Jocko Podcast 22 - with Echo Charles | Mind Control

2016-05-12T22:10:56Z

Join the conversation on Twitter: @jockowillink @echocharles 0:00:00 – Opening 0:03:24 – Book Review, “Nothing to Envy” by Barbara Demick. 0:59:08 – Mind Control / Mental Slavery. 1:13:26 – Solid Internet/Onnit Stuff. 1:17:13 – How to train BJJ when Injured. 1:24:08 – Knowing Personality Types. 1:28:05 – How to change the culture of a company. 1:33:20 – Dealing with Over-thinkers. 1:41:35 – Greg Jackson’s Criticism on Jon Jones (UFC). 1:46:26 – Feeling like Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill.

AI summary of episode

It's kind of like, you know, you got to consider the opportunity cost where some people, you got it, you know, you got to consider their credibility and then you got to kind of just go with it. So what that can end up with is this weird stiffness, you know, so you're going to end like it's like you've got to it's almost like you've got a warm up in life. And some people say, you know, well, I want to do, you know, I think they're, I think they're going to come out with this giant dream. And when you, I do know a little about a little bit about this where, um, so if you gain some a bunch of muscle, fast like a short period of period of time, you can have a way harder time dealing with, you know, the drawbacks of that muscle. The central committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, the central military commission of the party, the National Defense Commission, the Central People's Committee, and the administration council of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, report to the entire people of the country with deepest grief that the great leader, Comrade Kim Il-sung, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea and President of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea passed away from a sudden attack of Il-nus at 2am. And if you're doing it, like I said, the right things for the right reasons, people are going to see you and they're going to follow. If you cultivate this, you know, muscular body build, whatever, um, over time, like let's say you started lifting at 15 years old and you're, you know, 35 years old now. I mean, that's not a crazy place to drive really, you know, come here to like, I don't know, I would buy whatever, yeah, or so to LA, man, hit the 405 North on a Thursday afternoon. I want to know, I want to see how people are going to handle other personalities. and you're learning some new technique, you know, I find if I cannot roll, when I'm in class, I'll like pay a little bit more attention to what the instruction is being given because I know I can't roll. You know, you know, now you meet some people sometimes and they tell me their dream, and I go, man, you ain't got a chance of that. but then I kind of got to like do twists, you know, and then I'm strong, you know, then I'm ready to do it. I mean, I do to an extent, but I want to know how it interoperates with the world, with the people and with the situations that you're going to face. That's the point that I think I'm trying to make is don't be comfortable because what you think is awesome right now, there could be so much more, you know, if you can envision and pay attention to what's going on in the rest of the world and break out of that paradigm that you're in and see that you can fly, you can fly around the world, you can do it. I've talked to five people in the last six months that I thought we're going to tell me about their dream and that I was going to be like in shock. Or other people who only lived in bad places, just like people who grew up in a real negative household, when they go out into the world, just their beginning view of the world is negative. And I'll tell you, I've, I've thought about this and I've been waiting for people to start saying like, oh, you put another picture of the sweat and of a squat rack really, but I don't know if they understand. And you know, another thing I've been saying lately, when I'm out working with people is I used to not really understand why people are drawn to this complexity Like, hey, wait, that's, you know, that's a cool way of doing it or you know, whatever the group is. What did the leaders know about the people who started black markets and started growing these gardens and selling what they could to get people started to try and survive through exercising their personal freedoms.

Most common words

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jocco podcast number 22 with echo Charles and me, Jocco Willick.
[00:00:08] Good evening, I go.
[00:00:11] Good evening.
[00:00:14] And I would say that it is a good evening.
[00:00:18] Because we are free.
[00:00:24] We are free.
[00:00:29] And I talk about that all the time.
[00:00:34] You hear me say discipline equals freedom.
[00:00:36] You hear me say free your mind.
[00:00:40] And here in America and in places around the world that have the ability to be listening to
[00:00:46] this podcast.
[00:00:49] A lot of times we take freedom for granted.
[00:00:58] And we all want freedom.
[00:01:00] We want the ability to move around and go where we want to go.
[00:01:07] But more importantly, we want freedom of the mind and freedom of the heart.
[00:01:16] And those things sound abstract.
[00:01:21] They seem like things that cannot be taken away.
[00:01:24] We don't even know what that means to have them taken away.
[00:01:29] Because of the way we live and how we were raised.
[00:01:35] To think what you want to think and believe what you want to believe.
[00:01:43] To be who you want to be.
[00:01:48] To have and to exercise the freedom to question.
[00:01:55] To question everything.
[00:02:01] That's freedom.
[00:02:07] And there are parts of the world where none of those freedoms exist.
[00:02:18] In worse, there's parts of the world where any chance of free thought is exterminated
[00:02:27] from childhood.
[00:02:32] Will, broken, dreams extinguished.
[00:02:44] That's controlled.
[00:02:53] So let's go to a place where that is the reality.
[00:03:03] And again, I'm going to point this out.
[00:03:05] This is not a dystopian movie or some post-apocalyptic novel.
[00:03:12] This is real.
[00:03:13] Real life with real people.
[00:03:27] Red is reserved for the lettering of the propaganda signs.
[00:03:34] The Korean language uses a unique alphabet made up of circles and lines.
[00:03:41] The red letters leap out of the grey landscape with urgency.
[00:03:47] They march across the fields, preside over the granite cliffs of the mountains, punctuate
[00:03:53] the main roads like my-litch markers, and dance on top of railroad stations and other public
[00:03:59] buildings.
[00:04:05] They say things like this.
[00:04:08] We have nothing to envy in the world.
[00:04:14] If the party decides we do.
[00:04:21] Long live Kim Il-sung.
[00:04:26] Let's live our own way.
[00:04:31] We will do as the party tells us.
[00:04:40] We will do as the party tells us.
[00:04:47] And like I said, this isn't a book.
[00:04:52] This is real.
[00:04:54] This is North Korea.
[00:04:56] This is a story of horror and of slavery and of brainwashing.
[00:05:05] And it's also a story of choices.
[00:05:11] Story of freedom.
[00:05:13] And it's also a story of the strength of the human will.
[00:05:20] This is a book that is called Nothing to envy.
[00:05:25] It's a story of the ordinary lives in North Korea.
[00:05:29] It's by Barbara Demick or Demick.
[00:05:44] It traces a bunch of people that defected who Barbara Demick was able to interview once
[00:05:51] they left North Korea.
[00:05:54] But it traces their lives and what their lives were like.
[00:06:00] And one of the characters, and again, I want to call the character one of the people.
[00:06:04] That's in the book.
[00:06:05] His name, Miran.
[00:06:07] And going to the book here, Miran's father was a POW.
[00:06:11] And it talks about that Miran's father never talked about being a POW.
[00:06:16] But there is another fellow POW who wrote a memoir.
[00:06:21] And in his memoir, and I'm going to the book here, he said that men were housed in
[00:06:26] squalid camps where they were not permitted to bathe or brush their teeth.
[00:06:32] Their hair became infested with ice untreated wounds swarmed with maggots.
[00:06:37] They were fed one meal of rice and salt water a day.
[00:06:44] Under the name, construction unit of the interior department, new POW camps had been built
[00:06:50] near the mines.
[00:06:53] Colmining in North Korea was not only dirty but exceedingly dangerous, since the mines frequently
[00:06:59] collapsed or caught fire.
[00:07:03] And that same former POW wrote, the life of a POW was worth less than a fly.
[00:07:11] Every day we walked into the mines I shuddered with fear.
[00:07:17] Like a cow walking to the slaughterhouse, I never knew if I would emerge alive.
[00:07:29] So if you don't know anything about anything, the leader in North Korea at this time,
[00:07:37] the most opposed war is Kim Il Sung.
[00:07:47] Is in charge of North Korea.
[00:07:52] But at this time, I'm going to the book.
[00:07:54] After the war, Kim Il Sung made his first order of business to weed out foe from friend.
[00:08:01] He started at the top with potential rivals for leadership.
[00:08:04] He disposed of many of his comrades and arms who had led the struggle from Manchuria
[00:08:10] to unseat the Japanese occupiers.
[00:08:13] He ordered the arrest of the founding members of the Communist Party in South Korea.
[00:08:18] They had been invaluable during the war, now that they'd served their purpose, they could
[00:08:23] be discarded.
[00:08:25] Throughout the 1950s, many more were purged and what was increasingly coming to resemble
[00:08:30] an ancient Chinese empire with Kim Il Sung, the unchallenged master of the realm.
[00:08:38] Kim Il Sung then turned his attention to ordinary people.
[00:08:45] In 1958, he ordered up an elaborate project to classify all North Koreans by their political
[00:08:51] reliability and viciously seeking to reorganize an entire human population.
[00:08:58] The North Koreans were methodical to a fault.
[00:09:02] Each person was put through eight background checks.
[00:09:06] Your song, Bun, as the rating was called, took into account the backgrounds of your parents,
[00:09:12] grandparents, and even second cousins.
[00:09:16] The loyalty surveys were carried out in various phases with inspiring names.
[00:09:22] Intensive guidance by the Central Party was the first announced phase.
[00:09:27] The classifications became more refined in subsequent phases, such as the understanding
[00:09:34] people project between 1972 and 1974.
[00:09:41] Those things to me, they all sound like just bad movie plots.
[00:09:50] The intensive guidance by the Central Party, that's something you don't want to mess with.
[00:10:03] Here's how they would be.
[00:10:05] Here's what life was like.
[00:10:07] A little bit of life.
[00:10:08] People would be closely watched by their neighbors.
[00:10:12] North Koreans are organized into what are called in Minbong.
[00:10:16] Literally, people's groups.
[00:10:18] The cooperatives of 20 or so families whose job it is to keep tabs on one another and
[00:10:24] run the neighborhood.
[00:10:25] The Inminbong have an elected leader, usually a middle-aged woman who reports anything suspicious
[00:10:32] to higher ranking authorities.
[00:10:34] It was almost impossible for a North Korean of low rank to improve his status.
[00:10:44] Now we talked about this character or sorry, the person, Miran, that's being talked about.
[00:10:51] And she talks about her father.
[00:10:56] Here's what she says about her father.
[00:10:58] Miran often found her father's Pacifici maddening.
[00:11:03] Only later did she understand this was a survival mechanism.
[00:11:08] It was as though he had hammered down his own personality to avoid drawing undue attention
[00:11:13] to himself.
[00:11:16] Among the thousands of former South Korean soldiers who tried to assimilate into North Korean
[00:11:21] society, many slipped up.
[00:11:23] Miran's mother later told her that four of her father's buddies in the mines, fellow
[00:11:30] South Koreans, had been executed for minor infractions.
[00:11:34] Their bodies dumped in mass graves.
[00:11:38] Being a member of the hostile class meant you would never get the benefit of a doubt.
[00:11:43] While sarcastic inflection when referring to Kim Il-sung or an astrologer remark about South
[00:11:48] Korea could get you in serious trouble, it was especially taboo to talk about the Korean war
[00:11:55] and who started it.
[00:11:57] In the official histories, and there was nothing but official history in North Korea, it was
[00:12:04] the South Korean army that invaded, acting on orders from the Americans.
[00:12:10] Not the North Korean army storming across the 38th parallel.
[00:12:15] Anybody who remembered what really happened on June 25th, 1950 knew it was wise to keep
[00:12:21] one's mouth shut.
[00:12:25] So even history.
[00:12:30] Even facts that you learned that the country learned were just lies.
[00:12:38] New Rand didn't have any particular artistic or athletic talent, but like her older sisters
[00:12:44] did, but she was a good student and she was beautiful.
[00:12:48] When she was 15 years old, her school was visited by a team of serious looking men and
[00:12:52] women in somber suits.
[00:12:55] These were aqua members of the fifth division of the Central Workers' Party, recruiter
[00:13:01] recruiters who scoured the country looking for young women to serve on the personal staff
[00:13:07] of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.
[00:13:11] If selected, the girls would be sent off to military-style training camp before being
[00:13:17] assigned to one of the leadership's many residences around the country.
[00:13:23] North Korean girls her age didn't know what a conq vine was.
[00:13:28] Only that whatever you might do to serve the leadership would be a tremendous honor.
[00:13:35] If the smartest and prettiest girls would be selected, I think we can all imagine what
[00:13:44] that looks like twisted men in seats of power, praying on the entire nations for young girls
[00:14:02] disturbing.
[00:14:04] Now another character in the book, and I keep using that term character, you hear that?
[00:14:11] Even me, I'm sitting here trying to tell everyone, hey, remember these are people, but
[00:14:14] I'm calling them characters.
[00:14:15] These aren't characters in the book, these are people.
[00:14:20] And this person was named Mrs. Song and Mrs. Song, what's interesting about Mrs. Song is,
[00:14:28] she's a true believer.
[00:14:30] She's a true believer, and you're going to hear some of this, but these folks that are
[00:14:34] raised in North Korea, they just believe that they believe the propaganda, they believe
[00:14:40] that North Korea's the best place on earth and that everyone else is suffering and that
[00:14:46] because of their great leader, their lives are better than anyone else in the world.
[00:14:51] And she truly believes that.
[00:14:54] And here's kind of what her attitude.
[00:14:55] Here's what her life was like and her attitude was like.
[00:14:58] Mrs. Song usually went to work with one baby strap to her back and one or two daughters
[00:15:03] dragging along behind her.
[00:15:05] Her children basically grew up at the daycare center.
[00:15:08] She was supposed to work eight hours with a lunch break and a nap in the middle of her shift.
[00:15:13] After work, she had to spend several more hours in ideological training in the factories
[00:15:18] auditorium.
[00:15:20] One day, the lecture might be about the struggle against US imperialism.
[00:15:24] On other time, it might be about Kim Il-Sung's exploits, actual or exaggerating, fighting
[00:15:30] the Japanese during World War II.
[00:15:33] She had to write essays on the latest pronouncements of the Workers' Party.
[00:15:37] By the time she got home, it would be 1030 p.m.
[00:15:41] She would do her housework and cooking, then get up before dawn to prepare herself and
[00:15:45] her family for the day ahead before leaving home around 7 a.m.
[00:15:49] She seldom slept more than five hours.
[00:15:52] Some days were harder than others.
[00:15:54] On Wednesday mornings, she had to report to work early for mandatory meetings of the
[00:15:58] socialist women's federation.
[00:16:01] Friday night, she stayed especially late for self-criticism.
[00:16:05] In these sessions, members of her work unit, the department to which she was assigned,
[00:16:10] would stand up and reveal to the group anything they had done wrong.
[00:16:14] Mrs. Song would usually say, in all sincerity, sincerity, that she feared she wasn't working
[00:16:21] hard enough.
[00:16:24] Mrs. Song believed what she said.
[00:16:27] All those years of sleep deprivation, all those lectures and self-criticisms, the very
[00:16:32] same tools used in brainwashing or interrogations had wiped out any possibility of resistance.
[00:16:40] She had been molded into Kim Il-Sung's improved human beings.
[00:16:49] While Song's goal wasn't merely to build a new country, he wanted to build better people
[00:16:56] to reshape human nature.
[00:17:02] Once in power, Kim Il-Sung retooled the ideas developed during his time as an anti-Japanese
[00:17:09] guerrilla fighter, as instruments into instruments of social control.
[00:17:17] He instructed North Koreans that their power as human beings came from subsuming their
[00:17:23] individual will to that of the collective.
[00:17:29] The collective couldn't go off willy, nearly doing whatever the people chose through
[00:17:32] some democratic process.
[00:17:35] The people had to follow an absolute supreme leader without question.
[00:17:42] That leader of course was Kim Il-Sung himself.
[00:17:52] So they're being told through multiple channels, through every instrument available newspapers,
[00:18:02] radio, television, all controlled by the state.
[00:18:06] And through all these, they're being told that they have to submit their individual will
[00:18:13] and perform at the will of the collective.
[00:18:21] And you know, you will hear me refer to, for me, the most important piece of humanity
[00:18:33] is the individual, an individual freedom.
[00:18:39] And obviously this attitude is the opposite of individual freedom.
[00:18:47] And also you got to remember from a leadership perspective, the way you maximize a team's
[00:18:54] effort isn't through a supreme authority trying to control everything.
[00:18:59] It doesn't work.
[00:19:01] That's why we have a little something called decentralized command.
[00:19:05] I want my frontline leaders to think.
[00:19:07] I want my frontline troops to understand what they're trying to make happen and use their
[00:19:12] free will to make it happen, use their own brain to make it happen.
[00:19:16] So if you're in a leadership position and you realize that you're trying to control everything
[00:19:20] yourself, you're not getting the most effective performance from your team.
[00:19:27] And we're going to see this on a grand scale.
[00:19:30] And you know, we do see it on the grand scale when governments try to control humans.
[00:19:37] It doesn't work.
[00:19:42] Now it might seem crazy that you would buy into this propaganda.
[00:19:48] And here's a paragraph in the statement about that, back to the book.
[00:19:54] We laugh at the excesses of propaganda and the gollability of the people.
[00:20:00] So consider that their indoctrination began in their infancy.
[00:20:05] During 14 hour days spent in factory daycare centers.
[00:20:10] That for the subsequent 50 years every song, film, newspaper article and billboard was
[00:20:16] helped was designed to deify Kim Il Sung.
[00:20:22] That the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might might cast doubt
[00:20:27] on Kim Il Sung's divinity.
[00:20:31] Who could possibly resist?
[00:20:33] Are you not just being told that this guy is the leader you've been told he's God.
[00:20:43] In 1972 on the occasion of his 60th birthday, a traditional milestone in Korean culture,
[00:20:49] the workers party began distributing lapel pins of Kim Il Sung.
[00:20:54] More along the entire population was required to wear them on the left breast over the
[00:20:59] heart.
[00:21:01] In Mrs. Sung's home, as in every other, a framed portrait of Kim Il Sung hung on an otherwise
[00:21:08] bare wall.
[00:21:11] People were not permitted to put anything else on that wall, not even pictures of their blood
[00:21:16] relatives.
[00:21:20] The children were never to forget that they owed everything to the national leadership.
[00:21:26] North Korean children, they didn't celebrate their own birthdays, but those of Kim Il Sung
[00:21:31] on April 15th and Kim Jong Il on February 16th.
[00:21:38] When the time came, the children lined up in front of the portraits to express their gratitude.
[00:21:44] In Unison, they would bend from the waist, bowing deeply with feeling.
[00:21:50] Thank you dear father Kim Il Sung, the children repeated as their mother looked on with satisfaction.
[00:22:01] Televisions and radios in North Korea are preset, so they can receive only official government
[00:22:07] channels.
[00:22:09] Still, the programming was relatively entertaining.
[00:22:13] Besides the usual speeches of Kim Il Sung, on a typical weeknight, you might have sports,
[00:22:18] concerts, television dramas, and movies produced by Kim Il, Kim Jong Il's film studio.
[00:22:25] On weekends, you might get a Russian movie as a special treat.
[00:22:30] The newspapers would occasionally run feature stories about heroic children who ratted
[00:22:36] out their parents.
[00:22:38] To be denounced by a neighbor for bowed mathing, the regime was nothing extraordinary.
[00:22:45] I'm starting to get a little feeling for what we've got going on here.
[00:22:53] Now what happens when the government tries to control everything and you take the freedom
[00:22:59] of the people away, communism, obviously, and things are not as productive as
[00:23:08] they could be.
[00:23:10] That's what happens when there's no individual drive to succeed because if you're a farmer,
[00:23:17] once you plant your food, it's just going to get taken away by the government and redistributed.
[00:23:23] So what's your drive to grow the right amount of food or more food?
[00:23:27] There is none, because it's all just going to be taken away anyways.
[00:23:30] It's like they're all they avoid punishment, so they do the minimum, you know, rather
[00:23:36] than the opposite, when they strive for the maximum, that means they're focused on what
[00:23:41] can be, you know, rather than avoiding what can be.
[00:23:44] Yes.
[00:23:45] And so now this is again, I'm breezing through chunks of this book to get to some of the highlights.
[00:23:54] So now we're into the 80s and we're starting to run out of food.
[00:24:07] Kim Jong-il, who by the 1980s was increasingly assuming his father's duties offered
[00:24:14] on the spot guidance to address the country's woes, father and son were experts in absolutely
[00:24:20] everything, be it geology or farming.
[00:24:24] Kim Jong-il's onsite instructions and his warm benevolence are bringing about a great
[00:24:30] advance in goat breeding and output of dairy products.
[00:24:35] The Korean Central News Agency, Opine, after Kim Jong-il visited a goat farm near Chong
[00:24:41] Ginn.
[00:24:42] So that's the kind of headlines in the news.
[00:24:48] One day he would decree that the country sits switch from rice to potatoes for its staple
[00:24:52] food, the next he would decide that raising ostriches was the cure for North Korea's food
[00:24:57] surdaged shortage.
[00:24:59] The country lurched from one hair-brained scheme to another.
[00:25:06] So the fact of the matter is that even if this guy was a brilliant oasis brilliant farmer,
[00:25:11] he's not taking into account the various terrain and the different climates that are in
[00:25:15] the area and who can get what done.
[00:25:18] Whereas if you let the free market decide what can be grown and let individuals decide
[00:25:24] and let freedom guide people, things work, things find a way.
[00:25:35] The control does not work and you'll see that here back to the book.
[00:25:45] Soon the country was sucked into a vicious death spiral.
[00:25:49] Without cheap fuel oil and raw material, it couldn't keep the factories running, which meant
[00:25:55] it had nothing to export.
[00:25:57] With no exports, there was no hard currency and without hard currency, fuel imports fell
[00:26:03] even further.
[00:26:06] And the electricity stopped.
[00:26:09] The coal mines couldn't operate without electricity because they required electric pumps
[00:26:13] to siphon water.
[00:26:15] The shortage of coal worsened the electricity shortage.
[00:26:20] The electricity shortage further lowered agricultural output.
[00:26:24] Even the collective farms could not operate properly without electricity.
[00:26:29] It had never been easy to e-gout enough harvest from North Korea's hard-scravel terrain
[00:26:34] for a population of 23 million and the agricultural techniques developed to boost the output
[00:26:39] relied on electrically powered artificial irrigation systems and on chemical fertilizers
[00:26:45] and pesticides produced it factories that were now closed for lack of fuel and raw materials.
[00:26:53] North Korea started running out of food and as people went hungry, they didn't have the energy
[00:26:58] to work and so output plunged further.
[00:27:02] The economy was in a free fall.
[00:27:06] North Korea was the last play on earth where virtually all staples are grown on collective
[00:27:11] farms.
[00:27:13] The state confiscates the entire harvest and then gives a portion back to the farmer.
[00:27:18] But as harvest whithered in the early 1990s, the farmers themselves were going hungry
[00:27:24] and began stashing some of the harvest away.
[00:27:27] There were stories from the countryside of roofs that collapsed under the weight of grain
[00:27:32] hidden away in the eaves.
[00:27:34] The farmers also neglected the collective fields for their private kitchen gardens next
[00:27:40] to their houses or small steep plots that carved out of the side of uncultivated mountain
[00:27:46] slopes.
[00:27:48] Driving through the countryside, you could see clearly the contrast between private gardens
[00:27:53] bursting with vegetables, bean poles, soaring skyward, vines drooping with pumpkins next
[00:27:59] to the collective fields with their stunted haphazard rows of corn that had been planted
[00:28:06] by so-called volunteers doing their patriotic duty.
[00:28:13] Case in point.
[00:28:18] Koreans like to think to themselves as tough and so they are.
[00:28:23] The propaganda machine launched a new campaign, playing up Korean pride by recalling
[00:28:28] a fable from 1938 to 1939 in which Kim Il Sung commanded a small band of anti-Japanese guerrillas
[00:28:36] fighting against thousands of enemies in 20 degrees below zero, braving through a heavy snowfall
[00:28:42] and starvation, the red flag fluttering in front of the rank.
[00:28:47] The arduous march, as they called it, would later become a metaphor for the famine.
[00:28:58] And here's one of the statements that they would make no force on earth can bar the
[00:29:03] Korean people from making an onward march for victory and the revolutionary spirit of the
[00:29:09] arduous march.
[00:29:13] And the D.P.R.K. will always remain a powerful nation.
[00:29:20] Democratic people's Republic of Korea.
[00:29:25] Also people are starving.
[00:29:32] And the government is saying, yeah, we're going to drive on.
[00:29:35] It's a tough road, but we're going to make it.
[00:29:39] And during hunger became part of one's patriotic duty.
[00:29:43] Billboards went up in Pyongyang, touting the new slogan, let's eat two meals a day.
[00:29:51] North Korean television ran a documentary about a man who's stomach burst.
[00:29:55] It was claimed from eating too much rice.
[00:29:59] In any case, the food shortage was temporary.
[00:30:03] Agricultural officials, quoted in the newspapers, reported that bumper crops of rice
[00:30:08] were expected in the next harvest.
[00:30:11] When the foreign press reported on food shortages in the north in 1992, the North Korean
[00:30:18] news service was indignant.
[00:30:22] And here's what the North Korean news service had to say.
[00:30:25] The state supplies the people with food at a cheap price so that the people do not know
[00:30:31] how much rice costs.
[00:30:33] This is the reality of the northern half of Korea.
[00:30:37] All people live a happy life without any worries about food in our land.
[00:30:44] People are starving and the government is lying.
[00:30:49] If North Koreans pause to contemplate the obvious inconsistencies and lies in what they
[00:30:54] were told, they would find themselves in a dangerous place.
[00:30:58] They didn't have a choice.
[00:31:01] They couldn't flee their country, depose of their leadership, speak out or protest.
[00:31:07] In order to fit in, the average citizen had to discipline himself not to think too much.
[00:31:16] Then there was the natural human survival instinct to be optimistic.
[00:31:23] Like German Jews in the early 1930s who told themselves it couldn't get any worse, the
[00:31:27] North Koreans deceive themselves.
[00:31:29] They thought it was temporary.
[00:31:32] Things would get better.
[00:31:33] The hungry stomach shouldn't believe a lie, but somehow it did.
[00:31:40] Along with the new propaganda campaign, the regime stepped up at extensive network of
[00:31:45] domestic surveillance.
[00:31:47] The more there was to complain about the more important it was to ensure that nobody did.
[00:32:02] Now, at this point further in the book, Miran has gone off the college to become a teacher.
[00:32:10] And she shows up there.
[00:32:14] And this is what she deals with.
[00:32:16] The food in the cafeteria was even worse.
[00:32:20] North Korea was starting.
[00:32:21] It's, let's eat two meals a day campaign.
[00:32:25] But the school took a step further and offered only one meal.
[00:32:29] The thin soup made of salt, water, and dried turn-up leaves.
[00:32:34] The cafeteria would sometimes add a spoon of rice and corn that had been cooked for hours
[00:32:40] to pump up the grains.
[00:32:44] The girls and college began getting sick.
[00:32:48] One of Miran's roommates was so malnourished that the skin was flaking off of her face.
[00:32:55] She dropped out of school and others followed.
[00:33:07] Now during the, during the middle of this, Kim Il-sung dies.
[00:33:21] And it's crazy to hear how the people reacted.
[00:33:28] And so I'm going to start off with this announcement that was made.
[00:33:33] And this is long, a little bit of a long announcement.
[00:33:38] But just to get the tone of it is worth it.
[00:33:42] Here we go.
[00:33:43] The central committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, the central military commission
[00:33:47] of the party, the National Defense Commission, the Central People's Committee, and the
[00:33:51] administration council of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, report to the entire
[00:33:56] people of the country with deepest grief that the great leader, Comrade Kim Il-sung, General
[00:34:03] Secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea and President of the Democratic
[00:34:11] People's Republic of Korea passed away from a sudden attack of Il-nus at 2am.
[00:34:18] Our respected fatherly leader, who has devoted his whole life to the popular masses, calls
[00:34:26] of independence and engaged himself entirely as an energetic activities for the prosperity
[00:34:33] of the motherland and the happiness of the people, for the reunification of the country and
[00:34:39] independence of the world till the last moments of his life departed from us to our greatest
[00:34:48] sorrow.
[00:34:55] Very disturbing.
[00:34:58] And what's crazy is you hear all these bureaucratic names.
[00:35:01] That's what's crazy about it.
[00:35:02] So these government organizations picking away at the people.
[00:35:13] And here's some of the reactions the morning that went through and people like Mrs.
[00:35:21] Song who is a true believer.
[00:35:23] This is how they felt.
[00:35:25] The old women wailed.
[00:35:30] How could you leave us so suddenly the men screamed?
[00:35:33] Those waiting in line would jump up and down, pound their heads, collapse into theatrical
[00:35:38] spoons, rip their clothes and pound their fists at the air in futile rage.
[00:35:45] The men wept copiously as the women.
[00:35:49] The hystronics of the grief took on a competitive quality.
[00:35:54] Who could weep the loudest?
[00:35:55] Who was most distraught?
[00:35:58] The mourners were eggdone by the TV news which broadcast hours and hours of people wailing
[00:36:05] grown men with tears rolling down their cheeks banging their heads on trees, sailors banging
[00:36:10] their heads against the mass of their ships, pilots weeping in the cockpit and so on.
[00:36:16] These scenes were interspersed with footage of lightning and pouring rain.
[00:36:22] It looked like Armageddon.
[00:36:26] Our country is enveloped in the deepest sorrow in the 5,000 year history of the Korean nation
[00:36:33] in tone and an answer on television.
[00:36:40] And they had these little myths that they threw out there like this one.
[00:36:43] Here's an official release.
[00:36:45] When the great martial died, thousands of cranes descended from heaven to fetch him.
[00:36:52] The birds couldn't take him because they saw that North Koreans cried and screamed and
[00:36:57] pummeled their chests, pulled their hair and pounded the ground.
[00:37:04] They couldn't let him go.
[00:37:12] Nonetheless, despite the heroic efforts of the grand martial, the famine continued.
[00:37:27] Here we go to another person in the book whose name is Dr. Kim, a woman doctor in North
[00:37:36] Korea.
[00:37:37] In the pediatric world, Dr. Kim noticed that her patients were exhibiting peculiar symptoms.
[00:37:45] The children she treated born in the late 1980s and early 1990s were surprisingly smaller,
[00:37:52] even smaller than she'd been as the tiniest kid in her elementary school class.
[00:37:57] Now their upper arms were so skinny she couldn't circle them with her thumb and forefingers.
[00:38:04] Their muscle tone was weak.
[00:38:06] It was a syndrome known as a wasting where the starved body eats away at its own muscle
[00:38:12] tissue.
[00:38:14] Children came in for constipation that was so acute they were dulled over and pain, screaming.
[00:38:21] The problem was with the food.
[00:38:24] How's lives had started to pick weeds and wild grasses to add to their soup to create
[00:38:29] an illusion of vegetables?
[00:38:32] One was increasingly the staple again instead of rice, but people were adding leaves, husks,
[00:38:38] stems, and cobs to make it go further.
[00:38:42] That was okay for adults, but it couldn't be digested by the tendered stomachs of children.
[00:38:51] The babies were in the worst shapes.
[00:38:54] Their mothers themselves, undernourished, didn't produce enough breast milk for them.
[00:39:00] The beef formula was non-existent and milk was rare.
[00:39:06] In the past, mothers who couldn't produce enough breast milk would feed their babies a water
[00:39:10] down, congee made from cooked rice, but now most of them couldn't afford rice either.
[00:39:23] Here's Dr. Kim talking about the toddlers.
[00:39:28] They would look at me with accusing eyes.
[00:39:31] Even four-year-olds knew they were dying, and that I wasn't doing anything to help them.
[00:39:38] Dr. Kim told me years later, all I was capable of doing was to cry with their mothers
[00:39:43] and their bodies afterwards.
[00:39:48] Dr. Kim hadn't been a doctor long enough to have erected the protective wall that would
[00:39:53] insulate her from the suffering around her.
[00:39:57] The children's pain was her pain.
[00:40:01] Years later, when I asked her if she remembered any of the children who had died on her
[00:40:07] watch, she answered sharply, I remember all of them.
[00:40:18] Now me ran, has graduated from college and she's an actual school teacher.
[00:40:25] And actually, requirement of school teachers was that they need to know how to play the
[00:40:30] accordion, which is like a transportable instrument.
[00:40:33] So therefore, it's considered to be a good thing because you could carry it on a march.
[00:40:38] So all school teachers had to play the accordion of these.
[00:40:41] They sang songs like this, and they would sing it with the class.
[00:40:48] Our father, we have nothing to envy in the world.
[00:40:53] Our house is within the embrace of the workers' party.
[00:40:57] We are all brothers and sisters.
[00:41:00] Even if a sea of fire comes towards us, sweet children do not need to be afraid.
[00:41:06] Our father is here.
[00:41:09] We have nothing to envy in this world.
[00:41:14] Another one of the songs that they'd sang, where have we gone?
[00:41:18] We've gone to the forest.
[00:41:20] Where are we going? We're going over the hills.
[00:41:23] What are we going to do?
[00:41:25] We are going to kill Japanese soldiers.
[00:41:31] And another classic that was taught in the music class is called Shoot the Yankee Bastards.
[00:41:38] Our enemies are the American bastards who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland,
[00:41:44] with guns that I make with my own hands, I will shoot them, bang, bang, bang, that idea of
[00:41:51] nothing to envy in the world.
[00:41:55] And again, as you read through this book, you hear the people saying that they believed
[00:42:00] wholeheartedly that they had nothing to envy in the world, that this dismal life of starvation
[00:42:07] or near starvation was as good as it gets.
[00:42:15] And here's what the hunger would look like in school according to Miran.
[00:42:19] Each child was supposed to bring from home a bundle of firewood for the furnace in the
[00:42:23] school basement, but many had trouble carrying it.
[00:42:28] Their big heads, rolled on top of Scrawney Necks.
[00:42:32] Their delicate rib cages protruded over their waist so small that she could encircle them
[00:42:36] with her hands.
[00:42:39] Some of them were starting to swell in the stomach.
[00:42:41] It was all becoming clear to her, Miran remembered seeing a photograph of a famine victim
[00:42:46] in Somalia with a protruding stomach.
[00:42:48] Although she didn't know the medical terminology, she remembered from her teachers'
[00:42:53] college course on nutrition that was caused by severe protein deficiency.
[00:42:59] Miran also noticed that the children's black hair was getting lighter, more copper-toned.
[00:43:06] It was always the same progression.
[00:43:09] First the family wouldn't be able to send the quota of firewood.
[00:43:13] Then the lunch bag would disappear.
[00:43:16] Then the childhood stopped participating in class and would sleep through recess.
[00:43:21] Then without explanation, the childhood stopped coming to school.
[00:43:26] Over three years in Roman and the kindergarten dropped from 50 students to 15.
[00:43:34] What happened to all those children?
[00:43:38] Miran didn't pry too deeply for fear, the answer she didn't want to hear.
[00:43:44] A decade later, when Miran was a mother herself, trying to lose her post-pagnancy weight
[00:43:54] through aerobics, this period of her life waited like a stone on her conscience.
[00:44:01] She often felt sick over what she did and didn't do to help the young students.
[00:44:07] How could she have eaten so well herself when they were starving?
[00:44:12] Is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand a statistic?
[00:44:17] So it was for Miran.
[00:44:20] What she didn't realize is that in her, there's that her indifference was an acquired
[00:44:25] survival skill.
[00:44:27] In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food.
[00:44:35] To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring.
[00:44:40] In time, Miran would learn how to walk around a dead body on the street without paying
[00:44:44] much attention.
[00:44:46] She could pass a five-year-old on the verge of death without feeling obliged to help.
[00:44:53] If she wasn't going to share food with her favorite pupil, she certainly wasn't going
[00:44:57] to help a perfect stranger.
[00:45:01] And here's some...
[00:45:02] I guess I would say thoughts on a famine or realities of a famine.
[00:45:12] In a famine, people don't necessarily starve to death.
[00:45:17] Often some other ailment gets them first.
[00:45:21] Chronic malnutrition impairs the body's ability to battle infection and the hungry become
[00:45:26] increasingly susceptible to tuberculosis and typhoid.
[00:45:32] The starved body is too weak to metabolize antibiotics, even if they're available.
[00:45:38] And normally curable illnesses suddenly become fatal.
[00:45:44] Wild fluctuations of body chemistry can trigger strokes and heart attacks.
[00:45:50] People die from eating substitute foods that their bodies can't digest.
[00:45:55] The situation can be a sneaky killer that disguises itself under bland statistics of increased
[00:46:01] child mortality or decreased life expectancy.
[00:46:06] It leaves behind only circumstantial evidence of excess morality, excess mortality, statistics
[00:46:15] that show a higher than normal death during a certain period.
[00:46:20] Yet another gratuitous cruelty.
[00:46:24] The killer, famine, targets the most innocent.
[00:46:28] The people who'd never steal food lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend.
[00:46:35] It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after merging from Auschwitz.
[00:46:42] When he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see another one again,
[00:46:48] one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed.
[00:46:54] As Mrs. Song would observe a decade later when she thought back on all the people she knew
[00:46:59] who died during those years, it was the simple and kind-hearted people who did what they
[00:47:06] were told they were the first to die.
[00:47:19] By 1998, an estimated 600,000 to 2 million North Koreans had died as a result of the famine,
[00:47:27] as much as 10% of the population.
[00:47:31] By the end of 1998, the worst of the famine was over, not necessarily because anything
[00:47:37] had improved, but as Mrs. Song later surmised because there were fewer mouths to feed.
[00:47:44] Everybody who was going to die was already dead.
[00:47:50] Now that's how the famine wrapped up, but to go a little bit in depth of what it was
[00:47:57] like once the famine was raging, people became homeless, which was strange because in North
[00:48:05] Korea they never had a problem with homelessness because if you wanted food, you needed to
[00:48:08] live in your home because the government would allegedly bring you food.
[00:48:11] Well once they weren't bringing food anymore, there was no reason to stay at home.
[00:48:14] So now you had people going out trying to survive.
[00:48:19] And this talks a little bit about that, especially for the children.
[00:48:25] It was a dangerous life that children couldn't sleep without worrying that somebody perhaps
[00:48:29] another gang member would steal what little they had.
[00:48:33] There were strange stories going around about adults who prayed on children, not just
[00:48:38] for sex, but for food.
[00:48:41] Hayak was told about people who had drugged children, killed them, and butcher them
[00:48:47] from meat.
[00:48:51] Behind the station near the railroad tracks were vendors who cooked up soup and noodles over
[00:48:57] small burners.
[00:48:59] And it was said that the gray chunks of meat floating in the broth were human flesh.
[00:49:07] The story's gotten more and more horrific.
[00:49:10] Supposedly one father went so insane with hunger that he ate his own baby.
[00:49:17] A market woman was said to have been arrested for selling soup made from human bones.
[00:49:23] For my interviews with the defectors, it does appear that there were cases in which people
[00:49:29] were arrested and executed for cannibalism.
[00:49:36] What did our wonderful leaders do during this?
[00:49:43] What did the leaders know about the people who started black markets and started growing
[00:49:49] these gardens and selling what they could to get people started to try and survive through
[00:49:56] exercising their personal freedoms.
[00:50:02] And here's one of the ways that they're here's their comments about this.
[00:50:06] This is coming from Kim Jong-il as well as any of the world's strong men.
[00:50:13] He understood perfectly the cliche that an absolute-dist regime needs absolute power.
[00:50:20] Everything good in life was to be bequeathed by the government.
[00:50:25] He couldn't tolerate people going off to gather their own food or buying rice with their
[00:50:30] own money.
[00:50:34] Having people to solve the food problem on their own only increases the number of farmers
[00:50:38] markets and pedellers.
[00:50:40] In addition, this creates egoism among the people and the base of the party's class may
[00:50:46] come to collapse.
[00:50:51] So he's trying to stop people from solving the problems themselves which they have the
[00:50:57] capability to do and they don't talk about it too deeply here but they go into the
[00:51:01] massive black market that was started and there was people that were surviving or people that were
[00:51:06] doing that that were figuring out a way to make money.
[00:51:13] And Kim Jong-il retaliated against that free market excessively to try and stop it.
[00:51:20] It was better that people die of starvation than they have the freedom to try and let their
[00:51:29] get their family to survive.
[00:51:32] And here's an example of what they did with one man that was trying to get money so his
[00:51:41] family could survive back to the book.
[00:51:44] The man was accused of climbing electric poles and cutting copper wire to sell.
[00:51:50] The theft caused extensive damage to the nation's property and was done with the intention
[00:51:54] to damage our social system. It was an act of treason that aided the enemies of the socialist
[00:52:00] state. The prosecutor read his voice bellowing through the scratchy speakers.
[00:52:07] Then a man acting as a sort of lawyer for the accused spoke, although he offered no defense.
[00:52:13] I have determined that what the prosecutor says is true.
[00:52:17] The accused is the hereby sentence to death and the sentence will be carried out immediately
[00:52:24] to create a third man. The condemned man was bound to a wooden stake at the eyes,
[00:52:32] the chest, and the legs. The firing squad would aim to sever the ropes in order.
[00:52:41] Three bullets in each location, nine in total, top to bottom.
[00:52:48] First, the lifeless head would slump over so that the body would crumple in an orderly heap
[00:52:53] at the foot of the stake.
[00:52:56] Neat and efficient. It would look like the condemned man was bowing in death
[00:53:03] as if to apologize.
[00:53:05] A murmur went through the crowd who thought the execution was excessive punishment for a minor
[00:53:13] theft. The electric lines weren't working anyways. The few meters of copper wiring the man
[00:53:20] had stolen probably had gotten him no more than a few bags of rice.
[00:53:25] A pity. He has a younger sister, somebody said, two sisters said another.
[00:53:30] The man's parents must be dead. Clearly, he knew nobody would influence to intervene on his
[00:53:38] behalf. He probably had a poor class background as well, maybe he was the son of a minor.
[00:53:48] The shots rang out. Head chest legs. The head burst open like a water balloon.
[00:53:58] Blood spurred out over the dirt almost spilling onto the feet of the crowd.
[00:54:04] What do people do to stop this? You have rebellion in the world. You have people turned against
[00:54:29] the government in the world. But in North Korea, that did not happen.
[00:54:39] And here's why the level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take
[00:54:46] root. Any anti-regime activity would have terrible consequences for the protester, his immediate family,
[00:54:56] and all other known relatives. Under a system that sought to stamp out tainted blood for
[00:55:04] three generations, the punishment would extend to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters,
[00:55:11] nieces, nephews, and cousins. A lot of people felt if you had to give one life,
[00:55:19] you would give it to get rid of this terrible regime. But here, you are not the only one getting
[00:55:27] punished. Your whole family would go through hell. So with the fact that they're going to,
[00:55:40] if you protest, they're going to kill everybody. So there was no protest. So now the only thing you can
[00:55:51] possibly think of doing is escaping. And it goes through the various people in the book and
[00:56:04] how they escaped. But I thought what was interesting, in fact, the most interesting sort of mental
[00:56:11] transition to make was from Mrs. Song, and again, she was referred to as the true believer.
[00:56:19] And her daughter had escaped and made it actually to South Korea. And her daughter arranged to have
[00:56:30] Mrs. Song visit China. But she visited China sort of against the rules thinking that she was
[00:56:38] going to go back to North Korea. Because she truly believed that North Korea was the better place.
[00:56:47] She believed that South Korea was the enemy and it was evil. And so she spends, but she does go to
[00:56:55] China. And she spends some time in China. And when she's in China, she's staying in a house
[00:57:02] that her daughter set up for her to stay in and they have TV. And they have microwave oven,
[00:57:08] and they have dishwasher. And they have a rice cooker, which is miraculous to her. I mean,
[00:57:15] she's talking about it. She's saying, at a certain time, the light would come on and it would
[00:57:20] make a trip. And that means the rice was now being cooked. And by the way, at this time, they didn't
[00:57:25] have rice in North Korea. So there's this thing that just automatically cooks up your rice in the morning.
[00:57:32] And it was that combination of things that broke her. Because when she first saw that stuff,
[00:57:37] she said, oh, this is imperialistic. You know, this is capitalism. It's evil. They're trying to buy
[00:57:41] us and slay us with their capitalism. That's what she'd been convinced her whole life.
[00:57:46] And then she has the realization. And I'm going to close with this because after this, it goes
[00:57:57] through the stories of how they escaped and whatnot. But this realization, this moment in time
[00:58:05] when her mind becomes free. And here's how it goes. How much they all, how much had they all missed,
[00:58:17] herself, her daughters locked away in North Korea, working themselves to death for what?
[00:58:26] We will do what the party tells us. We will die for the general. We have nothing to envy.
[00:58:39] She had believed it all and wasted her life or maybe not. Was it really over?
[00:58:56] She was 57 years old, still in good health. This was her wake-up call.
[00:59:05] She was ready to go. So I ask, what is your wake-up call? What is enslaving you?
[00:59:25] What is controlling your thoughts? Is it the television set feeding your mind images of what life should be?
[00:59:45] Is it the internet drawing you in and controlling your time?
[00:59:50] Is it drugs or alcohol numbing your brain and diminishing your desires? Or is it weakness?
[01:00:07] A lack of discipline that prevents you from accomplishing what you want to accomplish.
[01:00:13] And I'm not saying that you have to rebel. I'm not saying that there aren't things in life
[01:00:25] that we just have to do. There are. But what I am saying is ask questions.
[01:00:34] Don't believe everything that you're told and don't follow the path just because it's there.
[01:00:46] Don't get in line just because other people are.
[01:00:50] Get up and wake up and be conscious of what is reaping into your mind.
[01:01:05] What's getting in there? What are you letting in there? What is forcing itself in there?
[01:01:10] And what does it want you to do? You have only one life.
[01:01:28] So don't waste it. Being controlled by someone else.
[01:01:35] That's one of those things. It's everywhere. You can easily be controlled by stuff.
[01:01:44] Like a big one is hate to harp on parents. But your parents. So nobody's perfect.
[01:01:53] So all your imperfections or a lot of your imperfections will be passed onto your kids just because
[01:01:58] you don't know any better. Like that Mrs. Song Lady. She just believed it. She didn't know any better.
[01:02:03] And so you can end up passing these things down like certain traditions or just methodologies of raising kids
[01:02:12] that you might hear otherwise. But that's your thing. You know that you believed it. It crept in your mind because
[01:02:20] your parents, their parents. And you don't ask questions. And you don't ask questions. You're just like, hey, that's how I was raised.
[01:02:26] You passed it on. Meanwhile, you're doing the wrong thing all the time. That's what happens when you don't ask questions.
[01:02:33] That's what happens when you don't ask questions. That's what happens when you believe authority all the time.
[01:02:41] And hey, this might come across as some people are sitting there saying, wait a second.
[01:02:44] Jocca won't you win the military for 20 years? Your damn right, that was. And
[01:02:50] there was a definitely I was a rebellious kid. And when I was in the military, I was always a
[01:02:58] question to everything that we did and why we did it. So and I think that's one of the things that helped me
[01:03:06] get to a leadership position and become a decent leader was the fact that I didn't just take everyone's word for it.
[01:03:12] And say, oh, yeah, that's what we're going to do. Okay. Right. No, you know what, we're actually going to change the strategy.
[01:03:16] We're going to change the tactics. What why was taught is an working right now. We're going to do it differently.
[01:03:23] Yeah, and we did that all the time. Yeah, but this is a broader scale. This is a broader scale.
[01:03:30] This is life. Not just in the book, but life in general. Life in general, like what are you doing?
[01:03:38] Where are you getting your direction from? Yeah. Who is, who's got a hold of your steering wheel?
[01:03:44] Yeah. Yeah. And that's make sure it's you that's got a hold of your steering wheel.
[01:03:52] Yeah, and that's one of those things where it's tough because you got a balance it as well.
[01:03:55] You know, so if you're just rolling around saying, hey, nothing's true until I figure it out.
[01:04:00] It's kind of like, you know, you got to consider the opportunity cost where some people, you got it,
[01:04:04] you know, you got to consider their credibility and then you got to kind of just go with it. And again,
[01:04:09] this is just kind of demonstrating like there's a balance there. Yeah, but just like, are you saying if something,
[01:04:16] if it's not working and someone presents you with some alternative, don't just be like, hey,
[01:04:22] I've done it this way. So, you know, leave me alone type of thing. You know, ask those questions and listen to them.
[01:04:29] You know, Shenzhen, sorry, you might find a little improved method and doing some stuff.
[01:04:34] Yeah, or you might find out that you've been sucked into a trap, you know,
[01:04:37] you don't want to be in. No, you've got to free your mind. You've got to free your mind.
[01:04:43] You've got to get out of that box out of that cage. You know, think of that. You know, I meet people now.
[01:04:52] And it's so bizarre because because I've traveled a lot and I've walked with a lot of different kind of people,
[01:05:03] you know, from all different walks of life. And I meet people sometimes,
[01:05:10] and I think to myself, man, this guy's pretty awesome. He's got all this, you know,
[01:05:14] I don't know what this person's goal is. And sometimes I'll ask like, you know, what do you want to do?
[01:05:19] I'm like, what do you, hey, how many some kid or what you want to do? And some people say,
[01:05:26] you know, well, I want to do, you know, I think they're, I think they're going to come out with this giant
[01:05:32] dream. And they come out with like a, um, little mediocre idea. And I, and I, and I haven't done this yet.
[01:05:46] I've talked to five people in the last six months that I thought we're going to tell me about their dream
[01:05:55] and that I was going to be like in shock. And I was going to be impressed and say, yeah, that's what I'm
[01:06:02] talking about, brother, go get it. And instead, I had to bite my tongue because they were telling
[01:06:11] me their dream, but it wasn't big enough. It wasn't big enough. It wasn't, it was too realistic.
[01:06:18] You know, you know, now you meet some people sometimes and they tell me their dream, and I go,
[01:06:22] man, you ain't got a chance of that. You need to, you need to tone that down. You need to get a grip.
[01:06:27] Right. These people are like, you can achieve anything you want. No, actually, you can't achieve anything
[01:06:32] you want. If you could achieve anything you want, you know, everyone would be sitting on a yacht or doing
[01:06:39] whatever big bad ass thing that they want to do. It depends the way you mean by can't, though. But yeah,
[01:06:45] yeah, it's true. I mean can't. That's what I mean. These, these people that are like you can do
[01:06:53] whatever you want. No, actually, there's limitations to that. All people are not created equal.
[01:06:59] Some people are smarter than other people. Some people are better athletes than other people.
[01:07:04] Hey, reality. Now, what can you hear the question isn't that the question is, what can you do?
[01:07:13] With what you've got? What can you do? And I'd much rather, I love to hear people over shooting.
[01:07:24] But don't trap yourself in a box where you're like, well, I'll be happy if I can do this.
[01:07:32] And there's the other part of this is it's sort of like North Korea. There's people that are
[01:07:37] trapped in a paradigm in their head of the world. They think that the world is this thing that they
[01:07:44] live in. They think that the world is this small, this small place, the people that they know.
[01:07:52] And the atmosphere that they live inside. And it's really, really small.
[01:08:01] And I think to myself, man, you got to get out. And I'll tell you a part of this came when I
[01:08:07] got out of the military. Because my whole life, the only guys I knew were seals. I mean, that's just
[01:08:13] who I knew. And so when I got out and I started meeting other people. And I especially started
[01:08:18] working with big business and started meeting really not just successful in terms of financial
[01:08:26] people. But people that had really done something. And I started realizing that there was a whole
[01:08:32] other level, not a higher level. But there's just another world. Like in the seal teams, oh, well,
[01:08:38] you know, I did, I did my seal opportunity to silk to commander. You know, you do these certain,
[01:08:43] I did task in a commander. You do these things. And that's what you do. And it's awesome.
[01:08:48] And that's a whole world. But there's other worlds. And I'm ever telling one of my
[01:08:54] seal buddies, we were out surfing. And this is after I'd been out for like two years. I had this
[01:08:59] exact conversation with them. I said, hey, man, like we were talking, we're out there surfing for an hour.
[01:09:05] And for 58 minutes, we're talking about the seal teams, the seal teams, the seal teams, the
[01:09:09] seal teams. And then I said, hey, man, the seal teams is awesome. But just so you know,
[01:09:18] there's other things in the world. And it's stuff that I'm saying, my mind was in North Korea.
[01:09:24] My mind was just seal team. And I'll tell you what, I'm glad it was because it made my life very
[01:09:31] simple. And I still, you know, obviously, I love the seal teams more than anything. But there are
[01:09:38] other worlds out there. And you can do other things in the world. And so now when I meet people in different
[01:09:44] environments and different jobs and each little, each little environment that I poke my head into,
[01:09:54] because we work in different industries all over different, you know, manufacturing and gas oil,
[01:10:01] and financial. And then all their own little worlds. And sometimes people are trapped in those
[01:10:07] worlds. And I just want to say, man, free your mind, free your mind and see what else is out there.
[01:10:15] Yeah, kind of like what you and Tim, Tim Kennedy, we're talking about. How you guys, you guys are
[01:10:22] in examples, people who have seen the really, really bad parts of the world and the really,
[01:10:28] really good parts of the world. Because you guys travel all over and you live in San Diego,
[01:10:32] which is, you know, arguably one of the one of the best places to live. So you have that expanded view.
[01:10:36] Meanwhile, some people, they only go on vacation when they travel. So they have, although a
[01:10:42] real positive and really nice view, but it's really narrow. Or other people who only lived in
[01:10:48] bad places, just like people who grew up in a real negative household, when they go out into the
[01:10:52] world, just their beginning view of the world is negative. Like money is just so hard to come by,
[01:10:58] because when they grew up, their parents were complaining about the rent and bills are piling
[01:11:02] off and all this stuff. So that's their attitude when they go out. And then that's how they kind of
[01:11:06] take on the world. Man, I know this and this is kind of a different thing, same subject, same subject.
[01:11:11] But I had a friend in high school and this people, I grew up in quite smiling and why. So
[01:11:18] some people straight up have their whole life haven't been off of quite. And no less the mainland.
[01:11:24] The mainland is this fantasy world place where Disney land is and Hollywood and all this stuff.
[01:11:29] So I had a friend, one of my good friends, he moved to the mainland, but it was just a small
[01:11:35] teeny tiny town, just a small is quite. So I remember one time where what state was the downed
[01:11:40] Colorado, Colorado, he moved to Pueblo, he's called. So I remember we were just having a
[01:11:46] conversation later and I was like, hey, yeah, let's go to Las Vegas, a lot of white people
[01:11:50] go to Las Vegas and I was like, let's go to Las Vegas or whatever, I was like, when do you
[01:11:54] what do you do? You run into car, he was like, I would never drive in Las Vegas. I would never drive
[01:12:00] in Las Vegas because it's too crazy. You know, there's freeways, there's no freeway on
[01:12:04] quite on a wall there, there's a highway, but and he a grown adult. So it is true.
[01:12:13] Can't even drive, you know, so that's like an example, that's how narrow his whole view was
[01:12:17] world, his whole world and that extended to his driving skill. You know, this was just
[01:12:23] the sohactic on a freeway highway Las Vegas, even, I don't even know how crazy that is. I mean,
[01:12:29] that's not a crazy place to drive really, you know, come here to like, I don't know, I would
[01:12:33] buy whatever, yeah, or so to LA, man, hit the 405 North on a Thursday afternoon.
[01:12:42] Yeah, there's no doubt there's so much out there and if you stay comfortable in your world,
[01:12:48] you can get used, you can get comfortable starving in North Korea. Yeah, that's what the scary
[01:12:53] thing is. That's the point that I think I'm trying to make is don't be comfortable because what you
[01:12:59] think is awesome right now, there could be so much more, you know, if you can envision and
[01:13:08] pay attention to what's going on in the rest of the world and break out of that paradigm that you're
[01:13:14] in and see that you can fly, you can fly around the world, you can do it. You know, don't get
[01:13:27] trapped in free your mind. Yeah. All right, let's get to some questions from the interwebs,
[01:13:36] in a web, speaking of interwebs, if you like supplements, good supplements, which I think we both
[01:13:43] recommend, right, as far as supplements go, get on it supplements and then we are sponsored
[01:13:52] as it so happens by on it. But I would say get on it supplements anyway because I was taking them
[01:13:57] even before we're sponsored by on it. On it dot com slash jockel and get 10% off. Get your
[01:14:04] krull oil supplements. Get your alpha brain. Yeah, krull oil and krill oil is anything for your
[01:14:10] joints is critical because like when you even even when I was young, when you live hard, when you
[01:14:15] get after it, working out. So, okay, so if you gain strength, right, which of course we all kind
[01:14:24] of want to do or whatever, you don't have to put a whatever on the end. We just all want to.
[01:14:30] Period. Jeremy, that's not to speak for everyone, but I think it's safe to assume that yes,
[01:14:35] we're getting straight strength. But when you have a higher capacity for strength, a lot of times
[01:14:39] your muscles will just want to fire real hard. So what that can end up with is this weird
[01:14:45] stiffness, you know, so you're going to end like it's like you've got to it's almost like you've got
[01:14:49] a warm up in life. It's almost like that feeling, you know. So it's like yeah, you're strong. You're
[01:14:54] about to carry like the whole blow of groceries in and you can do that. It may be you know,
[01:15:01] you're road agrocy. You've got to come up. I'm just saying every day stuff. And you can you can
[01:15:06] get after it doing that, but you kind of got a warm up, you know, it's kind of like,
[01:15:09] kind of do you have any groceries you have? A lot, man. Get after it in the store out of the store.
[01:15:16] So anyway, so the point being like when you have stuff like for your joints or you don't take
[01:15:22] care of your joints. See, I would have told this totally differently. I like if you want to jack
[01:15:26] big steel, you want to do GG-Jitsu, you want to jump off things, you want to throw stuff around,
[01:15:31] get some creloys, so you stay healthy. Yeah, that groceries. No, but I'm saying no, it's it's
[01:15:37] it seems kind of productive because I've experienced this where I'm like, yeah, but then I kind of
[01:15:43] got to like do twists, you know, and then I'm strong, you know, then I'm ready to do it. Or if I'm like
[01:15:50] kind of stupid, it's kind of cold out and then I go to live, I'm like dang, I can live a lot of
[01:15:53] weights, but why on this first set, I can't even lift anything. You need to grow. I'm just saying
[01:15:58] your joints got to be like good to go. That was all in your inspiration. Right, it's absolutely
[01:16:05] true. I'm telling you, if you take that to a heart, well, you already take real oils. Yeah,
[01:16:11] yeah, anyway, yeah, on it.com slash jockel, get 10% off. You happy you did. And if you want to support
[01:16:19] this podcast before you shop at Amazon, go to jockelpodcast.com or jockelstore.com click on the
[01:16:25] Amazon link on the top and it, it gives us a percentage and you know, you don't paint nothing.
[01:16:31] People have been a few people mentioned that like the link doesn't work or whatever and I found
[01:16:38] out through one of the the true pursuer in the know. Sometimes you have ad blockers on your browser
[01:16:45] and they're activated, which is a good thing, by the way. It's good to, you know, because sometimes
[01:16:50] they can malware can get back anyway. Yeah, because it's an actual code and it works in, in, in the
[01:16:56] same ways. Don't talk too much. Yeah, anyway, so deactivated, you know, you're going to get past it.
[01:17:03] There it is, or if you want to buy some shirts, which jockels hit and or name on it, go to jockelstore.com.
[01:17:10] That's, it's cool way to represent. Anyway, yep, there it is. All right, let's get it first question.
[01:17:17] In any questions, okay, first question. How do you continue to change your jitsu when hurt or injured?
[01:17:24] Be the same thing with whatever kind of injury I got and whatever I'm going to do, I'm going to do
[01:17:29] what I can. You know, now one thing you do have to do is you have to let yourself rest enough that
[01:17:35] you can heal. Because sometimes they get the spring ankle and instead of lasting one month, it lasts
[01:17:40] 18 months, no kidding. If you push, if you just won't let it heal, the thing is not going to heal.
[01:17:46] So you have to let things heal. Now, but you can go through all kinds of positions, you can work
[01:17:55] different transitions, but sometimes you get an injury and if you're a jitsu person, you know what I'm
[01:18:00] talking about. Like, you get a weird injury that you can't do certain movements. Yeah, like,
[01:18:05] guy, I'll have a hurt back, can't get on top. I can't be on top. I can't. So you just practice your
[01:18:09] guard or you have a hurt, you know, groin muscle. So you can't hold any guard. You have to work
[01:18:16] like side control only. Okay, cool. Escape side control or be inside control. So you can definitely
[01:18:23] do those things. You just figure out what movements you can do. You figure out what training
[01:18:27] partners aren't going to go psychopathic on you and just hurt you even worse. So that's important.
[01:18:34] You know, just being in class and you're learning some new technique, you know, I find if
[01:18:38] I cannot roll, when I'm in class, I'll like pay a little bit more attention to what
[01:18:43] the instruction is being given because I know I can't roll. So I know all I'm going to get out of
[01:18:47] this is what I'm going to learn right here from Jeffy Glover or Dean List. And so I will be like
[01:18:53] paying extra special attention. Yeah, that's good. And then I'll tell you, this is something like
[01:19:00] I wear me pads when I roll. And I think that they prevent some injuries from happening. And I just
[01:19:05] made a transition in my life where I used to wear extra large pads. Neaparine knee pads,
[01:19:13] knee-uprene knee pads like knee-uprene. There were some sprays. Yeah, it's not like braces though.
[01:19:17] There's nothing bracing there. Just like a piece of knee-uprene. Yeah, yeah. But I recently
[01:19:22] like two weeks ago, I went, I used to wear extra large and I went to large because they felt
[01:19:27] a little bit stutter and I just got medium and I got some pretty big legs and I got medium and
[01:19:32] they're like really compressing my knees and keeping it all together and they feel really good.
[01:19:38] So maybe just over that legs are sized down to the compression and the same thing like when I
[01:19:43] have heard elbow, I'll put a elbow pad on. So wrap up whatever you can and just keep training.
[01:19:50] And warm up a little bit. Yeah, you know, I didn't use to. I do now. I'll do a
[01:19:58] five-minute round where I'm not trying to kill the person. I'm hoping that the person's not going
[01:20:03] to try to kill me. Although you and I had a little incident the other day we did a little excited
[01:20:07] in that first round. Yes. Just to clarify, when you say knee pads, elbow pads, they're not like
[01:20:14] the kind soccer. No, they're knee-prain. They're just a knee-up like a wetsuit, like a knee-uprene
[01:20:19] knee-prain. A6. Yeah. Clif-kene. Wrestling knee pads. That's what they are. That's what they're called.
[01:20:25] And they're generally made in knee-uprene. Gotcha. Yeah. So a lot of this, the training part of
[01:20:31] everything, that's a big deal. If you choose to train when you're injured, because, man, I can't sit
[01:20:36] here and say train when you're injured and I might even say, don't train, just learn like how you
[01:20:41] say, if you want to show up, because you got the ball. Yeah, you know, you can't just not show up on
[01:20:47] the mats. You know, the mats, even if you're not rolling, it's like, that's a good place to be.
[01:20:51] It's face it for most of us. And you sit in on a class or just do the instruction part of it,
[01:20:59] you know, and do the movements, because you're not going full speed, you know, rolling,
[01:21:02] do the movements that you can and you can pick up a lot, man. In fact, when you, especially,
[01:21:06] you know, how you say, we're learning from Dean, Jeff and mostly instructors here. They're
[01:21:10] really good. Even if you learn one little detail. Even if you know, I know this card pass.
[01:21:15] You know, he added that one little detail to him. Dang, I've been training for all these years
[01:21:19] and I just learned that one. You can always add something. The aim, I think, that's, that's a big deal.
[01:21:25] Show up and be there and you will learn. It's like I was talking to Greg one time,
[01:21:30] long time ago. He was like, we were talking about, hey, so if someone asks you, how long have you
[01:21:34] been training? But let's say you started training 10 years ago. But then you trained for a year.
[01:21:38] You took off a year and then you went back, but you were only training a little bit. You know,
[01:21:42] so how long have you been training? Really? How do you count it and all that anyway? So he was like,
[01:21:46] he didn't go too deep into it, but he was like, no, man, if you started 10 years ago,
[01:21:50] you've been training for 10 years. Because if you start training for a year, even if you take a year off,
[01:21:55] when you see something, you hear something, someone's talking about something. You're picking all that up,
[01:22:00] because you have the context of you know, you know. So your, your brain is similar to the
[01:22:04] into your system and you're fine, even if you're not training. Yep, exactly right. So if you're injured,
[01:22:08] just keep that going. That's a weird thing to do though. There's a little ego situation. If you're like,
[01:22:14] well, I've been training for 13 years, meaning I started 13 years ago, but I took a lot of time off
[01:22:22] it. So you might catch me. Right. Yes. Yeah. That's basically what they're saying. So just tell people
[01:22:27] like I've been training for 13 years. Yeah. You cannot make that kind of a war. You know what?
[01:22:33] Let's see how good I am. Yeah. You know, if in fact get it. Yeah, because I think it's
[01:22:38] coming getting so automatic for the person like, like, if you're at, if you ask me, how long have you been
[01:22:45] training? It's automatic for me to try to justify my skill with my number of how long. You know,
[01:22:50] even though the guy asking typically is just asking for conversation, he's not training
[01:22:54] evaluate how good you're really when I ask the wrong size. There's no, but you're different.
[01:22:59] Hello, you've been training for what's cool. But you're different. You compete.
[01:23:04] Well, I was talking to Keenan about that. Like, how do you do it? And they're kind of
[01:23:10] cycle, though. They'll be like, it's Matt hours. That's how you say it. You do you train for
[01:23:14] 10,000 hours. You do that's how long you've been training. I don't know if you're the series or not,
[01:23:18] but that's the one way I look at that. Yeah. I don't know. I don't feel the same way as you though.
[01:23:26] I don't feel what I definitely do. And I'll tell you what, like if I've said this before,
[01:23:30] if my back is tight, nothing better for your back than you do. Yeah. You next little sword,
[01:23:36] you do too. Yeah. Shoulders my little stretch. You do it. No, you, I'm not saying go out there.
[01:23:42] You can be able to kill it. You're going to be able to go like this. You're super hard crazy
[01:23:45] rounds. Not gonna work. Yeah. Yeah. Just be careful. How'd they be here? Yeah.
[01:23:51] Yeah, I am not a doctor. And probably if people listen to me, as if I was a doctor,
[01:23:59] their health would be deteriorating quickly. Yeah. It'd be in question. Yeah. Sure. From time to time.
[01:24:04] Don't sleep eat me train injured. Go. That's my attitude.
[01:24:12] All right. Next question. How crucial is knowing the personality type,
[01:24:18] introvert, extrovert of your colleagues in combat business or choosing an MLS, which is occupation?
[01:24:25] Yeah. How crucial is it to know the personalities of people?
[01:24:33] It's really crucial. Knowing and understanding people is critical in every aspect of life.
[01:24:43] And that being said, the most important part of knowing people is knowing that you really can't
[01:24:52] know people, not 100%. I hear people talk about personality types and there's these tests and
[01:24:59] these categories and stuff like that. And honestly, I've never been familiar with that.
[01:25:06] But you can put people in different categories. But for me, when you put person in a category,
[01:25:14] by themselves, that's only 50% of the situation. The other 50% is the other people that they're
[01:25:22] working with. So I want to know not just what type of personality they have,
[01:25:30] because that's a, like I said, that's half of the equation. The other half is how do they interact
[01:25:36] with other people and other people's personalities? How do they handle slackers? How do they handle
[01:25:44] overachievers? How do they handle loud mouths? How do they handle submissive people? How do they handle
[01:25:49] aggressive people? Those are all different personality traits. I want to know, I want to see how
[01:25:53] people are going to handle other personalities. And then I want to also know how they're going to handle
[01:25:57] certain situations. Pressure, conflict, authority, responsibility. I mean, I want to know
[01:26:06] not just what their personalities, but how they're going to react. Because you can get people that are
[01:26:12] a really easy example is people that are super aggressive, but they fold under pressure. And you can
[01:26:16] get people that are super passive that fold under pressure. And vice versa, you can get someone
[01:26:21] that's super quiet and humble and under pressure. They're just strong. So that's what I want to know.
[01:26:29] I don't care what kind of person now do you have? I mean, I do to an extent, but I want to know how
[01:26:35] it interoperates with the world, with the people and with the situations that you're going to face.
[01:26:41] And how do you do that? You do that by observing them while they're dealing with other people
[01:26:44] and while they're dealing with pressure situations. That's just a reality. And you can't,
[01:26:51] you can have an idea. You know, I won't say that you won't be able to predict it, but you'll get
[01:26:57] surprised. Sometimes you get surprised. A lot of person that you think is all tough and they fold
[01:27:03] or people, person that you think is weak and they're strong. So you will get fooled sometimes.
[01:27:07] A lot of times you're, you know, you're probably right 60% of the time, 70% of the time. Yeah,
[01:27:12] big one is also how they react when stuff goes bad. Like when stuff doesn't go their way.
[01:27:19] Yeah, you know, and that's a spectrum too, but you can meet someone and or things are going
[01:27:25] good. You're hiring new people with growth or whatever, whatever your situation. And it's like
[01:27:29] saying this guy, so I'm so glad I heard this guy, but when something goes wrong, they self-destruct.
[01:27:33] There's something like that. Man, yeah, that's, I think, a critical component.
[01:27:36] And so I, you know, the simple answer is that there's, there's so many different variables.
[01:27:44] So many different nuances that what you want to do is you want to know your people.
[01:27:49] Yeah. You want to build relationships with your people so you know them so you understand them.
[01:27:53] That's what you want to do. Yeah. The R word relationships.
[01:28:00] Yeah, that's what you need. That's how you get to know your people. And that's how you
[01:28:05] lead them correctly. Next question. In regards to subordinate leadership, how do you begin to
[01:28:15] change the culture slash school of thought of an industry or a company?
[01:28:24] You know, I'm not sure if they mean in regards to how do you change your subordinate
[01:28:28] leaderships or if you are subordinate. I'm not sure what which one of those it is, but
[01:28:33] regardless, it doesn't matter because guess what I'm going to do. I'm going to lead. That's what
[01:28:38] I'm going to do. Whether I'm on whether I'm the subordinate guy or the superior guy, I'm going to
[01:28:44] lead. Oh, we're going to, I want to change things and make them a certain way cool. I'm going to do those
[01:28:49] things. I'm going to make those things happen. That's how you do it. And if you're doing the right
[01:28:55] things for the right reasons, your message is going to spread. You know, how many bad
[01:29:01] school platoons I was in? I'm in zero. You know why? Because me and my buddies, we always had a good
[01:29:09] attitude. We always had the right attitude and that spread to the other people that were with us.
[01:29:17] Now, there's a red flag that you can get for yourself. And this is frustration. When you
[01:29:27] start saying yourself, which I'm not saying this necessarily, but this kind of question is coming
[01:29:33] from somebody that wants changed to happen, but it's not happening. So they're getting frustrated
[01:29:37] and they're thinking, they are not bored. They don't care. They aren't professional. They're not motivated
[01:29:43] like me. They don't have a good attitude. So there's a lot of blame going on right there. So this
[01:29:53] isn't about them, though. It's about you. And it's about leading from any level in the chain of command.
[01:30:03] If you're leading, if you're doing the right things, forward the right reasons, that's going to
[01:30:10] spread. So when the classic example I talk about it all the time is if your exercise in the
[01:30:15] extreme ownership, if you're saying, you know what? I got this. There was some stake made. It was my fault.
[01:30:19] That spreads. If you're humble, that spreads. If you have an open mind, that spreads.
[01:30:32] If you're being aggressive, not again, not aggressive towards other people, but if you're being
[01:30:36] aggressive in pursuit of your goal, that spreads. You know what doesn't spread is when you're
[01:30:44] aggressive at people. Oh, I'll actually, it does spread, but it's negative. You know what doesn't
[01:30:50] spread? It doesn't spread when you're trying to get people to do things because it's going to
[01:30:53] make you look good. That doesn't spread. You can't get people to behave better because you want to
[01:31:00] look good. It doesn't work. People see right through that. Oh, he wants to look good. You know what I'm
[01:31:06] going to do? Sabotage. Now the other thing I've been saying lately, because people are
[01:31:17] surprised or whatever, or not surprised, but they're concerned. They don't see how it's going to
[01:31:24] work so fast. And I say, you know what, it's not going to work fast. It's got to be, and here's the
[01:31:29] word. It's got to be a campaign. It's got to be a campaign. It's not like World War II was not one
[01:31:36] battle. World War I was not one battle. It's a campaign to win in Europe. It's a campaign to win
[01:31:43] in the Pacific. It takes battle after battle, after battle. And guess what, you don't win them all.
[01:31:49] You lose some of them. And so you're going to, on this campaign, you're going to win and you're
[01:31:53] going to lose. But you got to have the persistence and the patience and the persuasiveness to continue.
[01:32:01] And another piece of this is, you are best off if you go indirect and not be like, hey, you need to
[01:32:17] act like me. No. People don't like that. You need to just act how you're acting. And if you're doing it,
[01:32:26] like I said, the right things for the right reasons, people are going to see you and they're going to follow.
[01:32:36] So that's how you begin to change the school of thought. Yeah, that genuineness, like,
[01:32:43] tends to show itself or that, like, if you're not genuine, it tends to show itself. You know,
[01:32:47] just because of the dynamics of any of your words. That's what my words do. It just,
[01:32:51] straight shows itself. So when you're doing it for the right reasons, like you can't help but
[01:32:55] expose that, you know, that will be exposed. So yeah, people will sign on sign right on. And then
[01:33:00] you end up gaining, like, how you say, it's a campaign. It's like, you'll gain a little bit of
[01:33:04] ground. You might win this guy over. Like, hey, wait, that's, you know, that's a cool way of doing it or
[01:33:08] you know, whatever the group is. And you make these small little steps. You kind of hold that
[01:33:14] ground. And yeah, before you know it, it's kind of dang the whole culture of this, I don't know
[01:33:17] office or whatever. It's kind of changing. You know, it just, that happens. It's true. I've seen it happen.
[01:33:26] Next question.
[01:33:29] Jocco Echo, how do you work with people who overthink things?
[01:33:37] The classic overthinker. What does that mean? The overthinkers? They won't pick up this pan right
[01:33:44] here because they look at and say, hmm, I wonder what the way to that pan is. And if I should pick
[01:33:50] it up right now because I'm also thinking about saying something and what if I drop the pan
[01:33:54] while I'm trying to say something that makes a noise on the desk that disrupts from the flow of my
[01:33:58] sentence. And then the whole flow of my sentence is disrupted, which means my train of thought will
[01:34:03] be disrupted. Now I can't, we're finished when I was going to say that's an overthinker. So that's
[01:34:08] first of all, now you can just imagine applying that thought pattern to an actual project that you're working on.
[01:34:14] Right, right. Not a good scenario or you're trying to apply it to a combat situation that you're in.
[01:34:18] Or you're trying to apply it to a relationship that you're in. You start overthinking. Well,
[01:34:23] I see this and she might think that. Right. Yeah. They mean that. Yeah. That little book.
[01:34:27] But yes, yes. Yeah. That's true. Okay. That's an overthinker. So quit thinking so much. You're overthinking
[01:34:34] it. So here's what I do when someone's overthinking where I got someone that's like a like a
[01:34:39] chronic overthinker. I'm gonna, I'm gonna funnel them into the right mindset with questions and
[01:34:49] I'll give you some real easy questions to ask that'll make this happen. Things like, hey, we mean by that
[01:34:57] or like, can you explain that again? And you're getting them to explain it in a simpler way.
[01:35:01] Okay. Or you say, you know, hey, so hold on. So what's the actual goal? Do we try to get done here?
[01:35:08] Because again, they're putting layers upon layers of complexity on top of things that don't
[01:35:13] deserve it. So what exactly are we trying to do? And again, you're just kind of playing dumb a
[01:35:19] little bit and asking questions. And then if you can't get to them, if you can't quite get them to
[01:35:26] simplify it, then you say, oh, okay. So we're trying to do this very simple statement. So
[01:35:33] so that way they start subconsciously being coached and being taught to simplify things as much as
[01:35:41] they can in their head. And you know, another thing I've been saying lately, when I'm out
[01:35:48] working with people is I used to not really understand why people are drawn to this complexity
[01:35:56] but I actually think I understand now. And I think it has something to do with the fact that
[01:36:03] if I come up with a plan and it's super complex and super crazy and you don't understand it,
[01:36:08] then I must be smarter than you, right? Yeah. Right? I came up with something that's so genius and so
[01:36:16] complicated that you don't even understand it. I understand it. I understand it. Yeah, like what you
[01:36:22] do in it, right? And by the way, you know the only way you're going to understand it if I
[01:36:27] is if I break it down for you because you don't get it. So it's an ego trip and it's completely wrong.
[01:36:34] Because the fact of the matter is if I'm trying to get you to do something and you don't understand it,
[01:36:38] I'm a loser. I'm failing as a leader. So you, you, you got to try and get people to understand
[01:36:48] that simplicity beats complexity every single time and overthinking things is a failure in ability
[01:36:56] to simplify. So another thing and this is more kind of about planning and this is something I used
[01:37:03] to talk about in the SEAL teams and I call it 6% advantage over the enemy. And what this was was
[01:37:11] let's say you have a target building that you're going off of or going after you're going to
[01:37:15] go take down a target building in the middle of wherever the middle of the desert. And you basically
[01:37:19] come up with a plan that you're going to use your standard operating procedures. You're all going
[01:37:23] to get online or you're going to at least set up a base in a maneuver element. It's very simple. Two
[01:37:28] elements, one element is going to hold cover and the other one is going to move through the target.
[01:37:32] Cover and move. It's a simple as it gets. That's great. So you come up with a plan that's your plan.
[01:37:37] And then as you're looking at the imagery or you're looking at the map, you notice that there is an
[01:37:42] outhouse. 150 meters away from the house. So now what you do is you go, you know what?
[01:37:51] Because there's that outhouse there. You know what I'm going to do is I'm going to take another
[01:37:54] team of our guys. We're going to break them off from the main assault force. We're going to put them
[01:37:58] over there. And that's what they're going to be in case the guys in the outhouse bubble. So what
[01:38:04] you've done is you've separated your units. You've increased your communication problems. You've
[01:38:09] sacrificed your fields of fire. You disaggregated your fire power. You've diminished your unity
[01:38:15] of command. You've broke from your standard operating procedures. You've given up your real
[01:38:20] tactical advantage that you have for the chance. The chance that this guy at two o'clock in the
[01:38:28] morning when you hit the target is in the outhouse and not in his home. Is it worth that? No.
[01:38:34] So don't overthink it. We're hitting this target. You know what? Cool. He buys on that thing.
[01:38:41] No big deal. But don't give up your tactical advantage because you overthought the situation.
[01:38:48] Go with what you know. And another piece of that is a lot of times when people get super
[01:38:58] detailed like that and planning. They're actually planning things, planning on things that
[01:39:03] can't be known. So why would we make a plan for something that can't be known?
[01:39:11] I got a better idea instead of making a plan for something that can't be known. Make a plan. That's
[01:39:16] adaptable. You want your plan to be adaptable. And you know how you have the best adaptability
[01:39:23] for instance on the battlefield that you have the most control over your guys so that you can
[01:39:26] move them maneuver them quickly and how do you do that by having good unity of command and how
[01:39:31] do that by keeping your guys for the most part together. The many you start spreading them out all over
[01:39:37] the place and something changes. Something unknown that unexpected happens. Now you got to
[01:39:43] real everyone back in and try and get them to change the formation of their assault. It becomes
[01:39:50] very very complex. So if you set up your plan so that it's adaptable to changing situations,
[01:40:00] then you're going to be good to go. Same thing in business. Do you know what the market's going to
[01:40:08] do? No. We have predictors. Yes. Do we know them? No. Do you know what your competitor is going to do?
[01:40:16] No. Do you know what your consumers are going to do? No. Do we have intelligence? Of course we
[01:40:23] do. Do we have metrics? Of course we do but we don't know things. So keep your plans adaptable.
[01:40:30] So you can make adjustments when you need to. As opposed to overthinking things and creating
[01:40:39] specific branch plans for a possibility of something that might occur in the future or might not.
[01:40:45] Don't overthink it people. Sometimes people who underthink things. Sometimes they tend to say,
[01:40:59] hey, why do you overthink things when you're just normally thinking about something? Like you're thinking about
[01:41:06] something. Oh, so you're familiar. Yeah. So there's obviously you have to think about things. Right.
[01:41:11] And yes, you should be caution of someone cautious of someone that's just constantly saying,
[01:41:17] man, you're overthinking this. Right. That's been three minutes planning. Yeah. Watch out for that guy.
[01:41:25] Yeah. That's why you have one the word open overthinking comes up. Understand what that means.
[01:41:33] But I feel like your example is sound. Juggle. What do you think of Greg Jackson?
[01:41:44] That M. M. F. Famous M. M. Coach criticizing John Jones on his recent powerlifting and muscle
[01:41:50] gain. Yeah. So if you didn't see this if you're into M. M. M. May it all, they caught Greg Jackson on the
[01:41:58] mic after John Jones's recent fight saying, you know, basically, hey, I told you so. He's too big.
[01:42:06] He's all that powerlifting. And I've talked about Greg Jackson before and nothing but respect for
[01:42:14] Greg Jackson. Not only is he an outstanding coach and a great tactician, he's also just super humble guy
[01:42:22] who has built a really cool gym and built a lot of champions. So his record speeds for itself.
[01:42:32] So I'm not going to second guess, you know, what he's saying about a fighter that he's worked with
[01:42:37] since day one. And I think really it boils down to this sort of definition of perfection. If you've
[01:42:44] ever heard this definition of the definition of perfection is when you have nothing more to add
[01:42:49] and nothing more to take away. You've got it where it needs to be. And they use this with design,
[01:42:57] you know, design of whatever furniture of iPhones of, you know, anything, buildings.
[01:43:04] When you've got everything that needs to be there and you can't take anything away, that's the
[01:43:09] that's perfection. They say this about writing too. And you look at someone that writes really well
[01:43:14] every sentence you look at that sentence, you can't take away a word and you can't add a word.
[01:43:21] And that's perfection. And I think that is what Greg Jackson is trying to do with Johnny Bones Jones.
[01:43:28] Get him in that physical status where you don't want to add anything and you don't want to take
[01:43:35] anything away. So what they may have done according to Greg Jackson is they may have added a little
[01:43:42] too much muscle because of course you've got to have some muscle because it gives you strength
[01:43:49] that's in the explosiveness. But at the same time, muscle requires oxygen. And so you can actually
[01:43:59] get too big to where it's affecting your cardio. So I think that's all Greg Jackson was talking
[01:44:05] about it. And I think that's the balance that I'm always looking for. You know, I want to be
[01:44:10] big and strong enough, but I want to have endurance. That's what I'm trying to do. You know,
[01:44:15] and I try and find that balance by doing both strength work and endurance work. That's
[01:44:20] and when I say endurance, I mean muscular endurance. I don't mean marathon running because I don't
[01:44:23] run marathon's. Metcon. Metcon's, baby. So that's what I think he's talking about. And
[01:44:30] you know, like I said, respect for Greg Jackson and I'm sure that he had a
[01:44:36] he's got a good hand along why he's saying that. Yeah, fully. And when you, I do know a little
[01:44:42] about a little bit about this where, um, so if you gain some a bunch of muscle, fast like a
[01:44:50] short period of period of time, you can have a way harder time dealing with, you know, the
[01:44:54] drawbacks of that muscle. And that is endurance. That's the main thing. And at the same time, this
[01:45:01] doesn't have much to do with this particular situation. But if you gain muscle real fast, you
[01:45:05] can lose it. You have the potential to lose it real fast. But at the same time, you
[01:45:10] vice versa. If you cultivate this, you know, muscular body build, whatever, um, over time,
[01:45:17] like let's say you started lifting at 15 years old and you're, you know, 35 years old now.
[01:45:22] And you've always been muscular. Your body will have a, easier time holding onto that
[01:45:28] one for sure. If you stop like lifting for even a year, or if you stop lifting for a long time
[01:45:33] and then you get back to lifting, it'll, it'll jump right back up as far as your muscular,
[01:45:37] muscular muscularity. So, in regards to endurance, no matter what, bigger muscles require
[01:45:46] more oxygen, more fuel. So it's harder to get that endurance out when you have big muscles,
[01:45:52] just in general. But you're going to have the potential to gain that endurance way more if you've
[01:45:57] had muscle for a long time. So you do these big jumps in muscle gain, man, that endurance is going
[01:46:02] to suffer. It's going to be really hard to build up that endurance really hard. I'm not saying
[01:46:06] impossible, but it's just really, really hard. Yeah. So yeah, that is a dangerous thing, not dangerous,
[01:46:12] but it's, it's a, it's risky thing to do when, you know, I'm going to jump back into the fighting
[01:46:17] situation and I'm huge now. You know, I got that endurance weight stuff around that one. And,
[01:46:23] you know, obviously, or apparently it did there. Like, we, uh, maybe do one more
[01:46:31] here. Okay. Jockel, do you ever feel like Cicophys pushing a rock up a hill, only to watch it
[01:46:39] roll back down again and have to do it again. How do you overcome that? Do I ever feel like Cicophys?
[01:46:51] Yeah. Of course I do. I mean, I do. And I'll tell you, I've, I've thought about this and I've
[01:47:08] been waiting for people to start saying like, oh, you put another picture of the sweat and
[01:47:13] of a squat rack really, but I don't know if they understand. I've been getting on that squat
[01:47:25] rack and grinding it out for 25 years. And I'm not bored with it yet. It might seem like that's an
[01:47:40] unwindable battle, but really to me, it's not about winning. It's the battle itself. It's the struggle.
[01:47:56] It's the daily test. That's what life's about. Not just physically, but mentally.
[01:48:04] Getting that rock to the top of the mountain. That's not what my goal is.
[01:48:15] My goal actually is pushing the rock because pushing the rock
[01:48:22] pushes me. That makes me tougher. That makes me harder mentally and physically.
[01:48:37] It gives me much more than I give it. I want a struggle. I want a grinding claw and scratch.
[01:48:46] I want a digging and I want a push. And I don't want it to end. If I ever got the rock to the top
[01:48:56] of the mountain and it stayed there, I'd push it back down myself. I don't want to rest and
[01:49:07] I don't want a coast. And then I want to reach a point in my life where I say, that's it. I've done enough.
[01:49:19] I'm not going to give any more. I'm not going to push anymore.
[01:49:27] No. No.
[01:49:30] That relentless cycle of day to day challenges. They are madening to me. They don't frustrate
[01:49:42] me. They inspire me. Inspire me to drive and push more and to push harder.
[01:49:53] That's what that rock does to me.
[01:49:55] So why I say dig in and get to push and I think that's all I've got for tonight.
[01:50:16] So all you troopers out there. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for inspiring us.
[01:50:27] Thanks for listening to us. Listening to the podcast or watching the podcast on YouTube.
[01:50:35] I had somebody hit me up the other day on Twitter and said, man, I know you guys are on YouTube.
[01:50:39] Yeah, we're on YouTube. Got the YouTube channel. Jocco podcast. Sure. And thanks for giving us feedback
[01:50:51] and for spreading the word. If you want to connect with us on the interwebs on Twitter, echo is at
[01:50:59] echo Charles on Instagram. Echo is at echo Charles on Facebook. What are you? Slash echo Charles.
[01:51:10] Yes, sir. And on those three, I'm the same. I am at Jocco willing and to everyone out there in
[01:51:18] uniform. Military police fireman, EMS. Thanks for what you all do and gratitude for your service.
[01:51:28] Second up and for keeping us free and safe. And if you want to support the podcast,
[01:51:40] once again, how can you do it echo Charles? Support the podcast. At the same time, get supported
[01:51:47] too by on it on a dot com slash jocco. You get they give you 10% off. Boom, support your endeavors
[01:51:53] to get better supplement yourself. Again, on it dot com slash jocco or you can support the podcast
[01:52:00] by doing your Amazon dot com shopping through joccopodcast dot com. Click on that link and then
[01:52:07] you know, you can support it that way. Mind your ad blocker if you have one. It's rare, but if you have one
[01:52:15] mind it, if you feel like donating that school to and thank you guys to who have done that.
[01:52:24] Yeah, or if you want some shirts, get some shirts, man, represent. I think they're cool. I have
[01:52:29] made an effort to get like the quality shirts. Is that why they're sold out so much? Yeah, see in the
[01:52:36] big part of the world complaining about you. Yeah, I know and here's the thing I can't buy
[01:52:41] 5000 shirts because where am I going to put them right now, you know. So we it's a long story, but so
[01:52:47] yeah, sorry, I'm getting them. I'm getting them and I'm going to improve on that too, by the way.
[01:52:51] But their quality shirts there. They're they're they're solid. They're not like the ballpark
[01:52:56] giveaway. No, they're not shirts. $2 should shirts. I would wear them if they didn't have my own head
[01:53:01] all of them. Or if they just had victory MMA and fitness on them, then you. Yeah, that's right. But anyway,
[01:53:08] yeah, at jockelstore.com, or you can get a coffee mug. They're kind of cool. I think I think they're kind
[01:53:13] of cool. And if you want, if you if you kind of liked what what we're talking about here,
[01:53:18] leadership, life, lessons, you can check out a little book that myself and my brother,
[01:53:24] Dave Baben wrote, it's called Extreme Ownership. You can get it on hard cover. You can get it on
[01:53:33] Kindle. You can get it on audio. And the audio is read by myself and by life as well. So you can
[01:53:41] check that out. And thanks for supporting that. And finally to everybody out there in the world,
[01:53:50] living in freedom, take advantage of it, take advantage of your freedom and your life
[01:53:59] by driving hard and by pushing that rock up that hill with everything you've gotten.
[01:54:11] And also, and of course,
[01:54:16] drive hard by getting out there and getting after it.
[01:54:23] And so, until next time, this is Jocco and Echo out.