300: War is a Racket

this is jaco podcast number 300 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening and also joining us tonight dave burke good evening dave good evening the secretary of the navy takes pleasure in transmitting to first lieutenant schmedley darlington butler united states marine corps the brevet medal which is awarded in accordance with marine corps order number 26 for distinguished conduct and public service in the presence of the enemy while serving with second battalion of marines near chen sin china on 13 july 1900 on 28 march 1901 first lieutenant butler is appointed captain by brevet to take rank from 13 july 1900 awarded for actions war department general orders number 177 december 4th 1915 the president of the united states of america in the name of congress takes pleasure in presenting the medal of honor to major smedley darlington butler united states marine corps for distinguished conduct in battle in the engagement of veracruz mexico on 22 april 1914 major butler was eminent and conspicuous in command of his battalion he exhibited courage and skill in leading his men through the action of the 22nd and in the final occupation of the city awarded for action the president of the united states of america in the name of congress takes pleasure in presenting the medal of honor second award to major smedley darlington butler united states marine corps for extraordinary heroism in action as commanding officer of detachments from the 5th 13th 23rd companies and the marine and sailor detachment from the uss connecticut major butler led the attack on fort riviere haiti on 17 november 1915 following a concentrated drive several different detachments of marines gradually closed in on an old french bastion fort in an effort to cut off all avenues of retreat for the caico bandits reaching the fort on the southern side where there was a small opening in the wall major butler gave the signal to attack and marines from the 15th company poured through the breach engaged the caicos in hand-to-hand combat took the bastion and crushed the caico resistance throughout this perilous action major butler was conspicuous for his bravery and forceful leadership so there you go major schmedley butler uh united states marine for 34 years fought in the philippines china central america fought in the caribbean during the banana wars fought in world war one although against his wishes he was more in a support role he’s one of only 19 men in history to receive two medals of honor he’s one of only three men to receive the marine corps brave medal and the medal of honor and he’s the only man in history to receive two medals of honor and the brave medal and with that career after he retired from the marine corps he wrote a book called war is a racket you heard that right war is a racket this is a book that harshly condemns war denounces the military industrial plo complex vilifies the captains of industry and politicians along the way and disparages americans america’s foreign actions in war so there’s a bit of an about face going on and these are some extreme views that he has and when individuals make extreme statements sometimes that’s not the best approach to take because sometimes extreme statements though they’re they may be true or parts of them may be true it can also alienate the general populace and and kind of kind of lead people to throw the baby out with the bathwater on some stuff meaning that they throw away someone’s ideas they throw away all of someone’s ideas because some of the ideas that the person has or the way that they state them is in an extreme manner which is i personally don’t think it’s a good idea well it’s a good it’s a good thing to understand it’s a good thing to understand because what that should tell you is that if you if you back off the extremity of your statements a little bit you’re gonna get more people to listen to them so that’s a good thing to understand and it’s also a good thing to understand that if people are talking in a really extreme way you shouldn’t just say you know what this person’s just crazy i’m not gonna listen to him maybe you should actually listen to what they try and say and decipher what’s just extreme and maybe not true but are there kernels of truth in what people are saying so i think it’s a smart idea for us to listen and i think as we have watched america’s withdrawal from afghanistan in the late summer of 2021 after 20 years of war after thousands of lives after trillions of dollars and no progress maybe we should at least listen to what this marine major general smedley butler one of the most decorated marines that ever lived maybe we should listen to some of what he has to say and see if there’s some things in there that make some sense we have to get a little basic understanding of smedley butler who he was where he came from um born july 30th 1881 eldest of three sons father was a lawyer and a junk and a judge he came from a good background his grandfather was a congressman and his and his father was connected he was a connected guy and smedly butler went to an exclusive private school which is sort of an east coast thing i mean i guess they have them out on the west coast but on the east coast is a bigger thing to have exclusive private schools he went to one called the haverford school and so you kind of get this image you know you kind of get this image okay well you know he’s this rich kid that went to this exclusive school and then you hear that he left school 38 days before his 17th birthday to enlist in the marine corps which is i think we have to give him credit right we just have to say credit that’s pretty much what you say credit he still got his diploma they allowed him to graduate he lied about his age and gets commissioned to second lieutenant so i don’t know how he pulled that off but this is back in the day man there’s no records you’re just showing up how old are you 23 i went to college whatever people like oh okay you know what i’m saying this is back in the day there’s no isn’t it the kind where like your id card is written in yeah like by hand yeah you like change that one to a seven yeah you’re good yeah or you’re just you’re really just making adjustments yeah yeah so i feel like i missed out on a lot of stuff in life because i didn’t have that kind of yeah i mean we were close you know but we were just they were still tracking stuff so he’s 16 years old and he leaves his high school to go and join the marine corps shows up gets a commission as a second lieutenant and he’s the spanish american war is going down but he gets there a little late um ends up showing up in gitmo after it’s been invaded after it’s been captured doesn’t really see any combat gets assigned to the to the philippine american war he shows up there he’s bored at first gets in trouble gets temporarily temporarily relieved of command because he’s drunk and doing whatever gets his job back however um october 1899 he gets his first combat action leads 300 marines in to take the town of novaletta one marines killed ten or wounded his first sergeant’s company first sergeants wounded there’s a little note about him like panicking at first a little bit and then he kind of gets composure ends up in the boxer rebellion so battle of qin sin this is in china he he definitely kind of shows up now there’s a wounded marine officer and he is in the trench um smedley butler’s in a trench and he exposes himself to enemy fire to rescue this marine he ends up getting shot in the thigh his commanding officer major waller who later became the best man at his wedding he commended him and wrote for such reward as you may deem proper for the following officers lieutenant smedly d butler for the admirable control of his men in all the fights of the week and for saving a wounded man at the risk of his own life under very severe fire and that’s what got turned into the brevet promotion which which the brivette um if my memory serves me correctly the marine corps had it for like maybe 20 years and it basically was you’re getting promoted it was a promotion so that’s why even when i read it says oh he went from from from first lieutenant to captain it was a promotion and then they people that got promoted that way they eventually got an award called the brevet medal which looks like the ribbon of a medal of honor you know the medal of honor has the white it’s it’s a light blue the brevet with the light blue with stars the brivette is red with stars but it looks very similar as far as the ribbon goes so he gets that promotion he ends up in the banana wars these are police actions and these are police actions that we’re conducting to maintain you know trade and and the way we want things to be in the way america wants things to be in central america and in the caribbean honduras rolls into honduras he gets tasked with defending the us consulate during a revolt there he rescues the consulate in trujillo he gets this nickname his nickname is old gimlet eye gimlet is a is a hand drill it’s something that it’s a two it’s an old school two that used to drill wood so he had this piercing look that he would give people and they called him old gimladi uh broken service gets out gets married has kids runs a coal mine in west virginia goes back in the marine corps it must have been easy to get out in and out of the marine corps back then he does it a couple times more fighting in central america battalion commander in um in nicaragua fought in the battle of mazaya leads the assault the bombardment the assault and the capture of coyote hill next up is veracruz these guys are he’s rolling i mean they’re doing they’re they’re getting it on with these low intensity conflicts i remember one of my old senior chiefs said what we need is a low-intensity conflict in a high per diem area which i always got a kick out of so that’s what he’s got going on these guys are in low intensity conflict hyperedim area mexico veracruz first medal of honor so they end up going through veracruz they’re kind of clearing it door-to-door there’s 5 800 sailors and marines on this operation 17 killed in action 63 wounded in action which if you think about that’s 5 800 sailors and marines there’s 17 killed this is so the the fighting i’m trying to say that the fighting wasn’t that extreme but there was medals of honor given out pretty pretty um uh a lot so one army guy got a medal of honor nine marines got a medal of honor and 46 navy sailors got the medal of honor from this action at veracruz so he eventually tried to return the medal and said hey i didn’t do anything to earn this and they not only did they tell him to keep it they told him you better wear it too so that’s his first medal of honor he didn’t feel comfortable about it um but he got it haiti second medal of honor fighting the haitian the caicos rebels the rebel group down there and they have this stronghold he kind of heard me talk about it in the in the citation there but he’s getting the medal of honor the the whole battle was 20 minutes long this assault there was one marine wounded and he was wounded by being hit with a rock in the face all 51 of the rebels were killed so he got the medal of honor for that and that’s what happened after that he became like a public administrator or sort of sort of a military i don’t know many dictator kind of running things a little bit the public works and keeping things you know the social order and he also it’s also said that they hunted the remaining rebels like pigs [Applause] world war one comes around he requests he wants to go into combat again um he had a reputation of being brave he had a reputation of being smart he also had a reputation of being a little bit of uh a little bit of a rebel a little bit unreliable and and so i don’t know if that’s why they decided not to put him in combat because i’m thinking if world war one they would be like oh yeah you’re just the guy we’re looking for you’re brave and you’re smart but you’re super crazy come on up to the front lines we got something for you but they didn’t he ended up running this debarkation depot you know in the rear and the by all accounts he did a great job and squared this thing away was a real mess when he showed up and he squared it away and he got the army in the navy distinguished service medal um after that he goes and he’s the commanding general of quantico when he was the commanding this guy was always doing something he’s one of those people like he always was doing something when he was the commanding general at quantico they used to form up the troops and they would march to various battlefields civil war battlefields and do reenactments and he would lead the marches so yeah i mean he’s just they they march from quantico to damn gettysburg right and he was in front leading it and they got up there let’s do let’s do the walk of gettysburg so so then he’s so he gets done with that now he has a broken service and he becomes the philadelphia director of public safety and and this is like i might need a movie reference here echo charles yes sir uh what’s a movie where they’re like gangsters they’re trying to crack down untouchables sure okay he so there’s there’s this is the time there’s speakeasies and the prohibition is going on and he comes like law dog right he is go he comes into he has a personal war on crime for two years and it seems like when you read about it seems like it’s its own movie right this guy is going in just ready to take things on he will he wasn’t allowed to fire if i remember this correctly he wasn’t allowed he found out he wasn’t allowed to fire individual police because the union and whatever so what he did was he would just take and just move them all around all the time so they didn’t have they didn’t have time to get to get to know the local criminals and get paid off so he just moved him all the time they were moving that’s like one of the things that he did and he he made a lot of enemies because of so many people are corrupt made a bunch of enemies finally he gets kind a little bit he did it does it for two years he cleans up a lot of stuff but also makes a bunch of enemies his final shot in the papers before he went back in the marine corps he said cleaning up philadelphia was worse than any battle i was ever in uh when he comes back in he’s comes comes the base commander in san diego deployed with the marine expeditionary force to china does a good job there politically influences a bunch of people makes major general at 48 years old and in that time also his dad died and his dad was super influential he was like i said he was always kind of he always kind of had a spotlight put on him and one of the things when mussolini’s now in power he and there was some weird um like a conspiracy about mussolini in a hit and run or something like this i forget but he sort of spread those rumors you know i think if he had twitter he would have been a real popular twitter dude because he started spreading this guy you know this guy is a murderer and and the italian government this was before the war the italian government was like hey get get your bully in check and they pressured the sec nav to to court-martial butler and they did they court-martialed butler i think he was the highest ranking military person to be arrested after the civil war so he got arrested and he apologized they let him off of the reprimand um the commandant of the marine corps died at the time and he was kind of in the running and he ends up it’s pretty obvious that he’s a he’s not enough of a company guy to get commandant and he doesn’t get it so he retires from the marine corps october 1st 1931 he starts going on like a lecture tour speaking and he gets paid for it he donates a bunch of the pay that he gets for the unemployment relief he runs for senate he loses he supports the bonus army which was when the world war one vets they had these things called service certificates that they that they bought and when they bought those things they had again i’m sorry if this isn’t perfect but it was something along the lines of when you bought these things they had like a 20-year maturity time on them and the depression’s going on and everyone’s like hey we want that money and all these veterans thousands and thousands of veterans are saying hey we you know we gave you that money we bought those service certificates which are like bonds we want we want to cash them in now and the government was like hey those are 20 years man you bought those 19 you got another you got another few years before you can cash those things in and this is when they had all the big standoffs in the you know the world war one veterans march down and set up camp in washington dc and he he supported that gave more speeches uh here’s a here’s an example this is what is when we know where he’s heading mentally right i don’t mean that in a bad way i mean we can see what his angle starts to become this was and this was a summary of one of his speeches that was published in socialist magazine that was called common sense it says i spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period i spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for big business for wall street and the bankers in short i was a racketeer a gangster for capitalism i helped make mexico and especially tampico which is a city in mexico safe for american oil ass interests in 1914 i helped make haiti and cuba a decent place for the national citibank boys to collect revenues in i helped in the raping of half a dozen central american republics for the benefit of wall street i helped purify nicaragua for the international banking house of brown brothers brothers in 1902 to 1912 i brought light to the dominican republic for the american sugar interest in 1916 i helped make honduras right for the american fruit companies in 1903 in china in 1927 i helped see to it that standard oil went on its way unmolested looking back on it i might have given al capone a few hints the best he could do was operate his racket in three districts i operated on three continents so he’s kind of pissed 1934 again this guy would have been all over twitter 1934 he’s sort of the leader of this thing that was called the business plot which was this that there’s this this conspiracy that there was this plot for business leaders to overthrow president roosevelt and in 1935 he wrote this book called war is a racket now we’re going gonna read it um some of it’s extreme some of it may be too extreme some of it’s not accurate some of it’s his feelings his emotions um you know when colonel david hackworth when he went and talked to the press and you and i have had that discussion dave like did he give up his influence he could have been a division camera brigade commander next and a division commander and and i think people sometimes reach a point where they emotionally can’t take it anymore and i think david hackworth got there where he had had seen enough american soldiers and he loved so he loved his soldiers and he loved all soldiers and he loved the army and just to see the soldiers being utilized in a way that he didn’t think was tactically sound eventually he just couldn’t take it anymore and i think that major general smedley butler got to a similar point and of course this is 1935 so i mean we got hitler in power in 1933 so he sees though he hears the war drums beating and as he sees the war drums beating he doesn’t like it what are your thoughts so far dave it’s interesting to hear you recount some things that i remember because obviously as a marine this is one of the characters in the history of the marine corps that you are are given early on yeah so they give it they give you smedley butler early on oh yeah is there is there not risk in that aren’t they like wow yeah the weird thing was that we’re at the medal of honors right look i’m in no position to be like well i’m not sure but when 46 navy sailors got a medal of honor and there’s 17 killed in action like that’s a that that seems very seems very that seems that seems strange yeah right seems strange and that’s the that’s really kind of the point that i’m thinking about in my mind is you know there’s a little bit of a contrast this is a guy that you you hear about and certainly in and listen you could i mean i got to be careful with my words too because i don’t want there to be a negative connotation to it but there’s a there’s an indoctrination you go through and you’re a marine and that indoctrination is we’re kind of awesome and our history is pretty awesome and we’ve got some amazing people that did some amazing things and you start to think about who those people are one of the things that’s interesting about the name smedley butler is when you see the pictures of this guy like you’ll be in a class and it’ll be about marine corps history and they’ll literally have a slide or a picture up on the wall of the person and he’s not he doesn’t really look like a a i guess he looks like a poster boy marine he looks like a guy named smedley he does that went to a maybe a private school in this coast and and then you know you’re you’re seeing bazz alone and you’re seeing chesty and these pictures and just the pictures alone are enough to be like okay this this dude is legit um but you know they also i i i don’t have any recollection of of the things that he did and the times that he did them and the awards i don’t ever remember being given sort of the other side of it was hey listen there’s a different time different circumstances so as i hear you talk about that and i’m listening to that i just did some basic math you know 50 600 people and then you sort of did the w wounded and killed i’m like no i’ve seen that i know what the middle or more of the other side of that looks like and those numbers are good numbers you know by by by standards like you said this is probably not the most high intensity thing that that that marines have been through but the other side is is this is also i’m literally you just said he’s 48 years old he’s a major general there’s a guy that went back in the marine corps twice as a guy that left high school and by rights could probably just coasted on a pretty easy life um so you’re kind of forced to reconcile in your mind that i i think to maybe the whole point of this podcast is i probably need to listen to what he has to say um but yeah i no he’s he’s he is one of the characters that and i’m using that term just you know to illustrate that we are introduced to histori marines that have have had impact in history and that’s someone that you we know about for sure we we could probably do a whole podcast about awards and whatnot but i forget what year like the bronze star and the silver star it wasn’t they didn’t have those yet at this time yeah i think and so this was if you were going to get an award it was going to be the medal of honor um and there you go again it’s it’s like crazy because you got this guy that has two metal two medals of honor and this marine corps bravette thing which there’s there’s not many of those things handed out either it’s it’s a tiny number and and also the type of combat that they were going into i mean this is pre-world war one is the combat he’s talking about so combat was totally different between ah you know what i mean you got the civil war we knew what combat was but but um yeah there have been there’d been a generation maybe that was a little bit that that hadn’t quite been there yeah and i think the sense that i’ve always had was that the when you think of conflict or you think of combat and you think of world war one it has a very strong sense of organized conflict between two well-established well-organized size sides that have design and structure and and components that you can almost align against each other and that certainly for world war one produces probably like the most heavy intensity of conflict whereas before that you have this sense of this well-organized team the united states navy the united states marine corps the organization of those two working together where we’re gonna get you to the beach you’re gonna embark and you’re gonna or or debark and get onto the land and we’re gonna support you and but the the the people you’re in conflict with don’t have that level of organization so when you said um you know one wounded on the good side and 57 killed i’m like i can and again i should be careful wounded by a rock but you can picture that like this is a lopsided scenario and it doesn’t mean that that weren’t incredibly brave actions that didn’t happen to solicit that outcome but when you think of world war one and world war ii or really conflicts we’ve had since then that organized versus organized you don’t get those sense of that long period of marine corps history and those are all in marine corps history we we’ve learned about all those things but you don’t get a sense of this force on force conflict that we’re near traditional um world war one world war ii we’re going against someone that’s pretty much like we are professionally trained professionally outfitted and prepared for for this type of conflict check so he writes his book war as a racket and people people i i don’t know i’ve had this book for five years um in fact i couldn’t even find i have two copies of it and i had i wasn’t able to find them so you can get this thing on pdf um and the reason i couldn’t find them is because the moving scenario i’m going through so all my books are in big giant boxes and i was like it’s time to do it and yeah what makes it time to do it because well one of the things that just totally provoked me was a trillion dollar price tag on afghanistan and thousands of lives lost and you’re thinking hold on a second who what was what was the overall goal here what are we doing because if i could spend a trillion dollars and do literally anything you give me a trillion dollars a trillion dollars you’re telling me you couldn’t square away a country with a trillion dollars in 20 years and basically an unlimited supply of people and and assets it’s crazy so what was going on so as i’m thinking about that here i am a guy that’s that supports the military that is very patriotic and i’m thinking who spends a trillion dollars and and doesn’t doesn’t get the job done how’s that happen who are you what are you thinking about what is your ultimate goal and that very quickly my mind very quickly jumped on oh this is probably what smelly but no i’d read war as a racket i was always kind of like yeah well yeah i mean that’s one way of looking at it right so let’s look at it here we go chapter one war is a racket it always has been it is possibly the oldest easily the most profitable surely the most vicious it is the only one international in scope it is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives a racket is best described i believe as something that is not what it seems to be to the majority of the people only a small inside group knows what it’s about it is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many out of war a few people make huge fortunes okay if we’re just going to fact check this thing as we go so far we are we are factual right that’s what a racket is right a racket is something where a couple people kind of know what’s going on everyone else is getting fooled the couple people insiders are going to make a bunch of money other people are kind of going to get screwed that’s what’s going to happen in war there are people that make a lot of money he calls it the world war because there was only one at the time in the world war a mere handful garnered the prophets of the conflict at least 21 000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the united states during the world war that many admitted their huge blood gains or sorry that many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns how many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows okay so a lot of people made a lot of money in the war i just saw an article that there’s several billion dollars in taxes that are that are avoided by the top one percent earners in this country so are there people that are doing things to get around taxes yes were there people that were made into millionaires and billionaires after september 11th yes there were next how many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle how many of them dug a trench how many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat infested dugout how many of them spent sleepless frightened nights ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets how many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy how many of them were wounded or killed in battle rhetorical questions that i think we all know the answer to not many out of war nations acquire additional territory if they are victorious they just take it this newly acquired territory promptly exists is exploited by the few the self-same few who run dollars out of blood in the war the general public shoulders the bill fact check kind of negative on this one i mean america speaking of america we haven’t we’ve we we kind of are established what we have territory-wise and we haven’t taken any new territory in recent wars that’s not been our goal so and even you know the idea that oh we’re just going in there to take the oil we don’t actually go in and take the oil it doesn’t it hasn’t happened and what is the bill this bill renders a horrible accounting newly placed gravestones mangled bodies shattered minds broken hearts and homes economic instability depression and all its attendant miseries back-breaking taxation for generations and generations factually true horrible accounting and taxation to pay for these wars for generations for a great many years as a soldier i had a suspicion that war was a racket not until i retired to civil life did i fully realize it now that i see the international war clouds gathering as they are today i must face it and speak out and again that’s because he’s looking at world war ii we call them the war clouds again they are choosing sides france and russia met and agreed to stand by side by side italy and austria hurried to make a similar agreement poland and germany cast cast sheep’s eyes at each other forgetting for the nonce their dispute over the polish corridor and look what nonce was it means uh it means like a one-time a one-time deal just hey we’re just going to forget about our dispute over here because we’re going to be friends right now assassination of king alexander of yugoslavia complicated matters yugoslavia and hungary hungary long bitter enemies were almost at each other’s throats italy was ready to jump in but france was waiting so was czechoslovakia all of them are looking ahead to war not the people not those who fight and pay and die only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit what do you got are you gonna fact check that no no no no yeah yeah i’m i’m kind of sitting here listening to you talk which is his work you read this before no i have not so that’s why this is like a it’s hard this is hard and so i mean i wrote down a bunch of different notes the last one i just wrote down was was just literally the word angry like and i don’t i don’t think you’re trying to convey that emotion on purpose it’s literally the words that you are reading if you just if you try to put yourself in his shoes and i was just kind of recounting we were talking about low intensity conflict and maybe the things that happened up until prior to world war one and and i did think of something after i i was talking a minute ago about you know the word low intensity conflict i do remember the first time i was shot at like for real and there’s a moment when you’re the one who who is you know the victim or the potential victim here it feels like world war iii because when you’re the one being shot it doesn’t really matter the scope of what’s going around you that sense of things like oh damn those people they’re trying to kill me and they’re actually pretty darn close um you don’t say well you know in the grand scheme of historical things this is a very low intensity conflict and this particular engagement isn’t you don’t think like that you think okay this is a big deal this is a huge deal and then if you if you observe that in in your own issues and you lead up to to the travesty of world war one i’m just trying to be empathetic to the level of frustration you would have at the hands of a few number of decision makers both military and civilian by the way when we talked about world war one it’s not hard for me to try to understand that as he said i’m just almost picturing him writing this down and just the just the frustration and the anger that he has and how clearly that’s coming through and hearing you say his the words that he’s saying um that it’s hard not to to get a sense of his frustration and and you’ve even talked about with how hackworth is that when you just kind of boil over you’re not able to really even articulate yourself i don’t mean to say correctly but but the way that you would normally want to when you can keep your emotions in check yeah which you can’t yeah and i know you gotta you found it very interesting when we did when we talked about b h la del hart just the fact like once you realized he was in the battle psalm you’re like oh got it okay so this guy has a totally different perspective which is completely grounded and and fermented in what he experienced on the battlefield and yeah this is a yeah it’s definitely it’s definitely a similar a similar deal moving on there are 40 million men under arms in the world today so this again this is 1935 and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making hell’s bells are these 40 million men being trained to be dancers not in italy to be sure premier mussolini knows what they are being trained for he at least is frank enough to speak out only the other day el duce in international conciliation the publication of the carnegie endowment for international peace said quote and above all fascism the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace war alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it end quote that’s a it’s one thing for ronald reagan to say peace through strength and hey we’ve got to be strong and we’ve got to you know the best way to to avoid war is to be prepared for it but when you got mussolini just saying hey there’s i don’t believe in the possibility or the or the freaking utility of peace war alone brings to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it that’s the leader of your country guess what’s happening you’re going to war undoubtedly mussolini means exactly what he says his well-trained army his great fleet of planes and even his navy are ready for war anxious for it apparently his recent stand at the side of hungary in the latter’s dispute with yugoslavia showed that and the hurried mobilization of troops on the austrian border after the assassination of dolphus showed it too there are others in europe whose saber rattling presages war sooner or later hair hitler with his rearming germany and his constant demands for more and more arms is an equal if not greater menace to peace france only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to 18 months all this stuff is going on he’s just tracking it he sees everybody’s just heading to war yes all over nations are camping in their arms the mad dogs of europe are on the loose in the orient the maneuvering is more a droid back in 1904 when russia and japan fought we kicked our old friends the russians and back japan then our very generous international bankers were financing japan now the trend is to poison us against the japanese what does the open door policy to china mean to us our trade with china is about 90 million dollars a year or the philippine islands we have spent about 600 million dollars in the philippines in 35 years and we our bankers and industrialists and speculators have private investments there of less than 200 million then to save china to save that china trade of about 90 million and to protect these private investments of less than 200 in the philippines we would all be stirred up to hate japan and go to war a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars hundreds of thousands of american lives and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men of course for this loss there would be a compensating profit fortunes would be made millions and billions of dollars would be pi piled up by a few munitions makers bankers ship builders manufacturers meat packers speculators they would fare well yes they are getting ready for another war why shouldn’t they it pays high dividends but what does it profit the men who are killed what does it profit their mothers and sisters their wives and their sweethearts what does it profit their children what does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits yes and what does it profit the nation so i kind of have my thoughts on all this that i’m gonna save a little bit um but what’s what’s what’s the the i would say the methodology of the argument that he’s presenting is to show one side of the argument which is very it’s a good argument i mean you can’t you can’t really you can’t really come at this argument you can’t say well people aren’t going to make money no people make money that’s what happens and that by itself isn’t automatically a bad thing either this is true that’s the other that’s the other part that’s what i’m saying like there’s i know you’ve got thoughts on this soon i got to be careful i could probably chime in like i usually do on every single thing that’s said and there’s thoughts going through my head like crazy yes yeah i mean there are profiteers and there are people that profit and and if i’m using the terms correctly you can distinguish between those two right and they can be aligned for sure i mean it’s easy for me to sit here in retrospect but it’s like hey hitler mussolini yeah we probably want to go to one of those people yeah now not yet let them do what they want that’s not a good plan and i know this now sitting here looking back but you’re right and and i think to your point his perspective is correct it’s not the whole story but it’s a perspective that what he sees and the way he’s presenting it is correct yes it’s just that there is more there’s more to it and as you said there’s nothing more obvious than that than a guy named adolf hitler right that’s about to go on a tear yeah and kill millions of people and it’s interesting he’s using him like hey he might be worse than this other guy yeah he might be yeah in 1935 he didn’t seem so bad compared to mussolini he’s going to give a little example example here take our own case until until 1898 we didn’t own a bit of territory outside the mainland of north america at that time our national debt was a little more than a billion dollars then we became internationally minded we forgot or shunted aside the advice of the father of our country we forgot george washington’s warning about entangling alliances we went to war we acquired outside territory at the end of the world war period as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs our national debt had jumped to over 25 billion our total favorable trade balance during the 25-year period was about 24 billion therefore on a purely bookkeeping basis we ran a little behind year for year and that foreign trade might as well have been ours without the wars again when you just look at the numbers to run the numbers man we’re we were a billion dollars in that debt and now we’re 25 billion dollars in debt that hurts it would have been far cheaper not to say safer for the average american who pays the bills to stay out of forward entanglements for very few this racket like bootlegging and other underworld rackets brings fancy profits but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people who do not profit and now we get into chapter two who makes the profits the world war rather our brief participation in it has cost the united states some 52 billion dollars figured out that means 400 dollars to every american man woman and child and we haven’t paid the debt yet we are paying it our children will pay it and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war the normal profits of a business concern in the united states are 6 8 10 and sometimes 12 percent but wartime profits ah that is another matter 20 60 100 300 and even 1800 the sky is the limit all that traffic will bear uncle sam has the money let’s get it of course it isn’t put that crudely in wartime it is dressed into speeches about patriotism love of country and quote we must all put our shoulders to the wheel but the prophets jump and leap and skyrocket and are safely pocketed let’s just take a few examples take our friends the duponts the powder people didn’t one of them testify before a senate committee recently that their powder won the war or saved the world or saved the world for democracy or something how did they do in the war they were a patriotic corporation well the average earnings of the duponts for the period of 1910 to 1914 was 66 million dollars a year it wasn’t much but the duponts managed to get along now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years 1914 to 1918 58 million dollars of profit a year we find nearly 10 times that of normal times and the profits of normal times were pretty good an increase of profits more than 950 percent take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacturing war materials well their 1910 to 1914 yearly earnings averaged six million dollars then came the war and like loyal citizens bethlehem steel promptly turned to mission munitions making did their profits jump or did they let or did they let uncle sam in for a bargain well their 1914 to 1918 average was 49 million a year oh let’s take united steel normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were 105 million dollars a year not bad then came along the war and up with the profits the average yearly profit for the period 1914 to 1918 was 240 million not bad then you have some of the steel and powder earnings let’s look at some let’s look at something else a little copper perhaps that always does well in war times anaconda for instance average yearly earnings during the pre-year pre-year wars of 1910 to 1914 10 million during the war years 1914 and 1918 profits slept to 34 million dollars a year utah copper average of 5 million during the pre-war period jumped to an average of 21 million yearly profits for the war period let’s group these five with three similar companies the total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910 to 1914 were 137 million then came along the war the average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to 408 million a little increase in profits of approximately 200 percent does war pay they paid them but they aren’t the only ones there are still others let’s take leather for a three-year period the before the war the total profits of central leather company were 3 5 million that was approximately 1 16 million dollars a year well in 1916 central leather returned a profit of 15 million a spelling small increase of 1 100 that’s all a general chemical the general chemical company averaged a profit for three years before the war of a little over eight hundred thousand dollars a year came the war and profits jumped to 12 million dollars a year a leap of 1400 international nickel company you can’t have a war without nickel showed an increase in profits from a mere 4 million a year to 73 million a year not bad an increase of one thousand seven hundred percent american sugar refining company averaged two million dollars a year for three years before the war in 1916 a profit of six million dollars was recorded listen to senate document number 259 the 65th congress congress reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues considering the profits of 122 meat packers 153 cotton manufacturers 299 garment makers 49 steel plants 340 coal producers during the war profits under 25 percent were exceptional for instance the coal companies made between 100 and 7 800 percent on their capital stock during the war the chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war if anyone cream if anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations they did not have to report to stockholders and their profits were as secret as they were immense how the bankers made their millions and billions i do not know because those little secrets never become public even before a senate investor investigatory body people make money i mean and part of that is supply and demand and one of the reasons that america does so well during war is because we have capitalism and that’s how we’re able to out produce other countries even i mean especially companies that have socialized or communist controlled industry they just can’t do what we do why because they’re not driven to do it there’s no hey look i’m running this factory for whatever for the soviet union they want me to make 100 tanks they want me to make 200 tanks i’m going to get the same paycheck regardless and if i’m a guy whatever working on the the the fabrication of one of those tank treads i don’t care if i make 20 today or if i make 100 today i i’m going to get the same paycheck so these people are going to make a lot of money because they’re going to turn out something that is in high demand here’s how some other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits take the shoe people they like war it brings business with abnormal profits they made huge profits and sales abroad to our allies perhaps like the munitions manufacturers and arm armor makers they also sold to the enemy for a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from germany or from france but they did well by uncle sam too for instance they sold uncle sam 35 million pairs of hobnailed service shoes so that’s a big number there were four million soldiers eight pairs or more to a soldier my regiment during the war had only one pair to soldier per soldier some of these shoes probably are still in existence they were good shoes but when the war was over uncle sam has a matter of 25 million pairs of shoes left over bought and paid for profits recorded and pro and pocketed and this is you should start getting into the idea of just like the government waste and it’s just the crazy crazy government waste which is why the free market is so powerful because people try and streamline things there was a lot of leather left so the leather people sold your uncle sam hundreds of thousands of mcclellan saddles for the cavalry but there wasn’t any american cavalry overseas somebody had to get rid of this leather however somebody had to make a profit in it so we had a lot of mcclellan saddles we probably still do also somebody made a lot of mosquito netting they sold uncle sam 20 million mosquito nets for the use of soldiers overseas i suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the others making passes at scurrying rats well not one of these mosquito nets ever got to france anyhow these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net so 40 million additional yards of mosquito netting were sold uncle sam you know why cause you’re not spending your own money you’re not spending your own money when you’re not spending your own money man you spend it on stuff because it’s really easy you know what they might need them you know what let’s get them and all politics are local and who knows who was putting in those where those mosquito nets were made these were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days even if there were no mosquitoes in france i suppose if the ward lasted just a little bit longer the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold uncle sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in france so that more mosquito netting would be in order airplane and air and engine manufacturers felt they too should adjust their profits out of this war why not everybody else is getting theirs so a billion dollars count them if you live long enough was spent by uncle sam and building airplane engines that never left the ground not one plane or motor out of the billion dollars worth ordered ever got into battle in france just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30 100 or perhaps 300 percent remember the fraud waste and abuse hotline apparently they didn’t have that like in the military echo charles they got a thing called the fraud waste and abuse hotline you call up and say hey we’re buying plane engines we got them lined up we’re not using them we’re buying mosquito nets we’re not using them did anyone actually use that or do you know of anyone who i never used did you ever use it i never use it but i know the sticker on the wall i know if i would have had to use it i’d probably use it on my tasking or my platoon for the money we were wasting on ammunition just slaying ammunition undershirts for soldiers cost 14 cents to make and uncle sam paid 30 to 40 cents each for them a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer and the stocking manufacturer the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturer and the steel helmet manufacturers all got theirs why when the war was over some four million sets of equipment knapsacks and things that go to fill them crammed warehouses on this side now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents but the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them and they will do it all over again next time there were lots of brilliant ideas for making profit during the war one very versatile patriot sold uncle sam 12 dozen 48 inch wrenches oh they were very nice wrenches the only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches that’s the one that holds the turbines at niagara falls well after uncle sam had bought them and manufactured and the manufacturer had profited from them the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the united states in an effort to find a use for them when the armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer he was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches then he planned to sell those too to your uncle sam still another brilliant idea that the colonels shouldn’t ride in automobiles nor should they even ride on horseback one has probably seen a picture of andy jackson riding on a buck board well some six thousand buck boards were sold to uncle sam for the use by kernels not one of them was used the buck board manufacturer got his war profit board is like a wagon it’s like a carriage with leaf springs to be towed behind a horse six thousand of them the shipbuilders felt they should come on on some of it too they built a lot of ships that they made a lot of profit more than 3 billion worth some of the ships were all right but 635 million worth of them were made of wood that wouldn’t float the seams opened up and they sank we paid for them though and somebody pocketed the profits it’s been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your uncle sam 52 billion dollars of this sum 39 billion was expended in the actual war itself this expenditure yielded 16 billion dollars in profits that is how the 21 000 billionaires and millionaires got that way this 16 billion dollars in profits is not to be sneezed at it’s quite a tidy sum and it went to a very few the senate committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits despite its sensational closures hardly had scratched the surface even so it’s had some effect the state department had been studying for some time methods of keeping out of war the war department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring the administration names a committee with the war navy departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a wall street speculator to limit profits in wartime to what extent isn’t suggested hmm possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1600 of those who turned blood into gold in world war in the world war would be limited to some smaller figure apparently however the plan does not call for any limitation of losses that is the loss losses of those who fight the war as far as i have been able to ascertain there is nothing in this scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye or one arm or to limit his wounds to one or two or three or to limit the loss of life there’s nothing in this scheme apparently that says not more than 12 percent of a regiment shall be wounded in bottle or not more than seven percent of a division shall be killed of course the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters so they put together a committee and say well you know they’re making a little too much money we should put a limit on how much money they can make possibly limit those war profits [Applause] chapter three who pays the bills who provides the profits these nice little profits of 20 100 300 1500 1800 we all pay them in taxation we paid the bankers their profits when we bought liberty bonds at 100 and sold them back at 84 or 86 to the bankers these bankers collected dollars plus it was a simple manipulation the bankers controlled the security marts it was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds then all of us the people got frightened and sold the bonds at 84 86 the bankers bought them then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par and above and then the bankers collected their profits but the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill if you don’t believe this visit the american cemeteries on the battlefields abroad or visit any of the veterans hospitals in the united states on a tour of the country in the midst of which i am i am doing at the time of writing this i have visited 18 government hospitals for veterans in them are a total of about 50 000 destroyed men men who were the pick of the nation 18 years ago the very able chief surgeon at the government hospital at milwaukee where there are 3 800 of the living dead told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home so this was interesting because we we hear a lot about what happens when we come home we hear about ptsd and you you see like the images of shell shock in world war ii especially in england and the brits you don’t hear a lot about it from world war one and this this is a weirdly written sentence i tried to read it in a way that made it made sense but it says the very able surgeon the variable chief surgeon at the government hospital semicolon at milwaukee where there are 3 800 of the living dead told me that the mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home so what he’s saying is people that fought are three times likely to die three times more likely to die than someone that didn’t fight he doesn’t talk about how but my guess is a lot of those are suicide or just like the crazy violent deaths that military people that have that experience end up having and here he goes into it a little bit in the most simplistic and so obvious way boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks they were remolded they were made over they were made to about face to regard murder as the order of the day they were put shoulder to shoulder and through mass psychology they were entirely changed [Music] we used them for a couple years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed then suddenly we discharged them and told them to make another about-face this time they had to do their own readjustment without mass psychology without officers aid and advice and without nationwide propaganda we didn’t need them anymore so we scattered them about with any three-minute or liberty loan speeches or without any three-minute or liberty loan speeches or parades many too many of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed mentally because they could not make that final about face alone that’s pretty straightforward and he gives a example here he says in the government hospital in marion indiana 1 800 of these boys are in pens 500 of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around the outside of the buildings and on the porches these already have been mentally destroyed these boys don’t even look like human beings oh the look on their faces physically are in good shape mentally they are gone there are thousands and thousands of these cases and more and more are coming in all the time the tremendous excitement of the war the sudden cutting off of that excitement the young boys couldn’t stand it i’m gonna have to dig into that i have to get some research going on that because that sounds horrific 1800 got 1800 men boys he’s calling them but but this is 1935 you know the war ended in 1918 so he’s these are young men and you just don’t hear about this you hear about it now you don’t hear about it from world war one and in fact world war ii i’ve talked about like well you know in world war ii you got to come home on a ship with some other guys and you got to decompress for five or six weeks and you you are held up as a hero and all this stuff and that’s why it was easier to adapt it’s like uh what about world war one and that freaking psychotic war yeah i mean everything that’s in my mind obviously has to be tempered with the fact that i truly cannot claim to appreciate the reality that he’s describing he yeah he said he’s been basically talking about va hospitals he’s been to 18 different va hospitals this is a passion for him he’s going around seeing what’s going on and at least in this sense of of when you think about world war ii that there was this and i got to assume it was felt at the time this very clear sense of good and evil right and wrong and the sides that we are on and the the the the justification and the necessity the global necessity and if you think about world war one to at least try to reconcile the loss and what was it for and what was really at stake and how much blurrier just you don’t feel that in world war one and you talk about probably a nation that’s just totally ill-equipped to have a 25-year-old come back after seeing what they saw without even be able to say hey i at least saved the world you know from holocaust or nuclear war whatever could have been at stake by the end of world war ii and being totally ill-equipped to know how to even handle that at least in modern times right you’re at least a little bit desensitized right you’ve seen horror movies you’ve seen blood and guts you’re playing first person shooter video games like this is can you imagine coming from freaking omaha nebraska where you’re like going to school you you know i mean you’re just a a normal kid that might not even be the best example because at least in omaha nebraska you’re you’re slaughtering pigs you’re shooting guns but if you’re in whatever if you’re from the city and you just you’re just not around that you’re not seeing it and then boom you’re thrown into world war one yeah and there was another section that he that uh that i know about smelly butler there was a point i think it was when he was in china where he for the first time saw like mass slaughtered japanese and it’s just one of those points that he had seen some real violence and that was before world war one but yeah at least nowadays this might be a bad thing is that people are desensitized somewhat you know go on go on um whatever youtube i don’t know does youtube filter out like uh heinous shootings and stuff like that yeah so where do you see stuff like that now oddly and i don’t want to go too deep into it but oddly they had a few websites out there that you could just go yeah they say click here make sure you’re 18 whatever yeah and then you can watch whatever sick video you want but as i’ve noticed not that i frequent these things but as i’ve noticed they’ve been kind of disappearing yeah that’s interesting like i remember there was a video of a of a a russian soldier being killed by a by a cheshian yeah and it’s brutal they’re putting his boot on his head and they’re just he’s screaming and they’re cutting his throat and he’s sort of like slowly the impact of the knife blade yeah that’s old school there’s way worse stuff i’m saying that’s old school but i haven’t seen that in a long time and but i’m sure there’s like some websites where you can see all that stuff yeah and i like i said i think they’re kind of quietly doing away with them maybe because they encourage certain like groups to be like oh let’s see if we can put ours up you know because in that dark area of the internet it’s like the people who are responsible for making those videos um sometimes they get into these little competitions to see who can make the sickest video well and they go hard for sure even if you just saw rated r movies yeah you would be more accustomed to this kind of scenery oh yeah and and you got you have like like yeah the exposure of what war actually is is way more now compared to yeah time like hey if you watched um saving private ryan yeah you’re like okay man i mean this is oh yeah and there’s reports plenty of reports that world war ii veterans that were at d-day were totally you know thought that nailed it and they were very disturbed in watching it and had to take a break had to walk out whatever because it was so realistic so that’s going to condition you yeah but if you leave freaking maryland where you live in a small neighborhood and your dad works at the factory and next thing you know you’re in world war one and then and then all of a sudden three weeks later you’re back back in maryland in your neighborhood it’s gonna be a rough one that’s a good way to put it i was like hey they take you out of your normal world and make you do an about face with all this essential training and like all this cook you know this influence and stuff and then when that’s done just all of a sudden hey do another about face but hey do it on your own kind of a thing it’s like dang that’s exactly what happens huh you know that song by the white buffalo that he played when he was on here it’s called wish it was true yeah well when he was on here he played that song and and i actually had like asked him to play the slow one yeah and um but the song you know it’s got a line in there that basically says hey you’re just a number and we used you and you’re through and there’s a couple people that you know left some comments or hit me up like this is an anti-war song what are you talking about i was like hey bro this is what happens it doesn’t happen all the time but this is a this is a song written from someone’s individual viewpoint of hey went to war whatever war it was maybe world war one world war ii world war korea vietnam there was plenty of people that went to those wars came home and this is exactly what happened that’s what that song is about it’s not saying oh you you just got used by the every single soldier’s not saying that but there are this happens this does happen and that’s why it’s such a powerful song this might sound a little bit insensitive but you know you don’t ramble that’s what that story was essentially about it is when you watch first blood yeah right like that’s essentially what it was about and then they’d then they of course they do them dirty again send them to jail then rambo two they’re like oh wait wait we need that guy again you know let’s go get that guy and then they do them try to do them dirty again see i’m saying that is essentially the story yeah and it’s not and and look there’s plenty of people that come home from war and they get they they’re able to deal with it and they go cool you know what i did what i had to do and now i’m going back to the work and i’m going back to the factory i’m going back to the construction site going back to the to the insurance business that i’m running or that i work at it’s people people do and they also saw different things what did this person see they’ll do different things what did this person do so we got to take all these things into account but like you just pointed out echo the fact that you’re going to take hundreds of thousands of people in world war one in world war ii you can take hundreds of thousands of people and train them to kill and then when it’s over you’re like cool we’re good hey appreciate it see you later and i mean i don’t uh eugene sledge i mean he had a really hard time when he came home from war a really hard time when he came home from war and he still carried on with his normal life i mean actually all those guys did um all those guys that were over over there had a real hard time but there’s also millions of veterans that came home and like they carried on with their life you know i mean um i i i mean i’ve had him on this podcast i mean charlie plum how has he come home from six years of captivity and just like okay cool well you know do you know we’re gonna move on yeah william reader by the way william reader 40 years like stayed in the army for another whatever 38 years doing his job getting a fit rep how do you write a fit rep for for william reader how do you not just say hey sir what look i’m supposed to be in charge of you you tell me what you want to do because you have done more than for the military than i could have ever hoped to have done and i appreciate you sitting here and not like not like beating me up or whatever not not counseling me on what an idiot i am so there’s plenty of people that come home and they they all right now i will say this and charlie plum pointed this out to me their the amount of like post-traumatic stress that the guys that were in the hanoi hilton had was less on average than normal infantrymen and it’s because they had this camaraderie at least that’s what he said at least i think i remember what he said but but they had this camaraderie so it was like hey you know we were all and they had time to process it and and then they got this huge beautiful welcome home [Music] and i mean when i uh it was jim sterlsey i think it was jim sterlsey when he you know he’s lost both legs and his arm and the guys came home from being pows with the white you know with the big reception and he was like hey bro uh i understand you guys were held captive i’m sorry um you know i i got back and just went to a freaking rehab for nine months and then i’m out here with one arm so that probably helped the the guys that were capped captives in in in vietnam as well is that they got a very warm welcome home and as we know a lot of vietnam veterans did not get a warm welcome home and i from what it sounds like here same thing world war one oh the look on their faces physically they’re in good shape mentally they are gone yeah i wrote that down too that that the metaphor that he describes about we take them we have him doing about face and then we have him doing another about face and it’s they can’t do that second one we have them do the second one on their own on their own they can’t do it it’s not unreasonable to think and just i was literally just thinking about what who are you if you’re a 21 22 year old male in 1914 going to world war one who who are you and and it’s it’s not unreasonable to think that they had no idea what war was period what war was and if you think about today like joining the military to your point at least some exposure is accessible to anybody you have some idea what war is you’ve seen platoon you’ve seen full metal jacket you’ve seen save in private ryan you’ve seen apocalypse now you’ve seen all these movies yes and it’s in the national psyche people are talking about it people have been talking about it if you were in world war one and you’re 20 i mean the last yeah there’s historians probably do some math but like this unless you have some connection to the civil war which ended 50 years ago and you’re getting stories from your grandpa you have no idea what war is and then you’re going to world war one where the use of human capital the the use of a human being was was less significant than than any other piece of material that was out there and and today like i i did 23 years in the marine corps i retired like five years like 30 years coming up on my military experience we take excessive sometimes tactically unsound lengths to preserve american lives now obviously we know that doesn’t always work out but we don’t by design waste lives and you can kind of almost count on that like hey there there are no more human waves there’s no hey listen gents have a seat let’s talk about this plan we know we’re all going to get wiped out but we have to go do this like those conversations aren’t really happening and so you kind of know what you’re getting into a little bit at least softens out a little bit you know what war is some idea what the word’s gonna be like i can’t imagine a bigger contrast of being 19 years old hey you’re going to europe like hey where is that okay cool it’s here hey what country is that that’s this country here okay who are we fighting these people over here oh how is this going to work well when you get there we’ll show you okay cool and then and then and then you see world war one yeah the second about face to do on your own yeah it’s gonna be a rough it’s not gonna work out right and he’s now touring the country going yeah and and yeah the frustration is should we probably take a couple of those dollars i mean the sarcasm with which does this so should we take a couple of those dollars and maybe help these folks with that about face these patriots over here making money again and this is just me saying i can appreciate this point of view get where he’s coming get where he’s coming from and this is this is not some coward this is not some um this is not a dude who’s sitting on the sidelines casting judgment this is a guy who who for whatever got back in the this is a guy who can speak you know from a first person point of view certainly can so he gets done talking about that part of the bill and he says that’s a part of the bill so much for the dead they have paid their part of the war profits so much for the mentally and physically wounded they are paying now for their share of the war prophets but others paid too they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of uncle sam on which a prophet had been made they paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in their lives and in their communities they paid for it in the trenches where they were shot at and they were shot where they were hungry for days at a time where they slept in mud and cold and rain with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby but don’t forget the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too up to and including the spanish-american war we had a prize system and soldiers and sailors fought for money during the civil war they were paid bonuses in many instances before they went into service the government or the states paid as high as twelve hundred dollars for an enlistment in the spanish-american war they gave prize money when we captured any vesseled vessels the soldiers all got their share at least they were supposed to then it was found we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it but constricted conscripting the soldiers anyway so just going to the draft then soldiers couldn’t bargain for their labor either everyone else could bargain but the soldier couldn’t napoleon once said all men are enamored of decorations they positively hunger for them so by developing a napoleonic system the metal business the government learned it could get soldiers for less money because the boys liked to be decorated until the civil war there were no medals then the congressional medal of honor was handed out it made enlistments easier after the civil war no new medals were issued until the spanish-american war in the world war we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription they were made to feel ashamed if they didn’t join the army so vicious was this war propaganda that even god was brought into it with a few with few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill kill kill to kill the germans god is on our side it is his will that the german should be killed and in germany the good pastors called upon the germans to kill the allies to please the same god that was part of the general propaganda built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die this was the war to end all wars this was the war to make the world safe for democracy no one mentioned to them as they marched away that their going and dying would mean huge war profits no one told these american soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here no one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with united states patents they were just told it was going to be a glorious adventure thus having stuffed patriotism down their throats it was decided to make them help pay for the war too so we gave them a large salary of 30 a month all they had to do for this magnificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind give up their jobs lie in swampy trenches eat canned willy when they could get it and kill and kill and kill and be killed but wait half that wage just a little more than a river in a shipyard or a labor and a munitions factory safe at home made in a day half that wage was promptly taken from him to support his dependents so that he would not become a charge upon his community then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance something the employer pays for an enlightened state and that cost him about six dollars a month he had less than nine dollars a month left then the most crowning insolence of all he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition clothing and food by being made by being made to buy liberty bonds most soldiers got no money at all on paydays we made them buy back but we made them buy liberty bonds for a hundred dollars and then we bought them back when they came back from the war and couldn’t find work at 84 86 and the soldiers brought about about two billion dollars worth of these bonds yes the soldier pays the greater part of the bill his family pays to they paid in the same heartbreak that he does as he suffers they suffer at nights as he lay in the trenches and watch shrapnel burst about him they lay home in their beds and toss sleeplessly his father his mother his wife his sisters his brothers his sons and his daughters when he returned home minus an eye or minus a leg or with his mind broken they suffered too as much and sometimes even more than he yes and they too contributed their dollars to the profits of the munition makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made they too bought liberty bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the armistice in the hocus post pocus of manipulated liberty bond prices and even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who were never able to readjust themselves are still suffering and pain fact check i’m gonna go ahead and say truth so what’s going on chapter four how to smash this racket well it’s a racket all right a few profit and the many pay but there is a way to stop it you can’t end it by a disarmament conference you can’t eliminate it by peace parleza geneva well-meaning but impractical groups can’t wipe it out by resolutions it can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war the only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before nations manhood can be conscripted and there’s just an interesting thing i got to point out when he talks about capital industry and labor he’s talking about those groups of people and i’m not going to change it would be saying like the capitalists and the industrialists and the and the labor force you you could say that but that’s what he there’s the words he uses his capital industry he’s talking about those people one month before the government can conscript the young men of the nation it must conscript capital and industry and labor let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and munition makers and our shipbuilders and airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit and wartime as well as the bankers and the speculators be conscripted to get 30 a month the same wage as the lads and the trenches get but the workers in these plants get the same wages all the workers all presidents all executives all directors all managers all bankers yes and all generals and admirals and officers and all politicians and all government officer office holders everyone in the nation can be restricted to a total monthly income not to be not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly thirty dollar wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy liberty bonds why shouldn’t they they aren’t running the risk of being killed or having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered they aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches they aren’t hungry the soldiers are give capital and industry and labor 30 days to think it over and you will find by that time there will be no war that will smash the racket that and nothing else maybe i’m a little too optimistic capital still has some say so capital won’t permit the taking of profit out of war until the people those who do the suffering and still pay the price make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding and not that of the profiteers you know so here you get to like a a kind of a um an argument you know that’s like hyperbole right hey what you need to do is first just if you’re going to go and and if you know no one will argue with it because it makes sense but it’s just it’s it’s just an unrealistic thing to think about um unfortunately guys we all get the idea yep you want to go you want to go to war cool and he’s the interesting he’s not even talking about them going to war he’s just talking about you just get the pay for and he’s only talking about for 30 days he’s only talking about 30 years 30 days you know you’re the ceo of a of a defense company for 30 days you’re gonna get this pay i actually don’t think that’s enough right now i think it’d have to be a lot more you know you always hear that and actually when when you when you read about the vietnam war one of the things that really started to turn the tide of the american public against the vietnam war was the draft because all of a sudden it wasn’t just you know the the freaking poor redneck from west virginia or the inner city black kid from harlem that was getting shipped off the water all of a sudden it was like oh you’re in a you’re from wherever and you’re your dad is a lawyer your dad is a judge your dad is a business owner and you got a bunch of money and guess what yep yeah load up load up on the bus because it’s time to go get some and that star as that expanded and normal richer people started going to war it was like the rich kids the rich parents started sending their kids off to work that’s a problem and that’s one of the things that started to push the the the resistance against the vietnam war because when it was just hey we’re sending a bunch of damn poor people hey cool whatever that’s not my kid my kid’s not my kid’s going to freaking uh uh college next year he’s not going to boot camp he’s not going to nom so i don’t care yeah it seems like a great idea let’s stop communism over there until little johnny gets freaking called up and then they’re like oh maybe not so i would say from that perspective that’s that that’s a good assessment realistic assessment that if you start saying oh yeah you want to said do you want to send america to war cool your kid goes people start changing their freaking minds real quick factually he doesn’t stop there he’s got another step another step which is funny because he he starts off by saying this is the only thing you need to do but he does have another step another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is limited a limited placee plebiscite sorry plebiscite which is a plebiscite is is a direct vote like it’s just a vote plebiscite another step necessary in this war in this fight to smash the war rocket is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared a plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying there wouldn’t be very much sense in having a 76 year old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manual manufacturing plant all of whom see see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war voting on whether the nation should go to war or not they never would be called upon to shoulder arms to sleep in the trench and to be shot only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war there is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote in most it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote in some you must own property it would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the world war and be physically examined those who could pass and who were there for to be who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of a war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite they should be the ones to have the power to decide and not a congress few of those few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in the physical condition to bear arms only those who must suffer should have the right to vote there you go and as i said in vietnam that kind of worked people said um not johnny and he said there was one step that he’s introduced to here’s the third one a third step in this business of smashing war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly for forces for defense only at each session of congress the question whether a whether further naval appropriations comes up the swivel chair admirals of washington and there are always a lot of them are very adroit lobbyists and they are smart they don’t shout that we need a lot of battleships we need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation nation oh no first of all they let it be known that america is menaced by a great naval power almost any day these admirals will tell you the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125 million people just like that then they begin to cry for a larger navy for what to fight the enemy oh my no oh no for defense purposes only then incidentally they announced maneuvers in the pacific for defense uh-huh the pacific is a great big ocean we have tremendous coastline on the pacific will the maneuvers be off the coast two or three hundred miles oh no the maneuvers will be 2 000 yes perhaps even 3 500 miles off the coast the japanese a proud people of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united states fleet so close to nippon’s shores even as pleased as would be the residents of california where they’d dimly discern through the morning mist the japanese fleet playing at war games off los angeles the ships of our navy can be seen should specifically limited by law should be specifically limited by law to within 200 miles of our coastline had that been the law of 1898 the maine never would have gone to havana harbor she never would have been blown up there never would have been no war with spain with the attendant loss of life 200 miles is ample in the opinion of experts for defense purposes our nation cannot start offense an offensive war if it is ships can’t go further than 200 miles off the coastline planes might be permitted to go 500 miles from the coast for the purpose of reconnaissance and the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation to summarize three steps must be taken to smash the war rocket one we must take the profit out of war two we must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war and three we must limit our military forces to home defense purposes again um not a great strategic plan to sit back and like just stay in your own ao you want to project power a little bit you have to piss people off but you definitely want to project some power out there what are you writing down dave i’m just summarizing what he said i’m just trying i’m spending this all this time just trying to appreciate what he’s saying because obviously and i’m gonna wait you know i know there’s a couple more things to read here i’m gonna i’m gonna wait to the conclusion but i spent a lot of time in my own brain saying i hear what you’re saying i hear what you’re saying well this is a but there’s a yeah well this is the thing that we have to do that’s like what the whole start of this thing hey hey listen man we just spent a trillion dollars totally man in a 20-year war and when we got there the taliban was in control of whatever percentage of the of the country and now we left and they’re now going to control 100 percent of the country totally we spend a trillion dollars we have thousands of lost lives we have thousands more wounded maimed for life yeah and and and you have to at least open your mind and say okay what’s this guy talking about yeah what was he talking about because like you said this isn’t some armchair quarterback this is a guy that fought chapter five to hell with war um i am not as full to believe that war is a thing of the past i know the people do not want war but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war looking back woodrow wilson was realistic re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had quote kept us out of war and quote and on the implied promise that he would quote keep us out of war yet five months later he asked congress to declare war on germany in that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds the four million young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth and to suffer and die then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly money an allied commission it may be recalled came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the president the president summoned a group of advisers the head of the commission spoke stripped of its diplomatic language this is what he told the president and his group there’s no use in kidding ourselves any longer the cause of the allies is lost we now owe you american bankers american munition banker makers american manufacturers american speculators american exporters five or six billion dollars if we lose and without the help of the united states we will use we england france italy cannot pay back this money and germany won’t so end quote had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned and had the press been invited to be present at that conference or had the radio been available to broadcast the precedings america never would have entered the world war but this conference like all war discussions was shouted in utmost secrecy when our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a quote war to make the world safe for democracy and a war to end all wars well 18 years after the world has less of democracy than it had besides what business is it of ours whether russia or germany or england or france or italy or austria live under democracies or monarchies whether they are fascists or communists our problem is to to preserve our own democracy and very little if anything has been accomplished to assure us that the world war was really the war to end all wars yes we have disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences they don’t mean a thing one has just failed the results of another have been nullified we send our professional soldiers and sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences and what happens the professional soldiers and sailors don’t want to disarm no admiral wants to be without a ship no general wants to be without a command both mean men both mean men without jobs they are not for disarmament they cannot be for limitations of arms and at all these conferences lurking in the background but all powerful just the same are the sinister agents who profit by war they see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments the chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential flow foe i i remember having this thought when you and i were in the battle of ramadi and that thought was how freaking awesome the u s military was and how much of that awesomeness relied on these individual human beings that were making things happen because when you look at the operations that were taking place when you look at the effort that was put forth it was literally platoon commanders company commanders battalion commanders brigade commander that was that was through force of will making things happen making things happen you could if if if the brigade commander didn’t really care and just wanted to kind of do a deployment get it under his belt and just like uh yeah i did my deployment if he didn’t care if he didn’t want to do good we wouldn’t have done anything yeah right the battalion commander that’s going to push into an area of operations that hasn’t been pushed there is individual effort and here’s what’s scary is look in the battle of ramadi we were trying to we’re trying to stabilize and secure the city of ramadi if there’s no goal like that a clearly defined goal and you have people that are trying to do make their best individual effort to make their mark to leave their mark to do something to get a good fit rep what are you going to do you’re going to say well we’re going to do this we’re going to do that we’re going to expand we’re going to grow more i need more people this idea that there’s no real competing competing um asset or competing competing uh perspective of someone saying hey wait a second what are you actually doing over there i mean if let’s say you went you were you were in the marine corps and you were supposed to train iraqi soldiers and i do turn over with you and you say yup hey jocko we trained 100 iraqi soldiers and i go that’s great how many iraqi soldiers do you think i’m going to train how many think 101 at least 101 at least 101 yeah i’m gonna do more than you totally i’m gonna do more new i remember this is back in the day i remember going out on a workups with the with the fleet and you could see i did a work up with the fleet that was i wasn’t i wasn’t embarked but we did some work with the marines then my next deployment i did a full workup with the marines then the next one i did another full workup with the marines so i did basically saw three workups in a row with the marines and each one of them was a little bit more each workup was a little bit more sure hey oh yeah you guys did you guys did four amphibious landings oh yeah i’m gonna do five we did five yeah oh what about the next one with the next guys doing six this is real yeah i had similar experience and even in training uh you know classic yeah a hundred percent 100 so when you get so that that just reminds me of what we’re talking about here which is no admiral goes you know what i think we need less ships the amount of admirals that say that is zero total the amount of generals that say i need less divisions i need less brigades i need less battalions the number of generals that say that is zero or you know sure are there some i’m sure there are but the vast majority and those those few that say well i think we need less ships he’s not getting he’s definitely not getting promoted he’s not gonna be the cno yeah he’s definitely not gonna be the cno hey i’m the guy that downsized the navy promote me it’s not happening right it’s not happening hey i got us less brigades less combat brigades good job yeah let’s promote you no one says that so you have this self-fulfilling prophecy and this self-licking ice cream cone which is a term i understand what it means but i’m not exactly sure you know where it came from right but that’s what you have right is we want to have more and that’s exactly what he’s talking about here there was no one there was very few people that would come back and say hey uh yeah the iraqi soldiers we had to do it in ramadi we had to say these guys are not ready yet because it was it was so obvious what would happen if we just sent them out on their own and they tried i mean remember they turned over like some of the checkpoints like two nine or five and uh they turned it over and and two days later the insurgents hit it and overrun it uh ecp3 down there by on the bridge same thing turned it over to the iraqis hey these guys are ready you know it’s like actually no they weren’t ready and they got annihilated so there wasn’t really the the opportunity for us to be like well yeah the iraqi troops that we are trained are now 100 what they call it what they call it they’re ready for unilateral operations right i didn’t send up a message saying yep our iraqis that we’ve been training for six months are now ready for unilateral operations even though that was what everybody wanted us to say but we couldn’t say it there because you would find out on their first operation that there is no possible way they were ready but if we would have been a more permissive environment the pressure to say yeah hey they can conduct unilateral and unilateral operations the pressure would have been so great because otherwise be like hey jocko the last the last task unit commander that’s out here has you know he trained up four platoon special mission unit elements that are now that were now ready to perform unilateral operations what did you do i’d be like well actually i don’t think those four are even capable and we should downgrade them well what’s wrong with you jocko the last task unit commander was able to is why couldn’t you do that so you have felt that pressure and a lot of times people break to that pressure i mean obviously i think that happened a lot in afghanistan yeah hey we trained these guys for six months and who says yeah we train somebody for six months they’re not capable we train them for a year they’re not capable it’s difficult it’s a difficult thing to do it’s also difficult to assess so i think you get this that’s what he’s talking about here there’s no no admiral wants to be without a ship no general wants to be out of command so what do they do they want more there’s only one way back to the book there’s only one way to disarm any semblance of practicability that is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship every gun every rifle every tank every warplane even this if it were possible would not be enough the next war according to experts will not be fought with battleships not by artillery not with rifles and not with machine guns but it will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its full its foes wholesale yes ships will continue to be built for the shipbuilders must make their profits and guns will still be manufactured manufactured and powder and rifles will be made for the munitions makers must make their huge profits and the soldiers of course must wear uniforms for the manufacturer must make their war profits too but victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists if we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples by putting them to this useful job we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war even the munitions makers so i say to hell with war and that’s the end of it um again you know he’s he’s in the end you know kind of uh got the fantasy got the fantasy argument of hey can’t we just have people working on good to have the scientists working on good stuff instead of evil stuff and like yeah cool like so it’s it’s such an extreme argument that people go oh he’s he’s just crazy right and let’s throw this whole book out um but if we’re to actually listen to what he’s saying and maybe put some of it in the crazy pot and put some of it in the just factual pot and then some of it is debatable like okay what does that actually mean how does that apply today i think it’s i think it’s very important for us to do that i i was recently on russell brand’s podcast and the thing is it’s behind a pay wall is that right yes sir okay a firewall it’s behind the paywall and so russell brand if you don’t know who he is he’s uh a guy from england super nice guy very funny guy he’s he’s originally a comedian kind of a movie comedian yeah kind of and a performer as well so he does aka aldis snow what’s this now all this snow that’s his other alias oh really yeah that’s like his character you know and what’s that guy supposed to be like a singer really yeah get him to the greek uh forgetting sarah marshall look into it that’s who russell brand is okay he’s a man so it was he he’s an actor too yes sir super nice guy um and he asked me to be on his podcast and it was pretty it’s pretty cool because he started off the podcast he was saying like he was being real complimentary of me and like and and and just being nice you know this guy you know he he thanked me for my service and and you know he he he said i did great bunch of great stuff and and real complimentary nice and and i kind of said hey man i appreciate it i said bro i’m not like this i’m not a rare uh hero from the military i said i had a kind of average career um and then he goes well you know i just wanted to say that because i want you to know that i respect the military but because i want to set that up properly because i also have like some issues and i’m going to probably go he didn’t use the term hard in the paint because he’s from england but he basically meant i’m gonna go hard in the paint on some topics and then i said well hey you should then know that even though i spent my adult life in the military i was also like a hardcore kid growing up listening to heavy metal playing in bands i’m a rebellious kid i listen to punk rock and heavy metal and so you should just know that too that even though i because he he also mentioned that he’s like as i look like a hippie and i was like because i know i look like a the most military human that you could imagine that’s true yeah that i also know that you know you should know that i’m kind of a rebel and that as well and so then we had a little laughing um so so eventually you know we get to we start having the conversation and then he posed this kind of two questions and they were somehow paired up or they were somehow there was like a semicolon between them meaning they were attached they weren’t quite separate but they were still attached but they were they were a little bit separate so the one of them was like isn’t war driven by the profitability of the military-industrial complex that was kind of questionable number one and then similar question isn’t capitalism and and businesses and corporations aren’t they simply driven by the profitability for the rich owners and shareholders so that was kind of the question aren’t these two major forces in the world the military and the corporate world aren’t they just driven by greed essentially and then i answered him and i you know my answer was well russell the answer is yes and i think i think he was a little bit taken aback by that answer but the fact of the matter is it’s true that profits certainly drive corporations to do things to to make products and defense companies certainly get rich during wars as we just heard from smedley butler those are totally true totally true and just like smedley butler like you and i were saying dave that that’s like one part of the argument that’s not the only driver that’s not the only driver and i mean for the corporate example i’ve worked with hundreds of companies and dave you’ve worked with hundreds companies and the companies make money they make a lot of money and they are certainly driven by profits in some way but they’re also making products that people want and they’re making products that people need and they’re employing people and they’re making products that make people’s lives better that’s what’s happening in in the vast majority of cases no better example than medical device companies pharmaceutical companies and i’ve worked with scores of medical device companies i’ve worked with scores of pharmaceutical companies over the last decade and some of those companies that i’ve worked with that you’ve worked with dave some of those companies make hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in profit billions of dollars in profit and so you could say to yourself well that’s what’s driving them just to want to make money but i have also seen and met their patients along the way you go to event and they got a a man or a woman or a ch a child a little boy or a little girl and the only reason that that child is still alive is because of this device that that company makes or this drug that this company makes that’s that’s that’s why they are on stage they will present and they’ll get these people up there and say thank you and those patients who are only alive because of these companies are grateful to be alive and they are overjoyed that those capitalist doctors were greedy enough right to take the risk and invest money and push hard and toil and do the work to create products that actually saved people’s lives and the same thing the same thing can be said for war the same thing can be said for war and i have participated in wars that made some defense companies tons of money you know i said i said this russell brand something along the lines of like listen i could be talking to my platoon and say all right guys here’s what’s going on tonight we’re going to go out we’re going to risk our lives and i just want to let you know that every round that you fire is going to put 12 cents into the pockets of the wartime profiteers right and that would actually be true because that is true those those rounds cost money and those defense companies make money from those things but i also know what happens on the ground dave you know what happens on the ground i know i know that we help people the people on the ground i know that we killed evil terrorists and insurgents that systematically tortured and raped and murdered the innocent local populace i know that we did that i know that we were able to protect children from these insurgents from these terrorists i know we were able to protect families i know that those families wanted these insurgents out of their city and out of their country and so while there were defense companies certainly making money there was a simultaneous good that was taking place then we took lives but we also saved lives and that’s the truth enriching global corporations and enriching the military-industrial complex that enrichment certainly influences behaviors right it influences someone that’s making a weapon system to try and make their weapon system better to try and make better body armor there’s a there’s someone right now as we speak that is trying to make better body armor and part of the reason they’re trying to make it is to protect the american soldier but guess what they got a mortgage to pay and they want to make better better body armor because they want to make more money and if they can make better body armor then the us government goes wow that’s lighter it’s stronger it provides more protection we’re gonna buy it it’s not that the person is just thinking about money but the money the the the two goals are aligned there’s a simultaneous drive that is that is moving behavior in the right direction and often times like i just use that example body armor they’re aligned with this company out there acme body armor they want to make best body armor and they want to make it do they want to protect americans yes they do do they want to make money yes they do so i have no problem with that if they’re aligned it works out perfectly here’s the problem the problem is if they’re out of alignment that’s where it can become awful and that’s what we need to watch out for what is the driving force behind going to war are we going to works is the right thing to do are we going to war for benevolent reasons are we positive that it will have a a positive impact that will offset the natural negative impacts of war because when you go on a war there’s going to be negative impacts people are going to die people are going to get wounded and is the positive impact going to offset that negative impact is it going to help stability in the world is there a strategic benefit for us as america if we’re going to war for those reasons because there’s going to be a strategic advantage because it protects our national security because it’s going to be truly good for the people on the ground that need protection that need help to get out from a tyrannical a tyrannical regime or an evil regime and there are evil regimes and if you don’t think there’s evil regimes you’re wrong because there’s people in the world there’s regimes in the world that will systematically rape little kids so if we’re going to war for those reasons okay it’s we can consider it if the primary driver of going to war is to make money if it’s the profit if it’s to sell more guns and bombs if it’s not going to stabilize the world if it doesn’t help us protect our national security if it’s going to be a strategic defeat then we’re wrong and and can there be alignment by these two drivers yes they absolutely can i don’t mind i don’t mind someone making great body armor making money off i don’t make i don’t mind somebody making a great weapon system that makes a bunch of money and it helps us win a war i have no problem with that at all but if these things aren’t aligned and we’re fighting for money or we’re fighting for profit and we’re not getting positive impact and we’re not getting strategic benefit well then we need to listen to major general smedley butler and say to hell with what that’s what i’m thinking dave um i’m with you i was thinking of a story as you as you said that i i don’t even remember why i was in the pentagon but i was in the pentagon for something and it was maybe like i was just taking over this f-35 job and had to go meet somebody in the pentagon whatever dave came up to the pentagon and talked to some general i literally walked through the halls of the pentagon and i run into who is an old battalion commander that i work with who is now i happen to be a one star just literally walked into him in a in a waiting room of some office somewhere waiting for some meeting and we bumped into each other and he was there with a couple people from a company in industry so civilians in the industry and he was there to show the technology of a helmet that they designed to stop a 762 caliber sniper rifle a helmet light enough but strong enough to stop a sniper rifle and for those of you who are listening that don’t know the story of and i’ve talked in general terms about my radio operator chris leon who was on my team the first angle marine killed my radio operator was killed in ramadi the first angle marine killed in iraq was my ready operator was shot and killed by a sniper that pierced his helmet went right through the temple of his helmet and killed him was i on board with this company making profit making money off the american taxpayer to design a helmet that would somehow have prevented what happened or at least can prevent what might happen in the future yes i’m on board that plan i’m on board with that plan and i support that plan and i want that plan to not only make them money but make enough money to continue to build even better technology grow their company and be a positive force for whatever may happen so i am i am totally on board with that idea and this idea of alignment and while where i struggled especially towards the end listening to him talk you reading his words was i think a trap that is so easy to fall into is that we describe it as the government or industry or the military one of the things that i’ve learned in in our current job is that these are actually people they’re people the the military is just people and generals and admirals are regular people and you know what there are some really good ones and there are some not so good ones and people in the government i know classmates of mine that are that work in the government and you know what they try to do most of the time every day the right thing they try to do the right thing do they always do the right thing no are there forces at play that make it difficult of course but when you fall into this trap of like oh it’s the government it’s really easy to create a narrative by which their only goal is to somehow whether it’s lying their pockets or whatever that might be is we lose sight of the fact that most of the mechanics that are going on inside industry these companies we work with are regular people trying to do the right thing even for the most part of my experience at the highest levels we work with ceos of multi-billion dollar companies and what you get to know is that for the most part for the most part they’re people trying to do the right thing are they trying to make money yes because for a whole host of good reasons they want to pay their bills they want to pay their people they want to grow they want to expand they want to build brighter products that are safer they can reach more all these things and i’m not naive and i don’t want people to think the exact opposite was like everybody’s just altruistic in it for the for the big no that’s not the case but there’s a trap that we can fall into which was there’s this this thing the industry well if it’s just the industry then yeah it’s easy to paint them as as this this thing that’s not a real thing it’s not a person it’s not a human being and what this thing wants is to just soak up dollar bills or waste human life to get to their end state with no regard for that and and that is a a that is a trap that i think it’s easy to fall into and you can hear his words like hey hang on a second just hang on who is this company who are these industries or governments or whatever these things we’re talking about most of the time most of the time there are people trying to do the right thing that’s what they are most of the time yeah uh you know what survivor biases yes yeah do you know what it is i think so it’s like um if you go out and you talk to 10 people that started companies and you say you know hey how hard was it to start your company they’re all like yeah it was pretty easy man you know i got it going you’re not talking to the 90 other people that failed so you get this survivor bias we at echelon front probably have a little bit of echelon front bias which is we mo the companies that we work with they’ve read extreme ownership they’re in the game they listen to podcasts like these these are companies that have a a good sort of fundamental value system so we we kind of have a little bit of that bias because you’re right the amount of companies that we’ve worked with where i’ve said wow this guy is going to put this product out there that’s harmful or this guy or this woman is making a decision that’s going to cause their employees to suffer it doesn’t happen now are the companies like that yes there are and and but i would tell you same thing even though even with even if you take into account the ef bias the echelon front bias which is that most people that we work with have a good value system even with that accounted for most companies these days you have to have a good value system you have to be doing the right thing because there’s just too much information out there and a damn yelp review i mean on the like the the base level hey if you run a restaurant and you treat your employees or your customers bad a yelp review now you go big and you run into you know the wall street journal is doing an expose on what you did to maximize profits while you hurt your you know your your employees or your clients or whatever so so the even in cases where you have people that might not be the most altruistic people yeah the reality of modern technology keeps on keeps the vast majority of them in check yes so that’s true the other thing is look there’s going to be these two these two things they create a nice positive natural tension that’s what we want we want to have someone saying like hey yeah if you guys go to war we want you have the best gear that’s good and the other the the the business should be saying hey if we want you to go to war we want you have the best gear and the general should be saying yeah we don’t want to go to war but if we do we want the best gear there’s a little tension these guys might want to go to war more these guys might not but there there should be a natural tension and i think what we have to watch out for is when there’s no when people lose that when there’s no tension when there’s no one saying hey you know you know you know i just want you to think about something if we go to war it’s johnny over here that’s going to get killed that’s going to lose his legs whatever the case may be that’s what we never that’s what we need to make sure people think about i know this goes back to one of the f actually i think it might have been the first like ever thing that i got recorded saying was when we did the the war fighters thing for the history channel about mark lee and i’ve repeated this on a bunch of occasions how do you know when it’s time to go to war and the the it’s time when you are willing you when you are willing you have the will but it’s the will to die and it’s the will to kill and that’s what’s going to happen your war so you need to put that overlay on this yeah and if you ever forget about that overlay that you think well you know this is worth it because it’s gonna be beneficial okay oh cool it’s gonna be beneficial to the people there do you know that we’re gonna kill some of the people there not just the enemy but some of the people that are there are going to die because of us and we’re going to have our own people killed that’s what we need to think about we can never lose that tension and and i think that that tension does get lost i think that the people that that hold up their hand say hello wait a second what are we doing here and and part of the reason is because what is it there’s a saying old men want to go to war and young men do too i mean you know it’s that’s the thing you survey freaking 19 year old kids that are in the marine corps and you ask them how many people how many you want to go to war there’s a big percentage that’s coming through in the affirmative and that’s the coolest part about the comment about that tension which is i mean that’s actually the tension that you want is i want i actually want marines that want to go to 100 that’s what i want i want reasons i want to go to war and do i love the idea of world peace yes i love that idea i love that idea that idea is not going to happen today or tomorrow it’s not going to happen and is as much as i love the fantasy of this the the simple things we need to do to to achieve that the the the tension is you know with that reality too is that hey not only is that not likely there are people that actively do not want that actively do not want that and you know he i was he was talking about he you know the next step is we’re gonna see war uh with chemicals and and he was sort of foreshadowing what then and he was correct obviously you know we we know that there was you know some of those things he saw that at world war ii with chemical warfare and he was foreshadowing this ever-growing capacity for people to wage war against each other in these awful awful ways well you know you could get rid of all the weapons in the world and there’s people waging war with computers now so this this this persistence of the reality with some of the nefarious things and the profiteers that might be out there there’s a reality out there that we also need to accept and face and i want to be around people that want to do that i want to be around those people and i want marines i want marines that have that exact same feeling and yes do you want to manage that and temper that and guide that and shape it yes all those things but i want to be around those people and i think that that tension that you talked about that natural tension because those two things exist in the world and to pretend like they don’t is is not a good plan yeah i don’t know what the percentage of people uh let’s say you let’s say you did what they said if you take the young men that are going to have to go to war and they get to vote i almost feel i almost don’t feel super comfortable with that because i think a lot of them would be like oh yeah it’s on here’s my chance yeah it’s on but but i’m not sure that’s also my own warped that’s sort of the jocko bias which is i think everyone’s kind of thinks like me which i know it’s not true there’s also a chance that i’m wrong and a bunch of people would say no matter what was happening in the world they’d be like no we’re not going to war right you know what i mean so you got to have somebody with a detached perspective yeah that’s actually saying you know what now is not the time to go to war or a detached perspective and say hey we’re looking at this whole thing we see nazis we see them running rough shot all over we need to do something about this and you described it again i i the you know whether you call it the tension or or this idea hey when you’ve got some skin in the game when it’s not johnny it’s your johnny when you’re talking about who’s going to war yeah i love that idea of oh you talking about me now okay hang on let me let me put some thought into it because in the end the answer actually might still be yeah i’m going to send my son off to war but i’m certainly going to think about it a lot harder the closer it is to me and i mean that’s been the challenge in society forever which was do we want to insulate our people for more yeah we do i want i want to insulate america from war and you could look at we talked about afghanistan are there some good things that come out of that yeah absolutely and if you insulate them so much if you if you remove them so much that they don’t even understand what really is happening those decisions actually aren’t the best decisions because what do they care right yeah sure it’s a great idea go go go to war um doesn’t affect me at all i don’t want a society that has no no impact on that either and even inside that you talk about that tension of i want to keep [Music] i want to separate us from that as much as possible but if not but not so much they don’t understand what it actually what that really means to send somebody off to war we were just talking an hour ago when these people went to world war one didn’t even know what they were doing they even know what it meant to send someone to war and there’s just no way yeah there’s some some great things with technology and if you’re doing something for the wrong reason it’s pretty it’s it’s much harder to hide that now than it ever used to be if your industrial plan or your company plan is really nefarious you’re you’re running the risk of getting found out there’s just too much information that’s free out there it’s really hard to keep those secrets anymore but sending somebody off to world war one do you think anybody really knew what that meant no no and do i do you think they should know a little bit yeah i see his point it’s your kid going you might think twice before you you send him but just like you said too there are actually times so you’re gonna say yeah because the alternative that’s not acceptable well definitely um i think the lesson here is keep your minds open and listen and try and understand these various perspectives that are out there because i bet there’s a bunch of people that hear this and they go well that guy was a traitor or whatever they’re gonna say yeah or say hell yeah it’s it’s just that’s what makes it so interesting because you can’t call a guy that did what he did in his life a traitor and what we should actually do is listen that’s what we should do with an open mind with an open mind goes a long way yeah with that echo charles yes sir so we’re trying to keep our minds open but we’re also trying to keep our mind sharp yes sir keep the sharp minds got to keep the the vessel that the mind is contained in got to keep that kind of up and running sure concur the brain well yeah no well the brain the brain is in the body sure the skull more specifically more specifically yup see look at you i’m trying oh very creative to my comments there was there was a there was a part in there where he was he was kind of going hard you know exposing all these prophets and all this stuff and it makes sense man so and you can kind of get a taste of his emotional state right it makes sense but also you got to say hey man if i was having to fight the freaking nazis how happy am i that i have some american steel manufacturer that is staying awake 24 hours a day you ever seen that when they used to build those liberty ships you know what i’m talking about dave these big liberty ships that were used to transport stuff back across back and forth across the atlantic ocean they were making them in a day a freaking whole ship bro this is impossible and america was doing it in a day now if i was over there on the front lines and i needed some more ammunition i would be so damn happy and i would be more than happy that people are making a bunch of money did the profits get a little bit extreme maybe they got a little extreme yeah so in in that that’s kind of the point there where you can kind of he goes hard in like both directions and you’re like oh man i see i especially when he’s talking about the waist you know like the ships that don’t even run and it’s like no we’re still paying the bill and it’s like and then meanwhile you know from his perspective he sees all the all the downside of war right hardcore and then he kind of sees and he looks and he sees all these numbers all these dollar signs that go to other people or whatever who are making shitty ships and all this stuff oh man i get it but he went a little bit too hard in a bun even in these little subtle ways extreme extreme so he goes makes you shut him out about that a little bit yes and and i was trying to stay like with you guys were like okay get it no no maybe not man but there was a party he was talking about the boots right he was like oh they made all these boots and like all this stuff or whatever and i’m so thinking wait that’s the we kind of need those boots but we only had four million soldiers and we bought 25 million boots yes okay and then that part it’s like okay yes as far as the waste goes 100 that’s gonna apply across the board um and then he he went on to even add like oh those were good boots yeah yeah yeah i was like yeah we need those boots yeah but we wasted of course of course we don’t need the waste that’s true same thing with the ships and all that stuff but so you could tell like all you got to do is kind of detach from like that very specific perspective just a little bit and you’re like okay this guy might not be getting it you know in certain ways well i i don’t think that’s a great example because you can also say hey he gets it these are boots we need boots they’re good boots they’re probably lasting for a long time we didn’t need 25 million pairs bro yeah that’s true yeah so he he’s getting it where he loses it is just saying that that’s the only reason that they’re doing anything right and that’s what i mean where and because that’s it seemed like it put it this way it seemed like he was going hard in that direction it’s like that’s what he kind of wanted you to think yeah it’s it also shows you that the you know you have a government organization that’s running things and it’s not your money yeah yeah you’re gonna get fraud waste and abuse yeah that means a big way that’s why that’s why it’s usually better to have a little bit less government control over things yeah that’s so to keep things as decentralized as possible and i know i covered a little bit of uh of uh thomas saul’s book i think i don’t even know if i even got to it it was i don’t think you were on the podcast was with jordan peterson but he got this little section where he just talks about how freaking hard it is to like control price you just you can’t you can’t do it you can’t control price has to do with the pelts of some animal there’s a worth a certain amount and then he goes through how hard it is to control the price and then he says and by the way there’s whatever 1 2 billion products or line items that you need to control the price of it’s impossible you got to let the free market work a little bit and that’s where you run into problems where you have the free market brush up against the government the government uh checkbook yeah and they’re like yeah we can make you probably need 25 million boots how many soldiers you got four million they need yeah sign here so yeah that’s true huh cause you know like when you get with the old thing the irresponsible person with the crew when they first get a credit card kind of feels like oh it’s not my money right so then they overspend they can’t pay that kind of stuff so it’s like like it makes sense that phenomenon does make sense people will spend their other people’s money like crazy yeah they do it all the time that’s what the government does the government spends other people’s money all the time you know do we need to spend some money yeah yeah but if you looked at it from like a household perspective if this if this either this state we’re in california or this country if you looked at it from that standpoint of hey our budget you know we make hey look here’s here’s hey you know hey darling wife we make five thousand dollars a month that’s how much income we bring in um we’re gonna buy a car that’s gonna cost us two thousand dollars a month and we’re gonna rent a uh uh an apartment that’s gonna cost us four thousand dollars a month and then we’re gonna go out to eat every night that total is gonna be seven thousand dollars a month you can figure out real quick like oh i’m in the hole this is the credit card problem yeah so but if it’s not our money yeah we’re kind of like hey we’ll go into debt a little bit it’s all good watch out man yeah just gotta be careful with this stuff yeah all right what do we got so speaking of be being careful i like it we gotta be careful with what we put in our bodies especially on this path about this hard dave burke i’m saying it’s hard it’s not always easy it’s fun it can be fun from time to time okay especially when you’re collecting those long-term gains see i’m saying capability cognitive enhancement smarts all that stuff better decision making too either way when we’re on this path we want to stay healthy stay ahead of the game health wise dave i notice you’re drinking the mango discipline good choice you could have drank the orange you could have but i have a little bit of a love hate relationship with the mango i understand fully so discipline go that’s what this is that’s what we’re talking about here it’s a healthy healthy energy drink yep it’s a big deal most times the energy drink as we know them or as we knew you know where i’m going to go with this right now where are you going well we were talking earlier about the fact that hey most companies are out there trying to do the right thing and guess what we have we have some companies that are out there saying oh you know what if i can cut the cost of my product by a little bit add some chemicals to it that are a little bit cheaper give people an addictive thing called sugar and they’ll just buy more of it cool so we got our example now we got some nefarious companies out there making poison and feeding it to people it’s kind of a spectrum to and consider i’m not just saying necessarily energy drinks or whatever but like in general especially when it comes to stuff that you eat or put in your body whatever because you’re dealing with two different forces there yeah you know what bothers me about that though is this like is the attitude like yeah but that’s what people want right that’s what i’m saying there’s two different forces and that’s not a good that that’s that’s what people want that doesn’t mean you can’t just make adjustments to give them what they want and not give them poison hey some people want crack some people aren’t straight up some people want vodka straight up mainstream some people want is vodka good it’s about good good no kind of hard to make that argument on you know on many many levels either way i dig what you’re saying but guess what we don’t have to worry about that kind of stuff anymore we are not a nefarious company negative we are making the clean the clean energy drinking energy drink both uh win-win upside short-term upside long-term in many ways too by the way there’s electrolytes in this one yeah yeah imagine just being saying oh yeah you want to try something all upside oh how often do you get that in life yeah hey you hear something all upside yeah and as far as like the mango flavor it’s like really upside yeah especially okay insane as compared to other flavors which is just normal upside which i understand of course either way if you want if you want to take part in this energy drink rather than the poisonous snacks i’m starting to go down the path now now we’re talking about nefarious companies i’m going straight to the clothing manufacturer’s necks that are out there cutting the corners and saying oh we’ll just get this made in china we got slave labor over there yeah we got the uyghurs over there in actual slave labor camps making you’re making your shorts how’s that feel doesn’t it feel good no i don’t feel good about it i don’t feel good about either that’s why you know what i don’t get i don’t get shorts that are made in china yeah i dig it man i dig it but back to the energy drinks okay you want to stick with those for mental and physical enhancements enhancer capability also uh you can get stuff to to take you out of any kind of roadblocks or speed bumps in recovery we got protein we got stuff for your joints we got stuff for you immunity we also got protein but you could actually just call it dessert yes another one of those i almost had an emergency the other day i thought i ran out of peanut butter yeah wait peanut butter flavored milk peanut butter peanut butter flavored milk yeah but then it was in the back of the caps but i was like speaking of crack yeah i look like a crack crack cocaine addict yeah yeah yeah yeah i was one of my daughters just like went ham on the peanut butter yeah makes sense yeah and it was just like downtown i got you know half a scoop which is not going to get you through the moment right you uh you mentioned your daughter and they’re older your kids are older i’m kind of young where i play tricks on them where they’re not tricks it’s a strategy you see i’m saying so i don’t give them mulk when they want it i said i mean one it’s almost it’s like a reward yeah you see what i’m saying it creates that that demand so when they when they hit it boom that’s the standard of the standard payoff of the desserts i’m saying meanwhile they’re getting the the tail and the benefits yeah that’s a good idea i’m out of peanut butter by the way b little’s on the case that’s you with the long war going i’m over here trying that’s for sure all right we got a bunch of stuff where do we get this stuff jacqua fuel com also okay the the energy drinks you can get at wawa you can get it at vitamin shop you can get a jockofield com um the rest of stuff mostly jockofield com and vitamin chocolate yeah hey just real quick if you want it delivered if you don’t want to run out of peanut butter milk or whatever else if you don’t want to run out jordan if you subscribe to it shipping is free so that’s our way of competing with some other large corporations that may not be as benevolent the with you yeah it’s a good move right there subscribe also origin usa this is where you can get american-made stuff you said it you mentioned it yeah like sometimes hey some places some some of the clothes that that some of the people where it’s made with slave labor straight up and varying levels of slave slave labor too you can go deep in that rabbit hole and find out some stuff right you’re not yeah you can go on whatever those other youtube channels are that you were talking about you can watch you know little kids getting beaten because they didn’t produce enough freaking pairs of shorts yeah bruh yeah you can go deep for sure but without depressing anymore like the factories where they got nets around them so when the people try and kill themselves they hit the net and then they drag them back in and put them back in front of the sewing machine again you know what i’m saying yeah that was really scary i didn’t know that that was real yeah that but that’s a scary thing to consider like that’s how common it is that they have a straight up sop like a little protocol and they play oh yeah this is just just to prevent the people from from actually dying when they try to commit suicide so that’s why we want another day and a half yeah we need that labor you see what i’m saying for this for clothes our we’re we’re not down with that no we’re not that down with that so all this stuff is a made in america be made in america by people who want to make this this stuff they’re so fired up like brett just grab one person from there okay so you can and you can see this on their youtube channel by the way but you see the people making it their brother they’ll explain the whole thing to you yeah they’ll be like oh yeah this one is this and this isn’t that in fact i saw one where they’re saying hey i’m making this for this very specific person i was like damn that’s where i want to get my stuff from for sure origin usa dot com that’s true made in america yep jiu-jitsu grown in america yeah the seeds jiu-jitsu stuff boots by the way we have we made we sold the government 24 million pairs of boots we haven’t yet but even if we did we wouldn’t sell them 24 million not necessarily if they don’t need to know especially because these boots are going to last yeah so and you’re going to look good too let’s face it let’s face it echo if you if echo ever goes into combat he’s going to be that’s key component alpha well that that’s something that does have some value same same because i think a lot of people we care about like at the very least a little bit about what it looks like it’s insane i put on the delta 68 it’s not like i didn’t look in the mirror i was like it’s not like i was like sure they fit and then just kind of walked out just i looked in the mirror a little bit and in fact i remember when i red red-shirted in football and we’re warming up for the game you know you can you can suit up for the game when you’re red shirt for football and the coach said he was like dang echo looks good in his uniform he’s not ready to play but he looks good in his uniform well that could be also a foreshadowing of your tactical yeah your tactical missions in life you might not be ready to operate you will look good yeah that’s what i felt when i put on the delta 68 yeah i’m not ready for you know the the mekong delta but i’m ready to wear this stuff for sure 100 percent nonetheless get all the origin usas good stuff guilt-free stuff and superior stuff yeah another win-win on that one also chocolate is a store called jacko store so you go to jackalstore com and that’s where you can represent hardcore on the path discipline equals freedom good it’s a good way to look at things good you’re gonna watch that video yeah that’ll help a lot of us through some some stuff man nonetheless you want to represent that’s where you can got some other stuff on there some shorts some hats some hoodies women’s stuff you heard me say that’s good thing for the first time were you like oh this is good yeah i did you like new at the moment well if you remember how that video all came about or whatever if you even want to call it coming about i had my camera in the corner and when i was reading the notes like you know i’ll just go over the notes or whatever i was like oh that one’s gonna be a good one so i i didn’t even take out the camera and set it up if you noticed if you remember yeah i kind of i brought it out of the corner and if you watch that video if you look close you can see like there’s like my computer monitor kind of obstructing like it wasn’t set up it’s just like i just sort of started running it because i thought oh yeah that’s looked good in the notes check you out dude so just put some freaking music on that [ __ ] and send it out nonetheless you want to represent like i said jackalstore com go there if you like something get something also we have a subscription thing too free shipping on this one as well some new maybe more creative designs on that one good feedback on that one check yeah yeah see the short shot that says check yep it’s true also you know uh there’s a we have an homage to the sea wolves on there we’ve got a homage to another group that we have grown very fond of that’s all i’m going to say right let me inspect that thing better let me inspect that thing before we roll it out yeah please cause i gotta oh you gotta have the ominous dominus just to confirm all right there have been errors made in the past i think we don’t need to bring them up right now but there have been things that have been created without approval and they were not correct all right well you know that’s the risk we all run but yes you’re correct and occasionally occasionally you know look i’m i’m prone to run things a little bit too decentralized that’s kind of what i do yes but occasionally let’s do a little inspection to make sure we aren’t making mistakes that we don’t want to make what do we call a qa quality quality assurance before you print the shirt and send it to people you should do that yeah i think you might be right about that actually okay i understand what you’re saying no yes i remember i remember did brick in the house actually dave burke was a big part of that uh rectification yeah okay yeah yeah when i say a big part i mean the part so let’s let’s just do a review this is what we’ll call it a review hey uh subscribe to this podcast wherever you subscribe to podcast we’ll also have jocko unraveling we have the grounded podcast we’re the warrior kid podcast we also have jocko underground where we are talking about uh let’s see closely related topics we’re answering q a so there’s a special way you can send your questions in and so we’re answering q a on there and it is also our place to go in the event of problems problems you uh if we get banned or whatever you’re always like advertising some stuff or whatever yeah you always like gloss over they oh just do q a or whatever and a lot of those questions are like that’s like advice like if you want life advice from jocko it’s sort of that’s essentially its column i guess it is bro it is and jocko willing life coach jocko underground com hell yeah yeah it sounds funny when you say like that but conceptually you know what’s weird i said that for the first time a long time like before i even got out of the navy because guys would come to me and be like what’s going on i’d be like doggo like life coach oh yeah you know and i’d say here’s what you need to do bro amen it’s effective i’m telling you sometimes like they’ll ask these questions and i’ll be like oh yeah i’ll read the question or whatever and you think you know you think you know what i’m going to say well i a lot of times i do know what you’re going to say okay in general but here’s the thing here’s what happens sometimes where someone i’ll read the question and and i’ll be like oh yeah that’s a unique question for like that person you know it doesn’t really apply to me so it’d be interesting to hear jocko’s answer which i may or may not know the answer you know as far as the one he’s going to give but then you expand on this answer it’s like wait a second i can kind of use that right there you see insane so it kind of like it kind of affects your life even even though the question’s not like necessarily just yours if you got questions you want them answered do you want to hear what we talk about on that underground podcast go to jockowunderground com it costs eight dollars and eighteen cents a month that’s how you’re supporting that whole thing if you can’t afford it it’s cool we still want you in the game email assistance jockowunderground com we have a youtube channel you can subscribe to that also origin usa has a cool youtube channel where they’re showing behind the scenes what’s going on psychological warfare is an album that echo made i talked on it so we made sure okay so we made it as a little collaborative effort i came up with the things i wrote it i then i did the words and then i said them in a proper way and echo collaborated by pressing record which was cool yeah i do it so if you want to get the psychological warfare you need a little help getting through some moment of weakness we got you jocko life coach okay we got you uh if you want something to hang on your walls go to flipsidecampus com dakota meyer speaking of metal on of honor dakota meyer without question um earned that thing and he’s got a cool company made in america flipsidecanvas com making stuff to hang on your wall got a bunch of books final spin coming out soon we don’t even know what is it a book is it a novel is it a poem is it what do you call it dave you’ve read it literature it’s all those things i guess i know what it says on the cover yeah what does it say on the cover final spin oh it says yeah that’s right they have to call it something it’s more than that i know that for sure yeah check uh then we have leadership strategy and tactics field manual that’s gonna answer all your questions about leadership the code the evaluation of protocols you gotta know you gotta have a code you gotta evaluate yourself you gotta follow some protocols in life there you go we wrote them for you me and dave burke discipline because freedom field manual way the warrior kid one two three and four mikey and the dragons about face by hackworth i wrote the forward to it extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership that i wrote with my brother leif babin echelon front we have a leadership consultancy and what we do is we solve problems through leadership go to echelonfront com if you want to have us engage with your company your business or your team go to ashlandfront com that’s also where you can find out what about the live events that we do we do the muster big leadership learning session two days long next one up is in uh vegas las vegas october 28th and 29th we also do field training exercise we run around and do tactical missions and utilize the principles of leadership we do ef battlefield tour gettysburg primarily we don’t make you march there but we do walk around there and and learn those lessons we have an online training course because we we want to get this information to as many people as possible how do you do that how do you scale that i can’t be everywhere dave can’t be anywhere everywhere leif babin can’t be everywhere jp can’t be everywhere we can’t just be everywhere so what we did is we consolidated information onto the extreme ownership academy it’s leadership courses we do live sessions on there all the time if you have a question you come there and ask me go to extreme ownership com for that if you want to help service members active and retired their families gold star families check out mark lee’s mom mama lee she’s got a charity organization that does all kinds of great stuff for our military members and our veterans if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america’s mightywarriors org and if you want more of my prolonged proclamations or you need more of echo’s derelict decrees you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on the gram on facebook echoes echo charles i am at jocko willink where are you at dave david r burke david r burke i escaped the uh the ridicule the ridicule it’s nice what ridiculous you know what they were like decrees for you all right if you’re not getting ridiculed it means people don’t like you and many thanks to all the men and women in the army navy air force marines you are the ones that carry out the will of our country and you are also the ones who pay the price and we are forever indebted to you for your sacrifice and to police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders you step up and you protect us here on the home front and we are indebted to your service as well and everyone else out there this might seem obvious but think about what you’re doing weigh the risks and the benefits the strategic benefits the reward and the consequences and make sure make sure that you are doing the right things for the right reasons and until next time this is dave and echo and jocko