Jocko Podcast - Jocko Podcast 14: Guilty Pleasures, Storm of Steel book review, Training Schedules, Lazy Delegation, Evals, BUDS Filter

Episode Date: March 16, 2016

0:00:00 - Opening 0:10:00 - Storm of Steel, by Ernst Younger - Book Review 1:02:38 - Internet Questions 1:03:45 - Jocko and Echo's Training Schedules 1:19:14 - Difference between lazy delegation, and decentralization. 1:27:42 - Jocko's Writing Process. 1:31:52 - Is detachment to be done in real time? 1:38:12 - Dealing with being evaluated by people w/ different opinions. 1:43:49 - Jocko and Echo's (food) guilty pleasures. 1:54:59 - Is BUDS the right filter for the SEAL teams? 2:03:40 - What does "discipline" really mean, besides waking up early?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 14 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willing. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Now, I want you to imagine yourself in the moment, the moment just prior to the battle. Now, I don't want you to think that because you're a. soldier that this training has made you into some kind of a superhuman or maybe into a different kind of being because it hasn't the training that you've been through hasn't changed the fact that you're a human being all warriors are human beings so this is you i'm talking to and i want you to

think about that time before you are going into the battle because that's the time when you can actually think when you're waiting, when you're waiting to go. And if you're going to feel fear, this is where you feel it, because you have time. The preparation is done. The planning is done. The briefing is done. The gear is prepared and you are dressed and you are ready to go. And now you're just waiting, waiting for the call or for the signal or for the command. And so you have time to think. And in fact, all you can do at that moment is think. And if you're in Iraq, maybe you're waiting to go into the Malab district of Ramadi,

where there's been vicious IEDs and casualties happening every day for months on end. Or if you're in Vietnam, maybe you're in a helicopter, and you're about to take part in an air assault on a known enemy strong. If you're in the Korean War, maybe you're hearing the whistles, the whistles signaling a coordinated attack by the Red Army. And you're just waiting, waiting for the shooting to start. And if it's World War II, maybe you're just offshore and you're in a landing craft and the sound of explosions and gunfire in the distance on the beach where you're headed, the beach you're waiting

to hit. And if it's World War I, perhaps you're waiting and you're at Tenenburg or Verdun or the Somme, but you're waiting to go over the top out of that trench and into almost certain death. And in that moment, what do you think about? Do you think about family, friends, you think about your life, do you think about death? You think about that girl, you wish that you would. have asked to marry? Maybe you're thinking, how did I get myself into this? Or maybe you're thinking how do I get myself out of this? Or maybe you're just sitting there, rethinking the plan and the

sequence and the orders you were given. Maybe you're thinking about your friends getting killed or wounded. Maybe you're thinking about yourself getting killed or wounded. You could be thinking about so many different things, but one thing is certain. Whatever you are thinking, you are thinking about, whatever those thoughts are, those thoughts are clear. Those thoughts are an insight into your true nature, into your being, into your soul. And maybe that's the thing we miss about combat. And you know, we always hear about the adrenaline rush and the excitement and the challenge of combat. But what about the cleansing of the mind? against a backdrop of death.

Seems like there's some purity that can only be revealed by the horror and the blood and the violence of impending combat. And as you think these thoughts and there's this moment when you realize that who's killing us is us. It's other people.

It's other people. humans and and what are they thinking? Who are they? Why are they? What are they? And what am I doing here? Why? Why am I here? And despite all those thoughts and all those ideas and all those questions, there's only one answer. In the politics, they disappear and the thoughts disappear and the fears and the reservations and the concern and the ego. It all disappears. Because Because at that moment, that moment of truth, there's only one answer. Forward. Forward into the battle, into the fray.

Toward the smoke and the fire and the bullets and the bombs and towards death. To face it all head on. And maybe that is what the real addiction. of combat is. Maybe that's what we yearn for. Maybe those, those are the thoughts that fill our dreams and our nightmares to be there again in the breach. Have but one clear and resounding purpose for everything in our lives, everything in our world, everything in past, in present, in future, all of it wrapped up into that one instant to have that one singular purpose for being alive at that moment with everything you have with every ounce of commitment with every bit of clarity

and focus that you as a human being can possibly muster attack with your weapons and your mind and your body and attack with your very soul and maybe that. purity is what we miss is what I miss and so let's go back there once again once again to the battlefield to World War I again in my mind the most brutal of all wars where tactics and intelligence and strategy did not matter it was attrition and death and horror rendered possible only because of the purest and almost insane level of selflessness and bravery.

And this starts off in that very situation, waiting for combat. I sat up for a long time that night in the foreboding eve of battle mood, of which all soldiers at all times have left report. On a tree stump cluster, around with blue anemones before I crept over the ranks of my comrades to the tent. I had tangled dreams in which a principal role was played by a skull. In the morning, the tender green

of young leaves shimmered in the flat light. We followed hidden twisting paths toward a narrow gorge behind the front line. On the dot of noon, our artillery, launched into a furious bombardment that echoed and re-echoed through the wooded hollows. For the first time, we heard what was meant by the expression, drum fire. We sat perched on our haversacks, idle and excited. A runner plunged through the company, to the company commander. Brisk exchange. The three nearest trenches have fallen to us, and six field guns have been captured.

Loud cheers rang out. a feeling of up and atom. At last, the longed-for order. In a long line, we move forward toward the pattering of heavy rifle fire. It was getting serious. To the side of the forest path, dull thumps came down in a clump of furs, bringing down a rain of branches and soil.

One nervous soldier threw himself to the ground. Then, death's call slipped through the ranks. Ambulance men to the front. A little later, we passed the spot that had been hit. The casualties had already been removed. Bloody scraps of cloth and flesh had been left on the bushes around the crater, a strange and dreadful sight that put me in mind of the butcher bird that spikes its prey on thorn bushes.

We entered the battle-traumpled realm of, of the infantrymen. The area around, the jumping off position had been deforested by the shells. In the ripped up no man's land lay the victims of the attack still facing the enemy. Their gray tunics barely stood out from the ground. A giant form with red, blood-spattered beard stared fixedly at the sky, his fingers clutching the spongy ground. A young man tossed in a shell crater, his features already yellow with impending death.

seemed not to want to be looked at. He gave us a cross shrug and pulled his coat over his head and lay still. In a curious failure of comprehension, I looked alertly about me for possible targets for all this artillery fire, not apparently realizing

that it was actually ourselves that the enemy gunners were trying for all they were worth to hit. Ambulance men. We had our first fatality. A shrapnel ball had a ripped through rifleman's stone, Stultler's carotid artery.

Three packets of lint were soddened with blood in no time. In a matter of seconds, he bled to death. In the rising mist, I leapt out of the trench and found a shrunken French corpse. Flesh like moldering fish gleamed greenishly through slits in the shredded uniform. Turning around, I took a step back in horror. Next to me was a figure crouched against a tree.

It still had gleaming French leather harness And on its back was a fully packed haversack Topped by a round mess tin Empty eye sockets and a few strands of hair On the bluish black skull Indicated that the man was not among the living There was another sitting down slumped forward towards his feet As though he had just collapsed

All around were dozens more rotted, dried, stiffened to mummies, frozen in an eerie dance of death. The French must have spent months in proximity of their fallen comrades without burying them. A headless torso was jammed in some shot-up beams. Head and neck were gone, white cartilage gleamed out of a reddish-black flesh. I found it difficult to fathom. Next to this very young man lay on his back with glassy eyes and fists still aiming.

A peculiar feeling, looking into dead, questioning eyes. A shudder that I never quite lost in the course of the war. His pockets had been turned inside out. And his empty wallet lay beside him. So that right there is a portion of the opening chapters of a book called Storm of Steel. Going into the introduction of the book, it says Storm of Steel is one of the great books of World War I, if not the greatest. Ernst Younger, that's the author,

Erst Younger's book on the 1914 War, Storm of Steel is without question the finest book on war that I know, utterly honest, truthful, in good faith. In contrast with most of the others is stark. It has no pacifist design. It makes no personal appeal.

It is notably unconstructed book. It does not set its author and his experience in any sort of context. It offers nothing in the way of hows and wise. It is pure where and when and of course above all what. There is nothing in it about the politics of war, nothing even on its outcome and very little on the wider strategy of its conduct. War is all. Fighting is all.

Everything else is cropped away. And from first to last, in the affirmative. It is the work of a man whom the war made. So it's a little bit of a different kind of book.

That was someone explaining the book. Someone explaining the book. And just how it is, it's just about the fighting. Yeah, so it just throws you right in the war. Yeah. And that's one of the things that makes it so powerful. And it's also one of the things that reflects very well

what it feels like to be on the front lines. Yeah. When politics don't matter, when the outcome doesn't even matter. The outcome of the broader war doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. So what are we doing right now in this trench? talking about being in these trenches,

which obviously all these soldiers spent an immense amount of time. They lived in these trenches. Back to the book, the desolation and the profound silence, sporadically broken by the crump of shells, were heightened by the sorry impression of devastation. Ripped haversacks, broken rifles,

scraps of cloth, counterpointed grotesquely with children's toys, shell fuses, deep craters from explosions, bottles, harvest implements, shredded books, battered household gear, holes whose gaping darkness betrayed the presence of basements where the bodies of unlucky inhabitants of the houses were gnawed by the particularly assidious swarms of rats. In the cattle buyers and stables and barns, the bones of livestock still dangling from their chains, trenches dug through ravaged gardens, in among sprouting bulbs of onions,

wormwood, rhubarb, narcissists, buried under weeds. On the neighboring fields grain barns, through whose roof's grain the grain was already sprouting, all that with half-buried communication trench running through it, and all suffused with the smell of burning and decay. Sad thoughts are apt to sneak up on the warrior in such a locale. when he thinks of those who only recently led their lives in tranquility. So he's actually providing a little caution to people.

A little caution of the warriors that when you see, you know, these babies, toys, and this normal village that's been ripped and now his trenches running through it. And you can't let that sneak up on you, he says, that emotion. You've got to detach yourself from that. And speaking of the rats, here he says, they are repellent creatures, and I'm always thinking of the secret desecrations they perform on the bodies in the village basements. Once, as I was striding through the ruins of Monke on a warm night, they came oozing out of their hiding places in such undescribable numbers that the ground was like a long carpet of them, patterned with the occasional white of an albino. So, so many rats. First of all, so many rats that it looks like a carpet and so many rats that there's actually a regular occurrence of albino rats.

That's a lot of rats. And talking about life in the trench, we're real Renaissance, back to the book, we're real Renaissance men who can turn our hands to anything. And the trenches make their thousandfold demands on us every day. We sink deep shafts, construct dugouts and concretes. create pillboxes, rig up wire entanglements, divine drainage systems. Revette, support, level, raise and smooth, fill in latrines. In a word, we do all possible tasks ourselves. So these guys are in the business of constructing their house, constructing the trenches

that they live in. They live in these dugouts, which is like a lower part of the trench where they dig in. They build all this stuff themselves, and that's what they do. and then in the middle of that, back to the book, a century collapses, streaming blood, shot in the head. His comrades rip the bandage roll out of his tunic and get him bandaged up. There's no point, Bill.

Come on, he's still breathing, isn't he? Then the stretcher's bearers come along to carry him to the dressing station. The stretcher poles collide with the corners of the fire bays. No sooner has the man disappeared, than everything is back to the way it was before. Someone spreads a few shovelfuls of earth over the red puddle, and everyone goes back to whatever he was doing.

Only a new recruit maybe leans against the revetment, looking a little green about the gills. He's endeavoring to put it all together. Such an incredibly brutal assault, so sudden with no warning given. It can't be possible. It can't be real. poor fellow

if only you knew what was in store for you 7 October 1915 Standing at dawn On the firestep opposite our dugout next to the century When a rifle bullet ripped through his forage cap Without harming a hair on his head At the same time two pioneers were wounded on the wires

One had a ricochet shot through both legs The other a ball through his ear In the morning, the sentry out on our flank was shot through both cheekbones. The blood spurted out of him in thick gouts. And to cap it all, when Lieutenant Von Ewald, visiting our sector to take pictures of Sapp, N, barely 50 yards away, turned to climb down from the outlook. A bullet shattered the back of his skull and he died on the spot.

Large fragments of skull were left littering the sentry platform. Also, a man was hit in the shoulder, but not badly. The middle of the platoon section of Trench was attacked with six-inch shells. One man was hurled against a post by the blast so hard he sustained serious internal injuries, and a splinter of wood punctured the artery in his arm. That night, two men were wounded while unspooling wire. Gooch-Schmidt was shot in both hands in one thigh, and Schaefer took a bullet in the knee. Following a torrential downpour in the night,

all the traverses came down and formed a gray, sludgy porridge with the rain, turning the trench into a deep swamp. Our only consolation was that the British were just as badly off as we were, because we could see them bailing out for all they were worth. Since our position has a little more elevation than theirs, we even managed to pump our excess their way. So here it is. They're almost face to face with the British.

They're getting a downpour of rain, and they take a little satisfaction to the fact that they can actually funnel some of the water into the British trench. That's how close they are. The crumbled trench walls explode, expose a line of bodies left there from the previous autumn's fighting.

I was standing next to territorial Weigman in front of the Altenberg Redoubt when a long shot passed through his bayonet, which he was carrying over his shoulder, and gave him a bad wound in the groin. So this is kind of the daily life that he talks about, being stuck in these trenches.

And it's just brutal. It's brutal. And you can kind of get the matter-of-factness that he delivers so much of this with. It's like, oh, this guy was shot. This guy was shot. This guy had his leg blown. off. It's just like boom, boom, boom, boom.

You know, when he mentions how he noticed someone else reacting to that, when meanwhile, it's just a real matter of fact to him, but just the other guy reacting to it stands out. You know, that's how matter of fact it is. And the book, which I kind of got in the beginning, talked about some of this first combat that he was exposed to when he goes on to go through, I mean, just the battle of the song. which is 60,000 casualties in the first day. 60,000 casualties in the first day. You know, there was 58,000 killed in Vietnam.

I mean, 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam. We're talking 60,000 casualties the first day. And in three months, there was a million. A million. That's the whole state of Hawaii, by the way. It's unbelievable what this war was. It really was. And it's really unfathomable as I think about what these guys were ordered to do

and the fact that they did it over and over and over again. We have more respect for human life now than we did then, period. I don't care what anybody says. We have more respect for human life now than they did then. Maybe that means we're weaker. Maybe it means we're more cowardly. But just to send millions of men to their death for a river that didn't really have any strategic impact that that was true.

It's horrible. It's horrible to think about. And so now we're getting, I leave that for people to read, you know, the bulk of the middle of the book where he goes into these details. But then I kind of moving forward here more towards the end of the book. And now we're getting into these really pretty fierce battles. And also what's interesting is this is when he starts seeing the enemy. Like they can hear him in the other trenches,

but now he starts meeting them face to face. And indeed we heard on 29 November from Captain von Brickson that we were to take part in a sweeping counteroffensive against the bulge that the tank battle at Cambrai had made in our front. Even though we were pleased to play a part of the hammer, having so long been the anvil, we wondered whether the troops still exhausted from Flanders would be up to the job. That said, I had every confidence in my company. They had never let anyone down yet.

On the night of 30 November to 1 December, we were put on Lurie's truck. in the process, we took our first losses as a soldier dropped a hand grenade, which for some reason exploded, gravely injuring him and another man. Someone else feigned insanity in an attempt to get out of the battle. After a lot of towing and throwing, a buffet in the ribs from an NCO seemed to sort him out, and we were able to go. It showed me that that sort of play acting is difficult. to keep up.

Now, I've talked about this before, and if you didn't go the last time I talked about it and look at the shell-shocked videos of World War I on YouTube, they're horrific to watch. And you realize what this war did to people. And I pulled this section out because he was a guy

who probably had gone completely insane. And he's like saying, this guy feigned insanity. He just said, you know what, this guy's faking. You know, even though he probably was for real. He probably was. He says, you know what? Beat this guy up.

Tell him to suck it up. And now he can go. And that's exactly what happened. Right. And that was kind of the attitude, right? Remember you're saying? That was kind of the attitude back then. It absolutely was the attitude.

It was the attitude. And they talk about, I mean, I've paid more attention to it on the British side. But, you know, if you came back from the war with all your limbs and you went into a medical war, meaning you were in there because you had psychological problems. moms. It was because you were a coward in their minds. Yeah. Which is sick. It's sickening. Yeah, I think how you were saying life meant less than, or where it means more like human life,

I think it was just a lack of knowledge. You know, like they've looked into it over the years and stuff and they kind of find out all this stuff. Oh, as far as the PTSD and the shell shock. I think everything, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We've learned all kinds about that. Yeah. But it is really horrible when you see those videos of what this war did to people. And that's what war does do to people. You know, we got to remember that, that it impacts people in a horrible way.

And this war, to me especially, more so than near the war, primarily because of the conditions and from the indirect fire, the mortars and the shelling. And again, it's something that you have no control over. And also, you could see these guys had no control over their fate. They were going to get told to do something. They were going to do it. And if you weren't going to do it, you were a coward.

You know, if you were to protest and say, hey, this doesn't seem like a good plan to me. It wouldn't be, well, okay, what's your strategic opinion? What's your tactical brain tell you? No, you're a coward. And that's why it's so important, really, in any endeavor, especially in war, but in war, in business, to have an open mind from a leadership position, to listen to what people are saying,

because they might be right. And here I guarantee there were thousands and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of soldiers that would have said, hey, you know what? This doesn't make any sense. And part of it is incumbent upon them to say, you know what? No. I mean, it's like we talked about with Napoleon's Maxim, right?

Napoleon's Maxim was, if you are aware of a problem with an order and you carry it out and you get your guys killed, you're culpable. Yep, it's on you. So these guys obviously hadn't read that and hadn't taken that on board where you listen to your subordinates and you say, okay, what do you think of this plan? We've tried it 12 times in the past, you know, month and a half, and we're going to try it again tomorrow. We're going to get up at the sound of the whistle and we're going to charge towards these other enemy machine guns.

It hasn't worked yet, but we think it might work tomorrow. No one figured that out. Listen to your people. And listen to your brain. You know, listen to your common sense. Don't get stuck. Don't get stuck in a mental rut with anything. And it's so easy to look, if you could send millions of humans to their death

because you can't think your way out of the strategy, you can't identify a strategy as being wrong, you can't come up with a new way to execute something, that shows you how trapped in a box your brain can get. And not only you, but your buddies that are all thinking the same way and you're all feeding off each other with incestual ideas that are the same ideas being fed to one another. And it leads to this.

Back to the book. Suddenly there was some commotion at the British barricade. Hand grenades flew, rifles banged, machine guns clattered. They're coming, they're coming. We leaped behind sandbags and started shooting. In the heat of the battle, one of my men, Corporal Kempenhouse, jumped onto the parapet and fired down into the trench until he was brought down by two bad wounds in his arms.

I took note of this hero of the hour and was proud to congratulate him two weeks later on a ward of the Iron Cross first class. No sooner had we got to. back from this interruption to our lunch, than there was more pandemonium. It was one of those curious incidents that can suddenly and unpredictably transform

an entire situation. The noise was coming from a subaltern in the regiment on our left who wanted to line up with us and seemed inflamed by a berserk fury. Drink seemed to have tipped his innate bravery into towering rage. Where are the Tommies?

Let me at him. Come on, boys. Who's coming with me? In his instant fury, he knocked over our fine barricade and plunged forward, clearing a path for himself with hand grenades.

So this guy is, you know, going after it. He's described as being like almost drunk. Maybe he actually is drunk. but he's just standing up and charging, charging forward, clearing a path for himself with hand grenades back to the book. His orderly slipped ahead of him along the trench,

shooting down anyone who survived the explosions. Braverly, bravery, fearless risking of one's own life is always inspiring. We too found ourselves picked up by his wild fury and scrabbling around to grab a few hand grenades, rushed to form part of this berserkers progress. Soon I was up alongside him, tearing along the line. And the other officers, too, followed by riflemen from my company.

Even Captain von Brickson, the battalion commander, was up there in the van, rifle and hand, bringing down enemy hand grenade throwers. The British resisted manfully. Every traverse had to be fought for. Four. The black balls of Mills bombs, those are British grenades, crossed in the air with our own long-handled grenades. Behind every traverse we captured, we found corpses or bodies still twitching. We killed each other, sight unseen. We too suffered losses. A piece of iron crashed into the ground next to the orderly, which the fellow was unable to avoid, and he collapsed the ground while his

blood issued onto the clay from his many wounds. We hurled over his body and charged forwards. Thunderous crashes pointed us the way. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were lying in weight behind rifles and machine guns in dead man's land. We were already a long way from our own front lines. From all sides, bullets whistled round our steel helmets or struck the trench parapet with a hard crack. Each time a black iron oval broke the horizon, one's eyes sized it up with that instantaneous clarity of which a man is only capable in moments of life and death. During those instances of waiting, you had to try and get to a place where you could see as much of the sky as possible because it was only. against its pale backdrop that it was possible to see the black jagged iron of those deadly balls with sufficient clarity. Then you hurled your own bomb and leaped forward. One barely glanced

at the crumpled body of one's opponents. He was finished and a new duel was commencing. In the exchange of hand grenades, it reminded me of fencing with foils. You needed a jump and stretch almost as in a ballet. It is the deadliest of duels as it invariably ends with one of the participants or the other being blown to smithereens or both. Hand grenade fights. And just to kind of explain that a little bit, it's one thing that we definitely learn in the SEAL teams when you're patrolling at night, and this is especially before

night vision, when you wanted to see the person in front of you, and especially like to see their hand signals because we use all hand signals at night. So if you want to see them, you kind of get down on a knee and you put the backlight behind him so you can see what hand signal are passing. And what he's doing here is

they're trying to get as low as they can and back light the sky as much as they can so they can see the grenades that are being thrown at them. And then when they do get thrown at them, they try and get up to a spot where they don't think it's going to blow up and then they're hucked their own grenades back. In these moments,

I was capable of seeing the dead. I jumped over them with every stride without horror. They lay there in their relaxed and softly spilled attitude that characterizes those moments in which life takes its leave. Now they get the British kind of trapped. The trench they were trying to escape down, doubled back on itself towards ours like a curved frame of a leer. and at the narrowest point

they were only 10 paces apart so they had to pass us again from our elevated position we were able to look down on the British helmets as they stumbled in their haste and excitement I tossed a hand grenade in front of the first lot bringing them up short and after them all the others

then they were stuck in a frightful jam hand grenades flew through the air like snowballs covering everything in milk white smoke. Fresh bombs were handed up to us from below. Lightnings flashed between the huddled British, hurling up rags of flesh and uniforms and helmets. There were mingled cries of rage and fear. With fire in our eyes, we jumped onto the very lip of the trench. The rifles of the whole area were pointed at us. Suddenly, in my delirium, I was knocked to the ground. as by a hammer blow.

Sober, I pulled off my helmet and saw to my terror that there were two large holes in it. Cadet Mormon, leaping up to assist me, assured me that I had a bleeding scratch at the back of my head, nothing more. A bullet shot from some distance had punched through my helmet and had only brushed my skull. Half unconscious, I reeled back with a hurriedly applied bandage to remove myself from the eye of the storm. No sooner had I passed the nearest traverse than a man ran up behind me and told me that Teb had just been killed in the same place by a shot in the head. The news floored me, a friend of mine with noble qualities with whom I had shared joy,

sorrow, and danger for years now, who only a few moments ago had called out some pleasantry to me, taken from life by a tiny peasantry. of lead. I could not grasp the fact. Unfortunately, it was all too true. In this murderous sector of trench, all my NCOs and a third of my company were bleeding to death. Shots in the head rained down. Lieutenant Hoppin was another one of the fallen. An older man, a teacher by profession, a German schoolmaster in the best sense of the word. My two ensigns and and many others besides were wounded. And yet the seventh company held on to the Concord Line

under the command of Lieutenant Hoppenrath, the only able-bodied officer remaining until we were relieved. Of all the stimulating moments in a war, there is none to compare with the encounter of two storm troop commanders in the narrow clay walls of a line. there is no going back and no pity. And everyone knows who has seen of them in their kingdom.

The aristocrat of the trench with hard-determined visage, brave to the point of folly, leaping agilely forward and back with keen, bloodthirsty eyes, men who answered the demands of the hour and whose names go down in no chronicle. And I think as we read these books, right, these books, these are chronicles. Somebody wrote, this guy lived and wrote,

but he's making a specific point here. He uses the term the aristocrat of the trench, And it's not the term, you know, the term aristocrat, it's not the, you know, the snobby aristocrat. That's not what he's talking about. You know, you look up the definition of aristocrat, and one of the meanings of it is like the best of. So that's what he's talking about, these guys

that were the best guys in the trench that had the hard look that would get after it. And yet their names go down and no chronicle. and I'll tell you, I know many, many brave men in the SEAL teams, in the Marine Corps, in the Army, brave souls that were aristocrats of war

and their name will go down in no chronicle. A later battle. Two men who had just ahead of us tried to make it back over the top, One toppled back into the trench with a shot in the head. The other shot in the belly could only crawl into it. We hunkered down on the floor to wait and smoked English cigarettes. From time to time, well-armed rifle grenades came flying over.

We were able to see them and take evasive action. The man with the wound in the belly, a very young lad, lay in amongst us, stretched out like a cat in the warm rays of the settings. son, he slipped into death with an almost childlike smile on his face. It was a sight that didn't oppress me, but left me with a fraternal feeling for the dying man. Even the groaning of his comrade gradually fell silent. He died in our midst, shuddering. It's that that line there really caught me. of he died in our midst shuddering. And it's, I think what catches you about it,

it's because the other, it's contrasted with the other one who died with an almost childlike smile on his face. And you know, I was thinking when you see this much death, it's like, you know, when they say the Eskimos have thousand words for snow, because they're so familiar with snow. And these men were faced with soul. much death that they saw the varied

faces of death and how different they are and you know one thing that I remember from some of the older Vietnam seals talking to me about guys that have been wounded this is you know in the 90s so I had no idea anything about combat

and I remember like they were telling me hey you know sometimes guys get wounded they get shot and it doesn't phase them and as part of it's the physiology like if you get shot in a certain place it just doesn't it just doesn't do anything you know you can you can drive on and then you'll have someone else get shot in a different place yeah and it just it there's nothing you can do about it like it blows their femur apart or it hits their hip in such a way that they cannot they're just down and they're in agonizing pain whereas someone else may get shit shot on a through and through meaning it just goes in one side and out the other and it's almost a almost like they don't even notice it. Yeah. Because it happens so fast.

Happens so fast and it doesn't cause any traumatic damage. And then you have the psychological aspect where some people psychologically they get hit and they're freaking out, oh my God, I'm going to die. And some other people are, you know, oh, I got hit. Just leave me alone. Hey, I got this. Don't worry about me. Ain't got time to bleed.

Yeah. So those are some situations that you are just different. And then it's the same thing. Obviously, when this guy sees death after death after death after death, he sees the variables and the various faces of death. So now we're getting towards the end. And he's, I mean, this is at a point now where they're starting to recognize that they're going to lose the war.

And what's crazy about that is Now, okay, if you tell me, hey, we're fighting for our country, okay, I get it, we're going to drive on, maybe we're going to make some sacrifices. These guys now recognize that they're probably not going to win. And he's kind of given his guys a brief

before they go into another assault. I paraded my company in battle order in a small apple orchard. Standing under an apple tree, I addressed a few words to the men who were drawn up in front of me in a horseshoe arrangement. They looked serious and manly.

There wasn't much to say. In the course of the last few days and with a kind of sweepingness that is only to be explained by the fact that an army is not only men under arms, but also men fused with a sense of common purpose. probably every one of them had come to understand that we were on our uppers and on our uppers is an expression that means it's like when you're in poverty or when you don't have the means anymore so they knew he knew that they were on their last legs they knew that they were on their last legs he goes on with every attack the enemy came forward with more powerful means his blow were swifter and more devastating.

Everyone knew we could no longer win, but we would stand firm. But we would stand firm. Now they're in his final battle. I had a very impartial feeling as if I were able to view myself through binoculars. You can see he's now becoming detached. For the first time in the entire war,

I heard the hissing of individual bullets as if they were whistling past some target. We were coming downhill. Indistinct figures moved against the background of red-brown clay. A machine gun spat out its gouts of bullets. The feeling of hopelessness increased. Even so, we broke into a run while the gunners were finding their range. We jumped over several sniper's nests,

and hurriedly excavated trenches. In mid-jump over a slightly better-made trench, I felt a piercing jolt in the chest, as though I had been hit like a game bird. With a sharp cry that seemed to cost me all the air I had, I spun on my axis and crashed to the ground. It had got me at last. At the same time as feeling I had been hit,

I felt the bullet taking away my life. I had felt death's hand once before, on the road at Mori. But this time, his grip was firmer and more determined. As I came down heavily on the bottom of the trench, I was convinced it was all over. Strangely, that moment is one of the very few in my life of which I am able to say they were utterly happy.

I understood as in a flash of lightning the true inner purpose and form of my life. I felt surprise and disbelief that it was to end there and then. But this surprise had something untroubled

and almost merry about it. Then I heard the firing grow less. as if I were a stone sinking under the surface of some turbulent water. Where I was going, there was neither war nor enmity. Well, obviously he did survive that wounding because he was able to write this book and he wrote many other books. The book is called Storm of Steel. by Ernst Younger.

And as I wrap up these books, again, sometimes I feel like, you know, hey, where do I compare this? How do I tie it in? And I mean,

obviously there's lessons in leadership and strategy and, you know, I talked a little bit about listening to your troops and keeping an open mind. And even though you know they started off in the description of this book is saying you know there's no pacifist leaning in this book but something that i often remind people about the guys that have

fought in wars is that if there's anybody that looks at war and says let's try to avoid it if we can. It's the guys that have been there. It's the guys that have fought. We don't want to send our friends to war. We don't want to send kids to war. And I think this book is a reminder

of just how bad it can be. And just how horrible a thing that war is. Now, of course, that always comes with the caveat of the fact that there are

that are more evil than war and there are things that can only be stopped there is evil that can only be stopped through the waging of war but when you do have to go to war because the evil must be stopped then go to war to win and win decisively so you don't put men through horrors for nothing Going back to that, the part where you're talking about guys getting hit and they deal with and different people just have different reactions. When it's that kind of blow like a bullet happens so fast, I don't think your nerves really register. It just depends on where you hit because the bullet could go through your arm and you don't notice it or go through your arm and hit your bone or the nerve. Or like graze the bone. Yeah, it could hit the bone.

It could shadow the bone. Yeah. You know, I saw guys that got hit in the bone, and it's devastating. Yeah. And you see guys that got through and throes, and they're fine. Yeah. They're literally fine. Yeah.

And so that's, you know, war is a, there's a huge element of chance in it. Yeah, man. And, you know, I actually got, there's an internet question that I got asked, and I didn't, I don't think we brought it up. But, you know, it's basically somebody saying, how do you deal with the randomness of war? like you could just how do you deal with the randomness of war and for me it's

the way I dealt with the randomness of war is the really simple thought of I'm gonna control what I can control and if I can't control and I'm not gonna worry about it yeah

you can't worry about the random sniper shot I mean you can do everything you can to mitigate it you know when you're out there in the field you know you keep moving you stay behind cover as much as you can you don't come up in the same spot

over and over again you do the things to mitigate the risk, but you can't just be dwelling on it. Right. Because you can't control it. Yeah. The same thing of getting hit with a random IED or a random, you know, indirect fire from a mortar.

You cannot mitigate all that risk. So what do you do? You do everything you can to mitigate it. And then, you know, you worry about the things you can control. And I used to tell that to MMA fighters too. And I've told that story before, you know, Listen, guys are getting worried they're going to get knocked out or they're going to get caught in submission.

It's like, hey, you've done everything you can to mitigate that. You've trained. You've conditioned yourself. You've spared. You've done mitts. You've done everything that you can do. If that happens, you can't control it. If it happens, you can't control it.

So don't even worry about it. Worry about the things you can control. The pace of the fight. Putting the fight where you want it to be. Winning the rounds. Being a tactician. Worry about those things. Don't worry about getting knocked out.

You know what? Keep your hands up. Keep your head movement. Keep the distancing correct. Those are the things that are going to keep you from getting knocked out. But you can't mitigate all that risk. You're in a fist fight. And in a fist fight, sometimes people get knocked out.

And in a war, sometimes people get wounded and sometimes people get killed. And you cannot mitigate that risk away. It's a war. And you've got to deal with it. I remember this is going to sound kind of funny, comparatively speaking. but I shot my own hand one time. With what? A BB gun.

You know the kind of with a CO2 cartridge. You don't have to tell the story to the public, you know. There's a lesson in there, though. It's not even a lesson. It's like, lesson is don't shoot your hand with a gun. Yeah, it was done. It was one of those ones where, you know,

you put the CO2 in. So I just changed the CO2 cartridge. And I was like, hey, there's no BBs in here. So I'm going to see just how strong does this air feel, you know, with a brand new CO2. and there's a BB in there. And so I shot it and I didn't feel anything. That's the weird thing is why I say.

So when I shot it, the BB went and it went deep in there. It went in. I didn't see it. And then I saw this little kind of like a little ring, you know, like a little tab of skin just appeared. And I was like, what? You know, like I felt the air. I was like, that's some pretty strong air. And then kind of, you know, a few seconds went by and I feel just this pressure.

Like someone's like kind of squeezing my hand a little bit with their fingers. And I was like, kind of confused because I of course I didn't there was no BB in there I knew that from the beginning and I don't I don't you actually didn't know that but right yeah I'm saying that's thinking at the time and then maybe you know maybe 10 seconds or so it just starts gushing blood and it comes to real but no pain no pain in you know and I kind of like you start kind of blacking out I think he was I was I was like 12 years old I start kind of blacking out it's and what what happened was the B the BB one. went through and got lodged in my tendons under there. So it took like three surgeries to get it out. You know, the first one, he just reached in there. Second one, he cut it a little bit. And then the third one, they just cut my hand open.

They had to, like, move the tendons to the side and, like, grab it. It was bad. But the point is there was no pain. Yeah. Because it just happened so fast, you know? Actually, that's one point. The other point is always treat weapons as if they're loaded. Oh, yeah.

And never point a weapon or anything you don't intend to destroy. Well, we know that. I'm just making sure everybody knows that now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. We've got some young listeners out there. Yeah. Don't point guns at your hands and pull the trigger. Yeah, that's actually...

Always treat weapons as if they're loaded and never aim a weapon or anything you don't intend to destroy, period. Those are like the official, like when you, if you go through a gun course or something like that, those are, that's the first thing. Yeah. Interesting. Well, you went through seal training. So it's a little bit more heavy than a gun course.

The basic principles of gun safety. do not change. Yeah. And they should not change. Yeah, I wish I would have known that when I was 12. Thank you. First question. Can you talk about your training schedules, roles, which is jujitsu training sessions.

I call them roles. Was that for me? Are you explaining me what roles is? For everyone. All right, all right. In the event of them not knowing. We'd be rolled in there. So can you talk about your training schedules, your roles, and what is a typical week?

What does that look like? Well, for me, you know, I work out every day. So what that means every morning, I wake up early, and I get it on. I lift weights, I do calisthenics, I do some kind of sprinting evolution. Seven days a week.

Seven days a week. And as I've explained to many people on the Twitter, they say, don't you ever take a day off? And I do. But I don't plan to take days off. Days off, life brings days off. You got the broken water heater. You got the sick kids.

You got sick You got the The car broke down You got the event at school Whatever it is There's some reason There's some travel plans That don't allow it

So there's life will give you days off So don't take off days voluntarily Don't do that Let the days off come Through life And then you don't have to freak out about them You just go oh cool I got a day off day to rest Cool I'm to travel or I'm gonna

You know I'm gonna miss a workout today I'm just going to take it as a day of rest. But I do. I work out every day. And part of that is going off of instinct of what I feel like of what type of workout I'm going to do. And by that, sometimes I mean I don't feel like doing a certain kind of workout. Therefore, I'm going to do it because it's punishment for being weak. And then there's times where I'm like, you know what, I do not want to do that kind of workout today because I feel an impending injury.

Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, like, hey, I'm going to lift real heavy today? No, not today. I'm tight. I'm sore. I'm going to not do that type of workout today. So it's a little combination of instinct and discipline versus freedom of, you know what, this is going to be too much for me today. I don't want to lift heavy today.

Or I don't feel it. Sometimes I feel like lifting heavy. You know, in other words, I'm maybe drained. I'm drained to do some kind of an endurance type workout or a Matt Consell. I'm just going to go in there and just do some singles. And but then some days you feel, you know, man, I don't feel like putting any heavy weight up today. I'm going to go in there and do something lighter,

but maybe higher repetitions and that type of things. So I'm doing that every day, you know, calisthenics. Sometimes I'm doing a combination of all three. Sometimes I'm doing one. So that's just how I'm getting after it. And again, I think at some point I'm going to write an e-book. Because the publishing process and the publishing world is a real pain. And the e-book's not different.

book, an e-book is easier. It's easier to do. You do it. You produce it. You put it through Amazon and Amazon just says, oh, cool. You sell them. I could sell them for like three bucks. Oh, dang. And then anyone could want some could just get it. And it doesn't have to be, I don't feel bad if I don't, you know, if it's not the, it's something that I could do the way I wanted to do. I don't have to, I don't have to, like, I don't have to make it a certain length. Like, no, man, it's three bucks. You know, it's 28 pages. That's the information I have. It's not, you know, if someone said, hey, Jocco, we want you to write a fitness book, then that's got to be 127 pages and it's got to have a bunch of things in it that I don't want to talk

about. Because it's not that complicated, right? So 27 pages, e-book, download it, print it out, everybody can have it, cost three bucks, people are stoked, we're all good, people can stop asking me what my workouts are like because everybody wants to know that i don't know why i'm not you know some incredible athlete you know so here's my workouts and so that's what i'm thinking of doing um then again that's that's i've been thinking about actually getting someone and saying hey you seem like a capable human help me write a little ebook i'm going to tell you what to put in it and you do it why so it like sounds dope or whatever no no no no just so it gets done because right Now I'm just busy.

Right. Too busy for the fitness e-book right now. Yeah. So I got to move that up. I got to move that up on my chart because I know people want to get out that. Okay. So then on top of the working out, there's the surfing, which if there's waves, I'm surfing, right? That's just the way it goes.

If there's good waves, I'm surfing. There's not always good waves. But if there's waves, I'm surfing, one thing I need to do more of is just go out and paddle. I need to do that more just go out so you're constantly in shape because paddling a surfboard is a different kind of conditions. Anything else. Yeah, just to be in shape for battling. Kind of like I've been saying, hey, if you want to get good a hump in a rucksack,

then just hump a rucksack. And if you want to get good at doing poles, two poles. Well, if you want to be good at paddling a surfboard, you got to paddle a surfboard. So you always feel weak when the big waves come and you haven't surfed in a while, and you feel weak because you haven't been paddling. You lack the discipline. So I should be paddling more. And then we get to the jiu-jitsu.

The role. The jihis-so. So I roll, if I'm home, I'm going to the gym and I'm training. You know, we usually do some technique. I usually get a little something from Jeff or from Dean. And, you know, Dean and Jeff, what's crazy is you can always learn something. And it still freaks me out. Yeah.

Because it's not like, when I say learn something, I'm not like saying that they're teaching me some new, very, to the go-go-placha. Right. Yeah. No. They're teaching, like, Dean will say, hey, when you put the guillotine on over here, make this adjustment.

Or when you're passing the guard, do this here. Like some simple thing. Or Jeff. I remember Jeff Glover was, I said, Hey, Jeff, teach my son the dars choke. And I just watched him give my son, you know, like a seven-minute class on the dars choke. Now, my son, you know,

can you imagine you're getting your nine years old and you're getting a personal class on the dars choke from Jeff Culver? But my son, you know, he just thinks that's normal. But I'm watching and I remember Jeff was just going over little details and stuff that I did not know.

Jocker relearning the dars choke. Relearning the dars choke. And so there's always these little things I always am surprised at the obviousness of those things. And actually it does happen occasionally in the other direction. You know, Dean, was going through a slump where he's really having a hard time passing my guard. And I just said, hey, man, you've been doing Y?

Just do X. And you could see, I saw on his face because he has a mutant grappling mind. Like I saw on his face as soon as I told him that, it was like, bang. It was like connection made. And he instantly started passing my guard again. And I was, yeah, damn. But, yeah, you get these little obvious things. you get the

you get the the learning so you'm always trying to learn a little something and then you know there's the situational drills of going in and then there's the reality here's the reality man I like to roll yeah I like to roll

that's the reality of it I enjoy training not starting I'm not starting in one position and going into no I like to train that's what I like to do that's what I love about jiuitsu so I like to roll and I roll and when I've I go in, my goal is to roll.

And the same way that I will, some nights I go in, like there was, some days I go in or nights and, and, you know, normal night I just feel like rolling, so I go in and roll. Some days I'm like, you know what, man, I'm not feeling it today. And because I'm not feeling it today, I'm going to get it on. And I'll force myself. That's kind of like when you're a kid and you start crying or something and you start crying or something and your dad tells you, I'll give you something to cry about.

Yeah, it's like that, right? Like, oh, I don't really feel like it. Oh, you don't feel like it? I'll give you something to not feel good or whatever. That's right. It is that. And like a couple weeks ago, I said to myself, I got there and I did not feel like rolling.

And I said to myself, I'm not going to stop until everybody stops. And so, you know, the last, you know, so we start with 20 guys on the mat and then after three rounds, there's, you know, 15 guys or 16 guys on the mat. and then it's down to 10 and then eight and then four and then it's me and one other guy. I'm like, looks like it's you got the last round, my friend. But I just did that to myself. It's a little form of exercising, a little discipline.

But that being said, there's days where I go in and I don't feel it, and I don't feel it's a different sense that I have, which is today's not going to be a good day. Today I'm going to tweak something. Today I'm too war down or whatever. And so I'll go. I'll do some rolls. and then I'll just I'll just leave it at that you know I won't I won't force myself to stay on the map forever so I do again I use that instinct of of what I am feeling to make a decision on how

it's going to go down this one day um Greg he randomly I came in he was like yeah I feel like I just feel like I'm going to break my toe today yeah sounds weird right he said that yeah I feel like and I was like oh yeah you just feel that he's like yeah I just feel like it that day I broke my toe I didn't really break it it was like kind of dislocated or something like that

but it's weird right I know way different point but still so my workouts I'll go through it real fast different than yours I workout average five days a week

but they're not everything all in one so if I roll three days I'll lift and do Matt cons and cardio and that kind of stuff two days really yeah so hang so I don't do like what do you do with all your free time

man make videos that's right hang with a bam so you really how many times a week do you train three jiu jitsu three sometimes two unless I'm like super busy than one dang yeah but yeah back when I was competing I was doing six and now it's like two a days not two days training but I'll do running lifting conditioning yeah and then a different session. I do Jiu-Jitsu and whatever, you know, that entails. Same thing as you, you know, do some technique, but I'll typically

Hey, how many rounds do you think, like on a typical day? You know how you'll do some technique, a table class or training session even, you'll do some technique, maybe some drills. Six. And then rounds, right? So you do six rounds, that's solid? What, five minutes?

Six minutes or six, six-minute rounds. You know, it's kind of like what I like. It's, yeah, it's strange because that's one time we did like a, We had the gym was closed, but we had, you know, an open mat. But it wasn't an open mat. It was like, hey, we're going to train. And we did.

Wait, we, who? Just a bunch of, a handful guys. You were probably there. I don't know. I don't remember. But we did six, six minute rounds, no ghee, and then six, six minute rounds. Gu. Were you there that day?

I usually don't get tired. Yeah. I got tired that day. Well, I got tired that day. Yeah. How's it? Okay, so I'd go to, I haven't. been to Atos in, I don't know, a few months now, but I'd go there, like, when they're

trained for ADCC, and I'd go there once a week, once every two weeks, just for one. And so they do stuff like in every single time I've been there, it's been one of these things. 10, six tens, six rounds of 10 minutes each, 30 seconds in between one, and then one minute between the next one, you know, it goes to, or five, 10 minute rounds, no, four 10 minute rounds and then won 20 minute rounds. Those you get tired. Yeah, I have conditioning, because when we do 20, like, when Dean's getting ready for ECC or whoever we got, that's doing the longer or the no time limit of matches.

Yeah. And I'm doing 20 minutes, 20 minutes, 20 minutes, I'm just good to go in. Yeah, I don't know why. I was in good shape when I did it. But I think it has to do with what we talked about the other day where I'm not a really fast sprinter and I'm not a really fast runner. But if you put a rucksack on me, I can go for a long time. And I think it's one of those.

Like, I can grapple for a long time and not get tired. Yeah, I think mine's psychological where if I know it's 20 minutes, then I'm not, I don't feel like, I don't know, confined or, I don't know, I feel like I can just handle. You know, the hardest thing that we do is, like, when we shark tank each other, you know, is when you're putting, you know, I'll be in, or one of our guys that's competing, we'll go in the middle, and you're getting a fresh guy every two minutes, one minute, three minutes, five minutes, whatever the case may be, you're getting somebody fresh on you. And that's where you get, that's where you get tested. Yeah. I would say a typical class, though, it's like anywhere from a five-minute round, six-minute round, either five or six-minute rounds, either five or six minutes, three, four or four rounds. I'd say that's a typical, you know, not a, not a training for coming.

Competition just that you know this is what we're doing if you go four five six rounds that's like that's kind of a lot of rounds Compared to just the average I think in my experience yeah I let I sort I feel like I got I got good I got good at like six six minutes of training that makes me feel good yeah man for yeah that's a lot That's a lot though you know you'll see guys dropping off after three rounds I would say yeah not everybody But obviously it has to do with who you're training with yes yeah yeah because I mean 100% I can train with somebody that's not that good

all day long Right But you can start getting The grinders on you Yeah You gotta be ready Who did I just Oh and I was trained

With Andy one round Yeah One round is like Literally like three rounds With an like an average Normal person on your level Yeah And Andy's

What's cool about Andy was Andy Andy is He's probably my main Training partner now I train with him all the time But for a while he didn't work out at all.

He didn't like lift or anything. Right. Yeah, back in the day, right? And then I said, hey, man, you got to get to the next level. I hate to say it. You got to do some working out. And he's an athletic guy anyways. And I just said, hey, go do a bunch of pull-ups.

Then the next day, do a bunch of push-ups and dips. And the next day, do some squats. And he's okay. He started doing it. And in a month, man, he was a different dude. And now he started powerlifting. So he's even morphing a little bit more. But he's won some big tournament.

He's got some game for sure. He did good. in the Challenges League, Menomar's Challenger. I think he took like second. Yeah. Or something like that. Yeah. He's great training partner.

Yeah, it's funny. He was, I noticed that where he was always athletic and stuff. And then one time I hadn't seen him for not that long, but maybe like four weeks. It didn't take him long. I was like, hey, what, you know, what did you do? Because you look way different right now. And he was like, oh, I just changed my eating.

I don't eat like whole containers of Nutella anymore. Okay. Got you. But yeah, I think it's animal. But yeah, that's it. Next question. Let's do it. Can you please share on your podcast what the difference between lazy delegation and decentralization is?

Okay, so decentralized command is obviously the one of the principles of combat we have in the book that we wrote. And I have a very simple definition that I've been explaining to people, decentralized command. It's everybody leads. That's what decentralized command is. and obviously that means you want everybody else to lead. And so this question is what's the difference between being lazy and just delegating everything and what's good decentralization. So lazy delegation.

Number one is delegating things that are actually your job, right? Because there's some roles and responsibilities that people have. And if you take something that is supposed to be your job and you delegate it to somebody because you don't feel like doing it, then that's lazy. As a matter of fact, if you're delegating something that it's something that you're delegating because you don't want to do it,

then that's being lazy, right? If you're actually delegating something because it's something you don't want to do, then you're being lazy. And I'll tell you, it's actually a mindset to take on the tasks of the things that you don't want to do or that your team doesn't want to do.

So this is like literally, oh, there's something that is hard to do or that no one wants to do, do that thing. And I give you an example. We had to stand watch in Iraq. On my first deployment to Iraq, we had to stand watch on the prisoners that we would capture. So we'd come back, we have to stand watch on them. So I made myself and my assistant platoon commander, I was a platoon commander at the time, I gave us, I assigned us the worst watch of the night,

like the 0,300 in the morning till 0,500 in the morning. The watch that nobody wants because it's in the middle of your sleep pattern. No one wanted that watch. I put us on that watch. We took the worst watch. So I didn't delegate the hard watch.

I took the hard watch. So there's an example of the opposite of being lazy. You're taking on board the hard tasks. You know, another one is when we would go shooting and we'd get done shooting and believe it or not, even the seal teams, you got to go pick up brass. You got to go pick up brass off the ground all over the desert, all over the field,

all over wherever you did a bunch of shooting. And it's pretty easy for the guy that's in charge to have a meeting to attend to when it's time to pick up brass. But I would always pick up brass. You know, I would delegate the shells. The shell cases. But it's a pain, you know, literally when you're at land warfare, it takes a couple days to pick up brass.

And instead of, like I said, instead of having to go back for a meeting, I'd go out there and, you know, jump in there. and have the crap job like everybody else of picking up brass. So I wouldn't delegate these things. That's being lazy when you delegate that. And another thing I'll find

is if somebody's complaining if one of my subordinates is complaining to me about having to do something, I automatically take it. And I say, oh, oh, echo, it's a pain for you to do this? Cool, I'll do it. And it has a good psychological effect on it.

Right? I mean, it's, it's, it's showing them that, like, look, man, I'm here for you. And if it's too much for you, I'll take it. And I've had people literally go, no, no, no, no, I got it. Because that's the instinct that people have. They go, look, man, I got it. And that's what I would do. If I complained about something.

And then I said, and then my boss said to me, you know what, if it's too much for you, I'll take care of it. You're like, no, no, no, no. It's not too much boss. No. So, and that's also, I'll tell you, there's also a little. form of discipline in there, a little form of discipline of taking on board tasks and doing things that you know you don't want to do. That's a way of exercising some discipline in your life and making things happen. So that's the kind of thing, all those things, that's like lazy

delegation if you're doing those kind of things where you're getting rid of jobs you don't want, you're getting rid of jobs that you should be doing and getting rid of jobs that are a pain or are monotonous or you think they're below you. So the opposite of that is decentralized command, right? This is where you're letting other people do what they're supposed to do. It's when you're letting people do things that will help them grow. Does it help a person grow by picking up brass? I suppose there's a little character building in there,

but it's not going to literally help them grow, so you don't need to delegate that task. Does it help someone grow as a leader to do the 0-300-0-500 watch on prisoners? It's pain. It's just unmitigated pain. So it doesn't help people grow. So then you don't have to decentralize that. But if you got something that's going to let somebody grow,

you let them do it. If there's something that allows you to stand back and be the tactical genius, and we wrote about this in the book, you know, then and thereby allowing me to have a different perspective on something, then I should absolutely decentralize that and delegate. So if there was a mission came up

and we need to come up with a plan, I would tell you to plan it. I'd be like, Echo, you come up with a plan on this. And then you'd go and plan it and you'd be all involved in it and you would lose the elevation that I would have.

So when I come back to look at your plan, you say, here's the plan. I go, hey, it looks good except for these two points and you'd be like, man, how did he see those points? I'd say it's because I had the altitude. So that's another time

that decentralized command. It's very helpful. Decentralized command means letting people make little mistakes and not punishing them because of those mistakes. That's decentralized command. If I just hammer people and punish them when they make a mistake, they're not going to want any chances, they're not going to want to take any risk, and they're not going to want to lead. Because I've been punitive with my actions towards them. Now, that doesn't mean, and I've seen this happen, that doesn't mean if I'm going to let you go plan a mission

and I see you're screwing it up, I'm just going to let you have a catastrophic failure. No, I'm going to be like, hey, echo, think about this over here. Hey, echo, think about that over there. We're going to get you dialed in. I'm going to give you some rope, but I'm not going to let you hang yourself.

I'm actually going to give you enough rope to get the job done and think on your own, but if you start looking like you're going to hang yourself, I'm going to stop you. The other thing about decentralized command, that's positive, that's not just lazy delegation, is when you let your subordinates lead so that you can focus upward, outward, and forward.

So if you have a mission, if we have a mission to accomplish and I tell you to lead it, that means you can take care of that mission. I can look upward, meaning up the chain of command, find out what's going on, outward, meaning what's the enemy doing, and forward, meaning what's going to happen in the future?

And if I'm wrapped up in the accomplishing of the task at hand, from a leadership position, I can't do any of those things. look outboard I can't look outward and I can't look forward. You got to let people lead so that they can become leaders and your actual goal, and this is where people get intimidated, is to set them up so they can take your job. That's what you want.

You want them to be able to take your job. And people get scared of that, but you can't be scared of that. Yeah, what was that quote? There was a quote where one guy was asking the other guy or something, like, hey, what happens if we develop, you know, our workers and then they leave us? and he's like, it's better than not developing them. Yeah. And having them stay.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. I mean, that's me trashing the quote. It's you murdering a quote. Yeah. But you know what I'm saying.

Yeah. No, that's good. And you definitely want to set your people up. You want to work yourself out of a job. And then you've got to, you know, your other opportunities will come because people will see that you develop a team. People will see that you develop good leaders. And they're going to say, hey, I want you to come and do that at this higher position.

And you're going to get benefit from that as well. Well, Echo, can you ask Jocko to talk more about the writing process? Any ups and downs, obstacles, daily rituals, and or future plans? So I know I've answered this question before. It's very, I'll answer it again, I'm going to do it quickly. What did I do when writing? I wrote a thousand words a day, no matter what. if I had some obstacles, as the question said here, I would write.

If I had ups and downs, I would write. If I had a daily ritual, it was to write. Every day, that's what I did. I wrote 1,000 words a day. And when you're writing a 50,000 or 60,000 word manuscript, that means in two months you got your manuscript done. The thing about writing every day, and I've said this before, is if you write every day,

you don't need to rehash what you wrote before because you remember it. So you can just open the book or you can open your page, you can open the document, and you can just start writing. And even I used to like kind of leave myself a lead sentence that I knew would just, I could sit down the next day and start flowing right into it.

So do that. And also I had the outline, I mean for extreme ownership that Laf and I wrote, I had the outline, we had the chapters. So I broadly knew what I was writing about. And then it's just a matter. of sitting down and making it happen.

And when I went to college, I was an English major in college, and guess what? I sat down and wrote when I had to write papers, when I had to write scripts, when I had to write whatever I had to write, I just sat down and started writing. And then it's the same thing when I was in the Navy. The Navy, you write all kinds of stuff. You write evaluations, you write operational summaries,

you write awards, you write all kinds of things in the Navy. And I used to just sit down and it's right. That's what you've got to do. You just got to get on it. And one thing about me is my rough draft. When I'm sitting down, I just start writing, I know it's going to be rough. It's going to be a rough, rough draft. That's what I'm going to write.

So you just go. Just go. And I don't care. And I misspelling stuff and the punctuation's bad. But I don't care about that. I'm going to stop. Because it's so easy to clean that stuff up later. The hard part is getting the foundational information down on the paper.

That's the hard part. and it's easy for me to edit it or hone it later. Now, as far as future plans, future books, yeah, I mean, Leif and I are definitely doing a follow-up book about leadership, and we're working on that right now. So that's a common. I notice that your text messages are always grammatically correct. Yeah, I was a, I was an English major. And I took classes, I took classes like advanced grammar and syntax.

Yeah. And, uh, yeah. So I, and actually, I find language and linguistics to be very interesting. Yeah. And I know that, uh, might strike some people as weird, but I really do. I find linguistics and language and the written word and the way words are combined together to make thoughts in people's brains. It's a very interesting process to me.

Yeah. And so I was, uh, I was very interested in it. And that's another reason why I, why I studied English when I was in college. It's the, it's the written word. Yeah. You know, it's the written word, which is a very, very powerful, very, very powerful tool. I also noticed your overuse of, capital letters in your text messages.

But maybe that's just how you're feeling sometimes. That's only when I'm texting you certain things. Next question. Like I'll see you on the mat. Next question. Jocko, is detachment something you do in real time? Or is it before or after an event?

I think I've heard you describe both. Is it both? No, it is not both. It is not both. Actually, and if you think about it, okay, the detachment that we're talking about is when you get involved in these situations, you've got to detach yourself from them

so that you can make good decisions so that you can see things clearly so that you can assess things clearly. That's why you detach from these situations. So technically, if before or after an event, you are detached from them. Right. Because they're not happening at that time.

Now, I guess you could be so emotional about an event that even after it happens, you could still not see it clearly because you can't detach from it. So I guess I could give it to you that, okay? Yeah, yeah, that's true. And before it, you could be so amped up about it and so nervous about it and so emotional about it that I guess beforehand you could. So I guess I am wrong. I am talking about detaching throughout the process. Right. But even if you're, if you have to detach beforehand, you're not detaching on the incoming situation, you have to detach from your current being nervous about the incoming.

Right, right, right. And that may help you prep, and I'll talk about that a little bit, but the skill itself is being able to detach during the event. And I'll tell you, once you do detach from it, it's actually pretty easy, but to punch through that gravity that your brain makes with emotion and chaos and mayhem. That's the hard part. The hard part is to notice that you're stuck in the gravitational pull of all that emotion. So you've got to pay attention to that.

And what you really want to try and do is trying, it's what you just said, trying to detach yourself before the gravity and the gravity of the emotions and the chaos builds up. If you can detach before that, then you'd have to break through it. You're already outside that realm. And so then it's much easier. So it's like there's quicksand in front of you. And it's much easier to just see the quickstand and just say, I'm not going to step in there than it is to walk in there, go up into your waist and start

getting sucked down and then decide, oh, I'm going to pull myself out of that. It's a lot harder. So you got to look for those signs. You got to look for that moment when you start feeling emotional or you know that it's going to be something emotional. you've got to step back from those and get yourself in the habit of asking yourself, what do I look like right now? What does Jocko look like right now?

What does Jocko sound like right now? Listen to yourself talk. Listen to the words that are coming out of your mouth and see if you're being a reasonable human or not. And I'll tell you one thing that I I do I kind of see is you know when in the movie The Terminator

when he sees like the various responses he could give Well when I'm really good In a very detached mode And I'm having a conversation with someone I like see the options in my head Of what I could say to him And I oh yeah that'll make him mad

Oh yeah that's too offensive Okay that's a good one Hey, buddy, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think that that mindset kind of works pretty good. But again, look for the signs. Look for the quicksand. Look for the emotional quicksand. And don't step in it, the emotion of the anger, the frustration.

There's little physical signs, too. When you start feeling the sweat beating up, when you start feeling hot. Like, you literally start feeling hot. That should be a big red flag. Yeah. That warmth that flushes through your face, that's not good. The breathing, when you start getting, when your breathing starts increasing, your pulse is going, that's the stuff you've got to notice to say yourself, oh, there it is. There it is.

That's the quicksand of emotion and confusion and chaos. You don't want to step into it. You want to pull yourself back. The takeaway there is be like the Terminator. No, I'm not saying be like the Terminator. Terminator. That was a comparison of thinking, of being able to visualize the options that you have. And if you're emotional, you don't think like that.

When you're emotional, you're just blurting out whenever is going to come out of your mouth. But when you're detached a little bit, you go, okay, I could say this, I could say that. Oh, this is answer three. And then you say it. It's like a problem solving tactic. Don't you think it's interesting? Because on the Terminator, he blurted out. analytically he blurted out an emotional response because he was acting like a person.

Remember that? Remember what he said? I don't. A bunch of profanity. When he's in the thing, he's looking, he's all shot up. And the superintendent or whatever, whatever, he's knocking on the motel door. He's like, hey, buddy, you got a dead cat in there or what? Because all these flashes right, you know.

So he looks through his responses. And they're pretty funny if you read them. I forget exactly what they are. But he goes, like the one he chose was, fuck you, asshole. That was it instead of all, you know. I do remember that. Yeah. That was pretty dope.

The fake emotions, which sometimes, which I've talked about before, sometimes you've got to use the fake emotions. The switcheroo? Yeah. Or is that what's good for the goose is good for the... No, it's like when your kid is not getting... You're not listening to what you're saying. You're not having the impact that you want to have,

so you've got to show a little bit of anger. Yeah, yeah. Turn up the heat. That's kind of good, too, and don't get crazy with it, as far as with the kids, where if you show anger, not only is it like a powerful thing and they're like oh shoot this is powerful it demonstrates to them that you care about what we're talking about right now it i care about exactly you know rather than you know rather than i'm just a machine a robot yeah yeah i don't care but i know i'm supposed to tell you this kind of feeling next question how do you deal with being evaluated

specifically by different people with different opinions and motives oh how do you deal with being evaluated Well, I can tell you right now, nobody likes being evaluated, right? Nobody. Now, you might get somebody that says, oh, I love being coached. And there are some people that are pretty positive about that. And as a matter of fact, I have clients where they want to be coached, right? But most people, especially in a normal environment, like if you go out and you hire someone to coach you, okay. But most people in a normal environment, they don't like being evaluated. they don't like being judged. Always judging. So the first thing you have to do when it comes to being evaluated

is get that in your head that you, like everybody else, has defense mechanisms. And they're going to flare up as soon as somebody says something critical of you. As soon as somebody goes to evaluate you, your defense mechanisms are going to go up. And then once that happens,

once you feel those defense mechanisms go up, you got to put your ego in check. You got to put your ego in check. And then once you do that, you got to listen. Listen, I know it sounds crazy. Listen to what they're saying. Don't even think of a response. Say to yourself, you know what?

I'm not even going to respond. I'm only going to listen to what they're saying. Yeah, but to kind of add to that. You already can't even take it. No, no, I can take it. Oh, okay. I'm saying, but I think, because people will, quote, unquote, do that, but they won't really do it as far as just, I'm not going to say anything.

I'm just going to listen. Yeah. That's actually, that's actually, like it. That's actually how they set it up to. Look, I'm not even going to say anything. I'm just going to listen. Yes, exactly what I'm talking about. It's like, you know, or they'll all body language, you know, the kind where they're like,

you know, they'll do that kind of stuff. Don't do that. Don't do that. So, so you're right. You got to listen and not just listen, but truly listen. Not listen just with your ears, but listen with your mind and your brain and with an open mind, an open mind. And then think about what people are saying and then see it. It's important.

See it from their perspective. Because if you just see it from your perspective, you're not even seeing what the criticism really is. You're only seeing the defense of the criticism. So actually get in their mind and say, wow, what does this look like from their perspective? Why would they be taking the effort and the risk and the challenge of trying to present this problem to me if it wasn't important? Are they just doing it just to make me mad? No, they're trying to help you and you know what? Just like a joke, you know, they say like every joke has some little truth to it Every little criticism even if the person is your arch rival their criticism is built on something.

So what is that reality that you can take away from it? Even though you've got to take it with a grain of salt, especially if the person like it says here, if the person has different opinions and motives. Well, of course they have different opinions. You want people with different opinions. Maybe they have different motives, so maybe you think they're trying to usurp your authority

or something like that. So maybe you've got to take it with a grain of salt, but find the grain of truth in there too and find what it is from their perspective, what the problem is, and learn from it. And one of the most beautiful things about this is

you take the criticism and you make adjustments. You know, how do I deal with being evaluated? I try and accept the evaluation and make adjustments to improve myself as a human. That's how I deal with being evaluated. waited. And I'm not saying I deal with it anybody better than anybody else.

Because everybody gets defensive, myself included. You know, we had a little conversation when we started tonight. Right? Sure. You said I repeated some stuff on the last podcast. Allegedly. And

you know, and then we talked through it. And then I said, you know, and you know, I noticed that your camera work was a little bit off. And, you know, it was just, my point was just to prove how defensive we all get. We all get. And you know what I did?

I said, you know what? I noticed that too. You know, as far as me repeating, there was a couple little sections. And it was because I pulled from multiple different books and they had a little bit of overlap. And looking back on it probably shouldn't have, but at the time I thought, you know what, this is emphasizing really important points. Yeah. But still, people don't want to hear the same thing over and over again.

So I probably shouldn't have done that. So guess what? Criticism, accepted. I will adapt, adjust, and I will make improvements to my game based on your criticism of my technique, my skill, and my life. I didn't accept your criticism about the camera work. No, you don't. You know, you don't know anything about cameras.

There it is. You don't know anything about framing. There it is. Yeah. So who are you to tell me? Can't tell echo anything. Yeah. Can't tell echo anything.

Take their criticisms. Fix the problem. That's what it's all about. You use them to get better. Next question. Jocko, Echo, what are your guilty pleasures other than donuts?

And by the way, I don't even like donuts. That's pure echo right there. Yeah. You were talking about you had a donut delivery. Sorry, let me finish the question. What are your guilty pleasures other than donuts? Jocko, what do you do when you momentarily give in to a vice for something that you know is bad

for you mentally or physically? I like the fact. that the people that are asking, this is actually two questions in one, I appreciate the fact that this person says, Jocko, what do you do when you momentarily give into a vice?

I appreciate that as if I'm this person that could only for a fraction of a moment give into any form of vice because I am not a human. So I appreciate that. You want to hear the part I appreciate about this two part question? The first part

asked both of us specifically Jocco and Echle, what are your guilty pleasures? The second part asked other, or the second part asked, Jaco, overtly excluding my name. So Jocko, what do you do when you momentarily give in to advice of something that you, and the way I see this is that you do something about it if you momentarily give in. Me, if I momentarily give in, like, no one wants to hear my advice because it probably doesn't work.

Oh, because I thought you'd say, because it's just game over at that point. It is game over. That's what I mean. Or you could take it to the fact that they don't even think you ever break. Yeah, that's, yeah. But then again, you talk about eating sleeves, Oreo cookies on here, so that's an issue. But to get down to it, obviously. Wait, what are your guilty pleasures, though?

Guilty pleasures. Number one, first and foremost, mint chocolate chip ice cream. And especially mint chocolate chip ice cream milkshakes. And I do some twisted things in my face. brain to kind of convince myself that those are actually good for me and that they contain, you know, just enough carbs and there's some protein in there and there's some fat. It's actually like a full good meal, which is just a big lie because it's a big sugar bomb. It's like a supplement.

Right. So, but I do, I do, uh, yeah, I love mint chocolate chip ice cream. I really love chocolate milk too. Mm-hmm. And, and there's been these articles floating around the internet that say that it's the Best post-workout thing you can get. And that's another thing. It's like, okay, but the reality is it's sugar in milk.

And so again, I'll twist that one in my head. And sometimes for 10 minutes, I'll convince myself that really that is the right thing to do. Obviously, we've discussed on here before, those little damn preunzel-wrapped hot dogs that they serve in the airport that have some kind of bubble. butter or something on them that just, damn. Yeah, that's dope. I don't know who invented those things, but God bless them. And then, you know, the normal crap foods, the potato chips, the french fries, the whatever, the junk. Okay?

So, am I immune to the genetic evolutions that human beings have been through that make us desire sugary foods and the endorphins going off and firing your head? No, I'm not immune to those things. When I, and I'll tell you, when I do, first of all, I like to earn those things, right? I either earn them on the front end or the back end, like one way or the other. Like, I either busted my ass and it did a couple days of hard working out. And all of a sudden I'm, you know, I'm out with my kid and we're swinging by. And all of a sudden I see there's a little ice cream shop in the corner. You know what?

Hey, let's get a little ice cream. There's a little go time. And one thing I, when I do it, I don't like have guilt when I'm sitting there. I don't know. I'm not going, oh my God, I can't believe I'm doing this. No, I say, man, this is awesome. This ice cream milkshake tastes great. That's great. But later on, either that night or the next day, I earn that thing. Put a little punishment in place, a little punitive reprimand for slack behavior.

And I'll tell you the thing you got to be careful of is that it is a slippery slope. And as you mentioned, like one person, potato chip can lead to 20 and it does lead to 20 and even that is like okay understand we had a we had a derailment right but don't let one day of bad food lead to another day of bad food and no working out lead to a that's what happens that's what makes you sign off the rails and and actually i mean there's like Tim Ferriss he's got that thing where he does it's something like six days in a row of eating super clean and then on the seventh day you actually it's not just cheat a you have to like just get after it because your body has to

get the shock of carbs and all this stuff there's another big lie like you can tell you you can twist your day and all of a sudden be like well you know Tim Ferriss did say but but you do have to be careful of the slippery uh slope that for me, that's what I think happens. I think, I don't believe in the stuff that, you know, you use up your willpower throughout the day and you use up your discipline. I believe that your discipline decisions

create more disciplined decisions. Now, if I do just have a disaster of a day, or if I have, let's say for whatever reason, I have a two-day, just gluttonous train wreck, binge, where I'm just, where I just, for whatever, I lose the bubble,

you know, and there could be anything, any number of things that could cause that. Maybe, you know, it's like multiple, I don't know,

bad situation with travel, then with an event, then with something, then it's a birthday party, and the only thing to eat pizza, and I'm like, you know what, and it's just done,

right? Is it better to hold the line? Yeah, it is. But if I do have one of those situations, then I'll usually react, to that, you know, I'll earn it later. I'll, if I go on just a terrible food thing, I'll do some kind of a fast.

I'll do like a 24 hour fast, maybe in a 48 hour fast. I haven't done a 72 hour, but I'm gearing up to do a 72 hour. What do you, just drink water? Yeah, just drink water. Dang. I did the 48 hour, and it's, it was actually nothing. It was like, no problem, no factor. I did everything normal, squatted, went surfing,

did jiu-jitsu. There was like some guys on the mat, and I said, I was talking to Big Eric, you know, big Eric. And I was like, hey, I got to tell you something when we got done training. This is after this is on the second day of doing it. And so we trained a bunch and, you know, there's no factor. And he's at, what were you going to tell me? I said, I haven't eaten for, for 48 hours. And I said, you know, I'm just trying this out. And I feel completely normal. So, so that's one of the things I'll do to recoverment. I'll just do some kind of, you know,

psycho, kind of hardcore workout. You know, a body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay in rest. Don't let the momentum start going the wrong way. You know what I mean? Get that body back in motion. Get back on track. Snap yourself back into the discipline. Yeah.

Crush some workouts. Get after it. And get on that path. The path of discipline and strength and stay there. You mentioned the giving into the brain that you are evolved to have or whatever, you know, and that's like seeking out sugar and fat and, you know. Fat's not bad. Right, but that's what you're evolved to want.

And it's for a reason. So, you know, put simply back when you were a caveman, you didn't know when the next meal was coming from. Yep. So, you know, you get that honey or that sugar, that big calorie meal, eat as much as you can. So your brain still like that. So a good tactic, and I use this and it crazily, it worked. It worked for drinking. I mentioned this to before

where you just understand that your brain is in a way playing a trick on you and if you give in literally by this model you just fell for a trick

and so now you know that right so you're falling for a trick that is played on you by your own brain because it thinks you're still a caveman so you see these donuts or cake or I don't know pizza something delicious

and fatty. You mean what you had for dinner tonight? Yeah. You see my dinner and your brain is... Hey, this is one of those situations, though. It's your daughter's birthday party, right? You got the family over. What are you going to do?

Put them all on a paleo diet for the evening? No, you're going to get them some pizza and ice cream and it's all good and it's a little bit of cake for Echo Charles. Technically, that was lunch and then I had a salad for dinner. Okay, good done. Technically. See, you disciplined yourself. Back on the track.

Yeah, I like that. But so if you understand that you're... you just fell for a trick right there. So now going forward, you know, or okay, if I have these cravings or that donut looks delicious in whatever way, you're about to actively

and consciously fall for a trick right now. There's no scarcity of food right now. There's an abundance of food. And you know what's a perfect phrase for this? Don't be a sucker. Yeah, exactly. Don't be a sucker. Like, how often is it like, That's like one of the worst things someone can tell you.

That's what I think too. You are a sucker. That's why I worked so good. And that's why I worked for you. Yeah. Don't be a sucker. Yeah. So don't be a sucker to that piece of your brain that's trying to trick you into wanting stuff that's actually bad for you.

Yeah. So yeah. And so how the trick works is your brain is saying, hey, those donuts, those are beneficial. And look at all these benefits. Like you'll get your calories. Who knows when they're going to come? That's what your brain is. That's how it feels.

they're going to come when you order dominoes. Yeah. Yeah, that's the reality. But your brain's not telling you that. It's giving you a credit because you need all those calories. You don't know when it's going to come. And look at all these benefits. It's going to taste good.

And this is what you need. That's what your brain is telling you. This is what you need. But the reality is you don't live in that world anymore where you can get as many donuts as you want now. So it's tricking you into thinking that the short-term benefits are the benefits. When in reality, since the world we live in now is, different, the long-term benefits are the benefits. Yes.

And they don't involve donuts or drinking. Don't be a sucker. Don't be a sucker. Yeah. It helps, man. It helps. If you care about being a sucker, though, that's the thing. If you're like, I don't care about being a sucker,

there's no one that likes being a sucker, though. That's what I think, too. That's what I think, too. All right. Next question. Jocko, is Buds the right filter for the kind of people you want in the SEAL teams? Does it filter out good people?

and let in the bed? So Buds is the basic underwater demolition and seal training, and it does a decent job. And I'm not going to say that everybody that makes it through Buds is a guy that you want to work with or even a guy that you want on your team.

Because one thing that happens in Buds is that punishment is dealt out, right? I mean, it's just suffering, it's just hard work, it's putting a boat on your head and being cold and wet and all this stuff. And you either embrace that and crush it. That's one way to get through. That's the way you should get through.

But there are guys that they find a way to get by and to sneak by and to work the system. Right. It does happen. And those guys definitely exist in the teams and the real team guys know who those guys are. But one thing that's hard, it's hard for a civilian to know the difference. because to a civilian, a seal is a seal, if you have your trident, you're a seal, you must be a badass.

So what is it like, kind of like when your coach is saying, okay, everybody push-ups for, you know, 60 seconds and he's looking around and when you see he's not looking at you, you just kind of cruise. There's that guy who does that. There's all kinds of guys.

There's all kinds of little corners that you can cut. There's things you can get away with. And the weird thing about Buds is, I think Leif talked about this when he was on the podcast is, or maybe he didn't, maybe we just had it in conversation.

but you have a mentality when you're going through buds is that you're a teen and you're trying to help everyone get through and so you don't like rat those guys out when you see them cutting corners you very seldom do you rat one of those guys out unless it's just an atrocious case most of the time guys are you know like hey man are you okay like oh and instructors coming like they'll help people skate through right so it's pretty negative. When you get through buds and you're in the SEAL teams,

then everyone says to a man, we'll say, I wish I wouldn't help anyone get through. Because now they're in the teams, and now we can't count on them. Oh, yeah. And now we've got to carry their weight. So it is definitely a test of making it through, but there's two ways to make it through.

You can crush it and survive it, or you can sneak through it and skate through it, and it does happen. Now, it's also mainly a physical test, and people talk about, no, it's mental. It's physical, right? There's a mental aspect to it, no doubt. And if you're not mentally committed to making it through, then it's going to be hard for you. But it's primarily a physical test.

And physicality is actually a small part of being a seal. Now, of course, it's like a baseline factor. I mean, it is a factor. As a seal, you've got to be able to do the job physically. but that's the baseline, right? And being a good athlete is definitely, that does definitely not automatically make someone a great seal because there's guys that go through buds that are studs physically.

And we get the seal teams, they're not good. They're not good seals. They might be a bad leader, they might be unsafe, or they can't shoot, or they can't handle the pressure, or they can't handle the grind. Because you get a guy that's an elite level athlete. And guess what? He's used to elite level of food.

He's used to elite level of treatment. He's used to an elite level of rest. And you get to the seal teams, and there's no elite food, there's no elite treatment, there's no elite rest. There's just grind. And you're out in the desert, and you're just going on an operation after operation after operation.

And some of these high-level athletes, they're such a fine-tuned machine. It's like we talked about before. They're like a Porsche or a race car, and what you want to be is a four-by-four. Like you can put diesel or biofuel or whatever into that engine it's going to keep running.

You have to put the high-octane, clean stuff into the sports car, and some of those guys break down on that. And the reason is, like I said, is because the SEAL teams is not Bud's training. And I've said to be this before, no one in the SEAL teams cares about Bud's training. Once you've gotten through buds, it's like as normal as brushing your teeth.

Like everyone's done it. No one says, hey, did you brush your teeth? No, we all brush our teeth. We all went through buds. It's not that big of a deal. One thing that buds does do good, though, is it does do a good job of finding people's weaknesses and whether it's swimming or whether it's running or whether it's the obstacle course or whether it's lack of sleep or being in the water and the waterwork that they make you do.

if you have a weakness of any of those areas, it's going to show. It's going to show. But again, some guys do find a way to make it through and they end up in the teams and they end up doing a couple of seal platoons. But again, just being a seal doesn't make you a badass. That's just the truth.

It doesn't make you a great leader. It doesn't make you a tactical expert. It just doesn't. It means that you made it through the training and you survived a couple seal platoons. That's what it means. Now, there are plenty of seals that are badass and great leaders and definitely some tactical experts, but it certainly isn't every seal. Because there's a bell curve in the seal teams, a bell curve, just like any other group of people

or any other organization. And at the top of the bell curve, you've got a bunch of reliance. relentless, unstoppable warriors that carry more than their share of the weight in the teams. And these are the guys that have built or are building the reputation that the SEAL teams have. And then in the middle of the curve, that's where you've got the bulk of the guys. And these are great guys. They're great SEALs. They do the job and they do it well.

and they're outstanding professional combat troopers. Who get the job done? And they get the job done on time and on target. And those are awesome, solid guys that maintain the reputation of the SEAL teams. They maintain it. And then you got the crew at the bottom. And these are the guys that slip through the cracks, they work the system,

and while they're technically classified as SEALs, these aren't guys that are like respected by other guys in the SEAL teams. And quite honestly, these are usually the guys that talk the most and brag the boast about being a SEAL. And these are the guys that they don't build the reputation or maintain the reputation of SEAL teams. These are the guys that live off the reputation of the SEAL teams. When in all likelihood, they probably haven't contributed anything themselves to that reputation. leeches. But that is what it is.

And as I always say, the teams gave me everything. The good, the bad, and the ugly, and I wouldn't change a thing. I love the SEAL teams. The Frogman, the AW gunner in a SEAL platoon, the point man, the corpsman, the radio man, the rear secure men. the platoon chief and the LPO and the OIC and the AOIC those guys those guys in a seal platoon the ones that carry the weight and carry the torch those guys are in my blood and I love those guys and I always will okay last question Jocko what does discipline really mean

You know, besides waking up early and how do I employ it to all aspects of my life? What does it really mean? Yes, discipline, it does start with waking up early. It really does. But that is just the beginning. And I always say that discipline is the root of all good qualities. but you have to absolutely apply it to things outside of just waking up early. It's everything. It's working out every day, making yourself stronger and faster and more flexible and healthier. Discipline is eating the right foods to fuel your system.

It's about disciplining your emotions so you can make good decisions. It's about having the discipline to control your ego so your ego doesn't get out of hand and control you. It's about treating people the way you would want to be treated and doing the tasks that you don't necessarily want to do, but that you know will help you or help your team. It's about facing your fears. It takes discipline to face your fears so you can conquer them. And that's what discipline is. Discipline means taking the hard road, the uphill road, to do what's right for yourself and for other people.

It's so often the easy path. The easy path it calls to us to be weak for that moment, to break down for that moment. to give in to the desire and the short-term gratification. But the discipline will not allow that. The discipline calls for strength and fortitude and will. It won't accept weakness. It won't tolerate another breakdown. The discipline can seem like it's your worst enemy.

But the reality is, discipline is. discipline is your best friend it will take care of you like nothing else can and it'll put you on that path the path to strength and health and intelligence and happiness and most importantly it'll put you on that path to freedom and i think that's all we've got for tonight so thanks to everybody out there for putting on those those headphones and listening to this podcast. Thanks for the feedback you give us. It's definitely good to know that people are listening and getting something out of it. Also, thanks for subscribing and reviewing and spreading the word.

And thanks to On It for the support, for the great products that they make. We appreciate that. And please support them for supporting us. and speaking of support another big way you can support us and the podcast is if you want to buy something anything

especially the books that we talk about go through our website to get to amazon dot com echo how do they do that just like how you said instead of going straight to amazon com go to jaco podcast dot com

or jocco podcast 2.com or jaco store. And then just click on that and it'll go to Amazon. So jocopodcast.com. And that's if they're going to buy anything. Yeah, anything. Yeah, the books or even, yeah, anything. If you want to buy some duct tape. Get that duct tape through jacopodcast.com.

Yeah. That's awesome. And if you want to support this podcast, you can get some supplements from joccofuel.com. You can get some gear and clothing from origin, USA.com. You can get a bunch of cool t-shirts and whatnot from jocco store.com. And you can check out my leadership consulting company at echelonfront.com.

And everything is available at jocco.com. You know, awesome. We really appreciate that support. Again, that's how Echo Charles is hosting all this stuff and paying for all this stuff and all that. So it's much appreciated. If you want to talk to us or engage, with us or ask us questions. You can find us on the interwebs. On Twitter, I am at Jocco Willink,

and of course, Echo Charles is at Echo Charles. Thanks for leaving reviews of the podcast on iTunes that helps us with the rank and gets us pushed up and gets us more listeners. Also, if you bought the book Extreme Ownership that Laif and I wrote, jump on Amazon, throw a review up there. That helps us out as well. Man, we're asking a lot of the people. Yeah. I feel like everyone was kind of doing that anyway, though.

You know, I think. Who's everyone? The people, man. The people. The people. Well, the biggest thing is spread the word. Spread the word. If you want.

If you feel like it. Yeah. If it's been worth your while, spread the word. And, you know, really, most importantly, to you, you, you, that's listening to this, that's trying to get better, trying to be better, trying to do better. Thank you for getting out there and getting after it. Because when you make yourself better, you make the world better. And so until next time, this is Jocko and Echo. Out.