Sitting down with retired Navy Seal Jocko Willink. Jocko Willink Instagram http://bit.ly/Jocko_IG Jocko Podcast http://bit.ly/JockoPodcast Dichotomy of Leadership - Available for Preorder: http://bit.ly/Dichotomy_of_Leadership Music “Shine” - Bishop Gunn http://bit.ly/Shine_BishopGunn Support Our Sponsors Hood Hat USA http://bit.ly/HoodHat Use promo code HOODUSA for 20% off MNML Case http://bit.ly/MNML_Case Use promo code THEO for 15% off Grey Block Pizza http://bit.ly/GreyBlock Submit a video question on LiveRaise’s Fan Line: http://bit.ly/Theo_FanLine Theo Von/This Past Weekend Patreon: http://bit.ly/TheoVon_Patreon Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theovon/ https://www.instagram.com/thispastweekend_/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheoVon Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theo.von Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoVon/ Dates August 16-18 Laugh Factory Chicago, IL September 14-15 Zanies Nashville, TN September 20-24 Just for Laughs Toronto October 18-20 Skyline Comedy Club Appleton, WI November 1-3 Helium Comedy Club Buffalo, NY November 9-10 Wise Guys Salt Lake City, UT Nov 30 & Dec 1 Comedy Loft Washington DC No Guntry for Old Men Patreon Gunt Squad: Alaskan Rock Vodka Renee Nicol Angelo Raygun Matthew Snow Ryan Sweatman The Asian Hamster Megan Andersen-Hall Stephanie Claire Ryan Wolfe Carla Huffman Travis Vowell J.T. Hosack Austin Kehler Addison Ardolino thatdudewiththepaperbag Meghan LaCasse Nyx Ballaine Alta Jacob Rice Jonny Zaz Mark Bentley Kiera Parr James Hunter Jerry Zhang Gabriel Almeda Ryan Crafts Amanda Sherman Brett Jones justin marcoux Christopher Stath Bryan Reinholdt Niko Ferrandino Paddy jay Thee shitfaced chef Paul Flores Tommy Redditt Casey Rudesill Gunt Squad Gary Joey Desrosiers Cody Kenyon Kirk Cahill Philip James Michael E. Ganzermiller Scott Owen Lide Mitchell Watson Matthew Azzam Justin L Jeremy West Kenton call Steve Corlew Nick Butcher Megan Daily Ken Melvin Old McTronald Matt Kaman Tom Kostya Mike Vo Micky Maddux Sam Illgen Ben Limes Stepfan Jefferies David Smith Logan Yakemchuk Aidan Duffy MEDICATED VETERAN Dan Ray Audrey Harlan kristen rogers Josh Cowger Kelly Elliott Dwehji Majd Jason Haley Jameson Flood Jason Bragg Christopher Christensen Scott Lucy Ben Deignan Cody Cummings Shannon Schulte Aaron Stein Stacy Blessing Andy Mac Campbell Hile John Kutch Adriana Hernandez Jeffrey Lusero Alex Hitchins Joe Dunn Kennedy Joey Piemonte Robyn Tatu Beau Adams Yoga Shawn-Leigh henry Laura Williams Alex Person Mona McCune Suzanne O'Reilly Chad Saltzman James Bown Brian Szilagyi Arielle Nicole Greg H Calvin Doyle Jacob Ortega Jesse Witham Andrea Gagliani Scott Swain William Morris Qie Jenkins Aaron Jones Jon Ross Kevin Best Haley Brown Ned Arick J Garcia Lauren Cribb Ty Oliver Tom in Rural NC Christian from Bakersfield Matt Holland Charley Dunham Casey RobertsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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He has a new book available for pre-order right now called The Dichotomy of Leadership.
He's the host of Jocko Podcast.
You can find him on social media at Jocko Willink.
It is the retired Navy SEAL, a man that turns wanderers into warriors, Mr. Jocko Willink.
I can lift myself on my eyes.
Shine that light on me.
I'll sit and tell you my stories.
Shine on me.
You prepare for the day, Jocko.
I got up actually this morning, Nojug, I got up at 4.15 just to see what that would feel like.
How did it feel?
It felt inspiring, and then by about stayed up till about maybe 4.55 and then it felt kind of scary.
You know, I felt like maybe I had some sugar issues and I had to lay back down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I got up early this morning too.
Did you?
Yep.
Yeah.
Yep.
Do you, on the mornings when you get up and you have that, do you have that moment in your head where you don't feel like it anymore?
I know that some of that goes away when you repeatedly drive through that moment.
Do you still have that sometimes?
Sure.
Sure.
And what do you do?
Go anyways.
Just go.
Just go anyways.
Just keep it cruising.
Yeah.
That's it.
Take action.
Next foot.
Yeah, a lot of times people say, you know, how do you get up early in the morning?
And I say, set your alarm clock and get out of bed when it goes off.
Yeah.
That's what you do.
Right.
Do you ever, or are there days or moments or special times when you let yourself, you know, tomorrow's a day for luxury, tomorrow's a day to relax?
Not relax.
Not really.
Yeah.
Not really, because I've got a lot of stuff I got to do.
Right.
You know, things.
You have a lot of business, a lot of stuff going on.
Yeah.
And just at the end of a day where you took a luxury day, did you just call it a luxury day?
Is that what you said?
I'll say that.
Okay.
So let's say you take a luxury day.
Okay.
Right.
Theo takes a luxury day.
At the end of that day, how do you feel?
Right?
I feel like I need to gear back up.
Yeah, well, when I get to the end of that day, I just feel like I just wasted a day of my life.
That's what I feel like.
Right.
You know, so there's no luxury days happen over here on my side.
Okay, right.
We're going to keep it real over here.
Okay, this will be.
I'll let you handle the luxury scenarios.
I think I'd like to have less luxury days in my life, though.
Maybe that'll be one of my coming goals.
You know, I was thinking the other day, I was listening to some past podcasts that you've had with Joe Rogan, Tim Ferris, and are there things when you get into combat, when you get into a wartime scenario that you Think you would be totally prepared for, and then there's something that breaks a man at that moment that they have no point to know before that that they wouldn't be able to handle.
They could do all the training, they could do everything, they could do all the preparation, all the you know, um, the you know, simulation, all of that.
But at that moment, there's something inside of them, and it's not even a knock against them, but there's something that they can't handle.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I mean, so what it is, the big difference is someone's going to try and kill you, and you could die.
And so some people have a real hard time with that.
And so occasionally you'll see a guy that doesn't want to be in that situation where they can get killed.
And what is your responsibility at that point, like as a leader, like if you see something like that happen, are you able to notice kind of that now?
Yeah, the other thing that can happen is as guys put themselves and their lives at risk over and over and over again, eventually they can get worn down, you know, combat fatigue.
And so as they get worn down, that's where the responsibility of the leader is to try and recognize that and then pull them off the front lines to the best of your ability.
The way I always describe it to people, especially when I'm talking to the young leaders that are out there that are leading these men into combat, is when you see that, it's like having a check engine light on the car, right?
If you take that car in for service, they can put more oil in it or whatever, and it'll be fine.
But if you keep running that engine at a hard pace, it's going to blow out the engine.
It'll be ruined.
So you got to, as a leader, you got to look and recognize, hey, okay, this guy's had a little bit too much right now.
I need to pull him off the front lines.
And you don't say, I wouldn't say to you, hey, Theo, I can see you've had too much.
I'm going to pull you off the front lines because your ego would get involved and you'd say, no, no, I'm good to go.
When the reality is you need a break.
But I might say, hey, Theo, I got this logistics run that needs to be made back to the rear.
Can you make sure you go do that for me?
And that way, I want to make sure we get this, this, and this all squared away.
And I know that you're the guy I trust to get it done.
And you'd be like, yeah, cool.
And then you go back to the rear, you pick up whatever you need to pick up.
Maybe you catch a movie.
Maybe you have a little Theo luxury day back there in the rear.
And you get your mindset right again because guys do break.
And it's the responsibility of the leader to try and prevent that.
And it's a really horrible thing.
I just did a podcast on my podcast.
And in World War I, the British, and I don't know if you know anything about World War I, but World War I was absolutely heinous.
It was a heinous war.
All wars are pretty damn heinous, but that kind of takes the top spot as just horrible situations where these guys are getting killed by the tens of thousands.
Right.
I saw Dunkirk.
That's the only thing I saw.
And I don't even know if that's from that war.
I haven't seen that movie, but in World War I, guys are in trenches and you're going to charge another trench against machine guns and they're getting mowed down.
And there was no real, you didn't really have any say as even as a frontline leader.
It was like, okay, at six o'clock tomorrow morning, you're going to get up with your platoon and you're going to charge this other trench.
And guys would just get killed.
And then you had gas on top of that.
It was just a nightmare.
And the British during that war, they executed about 350 people, of which about 300 of those were for cowardice, what they called cowardice.
Now, you can go on YouTube and you can check out Shell Shock, World War I shell shock.
You see, it's one of the saddest things that I've seen in my life is these guys are so, because they're getting bombarded with shells and artillery and mortars for months and months and months and months on end.
And eventually their mind just couldn't take it.
And different people have different levels of what they can take.
And this doesn't mean they're a bad person.
It doesn't mean they're a coward.
It means that they took as much as they could and they couldn't take it anymore.
And these guys would literally shake.
This one guy's, his wife gets a letter and she doesn't recognize the handwriting.
And it's because he's in the hospital.
He has to have a nurse write for him because he can't hold a pencil to write to his wife.
And this particular guy, he ends up getting executed, shot at dawn, which is what they did with these guys, about 300 of them.
And eventually the British government admitted and said, hey, we were wrong and we did the wrong thing.
But that's a situation where if you had these guys who you see that they're breaking, you get them off the front line, you get them some rest and relaxation and some luxury, Theo style, you get them in that mindset where they can relax and then eventually they'll build back up and they'll be ready to go back to the front again, hopefully.
And maybe they won't, but there's a good chance that they will.
So that's definitely something that a leader needs to think about.
And it's also something that you as a human being need to think about, right?
Guys can push themselves so hard that eventually they need a break, you know?
And you have to monitor a lot of that.
Sorry to interrupt you, but you have to monitor a lot of that with ego because I'm sure with a lot of bravado, sometimes ego can probably get involved.
And with a lot of these men trying to, I mean, there's a lot of tough men that you work with.
Yeah, just like I was just giving you crap when we walked in here.
I'm just acting like I'm all hard and never take a day off, you know, and you're kind of like chuckling.
But that's what's that?
That's me just kind of playing my ego out.
Hey, I'm never going to rest, never going to take a break.
I'm just having fun because I've got to recognize, hey, if I get to a point where my mind is overwhelmed and I need to take a luxury day with Theo Vaughn, then that's what it is.
Is it hard to manage sometimes?
Like, do you see guys that are almost like, or even in your own life, have you noticed, like, as you become more of a, you know, I heard you talking on, I think it was the first time that you were on, or one of the times you were on Joe Rogan's podcast about being a, and I love how Joe Rogan's podcast has become almost like our library in America in a lot of ways.
Like, but in a neat way, because it's an honest, you know, I saw it.
Like, I know it's a real, it's a, you know, it's, it's something like, that I know occurred.
It's not just like a statement by somebody that I've heard, that I've wrote, that's, that I read.
It's like, okay, I saw this happen.
I know that this is the real occurrence.
Yeah, and you actually saw it me.
It's me.
It's the words coming out of my mouth.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think there's huge authenticity.
Jordan Peterson was talking about this, about how people are flocking to podcasts because people are just dying for authenticity.
They just want things that are real.
But do you notice in your own life, like, I mean, I've noticed even that like our as our podcast has grown and it's grown, I mean, it's grown like three times this year, I think, you know, and it's been a blessing, and it's also been a lot of pressure.
And it's also like I start to worry about my own ego.
You know, I start to worry about well, how is this going to start to infect me?
How do I make sure that you know I'm the same person that started the podcast?
I want to grow and expand, but how do I not, you know, it's easy to give in to becoming the idea of yourself.
You know, have you started a battle with any of that or seen some of that or like noticed those things start to flare up in your own life?
I'm not accusing you.
I'm just curious about it.
I hear where you're coming from, and you can see where that can definitely happen.
For me, I think I've been surrounded by so many guys that are way better than me that it's really challenging for me to try and think I'm anything.
You know, I've been surrounded by heroes and guys that have sacrificed and done so much that for me to be doing what I'm doing, I'm just sitting over here trying to get by.
And, you know, I always talk about the fact that one thing that is good about podcasts is, hey, it's just me sitting in a room.
Like even what you have here, this setup is pretty extravagant compared to me.
I have me and my, the guy that does a podcast with me, Echo, and it's two microphones and we're in a little room, a black room.
That's it.
That sounds like interrogational that I like.
Yeah, it is kind of like interrogation.
And it's sort of like an interrogation of myself because when you're again, another thing I do on my podcast all the time is I read books or excerpts of books from guys that have been through insane situations in combat.
And so you can't even can't even put, I can't even put a finger to these guys and what they've done.
So yeah, it's really easy to stay humble when you see what other people are doing and have done.
Yeah, and I guess it's really easy to stay humble, I guess, when you're yeah, when you're in that, when you, when the world's, one of the worlds that you work in has so much sacrifice in it.
What's one of the what's a sacrifice that you in Montreal that you saw like on the battlefield or something you saw out there, you know?
I mean, when we, my last deployment to Iraq, the, the amount of sacrifice that we saw was, was incredible.
And it was every single day there was guys that were, I mean, soldiers and Marines that were getting wounded and killed.
And, you know, we lost some of our guys.
And I mean, it's another level.
It's another level.
You know, when people talk about sacrifice, even, you know, you kind of hear people talking about you got to make sacrifice to get to get ahead or you got to make sacrifice to get where you want to be.
This is just another level of sacrifice when guys are risking their lives for each other and for what they believe in.
And when you say, and most, these days there's a lot of pressure, I feel like, like even recently, even having the American flag, I almost feel like it's some people look down upon upon it in some ways.
Like it's like, you know, it's almost become a symbol of like conservatism sometimes in America.
And do you feel like that patriotism has gotten any different over your tenure in the military?
Have you seen that kind of change?
Like what it means to like be a patriot?
Is it just about the flag?
Is it about the country?
Like have you seen any, like has that adjusted for you kind of over the time?
My viewpoints haven't really adjusted.
Other than that when you travel around the world and you see repressed nations and oppressed nations and oppressed people, it makes you very, very grateful to live in a place where you can pretty much do whatever you want.
I mean, it's an incredible, it's an incredible blessing to be in a country like America where you can, like I said, you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you're not hurting other people.
You can kind of do whatever you want here.
And so does that make you more patriotic?
In a way, it does.
But, you know, for me, my level of patriotism hasn't really changed since I've been in, other than to say, yeah, I've seen other parts of the world.
And yeah, I've seen people that are willing to sacrifice their lives for the freedom that we have.
And that's something that I think about every single day.
I think about that.
Is there a sense when you're in a battle environment, and I know you had the experience where a lot of the experience you've talked about with the Ramadi when you guys were – So first of all, it was 2006.
So they didn't start using the name ISIS until about 2007, 2008 is when they started to gain power at this time.
It was al-Qaeda in Iraq that was the group.
And yes, they were insurgents and yes, they were embedded inside the city.
The city had about a population of about 400,000 normal Iraqi civilians, just normal people that wanted to live their lives.
And embedded in those people and intertwined in those people was a bunch of really evil, really evil subhuman, just insurgent terrorists that wanted to get power for themselves and were willing to do anything to get there, including massacre, torture, rape, murder the local populace.
And did you realize that evil existed at those levels?
Did that experience redefine kind of your level for evil or chaos?
I would say both my deployments.
I mean, on my first deployment, I remember going into a room where Saddam had done torture and like there was hooks on the wall and like big hooks where you'd hang meat.
I mean, it was like really, when you walked in there, it felt haunted.
Wow.
I don't know if I believe in ghosts or whatever, but if I, that must be sort of what ghosts feel like.
You know, walk in this room where you know people had been tortured and killed and brutally murdered.
And you kind of feel that.
Oh, I bet.
A lot of pain would almost scare your spirit right out of your body.
So your spirit's just sitting there next to you almost.
So when you see that, yeah, you start to feel, I mean, you definitely know that there's evil in the world for sure.
And does that re-inspire you or support your feel?
Does that then, like once you get to that point, because you have, I'm sure as you build up, you know, your battle experience and your battle, your abilities to go fight and your preparation, and then you get there, does that then change like, oh, wow, we really are fighting something?
I knew and my guys knew that we were going to get something.
I mean, you know, you can look at, you look at what the insurgents are doing.
And really, when you got to see ISIS, that's one thing that was interesting is once ISIS started sort of social media broadcasting what they were doing.
Yeah.
And I don't know if they thought it would help them or whatever, but it didn't help them.
You know, people started, I mean, it helped.
If you were a sick, twisted person, you saw ISIS doing that and you go, oh, cool, I'm going to go join ISIS.
But most rational, normal, civilized human beings looked at what they were doing and just said, this is horrible and these people need to be destroyed.
And they've done a, I mean, the military has done a great job of eliminating ISIS.
It hasn't really gotten a lot of press, but it's been incredible.
There was about 40,000 ISIS and now there's, I don't know, maybe 500 left.
So from 40,000 to 500, that's pretty dominating victory.
And like I said, there hasn't been much press about it.
And I don't know if the press hasn't come because of because of the current president and people don't want to say, hey, this guy did it.
Or if it's because it wasn't just Americans that did it.
It was the Iraqis did a lot of the fighting.
And so maybe people weren't that concerned about it because of the Iraqis.
Or maybe it's less of a news story when it's not up close and personal, which is like the videos they were sending out, which would always get a lot of airtime.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, no, I think there's definitely, it feels like to me that there's something out there where, yeah, they don't even want to look at that war as even a thing that happens or that fighting is even a thing that happens anymore.
You know, it's almost like it's like it's taboo or something, even though it's necessary.
Do you feel sometimes in your blood like that we'll have to be at war again?
Well, we're at war right now.
Yeah.
So it's not even again.
Like we're in a state of war right now.
So when you say that, what does that mean?
Like, so for a regular American like me that goes through their day, like what types of things are going on in the background kind of that we don't realize?
Well, I mean, there's still ISIS that's left.
There's still other elements of al-Qaeda that are brewing up.
There's people that are being trained that need to be stopped.
There's insurgent forces that are rising up that need to get put down.
There's all kinds of things happening all the time, and it's going to be continuing in that way for a long time, in my opinion.
And I know you, and like you, you talk a lot about like, you know, not wasting time.
When you wake up in the morning or when you, like, is there a theme inside of your brain that like your enemy is them?
Your enemy is like evil.
Your enemy is wasting your own time?
Like, do you have like kind of an enemy in your head?
I mean, especially when I was still in, obviously, I had a theme, a big theme in my head that, you know, I was going to be meeting some other guy on the battlefield and it was going to be who's more prepared.
And so, but now that I'm not doing that anymore, now I wake up in the morning.
Well, first of all, I always tell people this, like, when you wake up in the morning, don't think about anything.
Don't sit there and start thinking about rationalizing things.
Just get up and do what you're supposed to do.
Just turn off your brain and go and execute and just don't think because when you start thinking, you start making things up and you start thinking about luxury and all those things that you could be doing instead.
Yeah, whatever.
And so I just stop all that and just get up and just do what you're supposed to do.
But from a day-to-day basis, I mean, you know, the fact that I've got friends, a lot of friends that aren't here that don't get to live their lives anymore, that were killed.
And I want to make sure that I'm taking advantage of every minute and every second that I have and living a life that if they're watching me right now, they're thinking, all right, all right, good.
Jocko's getting after it.
Yeah, he's doing it.
And do you, in America, do you feel like we do a lot of that?
Or do you feel like the average American, we just don't realize the luxury that we have?
I think it's a little bit of both.
I think it's a little bit of both.
There's definitely people that, you know, I work, I have a consulting company now and I work with companies all over the place.
And there's people in those companies that are just getting after it in their own way.
And they're building businesses and they're growing businesses and they're taking over market share and they're working hard and they're raising their families and they're doing great things.
I mean, it's awesome to see.
So there's plenty of people like that in America that I see on a day-to-day basis.
And when I work with the military still, I meet young, you know, people talk about millennials.
I meet kids that are 18, 19, 20 years old.
And man, they're ready to do whatever they have to do for their job, for their country.
And it's awesome to see.
So maybe the people that are more negative get more press and the people that are a little bit more positive, they don't get as much press.
When you're having like an experience in a battle, right?
And is it almost sometimes become like a, and I'm not trying to equate it to this, but does it become like a video game experience?
I'm trying to think of a way that somebody like myself could, like, is there ever like a moment or, you know, a half hour or four hours that break down and you're like, afterwards, you're like, oh man, I wish we'd have kind of played that, you know, I wish I could play it over.
That definitely happens.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't really play video games.
Right.
But when you look back and we always would look back, we'd always reflect when we get done with an operation or get done with an event that unfolds.
We always look back at it and say, what could we have done better?
What could we have done different?
Even if it went well, even it goes well, we still look at it and say, hey, what could we have done better?
If it goes bad, we definitely break it down and try and figure out what mistakes we made and how we can fix them.
If you take a casualty on the battlefield, somebody loses their life.
What is the protocol in that experience?
What is that like?
Well, the first thing you have to do is win the fight, right?
Because if you take one casualty and you focus on that, well, then you're going to take more casualties because their enemy is still trying to get you.
So what you do is when you take a casualty, you still try and win the fight.
You try and make sure you suppress the enemy fire.
You get your troops in a situation where they can defend themselves, and then you can start worrying about the casualties.
When a moment like that happens, is it scary or is it sad?
What is that like?
It's both.
I mean, I'll tell you, when you're going through these situations, you're doing what you've been trained to do.
And that becomes the focus of, okay, this is what's going on.
Here's what we're going to do to correct the situation or try and handle the situation.
You've got to kind of put your emotions in check until you have time later.
And does it automatically kind of happen that way most of the time?
Like your emotions are almost a luxury, if you will, to have later on?
A guy that's been well-trained, he's going to put his emotions aside and put them in check.
And, you know, that can be problematic, of course, afterwards.
And if you put those emotions away and you keep them away and you don't ever let them out, then that can become problematic because then they can start eating you up from the inside.
So at some point, you got to, you know, when you get the time, you got to take a step back and you've got to, you know, let out the emotions and mourn the losses.
And then, once again, when you get done with that, you can't dwell on that.
You can't keep thinking about what the losses were and you can't dwell on the past, you know, and a lot of people ask me about when they lose loved ones and how do you get through it.
And that's what I tell them.
Like, look, you know, in America, we don't have like a set standard way of handling death, right?
We don't have a ritualistic way because we're all from different cultures and all different cultures handle things in different ways.
But we've taken them all and kind of mixed them together.
And in mixing them together, we kind of lost them.
I mean, you look at other cultures and it's like when someone dies, you do this for a day, you do this for two days, you do this for another day, and then you move on, right?
You go through these little ceremonial things.
You sing this song and you, you know, you say this prayer and then you do this ceremony and then it's over.
Yeah.
And in the us, we kind of mill around a little bit.
We kind of mill around and we don't really know what protocol to follow.
So, you know, for me, it was like, okay, we got to, I didn't really think about this at the time, but it's like, okay, we're going to have a ceremony.
You know, we're going to celebrate the life.
We're going to mourn the loss.
And then we're going to get back to work.
We're going to, we're going to move on.
Right.
And when I say move on, that can sound cold and callous.
And by no stretch of the imagination, do I mean like, hey, we're going to move on and forget about this?
No, but, but we're not going to dwell in the past.
We're not going to dwell on the fact that we lost one of our brothers.
We're going to remember them always, but our best way of remembering them is to move on, is to live a good life, is to continue to execute the mission.
You know, that's one of the things that, you know, for me, it's like when, you know, because you don't get trained, you don't get trained on what do you do when one of your guys gets killed.
There's no training for that.
No one can really prepare you for that.
I think, especially when I was coming up in the SEAL teams, we hadn't been at war since Vietnam.
And so there hadn't been a lot of guys killed.
And so it wasn't like we were getting experience from older guys that were saying, hey, when you lose somebody, this is what you do.
This is the protocol.
And so for me, it was sort of, you know, when Mark Lee was the first SEAL that got killed, he was one of my guys.
He's an incredible person.
When he got killed, like there was no training for that.
And there was, there was, and I didn't really know what to do.
And so for me, it was like, okay, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to mourn.
We're going to take a couple days off.
We're going to mourn.
And then, and I told my guys, I'm like, look, the only thing I know how to do, the only thing I know how to do is work.
This is the only thing I know how to do.
Cause, you know, I've been, I was in the CEO teams my whole adult life.
I don't even know what else there is.
I was like, the only thing I know how to do is work.
And that's what I'm going to do.
And that's what we're going to do.
We're going to go back to work like Mark would want us to do.
We're going to lock and load our guns and we're going to get out there and we're going to do our missions.
And, you know, that's what we did.
And again, it's, I know it might sound callous and even saying it right now when you know like Mark, you know, here's a guy that was, yeah, he was an absolute just a warrior of a human, but he was also a hysterical guy.
He was a maniac guy.
He was a, you know, he was married.
He had a beautiful wife.
And, you know, he was a, he was a real person.
And I always try and remind, you know, everyone that these, that these warriors, you know, these so-called warriors, these soldiers, these Marines, these SEALs, these special operations guys, that everyone thinks they're these warriors and that they're just warriors, that there's a whole nother side to these guys.
And they're, you know, usually just awesome people that happen to have wanted to do something heroic with their lives and they step into the into the fray.
And so for me to say, oh, we're just going to move on again, it's not like, hey, we're going to forget about this guy, but the contrary is we're always going to remember him.
And the way we're going to remember him is by doing our job and doing the best we can in the life that we do have.
And moving forward, yeah, not dwelling.
Man, it's so funny.
I get stuck a lot of times sometimes.
Yeah, I definitely notice that.
Like I'm sober, right?
So, you know, I've been sober for about two years.
And one of the things that they taught me in the beginning was just to take the next right action.
Like, no matter what's going on, like, no matter what you're thinking, especially, because the devil can really live in your head, you know, just to take that next, just do whatever you have to do next, whatever's on your to-do list, do that next thing.
And by the time you get to even the next thing, you're not thinking about this.
Now you're in motion and an object in motion that stays in motion.
And then you usually start to piece, slowly piece your life together in positive ways.
And then you get to the end of the day one day and you're like, holy shit, I did five things today.
And then you literally, and I remember that next day, I woke up a different person because for so long I'd just been dwelling in this, you know, in my own fears and my, you know, just sitting in my uncertainties and just juggling like my deficiencies and just always, just keeping so much of the negativity kind of afloat or just the uncertainty afloat.
And all I had to do was just really physically take action and the rest of me would kind of follow.
It's amazing how your brain, even though your brain makes the decisions, your brain will follow your body sometimes.
Yeah, the two are definitely connected.
There's no doubt about it.
And I always feel, and I always tell people, and you know, when I had, you were talking about Tim Ferriss, when Tim Ferriss was on my podcast and we were talking about, you know, he went through some serious depression.
He went through contemplating suicide and planning suicide for himself.
And this is the guy that was at Princeton University at the time.
It wasn't like he was not doing well in life.
I mean, he was on a great path.
And so one of the things that he said is when, when you, it's something along the lines of when you can't get out of your head, get into your body.
But it was like, you know, take, go and do something physical.
And so that's why I'm, you know, I always tell people to, hey, if you're, if you're feeling whatever, not great, Go and do something.
Go and do, go and do, go and work out.
Go for a run.
Go for a swim.
Go do something and do some physical exertion because it lets your mind just kind of turn off and stop juggling all those insecurities that you were just talking about because it's got to juggle kettlebells for something else instead.
Yeah, it lets your mind take a break.
What kind of like, say, if you're going to do something, because I feel like you don't probably even, I feel like you sleep kind of, but like you're just like you're also leg pressing while you're at rest.
What kind of thing do you play with?
Like, I feel like you have, like, is there a, like a, I don't want to say a game because I don't want to seem offensive, but is there a board game or something that you enjoy?
Is there, you know, like Stonehenge?
Like, what do you fucking play with for fun, I feel like?
Isn't Stonehenge, like, what's Stonehenge?
I know what that is, but I don't go play with Stonehenge.
Well, if I had to picture you kind of playing with something in the yard, I feel like it Jocko's baby Stonehenge.
I could totally see you.
Does Jiu-Jitsu count?
Yeah, jujitsu does count.
Jujitsu is definitely...
You can do it all the time.
All you need is a training partner and some maths.
It's great right now because there's plenty of places to train in America.
But yeah, Jiu-Jitsu's Jiu-Jitsu is awesome to do.
Have you had Eddie Bravo come on your podcast yet?
I have not had Eddie Bravo come on my podcast yet.
That would be super interesting to see.
That would be fascinating.
It would be way fascinating.
I don't know if you know anything about Eddie Bravo.
No, I totally, yeah.
I mean, you know.
Obviously in the jiu-jitsu.
Yeah, in the jiu-jitsu world.
But yeah, I mean, I know him because of Joe Rogan.
And I actually know him.
I mean, you know, because he's an old school Jiu-Jitsu player.
Him and I were coming up around the same time, competing at the same old school Jiu-Jitsu tournaments back in the day.
Right.
And so, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, he's always been awesome.
Yeah.
Really cool to me.
I would love to see you.
You might need special forces to get him to quiet down sometimes.
He gets a little chatty.
But in a beautiful way, though, he just, I never met a man who's full of, I mean, most people have nine pints of blood or something.
I bet he's running on 11. Like that guy definitely, something else is in him.
You know, he's a special guy.
So for a guy like who's not, you know, a lot of guys feel regret.
And I noticed in my life that I feel regret like I never served my country, right?
It's a thing they play, you know, that kind of, I think at the core of a man somewhere, it plagues us, you know?
And it's almost, you feel ashamed to bring it up because you don't want to use it as like a pawn, like whenever somebody has served and, you know, to try and equate to that, like, oh, well, I feel bad I didn't serve, you know.
But do you find that a way that, you know, men at my age, I'm 38, or that, you know, who are kind of regularly statured physically, that a way that they can start to toughen themselves up, jiu-jitsu seems like a way that a lot of men are finding like not only ways to feel tough about themselves and feel some self-confidence, but to find like a brotherhood in a way.
Yeah, no, jiu-jitsu is a great way.
The funny thing is, is you just mentioned like jiu-jitsu makes you feel tougher.
Well, actually, jiu-jitsu makes you feel humble, especially when you start, because you're just going to get choked out.
You're going to get tapped out by people that are way smaller than you and by females that are smaller than you.
And that stings, you know, that stings.
And so jiu-jitsu is real humbling in the beginning.
And that's just something that you got to get through.
But yeah, you'll meet people.
When you train hard with people, you become closer with them.
That's kind of what happens in the military.
That's the general concept of what occurs in the military.
You take a bunch of people that don't know each other, they're all different.
You start putting them through hard training and they start to form a bond.
And that's what the military is.
That's why you end up with a bond.
And that bond, the more hard stuff you do, the tighter that bond gets.
So when you go to war with guys, that bond gets even tighter.
When you go to really hard, sustained combat, that bond gets even tighter.
And so is jiu-jitsu something that is hard training and it's humbling because guess what?
In war, you make mistakes too, and everyone sees them.
And so that's what happens in jiu-jitsu.
You make mistakes, everyone sees them.
You get tapped out.
There's no question about it.
Like there's no mystery in jiu-jitsu.
You got tapped out by this guy.
That's it.
That's the way it works.
And that means that guy just beat you.
And there's no question about it.
In combat, the same thing happens.
You make mistakes.
Your element gets surprised.
You get ambushed.
The enemy maneuvers on you in a way you didn't expect.
It catches you off guard.
It's like, yeah, that's really humbling.
And so there are elements of combat that are present in jiu-jitsu.
And that's one of the reasons why I love jiu-jitsu so much.
Yeah.
Now, do you love, like, do you find that over time, having served running gyms, jiu-jitsu, do you, like, what is it that you, is it combat that you love?
Is it competition?
Have you been able to kind of pinpoint like what that drive, like what that thing is, sort of?
Yeah, I would say there's like a whole bunch of different little levels of what I like.
I like competition.
I like winning.
And oddly enough, I like losing.
Like I like getting pushed to a point where, hey, man, I couldn't do it.
And that doesn't, this is a weird thing that happens with jiu-jitsu.
You take someone that's never done jiu-jitsu before, and you say, hey, come and train.
And they try it.
And they're going to get crushed.
And there's two reactions you can have to that as a person, right?
Well, I mean, I guess there's more than two, but there's two main ones that occur.
Some people say, damn, that was awesome.
I can't believe that I got tapped out by a 130-pound female.
I'm going to go back and learn this stuff.
And some people say, I can't believe I got tapped out by 130-pound female.
I'm never going to get near that again because it hurts their ego too much.
So that's pretty much for me.
It was immediately, hey, I want to make sure that this doesn't ever happen to me or that this happens as little as possible.
So I'm going to learn as much as I can.
And it's the same thing with, you know, it's the same thing with combat.
Like you want to learn and you want to be as proficient as possible.
And really, I think that's the way you should be with life is like, I'm going to do as much as I can as often as I can and learn as much as I can and get the most out of this little gig we got here for however many years you got.
Let's make something happen.
Do you miss war?
You miss it?
You miss battle?
Yeah.
Like you miss...
When you think about missing it, is it...
Is it the camaraderie?
What is it?
It's definitely the camaraderie, but imagine that you, Theo, had something going on in your Life that required every ounce of energy and focus that you could possibly muster.
It required all of that.
It required all that focus.
And the consequence of you failing to give everything you got, the consequence of that would be possibly your death and the death of your friends.
So you can't create that kind of focus any other way.
I mean, I just don't know.
So when you're in that and you get to feel that, and then you get the reward of knowing that you've done your duty and you've done the best that you can, you walk off the battlefield, you gave everything you got, then you definitely miss it.
Do you find there are moments, and I can fathom that as you're saying that, like, almost, as crazy as it sounds, I almost feel like how amazing that would be to have nothing else bothering you.
Nothing.
Except the value of your own life and the value of somebody else's life.
The value of your friends is the biggest value.
That's the biggest thing that I was always concerned about.
I was like, my guys, you know, my guys, concerned about my guys.
Yeah.
And it took me about a month, maybe two months after I got home that when I woke up, I woke up and I would be like, you know, for a couple of seconds, you're thinking, because, you know, when I was over there, I was in charge of a bunch of different guys.
And so there was always guys operating in the field.
There was always guys out conducting operations.
Always.
So when you woke up or went to sleep, you were checking in.
I was always wanting to know.
And you always think, well, is tonight going to be the night?
And as soon as you wake up, you think, oh, because my other guys would know, hey, if something was going on, they'd come and get me if I was asleep.
And it's not like I was sleeping a lot, but when I was asleep, they'd come and get me and say, hey, this is going on.
Or if a guy get wounded, hey, a guy got wounded or whatever.
And so, you know, you know how it is when you first wake up and you think, oh, is this a dream?
Is this what's happening?
And so it took about like a month, month or two before the first thought that I had in the morning wasn't, oh, oh, wait, one of my guys, is one of my guys hurt.
Is one of my guys killed?
That took like a couple months to get over that, that thought.
But again, even that, just there's a level of, there's a level of it's just focus, man.
It's just, there's a level of focus that you get into that, and it's like, is it almost, you say you can't create it.
So does it almost feel so when you're non-human?
When you're training for a fight, right?
So I trained a bunch of MMA fighters through the years.
And as hard as you can train a guy in the gym, you can't simulate what's going to feel like the night that he's walking into the U.F.C.
Have you been to any UFCs yet?
No, but Joe just told me yesterday, I was talking to him on the phone, he said that he offered to take me, and now I'm going to fucking, now people are going to hold him to it, to the Poirier Diaz fight.
Yeah.
So that's going to be sick, right?
But you can't simulate what's going to be going through Dustin Poirier's mind when he's going, or how hard Nate Diaz is going to be holding on to a move.
You know, like, you just can't simulate that.
And it's the same thing in combat.
As close as you can try and get that mindset going, you can't simulate the exact same thing.
You just can't do it.
It just can't do it.
Yeah.
And when, and so, and when the, do, do things get broad?
Do over time, being in battle more often, do things start to get more narrow, like in the sense where you, does it get, do you get used to it?
Is that a muscle?
Is it amazing that that is a muscle that's somewhere inside of man that you get used to?
You get used to it.
I'll tell you the biggest thing for me, and our training definitely helped.
I don't want to make it sound like, because our training got us so close.
It's sort of the opening question.
One of the earlier questions you asked me, like, is there someone that breaks because there's something you can't simulate in training?
They've been through all this hard training and they still just say, hey, man, I can't do this.
Yeah, that happens.
But the training gets you pretty close.
I mean, the training gets you to a point where, you know, the first firefight I ever got in, I was like, okay, cool.
I wasn't like, I was like, oh my God.
You know, I was just, okay, here's what's going on.
I see where the enemy is.
Hey, we need to do this and start making my tactical calls.
It's like real straightforward.
And so the training can definitely get you there.
And something that I talk about a lot is developing the ability to detach from what's happening.
Detach from the chaos, detach from the mayhem, and detach from your own emotions.
Because if you get wrapped up in your emotions, you're not making good decisions.
Right.
And I've heard cowboy, you know, cowboy Saronius.
He's a fantastic fighter.
But I heard him talk and when he fights really well, he said he feels like he's behind.
Like you talked a bit of, he feels like he's playing himself in a video game.
And it's just he can watch and he can see everything.
And that's when you, when you get that ability to detach and take a step back, that's very powerful.
And the way you get that is by putting yourself in pressure situations or being put into pressure situations where the only way to make good decisions is to take a step back, not get all captured in some situation and let things kind of, you get to a point where you can kind of see things unfolding.
And I do that all the time now.
It's kind of crazy.
You know, before we, I want to say one more thing because you mentioned this part and I don't want to leave it hanging.
You mentioned this part about like, hey, you know, you feel guilty because you haven't served.
And I hear that from a lot of people.
And I can't even imagine, like, if I didn't serve, I can't imagine how I would feel about that.
But what I wanted to say is, you know, it's, first of all, it's not for everyone.
That's fine.
It's like not everyone.
You don't need to be in the military to serve.
And the other thing is like, okay, what can you do if you didn't serve?
Well, there's a bunch of things you can do.
And one of the best things you can do is if you haven't served, is you go out and you try and live a good life, right?
You try and raise a good family.
You try and build a good business.
You try and try and just be a good person.
And I'm not just saying that like, I'm not just saying it, hey, be a good person.
I'm saying by doing good things, you're an American.
I'm talking to people that are from America right now.
If you're building a business, you're helping America.
If you're helping our economy, Without a thriving economy in this country, the military wouldn't even exist, right?
So one of the best things you can do as a person is go out and do your job really, really well.
Go out and kick ass and be the best, you know, whatever your job is.
And we work, like I said, with my consulting company, work with all different kinds of companies.
And I'm guys on the front line doing manufacturing and doing construction, drilling oil.
I mean, whatever you're doing, go out and kick ass at that and make that your mission.
And you are, by doing that, you're literally building America and keeping America strong.
So you're serving.
It's in a weird way, as you say that, I'm thinking, you're serving America in a way.
You're serving America by being a good person, by putting other people employed, by doing fair business.
Yeah, you are.
You're serving this country.
It's a real thing.
And I explain that to people all the time.
I explain that to people all the time.
When I talk to construction companies, I'm like, hey, you're literally building this country.
That's actually what you're doing.
Wow.
When I talk to gas oil companies, I say, you're literally fueling this company.
That's this country.
That's what you're doing.
And it goes with everything with the software company.
Hey, you're employing how many thousand people?
2,000 people.
That's what you're doing.
All those people are able to feed their kids and pay their mortgage and save providers.
And that's what it is.
So if you didn't serve, it's okay.
Like, that's fine.
Serve in another way.
And one of the easiest ways to serve is you go out and kick ass in the world.
I like that, man.
That's beautiful, huh?
That's cool.
Yeah, we try to do some special stuff here.
You know, we try to treat single moms out to like a night out when we're in a city.
Yeah, yeah.
I've seen that you do that.
That's awesome.
It's pretty cool, man.
Were you raised by both your parents?
I was.
Yep.
That's awesome.
And do you feel like a lot of your, do you feel like a lot of your abilities, do you notice that some of them came from your mom and some of them came from your dad?
I don't know.
I don't know.
It's kind of funny.
Was your mom a tough lady?
You know, my mom and dad, they were pretty normal, to be quite honest with you.
Smart, I'll give them that.
They're smart, but they're pretty normal.
Now, my mom was an English teacher and my dad was a history teacher.
And so people, when they listen to my podcast, because I'm always talking about, well, literature and history, that's kind of what I talk about a lot.
Well, that's what it's based on, but I'm really talking about human nature.
That's what I'm really talking about.
I'm talking about my podcast about human nature, but it's human nature through the lens of war and through the lens of leadership and through the lens of atrocities and horrible things that happen because that's what reveals human nature, right?
When you're out with your friends and everything's going cool, you don't learn anything about your friends.
When you're out with your friends and there's a car accident.
Oh, you definitely learned anything.
That's what you learned.
I was in an elevator that got stalled, right?
And you think like, okay, there's nine people in an elevator.
This is at Mardi Gras.
This is about probably maybe seven years ago.
And everyone was going up to like a fancy party.
We were on the street watching Endymion, which is a big parade down there.
Next thing you know, we're taking an elevator up to a fancy party and the elevator gets stalled.
We're in there for two hours, right?
By the second hour, bro, people start to, like one girl had broken down and started crying.
One dude like came out of the closet.
Eating each other.
Yeah, like people, like, but you start, one guy started thinking about starting a small business.
Like you, so one guy literally had been straining on the elevator doors till like I think both of his arms came out of socket.
Like, but you start to see who's who when the pressure is on.
That's interesting, man.
I want to put myself in more pressure situations because, you know, I think I do, as almost as scary as it is, I think I do want to know more about myself and I do want to kind of know who I am.
Yeah.
So that's, well, in reading these books and almost all the books that I talk about on my podcast either have people on there that have been through these situations or they're first person accounts of guys that were in war.
So that's what I do.
So back to my parents.
So my mom was an English teacher.
My dad was a history teacher.
I was a super rebellious kid.
I didn't, I couldn't care less about any of that, never did any homework.
I was kind of a maniac.
And so even, you know, my parents are kind of like, well, I guess you turned out pretty good.
But they don't jump and take a bunch of credit for it because they don't feel like it was them.
But, you know, certainly I was around them.
And so, you know, like, like my dad's really, really a really brilliant guy.
And so I'm thankful that, you know, I maybe caught a fraction of what my dad has for him.
Like my mom's, you know, really smart too.
So do you feel like you've made them pretty proud?
You know, the thing is, I'm from New England and we don't do that up there.
Oh, wow.
There is no like, hey, good job.
Like they don't care.
They're like work harder.
That's the whole, that's sort of the New England thing.
Oh, you did this?
We don't care.
Do something more.
Yeah.
That's pretty fascinating.
There was something you were just talking about that I was thinking about about what are ways that men can test themselves, you think?
So jujitsu is one thing that's really interesting, you know, where you can get out and immediately learn like, wow, I thought I was a badass because I had this new necklace, but also I just got put in a fucking hard scarf by some, you know, 90-pound Vietnamese girl, you know?
So like, who am I all of a sudden, you know?
Are there other things that you find that you are that novices and people who are, you know, new to kind of testing their own spirit and their own limits could do?
Yeah, I think there's all kinds of things.
And I think that's, there's so many things like that right now that that's why because people have realized that they want.
So if you look at the Spartan races, the tough mutters, the CrossFit games, you got all these things, right?
All those things are, you're not doing those.
You're doing those because you want to test yourself.
So I think there's all kinds of different ways for guys and females to test themselves right now, get out there and push hard.
And it feels good, you know?
You know it feels good.
Well, you might not know it feels good.
You probably think the luxury feels good.
Some stuff dude.
But hey, well, I just switched down to one plot toilet paper, so I am trying to cut back a little.
The luxury feels better when you've pushed yourself, right?
That's one thing.
I've had a couple guys on my podcast that were POWs in Vietnam, right?
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So one of them was shot down in Vietnam twice.
Second time he got captured, got captured in South Vietnam.
Dude, he was, so they had to do the jungle march up.
While he was in the jungle march up, he's caught in a two-foot-tall bamboo cage in the middle of the jungle, and he's trying to get some sleep.
His legs are shackled, and he can't sleep because the rats are coming and eating the wounds, gnawing at the wounds on his legs.
Right.
so his name is William Reeder, Colonel William Reeder, just an amazing, amazing human being.
Another guy named Charlie Plum, Captain Charlie Plum, he was shot down last flight of his first deployment to Vietnam, and he was shot down, captured, put in the Hanoi Hilton for six years.
For six years.
It's not a real Hilton, though.
It's like a joke.
No, it's called the Hanoi Hilton.
It was a prison camp.
Okay.
Yeah, it's the North Vietnamese prison camp.
And, you know, for six years, eating nothing but like a ball of rice every day, having nothing, having nothing.
Did he say he misses it at all in a weird way?
He didn't say he missed it at all.
No.
But what he did say is that the guys that were in the Hanoi Hilton, they formed a bond that was so strong that the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder was minuscule compared to the regular military, the regular guys that were out fighting the whole time.
They just formed this incredible bond.
The POWs formed an incredible bond and supported each other so well in that prison camp that when they came back, they felt like good.
The other thing that's interesting is when they came back, they had a huge hero's welcome.
And that is, you know, I was thinking about this because I read a book by another Vietnam veteran, and this is a horrible story, but this guy, he lost both of his legs and, you know, part of his hands.
And when he, when the, and he came back from Vietnam, and so now he's recovering for months and months and years, trying to stay alive.
And he's watching on the news when the POWs came home, and they're getting this big ticker tape parade.
Well deserved, of course.
But here he is, you know, alone in a hospital room with no, no celebration of any kind.
And it's an awful, awful story.
And that story, as a matter of fact, I did a series of podcasts.
And that's Plum, you said?
No.
So this is a guy named Lewis Puller.
And what's interesting about Lewis Puller, and I did a series of podcasts, three podcasts.
The first one was podcast number 121.
It was about a guy named Chesty Puller.
Chesty Puller is hands down the most famous Marine of all time, U.S. Marine of all time.
To this day, the Marine Corps has a mascot.
It's a Bulldog, and the Bulldog's name is Chesty.
Right now, they're on like Chesty 17 or something like that.
Some of the Marines have probably been eating some of the Chesties.
I've seen some of those.
Five Navy crosses.
This guy was just an incredible hero, performed valiantly over and over again on the battlefield and was in World War II in Korea.
And just known as, he's the guy that, you know, he said things like, oh, we're surrounded.
Good.
Now we know where they are.
He's that guy.
And he's the most famous Marine ever.
So he had one son.
His son was named Louis Puller.
And his son was raised and learned how to shoot when he was six or seven years old.
And he ended up going to the Marine Corps.
But he was a little bit of a different character, right?
He was a softer character.
He was a nicer guy.
He had glasses.
He was more of a cerebral type guy.
But his dad was in the Marine Corps and he decided, you know what?
Okay, I'm going to the Marine Corps.
And this is now 1967, I believe.
Should he have chosen the Air Force?
Is that what you're saying?
You know, the Air Force does incredible things as well.
Yeah.
But he chose the Marine Corps like his dad.
And so he goes to the Marine Corps.
And, you know, he's one of these guys that does the basic school or officer candidate school and then the basic school.
So he's whatever, nine months or something like that, gets 20 days leave and then he's a platoon commander in Vietnam.
Wow.
Platoon commander in Vietnam.
That fast.
Yeah, that fast.
Because of who he was or because of his abilities?
Because of the Vietnam War.
Oh, just that.
Because the Vietnam War was like, okay, guess what we need?
We need junior officers.
Why do we need junior officers?
Because our junior officers are getting wounded and killed at a very high rate.
Jesus.
So he goes.
He ends up in Vietnam.
It's awful as he describes what's going on.
They're going out.
There's three areas that they're rotating through.
And one of the areas that they rotate through, every time they go into this area, they lose a guy or they get a guy wounded.
And then they never see the enemy.
They don't even see the enemy.
So it'd be me saying, hey, I want you to go to Whole Foods, Whole Foods and Vaughns and Trader Joe's.
And every time you go to Trader Joe's, you're going to lose like a body part and you don't even know why.
Like you wouldn't want to do that anymore.
So these guys are doing that and they're doing that and they're losing guys and they're losing guys.
Like this coochie tunnels under the produce.
It's just, yeah, something like that, I guess.
So eventually he ends up, they get in a big, going this big operation to try and clean out that area.
He gets in contact with the enemy.
He's running back to his guys.
And as he's running back, he hits a booby track IED and it just brutalizes him.
Loses a leg, loses an other leg at the hip, and it loses a bunch of hands, and he's just a disaster.
They don't think he's going to live.
He holds on.
He makes it back to America and goes through his trials.
And by the way, his wife was pregnant at the time.
So he comes home.
She has the baby.
And, you know, he, you know, at one point in the book, as he's recovering, it takes years to recover, years.
And they're giving him prosthetic.
And the prosthetics that you can see when they're telling, when he's talking about the prosthetics, like the prosthetics we have now are much more advanced.
This thing is like leather strapped around his torso, and he can only walk on flat surfaces.
And finally, he just can't do it.
But, you know, he can't even wipe himself, right?
He can't because of the way his hands are deformed.
And it's just awful.
It's awful.
And, you know, meanwhile, his dad was a hero.
And his dad, when his dad sees him, like he's describing his dad is just, he can't, his dad can't even talk.
His dad is just streaming tears at his bedside when he sees him for the first time.
It's horrible.
And he makes it through this, right?
He makes it through this.
And he meanwhile gets addicted to the painkillers, gets addicted to the booze, goes down that whole spiral.
Once he's kind of recovered, he kind of goes down this whole spiral.
Finally sort of recovers From that, he runs for political office with these handicaps and everything.
Yep, he runs for political office as a Democrat, sort of a semi-anti-war Democrat.
And he did some interviews that got him some really negative press that he wasn't patriotic.
I mean, here's a guy that gave so much, and they're saying, Oh, you don't love America.
And he's running against a guy that had not gone to Vietnam, who's a Republican, a pro-Vietnam Republican guy that had his deferment, his draft deferment.
He didn't go to Vietnam for whatever reason, you know, whatever health problem he allegedly had.
He couldn't go to Vietnam and he loses.
So Lewis Puller loses to this guy, goes back down the spiral of alcohol and drugs.
Finally, his wife's like, hey, we're done.
Like, you need to fix yourself.
You're done.
Brings him to rehab, goes into rehab.
He recovers.
And while he's coming through his recovery, they're building the Vietnam Wall, right?
The Vietnam Memorial Wall.
And he starts to feel like, hey, they're going to recognize us for what we did.
They're going to give us some credit for what we did.
And they build that wall and he's like, he's into it, right?
And the book ends with him, they unveil the wall.
And he's like feeling like, hey, we got ours now.
We got our recognition.
And that's kind of how the book ends that he's going to write this book.
And that's what the book that you're reading is.
This book, it's called Fortunate Son by Lewis Poehler.
And then the book ends.
But the book doesn't end there.
The story doesn't end there.
Because Lewis Poehler, two or three years later, he falls out of his wheelchair and he breaks his hip.
And they bring him to the hospital.
And they put him back on painkillers.
And he starts drinking again.
And he kills himself.
Yeah.
And it's such a horrible story.
And when I did those two podcasts, I said to myself, I'm not going to do them unless I have something else to talk to.
I don't want to leave that thing out there.
And so I brought another friend of mine named Jake Schick, who's another Marine who was really badly wounded.
And he, man, he was close going in that direction, addicted to the drugs that they put him on and like suicidal.
And he came out of it.
And he has an organization called 22Kill.
But, you know, so there's, there's real hard things that people go through.
And I think that when you see people in those stressful, stressful situations, it reveals who they are as people, you know?
And so.
So taken away from that, man.
I mean, what a, you know, life is such an equalizer in so many ways, man.
I mean, to have a man whose father had so much accolades, right?
And it would seem like, and then to have another man, his son, that would have not only so many great, amazing experiences, but also so many, you know, just put into the, put to the fire, you know?
I mean, the struggles.
I can't even imagine, you know?
Like, you get, imagine getting back.
Like the part you told me, like, imagine getting back and you see your wife and you're not even like, you don't even have all your body parts anymore.
Man, that would just kill me.
And then you're about to have a son and he has all his body parts.
And here you are, like, you know, just like, I mean, it's just life is just such an equalizer.
When you see guys like that who have lost, who have had physical sacrifices, impairments from their body, do you feel bad still being fully able, capable?
I feel thankful.
I feel blessed.
And when I see the attitudes, I had another guy.
Is it hard to see that attitude?
I can imagine, man, even saying that when you see that attitude of somebody who has a positive attitude.
Yeah.
When you see Jake Schick, when you see, I've had multiple guys on my podcast that have been severely wounded.
A guy named Rob Jones.
A guy named Rob Jones lost both of his legs above the thigh.
I'm sorry, above the knee.
He ran 31 marathons in 31 days.
Wow.
31 marathons in 31 days.
Yeah.
So it doesn't make me feel bad.
It makes me feel inspired.
It makes me want to make sure that I'm not being a bitch.
Yeah.
Because those guys are out there and they're charging on and they're not looking down.
They're not asking for sympathy.
They're out there getting after it.
And we should be too.
Exactly right.
We should be.
And we should feel, and we shouldn't feel ashamed that we're not, but we should feel, like you say, we should feel inspired and we should wake up with some sense of gratitude that here we are fully able-bodied.
And if we just set in motion sometimes a foot, a step, something somebody who doesn't even have a foot anymore doesn't even have a step.
And if we just do that, that our brain and just because a lot of our listeners struggle with the emotional type of stuff, but if we just do that, that our brains and our spirits will follow.
Yeah.
And sometimes I take a little bit of flack for saying this, but you got to like get control of your emotions, man.
You got to like say, okay, you know what?
This girl left me or this job I lost or I had this happen to me when I was a kid.
You got to say, you know what?
Okay, I'm not going to let that situation control me and I'm going to take control of my emotions and I'm going to move forward.
You got to assert yourself.
You know, your mind is stronger than those little emotions that are running around inside your head.
You can overpower them.
You can do it.
And if you don't do it, they're going to run wild and they don't deserve to.
They don't deserve to.
They don't know what they're doing.
They're just up there making noise and going crazy and running around and calling things out.
It's like, no, you stop.
Get control of those emotions.
You got to do it sometimes.
And again, a lot of people say, hey, it's not easy for everyone.
I get that it's not easy.
But man, the alternative is like, just let your emotions run everything and run you into the dirt.
Don't let that happen, man.
Grab hold of them.
Yeah, grab hold of them.
Get control.
And like you said, start taking a step in the right direction.
That's where it starts.
Man, I love that, man.
I love that.
And I need, it's just so funny, man.
I'm so happy to be hearing this right now in my life.
Because, yeah, I'm just, ever since I got into like getting into the AA program, just a program, just something that helped me to start to change my perspective.
Yeah.
You know, well, it's a form of discipline, right?
It's a form of discipline.
You know, that's that's, I wrote another book called Discipline Equals Freedom.
When you put some kind of discipline in your life, it's going to, it's going to give you freedom ultimately.
Right.
Like before, when you were addicted to whatever you were addicted to, you, you were a slave to those things.
That's what you were.
And so when you put the discipline around those things, it gives you freedom.
And it's clear with that's a really clear example, but it's clear with anything.
Like when you, if you're going to spend all your money, if you're going to waste all your money, you're going to end up a slave to finances all the time.
You're always going to be worried about, hey, can I make rent this month?
It's like, no, put discipline around your spending.
Put discipline around your work habits.
Put discipline around how you invest your money and save your money.
And that's going to give you more freedom in the long run.
Yes.
So the more discipline you put in your life, the better off you're going to end up, the more freedom you're going to have.
Is it hard for you to relax a little bit sometimes or no?
Man.
Is it hard for you to let go?
Like what's like a, like, what's like something you would do?
Like, what's a vacation you would take?
Like, not in the Middle East with a gun?
I surf.
Oh, you do?
I surf.
I play guitar.
Oh, nice.
And.
Yeah, Kelly Slater's supposed to come on here.
Oh, really?
At some point.
Yeah, it should be cool.
I never met him, but we got in this conversation about water on Instagram.
Yeah.
What was the conversation about water?
I just, I don't know.
Water kind of freaks me out.
You know, more of a land guy kind of.
Yeah.
And he's like, man, water's okay, you know?
And that was kind of the gist of it was a little more.
Yeah.
No, I think that'll be good.
But see, surfing is the same thing.
It kind of gives you, it's a mind.
I don't want to say it's mindless, but it's pretty mindless when you're out there.
Your mind is just kind of wandering.
It's like jiu-jitsu.
Your mind is just kind of wandering and you're letting your mind go.
I play guitar, you know, I do that to relax.
I go watch the sunset and play guitar.
You know, I live in San Diego.
It's like, guess what I'm going to do?
I'm going to watch the sunset and I'm going to play some git box.
Yeah, that's the national pastime down there.
How many drunk people think you are John Cena?
That's what I want to know.
I would say a decent amount.
A decent amount.
I get called out, and I think he's younger than me.
People say you look like John Cena.
I would say he looks like me.
What's up?
Yeah.
Yeah, I wouldn't.
I mean, I would have had probably, I don't even know if I would have known probably if I hadn't, you know, done some research and stuff like that.
Do you feel like that we are getting weaker as a society of men?
Do you feel like that?
As I said before, there's some guys that are coming up right now that are hard as nails.
I see them in the, you know, when I go out and I meet with the young military guys right now, they're hard as nails.
And they're better than I ever was.
They're learning faster.
They're learning more.
They understand everything from the physical aspects of how to work out better and how to be in better shape and how to recover better.
They know all that stuff better than we did in my generation.
They understand all the tactics better because we've been at war for so long.
They're getting taught better.
So there's guys that are out there that are better and stronger and tougher than I was, right?
But at the same time, are there people that are getting pampered and getting their hands held so much that they don't know how to do anything for themselves?
Yeah, you know, that's why I ended up writing those kids' books.
I wrote a couple kids' books as well.
Nice.
We'll share links to those.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
Way the warrior kid.
It's like there's a kid.
He doesn't know his times tables.
He can't do any pull-ups.
He doesn't know how to swim.
And he's getting picked on in school.
And last day of school comes around and he's all sad and crying because he ends up on the pull-up bar and everyone's laughing at him because he can't do any pull-ups.
And he kind of runs away and goes behind the library and starts crying.
And when that happens, as he's going home, he remembers that his uncle Jake is coming to stay with him for the summer and his uncle Jake was in the SEAL teams.
Oh, but they're going to say it was a pedophile.
No, no, not at all, man.
Not at all.
His uncle Jake comes to stay with him and his uncle Jake's, you know, says, hey, you want to go play basketball tomorrow?
You want to go for a swim?
What do you want to do?
And he's like, well, I can't go for a swim.
My life's horrible.
And he explains all these problems he has.
And Uncle Jake says, hey, all these problems, we can get them fixed.
Wow.
Puts him on a workout program, teaches him how to study, teaches him how to eat right, teaches him jiu-jitsu so he can defend himself, teaches him how to swim, puts him on the path.
And a lot of kids don't have that right now and teaches them the discipline is going to give you freedom.
A lot of kids don't have discipline.
And there's something that happened.
I don't know what it was.
It was between, it's some generational thing.
There's so many young men out there who I think that are grasping towards guys like you, guys like Jordan Peterson coming from a little bit of a different perspective.
But, you know, guys like Joe Rogan, guys, you know, who we are just bet, like we are just empty with some of that.
I don't know if it's a parental thing.
I don't know what it is, but there's some, and it's, it's, I just, I see it everywhere.
And I hear about it a lot.
It's a lot of men are, and I think that's what it is.
We did not learn any discipline somehow.
Yeah.
And I think also it has a little bit to do with if you're always being told, if you, well, let me not not, not always being told, but if you're never told, hey, it's okay to be strong, or it's good to be strong.
Hey, it's good to be able to defend yourself.
Right.
Hey, it's good to get good grades and kick ass in school.
It's better.
You want to be smarter.
The idea that we can't compete with each other, I think has something to do with it.
To say, hey, we don't want to compete with each other.
Like, no, actually, you are going to compete with people.
And if you don't think you're going to compete, man, you're going to have a hard life because life is about competition.
And again, does this mean I'm competing with everyone?
Does this mean I'm like, hey, I'm going to get more downloads than Theo?
Right.
I don't really care, man.
I hope you get more downloads than me, but I'm competing with you.
I'm competing with myself.
I want to do a better job.
That's what we're doing, right?
And it brings everybody up.
Exactly.
Whereas if you get told all the time, hey, you don't know being strong is bad.
Hey, standing up for yourself is bad.
Hey, if you have an opinion, it's better if you just accept everyone's opinion.
It's like, no, actually, you can have your own opinion.
That's okay.
And so I think a combination of those things of I think that ends up putting in a certain generation has put guys in a situation where they look up and they say, there's something in them that wants to be a warrior, right?
That wants to compete, that wants to fight, that wants to win, but they've never been able to nurture that thing.
It's never been given any water.
Right.
And it's not even been allowed to even kind of peek its head around it.
Exactly.
Because a mom or dad saying, no, no, it's okay.
Everyone's a winner.
No, actually, you feel it, right?
You lose the game and you're like, man, I'm a loser.
And someone says, no, no, it's okay.
You're still a winner.
You don't feel that way.
Fuck that.
Sherman's a fucking loser, bro.
That's what I remember.
This one dude.
And then this dude, one time they had this kid in our school named Sherman, right?
And he was a fucking loser, bro.
And he wasn't probably really, well, everybody thought he was a loser.
He lost everything, dude.
And then one day, the last day of school, I think in fourth grade, he somehow got some boom boxes and put them in the cafeteria, right?
And turned them all on Michael Jackson, right?
This was the most ginger kid.
He was so transparent.
You could see him being alive.
You could see all of his organs, right?
I mean, just completely pale.
And he fucking did the entire Michael Jackson dance on the tables and just blew the entire universe open.
And after that, I don't even know what happened.
I think it might have went directly to the moon.
Like he was just a straight champion after that.
But yeah, I mean, it's like, I think there's also a thing.
Yeah, so I think it's that everybody's the same.
There's this thing that it's not okay to be different or to like open up your mouth if you have a different perspective.
Because then at least you learn to be wrong.
You learn to be right.
You learn to like, oh, well, maybe I am this way or maybe I'm more this way, you know.
I think also there's a lot of things where a lot of parents aren't allowed to discipline their kids.
And so a lot of kids don't feel, you know, young people feel more like our parents feel, I think, more like they're not allowed to kind of discipline, you know?
Like when I was growing up, you guys spanked.
I remember my buddy's mom would beat my ass all the time.
I'm like, I don't even fucking know this lady, you know?
But she would whoop my ass.
And I'm so grateful that she did.
I mean, I still can feel sometimes that hand hitting my, you know, my thighs, you know.
But I think there's definitely a discipline, a discipline thing that goes on out there.
I had one other question.
Then we have some fans that called in with questions for you.
Right on.
Do you, there's a lot of PTSD now.
There's a lot of stuff that happens when men are in the military.
Oh, I had this question too.
Did you ever, were there ever an instance where you tried to get yourself captured so you could be a POW?
No, I did not try that.
You didn't?
And I don't even know.
Well, first of all, there wasn't any such thing like they were going to cut your head off.
There wasn't like, hey, we're going to capture you and we're going to hang on to you.
Like, no, they're going to get you.
They're going to torture you.
You're going to cut your head off.
But no, that's not even a remote consideration.
Right.
I just wonder, I guess if you meet some of these other men with like, you know, that have had such extreme instances, does party view as that, you know, as that, you know, as that battler, does that battler in you almost?
Do you want to get tested?
Absolutely.
You want to get tested?
Is that an extreme test?
Yes.
Is that probably the most extreme test?
It's definitely one of them.
But, you know, no, I never, never thought about that for a million.
Like, it's not on your Christmas wish list.
No, not on any kind of list whatsoever.
There's a lot of this stuff with PTSD.
There's a lot of people that claim that a lot of other men are like claim women or people are claiming PTSD.
Like there's a lot of like a scam like with insurance, you know, like people getting money.
Do you feel like that is putting like a bad gloss on men that are actually suffering?
Do you hear anything about that?
Well, I would say that there's probably a portion of people that claim to have PTSD and don't really have any good reason for PTSD.
And I'd say there's a lot of guys that say that they don't have PTSD and actually do have some PTSD.
Wow.
So it's a brave men.
There's a lot of guys that don't want to admit to it.
But I think we're getting better about that.
As we get better about saying, hey, it's okay if you've got PTSD.
A lot of people go, oh, is it?
Okay.
Well, then I guess I had PTSD too, or I have PTSD too.
So I would say there's some of that out there.
And I think I'm not quite sure what to do about that or how to handle that.
But I think the guys, for me, you know, when I meet a guy that's been through a lot, you know, I just want to help them out whatever way we can and make sure that they are getting the help that they need.
And if we help some people that don't really need it, okay.
I mean, that might be the sacrifice that we make.
That's a good way to look at it.
Would you ever have to be deployed again or no?
No, because I retired.
You did?
Yeah.
But if shit hit the fan, can we count on you?
I'd be back ready to rock and roll.
That's cool Dude I went to So unless we get like level nine World War III going on, I probably won't be participating.
And more important than that, there's plenty of guys in the military right now that are way better than me, and they got it handled.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Man, I went to, you know, over the years, I did some different, just going and doing some service.
We went to Iraq one time or went to Arifjan one time, went to that, it's like a base or something where people land and a lot of planes land.
I think it's in Saudi Arabia maybe, but they had a moment where there's this alarm that goes off if something comes into the base.
And then everybody's just kind of standing there and you're waiting to see like if something is going to blow the fucking building off.
And it was like, bro, it was the craziest thing.
I didn't know and I'd never been around.
Were you in a bunker?
Did they get you into a bunker of some kind?
No, I was actually in the gym and it just went off.
I guess something had come over one of the fences and there's this alarm.
And it was just one of the most scariest things that I'd ever heard.
Yes.
And been a part of because basically I was waiting for 30 seconds to see if I was going to be alive.
It was like a really shitty game show kind of.
Yeah, so that sucks.
And then like I've been in a couple situations where I was getting mortared and where I've actually heard mortar launches.
So now you know they're coming and you don't know.
And it's just a roll of the dice at that point.
But then, again, that's like you're shaking like, oh my God, that's nothing compared to like when we were talking about earlier, about World War I, where these guys were taking that sustained bombardment of massive.
Like I'm talking about, oh, I had nine mortars shot at me.
These guys had tens, if not hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds fired at them.
There was Millions of rounds.
Like before the, I think it was the Battle of the Somme.
Before the Battle of the Somme, they fired 1.6 million rounds at the enemy before they started.
So we're talking a whole nother level, and that's why you see guys go watch some World War II, World War I videos on shell shock.
It's one of the most horrible things you can see.
And it also shows you how fragile the human mind is.
And that there's guys that would go blind.
There's nothing wrong.
They never got hit, but they would go blind or they'd go deaf or they'd go mute because their mind would just completely shut down or they couldn't control their body anymore.
It's a horrible thing.
So I'm glad you got to experience one millionth of a fraction of a percent of that when you were in Saudi Arabia and the horn went off.
But seriously, take that fraction of a second and you just multiply it infinitely.
And that's what these guys experienced.
I can't even imagine what these guys.
I mean, I can't even fathom.
Is it so loud that you can't think?
Or does that start, is that like how it is the first couple of times you hear some explosions and then it starts to adjust?
You know, it's weird.
Your mind does some things when there's situations going on that I'm sure you've heard this before, that things slow.
Do you ever in a car accident and things slow down?
Did things slow down?
Yes.
Yeah.
So there's that.
There's also some selective hearing that starts to take place where you can hear things like a voice that you might not normally hear because there's loud gunfire or whatever.
So yeah, there's some things that your mind does in that survival mode that are very effective and make you a little bit more ready to handle the situation at hand.
Do you start to have, did your faith adjust as you went through experiences like that?
Like, did you have any, was there anything like that that kind of happened for you?
You know, for me, it was sort of like my patriotism.
Like, it is what it is.
It was what it was.
Does it get strengthened?
Like, I'll tell you, the thing that strengthened me more than anything is from a faith perspective is like you get to see guys that put their friends above themselves.
Wow.
And, you know, guys that put their own lives, their friends' lives above their own lives.
And when you see that.
Is it pretty incredible?
If there's, there's, there's a, you know, maybe it's not a doctrinal religious element to that, but there is a deeply spiritual thing when someone says, you know what, I'm going to make sure.
And, you know, this happened with one of my guys named Mike Monsour.
You know, there was a grenade thrown onto a roof and there was three guys up there with him.
And he jumped on that grenade and he sacrificed his life for his friends.
And if that's not a level of spirituality and belief, and he was a very faithful guy, he was a believer in God.
And, you know, I think that with seeing that and knowing that with, you know, just understanding that that can happen and that that's a religion onto its own.
The way that we treat each other and the sacrifice we can make for each other, there's a religion right there.
Wow.
That's powerful, man.
Yeah, thanks for sharing some of those thoughts.
Yeah, I'd love to get into a few questions here, Nick, if we have some.
Totally.
And I had a question too.
Okay.
How do you prioritize and the military, like Russia, as a threat in comparison to some of the other people we're battling?
Because in the news, it's huge.
I think that we have to consider all threats, right?
And I think that we need to consider all threats as viable threats.
And I think the best way to keep viable threats at bay is by being as strong and powerful as we possibly can and to have the world know that if someone gets out of line, we will handle that problem.
And I think that's the best way to avoid having to handle those problems.
And if someone's listening, they think, oh, you're a warmonger and, you know, what you just said is, hey, we should go out and just start smashing people.
No, actually, it's the opposite is what I believe.
I believe, you know, when I say this all the time, the folks, the people that have been to war, we're the last people that want to go to war because we know who's going.
We know it's our friends and we know what happens.
And we know that it's going to destroy lives and people are going to get maimed and killed and families are going to be left without fathers and sons.
It's awful.
And so I'm the last person that's saying, hey, we should go to war.
But I believe that the best way to avoid going to war with Russia, with Iran, is to be strong and powerful and have people know and have the world know that if someone wants to test us, someone wants to push us beyond what we believe to be fair,
we will handle that problem and we will handle it strong, quick, judiciously, but at the same time, we'll handle it with enough force that we won't have to worry about that problem again.
Word.
Okay, so our first voicemail.
Our first voicemail, we had a caller come in and ask Theo who he'd want to spend dinner with, and then we put it back out to the listeners and we thought we'd get a lot of historical figures, celebrities, but one guy kind of went a different way with it, and we want to see what you think of it.
Theo, Jim from Pittsburgh.
Who I would have lunch with?
In 2005, I was in Iraq, and I got injured twice.
The first time, somebody lobbed a couple mortars in.
And for a longest time, I was just so angry and full of hatred.
But I really started thinking about it, and I would like to have lunch with this guy.
I mean, at that time, it hurt me, it hurt five other Marines.
But I want to figure out what just talks to him and hear his side, hear his point of view.
You know, is he some radical guy that's brainwashed?
Or is it some guy that's just trying to protect his home and his children and felt this was the way he had to do it?
Thanks, brother.
Cool.
Love your stuff.
You're killing it, man.
Yeah, I think that's pretty cool.
That's a pretty cool statement.
Is that a normal thing sometimes to wonder who's over there?
I don't know if that's a normal thing to wonder who's over there.
You know, we got to see him, you know.
Right, so a lot of these guys, you said there was some real so we knew who we were dealing with.
And, you know, it's interesting.
You know, that guy, Captain Plum, that I talked about that was in the Hanoi Hilton for six years, he went back there, you know, and he went there.
And it's, you know, there's propaganda and they make it seem like the prisoners were treated well and all this stuff, which is complete lies.
But it didn't really like change his viewpoint or anything.
You know, so I think that's a great statement.
I wish that guy could get, you know, I would love for him to be able to sit down with whoever lobbed those mortars at him.
And I think to his point, he was asking, or he stated, is it a guy that was radical or is it some guy that was just, I would say it was either some guy that was radical, like he said, or some guy that was getting paid 50 bucks by the insurgents to go and lob these mortars.
Wow.
And to me, it could be either one of those.
And that's the thing about war, man.
War doesn't care.
You know, the name that has your, has your, your, the bullet that has your name on it, the bullet doesn't have any name on it.
It just says to whom it may concern.
And that's the way it is.
Do you find it, like, I was just in China.
And to that guy, by the way, thanks for your service, brother.
Yeah.
Do I find it interesting?
Like, I was just in China a few weeks ago, and you can't get citizenship in China.
Like, you can't, like, it seems like there's a lot of countries that, like, they're not super welcoming of us.
You know, like, they're not unwelcoming, but it's not like this open door policy that sometimes we seem to have in America.
And I know that's kind of what defines America in a way is that we have a place where people can, you know, we have kind of a place where people can come to and feel welcome, you know, but then sometimes I start to feel like our country's starting to turn into a fucking airport where it's just like at the Atlanta airport just forever.
It's like this huge layover for everybody.
When, yeah, I don't know.
Sometimes I want to feel, I want to be okay saying I'm an American without feeling like I'm a bad person.
I feel like there's something like that that's going on in the ether these days.
If you come and hang out with me and my friends, you can say that all day and you won't seem like a bad person to any of us.
Thanks, bro.
I appreciate that.
Let's get another, let's get two more, Nick.
Hi, this is Austin with a question for Jocko Willink.
I just want to know if there's anywhere I can listen to your old punk band Rage of Discipline you brought up on the Joe Rogan show.
I've been looking for it, but can't find it.
Any information would be helpful.
Thanks a lot.
Love your work.
Did you ever play with Kyle Turley?
Did you guys ever cross paths?
I don't know.
No.
Don't know who that is.
Who's Kyle Turley?
He was an offensive lineman for the Rams, and he had a punk band, and he also served in the military as well.
Oh, right off.
Yeah, so when I was a kid, like I said, I was a real rebellious kid, and we were always in bands.
Now, the bands meant, you know, we were going to go in my shed and make noise.
You know, it wasn't like we were out on tour or anything like that.
But we did go in the studio one time, and we put down some tracks.
I think we put down like 12 or 15 tracks.
And my bro who was in the band with me, who's now a guy up in LA, Elgin James, he's actually a writer.
He's a writer and he's got his own cool story.
You could have him on the podcast.
Yeah, I'd love to reach out to him.
Yeah, he's he, anyways, I went in the military and he ended up joining gang and kind of getting crazy for a while and ended up in federal prison for a little bit.
And in the meantime, he had broken away from that scene and went to, started making movies.
And he made a movie.
He made a little short movie, got invited to the Sundance Film Festival or the Sundance Film Lab.
And he learned how to make movies.
And he ended up doing a great movie called Little Birds.
And now there's a new program.
You ever heard of Sons of Anarchy?
Yeah.
So there's a spin-off from Sons of Anarchy.
It's called Mayans MC.
about a Mexican motorcycle gang.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
So he's writing that thing.
Interesting.
But yeah, when we were kids, me and him were getting our rock and roll on hardcore music.
And we have the original, what are they called?
Reel-to-reel tapes.
And we were just talking about this.
Reel-to-reel tapes.
This is like back in the day when in a recording studio, they got all these different tracks.
And so you need a thicker tape to record all the tracks.
And so you have these big reels, like a movie, like a on the wall or something.
Yeah, so he's got the tracks, and we're finding a place right now that can take those tracks and burn them down onto.
And we're going to release a couple.
Yeah, we're going to get it real.
We got like, I think we got three songs that are salvageable that would be worth throwing out there.
So yeah, we'll do it, man.
We'll put it out there.
That could be a new weapon, though.
We would change the name of the band every six weeks or whatever because we'd say like, no, we're going in a new direction, right?
Because we took ourselves super seriously.
And so kind of the iconic name of the band was Bronson's Children after Charles Bronson.
And we had these cool shirts that had a picture of Charles Bronson.
They had Bronson's Children and like little kids writing on it.
And so no.
No fucking name.
Yeah, yeah.
So I actually reprinted those and I sell them.
So people are representing the Bronson's children.
So when you bring it back out, yeah.
Rage of Discipline was the name of the band for a little while.
It was Rage of Discipline.
We were called Struggle.
We were called Mock and Lowe.
We had all kinds of names, man.
You know, we'd have like internal issues about the direction and artistic control.
You know how it is when you're 14 and just playing in a punk rock band.
It's crazy.
You're really just loud in the garage.
Oh, yeah.
I was definitely loud in the garage.
There's no doubt about that.
That's it.
It reminds me of, have you ever had Henry Rollins on?
I haven't, but the interesting thing about Rollins Yeah, yeah.
So when I was a kid, I was way into Black Flag, which was, you know, where he originally played and who's the vocalist got brought into Black Flag.
But so I went on tour with, when he left Black Flag, he put out some albums of his own.
In the beginning, it was called Rollins Band.
The first one was called Henrietta Collins, but then the next one was called Lifetime.
This is a great album.
And when that album came out, me and all my friends from Bronson's Children, we went on tour and we would go to every show he'd play.
We probably went to like 10 shows, but I'd saw him a bunch over the years.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the cool thing is, this is back in the day where, you know, we'd go to CBGB's and show up at, you know, three o'clock in the afternoon, help them offload all their gear, help them get their gear set up as much as we could, hang out.
And it was, it was like, it was nothing, man.
It's kind of like what the UFC used to be like when you just hang out with all the fighters.
We would just be hanging out with everyone.
Everyone was cool.
And so did that with Rollins.
Probably, like I said, it probably went to 10, probably 10 shows, but I saw him a bunch of, well, not a bunch, but I probably saw him five other times or eight other times besides that.
And when I was a kid, Rollins was this kind of like bigger than life kind of guy because he's about 10 years older than me.
And, you know, he, you know, he has like Search and Destroy tattooed on his back.
And he's like, you know, all hardcore.
And, you know, that definitely influenced me when I was a kid, you know, because I was like 13, 14. Search and Destroy.
That was your next band.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
And there's an album called Black Flag My War.
And if you listen to My War side two, it's this really slow.
It was the first kind of like really slow and heavy music that started to mix the hardcore and the punk with Black Sabbath into one.
And so when I was a kid, that album, side two of that album stayed on my record plate for like a year straight, just playing that over and over again.
But, and then, so then I joined the military because I knew that's what I always wanted to do.
And when it was probably 1992, whenever the first Lollapalooza, remember Lollapalooza.
So Rollins was playing Lollapalooza.
And I went and I didn't have tickets or anything, but I figured if I could just get like hook up with him, he'd let me in.
Because you'd seen him so many times.
Yeah, like we'd seen him and like, you know, we would hang out.
Not like bros, but you know, hey, man, he's 26 at the time, right?
I'm 16. You know, that's, that's, so he's looking at me like, hey, man, this guy's one of my, one of my, one of my young people or whatever.
Yeah.
And so then fast forward a few years, whatever it is, and I went to Lollapalooza and I, you know, I was pretty good when I was a kid at sneaking around and figuring stuff out.
Yeah, covert operations.
And I finally, I got to him and he, he, he looked at me like he recognized me.
Who knows?
You know what I mean?
You meet a lot.
He's meeting a lot of people over the years.
But like I said, you know, we were, he might have recognized me.
Who knows?
But I was like, hey, man, I went on tour with you, Lifetime Tour, 80, whatever it was, 86 or something, 89, 88, whatever.
It's like 86, 87. And he goes, oh, yeah, man, what's up?
And I was like, hey, man, any chance you could get us in?
Get me and my boy here.
And I had some other kid that was in the SEAL teams with me that was an old hardcore kid.
And I just remember him saying, he goes, man, it'd be easier to get you into Fort Knox right now.
They got this place on lockdown.
And he was cool.
And then that was that.
And then I saw him a couple of years later at Cypress Hill.
I think it was Cypress Hill and the Beastie Boys and Rollins and saw him.
And so that was that.
And so to answer your question, have I had him on the podcast?
The answer is no, I haven't had him on the podcast.
I talked about him on one of the early podcasts.
Somebody asked me about him.
And, you know, I kind of talked about the fact that, you know, when I was a kid, hey, man, this guy was like super hardcore.
And, you know, that's that he had an influence on me when I was younger.
And then, you know, as I got older, you know, and I started, I was, you know, like he had search and destroy tattooed on his back.
And like, I was doing search and destroy missions, right?
So there was a.
So you think you're living out his tattoos?
A little bit.
But it'd be interesting.
I definitely would like to sit down and talk to him.
I'd like to find out if he really actually remembers us.
Yeah, because he might, because he's a smart man.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
And, you know, it's, the guy had a, and that band had a big influence on me.
They had a huge influence.
They did.
They had a feel on a lot of people.
Yeah, yeah.
Did you like that kind of music growing up?
No, I did go to a Cypress Hill.
I went on that tour.
Actually, he fucking hit this hot girl with my car in the parking lot one time.
And I still feel bad about it a little bit.
She was hot, but.
Did you injure her?
You know.
What does that even mean?
Everybody's got a different definition, I think, of what in and injured her.
Did you have to bring her to the hospital?
Look.
We didn't have to, bro.
We were running late.
Okay.
But I think somebody might have.
So all that stuff we were talking earlier about being a good person and doing good in the world, I guess this was pre-feel.
This was high feel.
High school.
This is high, literally.
I guess, you know, that's another thing.
Like, I had these guys on my on my podcast.
I had this podcast with Captain Plum, and then I had another guy who was in World War II, that was a fighter pilot in World War II, and he got shot down in France.
Oh, in France.
Oh, I hate the French.
Yeah, just like crazy.
This is when, you know, we were trying to help them.
Right.
And these guys started saying like, well, you know, we try and uphold the warrior ethos and doing good things in life like you do, Jocko.
And I was like, man, don't put me in the same category as you guys because these guys are like, just, you know, I was like, like, you know, a little kid running around like an idiot when I was younger.
Do you still feel like a kid?
Do you feel like an organized kid?
What do you feel like?
It's weird because part of me still feels like I'm 14. You know what I mean?
Part of me just is still excited to get up and just get crazy and do stuff.
I was maybe like two years ago.
You know what a beach cruiser is?
A bicycle?
Yeah, so I live down by the beach, but there's a little hill and I was on my beach cruiser and I was going down this hill and I had to make a left and there was like oncoming traffic and incoming.
What do you guys call that?
Just traffic that's heading towards me.
Okay.
Yeah.
I don't know if there's like a military term for it.
Yeah, well, incoming.
Okay.
Incoming is when there's rounds, like artillery rounds coming towards you.
Yeah.
So when that siren went off when you were in Saudi Arabia, that was to indicate incoming rounds.
Well, at least I assume that's what it was.
Right.
But yeah, this is just oncoming traffic.
Okay.
And I'm biking and I'm like, in back of my mind, I'm like, I think I can make this.
Right.
And so I do.
I like pick up speed and I cut the car off and he honks and I pull up and I made it, you know.
And I'm just thinking, you know, like that's the 14 year old kid that just still will slip out at sometimes and just do something stupid.
But, and that's why it's like a miracle that, that, you know, that I'm alive, that you're alive, because you think about the dumb stuff you did when you were 13, 14, 15 years old.
I mean, we're talking ignorant stuff.
Oh, yeah.
And so, so part of me still feels like that.
And part of me feels older.
And I guess you said the word organized.
Yeah, I'd say I'm more organized.
And just as you get older and you learn more and you start to get better perspective on life and it's the stuff that you, you know, that you just never listened to when you were a kid.
Like my dad would tell me something and I'd just be like, what?
And this guy doesn't know what the hell is going on.
I do.
You know, you're just, it's just because you're dumb.
Yeah.
And so as much as you want to, that's, that's like the kids' books that I wrote, it's like, it's good for somebody to hear it from a different angle.
And I get all kinds of dads, you know, that'll say, hey, thanks for saying this.
You know, it's the same stuff I've been saying, but the kid's listening now.
You know what I mean?
Because people don't listen to their parents a lot of times because you got to build up some kind of rebelliousness against your parents so that when it comes time to leave, you can do it.
You can do it easily, right?
It's interesting.
It's a necessity.
It's a necessity.
You know, you're going to leave the nest, so you have to try and figure out how you're going to break away.
So if you just were always doing whatever your mom and dad said and you were their little puppy, well, then when it comes time to go out and hunt on your own, you're not going to be able to do it.
So there's something that's genetically programmed into you to start to rebel against those parents and start pushing the envelope.
And that's what I did.
When I joined the Navy, I told my dad, I was like, hey, I just joined the Navy.
Like, I thought I was like a 40-year-old man.
I just joined the Navy.
And he says, oh, he says, you're going to hate it.
Wow.
And I said, why do you think I'm going to hate it?
And he says, because you don't like authority and you don't listen to anyone else.
You're like, hmm.
No, I was like, hey, I'm going in the SEAL teams.
You don't, it's a team.
And I was, that was, which is just stupid.
Because in the SEAL teams, guess what?
You have bosses and you have officers and you have chiefs and you got to do, you know, you got to carry the line.
You got to toe line.
You do have more influence, right, in the SEAL teams.
Like there's influence up and down the chain of command and we're all bros, but at the same time, you know, it's like you got a mission to carry out, you're going to go get it done.
Was it hard for you to learn to take direction?
I'm finding that that's something in my life I have a tough time with sometimes, but I know that it's probably better because anyway, yeah, was it hard for you to learn that at any point?
Well, here's what I did.
So yeah, my dad was 100% right.
Like I don't like authority.
I don't like listening to people.
That's why I was running around in a freaking hardcore punk rock band when I was 13 years old.
That's why.
Yeah.
Satan's nutsack.
Yeah, yeah.
That's one of the many names we have.
And so what I did to try and get around that is I just started saying, okay, whatever someone's going to have to tell me to do, I'm just going to do it beforehand.
So like I was a radio man in my first platoon.
And so that means you got to prepare all these radios and you got to waterproof the radios and you got to set up a communications plan.
And as soon as I realized that's what I was going to get told to do, I just started doing it.
And so when my boss would come in, hey, you got to do something.
It's already done.
So you aren't telling me what to do because I already did it.
So that was sort of my way of getting around it.
And then I continued to do that.
I was always trying to stay a step ahead and step ahead of my boss.
So I wasn't getting told what to do because I didn't like it.
And then as I got older, I was like, oh, you know why they're telling me what to do?
Because it's going to help us as a team and that's okay.
So I got to put my rebelliousness in check a little bit as I got a little bit older.
Do you have children or no?
I do have four children.
Do you really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Damn, that's crazy.
Dude, I think you could sell your sperm on the internet, dude, honestly.
Or like at one of those farms, like those bull things, you know?
Yeah.
Dude, oh, I bet a farmer would somebody.
A farmer?
Oh, dude, somebody would pay probably 40 grand for a half a gallon, I bet.
Yeah.
I hear you.
Do you love being a father?
Is it awesome?
It's awesome.
Yeah, it's awesome.
Did you think it would be that cool?
Was it unique?
Was it different to you?
Do you feel like a commander at all?
Is there any similarities in a plan?
There's definite similarities, but there's the key difference between being a dad and being a leader in a SEAL platoon is there's one level.
Okay, so when you're in a SEAL platoon and you're in charge of a SEAL platoon, you love your guys.
I mean, you love your guys.
You want to take care of them.
They're your number one priority.
And I didn't think that that feeling could ever get any stronger.
But when you have kids, there's one level more of emotion.
And the level more of emotion that you have is that you want nothing more in life than for them to be successful.
You want them.
And this is what makes it hard.
Because when you're a dad and you're 47 years old, you're looking at your kids like, listen, kid, if you do this right here, it's going to put you on the right path.
And then when they don't want to do it, you're like, no, you want to beat it into them.
Here's the problem.
If you try and beat it into them, they're going to rebel against it even harder.
I have a neighbor and my middle daughter, who's a badass, right?
She's a wrestler.
She's just strong.
Oh, she could probably beat Bernard Schaub, I think.
Yeah, for sure.
And so she's, but at a certain age, she was doing cheerleading, right?
And so I just was like, okay, you're going to do cheerleading.
And there's great athleticism in cheerleading.
But there's also like some stuff about cheerleading with the hair and all this makeup and all this stuff.
And so it's not exactly like the number one thing I wanted my daughter to do.
Even though they get a lot of confidence out of it, there's some real positives to it.
I don't want to talk bad about it.
But it's not something I was super fired up.
But my neighbor goes, he says, oh, where's your daughter?
And I said, oh, she's, you know, she's a cheerleading.
And he goes, oh, you let her do that?
Oh.
And I said, well, I do so she doesn't come home with like a tattoo on her forehead.
Right.
Because that's what happens.
And eventually she said she didn't want to, she wanted to focus on wrestling and not.
You had to kind of stand there and if I would have, in my mind, if I would have forced her and said, no, you're not allowed to do that, she would have either just done it even more or she would have rebelled against me in a bad, bad way where all of a sudden, you know, she's doing things that are really outside the box.
And that's, I always tell people when you got kids, like, you got to keep them in the box, but you want to give them a nice big box, right?
Your kids, a lot of parents, they think that their kids are going to be who they want them to be.
Like who you want your kid to be is who they're going to be.
And that's not going to happen.
I'm not here to break the news to you.
You want to keep them in a box.
Now, if they get so far out of the box that it's going to disrupt their life or ruin their life, like they're going to go to jail to start doing stuff like that, obviously, you got to type up something that's going to hurt their health really bad.
You got to pull them back inside the box and you got to find a way to do it that they don't rebel even harder against you.
And I think my parents, to their credit, gave me enough leeway because believe me, I pushed the envelope on the leeway.
Yeah, I mean, with Satan's nutsacks, we were charging hard.
And so they gave me enough leeway, I think, to where I didn't, when I got to the edges, I came back on my own.
You know what I mean?
And I think that's the proper way to do it, if you can.
Right.
It's hard to walk that line.
That's awesome, man.
And will you have any more children?
Four is good.
My wife told me it's no more children.
That's what my wife told me.
Yeah.
And where'd you meet your wife at?
I met my wife overseas, actually.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Overseas.
Yeah.
She's a Brit.
My wife's a Brit.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Crazy, man.
Really?
I think.
I mean, I've always had issues with the Patriots, my favorite movie.
Aim Small, Miss Small.
Oh, okay.
What's a movie that you watch?
Like, what's like a funny movie that you would enjoy that you like?
I mean, Big Lebowski, you know, is right there at the top of, as far as funny movies, I think the Big Lebowski is, I don't even know if there's any competition.
Is there competition against Big Lebowski?
I don't know.
That's a good one.
That's a notorious one.
Movies aren't that great anymore.
That's what I kind of feel.
Are there any war movies that you watch that really kind of set some of it into a place?
The Pacific, which is the mini-series that was on HBO.
The Pacific was the one that's about the Pacific theater.
And then Banda Brothers is the same thing, but it's about the European theater.
And it's about Dick Winters.
And they're both amazing.
And they're both based on books.
And actually, the Pacific is based on a whole bunch of books.
And I've actually covered, I think, every one of those books on my podcast because it goes into way more detail in the books.
And so, yeah, those are two, I think, of the best portrayals that I've seen.
Do you ever read that, The Things They Carry?
You know what I'm talking about?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I covered that book on my podcast.
Wow.
I'm going to start with that episode, man.
I love that.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
The episode of the podcast.
Yeah.
And it is.
And that's sort of a semi-fictional book.
And he ended up writing another book that's not as fictional.
But yeah, that's a great book.
For sure.
Yeah, I just love that thinking of all the things.
When you go into battle and you're in battle and that sort of thing, is any of that like in the morning before at night when you're like, are there moments, are you thinking, are some of those things kind of milling around inside of you?
Regrets?
What's kind of steaming up?
Is there anything beyond?
This is something that, you know, Laif, who wrote Extreme Ownership with me and who is the owner of the company with me, of Echelon Front with me, we ask questions like that and we always say the same thing, which is, man, you're so busy.
Yeah.
Especially like we, you know, he was a platoon commander.
I was the task unit commander.
When we were going out on operation, it was like we were so busy getting ready for that operation.
There wasn't time to, people would ask, like, what was your pump-up music?
And I'm like, you're talking about we were sitting around listening to music, like we were running up deconfliction plans and going through the brief and making sure no new intel came in and making sure our gear was squared away and getting the, making sure the brief was all.
I mean, that's what we were doing.
So we weren't sitting around thinking about like anything.
And that's, that comes back to what we talked about earlier of just like being 100% focused.
Like people would be like, oh, did you miss your family?
Like, I wasn't even thinking about my family.
At that time, I had a wife and three kids at home.
I wasn't thinking about my wife and three kids.
I was thinking about like, okay, that's what I'm thinking about is the situation that we're in and how are we going to get through it.
Yeah, and it doesn't mean that you're not thinking about them.
The love you have for them, you guys, all your experience, that's baked into you.
But right now it's go time.
You have focus.
You have your friends.
You have your group, your unit that you have to take care of.
Yeah.
Your own little band, your band of brothers out there.
Man, this is fascinating, man.
It's inspiring.
And I really love the part about if we can't serve, that we can still serve our country by utilizing the freedoms and the gifts that we have here.
Absolutely.
I think that's fascinating.
Jocko Willink, thank you so much, man.
We're going to put all of your stuff at the beginning of the episode.
Nick, was there anything else you wanted to get in?
Was there any other questions?
One super quick question, and I think it's really actionable advice.
I think you could probably answer pretty quick.
Okay, great.
Hey, how's it going, Theo?
What's up, Jocko?
This is Brandon from Las Vegas.
My question for Jocko is, in your opinion, what's the best weapon for home defense, and what kind of music do you listen to?
Just the first part.
Yeah, I mean, the best weapon for home defense, first of all, you got to make sure if you're going to get a weapon for home defense, you got to make sure you train with it and what you feel comfortable with.
A lot of people will say a shotgun, the noise that a shotgun makes is enough to just the cocking of a shotgun, right?
When you jack the slide on a shotgun, it goes shh, shh.
Most criminals are going to run if they're smart as soon as they hear that noise.
So a shotgun is a great weapon.
It's an easy-to-shoot weapon.
But at the same time, you know, and then you've got handguns if you need something quick.
But the biggest thing with both those is you have to train.
You have to train to use them.
And getting a weapon and not training to use it is dumb.
So if you're going to get a weapon, which definitely, if you've got a home and you live in an area where you can come under threat, you should be able to protect your home and you should get a weapon.
And if you get a weapon, whether it's a pistol, whether it's a shotgun, learn to use it and keep it in a safe place, in a place where only you can access it and you can access it quickly if you need it, but where the neighborhood kid can't break into your house and start fiddling with your gun and shoot themselves.
You know, it's a real big responsibility that responsible adults should be able to take on.
But yeah, do some research.
Go try shooting some different weapons.
See which ones you like.
Talk to the professionals where you shoot your gun and get a good opinion from them because it's very, it's a matter of opinion in many ways.
It would be best.
It depends on what you're, where do you live?
What's the house made out of?
You know, if you got concrete walls, you got plaster walls.
We got to analyze your situation a little bit.
Yeah.
No, but yeah, but definitely learn to use it.
Not be knowledgeable of it.
If it is a responsibility, treat it like one.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
My mom used a wooden spoon, I think.
Yeah, no.
And when you were talking about someone else's mom beating your ass, I was laughing because I've been smacked with a wooden spoon from someone else's mom.
I had the same reaction as you.
Like, wait, I don't even know this lady cracking me.
But she's keeping us in line.
But We were making too much noise.
It was 11 o'clock at night or whatever, and the other kid's trying to sleep.
You know what?
Shut up.
Jocko needs a crack.
Jocko needs a crack.
For sure.
That's going to be one of our next books.
That's going to be the title of this episode.
I think Jocko needs a crack.
Jocko Willington, thank you so much for your service and thank you so much for the inspiration.
I think that you do, you know, just trying to lead by example.
You know, being a father, being a businessman, being someone who just continues to attack life on the daily.
And even if you do every now and then take a little bit of a break, a small one, a luxury moment.
Luxury moment.
Occasionally.
But there's a lot of guys that are grateful for the inspiration.
So thank you very much.
Thanks for having me on, brother.
Yeah, man.
Let's go rush shopping them, huh?
You want to?
Now I'm just footing on the breeze.
And I feel I'm falling like these leaves.
I must be cornerstone.
Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found.
I can feel it in my bones.
But it's gonna take a little time for me to set that parking break and let myself go wild shine that light on me.
I'll sit and tell you my story just for me.
you you you you And I've been moving way too fast on a runaway train with a heavy load of black.
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