471: Better K-9s and Better Humans. With Mike Ritland
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This is Jocko podcast number 471 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. I love this country. I love the principles that it was founded upon. I love the people who live here, the diverse mixed bag of hardworking, freedom-loving, independent individuals who make up our society. I love this land, from the mountains in Colorado to the wide open cattle fields in Texas to the sun and waves of Southern California. I was born here, raised here.

I offered my life to serve this nation and protect its peace people. But as I look ahead, I fear for our trajectory. I fear for the future we're creating for the next generation. And that's why we need to talk. Because true change will only happen when honest, healthy, and thoughtful conversations take place. We live in a world inundated with noise.

The sound of people shouting their opinions and sharing information from every imaginable outlet, screaming to have their voices heard surround us. But though we may be talking, shouting, cramming information into our minds like a football team with a stack of pizza boxes in front of them, no one is actually communicating. No one is sitting down and having real conversations. No one is really talking. And we sure as hell aren't listening to each other.

We've become a polarized and divided society that refuses to emerge from our echo chambers to listen to anyone with a differing opinion. We've grown so accustomed to the incessant noise created by biased news outlets, angry people convinced of their own assumptions, and an onslaught of information that we've lost the ability to have any type of substantial positive conversations with our fellow man. As a result,

We miss out on the power that comes from innovative, open minds tackling our world's problems from differing viewpoints and unique perspectives. And that right there is an excerpt from a book called Un-Fuck America.

written by Mike Ritland. And Mike Ritland is a former SEAL dog handler, dog trainer, author of several other books, including "Canine Trident Warriors," "Navy SEAL Dogs," and "Team Dog." He's the founder and owner of Tricos International, which trains dogs, sells dogs, offers training programs for dogs, and fuels dogs with his Team Dog dog food, treats, and supplements.

He also runs the Warrior Dog Foundation, which takes care of retired working dogs that would otherwise be euthanized. And finally, he is the host of the Mic Drop podcast, No Holds Barred Conversations, with a wide variety of people to learn perspectives and expand horizons. He's been on this podcast before, over six years ago.

episode 113 and he's back here to discuss some of his more recent lesson learned things going on in this world so there you go welcome back dude yeah thanks for having me uh one quick correction i uh trainer not a handler which uh people in the in the community are pretty particular about so just as a heads up oh because i said you're a former dog handler and i should have said a former dog trainer yeah but i mean got it hey yeah we want to get it right it's real

There's, it might not mean much to echo Charles. Who's like, Hey bro, handler handler. What does mean if you're training them? Aren't you? Aren't you? Aren't you handling them? If you're training them? It's true. Um, so I was thinking about this book came out in 2021. Yeah.

That was like, were you writing it during COVID? I was. I mean, that's really the reason it was written was, you know, the two weeks to stop the spread that turned into two years of fucking madness. You know, sitting at home, the kids are home from school. You know, they basically went on spring break and then didn't go back. And so like, like, you know, everybody's kids. And so, you know, in, in my industry, a lot of things had slowed down.

in-person stuff had kind of shut off. And so,

I found myself sitting at home and I was like, well, I can go the way of a lot of people in Netflix and DoorDash or I can do something productive. And this had actually been a project that I had been approached by Penguin to do on the heels of the Team Dog training book. And basically it was a, hey, we love your podcast and there's all these different viewpoints and a lot of them are kind of hotbed political topics that

our nation is faced with that causes a lot of debate and controversy. And so why don't you jump in the mix? So, yeah, why don't you get, get started on that? And, and you know, so for me it was like, obviously they've done enough due diligence to say that they think it's a good idea.

my concern with doing it with them or any big publishing house was they're going to stifle my voice and edit the shit out of it and make it to where it's not even really worth doing. So I was like, well, you know, I've already done three under major publishers. Why don't I just do it myself? And then I can do it at a, at my pace B it'll be completely up to me how it gets edited. And especially with a book like that, because it's pretty edgy that way. You know, the last thing you want is a,

you know, multi-billion dollar publishing corporation and their HR team and lawyers going through something like that. So, yeah, that would have been interesting. Yeah. It would have been nine pages. Yeah. It would have been nine pages. Uh, and the title might've been changed for sure. So I don't, I'm not, I'm not going to read the whole book on the pocket, get the book. But one of the things you talk about here is you talk about America, uh,

And in this opening chapter, you call it the rich spoiled brat. And you go through that. I think that's a pretty obvious metaphor. Anyone could figure out what you write to explain that. But you talk about some of these freaking statistics. Mental health. On average, there are 132 suicides a day in the United States. 70,000 deaths.

Over 70,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2019. Yeah. I mean, those, those numbers are significantly higher now in both categories. Opioid crisis, 1999 to 2018, 450,000 people died from an overdose involving opioid. Like that's insane. Yeah. I mean, it's world war two numbers. Alcoholism.

It's funny because you and I were talking to you and you and I just did a podcast. You interviewed me for your podcast, but we were talking about alcohol and you were trying to pressure me. You're trying to peer pressure me into like the benefits of alcohol. And I literally have gone through this transition of, you know, when I was in the teams, drank,

When I was first got the team's drank a ton drank less the older and more senior I got and then eventually when I retired stopped drinking But still, you know, I get it. Hey, I get it, you know still and I didn't stop drinking like Immediately, but it's pretty quick and then it was like well, I still get it You know, I get it why the platoon boys are going out and having a beer. It's part of the thing. It's part of bonding and you know who your brothers are and

I went through that. Like, I get it and still support it. And I was kind of like, well, hmm. And right now I've just gone. I've gone. I can't find anything good about it anymore. So you talk about alcohol and this thing. And like, dude, it's excessive alcohol costs the economy, the US economy, $250 billion a year. It's crazy to think about alcohol. This is literally a poison that you're going to put in your body. It's going to make you do crazy shit. I had a friend that was when I was growing up.

And he eventually did every drug crack heroin, you know pot LSD the whole nine yards And he would say the only drug that he thought should be illegal was alcohol because he ended up where he was in jail and

a couple of times and the times he got put in jail wasn't because of heroin wasn't from crack. It was from booze. He goes, nothing makes me do the more crazy shit than alcohol. Yeah. So I don't know. Well, I guess to clarify, I wasn't, uh, my intent was not to, uh, you were exploring the bounds of my beliefs. Yeah. But not, not in a, in a manner with which I am trying to highlight any benefits of alcohol. I guess I would say, uh,

Going further into it, I think on the platoon front, I think it's

it makes sense to do those outings occasionally. You know, I agree like three or four nights a week. No, even once a week. No, but you know, I think like almost like a, not hell week, but almost like an FTX is that, Hey, let's, let's send the boys out into fucking Beale street on a trip and they all get shit face and see how they handle it. Like, I don't think it should be a regular thing, but I do see a benefit in, um,

seeing how guys handle themselves under the influence when they're around each other and there's that unknown of the civilian populace of other dickheads that are drinking and bouncers and and the great unknown I do I you know, maybe it's just I'll throw it on pay-per-view out of fuck I don't know but oh no if you want to get ratings on pay-per-view, you're in the yeah, that's a brilliant idea Give a bunch of guys booze Beale Street. Oh, yeah, let's go give him a fistful of money and

Throw some chicks in the mix. Yeah. You can see why I don't think this is a good idea because we know this would make great reality television. Dude, how many team guys wrecked their careers and or their lives? A bunch. And put a stain on the teams by doing dumb shit when drunk. For sure. Yeah. I mean, it's like I said, I mean, I've never been a big drinker. I couldn't tell you the last time I had any.

Like if my dad's in town for Christmas or something, we'll have a bourbon together or something. But that's about it. I mean, otherwise, I almost never drink. I don't particularly like it.

And I know what it's doing to your body. I mean, it is, it's, it's literal poison, you know, that's, that's how your body's treating it. And so, but to me, the biggest thing is the negative impacts that it has on society. Yeah, no doubt. Or just astronomical, you know, especially when you compare it to say marijuana, as an example, I'm not, I'm not a fan of that either, but,

If I had to pick one or the other, I think weed would cause less problems than alcohol. I have friends that smoke weed every day, multiple times a day, and they are way better off than the friends that I have that drink every day. For sure. It's not even close. Echo Charles, assessment? He's from Hawaii. You know what he thinks. Yeah, I would agree with that protocol for sure. Why is that? Why is what? Yeah. Like, why is that?

Because my friend was right that when he said that alcohol makes you do crazy things. Yeah. Well, weed. Do you do crazy stuff on weed? I don't know that that's true. And no, I don't smoke weed, but I've never heard of anyone in particular who did crazy stuff on weed. And I'll tell you why. Put simply, what alcohol does is to, you know, the two voices in your head, you know about this. Mm hmm.

The one that says, hey, yeah, yeah, do that, right? And then you have the regulatory voice that's like, no, no, no, don't do that because of these legitimate reasons, right? And then you play, you know, this dance. You go through life with that dance with those two voices. The alcohol just makes the voice that says, hey, no, don't do that. The regulatory voice just makes that quieter and quieter and quieter. That's it. And does it make the other one louder too? I guess by, I mean, as far as like, yeah, the result, yeah, it's louder.

More prevalent. Yeah. And that's the way it works. What do you get like when you're drunk? Echo Charles. It's the same deal, but I'm not like an aggressive person to go like start trouble in the public or nothing like that. So I just, but it's the same essential format where it's like, yeah, the voice is in my head.

that say, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this is true. This is a good idea, you know? Cause you know what he does when he's drunk? He buys multiple URLs from godaddy.com. Yeah. Or like experiment with stuff. Yeah. With video or special effects or whatever. But I'll tell you this where, yeah, if I'm embracing the protocol, I'll be like,

To be honest, it's true where, yeah, all my ideas seem like the best idea in the world. That's why I have all these URLs because I'm like, bro, I can make this website. And, bro, I just see it being this massive success. Every, you know, the voice saying yes, yes, yes is super loud. And the voice saying no, no, no is pretty much quiet. Then the next day he wakes up and then the reality sets in. See what I'm saying? So what my drinking looks like is different than what maybe, I don't know, a general person.

society person's drinking might look like. Yeah, when I used to drink, I used to...

Be more Jocko. I would be like extra, a lot more extra Jocko. Same dude, but like a lot more of it. It's yeah. This is kind of fun, but not worth the damn squeeze. Would you say that that's true though? And put very, very like fundamentally that that's true. The whole voice in your head, the one that. Yes, I think that's true. But, but here's the other thing I noticed, like there's some people legitimately when they drink, they get in fights.

Yeah. There's some guys when they drink, they're laughing hysterically. There's some guys that slur and fall down and like that's that. And you get to see all that in the SEAL teams. Like, hey, dude, watch out. Freaking Fred's drunk. Stand by. We're going to be in a fight. Or Fred's drunk. Help me carry him to the cab. Or Fred's drunk. Dude, look at him. He's hilarious. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. I feel like, you know, because, you know, we know all the...

for like the common name, right? Angry drunk, the lover drunk. Like, you know, I feel like we all have, or these different characters, they're inside them even when they're not drunk. They just have the regulatory voice that's saying, hey, that's not that appropriate right now. You know, or if you get in a fight which you want to, you're going to get in trouble, right? You know how we all have the regulatory. So I think we're all, I mean, the angry drunk is,

inside there's some anger in there just but it's just regulated really well which is good that's what being a mature person is you know right you know but then yeah when you start drinking that voice that says hey no don't freaking false that guy or whatever it gets all quiet then false that guy then you're in a fight um gambling pornography you talk about those addictions in this book and then you get physical health man obesity heart disease nutrition-based issues

From 1999 through 2018, the prevalence of obesity increased from 30.5%, which is already freaking crazy, to 42.4%. Yeah, it's almost half. And the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%. That's a problem. It's a huge problem. One of the things I talk about in there, which I think...

the symptom of that problem is, you know, you hear about healthcare. Like it's one of the most highly debated topics politically in our society. And, you know, everybody's trying to find this formula for the fix, you know, but the reality of it is, is that health insurance only works if most people aren't sick. Like there is no formula that works when there's as many people sick as not. You know, it's just like with car insurance. I mean, like,

any type of insurance you know you're hinging or hedging your bet on the fact that most people aren't going to need it you know because with what it costs even if you try to regulate costs even if you you know subsidize stuff even if you're you know importing things out there's only so many people you can fit in the lifeboat right before the lifeboat's going down yeah and so you know when people try to politicians try to say well if we do this like

You guys aren't looking at the problem. The root cause of the problem is the fact that there's too many unhealthy people in this country. There is no fix. Why do you think RFK rolling into the health department is going to impact when he starts changing some of the ingredients that are allowed to be put in food? I just hope that he's able to. My biggest concern is between lobbying and

The amount of people in our political structure that are tied into being benefactors of big food, big pharma, et cetera, that's going to be an uphill climb. And he's probably going to meet resistance at every turn. I hope that he can do it because it severely needs to be done. But he's got his work cut out for him. I think one of the things that's going to benefit this next administration that you're wanting is the –

communication platform of X. Yeah. Cause imagine when they start posting like what they, what doge finds when they say, here's what your taxpayer money went to. Yeah. I mean, they've already started and here's who's, here's who's trying to stop us from, you know, uh, removing this ingredient from food. Yeah. Here's the lobby that's trying to do who, here's who they're connected to. I think, I think it's going to be, I think the tools are in place to have impact like has never been made for sure. Yeah.

And to me, the scary part is the one weak link there is if Elon Musk had not bought X, it would have never happened. There would be no platform to expose that kind of stuff. Did you ever do something like when you were in the teams, like make some crazy midnight purchase out at the bar? I had a buddy one time, and we get –

the next day and he comes rolling and he's wearing like an outfit he had like he had like cowboy boots on and like acid wash jeans and he had been drunk and like made some crazy purchase you know you ever seen that oh yeah dude what if your buddy rolled out and bought a social media platform for 44 billion dollars nuts and it's just like oh yeah i'm just gonna do this yeah it's freaking epic

But, you know, I mean, as big of a percentage of his net worth that that was at that time, like I think a lot of people at first saw, you know, the decline in shareholder value of it and whatever and thought that he had made a huge mistake. But you look at it now and, I mean, his net worth since –

What in the last year is, you know, almost doubled, I think. I mean, like, it's just crazy the amount of money he's made from doing those things, you know. And it's not even, to me, the brilliance and the beauty of it is that I don't think that it has anything to do with money for him.

Yeah, I would say you're right. And especially because there's that interview with him where he's going, I don't care. I don't care. You can have it. I don't care. I don't care about this anymore. I mean, at a certain point, how many freaking Rolex watches are you going to get? I mean, you're literally flying shit to Mars, bro. I don't know what else you're going to do, but you're in a pretty good spot. So he doesn't care anymore. And what I like about that is it's sort of the...

It's sort of the ultimate form of doing the right things for the right reasons and winning. Yeah. And financially being in a position to do it and truly not give a shit or be beholden to anybody. Damn doge coming in hot. And how freaking crazy is it that that's doge? Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It's crazy. All right. Uh, education system. You talk about that in here.

The ranking was 38th. Our current ranking, despite United States having the second best education system in the world, consistently scores lower than many other countries in benchmarks, such as math and science. And its education ranking was 38th in math scores and 24th in science. So we spend more money than anybody else and we're losers. Yeah. Department of Education. I mean, if you look at the...

The correlation and the parallel between where we ranked as a society education-wise the year before Department of Education became a thing. 1979, I believe. And where it is now. There is a one-to-one parallel that just nosedives. Nosedive. Imagine that. You create a bureaucratic freaking managerial system and things get worse. Imagine. Imagine.

And what's funny is people on the surface. Oh, we're going to eliminate the Department of Education. Oh my gosh. Why don't you care about education? No, we're just going to give the money back to the people that do the educating the states. That's the plan to me like all day. Yeah, there's got to be some nerves some nervous people. Oh for sure in those bureaucratic bureaucratic jobs right now. Oh a hundred percent. I mean, I

Just looking at the, did you see the percentage of people that actually go into the office that work for the government? What the percentage is? What is the percentage? It's 6% that go between 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. 6% of the U.S. government does that. Now, does that include like a mailman? Well, so here's the beauty of it. When you remove security, police, you know,

Those types of shift jobs that are required for people to do that, it's 1%. So 1% of the U.S. government goes into the office five days a week, nine to five. There's going to be a reckoning. Huge. I mean, I think you could fire 80% of the U.S. government and nobody would notice except the people that lost their job. That's what Elon did at Twitter. Of course, we've all heard that over and over again. Twitter's not going to work anymore. It's going down. Got more efficient.

Sometimes I think that about my podcast staff. I think that too sometimes. As long as we're in agreement. I think I'd fire at least 50% and I should be good to go. Okay, another chapter. How'd we get so fucked every... Anyway, overcorrection and the exaltation of victimhood. What's that all about, man? So again, kind of looking at the, we'll say the 90s as being the...

the birth of political correctness on a larger scale. Going back to, say, the 50s where child rearing was pretty brutal, and I think most people would agree or argue that we as a society were probably harder on children than we should have been, and there weren't enough programs to prevent things like that from happening, CPS, etc.,

enter the 1990s and there's this highlight on that type of stuff. And in conjunction with, um, speech and political correctness and things of that nature. And just like with a lot of things, the road to hell is paved with good intentions kind of mentality is that it's so bad. You see the same thing with like, whether it's, you know, BLM or certain trans rights things or whatever is, is that you see a problem and you, you fix it until it's broken the other way.

you know, the classic government adage, if it ain't broke, fix it till it is. I mean, that's essentially what it is. So the problem is you have an entire society that, you know, is now walking on eggshells and is so overcorrected in terms of being politically correct and not punishing kids for certain things or not allowing, you know, schools to punish children or schools

You know, having certain consequences for bad behavior as kids grow up and no accountability. Parents are now suing teachers instead of, you know, corroborating or collaborating with them to say, hey, there's a problem with Johnny and we're going to fix it together. It's, you know, how dare you talk to my son that way and we're going to sue you and, you know, pull the kids out or what have you.

And so now fast forward a few decades and you have super self-entitled little selfish pricks that have never been corrected for anything that, you know, feel entitled to everything have never been told. No, you know, I've never had consequences for being disrespectful to teachers or being unruly in schools. And you, you've come full swing, you know, the other way. And now it's equally damaging just in a different direction. Now,

You know kids these days because you've got kids yourself, right? There's a lot of kids that are freaking really awesome and normal. Are you not seeing that? I don't know that I'd say that there's a lot of them. There are some. Whenever I get in this conversation with people, I always feel a little bit like I'm a little bit of a bubble of some kind because I look at kind of the kids that are around my kids, and I'm always like, eh, kids. Kids out there getting after it, doing what kids do. I don't see too much of the crazy –

You know, and like go to a wrestling tournament. Like kids are freaking... Yeah. They're getting after it, man. They're training their asses off. They're hard. Go to a, you know, a sporting event and the kids... Now look, can you see the occasional kid that seems like a spoiled brat? Yeah. But...

I don't know. I see less of it. And also, do you think we've turned the corner a little bit on some of this political correctness? It seems like we certainly have. I think so. We have. Again, three and a half years ago when the book was written, it was kind of at the- Apex. At the peak. No, maybe not. It was heading there. Getting close. I would also say- Your book corrected the course. I like to think that. I don't want to say that. You said it.

I think, you know, in your sample of kids that you're around, too, if you think about it, wrestling, athletics, I mean, athletics in general, that's not a very mean collective aggregate average of kids.

- High school America, I would say go to a high school cafeteria at lunchtime and get a sense of where kids are at or any classroom. - Echo Charles, next generation, 'cause your kids are a little younger. Are you identifying yet? Are you seeing kids? Do they seem that much different?

I think I'm in this in the same boat to a degree as you where I live in a bubble and the kids that consistently come around my kids. Now that's the key word consistently. Or I'm like, I can't, I don't see any entitlement at all or like spoiled. Maybe I see some like, Hey, like, right. I just said, what's up? Say what's up back kind of a thing. But the kid's eight years old. He's fired up. He's running and yelling and stuff like that. So it's like, whatever. So I don't see the entitlement except every once in a while. Yeah, I will see it. But,

I think it's like one of those things where you kind of correct for that, you know? So if some kid who's spoiled, who's entitled is coming around, it won't be consistent because I won't allow it to be consistent. So, so I've seen it. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen it, but I mean, to me, for all three of us, technically it's all anecdotal, right? Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. And I'd say the, the overarching crux as to why I wrote that book was exactly that is that

You know, we all have our own experiences. What most people see as being, say, the top 10 problems in the United States are what? What's what you hear on the media? It's what you see on social media. It's what you hear people bitching about. But what does the data say? Because to me, that's really what's reflective of what the problems are in between education and kids getting in trouble from a legal standpoint as they become young adults. Like those numbers have absolutely fucking skyrocketed.

And so, you know, to me, like, yeah, I mean, all of the kids that are around my kids seem like pretty decent kids. Just like, you know, some of the statistics that you see in the media a lot that aren't actually that big of a deal statistically from a top 10 standpoint in terms of what's the most damaging or dangerous and threatening to the United States. They're not even in the top 50, but we hear about it all day long.

And so to me, that was kind of the foundation behind the book was we're always distracted and arguing about things that scientifically or data-wise don't really have that big of an impact on our society, but that's all we're focused on. What are actually the biggest things? Well, it's being a fat ass, heart disease, depression, alcoholism, opioid addiction,

eating like shit and dying from heart attacks or arthrosclerosis. I mean, there's all these different things that are killing hundreds of thousands of people that nobody talks about. That's so glad that I covered my ass when I said I live in a bubble, right? Because you're right. I'm literally sitting here thinking about it and I was about to counter you with the fact that a lot of young kids

Again, that I have visibility on. Guess what? They don't sit around and watch TikTok videos. They sit around and watch Jordan Peterson talk about stuff. They don't waste their mind on brain rot. Do you know what brain rot is? Yes, sir, I do. Yeah. They're not doing the brain rot thing. They're doing like the Andrew Huberman thing, right? So there's like a whole crew of people that are probably going to come out better, faster, stronger, smarter.

And there's a whole crew of people that are going in the other direction, and it's probably, you know, it's lopsided. And your statistics that you point out in this book show that. Also, too, when you say anecdotal or whatever, which is like that's a lot more significant than it might even feel sometimes. Because, like, and we talk about this every once in a while where, like,

40% or a big percentage of America is like obese, right? Like, bro, how many obese people do you see in your day to day? Bro, kind of none. Yeah. But what are you doing? You're working out in your own gym by yourself. You're going to jujitsu with other jujitsu people or Muay Thai or, you know, back and forth or whatever, or surfing at the beach or whatever, all these active, active things. So it's kind of like,

just by happenstance your personal anecdotal experience you're avoiding all of those people so to you they're like there's no obesity problem I would encourage both of you to go to Lakeside Walmart and get your groceries tonight and see what the sample of caliber of person that's out there you know

It's probably going to be a little different. A little bit different. Yeah. Um, one of the things that you throw in here is, uh, escaping the echo chamber, which I think is like, obviously a very smart thing to do. Escape the echo chamber. No offense to echo our, our echo here. Um,

Tell me about this echo chamber. I mean, we're all freaking locked in there. Your algorithm is set up for it. Your phone is made to get you trapped in there. Well, and I think if you look at this current or this previous past current election, look at the from a media standpoint, the echo chamber that exists within the Democratic Party and or the liberal side is pretty significant.

Now if you look at the two candidates on the right, they were constantly challenging themselves, going on heated debate, whether it was podcasts or interviews with mainstream media that's liberal or left-leaning. There's zero of that on the other side. So you've got four years of media, politicians, candidates that are all just sitting in that echo chamber, agreeing with each other, never having to defend their positions.

never being argued with, just basically complaining about all the same shit and it being kind of corroborated internally. And then once you get to the last few weeks of the campaign where people are actually arguing and debating and it's laughable, there's an inability to even answer simple questions because of that, because they haven't had to do that. And so the problem obviously is that

One, one of the things I talk about in there is, is coming to the conversation with an open mind, which is a lot easier said than done, but it's, it's crucial. You can't have an open mind and have a discussion with somebody if you're only living in an echo chamber. And also, um,

You're never going to have good ideas if they're not being challenged. You know, like if, if you should welcome debate and welcome having your ideas challenged for that matter, even welcome having your mind changed. I do. I mean, there's things I've certainly changed my mind that I was pretty adamant about, but over time and, and, you know, people making their case and challenging a certain position and me thinking through it, like, no, you know what, you're right. I actually agree with that and have changed my position on several things, but

If you're never having to do that, that's never going to happen. So it's a very stagnant mentality.

That a good portion of our society, even if it's not somebody that's in politics, but let's just say you're on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok or whatever. But to your point, you know, your algorithm is such to where all you get is the things you agree with, the things that already piss you off, that everybody else you know, it pisses them off and you guys get around each other and you complain about it. And that's all you surround yourself with and you never go anywhere. Dude, it was crazy. Yeah.

in going up into the election to watch the other side. Yeah.

Just be totally like 100% convinced that, oh, you know, Kamala is going to win in Iowa. She's going to sweep. Like it was, it was crazy to see that. Yeah. Not to be that confident about things was very strange to watch. Yeah. Well, and I think that's why is that, you know, they spent four years patting each other on the back, you know, and even lying to the American people. I don't know if they actually believed it.

or you know it's a snow job or what but you know it's the no the economy is great i don't know what you're talking about that was joe biden sharp as a tack smartest fucking guy in the room like who the fuck do you think you're you're convincing that that was crazy right yeah but yeah crazy echo charles sometimes it seemed a bit crazy yeah didn't seem a lot crazy sometimes

It depends on what you mean, because you're asking my opinion on it. Yeah. I think that that's how, I think this whole thing is entertainment, by the way. I've said that many, many times. So under those circumstances, no, it's not crazy. What else are they going to say is what I would ask. And only in the spirit of you asking me if I think it's crazy.

I see what they're doing and I agree with you that that's what I believe that they're doing as well. But what else are they going to say? And be like, oh yeah, Joe Biden, he seems off. He's kind of losing it cognitively. What are they going to say? Oh, you know what? You're right. You guys are right about that. They're not going to say that. That would be kind of crazy, I think, for them to say that. Dude, it's like saying the sky is green though. Yeah. It's crazy talk. But if that's the show, that's the show. That's how I see it.

So, yeah, no, I mean, I guess under certain circumstances, yes, crazy, but no, the show is crazy. How about that? Yeah, it's the Truman Show in real life. So we got your methodologies to escape the echo chamber. Maintain independent thought. Number one, take it upon yourself to discern what is bullshit and what is not. Be open to the fact that you may already be deep knee and knee deep in bullshit and don't even know it.

Be honest and don't practice blind allegiance to a political party or news outlet that you can't smell the stench of what you stepped in. To this day, like even in the past several hours, the past couple days, I don't even know what the date is today. It is the 12th of, or the 10th of December, 2024. There were some things that happened in the past little while where I thought, I didn't even fathom

an alternative view, like a non-unified view. For instance, the CEO of a major healthcare insurer gets gunned down and killed. And I thought, wow, gun violence, assassination, lawlessness, wow, that's crazy. I'm sure. I didn't have the thought of

I wonder what the division will be on this. I didn't have that thought. I didn't have it. I just thought, oh, you know, the world will see this and go, wow, a crazy person has lost their mind and committed a murder. And it didn't take but hours before people were saying, yeah, but this healthcare company, they're bad. And they're responsible for people's deaths as well. And therefore, this guy is a hero now.

Not just like, hey, I understand it. He's probably got some, been through some real, I mean, as soon as I saw the health insurance thing, I was like, oh, this is a guy that either lost a family member or he's in some kind of pain himself and he's going out, but he's gonna, but even with that, you go, that's terrible, horrible, reprehensible thing to do. But no, it didn't take long. There's a complete, there's another branch of people out there that are going, this guy is a hero.

I saw a little clip of a professor at the Penn where this guy went to college. Never been prouder to be a Penn professor. What? That's crazy, man. What? What? That's an Ivy League professor. That's insane. So there you go. You can be so deep in this.

that you T you can find something like that happening and you go, Oh yeah. But yeah, blinded by your, your allegiance and both sides are guilty. I think, you know, something as simple as, as flying flags with politicians names on them, I think is a problem. I really do. Now, do I think it should be illegal? Of course not. But I think, you know, what it does is it speaks to that idolizing of a, of a political candidate. And I think, um,

One of the chapters in there, Jay-Z isn't Jesus, is speaking to that, is that we've idolized our politicians and put them on pedestals as though they are rock stars or A-list actors or entertainers, what have you. And it needs to be the exact opposite. We all need to realize, hey, fuckwad, you work for us.

Like we're going to hold you accountable, not the other way around. Like you're not going to tell us how things need to be. We're putting the people in those positions that reflect how we feel things should be run. And it doesn't really work that way. You know, whether, and I think social media does play a big and negative role, whether it's AOC on one side or, uh, you know, pick, you know, some of the people on the right that, um, that fall into that same category with big followings that, um,

you know, are posting shit on TikTok and Instagram that's funny. You know, it's always, you know, putting funny memes up or little skits that they do and shit like that. I think that's a mistake. While I understand people are trying to gain traction and following and influence and get reelected, the reality of it is, is that that position should be

considered, you know, a and honor and be something where, again, you're, you're working for the American people, not the other way around. And it just doesn't seem like most politicians feel that way. Another step to avoiding the echo chamber, spend as much time researching, corroborating and verifying the information you receive as you do taking it in. Don't just believe something because you want to believe it or because you like the person who is telling you to believe it.

If you want to believe it or you really like the person telling you to believe it, you should be researching even harder, knowing your own propensity towards bias. Yeah, there's a whole legitimate proven bias that we have. If we like, if I like Mike and he tells me something, I like, I don't like your idea. Yeah. Which I don't blame you on that one. But yeah, I mean, it's the same echo chamber. You know, if all you watch is one, one media outlet and you never see anybody else's perspective. I mean, if you want to,

see a kind of classic example of that being highlighted, especially like on election night or

Anytime something politically divisive is going on, it's like it's a breaking story. Switch back and forth between Fox and CNN. And it's like, am I on the same fucking planet right now? Two different movies are being watched. Yeah, it's like... It's crazy. It's like watching two people that are dancing together but to two different fucking songs. It's like, what the fuck's going on? But that's unfortunately the reality in the world that we live in where...

you know, if I, if I want it to be true, then I'm, I'm going to think that it is. And, uh, or I'm not going to take a lot of, um, consideration or convincing to, to believe it. Um,

Next one listen watch and read news from varied sources and outlets It's important to have as much well-rounded perspective as possible It won't be perfect or unbiased But it'll be far better than being glued to one fucking channel or media outlet and spoon-fed information without taking a deeper look into what's being presented to you Yeah, this is a live man. I picked this up in the military like you want to get different sources of Intel Yeah before you go and hit a freakin target. Yeah, I

Vote with your wallet. If you fundamentally disagree with the basis of a platform, stop using it. Don't engage it and don't take part in creating a demand for it. Hold media outlets accountable and call them out for their dishonesty. Have you gone on to Blue Sky? I haven't. I haven't gone on. Actually, I've looked at a couple profiles on it, but just hearing the things that are going on, it seems like it's totally insane. Do you know what Blue Sky is?

Guess the guy from Twitter went and created something else, but now he's gone from it and it's just the level 12 version Opposite of X X is just like free speech do what you want freaking don't hurt anyone and blue sky is like you better be on board with everything and say the right things and you'll get banned but what's crazy is it's like, you know, I

perverted stuff happening and well that's what you know that's my thing and so therefore it's okay for me to post this craziness like tolerance gone wild yeah tolerance gone wild that's tolerance gone wild yeah but zero tolerance for no no tolerance or for lack of tolerance yeah yeah which is a crazy thing you know what you need to have in a game

Rules. Rules. Rigs. Referee. You got to have some rules to the game, man. And if you don't, if you're, if you just, if you stay within the rules, bro, it's good. You can kind of do what you want within the rules. Once you go outside the rules, though, you got to get told, don't do that. Yeah. Don't do that thing. That's not, and I've gone off about this one other time.

Just be normal. Like do normal. This is not what you're doing is not normal. And normal can be really big, really wide and have a lot of things in it. But then you go across a certain line. Now this is not what you're doing is not normal. You can't do that thing. I feel like the bumper sticker for that is just read the room. I mean, get some t-shirts made up. I mean, whatever, but.

Read the room. Yeah, read the room, man. Take a look around. One of these things is not like the other. Well, I'm different. Okay, you can be a little bit different. Yeah, I guess that's the issue with the normal thing. It's like, well, what's normal, blah, blah, blah, you know? But I do what you're saying. There is like a certain...

Like a bell curve you could put together. Yeah, fully. You can do from here to here, but you can't go over there. You can't go over there. But at what point, I guess, and I'm not asking this. I'm saying this is kind of the question, I guess, is at what point did you go past the guardrails? You know, like I know you, bro. You believe in guardrails, but your guardrails is pretty lax. Let's face it. I know that. You know that. But it's like, well, what's the...

you know, prescriptive guardrail positioning for everyone. Yeah. And so it's got to be kind of flexible in some way. And then who's to say, wait a second, he can flex that much, but I can't flex like this much. Like what's the difference, you know, kind of a thing. And then it's like, well, it kind of degenerates from there. Yeah. But you gotta be like, no, that thing you just did. Nope. That's over the line. Yeah. And actually, which kind of gives a lot more credence even, which I know, I know you were, you're at least partially serious with the read the room thing where it kind of is that a little bit.

Cause there's a lot of stuff like that you can kind of say in certain rooms and it's like, who cares or whatever. And it's all good. And it can be pretty inflammatory, but in other rooms you can say way less inflammatory stuff. And it's like, bro, you shouldn't have said that, bro. It's not appropriate. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. So yeah, you got to read the room. You got to be a knowledgeable in that way. You know what I'm saying? It's like, it's like what you guys talk about before the camera's on versus when the camera's on. It's a very good example, sir. Uh,

Don't take it upon yourself to regurgitate everything you hear. I really like this one. Don't hit the share or forward button within 30 seconds of skimming an article or watching a video. Doing so only furthers a biased agenda and creates more of a divide. Some things need to be said. Some information needs to be shared, but a whole shitload of it doesn't. Be discerning. Dude, people like to just freaking hit share or send. Yeah, before they even finish reading the article. It's like the...

not reading the, the instructions or directions on a high school test or whatever that like the last thing says, don't even fucking fill this thing out, you know, and, and nobody did it and they filled the whole thing out and, you know, uh, yeah, it's just, you know, again, it goes back to similarly to the echo chamber I think is, and the corroboration of things is, uh, you know, if you,

If it's one site that's like Sky News Network fucking underground, you know, whatever, dot com, and that's your source, it's probably bullshit. I'm not saying that even mainstream media doesn't perpetuate bullshit, but if you're only getting it from one thing and you're not really looking into it and you just share it like all that's doing is furthering the problem. One thing that this makes me think about is the idea that people think that they have to have

a formulated and solidified opinion about everything that's freaking going on yeah i there's so many things where i have an idea but it's not fully formulated and it's certainly not solidified about what's happening and there's there's a temptation to get in that game of like oh something happened let me tell you what i think let me tell you what i know and it's like dude what do you know right now what does anybody know there's another thing i brought back from like combat

oh, reports are coming in that whatever. It's like, cool, that's the first report, and it's about to change 19 times before we know what the hell is going on. Yeah. I think it begs the bigger question of why are people like that? Why do so many people feel so starved to be heard for certain things that if you kind of think about it, it's like who gives a shit what you think or even what anybody thinks about this?

And I think, you know, unfortunately, we're a victim of our own success as a society and even as a species, really. If you think about human history as we know it, you know, I mean, who knows fucking pyramids and before, you know, whatever. But we'll say from when the Greeks were at the height until present day.

the human experience is by far the easiest it's ever been right now in terms of survival threats, predators, food scarcity, disease. And so, you know, I think that the human experience condition, what have you, is designed to struggle, to need something to overcome, to need something to be fighting against and, you know, be challenged over. Yeah.

If that doesn't exist, we're going to make it up. You will fucking make it up, you know, even if it's in your own twisted fucking brain. And I think when you couple that with physically not doing shit because you don't need to and being raised on red dye number five and high fructose corn syrup, like that perfect storm of horribleness is why you have people that are that batshit crazy about things that

don't even make sense, let alone, you know, really warrant somebody being upset about because they don't have anything else to feel passionate about, you know, and, and

I mean, I know I've had plenty of guests on. I know you have too when you talk about the transitions from the military. And it's not the experiences that guys usually struggle with. It's going through those things and then now being in a vacuum of purpose, of having no real reason to get up every day. And then that's when you get depressed and when experiences that you've been through manifest into problematic situations.

And so when you have, you know, all of those things kind of going on together, you have, again, just this perfect storm of a Petri dish of, you know,

of, of horribleness from our society. And, and, uh, you know, so I think if, if people just had a reason to get up and be passionate about something that didn't involve pronouns or, you know, fucking blue hair or, I mean, whatever abortion, I mean, like there's so many things that,

That you know, I find myself thinking like if that's the worst part of your fucking day Things really aren't that bad, you know, like if somebody isn't calling you by whatever fucking pronoun you you need to be called by like that That's your oppression or you know The thing that you're fighting against you got things pretty fucking easy Like you were born with a winning lottery ticket in your mouth and you should probably just shut up and be grateful So when it comes to uh, the next chapter in this book

It's about parenting and it's called who the hell raised these kids Not you two apparently Yeah Your daughters are old what? 19 and 18 right now. Yeah, I was very cautious cuz it's been when we start this podcast eight years ago Something like that nine nine years ago. So like when we started this podcast my oldest kid was like 14 Yeah, oh no, sorry 16

And youngest was freaking six. And so I was real cautious about saying anything about parenting because I was like, dude, the jury ain't out yet, bro. Like who knows what's going to happen? These kids, you know, you don't know what's going to happen. But yeah, I think you can, you can at your kid's age, 18 and 20, my oldest is 25. You get a pretty good feel for the trajectory of their lives. And yeah,

You know, obviously when you put this book together, you start talking about some of the rules that you set up or some of the guidance that you give. And I think start with this one right here. Give kids independence and let them fall on their ass sometimes. So the thing that I say is let your kids brush up against the guardrails of failure. The car is going to get a little dinged up. No one's going to get hurt. They're going to learn how to drive. Yeah.

Also tell people a lot treat your kids as adult as you possibly can So like as much as you can let them do the more responsibility you give them the more responsible they become You let them make that peanut butter and jelly sandwich when they're five years old and it's gonna take 20 minutes there's gonna be freaking jelly on the counter and there's gonna be peanut butter on the floor and It's just gonna be a mess and then it's gonna take them 20 minutes clean up. So it's a 40 minute evolution and

which you could have done with one hand in like one minute and be clean and carry on with the day, you're giving them so much more education in life and so much more self-reliance. And you start doing that not just with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but with the laundry and with the freaking school lunch and the breakfast in the morning and the taking out the garbage. Like all those little things that you allow them the responsibility is going to make them that much better off. And sometimes they're going to mess it up.

And that's going to be cool. I agree. And I, I would kind of dovetail onto your second platoon OICs lesson of, yeah, we don't have to do it, but is it the right thing to do like that? I think is parenting one-on-one now granted parenting,

They have to get to a certain age before you can implement that. But once they do, I think you should all the time. You know, it's like, I don't really feel like going to school today. Maybe that's not the best example, but, but as a, as a hypothetical, it's like you could not go. Is it the right thing to do? Do you think that that's going to serve you well? Yeah. Okay. Do it then stay home. See what happens. Would I necessarily do that?

Maybe, maybe I have, you know, I'll tell you one part of my parenting advice that I tell people all the time is if you can get your kids out of school for some reason, do it. Yeah. If you can take them to work, if you can take them on a trip, if you can take them to the thing, whatever, you got to go downtown and get permits from the city about the fence that you're going to build in the backyard and you can take your kids, go do that. Go do it. Yeah.

Get them out of that school. And if you can take them to do something cool, even better. And that's going to be awesome. But to the point that you're making, I think a lot of times what kids mess up or what kids don't connect is they don't connect what's happening right now to their future. Because they think, you know, what I'm doing right now, eventually everything's going to be cool. So I did a career day.

I did career day back in the day many moons ago and you know I was gonna talk about being in the Navy like okay this is what you do and dude who doesn't want to hear about being in the Navy being a SEAL about going to war about carrying a machine gun about shooting machine guns about blowing things up about jumping out of airplanes about scuba I got my slideshow it's got scuba it's got freaking draggers it's got parachuting it's got you know cool stuff hype hype

so i roll in there and these kids were i guess the age is maybe around sixth grade it's like 12 maybe seventh grade so i roll in there and by the way you know i like i'm in the team so i'm talking to people on a regular basis all good i'm not like a boring speaker right so i roll in there and i had to do it five times

So they broke career day up and like they were going to their classroom and come in for 20 minutes or 25 minutes or something. I present to the little class, present to the little class, present to the little class. And I'm in the same classroom the whole time. The first one I do, I'm sitting there like, all right, everyone, my name is Lieutenant Commander Jocko Willink. I'm in the SEAL team. Blah, blah, blah, blah.

I'm looking at the crowd. I'm reading the room. Dude, they don't give a shit. They don't care about anything that I'm saying. Like even the one kid that has like a Marines t-shirt on or something, he's like, doesn't care. No one cares. And I'm, okay, next slide. Parachuting. Like no one cares. And so I do the first one and I'm trying to explain to them, no one really cares. I escalate the next one. You know, like, well, what are you going to do? What do you want to do with your life? By the time I get to the last one of the day,

I'm saying, hey, listen up, kids. Here's the deal. There's 20, there's 30 of you in this room. You fast forward 15 years from right now, some of you kids are going to own three houses, one in the mountains, one by the beach, and one out in the desert. You're going to spend time wherever you want. Three of you are going to have one house. You're lucky. You're going to be here in San Diego. You're going to have a good job. You're going to have a house. Some of you are going to have a condo. Some of you are going to have an apartment.

Some of you aren't going to have an apartment. Some of you are going to still be living at home. Some of you are going to be living in a car. And there's two of you kids in this room right now that are going to be living under the bridge down in Mission Bay. At 12. And it all starts with the decisions that you're making right now.

This is where it starts. The decisions that you're making right now. So that's my point is that kids don't recognize that the decisions that they're making right now connect to where they're going to end up in the future. For sure. And I think that's the litmus that I, even if it's subconsciously uses, um,

If it's a decision that's going to be a detriment to their future, like I'm not going to let you fuck that up. Obviously, yep. You know, if it's something that, you know, yeah, it may be a pain in your ass or, you know, maybe embarrassing or, you know, whatever, then, yeah, I'll ask you, hey, do you really think that's a good idea? Can you, you know, can you sell me on why that's a good idea? Okay, well, do it then and we'll see what happens, you know. But, yeah, I think there's too much helicoptering and not enough –

I mean, look, the reality is like I would rather my kids make these mistakes while I can keep them between those guardrails and they can learn from it versus the first time they've ever had the autonomy to make a bad decision is when they're 19 and living somewhere else. And now the repercussions are fucking astronomical. You know, that I don't want. And I think too many...

Too many parents raise their kids that way. Yeah, and you're going to learn that through those consequences, right? If your kids are doing... If your kids are making mistakes and there's no consequences for them, it's going to be a problem. And the examples that you were talking about, like, oh, your kid, you know, is in school and they get in trouble with the teacher and they come home, you know, oh, I, you know, I got...

Got a zero on this test. Well, why well, you know, we she didn't tell us about the test. Are you serious? She didn't tell you about the test I'm gonna go in there and talk to her and we'll get you that great upgraded instead of being like, oh well You didn't hear about the test. You're telling me that she gets you tell me the whole class. No one knew about the test That's what's happening. Like well, no, okay. So what do you got to do? I?

Because what's your grade right now? It's a C minus. Okay. So what do you get when you get a C minus? Like, how's your world look when you get a C minus? Are there privileges that you lose? It's another nice thing I learned in boot camp and officer candidate school. Privileges. You don't realize what privileges are, Echo Charles, when you're a kid. You don't realize. Don't give me that look. You don't realize that there's privileges that you have when you're a kid. You don't realize that it's a privilege. You don't realize the depth of it.

You don't realize the depth, but you don't realize that a light in your room is privileged You don't realize that a TV is privileged. You don't realize that an iPad is privileged. You don't realize that hair hair You heard the story there is a privilege that you don't necessarily you are not necessarily granted that hair and black caught some shit for that somebody clipped up that thing of me saying Telling a story

they clipped it out in a way. Cause when I said that to my daughter, my daughter had already been in trouble and it wasn't looking, she didn't do anything freaking crazy, but she had gone outside the bounds and I tightened her up. She was, she was in trouble. And so then as I was, took away privileges from her, you know, phone privilege cause she was probably 14, 15. So she had the phone, took away the phone privilege, you know, took away the computer in your room privilege, took away the, uh,

No curfew privilege, 'cause I didn't have curfews for my kids. And whatever, a couple other things, right? And then later I'm joking with her. As the privileges are coming back, I'm like, okay, well, hey, remember.

You know, and this was, you know, pretty harsh, but it could be much worse. Well, how could it be worse, dad? Well, you still have a door on your room, which I think was awesome, right? A door on your room is a privilege. A mattress, you know, bedding, a pillow. And then, you know, jokingly, I said, and hair, you know, and my daughter laughed and got the message. Because it really is. It is a privilege. Like everything in life when you're a kid is a privilege. So when you can utilize those things to be removed from the situation, right?

you can be in a pretty rough spot. And you can realize, oh, I am thankful and I have gratitude for these things that I have. But you can utilize those as a parent to help them learn lessons, take away some of those privileges, and the privileges can be given back.

but those things happen in life. And like you said, you can do, you can make mistakes when you're 19 years old where you can give up the privilege of freedom. You can give up the privilege of a future. You can give up the privilege of being able to walk by doing dumb shit. Yeah. And I think to that, I think the key with communicating that to kids and, and really I think anybody is, is staying calm.

You know, is where I think a lot of parents and myself when they were younger absolutely fell into that category is raising your voice, losing your temper, like becoming visibly angry about it.

Cause that's when they stop fucking listening. You know, whereas is if you're like completely unemotional and you're like, okay, well I guess I'm taking this from you. And if you get this, then you'll get it back. Any questions? Nope. All right. Like if you say it that calmly, it's like, fuck, like he's not yelling at me. He's not mad. Like he's indifferent. You know, it's like, that's the best way to,

To communicate that because they'll actually listen and then now they're not taking it personal and they'll actually hear it and reflect on it. Yeah. So we got asked on Underground Podcast, somebody asked about spanking kids, right? And so I was like looking at the questions and I was at home and I was looking at the questions. I was like, oh, no, I don't really spank my kids. I didn't spank my kids. And then my kids were home.

I was like, wait, I want to make sure, you know, confirm because I don't want to be out here lying to the masses. And so my wife and my kids were sitting around downstairs and I came downstairs and I was like, hey, I've got asked if I spanked, but I didn't spank you guys. Right. And they're like, nope, nope. My wife's like, nope. And then they started with like, my son ended up saying,

I wished you would have spent this. It would have been easier. It would have been less psychologically damaging. And we were all laughing because I would like just either, I had a couple of protocols. I mean, obviously the privileges, but the other thing I was just like, not talk to him. Like one of my kids, if my kids were out of line, it would just be like, you know, you did the perfectly calm thing. I would just be like, totally shun them for three days. Yeah.

I don't recommend the three days worth of shunning. I think it's too much. Maybe one day. Yeah, maybe a day worth of shunning. But there's, I would like be at the dinner table and, you know, the salt would be on the other side of the kid that's being shunned. And I would ask the other kid, you know, hey, pass me the salt and just like act like they're not there. Total asshole. Sorry, kids.

I wish you would have whipped us. Take your belt off. And you mentioned this whole idea in this section, create an environment for learning life lessons at home. That's what we just talked about. Don't raise a victim. How do you prevent that? So, I mean, to me, there's a couple things. I mean, number one is don't reinforce it. You know, if you coddle and set up an environment and reinforce that type of behavior, then, you know, one of my favorite quotes by

the godfather of operant conditioning, BF Skinner, as it relates to dog training, is anything that's reinforced is likely to occur again. It's true everywhere, not just in dog training. So if you create an environment where people are rewarded for being a victim and there's no consequence for doing anything wrong,

you're creating that, you know, I mean, you're reinforcing that victim mentality and that's just going to carry further and further into adult life where there's going to come a time where it's going to be the shit or get off the pot moment and nobody's going to give a shit about

you know, what they went through growing up or, you know, what they had to deal with at this point in their life or, you know, what person broke their heart or what financial, you know, hardships they're having or what have you. And, uh, and I think the sooner you do that, um, the better off the kid's going to be. And there's never going to be that almost purgatory of, of entitlement. There is a certain, you got to figure out that time in life where you realize that you are

have agency and can take control of what's happening. And if you look, there's going to be some things that are not in your control. We get that. But at a certain point you go, Oh, I made this mistake and this is why I'm in this situation right now. I'll tell you what, the U S Navy drives that home real loud and clear in even something as simple as bootcamp. You're like, Oh man,

I made this mistake. Now I am paying the man. And that just escalates through seal training is like, Oh, I made this mistake and now I'm paying the man or I prepared, I planned, I was ready. We executed, got the job done. Now I'm in a good spot. Yeah. And that applies to everything in life. Yeah. And so if you can set conditions like that for your kid, uh,

So that when they do the right thing, the good outcomes, and you let them know that the outcome is because they were prepared and put forth effort. And when things don't go their way, it's like, oh, you didn't know about the test, huh? And that's the teacher's fault. Nope, that's not the teacher's fault. That is 100% your fault. And even if it is the teacher's fault, what can you do about it?

You're going to petition to have the teacher fired? The teacher's not getting fired. The teacher's union owns the state. It's not happening. So what are you going to do? You're going to continue with a bad grade? No, you have to figure out what you can do to fix this situation. And to me, there's a really critical component of that consequence part, which is being consistent and following through. Because that's where I see a lot of people. And I've been in situations with my kids in their teenage years where they're

I'm not going to say that I'm better than other parents, but I would just say that most parents would have folded and said, okay, no, you know what? Stop. Let's figure this out. Like, come here. And not let them do what they were saying. Fuck it. I'll do this then. Okay. Give me a good example. I'll do it off. There's too much personal information to share it. So I'll share it off camera. Leif Babin has a good example of that where...

He was telling his daughter, they were in Texas somewhere where there's little stickers in the grass or in the yard. And his daughter's like, he's like, hey, put your flip flops on. I don't want to. Hey, put your flip flops on. I don't want to. Put your flip flops on right now. No. Okay. And Liberty's little girl goes running across the yard and sure enough, she made it whatever it was, five steps. Ah!

It's like, Hey, so that's a perfect example. She's not going to die. She's not even going to get injured. She's going to have some little pain, but she's going to get that lesson learned. Well, yeah. And I think, you know, an older example where, where there's going to be more of that, like in that case, not that it's not a good example, but there's really no skin in the game for life. Like he's not losing anything by that. Let's say fast forward to, Hey, if,

Something happens and if it continues or you don't remedy this, you're not going to prom. It's like, okay, well, I want you to go to prom. I want you to have that experience. I would love for there to be pictures. I want you to have that as part of your high school experience. So something happens to where the deal was, if you don't satisfy this requirement, you're not going to prom. That doesn't happen. A lot of times, well, fuck. Okay, but...

we'll figure something else out. But you know, it's like, no, you don't get to go. I will use one example for that. My kids were probably seven and nine at the height of Halloween being fucking varsity, varsity activity. Damn dude. They're dressed up. We're ready to fucking go. Halloween's canceled. Sit the fuck back down. You're not going out cause you lied to your mom and I like straight to our face about something important. Um,

So we're going to sit here and have a come to Jesus for 20 minutes. You can take the shit off and we're not going out. Like that sucked. Yeah. You know, like there's, I mean, I love Halloween, love going out with the kids, especially at that age when it's magic. Uh, and we didn't, you know, I will say there's times where like, I still feel bad about that. Yeah.

But, you know, it's like, you know, and so I would say let that also caution you is that don't have a consequence be something that's going to kick you in the dick so much to where if you have to follow through with it, you're like, man, and you regret it, you know, so, you know, be be strategic. Yeah. One time my son did something that was not approved and he was a pretty little kid.

And I went a little too hard in the paint and I put him on a very Spartan protocol for life And it was very very Spartan and he was maybe six or seven And it was like very strict wake-up protocols, you know room inspections like I really went hard on him and removed basically all privileges as a child and I

And it hurt. It sucked, you know, like, but I was doing it. And so then he slowly... And so I had said to him, like, look, I have to be strict with you because, you know, this is not going to be good for you in the long run. I got to be strict with you. And so little kid, you know, he understood, okay, this is what strict is. And then as...

I as he earned privileges back and you know got his stuff back and started living a more normal childhood life and then something happened and And you know he did something a little bit, you know brushing up against the guardrails a little bit and I was like, hey Listen, do you want me to have to be strict again? And he looked at me little kid and he goes

Maybe that's what's gonna be best for me. I was like, oh my god. I was like, oh no This poor kid. I created a freaking monster. Maybe that's what's best for me That was like the first time I he asked for a haircut and I saw I shaved his head and And I got done and he okay all done and he goes he looks at me goes do I look more like a soldier now and I was like

I got a tear in my non-shooting eye. That was classic. All right, so you go through... You already talked about the Jay-Z isn't Jesus type stuff, but you go into this personal protocol, and this is sort of the meat of the book. And I don't want to get into every subject that you cover, but you cover this protocol for assessing important issues and subjects. And so...

I don't want to go through all of them, but I want to talk about your protocol that you use. You say, "I'd like to offer four cornerstone principles that can be used as a guide for assessing and approaching any important subject, issue, or problem. If every individual implemented the practice of utilizing these principles, I think we'd see a lot of change.

It's a four-step process. Here's how it works. Number one, remove emotions. Number two, remove politics. Number three, mind your own fucking business. And number four, hold yourself to the same or higher standard that you hold others to. That's it. So talk to me a little bit about this protocol. What are we doing with this protocol? Well, you know, so the, I would say the backbone of it is

is removing the predispositions that I think inhibit us to be able to have conversations with people that we disagree with or that we're trying to raise children-wise, et cetera. If you look at all of the divisive things that take place in our country today,

And you follow those four things. Like how many of those actually are problems that people are arguing about now? Like pick any political hotbed topic that you've seen in the last, say, six or eight months leading up to the election and put them through that ringer first. And do you still have an argument? No. No.

And I think not necessarily in that order, but number four, especially politically. Now, all of them, I think, are important, whether you're talking with neighbors, again, kids, people in your community. The higher up you go, I think the more you kind of need to go in reverse order, but

especially in politics, you know, and both sides are horribly guilty of this is my guy did it and I'm going to look the other way and that's fine. But at the second, your guy does it like we're going to shine a fucking interrogation lamp on him and we're going to spend three weeks talking about it, you know? And it's like,

you know, take, I mean, pick a topic and that's the case, you know? So again, I just think like if everybody going into anything that they're pissed off about or that they're trying to argue with somebody about, if you go through that checklist, A, nine times out of 10, you're not even going to have the argument with somebody because that's going to remove, you're going to realize, man, fuck, I'm wasting my time and I'm a hypocrite. If it does lead to that, you're at least going into it

With all of those boxes checked saying, okay, well, there's no emotion. There's no politics in it. I'm holding my side to the same standard and that's going to get rid of it. So even if you do end up still getting in an argument with somebody, you've kind of taken so much of the teeth out of it to where now you can just have an actual discussion about it and not sit there just screaming at each other where neither side is listening to one another. Yeah.

Don't get emotional about it, which is very difficult because some people are hyper emotional about things and sometimes it's a good reason, you know, sometimes like some Somebody was on welfare when they were a kid and so therefore welfare is a hugely important thing and they're super emotional about it So you got to be like, okay got to remove that emotion remove the political Well, I'm right-wing and right-wing is against welfare. So I'm against welfare. So let's get rid of that. Um,

Mind your own business. How is that applying to the welfare thing? I just, well, so to me, I mean, I guess from a welfare standpoint, it's, you know, if it doesn't affect you, then don't worry about it, you know? And again, how many, how many things like take abortion as probably the most classic example of that is, you know, or gay marriage, or, I mean, there's, there are a litany of different things to where it's like, you know, take one step back again, get rid of the emotion in politics and then ask yourself, like,

does this fucking matter to you? Like, does, does it really affect you? If it doesn't, if it's somebody else doing something that they, they like, they're passionate about and it doesn't impact you, then stop fucking worrying about it. Um, you know, too many times people, you know, whether it's in communities or on a national level, you know, whether it's your neighbor or,

you know, at a federal level is that people are pissed and worried about things that, that don't really affect them, you know, but they'll die on that Hill. They'll sit there and spend hours arguing with somebody about it. They'll get emotional about it. Um, and they'll let it, you know, border on control their life for something that, that doesn't even have any relevance. You know, um, I actually got in trouble for telling somebody to mind his own business on, on social media a couple of years ago, which is a whole nother story. But, uh,

It was funny because it, uh, somebody, there was a ton of comments asking like, Oh, where is it in your book where it says, mind your own fucking business. It was like fucking page 91 on this paragraph. And, and, uh, yeah, that's a funny story. I'll share it with you after, after, uh, after the show probably. Yeah. One of the other things I was thinking about this as I was reading it was, um,

Really trying to understand what the other person's perspective is and this again This is something I picked up like if you and I were planning for a mission and you were like I think we should hit the target from the south and I'm like, oh I think we should hit it from the north instead of me thinking I'm right. You're wrong. I'm like, okay. Why does he want it? Okay, why is he why do you think it's better hit it from the south? You're like well, we're getting inserted over here. There's a possible ID over here There's a bad terrain feature over here and look at this like nice little

High ground we can take to overwatch as we move in from the south I'm like well actually that makes pretty good sense or I say hey you know what that's all good Mike what I forgot to tell you is that there's gonna be a Fire mission that's gonna be going to the south. I didn't tell you that it's my fault, so we can't actually come Okay, cool So now we have a real conversation But I actually want to know why you think that's better And I think if you can do that normally you can at least find some level of

of understanding of that other person's perspective. All the way down to, you almost, I was kind of doing it a little bit when we were just talking about this killer, this murderer of the CEO of United Healthcare, because I immediately almost went into like, hey listen, that guy probably has a family member that suffered this and that. The thing is, with that particular case, you go, even with that perspective, even with that perspective,

I can't say yep go ahead and murder the CEO of the company like it did there's that doesn't work But most of the time in many cases unless the person is crazy or like I've often said like hey unless you're Isis or like a died-in-the-wool communist Like I'm gonna be able to figure out some little common ground that we have somewhere right like we're gonna be able to figure something out and

But if you're in this case, it's like, oh, now you're going to murder a person in cold blood. That's not OK. But most of the time it's like, oh, here's what you think. Oh, you believe in welfare or you believe in whatever the thing is. Right. You believe in whatever the thing.

Also, okay. Well, I understand I least have some comprehension of what you're where you're coming from and in my mind I actually try and figure out how I can help make them right I actually want to believe what you're telling me when you tell me some political opinion and I'm like, dude This guy's an idiot. I immediately know that that's my ego. It's my emotions. It's my politics and I go, okay stop and

Listen and try and figure out how Mike can be right about this particular topic that he's talking about How can I how can I agree with him? Yeah, and I work my ass off to try and figure that out and most of the time what I figured out was like You know what this opinion that I have not fully formulated and probably shouldn't be stabilized yet. It probably shouldn't be poured concrete It should there should probably some room to breathe because the world is a crazy complex place you know you and I talked about on the podcast on your podcast and

the amount of variables that are in war. And that's the same thing with so many complex topics that there are that why would you pour your, your, your opinion into concrete and have no ability to maneuver.

One of the things I say in there, not on that page, but later in the book, is listen to understand, not to respond, which is huge. And I think Jordan Peterson does an exercise in his couples therapy where he says, if you're in an argument with your spouse,

he'll have them flip sides, you know, and say, okay, now you're arguing her point to you and vice versa, you know, to really force you to understand where that other person is coming from, which is pretty brilliant. But I don't know how well it would work in some cases. I can see that going off the rails pretty quick.

Well, the reason I think that is because I'm a fucking idiot. I just start bagging on yourself. Well, listening is, I always explain that listening is one of the absolute most underrated skills in being in leadership. And it's also the cornerstone of building relationships with people is listening to what they have to say. As a matter of fact, again, when I was on your podcast, one of the questions from the audience was,

what do you do with someone that's not listening to you? And very quickly I responded, you listen to them. If someone's not listening to you, you need to listen to them. Find out what's going on. The more you listen to them, the more likely they are to listen to you. And 99% of the cases in the world are,

When you start listening to someone and taking notes on what they're saying and trying to incorporate their views into things, they will eventually start listening to you. Is there one? There's a, it's not even 1%. It's like 0.001%. That's just a freaking lunatic. Yeah. You probably don't. If you're listening to this right now and you're thinking, oh, you see, I knew it. I knew that guy was the guy that wasn't going to listen and I should just beat him down. No. Yeah. You don't have that person. That person doesn't even function in society normally. Yeah.

- For you in those environments, is there a statement that you use typically to open that door to listen or is it just totally dependent on the person, the topic, the situation? - I might say like, dude, what's wrong? And generally speaking, trying to take some kind of an ownership of the situation. Like, hey Mike, I don't think I'm doing a good job of understanding your perspective. Can you tell me what you're thinking right now? If it's your kid, hey, listen kid,

I can see that you're mad right now. Obviously, I'm not understanding what's going on. Can you explain to me what your viewpoint is? If it's your spouse, hey, darling, I can see that this is, I'm not doing a good job of understanding what's happening. Can you share with me? If it's your boss, hey, boss, obviously, I've done something that was out of line. I want to know what that is. Can you help me see it? Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong? You see what I'm saying? It's just like asking questions

And taking ownership of the fact that you're not comprehending what's going on. Yeah, that makes sense. And that's a good way to do that. And like then to your point, or I guess you made via Jordan Peterson, the intention of listening isn't then to come up with a response. Yeah.

The intention of listening is to nod your head, get out your freaking notebook. Dude, I used to do that when I was in the teams. Like somebody comes to me with some problem, I'm getting out my notebook. Get out my notebook, I'm going to write down what the hell you're saying. And you're going to know like, damn, dude, the boss is taking notes on what's going on. That's a pretty positive thing, isn't it? So I really like these protocols, running things through these protocols so that you can actually...

freaking calm down and understand things better and and you do it did you apply this methodology in the book you cover a bunch of topics from borders to guns to the economy to a bunch of social issues to foreign policy to Environment you cover it all and you kind of break it down and show these different perspectives And I think that's a good methodology for actually

Teaching people how to do this when they get to watch you do it throughout the book Which is freaking solid and then you get into the last the last chapter of this book Which is very uniquely titled you You say this that's why I want to end this book by sharing with you a handful of things that you can put into practice immediately in your own life all these things

All of these are things that I strive to practice in my own life. They are things that I have seen proven time and time again to have a positive impact both in the lives of individuals as well as society at large. I am by no means perfect or feel that I have arrived at any of these points, but you can bet your ass that I wake up every day doing what I can to progress, grow, and learn. Most days. Most days.

The first thing you talk about is shift your mentality in many ways This book has been all about shifting mentality and perspective the word mentality is defined as the characteristic of attitude or way of thinking a person of a person or a group all of us should make it our mission to pursue independent and informed thinking to check and recheck our Mentality about ourselves on the world around us constantly. It is a journey that each of us will be on for life There are two mental shifts that I believe

Do the most good in your life as an individual and a society and the first one is think for yourself and dude This is what it's weird. I remember when I was a kid and I was always liked war and like to learn about war and study war and You know, I remember even as a little kid watching like PBS shows about the Nazis and you would see

The Germans and you would see like the mass Hypnosis of the people like all freaking Sieg Heilings tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people and it seemed For many many years of my life. It seemed like a unique Thing like a thing where it's like, oh do this that guy Adolf Hitler had some freaking kind of magical power He had some kind of charisma

And then you learn a little bit more like, oh, it's also because the German economy had been crashed so bad. So that's another reason why the people were kind of down for the cause. Oh, and then also you learn that after the Treaty of Versailles, the German people, like they felt like they got screwed in that whole time. So now they're even more down for the cause. So by the time Hitler comes around, like you just have this, this massive people unique in human history that was ready to get on board with the program. But man, in the last like decade,

Several years it's become much more obvious how just completely pliable people's minds are and The only reason that we don't have a mass movement like that Unified right now is because there's just all these little mini mass movements that are going all the time and people are freaking scrolling through their phone and they're getting sucked down to that algorithm thing and next thing you know, they're on some weird freaking belief system that's

crazy that's leading them to become angry and frustrated and psycho and The the Nazis did that to a whole bunch of people at the same time They happen to unify that message and they got them all going but it's it's it's sad to see this happening now with all these little offshoots that you can go down and you can get wrapped up into these these rabbit holes where You're not thinking for yourself anymore. Yeah, I

Well, and I think, again, it speaks to the lack of purpose that so many people have, you know, is that they don't really have anything that they're that passionate about, you know. And when you don't have that, again, like we said, you know, you'll figure something out. Your mind and body will gravitate towards something. And the problem is that, you know, that passion needs to be real. It needs to be, you know, an ignited fire, right?

kind of coming from your soul. And if it's something that's trivial, then it's going to seem ridiculous because it is. Uh, but you know, it doesn't mean that you're any less passionate about it. It's just what you're being passionate about is, is a pretty trivial thing. Uh, you know, but to you, it's all relative. It doesn't feel trivial because that's, that's what your thing is. And so, uh,

I agree. It's an alarming time to see, or it makes more sense now where it's like, okay, now I get how Nazi Germany happened. And I think a lot of people have kind of come to that realization over the last few years of seeing people, when Trump was shot...

I mean, fuck a good portion of the country, you know, it was like, wish, wish they would have hit him. It's like, what? You know, it's like, I don't like Biden. I don't want to see him get fucking assassinated. You know, like what am I missing? Like, how's there that many people that are okay with that? You know, and same with the, the healthcare CEO, same thing. Like there's, you know, there's probably not probably, there's always going to be a portion of the population that,

cheers those things that is okay with that and applauds something like that. But it seems like the balance is so far tipped now to where there's so many people that are okay with dehumanizing people that they disagree with over some of the littlest things. It's like they're now an inanimate object almost and they could fucking care less. There's no...

Kind of human connection to that person because well, they don't believe what I believe and so they could have their head cut off And I wouldn't care. It's it's frightening. Yeah, my when I was growing up my dad's a real conservative guy and one like real conservative and one of our family friends was a Old like crazy what we would call like a crazy liberal guy and I

We had dinner with this family thousands of times growing up. And my dad and this guy who were on absolute opposite ends of the political spectrum would freaking sit there all night and argue and make fun of each other and bring up facts and go at each other's throats metaphorically.

And at the end of the night, you know, I have a good night. We'll see you tomorrow. Like, and, and that just, I don't think that really happens anymore. It doesn't. And I do wonder, uh, or I, I suspect that social media and the internet's played an enormous role in that, uh, for the simple fact that that, that, and kind of the political correction over correction of not being able to handle things the old fashioned way, like, uh,

It was interesting. My Uber driver on the way here was from Chechnya. We of course got to talking about Dagestan and wrestling and fighting and the differences between, you know, I'm like interviewing this guy on the way here, but, um, but it, you know, our society, what does he train?

He doesn't train here. You may see him coming through the victory doors here pretty soon. Could use some of that. Yeah. Well, he fought twice, won two amateur fights in Chechnya. And he's like, in Chechnya growing up, you either wrestle or you do judo. That's part of school for everybody. He's like, boys, you do one or the other. And there is no choice. And just the stark contrast between the two societies. But yeah.

He was saying one of the things that surprised him the most here, because we were at a stoplight and somebody like pulled out and somebody was honking and flipping them off and yelling out the window. And he's like, that never, ever happens in Chechnya. He's like, nobody talks shit to each other. Nobody fucking flips anybody off. He's like, like, if you flip somebody off, you better be ready to fucking fight right now. And nobody gives a shit.

You know, it's like people knock each other's teeth out for mouthing off or for flipping each other off or whatever. He said, it just doesn't happen. He's like,

in, in, in Chechnya, like you, if you pull out and there's some sort of disagreement as to a traffic maneuver or whatever, like people will, will ask, are you okay? And do you need any help? Like, it's not an aggressive, you're fucked up. Get out of my way. It's, is everything okay? Like, do you need a hand? Like, like assuming you're screwed up because something's wrong. It's just like a polar opposite mentality. But, um, back to, to that, that kind of point is that, um,

You know, we live in a society now where, I mean, you can say fucking anything to somebody with absolutely zero consequence. I mean, you can, you know, insult their family, their mom, their kids, their spouse, them. I mean, you can threaten them, frankly. I mean, I'm sure you've seen stuff, too, where people will say shit about

Just like, dude, how the fuck is that? How is that what you think? You know, like some of the comments on YouTube or on social media, which I admittedly don't read very much of or very often, but sometimes some have gotten my attention because of how egregious they are. But I think that's part of it is that, you know, it's like there's no consequence for talking to somebody in any manner. Like the most vile, disgusting, offensive things

threatening, disrespectful manner. There's absolutely no consequence for it, you know, and I think that's a problem. When you couple that with the fact that the weird timing of texting and social media and comments is that, you know,

Having a discussion or even a disagreement with somebody you don't have time to think about it that much right so everything is really off the cuff like when you have just enough time like you may spend minutes or even hours figuring out how to respond to somebody's smartass comment and

And so you have, you know, all of, all of these like one up, I gotcha, catch me, fuck me, trick fuck kind of comments on social media where people are, you know, have these well thought out things or there's no emotion behind it. You can't see the person's face. You can't humanize them at all because it's just, you know, text on a, on a little screen in your hand. And I think that that changes the way people view each other. Yeah. Yeah.

The idea like I'll see on social media of someone will say, you know, well, that's bullshit. Fuck you. And, you know, the last time I said, I said, fuck you to another person. I can't, I can't remember. Yeah. Like,

And the last time someone said that to me, I can't remember. Like for someone to look at me and say, fuck you. Like that is, that is an extreme kind of crazy thing that's going on. Like we're about to fight. Or I did something to you that like, we are now enemies. But for just to be, it's like a Tuesday afternoon and I'm going through this person who's talking about Biden or Trump or whoever. And my response is, hey, if that's what you think, fuck you. That's,

Yeah. Is that serious? That's, that's where we're at. That's what we're doing. Yeah. So yes, social media for, I wonder how that bleeds over to like real life. Well, it doesn't. So, but, but no, let's say you're a kid. Let's say you're a 15 year old kid and you're on social media and you're telling people, fuck you and this and that. And the other thing, and now all of a sudden you're in a movie theater and someone's talking and you tell them to be quiet and they say, ah,

You know, I'm not, you don't, you don't tell me what to do. Do you immediately just go to like, fuck you. And now we're fighting and like, I don't know. I think there's an element of that. I do think that deep down, even if it's hardwired genetic is that I think people still understand the, the primal nature of, of human beings and, and kind of what exists. And so I think it depends on the person in person.

I think there's a lot of people that would talk a ton of shit online, and if you saw them in person, they wouldn't talk to you that way. But I think it depends on who that other person is. With kids, yeah, I think a lot of them would go right to saying what they would type in social media. I do think as you get older and you get a sense of how somebody carries themselves, their presence, their nonverbal communication, eye contact, things like that, that plays a big role.

Again, I don't even think you ever have need to have been punched in the mouth or been in a fight to realize when you're in the presence of somebody who absolutely will fuck you up for being disrespectful. I think people recognize that even if they've never been in a fight. Yeah, there's a little bit of primal activity going on there.

One thing you say about this is this one mentality shift is something that you can begin pursuing right now. Start asking questions, start thinking for yourself, educating yourself, researching for yourself, expose yourself to a variety of deep thinkers, innovators, philosophers, political leaders, experts, and friends who think both similarly and different than you.

Certainly something that if you don't actively try and make that happen, it won't happen. Yeah. If you just look, it's so much more comforting just to hang out with a bunch of people that think what I think and I don't want to hear from everybody else. And by the way, your algorithm is set up to do that for you. Yeah.

And you go into the fact of voting here's another thing that you talk about which I well I guess you could say I fully wholeheartedly support this take responsibility No matter who you are or what stage of life for you are currently and it's important to remember that someone is looking at you You're an example to someone and you are an influence on someone. I

That alone should be a weighty responsibility. It is one none of us should take lightly. Take responsibility and ownership for what is yours. Don't blame your problems on other people. Put your head down and own the shit that's yours to own. If you made a mistake, don't pretend you didn't. Don't try and cover it up. Look it square in the face, own it, and take action to grow from it. In doing so, you'll show others that it's okay to fall down and get back up.

I wrote a whole book about that. Actually, it's only one chapter in that book, but yeah. Take ownership, everybody. And then you get into this trifecta of health. Three components. Get the fuck outside. Get off your ass. Get proper fuel. Step one, get the fuck outside. Why is that? So taking one step back, you know, the book highlights, like I was kind of saying earlier,

The premise behind it is, you know, there's all these data points that speak to much bigger problems than what typically is focused on in the media. It can be a daunting thing to see all of these issues, these data points, and be like, holy shit, you know, our country is in kind of a mess. And now the daunting part is, what can I do about that, right? It's like, well, you can vote and you can set the example. You know, I don't know what the adage is. All high tides raise ships or whatever the hell that is at the moment.

I know I messed that up. Whatever it is, you get the point, right? Do you know what it is, Echo? High tides raise all ships. That sounds about right. But hey, you know what? Yeah. All high tides do also raise ships. All high tides. We're good either way. It's the highest it's ever been. But that's the reality. So if everybody attacks that same problem of saying, okay, well, there's not a lot that I can control, but the things that I can control are me.

So those first four kind of protocols of how you approach everything, coupled with the fact that, okay, well, I can keep myself healthy because the reality is our country's biggest problem is drug addiction, alcoholism, and heart disease. By far, those three things kill way more people than guns, than, I mean, everything else by a landslide.

By getting outside, getting sunlight, the Huberman protocols of getting off your ass, staying active, and having that implemented as part of your routine is going to be super beneficial. The second thing is fueling your body appropriately. Same thing is that stop rinsing Snickers bars down with Mountain Dew and eat nutrient-dense whole foods that are relatively healthy most of the time.

Um, and then, you know, exercise and, and make your body strong and, and, uh, you know, do those right things. So those three things, you know, uh, staying active, eating properly and exercising, um, you know, take the biggest strain off of our society, because if you're doing that, you're not an alcoholic, you're not addicted to drugs and you're not clogging up our, our healthcare system.

But even beyond that is that mentally you're going to be the most capable. You're going to be the most productive physically and mentally, which is just going to be an asset to the country. And if everybody does that, if everybody maximizes their own potential, the collective average of the country is way above where we're at now. And those are things that you can control. You talk about getting off your ass, and we were talking earlier about the fact that you

were on this podcast before six and a half years ago and after that podcast at some juncture you got off your ass and you started training jiu-jitsu yeah what was that all about let's talk jiu-jitsu yeah i mean i'll step up to the mic i mean i already stayed pretty active working out but you know jiu-jitsu is one of those things where um i think i don't think i know that you know the

cost benefit of juice being worth a squeeze. Like if you're going to be active and you're going to put effort into a physical activity, I think you'd be hard pressed to find one that gives you the return that jujitsu does, you know, uh, for so many reasons, which I know you guys have talked about at length. Another part was, um, which I mentioned on the last show, but I'll, I'll mention again for your listeners is the, uh, Andy stump had the, uh, ask me anything. And somebody was like, who's going to win in a fight between Ritland and Rogan. Um,

And he was like, Rogan had fucked Mike up. And I was just like, well, fuck you. Like, I don't care if it's even true. Like, it's like, I should probably do something about that. You know, not that I didn't feel like I could at least somewhat handle myself, but not to the degree with which somebody who trains a lot and gets, you know, to be a preseason jujitsu athlete or even combatives. Cause I do, uh,

I don't compete. I don't focus on points or positions. It's all very kind of MMA or real world focused, you know, with starting from feet and, you know, doing takedowns and even throwing little strikes in here and there and being mindful of the fact that that's a thing. And generally speaking, no holds barred. I mean, we're not gouging eyes and shit, but we're doing a lot of things that aren't legal in competition and just kind of focusing on that as a mentality. But

For me, I found a huge, I would say, kind of release and balancing mentally with just, you know, whether it was ego or temper or frustration, you know, things that I didn't really expect as a consequence, as a positive consequence of doing it, but that have been

just overwhelmingly beneficial for me with, you know, being more patient and letting things go and like not letting certain little, little things bother me and what have you. And it's been, uh, it's been an amazing journey. I, uh, I wouldn't say that, uh, like it, it runs my life and I'm addicted to it, but I, I absolutely love doing it and, and I have to do it. So I don't know, maybe I am addicted to it. We do call that an addiction. How many times a week do you get to train? Um, it, it varies. I mean, it's,

I would say on the, like the most I'll do in a week is four days. That's pretty rare. It's usually two or three. Uh, for me, I do find that sweet spot of two or three, if three, if it's, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or, you know, at least one day in between training for me is, is pretty important for me to be able to recover and not feel like I've been hit by a bus when I get out of bed every morning. But, um, yeah, I just, you know, I train with a young, young, very skilled black belt, uh, mostly private lessons and,

And even the, you know, occasional group class that I'll do is, you know, there's usually some pretty competitive guys that are, you know, half my age and pretty athletic and make me feel fucking old, you know. But, yeah, I mean, I love it. And to me, kind of the 3-D chess component that just never gets old, you know. I mean, to me, it's, to use kind of a band reference, is like,

Striking is kind of like drums, you know, whether it's Muay Thai, kickboxing, whatever. Like there's only so much variance combination wise that you can really bring to the table. That's a freaking good one. Jiu Jitsu is the guitar. It's the electric guitar with wah pedals and fucking effects. And you can bend the strings and, and, you know, sweet fretboard. And by the way, look, dude, drummers and drumming can be in totally insane, complicated craziness. It's awesome. Yeah.

But it doesn't, the amount of complexity and infinite number of opportunities on a guitar fretboard are tenfold. It's like tenfold. And so, yeah, that's a really good, I always just say it's like linear versus nonlinear, you know? And you are limited in boxing. What can you do? There are only so many things you can do. And look, a boxer will be like, well, no, there's this, and they're right. They're right.

And every one of those things that you can, you can, every one of those variables in boxing, there's, let's say there's 10,000 variables in boxing. You can multiply that times infinite infinity to get to jujitsu. Yeah. I mean, there's just that there's the, you're never finished component to it. Like there's always some other level or whatever. And I feel like with boxing or, you know, really any type of striking, um,

You get to a certain point, and I don't think it takes that long before you're kind of as good as you're going to get. Because so much of it is hinging on speed and athleticism and quickness and reflex, and a lot of those things you can't change. So it seems like, I mean, I haven't done a ton of striking, but I've done enough to where it's like within a certain point and relatively soon, you're about as good as you're going to get at that.

Whereas jujitsu, it's just like, it just keeps going, you know? Just FYI, there is crazy levels to striking too. Like if you ever train with people that are,

what would be considered like a jujitsu black belt in striking. And you're not, you are getting worked over the same way as like, like we, we, Mike Regner, remember Mike Regner at city boxing? He's, you know, he was like a champion kickboxer, Muay Thai guy. Like you think about,

Kicking him and he's checking your kick and like returning and it hurts way worse than what you threw at him and he doesn't care or Robbie Garcia who was like the hit man like he hits you with a body shot like you're sparring your throne is thrown boom. Yeah, dude So and they they can just work you over That being said there is an even more exponential level change in yes, someone that is a

you know, a black belt in jujitsu. Well, I guess to clarify, like I'm not insinuating that there aren't the same amount of levels of skill in striking. What I think is that individually your ability to progress is far more limited. You know, like if, especially if you didn't grow up doing it, you know, it's like if you take a, say a 25 year old in good shape, you know, decent athleticism and you start putting them through the paces, boxing, Muay Thai, what have you,

you know, within a, probably a couple of years, he's probably as about as good as he's going to get. You know, even if he trains for the next 15, he may get a little better. I don't, I don't think there's the same learning curve in striking that there is in jujitsu. Jujitsu learning curve is definitely an apex learning curve for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's the way it works. And it doesn't stop. That's what, you know, people ask me like, Oh, who would be, who would win the 53 year old Jocko or the 25 year old Jocko? That's no contest.

The 30 year old jock was no contest. Actually myself, like six months ago, no contest, you know? So you get better all the time and you learn all the time and you can just, the difference. And there's a huge difference between like black belt that, that black belt, you know, guy over there and that other black belt guy over there. And it's like, Oh, this is next level activities that are going on. So it is definitely, um,

Definitely a... Do your kids do it? They have. So my youngest trains, I'd say more MMA style now. Oh, sweet. She does...

fair bit of striking as well. I, you know, so both of them did it when they were really young for, for several years. And then for a period, neither of them did it for a little while. My oldest wrestled in high school, which was great that all years, four years of wrestling, three. Okay. But you know, it's neat to see, you know, a women's wrestling team, you know, at Texas school.

It was also great in that they didn't have a ton of kids on the team, so they end up having to wrestle the boys a lot, which is good for them. And so, yeah, so now... Did the jiu-jitsu cross over pretty well to her wrestling? Did she have enough jiu-jitsu to make an impact? Yeah, I think it was like with a lot of kids...

it was a little problematic at first, you know, just the being comfortable on your back versus no, you never go on your back, you know, but that doesn't last very long, you know? So now I would say, uh, even the, you know, when we'll still kind of mess around a little bit, um, she's still pretty heavy in the wrestling, you know, the collar ties and the arm drags and the, uh, you know, you know, flinching and, you know, just the, the standard, uh,

wrestler stuff that you get into right away, which is still fun. And she's, you know, her frame is pretty good size. She's really athletic and stays in good shape. And, you know, she's a handful. I mean, for sure. Do you think she's going to venture back to jujitsu? I hope so. My daughter, you know, same thing. Jujitsu, wrestling, and boy, she went back into jujitsu. She's real into jujitsu right now. Yeah, I hope she does. I think she will. I mean, she has the personality that

would lend itself to, to probably do that. So she's out of state right now. I think if, if she comes back in the next year, which I think she very well may, then, then I'd say you can probably count on it, you know, but I hope she does. Yes. Yeah. Just to, just to kind of close out the book here a little bit.

You say our country's facing a lot of challenges right now and we need individuals like you to have the courage to think independently, to live with sincerity and integrity, and roll up their sleeves and contribute to the world around us. We each have a part to play and a path to take that is and should be different from one another.

There are times when you may feel like you're swimming upstream. You may feel insignificant or inconsequential in the grand scheme of life, but don't give up because your life, that individual thread that you've been given to weave alongside countless others is what will create the tapestry of the next chapter in history. What will be on that tapestry and what we will be remembered for is up to us.

Marcus Aurelius. There you go. There you go. Good stuff, dude. And you wrote that book a couple of years ago. So what else you got going on? So big thing now is just kind of continuing to do all the same stuff that I've been doing. The primary focus is the dog food company. Just because that's such a heavy lift, as you well know, just with, you know, product development and bringing new SKUs and, and even just continuing doing, you know, it, it,

With consumables, it never ends, which is good. And I think product-based business is – I think you have to have something where people are going through it and reordering regularly. But, yeah, the expansion of that, I mean, it's kind of ironic. I mean, over the last 15 years when I first started doing dogs for a living, it was like because I love dogs and I want to train dogs. And while I still do that –

you know, coming full circle. It's like the bulk of my day now is talking about shipping issues and truck delays and fucking packaging costs. And, you know, and it's like shit that has nothing to do with dogs. It's all the same stuff. You, you probably are, are, uh,

you know, uh, faced with all the time, you know, but, uh, but I, I love it. I mean, you know, I, I wouldn't have it any other way. I really enjoy doing it. And, uh, and it's fun. I mean, you know, the, the reason why I started the dog food company is in that same vein is that I just wanted to have a superior product and help dogs and,

and help people get the most out of their dogs, both from a training standpoint and from a nutrition standpoint. So I'm still doing the online training. I still sell personal protection dogs. I'll still teach it. You know, do you sell, do people order the dogs in advance or how's that work? Yeah, I only do that one at a time. So, you know, there, there are some companies out there that'll have, you know, three, four or five dogs for sale on their website. I don't do it that way.

If somebody says, hey, I'm interested in a dog, we have a conversation. And then kind of get the understanding of the family dynamic, the daily routine, and determine, hey, is this a good fit or not? Because there are times where it's not, where I'll say, hey, I really don't, your lifestyle from my perspective. Get a lab. It's just too dynamic. Yeah, it's too dynamic. Dogs thrive on routine, and their currency is engagement.

And if you can't do both of those things at a certain level, you just should get a fucking goldfish. Or an attack cheetah or whatever. Hire a fucking bodyguard. So at that point, then I'll go find the right dog for that fit and then bring them into my house and spend however long it takes to get them ready to be delivered. Then I'll spend a couple days delivering the dog and then that's it. It's a strange business because unlike...

Really anything. It's such an intimate transaction, you know? Yeah. Even if you're, you know, say remodeling somebody's bathroom, like you're in their house and whatever, but not with them here, you know, you're adding a family member. This, this customer is trusting you to put a potentially dangerous animal in their house and,

So you're spending time with their kids like you're seeing. And some of these people are household names or they're C-suite executives of household name corporations or things of that nature. And so you meet some really, really interesting people and get a lot of good advice business-wise, which was an unintended positive consequence that I didn't anticipate. But that transaction is such where

You know, you're seeing these people that, you know, as they're putting their kids to bed first thing in the morning, like you're staying in their house while they're doing their normal stuff. You see how they interact with their spouses. It's kind of weird. I wouldn't say. How many days do you spend? Usually three or four. So it's, but then, you know, that's once I'm comfortable and they're comfortable with me leaving at that, there comes a certain point where it's counterproductive for me to still be there because the dog's always going to default to me.

once, you know, everything's kind of good enough for me to leave, then it's still, you know, you're, you're touching base and checking in pretty often, you know, that they'll still have a lot of questions. And over that first few weeks, we're still talking quite a bit, you know, and then as a couple of months gets down the road, then they're kind of firing on all cylinders and, and, uh, they don't need a whole lot of, uh, advice at that point. But,

So dog food, dog training, selling dogs, the podcast. And then of course the warrior dog foundation, which is a warrior dog foundation, which you have, how many kennels do you have set up for that? 30. Um, and, and we're always full. I mean, we've got over 10 dogs on a waiting list right now. I mean, that's one thing where we're trying to,

Trying to expand, you know, it's tough to determine whether or not it makes sense to expand where we're at, which I don't think it really does, or have regional places. Like I'd like to have a warrior dog west coast, warrior dog east coast, maybe a warrior dog north, have different satellite operations where number one is that if the dog, you know, from whatever unit or police department is closer to there, then it's going to go to wherever the closest location is. But two,

These dogs don't play well with others. They're all kind of the Hannibal Lecters of the dog world in that they've bit a bunch of people they weren't supposed to. We're to a point where whatever unit they're coming from wanted to euthanize them, and then that's where we step in. These aren't the dogs that you can just adopt out from the movie Dog or Lassie or whatever. It's not that dog. This is the dog that's made a bunch of mistakes before.

and, uh, and as you know, hurt, hurt people and put them in the hospital that they weren't supposed to. And so, um, we can't let those dogs out together. You know, you're letting them out one at a time. So 30 dogs is kind of pushing it for one location. Um, and so we, we really need to expand. It's just,

I don't know, you know, one of the biggest challenges, I think, from a nonprofit standpoint is you're kind of in one of two camps. Either, you know, you're really firing on all cylinders in terms of the administrative staff, the fundraising, the, you know, reaching out, the advertisements, the galas, all that kind of stuff. Or, you know, you're doing 97 cents of every dollar goes to the mission and, you know,

you're not going to get emailed back right away and you're not going to get a Christmas card every year from on card stock that costs $9 for, you know, for the Christmas card. And we've always been very lean and, and, uh, you know, leaned more towards that trying to maximize the amount of, of, uh, you know, dollars going to the, the taking care of the dog. So, uh,

The reason I bring that up is that, you know, that expansion is pretty heavy lift financially. And while we don't have dedicated grant writers and fundraisers and gala organizers and things like that, it's tough to accomplish that when, you know, when we're not spending money on that. So still, you know, been able to save well over 300 dogs in the last 15 years and, you

and continue to do so and will so but I would like to see kind of the next phase of both my professional career and the foundation to kind of expand and maybe add a few locations to bring some more dogs in yeah that's good stuff does that get us up to speed?

Yeah, I think that's all I got, I guess. People can find all that stuff that you just talked about at MikeRitland.com, right? You've got the Mic Drop podcast. You're on Twitter and Instagram at MRitland. You also have at Teendog.shop, at Teendog.pet, at Warrior Dog Foundation, and you've got your YouTube channel, which is at MikeRitland. Yeah.

Does that cover all the bases there? That's every single base. I was going to put down all the different websites, but they're all under Mike Ritland. You can find them from there. Echo Charles, any questions? Oh yeah. Quick question. Yeah. Remember the Halloween scenario? Oh yeah. You know, we couldn't go out for trick or treating. Do you remember? I mean, if you're at Liberty to say, do you know, do you remember what they lied about?

I actually, I have no recollection of what they lied about. I agree with you with the lying thing. Yeah. I think, I mean, growing up, we got spanked very rarely for anything, but the thing we always, 100% of the time got spanked for was lying. Yeah. So it's like a weird, like...

psychological thing that I have against like lying. It's like, but, um, but I tried to perpetuate that through the kids or whatever. And bro, I would shut down Christmas, Halloween, new year. If they lied, overtly lied. Oh man. A hundred percent. I'm with you. Yeah. That's, that's a tough, uh, it's tough. Cause I think it's, I think there are phases in childhood where it's more common than others. And, you know, whether it's friend influences or, you know, stuff at school or whatever, it's like, man, it's a tough one to handle sometimes, you know? Cause, uh,

A, it's infuriating, and so trying to stay calm and not get emotional is tricky. But B, it's like, man, the one thing I need you to do is fucking level with me. It's like if I can't trust what you're telling me, we're going to have big problems moving down the road. My son lied to me one time, and it was actually the reason I'm thinking about it. It's not just because we're talking about lying, but also because we're talking about dogs, because what he lied about was...

My wife and I had to go somewhere like hey walk the dog cool You know and I'm as I'm walking out, you know You glance over and you see like the the pinch collar in a certain spot and other than that He's not even wearing a collar So if you're going for a walk, you're gonna take the pinch collar because he was a young dog at the time He needed to be on leash. So I notice it and I kind of just frame a reference real quick like oh, you know You can see the pattern that it's in Yeah

You know what this is, dog? So I come back, you know, we go back, we're gone for half an hour, whatever, 45 minutes, maybe an hour, come back. I look at that leash, it's in the exact same spot, in the exact same pattern. I was like, hey, did you walk the dog? And he's like, yep. I go, hey dude, I'm gonna ask you one more time, did you walk that dog? And he goes, yeah. And I go, okay. I said, I know you didn't. You're done. There's levels to being done

I'm going to allow you to have a lower level if you tell me the truth right now. Did you walk that dog? He's like, no. I said, okay, get your workout gear on. And I, you know, when he went through a little, he went through a little hammer session. The funny thing was, the funny thing is, so Leif and Seth were around, you know, this is when he was a young guy. So these guys were around all the time and he's like in the middle of some freaking punishing burpee thruster kettlebell punishment. And I'm like, you know what? You know, I said,

I said, do you think Seth and Leif ever messed up? Because I was going to, you know, do you think they messed up? Of course they did. Do you think they lied to me? No. I'm like, do you think Leif and Seth ever messed up? And he's like, no, never. Yeah.

I was like, bullshit. They messed up all the time. Do you think they lied to me? No. So there you go. No lying. No lying. That's what we're doing. Mike, any final thoughts, bro? No, I just, again, I can't thank you enough for having me out and taking a full day to let me interview you and then do the reverse. So thank you very much. I know your time is precious. Right on, man. Well, it's awesome to have you back here. Thanks for joining us once again. Thanks for what you did for the show.

the teams for, for our great nation. And thank for what you continue to do now, you know, helping dogs, helping people, um, and helping them both become a little bit smarter and a little bit better, better canines and better humans. My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks brother. And with that, Mike Ritland has left the building.

Obviously putting forth some pretty good steps to improve America to improve your community to improve your family to improve yourself and a bunch of steps one of the ones I noticed was Get outside clean fuel get after it train jujitsu. Yeah, so we're looking for good fuel. I

I recommend Jocko Fuel. Hey, you know, he was like, yeah, eat good foods. 100%. We're eating steak. We're eating salads, right? We're eating chicken. We're doing this. You're even eating sushi, right? We're doing it. But you can't always get everything that we need through these protocols. Check out JockoFuel.com. Get the other thing that you need. Supplement your fuel system. You can get extra protein.

Mulk protein ready to drink powder form you can get energy you can get super krill You can get time war get just the supplements that you need So check out Jocko fuel calm and get what you need You can get it at Walmart. You can get it at Wawa vitamin shop GNC military commissaries a fees Hannaford dashed doors in Maryland Wake Fern shop right H EB down in Texas Meyer in the Midwest

Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, and whatever gym you're at, they can have it there too. If they don't have it there, email jfsales at jockelefield.com and get it there.

That's what we're doing. Is there a, like a limitation to how big your gym has to be or anything like that? No, no. However, you could have four people that train at your gym and those four people could be fueled properly. So even like, you know, the little Pilates place, just for example, whoever, by the way, by the way, we're in chiropractic places. Yeah. We're in all kinds of like little niche places, anywhere where people are focused on,

being healthy and fit and High-performance we're in those places. So we're in but yeah, we're all kinds of different places hardware stores Yeah, yeah, let's roll it in. Yeah, that's what we're doing man. Jocko field comm check it out Also, you said you did - yeah, I did. Yeah, so if you're doing the Gigi Jitsu, which is you know, hey man recommended So yeah, if you're doing that you Gigi Jitsu, be sure to get a key. Oh

An origin gi. All made in America. And here's the thing. Yeah, made in America, yes. But in addition, you got the added fact that's the best gi in the world as far as quality goes as well.

Trust me, that's all the process. And I wear the geese, so I know 100%. Also jeans, also t-shirts, hoodies, hunt gear, everything that you need. We got it going on. You need it to work out. And by the way, you might as well get it made in America, the United States of America, not by some poor slave, child slave in some other country that's in an abusive environment that's working against their will. Don't put it into that system. Don't put money into that system. Put money into America.

Origin USA dot-com check it out. It's true. Also, yeah, it's still called Jocko store. Jocko store.com So we can get your discipline equals freedom shirts. There's hats on there. There's hoodies on there shirts. That's a good I'm gonna propagate good a little bit more. You've got a different item Anyway, we got socks on there anyway some cool stuff on there if you want to represent while you're on the path also What we have on there is this little subscription scenario called the shirt locker. It's a new design shirt design every month and

a little bit more creative designs, funner designs, people represent. That's when you can get your attention. A little bit. I don't mean bad attention. I mean like

You know the kind where you wear your shirt and be like, oh, where'd you get that shirt? So anyway, it's that kind of design. It's called the Shirt Locker. It's all on jocostore.com. Available. Available, big time. You're going to need steak. I did mention steak. We want to be eating steak. You might as well eat the good steak. Check out coloradocraftbeef.com and primalbeef.com. Awesome steak. One from Colorado, the other from the Shenandoah Valley. Either one is going to be epic.

Awesome steaks awesome people awesome companies check out primal beef comm Colorado craft beef comm also subscribe to this podcast also check out Jocko underground Also, we got YouTube channels. We got psychological warfare. We got flipside canvas books by Mike Ritland unfuck America Trident canine dogs

You're so funny. Because I was thinking the same thing when you're like, you're talking about the big publishers and what they're edits. They would have made you like, maybe the title. Yeah. But that was a thing for a while. Like that was a big shocking thing. And then the book came out that was called. Oh yeah. Unfuck yourself. Unfuck yourself. Yeah. You're right. But there might've even been another one, but there was one big hit. Unfuck yourself was one of them. And then that broke the mold. And now there's a bunch of books like that have a, a swear word. Uh,

One of them being unfuck America Trident canine dogs Navy SEAL dogs and team dog by Mike Ritland I've written a bunch of books about various things from leadership to washing machines to kids books So check out those books check out Mikey and the Dragons check out about face by Colonel David Hackworth We have a leadership consulting company. It's called echelon front. We solve problems through leadership and

So if you have problems inside your organization, they are leadership problems. And if you want to resolve those problems, go to Ashlandfront.com and check out what we have going on. There's also events that you can come to. One event is called the Dallas. The next one is in San Diego, February 23rd through the 25th. If you want to go to one of our events, please register early because they all sell out. On top of that, we have an online training academy where you can learn the leadership principles that we teach.

Online training courses. There's quizzes. There's live sessions go to extreme ownership comm if you want to learn these principles in your business in your life in your family Extreme ownership comm check that out And if you want to help out service members active and retired you want to help their families won't help cold star families

Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to americasmightywarriors.org. Also check out heroesandhorses.org, Jimmy Mays organization, which is called Beyond the Brotherhood, and of course, Mike Ritland's Warrior Dog Foundation. Check all those out. Great organizations. If you want to connect with us, for Mike Ritland, he's on the interwebs, mikeritland.com. And you can kind of find everything online.

That he talked about and everything that he does at Mike Ritland.com. He also has the mic drop podcast. He's got Twitter and Instagram where he is at M Ritland. And he's also got a YouTube channel, which is at Mike Ritland for us. You can check out Jocko.com and I am at Jocko Willink and echo is at Echo Charles. And just be careful because as we talked about today,

There's an algorithm that's going to try and lock you into a little echo chamber that's going to make your life miserable. So be careful of that. Thanks again to Mike Ritland for joining us. Thanks for your service to America, your service as a frog man in the teams. And thanks for what you're doing still today to represent. And thanks to all our military personnel out there around the world.

Including our canine dogs that are out there getting after it Thank you for protecting our way of life here in America as imperfect as it is It is still worth protecting and in that same vein Thanks to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers Border Patrol Secret Service and all other first responders Thank you for protecting us here at home and everyone else out there There's a lot of complex issues and topics that you got to navigate in the world

And it can be a little crazy sometimes. Yes, sir. But I would recommend that at a minimum. Like Mike Ritland says, you should get yourself squared away. Think for yourself. Take responsibility. Get outside. Get the proper fuel. And get off your ass. And that's what we got. Until next time, this is Echo and Jocko.