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[Assistant] Echo Charles, I know you don't really care about working here. That's fine. I get it. Listen, at a minimum,


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[Assistant] If you do a good job here, you work here for 6 months, you work here for 10, 12 months, I don't know how long you're gonna work here for.


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[Assistant] When you leave, I can give you a recommendation that'll get you a better job somewhere. That'll put you on a better path.


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[Assistant] And that's all I want. Look, I know you don't necessarily care about my company here. You don't like flipping burgers. I get it. But guess what?


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[Assistant] When you get done flipping burgers here, you can go get a job doing something that's a little bit better.


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[Assistant] Guess what? What is your life goal? Where is it? Where are you at? Cause I can promise you this, if you take care of me here,


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[Assistant] That's the path to not flipping burgers, which is really interesting. One time I said there was a


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[Assistant] If I don't like to fight. And I said that you actually should learn jiu-jitsu more than anybody else if you don't like to fight. Echo, if you don't like flipping burgers,


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[Assistant] You more than anyone else should say, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna be the best burger flipper that I can be. Because that's gonna allow me


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[Assistant] To step up into the next round, because if you can't flip burgers...


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[Assistant] Bro, how can I expect you to do anything else? You're definitely not stepping up the salad bar.


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[Assistant] When you go to work at a mechanic's shop, you want to be an automotive mechanic, and that's where you want to go. What do I tell them when they call here to say, could Echo Charles flip burgers effectively and efficiently and reliably? And I have to say, no.


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[Assistant] But you gotta, at least, you gotta do a little something for me too. So if you're running it, if you're working with that, those, those kind of entry level positions,


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[Assistant] Oh, okay. Well, you wanna be, uh, whatever you wanna be? First step is flipping burgers. And that's okay. Flip em good. Don't burn em. Keep em, keep em together.


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[Assistant] The existence of these capabilities can impose cost on a potential rival. Because the rival may need to expand resources if they want to overcome or negate a US competitive advantage as the rival pursues their goals. So you're, you're making other people pay.


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[Assistant] When viewed from this perspective, we gain an insight of, into how a military competitive advantage can help us compete with a rival.


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[Assistant] Also note that it needs to be a conscious decision on when and how to reveal our most sensitive competitive advantages.


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[Assistant] It happens in jujitsu too, like if you have that move that you're pretty good at, and you go for it,


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[Assistant] It's not a surprise anymore. I'm not saying you're not gonna get it.


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[Assistant] But, it's not a surprise, and now the person's expecting it to come.


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[Assistant] So you want, if you're gonna do it, might wanna hang on to it just for, you know, a little bit deeper into that role. Let that person be breathing hard. Let the O2 start to lack.


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[Assistant] This, you can't, you can't rest on your laurels, ever. You can't rest on your laurels, ever.


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[Assistant] Competitors as systems. Competitors are complex adaptive systems. Again, this, this,


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[Assistant] Like they said, very strict, what appears to be a strict hierarchy, all over the place. Guess what's more important?


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[Assistant] They've developed significant and separate political power based on its financial resources because it controls many businesses in almost every sector of the Iranian economy.


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[Assistant] Each of these power centers, among others jockeys for power inside Iran, working to advance their own internal or domestic interests. So, it's complicated. It's complicated.


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[Assistant] And you know what's crazy when you see like video, you ever seen videos of in our pictures and I ran in like nineteen, whatever, nineteen seventy three. It's totally westernized. Totally. It looks just like everything's good to go.


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[Assistant] Skipping forward a little bit. Developing a model of how a competitor system fits together helps identify their competitive strengths and weaknesses. At a basic level, each of these systems consists of people, ideas and things.


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[Assistant] The people make the system work. They also analyze its performance over time because they are also responsible for sustaining or improving the system's competitive advantages.


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[Assistant] The ideas of the system are found in the goals it pursues and in concepts it processes it and processes it uses to operate in the world.


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[Assistant] Mao famously stated politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.


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[Assistant] This quote suggests a mindset that blurs the lines between peace and war. The mindset


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[Assistant] This idea creates may give a competitor an advantage in operating near the threshold of violence.


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[Assistant] Within the system helping it achieve its goals. With this in mind, we can look at a competitor system and create a model of how it fits together, where it is strong and where it is vulnerable.


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[Assistant] Finally, after creating this model, Marines must remain disciplined in its use. Models are useful, but imperfect. They are theories about the systemic structure of arrival. We need to remain alert for opportunities to improve our models.


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[Assistant] People, ideas and things. That's sort of what you judge.


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[Assistant] How your competitor is going to operate. I, I, I think perhaps there is possibly one more that needs to be added.


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[Assistant] And it may be covered by people and it may be covered by ideas and it, not things, but a little bit. That is, that is the idea of execution.


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[Assistant] Or taking action. So you can have people, you can have ideas, and you can have things.


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[Assistant] You're dead in the water. Now, you could say that it's people that needs to make things execute, so okay, I get that. But, I just felt the need to kind of call that out, because when I look at a competitor,


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[Assistant] About yes, they got these people. Yes, they got their they got this team. They've got these ideas Okay, I get that they've got some competitive advantages there are disadvantages and they've got things they gotta they've got things


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[Assistant] Yeah, and even what you just said, like uhm, if you take a group of marines, or you take a group of soldiers,


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[Assistant] To me, it's almost like a fourth thing that does make sense in there.


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[Assistant] You ever seen an MMA fight that was about to happen, and on paper, that got fighter A should destroy fighter B, and what, what, what is the problem when he loses? The problem is he doesn't execute.


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[Assistant] Yeah, it also, that introduces the idea of, I know what you think is gonna happen.


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[Assistant] And I'm not going to allow that to occur. Which is, you know, what game


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[Assistant] It's, what game are you gonna play? Like, I'm going to get you out of your game. Uh,


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[Assistant] That's what I'm gonna do. Take away your competitive advantage. Yeah, actually, uh, Jeremy Stevens against Pettis, Anthony Pettis. And you know, Anthony Pettis is a striker primarily. And I, I was cornering Jeremy on that fight.


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[Assistant] We're going into the fight, Jeremy definitely going into the fight thinking, hey, it's, you know, cool.


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[Assistant] Anyway, it was a surprise. Surprise to me, surprise to Jeremy.


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[Assistant] And that's the way it went, but he changed, he did what we didn't expect him to do, which is just a brilliant move, right? So all the things that you think you know,


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[Assistant] So you're sort of talking about execution, maybe he doesn't really do it, but I think maybe an additional item to assess your opponent is necessary, and that is people, ideas, things, and execution.


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[Assistant] We also look at our own c- our own system to increase our competitive advantages or create new ones. For example...


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[Assistant] Do the people in our system have the necessary skills and aptitudes required to sustain our competitive advantages?


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[Assistant] To me, we can check those, we can check the ideas, we can check the things, we can check the people. I better check the execution. Cause none of this stuff matters without execution.


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[Assistant] It's not always true that the organization with the newest or most equipment wins the competition. Quote Dave Burke.


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[Assistant] Sometimes a side that is able to combine adequate material with innovative new ideas becomes the winner. From this analysis, we can then increase our existing advantages or create new ones as deemed necessary.


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[Assistant] The use of military force may take any number of forms from the mere deployment of forces as a demonstration of resolve to the enforcement of a negotiated truce to general warfare with sophisticated weaponry.


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[Assistant] Here we see the alignment between our warfighting and competition doctrines start to emerge.


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[Assistant] The whole point of this thing. In war, we impose our will on our adversary. Their cooperation is not required. Going back into influence and leadership, right?


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[Assistant] In competition, we make use of military force to attract or coerce.


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[Assistant] But the efficiency comes out tenfold in the field and in the ex- in the execution. Let's think about the execution.


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[Assistant] I have to remember that when I'm talking to you, there is the threat of me being able to fire you.


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[Assistant] I might not even say a word about it, so I have to kind of consciously...


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[Assistant] And that's why, by the way, that's why we show up there, because the business is failing, because there's total centralized command and it doesn't work.


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[Assistant] Marines participate in attraction strategies all the time, demonstrating our professional commitment to our national values when conducting bilateral training.


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[Assistant] In recent years, for example, as part of U.S., larger U.S. attraction strategy, Marines provided training on amphibious operations to an important ally, Japan. Check.


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[Assistant] That's what, that's what the Marines are doing all the time. That's what the entire military is doing all the time. That's what we need to continue to do. We get into coercion.


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[Assistant] Fast forward a little. Political actors often use coercion as a way to achieve their goals.


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[Assistant] To coerce someone is to pressure, intimidate, or force someone into doing something, or to reach one goals through the use of pressure, threat, or force.


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[Assistant] There's a big difference in jujitsu between attraction and coercion, right? Attraction is like you get someone to defend their neck so that you can take their arm.


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[Assistant] To take a specific action, deterrence is a threat intended to inhibit an adversary from taking a particular action to prevent it from even getting started.


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[Assistant] In both cases, the target of coercion must be cooperate, must cooperate.


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[Assistant] Because the target must decide to comply with the goal of an actor who is applying the coercion.


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[Assistant] This cooperation is not friendly or willing, but still must exist for coercion to be effective. Not friendly, not willing.


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[Assistant] You better have like his child in the trunk of your car. Forever. See, it's not a good plan.


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[Assistant] The idea of using coercion in a competition can be misleading if we do not identify the assumptions that support its use. It's often assumed that a stronger nation can naturally coerce a weaker one.


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[Assistant] into doing what it wants. However, this assumption may not be true if the weaker nation is willing to absorb more punishment than the stronger one can or will deliver.


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[Assistant] Or stay committed to its goals over a longer period of time. This is one of the


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[Assistant] Those 150 mean less to the, to the communist government than the one does to the American people and the American government.


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[Assistant] Through the continuum of influence. And you don't recognize that maybe they don't care if they get fired.


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[Assistant] So you want to hear about some miscalculation? So my, uh, my son had gotten a little out of line. This is when he was young.


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[Assistant] And he was in a very austere, I put him into a very austere environment to get him to course him to understand what he had done wrong and how we don't do this kind of thing. And.


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[Assistant] It was really strict. And it's not, and by the way,


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[Assistant] I s- he's, you know, something that's a little spark of like, mm, wait a second.


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[Assistant] And s- and what I called this, cause he was young.


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[Assistant] I called this, uh, you know, I have to be strict with you. So then I started being less and less strict. He started getting some of these privileges back.


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[Assistant] And then one time he started stepping out of line a little bit and I said, Hey, am I going to have to get strict with you again? And he said something along the lines of like,


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[Assistant] So you gotta pay attention, the kids will come at you man, they'll come at you. Psychological warfare.


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[Assistant] Information plays a special role in competition. Narratives play an important part because they are what gives meaning to a set of facts. For example, two competitors may both desire to possess a particular island.


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[Assistant] To give facts and meanings. I, I got a good question on EF Online the other day. I think it was EF Online. It might have been a client, but it was along the lines of, hey,


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[Assistant] How do we develop this culture? And my answer was, you need to tell the story of what's going on. And when we talked about it on this podcast, the Marine Corps.


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[Assistant] So important. Demonstrating a capability and exercise and then think, and then communicating so that it affects a competitor's thinking.


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[Assistant] Is another way Marines use information. Leaders determine what capabilities to reveal and when to reveal them as part of a large approach. However, much is specifically revealed


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[Assistant] Publicizing adherence to high standards in realistic training can help sustain the Marine Corps' reputational advantage and affect the thinking of our nation's competitors. Once again, the Marine Corps, with this manual, is increasing their budget.


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[Assistant] It's, it's attraction for the DoD is what it is.


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[Assistant] Know the story going back to the Unraveling podcast. What is your story? Know people's stories.


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[Assistant] The spectrum and styles of competition. The next section. The usual condition of internal relations is one of competition across the elements of national power.


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[Assistant] Or the effort to negotiate favorable terms in a trade agreement. Escalation on the spectrum. We might see sharper economic acts like industrial espionage, the theft of intellectual property, use of sanctions. What's interesting about this is how often do we go to war?


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[Assistant] And that's, we should do that as infrequently as possible, obviously.


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[Assistant] Repetitive actions can also move the line up or down over time. This is about the, this is about how you, how you kind of move up and down these continuums all the time.


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[Assistant] Experienced increasing cyber attacks in the past decades.


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[Assistant] This has imposed costs because the Department of Defense has to spend time and money to develop civilian training.


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[Assistant] Counter those attacks. We can also, fast forward, we can also impose costs during war when we first forced the adversary to divert resources from their preferred actions in order to counter one of our capabilities.


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[Assistant] Just think about that psychologically. If we start to think about the continuum of influence or leadership,


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[Assistant] That's what you're doing. You're crossing over that threshold where people are forced to submit. That's why you get the equal and opposite reaction.


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[Assistant] In some cases the posturing briefly, briefly crosses the threshold and violence occurs to demonstrate the resolve of the actor.


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[Assistant] The brief, this brief use of violence still has the same aim, which is to affect the target's decision.


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[Assistant] Many actors intentionally try to obscure or confuse exactly where this threshold lies. Oh man that's a good one right?


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[Assistant] Proactively prop up that image. Right?


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[Assistant] What, where, where you have, you might think that's a good move as a leader.


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[Assistant] But what you're really doing is now what you're doing is you're inducing more fear.


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[Assistant] And now people don't know when you're gonna lash out. And so now they're on egg shells and they're afraid to speak up and speak out and it's a problem.


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[Assistant] They do this to cause enough ambiguity and hesitation that they can achieve their aims with little or no interference. This has been true historically and will likely increase in the future. Some rivals use capabilities like certain cyber and space activities that have destructive effects but fall short of some definitions of violence and effort to obscure whether or not they would have crossed the threshold as a push in the envelope.


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[Assistant] In support of US goals, Marines performed missions on both sides of the violence threshold. In some cases, Marines were introduced into situations below the violence threshold. But then a political group performed a violent act against US interests.


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[Assistant] Now we get into decision making, initiative and response.


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[Assistant] You might just call that whole thing execution. I'm not 100% sure, but you might.


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[Assistant] Marines are taught that decision making is essential since all actions are the result of decisions or of non-decisions.


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[Assistant] It's so powerful to paint things so clearly.


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[Assistant] This is, whoever wrote this opener right here. Cause, you know, how many people wrote this book Dave? Six? Six, yeaah. Six.


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[Assistant] That's the little section you gotta highlight. Terminal Lance out there.


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[Assistant] This is what we're talking about. Initiative is as important in competition as it is in war. Gaining the initiative means our competitor must react to us.


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[Assistant] We can gain it by presenting a dilemma to our competitor and also by setting the tempo of the activity taking place.


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[Assistant] Brian stand when he was on his operational temple. He like, he, he, he, what, you know, everyone's got their move, right? In jiu-jitsu, everyone's got their, you know, they got that guillotine, they got that kimura, they got that heel hook.


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[Assistant] When Brian Stan was on here, I just remember him just talking about that operational temple where it's gonna, and I was, mhm. That's what he, that's what this guy's talking about.


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[Assistant] Marines must assume that potential competitors understand initiative as well as we do. Thus, they will take actions in order to gain the initiative.


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[Assistant] Without crossing the violence threshold, or crossing it briefly, and then returning below the threshold before triggering a war.


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[Assistant] This diverts attention and resources which creates a gap for an alert competitor to exploit.


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[Assistant] Having no fixed timeline for achieving goals. Plus opportunism.


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[Assistant] Also leads to incrementalism, which is the effort to achieve a goal by adding together a number of small steps taken on a path toward it.


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[Assistant] Therefore, what Marines are taught for warfighting serves them well here provided they also apply judgment in recognizing how timelines can differ between war and the rest of the competition continuum.


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[Assistant] So this idea of incrementalism is something we, you gotta be on the lookout for. You gotta be on the lookout for that slow creeping maneuver that your enemy's making.


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[Assistant] And at some point you gotta draw the line. What I recommend is...


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[Assistant] Instead of drawing a line, what you do is you incrementally respond. So when Echo makes a little maneuver,


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[Assistant] That's a little bit offensive to me. I just don't say, well, he hasn't really crossed the line. I actually give him a little bit of a check. Little check.


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[Assistant] Was that for a company trip? No, no, no. Hey, I'll change. I'll talk to you. We'll get it straight now. Okay.


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[Assistant] Cause you're trying to incrementally see if you can start putting real stuff on the company credit card. No you can't.


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[Assistant] But if I don't check you, if instead I draw a line in the sand.


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[Assistant] With a- with a hockey stick across the face? No! I'm gonna give you a little-


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[Assistant] Just a little, I'm here. I see what's happening. I don't draw a line in the sand because a line in the sand can be offensive.


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[Assistant] Charges adding up over time and then we look up and we, we, we have lost a bunch of money and spend it on things that don't really benefit the company.


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[Assistant] So anything that you think you're using for your personal gain or for your, for your personal life is not allowed.


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[Assistant] So that's a little bit of a line, but I'm, I'm not smacking you with it. I'm showing it to you.


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[Assistant] Yeah, so let's say there was a street in front of your house. Really busy.


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[Assistant] This is, this is 20 yards from the road where you could get killed.


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[Assistant] That's actively freaking criminal. You're done. That's where we're at. Just so everybody knows. You do something like that.


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[Assistant] You're, you're done. Period. End of story. There's no, there's not even discussion. So, don't do that.


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[Assistant] Apply that to your personal life. Apply that to your business. What are you trying to do? What are your enduring interests?


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[Assistant] Attraction is an important concept in our theory of competition. It uses incentives and rewards to get another political actor to act differently in ways that are aligned with our interests. That's what we're doing as a leader. We're using attraction. We're using coercion.


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[Assistant] In war, we impose our will on an enemy. With coercion, we need our rivals' cooperation because they must decide to comply with our wishes. Even if their cooperation is unwilling.


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[Assistant] If it's competitive advantages, advantage is made clear to a rival.


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[Assistant] These will often blend the threat of violence or the use of violence itself with other tools to gain an advantage.


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[Assistant] This constantly shifting mixture can get confusing, which is part of the goal.


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[Assistant] Competitors often intend for this confusion to help them reach their goals by causing their rivals to HESITATE.


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[Assistant] This also helps them gain the initiative so that they can set the pace, the tempo for the competition.


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[Assistant] That's what we're trying to do. To win, to, to influence Dave without Dave even knowing that I influenced him.


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[Assistant] I wanna maneuver my ideas into your head so that you think they're, they're, they're, they're your ideas.


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[Assistant] I wanna preemptively remove your will to fight before you even think you should be in a fight. Before, before you even think you should be putting up resistance, you already are thinking that you don't wanna resist. That's my goal.


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[Assistant] And by the way, what makes this easy, er, what makes this, and actually makes it easy, is when my cause


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[Assistant] But when I can align my goals with your goals and I can give you ownership,


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[Assistant] For you to get on board with what I want you to do and you don't even know that I'm trying to make you do it!


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[Assistant] So, it's one of the most important things about this manual. Simply making you aware that you're competing and you have to be aware that you're also influencing all the time.


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[Assistant] And you're on that spectrum. And you're on that continuum and you're either gaining leadership capital or you're spending it.


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[Assistant] And if you do it right, people are on board.


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[Assistant] And the deeper part of that is you are actually propelling them towards victory for them.


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[Assistant] You're propelling them towards victory and they are happy to be moving there.


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[Assistant] Of influence. Yes, we're competing, but we're influencing as leaders.


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[Assistant] We want to stay competitive, right? In a multitude of ways, we'll say.


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[Assistant] Any, uhm, any ways that you can recommend for us to maybe maintain or improve our competitive advantage in the world. What do you think? What do you got?


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[Assistant] You know, uh, just to confirm things in the world. You know, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. I'll talk about like how if you exercise, you'll be sharper. Right? Mentally sharper.


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[Assistant] And then hearing that chess player the other day, Garry Kasparov, talk about how if you're in shape, it's gonna help you win at chess.


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[Assistant] I was like, keep working out people. Keep working out people. That's what you need to do.


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[Assistant] Your family and your physical health are gonna fall.


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[Assistant] If you pour all your efforts into your family, your job and your physical health is gonna fail. If you pour all your efforts into your physical health, your job and your family are going to fail. So we have to be balanced.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you let the physical one fall apart, that's gonna negatively impact the other. I actually, they all, they all impact each other, right? They all impact each other, but...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Let's face it, as you pointed out on one of the earliest of these podcasts, the physical one will help you across the board in all aspects of the game.


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[Assistant] Right now. That person is happy that you're going down the path of whatever you're going down.


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[Assistant] Cause even as you're talking about this, people are thinking, okay, what does this all mean?


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[Assistant] Here's what, here's a bonus thing, cause we repeat a lot of the same stuff, right? Sure. We certainly seem to repeat. What are you writing now?


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[Assistant] With free shipping at originmain.com if you get a subscription. So if you want, what do you take every day?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay. Every single day. Dave, what are you on daily? Cold War. What about, what about curlew?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So if you go on that, if you subscribe, yes, and of course go, then you get free shipping. Yeah, which is...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Pretty awesome. So if you want to get any of these items on a regular basis, which we recommend you do,


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[Assistant] So you can, you can get them there, or you can get them at originmain.com. And if you get a subscription.


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[Assistant] But the great, the great thing is, uh, we started off in Florida, and it was sort of a test run for Wawa, and everyone went after those, went after those discipline girls in Wawa, and just,


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[Assistant] Almost, uh, like less than a month into it. Less than a month into a three month trial. Wawa came to us and said we want you in all the stores. So.


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[Assistant] Thank you for, for getting after it and w-wawa's gonna deliver.


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[Assistant] Competitive advantage. Competitive advantage to have not slave labor, but awesome people.


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[Assistant] Uhm, you can also join us on the underground.


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[Assistant] Go to JockoUnderground.com. It's alternative podcasts, some amplifying information, some behind the scenes, some Q&A.


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[Assistant] Some live stuff and we're gonna, we're gonna actually record yet another underground podcast right now about going into some other


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[Assistant] Facets of these discussions and and reason we're doing that we don't we we need to have an alternative platform We don't want to take on sponsors where we have to


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[Assistant] Uhm, too. But we, we don't want to have the Jocko podcast behind a, a paywall.


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[Assistant] I always say firewall, and you like correcting me right before I even said it, which is good, because I saw you.


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[Assistant] Okay, well we just have a, we don't want to put it behind a paywall because we want everyone to be able to hear it. And so that's why. $8.18 a month.


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[Assistant] If you can't afford that, it's okay, email assistance at jocounderground.com and we will take care of you. We also have Joco Unraveling podcast, we have the Grounded podcast, we have the Warrior Kid podcast, we have a YouTube channel.


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[Assistant] Where Echo puts his legit videos, a lot of those, most of the good ones are ones that I'm the assistant director on, and you'll notice a trend there.


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[Assistant] The good ones, psychological warfare, album, on iTunes if you need a little help, getting over a little, whatever, moment, moment, momentary weakness.


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[Assistant] We also have a leadership consultancy called Echelon Front. Go to echelonfront.com for details on that. We have EF Online.


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[Assistant] Where we are, have courses that you can take on leadership. We have live interactions there. Go to efonline.com.


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[Assistant] We have the muster in 2021, which is our leadership conference. Go to extreme ownership dot com for details. We're making some adjustments on that right now on when those are going to take place.


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[Assistant] EF Overwatch, executive leadership for your company. Go to efoverwatch.com if you want to help service members.


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[Assistant] Active service members, retired service members, if you want to help Gold Star families and service members, families at large, then you can check out Mark Lee's Moms.


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[Assistant] If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to americasmightywarriors.org. And if you didn't get enough of my


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[Assistant] You can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, which, obviously Echo only refers to as the Gram.


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[Assistant] And on Facebook, Dave is at David R. Burke, Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink, and thanks to all the military personnel out there in all branches of service.


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[Assistant] In uniform around the world, keeping us out of harm's way by going into harm's way yourself.


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[Assistant] And also thanks to police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. We thank you for the same, for going into harm's way to keep us out of it.


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[Assistant] On the competition continuum, on the leadership continuum, on the influence continuum. It's happening every moment of every day.


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[Assistant] So don't lose track of that and don't get beat without knowing you're competing.


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[Assistant] Until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jaco.


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[Assistant] This is Jocko Podcast number 243 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo.


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[Assistant] Normal life, you give away the normal world.


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[Assistant] That the world is dirt and blood and pain and death and you have to accept that.


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[Assistant] Family and friends and mortgage payments and bills to pay and a future to worry about and retirement and savings and the kids.


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[Assistant] And in 24 hours of flight time, you go from Ramadi, Iraq to San Diego, California.


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[Assistant] And you have a house and a wife and kids and mortgage and a future.


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[Assistant] And you want to live a life that honors your friends that didn't come home. And then it's let's go. Let's get it on.


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[Assistant] The surfing and the rolling and the eating and the drinking and the jamming on the get box was spent with Seth Stone.


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[Assistant] You know, he's a much nicer guy than me. Much friendlier than me. Always made friends.


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[Assistant] Somehow linked up with a guy by the name of Gene Cooper, legendary surfboard shaper.


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[Assistant] And through Gene, Seth also linked up with a guy named Mike Black that made a surf movie.


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[Assistant] If, if it can even be called, that's kind of a crazy surf movie called Invasion from Planet C, the sci-fi surf movie.


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[Assistant] It was kinda wild and funny and insane and just kinda completely crazy and maybe that's why we liked it. Cause it had some good surfing and it made us laugh.


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[Assistant] One song in that movie was called, Madman.


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[Assistant] In the White Buffalo songs, we're in some other surf movies along the way. One called Shelter.


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[Assistant] So Seth figured out where the rest of this music came from and we started listening to this white buffalo. Came like a little soundtrack.


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[Assistant] Saw him at the Casbah in San Diego. The belly up. A few times. Eventually we saw him at bigger places. Like the House of Blues and the Observatory. And we knew that somehow this guy...


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[Assistant] But it was a small enough crowd that everyone that was there knew who he was. There was no people wandering in. They knew, they knew who the white buffalo was and they were there to see him.


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[Assistant] People were drinking and people were carrying on. And they were talking and laughing.


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[Assistant] And then the PA music faded. Then the lights went dark.


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[Assistant] And when he got done playing, the place was silent for a second. Seth and I were standing there like everybody else.


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[Assistant] And memories are all I have left of Seth now.


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[Assistant] The man behind those memories and behind those songs, the man himself, a man named Jake Smith, otherwise known as the White Buffalo. Jake?


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[Assistant] Yeah man, uhm, tell me about it. Yeah, it's lots of stuff wrapped up in the songs that you write. It's uhm, it's kind of crazy when I think about all the time that I spent sitting there listening, playing them, listening to them, going to your shows.


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[Assistant] Uh, you know, just being some random dude. We almost got into a fight at the Belly Up one time. Some guy was talking, like, just, just Mad Dog and Seth, and Seth was like 6'2", you know? And...


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[Assistant] You know, I mean I know I look like a serial killer for sure. Seth not quite as much because he's too nice. But still, he's a strapping dude with a shaved head.


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[Assistant] And cauliflower ears, right? That's generally not a go situation for scrap.


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[Assistant] Yeah, so at Belly Up, we're standing there and this dude's kind of nudging into Seth and Seth's kind of looking at him and I'm standing behind the guy, which in the Jiu Jitsu world means I can kill you. You have zero chance. But it didn't happen.


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[Assistant] You were born where? Up in Oregon? I was born in Eugene, Oregon. And what was that all about? Were your parents working up there?


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[Assistant] And what was, what was the situation? Your dad's a college professor at Pepperdine?


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[Assistant] Say to themselves, they're looking at the courses, and they're like, there you go, public administration, that's calling my name! Yeah, I don't know.


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[Assistant] Did they have him? Did they have him? You had to carry it under your arm back then.


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[Assistant] Yeah, that's a big mental transition to make, man. My buddy Josh Hall just made me a board. That's 11-6. And it is, it's the thickest board I think a human could make.


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[Assistant] Because my son was telling him what I wanted. And, and they were doing this like as a secret surprise for me. Right? Yea. Was that cool? Like a secret surprise behind my back. So my son was telling him, hey,


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[Assistant] It's a, it's a, it's a surfboard for a bit, for a large man, right? We'll say. So, you, uh, and I know you play, you were a freaking hardcore baseball player, right?


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[Assistant] I didn't, I didn't play, well I played baseball. My dad wanted, my dad liked, really liked sports a lot. That's why my name is Jocko by the way.


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[Assistant] Echo gets into this kind of thing. But I just wasn't, you know, wasn't really, wasn't really my thing. So years later I went and talked to a professional baseball team.


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[Assistant] And when I was growing up, I remembered the baseball players, it seemed like most of the baseball players that were pros.


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[Assistant] How much practice did you play? I mean, are you one of the, cause sports was different, like nowadays, if you're a kid and you're gonna play sports, your parents are like, cool, you're gonna do that sport, you're gonna play it 365 days a year, you're gonna get coaching, you're gonna get some private whatever, uh, uh,


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[Assistant] But he was good in high school. Wrestling in California high school is no joke. It's the largest wrestling tournament in the world. I think he was CIF champ.


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[Assistant] At what point, what was your, what was you know, you're dealing with music?


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[Assistant] When you talk about music, I don't know if you think this, I think this. When I was younger, like within, when I met someone,


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[Assistant] Shook their hands, hey nice to meet you. Within the first...


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[Assistant] Let's say seven to nine minutes of talking to someone. I would say, what kind of music do you like?


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[Assistant] Like sometimes I meet you, I got four kids and they're all, whatever, 20, 19, 17, and 10.


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[Assistant] And for a while I would say, you know, well what kind of music do you like to these kids? And they're just, it's so, there's so much music.


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[Assistant] There's so much music out there that it's, you know, you know, you used to get the weird avoidance answer to that question. It's like, oh, I listen to everything. Yeah, I listen to everything. Right. And I used to, I used to say, okay, so you, to me that used to mean to me, you have no personality. If you don't say,


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[Assistant] Or, you know, I like the dead. Okay, I know who you are. Or whatever. You know, I like, uh,


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[Assistant] So much music and it's so accessible. So when I was a kid in order to get music that we wanted to hear,


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[Assistant] We had to go to New York, maybe, we, we had to go to a good record store, which they just weren't all over the place. There's one in Waterbury, good brass city, get some. Uhm, but you know, we'd go there and, and the, but the, that was part of the inhibitor. The other part was money. Like it costs $21 for an album.


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[Assistant] And, you know, we just didn't, so I, you know, I, I love music. And I had probably, I don't know, 30 albums that I just listened to over and over and over again. You borrow one from someone, and of course we got the little, we got tape cassettes too. You get the dub tape cassette.


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[Assistant] But even that was kind of hard to get because they would all sound like crap.


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[Assistant] Not that we really cared that much, I mean, let's face it. Nowadays, everybody kinda listens to everything.


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[Assistant] So you could, you're just opening it up even wider. Even more? Oh yeaah.


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[Assistant] Let me tell you, look, Echo's a decent guy. Thank you. When we go places, he drives, I ride, which means he gets control of the music situation. Yes. Which is a problem.


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[Assistant] So, uh, so did you get, so you said you played D1 college, so you get into college. Did you get into college, where'd you go to college?


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[Assistant] And did you, so is that when you were talking that you got a guitar or was that still in high school you got a guitar?


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[Assistant] Dude, wrestling's crazy man. I know, I mean my kids wrestle and it's like, it's mayhem. It's mayhem. You want to talk about political. Your dad's talking about soccer. Come to a freaking wrestling tournament. It's insane man. It's insane. Go to the state championships. Bakersfield, California. It's insane. It's awesome.


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[Assistant] Okay, so you're, so you're still in high school, and you're 27 years old.


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[Assistant] So you're still in high school and that's when you go, you hear, you hear a little bit of, uh, acoustic music that you go, huh.


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[Assistant] Were you feeling any, any of the burn, the baseball burnout at that point? Yeah, totally.


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[Assistant] So, so then you, you, so when you got your guitar, you're still in high school and you're immediately writing songs. Like you had that, you had that thought that


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[Assistant] I, I kinda, for my, my interpretation of that thought is, it's a pain to try and learn what someone else is doing, but if I just make something up, then it's a little easier. Was there any of that there?


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[Assistant] And, uh, the, the name that we've kind of, that kind of has survived is Bronson's Children, named after Charles Bronson, and even though we never made an album, and even though we did record, uh,


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[Assistant] Bronson's face and then underneath and little kids like a toddler writing it says Bronson's children, you know, with like a backwards R type thing. But I think the first song that I can remember


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[Assistant] Was there was this weird televangelist dude that was on late night TV. His name was Dr. Gene Scott.


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[Assistant] I don't even know. But anyways, we would watch him, he'd kinda berate his, you know, you need to donate now. It was one of those things. And there's the, there's the whatever. And so the first, uh, song


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[Assistant] In Bronson's Children was a song called Dr. Scott Get Off the Air.


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[Assistant] And then, so at some point during college, so did you play your whole four years of baseball?


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[Assistant] What practice did you do? Not much. What you got the guitar, did you?


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[Assistant] So you pick up the guitar and you start writing songs, you start playing songs, but you didn't, you're not one of these people that, like I've known, I had friends growing up where they got obsessed and it was, they were just like learning scales and whatever the hell else you learn when you're trying to get good at guitar, which I


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[Assistant] Yeah. So 98 to 2002, you're up there, you're, you're playing occasionally in the back of some freaking whatever, you know, and, and waiting tables.


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[Assistant] So, I'm still trying to figure this out, right? You're in San Francisco. It seems like you are very persistent, but not very focused. Or maybe something like that. Or is it just you just didn't know what to do?


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[Assistant] But wait a second, I'm just going to confirm this, we're in 1998?


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[Assistant] Yeah, there was story. In the shelter flick and the Malloy brothers are all cool guys. Totally.


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[Assistant] So wait, so then you, you said, I missed it, you moved to San Diego or you moved to LA? I moved to Orange County. To Orange County. Yeah. The surf industry in there. Yeah. Was that kind of what drew you to it?


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[Assistant] So how long were you in that situation before, when's the first time you went into a studio and recorded? Uhm, not on a pioneer tape deck.


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[Assistant] So, so that, so you record this thing.


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[Assistant] Weird, are we still pre, like, internet, uhm, whatever, mp3 situations?


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[Assistant] So, so, when that album comes out, is it, what happens? Is it freakin'... It's just no factor.


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[Assistant] What, at what point did you start to feel some forward moment? Like, like I was saying earlier, man, I went and saw you at UCSD in like a little cafe and there's 15 people in there. And I was actually like me, my wife, her friends, our friends, we're all sitting there.


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[Assistant] When you're in that state, so you're in this state, like there's gotta be a point, there's gotta be a thought that goes through your mind of, alright, you know, like, this ain't gonna work, I gotta,


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[Assistant] Was that thought in your mind or was it a good, were you getting by enough? Were you having, I mean, you, you, you obviously love playing live at least as far as I can tell you freaking love playing live. Is that a good enough time? We're like, Hey, this is a cool job right now and I'm good with it.


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[Assistant] You know when you were a kid and you had some girlfriend and, and like, she would break up with you but she would string you along, right?


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[Assistant] So then, so that was from Single Thing Yellow, which is a kick-ass movie. They take this board and they send it around the world. A bunch of different people surf it in a bunch of different wild spots. Uhm, but this is still


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[Assistant] Still you're not, you know, able to just, or are you able to just survive on being a musician at this point?


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[Assistant] I'm, I'm projecting my thoughts onto this, but you know, when you're sitting working in a dive bar somewhere playing a gig and you look over in the corner and you see this character.


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[Assistant] Is, does that develop into, hey, you know, I, I know what that guy's thinking or I'm thinking about what that person's life is like. Did that add, is it good that you went through this time period of, of where you were kinda...


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[Assistant] You're struggling through and making things happen. Did you does that incorporate into your the things you think about?


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[Assistant] Uhm, the musician, director from Sons of Anarchy.


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[Assistant] When I was in the SEAL teams, I was on deploy- when I would be on deployment, I would know.


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[Assistant] In my mind, like every day, I would know that this was like the best, you know, I was kinda just loving life, you know, living, you know, people always say living the dream, I was living the dream.


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[Assistant] Actually doing exactly what I always dreamed of doing for my whole life. Seems like that's what would be, you know, you being on tour.


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[Assistant] Get a taste of the road, bro. You're there and and then did that when you get done touring with that tour What's the next step?


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[Assistant] What made you decide to go? Why did you need? You've been doing it yourself. What made you make the transition?


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[Assistant] Are you the, uhm, is this all your decision making? You're the guy.


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[Assistant] And what does it look like when you get back to the states? Cause it's weird, you know, it's weird how that can happen. And I got some other friends and that are musicians and like overseas, they're freaking massive. And back here, there's just not, not action. I mean, it's


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[Assistant] Is it weird because how do you categorize your music?


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[Assistant] So that's an issue because you can't say, oh, there's this, you know, this other band that kind of fits in the white buffalo category and there we can play with these four other bands. We can do a festival or whatever because where do you really fit?


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[Assistant] Yeah, cause you're kinda like your own, you know, your own little, your own little genre.


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[Assistant] Well, at least you can slide in there. You can maybe do some, some Viking, uh, folk metal, what are they called? Festivals.


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[Assistant] So there's some level of you being on the lookout for a little...


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[Assistant] There would be people that would say, you know, I wrote this poem.


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[Assistant] Just, I just wrote it. And I'm talking like classical, like real famous literature people. Oh, the word is that this person just wrote this. It just came out.


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[Assistant] And it's like they didn't have to work for it. That's kind of what you're doing. You're just like, Hey, I'm rarely doing that.


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[Assistant] In other words, are you like, hey, I better get another album out in another, you know, cause you just put out your latest album, what, a few months ago?


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[Assistant] Do you start feeling the pressure in your head of, I need to do more because I need to cut another album? Do you start feeling pressure in your head that you got ideas in there that need to get out? Do you not even think about it?


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[Assistant] So the little pressure can maybe squeeze something out of you? Have you ever been at a point where you were feeling pressure but just nothing was coming out?


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[Assistant] No, you guys, you guys get, you guys look at each other and you guys just go off. It's freaking savage. It's awesome.


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[Assistant] I mean, you don't have a live album.


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[Assistant] We're in this together. We're bros, right? Bikers, hippies, surfers. I mean, it's like, let's all, let's all go get some, right? That's freaking. Yeah. No, it's, it's awesome. If people get a chance to see that it's like, um, yeah, you, you, you gotta go check it out. Uh, dude, what's the matador about the matador? Yeah.


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[Assistant] You've also provided me with like nice soundtracks for the darkness.


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[Assistant] Uh, you know, I never, I never have thought about the fact that you write murder songs before, uhm, until you said it today. I was like, oh yeah, that's, that's the whole thing. There's a bunch of those murder songs.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at my list, I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, that's, that's, oh yeah, oh darlin', what have I done? Oh yeah, that's, that's an absolute freak.


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[Assistant] Of a couple. Yea. Right? And, you know, it sounds like they meet when they're young. You've got some freaking great lines, man. Just great, great stuff. What made you decide to go, hey I'm going concept album?


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[Assistant] Man, freaking, all, all this great stuff, man, wherever you're getting it from, I hope those little magic nuggets that go into your brain help enter your brain or are produced in your brain. I hope they just freaking keep on coming, man.


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[Assistant] Well, it's a freaky, it's another, another great album, and you know, I always talk about there's, there's not too many bands, in my opinion, that can do five awesome albums in a row. Like, Black Sabbath, they did it. Zeppelin, they did it.


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[Assistant] Metallica, close, but they did it, right? There's not too many bands that can do five awesome albums in a row and part of it is I think what you said earlier, you know, you were at this level where, you know, if, if you would have done that first demo and gotten picked up by whatever big record company and had a big bus and all this nice stuff and


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[Assistant] You probably didn't, you probably wouldn't even squeeze out even two more good albums. But man, you were there and, and you're knocking out every album that you found. I don't know what number you're on right now, but it's more than five and you're still freaking putting out awesome work and


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[Assistant] Well, thanks for taking us on the road with you down that


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[Assistant] Like I said, look, I know I'm coming out dark, cause that's sort of where I tend to go, but man, there's a bunch of beautiful songs on there, the best music for


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[Assistant] You can apply to just about every part of your life. So thanks for coming on, man. Freakin' awesome. Thank you for having me. You think maybe take it out with one more jam? Sure. You got it. Something off the new album.


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[Assistant] Jake, the white buffalo. Smith has left the building. By the way, I forgot to mention this. You can find him on the interwebs at the white buffalo dot com. On Facebook at the white buffalo. Instagram. Buffaloco. Buffaloco. Maybe crazy buffalo? Is it?


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[Assistant] Twitter, BlancoBuffalo. Yea, that's what I mean. Right, so.


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[Assistant] And then YouTube, there's also a YouTube channel, The White Buffalo, where he puts out those little videos he was talking about.


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[Assistant] That's that man. Uhm, awesome to have him down. Jake, thanks for coming down. And Echo. Yes sir. There is some darkness.


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[Assistant] You kind of recognize. You kind of recognize, don't you? At what point, at what point did you go damn?


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[Assistant] He's like, hello? And you're like, yeah, I'm looking for, um, Mike Jacobs, the, uh, voice actor. And he's like, one second please. Hello?


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[Assistant] That's, that's just the absolute tip of the iceberg man. There's gold all throughout those albums man. Yeah. Legit.


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[Assistant] Well, there's darkness in the world as we heard. Yes, it's true. Also some light. Yes.


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[Assistant] We talk about the darkness, but we wanna move towards the light. What do you got? How can we move towards the light?


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[Assistant] If you want to test Echo's theories, go ahead and try it. We don't recommend it!


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[Assistant] Pills, capsules, you can have Discipline powder, and you can have Discipline in the cans.


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[Assistant] Jocko white tea, we got that as well. We also got mulk, so uuuh, look, you need supplementation. We talked about, we talked about the gains being the light. Well, you need something to build the light with.


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[Assistant] From a physics point of view, when you want to make gains, you need protein. You might as well have protein that tastes like a dessert. That's true.


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[Assistant] Isn't it awesome that your son wants something as much as you want him to have it? Yes. Here, go, like, how often do you get to say to your kid, yes, they're begging you to do something that's going to make them healthier, stronger, and a better person.


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[Assistant] Go. Have some monk. I'll make all the monk you want. How's that sound?


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[Assistant] You can get this stuff at OriginMain.com or you can get it at the vitamin shop around the corner.


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[Assistant] The vitamin shop around the corner. You don't have to wait. Go get some.


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[Assistant] Rash guards are available. Anything that you basically need to cover your body. Boots. You need to cover your body, otherwise it's gonna get...


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[Assistant] Scraped it's gonna get cold and you're gonna be naked. Yeah, which is not good many cases most cases So get some clothes get some American-made clothes get some American-made clothes That are functional functional and that's where my judgment stops. You have to judge the other


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That sounds like a marketing campaign.


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[Assistant] Leave a review, whatever. We also have some other podcasts. We have the Jocko Unraveling Podcast, which used to be called The Thread.


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[Assistant] It's back. It's in it's full glory. We have, we re-released or are we re-releasing the threads that were removed. Now we have the unraveling. We have some new unravelings coming right now. They're out. They are. Grounded Podcast. Haven't done one of those in a little while. We owe you. Warrior Kid Podcast.


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[Assistant] Especially if it's a video that's very short and you could easily pay attention to, then he puts a bunch of enhancement in there to make sure you can watch it for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. But when he does a 3 hour video, he doesn't put any enhancements in there. It's just a plain


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And for some reason, that's the way Echo's organized it, which is his call, you know? But if you wanna see what Jake Smith, the white buffalo, looks like, if you wanna figure out why they call him the white buffalo, because he kind of represents that.


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[Assistant] In a, in a visual kind of way? Sure.


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[Assistant] Come and check it out. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Hit like.


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[Assistant] Yeah, like comment and subscribe that's so weird


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[Assistant] Okay, well, we're not doing this big campaign to get you to fix the algorithm. You know what? If you like the videos, watch them.


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[Assistant] Subscribe to the YouTube channel, check it out. That way Echo can get in your head with his little videos.


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[Assistant] Also, if you want to have a visual representation to kind of keep you squared away, go to flipsidecanvas.com by my brother, Dakota Meyer, making cool graphical art to hang on your wall. Graphical. Also, uh, you know, pick up some of Jake's music. You know, go...


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[Assistant] Download the music or order it or whatever. Uhm, however you're gonna get that music, go get it man, go get it. Jake's out there making it happen. Also got some books. The code.


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[Assistant] The evaluation, the protocols, leadership strategy and tactics, field manual, warrior kid, one, two, and three, Mikey and the dragons, discipline equals freedom, field manual, extreme ownership, and the dichotomy of leadership. Pick up some of those books if you like what we talk about on here.


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[Assistant] Also have a leadership consultancy called Echelon Front. If you need help with leadership inside your organization, go to echelonfront.com. If you want to get engaged in the online brigade that we have where I talk about leadership, I interact. You want to ask me a question? You're thinking, oh, I wish I could ask Jocko a question. You can. You can literally come on there and ask me a question doing


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[Assistant] Two to three times a week, I'm on there, live interaction, go to efonline.com.


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[Assistant] Leadership is not something that you just get and now you're good. And you know what, maybe you don't wanna, maybe you wanna ask me about jujitsu, maybe you wanna ask me about some relationship that you're in. Whatever you wanna ask me, come and ask me.


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[Assistant] EF online dot com. We have the muster. The next muster is in Phoenix, Arizona, September 16th and 17th.


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[Assistant] Then we're going to be in Dallas, Texas, December 3rd and 4th. Go to extremeownership.com for details. We've sold out all these things that we've done. These ones are.


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[Assistant] Less seating because of social distancing. So they're gonna sell out even quicker. We have EF Overwatch. If you need leadership inside your organization, you want experience leadership, go to EFOverwatch.com where we have candidates that are proven leaders from the military that understand the principles we talk about. Go there and hire someone.


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[Assistant] EFOverwatch.com. We also have AmericasMightyWarriors.org. That is Mama Lee, Mark Lee's mom, who is on a mission to do good.


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[Assistant] To help service members, to help their families, to help gold star families, to help people that are deployed around the world. If you want to get involved or donate, go to americasmightywarriors.org.


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[Assistant] Then you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, and on the Facebook. Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And Jake the White Buffalo can be found on the interwebs at the whitebuffalo.com, Facebook, the whitebuffalo, Instagram, buffaloco,


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[Assistant] Twitter, BlancoBuffalo, and his YouTube channel is The White Buffalo, and thanks again.


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[Assistant] To Jake for coming on the show for sharing your vision, your voice with us. Thanks for taking care of our veterans.


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[Assistant] And thanks for adding a soundtrack to my life and to all the veterans out there.


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[Assistant] Thanks for stepping up into the madness, into the darkness. And thanks for not backing down.


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[Assistant] And to the police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service and all the first responders out there, thanks for keeping the darkness at bay on the home front.


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[Assistant] The words from a white buffalo song called When I'm Gone. He says I feel it closing in on me.


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[Assistant] I got to be all I can be. In this life there ain't no guarantee you don't get no shit for free.


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[Assistant] What does that mean? It means you gotta get out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco.


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[Assistant] This is Jocko Podcast number 273 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.


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[Assistant] I was with the Turks, and we were heading south.


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[Assistant] The Chinese had entered the war a few days before. They had kicked the ass of the entire 8th Army, and we were on the run.


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[Assistant] Everywhere you looked were the corpses of slaughtered Americans.


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[Assistant] One, a captain of infantry, I had met back in Fort Lewis, was strung up by the wrists between two buildings, his feet not quite touching the ground.


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[Assistant] He raised his head slightly, and his lips trembled as he tried to speak. His strength lay in a pool of frozen blood beneath his feet.


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[Assistant] I leaned my rifle against the wall and reached up to cut the ropes.


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[Assistant] He breathed softly, then coughed once the air gurgling through the blood in his throat.


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[Assistant] I had heard it before from the coal miners back in Hermione. It made no difference whether I cut him down or not.


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[Assistant] His chin sank to his chest, and he swayed lightly.


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[Assistant] Like the thin frail branches of the willow trees next to the cemetery back home. The men captured with him were hanging too.


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[Assistant] Some between branches, some in doorways, one between two thick limbs of an ancient apple tree.


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[Assistant] They had all been butchered the same way, stripped, then strung up like Christ on the cross.


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[Assistant] Their stomachs had been sliced open and their guts pulled out to dangle down before them.


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[Assistant] Blood, flesh, and guts were trampled in the snow everywhere.


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[Assistant] The Turks glided silently from body to body, cutting each down and laying it to rest.


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[Assistant] A bright Korean moon etched in silver, the horror of the scene.


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[Assistant] I can hardly remember a time when I didn't want to be in the service. Both my brothers were in. Bud was a chief torpedo man.


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[Assistant] In the North Atlantic, Chuck, the oldest, was an infantry company commander in Europe.


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[Assistant] Bud was the more colorful storyteller. And the Navy would have been my choice, hands down. Except for Hollywood.


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[Assistant] Hand to hand combat, paratroopers, the jungles, Errol Flynn in Burma, that was war.


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[Assistant] And that right there is the opening of a book called The Making of a Soldier.


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[Assistant] And this is an incredible book and I've been referencing it here and there as I've been reading it.


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[Assistant] And it's actually two books. There's actually two books. One is the book I was just reading from called The Making of a Soldier. The other is simply called Soldier, both written by Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Tony Herbert. And I first heard of these books a few months ago. I'd never heard of them before.


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[Assistant] Uh, by the name of Colonel Pat Howell. He's the director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. And after this event, he emailed me.


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[Assistant] And during the event I had mentioned About Face and Hackworth while I was talking to the cadets and Colonel Howe sent me a photograph in this email. And this photograph that he sent was a photograph of his copy of About Face.


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[Assistant] It was actually signed by Colonel Hackworth and the inscription said to Patrick,


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[Assistant] You come from a long line of great warriors who led by that adage of looking after your men. Warmest regards, hack.


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[Assistant] And it turned out that Hackworth had worked for Colonel Howell's grandfather in the army.


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[Assistant] And so Colonel Howell sent me a message and he also sent me a message, an image of another book and the book that he sent me the image of is called Soldier. And Colonel Howell said this in the email, he said, speaking of Dave Hackworth,


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[Assistant] I sent a pic of his autograph of my copy. He had worked for my grandfather years previously. I've also sent a picture of a very Hackworth-like story about a guy named Tony Herbert. The book is called Soldier.


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[Assistant] He also wasn't listed in the Korean War, got commissioned, and then was a battalion commander in Vietnam, and had a prickly time with his chain of command.


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[Assistant] He also worked for my grandfather back in Germany circa 1960.


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[Assistant] So uhm, I mean, I get that report right there. It's all I need to hear. I hunt down these books online. These two books, one, one soldier and, and then the other one, the making of a soldier.


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[Assistant] And I ordered them both. And it's to me, okay, well great, I got another warrior that I can try and learn from. Pretty straight forward. But I should have paid more attention to the statement.


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[Assistant] That Herbert, that this guy Colonel Herbert had, quote, had a prickly time with his chain of command in Vietnam. This is actually a pretty significant understatement.


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[Assistant] And, and the whole, this whole story, which is a combined about 600 pages of reading between the two books, as I tried, as I read these books, and this, this way this story comes out, it's a pretty big elephant to try and swallow.


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[Assistant] And I wasn't quite sure how to approach the whole thing for, for the podcast. I read the books and then I'm kind of stewing on them because there's the whole thing. There's war and there's war crimes and there's accusations and counter accusations and there's good leadership and there's bad leadership and it's all.


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[Assistant] You have this completely heroic individual that is definitely a hack worth type leader and you see


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[Assistant] These heroic tendencies eventually get caught up and put through the wringer of politics and ego and the bureaucratic machine. And it just really makes it.


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[Assistant] A complex story. And as I read the book, oh, both of them,


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[Assistant] There was lesson after lesson of what to do and what not to do and what to watch out for.


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[Assistant] And like I said, because of the vast range of the story, it was hard for me to wrap my head around it and present it and figure out how to present it. And luckily I have a standard operating procedure of what to do when I'm facing a tough task. What you do is you put your rock on and you start marching.


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[Assistant] And that's what we're gonna do here. The life and times of Colonel Anthony Tony Herbert. And I'm gonna utilize both these books and kind of bounce back and forth.


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[Assistant] Almost a different generation. A fact of life for which I never really forgave them. Because when World War II came along, they both packed up and marched off, leaving me standing on the front porch, cursing.


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[Assistant] I cried too when they left, not because they were going to war and might not come back, but because I couldn't go with them.


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[Assistant] My mother tried to comfort me. The army doesn't want you now, Tony.


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[Assistant] She said, you've just got to learn to understand rules are rules.


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[Assistant] But I neither could nor would. All I really knew for certain was that one day, above all other things, I wanted to be a soldier and that somebody or something was ruining my dream.


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[Assistant] So this guy comes out of the womb, ready to rock and roll as they say. And I'll tell ya, as I, well you're, I get into this early life, it's definitely a very cool description of America in this time frame. Both prior to World War II when he's a little kid and then as he gets a little bit older.


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[Assistant] He says this, guns were always an integral part of my life in the Herbert family.


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[Assistant] Not because we were great sportsmen or anything like that, but simply because we like to eat.


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[Assistant] And eating wasn't simple, wasn't a simple matter for a coal miner and his family in those days. The mines were all my father had ever known.


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[Assistant] The day after day regimen of dust and dirt and darkness and penny pinching and poverty.


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[Assistant] With never enough pennies to pinch. Up until John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers came along in 1939, the most cash my father ever saw for one week's work was $2.


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[Assistant] The rest of his compensation came in the form of credit at the Eureka store where Mr. Stahls, the manager and dutiful employee of the mine would carefully match the amount of purchases against the amount of credits. It inevitably worked out at the end of the year that my father and every other miner in town had bought more than their credit allowed.


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[Assistant] All my life I heard my father and mother worry about paying off the company store before they died.


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[Assistant] Their chief aim was to leave without passing that particular debt onto their children.


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[Assistant] They lived in a company owned house, in a company owned town, in a company owned county.


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[Assistant] Neither my father nor any other man who worked in the mines could quit. How could they? The mines owned them. But none of us ever really felt poor.


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[Assistant] There were so many other families just like us, that we had no standard of comparison. Everybody had to struggle to make it. At least, everybody with whom we had any contact.


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[Assistant] And for all we knew, the whole world lived precisely as we did, there in harmony.


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[Assistant] 40 miles from Pittsburgh, deep in the black heart of coal mine country.


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[Assistant] He was as steady as a clock up before dawn, walked to the mine, back home in the evening for a glass of beer or two before supper and then to bed. But with a wife and four children, Charles and Jules, my two older brothers, plus our sister Irene, four years my senior, and me, there was never enough money, never near enough.


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[Assistant] And the income from his guide service, and I skipped ahead, he also like will guide hunters sometimes, his income from the guide service couldn't bridge the gap. He trapped muskrats and sold pelts to Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck.


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[Assistant] An average skin would bring about $1.75. An exceptionally good one would sell for $3. And although he approached his trapping with all the same skill and determination devoted to his job at the mine and his hunting, it still wasn't enough.


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[Assistant] There were occasions when he would have to trudge down to the welfare office. It was painful for him. I knew. He dreaded every trip he had ever made down there. And when he came back with the government commodities, a bag of rice, a bag of raisins, a bag of cornmeal, he had the look of a man who had stood in a line of men going nowhere.


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[Assistant] He was unusually grim, and for days afterwards, he would not be himself. But somehow quieter, more withdrawn.


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[Assistant] I suppose the only comfort he had was in knowing that he wasn't the only husband and father in Hermony who was having trouble taking care of his family.


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[Assistant] All of us went to whatever lengths were necessary to get the job done. We made wine at home and sold or traded it for essentials. Charles took on an ice route.


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[Assistant] Delivering the 25 pound and 50 pound blocks up and down the street. We picked coal.


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[Assistant] At the slate dump, a smoking mountain of coal wastes deposited by the mine just at the edge of town. It was about a quarter of a mile across and three quarters of a mile long.


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[Assistant] All of the childhood images I have retained, one of the most vivid is of that ebony heap rising above the houses steaming and hissing like a volcano. We would trudge up its crumbling sides, pick up pieces of slate, knock off, knock the coal off, and put it in our burlap sacks that we carry.


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[Assistant] At the end of the day, we piled our sacks into a wheelbarrow and went downtown to sell the coal for a dime a sack.


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[Assistant] The slate pile was never one of my favorite places. There were cavernous hollow pockets beneath its contours, and we had all heard of the two people who had gone to the dump and disappeared forever into its black bowels.


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[Assistant] The town was one of several built around a collection of mines that had attracted


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[Assistant] Not only the Baltic immigrants, but a lot of Scots and Irishmen as well. Sulfur Creek, a bright red steam fed constantly with a drain off from the mine separated our town from Limerick Hill, the first of the others. The social systems


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[Assistant] That were premised on that creek were as rigid as though it were the Berlin Wall. Still, despite our differences, I never knew what they were. We shared one common bond, the minds and their wailing whistles that shrieked out at the beginning and end of the workers' days, sounding for miles and miles through the hills.


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[Assistant] And sometimes, signaling the reality of death.


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[Assistant] My uncle Joe Shearer, my mother's oldest sister's husband, died in a cave-in.


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[Assistant] At the nearby barking mine when I was about four years old. Three or four other miners were also killed in that cave-in. And I remember the sound of the whistles.


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[Assistant] It was always like that back then. Always some accident or cave-in that killed one or two or three men. Not any major disaster as the newspapers like to say. And so it was forgotten and ignored by those who had the kind of power that would have made some difference in the condition of the minds and the dangers faced by those who worked in them.


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[Assistant] He goes on here, he talks about the church, and he has Father Kelly there. He said, I always loved Father Kelly, but I was never sure about the church. He was a kind old man who had been a hero in World War I, and had the medals to prove it. According to my father, he had been gassed.


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[Assistant] At times he seemed very nervous about being a priest and maybe that's why he was drinking a great deal. He talks about another guy named Dr. Latimer. And look, I'm going into some detail here.


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[Assistant] Because as this story unfolds, you've got to try and figure out where he's making decisions from. Where, where, where is his morality rooted? And it's very clear as you move through this that there's people that influence the way he thought.


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[Assistant] Another guy that influenced the way he thought is a guy named Dr. Latimer. And this guy was, you know, like the local doctor. And...


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[Assistant] He kinda got to know him a little bit, and one of the things he would do is give him copies of National Geographic. And again, this is one of those things where when you read this you think, okay, it's when you look back.


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[Assistant] When you see the way the whole story unfolds, you look back, you think to yourself, okay, this is interesting.


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[Assistant] He says it was Doc, I think, who first started impressing me with the idea that wherever people live, they're essentially the same.


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[Assistant] Look at these natives, he would say, pointing at some bare-breasted folks from Australia or Africa. They hunt just like you hunt, Tony.


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[Assistant] And just like your father and your brothers, the only difference is that they use a bow and arrow. They bleed if they get cut.


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[Assistant] And the fathers and mothers worry about their children. And they all worry about food and about dying. And they all want to live as long as they can, just like you, Tony.


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[Assistant] The doc never went to church. Somehow that impressed me. Like my father, he seemed always to be what he was. Never any phoniness around him or about him.


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[Assistant] So that's, again, you can kinda see this guy's developing a pretty strong moral character about other people and seeing other people as people and what the common ground is. He talks more here about Father Kelly. He was a good priest. Good in the sense that he deeply knew the people in his flock.


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[Assistant] In 1942, when I was 12 years old, he changed mine to make it read that I was 16.


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[Assistant] And thus allowed me to get a work permit and start bringing home a little cash for the family. He had done the same for my brothers, I was told, and for almost anybody else in town who had sons who were willing to work. I had taken my first job when I was 10, along with Richard Nadel, the brother of a pretty girl named Mary Grace.


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[Assistant] We worked on Muller's farm right outside of town and every morning at 4.30, rain or shine, Mr. Muller would come into town and pick us up on his little truck. We were paid $1.50 a week and a gallon of raw milk and for that


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[Assistant] We both drove tractors, cut wheat, dug potatoes, fed his cattle, milked his cows. He knew what he was doing.


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[Assistant] Obviously that wasn't helping much with the family financial burdens, and Father Kelly's forgery was an absolute necessitary, necessary, necessity.


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[Assistant] So that, so he had the like the under the table job, but you're not getting paid very much. So he gets this doctored birth certificate. He goes out and gets a job at this glass factory. He goes into some detail about that. He's, he's working in a situation where he's wearing a full asbestos suit.


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[Assistant] And you work, he's working in a place that's so hot, you're only allowed to work for 10 minutes and then it's 10 minutes break.


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[Assistant] And it's not like these are lenient labor laws. It had to be so hot that you would like die if you don't get a break.


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[Assistant] So then he does that job for a while, he ends up at the Pennsylvania Railroad, he's making 85 cents an hour. And he's doing this job where once again,


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[Assistant] There's a 600 pound piston that's like above you and you'd never be- If it happened to fall, you were dead because you couldn't hear anything.


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[Assistant] During one of the, during one of the winters in my early teens, the Calsters lost four of their children in one swift stroke of fate.


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[Assistant] And once again, the mind whistle told the story to the neighboring communities. One of the older brother Harry's, Harry was a friend of mine.


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[Assistant] His two younger brothers and two sisters were out one afternoon playing on the frog ponds in the area. Ponds created by the still drainage of the mines. The near zero temperatures had frozen the water to what the kids believed was a safe depth.


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[Assistant] But the ice broke beneath them, and one by one the others plunged through and drowned too, trying to effect a rescue.


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[Assistant] With the courage so typical of the area, all four dead.


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[Assistant] I had never seen Harry cry before. I caught his eye at Stater's Funeral Home and his tears moved me to cry myself.


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[Assistant] Again, what, just the fact that he's talking about sort of this courage, and if you think about what your job is, what most people's jobs is going to those minds every day.


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[Assistant] He talks about another buddy of his and it doesn't really, well he doesn't explain what happened because he didn't know what happened but somehow this kid got shot with a .22 caliber like playing around or whatever.


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[Assistant] Uhm, he says he lived for some months but then gangrene set in and they brought his body back to her, her many.


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[Assistant] The funeral set at St. Edward's where I was an altar boy, the priest took the water shaker from me and began to sprinkle its contents on the casket.


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[Assistant] And I remember that I stood there before the altar trying to figure out at which end of the great metal box they had placed Joe's head and which end his feet. I never really fought in terms of the dead as being punished.


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[Assistant] It had always been a matter of living, getting their comeuppance.


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[Assistant] But that night my mother asked me to pray for the soul of Joe and for the first time in my life I did offer prayers on behalf of another person.


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[Assistant] I never picked individual fights, but I never seemed to have any trouble getting into them either. I guess because I was larger than most of the guys my age, a lot of them couldn't resist the challenge. I don't remember ever losing one.


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[Assistant] We get a good background with the guy. We get a good feel of the situation. It's very tough. Hard work. Always behind the eight ball financially. But still nonetheless, tight community.


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[Assistant] Fast forward a little bit. While I was getting started as an adolescent, my brothers were fighting the war.


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[Assistant] Chuck became an infantry officer and a company commander in Italy and Bud, a Navy man, served as chief torpedo man aboard a destroyer that prowled the North Atlantic. Their letters were never any aid or comfort to me. Vicarious combat, like books and movies and teleplays, had never been my cup of tea.


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[Assistant] I hadn't quite recovered from their abrupt departure from Hermini and their subsequent location in places with exotic names when they came home with medals on their chests and war stories to tell the old man on the front porch in the spring of 1944. That's what I wanted and I wanted it badly.


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[Assistant] I still wanted to be a soldier and I knew exactly how I could do it. The military's rules be damned. The phony baptismal certificate Father Kelly had worked for me, had worked up for me was the key. Actually I was-


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[Assistant] Already getting some advice from people at work about registering for the draft. They thought I was 18 years old.


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[Assistant] And I saw no reason to disappoint them. I went over to Irwin.


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[Assistant] With my work permit in hand and told Mrs. Gangaware at the draft office that I'd just forgotten about it and needed to register. She looked at me as if I were a lowlife son of a bitch who was trying to sneak out of my duty as an 18 year old American citizen.


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[Assistant] Actually I was a 14 year old teenager, American citizen that was trying to do my best to sneak into my duty.


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[Assistant] I'd like to say it was all my idea, but I can't remember whether it was me or my friend Tony Spazzali. So him and Tony Spazzali decide they're gonna go enlist.


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[Assistant] They catch or they hitch a ride until they get outside of Pittsburgh. Once they get outside of Pittsburgh, we walk the rest of the way to the U.S. Post Office in downtown Pittsburgh, where we both join the U.S. Marines. This kid's 14.


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[Assistant] The next day, the train, Tony and I were riding southward through Virginia towards Parris Island, South Carolina.


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[Assistant] It was halted in some backwards town and we were taken off by a man who identified himself only as a federal officer. We were both impressed, if disappointed.


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[Assistant] When we arrived back at the Pittsburgh depot, Mr. Gressman, our high school principal, was waiting and took us home.


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[Assistant] My father only shook his head, but my mother was glad to see me and smothered me with forgiveness. I went back to my traps and my school and my job and the railroad.


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[Assistant] The very next day. I wasn't finished, however, I was only waiting. Fast forward a little bit. Three years later, now he's actually the right age. He goes to, unless he's 17 years old, goes to the Marine Corps recruiting office. And gets told the quote is full. Because, by the way, the war is over.