I'm Tom Billieux and this is Impact Theory. Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Jocko Willink. Let's get right into it. One of the ways that the world works is that psychological influence to put the nicest spin on it works and works very well.
I see you as somebody who's moving into the world of cultural influence. Tell the story if you don't mind, of what made you decide to write your first book and then what it was that you're trying to help parents teach their kids. Yeah, I went and got a book at the bookstore for my son and it was like a pirate book. And it had a pre-covert, it looked like a pirate book.
And the pirate book ended up being like the weakest, most pathetic pirates ever. And I was disappointed. And so I just thought to myself I'm gonna write books so that I can convey the type of values and lessons learned that I would want my kids to have and I would want my neighbors kids to have and my friends kids to have. And so that's why I wrote the books.
And so what are those values? It's hard work. It's helping other people out. It's studying hard.
It's doing the best that you can in whatever you're undertaking. It's all those things. And one of the things I think the most important underlying messages and probably the most important underlying message is that you can decide who you want to become and you can become that person. So in the book, the kid is weak, can't do any pull ups, doesn't know how to swim, doesn't know his time stables and he's getting picked on by the school bully.
That's a rough place to be and for a 10 year old kid. And what his uncle teaches him is you don't have to be weak. You can work out and you can become stronger. You can eat better foods.
You can study and you can become smarter. You can learn how to swim and you can learn how to fight and defend yourself. And so you can actually become through hard work and through discipline, you can become who you want to become. So that's the message that I wanted to get to my kids.
And by the time it came out, my kids were pretty much a little too old for it. But luckily they've absorbed that message in other ways. Was that like a sort of intimate decision where it was like, I wanted something for my kids and so I did it and it felt intimate? Or is there a sense of like, I think I can actually nudge culture in a direction.
The culture's hungry for this kind of story. I bet there's a lot of parents just like me. They have kids going through the same thing. Like, do you think at that level?
Like, I want to bump culture in a certain direction? Or is it a much more local decision for you? When I was writing the first book, I was typing. And I felt like I was looking over my shoulder, thinking to myself, I hope no one sees one doing it because this is the best idea ever.
Like, the world needs this right now. I need it, the world needs it. I can't believe no one's written this yet. And so yeah, I felt like people were going to go, that's it, that's what we've been looking for.
And they were. So it worked. But I definitely had that feeling. Yep.
I was writing that book. I was thinking people are going to, the kids are going to want this book and parents are going to want the kids to have that book. How far are you, like, how deeply do you want that to take root? For me, when I'm doing the, especially the lives, I talk a lot about like, America needs to refine that thing that we had when I was a kid, where it was, you wanted to be tough.
You believe that you could do anything. You had Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, John Claude Van Damme, just so many guys playing like this really tough guy role. And I get how to a modern audience, I probably look super cheesy. But at the time, it felt so cool.
And I really want to see America reembrace that. Now, I take it to an extreme. I think that we are on the precipice of something exceedingly dangerous for, I think, countries go broke all the time. I think countries go from number one to middle of the pack faster than you can snap your fingers.
If anybody wants a lesson in that, look at Argentina. It was at the absolute top of the South American pile, only to find themselves hyperinflating their currency and going to absolutely nothing and struggling. And the only way to begin the process of coming back is to go through so much pain and suffering. Whenever your debt gets to the level that we have debt at, basically it ends in war, bloodshed of some kind.
You can have your French version, where you're just lapping people's heads off in the streets, or you can go to war like England did. But none of those seem like good outcomes to me. So I'm like, all right, how do you attack this problem? You attack it at the cultural level.
You focus on kids. You give them this message. And so every time I see you, for people that don't know you have a movie, that's going to be coming out of love to hear more about that. But do you have any sense of urgency?
It sounds like you do understand this is a huge vacuum. But do you have a sense of urgency for America? Or do you think I'm sort of overstating the problem? You know, it's one of those things where I have kids, right?
And I see what my kids are doing. And I see what their friends are doing. And I see them hanging out and what they're doing. And I don't, I'm not disfared at all.
I'm kind of like pretty stoked. You know, kids are out there. I think they're healthier right now than they ever have been. There's the kids aren't drinking as much as they used to.
I don't know what it was like when you were a kid when I was a kid. But when I was in the in the SEAL teams, like alcohol was everywhere. And kids are drinking less, less drugs. They're more healthy.
I think they've started to embrace things like the idea of extreme ownership of the first book that I wrote, which wasn't aimed at kids, same to adults. But like people want to take ownership of their life. People want to be responsible for what's going on in the world. And I think that's happening more and more.
And I think there's a meme world of, of, you know, the boomers, right? The boomers bought their house for $6,000. You know, and now you know, no one can afford a house. It's like, OK, so there's some there's some young people that say, you, the boomers got their house for $6,000 and we have to pay a half a million for one bedroom, whatever.
And so there's there's that. But there's also people like, Oh, yeah, that's what cost for a house? Now, cool, what I need to do to make it happen. And also, you know what the market goes up and down and we'll I'll find a way and I'll figure it out.
So I think there's a little bit of both, but I'm not overwhelmingly dis like, like, overwhelmingly fearing that the younger generation is not going to step up and do good things, do positive things. And when I work with military, like you work with young military people, they're young military people. They're ready to rock and roll. They're ready to get some.
Like that's what they're ready to do. So yeah, and same thing with like, I work with big companies with construction companies. And there's 22 year old kids that are working construction kids, 22 year old young men that are out there working construction, their iron workers, their porn concrete, like they're doing like we have lights on in this place right now because alignment was out there two days ago in the wind or whatever repairing the power lines that give us power. This stuff is happening.
That's not a 70 year old guy from the greatest era of you know, a Vietnam. No, it's a kid. It's a guy that went to alignment school and he's alignment now. So as much as I hear a lot of, you know, when you look at social media, when I look at social media, who we see, we're seeing the kids on social media, a lot of kids that are not posting themselves because they're not at the nightclub with champagne because they're hanging from a power line reinstall in a wire.
That's what's happening. And that's awesome. So I see a lot of the world beyond what is presented via social media. And what I see is Americans that are out there working really hard to make things happen, build companies, create things, work hard, save their money, be healthy.
I see that a lot. I don't have a pessimistic, a pessimistic view of America. Now I'll tell you maybe three or four years ago, I might have been a slightly more pessimistic, but even then I was talking to guys that were 23 years old working on an oil rig, saving money, making money, going to school to figure out how to get that next level. Like, I think they're out there.
I know they're out there. I talked to them. So I don't have a pessimistic view. And I also think that our lives have not been affected greatly in terms of like the way that we live in America from a war since World War II.
Like in the Korean War, obviously if you were a family member or a gold star family or you had people overseas that affected you, but most Americans, they were still doing what normal Americans do. When I was in Iraq, most Americans were at Starbucks ordering a double latte, whatever those things are that they order. They were driving their car, their nice car, they were surfing the internet. All those things were happening while we were at war.
So we haven't had a war or even maybe I guess you could say COVID kind of impacted us on mass, but it was also one of those things where we were looking around like, wait a second, what's going on here? It took us a while to figure out hold on what is actually happening. So everyone kind of went, oh, wait, this is this seems weird. Wait, if I think if something like that happened again today, America would be a lot different.
America would be a lot different in the way we respond. Americans are American, popular, it would be a lot different in the way that we responded as a group. The government really lost a lot of trust on that and the media lost a lot of trust. And so I don't see that happening again.
I don't see something like that happening again. So but by and large, the values that I put out in the way of the warrior kid, there's a reason why that book sells like crazy. There's a reason why kids listen, I have a warrior kid podcast, kids listen that over and over and over again and their parents play it for them on their way to jujitsu class. There's a reason because they want to be like that.
And more important, they recognize that those things are true, that those things are true. That's what they recognize. It resonates with them. Just like a good song.
When you hear a good song, there's something inherent in the chords that are put together on the guitar that are inherent that resonate with us, that resonate with people. And there's truths in that book that resonate with people. When they read it, they go, oh, yeah, this is it. This is what we should be doing.
This is what my kids should be doing. And that's why I think I'm not, I'm to use your word optimistic. I love it. The Warrior Kid Podcast is that you talking to kids?
It's just me. I'll talk about, I'll read stories. Actually, a lot of them are me just answering questions for kids. You know, I'm in fifth grade and this, there's a kid that's mean to me.
What should I do? You know, just those kind of standard things that kids go through. That is incredible that you've built a brand that can reach down to kids. Do they find you through their parents or through the Warrior Kid book?
I think both. That's really interesting, man. You seem like you would scare the life out of somebody in the fifth grade. I'm horrifying to a child.
I am, I mean, I am one scary looking human to a child for sure. And, and but it sounds like they get it. Oh, yeah. Get it because, you know, I believe it or not, even though I look scary, I'm, I'll interact really well with kids.
I interact with kids better than I interact with adults because I think I relate to them more. Kids are cooler and more honest and yeah, I have more fun interactions with kids than I do with adults. Stay tuned. We've got more with Jocko coming right up.
Let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building compounding. There's a reason that people have talked about this forever. But if you put an asset to work, it generates more of itself. Over time, the curve bends way in your favor.
Every serious wealth builder knows how compounding works. Most gold owners though have completely opted out of it. Monetary metals changes that equation. They've built away for your gold to earn yield paid not in dollars, but in more physical gold.
Up to 4% per year, more ounces stacking every single month compounding in one of the only assets that can't be printed inflated or debased. And storage and insurance are included by the way. So hidden fees don't eat your yield. The average person is passively absorbing inflation.
This is how you compound your way out of it. Click the link in the show notes or visit monetary dash metals dot com slash impact to learn more. This is a paid advertisement. Let's talk about the worst investment most guys make on repeat cheap clothes.
You buy them. They look fine. But six months later, they're pilling, shrinking or just falling apart. So you replace them.
You do it again and again, you're spending more over time and you never actually have anything worth keeping or wearing for that matter. That's the whole model behind quince. I've got one of their 100% pima cotton teas and the quality is immediately obvious from the second you pick them up. They're soft, well constructed.
The kind of thing that holds up over time and that is the point refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quince.com slash impact pod for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince Q U I N C E dot com slash impact pod for free shipping and 365 day returns.
Quince.com slash impact pod. Let's talk about money. You're leaving on the table. Every time you pay full price for a health product out of pocket, you could be missing out on 30% savings.
There are over 40 million HSA accounts in the U S holding a hundred and fifty nine billion dollars in pre-tax dollars. That's where TrueMed comes in. TrueMed helps qualified customers use pre-tax HSA dollars on health products that can qualify as medical expenses under IRS guidelines. You complete a health survey, TrueMed handles the documentation and the purchase and you can save an average of 30% on products like eight sleep, Peloton, AG one and others that studies show can treat or reverse many common chronic conditions.
Stop paying full price for products your HSA was billed for. Go to truemed.com slash impact and check out what things you want that may qualify. It takes just a couple of minutes. TrueMed is for qualified customers only HSA FSA tax savings vary.
All right, let's dive right back in. We were talking off camera. It is really, really, really interesting to me about how creative you are, how much of that side of your personality exists. You've got so much to be fancy bona fides from the be tough be strong, whether it's the military, which obviously is unbelievable.
You've gone through scene done the level that you performed at, all of that. Jiu Jitsu, the continued strength into your, I don't know how old you are, but certainly 53. Okay, Jesus. So you're in better shape than most 23 years are.
23 year olds are. Just, yeah, most people never get into your kind of shape. Most people out of time, they're 40s are making excuses. So it's absolutely incredible.
But then I hear that you also do music. You're writing kids books. You've now written your first screenplay, which I hear has been optioned. But before we get to that, your book, your children's book has been turned into a feature film.
Walk us through that process, which is incredible. I mean, this is like you're living my fantasy. So I am really blown away at the dexterity of your mind, the breadth of your personality. It's really inspiring.
I would say a very, very lucky beyond anything else, very, very lucky. I've been lucky and I got lucky with that whole thing. The story of the movie is I wrote the books and there's a guy that I did not know at the time. His name is Ben Everard and Ben has a couple kids and he walked into his kid's bedroom one day and they were doing pushups.
And he said, what are you guys doing? And they hold up this book. We want to be warrior kids. Do you know how they found the book?
I don't know. Look at that from school library. And you know, Ben, who's a happens to be a movie producer, he was like, what is happening? How did a book make my kids do pushups?
I can't even get my kids to make their bed and here they are doing pushups. So he reads the book and he's like, oh my gosh, I got to make this a good movie. Friend of a friend, he had known a guy. I had known a guy.
He reached out. I was like, you worked with this guy? Yeah. Ben set up a meeting with me, drove down to my gym in San Diego and presented me his vision but also his understanding.
Like I'd been, I had quite a few, not quite a few, but I probably had four or five offers over the years of buying warrior kid and making a new movie. But he's a guy that sat down and said, I see it. So you turned all those down? Yeah.
But I don't want to glamorize that too much. I'd have people say, you know, we're interested in turning, they didn't, you know, they send me an email that they'd call me up or something like that. But no one, like he was read, fully understood the book, understood the impact on his kids and came down and said, I can, I see it. I see how this becomes what it deserves to become.
And I said, okay, cool. Let's go. And so we started kind of formulating the idea behind the movie. Next thing you know, we needed the next thing he wanted to do was a screenplay.
And so he said, look, you know, if we want to bring this to market, we got to put together a package, part of the package is a screenplay. And I said, cool, you know, I'll write a screenplay. And he said, we should hire someone to write the screenplay. And I was kind of like, well, you know, hey, all due respect, I've written a dozen books, I've written a bunch of New York Times bestsellers.
I know how to write, I'll write the screenplay. And you know, he said, look, it's not the same. It's a movie, it's a different medium, it's a different skill. And we should hire someone.
And luckily talking earlier about being humble, I wasn't like, no, I got this. I was like, okay, you know what, this guy's a pro. He's aligned with me. He wants a movie to do well, right?
He wants to do well. He has this vision. And so I know that what he's making, he's saying this, not to undermine me, but because he has the same vision, he wants to do well. So I said, okay, cool.
So we hire, we interview a few screenwriters and we find the land on this guy named Will Staples, whose dad was a helicopter pilot and being a homage to me. He was like, okay, you're in. But this was right before, again, Hollywood, well, we're in Hollywood right now. So Hollywood screenwriting or strike was going to happen.
Writing strike was going to happen. So we wanted him to write the screenplay before this strike was coming. And so we said, yeah, let's make that happen. And then Ben said to me, okay, I'm going to find investors to pay for the screenplay.
And I was kind of like, well, well, how much is it? And he told me how much it was. And I said, well, what if I just pay for it? And he was kind of like, you want to pay for it?
And I said, well, yeah. And what I didn't realize at the time and what Ben didn't tell me is, and you know this point is zero, zero, zero, one percent of screenplays get turned into a movie. Right. So you're putting, you're putting money towards something that the likelihood of success is almost zero.
I didn't even know that. In my mind, of course, everything is awesome. Right. And I'm like, oh, yeah, of course, of course I'll pay for the screenplay because then I'll on the screenplay and then when a movie company studio buys it, then I'll just make more money.
Great. Cool. No risk in my mind. There was no risk in his mind.
It was all risk. But you know, he hinted at like, hey, there's no guarantee on this. Okay, cool. So I paid for the screenplay wrote the screenplay.
Screenplay was just, and we did it in three weeks. You know, he said in us a draft, we're sending adjustments back. James, let's make this happen. And the screenplay was was was beautiful.
It was just wild. So as that's happening on another part of my world, Jockofuel, an origin USA, Jockofuel supplement company, origin USA clothing company, all 100% manufactured and made American with American made materials as that's happening. Chris Pratt, whose friends or was in a series called the terminal list, which was written by a friend of my name, Jack, who was another seal. So they had obviously a relationship and then another friend of mine named Jared, who's another seal trained Chris Pratt for the terminal list.
And while he was training Chris Pratt for the terminal list to get in shape and be a stud, he gave him Jockofuel and he'd get a bunch of different supplements and Chris liked Jockofuel. And so he started taking Jockofuel time. And so he gets in great shape. And he eventually reaches out to me.
This was prior to the screenplay, prior to that Chris Pratt says, you know, I hate really like to, I love what you're making. And I love what you're doing with the origin USA because he's a patriotic guy. And he says, cool. I would really like to do something.
So we start having, so we kind of say, yeah, let's do something together. And then our business counterparts start talking, right? What would this look like? And meanwhile, Ben says, you know, like, hey, you should show this script to Chris Pratt.
And I'm like, dude, I'm not sure this thing Chris Pratt. I mean, I can't do that. The guy is a super nice guy. He wants to do he wants to do a different project.
And now I'm going to go and, you know, hey, by the way, I've got this screenplay. It just, it just, I couldn't do it. Chris is too nice of a guy. He was too like open and too, just too nice of a guy for me to be like, and by the way, I like to sneak this business deal.
I just couldn't do it. So I said, look man, I'm not doing it. But what happened was our business people were having the conversation. My business people were like, well, you know, Jockofuel's working on that movie.
His business people were like, what movie? Oh, it's a kids movie based on this word you kid book. And they said, well, send us the screenplay. So my people sent Chris's people the screenplay.
And they read it and went, oh my God, this is awesome. They give it to Chris's film agent. And this is woman, they call her doctor, no, because she says no to everything. And when I met her for the first time, she said, it's great to meet you.
She said, I read this script. I wiped the tears from my eyes when I got done reading it. And I called Chris and said, you better make this movie. So that was our first big meeting.
Nonetheless, once Chris got the script, Chris read it, he said he read it, one sitting, same thing, tears like this is epic. We're going to make this movie. And so then we had, we had a package because we also brought on the director, McGee, who is awesome, like just such a great guy came up through the music video world, but then eventually did Charlie's Angels, you know, and just blew up from there and has a bunch of epic stuff going on. So that was a package.
And that's what we kind of brought some market. We want to make this movie and eventually Skydance and Apple came in and said, we want it. Yeah. Did you guys make the whole film before you sold it to Skydance and Apple?
Okay. So they actually foot the bill. They foot the bill. That's incredible.
That's so exciting. Have you, did you have ambitions like, I know one day I'm going to write fiction or did that take you by surprise? You know, I always wrote a lot. And fiction stuff, everything.
Okay. And I was actually, I found an old story that I wrote the other day and I was like, this is, and I probably wrote it when I was like 15 or 16. And it's freaking awesome. And I was like, dude, this is so cool.
I love this. I'll tell you the story real quick. It was like a short story and there was this, there was these, like an old lumber town. And there was a train that left the lumber yard and, and drove down these tracks out of, and it came out of a tunnel.
And depending on where it was going to go would be on one of three tracks. And these young kids got this idea where they would, it was like playing Russian roulette, they'd run above this tunnel and jump down as the train was coming out. And if they pick the right track, they'd be okay to pick the wrong track, they would die. And it's just a whole story about where it goes from there.
But that's interesting. Like I was 15 or 16 years old. That's a totally fictional story that I made up. So yes, I've been writing for a long time.
That's really interesting. Have you seen the movie, Contact? No. Oh my God.
So movie, Contact, the book was written by Carl Sagan. And for people that don't know, I think he was an astrophysicist, but certainly was, he was like the Neil deGrasse Tyson of his day, but I would say much more famous and dare I say respected. But he writes this book and in it, this woman ends up, they get from aliens. They get instructions on how to build.
It's not time travel, but because it bends face in time might as well be. So they build this device that's going to allow her to explore the cosmos. They end up sending her because of her. It doesn't matter why, but they end up sending her.
She's a scientist. And as she's going through the wormhole, she's describing back to NASA or whatever, like what she sees and all this stuff. And she goes, they should have sent a poet. And I always thought that was a phenomenal line.
Now, hearing you talk about this, I realize that we sent a writer to war and I now want to see what it's like to be on the ground because I, and Jacque, you may have told me this stuff before, like it rings a disembelled music thing, but I didn't update my mental map of who you are. But today, when we were talking, I've been following the story stuff closely because I'm so impressed by it. And it's so in line with the kind of thing I want to do. So just completely blown away by that.
And so today, for some reason, I was just like, hold on a second. We've got this guy. He's in one package, but inside there is leadership is so on brand with the physicality. That one didn't jar me, but this is like writing stories from the time you were a kid.
You told me that you won an art contest at your high school, which is like a pretty big deal. A musician. Now you're a published author of kid stories, but like that's sell, not like, hey, I wrote a thing and I printed it for six people. And then it got turned into a movie, Chris Pratt, I mean, one of the most famous human beings on planet Earth.
It's not small time. There's a damn good reason for it. Yeah, like this is like, you really like, you're doing a thing that I saw Kobe do and I was so mortified when he died. Never met him, never interviewed him, certainly blown away by the mama mentality.
But more importantly, he went from being a basketball player and then won an Academy Award for filmmaking. And I was like, whoa, it's very rare that someone can take that thing, whatever that thing is, that discipline, that focus, but the creativity of it all and then pointed at something else and be successful. You've now done that with receipts on both sides that are so extreme. Okay.
Anyway, I say all of that because now I now that I feel like I have a better map of how your mind actually works. Are you shifting gears? Like you put, I've heard you talk about like you put the night vision goggles on and it's just different. You're just there.
But are is that creative mind processing the world? Like are you having moments where you feel the either profundity of war or the absurdity of war or are you narrating to yourself like what it means to put so much trust in another person? Like what are the insights that you can feed us back as somebody with your ability to capture a story, tell a story, paint a picture, like give me some of that insight. More which I'll go in like after this break.
And we're back. Let's pick up right where we left off. I did not ever think I would be doing this stuff. When I was in Iraq, I did not, I was, I was like only doing one thing.
Like that was trying to accomplish the mission and keep my guys alive. And that was the only thing I thought about. I didn't think about any after the military. I didn't have any concept of after the military.
I didn't think about after the military. I only thought about the seal teams. That's the only thing I thought about. That's the only thing I cared about.
And nothing else really mattered to me. And you know, it's funny. If I knew the trajectory I was going to be on, or I guess I should say an indicator of me not knowing the trajectory of my life was that I have, I have almost no pictures of me in the seal teams. Like I have almost no pictures.
So instead of me saying, Oh, here I am in Iraq and here I am doing this and here I am doing that or a journal. I wish I had a journal. I don't have a journal. The closest thing I have to a journal is from my last appointment to Ramadi, I have notebooks like this that only and all their fill.
There's no human insight whatsoever in those. There's only, you know, hey, make sure to make sure to tell the guys to watch out for this. Hey, this mission is going to go down tomorrow night. We're supporting this group.
Like it's only notes operational notes. I had no other thoughts in my mind. I was only there to to fight. And that was my whole and death was accepted as well of, Hey, this is this is what this is.
This is we're ready. I'm okay. I don't need I'm I'm I'm not come home. And that's fine.
I get it. This is what we're doing. We're assessing the situation on the ground from a creative perspective, 100% interacting with other people in a creative way, 100% talking to other people, 100%. Like I actually will look back now and you know when you go watch a movie where the freaking the battalion commander stands up and gives a speech and you're like, Oh, yeah, you see movies like that, right?
Or the the high school football coach or whatever they get. I did that. Like I really did that I really got to like for lack of a better word, give speeches to my guys. I never thought about the fact that I was giving speeches.
I never thought of them as speeches, but now I look back and I say, Oh, yeah, I remember when I said that, I remember when I did that, I remember what I was doing was I had a message that I needed to convey to the boys. And I had to be as articulate as I could. I had to convey this message. It can be hard to make people understand things.
So was there creativity in all those aspects? Yes. Did I think about capturing one eye od of that in a journal of any kind? No, I did not.
I did not at all. The only thing that I cared about and the only thing that I thought about was war and the seal teams and I didn't care about anything else. And I don't even know if that's healthy. It's probably not.
But that I felt like that was my one benefit I had of being older when I went to war was I knew every moment that I was there. I knew that this was this was the apex of my life. This was everything that I'd ever wanted to do. This was everything that I ever jumped at doing.
And this is we I am at the moment in time where I am needed to do what I am supposed to do. And then that's where I was. Do you think you'll ever write about the war? I mean, I've written about it.
I've seen extreme ownership, dichotomy leadership, leadership, leadership, strategy, about components about it. But as far as going back and telling that story, maybe at some point, maybe at some point, but you know, it's funny because, you know, whenever I tell people I wrote a novel, you know, their immediate question is almost like, what war is it about? And it's like, no, it's not about a laundry map. And it's always like what?
I admittedly did not see that coming. Yeah, like, so I think I think, you know, if we were to try and dissect my my brain a little bit, you know, the time that I was in the military, I think I applied the creative, the creative bend that I have in my brain, I think I just used it for military purposes. And just was that's what I focused on. You know, I went to school, I went to college while I was in the military and I studied English.
And when I studied English in school, the reason I studied English was that I could write better concept of operations was that I could write better evaluations for my guys. That's why I did it. And it worked like I was very good at that. And that's what I used it for.
When I retired, I did not think for one second that I would write a book. I did not think that at all. There was a moment where that future is just unknown and I, it didn't make sense to me. I never thought to myself, otherwise I'd have a bunch of pictures, right?
If I would have had any IODA or I would have kept a journal, I would have kept a journal. I would have kept a journal. Hey, on this date, we did this operation. Here's what happened.
Hey, we had casualties today. Here's what thoughts are going through my mind. You know, I was telling my wife and I was talking to my daughter the other day and I have, you know, one thing that's beautiful about emails is, you know, they're permanent and you can scan them very quickly. And I was on my oil.
I was going back and I was seeing what I wrote my wife after my friend and my brother, Mark Lee, first he'll killed and Iraq. What did I write my wife on? He got August 2nd, 2006. What did I write my wife on August 2nd, on August 3rd, on August 4th?
I went and read those emails and it's like, Hey, checking in, hope school is going well, not a mention, not a mention. What about August? Because there's a time where you're not allowed to say anything, but then that time passes nothing. So so compartmentalized and only focused on one thing.
It's like, yep, the family got to make sure the family's doing good to go. Got to make sure that the team is good to go. Those two things do not touch each other. They do not touch each other.
And so that's just a little bit of a snapshot into what I was thinking about. Was I thinking about poetry negative? Was I thinking about songs negative? I was thinking about war.
What environment do you think outputs the best leaders? Politics, corporations or the military? Politics, I would say is the one where I don't really think that might be the best example. I don't think politics produces good leaders because especially the way the system is now.
When I went to officer candidate school, when I went to officer candidate school, you, you have to polish your belt buckle. Well, you actually had to polish the you had to scrub your belt buckle with this chemical called brasso. You had to scrub your belt buckle until the finish on the belt buckle was gone. So they put if you've got a piece of brass belt buckle, they put a finish on it so that it doesn't get contaminated every single day.
Well, when you go to OCS, they actually make you polish that finish off of you remove the finish. And I remember just thinking myself, it's a slow evolution where, you know, 30 years ago, someone said, hey, make sure your belt buckle doesn't have any smudges on it. And then it's like, well, make sure that you polish it. And then it's we want you to polish this thing until it no longer has the finish on it that protects it.
And it just goes totally astray, right? I think that's what happens with politicians. Like they go into politics. They got to behave a certain way.
Okay, well, you're going to be a politician now, Tom, be more professional. Okay, so you're like, got it. And then so you adjust your behavior a little bit. And then well, we want you to adjust a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more and pretty soon the person that you were is gone.
And now you're just this weird articulation of a human being that can move its mouth and say words that it's being programmed with. So I would say politicians probably not the best place to formulate leaders, but corporate world, obviously I work with all kinds of corporation. There's some incredible leaders there. And then the same thing with the military incredible leaders in the military.
That being said, there's horrible leaders in the military. There's horrible leaders in the corporate world. So leadership is is it gets formulated from a bunch of different components. A lot of it is who you are as a human being is who are you as a human being.
And where are you as a human being? Because depending on where you are as a human being really depends on what kind of leader you're going to be saying where, what do you mean? What is your goal? What do you care about?
What do you value? Because if what you care about is you, that's going to be a problem. It's going to be a problem in the military for sure. It's going to be a problem in the civilian sector as well.
If your number one concern, Tom as a leader is Tom and it's not the team and it's not the people and it's not the mission, things just aren't going to work well. So but if your number one concern is taking care of your people, your number one concern is executing the mission. The number one concern is making sure that you create something of value for the world. That's going to be a person that's going to turn out being a better leader than someone that's focused on themselves.
So and by the way, you can be on the surface like you know that if you look out for yourself, you're not going to get promoted because you look like you're an egotistical maniac. And so you'll play the game and you can do that for a little while. But usually those that core ego sleeps slips out and it will be problematic. Do you have a sense of what the political game is?
So if it's this constant adjustment that makes somebody really sort of a caricature of a human, why does that system optimize for that? When I think people, I mean, I would certainly say politicians should be the people leading the nation that certainly I think the cover story that it has when people are voting, but it ends up not actually outputting that thing. So what is the essence of politics? Being able to conform to the machine and be able to execute what the machine wants.
And is that a game of compromise? Because I'm watching what's going on right now with like Trump and Elon are falling apart. Or so that's how it's being portrayed. But Elon does seem pretty pissed about if I had to put words in his mouth, like I went and slept on the floor and did all this stuff, trying to cut the budget.
And now you put out this big beautiful bill that ups the ceiling of the debt and like, you just betrayed everything that we stood for. And so there's that friction of you have a guy that realizes, oh, you actually can't do this dance because when I look at from the administration side, they're like, bro, we've got to get something passed. And so I get the ideology, but the reality is that we have this two party system where people are just battering each other. And so it's like compromise, compromise, compromise to get something to move forward.
And we all sort of tell a story and turn a blind eye to, in this case, a fiscal cliff that we're driving towards is because we have to get something that can be voted on. I would say that's a good assessment. That's a good assessment. There's the ideal and there's reality and how those two how you sort of thread those two together.
I think a politician, they're trying to do that. And I think it's a really difficult situation that they're in. And I don't think many of them do it very well. Choco, this has been incredible.
Where can people connect with you follow along, find the things you're doing? I guess Jockofuele.com or jonusa.com, nationalfrontfront.com, Jockof.com. And I'm on social media at Jockofuele.com. I'm on social media at Jockofuele.com.
I'm at the other. Absolutely incredible. I appreciate every second of it. Good seeing you, man.
Boys and girls, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do.
You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it.
When your routine breaks, everything tends to break. And that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done.
You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics. And then superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2 and flavor samples.
Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com slash impact to claim this offer.