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

== Description ==

[[Jocko Willink]] is a man who radiates decency. He is also part of a community of warriors drawn to test themselves in the crucible of deadly combat against an evil and implacable foe. [[Eric Weinstein|Eric]] sits down with Jocko Willink to learn how this cerebral Navy SEAL and hero of the battle of Ramadi against ISIS managed to bring military discipline home to the fight for personal freedom in peacetime writing kids books that teach ‘extreme ownership’ and radical accountability to children.  

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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 Am'''Erica from every different walk of life in Am'''Erica, 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.  

It's interesting the way I came to it, the way I came to, it was by re..., I actually had to have the ultimate form of humility with myself. Because I realized as I preached these, many of the theories that I had, as I preached them, I realized that I wasn't always right. And I'll give you an example is one of the things that I always talked about, especially on the battlefield was that you had to be aggressive, like you have to be aggressive. That's what you have to be. You have to be ready to maneuver, you have to take the fight to the enemy. If you see a problem, you need to attack that problem. I talked about that all the time. And then plain as day clearly, Are there times when as a leader or as a human being, you can be too aggressive? Yes, there absolutely are. And we used to call that running to your death if you're super hyper aggressive. Because '''Jocko said you got to be aggressive. And so now there's a machine gun nest on a hill and you just go charge that thing. You're going to die and whoever follows you is also going to die. So you you have to be you have to you have to modulate your aggression there're sometimes we have to back off. And that was sort of the first thing that I said, Well, on the one hand I talked about, you got to be aggressive, but there's times where you can be too aggressive. And then I said to myself, well, what about what about talking as a leader? Because Because as a leader, you have to talk, right? You have to communicate with the other people on your team,  

Is there such a thing as a leader that can talk too much? Yes, there absolutely is. And if I as a leader, all I do is talk, talk, talk, talk talk. Well, eventually, people stop listening to me, they don't know what's important and what's not. I over-communicate to them to the point where they stop listening. So you can talk too much. But the other side of the spectrum is I don't talk enough. And now you don't know what's going on. The team doesn't know which direction we're headed. So this is where this idea came from, is that the quality that we're looking for? Isn't on the extremes. It's a balance it's a dichotomy of leadership and finding the balance in those dichotomies led led me and my buddy Leif write this follow on book to Extreme Ownership. The reason the follow on book to Extreme Ownership. The reason for that is because that's as we work with companies. Not only did most questions revolve around this idea of the dichotomy of leadership, but most answers, most answers that I give are someone says, Oh, my team isn't taking any initiative. Okay, well, let's break that problem down. Why is that happening? That's happening because you perhaps are taking so much ownership, so much Extreme Ownership, you read the book, Extreme Ownership, so you're taking so all this ownership. Well, now, your team doesn't have any ownership. So they're just waiting for you to tell them what to do. So when you do that their initiative gets crushed. You go too far in the other direction, and you've got people doing things that they shouldn't be doing working on. They're stepping outside their bounds. They're they're not staying within the parameters you've given them because you've got them running wild. So you've gone too far in the other direction. Where do you want to be you want to be balanced and, and that's where that dichotomy of leadership comes in.  

Yeah.  

Because all of a sudden, you know, if you were if you had no initiative, '''Eric, and I said, Hey, listen, I might have been micromanaging, I need you to step up more. And you go, Okay, cool. And the next day, you show up, and you start doing some project that I hadn't even authorized. And now I gotta come back, and I gotta, I gotta adjust, because now I got to tighten you up and say, hey, I want you to take initiative, and I appreciate it. But you still got to stay within the bounds of what we're trying to get done. So I was right yesterday. And now all of a sudden, same mindset. I'm wrong and I have to adjust again. So you're 100% spot on there. You have to modulate all these principles for the people that you're dealing with and the situation that they're in.  

going through hard things together as what brings people together and for sure, the harder things that you go through, the tighter the bonds gonna be. So if you take the military, for example, to start with the military, Well, the first thing you do is you put them through boot camp, like We talked about, well, that's hard and you go, and you form bonds with people that other people that went through boot camp, we all kind of have that common bond, then you go to airborne school where you're going to jump out of airplanes. And that's a little bit of a death defying thing. And you're going to be the airborne crews are going to be a little bit tighter, you go to Special Operations Training and all of a sudden, you've done something that's harder than that. And and now the bonds are a little bit tighter. Now you take that unit, and you put them into a combat zone, and their bonds are going to be even tighter. Now you take that combat zone and you make it super intense, those bonds are going to be even tighter. So there's no doubt about it now in the business world, what that looks like, and especially, I mean I retired in 2010. So the companies that we worked with a lot of them that the company that we work with were many of them, survivors of the economic crash. And believe me, they talked about that like that was their battle zone. That's where they formed these really tight bonds, and they weren't going anywhere now they were tight. So whether you can replace it? I don't really think so I think the harder strife you go through with someone, the tighter the bond is going to be. And maybe over time you form a strong bond. You know, if I had to rely on you for something, and you came through for me, and then you did it again and again, and then I did it for you and we we stuck together. I mean, over time, you can definitely form really, really strong bonds with people. But I think the harder something is the stronger the bonds, if it doesn't fracture, if it doesn't break you,  

you know, I got your back you need anything. You know, let me grab some chicken nuggets over here. I don't think that my intent in saying that wouldn't be like Hey, brother. I got your back with the chicken nuggets deep. You know, I think it's just a slang thing that people are throwing around. Yeah, I percent.  

I think it comes up as a situation in which like, you know, the boss is going to come and ask a bunch of questions and one guy says, Don't worry, I got your back and he immediately folds Because he did not even think about what he was saying. And I think in part, one of the fears I have and I don't know whether you resonate with this is that I think a lot of Am'''Erican men, men in the developed world don't have any bonds that are comparable to the bonds that you're talking about. In other words, their closest friend is untested, in any real way.

all over, all over from the from all over.

So just just Sick, sadistic sub-human beings that should never have been allowed to do that. Now they did it. And once they did, and they took they took Ramadi and they took muzzle. You know, when Iraqi forces went back in with the support of heavy Am'''Erican firepower, they clean those places out. And and it took, I mean, they wiped out about 40,000 ISIS fighters, which is pretty much all of them. pretty unique situation  

some of them were, but what was interesting is you had them wearing uniforms, carrying flags, and in trying to act like a conventional military force in many ways, not always, but in many ways. And so, you know, you want to get into conventional war with basically with Am'''Erica. That's that's not a good tactic. But it was a good tactic for us for them to do that.  

Now I have a very unpopular opinion in this country, which is somewhat popular outside of it, which is that Saddam Hussein while a horrible in all the ways that we claim he was horrible was in fact holding together some powder keg and that was using was a relatively secular government and that brought some order to a potentially very chaotic communal situation. His sons of course, you know one one in particular was a stone cold psychopath and he you know, Saddam Hussein did terrible horrible things by Am'''Erican standards but if we evaluated him by the standards of the region, we might come up with a different answer. Is there anything to that? I mean he's obviously a bad guy.  

Well, as you pointed out, I mean, all human beings have a guttural reaction to violence. And violence is a language that every single human being understands. You know, you were asking me earlier what languages I speak Can I said English, And you said "you didn't learn in Arabic?" And I said, Well, I learned enough to say "get down, show me your hands." But But when I would speak those words in Arabic to, you know, enter a building in their home and there's, you know, a military age male, and I'd be speaking to them in Arabic, he didn't he didn't even understand that I was even trying to speak Arabic, a) because my Arabic is bad and b) because it's it's just he's not expecting that. And so they don't they don't respond very seldom what I have until we get them to calm down a little bit, then I could maybe speak a little bit of Arabic to them. But in that initial moment of terror, there's they don't understand. They don't understand what you're saying they're not they're not ready to hear it. But when you have somebody that is resistant, clearly resistant, there though there is some non-verbal communication that you can do. That is violence, and they will understand it and the other people that see it will understand it, so there's no doubt that Violence is a method of communicating with people a message stronger than words in many cases and people like saddam people like ISIS, they'll absolutely use that to the best of their ability. And then they'll exploit when things happen, you know, one of the one of the horrible strategic losses or strategic setbacks we had in in the Iraq War was the, the abuses that went on at the Abu Ghraib prison, because now we had photographs of these Am'''Ericans with doing things that look like extreme torture to the prisoners there and, and the al Qaeda elements just absolutely took those and ran with them to make to fuel that insurgency. And it did it did a great job of fueling that insurgency. So you have to be very, very careful about the way you treat your enemy. Because if you treat if you mistreat the enemy, then the enemy will use that as propaganda and they would do that on purpose. They they would love nothing more. Then Then for you to accidentally kill a kid or, you know, drop a bomb on a mosque or drop a bomb they love they absolutely would love that. And so we had to do everything in our power to prevent those things from happening. Because the strategic the negative strategic impact was phenomenal when events like that occurred.  

So a lot of people stateside did not watch that video. And one of the things that I found very interesting about it was that it had a point that was disguised by our unwillingness to watch the video. Now maybe it's important that ISIS not be allowed to communicate its point. But the point was, you're up there in the skies, meting out very particular forms of death in particular, incinerating people and burying them in rubble. And our aim in this video is to subject a captured pilot to the exact form of death that you are dispensing from the skies. And so you're normally not here to see this, let this be your death. And, you know, it was cinematically beyond belief it was shot to be gorgeous, and to be repugnant and sickening. And that concept of a Hollywood style death filmed for real a snuff film, if you will, with a point and then offering bounties showing the homes of the Jordanian pilots, you know, by street, I think in Amman, Jordan. My sense was is that Am'''Ericans didn't pick up anything of what was going on. Because we had decided that we didn't want our population exposed to anything coming from the other side. Even their propaganda informed us as to how they were thinking and feeling but it was as if we plugged our ears and didn't want to understand what we were watching. Do you Do you see that?  

I see. Yeah. And I would agree with the point that when you disconnect people from war, it's they lose track, right? I mean, in Am'''Erica, you know, we, when I was in Ramadi, in 2006, I was, you know, sitting in some combat outposts in the middle of nowhere with mortar shells coming in. And meanwhile, everyone in Am'''Erica was, you know, going to the mall and driving around their SUV and ordering a Starbucks. I mean, that's, that's just the way it is. I'm not mad at that. But there's a definite detachment there  

I'm mad at that. No, here's, here's why I'm at it. First of all, I think I'm slightly older than you are. And so I have some memories of the Vietnam War as it was playing out on Am'''Erican television. That's some of my earliest childhood memories. And let me say this, it was spectacularly gruesome. What We saw on the TV during that period of time, I believe that my parents turned off the TV when it showed an image of a GI's head on a pike, and it was just like, Okay, this is too much. And on the one hand, this was real information coming from the war. And on the other hand, it was propaganda. It was meant to strike fear in our hearts. There was a self hatred that was playing out, just as there was concern about the excesses of Am'''Erican kids being turned loose in a jungle with too little discipline and supervision. I mean, there was so much happening in Vietnam, which was hard to pull apart. And what I found was is that after that war, we never went into a conflict the same way again, the embedded journalists didn't seem to want to report in the same way that a non-embedded journalist did. And there's a need that we have to be able to go to war without constantly second guessing ourselves and putting our own troops in harm's way and not working through all of our psychological nonsense when we have people who are, you know, definitely at risk and doing our work as the military. I don't know that we've ever really come to grips with the lessons of Vietnam, we we don't have a clear sense that we should go to war as a nation where the newsreels should talk about our side versus the other side. We don't know how to do this. Do you have a sense that, like I my sense is, is that Vietnam really broke something in terms of our ability to go to war.

Vietnam was well you know, I've been lucky enough to have a lot of podcast guests that were in Vietnam and their experiences were all different. I mean, from one guy Captain Charlie Plum who was shot down and was in the Hanoi Hilton for six years. I've had SOG operators special operations or Studies and Observation Group guys that were fighting behind the lines in Cambodia and Laos. I've had helicopter pilot that was shot down in the jungle prisoner prisons for months and months being tortured and and mock executed the whole nine yards. So what was what was horrible.. There's so many horrible things about Vietnam. And you know, I've did I did a podcast about the My Lai massacre, which, which really is by far the most the biggest atrocity that Am'''Erican troops have ever committed. And it was absolutely heinous. Now, you could go to Sand Creek and maybe some of the Native Am'''Ericans there were some some significant horrible atrocities there is well, those generally weren't as clear cut. You know, most of those had Am'''Erican soldiers that were saying "no stop."  

there will absolutely be innocent casualties. And the other will that you have to have is you have to have the will to die. And that is that no matter how surgical you are, no matter how good your weapons are, no matter how good your technology is, when you go to war, you will have young Am'''Erican men and women being killed in horrible ways, way too young, over and over and over again. And if you're not ready for those two things, then you need to stop and think about what you're actually doing  

I don't believe this actually '''Jocko. here's, here's my take on it. If you think about what the cartels have been doing on our southern border, it is spectacular. The violence is so graphic and so disturbing by design. And yet so many Am'''Ericans are unaware of just how bad the drug wars have been in Mexico, because the information doesn't percolate. And these photographs, if they were run, would capture the public's imagination. I don't think there's any question.  

And the fact that that we didn't uphold that obligation. It's it's not good. It's It's It's a letdown. It's, and luckily, we went back and they were able to take back the city and Am'''Ericans did support that and but the Iraqis, they did the bulk, they did the fighting, which was very impressive, because when we were in Ramadi, in 2006, the Iraqis didn't didn't want they didn't really have the stomach for the fight. But I have friends that were in Mosul, and the Iraqi troops were fighting hard. They were taking massive casualties. In fact, the Americans were saying look, I don't know if we're gonna have enough Iraqis to do this. And but the Iraqis kept Fighting so so that was a really positive thing to see that the Iraqis were now fighting for themselves. But do we have a moral obligation? I think once we commit to something like that, then we need to see it through.  

it depends.  

And in the chat, one of the chapters I wrote about this a similar situation, there was a, a Bradley fighting vehicle with a 25 millimeter chain gun getting ready to engage armed sniper positions on the rooftop of a building. And as I deciphered the situation, and told him not to shoot, and eventually had them confirm exactly, by literally I said, count the buildings from where you are to where you see the enemy. And they counted the buildings and they said, "standby, we have an adjustment."  

right  

right?