Jocko Podcast 224 w/ Darryl Cooper: In An Uncertain World, Stack The Deck In Your Favor

this is Jocko podcast number 224 with
echo Charles and me Jocko will Inc good evening echo good evening there is
seldom a Mexican standoff in battle you either win or lose and in many fights a
commander reaches a point where he thinks he's lost he sees only his losses
and knows only his own situation not the enemies the carnage surrounding him
erodes his confidence Wellington at Waterloo thought he'd lost so did Easy
Company in the fight on the hill up north under desiderio Grant summed up
the feeling best at Fort Donelson during the Civil War he said either side was
ready to give way if the other showed a bold front well we'd certainly shown a
bold front but so had the men from China Neary appeared again this time carrying
a little unconscious Chinaman I found out later that after I told him we
needed a prisoner he'd taken it as a personal assignment he charged up the
hill and stormed the top unarmed once in the enemy position he'd smashed this
chink on the head with his fist and hot-footed it back to me
unfortunately the powa got the skinny he kept trying to pull one of the grenades
off near his belt on the way back and near he hit stomped him obviously a
little too hard so we got another prisoner but then just when we needed
him most our interpreter Kim decided to bug out speed saw him running down the
hill he stopped him I go I go said Kim and edged away Jack didn't know what to
do he was good and ready to waste him instead he leveled his weapon and shot
off Kim's hand this persuasive little tactic work and we bandaged up his hand
and Kim decided he liked our company how draw the word from the PIO w was just
what he wanted to hear our artillery had clobbered the enemy reinforcing unit and
no one on the hill had any fight left in him I told Jim and the others Jimmy and
the others to round up every gun that could walk limp or crawl we were going
to storm the top 20 bloodied and battered Raiders soon crested the hill
its surface which was covered with enemy dead
the Chinese defenders who hadn't been killed on position had chanced running
the gauntlet of military shot which continued to blast the back side of the
hill judging from the carnage on the reverse
slope few had made it but an intact Bren gun crew was still raising hell among
our tired band there were more casualties until Jimmy and Evans went on
the attack they killed the crew but paid the price Jimmy lay like a broken Reed next to the
gun he'd taken a shot in the face that ripped through his right eye and lower
jaw Evans lay nearby staring at Jimmy with wide lifeless eyes and a satisfied
look on his heavily moustached face there was the look of a winner
he probably just said to Jimmy we got the son of a bitch before a burst of
enemy fire most likely the last of the fight he didn't full in the chest and
ripped the life out of him near he switched on his radio to report the
capture of Hill 400 relief was enroute he was told dispatched by a worried
Colonel Sloane when we went off the air oh say can you see I fought as in the
dull light of the morning we collected our scattered and broken fighters from
the blood-soaked American held hill the inexhaustible brakeman was kneeling over
Jimmy pumping life into him with a container of albumin we had seven killed
in action 29 wounded in action and one Raider Salazar was missing the only two
Raiders who were not hit or Lipka and sovereign the two Gunners their machine
guns had been out of range of the frags that had depleted our ranks it was a
strange turnabout normally the gunners ride in the death seat we turned the
hill over to the relieving Wolfhound unit and continued looking for Salazar
we wouldn't leave the hill without him and any man who could walk joined in the
search he'd been patched up after he and Smith had knocked out the machine gun
but no one had seen him since he'd returned to the fight a faint moan was
heard in a draw on the steep left-hand side of 400 it was Salazar more dead
than alive he'd been blown off the hill by a
grenade and somehow with 29 slugs or shrapnel wounds in his body that tough
Texan hambre was still sucking air the doc got some blood into him and we
started down the hill we carried all our dead and the wounded who could not make
it under their own steam chink 82 millimeter and 120 millimeter mortar
fire continued to smashing around us but it was ignored by all after what we'd
been through it didn't mean a thing Colonel Sloane had walked alone to meet
us on Hill for hundreds forward slopes he too ignored the incoming as he went
from Raider to Raider helping comforting praising tears streamed from his eyes in
that early morning light as he helped us down he led us to the aid station and
there I saw seven figures all lined up each covered with a poncho it's just a
nightmare I fought but I didn't believe myself at
all I went to each body and pulled the sheep back off the face one by one I
cradled those men and rocked them in my arms crying and mumbling and damning God
because he had let me down now that curtain had fallen the shock of it all
came on suddenly I felt empty every part of me ate my mouth was dry as a beach
full of sand Sloane helped me to my feet he was a
fine caring man and a great commander the medic came up looked at my wounds
and hit me with another syrette of morphine it dulled the pain but not
enough he told me to go lie down in a litter so I could be evacuated but I was
not about to go anywhere the welfare of my men was not a responsibility that
could be delegated until everyone had been cared for I'd stay right here and that right there was an excerpt from
the book about faced by colonel david hackworth is actually the first book
that i covered on this podcast and it's the book where so many of the principles
that I talk about on that I utilize in leadership and life stem from like the
fact that the welfare of your men is something that cannot be delegated or
the fact that it was okay or at least normal to cry and mumble and curse God
in my petty anger the fact that it this kind of
uncontrolled emotion didn't make me a lesser man than that to lose your men
your comrades your friends is raw pain and I learned that from the book about
face or actually I should say that it solidified in my brain and when you read
something if you do it right if you read it right you take what you read and you
overlay it with what you know and you make that experience and that knowledge
from what you read part of your own and you know when I read when I read books
on this podcast some sometimes I get sometimes I get hit with some emotions
and I've always I've always managed for the most part to keep it together but the emotions that I that I that I
feel they're not directly from what is going on in the book I mean obviously
that's part of it but it's not the story from the book it's the memories that I
have because as I read I remember and I find myself there again feeling that
pain and that loss and there's a thread of human emotion that runs from whatever
story I'm reading into my own story there's a connection and if you trace
that thread then you can learn from it and I learned from it that's what
happens when you when you read and you absorb a story correctly when you
connect the thread of history with your own experience and your own knowledge
and and you make that connection when you do that you learn you learn and you
also you you begin to understand more now after a short time after we started
making this podcast someone sent me a message on social media and at this
point it was pretty easy to respond and actually follow up and take action on on
things that people were saying to me because it wasn't a bunch of them and
somebody just sent me a message on social media it said said there's a
podcast called martyr made you will like it so I
some point pulled out this podcast called Margar made and I listened and as
I listened to that voice I heard that voice making these connections
connections between the past and present connections between the emotions of
people from the past and our emotions right now
a voice that connected the emotions from from soldiers and citizens and
terrorists and patriots and murderers and martyrs the voice connected those
things and the voice understood understood something and that voice read
and spoke and tied those threads together and that voice came from
someone named Darrell Cooper who is the voice and the mind and the emotion
behind the podcast martyr made and I guess through the benefit of the
interwebs we eventually connected and Darrell just has a very good handle on
wrapping these connections together and he's here tonight to talk with us about
those connections the story of you know what his life has been and then the
thread that connects him and us to the past and the present and the future
Darrell thanks for coming on man thanks for
having me um yeah I remember somebody hitting me up and saying you gotta check
out this podcast and you're opening for podcast one Episode one of Margar made I
said oh yeah here it is this guy whoever told me to listen to this was right and
you actually put out that podcast well what was it early 2015
that sounds right yeah I can't remember I know it I know it was before I started
my podcast I know that because I looked at it the other day to try and figure it
out and then you know when I found out and the more I found out about you and
kind of your background and your backstory it's pretty it's pretty
fascinating and in my opinion let's let's go into it man let's start let's
start let's start at the beginning of your life how'd it start where'd you
come from I came from all over I was born in Stockton California
Stockton 209 209 yeah right on but I lived all over the place
I probably went to I tried counting them up every once in a while but there's
kind of gaps in my memory I went to maybe 35 36 37 schools k12 so we were
moving around all the time had a single mother who was taking care of us and you
know we kind of had to scrape and scrounge and you know live where we
could and at the end of the day you know we always had food on the table we
always had you know a roof over our heads the most part took care of us but
you know there was some there were some close shaves their various times and we
had to kind of bounce around wherever we could so I've lived all over California
from the south all the way up to Eureka for a little while I don't really
remember much about that but a lot of time in Stockton I think I went to every
school in Stockton at one point I think I went to 11 different high
schools in four years what like what's causing you to go from one high school
to another high school just you know we were poor we kind of had to move
wherever we could find a spot sometimes sometimes that meant moving in with
relatives other times that meant you know friends of my mom sometimes it
meant getting farmed out to various relatives while my mom kind of went on
her own little Odysseys for a while and had to look after herself
and so just bouncing around I lived up in Montana for a little while when I was
in high school I actually ended up graduating while I was up there and that
was a good experience it kind of you know I was one of those kids who is a
lot of people like this and I think a lot of folks who are comfortably
middle-class don't really don't really even understand this when you see it
down in LA there's a lot of kids who live in South LA for example there may
be 20-minute drive from the beach they may have seen it once in their life and
that's kind of that's kind of how we were you know you get confined your
little neighborhoods you know and you get on your bikes and ride around you
know like latchkey kids but your worlds very very small and so growing up and
kind of you know a lot of the rougher neighborhoods a places like Stockton and
Central Valley Bakersfield different places actually
being able to get out and go spend some time Montana when I was in high school
it was pretty life-changing for me I got to kind of be in a lifestyle and around
kind of people in a high trust society that I had never been around before you
know I'd never been in a place where people don't worry about locking their
car doors or where it's normal on a two-lane on a two-lane Street when
people are passing each other to wave to one another I just never seen that
before and it kind of opened up you know when you come when you come from a
certain world where social connections are very tenuous social trust is kind of
low to be around a place like that where people are generally looking after each
other it's obviously crime there's things that
happen but generally people are kind of looking after each other it lets you
know that there's a different kind of life out there so it was very good for
me we're what how'd you get up to Montana
what was the situation that allowed that to happen my grandparents moved up there
at one point I was probably in maybe late middle school when they moved up
there and then at some point in high school we would visit them for the
summer and we would always really enjoy it they had about 30 acres up there a
little farm and then at one point things were getting pretty hairy at home and so
we ended up going up the kids me and my sister we ended up going up there and
staying for a year year and a half before my mom ended up coming as well
and what your how many sisters Javel I had three rather two at the time yeah so
I was I was up in Montana of I was probably like 10 years ago maybe eight
years ago and it was in the summertime and I was driving out of Bozeman through
Big Sky and I was driving back to California and it was it was the
summertime and I wanted my kids to like sleep on the whole way home
so I left it probably 7 o'clock at night but it was the summertime so it stayed
light until about 9:00 so I did the full drive down the what is it the 191 I did
the full drive down to 191 which is just absolutely like the it's epically
beautiful yeah just beyond it's just epic and now my kids are falling asleep
so it's just me you know listening to Black Sabbath or something and just just
amazed right and then by the time I'm making it to wherever Idaho or something
and you start getting into the more open terrain it was dark and then I drove
through the night and as the Sun started to come up I was in San Berdoo and I
remember you know there's parts of the what is it parts of the 15 of the 215
through San Bernardino that turned into like a two-lane it's not like a big
highway and there's always traffic and so I I came from this just absolutely
open mountainous you know snow-covered Hills which there's snow-covered Hills
in the summertime pine trees animals everywhere and then the next
thing you know I'm in San Bernardino and you know it's just a totally different
world you know and when you were talking about the different world that you live
in you know and I grew up in a tiny New England town on a dirt road in the
middle of nowhere and you kind of think that that's what the world is but yeah
kids and I think it's probably less like this now because you can see so much of
the world through the internet and through media and through movies but
yeah it was kind of like that was your world so that must have been a serious
eye opener for you to get to good to go from you know central California to
freaking Montana it was yeah and socially what especially
socially you know coming from middle schools in high schools where you know
on one hand something like a fight on campus was taken very seriously there
are armed cops on campus right coming from a high school they had almost 5,000
kids a subway and a Pizza Hut you know on on campus and going to you know a
school up in Montana were my graduating class had about I think 40 people and
you know in a weird way a fight was not as big of a deal up there there this the
counselors and teachers would literally tell two of us to take it outside but
there was no threat that this was gonna escalate into something that no one was
getting shanked right it wasn't even in anybody's you know mindset that that was
a possibility and so it was like it was like going back a few decades you know I
know in a way and they still call soda pop up there well there's parts of the
country where that's just for that's just how I still I just can't help it
it's like Buddy Holly like 1950s but it was you know there's a lot of things
that it feels like going back a few decades which in a way is it's kind of a
sad way to look at it because the things that are different up there are really
that there are certain certain elements of civic society you know social trust
and things that they take for granted that we don't take for granted and the
cities on the coast for the most part anymore and so to say that it's like
going back few decades you know it's kind of
admitting that we've lost a little something down here and that you know
maybe there's something that's gonna be encroaching you know on the areas that
still have it you don't like to think of it that way but if it's how it fell so
wouldn't you when you were going from high school about how many high schools
did you say you went to I think eleven a couple of them I went to more than once
so I would change and then come back to another school so so how did you who you
hanging around with you know it would depend so when I would find at the
school in Montana that I was that I had like a little group of friends that we
would hang out with we go you know one of them their parents had a branch with
a bunch of land and we'd go out there and play paint Bob's it was a great time
and I had a good group of friends up there a lot of the times when I was at
my schools in California the big ones you just get lost in I would not really
I wouldn't hang out with anybody I would be the kid you know in between classes
I've got my nose in a book and lunch period I would go throw some shorts and
shirts on and go run laps or run stairs and in the football stadium or something
just kind of by myself to play any sports off and on and I got to be a
pretty decent wrestler by the end I played football when I could track
cross-country whatever you know depends on where I was it was hard because you
know it's kind of strange it's a rule that never really made sense to me and
it still doesn't but there I guess they're trying to prevent like schools
from bringing in ringers and stuff but if you get into a school there's like
you have to have been there for a certain period of time before they allow
you to participate in sports and a lot of times I was changed in schools every
three months you just wouldn't make the window
yeah so you like you say you were reading yeah at what point did you
figure out you're gonna start reading books cuz I don't think I figured that
until I was 28 you know you couldn't get me to read a book I mean when I was
going through high school you that was like a crazy idea to me just actually
voluntarily sit down and read a book it would be tough for me to figure out when
that started it's as long as I can remember though when I was 5 6 7 years
old I got to the point where if you stuck me in you know if I was in a
dentist waiting room and he had a you know an old issue good
housekeeping I'm reading the whole thing you know as long as I'm in there I read
dictionaries I read encyclopedia de round it's kind of I kind of missed that
actually like now with the internet you never read anything random you like you
go find something that you want to read about and you click on a link and you go
to the next thing I would just read whatever there happened to be around I
would literally read the dictionary if that was what was there it was it was a
refuge for me you know in you know in a life where instability was probably the
defining feature you know when I was growing up it just gave you these you
know I could I could be reading a series of books and something I could take with
me from this school to the next school to the next school and kind of stay in
that world and yeah it really was a refuge and it you know that the books I
would read was that's where I would get a lot of my sort of models for behavior
everybody does that to a certain degree you know they model themselves on their
favorite heroes or whatever but coming from a place where I didn't have a whole
lot of role models around especially not for any period of time they really took
the place you know of my real life role models and kind of taught me how to
behave in a lot of ways and kind of taught me the virtues and values that
you should that I should aspire to because I didn't have a lot of models
for those things in some ways it becomes you know you can you can get
pathological about that you can get to the point where you're so sucked into
these fictional worlds that you know I have friends a lot of people it seems
like mostly women but I men to who they can tell you how many they think
they can tell you what flavor of birthday cake they had on their seventh
birthday and what they got as presents and I don't remember anything from like
ten years ago and it's just you know most of the time throughout my whole
life and this is still it you know I have like a little bit of a Doctor
Dolittle kind of thing going where or mr.

Magoo rather where you know I'm
always up in my head you know I'm always thinking about whatever book I just read
or you know whatever book I'm about to read
and so I'm always kind of up here and I'm a lot of times I'm missing things
that are going on around me and so you try to ask me about things that happened
last week or let alone years and years ago there's hole patches of my childhood
that are just totally inaccessible you know and not even things where you know
somebody could be like you know that time and they jog your memory it's just
I was not present at the time you know my nose was in a book or that's what I
was thinking of and so I really kind of you know kind of kind of use that as a
refuge did you you you know you at you said you had a single mom what was going
on with your with your father at this point you know and so my father was gone
out of the picture permanently by the time I was – he was my mom was 16 years
old when she became pregnant with me had me when she was 17 and my father was a
criminal and a drug addict and a violent guy and came from a violent family you
know and he was in jail for the final time that I ever saw him when I was 2
years old I have a couple like very very brief kind of flashes of memories that
I'm told for him but I don't remember what he looks like
or anything like that and yeah so he was gone by the time I was – right about
that point right before he left he left my mom with my sister so she was
pregnant when he went to the clink and you know at that point my mom 19 years
old two of us so far two kids dad's out of the picture for the last time you
know she's got a 10th grade education any did she were her parents around you
know my family's kind of uh it's it's one of those I think it's a good
American story right there's various strains of immigrants you know my
great-grandmother came from Serbia and like 1906 or something like that my
great-grandfather her husband came up from Mexico you know these two people
from these completely opposite lifestyles and sides of the world
somehow find each other but they're both coming from you know my
great-grandfather was a miner you know he would his family would be in
California and he's going off to know Arizona and working in silver mines and
stuff just break his back to provide just enough for his family to get by it
was a hard life my father's side you know my father was a bad guy a million
different ways but you know he I hear I hear horror stories about where he came
from you know he was sleeping on a park bench when he was 12 years old because
his mom threw him out of the house his uncle was teaching him how to shoot up
when he was 13 14 years old you know this is a I don't hate the man at all I
never met him afterwards or anything like that but I have sympathy for
somebody like that there's very very few people you know discipline equals
freedom and all those kind of things your uncle's teaching you to shoot up
when you're 13 years old you're climbing off a pretty big hole you know and so
you you have like these sort of these these these family lineages that have
just fallen into whatever they may have been at one point back in the past by
the time they get up to about my grandparents generation it's just chaos
right it's just no structure no support system no no anything and things had you
know Mike my grandfather who was my mother and her three sisters which are
all for my hands that's that's all over my mom siblings my grandfather came into
the picture after they were all born and he's their stepfather he's the only
grandfather I've ever known but he was their stepfather and he provided some
stability he was a navy chief you know he was in horn real ornery old bastard
at the time he got to be a big soft teddy bear later on but he did provide
some stability and that was starting to kind of come together around the time I
was born in 81 but not really you know it was still like in its early stages
and so they were around but you know they didn't have a whole lot of patience
for you know my mom the way she was acting out she was already probably gosh
in her teenage years when she was having me and and you know her and her friends
were already drinking and partying she's probably an alcoholic by that point
already my grandparents didn't have a lot of patience for that kind of stuff
and so they were around sort of if she wanted to shape up but there wasn't
really a support structure for especially if she wasn't like
to kind of fully conform mm-hmm and so she was really out on her own from a
very early age you know with kids and ain't no real she's 17 years old and
she's got a kid you know what I mean she's by herself and then she's 19 years
old she has two kids yeah so when you're in school like are you what what you
know what is it what is it you know you're talking about how the world look
like you know physically kind of and socially on the outside from your mind
what did you what your future look like did you see you know are you looking at
people going oh well I could do this or I could do that I could go to college or
I could go in the military or I could like what were you think about day to
day did you have any visions like that not until pretty late no I you know one
of the things about I think a lot of people when they look at somebody like
you and whether this is true or not it's the impression that they get is that
Jacko's seems like this guy who like turned 18 or whatever got out of high
school and just I know exactly what I want to do and now from now this point
on like for the rest of my life like I'm gonna just focus on becoming that thing
and everybody's like god I wish I could have like had something like that when I
was whatever age most people go through their whole lives and they never you
know have that level of a vision of what they want to become and then being able
to focus on it and when you're coming up in a very unstable environment one of
the things that happens is your time horizon just gets shrunk down and shrunk
down and shrunk down until you know you're really trying to figure out how
to get through the next week or the next day or the next you know class or
whatever it is and thinking about the future no I mean I can't remember as a
kid like you know maybe maybe I watched Jurassic Park and like I want to go dig
up dinosaur bones or something but as far as like a serious vision for my life
now yeah you know I actually had one of the Jocko live events that I did I
talked about this fact but it's just pure luck right it's pure luck that at
some point you know you watch tracks Jurassic Park or whatever and I watched
a full metal jacket or I watched platoon and at some point I watched one of those
movies actually he's probably Apocalypse Now
I think that's the first the first thing when I was you know whatever probably
you know eight years old or something Apocalypse Now made you want to be a
soldier oh yeah that's just great job but you know you see Apocalypse Now and
you think okay you know I always you know I was always running around playing
war I was always running around playing soldiers so I had that in my brain but I
think when I realized oh yeah you know I was thinking about this the other day
there was a friend of the family who had an older son who was a Marine Corps
drill instructor and when he came home for leave or something and he had a
Chevy like SS right a Chevelle and he had a badass muscle car and you know he
was a Marine Corps drill instructor and I was like okay you know I don't know
how old I was but I wasn't old and it sort of made me realize that this idea
of my in my head of running around and being like some kind of commando was a
real thing that you could actually do and then then once I found out about the
SEAL Teams cool but my whole point in telling you all this is that you know
you here uh you here to like Jordan Peterson will talk about you know you
got to have if you have an aim then you then you know what you're trying to get
after right so when I joined the Navy and like wanted to be a seal and then I
wanted to be a good seal that was my aim and you're 100% right once that became
my aim and once I figured out what I needed to do and the beautiful thing
about it was in the Navy and then in the SEAL Teams they told me this is what you
have to do to be good to be a good seal you do this to be a good seal do you do
that to be a good seal you do the other thing so absolutely I was lucky because
you know I was a freaking you know crazy kid that was doing all kinds of really
stupid stupid things that just were not good for the world and luckily I signed
that dotted line and became you know when the Navy but so I did have that and
that immediately I was like okay and when I was I think my mom showed me
something where I was you know like whatever eight years old or something
yeah and it was what do you want to do when you grow up and I said like soldier
or marine like that was good to go right so that was it whenever anybody talked
to me about anything else I was kind of like a collider to know what I'm doing
so that was a real benefit and that put my whole future into context because I
saw this thing that I could do and as I told Johnny Kim the other day like when
I joined the Navy I felt completely liberated because I knew that I was good
to go for 20 years you know or 30 years I was like yep I'm good to go I've got a
job I got a paycheck I got a gonna have friends it's gonna be
cool I'm gonna have a mission to do like something to buy into it was something
to aim at it was something to buy into it as part of being part of like the
coolest gang ever so what's not like what's not to like I think where a lot
of people struggle whether it's probably two parts of it is one is trying to
figure out what that thing is you know most people they just they have things
that they're into and they what I think what most people really long for is
something that'll just present itself you know there'll be a ray of sunshine
shining down on it and they'll they'll just know this is the thing that I need
to devote all my energy to and now I can there's your aim right now I can just
devote myself to this thing fully I think that's why people you know get
caught up in movements sometimes right whether it's politics oh you know
whether it's a jihadist movement or whatever like whatever it is it's
something that like here's the answer do this here's a clear path to becoming you
know a better person quote unquote according to the following value system
but you know how to sort of level up in this in this mode and for most people
that doesn't come for most people you have to kind of start trying things and
really start working and then it'll unfold over time for you it's not just
going to present itself you know as easily and then the other thing is and
this isn't just true of kids that came from difficult backgrounds like I did
it's it's true you know more and more people where you know people talk about
like class privilege you know your parents are
most most of us like way that that applies is not that your parents are
gonna leave you a bunch of money it's that your growing up in a household
where you're watching your dad get shit done you're watching your mom get up in
the morning and put herself together and go about her day and put the house
together go to work whatever it is and you're just watching people encounter
obstacles in their life and assess execute you know what orient themselves
and overcome the obstacle and you know there's a just a growing number of
people who and I certainly was this way you know growing up with a single mom
who was having a very difficult time managing her own life and any kind of
you know the most basic ways I never saw anybody just sort of encounter an
obstacle at a point where they could see it in the distance you know everything
was a panic exercise all the times everything got put off until the last
possible moment and now you have to react to it because it's an emergency if
you don't everything is an emergency all the time and so you don't you don't
learn how to sort of structure your your your goals and how to systematically
work towards them and that's something that you have to learn you know I I was
fortunate enough that you know I had a couple coaches at various times for
brief periods but they made enough of an impact that you know things got you know
that I had a different way of looking at things but even me like I didn't start
to get that until until I was in the Navy you know probably I was 20 to 23
you said you were good restaurant rid of a wrestler were you all right decent I
mean I could hold my own I was I had a winning record but I wasn't any you know
so you didn't make it to state why not like that or did you well I went when I
was up in one Tanna but those boys up there Montana so I like this in
California up in Montana these kids I'll start when they're four or five years
old it's ridiculous and like down here if people start 7th or 8th grade like
they've got a huge jump on people because most people start a 9th grade
down here it's changing a little bit now let's changed a lot did you just I'm
here a report that the yeah these kids are getting after us I mentioned how you
know one of the things that happens when you're living an unstable life is that
your time horizon just shrinks you know your focus don't get
through the next on keeping your emotions together for the next half hour
sometimes let alone like thinking years in advance about what you want to do
with your life and you know a lot of people kind of
stay in that mode where they're just getting through the day and they're
doing that 365 times and then that's a year and then they do it from you know
more and more and then that's a couple years and now they're adults and they
don't even feel like they've made any decisions in their lives they feel like
you know obviously everything that they've done has been a decision but
it's never felt that way it's always felt like the momentum of their lives
is just carrying them forward and they're reacting to whatever the the
next thing is that's demanding a reaction but they didn't plan for that
you know for that thing it's just presenting itself upon them at a time
when they're not really prepared for it they haven't gotten themselves and so
they're just making a decision in the moment that may or may not here's
actually I should not tell this story actually so one of my first memories how
do I want to talk about this okay so one of my first memories like probably my
first memory is just my childhood occurs to me in flashes just brief little
flashes of images that people tell me are real and so I believed them when I
was like 2 years old I think I was laying on a bed with my father I must
have been 2 or younger cuz he was out of the picture when I was 2 and he used to
like to cut wedges of green apples and put a little bit of salt on them and eat
them I was eating these with them and we were
watching a TV that was like I'm one of those stands like up in the corner so
that's one flash and then there's a couple other flashes like that and then
there's a flash when I'm five years old and I know it because I was in
kindergarten at this specific school that I was at and I had just shit my
pants and I don't know what happened before that and I don't know how I
reacted to the situation it's just like the vision starts and I've crapped my
pants and then that's all I know and like then
it fades out right and so when I was in the Navy down in San Diego I had a
friend who was riding a bike down a hill and he fell and hit his head and so he
was in the hospital getting concussion workups and everything for a few days
and he lived with a bunch of other Navy guys down on one of the
really nice neighborhoods and Chula Vista when it was nice you know housing
developments down there like two two doors away an admiral lived in one of
those neighborhoods and it's a Sunday afternoon
and he's supposed to be coming home from the hospital my other buddies picking
him up and so I'm gonna go there meet him just to you know see how he's doing
everything so I get to the house and they're not there yet and so I just call
him up the hospital's taken awhile and so I said I got a book in the car I'll
just read the book until you guys get here so I'm doing this for a little
while and I'm drinking a 20 ounce coffee which is a terrible idea pretty soon I
start to get a little a little rumble right and so I call up my friends and
I'm like Richard any year doors open or anything like that like is there a key
somewhere can I can I gotta go the bathroom he's like I'll just piss in the
bushes oh my I gotta do the other thing he's like um I don't think so you can go
check and so I go check and garage door all the windows everything is closed and
now since I'm up and moving around it's really starting to become a problem
right and so we had another friend across the street so I run across the
street and I knock on the door pound pound pound doorbell doorbell and
nobody's there and I've run across the street now so now it's getting worse I
come back and I'm starting to panic I'm asking myself can I get in my car and go
drive and look for a gas station or something but I don't know the
neighborhood that well and I'm not confident that I can do that and then
now I'm out in the middle of nowhere I got might be out of options and so I'm
literally I go down like three or four houses knocking on the front doors but
nobody answers the door and I run back to the house at this point I'm starting
to panic and so I go into his back yard just so that I'm protected from
full-view or something right and I'm looking around and I decide I'm gonna
have to take crap in his garden which is not a it's not the worst thing that ever
happening but he'd go dig a little hole take a crap in the garden wipe with some
leaves do what you got to do and so I'm going over there and I'm preparing to do
this and I make this fateful decision and yeah my point here is I mean this
like panicking mindset and I'm not planning anything I'm just acting I'm
just doing whatever right and so I look up and they have a backyard like a
balcony deck coming off the master bedroom and I look up there and I say I
bet that doors not locked and for some reason I just decided I'm gonna
try that and I go over and I'm climbing up there's no stairs or anything so I'm
having to like pull myself up and climb up onto this back deck and as I'm trying
to pull myself up my shoes are real loose so I kicked my shoes off so I've
got just my socks on and I I'm at this point from the select from the strain of
getting up there that like if that thing's locked
I am crapping on my friends deck that's just all there is to it right and so I
get up there and I run to the door and I throw it open sure enough it's open and
I just run into the place and I'm already cooling my pants and underwear
down as I run into the master bathroom and literally doing one of those things
where you're like diving ass first towards the toilet like to kind of get
there and as I'm diving like that toward the toilet I can't explain this decision
like to this day I look and I realize he's out of toilet paper I can't I can't
do it here and so I jump up and pants and underwear down around my ankles I
run out of the bath run out of his bathroom and out of his bedroom and down
the upper hallway and he has one of those stairways where it kind of you
know it goes down like halfway and then there's a stopping point a platform and
then it goes down at a 90-degree angle and so I'm I mean what I'm just
everything is hanging out ass is hanging out and I run and I just jump onto the
second deck turn jump onto the ground floor which is like the bottom right in
front of the front door my socks cuz I kicked off my shoes hit the tile slide
out I fall down bang my head and crap everywhere and I'm literally lying there
this is a true story and so I'm laying there and for it at that point as I'm
laying I mean it's going up my back like I'm laying on my back and it's just
right and as I'm laying there I had that vision like it just came right to me of
when I was five years old night crapped my pants and it was almost like this
mystical like thing that happened where it seemed like the two incidents were
somehow connected right like I had had that happen and then it just my life had
been like one you know there's tumbling momentum up to this point that had led
me to a place where I'm lying on my friends you know tile floor with my
crap running up my back and I'm just laying in it with my head ringing trying
to figure out like just just going over all of the horrible decisions that I had
to make to end up in this situation and all of the off-ramps that I had to avoid
hit like I could have just gone to his garden I could have just you know
crapped in the toilet upstairs and solved the toilet paper problem like we
cross that bridge when I got to it but when you're in this mode where you're
just making decisions based on immediate need and whatever it's funny like I
didn't mean for this like to fit so tightly like this it kind of came into
my head when you mentioned it and you know you're just making decisions and
then you end up in places that you really can't explain if somebody were to
say like you know well you did this and you did that wrong and he did this
you're kind of like yeah yeah yeah but at the time like it didn't feel like I
was making a decision I was just I was just going and people do that in like
their real lives you know and oh the actually so the funny part is the end of
that story was I cleaned everything up and I got
literally like I'm just my heads ringing and I walk waddling over to my friend's
bathroom to go clean myself up just dripping it's disgusting and I'm like 25
years old I'm not a child okay I'm gonna dump you you're like this
is literally 2006 you're in Ramadi right now and this is what I'm doing and and I
get in and I clean myself up and I do my best to clean up the floor but he's got
like the grout tile and you can't quite get all the smell out and so by the time
my friend gets back home with my friend from the hospital I had a change I have
like gym clothes in my car I'm just sitting in my car reading my book like
doopa doopa doopa and so we go into the house and my friend smells their shit
somewhere and he blames his dog and he starts shouting at his dog and I'm just
watching it happen like I didn't say anything I didn't tell him four years
after that and but yet people do that with their whole lives right so instead
of having you know just their head bringing and being splattered with their
own with their own shit you know they have
three kids and an alcohol problem and maybe a record you know from something
they did when they were 17 or whatever it is and they get into this place where
like now the enormity of trying to correct course it's so overwhelming for
them because they not only are they in this hole they they have no tools you
know psychological tools emotional tools anything to kind of navigate their way
out of this it's a lot of people like that now I think that's why podcasts
like yours Jordan Peters I mean it's they resonate
with so many people because they they they they let people know that you can
just take control of your life like you can just you can just take control you
can start doing the right things like right now and you know what the right
things are maybe you don't know what the right things are in like a grand scale
but you know how to write you know how to clean your room you know the little
things that you don't do every day you sleep in stop sleeping in get up early
get up at 4:30 you could do that you know and when you get up go work out
maybe you don't know what the long-term path is but those these little things
that you can start to take control of and no matter how unstable or chaotic
your life is you know you can start to control this little world that can start
to expand once you do gain control of it and yeah so I mean that's one of the
reasons I really like it's been 20 years probably since I read about face but you
know the passage that you just read made me think about like one of the things
that I really liked that it was the idea that you can be in a situation that
feels extremely chaotic and so that you don't really have any anything stable to
use as points of reference when you make decisions but you can still carve out
like a little zone of control and you can make decisions like you know take
you can take control of that little area and you can you know you can be the
person that once you got control of your own life that maybe just the one person
that's closest to you need you to be and then the two or three or four people
closest you need you to be and you can kind of start to you know no matter what
the situation is no matter how chaotic it feels you can start to you know take
control and and uh yeah and like I said it took me
well I said 2324 earlier but I'm still shitting up my back when I'm 25 so maybe
I'll push that age fit dope hood out a little bit past that but now you and I
have talked about this a little bit but you know one of the things that I think
makes you unique is your cognitive capacity and and you know for lack of a
better way of saying it you're smart you're smart person and but when you
were in school like did what was the academic life for you like when you were
in school I was a C student I think I graduated with like a 2.4 I was one of
those kids who you know I'm smart enough I'm not a genius
but I met that level of smart where you know it can be a blessing or a curse
just like a you know you've got a high school athlete who has just been so
naturally gifted that he you know in in high school he just never really has to
learn work ethic he just doesn't have to and then he gets to college and it's
like oh everybody's a badass here and then it doesn't work out the same way
because it's just you're not going to develop that like overnight now at this
point you had to spend a lot of time doing that and that's what everybody
else has been doing so you know I when I grew up you know my home life was chaos
a lot of the times I mean really just chaos and and so I would come in and I
would a s– all my tests and I would you know write good papers when those were
due I'd win all the spelling bees went on and all the math contests and so
forth but I could probably count the number of homework assignments they did
on one hand in 12 years I just didn't do them and you know you could learn some
really negative lessons from that you know you can learn that you don't really
have to work on a day-to-day basis because when push comes to shove at the
very very end or whatever when the chips are down you can just sort of throw
something throw things together and make it work which works when you're trying
to pass you know history in seventh grade it
doesn't work when you have a serious job with a lot of responsibilities and
people you know who are depending on you doesn't work and so I feel very
fortunate that I went into the Navy because it allowed me sort of a space in
my late teens and early 20s to learn some lessons that if I had to learn them
out in the civilian world there would have been a lot greater consequences you
know for my for my growing pains and so yeah academics I mean it was you know
like my teachers generally like me I kind of depending on where I was I could
be a little bit of a clown have some behavior problems but uh you know
depending on which parts of my childhood I could be I was pretty angry kid that
could be pretty violent sometimes you know there's a lot of violence at home
and I had two little sisters that I was looking after and kind of trying to
provide some kind of stability for and so I would do my best at home not to
show any emotion really not to show that I was being affected by things that were
going on around but then I would get to school sometimes and I would take it out
on other people and I was never a bully I got bullied at home you know and so I
didn't like bullies but I would be kind of the kid who was waiting for an excuse
and you know I went to a lot of kind of you know inner-city ghetto schools where
I was the only white kid around and everybody else is in the same boat I am
as far as the stuff they're dealing with at home you know and so you know you get
a bunch of kids who were in middle school or early high school and
environment like that and there's plenty of excuses to go around if you were
looking for them and and yet even despite that you know I'm getting fights
and I would have some behavior problems but you know my teachers generally they
they kind of is another one of those you know blessing and a curse thing right
where they let me slide a little bit my teachers would like me for the most part
but they would let me slide on things they probably shouldn't let me slide on
just like they let me slide on never doing my homework because they assumed
that they kind of knew that things were kind of crazy back home and they would
make those excuses for me and you know you got to learn at some point in this
something I didn't get until I was in the Navy and had some good leadership
there that you're gonna reach a certain point in your life where nobody's gonna
care about your excuses anymore it's just not gonna matter like people will
they might sympathize or something but that's just it's not their problem
you're an adult now which means your problems are your own you know and if
you're looking around when you encounter a problem for who's gonna fix it without
realizing they're like oh I'm the guy like I'm a grown-up now
so I'm actually the one who's supposed to address this problem like other
people are supposed to be looking at me you know that's kind of that's kind of I
guess what I would maybe define as an adult
right is if you encounter something rather than having like a dependent
mindset where you're looking around it who's going to fix this you realize
intuitively you're that you're the one you know that that doesn't happen for a
lot of people for a long long time in their lives if ever and it didn't happen
for me until my mid-20s and you know again it's one of those things that
maybe you just sort of have some set of experiences or something in you where it
just clicks naturally but you know I think for most people you you pick that
up by watching the adults around you take responsibility for their own lives
and if you're not exposed to that that it can take a long time you know and it
took some some you know some ass-kickings in the Navy from some of my
leaders to kind of bang that into my head people that I owe a lot to you know
really owe a lot to and I was a huge pain in their butts for a long time but
you know I owe them a lot for sure you uh I guess maybe your senior year you
took the SATs and got a perfect score on your SATs yeah you know and I had you
know I was graduating with like I said about a 2.4 and nobody really knew who I
was or anything I was just a normal average goofball and then I aced my SATs
and you know so I get called in for like a meeting with the school counselors and
everything and they kind of talked to me about living up to my potential and all
those kind of things and you know I just I wasn't in a place at that point where
I was gonna make much of a dent you know at that one place yeah at that point in
my life like I knew I was a smart enough kid but when you're grown up in
like that I think you know one of the things that we will be all struggle with
is you know you grow up with a with a with a a very limited sense your own I
don't want to say your own capabilities because you have it doesn't necessarily
it's not that you don't think you can do things or accomplish tasks or something
but a very limited sense of your own of your own worth you know you you every
kid who comes up in a broken home has this little voice maybe some people find
a way to overcome it but I think most people they just learn to live with it
and you know sort of have put it in its proper place that's whispering in the
back your head all the time and no matter how things look around you no
matter what other people are telling you no matter how good your life is going at
the end of the day you're basically worthless you know you come out of the
gutter and that's where you belong and it's just it's something that uh you
know when you come from a certain kind of background it is gonna be in there
it's like you know the when a Roman general would be celebrated in a triumph
and they'd be in their chariot on a parade and everybody's cheering for them
they would put you know a slave behind him to whisper in his ear that despite
all this you were only mortal just to remind them of that it's like a really
pathological version of that all glory is fleeting yes yeah and and so you know
the idea that yeah I think about when I have kids the thing that I want to get
into their heads and I and I think about all the time how I'm gonna do it is I
want them to have in their heads that like you know if you want to be an
astronaut just pick the craziest thing you want to be a fighter pilot you want
to pick the craziest thing it is purely a matter of deciding that that's what
you're gonna do and then just focusing on it and step by step by step just
ruthlessly pursuing it and then you can literally do whatever you want you could
do whatever you want there's nothing that's closed off to you just kind of by
the nature of life you know and when you when nobody kind of teaches you that and
for whatever reason you don't pick it up in other ways you know maybe you you
know you figure out when you're thirty that like oh if I want to start focusing
on this when I was fifteen then you know whatever but like most people get to the
point where by the time they start to if they come out of that state you know
they've got so many obligations or a couple kids whatever it is that now your
life is kind of on a certain track and you know that's the thing that I would
love to get into my kids heads then you know there are no limits to what you can
do if you decide you want to do it there's nothing that's just naturally
closed off to you because of who you are or what you are or anything like that
but you know that's something that kids have to learn or maybe it's the other
way maybe they maybe they start out that way and they learn to think of
themselves as limited I don't know but I think kids have a hard time and I was
give this advice to parents and to kids when I talk to kids is kids have a hard
time connecting the fact that what they're doing now will will impact their
future and the way that you behave right now is going to impact the way you the
where you end up in life and I think that's a major connection that doesn't
get made and then the other thing is when you say to yourself well what do
you want to be when you grow up and your answer is I don't know that's not a good
answer because it doesn't give you anything – hey Matt right but if you say
I do if the the fall on for a parent when you ask your kid hey what do you
want to be when you grow up and your kid goes I don't know then what you need to
explain to them is okay then I want you to have the most amount of options
possible and the way you have the most amount of options possible is to be a
good athlete do good in school or card learn a work good work ethic state you
know stay out of trouble if you do that when you're young and you don't know
what you want to do when you get older you'll have a bunch of different options
to pick from if you don't do that and you don't do good in school and you
don't take care of yourself and you don't work hard and don't get good work
ethic and you get into trouble all a lot of those options are gonna close now
that's the way it works and so you have to explain those things to your kids
when they're and you have to explain it to them over and over and over again so
that they get it cuz otherwise they don't and you know like I said for me I
was super lucky because all my crazy you know all all energy going in
multiple different directions and most of them bad all of a sudden with the
signing of one piece of paper all of a sudden they all became focused in the
right in a positive way and that was very helpful to me and very helpful to
you but yeah so before we jump in the Navy
sir you get a you get a perfect score on the SATs which is insane especially like
I understand those kids that get perfect scores on the SATs a lot of them go to
you know a tutor and study and computer systems and they do all this stuff and
they take all the classes and they study all these classes all the time
you basically obviously you have the natural ability and then just reading
that's which makes me feel very vindicated or or reinforced because I
always tell little kids hey the way you get smarter is by reading read read read
read that's what you do it worked for you apparently did you get any like
pressure like hey you need to go to college well this was pretty this was
pretty late my senior year by this point and so I had kind of already decided
that I was gonna go to the State University where some of my friends were
going at the time and I didn't spend much time there I went there for a year
and realized that I didn't know what I wanted to major in and I plan on going
into the Navy afterwards anyway and my grandfather was in the Navy retired as a
chief and so I just said well I'm not gonna waste any more money here and more
time here and so I joined the Navy and it was did you join to do any specific
job no I was at a point where undesignated to the fleet know I you
know I aced my ASVAB and so you know they wanted to make me a nuke but I
couldn't go nuke I couldn't leave for like 18 months if I was gonna be nuke
and so they put me in as you know doing electronics I could you start off in the
same school and you can be an ET or a fire control man and fire control
Massoud did cooler wake over and so and so I went down that road
and I've I'm very glad I did I've loved my job ever since you know as far as my
actual the actual stuff I work on and everything I love it so when you joined
the Navy what was bootcamp like was it like a positive experience because you
were getting structure and a paycheck and all those things especially the
structure and and kind of like what you were talking about all of a sudden I had
a game that I knew the rules to you know that was look it's kind of a thing when
you grew up with instability is you just don't know what the rules are you don't
know like what actions am I supposed to take that'll actually lead me to a
positive place because it just seems like no matter what you do you know it's
it's it's not like you take a step forward towards some goal in another
step forward another step forward is you take a step forward and then the
situation changes and you're in a new place and now you take another step
forward and the situation changes in your new place
and so you can very easily get into a place that you can get out you can get
up sort of learned helplessness in a situation like that where you're just
kind of focused on trying to provide yourself a little bit of stability you
know in your personal emotional world a little bit maybe you know if my sisters
at the time and that's all you're really focused on you don't you just don't know
the rules you don't know the rules of the game and when you get into boot camp
you know I went in they went when I joined the Navy because I had some
college credits they said we can make you and III and I said well what do I
got to do do that I said you know go get your transcripts and so forth I'm like I
want to leave like as soon as possible like I don't care about that just I want
to get out of here and so I left three days after I walk into the you know
recruiters office basically what year was that 2001 in January so oh so it's
pre September 11th yeah and you were able to leave in three days I might be
exaggerated a little bit but it was very rapid I mean it was really rapid and so
I was on the bus and from the time I got there I loved boot camp because it was
where did you go to boot camp San Diego no Great Lakes they didn't have anywhere
but great locally and I was in January and my RDC my drill instructor was this
guy who was he's in you'd already been in like 25 years he was a Navy diver he
had this you literally look like Popeye he was kind of jacked and he had this
screwed up royal face recruit and he was his name was HTC Brian and he was just
such a badass he I mean you know I grew up without a father you know and I had
like an uncle and a grandfather who I would spend time with for periods of my
childhood who were good role models for me and like provided some stability and
like some idea of what you know a virtuous man look like and strong man
with issues with his life together look like but like all of a sudden I had this
dude who was like he was just like a rock you know and he was and the thing
that the thing that boot camp did for me that I think this is probably the
biggest lesson most most kids who were just unstructured get out of it is when
they would do things like you remember when they would do things like you know
one drill instructor would come up and tell you to you know make your rack and
do all these other things like you got a half hour to do it and he'll leave and
then another one will come and tell you to do a whole bunch of other stuff it's
gonna take you 29 minutes and so then you're done with that you know the first
one comes back and says why isn't your rack made and Don another done it up he
knows that you didn't have time to remake your rack the point is he's
trying to teach you that the answer is not oh I couldn't do it because of such
as such and so and so the answer is Roger that I'll make my rack right now
that whatever your excuses are nobody cares nobody cares and for me that was
it was it was the most helpful thing about boot camp and so I went in as an
e-1 even though they offered me 300 and he
won but in boot camp they made me the you know crew chief petty officer our
puck like right away and then I've you know for the for all of the graduating
divisions I was the honor recruit and so they made me an e3 anyway coming out of
boot camp and you know from then like once I got into the the technical school
pipeline you know I was the class leader all the way through I aced all my
schools and I was just like you know on point it was just you know it was nice
to know the rules of the game and know that if I do the following things
right then people are gonna people that I respect and whose approval I want are
gonna be happy with me and you know the just sort of the incentives and inputs
we're you know it's hard it's hard to describe when you come from such an
unstable environment how liberating it is to be in a place where you know there
are known rules to the game and you know you know how to play it it's it was it
was very very good for me so you know that's a good leadership perspective
there you know I talk all the time about how you got a light you know and not
only they talk about solving I do this all the time if you work for me you got
all kinds of leeway to move around and make things happen and step up and
execute things but occasionally I'll work with a boss who has got so much
who's so laissez-faire and so hands-off that no one actually knows what's
happening and the and the same thing I'll say listen you know I'm talking to
your frontline or I'm talking to mid-level managers they don't even know
what it is that you want them to do and so you know we'll formulate a plan of
alright here's the mission here's what we're trying to get done here's our
goals here's our produce and they put that out and then I'll go and talk to
the you know the the the subordinate leadership and they'll be so happy
because it's just what you said they go from not knowing the rules the game what
are we focused on what am I supposed to do and how do i how do I move through
this system right now to like okay I got it
you want me to do these things thank you for telling me so that is something that
as a leader you have to be careful of and that's something that that
definitely you know you and I had the same experience cool I'm playing a game
now and I know the rules so what was when you were how long was your rear
fire control school explain what that is a little bit so fire control is not
being a fireman fire fire control is working on naval weapon systems and so I
worked on the aegis weapon system which is the air defense and ballistic missile
defense system we've got on all of our destroyers and cruisers right now if my
school was about a year and a half and so you start out in like a basic
electronics schools people you know a lot of people on the outside they don't
understand they're taking people off this
and basically making effective they don't know what an electron is they
don't know why it is that when you plug something in the lights come on if I
didn't know any of that right I knew it was electricity and they got to take you
and turn you into somebody who can go you know take a bunch of test equipment
a bunch of tools and go figure out what's wrong with a hundred million
dollar radar right here and they do that in a relatively short period of time I
mean Navy schools the tech schools I think people who come out of those
schools our College has got to be such a cakewalk you know for doing that like we
were in we were in class for eight hours a day and then we had a couple hours of
mandatory group study sessions every night and that was five days a week
every weekend we had homework that was going to take four hours both days you
know eight hours total something like that we did that for a year and a half
and it was you know they pack a lot in and they know if you really like focus
on getting an education in there they will make you like pretty competent in a
pretty pretty rapid period of time and so I was a year and a half and then I
get put on I was on a I was learning about a brand new system I went to the
first ship that ever had it right this variant of the spy radar the aegis spy
radar and so I get there and the ship's keel has just been laid basically in
Pascagoula and so I get sent to San Diego to wait for the ship to be built
and it's not gonna be done for another year and a half two years and so I don't
see a ship in the Navy until I've already been in yeah just over three
years so what did you do for that year and a half it was pretty awesome
actually so we didn't have all I could do we didn't have especially for like
the first eight nine months or so we had very little supervision because we were
some of the first people that got there I think when my little group of of Ages
text showed up there the ship had a XO command master chief one other chief who
was out in Pascagoula and then us out here by ourselves and that's basically
how it stayed for a long time and so we played the other base teams in softball
we had a lot of those like computer-aided you know little classes
that you got to take on they teach you nothing because you never seen a ship so
like all these things you're reading about have to do a seaman ship don't
mean anything to you then after I had started to I had
already done all the computer-aided like tests I was done with every there's
nothing left for me to do and other people start showing up you know at this
point and I figured out that you know they have like they used to call like
SSE W and then they had like the bunch of advanced shooting courses basically
they had the simunition one that they did on the pigeon down on Pier 39 few
ever seen the they ship down there that you go on and basically play Counter
Strike you know and I had already done everything and so I just started asking
him can I go to this one again can I go to this one again I would go to these
like eight nine ten weeks in a row just go into the shooting courses all the
time so it's pretty great and yeah so that was a year and a half I
got to the ship in 2004 just over three years that I've been in at that point
and yeah I got to the ship and you know my attitude started to change a little
bit I'd a little I had some setbacks and I was on the ship
I just didn't you know I didn't work very well with uh I worked I worked
really well up to that point where where I could be where there was a route for
me to be the hotshot you know and boot camp that's exactly what happened in my
schools that's exactly what happened and when I was at the pre comm detachment
that's exactly what happened like I was the man out there you know because it
was just a limited group of people and it was a defined you know number of
activities that we were engaging in and so when I get out to the ship there's a
much larger group of people there's senior people you know I'm an e4
and I'm just another face in the crowd at this point and a junior sailor nobody
cares right but I'm just you know I was immature still by this point I'm 23
years passe and I just start having clashes especially with the Chiefs mess
you know just having Wars with these guys I was one of those I was a pain in
the ass I was a huge pain in the ass I look back on it now and I know some of
my Chiefs from back then and I'm like dude I'm so sorry like I was such what
were you doing just subjecting though that doesn't make any sense trolling you
know like sort of like in a way where you know I never showed up to work drunk
I never showed up to work late I never had any Liberty answers nothing
like that right you were an even worse kind of process I was the worst kind of
problem and it took me a long time to figure out why and the fact that I never
had any of those quote unquote more serious discipline problems allowed me
to think I was getting picked on right by a bunch of people just didn't like me
because I would look at these other people this is actually what happened
that turned me around I literally had an overnight turnaround I went to Kathy's
mass three times in one year I got convicted all three times for what
disrespecting a chief petty officer you think that captain's mask it was this
was a petty officer I was a problem that was a problem give me at least a little
bit of example cut only because in the SEAL Teams I don't know that I can
remember I don't know I don't remember anyone ever getting sent to captain's
mass for disrespecting a chief petty officer for a couple reasons the primary
reason is you would just get you know catch a beatdown like that just it's
just not gonna happen you'd get beat down yeah and and I wish somebody could
have just kicked my yeah do that normally so so you get captain give me
an example that is freaking insane you know I don't think any of them were
particularly egregious here's what I would do right is I was actually like an
artist at at figuring out exactly where the lines were I knew what the rules
were I know where the lines are and then just taking all my clothes off and
tiptoeing along them like hahaha I'm not touching you I'm not touching you right
like just I'm getting pissed off and like here's an example like one time is
the perfect example of the kind of things I would do after the first Iraqi
elections in 2005 you know the purple finger isn't everything I I know
perfectly well that writing out an all-hands email is something that the
captain the XO and the command master chief are allowed to do nobody else led
you you can't have every e4 writing out all hands emails right no you can and so
I write up this long email with pictures of the people with the picking of the
purple fingers and like telling everybody like you know
we've accomplished and this is such a great thing that like the US military's
helped to make happen and fire it out the AUSA you wait you wrote a serious
email yes but I would say you knew it kind of was well I would say that I did
it because I did it to be a pain yes but I meant what I said but I also was like
aha like I can troll them here and they can't really do anything because I'm
celebrating what we've accomplished and like you know whatever that's the kind
of thing I would do and once or twice it's like okay yeah knock it off but I
was persistent and I would it got to a point where and took one one guy first
class who I had just banged heads with for a long time before this I hated him
and he hated me and after this we got to be great friends literally like he
turned me around a one day so the third time I go up I got 45 45 45 days of
restriction and extra duty all three times right in one year and we were on
deployment for like five months of that year and we didn't count underway time
so I was locked on the ship for like nine months and and because one of them
had to do with like you know sending out the All Hands email for a good portion I
didn't have any computer access or anything I'm just in jail like on the
ship and and the last time that it happened so but what's the last time
that what happened that I went to Captain Smith what was the last was the
last offense okay yeah so this is the end so this is perfect because it it
just set everything up perfectly for me to get turned around and it doesn't
sound like that first so what happened was at this point they they were so
tired of my crap that they were definitely like just looking for a
reason right and and I knew it and I felt persecuted because of it right even
though I'm totally being a pain and so they they found something like I was I
didn't I done I was a person the designated person in the division of the
time who was supposed to do our maintenance on our damage control
equipment which kind of details you to like another division the damage control
division part time and so there was a time where I was supposed to go do
maintenance fire hoses and after you're done you put
this sealant on him to protect him from the elements something like that
and if that particular time the ship was out and the of the sealant and so the
guy at the damage control guy who is in charge of everything that particular
time you told everybody just don't worry about it this time go do your
maintenance and so I went and did it so a month or two later I get written up
for having gun dak this maintenance because I said that I did it in
accordance with the card but I didn't use this sealant you can tell because
they're all rusty and so in that instance I was able to bring like 15
other people who were all able to vouch for me
and you know that you did like where you went straight what's that movie uh you
went straight what's the damn Jack Nicholson movie a few good men you went
like straight you brought witnesses in did you do that I had one person who was
in my division who knew that I was telling the truth and I was like I can
bring people in like and they knew that I was right they I convinced him at the
time that I was right but I was also like I was so this I was completely
innocent this time like of this right not innocent but of this I was innocent
and they still gave me forty five forty five but all three of those times so 45
days restriction yeah and 45 days half sexual duty no special he never took any
pay and even though I went three times in one year they never busted me down
because they kind of knew that part of it was personal part of it was that I
had a personal problem with some of these guys but you know they screw my
personal problems I'm subordinate like if they're Jesus and I'm not right so
Roger that this is like the worst I'm serious like I'm saying this is like the
most annoying or the worst leadership problem is so annoying especially when
you have somebody who's smart enough to sort otally well you know and just you
know while I'm saying that like what I absolutely would have done with you is I
would have put you on a fast track I would have put you in charge of things
like I would have I would have done things so I I'm upstairs and one of our
combat system spaces and at this time like I'm really feeling aggrieved right
so now that you've already been you've been you now you're under sentence this
is this is later that day after I've been sentenced and so I'm really feeling
victimized here because I'm actually innocent of this and I'm still in that
mindset right and I've got my chief up there and my
chief at the time he's a great guy he's a good chief but he did not know
how to deal with me like he was just he's too nice and I needed someone to
put a boot up my ass and he was not that guy and he's a great guy I know him
today and he's just an awesome dude and he's one of the people I apologized to
on a regular basis and so I could i corner him basically and there's other
people in the space and I am just tearing him apart like I do this I do
that I do all this work in the division and what about this person who showed up
drunk he didn't go to captain's mast what about this person who didn't show
up from Liberty and like miss ship's movement he didn't go to cameras mast
and you're targeting me for this bullsh that's where I was at and from a
perspective I was right and so I am just laying into him and he doesn't know what
to say and so this first class who is my LPO at the time I don't like him and he
doesn't like me and it's funny because he this was this was he was he was like
uh he was uh he's a very interesting personality he's like um he's kind of a
nerd but he was like kind of a alpha personality still he was a sailor he was
a guy who took his job seriously and like you know if you just caught him out
on the street he's not some like alpha personality necessarily but like when
he's doing his job he takes it seriously right so he sees me tearing up our chief
his chief – and he's like Oh God like I gotta save him and so he runs in there
and he listens to me talk for another like 30 seconds or so and then he just
turns it around and he starts biting into me and I go back and forth with him
the crowds gathering up at this point and then he says are you seriously gonna
look me in the eye and tell me that you play no role in the putting yourself in
a position you're in right now and I was like okay I couldn't say that right and
and he's like I'll tell you what like this isn't this isn't World War two we
don't shoot deserters okay this is a this is a Navy these days where you know
if you don't want to be here I'll take you to the old man he will sign it you
won't even get a dishonorable discharge if you want to leave we'll let you leave
and every day that you're not doing that you're really listening for 24 hours
every day you come in and show up for work you're really listening for 24
hours because you can leave if you want to nobody's gonna prosecute you for
desertion whatever like you can leave and so don't
tell me that like this is such an awful and horrible place to be and everything
is just wrong with it or whatever because every day you're volunteering to
come in here and when you know every time I kind of try to tell the story to
people it doesn't hit them as profoundly as it hit me but at the time it just it
made me realize that all of the the entire mentality that I had carried
forward into that point up to that point on the ship it was just it was all wrong
it was a completely dependent mindset where I was looking completely outside
myself for the cause of all my unhappiness and problems and everything
he just got me to see that it doesn't matter what situation is like the ship
was disciplinary mass it was like it was a tough place to like if that's the
environment you're adapting yourself to it's easy to go awry right it was
there's a tough play of who's our captain got escorted off by Marines like
as soon as we got back from sail around what happened so we were in the Panama
Canal and the captain was an animal he'd be a guy who like he was a guy who like
seemed like he read about being a captain in world war two and now he had
his ship and he's walking through the interior of the ship with a lit stogie
in his mouth and he's just being a captain right he was a great guy in a
lot of ways but he's a wild man and we were in the Panama Canal coming over to
San Diego and when you park in the Panama Canal
sometimes they tie you off to these big wide concrete buoys right that kind of
keep you in place and so we were doing that and one of the Panamanians dipped a
line and it got caught up in our propeller and it sucked this giant
concrete buoy down and destroyed our propeller and twisted the shaft up going
all the way up into the ship right and so we get stuck in the Panama Canal for
several days we're like basically trying to figure out what to do with ourselves
everybody's super stressed out there all of the jitters are completely full
because when you're in the Panama Canal you can't discharge so they have to
bring on porta-potties those are awful people are like you know leaving bags of
crap like you know in closets so they can go throw them overboard at nighttime
so they're for like four or five days everybody's super heated and when we
when we're going to pull out finally they tell us just go limp home
on one propeller just just go and we go to pull out and I'm standing watching
combat and all of a sudden as we're getting ready to go
I hear the captain come over the intercom right the 1mc
know like you know crew this is captain or anything like that he says
master-at-arms this is the captain get up to the bridge right now he has the
Panamanian pilot arrested and confined the pilot that Panama Canal is one of
the only places where the captain gives up control of a ship there's a pilot who
was Panamanian down there who will drive your ship like when you're either
docking or leaving dock right and so he has this guy arrested and confined
because he gets into a huge fight with him drives the ship out himself hits the
pier on the way out and then has the quartermaster's doctor the logs to keep
it out yeah and the XO at the time did the right thing you know he kept it he
logged it himself and kept a diary but and then when we got back he reported it
because you know on one hand it's like you there's some people who thought it
was disloyal I'm like there's a bunch of jao's up there who their whole careers
are screwed if they're anywhere near this he saved all of those guys yeah he
did the right thing and so yeah so it's a chaotic ship there was a period like a
couple of years in where I think a third of the leadership all got you know
swapped out and booted off the ship for fraternization all at once we had an
external investigation because everybody was just sleeping with everybody it was
a disciplinary but was there females on board yeah oh yeah and and so but you
know and yet it was this guy my LP at the time who really somehow like he I'm
not a type person it's easy to shut up you know like especially if I'm like
getting going like whatever like I'm just I'm coming just like I was coming
at that chief and for him to be able to just shut me down like that like people
who were there were like they looked at me like oh what's he gonna say now and I
just had nothing to say and I went down to my rack this is now I'm on
restriction this is my first day of restriction and I literally go down to
my rack and I lied and I can feel something working inside
me and I just I just I don't I can't it's hard to kind of really describe it
I woke up the next day and I was not just a different person my job as a
completely different person it was like I it was like I matured ten years
overnight where all of a sudden I woke up in the morning and I was like oh this
is my life now and it didn't feel like that before in
the same way I could be like you know when I was doing well in boot camp in
school and everything it's like I can be good at this game
girls go sir you're playing a game right but you know getting to the point of
realizing that like whatever the environment is around me like I've got
my own responsibility to like you know take care of my own circle here and
literally the next day like I just completely different person this was
late in 2005 and around early 2006 so this is just a few months after I get
off restriction for the third time this year and I'm a second class at the time
because we're a pre comm we got everybody at once at the beginning and
so all of our leadership is changing out all at once and they got to find another
LPO and this is just a few months after me coming off my third stint on
restriction in less than 12 months and they made me the LPO because I turned
around that much and part of it was because we had this one guy on board he
was an older guy who kind of joined the fleet late he was like a bouncer in
Texas six five 260 armory dude really great guy but an armory dude and he had
kind of enough personal problems with other people in the division they
couldn't make him the LPO but they knew nobody else in the division could handle
him just on a personality level and so they put me in charge and it was exactly
what you said as soon as I got to a point where I realized that the
well-being of these other peoples now depending on me you know or if I want to
go start a fight with a chief that's gonna roll downhill and these other guys
as soon as that happened I mean my mindset completely shifted it was it was
it was a revelation and so the next year I was 2005 I I got convicted at
Katherine's mass three times in 2006 I was the destroyer squadron Sailor of the
Year and got a 500 eval yeah and our division was
the hot division on the ship you know we had we gave out
you got a 5oe Val yeah that's insane I was I was on fire man like I just uh I
you know it wasn't just it like I kind of realized like oh I can kind of do the
right thing now it was like uh it was it was like this revelation to me I was
eating it up I was like holy cow I can just I can just go do all the right
things and like I can take control of this situation and then you know I don't
have to wait for other people to sort of tell me it's all right or to tell me
what to do or I don't have to I don't have to be reactive I can just actually
go make things happen and you know and it was just a huge revelation so I was
just eating it up and yeah and I you know I owe that guy a lot you know I owe
that guy a lot I mean he and I after that we got along great he was this was
before don't-ask don't-tell got shit-canned and so he was he was gay and
when we would go in we got to be like enough friends that we would go into
ports in like Australia and other places and he would want to go off to like a
bar somewhere he couldn't tell anybody else like I would go with and cuz he had
to have a Liberty buddy to go with him and so I would go and that's that's a
good friend and a port for the first time and however long and you're gonna
go to the gay bar with the whole night and I would just hang out and like yeah
dude if you go to a gay bar in Australia you know you're those dudes are pretty
aggressive so you have to like you know be ready to just keep cool but I mean
that's how close I got to this guy you know really great friends with that guy
and to this day like I owe him a lot and I owe a lot to all the people who put up
with my crap for as long as they did because they had plenty of excuses to
just be like you know this guy's not worth the trouble the hell out of here
they could have booted my ass out for a million different things not for you
know again not punch anybody in the face or anything but I just I was not worth
the trouble what they were to work and everything else they were getting out of
me was not anywhere near you know what are the trouble I was given them and
it's like you said in a way it's the worst kind of trouble to deal with
because you know what I finally realized was the
reason that the guy who showed up drunk doesn't have to necessarily go to
Catherine's Mass and get hammered the way they were coming after me is after
they come to him and say how dare you this is wrong whatever he puts his head
down and he says Roger that he submits to the authority of the chain of command
and that was what it was my entire life was making a show of the fact that I did
not respect the chain of command like that was my whole goal on the ship was
to basically like be a performance artist at that and coming up with
creative ways to flip off the chain of command but doing it in ways again where
I know where the lines are I know what the rules are so that once you hammer me
for it I can say this isn't fair even though I'm totally provoking them like a
hundred percent and everybody knows it they know it but worse all of the other
junior sailors know it and so they're if they don't hammer me i under mines the
the entire authority structure if they don't come squash me they have to figure
out how to get me to bend the knee and because as long as I exist like that
like you know it could break down the discipline on the whole ship and I
finally understood that you know I finally understood why they had to come
after me the way they did and you know they just I took ownership for my own
situation you know and but again I I took somebody getting in my face and
shut me down and and if he hadn't walked in there that day I don't think I know I
wouldn't have learned that lesson I would have just hammered my chief and
walked off like haha got him and that would have been that I never would have
learned that lesson at least not in that timeframe so once you were now squared
away it's now 2005 what was you you're going on – boy how many deployments did
you do on that ship – in both of them we were doing independent deployments
actually supporting some of your buddies out in the Philippines okay yeah we were
supporting the Swick and seal operations you know when they were fighting
insurgents down some of the southern islands there you know since then I
worked for the DoD now and I deploy with ships sometimes and so I've gone on I
don't know ten or fifteen deployments at least for good chunks of them so I've
been all over the place at this point but
yeah that was so that was six when they put me in charge of the division and we
actually didn't have a chief at the time either so I was a second class for a
while and I was our acting chief and there was a Chiefs mess full of guys
that hated my guts and I had to learn to navigate that too and some of those guys
it was personal enough by that point that like they didn't really care much
that I kind of turned my attitude around took some took some time but yeah and
once you turned your attitude around and you are now dealing with these Chiefs
sometimes you see people slip back right like they they get some chief that they
didn't respect before but now they try to turn over a new leaf and when they do
it's like that guy that grace they still just can't put their ego in check enough
to stand down were you able to stand down well I would
say to a degree right so um I was the acting LCP oh and I was a second class
right which meant that we didn't have a real chief kind of defending our guys
and a lot of times my second classes and third classes would get stuck with extra
work that no other division wanted to do and and so there to a degree like the
the like I became very very protective of my guys like very very protective
because you know remember like I'm now in charge of a bunch of people who watch
me go to Catherine's mask three times last year right and I gotta navigate
that leadership issue some of them are older than me there's two first classes
in the division I'm only a second class you know and I have to figure out how to
deal with these 2025 people and I feel like I can walk in one day and you know
because I've ironed my uniform properly come in and be like now everybody listen
to me like a sign of work right and it's funny because as I've been doing this
latest podcast series on Jim Jones I've realized something that in a way what I
did is I started a cult not like a personality cult where they worship me
or anything but in a way where I created like a very strong us versus them us
versus the rest of the ship kind of mentality right and it bonded everybody
together one of the things I'm most proud of in my whole life is that I
would 80% of the group that was in our
division for those couple years to this day says 10 years ago they're all still
friends or they're at least like 1 degree of friends separated from each
other like if we had to get together today everybody would be like right
there like they just seen each other created some very powerful relationships
but it was very much like a you know like when I would have somebody get in
trouble one kid got a DUI am I gonna come up to him after I've been a cat his
mask 3 times last year and be like well how dare you this is just unacceptable
mister as I don't work right and so what I would do is I would say look you know
things are pretty good in our division right now right I give you guys each of
the each of the work centers I give you guys a lot of leeway to run your own
business and I don't like come over your shoulders all the time there are a bunch
of Chiefs on this ship who would love to get on their evaluation that they're the
CF now is our division that there are divisional chief right there they're
circling like vultures now I can hold them off as long as you keep behaving
you know hold off those those hyenas but when you misbehave like that it gives
them ammunition to like come after us and so I would create this thing like
they were out to get us and some of them were because some of them hated me
enough you know but then and after a while it becomes a little bit of a
self-fulfilling prophecy you create that us-versus-them vibe and you know you you
can only only go around thinking that you know other people don't like you so
long before just you make it true right true I always had to be careful that
because I'd get the whole gang mentality going and it would be us against the
world and you know every once in a while I'd
have to pull back the reins a little bit cuz you know you got 22 year old JP
Danelle thank you somebody says something bad about the task unit and he
is ready to murder someone I have to pull the reins a little bit you know
because it gets a little crazy in the in the days so what made you decide did you
make first class then pretty quick pretty quick yeah once I had that was
the ace the freaking tests and you had a 500 eval yeah I mean they were only
promoting 3 4 or 5% up to first class for my rate at the time but
yeah I pretty much ace a test and I defy but we bail so I made it pretty quickly
and then I got because of the way that the schedule worked out I was just like
a little kink in the schedule I got to know I got to pick my orders my Shore
Duty orders before I had to decide whether I wanted to re-enlist which is a
beautiful thing and so I ended up taking taking orders up at Port Hueneme which
is where it's like the engineering place for the aegis weapon system and any time
we would do major technical or training evolutions guys from there would come
out and and work with us the engineers who have been working with this stuff
for a long time and so they kind of knew who I was and I developed some
relationships with them when I was still on the ship and so when my orders came
up you know they kind of helped me get out there and that was a good experience
too because you get into a place like that where you know you think you're
pretty good at your job you think you have an idea what you're doing and then
you get around people who really know what they're doing and you realize like
you're like a little baby you know and yeah it's a great place to live it's a
great place to work so I've enjoyed that as well it's taking me all over the
world a lot of freedom in my job you know a lot of ability to kind of operate
independently so it was good and then at one point and what so so this whole time
you're still reading a ton I assumed oh so like in this job for example I would
say I would I would be away from home traveling mm 70 80 percent of the year
like sometimes I'm going 1011 once a year and a lot of that time is out on
deployed ships or I'm out in a place like Bahrain or somewhere else where
there's not a whole lot going on and I would bring a suitcase full of my
clothes and workout gear and everything and a suitcase full of books and I would
just that's all I would do when I was out there by myself at what point did
you start thinking about making a podcast when some of my friends told me
to make one so that I could leave him alone I you know I I was hardcore
history fan like everybody else right and it takes a long time between
hardcore history episodes and you want something else to be there and this is
in the early earlier days 2015 there weren't
that wasn't a bunch of podcasters and so I happen to be reading a lot about the
history of the israeli-palestinian conflict for the last couple years and
I'm always talking my friends about it and they're like finally one of them
said why don't you just go start a podcast you're always complaining about
hardcore history taking too long just go make one in between those episodes and
so I said okay I'll give that a shot and yeah so I started working on that one
and that was another one of those it was it was another one of those revelations
where it's very humbling in a way I got to the point where I had read maybe six
or eight books on a pre 1948 period of the israeli-palestinian conflict
if you've read six to eight books on a topic like it's pretty easy I'm pretty
good it's pretty easy yeah and so I start making like the first episode in
the second episode and by the time I kind of you know I'm outlining them and
kind of putting them together and by the time I kind of get up to like Episode
three or four of like how I'm making my outlines now I've read like twenty or
thirty books and I would look back at like the first episode that I had put
together when I had read like six and I realized I didn't it was it was
hilariously bad like not just like you missed this little point here whatever
but that you had I had no idea what I was talking about and then when I you
know I think all the time now about like it's really easy to get me to
pontificate for hours about some topic that I read one book about you know and
these are this is a topic that like I had read six or eight books on at the
time and having to look back and realize it I knew nothing about it like the most
basic kind of had you already recorded upon number one you just laid out the
notes yeah and I'm so glad that I took my time you know by the time I got
through that entire 6 episode series you know I read close to a hundred books
parts of another couple hundred almost two thousand you know academic papers
and articles and essays and Diaries and things like I just I read almost
everything that I could find on it to a point where I would get a new book and I
would read it or a new paper and I would read
and I would be glad if I would get like one more little tidbit out of that
mm-hmm and so I felt pretty good about that series when it was finished and a
lot of people you know have enjoyed it obviously I'm glad I caught you early
when you could still respond to emails was that you that sent me that I should
listen to you I don't think it was I don't think so I don't think it was I
think it was somebody else which is pretty random because I mean at that
time I I know when we started on this podcast 18 I've saw this figure 18
percent of America was listening to podcasts so you were before that so
maybe it was 15 or 12 percent of people for so for somebody of to have heard
your podcast and then my podcast and then connect us on social media that's
pretty frickin impressive it was you know I never expected anybody listen to
it like I didn't just never I'm not an authority on anything I don't have any
credentials you know or anything and I it just it never occurred to me but was
gonna was gonna be listening to it and it was yeah it was a lot to handle when
people started listening to it and started writing me emails I've gotten
emails from from Israeli Defense Force active duty guys running patrols in the
West Bank who have written me and said that like this made me sympathize with
the Palestinians more right that's a dude who that matters that's a guy who
like is gonna be dealing with these people tomorrow on patrol and I've
gotten emails from people from Arabs Muslims all over the Middle East who
said I never I never thought about the situation that the Jews were in in that
way before and I'm like it's a it feels like it's a pretty heavy responsibility
but at the same time like it's you know it makes it so that like you really feel
like okay I got a I gotta make sure that I'm saying things that I mean and I'm
putting the amount of work in this at it that it deserves so one of the things
that I I do that might one of my recent ones took a long time Jim Jones one that
I'm doing because I just I refuse to put out an episode until I feel like I can
at least have a glimpse of what it would be like to put myself in the shoes of
the people that I'm talking about and if I just if there's people in there that
I'm gonna be the amount whoo I just don't like AI or
hue I just have contempt for him in sort of a cartoonish way which is how I felt
about a lot of the people and Jim Jones's movement for a while I just
don't like these people they just elicit nothing but negative emotions in me and
I just refused to make the episode until I could get through that you know and
try to figure out what are the circumstances that these people could be
looking at that could make the decisions that they're making makes sense to them
at the time and you know that can be really hard to do like you know I've
been reading a whole lot about Al Qaeda in Iraq and all that stuff now and I
that's I mean that's I don't know if I'm gonna get through that one you know when
I read about sark Ali and some of these guys where it's just this is you know
it's another level of sadism yeah and I don't I don't feel like I need to get to
a point where I can you know where I can empathize with them before I can talk
about it but I do at least want to understand like the social conditions
and ideological you know parameters that that structure somebody's thinking in a
way that you know leads them to think that that's a course of action that
makes sense yeah and you obviously must be seeing connections between Jim Jones
and just the cult mentality oh you know yeah because that's essentially what
what you're dealing with and what you said earlier about you know when you're
young and you don't really know which direction to take and then all of a
sudden somebody shows up that you don't like we've been saying the whole time or
you know also know the rules of the game well when somebody shows up and says hey
I got the rules of the game here they are and this is what you need to do to
win you know then it becomes very easy to kind of sweep people into it and they
offer I mean I think one of the biggest things is they offer people an identity
you know identity something that in some ways we're not really comfortable
talking about in in society these days we find it to be kind of dangerous
social identity the way people type the ways that people tend to connect
themselves with larger groups and movements it's something that we look at
is pretty dangerous for pretty for pretty reasonable and we have reasons
for that right we look back at something like
World War two and we see how you know a group of people starting to get really
really serious about who we are and our identity can really go off the rails
right not you say we're uncomfortable talking about that but I mean there's
another side okay I was gonna say cuz we've got like people whose number one
thing in life is their identity with whatever group it is right and so it's
let's say maybe not that we're uncomfort with it but that it's something that is
volatile you know and when we do talk about it it's usually charged with a lot
of emotion one way or the other and and so rather than and it's usually attached
to you know ideas of historical grievance and things like that so we'll
say that you know a group that has some has some grievance they it's okay for
them to sort of identify in a in a group manner things like that but rather than
just talking about it as a psychological need that people have I mean when you
come up as a kid like I did where you know you're just you're just kind of
pasting an identity together out of random bits people that pass through
your life of things you see on TV book you read you're just kind of pasting
something together it's not like you know a good strong nuclear family is
this little cocoon where you can start to develop emulate your parents ideally
if there's somebody that you want to emulate and kind of figure out you know
where where there's room for your own individuation and so forth but you don't
have that you're kind of just pasting something together and you grow up in
the idea of like Who am I or who are we as a people I think in one of the early
israel-palestine ones and I was kind of talk about how you know the Zionists are
pulling people from all over Jews from all over Europe and trying to get them
to think of themselves as like you know this is a time when like German Jews
didn't really like polish Jews and American Jews kind of look down on all
of them in certain ways to pull all these people together be like no no no
no this is us like this is who gr s we're a people and it takes it's a
mysterious kind of alchemical process like how that works and it can come
apart really easily and I mentioned how what's the difference between you know
what is it that makes America you know you know where we say we don't
just say this is America we say we're Americans right what's the difference
between 300 million people who just happen to live near each other in the
middle of North America and this place called America with people who were
Americans you can cooperate and trust each other in various ways that allow us
to sort of live next door to total strangers without killing each other
which we think of is like well why would we kill each other it's like we'll go
try that in most of history if those people weren't members of your tribe
you're not living next door to them you know I have a Palestinian friend who
several years ago we were down in a place in LA having having lunch or
breakfast or something Sunday morning beautiful day and we're you know sitting
out on the patio there's just a bunch of people it's a wonderful little little
meal and all of a sudden I catch her just kind of looking around and I would
say what do you but what's on your mind what you thinking about and she said
this place she's from the Middle East right she says this place like here this
could never happen in my country and I just kind of looked around and yeah sure
enough like over here you've got at this table like you know two white people to
black people having a meal together over here you've got like two gay dudes
having a breakfast together just all different types of people they don't
know each other they're not related to each other and
they're just all good it's all good it's totally stable and totally normal
and if anybody fell down people would go to see what was wrong with them and you
know it's not that people don't care about each other in other parts of the
world it's that they're you know their level of trust for people outside their
group and what is defined as us is is something that's typically a lot
narrower you know I'm sure this is we'll talk about this in a future time when we
get into when you had to talk to the sheiks in Ramadi and stuff you had to
work through you had to work through it a whole tribal system that plays no role
over here you know we just don't have anything like that over here and when we
when we have like little versions of it with like you know say like the Italian
mafia back in the day or something where there's still this sort of in-group
mentality and stuff that starts tough it's hard to keep that together in
States and a lot of the institutions we have are kind of designed to break down
those sub loyalties so that you know there's this broader national loyalty
that we all kind of devote ourselves to you know the Hatfields and McCoys have
to figure out how to how to you know how to put their differences aside and get
on the same landing craft and go storm the beaches in Normandy you know they
gotta figure out how to do that and we take that kind of stuff for granted
because we're so far along that process here but you know you go to a lot of the
world and it's not something you can take for granted at all and I think that
how I grew up kind of it it pushed me in the direction of being interested in
those kind of things you know wanting to belong to something trying to figure out
what makes a community work or what makes a family work or what makes a
country work as opposed to one that just doesn't work what's the difference
they're not better people over here than they are over here they're just they you
know there's a little thing you know do you trust your neighbors you know do you
just have you know are your concentric circles of concern sort of expanded
enough today you know where they get to the point that they include people that
maybe you don't know but that you still consider at least relative to somebody
way over there like one of us you know and where does that where do those
circles of concern and you know to the end of the tribe well you're gonna have
a you know a hell of a time trying to put together like a functioning
nation-state if that's the problem if that's if that's the case you know and
you know if it ends it a lot of people it ends at themselves you know and I
don't think people generally want to be that way though I think they want people
and and something to identify with and to belong to and to kind of hand
themselves over to most people I think most people they they long for something
to serve and something to give themselves to but they look around and
you know they just again they're waiting for something that beam of sunlight to
shine down on it and just this is the thing and that's usually never gonna
happen and but I think that's what people are
seeking you know I think people want to sacrifice I think people want to serve
something and you know they spend their lives looking for something and or maybe
not looking hard enough maybe that's the wrong way to look at it they want it but
they don't necessarily go looking for it and it's a it's interesting times it's
interesting times because you can kind of get by without being linked into
something and so everyone can kind of get by without being linked into
something but then they have a certain void of being linked into something and
then you know it's like when you go to prison like when you go to prison you're
gonna join a gang but you know pretty much you're gonna join a gang that's
what's gonna happen if you're gonna survive period like that's what's
happening you're gonna you know and it's gonna be by race that's what's gonna
happen and then you'll get out and it's like
okay you know like that's a that's a really interesting microcosm to look at
but in there you need to do it to survive so all sudden you get in there
and next thing you know you're getting bolts tattooed on your neck because
you're you know you're going a B that's the way it's gonna be the the the thing
is now all the sudden you're part of a group well in this in the civilian world
you don't have to be a part of anything to survive so you have some kind of you
have some kind of void right or I'd say it is possible that people have some
kind of a void where they are looking to be a part of something and that's why
you know you get whether it's you know Isis jihadists and and by the way those
are people some of those Isis jihadists leaving normal you know first world
countries to go and be part of a death cult you know that's why you get Jim
Jones that's why you get these things unfolding because there's some kind of a
void that people have when they want to be connected to other people and they
can't figure it out and when they when they when that light gets shined down
well it's a lights of getting shined down by a bad person that it was an
interview I saw I never forget they were interviewing one of the guys who had
gone from Belgium perfectly nice life in Belgium to go join Isis and they asked
him why he did it he said Belgium's boring and I think to a lot of
people well I think to a lot of people on one hand that makes no sense to them
but I think on on the other hand there's this deep recess where it makes some
sense to them I think people do understand to some degree it's like when
you you know it's like when you remember when sometimes you could lived on a dirt
road maybe so I don't know if you had direct neighbors but like the power
would go out right and the power would go out and people would walk out like on
their front lawns and kind of look around well you almost have this sense
of connectedness with your neighbors that you don't have on a normal day you
know because everything kind of shuts and you kind of realize like well we're
just here together like at this point I wonder what's gonna happen and it's kind
of cool yeah you know yeah I've enjoyed I've been through plenty of power
outlets now outs out of just now in California and you're right power goes
out people are like oh let's walk out especially I used to live on one Street
in OB where it was like a it was a real neighborhood Street you know a lot of
families and all of our kids played together and then the power went out it
was like 30 seconds later everyone's out in the front yard looking around and
what's going on yeah absolutely and so I think there is something where societies
can become so over coded and so structured that people people think they
long for some instability but you know that happens in countries where people
don't know what instability is yeah you know and when it when it comes to like
being part of a group and again for me going into the SEAL Teams was me
absolutely trying to become or what or trying to become part of a group and
then being part of that group and knowing what I had to do to be a better
part of that group and and you know going back to your earlier behavior
which I was saying was so you know I can picture it I know it and I and I did it
you know I was one of those guys too you know I was one of those kids when I was
young you know I wanted to kind of test the patience of my boss especially if my
boss was a person you know whether it was my chief or my LP or my platoon
commander am I you know if they weren't quite the the respected individual that
I would AB solutely push buttons the the big
difference is in the teams there's a way to deal with it really directly like
you're gonna get tightened up and you're gonna realize that and the thing that
they put on you is like oh you owe you eventually it goes from hey even if
let's say no one respects the chief or no one respects the LPL or whatever
eventually someone's gonna say Amen that's the platoon chief I remember
someone saying that to me no no no wait I take that back I said that to someone
I said I said that's the platoon LPL and I said it as if are you absolutely
insane like you don't talk back to the seal platoon leading Petty Officer I
don't care that just don't want that that will never happen again
am I making myself clear that's a five mafia scenario right there at c5 mafia
scenario so the other thing and I just I know we're gonna wrap up here you're a
straight-up what is it autodidact yeah straight-up autodidact of the first
order like what is a autodidact teaches self-taught self-taught you know what
did you go to college at some point and I went for a little while and like I
said I didn't know what I wanted to major and I was gonna go into the Navy
is that the post high school yeah right after I went for a year but I just kind
of took some classes did fine but didn't know where I was going with it so moved
on and you and so you've yourself educated everything that you talked
about which is vast you know I get I get emails from people who want to start
podcasts all the time and they say you know I want to start a history podcast
or this kind of Punk is there any like tips you can give me I know I could
never do one like yours but and I tell these people like I'm smart enough right
I'm smart enough that if you're explaining something to me I'll be able
to understand what your time but I'm not some genius I just pound away on it
every day like if I'm not happy with something like I tell them if the fact
that you like my podcasts and that you're understanding and getting down
with like the concepts that I'm talking about shows you that you can work with
these concepts everything that I'm talking about you're capable of talking
about it's just a matter of like putting the work in
and getting it done and showing up every day and grinding and that's how I get my
podcast done you know I don't I don't just whip these things out like I got a
my genius brain or anything like that you know I just pound away on them are
you a fast reader no not really I'm like a I'm not a medium average read
because I when I'm reading something I tend to get in character you know so
I'll kind of read like in like if I'm reading a novel I'll literally be doing
the voices in my head but even if I'm reading a I'm reading one of your books
like it's your voice at your pace speaking in my head and so so it's not
exactly the speed read yeah I'm the worst I read books which I have
to do all the time and I'm reading at the pace that I basically talk ok maybe
not as bad I mean I get it when I read when I talk a lot of times I talk slowly
and a lot of times I have some pauses will say sure
pauses I don't have those pauses when I read but man I don't read as fast as I
wish I I just would all the time I probably read for the last gosh for the
last 20 years I probably read 6 hours a day I read all the time you read 6 hours
a day I would say probably cumulatively like I mean I read if I have if I'm if I
find my work waiting for a meeting to start and take in 15 minutes and I'm
reading my book getting some time in you know are you pay for books are you
digital books both you know I travel a lot for work and so if I can get it on
Kindle sometimes I will I prefer paper but a lot of the stuff that I read is
not available digitally so I just have to order some whole desk book you know
like that Amazon doesn't sell anymore it's coming from some other seller or
something when yeah I've got it I've got a pretty interesting library I how many
books do you think you have in your library last time I moved because this
is this the worst part is when you got to move and you got a big stack of books
last time I moved I gave away about 600 and I would say I probably have about
three or four thousand left yeah and and when I get more room I'm gonna have more
like I just you know and I'd say I've read like 70% of them and I'll you know
some of them are I've got for reference but I've got this fantasy where one day
when I've got did you know I'm gonna have this room
that's just gonna be wall-to-wall books and there's gonna be books kind of that
are more adult level that are gonna be higher up that they can't reach and when
they want to like give me that book up they'll be like no you know when you're
old enough to reach it you can read it and just make it this place so that you
know there was no kind of I wasn't in any kind of intellectual environment
anything like that when I was a kid and so to have like one of my kids to be
able to go into a room like that and just it's normal that there's like a
room full of books and you can pick one up and there's so much stuff in it
that's like my fantasy and so I get rid of books that I think I can probably get
again really easily you know if I read I don't think I have a copy of Moby Dick
if I want to get one I can get it for two dollars on Amazon I keep the ones
that are gonna be kind of a pain to get again and yeah that makes sense though
with it six hours a day especially if you're into reading because like you
know consider how you bust out your phone like any time there's dead space
in your day most of us are like busting out our phones checking this checking
that you know but if your mind is all automatic like let me let me get back to
that book or whatever oh yeah you'd be reading all the time especially if
you're actively like doing that like that's what you're into you know so you
and that's in so that'll be in addition to the time that you designate to read
or habitually yeah you know a lot of people if they get those time trackers
for their phones to see how much time they spend on your phone and they're
spending several hours a day – you know if instead you're just pulling out your
book and getting a couple more pages in it yeah it adds up no I mean for a few
hours and evening you highlight it depends so I'll highlight books that
I've already read but if I'm reading it for the first time then I don't do
anything like that what I'll do I used to do that and then I realized I wasn't
retaining stuff nearly as well I was building an external structure you know
for me to you know be able to reference things but I just wasn't retaining you
as well so the first time I read a book I'll usually read a section or a chapter
and then I'll stop and I'll just write something up about it and that'll kind
of hammer in two place in my head and then I'll
read the next section and keep doing that and then when you know maybe I'm
putting together a podcast episode I'll go back to books I've already read and
then I'm highlighting and underlining and marking up how do you organize your
books so that you can find them I mean when you've got what you say 3,000 bucks
probably you almost need to go Dewey Decimal System because this bothers like
with me I'll be doing a podcast about World War whatever World War one and
I'll be like oh there's this one part in this one book and I want to ensure with
this and I'll be like now I have to go find it and I don't know how many books
I have I don't have 3,000 but I have enough that they're in multiple
locations double-stacked in and it's just it dries I gotta figure out the
Dewey Decimal System from my house because it gets crazy um I spent a lot
of time around my books so I kind of know where they're all at I you know
sometimes I'll just when I'm waiting I'm letting the thoughts do in my head I
don't want to read anything necessarily to like put it out all right or maybe
it's a half form thought that I'm kind of waiting for it to come together
looking for something to kind of attach it to I'll just kind of walk around and
look at my books and pull one out and flip through it and put it back so I
kind of know where everything is just um it's like that that's my world the books
are like kind of ever since I've been a kid like that's been my world sort of so
it's like my primary point of reference in a lot of ways and what about like
just diving around on the internet how how do you discriminate when you google
search you know whatever ha do you have any good methodology for saying cuz I
like i'll be i'll be i'll go down the rabbit hole you know and i guess some
people goes down the rabbit hole sometimes on the internet but i go deep
on the internet and it's hard to discriminate like okay should i click
this link or not do you have any advice I'm not good at it I have to I have to
be very very I have to be a fascist when it comes to controlling my internet
usage because I don't to me it's like you know it's not like I don't I'm not
like addicted to it or anything but I don't I don't know how to like structure
my usage once I get in there and I start clicking things there's always another
one and I just I will end up where it's been
three hours that I've been on my phone today so I like until recently I didn't
have a I didn't have a smartphone I just had a normal flip phone just until
recently yeah like literally like a couple weeks ago and it was just because
I just don't want that I just didn't want it in my life
I don't want it anywhere near me I just you know it's yeah I don't want to get
on that cliche topic but like when you see a family sitting at a table and
everyone's on their phones I just can't deal with it I grew up in a house with
no dining-room table you know where everybody just kind of did their own
thing and like so just when people aren't paying attention to each other
and aren't be in there together with one another it just it turns me off and and
I find man I'll tell you one thing there is nothing that makes me that
deteriorates my my mind like my ability to recall and structure thoughts and sit
still and contemplate something more than if I spend a bunch of time on the
internet especially on the phone like if I like I had a smartphone back in the
day and I would fart around on it sometimes so you know maybe I'm reading
articles or whatever but just something about the way that the information is
coming at me I would put the thing down and for the rest of the day I would be
much harder to like sit down and actually read a book for like a long
period of time I got rid of that thing a week or two later I could just sit down
again read for 3-4 hours at a time like I was a kid again and yeah something
about him that did again it might be a discipline thing just have to figure out
a structure at the right way but I don't know I don't have any tips when I went
to college I was an English major and there was times on the weekends were and
one semester I took five English classes and it was um really dumb and I should
have never done it cuz I would spend you know like eight to ten hours reading on
Saturday and then eight to ten hours reading on Sunday I actually hurt my
eyes for a while it was it was crazy but I did not did
not like it I did not like it like sitting down reading from for six hours
for me and sometimes I still have to do it because uh because of the because of
the podcast you know it's like okay we're doing a podcast it's on this book
we're doing it in you know four days and you know there's almost never been a
point with this podcast where it's like oh don't worry we
have a podcast do you know you and in Dan Carlin who are like all put out a
podcast whenever I'm damn well ready that's you know a luxury that I don't
have I'm putting this thing out and so some I've had to read books you know
read really long books for me in then you know it's a you know to ten-hour
days and I just I'm not happy and it is what it is because you know you kind of
owe it sometimes it's work and I kind of benefit a little bit because of the way
I structure my reading I usually I don't just pick a book that sounds cool on a
topic and pick it up and read it usually I'll study a particular topic right and
I'll start diving really deep into it and the books that I read are sort of
hanging ornaments on that tree and adding little pieces to that puzzle and
then as I'm doing that on that topic I'll start to have questions there
outside that topic right I start reading a lot about Jim Jones and Peoples Temple
and then you want to know more about the nineteen sixties and like that you know
the movements that this are coming this is coming out of and so I'm starting to
you know accrue all these questions that are kind of tangential to the topic at
hand and I'm putting them there and once I've kind of you know pretty soon I get
to the point where now I'm getting impatient to go over to this other topic
and move on to that or maybe there's several topics and so I'll wrap this up
and then I'll go over there and I'm already excited about this and moving
into that area and I've already got questions that now these books are
answering and so it's like a path that I'm following you know it's not sort of
just random you know randoms yeah the arc of the current episodes of martyr
made the arc so it's about Jim Jones but man you are going deep and solid like
III I've explained I was explaining it to like my family specifically the same
explaining to my my mom and dad over I guess it was over Christmas or something
but anyways I was like I was like explaining what the podcast was what it
was about and the path that you took and when you're talking about the Black
Panthers I mean you know you when you go from Jim Jones and
in that thread ties into the Black Panthers it's pretty crazy and you know
what's his name Reverend divine yeah yeah Reverend if the whole thing on
Reverend divine I mean it's it's it's epic it's an epic tale and each one of
them is just this thread that just gets pulled and pulled and pulled and I I
mean I'm tracking you I'm tracking them like all I see where this is good okay
oh we're gonna open that doors in you open that door there's it's wide open
wide open and that's the thing that I think is cool and I think that's what
you know when I first started listening to Martyr made I you know since I read
so much what I realized is I realized exactly what you were doing I realized I
was like okay every single one of those little footnotes every single because
let's say I'm reading about a battle right hey you know what I opened up with
today what I opened up the I open up with about-face which I've read a
million times and I actually I actually talked about Easy Company under the
command of of desiderio right and the first time I read this was probably 15
years ago I don't know how long is a long time ago but what I do is I pulled
the threads that's all it says it just says so did Easy Company under desiderio
in the fight up then on the hill up north that's what it says
well who's who's that well that's a thread that when I did when I was
reading this section I was like how Nepal in that well it turns out you know
army captain it turns out Medal of Honor recipient turns out you can find out
exactly what's going on in that battle so when you start pulling these threads
out it starts to turn into a different level of knowledge and that's what I so
even when when I had listened to your first series of Margar made I realize
exactly what you're doing I said oh every single time he comes across a
little a little hanging piece of information that's not closed he's gonna
pull on that thread until it gets call until he figures out where it leads to
where it comes from what the what the situation is behind that and that's
that's what you know that's what really impressed me with what with with your
podcast and that's why you know you and I are about to record some podcasts of
our own kind of going off on a on a tangent it's a it's an idea that I
had for a while which was well it was this I talked about it on this podcast
where I talked about the fact that and I was I was complaining about the school
system and the educational system in America and my biggest complaint about
the educational system in America well there's a bunch of different ones but my
biggest one is that when you learn you don't you don't get taught the context
and the listen everything that you learn is tied together everything every single
thing you learn about anything in human history is connected there's a thread
that ties it all together there's a thread that you can trace back and we
never learned that thread and I don't care if you're talking about learning
mathematics or straight Sciences or philosophy or English literature they're
all connected they're all connected and if you can connect those threads for me
that's how I learn right when I want to learn something I just don't want to
learn the facts because that's just memorization I want to I want to
actually understand what's behind them and that's where I think our educational
system sometimes falls short and then you transpose that on to our current
news media which our current news media what do they do there's no context or
understanding it's a two-dimensional picture of what's happening today and
people don't understand the thread that connects all these things how they tie
together and that's why you know when I had this crazy idea of like hey wait a
second if I want to talk about things that are going on and I want to pull the
thread on some of these things I should get see if Darryl Cooper can come down
and give me a hand with it so I guess is that an announcement yeah we're gonna
make another few pie we're gonna make a podcast we're gonna make a podcast we're
to call it the thread we're gonna pull the thread on some things and well it'll
be out I think it'll be out yeah it'll be out when when you're listening this
podcast you'll be able to listen to another podcast called the thread what
else Darryl what do we miss
I think maybe the last thing I would I would talk about is um has to do with
what you were just saying what's the thing that schools leave out is they
teach kids facts and they don't turn it into a story for them right and that's
something that I think we talked earlier about people having purpose or goals or
direction in their life another way of saying that is that they're inhabiting a
story right there's something in the future that you're heading towards that
means that you've got a beginning a middle and and you know things like
you're living in a story and a lot of people are not living in any kind of a
story a lot of people ask me why I named my podcast smarter made my friend
Daniella bolelli who has helped me out a lot with it he
uh he's got the thickest Italian accent anybody's ever heard and he cannot
pronounce it for the life of him so every talks better on his podcast people
always have to write him and ask him what it is he tried to ask me early on
you just change the name of this podcast but I named it that for a reason right
so I mentioned earlier at the beginning you asked me how many sisters I had and
I had two at the time I have one now and my I had a sister in 2009 in early 2009
that committed suicide me and my other sister my oldest sister two years
younger than me she and I are you know we made it out
right we came out of a pretty dark and difficult situation we made it out she
was up for homecoming queen her senior year and I was there at the football
game watching her and you know it was it was a really incredible in the moment
just knowing everything that she had been through and come out of to see that
like that was coming on she was this good water polo player she's popular at
school you know she went on to college and doing very well my youngest sister
you know she didn't make it out she struggled and she always struggled a
little bit more had things handled things a little bit more difficult had a
little more difficult time and and we lost her in 2009 and
I had mentioned that my family when my mom was first having me and my sisters
was not really a family that was together she didn't have a lot of
support this is something that took time to kind of build up and people
individual branches of the family you know this aunt and uncle that aunt and
uncle would start to get their act together this one got their act together
but we were never really like together as a family
and my mom as well she got her act together for the last 20 years she's I'm
very very more proud of her she's been through a lot a lot more than I have and
she suffered more than I have for sure and you know she's doing very very well
now she you know manages a Kroger grocery store and she's very into it
she'll like go to war for like Kroger grocery stores and how they're better
than you know Albertsons or whatever and very very proud of her and so but we
hadn't gotten to a point where all the different threads of the family and
found their way back together again right people kind of gotten their
individual acts together but it was just like long-term kind of animosities and
little bickerings that had accumulated over the years when people you know
we're not we're not sort of living living their best lives say that it
accumulated and my sister passed in 2009 and my family came together was the
first family reunion I think I could ever really remember Ryan was my
sister's funeral everybody came together for that and at that time it was as if
like that event it was like everybody just kind of looked to each other and
realized it like whatever has happened in the past like no that matters like we
all you know we're a family we need to look out for each other we all love each
other and we need to be a family again and you think about like what is the
difference between a martyr and a murder victim right it's just the story you're
telling about it right a martyr and just a person who dies it's just you tell one
story about one another story about another what's the difference between
you know it occurred to me that if if my sister's death led to kind of the
rebirth of my family you know and it really has done that it's a it's a it's
a everybody now they're just happy grandkids are all playing together and
it's just a beautiful thing that if that could come out of that then you know her
death could be turned into a sacrifice you know where something good could come
out of something that really just by itself is just a horrible thing you know
my sister struggled her whole life she never really had anybody who you know
was kind of putting her first in the way that you know the like when the kids
would get farmed out to different relatives and stuff I would go somewhere
and my other sister Lindsay would go somewhere and it was kind of rewarding
to have us around you know we would do well in school and just like whatever it
was there was some it was a little bit rewarding my youngest sister she was
just she was partner she had a temper she was just kind of like a more wild
personality it was kind of just more of a more of an ordeal than a you know in
less rewarding and so there'd be times where we get farmed out because things
at home were starting to collapse you know really badly and Lindsay and I
would go to one aunt or another aunt we get split up in Jessica my youngest
would stay with my mom and those are some pretty dark times there's a reason
we were getting farmed out during those periods and so she was always more
attached to my mom and Lindsay and I the two oldest we were always kind of we
didn't intend this you know it just kind of happened for whatever reason we kind
of bonded more and we're closer to each other than either of us were to Jessica
we didn't exclude or anything like that it just kind of naturally we were kind
of closer and and she always knew that and felt it you know that she she that
Lindsay and I were closer to each other than we were to her that when we would
get farmed out to different relatives like you know people were like happy to
take me in Lindsay and they would have taken Jessica it was like look she has
to go somewhere but you know if she didn't want to come you know because she
was attached to my mom nobody was gonna really like push for it or anything
and so she grew up her whole life kind of always being kind of on the outside
and always being kind of thought of just not ever being anybody's first priority
you know it's just something that a kid needs at least for for some period you
know and and she struggled with that and you know I got out and I went into the
Navy and I'm just happy to be out of the house and doing my thing in the Navy and
Lindsay's in college and doing well and we kind of know that Jessica's still
struggling back home a little bit she's back home she's with my mom my mom's
totally cleaned up by this point and she's trying to get my sister you know
help her and help her get herself together but you know she's struggling
she has a hard time she's uh she gets pregnant with my nephew and inexplicably
the doctor she has a bunch of back pain while she's pregnant with my nephew the
doctor puts her on oxycontin my nephew comes out Jones and at birth and she
didn't she she was never able to kick that right and it kind of did generated
in the common way where she's hooked on that and she starts becoming you know
difficult to deal with for people who love her my mom wants to help her but
she doesn't know if like you know at a certain point are you enabling you know
at a certain point do you have to put your foot down you know she's stealing
out of my purse to do things when she's at my grandparents house you know she's
trying to raid their medicine cabinet and so she's got friends that are
telling her you know and other people in her own her own mind
you know just telling her like look at a certain point you have to give some
tough love and it makes sense you know that is what you have to do right at a
certain point you are enabling and she did that one time when my sister came to
the house might my nephew was staying with my mom by this point and my sister
came to the house one time in the winter it's in Montana it's a cold winter and
she wanted to stay there and my mom had like been preparing herself before she
knew that like when the moment came she wasn't gonna have the strength to say no
right so she had been kind of coaching herself up like when it comes you just
have to here's what you have to say here's the script
you know unless you're willing to do this this and this no da da da da just
go stay with your friends or whatever it is and so she shows up and she wants to
stay with my mom and my mom tells her you know I can't have you do it the last
several times you've been lying this and that and she didn't have anywhere else
to go that night and so she went to the rescue mission there in town and she
took some pills and she died there alone and it's just the most abject ly awful
story you know I was I was in the Navy I kind of knew something was going wrong
but you know I didn't you're just you you're living your own life and to say
that like you know when I look back on it because I feel tremendous amount of
guilt obviously thinking to myself now in the aftermath that you know I should
have just dropped everything and just said you're coming to stay with me and
focus on this a hundred percent right just because what else matters when this
is the end but you don't think that that's the end you're just kind of you
know you hear that she's struggling but she's not struggling that bad right and
when I would call her it would it would seem okay so I just kind of out of sight
out of mind I was living my own life and wasn't focusing on it and nobody was
focusing on and that was the point nobody was other than my mom and and
it's just an awful story it's a it's a girl who was never put first who came
out of like a very difficult set of circumstances and you know one out of
three she just didn't make it out and yet that horrible story that ended in
such a tragic way it saved my family you know and it brought my whole extended
family that you know when you know when I say like it wasn't just that like
people had gotten in arguments with each other and this got them to put it aside
it was that whole the whole thread that had brought my family together my great
grandmother coming from Serbia when she was seven years old my great-grandfather
coming out of Mexico just and then and it just it generates and breaks down and
by the time it gets to like the generation before me
it's just this typical like American broken-down family scenario right that
it just falling apart it was just did it falling apart and that and that when we
all came together for her funeral that it was as if everything like everything
was redeemed but by you know during that period it was like everything that had
been bad and broken was suddenly repaired and something that it wasn't
like a no not repaired is not the right way to say it because it wasn't like
there was this there was this family there that had gotten broken up now it
got fixed it didn't exist before this was something that was born out of that
tragedy and I realized that you know if I could it doesn't clear up all the
negative feelings obviously but if I could see it in that way that her death
could become a sacrifice you know something that she was the one who who
gave her life whether it was you know obviously she wasn't thinking of it this
way but she gave her life so that our family could could be borne out of that
and and and that the stories we tell ourselves about the things we do in the
lives were living you know very often or the things that oh those are those are
really what define us you know and I think a lot of people aren't living any
story and they're very vulnerable to people who come along and say I got a
story for you you know I got something for you right here
maybe it's Jim Jones maybe it's jihadi maybe it's you know some racial group
whatever it is I got a story for you you know that puts you right in the middle
and takes you seriously it makes you important in a way that you've never
been to anybody before makes them very vulnerable to those things and I think
that something I hope we can do with the thread is is is tell some of these
stories you know in a way that kind of you and I have both been around the
world a lot being around the world it teaches you that whatever is going on
it's wrong around here there's a whole lot of good
there's a whole lot of good you know around here in this country and our
society and the people around us and there's an opportunity and that and that
when people don't feel that way they look around here at their families or
their communities or their country and they don't feel good about it that's
just a story too you know and you can there are better stories out there to
tell that can frame your own life and you know your community's life in your
country's life in ways that you know are a lot more fulfilling and I would say a
lot truer than some of the ones that you know tend to tend to be undermining so
it's something I hope we can do well if that's the goal then I'm sure we can yeah it's very humbling because I my
sister was a good girl she was a sweet girl and you know I I feel no sense of
pride in the fact that you know I came out of rough circumstances and managed
to like make it out and now I'm you know securely in the middle class or whatever
however you want to frame it I feel no sense of pride in that because I know
people who were better than me and who were stronger than me and who
had better hearts than I do who didn't make it and that if there were a couple
times growing up or in my early adulthood when if I had zigged instead
of zagged or even when I where I just I got purely lucky you know where I you
know early 20s I get into a big fight out in town and the cops decide it's
they're just gonna let me roll out you know whereas if you know if I was if I
had maybe a darker color skin instead they'd be pulling my ass in and throwing
me in jail and then I'm not going into the Navy and then I'm not just a whole
train of things starts to happen you know where I just got very very very
lucky I know people who are way better way smarter way stronger than I am who
ended up going completely off the rails and that deserve has nothing to do with
it you know did they deserve it well they made decisions yeah sure I made
decisions but a lot of it just came down to pure luck you know and it makes me it
makes me very so it's humbling it's humbling and it makes me make that I try
to as much as I know that um you know you can get into a toxic mindset self
limiting kind of toxic mindset by feeling like a victim so I you know I
don't support that kind of thing but I does make me very I try to open up my
heart to people who find themselves in difficult circumstances because I know
that is an act of God it is a you know but by the grace of God
that that's where I could have been you know and i tribute none of it to you
know my own and again yeah and you have to make choices but it very easily could
have gone a different way with the same exact choices that I made yeah there's a
there's always gonna be some level of luck involved for sure and there's also
like little tiny minuscule decisions that you make for whatever reason that
you make them and sometimes those two have a trajectory that who lasts the
rest of your life and they could be good sure
like when I decided to join the Navy because let's face it that's a it seems
like a really really big decision and I guess it is but at the same time you
know there's a split second in time where you go you know what I'm gonna do
this but that there's a split second where it's a coin toss and you go you
know what I'm gonna do this I had I had friends that were right alongside with
me I'm gonna go and they didn't go in and and things did not work out well for
them at all and so when you look at like all these little decisions and just like
you said I mean what you know how many people's lives have been ruined by you
know the one DUI that they got which they crashed and they hid and they this
that the other thing how many people's lives been ruined by whatever whatever
momentary decision that they made that just just it went wrong and you know you
saw that combat all the time you know I've said many times there's there's
times where I made bad decisions and and like got home and said to myself well it
got away with that I never should have got away with that I can't believe I got
away with that got so lucky and there's other times we make the right decisions
and and things still go wrong and so there's absolutely some level of luck in
there and what you have to do as a human being is recognize that
and in every chance you get lean that thing in the right direction you got to
take it as soon as the sooner you recognize that in your life the better
off you're gonna be because the sooner you recognize alright this could be the
bad decision that I make this could be it you know I used to um occasionally if
I had a seal who was working for me that was like I could see where he's heading
and you know what you know what brief I'd give to him I'd give him this brief
right here hey this is what I want you to do I don't want you to do dumb shit I
don't want you to do anything that's stupid
do you understand what some of the words that are coming out of my mouth and
that's kind of what they needed to hear yeah look I don't want you to do
anything that's stupid do you understand what I'm saying and that kind of thing
because if you put that as a broad overarching when you're 21 years old if
you say look it I'm gonna I'm just gonna try not to do anything that's stupid
that's actually some really solid advice to go off of and if I wish I would have
had somebody there's a lot of lot of decisions that I made that I look back
now or they could have gone bad and when I look back at him if somebody would
have just said don't do anything say don't do dumb shit somebody would have
told me that it would have helped me out a lot it would have helped me out a lot
too and again I was just I got lucky along the way and the time that I did
something stupid I didn't crash the car the time I did something else stupid I
didn't you know fall into this curve ass that I fought Oh be cool I'll jump over
this thing or whatever the case may be you make dumb decisions
if someone saying to you hey don't do dumb shit it's actually really really
good advice because at the end of the day there's that that sometimes it's a
coin toss and do yourself a favor and don't flip that coin if you don't have
to and then to what you're saying when you look at somebody when whenever I see
somebody like that's that I can see their vended up in a bad situation it's
like I know that there were some coin tosses in there that that that that came
up bad I know it that's what happens and the difference between you know me
and that person that's strung out on meth you know sitting in this corner you
know covered in their own piss there's some coin tosses in there and so
minimize those freaking coin tosses and then yeah you got it look there's some
luck involved and make your frickin luck – you got to make your freaking luck cuz
you can't rely on that coin coming up the way you want it to so get up take
control of what you know what you've been saying take control take ownership
of what's going on everything that you can control control it don't let it go
don't leave it up the chance you cannot afford to do that you cannot afford to
do that the coin tosses don't always go your way with that probably a pretty
good place to stop you know Darrell thanks for um thanks for your service
thanks for coming on thanks for putting out great amazing
information for people and thanks for joining forces me to knock out some
podcast later echo yes sir we want to take control over what we can take
control of make our own look or we're gonna manufacture luck like I said
that's a life Babb in the other day oh no you don't I told life Babbitt I can
manufacture time yeah we were talking about something like do we have time for
this do we have time for that no one's like I can manufacture time I will make
literally make time how can we ever have time if we don't make time or take time
the matrix you want a control King Couture – what can we do he'll help us
hmm there are many ways right fitness
physical mind and body fitness good way – good way to get that coin to kind of
fall the way you want it to manufacture some some odds you can
manufacture odds venture some luck yeah yeah so anyway also capability big-time
capability reading as it turns out increases your capability big temp yeah
so does jiu-jitsu by the way but I think we already knew that so while we're
doing our jiu-jitsu we're going to get Aggie at least one my opinion and we're
gonna get that from origin if actually the best ski in the world that's why
we're getting them from origin but you also might want to support the entire
economy of this country by buying something that's made in America
literally now yep especially right now you might want to support the economy
you might want to support jobs coming back to this country rebuilding an
industry that was all but dead but it ain't dead anymore no it's not I just
bought two of those face masks legit yeah yeah that was a pivot a little
pivot oh yeah yeah and that it's like that was good when like well I was
watching that video or their I think there's more than one right about the
about the face mask yeah what Pete's doing so it's interesting to see like
you know under these kind of more like a better term extreme circumstances what
people and groups of people in companies are doing you know and you can kind of
tell a lot about I mean a lot I mean what does that even mean but you can
tell some things about some people and groups of people by what they do under
certain circumstances I think generally speaking that's true right but okay
here's a little background so we have a company it's called origin we make
clothes there is a virus going around America right now oh wait well called
the corona virus right now it is March 25th 2020 so this virus hit at first I
had a couple friends text me and say like hey you should make masks to
protect people from this and I was like oh and I talked to Pete
My partner Dorjan and said hey man what do you thing about making masks and he
kind of looked at it said well I guess we could what's the real you
what's the real demand gonna be blah blah blah and then a couple days later a
few days later the government starts saying look masks don't help they don't
help and I'm like okay well I say hey I don't worry about that mask don't help
and I don't want to be the guy that's trying to sell something that doesn't
work right so you know so we kind of abandon the idea this all takes place in
like a very short period of time all this because you guys track in this new
store it's been changing on an hourly basis so then you fast-forward two or
three days and they're saying not only should you wear a mask but you need to
wear a mask and and also we've got people in health care and whatever that
absolutely need these masks and there's no masks in America like or where
there's a massive shortage so now I go back to Pete and say be bro it looks
like these masks are needed and he kind of percolated on it and my mind was
stuck in like okay we got to make a surgical mask like what you see a
surgeon wear right Pete he said wait a second and he said oh let's make he took
our rash guard material because this is the other thing the CDC was saying if
you don't have a surgical mask just take a t-shirt or take a piece of bandanna
that's what they were saying and so we said okay wait a sec we can really help
here but then Pete came up with the idea of
making a mask from our rash guard material kind of like I guess the word
is a buff have you ever heard this before okay so it's basically like a
neck gaiter that's another thing it gets called I don't know what to call it but
most people call it a buff and anyways we put a little pocket in there so you
could put a filter if you can get one if not you can still just use the mask and
it does help them the CDC actually has numbers out like how much it helps if
you just put a t-shirt it helps you know 20% if you put a bandana in a t-shirt it
helps 40% like they calculate this stuff so anyways that's what's happening we we
started making these masks people been buying them like crazy because well you
know we were getting orders from hospitals we're getting orders
from nurses we're getting orders from doctors like that's and then we're
getting orders from normal citizens as well but so that's what's happening and
the reason I'm not really I haven't really been promoting it is because it's
it worse what we're sold out like we're making them as fast as we possibly can
and and I mean Pete's make I think he's made 4,000 of them today they're all
already sold so we're gonna make them as fast as we can we're gonna make as many
as we can but we're trying to get them to the right people and that's what's
happening with that yeah and those mouths kind of important too when you
think of the big picture because I mean the initial thought where it's like
we're a mass people be like well you know I'll just sort of you know like I
won't I'll be careful with where I breathe or whatever or my immune system
whatever but the mass is kind of a two-way street where that protects you
but it protects it as well that's something they said some time ago I know
this actually we don't think that though yeah here's where here's where I was
kind of like man I should have fought through this more from the get-go they
said you know masks don't help but it will help to prevent spreading it if you
have it you should wear it now I'm like wait a second
you're telling me that this will help someone not give it to me but if I put
it on it won't help me at all are you crazy
hold on a second that doesn't make any sense so I should have known that from
the beginning but I didn't I didn't suss it out correct yeah and but and that
kind of goes goes with it where it's like yeah it doesn't help me at all so
it's more like that's like a secondary thought you know but I think call it
like I said big picture situation where it collectively hey man we're all at the
morgue if everyone together everybody yeah and then so that not that's not to
mention okay what are all these secondary effects like economy people
going back to work all this stuff and were you part of that problem where are
you part of the problem spreading this whole thing exactly right if you're part
of helping it out okay here comes the economy way quicker
here comes people going back to work you know all the secondary stuff but all you
weren't all you were just like you strong young guy who has a strong immune
system you didn't care about any of this other stuff you see them saying so it's
like man you gotta wear that mask or and not even necessarily where the mass
specifically I'm not saying that I'm saying be part of the solution
in this that's kind of the important solution is that being that's part of
being an American yeah and by the way another thing like I just got this as a
coming in here he put together a face mask like a face shield with what's a
clear plastic like printer paper what is a lamination paper or something like
that he put together a mask with that yes a mask
well no welding yeah you kind of seen you go that's kind of cool whatever
guess what he's got it he just got an order like off based off of him stapling
this thing together the state of Maine just I think it was the state of some
was some some big governmental organization just ordered a thousand of
them a thousand of these things like that's where they're at they need
protection and so it's been very it's been it's been awesome and very humbling
to have a little role in trying to help us get through this and shout-out to
Pete to the origin crew up there to all the all the folks in the factory that
are actually turning and burning and working two shifts we might even have to
go to three to make as many of these things as we can to get them out to
America to help us get through this crisis situation some nurse or health
care worker out there wearing one of those things that you guys made like
that's gonna feel good it's awesome yeah and like I mean Pete Adam man um the the
the girls were making him like that Monday morning and filled up a box and
got him to Boston Children's Hospital like that you know ASAP because that's
where they're at and they're reusable like you can put them in the washing
machine you can't put a surgical mask or whatever $2 surgical mask in the washing
machine it'll be destroyed you can put these things in the washing machine all
day long what up now yeah and far be it for me to be the superficial twink on
this one but it looks kind of dope dude yeah it does like oh we're on the beach
a lot it's windy on my beats a lot of the time just posting up in the
origin/master yeah I'll wear that thing even asked did
you order blocked out one the blocker got a black one and a white
one for me and my fiancee so it's been it's been cool obviously it's and by the
way we're not the only company that's doing this is a bunch of company that
have pivoted to helping out you know weather and they're doing more advanced
things they have the technology to make help with the ventilators and help with
some of the other but we're getting well that's what we're doing that's what
America is doing right now which is awesome to see in the meantime
we do still have rash guards it's true the best keys in the world as you said
actually jeans mmm american-made denim american-made
denim and that's what's perfect that's what's that's what's awesome had we had
we let everything go had Pete not rebuilt this had peeped out maintained
this loom and maintained more important in the Loom is the people right the
stitchers the folks that actually have the capability to build things in
America if we don't keep them who's gonna do this for us that's the backbone
of America right there that's the backbone of America is the folks on the
front lines that have the skills to get this done god bless them all send a
little send a little blessing up to Farmington Maine to our people also
supplements by the war I'm not done we're at war right so right is so the
mass that's cure at QRF right that's a quick reaction force inbound sure yes
outside the QRF scenario there are like you said american denim jeans also
supplements keep your body physically in the game joint warfare krill oil cold
war called the board we're boost the boost the immune system enough frontline
says it were soon saying yeah there'll I don't nobody take that name yet I
actually always amazed and sometimes you you get an idea and you go man
that happened with the way the warrior kid like I had that idea I said how can
no one had thought of this oh my gosh I'm so lucky and I just wrote it and put
out there cold war cold war probably a year and a half ago I was like hey man
talk to be little I said hey man I am on the plains all the time I'm shaking a
bunch of people's hands all I'll line up and shake a thousand people's hands
what's the germ transfer that's happening right there come on
it's major a man as my friend so yeah so Brian put together that formula for cold
war and yeah it's and of course you know we put it out say hey if you guys need
some help someone's like what are you doing this won't stop Corona facts I'm
like bro no no you are not slinging the cure to come I'm not slinging the cure
to coronavirus now now that being said Dakota Meyer he's slinging the cure the
cure did you see what he posted and the posting taco discipline go dak savage
flavor and he's like hey it's me Dakota Meyer I haven't got coronavirus yet why
cuz I drink discipline go and the story next question CLS thinking that – let's
face it as a joke so you know the killer soap right it's activated charcoal
whatever so I'm using killer soap I'm taking cold war joint warfare super
krill oil discipline every single day with you know occasional molten Aereo's
I don't think I've had the coronavirus if I have I'm asymptomatic yeah
coincidence or Jocko whew I'm just saying I'm just saying but you know
obviously I'm not gonna make that claim you know go as far as Dakota Meyer is
good on that situation but nonetheless those are the facts of the case unless
like I said the facts of the case yes I mention mulk that is what we had this
dessert in the form of a protein many flavors you know – at this point it's
like just choose your flavor you know much I mean with you very few exceptions
at this point there you're good to go Phil yeah check that
one out if you're a warrior kid you can get some more your kid mokume deal
because your kids are home from school by the way right now oh yeah they're not
allowed to go to school and you could say Oh Johnny you want some you want
some high fructose corn syrup in your milk which will literally kill you or do
you want something with protein in it that's gonna make you stronger smarter
better yeah and that puts you on the path and that actually is a real thing
nowadays even more than before cuz you know how like you eat when you're bored
you want a little treat on a little C you know you drop right you're not
hungry you just wanna one of those little you know little something mmm
breath or chemo called a problem solved I'll tell you what you have milk bars
too don't you yes they do well I'm running very low beef freakin
kids yeah those are good men there do reals ridiculous yeah I have to say no
now this is just too much dude it's a miracle it's kind of a miracle to
eat something that's that good and that good for you that's kind of a miracle
yeah and and we couldn't get anybody to make them we had to walk the peace we
bought the we bought the factory denied we're making them ourselves by the way
you know if you can do it quick enough big I saw someone post on Twitter that
you posted something about the mass or somebody did maybe it was the origin
account and somebody posted that the corona virus is quarantine in itself and
the rest of our bodies to avoid contracting Jack oh I'm not talking to
you smack about it you know why because that's like this
curse right yeah that's like a Mac about it you're gonna get it maybe I'll put
you down hard confirm the keys and I do the big cover-up yeah we like me yeah
posting pictures from like a workout I did six months ago yeah yeah this is
true also chakra I keep by the way man work ups and you can get all the stuff
at the vitamin shop right now if you want to if you're going out actually can
you you probably can't right now oh I have no idea
but vitamin shoppe I think is open and also all these products are available in
amazon.com just kind of FYI yeah and or gin mein sapna to me all of
its faces yes also chocolate store and it's called Jocko store you go to Jocko
store calm and this is where you can get more rash guards american-made by the
way 100% by order we also have t-shirts discipline equals freedom good
stand by to get some you know all these things that are representing Fitness
yeah def just straight def corn deaf core to the core by the way yeah you
need you know the things that are representative of the path that we are
all on by the way we're on it straight up on it at some point I'm going to see
the graffiti with the little deaf core flag so little tags yeah yeah that was
do you remember this somebody posted a picture of graffiti in some city mm-hmm
and all it said was like at Joe Rogan at Jordan B Peterson at JA yeah that was
legit yeah my daughter does the like she grabbed with my weightlifting chalk you
know the little baggie of the chunk so grab it and she'll put you leave your
chalk all assembled into a block or should I try to yes in the bag so yeah
you grabbed the when it dissipates after it's like being used up then it collects
this powder on the bottom which is you know what you're talking about right
that's no I put the Block in there then break it into small pieces yeah no I
found where you grab the whole block and go like oh yeah that's good just
imagining that goes entire trunk full of weightlifting chalks yeah oh yeah with
the kids yet that's what it takes man that's what it takes
nonetheless yes jockle store calm that's where you can get this double C on the
path represent while you're on it too by the way also uh subscribe to this
podcast we also have another podcast now called the thread we also have another
podcast called the grounded we also have another podcast called the warrior kid
podcast we also have darrell has a podcast called martyr made which I
talked about a bunch just go just go listen to it listen to
the opener and then just well stand by because you'll be you'll be sucked in
don't you talked about kill or soap yes sir you can get that from Irish Oaks
ranch calm we got a young kid or warrior kid making that from goat milk quality
to men its quality that stress is the best soap ever
yes goats yeah the best goats for sure that's the strongest goats the cleanest
goats and yes have you ever seen black soap before no yeah so it's it's kind of
a psychological thing you get the the bar is black it's black because it's got
activated charcoal which a co could tell you all about what that does I'll tell
you later yeah I'll tell you later so it's got activate so it's black but then
you want you you wash with it and you still allows you to stay clean took out
a whole new baby right hand everywhere oh yeah big time person that's like
little what do you call exfoliant it's not white it's not that's what I'm
saying yeah it's not like a bracelet but you can almost feel it like if you're
not paying attention you might not even feel it that much but it's got the
feeling it's got a feeling here's what's cool a normal bar of soap right you pick
it up it's slippery right this thing is not this thing's not gonna start selling
this to prisons yeah you might have something there Tara Cooper for sure but
yes Irish folks wrench calm soon if not right now we're gonna have it on
chocolate or calm so hey man just go out there look for it get some boom also we
do have a youtube channel for the video version of this podcast a lot of people
watching podcast now rather than just listening to them they watching them put
them on the Smart TV you've been whining johnny-on-the-spot lately to getting
those YouTube ones up as soon as possible to collective effort yeah
between you me call the kid you know we're trying to you know I'm trying to
make it up it's been it's been nice yeah yeah agree and you know the accessible
want to see what Darrell Cooper looks like yeah you don't have some guy you
know working out got a pump right beforehand
you know actually you look different than I thought you look yeah yeah did
you ever dividual did never saw him before I saw like um that one stupid-ass
picture you use to me in the mask when I came on the podcast with Daniella
yes used one for my website when I'm in that mask it's the only you go through
the comments on YouTube and it's like great podcast great podcast
look at that dumbass mask this is the only picture I got of this dude I guess
we're going with it there you go yeah what is that from I was going to a
costume party that was a costume party I don't have a lot of pictures of myself
yeah and the one you do have is you end up straight up costs do it so yeah so
when you know you're like a tuxedo or something – is it like I was in a white
suit with this mask on like this I don't know like eyes wide shut kind of
thing yeah yeah okay now that you're kind of mentioned that I kind of
remembered what my expectation it wasn't very like concrete but it was just kind
of you know and what do you call an ambiguous expectation and I'm thinking
more along the lines of like a criss Angel scenario seems saying you know
Criss Angel is right yeah he does magical tricks yes
but the less you know I believe it looks like YouTube channel boom a lot of other
stuff on there yes SERPs what not a lot of value bow really as far as YouTube
goes yeah you gotta admit I on the grounded podcast whatever flippant
attack comment I made about you and your videos was pretty funny
wait and I forget what it was but it was pretty good yeah we're talking about
things blowing up or whatever and I was like oh
oh no no we were talking about affliction t-shirts with with tanks and
explosions and fire and I was like yeah kind of like echoes the videos psychological warfare you can get that
on itunes Iowa whatever it's me that's a little psychological he hate her for you
help you get through those moments weakness flipside canvas Dakota Meyer
making some cool looking stuff for you a bunch of books leadership strategy and
tactics Field Manual the warrior Kid series how's your how's your nephew like
to warrior kid is series every little niece and nephew that I have loves it
that is awesome including a bunch of my friends as well like I didn't have to
win every time I've wanted to give them a copy of the books they've already got
them that's not Jocko man that's Uncle Jake right there everyone likes uncle
Jake Mikey the dragons too if you think if you like I'd like to get the warrior
kids series but my kids only for cool Mikey in the dragons and then discipline
equals freedom Field Manual get yourself that and then the the first two books
well I guess the first the leadership books extreme ownership and the
dichotomy leadership which I wrote with my brother late family we got national
in front leadership consultancy we solve problems to leadership co national font
calm right now in the lockdown we're starting to spin up or I should say we
are we are pouring more resources into our online training so I've been doing a
lot of online live q and A's which is really cool and you I was a little you
get a little bit worried because you know you want everything to be of the
highest quality and then look sometimes connections aren't there right like and
we got a new system and man it's like it's like I'm talking to people you know
I mean it's like I'm in the room with people it's pretty it's pretty damn good
so go to EF online if you want to check that out EF online comm muster Orlando
cancelled muster in Phoenix Arizona September
18th and 17th Dallas Texas December 3rd and 4th go to extreme ownership calm if
you want to come to those hey listen Phoenix canceled and the way we what we
did with Phoenix did we gave people the option to cancel it or go to immediately
just enroll in either Phoenix Arizona or Dallas Texas
you said Phoenix cancelled or laughs I'm sorry Orlando's canceled Orlando's good
did I say that like yeah now I thought I thought Phoenix was cancelled too but
for this when you see him saying but yeah so Orlando's canceled Orlando
is canceled but what we did is we allowed people just to transfer their
ticket to Phoenix and then transfer there or Dallas so like we're already at
bigger numbers so everything always sells out there's only be two instead of
three that's you know another it's gonna sell out quick so check that out
extreme ownership calm and and then we have EF over watching the EF Legion and
here's here's just a real straightforward message right there's a
lot of people losing their jobs right now and there's a lot of people getting
hired right now in there's just a massive transition in the job market if
you are a veteran if you are a veteran if you served go to EF Legion dot-com
and enroll yourself so that way if your job changes we will you you could you
can be looked at and people can find you and pull you in and rehire you for a new
job they're looking for military people we know you have the discipline we know
you have the the wherewithal to get stuff done
we know you are trainable so if you're a vet go to EF Legion comm and get your
information in there and then companies we had a bunch of companies that are
looking that's where they're if you're a company and you want to find good people
and you need them right now go to go to EF Legion comm and get yourself some
some experienced leaders and if you want to check out more of us more if you want
to hear from more from Darryl Cooper he's got like I said his podcast martyr
made he's on Twitter Instagram and Facebook at martyr made he's going to be
on a podcast with me called the the red and on top of that if you hadn't
had enough of my grading slow paced voice or you haven't heard enough of
echos high-pitched meanderings then you can still find us on the interwebs on
Twitter on Instagram and on the old Facebook that Co is that echo Charles
and I'm a jock on willing and thanks again Darrell for coming on thank you
much appreciated thanks for the effort that you put into your podcast and
thanks for sharing your story here and hopefully we can continue to get after
it sharing people's stories and helping
people see stories in the right light to everyone else out there that's in
uniform right now holding the line around the world right now holding the
line thank you for what you're doing out there in uniform and to police and
firefighters and law enforcement and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and
correctional officers and border patrol and Secret Service thanks for holding
the line here at home and on top of that right now to all the doctors and nurses
and all the medical personnel that are on the front lines here at home every
day taking risk to fight illness thank you for taking care of us when we need
it most and to everyone else out there the world is an uncertain place and sometimes the trajectory of your life
comes down to a little bit of chance and what I'm saying is don't take that
chance very often and stack the deck in your favor and the way that you do that
is by going out there taking control and getting after it and until next time
this is Darrell Cooper and echo and Jocko out

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