Russell chats to former Navy SEAL and Leadership consultant, Jocko Willink about whether or not the US could have blown up the Nord Stream pipeline, how you balance your moral compass in conflict and leadership techniques.To WATCH the full interview - and join future EXCLUSIVE live sessions with the likes of Jordan Peterson and Dr Joe Dispenza, go to: https://russellbrand.locals.com/Enjoy weekly meditations and join us for a special Q&A weekdays after our new daily show streamed on Rumble from 5pm BST, 12pm EDT, 11am CT.Find out more about Jocko Willink: https://jockopodcast.com/about/ Come and see Wim Hof, Biet Simkin and Vandana Shiva at COMMUNITY 2023 - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Hello and welcome to Subcutaneous, our new podcast that replaced Under the Skin, where I have a deep conversation every week for free, for the majority of it, for you, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
We'll be talking to people like Eckhart Tolle, Jordan Peterson, Brené Brown, Tony Robbins, and today Jocko Willink, who of course is a former Navy SEAL and leadership consultant.
We have an amazing conversation about the Nord Stream Pipeline and whether or not it was sabotaged, the nature of leadership, the nature of nutrition, manufacturing, patriotism, service, how you feel as a service person, if the agenda to which you've devoted your life may be, from a certain moral perspective, questionable.
So what I consider to be a pretty fascinating conversation.
If you sign up to Stay Free AF, you can join us live for these conversations that take place every week and pass on questions, as Suzanne did, asking Draco Willink about his morning routine and the way that he speaks to himself.
Also, I do weekly guided meditations in response to your requests and inquiries, and breath work with people like Biette Simpkin, who's a breath expert, and tapping with Nick Ortner, who uses a fantastic technique called tapping, which uses Meridians in a way comparable to acupuncture to disrupt deep-held patterns.
We do a Q&A after our live stream show on Rumble.
Stay free with Russell Brand, where you can ask us questions.
In this conversation with Jocko, we talk a lot.
We talk about American military policy, the nature of leadership, of expertism, and whether or not it was possible for the United States to blow up that pipeline.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Now I know you're no longer a Navy SEAL, I recognise that, and that you're no longer active, and I know that you're not continually doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, but when you said yourself that you don't meditate, So it's not based on a caricature, although I probably do have a caricature.
Last time we spoke, I talked about that.
I talked about what our varied prejudices about one another would be on the basis of that both of us, in a sense, in our earlier lives, it seems, rejected convention and that you found a kind of salvation through the discipline in military excellence.
and service and I sort of went into this sort of bohemian, in some cases quite Dainesian,
but ultimately in a sense a disciplined life like I'm abstemious now, I don't drink or take drugs,
I also do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, this is not a precursor to a challenge, may I just clarify.
And so we found ourselves in positions that I think are quite comparable and I mention this
only because sort of over the course of this conversation there are so many areas of your
expertise that I am interested in and so many areas of your experience I'm interested in.
And I suppose, you know, because as we touched on last time, there are so many superficial differences that it would be easy for us to caricature one another.
And I'm very interested in what points of intersection there are between us.
I'm also interested in what variety of beverages you seem to have.
That's the second type of drink I've seen you summons.
So, you don't meditate, but you are generally pretty happy.
And for you, would you say that playing the guitar or the BJJ are wellness pursuits for you?
I certainly feels like that when I get done surfing or I get done rolling jiu-jitsu or get done jamming with my band.
Then, you know, I definitely feel good.
And I, you know, Sam Harris, I owe Sam Harris and I've owed him for a long time to meditate.
You know, he's got his app and he sent it to me and I said, let's do a podcast.
And he said, yeah, just do it for two weeks.
And I've lacked the discipline to do the meditation for two weeks.
So, at some point, I'm gonna get in there.
We're gonna try it out.
Yeah, it's an interesting aspect of discipline, it's an interesting aspect of life.
With Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, like myself, it brings up a lot of emotion in me, like a lot of, sometimes, ego.
Do you roll with people that are more capable or more advanced with you?
Are you ever confronted with stuff like that in that environment?
I think that's one of the most beautiful things about Jiu Jitsu is you are confronted with that and you're going to get beat by people that you really don't want to get beat by.
And it's beat in the worst possible way.
It means that they've dominated your life and could take it from you if they wanted to.
And that's a horrible thing.
But I mean, I find great joy in training with people that are better than me and that submit me and joke me and arm lock me.
And that's why I continue to train.
Yeah, I'm imagining that you're, when you're like just training and rolling recreationally, not in preparation for anything in particular, do you hold on quite, do you yield very easily or do you not give up the chokes, for example?
Chokes I don't give up very easily, but if someone's going to break my arm or ruin my shoulder for the rest of my life in a commuter or something, I mean, I'm not going to get hurt.
That's the nice thing about chokes is you can take it to the limit.
And if worst case scenario, you wake up a little embarrassed, but you don't get hurt with, you know, foot locks, heel hooks, knee locks, shoulder locks, arm locks, you can be injured.
And I do not like to be injured.
Probably because, as you mentioned, a lot of the things that I do for my own personal wellness are physically active.
So if I lose the ability to be physically active, I don't like it at all.
I can't stand when I'm injured.
Yeah, yeah, I don't like it either.
I need quite a lot of sort of routine to hold myself together.
Now, like on our podcast, we talk a lot about mainstream media narratives.
We talk a lot about Duplicity and disingenuity in the way that information is relayed to us.
The Nord Stream Gas Pipeline story has become sort of quite divisive.
In part because it's an established part of American foreign policy to disrupt the relationship between Russia and Europe when it comes to the supply of energy.
I wonder if you have any opinions about that matter and any speculation on whether that sabotage, and it is established that it's sabotage, was undertaken by special forces given your history within those services.
Well, it certainly seems like the type of operation that could be conducted by some type of special operations unit.
The question would be, the bigger question is which special operation unit and from what country executed the operation, and I don't know, and I look forward to the truth coming out at some point.
It certainly is a curious scenario though.
It is a curious scenario because of course in 2014 Condoleezza Rice said that, you know, we should stop that pipeline.
There was a Rand report that came out of America sort of saying that one of the things that they most had to do would be to disrupt that pipeline.
I wonder how, as a person that's sort of been within the elite circles of special services, the mindset that that requires in terms of fealty, loyalty, dedication, willingness to go into situations that other people mightn't.
What kind of perspective that gives you on geopolitics and also how it can be a challenge to patriotism.
Last time we spoke, Jocko, it was established that, you know, patriotism is natural in anyone.
We all feel an affinity to the tribe that we belong to.
But it sometimes raises moral and ethical questions if you subsume yourself into a larger group.
If you say, I belong to this tribe, for example, United Kingdom or United States of America, and there are moral questions that are raised.
How do you square the necessity for obedience, broadly speaking, in the military, although I'm sure that there's more flexibility in the elite areas and in command, I would imagine, How do you square your own personal morality with what sometimes seem to be unethical actions undertaken in the service, not of a country it sometimes seems, but in the service of the corporate interests that those nations sometimes represent?
And I mean both in the case of Britain and the United States in this instance.
Well, obviously there's a level of discipline inside the military and This is a question that comes up on a pretty regular basis.
You know, what do you actually do if you get told to do something that's unlawful?
And the answer is you don't do it.
And this is, you get taught this inside the military.
You know, one of the general orders of the century is you'll carry out all lawful orders.
And so if somebody is asking you or telling you to do something that is unlawful, then you are not just Not that you shouldn't do it, you're obliged not to execute unlawful orders.
So I think that's pretty straightforward and that's something that you're raised with in the military and I think that's one of the things that keeps the military In a sense, with a moral compass in the fact that military people are citizens first.
And so even when you're in the military and you're a soldier, you know that you are also a citizen.
And if you're doing something that's morally or ethically or legally wrong, you don't do it.
Do you feel that people within the military are able to maintain a kind of understanding of an idea like that under the kind of circumstances that you're confronted with?
And my assumption as a civilian and a person that's never Being subjected or being able to or willing to subject myself to the kind of processes that I've heard are necessary to become a Navy SEAL or a member of the SAS.
But once you've gone through that level of discipline, submission, personal expertise and excellence that you can Then still haven't, like, because even as a normal citizen, it's pretty hard to sort of carry in your head.
Oh, me owning this phone means that somewhere in the Congo, a kid is mining cobalt or whatever.
I find it hard to hold those ideas in my head.
If I was, I imagine that operating at that level, it's difficult to maintain those ideas.
And I wonder if you've Firstly, what level of loyalty do you still feel to the organisation that you long served and presumably have many, many friends and people you love still in that service?
What kind of loyalty do you still feel to them?
And were you ever confronted?
And can you, I mean, imagine there's things you literally can't talk about, but can you generally talk about if you've ever been confronted in that type of way while in service?
So, first of all, we know when you talk about the training that you go through, one of the things that happens when you go through that training is you learn a lot about yourself.
And I would say it strengthens your character.
It doesn't weaken your character.
It doesn't erode your character to go through rigorous training.
It actually strengthens your character.
So, a person that's been through rigorous training is going to be more apt To hold the line in what their beliefs are and what their values are.
So I think most people now look could you take someone that's maybe weak minded and they become brainwashed to a point where they're just obeying orders and that's that?
Yeah, that could happen.
But usually, when people join the military and they go through some type of military training, their character gets strengthened, their beliefs become strengthened, and they're more likely to stand up when something happens, or something that they don't believe in is going to occur.
They're more likely to say, no, we're not doing this.
As far as my loyalty, you know, I was in the SEAL teams for 20 years.
My loyalty is very high to the SEAL teams.
I love the SEAL teams.
The SEAL teams was a great place for me to grow up and I have all of my friends were people that were other SEALs and we have a strong bond and I know that those guys, you know, I've got a bunch of a bunch of friends that if I called right now, They'd be over my house in 20 minutes or two hours, however long it took them to get there without even asking me what I need them for.
They would just be here.
And that's a pretty awesome thing.
So I have a high loyalty to the SEAL teams and to the men in the SEAL teams.
Does this mean that I think that the SEAL teams is infallible?
No, absolutely not.
Does it mean that every human, every person, every man inside the SEAL teams is a good person?
No, it doesn't mean that at all.
Does it mean that The SEAL teams doesn't make mistakes.
No, it doesn't mean that at all.
So there's a good dichotomy between the loyalty that I have to the SEAL teams and also the questioning of The leadership and the authority and the rules and the regulations.
So again, you know, we talked about this last time.
I'm a rebellious person.
I've always been a rebellious person.
And I think that's one of the reasons I was able to be successful because when things didn't make sense, I would raise my hand and say that doesn't make sense and we're not going to do that.
And for an example of that, I wrote about this in one of my books.
We were ordered, when I was in Ramadi in 2006, a very tough battle, very determined insurgents, a lot of violence, a lot of bloodshed, a lot of casualties, a lot of sacrifice.
And we were ordered in this city that every operation that we had to go on, we had to take Iraqi soldiers with us, friendly Iraqi soldiers with us.
And they actually gave us a ratio of how many Iraqi soldiers we had to take with us for every American that we had.
And we didn't have enough Iraqi soldiers to make it so that we could bring enough SEALs in the field.
So to explain this a little bit more detail, what we were told was for every one American that we took in the field, we had to take seven Iraqi soldiers with us.
The Iraqi soldiers were untrained, they were unmotivated, they were poorly equipped, they obviously they didn't speak English, a lot of them couldn't read or write, so they were very Low-level soldiers, to call them soldiers even, is a stretch.
And yet, my senior leadership ordered us to take seven Iraqi soldiers, seven Iraqi soldiers for every one American.
The units, the Iraqi units that we were working with only had 15 soldiers, maybe 20 soldiers, maybe 12 soldiers, which meant I would only be able to take One or two, maybe three SEALs out in the field.
And now you've got SEALs in the field without backup, without their fellow SEALs with them.
Maybe they don't have a medic SEAL because the medic stayed back.
Maybe they don't have a Radioman SEAL because the Radioman SEAL stayed back.
So you've only got two SEALs.
Two SEALs is not a complete unit.
And so when I got ordered to do this, I assessed the order that we were given.
I didn't make sense.
It was going to put my guys at risk.
It was going to put the Iraqis at risk as well.
And I pushed back up the chain of command and said to my boss, you know, hey, sir, this doesn't make sense.
Here's why.
Here's the minimum people I would like to be able to take with me to make sure that my guys are safe.
I want to take a minimum of six people on every operation and My boss read my assessment and then said, yeah, that makes sense, Jocko.
Thank you for informing me of what it was like on the ground there.
And take however many people you want.
So occasionally, things like this happen that don't make sense.
And when it does, then you push back and adjustments get made.
The individual morality of any of us, for me, you know, we all exist on a spectrum.
We all have traits of, speaking of myself, like selfishness and self-interest and greed and lust and all these things as well as compassion and altruism and all that.
For me, like, the My general attitude to people in the services, let alone people in elite services, is, broadly speaking, awe that anyone is willing to put an idea ahead of themselves and then live in accordance with it.
That's something that I think is, in a sense, unquestionably admirable.
I don't really query it.
I sort of recognise it.
The principle of surrender there is so vividly aspirational for me that I don't query the individuals that are willing to do that.
What I feel like is that as an institution, it seems mostly that American military force is used in order to fulfill certain goals that seem increasingly to be economic, financial and resource-oriented goals, the conflict in Iraq being one of them.
So, like, while I would never call into question the values of, you know, whether it's ordinary inventory or elite service folk or people within, you know, any division of the military, the fact that that war was undertaken, you know, under the false premise that there will be weapons of mass destruction, And even the sanctions that preceded it that were non-military led to starvation of half a million people.
So, like, I don't feel that people in the services, I suppose, have a special consideration any more than I participate in a culture that requires poverty elsewhere.
I recognise that, you know, just with the iPhone example.
I suppose to me, the fact that British soldiers are loyal to the Crown, that American soldiers are loyal to a centralised power, the idea that the loyalty of those services is ultimately to the people, sometimes it feels to me, gets Lost, whether that is, you know, the Iraq war and the way that panned out, the revelations of, say, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, that there was sort of widespread, what do you want to call it?
I mean, sort of like there were unnecessary deaths that were concealed.
How do you how do you feel about that?
You know, because, of course, the argument, say, for releasing Julian Assange is that he should be regarded as a journalist, like the other newspapers that reported on it, like The Guardian or The Spiegel or The New York Times or whatever.
He considers himself to be a journalist rather than an activist, on one hand.
And how real is the charge, which I think has been broadly disproven, that Assange's revelations put American lives at risk?
I think that the revelation in these scenarios is that war is a horrible endeavor.
And there's blood and death and destruction at a level that is horrible.
And I think that these Reports these leaks this information that came out revealed and reveals how absolutely horrible war is If you compare, you know the the atrocities or the I guess atrocities the wrong word, but if you compare the scale of death in the Iraq War to World War two World War one you you're barely even scratching the circus surface, but
You know, I think when this information comes out from kind of behind the scenes, then it reveals how heinous war is.
I think it's shocking to some people.
Yeah, I think it is shocking.
In a sense, I feel like culturally, weird word to use, generally, we feel that war should only be undertaken when there is no other alternative.
but it seems like war is undertaken when it is the best way to achieve the objectives of the most
powerful interests. For example, this current conflict, it seems like that there were diplomatic
solutions available and yet war has been the result. What are your views on the Ukraine-Russia
war and also in particular reports that Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, potentially
intervened in talks between Zelensky and Putin to prevent a diplomatic solution?
I think what's most disturbing about all these situations is that we don't seem to learn.
And you know, the point that you made, which everyone will agree to on the surface, which is war should absolutely be the last resort.
It should be only undertaken under scenarios where there's just no other human imaginable way of resolving a problem.
That should be the benchmark, or that should be the bar for going to war.
But clearly it's not.
It's not the benchmark for going to war.
We seem to go to war at the drop of a hat, and go to war whenever it seems like maybe it's the quickest solution.
And when I say that we don't learn, what we don't learn is that war is such a completely unpredictable Engagement.
No one can understand and no one can predict what's going to happen in a war.
And that's why we end up in these wars that, number one, we go into them thinking they're going to be over quickly.
I mean, we went into the second Iraq war thinking it would be over as fast as the first Iraq war.
Vietnam.
We thought, oh, we'll go into Vietnam.
We'll send 2,000 people into Vietnam.
We'll be there for a little while.
We'll be home for Christmas.
And they don't realize, even Ukraine, when on the other side, when Putin invaded Ukraine, he thought he was going to be done with that war in, what, a matter of a few weeks?
And yet it's a nasty, unpredictable endeavor.
And it always is.
It always is.
So the fact that we forget about what we've been through, you know, look at the war in Afghanistan, 20 years, 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan.
And when you look at the parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam, the parallels are shocking.
They're completely shocking.
And yet, wait a few months and people forget That we don't understand war.
That we can't make predictions on where it's going to go, and how long it's going to last, and how many casualties there are going to be, and what are the second, third order effects that it's going to cause.
So we seem to just think that war is a pretty good option in a lot of cases.
And it's not.
It's almost never a good option.
So that's pretty disturbing.
And right now, with what's going on in Ukraine, I mean, clearly the news that people kind of interfered with the talks to negotiate some kind of peace, that's sickening, completely sickening.
And once again, when people think that they're so smart that they can predict the future, they try and intervene with these things and think that war is going to be a good option, and it's just not going to be.
It is actually Assange that said that the Afghanistan war is only viewed as a failure if you consider that the objective was a quick solution when you, this is quoting Assange, when you consider that the objective is to take public money and to put it into private hands, a long war is preferable.
Of the 14 trillion, I think I'm right in saying that the Pentagon was awarded from the American Treasury Over 50% of it ended up in military industrial complex contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and it's commonly understood that military veterans are perhaps not looked after as well as they could be.
It seems that the kind of feelings of loyalty and compassion that the bravery that military service elicits is often used to veil More nefarious motives, i.e.
financial ones, that war, while often presented as humanitarian or necessary, could be seen as driven by, as in the case of Iraq, a requirement for resources or potentially geopolitical objectives that perhaps we would agree with if I understood and had the capacity to understand.
Also seems like it's being undertaken for the reasons that we are told.
And because there's so much morale, like when you say, oh, like, you know, I've got like 20 mates that would come around my house and the drop of a hat wouldn't even ask what it was for.
That for me is a suggestion that there's sort of such a clear moral calibre and decency and honour And the famous British phrase is lions led by donkeys to describe the sort of massacres of the First World War of the British working class.
I, you know, I wonder, you know, now that you're an expert in leadership, in addition to your experience in the military, I wonder what this tells us about the leadership in our political and economic systems and how at odds that is with the principles and values that you cherish within your military experience.
What does this disjunct tell us?
Yeah, and you and I had a similar conversation last time that there's sometimes when you go to war, the reasons why people are pushing to go to war, there are some positive reasons.
They want to liberate a country.
They want to help move a country towards a more free society.
And at the same time that that's happening, you've got people that want to go to war because they know they're going to make a ton of money from it.
And those things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
And the example I gave you last time was, you know, I work with a lot of companies today at my consulting company, and we work with big medical companies.
And the big medical companies make massive amounts of money.
And at the same time that they're making massive amounts of money, they also create medical devices that save people's lives and allow people to live better lives.
So there are times when the two separate agendas are actually moving in the same direction, and that's OK.
The problem comes in when the one agenda is pretty minor and the other agenda is pretty massive and gets overrun.
Yeah, I think this is stuff that Americans and people in the nations that are sending their kids to war need to think about, and think about really hard.
The classic way I talk about going to war is you need to make sure that you're willing to kill and that when you say you're willing to kill that you're going to end up killing civilians and you're going to end up killing women and kids because that's what happens in war and anyone that doesn't understand that doesn't understand war at all and you've also got to understand that you are going to lose your own people and your young Your youngest, most valuable human beings in your country are going to get killed.
And that's what war is.
There's no doubt about it.
For me, this tells me that there is an urgent requirement for a social awakening that is quite broad and profound.
That if we can't in 2022 extract these things that are clearly inherent in one way or another in human nature, if we can't begin to extract them at scale from our modus operandi, there's little hope for our civilization.
But something that when it's experientially is honour, valour, service, care, love, self-sacrifice, plays out on a global scale as exploitation, annihilation, war crimes, genocide.
It seems to me that there is something fundamentally, ideologically Wrong.
And that is that it's at the head of the snake that the action needs to take place.
You know, because like as an anti-establishment person, broadly speaking, you know, I suppose the question I'm confronted with is and what I sort of feel like almost when talking to you, Jocko, is that, you know, are we going to eventually arrive at the point where it's like, well, look, you may think that kind of anglophonic Anglo-American hegemony has its challenges, But you try living in communist Russia or China, and I think you'd prefer this one where you're allowed to do your show and dress up all cute.
But I wonder if China and Russia indeed have expansionist goals of that nature, and it's pretty clear that the United States, or at least the set of interests represented by the United States government, do have an expansionist agenda that is causing, in my view, unnecessary suffering.
Yeah, I'm not sure, because if America had a true expansionist agenda, we would have taken over the entire world, you know, after World War II.
But we didn't.
So I don't know that that's the case, or maybe there's a group of people that want to expand.
I think China may look to expand.
I mean, when you look at what they're doing inside their culture, it certainly seems evident that they're looking to expand.
Obviously, Russia's trying to expand because they just invaded Ukraine.
So there's some expansionist going on there.
I don't think that America, I actually don't think that America has an expansionist mindset.
Because like I said, otherwise we would have expanded.
We would have taken over everything.
And we didn't.
In fact, we nurtured Japan back to health.
We nurtured Germany back to health, where they could have their own country.
That's what we've done in these wars.
So, I don't really think that's a piece of it.
But going to something else that you said, What's scary is, you know, you're saying, hey, with these wars that have taken place, it seems like we should have some kind of a massive social awakening.
If World War One didn't trigger a massive social awakening to never have a war again, then I have no idea what it's going to take, Russell, because It wasn't, what, 20 years later that World War II was kicking off.
This is after millions and millions of men were slaughtered for nothing.
And yet, you fast forward a few years and we were in World War II.
So, I don't know what kind of social awakening we could hope for.
I'm not sure, man.
I'm not sure.
If World War I didn't do it, I'm not sure what will.
Well, some people would argue that the conditions imposed on Germany after World War I, in a sense, created the tensions that led to World War II, and absolutely it was a refusal to take on board the lessons of that mode of 20th century imperialism that led to, yeah, another pretty awful conflict.
With regard to American expansionism, some would argue that Unlike the forms of colonialism that preceded it, like British colonialism, where it was all flags and crowns and jewels and people marching about, that it was undertaken in a more invisible and economic form through trade and corporatism and relationships between the countries that it
have even been listed in this conversation are somewhat bound by an
agenda that's ultimately beneficial to American corporate interests whilst I'm
not suggesting that ordinary American people in any way benefit from whatever
economic ties resist as a result of the treaties between America and Japan say
or any of the other nations and I speaking as a British person ultimately
after the Second World War there's certainly an argument for saying we
became a sort of de facto state and whilst we very much cherish what we
still call the special relationship I think it's pretty clear who's at the
front and who's at the back as it were in that particular loving cuddle across
the Atlantic - Yeah, so like really, I suppose when I'm talking
about spiritual awakening, what I feel like is when you talk about people that would be willing
to a drop of a hat come to your aid, or people that are willing to confront
the absolute necessity for sacrifice, people that are willing to undertake
the kind of suffering that I've heard described in what is, as I understand,
known as Hell Week in the Navy SEALs, that that kind of discipline, that kind of willingness,
that kind of capacity for human greatness played out without the kind of framing of the sort of cultural
and economic model that it currently lives within could lead to different systems,
if not perfect ones, better ones, different types of leadership.
If we had leaders that lived by the accord that you have described as being the creed
of the Navy SEALs, like leaders that were about sacrifice and service rather than the fulfillment of lobbyist agenda
corporate agenda and sort of puppet governments that for me that would be the one.
One way of instantiating sort of governmental change, both a spiritual and practical kind of, you know, kind of change.
That's not really a question, Jocko.
That's more of a wishful announcement I'm making.
Can I drag you back into the minutiae?
Right.
One of the things I said around the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is it wouldn't be possible that like America don't have the submersive capacity.
But in truth, does it?
I think it's in the Baltic Sea at a level of 200 feet.
Purely hypothetically, would it be possible for a special forces team to undertake the sabotage of a pipeline?
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
Did you have to do stuff like that?
Explosives under the water?
That's sort of Navy SEALs all day long, isn't it?
I mean, it probably would have been some kind of an unmanned drone, you know, an underwater drone that would do something like that.
Why would you send a diver down there when you could send a robot?
Right.
You can do that relatively easily.
Thank you.
Do you become cynical about the way that these things are covered and reported, having a degree of understanding around how this stuff actually works?
I guess the only thing that I find, and when I see you, when I see what you post about as well, I think it's just people get stuck into one digital ecosystem in their brain, and depending on what side you're on, you either only listen to this ecosystem, or you listen to this ecosystem, and there's not too many outlets that are sort of just trying to keep an open mind and listen to both sides of the story and just try and find out what the truth is.
So that's what I think, and I think people in social media go crazy about things that, based on some assumption or based on the ecosystem that they're living in, so I think that's pretty unfortunate.
I'm not sure what's going to get us out of that, but it's pretty sad to see people that are so sucked into one methodology of thinking that you can't even really have a conversation with them.
I know I have friends that are one extreme or another extreme,
and it's hard to talk to them sometimes, because they just don't-- their mind is so closed off
to hearing any other points of view, it can be very challenging to even have a discussion with
them.
And it's better just to not talk about it, because you're my friend, Russell,
and you're freaked out about something.
And I say, well, there's another possible viewpoint.
and you just get mad and started yelling at me, then maybe I'll just talk about something else.
You know, how about how about the football game?
Let's talk about that instead.
So I think our media is definitely Yeah, it becomes sort of abstract.
It gets to the point where you forget what people are actually like and how people treat each other on a daily basis and it becomes about sets of values that aren't really relevant in your daily life.
Either you're kind to people, you listen to people, you're willing to sacrifice yourself for others.
Or you're consumed by selfishness and like the sort of constant noise of our culture, I think, is probably intended to create the divisiveness that it does indeed create.
What kind of projects are you involved in?
Last time I spoke to you, Jocko, you were like writing, I think, a children's book.
You were consulting in a variety of areas.
What is it?
How is it that you are?
What are you pursuing now?
Yeah, so I've written a bunch of children's books, actually.
I think, yeah, I've written five children's books, and we're looking at one of those going to be making it into a movie, it looks like, right now.
The first one of those, so I haven't really talked about that, but it looks like we've moved forward towards one of those.
The first book in the Way of the Warrior Kid series being turned into a movie, which is awesome.
Also, interestingly, I have written a novel called Final Spin, which I'm putting into a screenplay right now, which has been picked up, so that's pretty cool.
Obviously, I have a bunch of companies.
Yes, I have a consulting company.
We're constantly working with companies, teaching leadership, traveling around the country and the world doing that, which is great.
I have a supplement company.
You're asking about my beverages.
So, yeah, I make a bunch of supplements, protein, and energy drinks, which are all clean and good for you.
So I've got that going on.
And then I have a business where we make clothing in America.
So I have several factories on the East Coast of America, and we make jeans, American-made jeans.
We make boots.
We make jiu-jitsu gis.
I got to get you a gi, Ross.
I got to get you an American-made gi, an origin gi.
I'd love that.
They're the most beautiful gis in the world.
You won't even believe that it's a gi.
They feel so comfortable and so nice, and they're all made in America with American-made, with American-grown material, so that's huge.
We're getting rid of the Chinese slave labor through this economic war, and I don't want to have my jiu-jitsu gi made by someone that is a slave in a factory with terrible conditions making a
dollar a week. I want it to be made by a person that lives and makes a good wage and has a good
skill and gets treated with respect and dignity and that's what we're doing at Origin USA. That's
pretty amazing. I'm 83 by the way.
A3.
I would love a gi, if that's possible.
If you don't send one, I'll happily purchase one online myself.
These models of creating independent businesses that employ people, that are locally resourced, seem to me like an interesting alternative to the centralised and dislocated models that dominate us.
Is it working out for you, employing people?
Is it successful and profitable?
Yeah, so we've got about 400 employees here in America, and it's working great.
And look, it's been a long haul.
It's been a tough struggle.
There's been a lot of challenges along the way.
We've blown a couple calls.
We've made some mistakes.
But luckily, you know, the way we've done it, the way we've scaled it, We've done it scaling in a slow method, and so we're doing well.
We're doing great, and everything that we make, we put right back into the businesses, and it's just an amazing thing to see.
We've got a factory down in North Carolina, a big, giant factory that we've kind of brought back to life.
We've got several factories up in Maine as well, and it's amazing to watch, and it's amazing to see, and it's amazing that People are so productive and people in this country are so, they want to do something meaningful.
And when you go to a factory and you work and you build and you create something, everybody feels good about it.
It's an awesome thing to be a part of.
Well, I hope that that was fulfilling and enjoyable.
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