A (0:00)

This is the Jocko Underground podcast, number 200 with Echo, Charles and me, Jocko Willink. We have been issued questions from you, all the troops in the field, and we are going to try and provide answers, if possible, courses of actions to follow, or at least some recommendations of maintaining the path. Yeah. So that's what we got. Let's get into it.

B (0:21)

All right, first question. A long time listener. I've read all your books, I've supported the underground, and now I have a crisis of faith as to whether you are com. Complete and utter bullshit in the grand scheme. It doesn't matter. We all have flaws, you included. But given what's happened in the United States with the killing of two citizens, the government responding with pure propaganda, eg, no right to possess a weapon, domestic terrorist, and your role in promoting and platforming this very government, when do you feel some ownership and step up and address this? Your response to raiding another country to capture the leader. Venezuela caused me to end sponsorship of your underground podcast. Your failure to do anything to address this mess will make it clear that you don't represent extreme ownership. And worse, your silence makes your sacrifices in your younger days worthless if we lose ours, our freedom, in the process.

A (1:21)

Okay, well, first of all, thanks for the support. Much appreciated over the years. And hopefully you've taken away something positive from the books and the podcast and whatnot. And you are correct. We all have flaws, me included, of course. And there are a lot of things going on in the country right now that are very polarizing. A lot of things going on in the country that are very polarizing. I am. I don't aim to be one of those things that's very polarizing. My goal as a person and as a leader in any organization that I'm in, whether I was when I was in the SEAL teams, whether I'm in business or a citizen in the country, my goal, first and foremost, has always been to try and find common ground and. And bring some unity to various situations. And one of the most profound places that I learned in that lessons was when I was running the Advanced Training Command for the suit for the West Coast SEAL teams. Sometimes SEAL platoons would have infighting because. Because there's all kinds of things to infight about when you're in a SEAL platoon. Different techniques, different procedures, different postures. You have different personalities in the platoon. And if the platoon leadership and the platoon themselves, because once you have. Once you have two divergent leaders, then they get their own teams within the team, and if they start going at each other the platoon can't find the common ground, and things fall apart. And so the extremist political sides of our country do a great job of capitalizing on people's egos and on people's fear and anger and resentment and other kind of reactive emotions. You ever notice, like, someone can say something to you and you. It will cause an emotional reaction, like, just. That's just. Just the way it is. So that's not good. And if you pull the string on what's causing that emotion, a lot of times it's ego. But if it doesn't cause. If it doesn't cause an emotion, one of the fear, resentment, or anger, a lot of times it will just trigger your ego. So I've always been very cautious about that. And if, you know, you've read all my books, which is awesome, I thank you. My default mode is to detach from emotions and detach from chaos and detach from mayhem and try and understand things and be balanced. So another thing you might recognize from reading all my books and listening to thousands of hours worth of podcasts that I've said over and over again, along with detachment and emotional detachment and putting your ego in check is one of the most underrated tools of being a leader is listening. So I try and listen and assess what's going on. And quite frankly, in this, every single day, there are events taking place that I could go through great effort to address these things, right? Whether it's riots or killings or arsons or arson or protests or assaults or bombings, right? And all these things are on different scales, some. Some bigger than others. And depending on what side of the media you're on, they're either completely amplified or completely ignored. But the thing is, you gotta remember is each one of these things has their own little nuances and their own little details, and you could analyze them for years. And I just don't. I just don't live in that world. I'm not monitoring the news 24 hours a day, pouring through reports, trying to decipher the details of countless news stories. I don't. I have other things that are happening, right? I have businesses. I have hundreds of employees. I have vast projects and tasks and charities that I work with and teams and family, of course. And, you know, I work 12 to 16 hours a day. And. And I'm not. None of my work revolves around being a political commentator. I'm a American working man. I can also tell you, and I would probably gather that, you know, that you might be able to sense that the media and the Political spin is not healthy for you. It creates divisiveness and hatred between our citizens. And it kind of does that on two levels. One level is because they want division, and the other level is on the media side, they want you to click on the stories and they want you to share stories. And there's no faster way to get someone to share a story than to make them emotional about the story. So if you love it, you share it. If you hate it, you share it. And that's. So that's what they're looking for. So they're feeding you the most emotion that they can give you. And my take is I don't want to add to that unless I think I can offer a perspective that some people might not see. So I stayed attached, so I don't get caught up in either side's propaganda. And in the meantime, of course, I mean, I see what's going on. I'm not. I'm not living in a cave. So I see things that are happening, and I see multiple sides to all these different issues. I see where both sides are right, and I see where both sides are wrong. I see both sides make mistakes. I see both sides make sense, and I see also see both sides act crazy. So, you know, what do you specifically ask about? Oh, two citizens were killed. That's absolutely awful. That's terrible. It was really horrible to watch. And those officers were not trained to be properly detached in very stressful situations. And the two citizens that were killed were somehow led to believe that it was their duty to go out and aggressively interfere with armed federal law enforcement, which is not good. So here's what I can tell you. These are human beings. These are human beings that have been put into stressful situations, and human beings in stressful situations do what human beings do in stressful situations. So when you mix these ingredients together, you're going to get bad things. So. So there you go. Did I progress this, you know, argument any further? No, I didn't. I told you that humans act like humans. You tell one group of humans that there's evil people coming in and you need to stop them, and then you put those people in with other people that are federal agents that are executing what they've been told to do, and they think they're right to do it because they're getting rapists and murderers out of the country, and so they're trying to do their job. So now you have these two opposing forces, and you're going to mix them together, and guess what's going to happen. Bad things can happen. So I wouldn't encourage that. I would de escalate that on both sides. So, you know, there's one America took out Maduro. And I hey, if you're on the side that says, hey, that's none of our business, we don't have the right to do that, cool, I can see your point. And if you're a person that thinks Maduro was a tyrannical leader that's killed thousands of Venezuelans and imprisoned anymore and conducted mass extrajudicial executions, and on top of that, he's facilitated the influx of drugs into our country that's killed hundreds of thousands of people and that the people of Venezuela celebrated his removal. And so you think it's a good move. I can see that side too. So I can see this is history taking progress. History isn't perfect. History isn't nice. History doesn't know whether it's gonna be right or wrong. But by the way, you know, how do those things turn out? I don't know. I hope, I hope that Venezuela transitions. Well, it seems like it is. There's not a civil war happening. There's not a power vacuum that's being filled. The infrastructure has been left in place. In fact, it's being improved. They're doing something that we didn't do in Iraq. Remember in Iraq, we went in and we eliminated the entire Ba'ath party and fired 400,000 soldiers. And then what did they have no jobs. And what did they do? They found a job being insurgents. So we did. We. Seems like we did a little bit better in Venezuela. I certainly hope it turns out a lot better. I. Hopefully they. This transition takes place and they hold elections and they move towards a nice situation where they have freedom and democracy. That's what I hope for. Can I guarantee that?