The Peter Attia Drive - #55 - Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL, Part I of II： objective, strategy & tactics, leadership, protocols, dealing with death, and applying the many lessons learned from war

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atiyah drive. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. The drive

00:00:10.880 is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along

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00:00:19.660 with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast

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00:04:10.580 for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Jocko and like Madonna, Sting or Cher, he's one of

00:04:16.040 those rare individuals that only needs to go by one name. For those not familiar with Jocko, he spent

00:04:20.680 20 years in the SEAL teams where he was a commander of SEAL team three's task unit bruiser, I believe,

00:04:27.120 which led the battle of Ramadi becoming one of the more decorated special operations units of the Iraq

00:04:32.440 War. Jocko returned from the Iraq war, served as an officer in charge of training SEALs on the West

00:04:37.400 coast. And ultimately when he stepped down from that role, he co-founded Echelon Front, a leadership

00:04:41.860 consulting company. Along the way, he's become a New York times bestselling author on leadership and

00:04:46.500 has also written a number of frankly, fantastic kids books, which my kids adore. He hosts the Jocko

00:04:54.420 podcast, which is an amazing podcast. And of all the podcasts I've ever been on that episode that I did

00:05:00.380 with Jocko is certainly one of my favorites. He's a black belt in jujitsu and the co-founder of

00:05:05.060 Victory MMA in San Diego. I met Jocko maybe four years ago through another mutual friend,

00:05:10.600 Kirk Parsley himself, a SEAL. This podcast was a ton of fun. It also took a while. We sort of lost track

00:05:16.700 of time. And before you knew it, I realized this was going to have to be released over two weeks and

00:05:21.000 not just one. In this episode, Jocko and I cover objectives, strategy, tactics, both in concept,

00:05:28.340 but also using specific examples from his experience. We talk about training versus actual

00:05:33.400 combat, when you should be humble and when you shouldn't, being wrong as a person and as a

00:05:38.480 leader, dealing with loss and the prospect of death, the importance of having protocols in place,

00:05:44.200 what is worth putting energy into and what is not, what SEAL training was actually like,

00:05:48.920 transitioning from deployments and post-military life into civilian life, obeying orders. And then we

00:05:55.600 actually had this total tangent where we talked about U.S. history with respect to various wars

00:06:00.460 from World War I all the way forward. At the end of this episode, we talk a little about decisions

00:06:04.940 and hindsight. So without further delay, please enjoy the first part of my conversation with Jocko.

00:06:12.820 Dude, it is so nice to have you here.

00:06:15.660 Thanks for having me.

00:06:16.880 And I have to tell you right up front, when my daughter left this morning,

00:06:19.540 she said, you have to stall as long as possible because I want him to be there when I get home

00:06:24.820 from school.

00:06:25.480 What time does she get home?

00:06:26.400 I don't know.

00:06:27.180 We'll make it happen.

00:06:28.220 You're sort of like Snuffleupagus to her. Like she knows so much about Snuffleupagus.

00:06:32.320 She sees videos of Snuffleupagus. She listens to Snuffleupagus talk. She reads his books,

00:06:37.380 but she doesn't know if he exists.

00:06:40.400 He exists, but I don't want to disappoint her. Maybe we should keep the mystery there and I should

00:06:45.260 get out of here. And I'll be like, oh, Olivia, I'm so sorry. You just missed him.

00:06:51.360 Yeah. And then you got to say he wanted to stay, but he had to go and save the world. So he couldn't

00:06:55.260 stick around.

00:06:55.880 There was a crisis. Yeah. Big Bird was in trouble and he just had to go.

00:07:00.660 There you go.

00:07:01.480 When we had dinner, what was that? About two, three months ago.

00:07:04.080 Something like that.

00:07:04.780 Yeah. Which means when I watched you have dinner.

00:07:06.480 Oh yeah, that's right. Because you were fasting.

00:07:08.820 That was the best looking hummus I'd ever seen.

00:07:10.900 I'm sure it was. I'm sure it was. You were four days in, three days in?

00:07:14.920 I was on day five.

00:07:15.900 Oh yeah.

00:07:16.700 Which actually is easier. By day five, you're over the hump.

00:07:19.720 Got it.

00:07:20.080 Your energy is incredible. You're smoking down the ketones. It's all good. If that dinner were day

00:07:24.980 two, it would have been more unpleasant. But we got talking about something that we had been

00:07:30.440 talking about for a year, which was there may be few people who can speak to a concept that's near

00:07:36.420 and dear to my heart better than you can, which is this notion of differentiating between an objective

00:07:40.040 strategy and tactics. And I think this came up, it literally came up through something in social

00:07:44.300 media where I had made a point. I don't even recall what the point was, but so I'll use a

00:07:48.500 different example, but your response was epic. It was sort of like in 140 characters, you just

00:07:54.580 completely embodied what I was trying to say poorly in like a treatise, right? So I'll tell sort of my

00:08:02.020 story about it quickly so that I want you to be able to sort of expand on this. So I met this guy

00:08:07.380 once named Dennis Calabrese and he really changed the way I thought about this because he has this

00:08:11.900 sort of framework for solving hard problems, which is you have to start with defining your objective

00:08:16.300 and you have to do that really clearly. Most people actually even miss that step.

00:08:20.460 You then have to actually put a strategy in place and strategies are frameworks, are scaffoldings upon

00:08:27.740 which you will hang tactics. And he said, most people, if they're lucky enough to form the objective

00:08:33.220 correctly, which they usually aren't, immediately go to tactics without this strategic piece in the

00:08:38.480 middle. So when you think about that, I mean, you live that, right? I mean, that's sort of anyone

00:08:43.340 doing something senior in the military is intimately familiar with that. Was that something that you

00:08:48.360 learned along the way? Was it something that was specifically taught or modeled?

00:08:53.220 I think I learned it from a leadership perspective, realizing at some point in my leadership career

00:08:59.100 in the military that if the frontline troops didn't understand things at a little bit higher level

00:09:06.360 than the tactical level, then they couldn't make decisions on their own and then decentralized command

00:09:11.480 doesn't work. And now we've got a real problem. So one of the things that can happen is, and this is

00:09:16.360 something that I would try and teach the young seals when I ended up in that role, is that a mistake

00:09:21.580 that you make on a tactical level can have a strategic negative impact. So the classic examples of this are

00:09:28.360 one classic example, I would say just from the Iraq war is the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. So you take a

00:09:36.760 bunch of young soldiers and they're literally 18, 19, 20 years old. You put them in charge of detainee

00:09:47.060 treatment at a holding facility in Abu Ghraib. They're guarding people that they believe to be terrorists or

00:09:54.340 bad guys. And so what do they do with them? They treat them bad. And then you can kind of decipher

00:10:01.620 what that really means. You know, were they torturing anyone? Maybe not really. Were they out of the bounds

00:10:07.960 of how a prisoner should be treated by Americans? Yes, they were. And what is torture? And we could try

00:10:13.640 and discuss that. I think you actually can come up with a decent answer, but they were doing things that

00:10:18.680 they shouldn't have been doing with these prisoners. And some of it, if it leaned up against some kind of

00:10:22.720 torture, okay. I looked at it as more like things that it was basically hazing. God, it's amazing,

00:10:27.760 by the way, to think how long ago that was. Like, it's such a coincidence. So you met Josh earlier

00:10:31.640 today. Yep. So Josh was working on me yesterday and I remembered while I was on the table and he

00:10:36.380 was grinding on me that the Iraq invasion took place on my 30th birthday because it was March 19th,

00:10:42.500 2003. I remember having dinner that night. Nothing special, right? I was just having dinner on my

00:10:47.160 birthday, but I just remember it was my birthday and that was the night of the invasion.

00:10:50.100 And I was like, how is it possible? That was 16 years ago. Like I remember that day so clearly and

00:10:56.420 not just that day, the days that followed. And when I think about how tangentially and irrelevant

00:11:01.900 I am to any of these things and to think like, how much more would you remember that, right? How much

00:11:06.500 more can you think back to what happened when the pictures and the videos came out from Abu Ghraib?

00:11:12.220 I mean, it's interesting to think of how everybody's psyche can be sort of seared and scarred by these

00:11:17.500 events. It can. And certainly those events that took place in Abu Ghraib, where I was going with

00:11:23.000 this is these young kids did these stupid things with these detainees. It was bad. Even worse,

00:11:28.360 they took pictures of them. And then what happened was those pictures got into the hands of Al Qaeda

00:11:33.240 and Al Jazeera and they put them up and said, Hey, Americans are evil. And the pictures looked

00:11:37.160 horrible. And there you go. So it had a huge negative strategic impact and did a lot to fuel the

00:11:43.400 insurgency and make a lot of people that would have otherwise said, Oh, you know, the Americans

00:11:47.380 are trying to do their best here. And then they see pictures of Americans torturing these Iraqi

00:11:52.280 citizens because that's what the propaganda is coming out as. So this is a massive strategic

00:11:57.580 negative impact because these frontline soldiers didn't fully understand the strategic situation that

00:12:05.420 they were in. So if they understood that, if they understood, Hey, we're trying to make sure that

00:12:10.300 the Iraqi people think that we're good guys. And if we do anything that presents us in a different

00:12:15.980 light, it's going to really have a negative impact. So don't do dumb things. If they had

00:12:20.920 understood that, then perhaps they would have fought a little bit more about what they're doing.

00:12:24.400 So there's a classic example of troops on the frontline, not understanding the strategy at all.

00:12:29.540 And therefore their tactics are totally off base. Their tactics were beyond off base just because of

00:12:34.580 their tactics. They were doing some dumb stuff, but it's the same thing. It's like you're doing dumb

00:12:39.240 things, dumb tactical decisions on the front lines because you don't understand what the strategy is.

00:12:43.500 So that's a classic example nowadays that I still talk about with young seals and young military

00:12:48.620 people. Hey, you've got to make sure that your troops understand what it is you're trying to

00:12:53.720 accomplish. Cause if they don't understand what they're trying to accomplish strategically,

00:12:56.780 their tactical decisions can be bad based on that fact of what they're missing.

00:13:00.960 And the other point you made even prior to that strikes me as even more ubiquitous, which is

00:13:07.280 if you don't understand the strategy and all of a sudden you get separated from central command

00:13:12.000 and you have to call an audible, you have to pivot tactically. You're lost.

00:13:16.420 That's why decentralized command works. And that's also why centralized command fails because oftentimes

00:13:22.860 you are separated. You don't even have to be separated. If you're one of my snipers and you're

00:13:28.340 looking down a street in an overwatch position and you see something, you don't have time to call me

00:13:33.820 and say, Hey, Jocko, this is what I'm seeing. What do you think I should do? No, you have to

00:13:37.240 understand what your mission is, what the rules of engagement are, what our overall strategic mission

00:13:42.960 is, what risk we're willing to take against that strategic mission. And then you can make a decision

00:13:46.880 by the way, in a half a second, whether you're going to kill someone or not. And so, yeah, you

00:13:52.260 absolutely have to understand the impact of what you're doing. You have to understand the strategic

00:13:56.220 mission, not just because you're going to be separated, but you're going to have decisive moments

00:13:59.220 where you're going to have to figure if you're going to go one way or the other way. And that's based on

00:14:02.880 your understanding of the strategy, not just the tactics. Yeah. The way I've always thought about

00:14:07.480 it is through a much less crucial lens in the moment because it's a longer lens, but it's through

00:14:12.640 health, right? It's through longevity. People want to talk about tactical things all the time.

00:14:18.220 Peter, should I eat this much or should I eat this much? Or should I fast like this? Or should I fast

00:14:21.700 like that? Or is a keto diet better than a Mediterranean diet? And one, I just don't like talking about

00:14:26.060 that stuff all that much. I guess I'm just bored. But more importantly, I try to discourage that kind

00:14:30.780 of discussion because it's very tactical. And if you ask tactical questions or tech questions

00:14:35.380 that demand tactical answers, you'll never get the bigger picture. And therefore, when

00:14:40.460 the information changes, which it will, as sure as God made little green apples, as sure as

00:14:45.020 Tuesday follows Monday, what we know about nutrition today is going to be far less accurate

00:14:51.380 than what we're going to know about it in 10 years. So instead of pegging yourself to what's

00:14:56.460 the right thing to eat today, peg yourself to the principle of nutritional biochemistry,

00:15:00.840 and then you can sort of evolve over time. And so again, that's not a minute by minute decision,

00:15:06.540 the way you're describing it. But in many ways, what you're describing is the pinnacle of that

00:15:10.420 thinking because it's going to require split second decision making, which means it almost has to become

00:15:15.200 autonomic. You have to be that wed to the objective and the strategy. Anytime that you miss out on that,

00:15:20.840 again, what you're talking about, like health and nutrition, everybody wants to hear the tactical

00:15:28.000 answer because it makes life easy. It takes the decision out of their hands. So if I'm a sniper

00:15:32.420 and I'm waiting to shoot and guess what? I'm not sure if I should shoot or not. The easiest thing in

00:15:37.700 the world is just to have Jocko say, Hey, if this is exactly what you see, then you take the shot.

00:15:40.900 Or if this is what you see, you don't take the shot. Hey, cool. You're free and clear. You don't have

00:15:44.880 to think you don't accept any blame. You're just doing what you were told. And so people want that,

00:15:49.540 right? It makes life very easy. If I go, Hey, Peter, I want to lose weight. What should I eat

00:15:55.380 today? What should I eat for my next meal? That's really easy, right? Cause they don't have to think

00:15:58.300 about it. But as you just said, in the long run, guess what? You're in an airport. Guess what?

00:16:03.320 You're at a hotel. They don't have the food that Peter told you to eat. So now what are you going to

00:16:07.740 do? Well, if you have the strategy, if you understand the strategy, then you can make a good decision

00:16:12.520 and that's going to get you through. Whereas if you're sitting there waiting for that little tactical

00:16:16.760 moment, it doesn't exist. Cause how many situations can I describe for that sniper?

00:16:21.420 Can I describe 30 things that he can see? Sure. Can I describe 50 things that he can see? Sure.

00:16:26.040 Can I describe a hundred things that he can see? Now we're starting to get to the reality.

00:16:29.840 And even if you could, is he going to have like a Tom Brady armband that's got every play? I mean,

00:16:34.320 it's impossible. Yes. And the other thing is combat things are going to happen that no one,

00:16:39.600 no one thought was going to happen. No one could have predicted this in a million years

00:16:44.140 that this individual is going to do what they did. One time I was watching ISR. So the overhead

00:16:50.000 coverage, and I got my troops are out in the field and I'm watching some of this ISR and we see a

00:16:55.900 vehicle pull up and then the guys get out and they're kind of looking around and all of a sudden

00:17:00.220 the trunk goes open and okay. So now we're focusing our eyes on this thing. And tell me in that moment,

00:17:05.280 what is the range of possibilities you are entertaining when that trunk opens? What is the best scenario you

00:17:10.840 can imagine? And what is the worst scenario you can imagine? What I assume is happening is this is a,

00:17:15.240 the beginning of some kind of an attack, right? These people have pulled up and there's an RPG in

00:17:18.620 the trunk. There's an RPG in the trunk. More likely I was thinking mortar because it was pretty typical.

00:17:22.620 These guys would pre-stage a spot where they knew the range that they had to fire a mortar. If you

00:17:27.260 know anything about firing mortars, it's a tricky thing. I know nothing about it. Yeah. It's a tricky

00:17:30.320 thing. You've got the angle and elevation. It's indirect fire. It's going to go a thousand feet up in

00:17:34.560 the air and there's going to drop down. So you've got to know the range. You've got to calculate the

00:17:37.800 angle that you're going to set the mortar out. You've got to calculate how much explosive you're

00:17:41.520 going to put on the mortar so that it projects as far as you want. So it's a complicated thing.

00:17:45.580 So what these guys would do is kind of pre-measure everything and know the,

00:17:49.020 Hey, when we pull up our car to this spot, we know how many meters it is. We got our charges ready.

00:17:52.980 We got the angle of the mortar set so we can do it in 30 seconds. Boom. We're out. We set up the

00:17:58.320 mortar. We dropped three rounds. We put the mortar back in and we leave. So that's kind of what I was

00:18:01.400 thinking. So you are planning for the worst. Is there anything that's crossing your mind that says

00:18:05.500 these dudes are literally on a meditation retreat. I'm using this to be facetious, but like

00:18:10.280 they're just here to get their smoke on. Well, you definitely have to think about that because

00:18:15.580 in Ramadi, for instance, there was 400,000 civilians living there and there was probably

00:18:20.140 anywhere between a thousand and 5,000 insurgents. Yeah. It may have been less than that may have been

00:18:26.040 more than that at certain times, but, and they blend well, they blend very well. So my mind isn't

00:18:29.900 thinking, Oh, they're open their trunk. That's definitely an attack. And actually I'll go over another

00:18:33.920 situation where the same thing happened to me before. So this was something that I'm kind of

00:18:37.160 used to. So I'm watching this happen and the guys, they're kind of mulling around the car.

00:18:42.660 They're looking and you're thinking, okay, here they are. They're getting ready to set it up.

00:18:46.500 And sure enough, the guy pulls something out of the car and you can't make it. And the other thing

00:18:50.440 that's really hard about, by the way, what distance are you at? I'm in a tactical operation

00:18:54.120 center. I'm two miles away. And this is one thing that makes it hard in the city. When people talk

00:18:59.520 about ISR and you've got coverage overhead. Well, just imagine you've got buildings and as the angle

00:19:04.980 changes, all of a sudden the person disappears behind the building, right? You just can't see

00:19:09.060 them until the orbit of the platform gets back to where you can see. So there's a little bit of that

00:19:14.460 going on. And by the time the orbit comes back on, boom, here are the guys that are pulling something

00:19:19.280 out of the truck. Oh, what is it? And it's hard to tell what things are. And to make a long story

00:19:23.640 short, they were getting a jack out of their car to jack up their car. They had a flat tire and they pulled

00:19:27.940 off their tire and they changed their tire and they left. And meanwhile, my guys got attacked

00:19:32.920 from another position that I wasn't paying attention to, right? Why wasn't I paying attention

00:19:37.540 to it? Now, is there a chance that these guys were a decoy? Actually a pretty high probability.

00:19:42.580 Most of the people running around in the city doing things like this were generally bad. And when

00:19:48.900 firefights were going on or when there was big movements in the city, most of the civilians knew,

00:19:54.380 okay, the Iraqi soldiers and the Americans are sweeping through this area. Guess what we're

00:19:59.080 going to do? We're going to go in our house and we're going to stay there. That's what we're going

00:20:01.440 to do. We're going to try not to bother and we're going to stay in our house. So when you see someone

00:20:05.000 doing something, you are definitely more suspect than in a situation where there's people going all

00:20:11.660 over the place. Anyways, the streets would clear when we would go out or when the enemy was going to

00:20:15.140 attack, the streets would clear. And that was the way it was. So to see someone out there

00:20:18.760 doing this, you're definitely suspect. And there's a, probably a pretty good chance that these guys

00:20:23.540 were doing that specifically to draw attention away from this other element that was attacking.

00:20:28.400 They're good. They know what they're doing. So those are situations that you can't predict.

00:20:34.800 And if people don't understand what the strategic vision is, then they can't make decisions out there.

00:20:40.680 Another example that I've experienced that is so dwarfed compared to both the stakes and the risks

00:20:47.560 of what you're describing is bow hunting. So I just came back from my first bow hunting trip and

00:20:53.360 game-changing experience for me. I mean, when I bought my first bow two years ago, I didn't think

00:20:57.160 I would ever hunt. I specifically went in there to say, look, I just want to shoot targets all day

00:20:59.880 long. And they said, well, you sure you don't want to hunt? Nope. Don't want to hunt. Just want to

00:21:02.540 shoot targets. Fast forward a couple of years and now I want to go and hunt. And what a learning

00:21:07.900 experience, right? So when you're sitting there shooting targets all day long, you're putting all of

00:21:12.480 your emphasis on precision, perfect fire, perfect shot over, over, over again. How far can you be

00:21:18.240 and make that perfect shot? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Then you get in the field. And we were

00:21:21.440 fortunate to be going after one of the hardest pieces of game in North America, the axis deer

00:21:25.660 in their terrain, incredibly mountainous. So there are places where you can hunt them flat,

00:21:29.880 but we were in a place that was staggeringly mountainous. All of a sudden, two things occurred

00:21:35.660 to me within 48 hours. One, it's happening way faster than I've ever prepared for. Meaning

00:21:42.700 when a deer is anywhere within shooting distance and our guide is like, knock now, put the arrow,

00:21:49.920 like knock the arrow. It's like, but I don't have good footing. Like I can't see where I am. Like,

00:21:54.080 I don't know how far the animal is. I haven't got my range finders. Like everything's going wrong.

00:21:59.320 Secondly, the noise that you make, the fumbling around to get in position, the deer's gone. The deer's

00:22:05.540 gone. These things can hear, see, and smell at a level that makes us seem like single cell amoeba

00:22:12.640 that are pointless. Like, so now, of course, by the end of the trip, six days into this,

00:22:18.340 we're figuring this out. I'm getting so much better at anticipating what's happening,

00:22:22.980 but it actually made me think in my tracks, how frightening is it for a soldier to train,

00:22:31.300 which again, your training is better than my training. Meaning the way that a soldier's training

00:22:34.620 for combat is much more comparable to the event than the way I'm training to shoot.

00:22:38.040 But it's like that saying, right? Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

00:22:41.120 I can't imagine what it's like the first time a patrol is out there and a roadside bomb goes off

00:22:47.140 and someone gets their leg blown off, right? Like, so now you're seeing this. And to me,

00:22:51.740 that's another example of how when stuff goes really, really, really bad, one, you have to

00:22:57.920 understand, have you been trained enough to automatically do the right thing?

00:23:01.580 And two, do you start making a whole bunch of tactical errors because that wasn't a planned

00:23:07.160 reality? I mean, how in the hell do you train someone for that? Well, thankfully the training

00:23:13.180 evolved so much even while I was in. So when I first came in the SEAL teams, we used blank fire

00:23:19.680 for land warfare and we used live fire for CQC, close quarters combat. So that means you're going

00:23:26.820 into a building and you're using live fire, which means you and I are going to be a foot away from

00:23:31.700 each other. We're shooting rounds really in close proximity at targets.

00:23:35.860 Why would you be using blanks at long range versus?

00:23:37.960 Well, okay. So we do the same thing. We do live fire in the desert as well. And in the jungle,

00:23:42.180 we would do live fire primarily. We would occasionally use blanks, but we used blanks in the land warfare

00:23:48.220 with this old system that the army used called miles gear, which was basically a laser tag system,

00:23:54.260 right? But it's not that great. That was the problem. It wasn't that great. And so a lot of

00:23:57.880 times it was like, oh, you know what? This is really, isn't that great. And so we just said,

00:24:01.020 you know what? The most intense thing we can do is train with live fire. So I should have completed

00:24:05.040 that statement, which was we tried using blanks and this miles gear. There's two factors. I

00:24:11.300 shouldn't just blame the miles gear as SEALs. We weren't that good at it. We got old equipment.

00:24:14.880 We'd get it from the army. It wouldn't be that good. We didn't really know how to site it in

00:24:17.800 correctly. And so guess what? We ended up with something that's not all that great. So we just kind of

00:24:22.020 focused on live fire and live fire. Let's face it. That's like, Hey, we're going live fire.

00:24:26.060 That's just the intensity is higher. That's what we do. We're SEALs. We train live fire. And then you

00:24:31.360 go in the kill house and you're training live fire and you're shooting at targets. And it's intense

00:24:34.940 because, you know, if you screw up in the kill house, you can easily shoot one of your buddies.

00:24:39.260 So it's intense. The problem with it is you're going against paper targets. And there's two things

00:24:47.620 that the enemy will do that will have a massive negative impact on your brain and on the situation.

00:24:55.520 And that is the enemy will shoot back at you and they'll maneuver. Those are the two things that

00:25:00.600 the enemy has. That's what the enemy does. Well, there's two things that a paper target can't do

00:25:04.600 shoot back or maneuver. And so guess what? We used to just crush these paper targets. I never got beat

00:25:09.120 by a paper target in my life. And I spent many years in the SEAL teams where we just kicked the shit out

00:25:14.820 of paper targets. And we felt really good about it. Right in the late nineties, we started using

00:25:20.480 something called simunition, which is you use your real gun, but there's a different barrel that you

00:25:26.400 put on the gun. And the barrel that you put on the gun allows the gun to fire paint rounds. Even

00:25:31.060 though you're loading with a magazine, you still have 25 rounds. So it's a blank that's being fired.

00:25:35.200 That's pushing out a paintball. Yes. Basically it's a paintball gun. You still have to do magazine

00:25:39.080 changes. You're still getting the same weight, the same kind of sight picture. So it's very similar.

00:25:44.220 I should say. And that had just a huge impact on us tactically because all of a sudden these

00:25:52.920 tactics that we were using where the enemy never maneuvered and never shot back at us. All of a

00:25:56.500 sudden they didn't work. A classic example is we used to stack in a hallway to move through a

00:26:00.480 building. We would all just stack in the hallway and then we'd go down the hallway, putting people

00:26:03.420 in the rooms. You take this room on the left, next two guys, take the room on the right. Next two

00:26:07.120 guys, take the room on the left. So there you go. You got 20 guys in the hallway and then you move

00:26:11.580 down the hallway and you clear the rooms as you go down the hallway. Well, what we didn't realize

00:26:16.280 because those paper targets never popped out of the door and shot back at us. As soon as we started

00:26:20.240 using simunition, you are all stacked up in the hallway. So you got 20 guys in the hallway and

00:26:25.120 somebody way down at the end of the hallway sticks their simunition gun around the corner. They don't

00:26:29.460 even expose themselves at all. And they spray off a magazine of rounds, 25 rounds comes down the

00:26:33.880 hallway. And guess what? Eight guys are hit. And there's this pushback against that. There was

00:26:40.600 actually some pushback against that, which was, that's not realistic. That guy didn't even take

00:26:46.400 a sight picture. That guy didn't expose himself. So it's not realistic. And my thought was, well,

00:26:50.440 wait a second. It just happened. And believe me, an AK-47 would have been even worse than a simunition gun.

00:26:56.040 Well, that's what I was going to ask you. I mean, is the paintball under or overestimating the

00:26:59.800 potential spray of the round? Underestimating. Oh, so then you're right, right? Yes. And there

00:27:04.580 were some guys that would say it's not realistic. And there were some guys that would say, actually,

00:27:08.760 what's messed up is our tactics. And so that was kind of the beginning of us putting pressure on

00:27:14.680 each other with more, we call it force on force training. We eventually got a system for our land

00:27:21.380 warfare because the problem with simunition is it's accurate to like 20 meters, 10 meters, not very

00:27:27.220 accurate. Whereas land warfare, our guys can shoot you at 800 yards, 700 yards, pretty easily. This

00:27:32.000 isn't like a big challenge. Even me, I'm not a sniper, but with my weapon and a scope on there,

00:27:37.340 I'm going to knock you out, you know, at 500, 600, 700 yards, it's going to happen.

00:27:41.960 So the paint doesn't simulate that. Eventually ended up getting a very good laser tag system for

00:27:48.460 external movement for land warfare. And it had little speakers on the system, little speakers next to

00:27:54.120 your shoulders. So as you were getting shot at, if it wasn't hitting you, but it was close to you,

00:27:59.640 it would make noises. Like there was rounds going over your head on these little speakers.

00:28:03.860 It was so good when I was running the training, the punishment for getting shot was your buddies

00:28:10.660 had to carry you for two kilometers, three kilometers in the desert at night on night vision,

00:28:16.100 you and all your gear. And let's put that in perspective, your gear weighs, because you're in body

00:28:20.600 armor. So what's the total poundage of gear, armor, everything pack?

00:28:24.740 Probably 60 to a hundred pounds, depending on the position the guy has in a platoon.

00:28:30.560 So you're easily carrying 280 to 325 pounds.

00:28:34.540 Easily. And carrying bodies is much, much harder than it seems. And it's much, much harder than it

00:28:43.320 looks in the movies.

00:28:44.000 By the way, it doesn't seem or look at all easy. When I, when I see, I mean, again, not to keep coming

00:28:49.840 back to this hunting thing, but it's just so fresh in my mind. Like even when we would shoot

00:28:53.920 an 80 pound animal and you would field dress it and then carry it out. I'm like,

00:28:58.240 this isn't that heavy, but why is this so awkward?

00:29:01.680 Yeah. And then imagine that that deer isn't dead, but it's wounded. It's a lot harder than people

00:29:08.680 think it's going to be. And realistically, oftentimes carrying one person can take four people.

00:29:12.980 If you lay out a litter and this guy weighs 200 pounds and you've got his gear on there,

00:29:17.100 now it's 280 pounds and you're going through the desert. And by the way, everyone's already

00:29:20.640 carrying 70, 80 pounds anyways. So it's very, very problematic. So as we got more and more engaged in

00:29:30.160 the force on force training, we got better and better and better and more prepared for what

00:29:35.440 combat was really going to be like. Now there are still are discrepancies because one thing that you

00:29:39.960 can't train or what I was going to say about the realism, I would see guys out in the desert

00:29:44.780 because the punishment was you would get carried and it's not punishment for you. Actually,

00:29:47.880 it is punishment for you because guess what? You feel horrible that your boys are getting,

00:29:50.720 not only that, they're not going to do an effective job. They're going to drop you.

00:29:53.380 You're going to fall. You're going to lose gear. It's like getting a beat down for two or three

00:29:57.900 hours in the desert. So the punishment was really hard. And so when you'd see like a guy starting to

00:30:04.520 get shot at and rounds were getting close to him and he was hearing those snaps on his little

00:30:09.020 speakers on his gear, you would see them dive for cover as if they were really getting shot at.

00:30:13.680 It was kind of crazy to watch that sometimes that being said, they still knew that they

00:30:19.780 weren't going to die. They weren't going to literally die. So you would still see guys take

00:30:24.000 risks that you think to yourself, would you really take that risk? If that building was getting hit

00:30:29.520 with AK 47 rounds that were impacting right outside the door, you probably wouldn't do the medal of honor

00:30:36.800 run. You'd hesitate. You go, okay, what can we do to mitigate this? So there were some times where

00:30:41.040 that becomes a little bit unrealistic on both sides, both the opposing force that the guys

00:30:46.000 would be going against versus the good guys, the quote unquote good guys. Cause they're all seals.

00:30:50.180 Do you remember the first time you were in combat and you had that moment of hesitation,

00:30:56.960 which was, this is live rounds. This is all the marbles here. I guess what I'm getting at is,

00:31:03.180 was there a moment that you recall when, if it were training and you couldn't die,

00:31:07.680 you would have done something, but in the situation you were in, your instinct was actually

00:31:11.600 to do something more conservative. The first time I was in a situation where,

00:31:15.560 and I got very, very lucky. The reason that I got lucky was almost as if it was planned.

00:31:21.920 My career in combat slowly escalated. It slowly escalated. It wasn't like, oh, all of a sudden,

00:31:29.060 I mean, my whole first deployment to Iraq was six months long, but the amount of,

00:31:36.660 we did a bunch of operations and we generally had the upper hand almost all the time. So it was a

00:31:40.960 really good confidence builder. The few times we got ambushed or whatever, we responded really well,

00:31:46.060 felt really good. And so I got to kind of experience that and kind of get it out of my system. But I was

00:31:51.460 going to say the first time I had a guy, we were doing a convoy. We were going to a location in

00:31:55.260 Baghdad. I had a guy get on our way to where we were going. We started taking rounds and I actually

00:32:02.080 didn't know it because I didn't know what it was like. And you're in a Humvee and you can't hear.

00:32:06.820 And what I saw was- And it's day or night?

00:32:08.920 It's nighttime. And what I saw was it looked like somebody was throwing cigarettes out of one of

00:32:14.940 the Humvees ahead of me because I'm a number two Humvee. And I'm thinking to myself, who's smoking

00:32:18.620 right now? We're on patrol. What is, I see a couple of sparks fly. And then I see more sparks and I'm

00:32:23.460 thinking, wait a second, now we've got multiple smokers in the lead Humvee? What's going on here?

00:32:27.520 And then it occurred to me, I was like, oh, idiot, you're getting shot at right now.

00:32:30.820 And then sure enough, we had a guy that took a round in the head and actually was okay. Again,

00:32:35.680 the miracle of what bullets do when they actually hit, it was probably a ricochet and it went underneath

00:32:40.760 his skin and then kind of wrapped around the outside of his skull. So it didn't penetrate his skull.

00:32:44.560 So it was clearly, it was a ricochet or something like that.

00:32:46.700 But that's such an interesting example, right? Like here, someone like me listening to this,

00:32:50.560 you look at a Navy SEAL and you think, man, you guys must know everything that's happening in

00:32:55.820 every moment. Like you're like cartoon characters, right? But yet in that moment, there's a

00:32:59.820 vulnerability, which is you literally didn't even realize you were being shot for a few minutes.

00:33:04.080 Like you had to go through the processing of, oh my God, this is real now. This is actually

00:33:08.100 happening. And there was a lot of that steep learning curve. And these kids that are coming

00:33:11.340 in now, I call them kids. I don't mean disrespect by that because the young guys that came in the

00:33:15.440 SEAL teams in 2005 and 2003, I mean, I came in in 1991. Okay. The first Gulf war was about to go down

00:33:23.420 and I was excited about it, but it was over really quickly. So there's a whole time period where people

00:33:27.780 were coming in the SEAL teams and they didn't really have it.

00:33:29.960 I didn't realize that. I know we have talked about this years and years ago. I think I had forgotten

00:33:33.300 that you were in the early nineties. I don't know why I thought it was like mid nineties. So,

00:33:37.100 I mean, 10 years before nine 11, I didn't shoot my weapon at a bad guy for 13 years of just

00:33:43.900 training and trying to be ready. And I guess to your point, your question was, we had trained so

00:33:49.280 much at this point that we all felt pretty good about what was going on. Now let's talk about the

00:33:54.900 difference between an enlisted guy who's coming in, in 2003 into the army. I mean, he can't have a

00:34:01.500 fraction of the training that you've just described, right? That is true. That is true. And that was one

00:34:07.040 thing that was a real disparity is like, for instance, we got to Ramadi, the guys that were on the

00:34:12.920 ground in Ramadi. When we got there, they were a national guard unit. And so these guys were

00:34:16.900 part-time soldiers and they had been on the ground fighting in Ramadi for 14 months and they had done

00:34:23.600 an unbelievable job and they took some very hard lessons, but it just shows you the professionalism

00:34:29.760 of the military and the dedication of these soldiers. We were in all of these guys. When we got there,

00:34:35.500 every one of these national guard units, every one of these guys in these national guard units

00:34:39.980 had more combat experience than anyone in my whole task unit.

00:34:42.980 That's a humbling experience. I can't imagine what you're thinking when you roll into that.

00:34:46.560 I'm humble about it. I'm thinking to myself, what can we learn from these guys? And we did. That's

00:34:50.480 what we did. We said, Hey, you guys are the professionals here. What do you think about

00:34:54.400 this mission? What do you think about this area? What do you think about this tactic,

00:34:57.400 this technique? And they would tell us what they thought. And what was kind of cool was

00:35:01.420 a lot of the young soldiers, they would look at us and go, you guys are SEALs.

00:35:05.600 You guys are Navy SEALs. And so they kind of had a little bit of respect for us just because

00:35:10.140 whatever kind of stories they'd heard or whatever, the legendary SEALs. And for us to go in and say,

00:35:16.060 Hey, how do you think we should do this? Or what do you think about this tactic? These young

00:35:19.180 Marines, these young soldiers, they were just awesome guys. And it is very humbling.

00:35:23.540 What took 14 months? Is this a resource issue? I mean, why were national guardsmen sitting there

00:35:29.800 for 14 months in one of the most violent parts of the world without a greater support system?

00:35:36.060 That's the way it is. I mean, this is something that the recruiter is not going to tell the people

00:35:39.460 that joined the national guard or joined the reserves. It's in the fine print that if we're

00:35:43.220 at war and we need you, you're going to get called up and you're going to go. And so that's what

00:35:47.340 happened. That's awesome. These guys were teachers and electricians and plumbers and lawyers and

00:35:53.900 doctors. And one day they get told, Hey, you're going to go to Iraq. And you know what they do?

00:35:58.680 They get their gear on and they go to Iraq and they do a hell of a job over there and make just

00:36:03.240 incredible, incredible sacrifices for the mission. And so, yes, we held those guys in the highest

00:36:10.120 regard and still do think about the guys that were there when we got there who definitely had less

00:36:14.860 training than us, but man, they were hardened combat warriors by the time we showed up and they

00:36:19.760 definitely helped us and kept a lot of us alive because they were able to share with us the way that

00:36:25.160 they operated. And to the credit of my guys, all the guys in my task unit, task unit bruiser,

00:36:30.840 we were listening. We were all ears. We were humble and wanted to learn from these guys who had been

00:36:35.660 fighting for so long there. Is that a lesson specifically that you talk about? Cause so much

00:36:40.520 of the work you do today is working with people who have never held a gun and are never going to hold

00:36:44.180 a gun, right? They're in a boardroom, they're wearing a suit. Do you see that parallel lesson show up in

00:36:48.940 the business world? I always say that humility is the most important attribute or characteristic for

00:36:54.440 a leader to have. And it really applies to everyone. Remind me to talk about the counter to

00:36:58.920 this. Cause there are situations where humility is not something I need to stress with someone,

00:37:03.700 but yes, in the business world, in any leadership position, when you're in that position and you don't

00:37:09.020 have humility or you think, you know, I already know everything. Think about this. If my task unit,

00:37:14.900 if we showed up in Ramadi and thought we knew everything, these guys were learning lessons,

00:37:19.360 these guys were fighting so hard. They were learning so many lessons. We were all ears because

00:37:24.580 we were humble enough to think to ourselves, Hey, guess what? These guys have been fighting for 14

00:37:28.780 straight months. These guys have been out in this, this road that we're going to go on patrol tonight,

00:37:33.100 this army private, he's gone down that road a hundred times, literally a hundred times. And we're all

00:37:38.980 fired up because we're going to go on this mission and down this road. And we go to this guy, Hey,

00:37:42.140 what should we watch out for? Oh, here's a couple of things. Guess what? The enemy likes to set up in

00:37:47.580 these buildings over here. Thank you. We'll hold extra security on them. Guess what? If you do get

00:37:51.940 in a firefight, here's where they're going to try and push you towards be careful. Cause they'll

00:37:56.060 choke this point. Like these are just common things. And so in the business world that happens

00:38:00.080 to you get someone that's been in the industry. You hear this all the time, right? I've been in this

00:38:04.220 industry for 22 years. I've been in this industry for 27 years. No one's going to tell me what's

00:38:08.260 going to happen with the market. No one's going to tell me a new methodology of doing something.

00:38:11.580 No one's going to tell me how to run my company. Okay, cool. We'll see how that works out for you.

00:38:17.360 It generally doesn't work out good. Now I'm not saying that in 22 years, you don't have some

00:38:21.440 good knowledge or in 27 years, you don't learn some good stuff. You absolutely do. Do you know

00:38:25.860 everything? Are there any times when you should maybe listen to what somebody else has to say,

00:38:30.460 or look at the way someone else is running something and maybe think yourself, Oh, that seems

00:38:33.860 like a good idea. I mean, the classic examples that I talk about a lot is Blackberry,

00:38:38.720 right? Blackberry was their market share. 80%. It was 90%. Was it that high? It was crazy.

00:38:44.820 Someone just told me what the share price on RIM is today and how, I mean, it's a completely

00:38:49.260 different company. Obviously it doesn't exist in the format that it once did, but yes, that was

00:38:53.140 at the height of that market. I mean, that must've been $140 a share company in 07.

00:38:57.700 Yeah. And who could ever teach them anything? Who could ever explain to someone that, you know

00:39:04.060 what, what you're doing right now might not be the same in a year. Same thing with Blockbuster,

00:39:09.460 right? We're going to do videos. You're going to come and you're going to rent videos from a store.

00:39:13.260 I have to explain that to my kids. My kids are, they can't even comprehend that. What do you mean

00:39:17.300 you would go somewhere and get a movie from somewhere else? What does that mean? And yet there's

00:39:22.500 arrogance there, right? I mean, tell me Blockbuster didn't have the capital to start streaming

00:39:27.120 movies during that time. They could have easily said, Oh, that seems like a pretty decent idea.

00:39:30.080 Let's get in on that game right now. Instead it was denial. And again, I'm kind of assuming this,

00:39:35.080 just looking at the outcome. I don't know the people that ran Blockbuster, but there was,

00:39:39.500 had to be some level of denial that some, Oh, what are you going to do? You're going to stream

00:39:43.760 movies. My internet barely works. I can barely stream a one minute video. How are you going to

00:39:48.060 stream? That doesn't make any sense. We're going to keep doing what we're doing. People will keep

00:39:50.600 coming to our stores. Come on a Friday night. You see how crowded my store is. Where are all those people

00:39:54.380 going to go? They love coming to our store and buying some popcorn and getting a video.

00:39:57.560 So there's arrogance there. And so that's why you have to be humble as a leader so that your mind

00:40:02.760 is open. So you can listen to what other people are saying and you can make an honest assessment

00:40:06.720 of whether it's right or not. And you can constantly look at yourself and say, you know what?

00:40:09.760 Am I really right? Am I really right? I'm constantly asking myself that. Am I really? Yes. Okay. I feel

00:40:15.620 pretty good about it, but I'm not a hundred percent. There's a great book on this called,

00:40:20.120 I'm going to screw this up. So the show notes will definitely correct me. I think it's called

00:40:23.620 Being Wrong. And I believe the author is Katherine Schultz. So I could have gotten both of those

00:40:28.220 wrong. That's the beauty of reading this book is you, it teaches you something that I really needed

00:40:35.580 to be taught. So I have a pretty good memory. I would say my memory is better than average,

00:40:41.380 at least when I'm paying attention. So I actually have a bad memory with names and things at a party

00:40:46.540 because I'm generally not paying attention. I don't have like sort of that Bill Clinton-like

00:40:50.200 memory of everybody's name, but for little details and things that I deem important,

00:40:54.140 I have pretty accurate memory. This book goes into how often we are wrong and wrong in times when we

00:41:01.980 are convinced we are right. So I read this book and it's riveting. It's sort of on the list of

00:41:07.700 sort of 15, 20 books I've read that I can't freaking stop reading once I'm into it. Like I'm on my bike

00:41:14.260 in the garage. This is pre-audible or at least I didn't use audible at the time. I'm literally

00:41:18.940 sweating over this book, flipping the pages, right? For me, that's a, to interrupt the workout to do

00:41:24.180 that is a big deal. But it leaves me with this vulnerability, which is what if Katherine Schultz

00:41:30.520 is right? What if my memory is not as good as I think it is? And I started just putting a tiny bit

00:41:39.540 of humility into statements I was making. And I remember having a, argument's too strong a word,

00:41:45.840 but a spirited debate with a friend of mine about something that occurred in the past and could be

00:41:51.280 verified. And so we go into this discussion and I've got my point of view, which is Peter the Great

00:41:57.280 is right because I freaking remember everything. And by the way, the friend that I'm debating is

00:42:02.280 notoriously moronic at remembering stuff. So like the pretest probability is so high that I'm correct.

00:42:08.280 And I'm like, yeah, no, no, no. It's exactly like this. Like this is exactly what happened.

00:42:13.420 But then I remember, I'm like, you know what? Remember that book you just read? And I go through

00:42:19.080 all like the sort of thought process that she brings to it and why we get tripped up and why

00:42:23.600 we are so arrogant and blah, blah, blah. And afterwards I'm like, I'm going to actually go check if I was

00:42:28.100 right. And sure enough, I was back ass. I mean, I couldn't have been more wrong, Jocko. I was a hundred

00:42:34.800 percent wrong. I mean, on the one hand it humbled me. On another hand, it scared me. It made me think

00:42:40.120 how many times have you been so sure of yourself in the last 40 years only to realize you were

00:42:47.020 probably wrong. Yeah. When this really occurred to me is when I started telling people this statement,

00:42:52.040 it's kind of the opposite statement. I would tell guys that I was teaching. I would say, listen,

00:42:56.760 I don't know everything, but let me tell you something. If I tell you something that I know,

00:43:02.860 and I tell you it's a hundred percent, I'm going to guarantee that it's a hundred percent, right?

00:43:06.520 Like you're going to hear me say it so seldomly, but like I'd have somebody that I was teaching

00:43:11.620 something and they maybe would say, well, well, you know, they'd have their opinion about something

00:43:15.560 and 95% of the time, 99% of the time I'd say, you know what? Yeah, let's give that a try. Let's

00:43:19.900 see if that tactic works. Let's see if that functions. And then occasionally I'd say, listen,

00:43:24.200 if I'm telling you that I know something a hundred percent, you should listen to me because I don't play

00:43:31.820 around with that statement. And I don't, you will very seldomly hear me say, I know something a

00:43:37.240 hundred percent because it's so rare that it actually happens. And my mind is open because

00:43:42.000 what I think is just what I think right now. And there's definitely other ways to come. So

00:43:46.620 I definitely don't ever box myself into a corner of saying I'm right and you're wrong or what I'm

00:43:52.900 saying is a hundred percent right. Unless there are some principles in the world or some tactical

00:43:58.200 things that I know, or some leadership things that I know where I say, again, very few,

00:44:02.980 but I'll say this is the truth right here. And there's very few of them.

00:44:06.100 Let's hear a couple of them, even a specific example that might be contextually sort of

00:44:09.900 limited. Well, one of the fundamental truths of combat is cover and move. It's the number one

00:44:14.340 law of combat that I wrote about in extreme ownership. And I talk about all the time, but

00:44:18.180 it's just the way it is. Meaning if you're taking fire, cover and move.

00:44:22.380 Well, what it really means is you and I have to work together. One of us has to put down cover fire

00:44:26.220 and the other one has to move. If we decide, guess what? You and I are just going to go for

00:44:29.520 it together at the same time. And there's no cover fire. That's wrong. It's just wrong.

00:44:33.360 And what's going to happen is we're both going to die. So what we should do is if you want to

00:44:36.700 get across the street, I'm going to get in a good position. I'm going to lay down cover fire.

00:44:39.520 And then you're going to move while I'm shooting at the bad guys and they can't shoot back.

00:44:43.300 Or you're going to put down cover fire and I'm going to move. But if someone says to me, well,

00:44:47.100 what we're going to do is we're just going to run for it. Now, are there situations where it's like,

00:44:50.860 okay, if you said to me, Hey, you know what? We're both going to go. We're both going to shoot at the same time.

00:44:55.260 And I'd be like, so you're going to cover for yourselves kind of fits in there. Okay. We can

00:44:59.920 try it. There's situations where you may have to do that, but that's not the rule we want to follow.

00:45:06.020 It's different when you say, just because you get away with something doesn't mean it was the

00:45:09.700 right thing to do. That's true too. Which is an example, right? So you almost would assert that

00:45:12.960 that's almost an axiom, right? Like we reserve that term for something that on first principles is

00:45:18.540 immutable or dogmatic, right? So, you know, in biology, there aren't many things that we are so

00:45:24.880 confident in that we say that about, but one of them is that DNA codes for RNA codes for protein

00:45:31.680 that has just become an axiom of biology. There aren't really ways around that. And of course,

00:45:38.240 on the margins, you sort of talk about like, is a prion sort of an exception to that? And maybe

00:45:43.260 blah, blah, blah. But yeah, this is as close to axiomatic as you can get in biology or in your case.

00:45:48.640 Now, was that something that came naturally to you to have that humility? Because

00:45:51.980 it doesn't come naturally to me. Like I think arrogance and grandiosity are my natural default

00:45:57.840 states. So I have to work staggeringly hard to pause in my tracks and consider the world through

00:46:05.340 another person's lens. Yeah. So you go into combat and you'll get humbled by it. I mean,

00:46:08.860 now this doesn't always work because there's sometimes where like my first deployment to Iraq

00:46:13.020 felt pretty good about it. It felt like kind of bad-ass, like, Hey, we can handle this second

00:46:17.560 deployment to Iraq to Ramadi. Very humbling. Cause there's going to be situations where as good as you

00:46:21.560 might think you are, you're not going to be able to control it and things are going to go wrong.

00:46:24.860 And it's going to be a nightmare and you're going to be holding, it's like trying to hold on to water,

00:46:29.000 right? You're trying to hold on to the situation and it's going to humble you.

00:46:32.860 But I still think that says just as much about you as it does the situation,

00:46:35.900 because I think there are a lot of people in that situation, Jocko, that are going to blame

00:46:39.300 their surroundings. They're not going to be humbled by that. When everything goes wrong,

00:46:43.040 they're going to say it's because of this. It's because of that. It's because of him. It's because of her.

00:46:46.740 It's because of the insurgents. So I still think you're pre-wired and preconditioned to be able to

00:46:53.900 fail and say, okay, that's humbling. I think that's an admirable trait. I, I'm trying to

00:46:59.420 understand if it came, did you come out of the womb with that? I think I saw great examples of

00:47:04.100 that along the way and realized how, if you want to do well, then that's the attitude that you're

00:47:09.940 going to have. And I had a boss that I worked for who was the most experienced guy that I ever worked

00:47:15.600 for. He was the most tactically savvy guy I'd ever worked for. He was the most experienced guy I'd

00:47:22.880 ever worked for. And he was the most humble guy I ever worked for. And all of us in the platoon,

00:47:28.380 he was our platoon commander, all of us in the platoon, we wanted nothing more, nothing more

00:47:33.520 than to make that guy look good, to not let him down. And I felt that I was a young seal. I was 21 or

00:47:39.720 22 years old. And here's this guy who has all this experience, combat experience in the nineties,

00:47:46.080 which not many people had. And we, me, the rest of the guys, we just wanted to make this guy look

00:47:54.460 good. And we didn't want to let him down. And it was because he was so humble. That was like the

00:47:59.980 initial opening for my life of thinking to myself, why do I want to follow that guy? And it was a very

00:48:05.580 interesting situation because we had a mutiny against the previous platoon commander. So there

00:48:10.160 was a mutiny. Us young enlisted guys went before our commanding officer and said, we don't want to

00:48:14.640 work for this guy. How many times does that work? It doesn't. I mean, that's a mutiny. You know what

00:48:18.980 the punishment for mutiny is? Death. It's death. Yeah. That's treason basically, right? So we had a

00:48:23.080 mutiny in a seal platoon in 1990, whatever. And the guy that we were mutinous against, he was not

00:48:31.700 humble. And I got to see this, this incredible contrast between these two guys. One who was

00:48:37.820 extremely arrogant and inexperienced and arrogant, which is a horrible combination. The other guy who

00:48:42.620 was extremely experienced and super humble. And the contrast between those two guys painted a very

00:48:46.760 clear picture in my mind as a young guy. Okay. What was the difference between these two guys?

00:48:51.360 Why did we all hate this other guy? And why do we all love this one? Well, here's the big difference.

00:48:58.040 This guy thought he knew everything and acted like it. And this guy knew everything and acted like

00:49:05.000 a humble guy that wanted to listen to us and left the biggest imprint on my mind. And that's why

00:49:11.240 humility has always been so important. Now I told you to remind me about when is humility not

00:49:15.420 important. And I talk about this now and there is, there's a dichotomy in all these things.

00:49:18.400 That's why I wrote the dichotomy leadership is because there's a dichotomy and can people be too

00:49:21.760 humble? Yes, absolutely. They can. And I went and talked to some underprivileged kids up in LA,

00:49:25.940 a pretty unique group of underprivileged kids who kind of had, let's say some kind of potential.

00:49:32.400 They were smart kids that had, and they were young too, between the ages of, I'd say eight and 13,

00:49:38.860 something like that. And they'd been kind of selected as kids that had some potential,

00:49:42.780 even though they were in these underprivileged situations. The reason I say that is because

00:49:47.480 when I went into this room and I was going to talk to them about what I've learned. And one of the

00:49:50.640 big things I was going to tell them is that you got to be humble. And I'm looking around this room

00:49:53.660 and every one of these kids in this room, just about every one of them was shoulders folded

00:49:59.700 forward, eyes towards the ground, heads hung low. So they were already broken. They were already

00:50:04.320 broken. You know, they were beat because, you know, you can go to the city, you can go to the

00:50:07.500 inner city and you can meet kids that are not humble at all. They're arrogant. They're super

00:50:10.680 hyper confident. They're overconfident. That's why I had to make this distinction. These weren't those

00:50:15.340 kids. So this was another example, by the way, tying it back, you made a tactical decision on the

00:50:19.640 front line in real time. You went in there with a plan, but you understood the strategy. What are

00:50:24.700 you trying to do? You're not here to give a talk. That's a tactic. Yep. And the immediate change was

00:50:29.420 I talked to him about confidence. I didn't talk to him about humility. I said, Hey, you put your

00:50:34.320 shoulders back a little bit. Sit up, look at me. Well, you want to ask me a question? Stand up.

00:50:38.140 And then the question comes like, well, sir, no. Hey, talk to me louder. That's what you got to do,

00:50:44.040 right? You got to instill that confidence in these kids. So there's a balance with all these

00:50:48.020 dichotomies. And can you be too humble? Yes, you absolutely can. Can you be too humble as a leader?

00:50:51.260 Yes, you absolutely can. You can be too humble where Peter, you come in and you're barking about

00:50:55.340 something and I go, well, Peter's probably right. And I'm just going to go with it. Well, no, if I

00:50:58.940 disagree with you, I need to say, Hey, Peter, can you explain to me why you want to do it that way?

00:51:02.280 Cause I'm not really seeing it. That's not me being arrogant. Yeah. That's not confrontational.

00:51:05.820 It's very confident in your opposition. Exactly. And so there are times where people are too humble.

00:51:12.040 Again, that's why we wrote the dichotomy of leadership because every trait that a human being can have

00:51:16.760 can be negative and positive. You can take something too far. Any of them. What's the

00:51:21.260 most positive quality you can think of a leader to have? Poise. Okay. Poise. Can you be a person

00:51:25.600 that gets so poised and is so elevated above the situation that people are looking at you going,

00:51:32.020 Hey, wait a second. This guy's not even. Absolutely. He's in connected to what we're

00:51:35.860 doing. He's a robot. We're down here gritting it out. And Peter's up there, no sweat on his face.

00:51:41.240 And he looks like he doesn't even. Or even just a more extreme example is not showing emotion is

00:51:45.800 generally a good thing, but sometimes it's people need to know that you hurt, that the leader is

00:51:50.780 also devastated by this finding. When you even look at presidents, I mean, some of the most

00:51:54.380 powerful moments are when presidents show their emotions, which again, not withstanding the current

00:51:58.980 one, it's generally quite rare to see a president's emotions. Yeah, no, it is. And when you do think

00:52:05.480 about George W. Bush standing at the base of the twin towers, think about Barack Obama after I think

00:52:11.380 it was the, uh, one of the school shootings. I mean, these are very powerful moments and it doesn't

00:52:15.740 matter if you agree with the politics, by the way, it doesn't matter if you agree with what's going on

00:52:20.880 and what the implications are. Oh, is this about gun control? Oh, no, no, no. It's not about that in

00:52:25.300 the moment. It's that person's a human. Yeah. That's a, another great example. We talk about this

00:52:30.560 in the dichotomy of leadership. It's like, yeah, if you have no emotions, you're a robot and people

00:52:33.900 don't follow robots. You won't have any connection with them. So having control over your emotions is one

00:52:38.340 thing, but not having any emotions at all is not going to make you into a good leader. It's just

00:52:43.640 not. The story you told a second ago, I think it's almost going to have to become the litmus test for

00:52:48.500 great leadership because to hear you tell it made me think about the person that I most thought of in

00:52:53.840 that way, which actually I spoke about. I spoke about this guy on your podcast, like four years ago,

00:52:58.340 his name is Chris Sonnende. He was the best senior resident I ever had when I was in surgery. And

00:53:04.160 it's exactly that thing, which is when you have a senior resident that you were in service of,

00:53:10.080 all you wanted to do was make sure one, you never let them down. Like you never wanted them to ask

00:53:15.200 you a question and you didn't know the answer or you hadn't done what they asked you to do,

00:53:18.980 but it goes beyond that. And that's the point that you made. They are the interface between the person,

00:53:24.320 the attending, the higher up and all you wanted, everything you did was through the lens of,

00:53:29.120 will this make Chris look better? Will this make Chris shine more in the eyes of the attending?

00:53:35.660 And that's a rare, rare benchmark, but it's interesting. It's exactly what you described.

00:53:41.000 I'm sure you also worked for guys that were arrogant jerks that thought they knew everything

00:53:44.640 and you... Most people were in between, but there were more extremes at the other end.

00:53:48.820 You take the extremes at the other end and now you're actually hoping that they fail.

00:53:52.180 You're hoping that things fall apart on them. You're praying for it.

00:53:54.520 Which is a disaster when you think about it. It's the worst morale imaginable.

00:53:57.700 It's a total disaster. And this is why I always answer that question with humility being the most

00:54:02.240 important characteristic for a leader to have. Because in most situations, the reason that the

00:54:08.040 leader ended up in the position is because they have some level of confidence already. So it's not

00:54:11.780 normal for a leader to end up in a leadership position, but they lack confidence and they're

00:54:16.020 overly humble. That's not normal. It does happen occasionally, but it's not normal. The normal case is

00:54:21.520 you've got someone that's an alpha. You've got someone that's fought their way to get up

00:54:24.720 through the ranks. You've got someone that was confident enough to be like,

00:54:27.080 hey, I'll take control of this. Hey, I'll run this. People elevate to that position because

00:54:30.380 they're confident. And that's why it tends to be the greater percentage of the time there's a

00:54:34.980 problem with humility. It's because they lack humility, not because they have too much humility.

00:54:38.700 Occasionally you get a tech company with a startup where you had some really humble guy that kind of

00:54:43.000 figured something out and he started a little company. And all of a sudden he's the CEO and he

00:54:46.200 totally lacks confidence and he's overly humble. He doesn't think he can make any good decisions.

00:54:50.060 That's a different situation. That's a more rare situation. The more common situation is I'm at the top

00:54:55.720 because I deserve to be. I made it here. And that's why everyone should listen to me. And

00:55:00.480 that's why I'm not going to listen to anyone else. And the minute you're in that situation,

00:55:03.120 you're going in the wrong direction. It needs to get balanced out.

00:55:05.580 So let's back up for a minute. You finished high school in 90, 91?

00:55:08.760 89.

00:55:09.440 89. What did you do right after high school?

00:55:11.300 We're in the Navy.

00:55:12.020 You went straight in.

00:55:12.920 Yep.

00:55:13.240 And talk to me about that decision. It's 89, right? So the Cold War is over. This is like the

00:55:17.800 most peaceful time in the world. People are thinking.

00:55:19.900 Most peaceful time in the world, except for what happened in Panama. So there was the invasion

00:55:26.300 in Panama. Four SEALs were killed on Patia Airfield.

00:55:29.580 Oh, I thought that was 1990.

00:55:31.220 No. And it was like December of 1989.

00:55:33.560 Oh, okay.

00:55:34.540 And I saw that and I couldn't believe that a war happened. In my mind, that was just a war,

00:55:42.900 that a war happened and I wasn't in it. And went and talked to the Navy recruiter and rock and roll.

00:55:48.060 Did you talk to your parents about it?

00:55:49.100 I told them afterwards.

00:55:50.600 What did they say?

00:55:51.440 My dad said, you're not going to like the Navy because you don't like listening to other people

00:55:56.400 and you hate authority. That's what my dad said.

00:55:58.200 What'd your mom say?

00:55:59.240 She was happy I had some kind of a job prospect.

00:56:03.020 You wrestled in high school?

00:56:04.320 No.

00:56:04.640 What sports did you play in high school?

00:56:05.720 Soccer and basketball.

00:56:06.700 When you were in junior year, were you thinking college? What was going through your mind?

00:56:11.700 My mom sent me something 10 years ago that was like sixth grade, something like that.

00:56:18.040 What do you want to do when you grow up? And I put Marine Corps.

00:56:21.960 Wow.

00:56:23.980 Yeah.

00:56:24.460 I remember you telling me once you weighed like a buck 60 in high school, right?

00:56:27.680 Yeah, probably. Maybe.

00:56:28.820 You were not a walking wall.

00:56:30.540 No. When I checked into SEAL training, I was 174 pounds.

00:56:32.800 And then I gained 10 pounds in SEAL training, 11 pounds because I graduated at 185.

00:56:38.240 You had already gone to the recruiter before you finished high school or?

00:56:41.180 Yeah.

00:56:41.480 Okay. So then you come out of high school and now it's what, 90 and they ship you off where?

00:56:46.720 You come to San Diego?

00:56:47.600 No, I went to Orlando, Florida.

00:56:49.220 Okay. And tell me what you do. What's the first week like away from home?

00:56:53.420 Went to bootcamp. And the coolest thing about going to Navy bootcamp for me was it was a clean slate.

00:56:59.220 Nothing else mattered. They don't care what your high school, they don't care what your grades were,

00:57:02.700 they don't care what sports you played, they didn't care how good you were at any sports,

00:57:05.820 they didn't care about anything. What they did care about is could you do what we're telling you to do?

00:57:10.340 And did you pick the Navy because of the SEALs in 89?

00:57:13.360 Yes. Yep. Yep. I liked the water and I wanted to get out of New England. I look back now and I love

00:57:21.820 New England and I got my company up in Maine and it's awesome to go back up there. But as a kid,

00:57:27.540 the small town thing wasn't for me. I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to literally see the

00:57:30.980 world as they say. And so the SEAL teams are Virginia beach and San Diego. And I grew up surfing

00:57:38.540 in Maine. And so I knew that San Diego and Southern California had epic surfing. And I said

00:57:44.300 to myself, well, if I'm going to go in to be a commando, let's work in the water and get stationed

00:57:49.400 in San Diego, California. That to me, it's hard to comprehend this, I guess, but it'd be like right

00:57:58.060 now saying, Hey, I'm going to go and live on Mars. That's how foreign it was to me to think that to

00:58:02.880 myself that I had a pathway where I could actually go out and live in California. I was amazed that

00:58:10.580 that opportunity was there. And so that was definitely a big reason, a big reason to pick

00:58:14.780 the SEAL teams. And I heard that the SEAL teams had the hardest training and I wanted the hardest

00:58:18.420 training. I also heard that SEALs had a 50% casualty rate, which is probably drawn from the fact

00:58:29.500 that in the D-Day invasion, the NCDUs, the Navy combat demolition units, they did have a 50%.

00:58:36.660 This was the precursor. The SEALs have been around since like 1970 or-

00:58:40.240 No, 1963. Yeah. Well, 62, 63. So those guys did suffer a 50% casualty, but whatever pre-internet

00:58:49.180 knowledge I had heard through the rumor mill was, Hey, if you're in the SEAL teams,

00:58:52.860 you got a 50% chance that you're going to die.

00:58:54.700 So why did that appeal to you when you were 18?

00:58:56.840 Wanted to fight.

00:58:57.740 Wanted to fight or wanted to die?

00:58:58.900 Wanted to fight. Wanted to fight wars. Yeah. Didn't want to die. No, but I wanted to fight

00:59:03.240 war. And plus when you're young, you don't think it's going to be you. You're not the one that's

00:59:06.340 going to die.

00:59:07.020 I see. So it was, this is the highest stakes thing that I can do.

00:59:10.500 Yes. Bring it, bring it. And you're fired up for that. And again, you know, it's always

00:59:14.480 important to remember that you don't think it's going to happen to you. You think that you're,

00:59:18.040 I think you and I have talked about this before. Like I think if I'm on an airplane

00:59:20.860 on a civilian aircraft, commercial aircraft, and it blows up in the sky, I think that I'm going to be

00:59:26.680 the guy that you might be able to do a somersault. No, I think I'm going to live. I'm going to come

00:59:30.480 down. I'm going to get in a free fall position. I'm going to track to a pool and I'm going to land

00:59:34.300 in a pool and I'm going to break my leg and it's going to be cool. That's what my mentality is.

00:59:38.540 So that's ignorant and stupid and fine.

00:59:41.300 But you could also argue that that's necessary.

00:59:43.200 Yeah, I guess so. But here's the reality. When you're a kid, you think that it's not really going

00:59:48.080 to happen to you. And I guess if you did think it was going to happen to you and you were afraid of it,

00:59:51.860 well, then that would be a problem, right? But you have to, at some point you're like, okay,

00:59:56.420 you know what? If I die, then I'm dead. And this is what I'm going to do with my life. And you're

01:00:01.000 over it. I'm not afraid of that. I'm still not afraid of it. I could die. Okay. In the battle

01:00:05.920 of Ramadi, the guys were facing and it's like, if you go out, there's a good chance you're going to

01:00:09.180 die. There's at least a decent chance. Maybe it's not a good chance. There's a chance you're going to

01:00:12.520 die. We're going to memorial services almost all the time for the soldiers and Marines that were out

01:00:18.380 there fighting. And so that's a reality is guess what? You can die. And you can't, in my opinion,

01:00:25.580 if you're afraid of that, you're going to have a real hard time. You're going to have a real hard

01:00:29.920 time doing your job. Do you think that changes once you have kids? I know it changes once you

01:00:35.540 have kids and it doesn't change in the way that you think it might. When I had kids, I was like,

01:00:40.100 okay, cool. Well, at least now if I die, I got kids. I wasn't like, oh, now I want to stay alive

01:00:44.820 more. I thought to myself, okay, I have kids. They'll carry on my genetic pool and that's cool.

01:00:53.480 And do I wish I could see him? Yes. But they'll know that I did my job and did what I was supposed

01:00:59.900 to do and did what I wanted to do. I loved my job. Best job in the world. Best job in the world.

01:01:05.520 When did you meet your wife in this process? I want to come back and go through this story in

01:01:08.780 some detail. I met my wife in 1994. And did that, because you could argue, well,

01:01:14.940 your wife is not your lineage, right? She's your partner. Did that change anything in your mind

01:01:20.580 about the willingness to survive? Like I wanted to survive more? Yeah. Did that change? I mean,

01:01:25.860 not that you didn't want to survive prior to that, but did it introduce an element of not wanting to

01:01:30.820 die more? No, not really. Going back to something you said a second ago, did you ever see the movie

01:01:37.300 Taking Chance? Do you know the one I'm talking about with Kevin Bacon in it? No. It's a very

01:01:41.180 interesting movie. It's a very touching story. And I believe it's a true story. And if not,

01:01:45.580 it's based on a true story. It's an entire movie about what is involved to bring a Marine home

01:01:51.300 after he died. So the name of the Marine in this movie, I believe was, uh, his last name was Chance.

01:01:57.620 Last name was Chance. Now I do remember. I remember hearing about it, but I haven't seen it.

01:02:00.880 I saw it many years ago, like when it came out, which is 06, 07, 08 or something like that.

01:02:05.360 And then I saw it again recently a year ago and it was just as moving. And I can't imagine what it

01:02:10.720 would be like for you to see that having seen, my guess is you've seen each piece of it in along the

01:02:16.240 way. Yeah. It's a very powerful movie. It's slow. It's not like, this is not high drama, right? This

01:02:21.860 is just the drama is the silence. The drama are the pauses. The drama is the humble realization of how

01:02:30.440 many times that happened. Yeah. I was going to say, if it came out in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008,

01:02:36.760 I mean, there was, that was just incredible amount of guys were getting killed and, and you're right.

01:02:43.380 And every single one of those guys is an absolute tragedy. Every one of those guys has a family,

01:02:48.620 has a wife, has a mom, has a dad, has brothers and sisters, has dreams, has goals in their life,

01:02:55.440 has things that they want to do, has inherent ideas and knowledge and thoughts and wisdom that

01:03:04.680 is completely and utterly unique to them. And we never get to see that. We never get to see what

01:03:10.460 would have manifested from these kids. And it's, it's awful. What was the hardest loss you ever saw

01:03:18.700 there personally? Meaning the person that died, you knew them and you couldn't distance yourself

01:03:24.680 from it emotionally. Well, my guys, any one of your guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you do that?

01:03:30.400 I don't understand that for most of us in civilian life. When we do encounter that you lose a parent,

01:03:36.320 you lose a child. I mean, you think of the worst things that you can imagine. You get to, if you

01:03:41.820 choose to completely retreat, like you don't have to go out and do something in that next moment.

01:03:47.820 Whereas that's quite different for what you're doing. You don't have that luxury of saying,

01:03:51.960 I'm going to spend the next three months in therapy dealing with this.

01:03:54.720 No. As a matter of fact, you're saying, Hey, in 48 hours, we're going to go back and put our gear

01:03:58.820 on and lock and load and go do what we're supposed to do. That's what you're saying.

01:04:02.460 And lately I've been talking a bit about the fact that as Americans, we've taken all these

01:04:09.300 different cultures and we've kind of compiled them all together. And in doing that, we've lost

01:04:13.280 normal protocols that other cultures have. And one of the protocols that we've kind of

01:04:18.280 lost and mixed up or mismatched is what's the protocol for death. In other religions or specific

01:04:26.400 religions or in other cultures, it's like, okay, this person died. Okay. Here's the ceremony that

01:04:31.280 we do now. Here's the next thing we do down the line. After that, we're going to have this party.

01:04:34.820 Then we're going to get together. Then we're going to say these things. Then we're going to use these

01:04:37.680 words. Then we're going to make these motions. Then we're going to do the final thing. And then

01:04:40.960 everyone's going to go back to, you know, everyone's going to move on because that's

01:04:43.460 what we know. That's how it works. And in America, we've put so many of these things together and

01:04:48.440 we've combined them and separated them and lost pieces that there's no real immediate,

01:04:53.820 Hey, here's the protocol. Cause when bad things happen, you need to follow a protocol, right?

01:04:57.840 You need to have a protocol in place. You should have a protocol in place, right? When your house

01:05:01.340 burns down, your kids have a protocol of where they're going to go. You have a protocol of what

01:05:05.020 you're going to do. And boom, that's what happens. If there's an accident, right? We work with all

01:05:09.940 kinds of different businesses, but we work with businesses or companies that are run a fairly

01:05:13.980 high risk of having something bad happen. You go on a big construction site, people get hurt.

01:05:18.220 You've got to have a protocol for that. This is what we're going to do. Not just what we're going

01:05:21.020 to do on the job site, but what we're going to do with the family, how we're going to follow that

01:05:23.400 stuff up. So you've got to have protocols in place. And for us, we don't really have these

01:05:30.040 both psychological, spiritual protocols. Now, again, there's some religions that people

01:05:37.400 follow in America. It's like, oh yeah, this is the protocol. But even those people have been,

01:05:42.620 I don't want to use the word polluted, but your protocol has been polluted. If you're a Catholic

01:05:46.920 or a Protestant, or you're a Muslim, your ideas have been mixed in with some other ideas along

01:05:50.900 the way. And maybe it's been taking that protocol a little bit out of your, what it was. And now it's

01:05:55.780 not a hundred percent and you're not a hundred percent about it. And you don't really know how to

01:05:58.580 follow it because you've never followed it before and no one else you know has. So what are we

01:06:01.860 going to do? What are we going to do? So that's a big problem. So when we went to Ramadi,

01:06:09.260 we didn't have any protocol. We didn't really even think about the fact, like, what do you do

01:06:14.580 from an operational perspective? You've got 16 guys in a platoon and one of them gets killed.

01:06:18.800 That's one 16th. That's one specialty inside of a platoon.

01:06:22.220 What do you mean you didn't have a protocol? Meaning outside of the immediate tactics of a person's

01:06:27.720 deceased and the body has to go here and then there's a whole team that takes over. You're

01:06:31.220 saying you didn't have a plan for how you would all deal with that?

01:06:34.760 Yes. To the point of- You had never discussed it?

01:06:37.320 No. Nope.

01:06:38.500 The 16 of you are going into the most dangerous-

01:06:41.220 Yeah. And actually, so we're talking two SEAL platoons. We've got 40 guys. Did we talk about

01:06:45.320 it? Sure. Just so you know, the military has what's called a CAICO procedure that you follow.

01:06:50.580 There's a book you open up and we had a book that we opened up.

01:06:52.560 What does CAICO mean or stand for?

01:06:54.220 Casualty Care Officer or something like that.

01:06:55.840 Okay.

01:06:56.560 And so there's a book that you follow. There's a manual. So yeah, the protocol did exist. The protocol,

01:07:00.600 the outward protocol of like, Hey, this is what you're going to do. This is how the whole SEAL

01:07:04.240 team of whatever, 200 guys and plus the support people, that's 800 guys. This is what's going to

01:07:09.740 happen. Okay, cool. Everyone follows that protocol a little bit. What happens in the platoon and what

01:07:15.100 happens with your head? What happens with the guy that just lost his best friend? What's the

01:07:20.660 protocol for that? The answer is we don't have one. And so then what do you do? And I'll tell you

01:07:25.580 what I did. I tried to create one. I said, okay guys, this is what we're going to do. And my basic

01:07:33.860 protocol was, was to do what I knew how to do. And this may be wrong. I may be wrong. My protocol

01:07:41.320 is to do what I know how to do is I know how to work. That's what I know how to do. And I know that

01:07:46.860 letting your mind be idle, letting your mind sit there and think about what just happened to me,

01:07:52.160 that's not a good protocol. The protocol is here's what we're going to do. We're not going to do

01:07:56.940 anything tonight. We're going to do a service tomorrow. And the day after that, we're going

01:08:01.140 to say goodbye. And then guess what we're going to do? We're going to get on our gear. We're going

01:08:04.660 to lock and load in weapons and we're going to go back to work because that's what our brothers

01:08:07.940 would want us to do in this situation. So, you know, Mark Lee was the first SEAL killed in Iraq.

01:08:14.360 The first SEAL killed in Iraq. Mikey Munster was the second SEAL killed in Iraq. When you're surprised

01:08:18.580 that we hadn't talked about that, who's going to kill us? We've been fighting here for three

01:08:22.160 years. We're good. It's like, maybe not. So we ended up losing Ryan Jobe as well. But each time

01:08:30.420 it's like, okay, here's what we need to figure out. And, you know, I've been discussing now on my

01:08:35.140 podcast, writing a book about protocols, because here's another protocol that people don't have

01:08:40.400 is you just got dumped. You're 21 years old. You're 18 years old. You're 23 years old. You've been

01:08:46.680 with the same girl or with the same guy for six years, three years, two years. They're the love

01:08:52.520 of your life. They dump you. And guys don't have a protocol for that. What do you do? So guess what?

01:08:59.360 If you have a protocol to follow, you open up the book, you figure out what the protocol is,

01:09:02.760 and you execute the protocol. There's all kinds of things. Sick, disease. What's your protocol when

01:09:07.040 you get fired? If you don't have a protocol, what do you do? What do you do? And the answer is you

01:09:12.560 follow the protocol. So I will likely be writing a book of protocols so that people know what to do

01:09:18.520 when things happen. By the way, you need a protocol for good things too, right? What's the protocol for

01:09:23.260 you just got married? That's a great thing, right? That could be a great thing. It can also be a

01:09:27.880 disaster if you don't have a good protocol to follow once you're married. You bought a new house. What's

01:09:31.820 your protocol? What's your protocol? What do we do now? We got this house. What do we do? How do we

01:09:36.360 handle that going forward? So there's all kinds of things that we need protocols for,

01:09:40.460 and we don't have them. And it's not like it's that complex. It's not like I would need to

01:09:45.860 do a year worth of research to figure out what the protocol is when your girlfriend of two years

01:09:52.480 dumps you. This is not a hard problem to figure out, but when you have no idea what to do,

01:09:56.500 it's a real problem. And I think I heard this recently, and you could probably confirm this,

01:10:01.080 but when people kill themselves, they kill themselves because they got dumped.

01:10:03.940 One of the biggest reasons is they lost their significant other. And I talked about this on

01:10:10.880 my podcast as well. I was going through buds, going through basic seal training. And I talked to my

01:10:16.560 mom and my best friend, who was my best friend from like first grade through seventh grade, he ended up

01:10:25.560 going down the wrong path and he ended up killing himself. And my mom said, Hey, this kid, Jeff,

01:10:31.760 he killed himself. And why did he do it in a relationship? And he's young and he doesn't

01:10:37.000 have a protocol to follow. And you don't have a protocol to follow. What do you do?

01:10:39.860 I think the point on suicide, that's really tragic. So I don't want to quote stats because

01:10:44.600 I just don't know them, but directionally, oftentimes when someone kills themselves,

01:10:49.180 it's due to an acute issue.

01:10:51.000 Oh, for sure.

01:10:51.600 In other words.

01:10:52.460 Oh, I get you.

01:10:53.260 Yeah. When you reflect on that for a moment, it's very upsetting because yeah, the example could

01:10:58.140 be, I just lost my job and the shame of not being able to do X, Y, and Z, or I just got dumped,

01:11:04.920 or I'm in an acute phase of depression, very acute. This isn't like I've been sitting in my room for

01:11:11.900 three years with a razor blade, just grazing over my wrist. And then I finally work up the nerve to do

01:11:17.760 it. No, that's far less likely and far less often the scenario. And so actually what you're saying

01:11:24.220 makes a ton of sense because I would argue that where protocols are most important are in acute

01:11:31.300 moments. And that's why you want a protocol.

01:11:34.260 Yes.

01:11:34.620 Right.

01:11:34.860 So you don't have to think about what to do because another thing that's good is when you have

01:11:39.520 problems, when you're caught up in something psychologically, one of the best things you

01:11:43.400 can do is do something, right? Take some kind of action that moves you forward. What you don't want

01:11:47.980 to do is stay stagnant and dwell on what's happening. You want to say, okay, this horrible thing

01:11:53.240 happened. Let me get out the book and follow the protocol because that's going to move me in some

01:11:57.600 direction. And it's going to start to get me to the point where I can move past this. Whereas

01:12:02.820 staying here stagnant, it's not a good protocol.

01:12:05.520 I was just about to say, this is going to be a long book, my friend. And you are prolific. I mean,

01:12:09.520 your discipline, maybe a couple of times ago when we were playing patty cakes, I was just blown away

01:12:14.960 at the discipline with your writing because writing's hard. There's just no way to put it. I can't say

01:12:20.640 this in any easier way. It's the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. And I'm constantly amazed

01:12:26.300 at the quality of stuff that you can put out whilst doing so many other things. So it's hard enough to

01:12:32.040 write if you're a writer. If your job is writing, all you have to do is write. That's hard.

01:12:36.440 That would be a luxury.

01:12:37.640 It's a luxury, but it's still hard.

01:12:39.280 Yeah.

01:12:39.500 But if writing is your night weekend job, which that's what it is for you, that's what it is for

01:12:44.540 many people that we know. That's what it's sort of becoming for me. It's really difficult. This will be a

01:12:49.180 long book. There's a lot here.

01:12:51.120 There is, but I'm actually looking at it right now as a pretty, keeping it pretty narrow,

01:12:57.300 keeping it on the big things.

01:12:58.480 Like 10 scenarios kind of thing.

01:12:59.940 Maybe 20. Also, this is interesting. There's protocols for what to do when you don't know

01:13:05.840 what to do, right? There's protocols.

01:13:08.460 That's the protocol.

01:13:09.220 The reason that I know this is because again, when I was running SEAL training,

01:13:13.540 I couldn't put a guy in every scenario that they were going to be in, just like we already talked

01:13:18.440 about it. I couldn't put you in every scenario that you're going to see. There's going to be

01:13:22.300 some scenarios that you can't predict and I can't predict.

01:13:25.060 This is the strategy protocol, the protocol for what to do when you don't know what to do.

01:13:28.860 It's come back to the strategy and the objective.

01:13:30.660 It is. So tactically, what do you do if you don't know what to do? Part of it is definitely

01:13:36.440 going back to the strategy, but tactically, what does that mean? What do you do? Okay. So we're

01:13:39.700 getting shot at, we're in this situation. What do I need to do? Here's the protocol that you

01:13:43.980 follow. And there is a protocol you can follow there. Like take a step back,

01:13:46.940 look around, make sure you assess everything that's happening. Think about what your possibilities

01:13:51.960 are. What decisions could you make right now? And what would the general outcomes of those

01:13:56.080 decisions be? If you can follow that and then say, okay, take an iterative step towards what

01:14:01.660 you think is the best decision. Not a giant step because you don't even know what's going on.

01:14:05.740 Yeah. Maybe even a reversible step. Yeah. I guess that's what I mean by an iterative,

01:14:09.220 a smaller iterative step. That's not a full commitment because you're not ready to commit

01:14:13.080 because you don't even know what's happening, but we think it's this direction. So that's what

01:14:17.200 I'm going to do. It's a very simple protocol. I'm going to take a step back. I'm going to assess

01:14:20.400 everything that I see. I'm going to think about what my possible maneuvers that I can make are.

01:14:24.560 I'm going to think about the outcomes. Then I'm going to take a small, what'd you call it? A

01:14:27.520 hesitant step. Yeah. Just a non-committed step. Yeah. A non-committed step that I can somewhat move in

01:14:33.000 the right direction. That right there, if you know, that's the protocol when you don't know what's

01:14:36.620 happening, that's a great protocol. That's a fantastic protocol. And that's going to cover a lot of

01:14:41.060 basis. Because guess what? Even though we write to cover 20 scenarios or 20 protocols of bad things

01:14:46.440 that can happen, good things can happen. It's not going to cover them all. There's going to be

01:14:49.840 things that you don't expect. There's sort of a parallel here between what you're describing and

01:14:54.920 what Jordan Peterson has written about in 12 rules. And I don't know Jordan, but I know you know him

01:14:59.680 pretty well. Have you guys talked about this? Because just listening to this, I see this significant

01:15:03.900 parallel. We haven't talked about this specific thing because I've only truly started talking about it

01:15:10.400 in the last six months. It came up on my podcast and it actually came up on the podcast. I had

01:15:16.660 discussed it before in terms of people dying, right? I've discussed that before. And then basically

01:15:23.080 there's two podcasts that I did where I covered two protocols. One of them was someone died. A father

01:15:28.680 had written in and said, my wife and I lost our kid. I don't know what to do. And when someone asks you

01:15:37.320 that question, the sad thing is, is I actually do know what to do because I've dealt with it a lot.

01:15:46.120 And I, I know what I've done. I know what I've figured out to do. I didn't know it at first,

01:15:50.640 but I figured it out over time. Like, this is what you actually do. Here's the protocol that I'm

01:15:55.420 recommending to you. Do these things, do these things. And that's going to get you. And the other

01:16:03.200 thing I gave them was an understanding of what you're going to feel. Cause what's going to happen

01:16:07.740 is you're going to get hit with a tidal wave that you are going to think is going to consume you

01:16:12.300 forever. That's what it's going to feel like. And what you don't realize, especially when you first

01:16:16.140 get hit with a tidal wave is that tidal wave is going to eventually subside a little bit,

01:16:20.580 a little bit. And what happens is people feel guilty about that because they say all of a sudden,

01:16:25.280 Oh wait, for a split second, I wasn't thinking about this person that I lost. I'm a bad person.

01:16:30.080 It's like, no, that's actually, you're not a bad person. You're starting to move. Right. And

01:16:36.700 that's okay. And eventually these waves of pain, the period of these waves is going to separate

01:16:43.420 more and more. And the strength of the waves is going to subside. The other thing that's scary

01:16:48.580 about it is when you lose someone and you have that kind of heavy sorrow, sometimes for the first

01:16:53.860 time in your life, you can't control your sorrow. Like you'll be sitting there and you'll look at

01:16:58.460 something and to remind you of someone and you'll start crying. You'll break down and you can't

01:17:03.220 control it, which is scary for people. It's very scary to have that happen. And they think this is

01:17:07.980 the way it's going to be from now on. And what I try to explain to people is like, no, that's not

01:17:11.780 what it's going to be like from now on. This is what it's like right now. But those waves of sorrow

01:17:16.420 are going to diminish over time. And that's not bad. That's not bad. It's good. Actually, it's good.

01:17:22.700 And you should look when the sorrow diminishes, when the wave is a little bit weaker, you should

01:17:27.180 be like, okay, cool. I'm starting to process this. I'm starting to get through it. I'm starting to

01:17:30.760 accept the situation I'm in. And then the final thing that I told this particular individual was

01:17:36.120 like, okay, when you get to a point, then what you do is you're going to write a letter to your child

01:17:42.060 and you're going to explain to them how much they meant to you, how much you love them, how much you

01:17:47.000 cherish the time you were together and how you are going to move forward. And you're going to live

01:17:54.340 a beautiful life and you're never going to stop thinking about them, but you're going to move.

01:17:57.740 You're going to do incredible things with your life to honor them. And then you're going to take

01:18:02.780 that to where they're buried and you're going to give it to them. You're going to read it to them.

01:18:05.840 And then you're going to walk away. You're going to move on because you have to,

01:18:09.620 because otherwise, what are you doing? You're burdening, you're burdening this soul

01:18:15.260 with your own sorrow. You're ruining your life on account of them. They don't want that.

01:18:21.240 They don't want that. They want you to move on. They want you to be happy. So go and move on and

01:18:28.040 be happy. So that was one protocol. And the other protocol was like, okay, when you break up with

01:18:33.260 someone, what are you going to do? And if you have a good protocol to follow and you have a good way to

01:18:37.220 think about that, then it's going to be very positive for you. I think the big connection I made

01:18:41.040 there is explaining to people that when someone dumps you, the main thing you have to consider

01:18:46.740 to get through that is when you get dumped, you have to recognize that the person that dumped you

01:18:51.420 is not the person that you thought they were. So if my girlfriend dumps me, I have her in this

01:18:59.880 elevated position. She's a freaking angel, right? She's an angel, but she dumped me. She's not an

01:19:05.780 angel. The person that dumped me, the person that I miss, the person that I thought I was going to

01:19:10.300 spend, that person doesn't exist. It's not that person for sure. Cause that person wouldn't have

01:19:14.300 dumped you. So you have to get through that part. And there's a bunch of other things to do from a

01:19:18.640 protocol perspective when you get dumped. But I think that's the key fact, the key fact you have

01:19:22.120 to recognize that the person that you thought was your everything doesn't exist. That's a hard

01:19:28.420 reality to face, but it's a better reality than the person that I was my forever person doesn't want

01:19:34.080 me forever. Well, that's a worse reality to face. And it's also not the reality.

01:19:37.420 And there's probably even another side to that going back to what you said earlier, which is

01:19:41.480 we could also take the view of, I'm probably not completely without fault here. There's almost

01:19:47.140 inevitably something I can learn about this that I can do better next time.

01:19:52.300 Yeah, for sure. There's no doubt about it. And I think that's something to consider more when you're

01:19:57.620 in the relationship, when you're in the relationship and things are not going the way you want them to

01:20:01.520 most likely you're doing something wrong. Now I can tell you right now,

01:20:04.540 a good relationship will have challenges, right? So if all you're doing is submitting constantly to

01:20:12.060 your partner, that's not engaging for them. So that attitude of like, well, I've done something

01:20:16.700 wrong. What can I fix? I've done something wrong. What can I fix? I've done something wrong. What can

01:20:20.800 I fix? The reality is, okay, it's not, Hey, I've done something wrong. It's Hey, the ownership that

01:20:25.840 I'm taking is I have feelings for this person that I shouldn't actually have. They're actually

01:20:28.580 unrealistic feelings. So I'm not necessarily going to be looking at, Hey, there's a problem

01:20:34.140 in relationship. It's my fault. And I need to change the way I am to strengthen this relationship.

01:20:41.200 If I'm going out with a girl and things aren't right, I take ownership by saying, Hey, you know

01:20:44.940 what? Maybe I've done a bad job selecting this situation. Now, once you're married and you have

01:20:49.140 kids, guess what? You got to take ownership of some problems because you're in there, you're in there

01:20:53.020 and you want to make it work. And something as stupid as what I'd say in the other day, I was

01:20:57.000 doing some kind of a Q and a in an event or something. And it's like, Hey, if your wife

01:21:02.800 makes bad sandwiches or no, I was saying, if you're, if your wife didn't wake up in time to

01:21:07.340 make sandwiches for the kids and you could say like, Hey, you didn't make sandwiches for the kids.

01:21:12.240 Your immediate reaction, that is not going to be good from her. You know, I've been up all night.

01:21:16.000 I was this, I was that. Why don't you make the sandwiches? And you're already in a bad situation.

01:21:20.300 Whereas if you wake up and say, Hey, I noticed you didn't get to make the sandwiches.

01:21:22.340 Is there anything I can do to help? Maybe it'd be better if I made the sandwiches in the morning

01:21:26.500 and like, that's going to move your relationship in the right direction for sure. So get some

01:21:31.860 my two cents on relationship advice. And I wish I kept it, but in high school, college, medical school,

01:21:37.900 I actually physically had these pieces of paper that I kept with me that were two lists. So each

01:21:44.760 time you went through a relationship and it could be a really meaningful one, or it could be one that

01:21:49.180 turned out not to be very meaningful, but I always felt like there were two things

01:21:52.320 I learned from these relationships and they fed these two lists. The first list was things

01:21:58.400 that I now believe are absolutely essential in the person I'm going to spend the rest of

01:22:02.860 my life with. And then the second list was things that I under no circumstance am ever

01:22:08.220 willing to tolerate in a person. And every relationship should be able to add at least one

01:22:14.480 thing to those lists. And by the way, the best relationships will add to both of those lists.

01:22:18.060 So, and it's hard in the moment to think about that. Like sometimes you can only think about that

01:22:22.700 in the months that follow or beyond. I wish I still had those things because I remember some of them

01:22:28.640 protocol checklist for relationships. Yeah, but I wish I still had it. And I don't know. Luckily my

01:22:33.780 kids, I say, luckily my kids are still young enough that we haven't had to have those discussions yet.

01:22:39.200 These will be things that we talk about at some point. And I don't know, that's a whole other world,

01:22:42.860 frankly, that I don't want to think about, which is it's one thing when your heart's broken. It's another

01:22:46.080 thing when you, I imagine for parents listening to this, it must be much worse when your child's

01:22:50.840 heart is broken. I got a lot of experiences in this, in the SEAL teams, because you always had

01:22:54.660 guys that were in a relationship. One of your friends, one of your bros in platoon is in a

01:22:59.360 relationship with a train wreck, legitimately a train wreck. And it's so clear. It's so obvious

01:23:06.680 you're looking at them and there's not one single way in any possible situation, any possible thing

01:23:14.240 that you can say that's going to get them out of the scenario. They're going in and it's awful.

01:23:19.180 So this is what you see with your kids, right? You see your kids. And then the other thing that

01:23:22.360 happens with kids, and it happens a lot, is everything is so important. Things that you know

01:23:30.520 from your 47 year old self or your 27 year old self, you're like, oh, this is literally no factor

01:23:37.500 at all ever in the world. And you are broken about it. This is also a good little sanity check

01:23:44.940 to put on yourself, you know? And like, how often are you upset or you're, this is something that I

01:23:49.860 don't know when I figured out, but bad things happen to me. I'm like, oh, okay. This is just

01:23:54.340 no factor. I'm not going to waste a one little bit of energy about what's going on right now,

01:23:59.520 because this is going to be fine and this doesn't matter. But believe me, I've had conversations

01:24:03.580 with, especially my older daughters, because I think, well, for me, my daughters are a little

01:24:10.200 bit more, they will care more. Like my son. Oh, really? Whatever. Like move past stuff. Just no

01:24:17.620 factor. Just that mentality. And although in each of my daughters is particular in their own way,

01:24:24.020 they can move past some things, other things, maybe not. But you're looking at them going,

01:24:28.540 this will have no bearing. I remember telling my daughter, I remember saying, hey,

01:24:33.580 the girls that I went out with in high school, I can't even remember them. They don't even exist.

01:24:39.840 And of course, when I was 15 years old and I had the girlfriend, she was the whole world.

01:24:44.360 She was the whole world. I haven't even thought about her. I haven't thought about her in 30 years.

01:24:49.380 It's no, it's zero factor. And that's where you're at right now. I know that this situation,

01:24:53.660 it seems like it's the whole world, whether it's school, whether it's grades, whether it's some boy.

01:24:57.180 And you think it's a big deal. It literally means nothing. But here's the deal. I could say that

01:25:04.260 over and over and over again, just like I could say it to a young seal that's going out with a

01:25:08.760 girl that is a disaster and they're not going to listen to you because they can't. They get trapped

01:25:14.480 in that heart-shaped box and it's, you can't use logic. It doesn't work. Very seldom.

01:25:20.840 So just hearing you say that I'm reflecting on all of these things that anyone listening to this can

01:25:27.480 imagine, right? Which is all of these things that we thought mattered so much. And then of course they

01:25:33.660 don't. One of my favorite Ted talks, arguably still my favorite Ted talk. It was maybe 2010,

01:25:39.960 2011, Rick Elias, RIC, we'll link to it, E-L-I-A-S. Very short talk, seven or eight minutes. And he was

01:25:48.200 one of the passengers on the U.S. air flight that landed in the Hudson, actually just 10 years ago.

01:25:52.720 That was January of 2009 was that flight. And his Ted talk, and Rick has now become a good friend and

01:25:58.920 actually can't wait to have him on the podcast at some point. His Ted talk is so much for me like

01:26:03.660 the David Foster Wallace commencement speech, This Is Water, which are just things I listen to so often

01:26:10.280 because they're such stark reminders. And one of the things that he talks about is having this gift

01:26:15.720 of knowing you're going to die in a minute. And I've had the luxury of not only getting to know

01:26:23.660 Rick closely to be able to speak about that in much more detail than he can talk about in a seven

01:26:27.860 minute Ted talk. But I also went on to meet another guy who I've since introduced Rick and this other

01:26:33.120 guy who was in a very similar situation. He was in a helicopter crash and it turned out he had about

01:26:38.880 a minute until impact. He survived. One other person survived. Everybody else was torn into

01:26:45.360 pieces. Like, I mean, he was trapped under shrapnel and metal looking at dead people all around him

01:26:52.120 that all died in the helicopter crash. And independently, they both describe it the exact

01:26:55.940 same way, which is one time slows down to a degree. You can't imagine taking a detour for a moment.

01:27:02.680 People who have survived the jump off the golden gate bridge all say the same thing.

01:27:06.340 That's about a 2.9 to 3.1 second fall, 220 feet until you hit what will turn out to be concrete.

01:27:13.200 When you hit the water, the golden gate below the bridge, every one of those survivor accounts that

01:27:17.360 I've read says the same thing. It's the longest three seconds of your life. I mean, it feels like

01:27:21.860 minutes, right? And so similarly, both Rick and Dan, this other guy talking about that minute that

01:27:26.820 you're just waiting to die. It's like takes forever. Second thing they both said independently,

01:27:33.260 not scary because Dan hadn't even, didn't even know who Rick was until I introduced them,

01:27:39.520 even though Rick had already given this talk. Now for me, that's hard to imagine. I think for you,

01:27:44.380 that's not hard to imagine. I feel like you understand what that would mean for me. I don't

01:27:49.820 know. I think that would be really scary, but I think the part that they also both talked about

01:27:54.660 really resonates with me, which is how sad it is. Like you just don't want it to end. You're sort of

01:27:59.600 like, I'm not ready for this to be the last moment. There's something else I want to do. There's one

01:28:03.420 more hug I want to give. There's one more person I want to see or, you know, these things. But both

01:28:08.880 of these guys have this incredible gift, which I think to some extent you've also captured through

01:28:13.580 seeing things that our sanitized world doesn't show us, which is you very quickly start to realize

01:28:20.520 what's worth putting energy into and what's not. And that's one of these things that Rick talks about

01:28:25.340 is when you basically die and then miraculously don't, and you get a gift, which is you get a do

01:28:33.000 over in life. You really start to think about the, he describes it very eloquently, which is just like

01:28:38.320 all the time I wasted on all the things that don't matter. And yeah, this just fits into that

01:28:44.500 category, right? It's negative energy. It's sad energy. It's all of these things. And I still,

01:28:49.380 I do it every day, Jocko. I mean, just a week ago, someone said something on Twitter, which why I'm

01:28:55.500 even looking at Twitter and reading comments, like I need a smack in the head for that, but I don't

01:28:59.980 often, but sometimes I do. And sure enough, it's Twitter, right? Like it's literally the world's

01:29:05.600 worst neighborhood. It easily stayed within me for like three hours, just thinking about why would

01:29:14.060 somebody say that? Like, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And again, it's not like pure negative energy.

01:29:18.800 It's not like, I want to kill that person. No, no. It's just like, why would they say that? Like,

01:29:23.000 how can they not understand this? What do they think? Blah, blah, blah. And then you look back

01:29:27.040 and you're like, you wasted three hours. Yeah, you were doing something else, but you weren't doing

01:29:32.720 it to the level you could have been doing it, right? You were distracted. You pride yourself in

01:29:38.040 never having a phone at the dinner table. Okay, great. Give yourself a pat on the back. But how many times

01:29:42.820 are you sitting at the dinner table and your mind is somewhere else at some email that some patient

01:29:47.560 sent you that was snippy and they were rude and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, dude,

01:29:52.320 you're wasting time. So, I mean, can you come up with a protocol for that? Because to me,

01:29:57.640 that is the problem of civilization is like, we have lost track of what problems really are.

01:30:03.180 Well, I can tell you one protocol is go overseas and have your friends and see a bunch of guys

01:30:08.060 sacrifice their lives and come home. And then realize that you talk about these guys,

01:30:16.580 how they realized they were given this gift. Like, that's how I feel every single day.

01:30:20.140 I can only imagine.

01:30:21.220 And I think many of the guys that serve in the military and women that serve in the military

01:30:26.700 that went overseas and spent that time over there. Like I said, hey, maybe it's not a good chance you're

01:30:32.740 going to get killed, but you got to face the fact that, yeah, it's going to take some luck to get

01:30:36.660 through this. And you realize life is a gift without question, without question, it's a gift.

01:30:43.000 I think also something that I talk about a lot, and I suppose there's some big philosophical kind

01:30:51.200 of realm behind it because I hear people talk about it, but just having the ability to detach from

01:30:56.460 what's going on and look at things from the outside. And this is something that I specifically

01:31:01.840 know for a fact that I started doing when I was in the SEAL teams. I know why I started doing it.

01:31:08.900 I understood the benefit that it gave me, but I started applying that to basically everything

01:31:15.260 that happens to me is oftentimes I just am detached from what's going on. So I can see that, oh, this

01:31:23.320 doesn't matter. This thing right here, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to me. These things are not

01:31:26.820 important. And from a leadership perspective, I talk about the same thing because good leaders,

01:31:31.040 they realize what's important and what's not. And a bad leader gets wound up about something

01:31:36.180 that doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. And it's really hard to watch because just like

01:31:41.940 your teenage daughter doesn't realize that this thing doesn't matter. You get someone that's a

01:31:46.320 leader and they're mad. They're mad about this guy disobeyed me and he didn't do the thing that I

01:31:52.380 told him to do. And you're thinking to yourself, this does not matter. And so you tell them this

01:31:56.160 doesn't matter. And you know what they say? But, but it, you know, but you don't see. No,

01:32:01.540 it's like, no, I'm telling you, this doesn't matter. I talked about that on my podcast. When

01:32:05.180 you get good at jujitsu, you realize that there's some things that don't matter. Like it doesn't

01:32:10.040 matter. Someone's grabbing your hand, your arm here. That doesn't matter. What matters is what

01:32:14.800 you're doing over here with your hips. That's what matters. And so the more advanced you get at jujitsu,

01:32:18.840 the more you realize what's important and what matters and what doesn't matter.

01:32:21.540 And so it's the same thing with life. The better you get at life, the more you're able to detach

01:32:26.720 from inside your own, just storm emotion filled, ego filled, crazy brain. The more you can get out

01:32:35.400 of that thing and you can take a step back and look at what's actually occurring, the better

01:32:39.000 decisions you're going to be able to make. Again, I'm not saying you should be devoid of emotions and

01:32:43.300 I'm certainly not devoid of emotions, but I know that if I'm going to make a decision, I want to take a

01:32:49.160 step back from those emotions. I want to take a step back from that chaos and mayhem. Cause so you

01:32:53.720 can actually see what's important and what's not because you're a hundred percent right. When you're

01:32:57.980 going out on an operation and you're going into an area where there's been, there's been 20 guys

01:33:05.500 killed in the last two months from big IEDs that blew up. By the way, you have no control over that.

01:33:11.700 Like, okay, you do your best. You study the Intel, you do mind clearance that you try and take the

01:33:17.420 routes that have been cleared. You do all those things. Great. That's fine. It doesn't matter.

01:33:20.520 You can still get blown up and you can still die. That's the way it is. So you say to yourself,

01:33:24.380 okay, you accept that. And now when you come home after you do that for an extended period of time,

01:33:30.160 you come home and you're like, I'm actually, this little thing over here doesn't really matter.

01:33:34.580 I'm going to be all right. I mean, the IEDs are, I can't imagine that because I don't know why

01:33:41.660 it just strikes me as by far the thing I would be most afraid of if I were in the situation of those

01:33:47.080 soldiers, because as you said, I don't know what the hell you do about it. Like you could do

01:33:52.260 everything right. Not that you can always do everything right, but, but it's different from

01:33:56.940 saying, well, no, like if I'm in a theater of combat, I can be more defensive. I can take this

01:34:02.160 posture. I can take less risk. Well, like IED. And especially as you said, in areas where

01:34:07.340 they seemed completely endemic. I mean, they were as ubiquitous as sand.

01:34:12.320 Yeah. What do you do then? Well, the thing that's interesting that you're saying is that would

01:34:15.920 worry you the most. Yeah. Paradoxically, the thing I have the least control over,

01:34:20.140 I would spend the most time wasting time thinking about. And you wouldn't.

01:34:23.840 Well, hopefully I would have been working for you and you would have beat that out of me.

01:34:27.040 It would have been like, okay, there's nothing we can do about that. Well, actually there is.

01:34:29.920 There's some things we can do. There's some things we can do to mitigate the risk and we're

01:34:32.740 going to do those things. And once we've mitigated the risk to the best of our ability,

01:34:35.920 now we're going to worry about the things we can control. And we're going to focus on the things

01:34:38.940 we can control. And that's what we're going to do to get through this. Because you do not want to get

01:34:43.400 stuck like that. No. And my guess is you saw people who couldn't get out of that way. I mean,

01:34:48.520 there must've been guys that were paralyzed by that fear. There definitely are. That's one thing

01:34:54.300 that I, I don't want to say this as a rule, but it makes me nervous when people are nervous,

01:35:01.680 right? When you're nervous, you're going to hesitate. When you're nervous, you're thinking

01:35:05.760 about the wrong things. So it made me nervous. When guys were nervous, I didn't like it. I liked

01:35:11.460 when guys were confident. They weren't scared. That's the guy that's going to do something

01:35:15.700 aggressive. That's going to keep everyone alive. Cause Oh, we're getting shot at from over. I'm

01:35:18.800 going to go attack that person as opposed to, Oh, we're getting shot at. I'm going to hide.

01:35:22.720 Cause when you're hiding and you're not shooting, guess what the enemy's doing? They're maneuvering

01:35:26.540 on you. They're going to kill you. So I think about that to this day, some situations happening to

01:35:31.260 me. I don't hide from it. I'm going to go after it. I'm going to get aggressive. Like I'm going to

01:35:35.660 default aggressive. That's going to be my mode. Cause to sit back and allow and wait things to

01:35:39.480 happen to you. The more you do that, the more defensive you are, the more defensive your

01:35:43.180 mindset is the worst things are going to turn out. Let's go back to training. Cause I've never

01:35:46.880 really heard the full story of how you make this progression. So when you show up as an enlisted

01:35:53.440 kid in the Navy, it's like you and a billion other kids, right? How many of you are actually

01:35:58.700 thinking I'm going to go to buds? Is that the next step? Like after you do some basic period of time

01:36:04.040 in the Navy? I have no idea what the number of people that joined the Navy to be in the seal

01:36:09.360 teams is, but you end up with a bunch of people that go to basic seal training and a bunch of them

01:36:15.120 don't make it. So how long were you in Orlando before you came out to San Diego? Eight week Navy

01:36:21.100 bootcamp. Navy bootcamp is pretty straightforward. What you're learning in the Navy, you're in some

01:36:28.240 kind of an industrial job, right? That's what you're doing. That's what the regular Navy does.

01:36:32.200 They're running engines. They're maintaining weapons. They're working on the ship. That's what

01:36:39.660 you're doing. You're doing some kind of a mechanical generally. That's what the Navy is,

01:36:44.280 right? It's a bunch of ships. The ships are big machines with engines. Oh, you might be working on

01:36:48.780 aircraft. Guess what? Or you're flying an aircraft or you're navigating the ship, right? So everything

01:36:52.820 is a technical. And so you have pilots in the Navy that are distinct from Marines, which also have

01:36:58.300 pilots, correct? Yes. The Navy has pilots. The Air Force have pilots. The Marine Corps has pilots in

01:37:02.040 the Army. Everyone has pilots. I think, I want to say the Navy has more aircraft than the Air Force

01:37:07.860 does. I might be wrong about that, but it's very similar. And the Army might have probably has more

01:37:11.840 aircraft than both because they have helicopters and they have A-10. So there's every service kind

01:37:17.040 of has their own thing. And just like the Army has boats, right? The Army has boats. The Marine Corps has

01:37:22.420 some kind of boats as well. So yeah, everyone's got a little bit of everything. But what I'm saying is

01:37:27.980 the Navy is pretty technical. Yeah. There's less hand-to-hand combat in the Navy than the others,

01:37:32.900 presumably. Oh, no doubt about that. And that's one thing that's a disadvantage for the SEAL teams.

01:37:36.860 The disadvantage for the SEAL teams is you don't have the basic infantry because you go through Army

01:37:40.480 or Marine Corps bootcamp, you're getting basic infantry skills, whereas the Navy doesn't give you

01:37:45.340 basic infantry skills. Now, are there guys that go from being in the Marines to the SEALs?

01:37:49.460 There are. You have to get out. You have to transfer. You have to go into the Navy. But it happens.

01:37:55.260 Oh, so when you enlist as a Marine, you're not enlisting in the Navy first.

01:37:59.340 You're in the Marine Corps.

01:37:59.920 You're directly in the Marine Corps.

01:38:01.300 Yeah.

01:38:01.760 Okay. So eight weeks out, you now go straight to BUDS?

01:38:05.800 Yeah. And then you go to BUDS. Well, and this is one of those things where what they do right now

01:38:09.780 is you go from bootcamp, you go to, I think it's like a prep course where you go for two months

01:38:15.060 in Chicago. And you basically run, swim, and get in good shape to go to BUDS.

01:38:19.660 Okay. Now you were already in pretty good shape showing up, I'm guessing. Did you know what you

01:38:23.760 were going to have to do? And did you train to do that back when you were in New England?

01:38:26.780 We had no idea. So for instance, if I thought, well, I know we're going to do a lot of pull-ups,

01:38:32.360 so I'm going to do a lot of pull-ups. What was a lot of pull-ups to me when I was 18 years old?

01:38:35.580 A lot of pull-ups was like five sets of 12, right? That's what you're going to do. That seemed like

01:38:40.160 a good workout. Now, I mean, I do hundreds and hundreds of pull-ups when I do pull-ups now,

01:38:44.240 hundreds and hundreds, 500 pull-ups, right? That's a normal workout. But I didn't know that.

01:38:49.420 So you go to BUDS and you don't know it. Just same thing with push-ups. Like you're going to do

01:38:52.400 so many push-ups. So no, I wasn't ready. You weren't ready for BUDS. The kids now are much

01:38:58.600 more prepared because they know more about what's going to happen. There's training programs. You can

01:39:03.140 watch the whole damn, you can watch all of BUDS. I didn't know anything about BUDS.

01:39:06.320 So BUDS is basic underwater demolition.

01:39:08.640 SEAL training. Yeah.

01:39:09.360 Okay. And how many weeks is it?

01:39:11.440 The basic part is 26 weeks. So it's six months.

01:39:15.340 And what is the process or what is the attrition rate over that 26 weeks? Is it mostly in the

01:39:21.220 beginning?

01:39:21.800 Yeah. It's mostly in the beginning. Yeah. 70 or 80% attrition rate.

01:39:25.160 And is the hell week very early in that?

01:39:27.100 It actually changes around. When I went through, it was like the fifth week, I think.

01:39:31.100 And it's somewhere around there. Maybe it's the fourth week, maybe it's the sixth week,

01:39:34.220 but it's somewhere around there. They give you a month or so to get ready. And then you go through

01:39:37.040 hell week.

01:39:37.440 And hell week, is that the greatest period of attrition?

01:39:40.120 It is the biggest period of attrition. Yeah.

01:39:41.880 So let's talk about what hell week is.

01:39:44.060 You do a bunch of working out for five days.

01:39:46.900 And the conditions are pretty tough. I mean, you're in San Diego, the water ain't warm.

01:39:50.800 Yeah. The water's cold. You don't sleep and you work out a bunch.

01:39:55.040 The thing is, man, people make SEAL training into this mythical thing and it's really not.

01:40:02.640 But you've told me stories. I remember you telling me about a guy who was in your class,

01:40:07.960 who was like the top water polo player coming out of UCLA. Like you couldn't create a better

01:40:14.680 aquatic machine, a better specimen.

01:40:17.100 For sure.

01:40:17.420 Than someone who can keep their hands out of water, maneuver, and propel themselves. Like

01:40:24.460 I am as good a swimmer as the average schmo out there. I can't do that very well. So how does this

01:40:30.400 guy not pass buds?

01:40:31.680 Didn't want to be there apparently.

01:40:32.840 So that's the part I'm interested in, right? It's like the mental fortitude that is required

01:40:37.060 to suffer.

01:40:37.800 Yeah. But there's knuckleheads that make it through. I'm telling you. I mean, I've had a couple of my

01:40:42.300 buddies reach out to me and say, you said buds is easy. It's not. And they're right. It's not,

01:40:47.380 it's not easy. And I had as hard of time as anyone. I made it through one class, which means I didn't

01:40:51.700 get rolled back. But what does that mean?

01:40:54.020 When I went through, if you failed, there's three phases that you'd go through. And you know what?

01:40:58.960 Don't quote me on this stuff. It's like kind of what I remember, but in first phase.

01:41:04.100 So basically there's two things going on. One, they're waiting for you to quit.

01:41:07.280 Yes.

01:41:07.680 But two, there's metrics you must hit during the workouts.

01:41:10.440 Yes. So run, swim, obstacle course. And then they have these other kind of evolutions that

01:41:18.040 are just going to crush you. So like underwater knot tying, you go down to 15 feet. They've got

01:41:24.080 a little cord down there. You tie a knot on it. They give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down. You

01:41:28.120 retie it. And then you go up, you get a breath, you come down, you tie another one. This is the kind

01:41:32.640 of thing where it's like, it doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but a bunch of people fail

01:41:35.300 underwater knot tying. Lifesaving. Same thing. You're going to rescue a SEAL instructor from

01:41:39.780 quote unquote drowning. And this person's doing everything to drown you.

01:41:43.000 They're going to drown you. So that's one pool competency, which is where you're learning scuba

01:41:46.880 and they're bringing you down there and they're ripping your mask off and they're pulling your

01:41:49.700 regulator out. And they're just going to, they're basically going to, again, they're going to make

01:41:52.600 you as uncomfortable as they possibly can in the water. And you're either going to bolt to the

01:41:56.820 surface in which case you fail, or you're going to do the wrong procedures in which case you fail.

01:42:00.380 So they got these kinds of things that you're constantly doing.

01:42:03.500 There was also some crazy thing you told me about that, like in the water, you had to do

01:42:07.720 something like a pretty long breath hold with a pretty significant task. It was beyond the knot

01:42:12.560 tying. Well, there's a 50 meter underwater swim, which is not that big of a deal.

01:42:15.440 Without fins or with fins. That's without fins.

01:42:18.220 Jeez, that's hard.

01:42:19.380 I guarantee you could do that. You're a swimmer. So anyways, there's those. And then there's

01:42:22.620 these timed evolutions that you have to do, run, swim, and obstacle course. So to make a long

01:42:28.940 story short, for me, none of those were easy. I was not a good runner. I was not a good swimmer.

01:42:35.040 What was the run criteria roughly?

01:42:37.060 Those I remember because those haven't changed, but there's a caveat to them. So the run,

01:42:41.120 first phase, four miles, soft sand, boots, 32 minutes, second phase, 30 minutes, third phase,

01:42:47.080 28 minutes. So-

01:42:48.520 Meaning you had to do three runs and clear those times successively?

01:42:51.540 They were weekly.

01:42:52.460 Okay.

01:42:53.060 And you had to hit those times. And if you missed those times, you failed.

01:42:56.500 So the last one's 28 minutes. So that's a seven minute mile.

01:42:59.520 Seven minute mile, which is a joke, right?

01:43:01.140 Well, it's a joke on pavement, but it's not a joke in sand.

01:43:04.800 Here's the caveat. The caveat is you're in sand, you're in boots. You, the night before did

01:43:11.080 1,000, literally 1,008 count bodybuilders, which is like a burpee with another movement in there.

01:43:18.320 You slept for three hours. You're on the beach. It's cold. And the run that's supposed to be four

01:43:24.440 miles is actually 4.42 miles or whatever. You have no idea. But so it's not as easy as it sounds.

01:43:30.860 It doesn't sound easy.

01:43:31.700 It crushes plenty of people. Now, if you ran track in high school, it's not going to be hard for you.

01:43:36.280 If you swam in high school, the swims are going to be easy for you. If you wrestled,

01:43:40.920 you're probably going to do pretty good on the obstacle course. So there's some advantages you can

01:43:44.140 have. For me, it was all hard. I wasn't great at running. I wasn't great at swimming. And I failed to

01:43:49.080 run. I failed to run because I decided I was going to pace myself. And by the way, you're not allowed

01:43:54.440 to wear a watch. And so I wasn't wearing a watch. I paced myself. I said, Oh, you know, I'm going to

01:43:57.720 save a little energy. So I went out and was coming to the finish line. And the guy started pointing to

01:44:02.880 the, you can go over there and take a knee. He's pointing to the ocean, which means you failed.

01:44:07.880 And so I'm saying, I'm like, damn it. But from then on, I just had to run as hard as I possibly could.

01:44:13.140 Cause you have no idea how long it's going to be. You have no idea what your time is. So I would just go

01:44:16.880 out from then on. And you don't run together. You're staggered in the start. This is like on

01:44:20.460 your market set, go everybody. Yeah. Everyone, every man for himself. And so, yeah, some people

01:44:24.300 pass, some people failed. That's the one that I failed. So I failed to swim as well. And the same

01:44:29.420 thing. And actually this one, I was swimming with a guy who wasn't the best swimmer. And this wasn't a

01:44:34.180 funny story. I swam with a guy who is not a great swimmer. And there's something called guiding,

01:44:38.840 which means you're looking at the shore and you're keeping yourself going in a straight line.

01:44:42.020 By the way, what are you wearing when you swim in the ocean?

01:44:44.040 What we used to wear was crappy, useless wetsuit tops with a beaver tail bottom that let water flow

01:44:51.340 through them. It was almost pointless. Nowadays, they wear a little bit nicer of a shorty wetsuit.

01:44:57.140 So when you guide, you're looking, you're keeping the distance, you're going in the right direction.

01:45:01.440 So myself and my swim buddy, we failed to swim. And so now we're all lined up with all the other

01:45:05.780 people that failed to swim and we have to go and explain what happened. And my swim buddy,

01:45:11.380 he says, what went wrong with you guys? And I said something like, didn't swim hard enough,

01:45:17.120 right? Which is the right answer. My swim buddy says, Willink doesn't know how to guide,

01:45:22.320 meaning it was my fault. And I was, I was kind of taken aback because I didn't expect it.

01:45:26.720 And the instructors were like, okay, fine. They split us up and put us with other swim buddies.

01:45:32.180 And I passed the next one and this guy failed it again.

01:45:34.900 But this all happened in one week because you said a lot of people have to repeat buds,

01:45:39.100 right? There's a lot of people that get rolled back, which means you got hurt or you failed.

01:45:44.780 So when I went through, and again, this is to the best of my recollection,

01:45:48.040 because here's the thing, man, seal training is a little tiny fraction of your career.

01:45:51.840 No one freaking cares about it. We never sit around in telling stories and talk about it.

01:45:56.420 Like it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. No one cares about buds. Here's the deal with buds.

01:46:00.520 You work out a bunch for six months. That's the deal. You compare buds to being in a convoy,

01:46:07.640 getting ready to roll out in the city of Ramadi or getting ready to patrol out of one of the forward

01:46:11.520 operating bases there. The mentality is not even close. It doesn't compare.

01:46:15.860 Does buds accomplish what it sounds like is one of the most important or two things that seem the

01:46:20.460 most important one, making sure that the soldier is physically prepared at a certain level and two,

01:46:27.500 and perhaps more importantly, making sure that the mental fortitude is at a level as well.

01:46:33.080 I'd say it does a decent job. You get like probably a 90% solution on those physically ready. Like,

01:46:38.580 yeah, 90% of the guys come out of there and they're pretty good to go. Once they get to a team,

01:46:42.500 90% of the guys, they get out of there and they're pretty good to go as far as like, Hey,

01:46:45.900 we're not going to give up, but you still end up with guys in the seal teams that are totally weak

01:46:49.220 and totally mentally pathetic. And this is the way it is. Every organization,

01:46:52.780 you can't perfectly screen anything, right? I mean, it just doesn't work.

01:46:55.140 And I'm guessing that buds is not a predictor of your success as a seal. In other words,

01:47:00.920 bud says almost zero prediction of what someone's going to be like as a seal, because

01:47:05.460 you can be a great athlete, right? It doesn't test leadership. For example,

01:47:08.920 doesn't really test teamwork to a high level. Sure. There's teamwork things that you have to do,

01:47:13.260 but you can play the game to get through the training. And then you can show up at a team and

01:47:17.500 be a complete idiot and look out for yourself. And then you're not a good team member.

01:47:22.000 Does it test intelligence?

01:47:23.000 Barely. Yeah. So you've got intelligence, intuition, leadership. There are lots of

01:47:27.520 things that are necessary to succeed as a seal. Yeah. Buds is pretty, as far as all that stuff

01:47:33.400 goes. Yeah. If you took guys and said, okay, this guy did great in buds, what are the chances that

01:47:37.560 he's a great seal? It's a random number generator. It's a coin toss. It's pretty much a coin toss.

01:47:41.580 There's guys that go through buds that are studs and they're just horrible seals. They're just horrible

01:47:46.520 seals and no one wants them. So we don't hear about these seals. Like we sort of think, well,

01:47:51.360 if you're a seals or if you're a ranger or if you're Delta, like if you're elite of the elite,

01:47:57.040 by definition, it's a meritocracy. Isn't everybody perfect?

01:48:00.060 Everybody's awesome. That's the funny thing is everyone thinks, oh, if you were in the seal teams,

01:48:04.540 then you're a great leader. If you're in the seal teams, then you're got incredible teamwork. And

01:48:09.420 everyone thinks that, but no, it's not true at all. I'm a perfect example because people think,

01:48:13.820 oh, Jock was super strong or Jock was super athlete. I'm not a super strong and I'm not a super

01:48:18.340 athlete by any stretch. I'm kind of like average. I'm kind of like low average, you know? And do I

01:48:24.260 work out a lot? Sure. I work out a lot, but I couldn't win a damn weightlifting competition in

01:48:29.780 any situation. Just not that. So I'm a good example of the fact that people get a mythical idea that

01:48:35.800 every seal is a great leader or every seal is a great athlete or every seal was incredible mental

01:48:40.680 fortitude. When did you get out? 11? 2010. God, it's hard to believe it's been that long.

01:48:44.600 It is. It is. Oh my God. Time does go faster the older we get. Yes. Yes, it does indeed.

01:48:53.440 What was the hardest transition for you to getting out? Your kids were young. Pretty young. Yeah.

01:49:00.060 What was it like? Were there moments when you're at a stoplight and it occurs to you like no one's

01:49:05.920 actually trying to kill you? That's coming home from deployment. When you come home from deployment,

01:49:09.940 that part is a very clear one, especially my first deployment. We were in vehicles all the time

01:49:13.580 and the IED threat was high and you were getting used to it and we were doing convoys in Baghdad

01:49:20.100 and it was like, okay, cool. These people, we don't want to let them in our convoy and you're

01:49:23.940 driving really aggressive. So there's a little bit of that. But once I came home, I was from my last

01:49:29.860 deployment was doing work and you get rid of those feelings after a little. We had a little,

01:49:35.320 when we came home from Ramadi, we had a little, I'd call it a little decompression time where

01:49:40.340 wasn't formal, but we were going hard. We were celebrating life. I'll put it that way. We were

01:49:46.220 happy to be home. We were mourning the fact that we lost guys and we were a little bit,

01:49:51.660 I know I personally was going, I was just going living hard. We'll say that living hard.

01:49:56.440 Was it hard for your wife to sort of, I guess it's hard for me to put myself in her shoes or your shoes

01:50:03.580 for that matter, but more so in hers to think I've kind of been holding down the fort here and I'm really

01:50:09.240 glad you're home, but I'm confused as to why you're doing this. Or was she totally understanding

01:50:14.000 of? My wife is a saint. My wife is a saint. And first of all, when I was gone, my wife was raising

01:50:22.840 our three kids at the time. She was holding down the fort. She was giving me zero concerns. Like I

01:50:30.020 was overseas. And as far as I knew, everything was fine. Everything was perfect. No water heater was

01:50:34.220 broken. No car was broken down. No kid was sick. No diapers were being changed. Everything was just

01:50:40.600 handled. That's what was going on. And then my wife was going to visit my guys that were wounded

01:50:47.140 in the hospital. My wife was going to my guys' funerals and she was doing that. And by the way,

01:50:54.860 when you've got families of SEALs that are going to the funerals of guys from the task unit,

01:51:02.720 every single one of those wives knows that there's just a coin toss that that's not my husband,

01:51:09.020 that that's not my son, that's not everybody. They feel that, right? So basically when you're

01:51:13.880 going to bury one of your spouse's teammates, there's no way you can't think that what are

01:51:20.460 the chances that this is my husband? And it never occurred to me until you just said that, but

01:51:24.720 you're not there. No. I never really thought about that. Yeah.

01:51:27.920 The funerals are the families without the soldiers.

01:51:33.460 Well, there's SEALs there that go that are back.

01:51:36.360 But many of the families are going without their spouse.

01:51:38.760 Yeah. So everyone from Task Unit Bruiser, every one of those spouses, kids, they're all going and

01:51:42.900 they're seeing one of their dad's friends get buried.

01:51:46.920 So your kids, was your oldest even old enough to have gone?

01:51:49.440 My kids did not go. No, my kids did not go. When they got older and there would be,

01:51:54.580 especially my son, I would take my son. If a SEAL gets killed, we'll go to the memorial service

01:51:58.560 because I want him to see what it's about. You know what I mean? You need to understand what this

01:52:03.140 is because everyone thinks, like I said, when you're a kid, you think, oh no, this will never

01:52:08.000 happen to me, you know, but you got to realize, no, this is real. This is what happens. And that's

01:52:13.680 part of life. That's part of war and all the glory that people talk about a war. They don't show this

01:52:19.100 part of it. So, but my wife was doing all that. And so when I came home, man, she was just happy.

01:52:24.380 I was home more than anything else. And my wife has always been very emotionally independent.

01:52:30.940 She also knew that I'm not normal. And she made that pretty clear to me maybe a year or so ago

01:52:37.860 when I was explaining something, I was trying to explain the way someone was behaving.

01:52:42.820 And I was kind of saying, well, I would never do that. And she's like, you're not normal.

01:52:49.160 And she didn't say it.

01:52:50.420 That's not a derogatory statement.

01:52:51.560 It's the first time where she said, cause she'd said it before, but she said it in a way

01:52:54.660 that was, I was thinking about it. She goes, the thing is, you're not normal. And I thought about

01:52:59.280 it. I thought, you know what? She's right. I'm not normal. And that's fine. But as far as me coming

01:53:05.900 home, she was awesome. And she, when I said that she basically supported me with what I was doing,

01:53:12.200 here's an example. I'm a total jerk when it comes to jujitsu and we were married. I was in,

01:53:18.240 in a platoon. I was in a task unit. And when I'd come home from work at seven o'clock at night,

01:53:22.740 I would grab my bag and I'd go train jujitsu. And then I'd get up the next morning at five o'clock

01:53:27.640 in the morning and I'd go to work and she wouldn't see me all day. And I'd come home and seven o'clock

01:53:31.740 the next day. And I'd pick up my bag and I'd go to jujitsu. And I would say of the hundreds and

01:53:36.380 hundreds of times that I did that, there was probably three times that I can remember where she was

01:53:40.200 actually looking at me with, with a look of disappointment. Like, are you serious right

01:53:47.660 now? You've been gone for three weeks. You've been working every night until seven o'clock and

01:53:51.980 you're going to actually go and train jujitsu instead of hanging out with your kids for an

01:53:55.400 hour before they go to sleep. And three times out of hundreds and hundreds of times is pretty

01:54:00.240 legitimate. But she realized that I'm not normal. And that she realized that her objections to that

01:54:07.240 were not worth it. Cause now all of a sudden I'm not doing something that really is important to me.

01:54:11.680 Not that my family's not important to me, but this is my release. This is my thing. So she cleared

01:54:16.620 me hot, you know, almost every single time other than maybe three. But it's funny. Like I remember

01:54:21.780 we were talking maybe last year at some point and you said something that really resonated with

01:54:27.480 me because each passing day, I feel it more and more. And it was, we were talking about doing

01:54:34.360 something going somewhere and you were like, you know, there is nothing I like doing more than

01:54:40.260 hanging out with my family. Like when it's me and my wife and my daughters and my son and we're at

01:54:48.400 home, like there's really nothing else I want to do and nowhere else I want to go. And it's sort of

01:54:54.600 funny. Like I've been reflecting on that and I was like, you know, I kind of feel the same way. Like I

01:54:57.840 just never like going anywhere anymore. I really most enjoy being home. Yeah. And that's a relatively

01:55:06.020 recent phenomenon for me. I don't know. Was that an evolution for you? Well, two things. Number one,

01:55:10.440 I'm doing jujitsu, right? I'm working out every day. If there's waves, I'm surfing. I play guitar a lot

01:55:15.040 when my family's sitting around, whether they want to hear me or not, but those are some things. So

01:55:18.500 I definitely want to do those things. And to be quite frank, if there was a war going on and I was

01:55:24.240 still active duty and I'd want to be going doing that. And this is another crazy thing about my

01:55:27.740 wife is like, I used to tell my wife, think about this. This is hard. And I caught some flack. I said

01:55:32.620 this on the podcast, but here's the reality of the situation. I told my wife, I was like, the teams is

01:55:38.620 my number one priority. The seal teams is my priority in my life. You are up there, but that's

01:55:44.420 my number one priority. And that's a crazy thing to say. That's just a crazy thing to say. And one of the

01:55:51.080 things that I didn't really make clear on the podcast when I talked about it is one of the

01:55:56.140 reasons that it's not just, it is my priority. It has to be my priority. It has to be my priority

01:56:00.460 because here's the deal. I'm going to go overseas. I'm going to be in a combat situation. The best

01:56:06.340 thing that I can do for our family is be completely and utterly as prepared as I possibly can so that

01:56:13.120 when things happen, I'm ready so I can come home. And by the way, it's not just me. I got 40 guys

01:56:20.780 that are counting on me to make the right decisions at the right time. So they come home

01:56:25.240 too. So when I say that the seal teams is my priority, the reason is because that's my tactical

01:56:31.880 priority right now. So that strategically in the long run, I'll be here in the future. And so will

01:56:38.380 my friends. So I had to clarify that a little bit because that's a pretty harsh statement to make.

01:56:44.840 Do you think that most of your peers felt the same way?

01:56:47.180 Most, I don't know, but a lot of them, a lot of them, man, I'm telling you, when you're in a seal

01:56:53.200 platoon, when you're a young guy in a seal platoon, there's nothing else in the world. The rest of the

01:56:57.800 world doesn't exist or it exists only for you to go and get into.

01:57:03.440 But thinking about what you said a moment ago, right? Which was if tomorrow there was a need for

01:57:07.920 you to go back and serve under the same condition. So not in some nice green zone where you're there

01:57:14.360 in part, but you're actually back out there in front of the IDs, you would do it again.

01:57:18.860 Yeah.

01:57:19.420 Today.

01:57:19.920 Yes.

01:57:20.580 You have three kids. You have a wife.

01:57:22.780 I have four kids.

01:57:23.640 I mean, you've got different responsibilities than you had when you were 25. And yet you would be

01:57:30.080 willing to go out there and make that sacrifice. And I have to tell you, I wouldn't.

01:57:35.660 Understood.

01:57:36.440 I've never really thought about it until now, but the way you frame it that way, like I,

01:57:40.140 I would not be willing to do it. I think I'm too selfish. I would not do that. And I wonder how

01:57:46.760 many of your peers today, meaning the guys that you were with in your twenties, in your thirties,

01:57:52.300 who now are in the situation you were in, which is they've been civilians for a decade. They have

01:57:57.120 families. Do you have a sense of how many of them could actually go back and put their lives

01:58:01.380 at that type of risk?

01:58:03.400 A decent amount.

01:58:04.420 Wow.

01:58:05.080 Yeah. Decent amount. Yeah. There's something you use the word

01:58:09.900 selfish to describe yourself. And I mean, that's obviously pretty harsh, but to go in

01:58:14.520 the opposite direction, there's something incredibly unselfish about the guys that I

01:58:18.660 used to work with and the guys that still serve right now. And it's not a completely,

01:58:23.000 I don't want to make everyone out to be these kind of angelic people. Cause there's definitely

01:58:28.540 some self gratification in it. Like you love doing this.

01:58:33.200 And so it's not a hundred percent just you're an angel, but there's guys that are willing to

01:58:41.040 sacrifice. I mean, that's what the U S military is filled with. The U S military is filled with men

01:58:44.800 and women that are willing to set aside everything that they have, including their life, because they

01:58:51.220 believe in a higher ideal. And yeah, that's a huge, huge, incredible thing. That's why it's so

01:58:59.000 incredible to have been part of that in any way. It's incredible.

01:59:02.900 Do you think part of it is just, if you believe the idea that there's no such thing as true

01:59:07.060 altruism, right? So even when we act at our most altruistic, it's because we are getting something

01:59:12.020 from that. We are getting a sense of connectiveness. We are getting a sense of joy, a sense of pride,

01:59:16.460 a sense of relational connectivity. So what you're describing is like this higher calling that

01:59:21.640 says, look, I mean, there is no higher honor. Do you think that there's just something

01:59:27.020 missing from the world today versus the world in the 1940s post-World War II? You know, David Brooks

01:59:34.800 has written about this quite a bit in a book that he wrote several years ago called the road to

01:59:38.420 character, where he talks about the difference between eulogy virtues and resume virtues. And he

01:59:45.280 talks a lot about a big turning point, which was sort of post-World War II. During the second world war,

01:59:51.880 you didn't just have to be a soldier to understand sacrifice, right? The women who weren't going to

01:59:56.880 war were killing themselves here, making ammunition. People were, everyone in the country knew what a

02:00:03.160 sacrifice was. Now, the highest sacrifice was paid by the young men on the front lines, but everybody

02:00:09.620 was connected to that. Vietnam, which would be the next major conflict, I guess, Korea, but then Vietnam,

02:00:16.040 it became disconnected. And I would argue that what you went through was even more disconnected.

02:00:20.540 So part of the argument of Brooks is we lost something when we lost that connection. I don't

02:00:27.200 think he articulates it that way, but the gist of it was many good things happen from the progression

02:00:32.460 of society through the sixties and seventies and beyond. But one of the things we sort of lost was

02:00:37.080 this sense of something greater than ourselves. I guess I wonder if that's part of what appeals to

02:00:43.300 you still is why would you risk today potentially, again, as a thought experiment, not seeing your family

02:00:50.040 again, there must be something really, really amazing to take that risk. And that amazing thing

02:00:57.040 is, is it this sense of a purpose that goes so far beyond anything you can contemplate as a civilian?

02:01:01.960 Yeah. Yeah. I guess it is because it's very clear to me. Yeah. When you ask this question,

02:01:08.700 it's a little bit, as I listened to you, the fact that you, you would miss it. You're like,

02:01:14.740 no, I wouldn't do that. Not even like, well, you know, I get it. I mean, we could press you further.

02:01:21.220 Like if it was an existential threat to you and your family, you'd be on the front line. So there's

02:01:25.240 the difference. I guess there's the connection part that you're talking about. And I guess for me,

02:01:29.580 I still have a connection in my blood to the guys that I worked with from the guys that raised me in

02:01:38.460 the SEAL teams, that if there was something that they needed me, your thought is, well, yes, I'll be

02:01:45.100 there. You know? I think part of it is I just feel like my world is shrinking as I get older and I feel

02:01:51.180 less and less important. I think I'm converging on a point where I think technically the only thing that

02:01:57.620 matters is my family. And they're the only ones who I can really influence in a way that matters.

02:02:06.220 And therefore my life is not that important outside of that. I don't think I have enough

02:02:13.020 belief that I matter or can make a difference outside of that. That sounds like such a nihilist

02:02:18.000 view, which is not how I, I don't want to take that to an extreme, or I can just imagine how many

02:02:22.640 people are going to write and say, oh, you're an idiot for saying that. But again, I'll try not to

02:02:28.280 read it. Right. But I just think I have a shrinking view of my place in the universe. I think I feel less

02:02:34.120 and less significant as time passes on. And that's not a bad thing for someone with my appetite for

02:02:40.320 grandiosity to feel less and less significant, but it converges to, yeah, you know what, in the end,

02:02:45.940 like outside of your kids, your wife, your closest, closest friends, family, like you're sort of

02:02:51.060 irrelevant. Like if you fell off the planet tomorrow, it wouldn't matter. The earth wouldn't even slow

02:02:56.100 one degree on its axis. And so more of that effort feels like those are the only people who matter.

02:03:03.960 And those are the ones who I want to make sure I'm doing the best for. So I guess that's where

02:03:07.940 it comes from. But it also says that I probably can't relate to, even when I watch a movie like

02:03:16.480 Saving Private Ryan, which, I mean, I'm sure everybody has seen that, but if you've listened to

02:03:21.980 this and you haven't seen it, you must watch it. That opening scene is riveting on many levels,

02:03:28.020 but one of the levels, cause I actually went to Normandy by total coincidence. I was there in

02:03:34.300 December of 99 and I happened to go to Normandy on December 6th of 99, which if you're like me and

02:03:40.060 you like to do the math, you realize is 666 months to the day from the D-Day invasion, June 6th of 44

02:03:46.480 or 45, sorry. So in December, which is not a nice time in the year to be in Northern France,

02:03:51.980 the weather was horrible, but it actually looked just like the photos of that day, which is why

02:03:58.600 that invasion was so challenging because you didn't get what you expected in June. One of the gifts of

02:04:03.860 doing that was there was not another soul at the cemetery. So you could see 10,000 crosses virtually

02:04:12.180 unobstructed. Also, when I climbed down the cliffs at Omaha, it was like awful. It was like the

02:04:21.920 weather was awful. And so I got to look up and see, or at least try to imagine what it would have

02:04:29.020 looked like to be a lamb in a slaughterhouse. And what occurred to me was what you said a second

02:04:35.560 ago, which was how many of those kids died? How quickly did they die? And how easy is it to forget,

02:04:44.540 right? How many dreams were never realized? And that was another thing that, I mean, just made me cry

02:04:49.480 was looking at the dates on the crosses. Because even by that point, I was in my late twenties or

02:04:57.860 something. And I realized that virtually all of them were younger than me. And I was like, wait,

02:05:03.320 this guy never got to go to school. This guy never got to go to college. This guy never got married.

02:05:07.500 And I don't know. On the one hand, I think they died with more purpose than I'll probably ever have.

02:05:12.180 But more than that, I was riveted by, but did that person's actual life matter more dead or alive?

02:05:18.860 In other words, would we have lost the war if John Smith hadn't died on that day? These are silly

02:05:24.640 arguments that are circular, but- The answer to that question is no, we wouldn't have lost the war

02:05:29.360 if John Smith didn't die on that day. But if we didn't have hundreds and hundreds of thousands,

02:05:34.820 millions of- John Smiths. John Smiths that were ready to go and make the ultimate sacrifice,

02:05:41.800 darkness would have prevailed. Changing gears for a moment. How do you think about

02:05:46.060 warfare in that evolution that we just talked about, right? World War II, Vietnam, Afghanistan,

02:05:53.440 Iraq. Don't forget Korea. I have forgotten Korea twice now. They call it the forgotten war.

02:05:58.260 Yeah. There's a reason. Yeah. There's a reason. And Korea was a complete nightmare

02:06:03.480 in many respects. And all wars are hell. And Korea is right up there. Right up there.

02:06:11.560 Korea was 50- Yeah. What? 51, 55, something like that. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

02:06:15.880 Yeah. How much of an evolution took place between World War II and Korea from a military strategic and

02:06:21.040 tactical point? Pretty similar, except for the fact that towards the end of Korea, it turned into almost

02:06:26.760 like a trench warfare scenario. Like almost a World War I type scenario over the demilitarized zone.

02:06:31.740 Yep. They were in trenches. I mean, not even kind of, they were in trenches and they're fighting

02:06:36.060 over. Could we push their trench back a hundred yards? So that kind of happened, but we'd at least

02:06:39.940 learned like, okay, you know what? We're in their trench and they're in their trench. It's kind of

02:06:44.060 hold what we got here for a little while instead of which World War I, to me, World War I is the

02:06:49.580 ultimate just nightmare of a war. Remind me the casualties because they always blow my mind. And this is

02:06:55.420 like, I talk about how good my memory is. This is something I constantly forget because it's so

02:06:58.860 upsetting. World War I, Battle of the Somme, 60,000 casualties in the first 24 hours.

02:07:05.480 To put that in perspective, what was the casualty on the American side from 9-11 till today,

02:07:11.680 approximately? I don't know, less than 10,000.

02:07:14.500 And 10,000 was the D-Day invasion within four days.

02:07:18.920 Yeah. So the casualties are in those wars were completely insane. Completely insane. And World War

02:07:24.860 I was a special kind of nightmare. The thing that I hate about World War I is it didn't really matter

02:07:32.660 how good you were with tactics, with leadership, with your skill level. You were going to get told

02:07:41.200 at 0600 when you hear the bugle or you hear the whistle, you're going to go over the top and you're

02:07:46.300 going to charge. And by the way, at 545, another battalion went and you're going to hear them get

02:07:52.660 mowed down. They're not going to survive. And 10 minutes later, another battalion is going to go.

02:07:59.540 They're not going to survive. And then at six o'clock, you're going to go and you're not going

02:08:04.000 to survive. And there's nothing you can do about it. That is the most sickening war. I hate that war.

02:08:09.580 I hate all wars, but that one I especially hate because of that. And because there's some horrible

02:08:16.160 things in World War I, if you were an able-bodied man in England, and for whatever reason you weren't

02:08:24.240 in a uniform or you weren't going into service. So let's say you were the sole support for their

02:08:29.160 family and they wouldn't have to go. There was a thing that they would, the women would give someone

02:08:36.860 a white flower, which means you're a coward. So to think about that, that's the way the society was.

02:08:45.080 And by the way, and then you were going to go and you were going to sit in a trench until you got told

02:08:50.560 to attack and you were going to die. And the fact that these soldiers on both sides did this day after

02:08:57.540 day, month after month, year after year, it's incredible. It's incredible that no senior leader

02:09:02.780 called bullshit on it. No one said, you know what? This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

02:09:10.240 I'm not going to send my 700 man battalion to die tomorrow. I'm not going to do it. You can shoot me.

02:09:15.840 And by the way, they did, did a podcast about that shot at dawn. They took British soldiers that had

02:09:22.500 serious PTSD and traumatic brain injuries that couldn't fight anymore, refuse to fight,

02:09:29.020 bring them out in the morning and shoot them. And they were all pardoned, but it's just crazy.

02:09:35.260 It's crazy to even think about. So that's why I get very, I always talk a lot about the fact that

02:09:40.500 people think in the military, you just follow orders. Like, Oh, you just follow orders. That's

02:09:44.040 what you're going to do. It's like, no, actually, no, if something's not a good plan, then I'm not

02:09:48.060 going to obey it. I'm not going to obey orders just for the sake of obeying orders. That's a tough one

02:09:52.600 too. And that's a great business lesson, right?

02:09:54.520 And that's not cut and dry either. Because if you tell me to do something that's going to get my

02:09:59.900 platoon killed and I say, Peter or sir, you know, captain Peter, I'm not going to do it. And you go,

02:10:06.620 okay, cool. You're fired. And here's one of my other guys who's a yes man. And he's going to take

02:10:10.920 them and he's going to do what I told him to do. So would I have been better to have said, you know

02:10:16.020 what, captain, I totally disagree with what you're doing. Here's another plan. Here's an alternate.

02:10:19.600 No, do it my way. I really disagree. I think it's going to get people. I don't care. Do it

02:10:24.400 my way. Am I better off at that point saying, okay, I'll got it. And I go and I mitigate risks

02:10:29.560 to the best of my ability. Or am I better off holding the line and saying, you know what,

02:10:33.680 you can find someone else. And maybe that's enough to wake you up and say, wait a second.

02:10:37.100 Jocko has been a great guy. He's been really supportive. Now he's telling me, no, I must be

02:10:40.320 wrong. There's that fine line. Well, it's going to depend heavily on both of those things,

02:10:43.920 right? It's a function of your track record. And it's a function of that person's humility.

02:10:47.340 For sure. For sure. But as the young leader, that's a decision I'm going to have to make,

02:10:52.560 which is going to be better for me, which is going to be better for my troops. More importantly,

02:10:56.580 which is going to be better for my troops. Is it going to be better for me to hold the line and say,

02:11:00.040 boss, this is such a bad plan that I am not willing to execute it. You can fire me.

02:11:06.380 You can send me to court martial, whatever, but this is a horrible plan. It's going to get people

02:11:10.360 killed. And then you go, fine, you're getting court-martialed. And by the way, here's Joe,

02:11:15.280 and he's going to do what I told him to do. When I read crack hours book, where men win glory,

02:11:20.160 it's a powerful book on so many levels, but a big part of it again, is the complete and utter

02:11:26.080 futility of the mission that cost Pat Tillman his life. I couldn't understand, and you have to help

02:11:32.940 me understand this. You remember the details, right? There was like, I don't know, it was like

02:11:36.180 a helicopter or a Humvee that was down. They basically had to go in and get a downed piece

02:11:40.880 of equipment and go through what was clearly a completely risky exposed terrain. And then of course,

02:11:48.440 on top of that, to die a friendly fire just is the ultimate, you know, injury upon insult.

02:11:53.600 But I'm reading this. And of course, you know how it ends when you're reading it,

02:11:56.620 which makes it hard to read. And you're thinking like, how did nobody, because there was like,

02:12:01.780 it's been so long since I've read it, but one of the very senior people on the ground,

02:12:05.540 so not in command, but on the ground was like, it's an awful idea. It's an awful idea. Like we're

02:12:11.780 going to risk the lives of 10 men to get a piece of equipment. Nope. That's the plan. We're doing

02:12:18.400 it. I mean, I just, and you think, well, okay, that story got written by Krakauer because of Pat

02:12:23.860 Tillman. How many times did that story happen? How many Pat Tillmans are there?

02:12:28.080 That's why I tell people all the time, and I tell them in business too, because it happens in

02:12:32.800 business too. But in the military and business, if you're a subordinate and you have an obligation,

02:12:38.380 and in some cases, a moral obligation to stand up and say, Hey, I don't know. I don't think this is

02:12:42.820 the best plan. Again, I wish it was that cut and dry because there's a good chance that if you're

02:12:47.480 Pat Tillman's platoon commander and you say, Hey boss, this is a horrible idea. I'm not doing it.

02:12:52.240 The general or the Colonel says, okay, fine. You're not doing it. Cool. I'm sending this other

02:12:56.200 group of guys. I'm firing you and I'm replacing you. This is what makes leadership so hard. It does

02:13:01.060 happen in the business world too. And what does all this stem from? It goes back to what we were

02:13:04.380 talking about earlier. This is a lack of humility up the chain of command. You've got people that are not

02:13:08.220 humble. You can also take ownership of yourself because if you're telling me to do something that

02:13:11.800 I don't think is smart and I haven't developed a good enough relationship with you where you

02:13:15.020 actually listen to me, which is by the way, everything that I'm trying to do as a subordinate

02:13:19.180 leaders, I'm trying to get a relationship with you so that you trust me so that when I actually say to

02:13:23.220 you, Hey boss, this isn't a good idea. You listen. And that's the goal, right? Because if I don't take

02:13:29.160 any ownership and it's like, Hey, my boss told me to do something and I just have to go do it. Like,

02:13:32.420 no, you have to take ownership of that relationship. You have to make sure that they understand that

02:13:35.540 you have to support them enough so that you trust me. Cause if everything that you tell me to do,

02:13:40.440 I object to, well, then I'm just a boy that cried wolf. And eventually you just say, Oh,

02:13:43.540 Jocko doesn't want to do anything I say. But if I do what you tell me to do and I support you and I

02:13:47.440 carry out the things that you want me to carry out. And then eventually you tell me to do something

02:13:51.540 and I say, this doesn't make any sense. You'll listen to me. So we have to take ownership of the

02:13:56.040 relationship that we have up the chain of command. Otherwise you're at the whim of some random person

02:14:01.560 that you don't know. And that doesn't listen to you. I can't remember which organization

02:14:04.940 coined this term, but the obligation to dissent is basically what it's called, right? Which is

02:14:10.160 you actually, as a subordinate, you have an obligation to speak up when something is wrong.

02:14:16.640 Not that it's an option. It's an obligation. Is that becoming more ingrained in the culture of the

02:14:22.100 military? It's interesting. Napoleon said that Napoleon said, if you get told to do something that

02:14:26.940 you'd know is a bad plan and you execute it, you're culpable. That's Napoleon. So this idea

02:14:31.940 has been around for a long time. As to where it falls out in the military today, it's all over

02:14:36.380 the place. In other words, it's still so, even the style of leadership is that decentralized.

02:14:41.060 When I said it's all over the place, I used the wrong term. I meant that it's scattered.

02:14:45.360 So some places have it. That's what I mean. It's heterogeneously laced.

02:14:49.220 Some people are good leaders that listen to the decentralized command and some people are not.

02:14:54.000 And that's the way it is. And are we moving in the right direction? I sure hope so.

02:14:58.780 I'm doing my best to get it there. So going back to World War I,

02:15:02.180 the time between World War I and World War II is about 20 years, right?

02:15:05.960 Yeah. 1918 to 1939.

02:15:08.060 And when we think about like 20 years ago, it seems like yesterday. In that 20-year period,

02:15:13.500 what were the significant changes in either technology, strategy-

02:15:17.040 Maneuver warfare.

02:15:18.100 Maneuver. Yeah.

02:15:18.780 Because World War II has almost nothing in common with World War I in terms of the fighting, right?

02:15:23.180 Towards the end of World War I, the Germans started to employ decentralized command. That's

02:15:28.580 what they started to do. They started to say, you know what, Sergeant? We got some bad guys over

02:15:32.240 here. Go and figure out how to handle them. This actually came from the Napoleonic Wars where the

02:15:42.120 Germans, the Austrians, the Prussians got beat up by Napoleon. And they started to say,

02:15:50.700 why are we getting beaten by Napoleon? And what they realized was they had too much centralized

02:15:54.580 command. They had a bunch of fundamental problems. And so they started to make plans to figure out a

02:16:00.540 better way to run their organizations. That's where you find the famous command staff, the German

02:16:06.120 Austrian command staff. That's sort of like a famous thing. And that's where it started. Well,

02:16:10.220 they didn't really get it going until the end of World War I because it's so hard to change a big

02:16:14.860 organization's attitude. By the end of World War I, they started doing it. They started doing

02:16:18.900 decentralized command. They started doing maneuver warfare. It would have really helped them, but

02:16:22.040 they were way late. They waited till the end. And by then they didn't have the men or materiel to

02:16:27.480 continue the war. So you take 20 years. So they realized that at the end, it was working. They

02:16:32.640 still are going to lose. They get crushed by the Treaty of Versailles. And now when they start

02:16:37.600 rebuilding, they start rebuilding with the attitude, we're going to move fast. We're going to use

02:16:40.920 maneuver warfare. We're going to use decentralized command. And that's what they did. That's what

02:16:44.280 Blitzkrieg was. It was decentralized command, maneuver warfare very quickly. And they would

02:16:48.740 have done exceptionally well and continue to do well, the Germans, had they not started

02:16:53.140 to centralize everything back again to Hitler, who started making decisions and started telling

02:16:58.000 the generals that were on the Eastern front what to do.

02:17:00.740 What year approximately did Hitler kill Rommel?

02:17:04.380 It was towards the end.

02:17:05.620 It was toward the end, right? It was like 43, 44?

02:17:07.800 Yeah. Yeah.

02:17:08.700 I've only read one book on Rommel and I don't know why I find him to be such a fascinating character.

02:17:14.560 I imagine there are Rommel scholars out there.

02:17:17.240 What book did you read? Attacks?

02:17:18.740 Oh, Yellow Cover. I can show it to you. I still have it. It's been about 10 years.

02:17:22.480 I thought of doing Rommel on the podcast and I'm actually going to start it off with how he,

02:17:26.960 the circumstances under which he killed himself or which he was murdered, depending on what I say.

02:17:31.340 Very interesting circumstances. They brought him and said, okay,

02:17:34.460 you're either going to go out as a hero and we'll take care of your family or everyone dies. So what do

02:17:38.380 you want?

02:17:38.780 Unbelievable.

02:17:39.100 Jump in the car. Hitler thought he was part of the group that tried to kill him, which I-

02:17:43.840 I don't think he was. Certainly that's not how I read it was that he was not. One of the guys who

02:17:47.920 worked for me many years ago loved the book so much because after I read it, I think I bought a

02:17:52.860 copy for all the guys that I was working with and he typed up these incredible notes from it.

02:17:58.440 I'll find them and send them to you. You will love this. It's like 20 pages of like-

02:18:02.000 Was it a book by Rommel?

02:18:03.140 No.

02:18:03.560 Because his most famous book is Attacks.

02:18:05.180 Yeah, no.

02:18:05.560 That's the book when George C. Scott is playing Patton and he's saying, I read your book because

02:18:09.100 that book is about World War I. And it's a great book. And there's some really, really good lessons

02:18:13.660 in there. It's written very German, dry, straightforward. These are the facts. Every

02:18:20.000 section has a little section at the end that's like the lessons learned, which is probably the

02:18:23.600 highlight when I do it on the podcast. I'll probably spend most of my time in those sections.

02:18:27.520 It's also very, very tactical. Now inside tactical lessons, there are leadership lessons. There are

02:18:34.060 strategic lessons inside tactical lessons for sure, but it is very tactical, very tactical book.

02:18:40.540 The Rommel papers.

02:18:41.480 Okay.

02:18:41.840 That's the one.

02:18:42.440 I'll take a look at that one.

02:18:43.600 Yeah. And it's funny. You think about how even at the level of an enormous war,

02:18:47.700 slightly different decisions, right? Like you could argue Hitler's arrogance in North Africa-

02:18:52.540 A hundred percent.

02:18:53.220 Cost them the war.

02:18:54.000 And his arrogance to think I can fight on two fronts in the West and in the East.

02:18:57.060 That's probably the bigger one. And I'll tell you what, the Stalingrad scenario,

02:19:01.880 I covered that one on my podcast. And most of the books that I cover on my podcast are first

02:19:06.940 person accounts of guys that were there. I covered one that was a German guy. They're listening to

02:19:11.540 Hitler on the radio talking about the great sacrifice that was made past tense. You guys are

02:19:18.840 still alive. They're getting said, Hey, these guys held the line. They did their best. They fought on.

02:19:23.540 We're going to win because of their sacrifices. They're still alive. They're trapped.

02:19:26.800 They're starving. They're freezing. They're getting killed. But that's what Hitler did.

02:19:31.440 Just wrote them off and said, no surrender. That's it. Horrible, horrible situation.

02:19:38.220 But the difference is that the world war one was, Hey, we're going to be in these trenches,

02:19:43.500 no decentralized command. And then that's the big thing that the Nazis changed was we're going

02:19:48.060 super decentralized command at the beginning of the war. And that's why they were so effective

02:19:51.420 with blitzkrieg. Here's the goal. The goal is take Poland, take the Rhineland. That's the goal.

02:19:56.740 Make it happen. And these guys were cut loose to go and do that. And they did it and they did it

02:20:00.340 quickly and they did it well. And then, like I said, by the end of world war two, all the decisions

02:20:05.220 had been centralized back through arrogance. Cause guess what? When you win every victory increases

02:20:11.440 your confidence in your arrogance, right? And it doesn't take long to tip it in the wrong direction

02:20:15.140 where you think, ah, I can take Russia. Hey, no problem. We've got plenty of time. Winter won't

02:20:21.060 come. Oh no, my friend, winter is coming. Winter is coming. And that's the big differences there.

02:20:28.940 Now you get to Korea. Like I said, Korea was definitely.

02:20:31.960 Wait, one last world war two question, which is again, just sort of a philosophical or theoretical

02:20:35.800 thought experiment. If the Japanese had not attacked Pearl Harbor, in fact, if the Japanese

02:20:39.780 had said, we're never going to wake this leaping giant over there, we're going to just keep

02:20:43.720 mucking around over here on our side of the Pacific rim. How does world war two end?

02:20:47.580 Would have been rough. Would the Americans have gotten involved?

02:20:50.660 Eventually. I think they would have. I think so. Yeah.

02:20:53.600 Would it have been too little too late? Could have been. But I'll tell you what,

02:20:57.500 when you flip the switch on the American machine, the production, I'm talking about the industry,

02:21:02.440 like, okay, the war fighters for sure. Incredible. I mean, I remember speaking of the internet when the

02:21:08.140 internet first kind of started, I was on some martial arts. I don't even know what they're called

02:21:13.320 back then, but it was like a chat page or a forum. And I was into Jiu Jitsu. And so this is like 90.

02:21:19.140 Yeah. This is in the mid nineties. Yeah. This is like 90, 93, 94, 95.

02:21:22.660 Five. Maybe it's when I got internet. I know exactly this moment.

02:21:26.580 And anyways, somebody was talking about the Japanese martial arts and the Japanese warriors and all that.

02:21:32.820 And the incredible fortitude of the Bushido mindset that the Japanese empire had. And it was like the

02:21:42.540 first snide Twitter comment I ever made. But I said the Japanese Bushido warrior spirit was defeated

02:21:50.640 and destroyed by the United States Marine Corps and the Pacific campaign. And that's the way it is.

02:21:56.000 So the soldier, the Marine, the airman, the sailor from America, man, that is a, you know,

02:22:03.800 there's another great quote. I wish I had this quote on the top of my head. It was something along

02:22:08.620 the lines of when the Germans attack, they yell. When the British attack, they scream. When the French

02:22:17.080 attack, they sing. When the Americans attack, they're silent and they just keep coming. They will not stop.

02:22:24.820 And that is like just such an awesome, in my mind, as a kid hearing that, I was like, wow,

02:22:31.240 that's powerful, right? There's no singing. What we're going to do is we're going to do our job.

02:22:34.980 We're going to do it quietly. We're going to crush. So on top of this American fighting from a

02:22:41.500 humanistic point, from this culture, this warrior culture, that's what we have in America. Then you

02:22:45.160 want to talk about what we've lost a little bit. We still have it, but there's no doubt there is an

02:22:50.280 American culture of fighting, which is deep, right? It's deep. It's part of American culture.

02:22:56.820 Like we're war fighters, we're revolutionaries.

02:22:58.900 And do you think it's because we are close enough to our independence relative to some of the other

02:23:03.280 countries?

02:23:04.160 I certainly hope so because you're right. I always say that, hey, when people get a taste of freedom,

02:23:08.480 that's like the ultimate peacemaker, right? You want a country to be free or to stop being hostile,

02:23:14.460 give them a taste of freedom. Give them a taste of freedom. And people start seeing that

02:23:17.420 a vast majority of people will say, wow, I like this lifestyle. You know what? People don't want

02:23:23.520 freedom. The people that don't want freedom are the people that fear that their status will come

02:23:31.640 undone because they'll be judged on their performance. This is really right. So if you

02:23:38.760 take a country where there's no freedom and freedom starts to manifest itself, the people that will be

02:23:44.860 scared of the freedom are the people that think if there's freedom, I'm going to be tested against

02:23:48.880 everyone else and I'm going to fail. So I'm just going to keep everyone under the heel.

02:23:53.020 Now, do you buy the argument that certain parts of the world, let's just take Egypt as an example,

02:23:58.480 benevolent dictatorship is a better model than freedom? Or do you say that freedom can be included

02:24:03.220 within benevolent dictatorship? In other words, you know, I don't want to expose myself as the

02:24:07.200 complete ignoramus that I am when it comes to the politics of the world, but could you make the

02:24:11.160 argument that under a Mubarak style of leadership where basically the fundamentalists were shut out,

02:24:18.420 right? I think where you're going with this is to find out my opinion. I think that those types

02:24:23.340 of situations can be good to usher in true freedom over time. That's what I think. Because what you have

02:24:31.500 there, exactly that situation, you've got the Muslim brotherhood that is scared of freedom because

02:24:36.000 they're going to end up in a situation that they don't have any control over, that they're going to

02:24:38.420 have to compete with other people, that they're going to be judged on their merit rather than just

02:24:42.640 being judged on their force, right? And so they want to stop that. So then you have the government

02:24:48.060 coming in and say, okay, you know what? We're going to instill, we're going to impose freedom.

02:24:52.560 We're going to impose discipline, right? We're going to impose discipline on the situation,

02:24:55.360 get rid of people that feel that way. And then hopefully that creates a culture where we can

02:24:58.820 eventually evolve to a truly free society. I mean, the biggest challenge with this,

02:25:03.180 it actually was something that my daughter and I talked about two nights ago, just by a complete

02:25:06.500 random coincidence, but we were, it was our turn cleaning up the kitchen. And I don't know how it

02:25:10.860 came up, but somehow she asked me, she said, who is your favorite president? And I said, probably

02:25:19.980 Lincoln. And I gave all my reasons. And I said, but you could ask 10 people. And I think half of them

02:25:24.840 would probably say either Teddy Roosevelt or FDR and kind of walked her through sort of high level

02:25:29.900 history. And she said, well, what about recent presidents? And I said, you know, it's really tough,

02:25:34.780 Olivia to evaluate a president whose presidency has taken place in the last 40 years. And I don't

02:25:41.940 know if my argument to her made sense, but she seemed to get it, which was like, look, by definition,

02:25:45.460 any decision a president makes is brutal. Any book you read on presidents, it's like no easy decisions

02:25:51.260 come to them. So by definition, they're only dealing with the world's worst decisions. And maybe part of

02:25:56.920 me getting a little older is realizing the humility of that, which is, it's a very long arc of history

02:26:04.360 to be able to truly judge what another person did. And I think if anything, I've got more empathy

02:26:11.400 for things that at the time I felt very strongly about. Like I remember very strongly in 04, seeing

02:26:19.880 Bush talk about what was clearly looking like a botched war in Iraq. I just wanted him to apologize.

02:26:26.640 I just wanted him to say, I screwed this up. Here's a plan to fix it. And he didn't,

02:26:31.460 he kept doubling down on, no, this is right. This is right. This is right. And I remember

02:26:35.240 just being completely turned off. Right. And of course, now I look back and I said, look,

02:26:39.280 if we're going to be brutally honest, Olivia, I don't think we have enough time to know if any of

02:26:45.700 these things made sense. You could argue, well, I think it's been enough time since Vietnam to say

02:26:50.300 that maybe that wasn't the right thing. But even there, once you really start to understand what

02:26:54.440 happened in Vietnam and now that it's become quite clear how long, meaning how many generations of

02:27:00.860 presidents had seen what was happening there, it's not just about blaming one president either. You

02:27:06.400 can't just say, well, look, this was Johnson's war or this was even Kennedy's war. No, no, this goes

02:27:10.880 back. This goes back to probably Truman, right? So this idea that you can't look through the

02:27:20.440 retrospective scope with a short lens is a scary idea on some ways when you consider how reactionary

02:27:28.020 we can become. Right. Another point to that is you're making decisions with what you know at the

02:27:34.380 time. Right. Of course, this happens a lot with combat where people want to armchair quarterback

02:27:40.140 in hindsight, right? It's not even just armchair quarterbacking, which is, Hey, I'm sitting out here

02:27:44.300 and I could tell what you could do, but we're armchair quarterbacking in hindsight with all the perfect

02:27:48.320 knowledge that we have. You don't have that situation. You're making decisions based on what

02:27:52.240 you know at that time and you're making the best decision you can. And it's almost impossible to

02:27:55.680 actually get in that person's frame of mind when they're making those decisions. So not only does

02:28:00.400 it take time to pass to see if that was the right decision or not from a presidential standpoint,

02:28:04.280 but you got to look and say, what did they actually know at that time? And okay, you can say,

02:28:09.280 I would have done something different. Really? Really? You would have done something different.

02:28:13.240 And here's another thing that can happen. You can make a great decision and things can go horribly wrong

02:28:17.720 and you can make a bad decision and things can be fine. That was a flip side of the discussion with

02:28:21.700 her, which is on one level, presidents have to make these really hard decisions and they only

02:28:27.580 have so much control over it. On the other level, it's like, you almost wonder how much they matter

02:28:31.560 sometimes when, especially when you talk about things like the economy, every president wants to

02:28:35.440 take credit for a good economy. There's like a hundred other forces there, right? That are playing a

02:28:41.140 role. You know, how much credit does Clinton deserve for the booming economy in the late nineties? I don't

02:28:45.820 know. I've read arguments that say none. I've read arguments that have said all of it,

02:28:50.540 probably neither of those extremes. Yeah. There's all kinds of factors playing into

02:28:54.540 all those situations, but the economy's obviously. It's one of my favorite examples of things like

02:28:59.220 the president's touting what the stock market is doing. Like they've got their hand on that scale.

02:29:03.580 Yeah. Especially if they knew what was going to happen, which it's going to go down,

02:29:07.240 they might want to keep their mouth a little bit, a little bit to themselves when they start bragging

02:29:11.440 about how good the economy is doing, because it's never going to keep going in that direction for too long.

02:29:15.180 So now world war two to Korea is a very short period of time. What was the big strategic tactical

02:29:20.800 or technological change, even though it was a bit of a reversion to this horrible sort of trench

02:29:25.400 warfare? It was, there wasn't that much time between these two wars actually. And a lot of,

02:29:30.260 they called up veterans from world war two and said, okay, reload, we're going again. And one really

02:29:36.260 interesting story is, you know, Dick winners, who is the guy that's the commander of the second of the

02:29:42.080 five Oh six in the band of brothers series. And you've seen that, right? I have, but I don't

02:29:45.580 recall his name. Okay. So he's just an incredible leader. I've covered books about him and his book

02:29:51.580 on my podcasts. And I talk about band of brothers all the time because band of brothers is really

02:29:56.240 incredible leadership story. And Dick winners got recalled, go to Korea. And they got to San Francisco

02:30:05.160 and they said, Hey, don't know what the criteria was, but it was something like if you've done two

02:30:10.500 years, world war two step over here. And they went over there and they said, does anyone not want to

02:30:15.040 go? Cause you don't have to go. And Dick winners was like, I'm not going. So this was what I was

02:30:20.220 thinking about when you were asking me, like there's an example of a guy whose commitment

02:30:24.340 and whose leadership is impeccable, impeccable. And he'd come home. And I mean, he saw infinitely more

02:30:32.100 infinitely. I can't make that word big enough, more combat than I ever even came close to seeing.

02:30:38.740 He came home, started a farm in Pennsylvania or whatever, and started doing his thing,

02:30:43.500 carrying on with his life and got recalled. And they said, Hey, if you don't want to go,

02:30:47.400 you don't have to. And he said, yeah, I'm going home. And he did. He went home. So that's the way

02:30:52.580 some people, and no one, no one's going to say anything to Dick winners ever. He died,

02:30:57.640 but no one would ever question his patriotism, his willingness to sacrifice, his leadership,

02:31:02.880 his commitment. No one would ever question that in any single way. And when they said,

02:31:05.660 Hey, do you want to go? He said, Nope, not going. Cool. I'll go home. Don't need you.

02:31:08.800 So what was Korea like? Definitely a lot of similar things from world war two. And then it kind of

02:31:13.060 stagnated into world war one. And now Vietnam is 20, no, not even 20 years later. It's basically

02:31:19.460 10, 15 years later. Yeah. And is that the introduction for Americans to guerrilla warfare?

02:31:23.960 It definitely is the introduction on a large scale to guerrilla warfare. And that's what made it so

02:31:31.580 challenging. We're fighting against asymmetrical situation where we're bigger, stronger, more

02:31:36.800 well-equipped, technologically more advanced against a foe that is inferior in all those ways,

02:31:43.660 technology, industry capability. And we came up against someone that knew how to fight against us

02:31:51.040 and figured it out. Just like they'd figured it out against the French. Vietnam's never been taken.

02:31:55.780 That's a proud history. You've been around for thousands of years and you've never been taken.

02:31:59.980 Why is that? Because you know how to fight. In retrospect, aside from not going into Vietnam at all,

02:32:05.820 knowing everything we know today, and perhaps what we've learned through the next huge asymmetric war,

02:32:12.100 which was the one you were a part of, what is the lesson you take back to that war? If Jocko's in a

02:32:16.760 time capsule and he goes back to 1964. Yeah. These are the common lessons that everyone talks

02:32:21.540 about. The big thing in a counterinsurgency is you have to win over the populace. And we didn't do

02:32:25.600 that. We didn't do that in Vietnam. You know who did that? The Viet Cong did that. The communists did

02:32:29.700 that. They won over the populace. And that's because they are the ones who protect you, who allow you to

02:32:35.200 be camouflaged, who you mingle. Aside from winning hearts in the rebuilding, which clearly that makes

02:32:42.020 sense, it seems like that's also important in combat. Yeah. At a minimum,

02:32:45.500 they're going to passively support the insurgents, which is basically what happened in Vietnam.

02:32:50.120 There's passive support. The villager doesn't care. The villager just wants to grow rice. The

02:32:54.380 villager just wants to raise their kids or whatever. That's what the villager wants to do.

02:32:57.900 Well, the Americans just dropped the bomb. The Americans shot one of my kids. The Americans did

02:33:02.480 this. And the Viet Cong are coming in and saying, hey, why did they do this to you? We'll protect you.

02:33:06.560 We'll help you and plant these booby traps for us. So those are the mistakes we made. One of my favorite,

02:33:11.520 well, actually my favorite book is called About Face by Colonel David Hackworth. And

02:33:14.900 he was trying to fight that guerrilla type war, trying to win the hearts and minds. That's what

02:33:19.380 he was trying to do. And he did it. And they did very well with it. But that strategy did not spread.

02:33:27.340 And what you had was the whiz kids. This is another great dichotomy. The whiz kids saying,

02:33:34.460 hey, this is how we're going to beat them. These are the metrics we're going to use to decide if we're

02:33:38.280 winning or not. And everyone knows now that the metrics that they decided to use was the body count.

02:33:41.740 And so if we're killing more of the enemy than they're killing of us, then we'll beat them in

02:33:46.680 a war of attrition. And what was that kill count? It was the Idrang Valley is kind of where we started

02:33:52.380 to realize, wait a second, we can kill way more of them than they can kill of us. And I think the

02:33:57.800 Idrang Valley, the kill count was like 173 to one. So for every one American that was dead, we killed,

02:34:04.760 we suspected that we killed 173 or something like that. It's some crazy kill count. And so

02:34:11.600 as Americans, we think to ourselves, okay, well, who's going to put up with that kind of situation?

02:34:16.700 No one. No one's going to put up with that. What we didn't realize, you know, who's going to put up

02:34:20.600 with that? The Viet Cong are going to put up with that. And you know, who's not going to put up with

02:34:23.500 losing one? America. There it is. There's the answer. We fought the war with the wrong strategy.

02:34:29.280 And you stick to your guns and those whiz kids. And my point is because I do this with businesses,

02:34:35.000 the leadership consulting company. And sometimes what we deal with is we deal with companies that

02:34:38.960 are looking at metrics and they're looking at metrics really hard. And they bring in

02:34:41.920 a consulting company. And what's that consulting company going to do when they get there? They're

02:34:45.760 going to look at the metrics and they're going to start saying, okay, here's what you need to do to

02:34:48.420 win. You need to drive these metrics over here. And that's cool. You got to look at metrics,

02:34:52.380 but you got to balance out what's going on, the human side, the human factor, the leadership,

02:34:56.960 what's unfolding inside the company. What's the culture inside the company? Because if you don't

02:35:01.340 have the right culture inside the company, the metrics aren't going to matter. And so you have

02:35:05.760 to find that balance between the two. Sure. You got to check the metrics. You got to make sure that

02:35:08.960 you're not sacrificing more people than they are. But at the same time, you can't drive your strategy

02:35:14.300 based on pure metrics. And if you do that, you absolutely have problems. Absolutely.

02:35:21.100 So is McNamara still alive or has he passed away?

02:35:24.220 Dead. I believe. Westmoreland's definitely dead because I remember when he died.

02:35:30.040 I'm trying to remember. Wasn't McNamara the one that they did the documentary on the fog of war?

02:35:34.100 Possibly. I feel like there was a pretty good documentary done. Either I didn't see it or

02:35:37.140 I saw it so long ago, I don't remember it. Did he ever come to grips with the mistakes of Vietnam?

02:35:42.680 I don't know. Not a whole lot of ownership across the board though. I can tell you that much.

02:35:46.340 So then we fast forward to first Gulf war, right? Which is in many ways, like the greatest

02:35:54.000 technological leap forward, right? Yes. In terms of like Warcraft. Yeah. Yeah. Cause we're talking

02:35:59.080 smart bombs. Yeah. Yeah. Stealth. Right. Yeah. Night vision. Oh my God. I never even thought of

02:36:04.300 that. You didn't even have night vision. Vietnam. They had like starlight, but it wasn't anything even

02:36:09.040 close, not even remotely close to what we have now. So in some ways you could argue, quote unquote,

02:36:13.160 the problem with the first Gulf war is maybe a false sense of confidence that this new style of

02:36:19.300 warfare, this shock and awe, this complete, like there's probably no greater Delta in the

02:36:24.480 technologic advantage between two entities than that war, right? That's a good one. Yeah. And then

02:36:29.560 that becomes the setup of the hubris a decade later, right? Yeah, I guess. But let's say in the second

02:36:37.560 war in Iraq, we just said, you know what we're going to do? We're going to get Saddam out of power

02:36:41.740 and then we're going to leave. If we did that, we were done really quick. Yeah. It was over pretty

02:36:45.180 quick. And then if we were said, okay, cool, we're done. Figured out. That would have been,

02:36:50.000 we would have been similar. It would have been a similar situation over very quickly. I mean,

02:36:54.500 the first one was over in 72 hours, I think of ground fighting. The second one, few months.

02:36:59.620 It's interesting as a civilian, I had a hard time in my mind when the news was coming on to

02:37:07.740 understand the difference between the different fronts, to understand that there was something going on

02:37:11.680 in Afghanistan and there was something going on in Iraq and these were under very different control,

02:37:15.420 right? How interchangeable were the macro units between those two? In other words,

02:37:22.300 were there teams of SEALs also in Afghanistan, but the groups that were in Afghanistan were always

02:37:26.980 going to stay in Afghanistan when they were deployed or were you going back and forth potentially?

02:37:30.640 All services were going back and forth. Yeah. So Marines were going to both. Army were going to both.

02:37:35.020 The special operations were going to both. Yeah, for sure.

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The Peter Attia Drive - May 27, 2019

#55 - Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL, Part I of II： objective, strategy & tactics, leadership, protocols, dealing with death, and applying the many lessons learned from war

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