6: Jocko Willink - The Way of the Violent Intellectual: Difference between revisions

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Hello, welcome to another episode of the portal with Eric Weinstein and I am pleased to be joined in studio with none other than Jocko Willink, Jocko. Sir, and I just did the Jocko didn't call for an immediate response and so none was given Jocko, it's great to be here with you.  

Thanks for coming. One of the things I'm really excited to talk to you about is just how our military interacts with our civilian society. But before we get there, what I'd love to do is to just have you talk a little bit about your trajectory through special forces in the seal program into this situation where you're now a podcaster I guess, you were brought to the world of podcasting by our mutual friend, Tim Ferriss. And what that trajectory what are the highlights of that trajectory so that we have some place to begin.

I was born and raised in a small New England town on a dirt road out in the middle of nowhere. I joined the military. When I got done with high school. I went through SEAL training, I went in the seal teams, it was now 1991 when I showed up with a seal team SEAL Team one. I was an enlisted guy. So then I spent several years there. And then I got picked up for a commissioning program, which meant I was going to become an officer move into a leadership position. And I did that and then I went to the east coast, went to seal team to from there, I had to go to college. I went to college at the University of San Diego and majored in English and went back to a seal team. I did two deployments to Iraq once as a platoon commander And once as a task unit commander got done with that, I ran training for the West Coast seal teams. And the training that I ran was the tactical training not not the training, where you see the guys on TV carrying boats on their head and carrying logs around. That's the basic SEAL training. And I ran the the advanced kind of tactical training where seals learn to shoot, move and communicate and where they learn their tactics and where they learn combat leadership. And that's where I spent my last three years. And then once I got done with that, I retired from the Navy. And when I got out, I started working with companies teaching leadership, and that expanded eventually started working with a friend of mine, I was in the sales teams with Leif babban. We got a lot of business, consulting about leadership. Eventually, a lot of those businesses asked us to write down the concepts that we had or have to be able to give them something you do handout of some kind. So we wrote down the concepts, and that eventually became the book Extreme Ownership. The book Extreme Ownership came out in 2015. And in 2015, I was on Tim Ferriss podcast, through a mutual friend through two mutual friends Kirk parsley and Peter Thiel, and was on Tim Ferriss podcast. When when I got done recording with Tim Ferriss, he pressed stop on the recorder. And he looked at me and said, You should do your own podcast. And I noted that, and then a couple weeks later, or a couple months later, I was on Joe Rogan's podcast and in the middle of the podcast, he told me that I should have my own podcast. So I started my own podcast because when Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan tell you to start a podcast, you should start a podcast. So they told me I started a podcast. I've recorded 180 something podcasts. Since then I've written a bunch of other books. A book called discipline equals freedom field manual, a book called the dichotomy leadership. I've written three books books in a series called The way the warrior kid series. And I've written once book for smaller kids called Mikey and the dragons. And we've continued on with the business at Echelon front working with companies all over the world teaching leadership. I think that's where I'm at right now.

Well, it's quite a story. Something that would be meaningful for me to know more about is. Yeah, I've always understood that our military has had to have really a separate culture, right down to let's say, marriage ceremonies looking different in the military than they do outside. And one of my questions is, to what extent is the military still a separate culture? Do I have that wrong? And then following up on that, to what extent are the individual Special Forces units really an entirely alternate world with different practices Different disciplinary regimes, things that are unthinkable let's say in the civilian world.

The military is made up of a bunch of human beings, people from America from every different walk of life in America, and they all come in, then certainly you go through boot camp, or whatever indoctrination program that you go through, and you learn some of the fundamental military methodologies of living, such as being disciplined, such as chain of command, such as rank structure, tactics, so you learn those things. But at the end of the day, those are just overlays on a bunch of human beings that are just human beings. And so the the military is just a subsection of American society. And it reflects that way inside the military, as far as the Special Operations Forces, sure they all have their own little culture, but you know, you go to different colleges and they have different cultures. And you go to different businesses, I work with different businesses all the time, they all have their own little cultures going on inside and  

you don't think it's more profound,

the military  

of a difference.

I don't know if it's more profound. There's some really dynamic companies out there that have very, very deeply rooted cultures. And those are probably in some cases even more distinct than what what you have inside the military. One thing that's interesting about the military Sure, there's some military traditions that go back hundreds of years. But the military people come and go in the military all the time, you know, as an, as an officer in the military, you might spend two, maybe three years at a at an individual unit, and then you're gone and someone's gonna take your place. So it's not like a business or a company where sometimes you go to a company, I work with companies where there's been people there for 28 years, you know, throughout the chain of command, maybe it's a frontline worker. That's been running some machines. at a company for 27 years or maybe it's the CEO who's owned the business or started the business or inherited the business, or bought the business but he's been there for a long time. So those cultures can have kind of a more unified way about them because there's there's that there's that continuity of, of human beings in it, whereas the military people move around and they get stationed they get out they retire. But so there's there's cultures I think, in, in everywhere in the military, certainly has a culture button, depending on depending on what you're into. You know, if you go to a Grateful Dead show, you'll see a a strong culture there that everyone dresses the same, everyone looks the same. Everyone probably thinks very similarly. If you go to a Metallica show, same thing, you know, people are going to dress very similarly. So I guess it just I think everyone's got a culture and its present in the military, for sure. But I think there's cultures everywhere.

Somebody was in the military once said to me that you have to understand that the military values interoperability in place of continuity that because people are constantly being moved around the culture is almost defined by a kind of mental flexibility of certain kind. And that person went on to say that American companies used to move people around and have stopped doing that largely so that it used to be in his estimation, that our companies like Procter and Gamble or an Exxon would be much more like the military and that they would have an expectation that you would be posted to a particular place for a couple of years there would be sort of a Welcome Wagon. There was a way of absorbing families and that that had actually been given up and that the military had retained some of that, but that that was in fact also at risk. I don't know whether that resonates at all?  

Well, certainly the military, you, you have to be adaptable,

right.  

And when you take different people all the time, and you cycle them into different military units, you learn to work with different people, that's for sure. And you can't get used to working with one type of human being. Because even though that human being has been through boot camp, and they've been indoctrinated, they're still got all their own personal emotions and drives and personality and, and idiosyncrasies and things that are going to drive you crazy. And things that work well, and things that don't work well. And you've got to deal with all those things.  

And so it is that that does happen in the military, and it happens in the civilian sector. Now, what I find interesting about that statement is, I think nowadays people change jobs a lot more than they did when I was a kid. When I was a kid, all my friend's parents, they worked at the same company for 29 years,

Yeah, but you but you might move around from company I need a company.