Jocko Podcast - JOCKO PODCAST 16: MACHETE SEASON, BJJ COMPETITION MINDSET, INJURIES, SCHEDULES WITH NEW KIDS, ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

Episode Date: March 30, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QorFNL9CRrU 0:00:00 - Opening 0:07:55 - Book review, "Machete Season: The Killers in Rawanda Speak" 1:17:40 - Onnit / Jocko Podcast Info and Support 1:20:55 - BJJ Competition mindset and training for Competition. 1:25:44 - Taking advantage of time off training. 1:34:30 - Dealing with orders you don't agree with. 1:45:35 - What Supplements do Jocko and Echo take? 1:49:35 - Dealing with training troops in hard and tragic situations. 1:56:55 - Advice on workout schedule with newborn kids. 2:15:39 - What are the right questions to ask?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 16 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. We couldn't have been more excited. It was a real mission. None of us had been on a real mission before, except for our LPO, this is our leading petty officer who was in the first Gulf War. and our platoon commander who was in on the Granada invasion

and fought at the radio tower, those guys had this small amount of combat experience. But at the time for us, that was a world apart from what we had because the rest of us had zero. This was the 90s. There was no war going on. And so now, here we were with a real mission on deck, 1994, I think I was about 23 years old.

I'm in my second seal platoon. And at the time, being in a sealed platoon was literally the sole purpose and focus of my life. It was my whole world. And that's what most of my platoon mates were like as well. That's,

that's what we were. And this was an awesome platoon. A great platoon, the ARG alpha platoon. And as far as having tight friends and a brotherhood inside of a platoon, this was definitely one of the best that I was ever in, if not the best. And all of us were just 100% about being in a seal platoon. And it was the world to us. And we didn't care about anything else, really.

Not politics, domestic politics or international politics. We weren't sitting around and reading newspapers, and we barely even watched the news at this time. We were deployed on a ship. There was no internet. We were troopers. We were errand boys, as Colonel Kurt says in Apocalypse now. We didn't know about the policy,

but we sure as hell would enforce. horse it. And so we had this mission and we were fired up. We were, like I said, we were on a ship and we were off the coast of Africa. And there was something going on in one of the countries there. And during the last deployment that SEALs did on a ship at this time, it was some of our fellow SEALS guys that we knew had gone into Somalia. And so that was a real mission. And we kind of thought maybe this will be our opportunity. And probably seven or eight months prior to this, the Battle of Mogadishu had taken place, which is where the movie Black Hawk Down came from. So this was, this was Africa. This was like our chance to get into some kind of combat.

And we started hearing more about the situation where they might send us. It looked like we were going to go in and provide some kind of security. And then it looked like we were going to go in and maybe help some Americans that were there and get them out. And then it looked like we might go in and reinforce some kind of UN troops. And like a bunch of missions. And they kind of changed as the situation developed. And we started reading about what was happening and what we're going to be going to do. And what the situation was there on the ground. And I didn't understand it at first. But there was people killing each other by the thousands. by the by the tens of thousands by the hundreds of thousands hundreds of thousands of people were being killed but it wasn't like a it wasn't like a war that you know i had read about or i'd seen in the movies they weren't shooting each other with guns or dropping bombs on each other they were they were using machetes

like a like a horror movie hundreds hundreds of thousands of people being butchered and what was it all about it was a tribal difference that's barely distinguishable to us i mean it's barely distinguishable for them the country was rwanda in the event came to be known as the Rwandan genocide, mass murder, primarily of Tutsi tribesmen by the rival Hutu clan. Now, war is something that I can rationalize, right? Maybe I shouldn't be able to do that, but I can. I mean, there's some kind of wrong or evil in the world

that needs to be stood up against. You know, is it fascism? Is it tyranny? Is it terrorism? It's forces of darkness. And they're pitted against forces of light, forces of freedom and democracy. And as I say all the time,

war is hell. And it should be a last resort when everything else has failed. And that being said, war is necessary. sometimes to stop evil. And sometimes it's the only way to stop evil. But this

idea here, this situation where people are killing each other in a mob type scenario and they're literally doing it like a horror movie. I don't know how else to explain it. It's like a horror movie that seems too insane and too bloody to even be believable. You take the worst horror movie you can imagine with the worst plotline.

And this makes less sense. It wouldn't even be believable if it was a horror movie. It's too much. It's too violent and too ruthless. And there's too much to even comprehend or understand. And this is, I mean, I hope that this is somewhere at the, the limit of the evil that human beings are capable of. You hear me talk about the darkness, the evil in the world.

This is it. And I'm going to the book now. The book is called Machete Season. The killers in Rwanda speak. During that killing season, we rose earlier than usual to eat lots of meat. we went up to the soccer field at around nine or ten we would go off on the attack rule number one was to kill there was no rule number two it was an organization without complications the judge told everyone everyone there that from then on we were to do nothing but kill tutzies well

we understood. That was a final plan. The killing of every Tutsi without exception. It was simply said, and it was simple to understand. There were some who asked if there were any priorities. The judge answered sternly. There is no need to ask how to begin. The only worthwhile plan is to start straight ahead into the bush and right now without hanging back behind any more questions when you get right down to it it is a gross exaggeration to say we organized ourselves the killings began without much planning the only regulation was to keep going till the end maintain a satisfactory pace spare no one and loot what we found it was impossible to screw up And that's one of the craziest things about this book.

Again, the book is called Machete Season. It's The Killers in Rwanda Speak. So this author, Jean Hetzfeld, he went into the prison where these people are now being kept to talk to them about what they did, and it's their own words. In the preface to the book, just to give you a little bit of background, ours is appallingly an age of genocide. But even so, what happened in Rwanda in the spring of 1994 stands out in several ways. In a tiny, landlocked African country smaller than the state of Maryland,

some 800,000 people were hacked to death one by one by their neighbors. The women, men, and children who were slaughtered were of the same race and shared the same language, customs, and confession. They were Roman Catholic, as those who were. eagerly slaughtered them. And I'll tell you, I was seriously considering not doing this podcast. And it's this book, Sam Harris, a acquaintance of mine who does podcasts, who I was on his podcast, very smart guy, brilliant guy.

and he sent me an email and said, hey, Jocko, check out this book. And, you know, he said it's about the Rwandan genocide. And I immediately said, hey, you know, I was there. I mean, it wasn't on the ground, but we were there waiting to go in. So I immediately knew what he was talking about. He basically said it's by the killers. And so I immediately ordered it on Amazon. and as soon as I got it and I just read it and at first I was excited you know thinking oh this is

really this is going to be impactful but as I went deeper and deeper into it I started saying to myself maybe I don't do this podcast maybe I don't do it because like I said it's it's almost too much I think it is too much and for that very reason I'm going to do it because We can't. We must not deny that evil exists and that humans can be evil. And as the preface of the book continues, our obligation, and it is an obligation, is to take what human beings are capable of doing to one another, not spontaneously. Crimes of this order are never spontaneous.

but when mobilized to think of other human beings, people who were their school friends, neighbors, coworkers, and fellow parishioners as not human beings at all. And when organized for and directed to the task of slaughter, for the issue who finally is not judgment. It is understanding. To make the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda is a painful task that we have no right to shirk.

it is part of being a moral adult. So now let's listen to these, and that might be a stretch, but let's listen to what these people had to say. At the beginning, we were too fired up to think. Later on, we were too used to it. In our condition, it meant nothing to us to think we were busy cutting our neighbors down to the last one. It became a goes without saying. They had already stopped being good neighbors of longstanding.

the ones who handed around the Urwaga can at the cabaret. It's a banana beer. Since they wouldn't be there anymore. They had become people to throw away, so to speak. They were no longer what they had been, and neither were we. They did not bother us, and the past did not bother us, because nothing bothered us. And so the Tutsis were driven immediately.

They tried to escape to this area that they called the marshes, which are outside, you know, the hills, the people lived in the hills, and they tried to escape the mart. The Tutsis tried to escape to the marshes. And another one of the murderers says, kindness too was forbidden in the marshes. The marshes left no room for exceptions. To forget doubt, we had meanness and ruthlessness in killing.

And a job to do and do well, that's all. Some changed color from the hunting. Their limbs were muddy, their clothes were splattered, even their faces were not black in the same way. They became grayish from everything they had done. A little layer of stink covered us too, but we didn't care. We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a tootsie in the swamps. I mean a person like us sharing similar thoughts and feelings. The hunt was savage. The hunters were savage. The prey was savage. Savagery took over the mind. The more we killed, the more greediness urged us on. Grudiness, if left unpunished, it never lets you go. You could see it in our eyes, bugged out by the killings. It was even dangerousome. There were those that came back in the bloodstained shirts, branded.

their machetes, shrieking like madmen, saying they wanted to grab everything. We had to calm them down with drinks and soothing words because they could turn ugly for those around them. Man can get used to killing if he kills on and on. He can even become a beast without noticing it. Some threaten one another when they had no more tutsis under the machete. In their faces, you could see the need to kill. Me, I was not skilled. of death. In a way, I forgot I was killing live people. I no longer thought about either life or death, but the blood struck terror into me. It stank and dripped. At night I tell myself, after all, I am a man full of blood. All this spurting blood will bring me catastrophe, a curse.

Death did not alarm me, but that overflow of blood, that, yes, a lot. and one of the things that they talk about in the book is in this in this part of of the continent the people they use a machete for everything so they they do their they cut down brush with it they slaughter the animals with it they cook their dinners with it they do everything with a machete so everybody is just sort of it's it's their it's their it's their iPhone right it's their iPhone they everyone has It's their smartphone. That's what they use for everything. Like we do in America, we use a smartphone. They use a machete for everything. That's how they get their food. That's how they clear out their house.

It's how they build. I mean, it's everything they do. They do with a machine. She says, so everyone's very comfortable with a machete. A boy with the strength in his arms to hold the machete firmly, if his brother or father brought him along in the group, he imitated and grew used to killing. Youth no longer hampered him.

he became accustomed to blood. Killing became an ordinary activity since our elders and everyone did it. Or a young boy might even prove more at ease with it than an experienced oldster because death touched him farther away. Given the novelty of the circumstances

and his young age, death seemed less important to him. He saw it as belonging to an older generation. He shrugged off as a little bit of perils and considered it a distraction. It became a madness that went on all by itself. You raced ahead or you got out of the way to escape being run over, but you followed the crowd. The one who rushed off machete in hand, he listened to nothing anymore. He forgot everything. First of all, his level of intelligence. Doing the same thing every day meant we didn't have to think

about what we were doing. We went out and came back without having a single thought. We hunted because it was the order of the day until the day was over. Our arms ruled our heads. In any case, our heads no longer had their say. We became more and more cruel, more and more calm, more and more bloody. But we did not see that we were becoming more and more killers. The more we cut, The more cutting became child's play to us. For a few, it turned into treat, if I may say so. That's one of the things they do is they use some words like cut. And what they mean is slaughter and murder.

But they use kind of a term that's less direct as a euphemism. At the start of the killings, we worked fast and skimmed along because we were eager. In the middle of the killings, we killed casually. We killed to keep the job going. Some were tired of these blood assignments. Others amused themselves by torturing tutzies, who had made them sweat day after day. Since I was killing often, I began to feel it did not mean anything to me. It gave me no pleasure.

I knew I would not be punished. I was killing without consequences. I adapted without a problem. I left every morning, free and easy, in a hurry to get going. I saw that the work and the results were good for me. That's all. During the killings, I no longer considered anything in particular in the tootsie, except that the person had to be done away with.

I want to make it clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one. Now, as I said, it was difficult for to tell who's who. They had the same culture. They had the same language. They looked the same. And you might be wondering, how did they know who was who? Well, the author explains that somewhat here. And it is just, well, I'll go to the book. After the genocide, many foreigners wondered how the huge number of Hutu killers recognized their Tutsi victims in the upheaval of the massacres. since Rwandans of both ethnic groups

speak the same language with no distinctive differences, live in the same places, and are not always physically recognizable by distinctive characteristics. The answer is simple. The killers did not have to pick out their victims. They knew them personally. Everyone knows everything in a village.

So they didn't have to guess. They didn't have to identify him by a different skin color or by a different facial structure or by a different language. They knew them. A teacher and a survivor of the marshes confirms the principal and the inspector of schools in my district participated in the killings with nail studded clubs. teachers, priests, the burgomaster, a sub-prefect, a doctor, they all killed with their own hands. They wore pressed cotton trousers. They had no trouble sleeping. They traveled around in vehicles or on light motorcycles. These well-educated people were calm and they rolled up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes. For someone who has spent his life teaching the humanities, as I have,

such criminals are a fearful mystery. So like the priests, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, burgo master, which is like a, yeah, kind of a German name of a, of a, of a political person, political magistrate in a town or a sub-prefect, that's a, a sub-prefect is someone that's in command, someone of authority, especially in the Catholic Church. Mm. So these people, with their nice shirts and nice pants, were rolling up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes. At first, the killing was obligatory.

Afterward, we got used to it. We became naturally cruel. We no longer needed encouragements or fines to kill or even orders or advice. Discipline was relaxed because it wasn't necessary anymore. I don't know anyone who was struck because he refused to kill. I know of one case of punishment by death, a special case, a woman. Some people cut her to punish her husband who had refused to kill. But she was, in fact, a tootsie.

Afterward, the husband took part without whining. In fact, he was one of the busiest in the marshes. So these tribal, the Hutus and the Tutsis would marry each other. just like you know you put human beings living in the same village you know but you end up marrying somebody from the other tribe and if you didn't go with the system you were getting murdered in the evening we had to report to the leader about exactly what we had killed many boasted for fear of being taunted or frowned on that was also a good reason why we did not bury the bodies someone suspected of faking could guide the verifiers to the truth.

Anyone who had the idea of not killing for a day could get out of it no problem. But anyone with the idea of not killing at all could not let on or he himself would be killed while others watched. Voicing disagreement out loud was fatal on the spot. So we don't know if people had that idea. in the evening after the killings there was time for friendship

and meeting friends brought us light hearts we would chat about our days we shared drinks we ate we no longer counted up what we had killed but what it was that it would bring us the killings had made us gossipy

and greedy so that's one of the things that drove was they got to you go kill a family you take whatever you want from them including their land including all their property, everything. So that's what they talk about. They become greedy. And then at a certain point,

the authorities no longer had the ability to plan or to channel. Their orders fell on deaf ears. The massacres had become extraordinary, beyond all reason. The keenest ones, when they killed, grabbed the possessions of the dead. They wanted everything right away,

not even stopping to finish off their victims. The looting excited them so much. they needed no advice or encouragement. Their greed spread to those who followed, who went crazy in turn. We began the day by killing. We ended the day by looting. It was the rule to kill going out and loot coming back.

We killed in teams, but we looted every man for himself or in small groups of friends. Those who killed a lot had less time to pillage. But since they were feared, they would catch up because of their power. So, hey, if I go out and kill the most people, I don't have that much time to loot,

that's okay, because everyone's scared of me. Yeah, so they kind of let you. Yeah. Some killers claimed girls in the marshes that satisfied them and made them neglect looting. They figured they'd catch up the next day. Now, here's a...

Again, this is going back to the author. It's not direct quotes from the killers, but the author's kind of telling a story about a situation that happened. One of the murderers witnessed the passage of armored cars. So the international community, like you heard me talking about the fact that I was on a ship with seals, with Marines,

that could have done something here, but we didn't do anything. Actually, the Marines went in and provided a little, a tiny bit of aid. I think they sent 30 guys in. But there was nothing, nothing to what, it had a very minimalistic impact. But what happened was civilized people left.

And so they see armored cars coming. And they caused it here, now this is going to one of the killers talking, they caused a big panic among us, who were already roving in the streets, heating themselves up with sudden bursts of gunfire. Some of them shouted, the whites are here. Others will come.

They have terrible weapons. It's all over for us. When they saw the convoy disappear in the dust without even a little stop for curiosity or a drink on the main street, they celebrated with some primus, which is getting an alcohol, and shot off the cartridges in their guns

as a sign of relief. You could see they felt saved. They were rid of the last stumbling block. so to speak. At the same time in Kigali, which is the capital, whites were leaving the embassies, offices, monasteries, and universities via road convoys to neighboring countries and an emergency airlift operating out of the airport. Very few foreigners sought refugee, saw refuge in guarded villas, but no foreigners were left. And now this is, again, this is the commentary. from the author. Not one foreigner, priest, service corps volunteer, diplomat, NGO worker.

None can provide a convincing reason for this immediate and astonishing flight during the opening hours of the killings. In any case, neither danger nor panic can justify such haste. The most telling explanation I have heard so far comes from Claude, Dean Caiste, a farmer and soup and survivor on the hill when she says, reversing our proverb, whites do not want to see what they cannot believe, and they could not believe a genocide, because that is a killing that overwhelms everyone, them, as much as the others. And so they left. now the thing that sparked this

there was a there was a leader so there had been there had been a revolutionary a civil war going on and it was the Rwandan civil war had been going on and it was between the Hutu led government and the Rwandan patriotic front or the RPF and so the RPF was largely composed

of Tutsis and a lot of them had fled to Uganda but now they were you know saying hey, let's go back. And there was a bunch of pressure, international pressure on the government, which was led by the president of Rwanda, named Habi Arimana. So Habiurimana felt all this pressure,

and so they made peace. And then what happened was on April 6th, 1994, an airplane that had, Habiari mana in it was shot down and everyone was killed including him and that was it. So the Hutu president was killed, but his aircraft was shot down and that was it. And I pulled this little paragraph here from Wikipedia. Genocidal killings began the following day.

Soldiers, police and militia quickly executed key, Tutsi and moderate Hutu leaders. So they were just getting after it. then erected checkpoints and barricades and used Rwandan's national identity cards to systematically kill Tutsis. So in the 30s, they had implemented this system where you would put whatever tribe you were in

because it was so hard to tell who was who. And they just used those identification cards. These forces recruited or pressured Hutu civilians to arm themselves with machetes, clubs, blunt objects, and other weapons to rape, maim, and kill their Tutsi neighbors and to destroy or steal their property. But one of the major influences on the people was radio.

Was radio. And as leading up to this, you had this situation where they were broadcasting sort of, I guess it's what we call hate speech. You know, that's what we call it. only this was actual hate speech going to the book in the broadcast studios of popular radio stations radio rwanda the tozis were referred to as cockroaches announcers the two best known of whom were simon bikindi and kantano used humorous sketches and songs to call openly for the

destruction of the tootsies one of the one of the killers remembers those gen and actually this this guy was a yeah he was one of the killers those gentlemen were famous artists and great comic virtuosos what they said was so cleverly put and repeated so offies often that tootsies themselves found them funny to listen to they were clamoring for the massacre of all the cockroaches but in amusing ways and for the tootsies those witty words were hilarious so they're actually hearing this and laughing about it the songs urging all Hutus to get together to wipe out the Tutsis. We laughed out loud at the jokes.

And they made this Hutu Ten Commandments, which is basically it's a document. You look it up on Wikipedia. It's just a document that's the Ten Commandments. If you marry a Tutsi woman, she should be killed. I mean, it's brutal. Absolutely brutal. And now,

this is, this is, I found this piece fascinating, continuing to talk about the radio. And this is a statement, and this is interesting because we're on a podcast. And I listen to podcasts. And I haven't talked about this before. But when I was a kid,

I listened to radio shows. And I understood the power of them. I listened to a radio show, and I'll have to look and see where it is now. It was called the Dr. Demento show. And the Dr. Demento show was this, it was on like Sunday nights at 10 o'clock on some college radio station in New England.

And it would just have various, it was like a variety show. And they'd have a comedic part and there'd be like a Twilight Zone type thing. But I would sit there like we do with podcasts now and I'd put the headphones on and I'd get in the zone and I would listen. and you realize, and you realize this when you get into a podcast, you realize there's a certain power to it.

There's a certain power to listening to a person and their voice going into your head. And there's a piece about this inside the book, and it just nailed me. It's a remark made by Serge Daney, who was an essayist, and he's talking about the first Gulf War. But what he says about radio, and he would be obviously saying this about podcasts now, is that radio is far and away the most dangerous of the media. It wields a unique and terrifying power once the state or an institutional apparatus collapses. It casts off everything that might attenuate or sidetrack the force of words. In a chaotic situation, radio can prove to be the most efficient tool of democracy

as well as of revolution or fascism because it penetrates unhindered to the individual's deepest core anywhere at any moment immediately without the necessary and critical distance inherent in the reading of a text or an image. So when you listen to a podcast, that's such a great note to explain why radio has so much power. You don't even have to interpret the words. You don't have to interpret an image. the words are going into your head and they use it. They use it in situations like this and one of the killers said

ever since the plane crash so ever since the president was shot down the radio had hammered at us. The foreigners are departing. They had material proof of what we are going to do and they are leaving. This

time around they are showing no interest in the fate of the Tutsis we witnessed that flight of the armored cars along the road with our own eyes. Our ears no longer heard murmurs of reproach. For the first time ever, we did not feel we were under the frowning supervision of the whites. Other encouragements followed that assured us of unchecked freedom to complete the task. So we thought, good, it's true. The blue helmets did nothing except an about face to leave us alone.

And if you don't know what blue helmets are, when you're working as a United Nations peacekeeper, they give you a blue helmet. And anybody can fill that role. Any nation that's part of the UN, Americans fill that role from time to time, but any nation can do it. So he's saying that the blue helmets did nothing

except an about face to leave us alone. why would they come back before it's all over at that signal off we went we were certain of killing everyone without drawing evil looks without getting a scolding from a white or a priest we joked about it instead of pressing our advantage we felt too at ease with an unfamiliar job that had gotten off to a good start but time and laziness played an ugly trick on us based on us Basically, we became too sure of ourselves. We slowed down, and that overconfidence is what did us in. So let's hear a little bit about the psychological impact of what's happening to the book.

Rowdies kept on slaughtering cows after the killings because they couldn't put down their machetes. During the killings, we had not one wedding, not one baptism, not one soccer match, one religious service like Easter. We did not find that kind of celebration interesting anymore. We did not care spit for Sunday silliness. We were dead tired from work. We were getting greedy. We celebrated whenever we felt like it.

We drank as much we wanted. Some turned into drunks. Anyone who felt sad about someone he had killed really had to hide his words and his regrets for fear of being seen as an accomplice and being treated roughly. Sometimes drinkers went mean when they had found no one to kill that day. Others went mean because they had killed too much. You had to show them a smiling face or watch out different personalities. Some guys are going crazy because they're not killing enough and some guys are going crazy because they're killing too much.

A youth could hide a girl he had brought back from the marshes to have her behind a pen. or a clump of bushes. But when he had had enough, or when tongues started wagging, in other words, when people started talking about the fact that he had brought one of these girls back, he had to kill her to avoid a serious penalty. We had sessions with girls who were raped in the bush. Nobody dared protest that. Even those who were edgy about it because they had received blessings in church, for example,

told themselves it would change nothing since the girl was marked for death anyway. there were two kinds of rapists. Some took the girls and used them until the end, even on the flight to the Congo. They took advantage of the situation to sleep with the prettiest hootseys, and in exchange showed them a little bit of consideration. Others caught them just to fool around with for having sex and drinking. They raped for a little while,

and then handed them over to be killed right afterward. There were no orders from the authorities. The two kinds were free to do as they pleased. Now we get into a story, other than a story, a travesty, a horror, coming from one of the workers at a basically a little Christian hospital. They surrounded the maternity hospital. They ripped down the gates. They simply shot up the locks.

They wore very handsome cartridge belts of highly polished. leather, but they wanted to avoid wasting bullets. They killed the women with machetes and clubs. Whenever one of the more agile girls managed to escape in the commotion and get out a window, she was caught in the gardens. When a mama had hidden her child underneath her, they picked her up first, then cut the child, then cut its mother last. They didn't bother to cut the nursing infants properly.

They slammed them against the walls to save time or hurled them alive onto the heaps of corpses. That morning, we were more than 300 women and children. That evening in the garden, there were only five women left, spared because they were lucky to have been born Hutu. Now, the author goes into a statement here about a tradition in war-torn areas where, you know, there's some sort of friendship or there's some love that makes people do things that are outside the bounds of what the norm, of what

the massacres are helping the opposite side or whatever. So he says this, people who have lived through war often tell wonderful stories about friendships, incredible romances, amazing gestures of solidarity, comical and poignant collaborations between protagonists and enemy camps, or humble and admirable deeds. It all provides material for novels, songs, films, and evenings of memories, and it patches things up between you and humanity. French and German conscripts chatted across the trenches

and swapped tins of potted meat. Algerians hid French colonists with whom they played cards. Avichy minister foiled the deportation of a colleague with whom he had went to school. It was the same in Vietnam, Ireland, Lebanon, Angola, El Salvador, Israel, Cheshnia. In the name of passion, childhood, a clan, elemental things like affection or loyalty. But here, we've been. find not one camaraderie impulse among teammates not one gesture of compassion for helpless babies at the breast no bond of friendship or love that survived from a church choir or an agricultural

cooperative no civil disobedience in a village no rebellious adolescent in a gang of budding tufts and not a single escape network although it would have been easy to have set one up in the 40 kilometers of uninhabited forest between the marshes and the burundi border no convoy no links among the herders paths no web of hiding places to allow the evacuation of survivors nothing and he continues to talk about really the difference between genocide in war. In war, men are killed first because they are the most apt to fight back. The next targets are women liable to help them, and boys because they try to continue the

conflict, and then older men who can offer wise counsel. But in genocide, the killers track down everyone, in particular, babies, girls, and women, because they represent the future. genocide goes beyond war because the intention lasts forever it is a final intention and again just talking about the fact that there was no mercy no mercy one of the killer says i do not know of a single who to woman who hid away a little tootsie child to save it from the massacre of its family not even a toddler wrapped in a cloth or nursling unrecognizable to her neighbor because of its tender age.

Not one woman on the whole hill cheated in the way of a rescue, not even for a short moment of trying. And one of the other killers said, I did not hear many women protesting against Tutsis being raped. They knew this work of killing fiercely heated up the men in the marshes. They agreed on this, except of course if the men did their dirty sex work near the houses. And again, here's one of the killers. talking about the fact that they knew these people.

In war, you kill someone who fights you or promises you harm. In killings of this kind, you killed a Tutsi woman used to listen to the radio with. Or the kind lady who boat medicine plants on your wounds or your sister who is married to a Tutsi, or even for some unlucky devils your own Tutsi wife and your children by general demand. You slaughter the woman same as man. That is the difference which changes everything. And here's the lone story of someone that tried to stop this. It was close to noon on April 11th. So remember this started on April 6th. So it's been five days, the first day of the Tootsie hunt in this particular area. Isidore was sitting on a chair.

in front of his house, resting after a morning of weeding. He was a Hutu farmer, 65 years old, who had arrived 20 years before. Some strapping fellows armed with machetes came singing up the path that ran near his house. Isidore called to them in his deep old voice and lectured them in public in front of the neighbors. You, young men, are evildoers. Turn on your heels and go. Your blades point the way towards a dreadful misfortune for us all. Do not stir up disputes too dangerous for us, farmers.

Stop tormenting our neighbors and go back to your fields. Two killers approached him, laughing. And without a word, cut him down with their machetes. Among the band was Isidore's son, who, according to witnesses, neither protested nor stopped to bend. over the body. These young men went on their way singing. Now speaking of family and I mentioned that some of the Hutus and Tutsis were intermarried and had mixed children and here's sort of the standard operating procedure for that. This is coming from one of the killers. A Tutsi wife, you could try to

save her. You offered a cow to the leader and a radio or the like to the organizers. Then you handed out small payments of money to those who were prowling around your house. But that wasn't even worth trying if you did not want to cooperate. Meaning if you didn't want to kill. A Tutsi husband, you couldn't bargain for. He was at the head of the list. If his wife began to argue, she was struck right away. And they cut her husband, while she watched to discourage her. If she kept on, she'd be cut herself with her children. One of the other killers said,

someone who wanted to save his Tutsi wife was required to show great enthusiasm in the killings. Someone who behaved weakly or timidly knew it was all over for his wife. Growsing or idleness doomed her. So if you even complained. And they talk about one of the other killers talking about how it was easy to kill the strangers. It was much better to kill strangers than acquaintances because acquaintances had time to stab you with an intense look before receiving the blows.

A look from a stranger pierced your mind or memory less easily. But there were some that obviously seemed to enjoy this. Some amused themselves with their machetes on the tootsies to show off their skill to everyone. They would swagger around boasting later in the evening. Some slowed down their machetes just for punishment. If a tootsie had worn out a pursuer in a running chase, he could be teased with the point of a machete. It would be nasty for him.

It was like demonstrating the bad example, except that no one was left alive to notice. And obviously, when you have family, you have children and we have children you have babies and here's one of the killers talking about the treatment of the babies saving the babies that was not practical they were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away but they were killed more quickly because of their small size and because their suffering was of no use they say that at the church they burn the children with gasoline maybe it's

true, but that was just in the first day turmoil. After that, afterward, that did not last. In any case, I noticed nothing more. The babies could not understand the why of the suffering. It was not worth lingering over them. And as I mentioned earlier, some of the kids were part of the killing. And here's one of the killers talking about that. Many children killed. Some say they were sickened by it, scared of it, but were forced to cut by their mamas or popas. Most are completely silent when they hear talk of the killings, even from years ago. Keeping silent blocks both judgment and change. Now, to add to the evil of all this, to add to the incomprehensible nature of it all,

it's it's it's almost just unbelievable nature but on top of all this these people were Christians they were Catholics they were they were church-going people that were transformed almost instantly into murderers and here's one of those one of the killers talking about that transformation that Saturday after the plane crash was the usual choirer day at the church. We sang hymns and good feeling with our Tutsi compatriots, our voices still blending in the chorus. On Sunday morning we returned at the appointed hour for Mass. They did not arrive. They had already fled into the bush in fear of reprisals, driving their goats and cows before them. That disappointed us greatly, especially on a Sunday.

Anger hustled us outside the church door. We left the Lord and our prayers inside to rush home. We changed from our Sunday best into our work-a-day clothes. We grabbed clubs and machetes. We went straight off to killing. Here's another killer. I was a deacon, the one who made arrangements for the Christian gatherings on the hill. in the priest's absence

it was I who conducted ordinary services during the killings I chose not to pray to God I sense that it was not appropriate to involve him in that the white priest took off at the first

skirmishes the black priest joined the killers or the killed God kept silent and the churches stank from abandoned bodies religion could not find its place in our activity for a little while

we were no longer ordinary Christians we had to forget our duties learned in catechism class we had first of all to obey our leaders and God only afterward very long afterward to make confession and penance when the job was done again I it's just

it's I didn't know if if I could do this book to bring people here to this place and to me this part that I'm about to go through is about as dark as it gets in the marshes you heard no children's cries not even murmurs they waited silently in the mud it was really something when we uncovered a woman the nursling, the infant would not even whimper. It was miraculous, so to speak. Many Tutsis no longer asked to be spared. That was how they greeted death among themselves. They had stopped hoping. They knew they had no chance for mercy and went off without a single prayer. They knew they were abandoned by everything, even by God. They no longer spoke to him.

at all. They were leaving and suffering to join him and no longer asked him for anything, not comfort, not blessing, not welcome. They no longer prayed even to drive away the fear of an agonizing death. It was too astounding. It was unnatural. Even animals that know nothing of pity, nothing of anguish, nothing of evil, they cry out terribly at the moment of the fatal blow. That mystery drove us to many discussions. We sought explanations for these Tutsis who went often to death without breaking their silence. That could frighten us sometimes at night because it was said that such calmness must be a bad omen from heaven. And here's one of the other killers talking about that silent death from the Tutsis. When the Tutsis were caught, many died without a word. In Rwanda, people say,

die like a lamb in the Bible. Of course in Rwanda, there are no sheep, so we have never heard their cry. It sometimes touched us painfully that they awaited death and silence. Evenings, we would ask over and over, why no protest from these people who are about to leave? Why do they not beg for mercy? The organizers claim that the Tutsis felt guilty for the sin of being Tutsi. Some kept saying they felt responsible for the misfortunes they had brought upon us. Well, I knew that was not true. The Tutsis were not asking for anything in those fatal moments because they no longer believed in words.

They had no more faith in crying out, like frightened animals, for example, howling to be heard above the mortal blows. An overpowering sorrow was carrying those people away, and they felt so abandoned. They did not even open their mouth. And while all that was happening, where were we? Like I said, I mean, I was in a seal platoon on that ship.

We had assets. And the Marine Corps did, like I said, something small. They got authorization, but it was tiny in comparison. And it was to hear them, to hear the killers talk about that. Here's what one of them said. All the important people turned their backs on our killings. The blue helmets, the Belgians, the white directors, the black presidents, the humanitarian people, and the international cameramen, the priests and the bishops, and finally even God.

Did he watch what was happening in the marshes? Why did he not stab out our murderous eyes? with his wrath or show some small sign of disapproval to save more lucky ones in those horrible moments who could hear his silence we were abandoned by all words of rebuke and i'm going to close from the book with this statement from one of the survivors before i knew a man could kill another man because it happens all the time. Now I know that even the person with whom you've shared food or with whom you've slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor can turn out to be the most horrible. An evil person can kill you with his teeth. That is what I have learned

since the genocide. And my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world. My eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world. What can we take away for this utter madness? We have to learn something. We have to gain something but what? What is it? And as I tried to answer that question for myself, I thought about something that I say and something that I know.

and this made it even more clear that there is evil in the world there is darkness and it exists and it's real and it comes from us it's human it is people we are evil

it wasn't a monster that murdered all those people those men and those women and those children and those babies it wasn't an animal or some force of nature like a tornado or a hurricane or a tsunami. It wasn't Satan and it wasn't some mysterious evil spirit.

It was us. And that is downright horrifying. A counter to that. There is a dichotomy to that. And that is the fact that while we are the evil in this world, we are also the good. we are the light that counters this darkness. And it sickens my heart to know that we did nothing while this happened.

And I was there. I was off the coast. I was on deployment and my platoon was one quick helicopter flight away. And maybe we could have helped. Maybe we could have saved even just one person, one child or one mom or one baby. We could have made some kind of difference, but we didn't.

We didn't get the order, and so we sat while this evil unfolded. And I'm ashamed of that because you see, we all have the capacity to bring light

into the world to counter the darkness. All of us do in some way. Maybe not directly. Maybe not face to face with evil. But we can help all of us. can help. So the message I take away from this abject horror to me, it's that I need to focus, that we need to focus on what good we can do to help people. Who can we help? Who can we help get

better? Who can we help improve their station in life? What threatened person can we defend? What oppressed person can we free? What person, what fellow human being can we remove from the grip of fear? Who can we? Who can I? Who can we? What person out in the world can we take from the darkness and bring into the light? And that's the question and the answer that I brought away from this.

And I know that this was a heavy, heavy booked cover. And I like I said, I don't just want every time that you turn on this podcast to get crushed with something like this. And I don't want to dwell on it. And I've got some good positive books I want to look at next. But I don't want to ignore this kind of thing either. Because as I've said before, you can't appreciate the light if you don't understand the darkness. And as I said, this is truly. about as dark as it gets.

A little bit heavy, huh, Echo? Yeah. Yeah, I'd say so. Yeah. I gave Echo a heads up three or four days ago. And I said, hey, man, I'm not quite sure

about this one. This is going to leave a mark. And I truly debated whether or not to go forward. You know, because I, There were some people that even about the,

even about the forgotten Highlander. There were some people that said, hey, you know, that's just too much. You know, that's just too much. And this is, this is, this is, this is completely beyond that. Because the, the, there is no rhyme or reason. I mean, at least you could look at a Japanese imperial soldier

and say, hey, he's a sick person that's doing something for this cause. There was, there was nothing here. Rime or reason that we, just slaughter. Kids and that's, that takes it to a whole other level and just how they talk in detail

about how they deal with the kids. And again, to me, the thing I took away from it is this sort of personal responsibility that we all have. To help out other humans. And again, I understand that everyone's not going to be

in the military out on the front lines fighting against, you know, tyranny and even, I understand that. But what can you do to help out? And I've said this since day one. That's one of the things I talked about in this podcast is, you know, I don't feel like I'm really good at helping, you know,

people with causes and stuff like that. I just don't feel it. I don't feel like it's something I'm very good at. But this makes you rethink and say, you know, what can you do to help? Because there's people that are suffering. I mean, obviously right now we've got, you know, we got ISIS that are doing this same activity.

if not worse, they just crucified a priest. That was just in the news. So the evil is still there. And it has happening before our own eyes. And it makes me sick that we, with the ability to do something about it, we sit on the sidelines. So hopefully we start to move in a direction. where we take a leadership role in the world

and help lead the world towards the light and away from the darkness. And with that thought, let's move away from this darkness right now. Let's talk about something else. Not to forget about this, but we do have to recognize that we gotta live our lives

to live our lives and people got to live their lives. And again, don't deny that this stuff is out there. Don't forget that this stuff is out there. Relish your situation. If you're, if you have a MP3 player of some kind and you're listening to this podcast, be thankful. Be thankful that you're in that situation and look down below you into the darkness. And if you get the chance, put out your hand and see if there's someone down there that you can help pull up. So out of that heaviness and out of that darkness, let's head into a little bit of light with the community. Questions.

Questions from the troopers out there. Got questions for us. And, you know, before we talk about the, before we go to questions from the interwebs, What can we do from the interwebs Supporting the podcast style And if you want to support this podcast You can get some supplements from jacofuel.com You can get some gear and clothing from origin USA.com

You can get a bunch of cool T-shirts and whatnot from jaccos store.com And you can check out my leadership consulting company At echelonfront.com And everything is available at jocco.com You want to buy this book right here? Which you should. Because it's an eye-opener.

I don't know, though. I don't know. It might not be for everybody. I'm telling you, if you're a human, you should know about what the world is like. I dig it. Machete season. Yeah. Right there.

If you want to get that, for example, through Amazon, just click through the link that is on joccopodcast.com or jocopodcast.2.com or jocco store. And by the way, if you want to buy anything from Amazon and you click through that link, little something goes to the podcast. Right. Yeah, so you're kind of passively supporting. Also, you know what? You know what I just realized earlier today? We have shirts. Jocko podcast shirts.

You know, they're a couple of designs. I've never mentioned it. I posted a picture on Twitter. Before, a couple pictures on Twitter, that's it. I've never mentioned it. So that's another way to support the podcast. Yeah, get yourself a shirt. Get yourself a shirt.

But just look at the shirts. at jocco store.com. Look at them. If you like it, if you like one of them or both the designs or whatever, get a shirt. If you don't like them,

don't get the shirt. That's simple enough. Yep. There it is. Let's get some questions going. Okay, first question. Jocko, can you tell us your views

on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competing mindset and training leading into a competition? Well, competing is great. Competing makes you better. competing points out your weaknesses,

competing lets you roll against people that you've never trained with before that are going to go 1,000% against you. Every move matters in competition. Yes, they bring it. I competed a ton back in the early days. You know, really, I'll just talk about Dean because Dean and I were teammates back then and still are,

but we competed all the time. And we competed in the old school tournaments, the grappling games. They used to have those. The Pan American submission grappling. It was sort of like some offshoot or another competing sort of Pan Ams type

situation. There was the Joe Moriera tournaments back in the day. Those were pretty cool. And the Copa Pacifica. I think I did a few of those back in the day. My favorite was doing the neutral grounds tournaments

because those were like held up in L.A. up in the hood somewhere, and we'd roll in and be kind of underground, and those were really cool competition. But competed a ton back in the day. Honestly, once September 11th happened, that was now my focus more than anything else.

And I needed to be ready. I needed to be ready. I couldn't be having a blown out knee. I couldn't be having a hurt shoulder. And furthermore, I had less time to focus and have real, like, let's call it, a training camp to be ready to compete at a high. level and I mean I was at a high level you know I mean I was I was you know a brown belt or a black

belch at the time and so it wasn't like you could just show up a weekend warrior and jump in the jump on the mat with you know some some other black belt and it was going to go easy for you wasn't going to happen so I you know the bottom line is I needed to be 100% for the job but competing is awesome it's intense no matter what you do in training you cannot get a person as fired up as they are going to be in competition. It's not going to happen. So it's really good to compete. So you find out what your

weaknesses, you find out what it feels like when someone's going psycho on you, because they're going to be going psycho. And to prepare for them, you know, you got a, you got a, my favorite thing to do prepare is, you know, you get guys where they're going, got fresh people coming on you. Because everybody can be destroyed when fatigue rolls in and starts

playing a role in the situation. It gets bad. So when you bring in a fresh person, you know, after every two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, one minute, six minutes, but one person is fighting the whole time and other people are getting rested and coming in, that's very challenging. It makes you rely on your technique. It pushes you beyond your normal limits, and it's an awesome way to do it. So that being said, you also can't just do that all the time because you have to train your explosiveness as well.

And you need to be ready to do, you know, if you're doing a seven-minute fight, you need to be able to go hard for seven minutes. and not save everything for a 38-minute fight, which is what you sometimes end up doing in the gym. I do that all the time in the gym. I'm doing six rounds, seven rounds, nine rounds, whatever the case may be. And you're also doing just one round, but it's one round that's 23 minutes long.

Yeah. That happens too. So I like to do a little bit of all those things. But yeah, compete, get yourself better, and it'll definitely make you a better jiu-too player, which will make you a better person. you're used to that pressure. You know, another tactic, which is kind of good.

And Jeff will do this sometimes. He'll do like a three-minute round. Yeah. So it's strange because when you know there's only three minutes, you kind of get that illusion that I'm just going to go all out. And see how many, if I can get this guy, I only have three minutes to get them. And so you're going hard.

So your sense of urgency is more than if you have an eight-minute round. Yeah, for sure. But here's the little, and I don't know if Jeff did this on purpose, but it's, it's kind of, of this little trick where you're going hard but he only gives us 30 seconds in between so it doesn't matter if it's a three minute round you're going like six rounds yeah so you're like and so that'll test your conditioning but it'll test like your quickness and not quickness like quick but your urgency yep you know you're not going to be just chilling in some guy's guard or you know because because it's

you can't possible to chill in the guard you can yeah in fact that's that's a good strategy in some cases you know when you got to recover or something like this anyway that that's those that's that's It's an interesting one that I came to realize when Jeff put it on us one day. Jeff Glover. Jeff Glover, yes. Okay. Next question? Yeah, let's do it.

Okay, I hurt myself significantly throwing a roundhouse kick recently. Abdominal hernia at the site of an old appendix surgery. I trained to MMA five days a week, sometimes more, multiple times a day for two years until last week when he got that injury. But now I can hardly sit in the chair without pain. and surgery is two months out and who knows how long recovery will be before I can train again. What I'm asking is

what should we as martial artists and men do in times of forced hiatus and injury? What do we do when there's a quiet but we miss the storm? Well, one thing with injuries, injuries are going to come. And you cut wood, you get sawdust. You train, you're going to get injured.

That's what's going to happen. I mean, it's just, that's just, this is the law, this is the law of the land. The number one thing to remember is, and this is something that's really hard when you're super active and you're super fired up and you're training all the time. When you get injured and you get sidelined, you feel like it's never going to go away. You feel like it's not healing and you're just like, oh man, this is, I'm doomed. So the injury is going to go away. Now, obviously, for some guys, for some actual soldiers or warriors that have been with, wounded in a permanent way, that's different.

And those guys, what they do is they learn to adapt. You know, they learn how are they going to get through this? How are they going to adapt their life? How are they going to roll with one leg? How are they going to do pull-ups with one hand? Jeff Rialo. You know Jeff Rialo? We were doing burpee pull-ups the other day.

I was putting the MMA classes through it. If you don't know, Jeff Rial, awesome guy, awesome fighter, awesome jihsoo player. He's born without one hand. I had the guys doing burpee pull-ups. Black belt, by the way. Yeah, black belt. And he has like a little hook he can put on there to do pull-ups. And I guess the thing was falling off.

And so he just threw that thing to the ground. And he was just hooking his forearm over. And then the other hand was grabbing. He's doing pull-ups. I mean, if Jeffreyow can just jump and do, we did, I don't know, six rounds worth of burpee pull-ups or five rounds worth of burpee pull-ups, and he crushed. it, no one has any excuse.

So guys that they get some kind of a permanent injury, they get wounded, something like that happens, okay, you got to adapt to it, you got to figure out what you can do. But the injuries, the basic injuries, the daily injuries, the temporary injuries that is normal from training, that's, you're going to get them. And so, of course, oh, you got an injury? Good. Right? It's a little injury.

Be thankful. It's not something worse. You know, I've, I've had, you know, a blown out ankle. I've had a torn MCL. And, you know, what do you do? What do you say when you tear your ACL or your MCL? You say, okay, awesome. It's not my ACL.

It's not my meniscus, you know, the MCL will heal itself. What do you say if it's your, if it is your ACL? Okay, great. That's one that can be repaired with surgery. So none of these problems are permanent, right? So be thankful you don't have a permanent injury. And even though it seems like it's going to take for, forever like homeboy here who's got two months before he even get surgery and then how long

is it going to take it seems like it's going to take forever i had neck surgery right that's a blip on the radar i don't even remember how long it took and it was a long time i mean it took months to heal from that i don't remember that when i do during that time i did other exercises i figured other stuff i watched youtube videos i figured out other moves you know that's what i did so i guess youtube wasn't around i was watching dvdivis j jdivis dvd yeah the hs ds yeah the hs chest tapes. So what do you do? Number one, stay active, right? You know, move. Do, if you, if you can't move your body, y'all, work your forearm strength, right? Squeeze a tennis ball. One of my buddies blew out his knee. What is it? The triple threat. He did ACL, PCL, meniscus. Boom. Heel hook,

right? Didn't tap. You got to tap to the heel hook, people. Got a tap to it. Got caught a heel look, didn't tap, blue is blew it all apart. He was in a, he had to get him all reconstructed. So he, we had a dummy. Remember the big dummy we have at the gym? We had a big one. It was 120 pounds. And he would lay on the ground.

His knee is in a full, his leg is in a full straight brace, won't bend at all. He would lay on the ground and lay next to this dummy. And he'd just pull it from one side of himself, put it on the ground to the other side of the other side. Pull it back to the other side, back to the other side. So he's getting this motion of sort of turn. on the ground this massive core strength and when we when he finally recovered it was powerful and you know when he would turn underneath you'd say you got some got some strength there so

you got to figure out what you can do you know if you can't roll box if you can't box lift if you can't lift stretch and get that flexibility working in some area that you're not flexible well whatever you're going to do stay engaged stay active because I think I'm definitely a believer in the active rest. You know what I mean? When you just go, okay, I'm injured, so I'm just going to sit on the couch and watch TV? No, wrong answer.

Run away from that TV. You've got to keep moving because that keeps your blood flowing and it keeps, it gets more blood, more circulation, more healing gives to this area that's injured, so do that. And if you're, but, you know, still, you're still going to have more time in your day, right?

So what are you going to do? I'll tell you what you're going to do. Get a guitar. Right? Learn to play guitar. Write a book. Build a website. Take pictures.

Learn a language. Read more books. Expand your brain. Expand your mind. When your body needs a little recovery, when your body's injured, make yourself smarter, make yourself better. Free your mind. And so the bottom line, the question was,

what does a man do when there's quiet? And I'll tell you what a man does when there's quiet. He takes advantage of it. Right. So take advantage of it. Get smarter, get better. You know, their ways. And when the body comes back, you will be better.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it, like, take advantage of it, like, actively. Because a lot of times, like, where the problem comes about, I know this because when I tore my bicep. That's right. One year. I was there. I was watching that. Yeah. Yeah.

I have a picture of you. Yeah, that was messed up. Laying on the ground. Yeah. That was messed up. I think you sent me a smarmy text, too, something like that. No, that was for something. else but same day though nonetheless what where the problem comes when you miss the story you miss

the action is you're harping on it it's almost like you have this hope like oh it'll be soon or maybe the doctor said nine months but maybe i could do it in four kind of thing you know just that mindset where you kind of in a way got to admit to yourself okay i'm i'm out right now i can't roll right now I can't train MMA two times a day five days a week. I cannot do that. You got to admit that to yourself. Did you work on your video editing skills during that time?

Oh, man. I think that was before. So what did you do? I forget it. I don't know, but I'll tell you what I didn't do is harp on it. Yeah. You moved on.

You figured out what else you can do. Yeah, exactly. And I was always into working out and stuff. So I would do other stuff like legs and stuff like that. Work your left arm. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, my left arm is still big.

a little bit. Nonetheless, I think that that's, that's a good little jump start is don't harp on it. You got to admit to yourself that you're out. You're injured right now. And then how you said, take advantage of it. Dang, that's good. I wish I would have known that actively take advantage, because there's so much advantage to be taken. Yeah. There's all kinds of time you have. Yeah, man. I think about all the time that I spend in the gym and on the mats. I mean, that's a bunch of big chunk of time every day. like with reading for example I got back into reading

and I look at it this way where as far as books go books that exist any information in the whole whether you're interested in it not interested whether you can understand it or not all the information of the world is accessible

yeah right now more than any time ever all different angles different aspects of everything is just out there and you have more time now take advantage of that actively actively next question

my question is this as a military man what do you do if you cannot reconcile the orders that you're asked to do I know that in your book you talk about believe the mission and how you must ask questions until you believe what happens if after all the questions and all the explanations you don't agree or believe what if the politics ask of you something you're not congruent with how do you as a military man respond to your incongruency with a mission

so this is a great question and and you know it's kind of ties in with what we just read with the book review of machete's season how people were just doing some of them didn't believe in what they were doing they did it anyways wrong answer And it resulted in the death of the one guy, you know, you talk about that's in the book. But, you know, so first of all, as you stated in the question itself, if you don't agree with some mission that you've been given, then you have to ask the question why. And in the book, Extreme Ownership, we talk about that. The primary example is we talk about is working with Iraqi soldiers and how that's very challenging and very difficult and very dangerous. And the story that we tell in the book is that I said to myself, okay, why are they having us work with these Iraqi soldiers? My guys are going to be at risk, et cetera, et cetera.

And eventually I realized why we needed to do this was because if we didn't get the Iraqi soldiers to a point where they could handle the security in Iraq, then who was going to do it? And the answer was us. So I understood why. Now, I actually didn't even have to ask anybody why. I figured that out.

I asked myself why. And so I was able to come to that conclusion. but when you are part of something, whether it's in business or it's in war, the goal, the ultimate goal, it has to be aligned. And so, for example, we're in Iraq, we're supposed to use Iraqi soldiers.

Okay, do you think that the generals wanted our men to be killed because of the higher risk? No, they wanted to win the war, they want to keep our guys safe. So that's what I wanted to. We want to win the war. We want to keep her guys safe. So that's aligned.

So anything that they're telling me to do, it must be at some point in the distance aligned with the same goal that I have. And it's the same thing with a business. Do you think a boss of a business doesn't want to be profitable or doesn't want to be ethical? No. Somewhere in the future, they want to be profitable and they want to be ethical. And somewhere your mission is going to align with that. If you don't, if those don't,

Don't align at some point. Then you got a real serious issue on your hands, right? Because maybe you're being told to do something that you just don't believe in. And you at first, you know, like I said, you've got to ask those questions all the way up. And if you do ask those questions all the way up and you still find, okay, I don't believe in this mission. Now you've got to weigh out the consequences. because, for instance, if there's an order that comes, and for whatever reason you don't believe in it,

and you've asked the questions, and you still don't believe that it's the right thing to do. But what if it's something that's, like, pretty inconsequential, right? Something that's no big deal, and you say no to it. Like, I'm not going to do this. You decide to make your stand. Okay, well, now you're, first of all, you're not supporting the chain of command anymore.

And if you're not supporting your chain of command anymore, how can you support the guys that work for you? Because now you might get removed. And if you get removed from the situation, now who's going to go execute it? Who's going to go do this thing that you thought was wrong? Now you're going to give it to somebody that might execute it in a harsher way, in a worse way, or you lose control of it. You've lost your influence. You've used up some of your political capital. you've impaired your reputation by saying, no, I'm not going to do that because I don't believe in it.

What was it? And by saying no, what did you accomplish? Because now you have no control over anymore. You can't change it. You can't affect it anymore. So let me ask you this. This is an example. This will make it very clear what I'm trying to say, because I don't think I'm being very clear right now.

If you're playing a game, right, you're playing a football game or a basketball game, and the ref makes a bad call. Okay, so you say, the ref made a bad call. I don't agree with this call. I quit. I'm walking off the court. Now, does that make sense? I mean, how bad of a call was it?

How did it affect the game? And furthermore, once you walk off the court, what good are you? Can you do better? Can you try and bring back the score? Can you try and show the ref that, yes, you are playing fair? Look, I'm a good guy. I'm keeping my head. I'm keeping my cool.

No, you've thrown that all away. You've thrown that all away. And so what good is that? It's the same thing. Not necessarily the ref, because that's sort of outside your chain of command, but what if your own coach? What if your coach pulls you out of a game?

Or a coach calls a play for you to run a play that you didn't believe in. So you're going to say, you know what? I don't believe in that play. I'm walking off the field. That's an exact correlation to this idea, right? This military order comes down that I don't believe in. Oh, I don't believe in it.

So now I'm going to walk away. Right. So that is problematic because you've given up, you've surrendered your right to affect the situation. And that's not good. And in the military, there's all kinds of little, you know, policy nuances that we might not believe in 100%. Little things. There might be little things that you go, you know what, I don't see, I don't think that's the best way to do it or I think there's a better way to do it. but if you walk away from it,

now you can no longer affect it, and that is bad. So generally speaking, for most of these things, you, I dealt with in the military all the time. dealt with it all the time. And you know what?

Generally speaking, you stay in the game so that you can still have an effect and can still have influence. Now, that being said, there can be orders that are unlawful or unethical, that can happen, right?

If you are in a bad situation, you're working for a bad commander, you're working for someone that's unethical or whatever the case may be, it may be their orders or plans that are tactically unsound to the point that you're afraid people are going to die. And in those situations, you know,

as we're going back to Napoleon's Maxim, again, if you execute something that you knew was wrong, you're culpable. So then it is a time when you stand up and say, you know what, I'm not doing this. You want to send me to Leavenworth? You want to demote me? Demote me. Do it.

But I do not believe in this, and here's why. So that is a time where you may have to say, after you weigh out the situation, how bad is it something that's unethical, unconstitutional? And you think you're going to have a bigger impact by protesting it, by possibly jeopardizing your career

or possibly going to Levinworth. if you're in the military. Getting court-martialed. All those things could happen. If you think that it's so important and that you will have a better effect on it by making this protest, because that's what you're doing.

You're now making a protest, then okay, maybe that makes sense. So you got like the Malai Masker in Vietnam where horrible situation happens. And if you were a soldier that was there and said, you know what, I'm not doing this. Stop. And maybe you do risk getting court-martial.

Maybe you risk getting killed. But that's a situation where maybe you do it or maybe it's some mistreatment of civilians or something But again, even with mistreatment of civilians, the U.S. military is not going to order the mistreatment of civilians. It's not going to happen. So if it is happening, it's coming from a rogue commander that you're going to be able to destroy when you bring this situation to the authorities or to the higher chain of command. so again you know if you're getting wrapped up in some small nuanced thing

yeah he mentions the political like if you're not politically congruent with i don't know if you meant that's but yeah and again when you're in the military you're you're not there to worry about the politics of it you know you're there to carry out the politics you're there to carry out the policy now if there's a again if the policy is a egregious. Right, right. If it's egregious and you think you would do better to make a protest and end up in jail and, you know, be on CNN and Fox News and saying, hey, this is why I'm in jail because

I didn't agree with what we were doing. If it's something that the rest of the nation is going to look at and say, yeah, this guy was right, of course. But if you're doing it because it's something that is, in comparison to that is something relatively small, then you're probably, you're probably doing worse to help the situation. You're probably doing less good by walking away, getting off the field, and letting the, situation transpire without your presence. I want to be there.

You know, I want to be there. If my guys were getting tasked with a mission that I thought was a little bit sketchy, I want to be there. I want to be there. Not, hey, I protest, so I'm not going to go. not a good call so um yeah and again i'm not saying that you don't stand by your principles but what i'm saying is especially for this guy that's in the military your principles should be for the most part in line this is america and if you're if you're if you're being told to do

something that's that's un-american then yeah stand by your principles but most if it's something that's small and it's something that you just might not agree with a hundred That doesn't mean you're an unprincipled person. It means that you are winning, losing the battle, but you're going to win the war. Yeah. Yeah, I like that way it out. Yeah. Everything's not black and white.

That bothers me. I'm jumping on the, you know, on that side of things. Next question. Jocko and Echo, what supplements do you guys take besides krill oil and alpha brain? And do you take the alpha brain instant or capsules? I take Applebrain instant. It's tasty treat. It's got a little sweetness to it.

It's got a little sweetness to it because it's got stevie in it, so it tastes good. If you have a little bit of a sweet tooth, you want something sweet, you've been eating steak for the past seven days. No, it tastes good. I also take glucosamine, as I've mentioned before. I do get it from on it. It's a product called strong bone. That's what I take. And I'll tell you, I, I, the, for the, for the, for the, for the, for, for the, you.

Getting ready for the podcast, right, doing prep work. Sure. Like three days in a row, I was deep in prep work. And I was pounding some alpha brain. And each day I was like drinking full alpha brains and maybe like two of them. And I had, I did it two days in a row. And when I went into train and I trained with Dean, Dean's getting ready for something right now. and I was rolling really good with Dean.

Each day I was, you know, I was getting. Doing well. Yes, I was doing well. And Dean was not a happy camper. And then the third day was like I was pretty much done with wrapped up the prep. And I didn't have any alphabet and I had a rough day. And I said to myself, maybe this is a little something here. Causation?

I don't know. Maybe. But, uh, yeah. And I suppose you want to throw out some shroom tech. Yeah, shroom tech, of course, like I've always said. Again, even before this, I took shroom tech. That's a good one. The pre-workout sometimes, you know, well, actually all the time.

If you really want to feel like working out, you know, like, hey, I feel like working out right now. You don't always feel like that. If you want to guarantee you feel like that, take some pre-workout with the alpha brain. Instant. Mix them together. Boom. Gatorade. Boom.

Yeah. As far as the alpha brain instant versus the capsules, and my brother has verified this. I've never taken, I've taken the capsules, but not before I go to sleep. I hear that if you take the capsules before you go to sleep, because I don't think there's like any kind of caffeine or nothing in alpha brain.

No, there's not. So taking it before you go to sleep, you get lucid dreams. Lucid dreams. Yeah. I've heard that. I've heard that from everybody. Everybody who takes alpha brain, they say that it affects.

it affects a dream. I don't want my dreams to be any more real than they are, actually. But do you know that you're dreaming when you go through a dream situation? Sometimes. Yeah, apparently like this. But a lot of times my dreams are just blank, but I wake up in a complete full athletic sweat, drenched bed. That's how I wake up.

It's not fun. Yeah. But in regards to like protein powder or nothing like this. Steak. Yes. I said it before and I'll say it again. Yeah, I think that's a big deal. deal like a lot of people you know people some people are really into supplements like to be yeah the

new this is the new protein powder because it comes with this delivery system and all this stuff um dual action protein yeah you know all this other stuff and it does um like if you eat food that yeah just normal food that is a good delivery system that is tell you that especially especially when it's in the form of a rib eye steak a good delivery system right there yeah yeah i would imagine so but yeah that's it not that heavy into the supplements, maybe a multivitamin from time to time, right?

I don't really take a multivitamin anymore. Yeah, I don't know. I did for a while. I don't anymore. Yeah. Cruel oil off the brain. Yeah, that's it. Next question.

I'm a Kentucky trooper, and I'm an instructor at our academy, the police academy. We lost three guys last year. Could you discuss how to deal with training these guys as hard as you can, and they still lose their lives while working. So as far as dealing with people and letting them know that, you know,

that this goes down, how do you deal with that? Well, first of all, I get a lot of feedback from police officers out there in the world. And if I would say one thing to them to lead this office, thank you for what you do. You guys have a dangerous job. it's intense, it's thankless most of the time, and you're dealing with the dregs of society all day long, and then you have to balance that

with dealing with normal civilians and citizens. So thank you for what you guys do. And also I'll throw on top of that, firefighters, you know, paramedics. Thank you guys for what you do. And again, thankless job. difficult job, dangerous job, where people, you're helping people that don't want to help themselves in many cases. So thanks for everybody. Thanks for all those first responders for what you guys do. Now, as far as training guys hard and then you still get guys that get killed, bless them.

but let me ask us, what is the alternative, right? What are you going to do? Not train hard? You know, I had the first seals that were killed in Iraq were killed under my command. They were my guys. Mark Lee, Mikey Mansour, and Ryan Job. And we trained as hard as possible. And we still took those casualties.

I'm telling you, we trained as hard as possible. And it wasn't for lack of training or lack of planning or lack of skill. It's the nature of combat. It's the risk of conducting operations in a hostile environment. And I'll tell you what, when I got back to America and I took over the training for the West Coast SEAL teams, that fact, that fact of losing my guys in combat, it made me fanatical. about training. And I was already fanatical

about training, but it multiplied it infinitely. Because it now became my mission to prepare these guys, to the absolute best of my ability, and get them ready for combat. And part of that preparation was making them understand

what was at risk. And I think that's something that you should do here. You know, you don't know what's going to have. happen when you go into the field and you don't know when it's going to happen. So everything you do should be to prepare yourself mentally and physically for the moment of truth, whether that happens at a traffic stop or while you're serving a warrant or while you're stopping a bank robbery,

you don't know when it is going to happen. And so you've got to tell these guys, tell them the truth of the danger and let it sink in and hound on it. And I tell this story from time time. It's not a story. It's a statement. And it's because I remember this feeling. And it was when I got back from Ramadi. And we were doing, we'd be doing urban training.

And I would see a guy like standing in the street, standing in the middle of the street, which is, which is not a good move, right? That's where bullets fly down, you're going to get shot when you're standing in the middle of street. And it happened all the time to guys in Ramadi. And I would see a guy that would be standing in the street and I would

literally feel sick. It was only for about maybe six to nine months after I got back when I'd go out to these training sites. I would feel sick to my stomach. I would just feel this horrible feeling because it was like I was waiting for something to be, I was waiting for him to get shot. And it felt horrible. And my goal was to transfer that feeling into their heads.

I wanted them to feel sick. I wanted them to feel embarrassed and feel guilty and feel angry and feel dismal. I'm disappointed that they were doing something wrong because I wanted them to change their behavior, which would keep them alive. So I would say in this case, you've got, you're putting people through training, valuable training.

And of course, they're still going to go out and do a dangerous job. But you don't back off the training. You train harder. And you use these guys again. God bless them. you use these guys that were killed in action as an example of, hey guys, this is why we're training hard. This is why we're going to push.

This is why I want you to take personal responsibility for yourself and for your training and for your skill set so that you're ready. You train how you fight and you fight how you train. So take advantage of that and be ready. Again, a lot of times that pain of, you know, any kind of failure. In this case, this is an extreme case losing your guys. You know, you guys are going through these extreme cases. And that, you know, so there's a spectrum of, you know, of cases.

But any kind of failure or mishap that causes any kind of pain, you can, and it's not easy, it's not easy. But you can use that pain to facilitate your passion in a corrective way. Absolutely. Like how you say, train harder. you can take that pain and literally focus on good ways of training, training hard, being attached to the results of training or the process of training. Yeah. And essentially, you can use that pain.

Yeah, absolutely. You get a guy that's an MMA fighter that loses to a submission hold. Right. You take that and you say, okay, bud, you got to work that jih Tzu. You take a guy that gets his legs kicked out from underneath him. Okay, you got to work your Muay Thai. So you take those painful training experiences and you put them, like you said, you put them to work. Absolutely.

Yeah. And a lot of times that'll come naturally a lot of times, but it doesn't always. So in those cases, you can just actively and consciously take that pain, you know, and redirect it. You can do it. You can do that. Well, even if it doesn't come natural and it helps. Okay, Joccoe, any advice you have to continue to work out at 4.30 a.m., but with two newborn twins at home.

because the struggle to stay awake is real. Awesome question. And, well, I have four kids. The first three of them were born in pretty rapid succession, not quite twins, obviously. But, you know, we had, at one point, we had three kids under three. So, yeah, we were getting after it. And now, part of that I got in full disclosure,

I was deployed a fair amount. But when you got those young kids, here's what you got to do. You got to get it done. You got to get it done. And this idea that you're going to get it done on some pattern or some structured time schedule, it's going to fall apart.

And you got to both sleep and working out and every other thing that you're trying to get done in your life, You have to make it happen when you can make it happen. You know, you have to make it happen when you can make it happen. There's going to be no ideal time. You might be working out at 3 o'clock in the morning. You might be working out at 7 o'clock at night. You might be working out at midnight.

You might be trying to sleep at noon. You don't know what's going to happen. I would definitely say when you got the young kids, get some kind of a home gym set up, at least get a pull-up bar, at least get yourself a pull-up bar. Because if you have a pull-up bar, you can do everything. You can do pull-ups.

Then you can do push-ups. You can do squats. You can do sprints. You can make stuff work if you at least have a pull-up bar. And then you just got to squeeze it in there. You know, it's a half an hour there. It's 20 minutes here. It's 15 minutes there.

It's a power nap in the afternoon. It's some squats while you're sitting there holding a baby, trying to get the baby to fall asleep. That's what it is. It's the stroller to the park with a chalk bag. So when you get there, you can do some pull-ups on the swing set. And that's what it becomes, because life is going to have a vote in these situations. And your kids and your family are more important than you are.

And that's something that is a tough reality for the young dads to face. All of a sudden, you are not the most important thing in the world at all. they are more important than you are. That being said, which I know I'm supposed to pay some kind of a fine when I say that being said. Somebody on Twitter hassled me about it. That being said, so your kids are more important than you,

your family's more important to you. That being said, guess what the number one thing you need to do for them? Stay healthy. You've got to stay healthy. You can't get all out of shape and turn into a bum just because you've got kids. they're looking to you to be able to provide for them for a long time.

They're also looking at you as an example. So you've got to be the right kind of example. And physical fitness is part of that example. So they should see that from day one. They should know Big Daddy's doing some squats while he's holding me. Now, I'm going to double down. That being said, this is not a time of your life when you have newborn twins that you're going to be in the optimal condition.

You're not going to be at your peak performance. That's okay. Right? That's okay. Hey man, you got things going on. You're a dad. You know, you're not. New dad with twins.

New dad with twins. You're not going to be set in any of your PRs on your deadlift. Right? It's not going to happen. But that's not a reason that you fall apart at all. You've got to hold the line as much as you can. You got to balance this situation out. You've got to squeeze in, dig in.

You've got to be creative with your workout, with your rest, with your sleep. When the opportunity presents itself, whichever one of those is the priority, you've got to go get it on. And, you know, it'll happen. It's not just when you have newborn kids. It'll happen with your job. You know, you'll get some pressure situation at work, and all of a sudden you're going to, you've got to squeeze it in. You know, I had, I bought houses over time. And I would always buy these houses that were unlivable, right?

Just unlivable, just ransacked disasters because they were cheaper. And then I would go in and do these like speed remodels alone. By yourself. By myself. Dang. But, you know, for instance, I did a, I gutted a kitchen in one of my houses, gutted a kitchen and redid the whole kitchen plumbing electrical new counters the whole thing and i got it i didn't get the countertops in because that that was like you know especially guys coming to do that but 72 hours

72 hours non-stop work when i moved into another house i had we pulled up the carpet i thought there was these nice hardwood floors under the carpet pulled up water damage a third of the a little bit more than a third of the full almost half the floor is water damage so i had to yank those boards out and then sand this whole thing and it was a nightmare but it took me 72 hours right of no sleep like i'd sleep for 20 minutes waiting for the the next layer of varnish to dry sitting there in the fumes right but that's what you got to do sometimes you got to be like i said a big project at work something that's coming uh and you got to figure out how to what you can fit in when you can fit it in and realize that there's benefit yeah there's benefit to that 20 minute little session you just did

Go do 100 burpees, right? Go swing a kettlebell. Just go swing. I was talking about the other day. I got kettlebell. I got the zombie bells, right? I got the zombie bells. You know, I have a garage gym.

The zombie bells are in my house because I'm walking around and sometimes you need to snatch a kettlebell, right? Sometimes you got to snatch a kettlebell. So you have that and that builds up because now you're just, boom. You hit out, you know, you're not even breaking anything. into a sweat. Just hitting seven, seven each arm. You know, cannibal snatch. Maybe you're just

doing that. Yeah. And so that's the kind of thing. Maybe, you know, the newborn dad, you've got to have that zombie bell sitting in your house. Ready just to hit some snatches. Ready just to do some, some sumo deadlift high poles, right? What's it going to be? Make it

happen. We'll get the pull-up bar. Or a set of rings. Get the rings. Yeah. You know, something that you can, rings are great, because then you can do You can do dips. They're very, very versatile. Very versatile. But you're gonna, the bottom line here is,

your life is going to change. It has changed. So it doesn't mean, and you know what? Your life has changed. And it just got better. It just got better. So what you need to do is you need to adapt to the new situation

and continue to drive the excellence, but the excellence isn't going to be served up all at once. The excellence is going to be served up in little chunks throughout the day where you can grab it. Yeah. And that's the way it goes. Yeah, another tip in, I am a twin. I don't have twins. Yeah, if you don't know, Echo Charles is a twin.

And by the way, we've got some requests for the Echo's story. So maybe next podcast we can wear here, Echo's Story. Yeah, sure. I'll give you three minutes and 30 seconds for a good story. That's all I need. But no one, when I had my daughter, and I'm pretty into working out. So to not work out was kind of hard or not have the time. But here's the thing.

I'm really into like a luxurious situation, resting for a long time and getting really mentally ready, like taking an hour and a half to get ready for, I was used to that. So that was a big change to not have that much rest and not have that much time. And now you're doing Jocko podcast. You get even less rest. Yeah. Well, she's three now. So it's different.

But a thing that helps on top of everything you said, which is, in my opinion, absolutely correct. 100%. To add to it is work with your wife or a husband if you're a girl and you guys have, like, kind of communicate with them. Tell them that, you know, working out and staying in shape is important to me or whatever. Or, and a good way to put it is getting unhealthy at this time with our new kids is means a lot, you know, if I do that. Like, it means a lot to stay healthy. So, you know, if you communicate, that'll help as well because you can work with each other. You know how like, you know, when you have a new kids, it's kind of like one guy can, you know, capitalize on a rest time, you know?

Yeah. And then, you know, the other guy will kind of stand watch with the kids and the other person can get rest. So if you communicate, that'll help your situation so much. Yeah. So I am guilty here of unintentional communications. Because if I, you know, when my wife and I, when our kids were young, if I didn't work out, and quite honestly, if I, if I didn't train jujitsu. I'm salty.

I'm, yeah. I wouldn't recognize it, but it just would really, like, frustrate me. Right. And so eventually she said, you know what, just get your stupid ass out of here and go train. Yeah.

Because I'd rather just have you go. Yeah. And that's when, that's when I, you know, I'd show up at the gym at 8 o'clock at night. Like, Dean would be done teaching class, and I'd come in there and we'd train for 38 minutes. Yeah. You know, just go in there, get it on, and come home.

Yeah. So, you know, try not to do that where you're a jerk. Right. But there's something, I mean, I talk about this all the time, that there is a mind-body connection that is undeniable. Yeah, for sure. And if you don't find a place to get that aggression out and get that, the endorphins flowing and get the good feeling

that you get from physical activity, then you're going to turn a little bit nasty. Yeah. That's not good. Yeah, and of course that. I bet you a lot of relationships really suffer from that and people don't recognize it. I think so, too. I think in my experience from talking to people, okay, so, okay, so that element, that

element of exercising and it being interrupted by new kids or something like that, that'll vary from person to person, right? So you being all nuts because you can't train, you know, the next guy might not be that nuts. It might affect maybe this much, maybe this much, you know. It's different. and A, that goes along with what I said, like communicating actively, you know, not like doing what you did, but communicate.

And at the same time, if you're aware of it, which can be the hard part, if you're aware that you're just not as happy, just know that. So really kind of check yourself if you feel yourself losing your temporary. I'm, you know, I'm unhappy because I'm sacrificing a few training days. You're right. The red flag of, that's a good, great point. The red flag of, hey, it sucks having kids. Yes, yes.

The red flag, the reason you're feeling that is because it's, part of that reason is because it's disrupting your physical activity. Right. So recognize that and then do something about it. Yeah. Communicate with your spouse. Yeah. Set up a plan. Get a pull-up bar.

Get a kettlebell in the house. Yeah. Do, and make it happen. I think that's a good plan. Yeah, and it's not going to be as luxurious as you're used to. No, you're not going to be optimum. It's not a time for optimum. And a lot of times with me, that bothered me.

Yeah. You know, not it didn't, I didn't really pay much of a price, you know, as far as it bothering me when something bothers to me, I don't like lose my temper typically. But I did feel that. I'd be like, oh, my gosh, I don't have that much time. Or I don't have the energy because I didn't get enough sleep and it was kind of annoying. But at the same time, I did adapt and I got real good at, um, you know, like the exercise, like, gymnasts can do it like on a palm horse or something

where I'd go on the ground, I'd sit with my legs and feet out and run and you can lift here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, I got real good at doing that. But nonetheless, back to the jiu-jitsu thing, two things. Yeah, communicate, understand when you're starting to get a little irritated because you didn't train. Understand that. And then handle it accordingly. That's A.

On the flip side, if you have to recognize, because, okay, this is a typical situation where now you have kids, yet you still want to go train Jiu-Jitsu. But your wife is like, how can you reconcile going to train with your buddies? You know, because a lot of times the girlfriend and the wife will think that that's just some funning games that you do. In their mind, they think it's another relationship. Yeah, some have. Yeah. It's like a whole other thing. But they don't understand the important.

They're jealous of the Jiu-Jits. potentially yes and it's the spectrum so it's important to to like I said communicate and let them let them know that it's not that yeah you know and they don't always get it I understand that but if you just can communicate and effectively get the message that it is an important thing in life hey hey listen darling what's important to you what's it well you know because you know what it is whether it's their running or whether it's their biking or whether it's their or anything date night with their girls or whatever the case may be

that's what you've got this is what I've got I've got these two things I've got to work out I gotta train some jujitsu you know that's what I got to do but be fair though like if you're going seven days a week before the kids

and you still want to go seven days with three hours a day understand that okay you got kids now you gotta bring it down to like six six days a week I was really bad yeah I can see that but it's in a way it's not fair

not only to your wife but to the fact that you have kids now you know there's only so much jaco can go around yeah i don't i'm questioning whether i should tell this but i'm going to so there was times where i would come home from work in the seal teams work until seven o'clock at night i come home from work walk through the door, drop my work bag, and pick up my gym bag. My wife's there with three young kids, and she would be looking at me

with the expression of, are you freaking serious? Because, you know, I'm only home for, let's call it, four days, then I'm going on another trip, then I'm home for three days. So those four days, she's thinking, cool, he's home for four days,

family time. I'm thinking, cool, home for four days. That time. But again, what she realized was that if she was to stop me, she's got a jerk in the house now. Not even, I mean, it just is. It's just the reality of it. You know, I just would be really frustrated with the situation.

And all I want to do is just go train because it's part of who I am. And I want to get on the mat and I want to get better. and I want to, it's very selfish, right? I mean, all those reasons are selfish. But that being, that being said. But the reality is that's, that's me. That's me. Yeah.

That's me and you can't change. Yes, you can't. Well, of course, of course. It's still going to be you, but, you know, this is going to sound real obvious and cliche, but the whole compromise thing, you know, when you guys have a bunch of kids, you've got to compromise that.

And don't be like, hey, everyone else in the whole group, by the way, the kids even, you know, your wife, everyone in the whole group, you guys compromise a factor of 8 out of 10. Me, I'm just going to compromise a factor of 0.5. Because I'm still going to go to jujitsu every single day for as long as I've done it. You know, do all the things that you've done before you have kids. You can't do that. Yeah.

I don't think you can do that. Yeah, no, you shouldn't do that. But I am saying, and I did. Yeah, and I'm sure a lot of it, because you're not aware a lot of times, you're not saying, you know what, I know I'm being a dick right now. And you know what, I'm okay with being a dick right now. Yeah. You know, it's a nice year of fault for not letting me train or whatever. Yeah.

I guess I might not have been the best, the best husband in that scenario. Live and learn, man. Live and learn. And it's, it's, I don't want to say it's good, but when you have new kids and especially twins, Yeah, no, I never had twins. It does allow you to kind of reconcile what's important. You know, like, let's say every Tuesday you went to Taco Tuesday or something like that and drank every Tuesday right before kids. Now you got twins.

It's kind of, man, really how you get to honestly ask yourself, is that kind of stuff important now? No, Taco Tuesday is not important. Compared to kids, yeah, no. But you could say time with my friends is important and all this other stuff, but the drinking and just all little, little detailed things that you can. easily go without. And in a lot of cases, do better without, but they're vices or whatever. When you have twins

or new kids or just kids in general, you do get that opportunity to reconcile what's more important. Yeah, you get to prioritize and execute. Sure. For sure. That too. All right. We have congratulations. Twins. It's a big deal. Yeah, no doubt. I hope their

names are echo and gene. Yeah, me whatever. You got time for one more. Time for one more. Yeah. Jocko, knowledge is a powerful tool. To become knowledgeable, you must ask good questions.

Do you have advice for asking good questions? Yeah, I mean, knowledge is a powerful tool, for sure. I mean, it's the master of tools, right? It's where all your tools come from. Because without knowledge, there's nothing. And, you know, you take that one step further and really knowledge is, it's a weapon.

It's the ultimate weapon. And it trumps all other weapons, right? Thought is what wins. The mind is what wins. the knowledge is what wins. And you absolutely, you, you, you,

you gain knowledge by asking questions, right? So my advice for asking questions is, pretty simple, question everything. Don't, don't just accept anything as

truth. Question it all. Question everything. I tell my kids, when they go to school to sit in the front of the classroom and when they don't understand something, the second they don't understand something, just put your hand right up in the air

and say, I don't understand that. I don't understand that part and you go over that again. And that's how you need to be in life. That's how I try to be. When you don't understand a word, break out a dictionary and look it up. If you don't understand a concept,

break down the concept until you do understand it. If you don't know how something works, dig into it until you do know how it works. Ask every question that comes to mind. And I'm not saying that you have to blurt out why, why, why, why this, like a five-year-old and everything you see. But yes, ask those questions and learn. And most importantly, question yourself. Question yourself every day.

ask yourself, who am I? What have I learned? What have I created? What forward progress have I made? Who have I helped? What am I doing to improve myself today to get better, faster, stronger, healthier, smarter? Ask yourself, is this what I want to be? this. Is this all I've got? Is this everything I can give? Is this going to be my life? And do I accept that?

You got to ask yourself those questions, those hard questions, and you got to answer them. You're going to answer them truthfully. And you got to realize that all of us, All of us can do better. We can be better. You just got to take that first step. And that first step is when you begin to ask those questions. So advice on asking questions, ask the hard questions. And ask the hard questions of yourself.

And in the answers to those questions is where you find that path. path to progress, the freedom inside your mind. And I think that's all I've got for tonight. Thanks to all the troopers out there for tuning in, listening, spending some time in my mind with my strange little thoughts. Appreciate it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me on the interweb connecting. It definitely is cool to have everybody connect with me and give me feedback,

giving us feedback about what's going on, supporting the podcast, listening, downloading, subscribing, reviewing, all that stuff is very helpful and very cool. And we got a couple other things that we can do, that you can do if you want to support the podcast. So what can they do, Echo? First thing they can do, if you want, when you do your Amazon shopping, just click through the link on our website. Two websites, jocopodcast.com and jocco store.com. Some people don't know about that one.

We do have shirts. I haven't mentioned that before. We have shirts. If you like those, get some of those and a coffee mug. If you want, if you like them. And then you can, we have a Facebook page now.

Okay. Facebook.com. And that's, so people can ask a little bit longer questions. Yeah, because, yeah, sometimes it's hard to ask questions in, you know, 140 characters or less. And actually less than that

because you got to put the Jocko Wailing, you know. So the Facebook page is, Facebook.com slash Jocco Podcast. and you know like it and then you can put your questions there and answer those ones. Yeah, and there it is. Then you got the donation thing too, right? Yes. Yeah, a strong request for the donation situation.

And I didn't know how to feel about it at first, but man, yeah, thank you. Thank you guys for that. And it is available. So, yeah, I did it. Yeah, I'm feeling good. Yeah, $4.34. $4.34. Yeah, a lot of people.

$4.34 month is from, it's from Jock. So if you want to donate, you can donate. And besides, you know, thanks for all that support. Thanks for getting the book, Extreme Ownership, you know, hardcover, Kindle, audiobook, if you didn't know that, review it. And you know what? All that stuff is great.

But most importantly, here's what you need to do. Get up and get out of bed in the morning. Shake off that dreariness and that darkness and clench your feet. fists and go out into the light and out of the world and get after it that's what you need to do so until next time this is jocco and echo out