Jocko Willink, Matt McCusker & Jeff Dye - Mostly Wise #3 - #1139

Did any of you ever nearly join the military? I keep thinking comedy and special operations could have crossed over way earlier.

In grad school, reserve emails had me staring at the cash bonus like, damn, that would help. My wife said I’d hate disappearing every weekend for years. Eventually, yeah, no chance.

I wish I’d done it. I needed structure, discipline, older male influence—the whole package. But nobody told me to go do that, and I sure wasn’t disciplined enough to seek out discipline.

You didn’t have the discipline to stop yourself becoming disciplined. What’s the actual bar for becoming a SEAL? We’ve got watches and we’ve been swimming; surely we’re nearly operational.

The basic physical standards aren’t superhuman. A decent high-school athlete has the raw capability. But you’re exhausted and broken down, and still need to run, swim, climb ropes, and keep going. Studs quit too.

There’s roughly an age cutoff around thirty-one, with rare waivers. You can’t reliably spot who will make it. Big, small, athletic—there’s something in a person’s head that says, I’m not quitting.

That Trident punch-in thing is what annoys me about sanitizing everything. You’ve endured sand, cold, no sleep—all of it—and people act like a hard punch onto your badge is the scandal. It’s a proud mark.

Rituals can build belonging, but people get weird fast. In hazing, somebody always wants to escalate a dumb idea. You need limits, or one guy reaches for a scalpel because he thinks he improved tradition.

That gets into why extreme people persist. In a tiny community, they’re destructive; in a large violent group, maybe you need a few Vikings willing to raid, fight, and come home without falling apart.

We had a drawing of a frogman behind glass: break it if war comes. Some heroes were a mess as civilians, then war gave their aggression purpose. The hard part is managing that weapon in peacetime.

It’s like owning a working dog. You watch those guys and give them outlets—training, jiu-jitsu, boxing, wrestling—because pressure has to go somewhere.

I met SEALs after a show once, all in flannels, just hanging out. Some guys started peacocking over two women with no clue who they were. I thought, please pick a fight—but the SEALs stayed reserved.

Military dolphins have me desperate to believe it while wondering how the hell you give a dolphin orders. A shark with a glucose bag sounds cool until it ignores the mission and eats a thousand fish.

Dolphins are not cute little ocean pals once one swims close. They’re enormous. I told my kids not to worry, touched one, and immediately thought, actually, little buddy, you go first.

Everyone trains for cold, desert, cities, whatever terrain a deployment demands. I grew up in New England expecting jungle war and ended up mostly in desert and urban environments. Personally, I’d take cold over extreme heat.

I got sober after getting arrested, crashing my car, and fighting cops. Humiliating. Drinking is great until it turns sad or dangerous. Sobriety’s fantastic: I work out more, even if it’s a crap workout, and smoke ridiculous cigars.

I’d considered quitting for a long time. I drank again after jail because I thought nobody knew, but once it became public, I had to admit: this is a problem, not just a funny story.

Alcohol withdrawal can kill you, so that isn’t casual. For injured operators, the cycle is real: take something to work through pain, need more because you never recover, then add things to sleep or focus.

Dating sober is harder because drinks used to do half the work. I have to say, I like you, you’re nice to me, do you want to go out? I don’t want random hookups now; they create social messes.

I’m single because I like freedom, and that’s selfish but honest. Any gig, any flight, nonsense all night. But Christmas alone, green rooms alone, planes alone—that’s real. If you find someone you love, you’re winning.

Single men after seven can get properly strange. Women are a civilizing force. Leave us alone long enough and we’re doing headstands, buying miniatures, or researching some wildly specific obsession until two in the morning.

My wife and I married at a San Diego courthouse on a weekday. T-shirt, surf shorts, flip-flops, platoon chief as witness. In and out. Nearly thirty years later, apparently the minimum-viable wedding worked.

After September eleventh, everybody knew we were going to war. I was in college and asked to return immediately, thinking I’d miss a brief conflict. By 2005, the insurgency made it obvious: this would last.

You can’t map exactly how a war, country, or person will behave. A weaker-looking guy might have a knife; a nation might endure more than expected. Lack of humility creates bad plans.

Ukraine shows how fast warfare changes: drones, jamming, fiber-optic control lines. In Iraq, countermeasures took months. Now units refine tactics almost immediately.

If I texted my old guys to get their gear ready, almost all would answer, Roger, on the way. In Ramadi, I offered a miserable, dangerous permanent assignment. Twenty minutes later, every name was on the board.

That is so sick. It sounds like the right people got selected for that job, while the rest of us sit here talking into microphones. Appreciate you all, boys.

I’ve got stand-up dates coming up: MattMcCusker.com. I’m still trying to understand raw milk, dolphins, and why nobody made Wheelies a special-operations platform.

JeffDye.com. There’s a special on the way. I’m sober, dating like a confused adult, and I’ll probably keep talking too much. That’s my whole jabbering existence.

My Warrior Kid books became a movie, coming November twenty-fifth on Apple. Skydance made it, Chris Pratt stars, and it’s for the whole family. I’ve seen it. It’s really good.