114: How to Lead and Win with Leif Babin.

0:00:00 - Opening 0:04:03 - Leif Babin 0:07:20 - How often does Leif Disagree w/ Jocko's commands? 0:22:51 - The evolution on Echelon Front. 0:31:01 - How to control rumors and gossip in an organization. 0:37:07 - Benefits of The Muster. 0:51:59 - What would Leif and Jocko have done differently in the past? 0:55:18 - Advice on restarting your life after the military. 0:58:10 - Jocko's most impactful strategy on Leif. 1:04:17 - Las Vegas stuff. 1:11:08 - Daily non-negotiable habits. 1:17:28 - Thoughts on the policy that the ship's captain takes all the blame. 1:25:00 - Self talk for clear thinking. 1:35:28 - Injury rates in Jiu Jitsu. 1:44:36 - How to promote healing when tragically losing a team member. 1:47:55 - What to do if you Jiu Jitsu coach/instructor is a "know it all" 1:54:29 - Staying focus when having bad days in the field. 1:58:46 - Getting into trouble as a teen (before the military). 2:03:01 - How did the enemy in Ramadi match up against US Special Forces? 2:11:53 - How Does the Navy Prepare you to Lead? 2:20:03 - At What point did The Extreme Ownership Enlightenment Occur? 2:35:32 - Support: JockoStore http://www.jockostore.com stuff, Super Krill Oil and Joint Warfare and Discipline Pre-Mission http://originmaine.com/origin-labs/jocko/, THE MUSTER 005 in DC http://www.extremeownership.com/washington-dc-005. Origin Brand Apparel and Jocko Gi http://www.originmaine.com, withJocko White Tea http://www.jockotea.com, Onnit Fitness stuff, http://www.onnit.com/jocko and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes) https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/psychological-warfare/id1183222322. Extreme Ownership (book) http://amzn.to/2jonHTx, The Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, http://amzn.to/2szgaEj and Jocko Soap. https://irishoaksranch.com/storefront/jocko-soap 3:00:03 - Closing Gratitude Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 114 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. And tonight, we have a guest on the podcast for the fourth time. The fourth appearance, which is no surprise really because this is a guy that I went to war with, started a business with, wrote a book with. I actually watched him get married and have kids and buy houses and go from a,

• 0:43Jocko Willink?

  let's say a wild, single man going to live a Friday night like it was his last night ever,

• 0:54Jocko Willink?

  to a guy with a diaper in one hand and a bag of cheddar bunnies in the other hands, trying to tame his son, who at one years old was like a hard-headed borderline psychotic version of himself.

• 1:19Jocko Willink?

  And I also saw this guy in much harsher environments and in some of the most challenging situations. I saw him bear the incredibly heavy weight of leading men in combat.

• 1:35Jocko Willink?

  And also the crushing weight of losing some of those men.

• 1:44Jocko Willink?

  I still see that weight on his shoulders.

• 1:51Jocko Willink?

  And I see it in his eyes. And I wish I could take some of it away.

• 2:01Jocko Willink?

  But I can't.

• 2:05Jocko Willink?

  And as we learn in the SEAL teams,

• 2:13Jocko Willink?

  we don't complain.

• 2:16Jocko Willink?

  We shoulder our share of the weight.

• 2:22Jocko Willink?

  We shoulder our share of the burden and we drive on.

• 2:30Jocko Willink?

  And I've seen him stand up when I needed him to stand up. When what I was asking for was more than I could have asked or should have expected from anyone. And I watched him time and time and time again move out. Move out into the darkness. Toward the unknown, toward the violence, toward the enemy

• 3:09Jocko Willink?

  whose mission was to maim or to kill him. And his men. But he went and he went every time and he went without fail. And his name is Leif Babin. And if you want a more thorough background of Leif, you can listen to the other times that he's been on this podcast. He was on number 11, number 34, number 65. You should listen to those first before you listen to this one. You can also read the book that we wrote. It's called Extreme Ownership. It's about

• 3:51Jocko Willink?

  our experiences in combat and the leadership lessons we learned there. But for now, here we are once again. And Leif, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me on. And we had a couple of different options on what we were gonna do this time around and tweeted out, you know, if anybody has any questions and we got a lot of questions. So I know I can answer questions. We'll just say in a really, in a very in-depth manner from time to time. Sure. And we got a lot of questions. So I, I, I, you know, we, we just took down a bunch of the questions and I'll read through some of them and we'll try and burn through a bunch of these questions that we got from everybody. Let's get some.

• 4:36Jocko Willink?

  Ready to get some. Like I said, life is always ready to get some, which is a good thing.

• 4:40Leif Babin?

  Stand by to get some.

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  Stand by to get some.

• 4:43Leif Babin?

  For people that don't know, don't know what that means, and we often put that out on social media. I don't think people recognize what that actually means to us. Like, we, we knew, we would say this all the time in combat or in training scenarios, when you knew that, I mean, it was about to go down. Bullets were gonna be flying around, explosions were gonna be going off. And you'd hear someone very clearly over the radio, just in a real convoy is coming up and be like, "Stand by to get some."

• 5:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Leif Babin?

  So we get a chuckle out of that every time.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  Always get a chuckle out of that one. Yeah, that's a, that's a, it's a true statement though, right? You know you're gonna get some.

• 5:18Leif Babin?

  But when you could say it in that manner, you know, when you should be like, you know, "Stand by to get some," and, and people are like, "Stand by to get some."

• 5:27Leif Babin?

  It's pretty awesome.

• 5:27Jocko Willink?

  I was on my first deployment and we were driving, driving south from Baghdad. And, and we got ambushed. And we were in like a, like a five or six vehicle convoy. And the ambush hit the tail end. I was, I was in the number two vehicle as normal for, you know, the, for platoon commander at the time. I'm in the number two vehicle. The tail end of the ambush gets ambushed, or tail end of convoy gets camp, ambushed. And, but I mean, it's very clear. It's RPGs are going over the convoy and explosions and machine gun fire. And, and it's really obvious we're getting, um, ambushed. And, but we're on a highway and we're moving fast. So we, you know, it's, you know, I was like pushed through.

• 6:12Jocko Willink?

  You know what I mean? Like, we didn't stop at all, didn't even hesitate. And then we continued down the road and, and I asked for the, um, you know, like up count from the rear. I was like, "Up count?" And so it was, you know, I hear like, "Vehicle six is up, then vehicle five is up, and the vehicle four is up," and, and it gets to the front and I'm like, "Roger, we're up. Keep rolling." And then another, maybe another minute goes by.

• 6:35Jocko Willink?

  And my platoon chief, great guy, he's in the back vehicle, rear, you know, in the rear vehicles. Cause that's how you break, you know, break it up. So if something happens, he's in control there. And, and he comes up on the radio and he's like, he's like, "Hey, sir, just, just, just wanna let you know that we got ambushed. You're back here. Did you know that?" And I go like this. "Roger." We got back. We had a good laugh about that one. But, uh, it was pretty good times. So.

• 7:02Leif Babin?

  Awesome.

• 7:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. All right.

• 7:06Jocko Willink?

  Get into some questions. This is a question that actually came, a very similar question that I had when I had Tony on. And most of these questions, because I said these questions are for Leif coming on the podcast, so most of them are directed at you. And I'll chime in or whatever if I feel the need, but you like that? So here we go. First one, Leif, how often did you disagree with Jocko's commands? And how many times did you actually let him know? Also, how did you handle either situation? So there you go.

• 7:37Leif Babin?

  I disagree with Jocko every minute of every day. Listen, we actually, we had a, it's a great question. And look, Jocko and I are different people. We have different views of the world. We have,

• 7:49Leif Babin?

  there were, there were times when, you know, his job was, your job was strategic and you're looking at the bigger strategic picture. My job was tactical. I'm looking at the tactical picture. Sometimes you can make a tactical decision that could impact the strategic mission and, and every, it was very rare though, that we ever had any kind of disagreement on those things. Uh, I think, um, you know, there were, there were a number of times when, uh, what I always liked about Jocko, and I think people look at you and think, oh, he's this big intimidating guy. And I remember, um, our commanding officer, actually, um, we were talking to him and of course he, he loved our task unit and he was like, yeah, you guys are bruised. He was like, he was talking to me and, and the Delta Platoon commander. And, uh, and said, you guys, you gotta do what Jocko says or he'll choke you out.

• 8:35Leif Babin?

  And we were kind of laughing about that because we were, we were training jujitsu every morning. Like, man, I've been choked out by Jocko hundreds of times. It's not even a threat anymore. But, uh, it was, it was never, we never did what you said because it was fear, intimidation, or like, we have to do what he says because he's in charge. What I always loved about you and your leadership was that I, I knew that I could push back on stuff and you were going to listen to me. And it was, uh, it was interesting, interesting for me to see that as, you know, we built a relationship. I could, I could come in and be like, hey, I, I think we ought to do this. And, and, and very rarely would you, you, you would never say like, no, do it this way because it's my way. But even very, very rarely would you, would you say, sometimes you might be like, well, we want to go in this direction. Here's why we want to do this. But most of the time you would actually just say, hey, well, talk me through that.

• 9:20Leif Babin?

  Okay, how's that gonna work? And you would give me the opportunity and others in the between the opportunity to come up with a plan and kind of analyze it and look at it and give it a shot. And so that's where I always loved about that. I mean, a couple disagreements that came up. You know, for me, something that we talk about all the time, you know, with our business echelon front, when we're talking to companies and leadership teams, going through the workup cycle. You know, we always talk about it. People want to hire folks and just kind of let them run and, you know, people won't say, hey, give them the opportunity to go out and succeed. And a lot of bosses want to kind of, you know, just, hey, I'm really busy. Hire someone with experience, put them in position. You kept really, really tight reins on us.

• 10:05Leif Babin?

  And initially, that was super frustrating to me. I mean, I remember being in our mount training, military operations, urban terrain training. For folks that don't know what that means, we're in the mock cinder block city and we've talked about that on the podcast and talked about that often here for other folks at other podcasts. But that was, I wanted to plan these things. I'm the platoon commander and I want to be in charge. I remember you saying, hey, we should do this or let's plan it this way. And I remember wanting to kind of push back against that. And oftentimes, but I recognize like as we're going along, you're actually training me and giving me the, giving me, you've done a whole bunch of these operations that I hadn't done any of those operations previously. So you were teaching me and mentoring me and once we got to the battlefield, you just

• 10:50Leif Babin?

  unleashed us to get after it. And a couple of times I do remember some pushback where you came up and gave me some direction and, you know, where you said, hey, why don't you try this or do that? And one of those times in particular was when I was, you know, when I was trying to get, get, I remember a number of times, one of them out in our desert training facility out at what we call land warfare. And I'm trying to get the platoon to pull back to a position and we're trying to patrol out and you gave me, you told me to actually. Stop trying to put, put a bunch of detailed information out of the radio, like use verbal commands,

• 11:30Leif Babin?

  do it this way, and I, I, you know, immediately my ego getting the way I was in it was frustrating because the team wasn't doing what I want them to do.

• 11:38Jocko Willink?

  And that's like step number one in the frustration. So my team isn't doing what I want them to do.

• 11:43Leif Babin?

  So automatically my meter is kind of starting to get pegged in like, you know, the red, no one's listening to me. So when Jocko comes up to give me some direction of like, hey, you ought to do this, my immediate pushback is like, no, I'm not going to do that, you know, and I didn't say that, but I just, I was like, I kind of bristled a little bit. I remember kind of bristling that. And I was like, okay, let me think about it. Um, what do we, you know, uh, he hasn't told me wrong before. And I was like, let me give that a shot. It's like, okay, I'll do that. Use verbal commands, get everybody moving. And you do that over and over and over again throughout multiple training scenarios. And then on the battlefield as well, where, where that's what built up trust. So when, when you did tell me to do something, I was like, I'm going to give it a shot and, and it worked.

• 12:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So just to expand on that a little bit, the verbal command thing is so you get guys that there's a bunch of people, you know, you got, you got a platoon, we'll just take this case. You got a platoon of 16 guys, they're in various terrain features. One guy's in a little, in a little ravine, one guy's up on a little knoll, another guy's behind a shrub. So there's a little bit of dispersion with your troops and you want to get them to do something. You want to get them to fall back, or you want to get them to muster where you are, and maybe the shooting stopped or whatever, but you, you want to control all these people at the same time. And so what you think is, hey, I'll just get on the radio and I'll tell everyone, hey, everyone, I'm back about 100 meters back. There's a, a little piece of terrain sticking out. There's a rock by it.

• 13:02Jocko Willink?

  I'm behind that rock. And if you guys start peeling back here to the northwest at about 090 degrees, that's where you're finding me. Okay. So now what does that come across like on a transmission for a guy that's shooting a machine gun? He, he hears like, come back. He, that's what he hears. He doesn't hear anything. And, and so, and you've given this long, complex direction. And what you really need is, hey, everyone, fall back here now. That's what, that's what they need to hear. And so then you do it and you realize that now we have a thing in the SEAL teams where you pass the command and so when you hear a loud verbal command, everyone passes it. Now everyone heard it and now everyone comes back to your position. But this is the essence of in the book Extreme

• 13:45Jocko Willink?

  Ownership, this is really the essence of simple, like it's simple, clear communications and that's one of those things that we, once you learn it, you're like, yeah, if I, if my people, if my team isn't doing what I want them to do, not that they don't want to, they don't even know what you want them to do because you're giving it in such a complex way. I gave that counsel hundreds of times. Once I was running the training on the west coast, I gave that counsel hundreds of times, like, hey, man, just tell everyone a simple command right now to get them to do something. So that holds true. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you another situation where you, you kind of disagreed with me. And we, we, we were working with a company, I'm not going to mention the company's name. We were working with a company and there was a, a scene of, of, like a mid-level,

• 14:26Jocko Willink?

  but a somewhat senior leader and you didn't like him. And the reason you didn't like him because he wasn't really that competent. He, he had messed some things up and his whole, his division was suffering a little bit. And you were, you were kind of like, hey, Jocko, we should talk about getting this guy fired.

• 14:46Leif Babin?

  Well, it wasn't that he was, it just wasn't that he was competent, his division was suffering. Like they were like, hey, what's the, this guy is dragging us down. This is a major issue. And, and, and I was, we were getting massive negative feedback that was impacting the team, particularly from a guy who was supposed to be the knowledgeable guy that was able to groom and mentor the, the junior leaders, you know, underneath him. And, you know, I thought, man, why should they keep this guy? This is, he's actually dragging the team down. And you said, well, strategically, it, it, if they get, you know, if they get rid of this guy, it's gonna, it's gonna actually have some, some impact to the strategic mission they're trying to do. The, the senior leaders were gonna,

• 15:28Leif Babin?

  you know, maybe question what was going on there. If you remove a key leader from it.

• 15:32Jocko Willink?

  So strategically at that point in the company, that individual who was, you know, again, we'll just say incompetent and also unliked, he had really, really good political and relationship connections with.

• 15:49Jocko Willink?

  The, we'll say a parent company, but the people that controlled the funding. And so, we could get rid of this guy, but all of a sudden, all these people that were funding this company, there was gonna be problems. And I was like, hey, if we get rid of that guy, we're gonna cut a lot of relationship cords. So, we, we, let's try and find a way to mitigate as much we can, and we disagreed upon it. But, basically, you know, you fundamentally got the other leader in that division to figure out how to work with the guy, and got him trained up, and, and then that guy took enough control that they mitigated the non-performer kinda out of the picture, and it worked out well.

• 16:32Leif Babin?

  And I think the lesson there is that, you know, like I, I mentioned earlier, you can win the tactical battle and lose the strategic war, and you certainly don't wanna do that. I think, you gotta recognize that when you're, whether it's terminating someone or making decisions, uh, I think that's where we had, you know, you had that strategic picture in mind, and, and I was focused a little more on, on the tactical side. So, um, you gotta, you gotta keep, you can make the right tactical call and can have some real strategic consequences in the cascade and cause you a lot more problems. I, I think though, that the, my true answer to this question on our most fundamental disagreement came on patches. And, uh, that was, uh, Jocko was understood as SEALs, that we needed to be squared away.

• 17:14Leif Babin?

  We wanted to be storm troopers in T Bruiser. That's what we wanted to, we wanted to all look the same. We wanted to have, uh, you know, squared away haircut, squared away uniforms, everybody in the same, same gear. That's hard for SEALs, cuz SEALs often wanna just kinda wear a, you know, mix and match of uniforms and, and kinda whatever gear they wanna use.

• 17:30Jocko Willink?

  They wanna look cool, straight up.

• 17:32Leif Babin?

  Long hair, beards, all those things. You recognize, we needed to, we needed to do that. And, and guys can get out of control. We have all these patches made that are, you know, that are like, uh, look at these cool guy, I got patches all over me. And, and, uh, and, and that's, SEALs are some of the best, you know, the biggest offenders of that. So Jocko was like, no patches.

• 17:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and just to expand on this a little bit more, but strategically, from the Army, from the Marine Corps, the Army and the Marine Corps, when they look at someone that's not in a squared away, squared away uniform, they think to, they think to themselves. Hey, if this guy can't even wear a squared away uniform, how can he operate out in the battlefield? And that's what they think and good for them because it's a true statement. If you've got someone that can't mind some, some details and look squared away, then how can, how can I expect them to do their job well? Now, in this, in the SEAL Teams and really in all soft communities, there's some absolute laxity when it comes to uniform requirements. That's why you see pictures of guys doing this, uh, you know, dressing out a uniform and mixing and matching uniforms. It's, it's the way it is. And you know what?

• 18:28Jocko Willink?

  My, in my, in my deepest knowledge, I know that you can have, and this is a classic military quote is, you know, uh, "An inspection-ready platoon has never passed combat and a combat-ready platoon has never passed inspection." It's, it's a commonly known thing that I understand and I get. And, but especially we're new in the battle space. We're just showing up here. We got, you know, Marines and, and, and Army soldiers and senior leadership that we're going to be working for. And I say, okay, we're going to make a good, this is the base, fundamentally, we're going to make a good first impression. We're going to look squared away, which means we're going to, you know, have squared away haircuts. We're going to blouse our boots and we're going to wear a normal looking uniform,

• 19:10Jocko Willink?

  which means we don't have crazy looking patches that, that make us look different, right? Cause it's, that's the thing that you're saying. The thing you're saying is, "Look at me." That's what you're saying. "Look at me, I'm cool." That's what a patch is. It's, "Hey, look at me, I'm special." And then, and obviously I don't like that attitude. And so here we go back to the patches.

• 19:31Leif Babin?

  So we, I mean, when you told me, we were on board with everything on the same page and we saw eye on so many things. It's certainly me and the Delta Platoon Commander with you, absolutely. And, uh, but that was, I don't know why, but for one reason, I, we got together and I was like, "We designed our own patches." We're like, "We're making patches."

• 19:49Jocko Willink?

  You and the Delta.

• 19:50Leif Babin?

  Me and the Delta Platoon Commander, we. Me and the Delta Team Commander said, "We're gonna design some patches for Task Unit Bruiser." And I don't know, I don't know why if we just had an idea that this was gonna be a historic unit. This was gonna be something we wanted to be a part of, but we felt like we needed Task Unit patches. And I felt like you secretly wanted us to have them, even though you told us not to do it. So, so I was like, we designed these patches. One of them, I, I used the Lord Humongous from the Road Warrior for one, and the other one, we had a, we had a big cow skull. And, and it was, so we had these two patches. We went out, we had them made. So we, I secretly had them shipped. I secretly had them distributed to, to both platoons, and we keep them in our shoulder patch pocket.

• 20:34Leif Babin?

  And we'd be, so we'd be in a convoy, ready to roll out. Jocko would come out, see everybody off, shake hands with everybody. And, and we'd be launched on the operation. And we'd come up over the radio, my leading pad officer would come over the radio and be like, "Patch is on." Everyone would pull the patches out, slap the patches on, and then we'd... Although we got busted when there was an embedded reporter with, there was an embedded reporter with one of the units we were working with, and there were some photos of patches. So, we got busted. Although, you didn't, you didn't come down on me hard like that. You just...

• 21:05Jocko Willink?

  Well, I, I just, because you mentioned that we had this conversation on text the other day. And I'm actually, I just pulled out my phone to read this text back and forth. We were just talking about, you were basically saying, "Hey, you know, you, let's not forget, you didn't want us to wear patches." And, and, and then, and then I wrote back to you, "Hey, don't forget that while I was outwardly disapproving, inside I was smiling, knowing that a little rebelliousness isn't important, is important for leaders to possess, and that esprit de corps trumps compliance and uniformity." Oh, that's an actual text conversation we were having. That's kinda jacked up, isn't it? But my, my point is, like, you, you know, obviously it meant something to you, and it was bringing the team together.

• 21:47Jocko Willink?

  It's like, it's like when you go through boot camp and the drill instructors will let you get away with something because they know it's unifying the team, and that's what it was for me. It's like, okay. And also, how much leadership capital am I gonna expend? Because even though I just made it sound like it was a big deal, and, and also, we had earned a good reputation. It wasn't the first impression anymore. It was like the impression had been made and the impression was solid. And so now it's like, oh yeah, these guys are, these guys, oh yeah, they're actually a unit identifying patch. So.

• 22:13Leif Babin?

  We actually, and we gave that patch to the brigade commander when we departed, which was awesome. And, and I'm very proud to say that uh, there's not a whole lot up on the wall in the Jocko gym. But uh, in, in the garage there, but uh, but there is a TU Bruiser patch.

• 22:29Jocko Willink?

  There is indeed.

• 22:29Leif Babin?

  With Lord Humongous represents.

• 22:30Jocko Willink?

  There's a seven echo from my, from my Echo Platoon at Team Seven, and there's a SEAL Team One patch. I mean, a sticker. That's my, that's my uh, wall of glory.

• 22:41Jocko Willink?

  Stapled to the wall. Awesome. All right. Next question. See, that's the one question where 20 minutes deep. You gotta like that. Um, all right. Next question.

• 22:52Jocko Willink?

  Can you discuss the evolution of Echelon Front? Was the company ready for the explosive popularity of Extreme Ownership? What kinds of challenges have you faced?

• 23:00Leif Babin?

  We faced all kinds of challenges and the same challenges that, that any business faces. Uh, certainly, and you know, for, for us, it's been learned to the fire hose. It's been, it's been an awesome experience. I mean, I, I think just like any, just like our, our combat experience, we, we would adapt to the battlefield. We learned, we educated ourselves about things that we didn't know about and, and uh, and we've grown. I mean, I don't think anyone could, I don't know if we could have predicted just how, you know, widely disseminated the, the book would be or, or uh, you know, the popularity of things that we're talking about. We knew they were powerful. It's the whole reason we wrote the book. There was a massive demand signal for it. And uh, and I think, you know, as we work with companies now through, through our company Echelon Front, I mean, there's just, we're, we're able to go and,

• 23:42Leif Babin?

  and deliver uh, some impact to these teams uh, in a way that other people aren't able to do uh, because most of the, the folks in that space are, it's a feel-good thing. You're out there to talk about a, You guys, you're great and let's harness your inner potential and all this kind of stuff. And I laugh when people call us motivational speakers because I say, look, motivational speakers tell you how good you are and we're here to tell you how much you suck. You gotta get better if you want to win. So that's what we do and I think it's the same way that broadly honest assessment of yourself, your team, the same thing that makes SEAL units successful on the battlefield and other military units is the same thing that we're doing now with our company. Certainly, you know, all the challenges of bookkeeping and, you know,

• 24:26Leif Babin?

  the billing processes and paying taxes and I mean, just the, you know, regulatory environment, those things that make it hard for any business launching. But just like on the battlefield where we can either bitch about the paperwork or we can figure out a way to most efficiently get it done so that we could actually go accomplish the mission, which you instilled in us, like, hey, I can complain about it all day. I could figure out a way to get this done and make it happen because that's what it requires to do and that's what we've done with our business. And it's been awesome and frankly, what I love is working with leaders and so many of the folks that contact us that want to work with us, they're already doing well and they want to do even better. And it's just so much fun to work with folks who want to just constantly grow and learn

• 25:10Leif Babin?

  and we grow and learn all the time from them.

• 25:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. I think you hit it all. Next question. In battle, having the high ground is crucial. How do you see this principle applied to the business world? And we have, I've answered this question before with the statement, take the high ground or the high ground will take you. So, business world, okay, well tactically, what do you think? Why do you need the high ground?

• 25:38Leif Babin?

  Well, I think that's the real question, right? Why is the high ground important? And obviously, you know, out of thousands of years of military history, the high ground's always important. By the way, I did have a, I did have a training instructor a few years ago, my SEAL Team days, who we had, he said, "Look at your high-speed altimeter watch and, uh, and you get, get down behind something." So he was basically telling us, like, "If that thing's going up, you're wrong. That should, thing should be going down." He was, he was telling us to take the low ground, which was, uh, which was kind of laughable. So, out, outdoing thousands of years of, of military history, always take the low ground. No. Don't do that. You want to take the high ground. The reason is because tactically, if you're on the high ground, you, you have got a better shooting position. You can shoot

• 26:23Leif Babin?

  down on people who can't hide very well because you, you, you're above them, which is why it was awesome for us to be in, in buildings. And if we could get a three or four-story building in this, you know, in the city of Ramadi, the urban environment, it was awesome. It's no different in the business environment. And, and what you have to do is just identify the key terrain. What is the key terrain? The high ground is key terrain. Uh, so that, that doesn't, it doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, um, you're gonna go climb to the mountaintop because that's where you want to be. Uh, but, but if, if that ridge line that's on the high ground gives you, you know, tactical advantage on the battlefield, that's, it's the same thing in the business world. If you're, if you're a retailer, you know, where's that key terrain? Where's the intersection that, that's, that you want to be that's going to give your business the, the best, uh, you know, the best chance to, to succeed? If you're, um, you know, any space, I mean, there's, there's key terrain

• 27:08Leif Babin?

  that you can identify where you want to be a part of. If it's, if you're a private equity company, you're trying to get, break into some new, you know, some, some new technology or a new, uh, uh, new, new particular industry, that, that's, that's key terrain. You need to be focused on that. And identifying that is critical, why it's important. Um, and, and everyone's gonna be, gonna be vying for that. And you want to be aggressive. You want to maneuver, uh, because if you get there first, um, you're gonna be a lot better positioned. It's, it's flank or be flank. We always say, you know, you're maneuvering on the enemy or they're gonna maneuver on you. Um, so what you don't want to do is wait for somebody else to get in a better position. Uh, and then you actually have to fight your way out of that. It's, it's not good. Like in Jiu-Jitsu, you don't want to wait till someone's gonna mount you. That's not a good place to be or take your back, right? You want to

• 27:50Leif Babin?

  try to prevent that before you can get there. Uh, and, uh, and if you can do that to them first, then you're in a much better position. And I think it's no different in the business world.

• 28:01Jocko Willink?

  Basically, what they were saying was that their competitor was lying about them to to as they're trying to close accounts, their their competitor would go in the field and say, oh, yeah, this, this, the company are this to this company, they don't do it right. And they don't have these accounts and they're they're going out of business and everything's bad. So there's there's their competitors were out there lying about them. And, you know, the sales leader said, you know, I don't, I don't want to stoop to their level, you know, and and start throwing lies out there about them or making accusations. I think that's, you know, I said, Well, no, you don't want to take the low ground. You want to take the high ground. And he said, Well, yeah, but at the same time, what were we supposed to do? And I said, Well, you actually have the most powerful weapon in this fight. The weapon

• 28:43Jocko Willink?

  that you have is the truth. You have the you have the truth. But you're not getting the truth out there. I said, What do you do when you do close an account? What do you do? How do you publicize it? He's the cool, we really don't. And I said, Well, do you do you do a press release when you close a big account? No, we don't do that. Do you advertise it anyway? No, we don't do that. I said, So the most powerful weapon you have is the truth, and you're not utilizing that weapon. You need to have a propaganda arm at this company that's going to go out there and explain that all the wins and what the truth really is. And that will be more powerful. And then you can maintain the high ground. And by the way, when those other companies are out there lying about you, and then people find out, it makes them look even worse. So they they've broken their trust with with the potential

• 29:26Jocko Willink?

  client. So yeah, always take the high ground. Always take that ground. It might not win you the short term battle in business, right? Um, you know, you see, you see companies, you know, like, I can sell you this thing right now. I can I can paint repaint this thing, put a fresh coat of paint on it and sell it to you. That's not the high ground, right? That's the low ground because it's going to it's going to fail you because what's underneath the hood is crap. So that might win me, you know, that one sale. But what's going to happen? In the long road, taking the low ground, you're going to you're going to put on Yelp that you got a crappy deal. And I did, you know, I repainted something and sold it to you, and it wasn't worth it. And now that reputation is going to spread and it's not going to help you. If you take the high ground, hey, here's what's going on with this vehicle or whatever you're selling. Take the high ground.

• 30:11Leif Babin?

  The cool thing about that is, is we, we see so many leaders and some of the most successful people we do that recognize how important that is to build relationships and they're, they're willing to, to lose a sale or, or lose a, uh, you know, to, to send someone to a competitor just to, just to make sure that person gets exactly what they need. And they're building a relationship. So that means more business gets sent to them as a result.

• 30:33Jocko Willink?

  It's what you started off talking about. It's a strategic win as opposed to a tactical win. And that, and that's what you've got to be focused on. And that's really as a leader, that's what you've got to be looking at. You've got to be looking at your frontline people and making sure that they, they're not just out there trying to win every little tactical battle, but they're going backwards strategically. So keep that in mind. That's why you have to detach. That's why you have to stay out of the weeds. And when you get in the weeds, you've got to step back out of them. Cause otherwise you lose track of that and you're gonna end up in the low ground before you even recognize it. All right. Next question. How do you control rumors and gossip within an organization?

• 31:08Leif Babin?

  That's pretty easy. You just, you just talked about being, you know, getting out there with the truth and your propaganda armed outside your company. It's no different inside your company. You, you've got to make sure that people. It's interesting that when you work, we work with leaders sometimes and you see people that are like, well, I, I don't want to share this with my people. You know, cause I don't know what they might think. Like they're, they're thinking something that may be totally not true. They're, they're not just sitting there not thinking anything because you're not sharing it with them. They're coming up to their own conclusions, which may be completely false or opposite. But like we say in, in the, in the Navy all the time, you know, perception is reality. That becomes reality. So you've got to, you've got to, you can defeat the gossip, uh, and rumors by actually just sharing the truth, be open with people. And, uh, and, and, and being first out there with the message. So people get it and understand it.

• 31:53Leif Babin?

  And even when horrible, bad things go wrong, extreme ownership, right? If, if you take ownership for that and say, hey, listen, this happened. Here's what we're doing to fix it. Here's what we're doing to turn things around. Um, it, it's gonna,

• 32:06Leif Babin?

  people, people are not going to lose respect for you in the organization. They're actually going to gain respect for you as a result. Something we talk about all the time. So, uh, don't be afraid to do that. Again, just get the message out there and, and, and be transparent and, and talk to folks.

• 32:24Jocko Willink?

  If you don't tell people what's going on, they're gonna make up their own ideas of what's going on. And the thing that I have to,

• 32:34Jocko Willink?

  I have to, we have to, we have to take this just a little bit further, right? Just a little bit further. Because we talk about transparency, right? And that word gets thrown around all the time. And

• 32:45Jocko Willink?

  of the idea that you're just gonna, the idea that you're just gonna tell everyone exactly what's going on. And that sounds great. And it's like, hey, I'm a fully transparent leader and I'm gonna tell everyone what's going on. But there's times where you actually don't wanna do that. There's times where you have to maneuver and you have to be tactful. And some of the things that you might tell someone actually is not the right thing to do. Now, I'm not saying we're gonna be dishonest with our people. I'm not saying that. And I'm saying that transparency is a great thing, but I mean, just on a personal level. If Leif's, Leif's, uh, working for me. And he's not doing, he's doing something horrible. Is the best way to go about that, to fully, full transparency is, hey, Leif, you're doing horrible at this. Is that the best way to do it?

• 33:30Leif Babin?

  In front of the entire team?

• 33:32Jocko Willink?

  In front of the team, right? Is that, is that, it's full transparency, right? Hey, I'm fully transparent. Okay, everyone, welcome to the meeting today. By the way, I just wanted to point out that Leif missed his numbers again and he's a loser. That might be what I'm thinking. That's fully transparent. Hey, guys, just be, and you love this too, right? Just being transparent. Leif's, Leif's a loser. He missed his numbers again. And you know what? I'm actually thinking about firing him, just in case anyone was wondering. So that's, that's full transparency.

• 33:55Leif Babin?

  I'm gonna wait to close the business Friday.

• 33:57Jocko Willink?

  Did I do a good job? Right? So, so let's not get carried away, right? You know, what is the smart way? The smart way is to maneuver. The smart way is to say, okay, Leif's not doing what he, what he wants, what he should be doing. If I go and accuse him of failing, what's his reaction gonna be? How's it, so what do I do instead? Instead, I go, I wanna take ownership of it. And so instead, I say, hey, Leif, you know, hey. Comes in like, come to my office, I want to talk to you about a couple of things. So he comes to my office, so I'm not in a public place. And now it's, hey Leif, hey man, I noticed that you, you know, you, you missed your numbers and I'm thinking that maybe I'm not giving you the kind of support that you need to, to get where you need to be. Is there anything else that you need from me so that you can win?

• 34:40Jocko Willink?

  Again, inside, sure, I'm thinking, Leif, you pathetic loser, you missed your numbers again, right? But I'm not gonna do that. So the full transparency thing, I get it. And it makes sense, but we do have to consider the tertiary and the secondary and tertiary effects of the things that we say, especially as a leader. What you say has a lot of impact as a leader. And sometimes I see leaders, they make a little off the cuff remark about something, you know, oh, that won't matter. Oh, oh, okay, so it doesn't matter. So, so this little thing, you know, hey, hey boss, we wanted to get this, this task done by this date. Is it still important? Ah, it doesn't matter. Oh, okay. So it doesn't matter. So what I was working on for the last month and a half doesn't matter. Okay, cool. Great.

• 35:25Jocko Willink?

  I was fully transparent. So just be careful. Use tact. Use your brain.

• 35:30Leif Babin?

  Yeah, that's, that's 100% correct. I, I think, you know, what I was trying to explain in the, in the first situation is, I mean, I, I was having a conversation with a leader, uh, that we work with. Who was, you know, telling me that, uh, there was a key leader in his team that didn't want to share with any of his key leaders that. They, uh, you know, they, they're the, he didn't want to share with the key leaders that they were, they were having, having some issues, having some dire straits. Wonder, you know, getting to a point where they're wondering, hey, I don't know if we're gonna make payroll. You know, a, a few months from now, if we don't turn these things around, but I don't want to share that with them because I don't want them to panic. And when I, when I heard that, I was like, uh, what kind of panic are they gonna have when they find out?

• 36:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:14Leif Babin?

  That they can't make payroll, but no one told them about it and they thought everything was great. So the panic is gonna be a hundred times worse.

• 36:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Leif Babin?

  And, and that's, that's the kind of transparency I'm talking about where you're like, listen, you need to go and have a direct conversation and say, guys, here's where we're at.

• 36:27Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 36:27Leif Babin?

  And that should be something to help get them in gear. Be like, listen, we have got. We gotta hit these numbers. We gotta get things going again. We gotta turn performance around. Or this is where we're gonna be next quarter. Uh, if, if we don't do that. And I think those, uh, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about where you're not. Keeping the secrets is not helping you out.

• 36:45Jocko Willink?

  Because by the way, everyone knows the numbers, right? So they know they're already. Probably know you're in dire straits and they're thinking, well, I better find a backup job and they're gonna leave and now you're in even worse straits. So yeah, absolutely. You don't need to hide information from, from the team.

• 37:00Jocko Willink?

  All right. You know what? We actually have like a few questions. On the muster that people asked. One of them was. One of them was, why should I come to the muster? What do you think?

• 37:14Leif Babin?

  Why? Should you come to the muster?

• 37:19Jocko Willink?

  By the way, the muster, in case you don't know, muster is a leadership.

• 37:23Leif Babin?

  Event.

• 37:24Jocko Willink?

  Is it seminar?

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Gathering.

• 37:27Jocko Willink?

  A gathering. Oh, okay. I like it.

• 37:29Leif Babin?

  A gathering of leaders.

• 37:30Jocko Willink?

  So the muster is a, a, a leadership gathering where we get together and we. Talk about leadership and we have them twice a, well, this one, we're having twice a year. Uh, but anyways. Why should someone come to the muster? What do you think?

• 37:46Leif Babin?

  What I love about the muster is. Well, you have to understand that we talked to. Hundreds of, we've, we've actually worked with, we talked to thousands of leaders over the last. Six years that we've had this company echelon front, worked with hundreds of companies and about every industry you could imagine. And we speak at a lot of leadership conferences. We speak at them all the time. Uh, and there is nothing like the muster. There just isn't anything out there like the muster. Nothing even comes close. And the reason I love it, I mean, I, I, I, I just get super excited to be there and be a part of that stuff. And I even use words like magical to describe it on previous podcasts, which I took some heavies for. Took a lot of heavies for out there.

• 38:27Jocko Willink?

  It was pretty magical, I guess.

• 38:28Leif Babin?

  There were, uh, there were some pretty good like Disney, uh.

• 38:31Jocko Willink?

  Disney memes.

• 38:31Leif Babin?

  Yeah, dis- Disney memes going there. That was pretty good. But the, the reason the muster is so amazing is. Uh, it's just different from anything else that, that we do. And I think, and when I think about what really makes the muster different, it's the, the people that are there. It's the content that we're talking about and it's the impact that it has. And, you know. So who comes to the muster? The reason that's so awesome is that there are leaders from all over the place. And these leaders are hell bent on dominating their universe. I mean, these are people that are there, they're in the game. And they're from every type of business, every type of industry. I mean, we have entrepreneurs, we have senior executives from major companies. We have mid-level managers, we have frontline leaders, and we have people who really aren't even in a leadership position.

• 39:14Leif Babin?

  Maybe with no direct reports, but are aspiring to be that way and grow and learn. We get, we get police and firefighters and other law enforcement officers, members of the military. I mean, they're serving out there on our front lines of the home front and abroad. And these are the most committed people I've ever met.

• 39:32Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's, it's, it's one way to quantify this. Or when, when we're at the muster, the, like, the hotel staff will, will come up and they'll be like, oh, my God. This is crazy. Cause for instance, the doors to open to actually get in the morning of the muster, they open at eight o'clock, right? Or I guess seven, seven fifty or seven forty-five, because it starts at eight, seven forty-five, the doors open up. And most, I mean, like you said, we go to these conferences all the time. Everyone's listening, been to some kind of conference and it's, you know, people are meandering around.

• 40:04Leif Babin?

  They're coming in late.

• 40:05Jocko Willink?

  They don't really care. At the muster, it's like the doors open at seven forty-five. Everyone's out in the hallway and we're out in the hallway hanging out with everyone at, you know, seven o'clock. And that's after we do a four forty-five PT in the morning. We do, because we do a little get some. And that's another thing, like the hotel people, we're clearing it with the hotel. We're just letting them know like, hey, there's going to be a large gathering of people in, in front of the hotel in the morning. And they're like, well, what time? And we're like, oh, four forty-five. And they're, they say, well, like, like how many people? And we're like, well, there's four hundred and fifty people here. So there's going to be about four hundred and fifty people here. And sure enough, there it is. And that's what the whole muster is like. Oh, we say, Hey, we're gonna restart in 10 minutes and everyone goes out and they come back in in 10 minutes.

• 40:47Jocko Willink?

  Everyone's seated, ready to rock and roll. So that's, that's the, and that's, it's funny to hear that from an outside perspective because we're in it, but the hotel people always make comments about, they, they say, hey, we've, we never, you know, Kyle say, hey, I've been, I've been running conferences here for 22 years. I've never seen a group of people like this. So that, that to me shows you what kind of people show up at the muster.

• 41:08Leif Babin?

  When the, and when the doors open, it's just bum rush in there. Everyone wants to be in that front row, you know, be there engaged. They can ask, and not just so they can, uh, you know, so, so they can actually ask questions. So they can actually engage with us. And that's what I love about those folks. I mean, they just, they're, they're not there to feel good about themselves, right? They're there to take a hard look in the mirror and, and learn and grow and get better and, and, and so they, they can better and be, be more effective leaders. So they can lead and win in their teams, whatever they happen to be doing.

• 41:38Jocko Willink?

  Now, so you just kind of talked about the, the other question was who comes to the muster? And it's really every type, different type of leader. The, another question that we got about the muster is what do we talk about at the muster?

• 41:52Leif Babin?

  For, what, that's the other piece that I really like about it is, is content, right? It's, it's content that, uh, that we talk about. And of course I love telling war stories as you all know from listening to this podcast. Uh, we like talking about war stories. We like talking about our time in the teams. And, uh, even when you, you put that photo up there of, uh, you know, of, of us and Ramadi from back in the day. And, and I just, it just brings back great memories. I mean, those will always be, um, some of the absolute best times of my life. Certainly some of the worst times of my life as well. Uh, but, uh, but mostly some of the absolute best times of my life. And, and so we get to talk about that, but not just in a way that's, that's, that's a cool story, but it has impact. And I think taking the, taking the combat leadership lessons

• 42:35Leif Babin?

  that we talk about from extreme ownership and applying them directly to, uh, you know, to, to people's lives and, and what they do and how to overcome their challenges. Uh, that's what it's about. It's, it's super engaging. Uh, and for us, you know, for, for me and Jock, this isn't a, the standard Leadership conference where there's like 40 different speakers and the the main folks kind of get up there and spend a few hours. I mean, we're we're there the whole time and we're there to engage with leaders. It's me, it's Jocko, it's Dave Burke, it's JP Danel from our echelon front team. We're there. We're the guys on stage and and even during the breaks, we're talking to leaders that are coming up and asking questions. We're we're engaging with them.

• 43:14Jocko Willink?

  No green room.

• 43:14Leif Babin?

  And Q and A.

• 43:15Jocko Willink?

  No green room, by the way.

• 43:16Leif Babin?

  There isn't a green room. There isn't someplace we're hiding behind the curtain.

• 43:18Jocko Willink?

  There isn't somewhere in the back where Leif is getting cucumbers put on his eyes.

• 43:24Leif Babin?

  Take a load off, sir. Sipping, uh, sipping my Jocko white tea with pinky up. Look, and that's, you know, these, these folks are there to get their questions answered and to ask hard questions.

• 43:36Jocko Willink?

  The thing that you really, we really get granular on a lot and that's, that's what it is. You're taking, like, you understand the principles. It's like, it's like learning a, a, a jujitsu move from one person and they teach you a fundamental, basic move and you're like, okay, I understand that. And then compared to, okay, now you're getting a private lesson. Like, that's like in a class, right? Hey, this is the arm lock. Then you get a private lesson with someone that goes in and adapts the technique to your body style, to the opponents that you're facing, the adjustments that you need to make. That's the kind of granularity we get because the, the, the more you see these different angles and the other great thing is because with all these different people that you got there and we do

• 44:18Jocko Willink?

  group exercises where now you're sitting down and we, we purposely don't want people to sit with, with industries that they already work with. So in one group, you'll get a, a, a CEO, you'll get a firefighter, you'll get a startup business owner, you'll get a mid-level manager and you'll get some, you know, regular corporate EVP and they'll all be sitting at the same table. And we'll, we'll give them a problem. We'll give them a task and they'll come up with a solution and they'll relate it to how it affects their lives and their business. And when you see stuff from different angles like that and you're all applying, we're all speaking the same language because everyone there has obviously read the book. Everyone understands the, everyone understands fundamentally what the principles are. But now we're getting to see how they impact people's businesses and lives and leadership roles.

• 45:03Jocko Willink?

  From all these different perspectives and it just makes you that much better. That's why during these exercises, like I'll, I'll say, okay, I'm going to float around to these different tables and listen, but the first table I'll get to, I'll be like, oh, man, these guys are, you're, I'm sitting there learning because you got, like I said, you've got a firefighter that's explaining to a CEO what you do in a situation where your team has decided that they're not going to follow this procedure anymore and they have good reason why they don't want to. Like it's one thing when you're, when your team doesn't follow the procedure and you say, hey, you got to follow this procedure and you, and they say, well, why? And you say, you explain it to them and, and they go, oh, okay, that makes sense. But what about when you tell them to follow the procedure and they have a reason that actually makes sense, then what are you going to do?

• 45:45Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's what you learn at, at the muster. That's where you make the progress. So that's good. One, one last question that we got about the, the muster is what kind of impact do you see from people that have been to the muster?

• 46:01Leif Babin?

  The impact is, uh, is, is obvious in that the number of people who are there that are talking about how they just got promoted, you know, or, or they, they just got put in this, in this position of greater responsibility and, and authority on their teams. Are they've been recognized for their exceptional performance? Are the folks who've, who've come back from that and we hear about on social media or reach out to us via email or come back to a muster to talk about that from what they, you know, what, what had happened to them previously? The number of leaders who come and, and see what we're doing and bring their teams, you know, that's what's pretty awesome. I mean, that to me, when a, when a, when a CEO, uh, uh, from a company comes, checks out what we're doing, uh, and brings 25 of his, his team members back, uh,

• 46:45Leif Babin?

  to be a part of that because he recognizes the impact that that can have to his, to his team and will have. And it's, it's just, it's awesome to see that. I mean, these are the most, again, the most committed people you could ever be around and they just, they leave there with the, the knowledge to directly apply things to solve problems, uh, and they learn from us. They learn from each other, just as you said, uh, and part of that too, I think is the recognition that these kinds of problems that I'm having. are not unique to me. They're not unique to the market that I'm in. They're not unique to my industry, but they're leadership problems and they and they apply everywhere. Uh, and I'm trying to get a diverse group of people to focus their efforts to uh and mutually support one another, accomplish a mission just like everybody else in in every other industry.

• 47:27Leif Babin?

  In in the in the business world, as a first responder, the military, it doesn't matter. It's the same thing. Uh, and these same techniques apply everywhere and it just uh, that's why it's awesome. I I love the muster and and I I can't wait. I can't wait to meet those folks. Uh, and uh, and that's why so many people come back again and again and again. And it's just uh, it's just an awesome event. It's the best thing that that we're a part of. And uh, and frankly, if you don't want to have that good look in the mirror, that hard look in the mirror at yourself and have, answer some tough questions about where you can do better, you probably shouldn't come because it's not for you. It's uh, it's for people who are are eager to destroy their competition and dominate the universe. And that starts with looking at themselves and taking ownership and solving problems so they can win.

• 48:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's it's interesting because if you think about it, and I I was talking about this yesterday. Like every problem that you have in an organization is going to be solved by leadership. That that's it. That's it. That's what it's going to get solved by. Every problem that is in an organization is going to be solved by leadership. I don't care if it's because you're missing numbers. I don't care if you got bad process. I don't care if you got the wrong people in the wrong positions. All those problems are all about leadership because if you've got a bad process, there's a leader that's allowing that process to be in place. If you've got bad people, then there's a leader that's not either training those people or getting rid of those people. And if your P and L is upside down, there's a leader that is not paying attention to the numbers. So all these problems are going to be leadership problems. So if you want to improve your business, well, then what you need to do is improve your leadership.

• 48:55Jocko Willink?

  Now, I I will say this as well. I just got to make like a little caveat here because you just talked about the value of it. If you're out there in the world and you can't afford to come to the muster, which I understand the muster is expensive. It costs us a lot to put together. I had somebody hit me up like, hey, it sounds like you care about more about making money. I was like, no, no, we we definitely want to make money. Um, that's what that's what we we are business and we need to make money. And we need to pay our team. And so, yeah, we are, we're going to make money and the muster is expensive. It costs a lot of money. If you can't afford to come to the muster. Don't come to the muster. If you can't, don't go out and borrow money to come to the muster. No, you, you, you're not, you know, don't skip a mortgage payment so you can come to muster. That's not a good idea. What you do is you implement some financial discipline.

• 49:40Jocko Willink?

  You start saving money. You put it together and you can come to the next muster. By the way, if you can't afford the muster, you can get a book called Extreme Ownership. It costs sixteen ninety-seven on Amazon. That's fine. We, this podcast is free. There's four hundred something hours of us talking about this kind of thing. So you can do that. Like I said, if you can come to the muster, that's when you're gonna get basically a private jujitsu lesson. You're gonna learn really granular things. You're gonna get the interaction face to face. You're gonna get to ask the specific questions about your world and you're gonna interact with people that are on the same path as you. That's awesome. If you can come, come. We'll, we'll see you at the muster.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  That no green room thing?

• 50:22Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  And we've talked about that before, but that's, that's a big deal. That's a bigger deal than it might seem because you know how like how you said like, okay, you have a Q and A part? Or, um, you know, like you have, you have a specific question like, hey, that was cool what you just said, but what about the, you know, like some people have questions. So during the break, when most times like at these conventions or whatever they got, you know, the people, they'll, they'll say their, what they have to say and then they'll go and they'll disappear.

• 50:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Straight up disappear.

• 50:49Jocko Willink?

  They're gonna get cucumbers on their eyes.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, whatever, grapes, whatever. And, um, but here it's like people are like, hey, that question that I had, now I can go run and go, go grab Leif or Doc or whatever and ask it like personally.

• 51:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's what we have when during the break, Leif and I were on stage.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:07Jocko Willink?

  The break, we say, okay, take a break, come back in twelve minutes. We step down off the stage and we stand right there and people just come and ask us more questions and we continue talking. And sometimes they, somebody asks such a good question, we're like, bring it back and we'll go back on stage and say, hey, someone just asked this question.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:21Jocko Willink?

  Here's the question, it's a great question.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:22Jocko Willink?

  It's a problem that, yeah, the whole time.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  The whole time, yeah. Even the kind in the, in, this would happen to me a lot for some reason. I think I know, well, I guess I kind of know a little bit.

• 51:30Jocko Willink?

  They come and ask you the leadership questions.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Like in the hallway.

• 51:32Jocko Willink?

  That goes in the game.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Like in the hallway, you know?

• 51:34Jocko Willink?

  And he's like, the best thing to do in that situation is you wanna just kinda cruise a little bit.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:39Leif Babin?

  That's, I was gonna say, that's one of the other primaries to come to muster is Echo Charles is gonna be there. And one of these days, we're gonna get you onstage for a keynote presentation.

• 51:48Jocko Willink?

  Sure.

• 51:48Leif Babin?

  And it's gonna be awesome.

• 51:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 51:50Leif Babin?

  You're gonna be right, right in your comfort zone.

• 51:52Jocko Willink?

  Getting flanked. Alright, moving on. Those are the three questions about the muster, but they got asked. So, here.

• 52:02Jocko Willink?

  Knowing what you know about war and the teams, if you could go back in time, what would you have done differently?

• 52:10Leif Babin?

  Man, I wish I could go back in time.

• 52:13Leif Babin?

  Dave Burke and I were doing an event, uh, earlier this week and he was, he, he, he said, uh, you know, I'm glad I'm not in Ramadi. I know Leif probably wished he was in Ramadi, 100%. I would go there right now. Let's go. Um, and look, it's, what I would do differently is the recognition that, uh, we were super aggressive. We took a lot of risk.

• 52:38Leif Babin?

  What I would do differently is I would actually be even more aggressive. I would be 100 times more aggressive. I would be putting up, you know, a concept operations brief for your, for your approval, to send up the chain, to swim across the river and hit targets and, and, and, you know, put in some cyber over watches and just completely ruin the bad guys program going on in South Central Miami when they had a complete freedom movement before they had any expectation that we could be there before anybody could get to us. And I think, uh, they would never see it coming, which means that, uh, we would have more impact and it would actually be safer for us, uh, because they wouldn't be expecting it. So they would probably hammer us, but we, we recognize that we could get away with a lot more, um, you know, than, than we could.

• 53:20Leif Babin?

  Uh, and looking back on it, I just, when you, when you come into an area and they're like, hey, don't go in there, you're all gonna get killed. You, you wanna be cautious. You, you wanna, you don't wanna just jump into things. You wanna mitigate risk and control, certainly. Uh, but we recognize we could get away with a lot more, uh, than, than we thought we could and, and more often than not, bring, bring guys home. And of course, that's the one thing I would change, obviously, if I could change. If, uh, I would trade places with Mark Lee and Ryan Jobe in my platoon in a second. Uh, I'd trade places with Mike Montour and Del Platoon in, in a second. And, and I wish I could do that. Uh, and I can't, but, uh, that is, uh, that is what I would change. Um, but, uh, I certainly would, uh, if we could go back there again, we would be even more aggressive and we'd have even more impact.

• 54:03Jocko Willink?

  There's a term that that they used to say in the teams. I don't know if you ever heard it. You probably did when we'd be doing special reconnaissance training and guys would say, "Trust your camouflage." Did you ever hear that expression? You may not have. I don't I don't believe so. So what it was was when you got good at putting your camouflage together, you could really get aggressive in getting up and observing a target. Because if you trust your camouflage, you've done a good job with your cami paint, your ghillie suit and and and putting yourself together well, the enemy's not going to be able to see you. But it's really weird to be, you know, 40 meters from a target that you're looking at. Then there's a guy walking around and you feel completely naked like they can see, but they can't see you at all. They can't see you at all.

• 54:46Jocko Willink?

  And so it takes some it takes some time to learn to trust your camouflage. And I think, you know, obviously hindsight is 2020. And when you look back at your body, like you look back and you think to yourself, "We could have done this. We could have done that. We could have gotten closer to that target. We could have done more things because our hindsight's 2020." And also, we learned over time to trust our camouflage. And the longer we were there, the the the more aggressive, you know, operations took place. But yeah, that's hindsight's 2020, isn't it? That it is.

• 55:19Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 55:22Jocko Willink?

  Advice on restarting your life after the military?

• 55:29Jocko Willink?

  I think you just got to figure out what you want to do. Yeah. You got to figure out what you want to do. I have a new mantra that I tell people now. It's it's a find your next mission. And that's what you got to do. And I got I got really lucky because we got right into this. And and you you the same thing, like we we went right into a new mission. And so any time to kind of wander around and look around and figure out which direction to go. And by the way, when you're wandering around and looking around to find out which direction to go, you're going to get pulled in a direction and that direction is probably going to be the path of least resistance. It's not going to be a good path. We certainly know it's not going to be the path. So when you come out, when you get out of the military, man, have a mission. Figure out what your next mission is going to be.

• 56:07Leif Babin?

  But I, I would disagree with you there in that it wasn't that we got lucky, right? And that, and that if you think about what we're doing now, this is what we like to do. And this is what we, we, uh, we brought lessons back from Mahdi that we, uh, we translated and gave to the next generation of SEALs and saw the impact that was happening. I mean, when you, when you came back from Mahdi, you could have had any job that you wanted to, and you said, I want to go run training detachment. Because I want to make sure that the, the, the next, uh, SEALs that are coming through this training and going forward to places like Iraq, Afghanistan are ready. Uh, you chose to do that and, and I was running a training program that that's, I would, I didn't want to be anywhere else than that. It was awesome. And I recognize how powerful that was, uh, and, and the kind of reward it brought to me to see these young officers go out there that I put through training and, and succeed

• 56:52Leif Babin?

  on, on incredibly difficult, dangerous battlefields in different areas that, that I'd been to. So, you know, we, we took that and recognized like this is something that, that, that is useful, it has impact and, and that we can do for others. So I, I think that's, it was absolutely not the path of least resistance and I got, you know, we had job offer, offers that people thought, people thought I was completely crazy. A buddy of mine was like, come work for me, we'll pay you this huge salary that was, you know, triple what my Navy salary was. Uh, and I said, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to start my own business. I mean, he looked at me like I was nuts.

• 57:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we were talking about yesterday because we weren't making a lot of money at the beginning of Echelon Front. Now, were we? Yeah, we were, we, we, we had to put it together. We were writing checks and paying for things and traveling on our own dime to, to go and talk to companies and.

• 57:42Leif Babin?

  For free?

• 57:43Jocko Willink?

  For free.

• 57:43Leif Babin?

  Or for almost nothing.

• 57:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Leif Babin?

  And, and I think that's, and that's really it is, is finding your mission. Like this is what I can do, uh, and this is, this is what I like to do and, and I'm going to figure out a way to do something that is useful and impacts people. Uh, and I think that's, that's really key is finding that next mission for sure.

• 58:02Jocko Willink?

  Next question, I like this question. This, this question, uh, made me think that whoever wrote this question has a good feel for like kind of the whole thing here. So the question was, is this question to Leif? What's Jocko's most impactful strategy on you? When he says, Leif gets real fired up.

• 58:24Leif Babin?

  Definitely someone who's been listening to a lot of podcasts, or maybe he's come to the Buster or heard us speak or talk before, because Jocko talks about angry life. Angry life. Angry life. I can get angry. That's like hothead, right? Basically? Be a little bit of a hothead? I can definitely be a hothead. You can be a lot of bit of a hothead sometimes. I can't, and usually, I mean, I, I, I'd like to think that it takes me, I don't immediately spin up on things, but once I get spun up, I get really spun up. And I don't know if you disagree with? No, no, I, I agree. No, I was gonna ask you, is, is, is, how's having two kids? For sure. That, that, that teaches you some temper control. Big time, big time, and, and particularly when, you know, when, when there's, there's timelines that you're trying to meet and we're trying to run a business. Kids don't have a timeline? They don't. Kids don't have a timeline? They just do.

• 59:09Leif Babin?

  Oh, the timeline is now. I want some crayons, now. And what I, what I've loved is, I love spending time with my, my son and, and, and my daughter, and they're awesome kids. And particularly my son now, he's three, he's old enough to kind of, you know, he, He's in the game. Yeah, we'll go, we'll go somewhere, do something fun, or, or we're hanging out, and it doesn't matter if that's five minutes long or five hours long, like when it's time to leave, it's level 19 meltdown, every time, right? And he's, I, I, I'm waiting for the timer, he's like, Dad, thank you for the time, this is really fun. Doesn't happen. So, so yeah, that, that actually instills in you some, uh, Some patience. Some patience, but it's the, we always talk about red flags, and that's something that I learned from you, um, and, and that, and I know you were looking at for me to see, like, oh, some red flags are going off.

• 59:54Leif Babin?

  Red flags are those things that, as you talked about often, you recognize in yourself, like, okay, I'm getting spun up right now, I need to take a step back here and, and throttle back. I need to throttle back because I'm getting spun up. So, so with kids, I gotta look at it as, you know what, this is good, because, because I know that's something, it's in my nature that I can get spun up. So with kids, I gotta relish that opportunity to say, this is a training opportunity for me to be outside my comfort zone to say, you know what? I feel myself getting spun up, I'm gonna practice detaching and spinning down and not not reacting in a way that I might otherwise would have. And I think it's a great, it's a great tool there. Really for for me, I think what the when Jocko would sense that in me, and we've talked about a number of times when that's happened here on the podcast,

• 1:00:38Leif Babin?

  that I was getting spun up, you know, we talked about, you know, previous in in previous podcasts about cancel the op and some of these things where I, you know, I just, I would, I would get fired up. And get angry and and you, what most people would have done in that situation, what I probably would have done to a subordinate leader is get is is get spun up as well and

• 1:00:59Jocko Willink?

  Like you yell at me, now I'm gonna yell at you, but a little bit louder.

• 1:01:03Leif Babin?

  Exactly. And now we're gonna ramp up and it becomes like the battle of wills and and how you handle that exceptionally well with me was generally you would, you would never get spun up, you would just be very calm in your response. And you would ask questions or in some cases you would just start chuckling like like laughing about it like, hey, man, you get spun and not not in a way that was condescending or like, look at you, you idiot. Yeah. It was in a way like

• 1:01:26Jocko Willink?

  You don't wanna laugh at people when they're getting mad.

• 1:01:28Leif Babin?

  Yeah, it was in a way like, hey, man.

• 1:01:31Jocko Willink?

  Take it easy.

• 1:01:31Leif Babin?

  Yeah, just take it easy. And then you start laughing about it. And it was, and then it just, that was something that was, would you ask questions in a way that were, hey, well, why, why do you think this? Or those things, that was powerful as well to me. That wasn't, it wasn't like, hey, why are you doing this? Or why won't you listen to me? And and it was, that always allowed me to kind of take a step back and recognize, okay. So so I think you you gotta make sure you see a red flag of somebody else, they're getting spun up and they're really emotional. You need to be unemotional and you need to, you need to check your ego to to do an end around. I never see anybody do that before. You did exceptionally well against me and and I learned a lot from that because I recognize like I gotta do that better. And it never, it just doesn't benefit you from getting spun up and angry.

• 1:02:13Jocko Willink?

  And and I'll tell you one thing that's another little thing that I noticed that I do for sure is if someone comes at me and they're super mad about something, I can't just be a hundred percent calm. Because if if you come in the room and you go, Jocko, this is crap, the we're getting told to do this thing over here, this is total crap, we shouldn't be told to do this. And if I go Leif, just calm down. It's not that big of a deal. Like, right there, I've already taken, right? Cause you're like, what are you talking about?

• 1:02:43Leif Babin?

  I tried that with my wife, Jenna, at times. It doesn't work very well. The opposite.

• 1:02:48Jocko Willink?

  What you have to do is you have to be, you have to show some, uh, we'll call it a diminished reflection of the emotion that they're showing. You wanna, you wanna take a little off of it, but you know, "Oh my, Leif, are you serious? They're telling us to do that? Aw, man. That's, that's, that's crap. Alright, let's, let's find out what's going on." So now, instead of being against you, now all of a sudden, I'm on your side. I've calmed down a little, I've brought you down a little bit, but you at least recognize that I'm on your side. Because if I just, if I just say, "Leif, calm down. Getting mad is not gonna help. It's like you're gonna get even madder." Or if I say, "You need to think about what they're saying." No, no, I need to join your side first. Once I'm on your side, now we can talk and we can move through the problem effectively. So, you might wanna just show a little diminished reflection

• 1:03:31Jocko Willink?

  of the, you know, if someone's really sad about something. Okay, you know, you can't just be like, "Hey, it's not that big of a deal." Like, you know, I got, I got kids, right? I got, I got teenage girls. And, you know, they get sad about stuff. And, and I can't just, you know, I've tried it before, like, "Don't worry about that. It will mean nothing in three years." I've done that. By the time you graduate high school, you won't even think about that anymore. Stop.

• 1:03:53Leif Babin?

  How does that work?

• 1:03:54Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't work good. Because you realize that that's the whole world to them. So, you know, instead you gotta say, "Ah, man, I can't believe that happened. You know, that's, that's, that's sad, you know, but the good thing is, here's some good points about it, and maybe," you know what I mean? So, just don't be completely emotionless, because then the person can't relate to you, and if they can't relate to you, you're not gonna be able to talk about it. If you can't talk about it, you're not gonna make any progress on the subject.

• 1:04:19Jocko Willink?

  Be careful with that one. Alright. Wanna hear more HDH in Vegas? Did we talk about the HDH hands on one of the other podcasts?

• 1:04:28Leif Babin?

  Yeah, we talked about it.

• 1:04:29Jocko Willink?

  So, $100 hands in Vegas.

• 1:04:30Leif Babin?

  Listen to Podcast 11 if you wanna hear about Mark Lee, so our Shenanigans in Vegas. We did have, There were, there were a couple of good stories of Vegas. We, you know, we, that was a crazy boondoggle trip. But one of them that I, I did remember well was we had this giant convoy of Humvees. And we were coming up to a major intersection just off the, the Vegas Strip, a red light.

• 1:04:52Jocko Willink?

  Cause we were driving, just so everyone knows, we were driving, we drove the, the Humvees to a range to do work up in that area. Uh, uh, is it an Air Force range?

• 1:05:00Leif Babin?

  Nellis, Nellis Air Force Base.

• 1:05:02Jocko Willink?

  So it was a Nellis range where they do training up there and we had taken the Humvees from one base on civilian roads to another base and we'd spent the day training there and now it was time to come back to base. So we're back on civilian roads again in a, in a convoy of Humvees, what, five trucks probably? So five Humvees and we had done a, a drill where we had the, we, I was always big on you train how you fight, right? So that means if we're driving Humvees, guess what we're doing? We're mounting weapons. We're gonna, we're gonna be ready to get after it if we have to. Not that we're gonna have to get after it in Vegas, but we're gonna, we're gonna test things because if you're not used to swinging that gun around up in the, up in the turret, then you're not used to it. So you gotta practice. So we were basically in, in full kinda kit.

• 1:05:46Leif Babin?

  I think we actually had the whole task in us. I think we had like eight or 10 Humvees. It was, it was, it was a big, bigger convoy. But yeah, so we come up to, we're coming up to a red light. The red light starts to turn yellow and the lead, the, the lead navigator. You know, this is a major intersection, you know, two four lane roads that are coming, coming up to. Uh, he's, he gives the command blow through, which means that we're just, if you get, you're in ambush and people are shooting at you and you're just gonna keep rolling and he says, blow through. So we literally have the entire convoy behind him, like running this red light at a major, major intersection. I was like, we're gonna be standing tall in front of the Avron this one. This is not good. We don't wanna do that.

• 1:06:24Jocko Willink?

  Cause in, in like in Iraq, you wouldn't stop at a red light or you wouldn't stop at a stop sign. You, you know, you'd, obviously the lead vehicle would check close enough and then you, you're traveling really tight. You make sure there's no cars coming, but yeah, you're just gonna blow through. You're not gonna stop. And so that, yeah, the call came out to blow through.

• 1:06:38Leif Babin?

  So which would have been a

• 1:06:39Jocko Willink?

  I'd get in trouble for that.

• 1:06:40Leif Babin?

  It would, it would have been a fine, well luckily we had some heads up drivers that stopped at the, at the, their green light and, and saw us coming, or maybe they were intimidated by guys with fifty cal machine guns and, and the turret. But, uh, definitely, uh, you know, that's one of those things where it's hard for guys to turn it off sometimes. And when you're, when you're doing tactical driving on the range, as if you were in, uh, a combat scenario and all of a sudden you're on the, the street.

• 1:07:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, see that, that again, this is

• 1:07:03Leif Babin?

  It's hard.

• 1:07:03Jocko Willink?

  I should have been said, okay, guys, we're going back on ceiling roads, stand down. You know what I mean? I should have said that, but I didn't say that, cause I'm dumb and I

• 1:07:13Leif Babin?

  Well, we, we, we, we made the assumption, which turned out to be false, that people would automatically know that and they didn't.

• 1:07:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:07:21Leif Babin?

  So we had to tighten that up, but, uh, that was just one, one lesson learned from our, our biggest trick that was shenanigans.

• 1:07:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Leif Babin?

  It was good times.

• 1:07:27Jocko Willink?

  I'm surprised I didn't get in more trouble for that. One of the, one of your guys, we were in a, he was a designated driver. We're in a Navy van and we go from one place, we, we knew someone and we were out, out in town and we went from there to downtown. To go to, you know, the bars, right? In Vegas. We're pulling into a parking garage and you know how they have that metal pipe that says, you know, six foot, two inch clearance? Or whatever the clearance was. It was a very low parking garage. So he's got this big Navy van. We come in and we, we kinda hit that. And I'm, I'm sitting in the back and you know what? This is a classic example of a decentralized command.

• 1:08:06Jocko Willink?

  I'm not going to step on the toes. The guy's the designated driver. I, I wasn't drinking, I probably had a few drinks or whatever, but I wasn't, definitely wasn't intoxicated. And, but I see, oh, like I look out and I see we, we kinda hit that thing. And so we go around the corner and then we start to actually enter the, the parking garage. And as we go underneath the first concrete beam, the, the, it's, you can hear it. It scrapes against the ceiling, but it scrapes hard and the vehicle comes to a stop. And what does the driver do? Again, this is the designated driver. What does he do? He starts pressing down the gas. He's just gonna power through this. And I'm, I'm in the back. I go, dude.

• 1:08:47Leif Babin?

  Blow through.

• 1:08:48Jocko Willink?

  I'm like, dude, what are you doing? Stop. What are you gonna rip the roof off of the vehicle? Like back out of here and leave. He's like, well, I thought I could have made it.

• 1:09:01Leif Babin?

  Oh, man. One, one good team guy shenanigans that we were talking about was me, you and the Delta Commander. Delta Platoon Commander rolling, rolling up to Santa Barbara. I think you actually came up to me and said, "Tenacious D." Oh, you go see Tenacious D, yeah. So, for those of you that may not know, Jocko is a huge Tenacious D fan. The D. The D. And I think that's, that's how it came out. You're like, "The D, they're in Santa Barbara. Let's go." Road trip. Road trip. Road gig. Road gig. So, we jumped in, yeah, of all the things that you gave me, you gave me a copy of About Face by David Hackworth when, when we were working together, T U Bruiser, at the end of our, our tour together.

• 1:09:43Leif Babin?

  And you gave me the, the set to, the DVDs to Tenacious D. There you go. And the Delta Platoon. There you go. That's the dichotomy of leadership right there. Hackworth, About Face, the Tenacious D. Yeah. So, we found out Tenacious D was having a concert up in Santa Barbara. You know, we're all stationed here in San Diego and, and we jumped in Jocko's Dodge. 1997 Dodge Grand Caravan. 1997 Dodge. A lot of people just called it the pimp wagon. Cause it was hard to keep the ladies off. Where, when you're rolling in. The window was taped shut on the driver's side. Right, yeah. It's riggers taped shut. Hard core. You weren't getting in there. No, that thing was shut. Cause the little electrical thing broke.

• 1:10:26Leif Babin?

  So, we're, we're, we're cheap bastards, so we're not gonna spend the night up there. I think we actually had work to do, maybe the next day. So, we jumped, we jump in the van. Jocko, I think you drove up there. We rock out to Tenacious D concert in Santa Barbara. We, we bought Jocko a T-shirt. Still got it. The Sasquatch is real. The Sasquatch, he is real. And I, I remember driving back at about, it was about 3 o'clock in the morning. We were like passing through Camp Pendleton, as kind of where our ranges are there, as, as on the way back down, we're just a cappella singing to every Tenacious D zone that we, we knew by heart. We're gonna make a new band. It's gonna be called Acapello D.

• 1:11:07Leif Babin?

  That was a good time.

• 1:11:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, that was a pretty fun. Alright. Tenacious D.

• 1:11:15Jocko Willink?

  What are your daily non-negotiable habits, Leif Babin?

• 1:11:20Leif Babin?

  My daily non-negotiable habits? Usually I want to sleep in about 10:30, 10:30 a.m.

• 1:11:28Jocko Willink?

  Leif Babin style.

• 1:11:29Leif Babin?

  Just eat some doughnuts.

• 1:11:33Leif Babin?

  Listen, I mean, at the end of the day, just when it goes freedom, it's a mantra that I learned from you and that it's just absolutely true. And if you gotta, you gotta get up in the morning and work out. There's some days, frankly, I can't do that because life gets in the way, whether I'm, if I'm traveling or my kid wakes up early and I know, you know, I've been out of town and my wife wants to get a workout in before the day starts. So I'll take the kids so she can do that and we can, we can rotate out. You know, so, so I can't tell you that always happens, but you gotta get up early. You gotta work out and you have to, you have to prioritize and execute and having that checklist that you put together the night before about what you want to do. And what's important is absolutely critical, otherwise you lose it.

• 1:12:13Leif Babin?

  And, you know, for me and Jocko and for all of us at our team on Echelon Front, like it's when we get away from the things that we talk about to people. We're human beings like everybody else and we can get pulled in different directions. When we get away from those things, it doesn't work. Things start to fall apart. You lose, you lose track of where the priorities are. If I can't regularly detach, that's something I have to really focus on to do. Is to regularly detach. If I'm grinding on something for two or three or four hours at a time. Sometimes it's easy to miss other things that are, that are coming up and I gotta make sure I pull away from things. Kind of, kind of think about the prioritize and execute piece, figure out, you know, if I need to reprioritize and, and so I don't get target fixated on one thing and, and keep going. But I think for me, you know, what I want to do is I try to make time, spend time with my family as much as I can as well.

• 1:12:58Leif Babin?

  And obviously there's, there's a, there's a lot of work to do. There always is. And, and it's, you know, those things, the, the, when, when, when I can stay consistent on getting up early in the morning, getting a workout in. You know, stay focused on a list that I have from the night before that I'm following through, all the things that you talk about. That's, I'm, I'm, I'm performing better than I ever do.

• 1:13:20Jocko Willink?

  That's how you win.

• 1:13:21Leif Babin?

  It works. At the end of the day, there's what works and there's what doesn't work.

• 1:13:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's how you win. Check. Tell us about a time you were annoyed with Jocko or his intensity.

• 1:13:36Leif Babin?

  Annoyed with Jocko or his intensity?

• 1:13:40Leif Babin?

  You know what? We got along pretty damn well together. And I think there's not, there's not really any time that comes to mind that I was annoyed by you. Except for maybe, you know, what we mentioned earlier, right? When the times when initially when we were working together and you're looking over my shoulder and telling me to do like, we should do this way. Let's plan it like that. That, I definitely got annoyed from that time. I felt like I want to run my, you know, everyone's trying to tell me what to do here. And Jocko's looking over my shoulder. I want to run, run my team, just as I explained earlier. And, and I didn't realize until later, like what you were doing. Like, hey, you're, you're passing, you're passing on a lot of great information. I see that all the time, actually, with people. Because if I could have detached from that situation, I would have recognized like, hey,

• 1:14:25Leif Babin?

  I'm a new platoon commander. I've never been a platoon commander. Jocko was just a platoon commander. He had a highly successful platoon commander tour. He had a historic deployment where he did a whole bunch of operations. And he's got a ton of lessons learned. So what an amazing opportunity to learn everything from him. But that's not the way you approach it, right? It's like ego, my ego. And I see it all the time. And there was, there was a leader, a leader I was dealing with where I was talking to a member of the board for this particular leader who was constantly bucking against the, you know, this guy's, and it was, it's amazing to me though to see like, hey, the CEO of this company who's pushing back against this member of the board, like, he should be so thankful that the member of the board has, who's got massive amounts of experience, extraordinary

• 1:15:07Leif Babin?

  success, is there to mentor and train him, and yet he doesn't want to listen to that guy. I want to do it myself. You're always over my shoulder. Instead of being like, hey, man, open up the legal pad. Let's take some notes here. I want, I want to pick your brain for everything. I want to, you know, it's, and, and I think just recognize if you're feeling that way and you're frustrated with, with somebody who's looking over your shoulder, then, then you need to take advantage of the situation to learn from them. And certainly build up trust. The way to get out of that situation is to build up trust to show that you, you're learning, you're growing, and, and that you don't need someone to look over your shoulder every second. And usually that comes even after we got forward.

• 1:15:44Jocko Willink?

  And you just unleashed us on the battlefield. I would always come to you and be like, hey Jocko, what do you think about this? We're gonna do this situation. I wasn't looking to you to tell me what to do, but I was running things by you and we do that all the time now with Echelon Front. I called Jocko up and said, hey, here's what's going on. I'm working with this leader. You do the same. I mean, we talk about these things all the time. Yeah, well, and that actually, that what's interesting about that is that in the last six months, that idea has really become formalized in the tank, which is where we take the companies that we're working with and we whoever's working specifically with us with a specific company on the ground is coming back to the tank, all the Echelon Front team, and we get on the call or

• 1:16:27Jocko Willink?

  the Skype or the conference room and we go through all the issues that all these different companies are having. And that's where we solve the problems is in the tank. So that way we get everyone's input and not only do we give the best solution to the client, we also all learn from it so that we have that solution in our heads. So we all get stronger and better. So that's, that's one of the evolutions in Echelon Front. That's pretty awesome to see is what started off as just like how we would run TU Bruiser, which is, hey, we're gonna bounce ideas off each other and hey, I don't know how to solve this problem to you, or hey, I don't know how to do this operation to you, or this is what I think, what do you think, which is the way a team should work together. And now what we do is we get to do that for other companies, use the same brain power, use the same methodology, and it's, it's awesome to do and it's awesome to see.

• 1:17:12Jocko Willink?

  It is awesome. The tank. Yeah, getting in the tank. Uh, all right, Leif, you were, for those of you that don't know, Leif was a ship driver for how many years? Before, so Leif from the Naval Academy, didn't get picked up for SEAL Teams right out, didn't get picked up for BUDs right out of the Naval Academy, so he had to go to a ship. Here's a question about, not about that specifically, but Leif, what are your thoughts on a ship's captain being relieved of command and what to do if you are involved? And he would like to know from the ship's captain's perspective that is being relieved because of the mistakes of your crew, or if you're in the crew and the captain's getting relieved even though you made the mistakes. What are your perspectives on that?

• 1:17:55Leif Babin?

  Well, look, I, just to give people some background on that, I know, and I've talked about my background on Podcast 11, but, but it was, I never wanted to be a ship driver. I wanted to be a SEAL. That's why I went to the naval camy. Uh, I got thrust in that position. Looking back on it, it was, it was an amazing opportunity for me as a young man to have, uh, to be in those leadership positions and I, I enjoyed my time on, on the ship.

• 1:18:14Jocko Willink?

  How much does a warship cost to build?

• 1:18:17Leif Babin?

  Billions.

• 1:18:17Jocko Willink?

  A billion, a couple billion dollars.

• 1:18:18Leif Babin?

  It's crazy.

• 1:18:19Jocko Willink?

  So you're, you're, you're, sometimes you're the guy, right? You're a lieutenant JG on the bridge of a $2 billion ship and you're in charge of all that.

• 1:18:26Leif Babin?

  Yeah. And when you're, when you're the officer of the deck, like you're the guy in charge. The captain's asleep.

• 1:18:30Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:18:31Leif Babin?

  In, in his cabin and he's got all full, full faith and trust in you and you're running the ship.

• 1:18:35Jocko Willink?

  And so there's the question right there. Sometimes the captain's a ship asleep in the cabin and he runs and, and, and the crew runs the ship aground. The captain gets fired. What do you think about that?

• 1:18:45Leif Babin?

  That is the Navy way. It's, uh, it's always been that way. Uh, and I think it's 100% correct because there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. And, and I think that if you have, um, even if the captain wasn't in direct responsibility, it's his job to train that team. It's his job to mentor that team. And if he's got questions about whether or not somebody is, uh, has the capability to do that job, uh, then, then they shouldn't be in that position. It's up, it's, it's up, it's up to the, the captain. Now the captain can't be everywhere at once. So it's decentralized command. He has to rely on his leaders, but, uh, it's, um, it, it's definitely, uh, I think ultimately the, the, the captain is responsible and that's, that's really what extreme ownership is about.

• 1:19:27Jocko Willink?

  I had a client ask me a question yesterday. Uh, have you ever sent anyone to do something that they weren't ready to do? And I thought about it for a minute and the first thought was, well, of course, the second thought was no. The real answer is it's gray area, right? Did I ever send somebody to do something that they weren't 100%? If I put this quantification on 100% ready for it?

• 1:19:54Leif Babin?

  All the time.

• 1:19:54Jocko Willink?

  All the time.

• 1:19:56Leif Babin?

  Uh, how often did I send somebody to do something that they weren't capable of doing? The answer is zero. In other words, if you weren't capable of doing this and I didn't trust that you could make it happen, I wasn't gonna let you do it. That'd be irresponsible for me as a leader to let a subordinate go and do something that they're not ready to do. That's it, period. Or they're not 100% ready to do, or they're, no, not, not 100%, but they're not capable of doing. But, I mean, when we first got to Ramadi, in your mind, you probably weren't 100% ready to go out there and execute. Particularly because we've been training for a, a mission with just SEALs. You know, for, for, for roll-up assaults or direct action raids, you know, at nighttime and all of a sudden we're shifting to daytime counterinsurgency operations, working with Iraqi soldiers. Completely different mission.

• 1:20:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Leif Babin?

  Broken up into all these different units. We hadn't trained, we hadn't trained like that.

• 1:20:44Jocko Willink?

  In a violent war zone, by the way. But, I, you know, I had trust that you were completely competent and capable of doing that. And if I didn't think that, and I didn't think you were competent, or I didn't think you were capable, then I, I would, I would be a, a bad leader if I said, "Yeah, go ahead and go, go do that." And, and then I answered the question further to this client. I said, "There was two people from Task Unit Bruiser that didn't go on deployment with us." Because they weren't capable of doing that job. So, yes, you as a leader, you're responsible. And I was thinking about this. There's been times where Navy ships have run aground and the captain wasn't even on board. He had flown to somewhere to go do a meeting somewhere. The ship runs aground. Guess what? Still getting fired. Because you left someone in charge that, you left that team, you didn't train them well enough.

• 1:21:28Jocko Willink?

  And you can make all the excuses you want. "I wasn't there." Yeah, well, guess what? You're still getting fired because you were responsible for that team, so.

• 1:21:34Leif Babin?

  I think part of that too is the understanding, you know, what no bad teams, only bad leaders, with the chapter two we wrote, you know, in Extreme Ownership, is, is about the, the part of that is, I, I have seen some people that misinterpret that, right? To say, "Well, I, I got a bad leader, so the team's not good." That, that's not an excuse.

• 1:21:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:21:50Leif Babin?

  So when we're talking about leadership, we're talking about leaders at every level of the organization. So, so, you know, if you're, if you're, if you're a department head on that ship, or a division officer, or a division chief, uh, and you say, "Oh, I got a bad, I got a bad commanding officer." It's all the commanding officer's fault. Our ship doesn't. Is it performing the way it should, whatever your team is, that's not an excuse. You gotta do your utmost to get your team ready to train others around you. Uh, and, and lead that team as much as you possibly can. You don't have to be the senior guy in charge and office some of the best units we worked with. And we're part of the senior guy may not, he may not have been the guy driving the operations, but he allowed his leaders to, to go out and execute and, and make it happen. So. Leadership, we're talking, we're talking leaders at every level of the organization. It's not an excuse to put the blame on the boss.

• 1:22:34Leif Babin?

  Uh, you gotta step up, you gotta lead and own your team, solve problems, get better, learn from mistakes and make it happen. What does it mean when a ship runs aground?

• 1:22:44Jocko Willink?

  I mean, literally hits dirt.

• 1:22:46Leif Babin?

  Oh.

• 1:22:47Jocko Willink?

  That's what it means.

• 1:22:48Leif Babin?

  Alright, okay. Yeah. Well, in thi- in this case, we're talking ship collisions. So running a ground is one thing. Uh, the, um. You know, and there's an argu- there is an argument to be said like, because some of our greatest leaders like, uh, Admiral, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, who was the hero of the Pacific War. Was, I've quoted him, you know, on this, uh, on this podcast previously, uh, he was the commander in chief of all US forces in the Pacific. So he was, he was the, the, the, the person. Responsible for the entire war effort against the Japanese in World War II and that victory. Uh, a massive effort, obviously in an extraordinary turnaround, uh, from, from disaster to, to victory.

• 1:23:26Leif Babin?

  He, he actually ran a ship aground as, as, as a junior officer. So, so there's, you know, there's an argument to be made that there is no, you know, the flawless performance, it doesn't exist and people make mistakes you can learn from it. Um, uh, you know, as far as ships running aground, um, you know, that, that's one thing. I, I think, you know, you can make a careful evaluation. What we're talking about here is specifically that ship collisions and, uh, you know, those, those should not happen. That just, that should not happen. I understand how easily that can happen. Cause it, it, there's a, these are huge machines that go very fast and you're out on the ocean with other, other ships that are moving around. And there's a whole lot of dangerous things.

• 1:24:02Jocko Willink?

  And it takes, some of those big ships takes miles to stop them. Like even if you see and you go, okay, hit all full brakes right now. It doesn't matter. You're still gonna hit. You know, you're gonna get hit for like 10 minutes.

• 1:24:12Leif Babin?

  Yep.

• 1:24:12Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's, you can't stop it. Just brace for impact.

• 1:24:16Leif Babin?

  If you've got, you've got the right team in place, they know what they're doing, you know, there, there, there's all kinds of safe safeguards in place. And if that team's properly trained, like that should not happen, it should not, it's like, you should be able, the airplane should land safely. All the horrible things that could go wrong when you're flying in an airplane and landing in a crazy airport like JFK or, you know, or LAX.

• 1:24:33Jocko Willink?

  You're flown to Hong Kong?

• 1:24:34Leif Babin?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Jocko Willink?

  That's a doozy too.

• 1:24:35Leif Babin?

  Yeah, so those, those kinds of things that are crazy, so, but there's a lot of things that go wrong, but if, if it's done properly and safeguards are in place, you, you, you're gonna, you're gonna be fine, so, so, so, but there's, again, it, it doesn't mean that, you know, we expect flawless performance, that no one's ever gonna make mistakes, I think if, if a mistake isn't that bad, it should be forgiven. But there isn't, there just isn't an excuse of like, well, it wasn't me, somebody else on my team did it. That's the opposite of extreme in ownership, it doesn't work.

• 1:25:00Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't work. Check. Next. I, this is for life, well, I guess, yeah, I guess it is for life. I heard you say it is important to think. I heard Jocko say this too. How do you think? Meaning, how do you talk to yourself? Do you ask yourself questions? Do you think by talking to others? What do you believe is the most valuable method for becoming a clear thinker and communicator?

• 1:25:29Leif Babin?

  That's a deep question.

• 1:25:31Jocko Willink?

  I actually think it's pretty easy to answer.

• 1:25:33Leif Babin?

  It is easy answer, I think.

• 1:25:34Jocko Willink?

  I can answer it one word.

• 1:25:36Leif Babin?

  Go.

• 1:25:37Jocko Willink?

  Detach.

• 1:25:40Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's, that's how I think. You, you can't, you gotta step out, you gotta step back mentally, you gotta step back, look at what's going on. And think, and that's where you can think about it, that's where you can figure out what's going on. If you can do that, you're there. If you can't do it, you don't even know you're not doing it, that's the problem. When you're not detached, you don't even know you're not detached, you're in the storm and you don't even know it.

• 1:26:03Leif Babin?

  That's, uh, that's exactly right, and I, but I think, you know, for people that maybe don't fully understand what that means, right? The, the, this, this idea of detachment, which you've obviously talked a lot about on here, and which is such a key thing for decision making. It, it's. The, the, I think the key thing there is, is to make sure that, that you're not, you're not clouded by, you know, this emotional attachment to plans, which we often talk about with our leaders in the SEAL teams. So I'm emotionally invested in a plan that I came up with. I spent hours or days or weeks or months, you know, in, involved in, uh, and I want that to succeed, of course, but, but is that, you know, I gotta have that realistic assessment and that's what the detachment really requires is that

• 1:26:43Leif Babin?

  you, you pull yourself not just physically away, you know, out of the weeds or to say, okay, let me think about this in the strategic picture, but you really, you take away that emotional investment that you have to, to maybe even whether it's a plan, sometimes it's a team member as well. And if you have, you know, someone that you just have a close relationship with that you, you know, whether they're a relative of yours or you had a longstanding relationship with and, and that maybe you've gotten too close to them and you can't see that, that, you know, they've become more important than the mission and they're dragging the rest of the team down. You're not making the, the call either tighten them up or let them go if that's, that's the right case. So I think what that really requires is you gotta emotionally pull back. It's, it's a, it's a mental thing to, to really have a brutally honest assessment of the situation.

• 1:27:23Leif Babin?

  Uh, that's, that's independent from any kind of, uh, previous bias that you might've had.

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  That's interesting there because even if you know like, oh yeah, I'm gonna detach.

• 1:27:34Leif Babin?

  Oh, it's not that easy.

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, like you can't just go through the motions. You can't be like, hey, I'm gonna detach. I'm detached right now. Meanwhile, you're just like I said, clouded by the emotional part that you're like kinda one foot in emotionally. So you're technically not detached. So it doesn't work.

• 1:27:49Leif Babin?

  You know what else is a good way to think is to listen. Do listen to what people are saying. I've been thinking about Hal Moore, how he said, if you listen, you know, twice as much. You know, everything that you know, and you know, everything that the other guy knows.

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:06Leif Babin?

  That's a great, that's a great thing. But if you're sitting in a, in a conversation, I mean, from a business perspective, if you're in a meeting and, and there's a conversation going on, if you're in the conversation, you're talking, you're adding your piece, well, then you're, you're not detached. You're in it. But if you sit back and you listen and you hear what's going on, you can assemble, you know, thoughts better. So.

• 1:28:31Jocko Willink?

  Alright, next. When can we expect any books to come out by either of you? And what are they going to be like? Extreme Ownership or Way of the Warrior Kid? So, I also had a book out called Discipline Equals Freedom. It's a field manual, by the way.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:28:45Jocko Willink?

  You familiar with field manual?

• 1:28:46Speaker 02

  I am.

• 1:28:47Jocko Willink?

  You claim to be familiar with field manuals.

• 1:28:49Speaker 02

  My favorite kind of manual, yeah.

• 1:28:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:28:53Jocko Willink?

  Way of the Warrior Kid 2 is coming out in April.

• 1:28:57Jocko Willink?

  It's called Mark's Mission. And we are in the process of writing Leif Babin. Tell me about that.

• 1:29:02Leif Babin?

  Yes, we are. We're getting after a second book right now. It's a follow-on book to Extreme Ownership. And I'm super excited about it. It's gonna be in the same format. We talk about combat lessons learned on the battlefield or in training, and then a principle, and then its application in the business world in the same format as Extreme Ownership. And what it really is, is it's to answer all of the questions and difficulties that people have from applying the principles. We get these common questions all the time of like, "Okay, I'm having this issue." "Okay, you said take ownership here, but what does that really mean? And how do I apply cover and move to my team?" It's gonna dive much deeper into that. And it's gonna be awesome. It's gonna be coming out fall of 2018.

• 1:29:44Jocko Willink?

  How do you feel about writing a sequel?

• 1:29:48Leif Babin?

  It's not a sequel. It's gonna be a standalone book on its own. It's gonna be good.

• 1:29:53Jocko Willink?

  Okay, I think it's nerve-wracking. Because you know what? Have you ever seen the movie Jaws?

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:30:01Jocko Willink?

  It's one of my favorite movies. Have you ever seen the movie Jaws 2?

• 1:30:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:30:06Jocko Willink?

  We got issues with Jaws 2. We got issues.

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Jocko Willink?

  And this is what I think. So, I think, again, I'll call it luck. Maybe not, but I call it luck. Luckily for us, this book has sold really well. That... If we would have written a sequel a year after this book came out, it would have been Jaws 2, to be honest with you. But luckily during, because now it's been two years since this came out. So we've had, and by the way, a follow-up year, if we were to release a book, if the publisher's going, "Release another book, release another book. We'll pay you more money." That's what they do. They want you to release another book. "Now we got some hype from this book. We'll get another one out there." And Leif and I were like, "Well, no, not right now." Just stop.

• 1:30:53Jocko Willink?

  And we'll let time, "Write another book." Well, I did write another book, but they're not the same, right? We don't want to make Jaws 2. So we let time go. And guess what we were doing all the time that we had passed, right? We weren't sitting around. No, we were working with more companies. We were working with more military units. We were working with police. We were working firefighters. We were having the muster. We were learning more and more lessons. And we were getting feedback from this book and saying, "Okay, I see some threads." And at first it was one little thread, and it was another little thread. And now all of a sudden, all those threads come together and you get something. You get a fabric. And that's what we waited for, is let's get something that is a woven fabric. It's gonna be strong like Kevlar. So the next book that we got coming out,

• 1:31:40Jocko Willink?

  I disagree with you that it's a standalone book. I don't think it's a standalone book. Are you gonna retract your statement? I'm gonna give you a chance. You should.

• 1:31:48Leif Babin?

  I do retract my statement.

• 1:31:49Jocko Willink?

  Because it is. I mean, the new book.

• 1:31:51Leif Babin?

  I thought you were setting me up for an ambush there.

• 1:31:54Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 1:31:56Jocko Willink?

  No, it's, it, it, I'm sure you could read the new book on its own, but you shouldn't. You should read Extreme Ownership first. And then you read the new book. And when you read the new book, it's gonna, again, all those threads are gonna weave together and, and, and.

• 1:32:14Jocko Willink?

  They're gonna be the perfect, it's gonna be, they're gonna complement each other ama- in amazing way.

• 1:32:18Leif Babin?

  I, I think that's, in that, in that method, or in, from that perspective, absolutely. I, I think absolutely it is, it is a sequel in that perspective. It, it will be written in a way that, that you can read it as a standalone book for, for sure. Uh, it will certainly reference, uh, you know, the things that we talked about in Extreme Ownership and the foundational principles of Homowitz that, that, that's written. I think there are a few exceptions though to your Jaws analogy.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  A lot, actually.

• 1:32:41Leif Babin?

  Yeah, I mean, I can think that Indiana Jones, the Temple of Doom.

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, Terminator.

• 1:32:45Leif Babin?

  Yeah, Terminator 2, Judgment Day.

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  But it does have a lot to do with how you said, hey, let's wait a little bit.

• 1:32:50Leif Babin?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  You can't just start, unless the whole story that you on purpose are gonna do it.

• 1:32:55Jocko Willink?

  That's the difference, cuz if you just, oh, we had a hit movie, make another one right now. Jaws 2.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Jocko Willink?

  That's a good title. Jaws was a hit. Let's make another one, we'll call it Jaws 2.

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if they would've waited, like Terminator, they waited like what, eight years or so? Then it's like, okay, a lot of things are updated, a lot of new stuff they figured out. It's like how you were saying, the boom, Terminator 2, just as good.

• 1:33:15Leif Babin?

  Aliens.

• 1:33:17Speaker 02

  Aliens?

• 1:33:17Leif Babin?

  Aliens crushed the first movie.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  Was that pretty quick afterwards though?

• 1:33:20Leif Babin?

  The second movie, Aliens crushed the first movie.

• 1:33:22Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 1:33:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Jocko Willink?

  So I, I, I, I'll, to be totally honest.

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  It's a gamble though.

• 1:33:27Jocko Willink?

  No, I actually, I don't know, cuz I'm, I'm halfway, a little bit more than halfway done with my writing part, right? Before we start editing each other, I think, I think we might have an, a, a sequel that's better. I don't know. I, I have a suspicion that the sequel's better. Possibly better.

• 1:33:44Leif Babin?

  I, I think so too, it's been, it's super fun to write, you know, as we're doing it, and I think as you said, our, our knowledge is so much more now. I mean, we, our knowledge of the business world was, was, you know, we, we'd been working for a couple, you know, two or three years in the business world at that point. Uh, but, but now we've got double, more than double that. And, and, and the reach and expansion of, of, of what we've been doing since the release of Extreme Ownership is, it's, it's a hundred X what we were doing, you know, previously. So, uh, that's just given us, it's been a, a massive education and, and, uh, our knowledge of how to apply these things across the spectrum, yeah, is incredibly, um, uh, so much, so much deeper than, than it was previously and, and, uh, I'm, I'm excited about it.

• 1:34:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's gonna be good. Next question is, how long does it take to prepare for a muster? And when, when we read this question earlier, I thought it was the person asking how long it would take this individual, me, or whoever, a, a, a a person out in the world to get ready to go to the muster.

• 1:34:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:41Jocko Willink?

  And the, the answer to that is it doesn't take you any time. You just, I mean, you should read Extreme Ownership for sure, but there's no like big physical. There, there's physical things that you do at the muster, but they're scaled that anybody can do them. So it's really, you don't need to do any major preparation other than put your ego in check.

• 1:34:57Leif Babin?

  I think the biggest preparation you need is, is to look at yourself in the mirror and, and write down where your weakest and where you need to work. I mean, that's what we want to talk. I don't care where you're doing great. We're not there to pat you on the back. We want to care like where you can get better and everyone can get better. Certainly you can improve all the time and I think that's what you need to do. I had thought this question was about how we prep for the muster, which is substantial.

• 1:35:19Jocko Willink?

  It's always about.

• 1:35:19Leif Babin?

  Which is substantial.

• 1:35:20Jocko Willink?

  Always about life.

• 1:35:22Leif Babin?

  All about me all the time.

• 1:35:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it is a ton of work to prepare for the muster, but.

• 1:35:28Leif Babin?

  Which is, it's fun. It's fun. It's, it's great. We enjoy it.

• 1:35:33Jocko Willink?

  Random question. In your experience, have you had or do you see high injury rates in jujitsu? Want to start rolling again, but don't want to disrupt progress on the barbell.

• 1:35:45Speaker 02

  The barbell. Oh yeah, sure. What was that bench or something?

• 1:35:48Jocko Willink?

  It's possible I am being a weak suck. Although not probable. Risk assessment. What do you think? Can you get injured in jujitsu? Yes.

• 1:36:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, just like you get injured playing basketball.

• 1:36:02Jocko Willink?

  Playing basketball.

• 1:36:03Speaker 02

  Actually, you'll get injured playing basketball quicker than jujitsu, I think. As far as injured goes.

• 1:36:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, as far as injured goes. I will, I, the, the key part about this question for me is you want to keep making progress on the barbell, right? So you want to keep getting stronger. That's cool. I want you to be stronger, but if you're super strong and you don't know how to fight, I got nothing for you.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a deeper thing too. And keep this in mind though, and this goes for any physical activity. Like if your goal physically is this thing and then you start going. Hard in another direction, it could very well take away from

• 1:36:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's gonna take away. You're not gonna reach your maximum potential as a weightlifter.

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you do.

• 1:36:40Jocko Willink?

  If you're doing jiu-jitsu, for sure.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, or swimming.

• 1:36:42Jocko Willink?

  Or swimming or anything else, no.

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  Marathons, whatever, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:43Jocko Willink?

  You gotta find the balance, but, I mean, what's the most important, what's a more important skill to have?

• 1:36:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:48Jocko Willink?

  Be able to snatch big weight, or be able to defend yourself in a street fight?

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:54Jocko Willink?

  Hey, the snatching big weight's gonna help you defend yourself.

• 1:36:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, big time.

• 1:36:57Jocko Willink?

  We appreciate that. We're fans.

• 1:36:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:00Jocko Willink?

  But prioritize.

• 1:37:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:02Jocko Willink?

  Now, what's interesting is on a daily basis, I always work out, but I don't always do jiu-jitsu because you can't, you need, you need someone to train with. You know what I mean? Like, you need someone to do jiu-jitsu with. You can't do jiu-jitsu by yourself.

• 1:37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:16Jocko Willink?

  So, sometimes you don't have anyone to train with.

• 1:37:18Leif Babin?

  Look, I think from my perspective, as a white belt, it's, it's, uh, I, I've trained enough.

• 1:37:22Jocko Willink?

  You gotta be getting close to that blue belt.

• 1:37:26Leif Babin?

  Well, uh, I, I got a lot, lot more work to do. Certainly a lot more work to do.

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  It's not up to him anyways.

• 1:37:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:37:31Leif Babin?

  You guys have inspired me. I'm training, training hard. Got a, got a great place I'm training down in Texas now. Jean-Jacques Machado Austin, it's awesome.

• 1:37:37Jocko Willink?

  That's where Todd White, right?

• 1:37:38Leif Babin?

  Yeah, Todd White.

• 1:37:39Jocko Willink?

  Todd White's awesome guy, yeah.

• 1:37:40Leif Babin?

  And, uh, and it's the type of people that train in there, I mean, it's, it's, and that's, that's what I like about, and that's, that's, you know, same thing with the place I, I trained in New York, it's just, that to me has, uh, I think if you're constantly getting injured all the time, like, you're not training with the right people.

• 1:37:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:55Leif Babin?

  And you're not training in the, in the right manner, uh, something that I learned years ago, and when I was on the boxing team in the Naval Academy. Me and, and my buddies, you know, who were kinda scrubs, we didn't travel with the team, but we just beat the piss out of each other every, every day. And no one could breathe out of their nose, and everyone had black eyes, and you watch the guy who was, the guys who were really skilled, they sparked, but they were working on form, they were, you know, they, they weren't just knocking each other's heads off every punch, every time, you know, every single day, and, and I think that's, that's where you have to, it's great to train hard, but I think you need to train smart, and I think you, you need to, the biggest thing, I'm guessing this person is probably, um, hasn't trained that much, so that they, they spin out, Dave Burke and I were just rolling, you know, here at Victory last night, and, uh, I was, uh, I was

• 1:38:40Leif Babin?

  I was telling Dave, you know, Dave's, he's made some progress. He's been training out in Virginia. I was like, cool, man. You're doing good, but he's, he gets so amped up that he can't detach. So he can't detach because he's, he's gets so amped up and it's, it's, I realize I used to just be in that. I've trained enough now. I still might be the white belt, but I've trained enough now to know that, uh, that I've got, uh, I've got to throttle that back because it's, you get so focused, right? I'm going to focus on my one little white belt Americana I'm trying to get, you know, or arm bar. Versus, versus like, no, detach and think.

• 1:39:12Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like Dave Burke is getting nuts, dude.

• 1:39:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, he gets nuts a little bit.

• 1:39:15Jocko Willink?

  Did you train with him?

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  I, yeah, we did like, uh, yeah.

• 1:39:18Leif Babin?

  So he, it was funny because we were rolling around. I mean, he is, is, uh, uh, and at one point I'm, I'm like laughing at him because he's literally like,

• 1:39:27Leif Babin?

  you know, that, that kind of breathing like Dave.

• 1:39:29Speaker 02

  In his defense though, it's like, you know, when you breathe, when you hear somebody breathing hard like that, typically it's like when you're, they're right in your ear. So it's, it sounds way more intense than it really is.

• 1:39:39Leif Babin?

  It could have been also because I had a little, little elbow pressure.

• 1:39:43Jocko Willink?

  What about that time period when you're in like kind of starting jujitsu? And Dave Burke might be in this situation right now. It's, it's the very early in jujitsu where in your mind, you think like, you know what? Like I'll be able to, I think I'll be able to get like Jocko, right?

• 1:40:01Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:40:02Jocko Willink?

  Like I'll be like, like, hey man, if I, I think they learn some little move and they're like, oh, if I throw this at Jocko at the right time, I throw this at this black belt at the right time, I'll be able to get him.

• 1:40:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:11Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12Jocko Willink?

  You have that thought in your brain, right?

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, for sure. I had that with Dean one time.

• 1:40:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:17Leif Babin?

  I mean, but what, what, I, you, when you're amped up to that level though, you know, and yeah, you, when you're thinking that like no one can tap me or, and I don't think Dave's is in that, in that mode. He's, he's learned enough, uh, maybe to be, be beyond that, but it's, it's, when you're that amped up, your chances of, of getting injured are way more, you know, just more significant. And it's, it's why, you know, if you see a brand new white belt coming, I'd much rather roll with brown belts and purple belts and blue. Even though I know they're going to, you know, they're, they're going to get the best of me. Uh, I, I have a much less chance of getting injured than just the death match with some white belt who's, you know, who. Doesn't even know, you know, anything and, and, and you, so I think you gotta be smart about who you train with. And that's what I love about, you know, Jean-Jacques Machado Austin with, with Todd White, these guys, they're, they're, they're, they're super.

• 1:41:00Leif Babin?

  You know, they're very knowledgeable, they pass on stuff, but they're humble, just, just like, just like folks here. At Victory, I mean, it's, uh, and I think when you're training with the right people, they're like, oh, cool, you got, you got me in an arm bar, you got me in a kumora. That choke was great, show me how to do that. And it's, it's a, but it's a humble learning environment where, you know, you're not there to injure people, you're not there to get hurt. And I think it's, sure, you're gonna get tweaks and, and bumps and bruises, uh, but I think there's, you know, if you're training smartly, uh, and training to learn, then, uh, the chance of getting injured, the probability is, is much less.

• 1:41:30Jocko Willink?

  My boy Todd White, Todd White, he's like old school jujitsu guy. He, me and him were on the circuit back in the day, the competition, back in the day, he was, he was an old LA Jean-Jacques guy. And, and by the way, he listens to the podcast, by the way.

• 1:41:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, LA, that's all the tournaments were.

• 1:41:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they were back in the day. All right.

• 1:41:50Speaker 02

  Um, addition to that, the jujitsu, what even, like, I wouldn't want to paint the picture that, like, all white belts are gonna increase your chance of injury. It's, it's kind of a specific type of person to roll with that will increase your chance of injury. And that's like a, a guy who's strong. May or may not have like this ego where you can't tap me and I'm gonna try to kill you every single time.

• 1:42:13Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 1:42:13Speaker 02

  And he, he has like an element of, um, like legitimate strength and athleticism on top of it now. So you gotta put all those together, like, you go into a typical gym, all, you take all the white belts, you may not even have a guy like that.

• 1:42:28Jocko Willink?

  That's true.

• 1:42:29Speaker 02

  It's like, the, the, the probability of a guy being like that is pretty low. I'm not saying it's zero.

• 1:42:33Jocko Willink?

  I, I disagree.

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  There might be, but I'm saying.

• 1:42:36Jocko Willink?

  Not pretty low.

• 1:42:37Speaker 02

  Depends on what, uh, depends on what you mean by low.

• 1:42:39Leif Babin?

  What changes that though, in my opinion? What changes is the, is the black belt instructor. Like, so if someone is like, oh, you wanna get tough with that guy over there? Well, let, let me, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna impose some humility on you.

• 1:42:48Jocko Willink?

  It's called regulation. It happens.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is yet another factor that kinda contributes to the, the overall safety of it. So, and I'm not saying low, like they're rare, nothing like that, but I'm saying if you take a, just, I don't know, some random class, uh, A new white belt spazzy, strong, maybe, may or may not be young with like a huge ego. Maybe one guy. I mean, you won't get a class full of those, you know? So your day to day rolling is, is pretty safe. You know what I mean?

• 1:43:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you, you do need to pick your training partners carefully, for sure.

• 1:43:24Leif Babin?

  But to, to this guy though, here, here's, I mean, look. Echo and I go way back. I, I think I probably knew Echo even before, before you did Jaclyn in our, uh, surface warfare days. Our good, good friend Cake Nuts, who's a mutual friend and, and others that we've, uh, we, we worked with. In fact, Echo was, you were, he was a bouncer downtown before I knew.

• 1:43:44Jocko Willink?

  Everyone knows because he talks about.

• 1:43:47Leif Babin?

  He had to put up with all our shenanigans and, uh, back in the day. But, but I, I remember coming in here and training at Victory and Echo was a blue belt and showing me and Cake Nuts like some moves and, and, and, and because I kinda had this mentality of the guy who asked this question of like, you know, you might get injured and, and I was focused on other things. And, and I, I trained here all the time and a lot of times I'd be here to work out and I, I, I do stand up. Uh, and I would never, I never trained jiu jitsu like I should have, never stuck with it consistently. Didn't have the discipline to, to do that. Uh, for, for whatever reason, I get pulled in different directions and, you know, here we are, you know, 10 or 12 years later and Echo's a brown belt. He knocking on the door of, uh, of getting his black belt and I'm still a white belt.

• 1:44:28Jocko Willink?

  What door is he knocking on?

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  I'm not knocking on any door.

• 1:44:30Jocko Willink?

  No door getting knocked on?

• 1:44:31Speaker 02

  That's not a, I don't think about that.

• 1:44:33Jocko Willink?

  Silence out there.

• 1:44:35Leif Babin?

  So don't be that guy. I think, uh, I would make the time to train.

• 1:44:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. All right. Losing a teammate, both military and civilian, civilian world happens. How do you assist and promote healing and growth within a team that has lost a pivotal member? What do you do when the emotional toll leaves your guys unfocused and is creating unacceptable risks?

• 1:45:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, um, you know, I've talked about this, this before, and I think obviously this can happen. This part of life is death and people are gonna die and you, obviously, we're all gonna deal with it. They're all gonna face it at some time. In a work environment, how do you deal with it? One of the things that I always say is get back to work, right? You, you, yes, you're gonna mourn. Yes, you're gonna have your memorial services and then you gotta get back to work. And I think if you let people, if you give them too much time off, if you let them sit around, um, they're gonna get unfocused. They're gonna start thinking about, you know, they're gonna start thinking about things that are not

• 1:45:48Jocko Willink?

  good to think about because we wanna, yes, we wanna mourn, we wanna do the, we wanna remember, but at the same time, and I say this all the time, we don't wanna dwell. You don't wanna dwell in the past. You wanna remember, but don't dwell. So I say, get back to work. Going back to what we talked about earlier, find out what your next mission is gonna be. You have more of a reason to achieve your mission because you lost someone that, you lost someone that can't, that can no longer carry on with their mission. So for them, carry on with your mission. Go forward. Don't dwell on the past. Anybody that you lost that you cared about, what would they want you to do? Would they want

• 1:46:29Jocko Willink?

  you to sit around and, and sulk and look at the ground? No. They'd want you to get your gear, get your mindset straight and get back after it. So that's what I recommend.

• 1:46:42Leif Babin?

  I think that's, that's exactly right. And I think getting to work, uh, the reason that's important is, is if these people, if that person died, you know, and for the guys that we lost, like if we just, if we just gave up and walked away, that means they died in vain for nothing. And, and we're not gonna do that. We're gonna, we're gonna double, a triple, quadruple down on that mission to make sure that we win, that their sacrifices weren't, weren't in vain. And I think that's helping the team understand, uh, what you're accomplishing and why they're doing what they're doing is incredibly important. And we wrote about that in Extreme Ownership and talk about it all the time. That understanding why and briefing the team and helping them understand why is critical. But yeah, focus on accomplishing that mission is what you gotta do.

• 1:47:24Leif Babin?

  I think the other thing too is you do everything you can to take care of that person and their family. Take care of their family and help them out and you know, that's an obligation that never goes away. That you're always gonna have and that's extremely important. And something that's helped me through you know, those difficult losses is by serving others and trying to look out for others. And I gotta do that even more than I do.

• 1:47:51Jocko Willink?

  You know, another thing that can help out in those dark times is a little bit of jujitsu, to be quite frank with you. Next question's about jujitsu again. My BJJ coach knows it all. The problem is, he's a know-it-all. Condescending, insulting, derogatory comments to students while class is in session. Option A, stay. Option B, go to a school down the road with less experienced but much more mature-minded teacher. What would Jocko do? What would Leif do? What would Echo do?

• 1:48:29Speaker 02

  I would probably move.

• 1:48:30Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:48:33Jocko Willink?

  Fair enough. It's straightforward.

• 1:48:34Speaker 02

  Depends how much.

• 1:48:36Jocko Willink?

  Maybe not that straightforward.

• 1:48:37Speaker 02

  Depends how much less experienced though.

• 1:48:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:48:39Speaker 02

  Same thing.

• 1:48:40Jocko Willink?

  But, but purple belt, brown belt?

• 1:48:42Speaker 02

  If I'm just beginning, white belt, whatever, yeah, move.

• 1:48:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Leif, babble.

• 1:48:48Leif Babin?

  Yeah, look, as a white belt myself, like I learned from, there's amazing purple belts and brown belts out there. You know, I've learned a ton, you know, from you Echo, you always show me stuff and you have a great knack for teaching, which is good, you know, people, some people just don't have that as much. And I think, yeah, I think that's a, if you're at the white belt level, that's, that's great. So I think that's.

• 1:49:11Leif Babin?

  Jocko apparently disagrees.

• 1:49:12Speaker 02

  I know, man.

• 1:49:13Jocko Willink?

  Jocko's a very good teacher.

• 1:49:15Leif Babin?

  That is, uh, Jocko's-

• 1:49:16Jocko Willink?

  You can see his, you can see him swell up a little bit when he gets that. He gets that, he loves that, loves it. Look at him.

• 1:49:23Speaker 02

  Hey, Leif said it.

• 1:49:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah?

• 1:49:24Speaker 02

  Just saying.

• 1:49:25Jocko Willink?

  He's like, "A impartial."

• 1:49:27Leif Babin?

  Listen, that's because I've been, you have taught me things.

• 1:49:30Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:49:30Leif Babin?

  I imagine you haven't taught Jocko things in that way.

• 1:49:32Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 1:49:33Leif Babin?

  But, uh, and even if he would, yeah, you should, you should go for that. Maybe we should do that right now.

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  Nah, nah, nah.

• 1:49:39Leif Babin?

  Kumite.

• 1:49:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:49:40Jocko Willink?

  I'll down.

• 1:49:41Leif Babin?

  But look, I, yeah, I think you can learn from a lot of different people and-

• 1:49:43Jocko Willink?

  Real down.

• 1:49:44Leif Babin?

  One thing you just can't make sure is you can't make, you make sure it's your ego getting in the way. And when someone's really coaching you and saying, "Hey, you need to do this, you need to get better." And you just don't like the manner in which they're, they're doing it public or whatever. Uh, you might need to put your ego in check and just say, "Okay, I, I don't know everything." Of course you don't, let's learn. Uh, if it's over the top, then yeah, absolutely, you should go where you can learn, uh, best. And, and the quality of the people around you that you're rolling with, as we talked about earlier. I mean, that, that to me is everything. Uh, and, and that's what I love about jiu-jitsu is that just the, you know, such a diverse group of people. When you get at a great gym that you're training at and just, folks are working together and, and learning together. And, uh, you know, they get the best of you and then they're, they're willing to show you about how they did that or some things you should think about.

• 1:50:24Jocko Willink?

  Keep it a secret.

• 1:50:26Speaker 02

  Old school.

• 1:50:27Jocko Willink?

  Uh, my opinion on that is, I, well, just to, yeah, I agree with you guys, but at the same time, I'll say this. One of the things you gotta learn to do in life is you gotta learn that you're not gonna get along with everyone and not everyone's personality is gonna mesh with yours. That doesn't mean you throw away the baby with the bathwater.

• 1:50:43Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:50:43Jocko Willink?

  You see what I'm saying? So there might be a guy that he's not a good teacher, he treats people like crap, but he's got really good information. And he's, you're learning a lot and you, so I'm gonna take as much knowledge as I can from that person. I'm not just gonna walk away because I don't like his attitude. You know what? You're gonna have people that you work for that have bad attitudes and you're gonna have people that work for you that have bad attitudes. You're gonna have to learn to deal with it. You're gonna have to learn how to get as much out of them as you can. Out of everybody, as a leader, everybody that you got. There, there's people that aren't gonna be good at this, but they're good at that. Okay, well, let's, let's capitalize on what they're good at. So this guy, very knowledgeable, kind of a jerk. Let's capitalize on the fact that he's very knowledgeable. Put your ego in check, show up there, take the knowledge from him.

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:24Jocko Willink?

  And then in years to come, you pay him back, pay him a visit.

• 1:51:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've, uh- I dig it. Sure. And I think, but overall, big picture.

• 1:51:33Jocko Willink?

  But.

• 1:51:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. The if, yes, if you're getting the knowledge.

• 1:51:37Jocko Willink?

  See, you're you emphasizing your life cruising.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 1:51:41Jocko Willink?

  I emphasize in my life getting after it. So therefore, therefore, you're at that, you're like, oh, this guy doesn't cruise hard enough.

• 1:51:46Speaker 02

  Right, right. We might be coming from two different.

• 1:51:48Jocko Willink?

  After it. Yeah.

• 1:51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. No, I dig it. And but I think at the end of the day, if how you said, the guy, yeah, he's not saying cool stuff or he's saying stuff that's not cool or whatever. But you're still getting the information, then, okay, you know, and also, just like, um, with Jordan Peterson, like, it pays off in life to have thick skin. Like, you're gonna be successful. Like, that's one of the ingredients for for success. They dig it. So if you're getting the information, for sure. But a lot of times with the know it all situation, which is the words he used, um, I've been in that situation like a few times where it's like, I see what you're doing there. And you being the guy who's kind of had some experience, I'm thinking like, I don't, the circumstances that you're talking about, that's not gonna work.

• 1:52:32Speaker 02

  And I know that just from experience or whatever, but this guy's a know it all and no, no, I know you don't know kind of attitude or whatever. And if that's the way the whole teaching experience is and learning, quote unquote, learning experience is, I think, no, I think more benefits would be gathered elsewhere.

• 1:52:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's interesting. When Leif, when you were talking about, yeah, you use your kid as a test for yourself to calm down and get more mature and detach and all that.

• 1:52:59Speaker 02

  That's good advice.

• 1:52:59Jocko Willink?

  I'm basically doing that all the time. Like, when I, when I meet someone that that is, rubs me the wrong way, I always look at that like, okay, cool. I'm gonna form a relationship with this person, become their best friend and see if I can get through this and make it happen. So that's maybe what I do with that jujitsu trick.

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, good.

• 1:53:12Jocko Willink?

  By, while, by the way, I'm taking all this knowledge from him, so I can formulate it into goodness.

• 1:53:17Speaker 02

  Again, if you're getting the knowledge, yeah, good, man, good. But as a white belt, it's like, come on, bro, you're gonna, you, you wanna get the best teaching, learning, overall jujitsu experience possible. That's where, you know, like, as a new beginner, white belt or whatever, I'm gonna come in and then just get insulted by a know it all or whatever. Like, I don't know even know if I like jujitsu now.

• 1:53:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:37Speaker 02

  Kind of thing. And you run that risk big time.

• 1:53:39Jocko Willink?

  For business, that's for sure.

• 1:53:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. So of course, hey, you're Jocko. I get it, man. Leif gets it. But. We're not all Jocko. When someone says like, or is a know it all and I'm supposed to trust this person to teach me jujitsu, because you know, for all the great reasons, we take jujitsu. And I'm trusting this person, and they're gonna be like, how this guy explain? I don't know, man. I don't know. Big question mark right there.

• 1:54:02Jocko Willink?

  You go down the street and train.

• 1:54:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would rather get 99% of the knowledge from a good purple belt than 5% of the knowledge of a know it all guy.

• 1:54:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:54:15Jocko Willink?

  There's, there's, there's a clean argument for that. Next question.

• 1:54:20Jocko Willink?

  This is from, uh, Vijay Nirmal Kumar. He's been, he's been on, in the game for a long time. Yeah. Got a lot of, a lot of listeners. Do you know we've got a lot of listeners in India?

• 1:54:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually I talk to Vijay from time to time online.

• 1:54:33Jocko Willink?

  Check. So he says, "You must have had good days and awful ones in the field. How did you manage to stay focused despite the ups and downs? How did you win over the darkness? Also, what was your workout like when you guys were engaged in the field and probably tired?" Two questions there.

• 1:54:56Leif Babin?

  I think how you manage the ups and downs is, is, um, you gotta stay focused on what the goal is. You know, and I think we talk about that, how the recognition, you know, when we came back from that deployment, and you put that slide together about the Battle of Ramadi, they kind of capture on this map, you know, the, the, uh, the areas that we'd taken back. And even though I'd planned and led those operations, um, each, you know, so many of those operations, I've been intimately involved in the planning and leading those ops and then writing, you know, post operational summaries and all the reports that we, we had and was involved in some of the battalion and brigade level meetings, uh, you know, for that, that whole strategic plan, uh, I didn't really have a fully grasp.

• 1:55:37Leif Babin?

  Just, I didn't put it all together in that way. And when you, when I saw that slide that you put together that showed, you know, the, the red enemy held areas of Ramadi and all of a sudden blue circles going in the, the US bases uh, that, that were put in that we were often the lead element on the ground for, um, it put it all together for me in a way that, that I had not seen before. And then I recognize I had to do a better job with my guys of doing that too. And I think that's something that for every leader, that's where that detachment comes in. Uh, to, to be able to think, okay, help me understand what this is all about. Through the dark times, through the rough times, so I can focus on what the strategic goal is. Uh, and, uh, and so I can help the team understand that as well. And I think,

• 1:56:17Leif Babin?

  uh, that's, that's something that, you know, if you step back from the details, kind of think about it so that you can understand it and then impart that team, that to your team, so they get to understand it. It, it enables them to slog through, uh, when it's, when it's really difficult and, and it's, it's dangerous or they've got some real challenges ahead. Uh, but they can stay focused on that, that, uh, that goal.

• 1:56:37Jocko Willink?

  You also gotta remember what it feels like to do the right thing. For, for me, like I, I know what it feels like to not do the right thing and I don't like that feeling. Later, right? It, it feels good right now to not do the right thing. Cause you're like, oh, cool, bag of Cheetos. And I'm gonna get some, right? You know what that feels good right there. You know what it feels like later. You know you went off the path and that's not good. So I, I just always think, okay, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna suck it up now. Take the, take the problem now, take the hard path now, cause I know later it's gonna pay off. I'm gonna feel better in the long run. Pay now, pay later. Pay now or pay later. That stuck with me when you said it. It was good. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:13Leif Babin?

  I like when you, uh, pay now and pay later.

• 1:57:16Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes you do that. Sometimes.

• 1:57:19Leif Babin?

  Pay the man now and then pay the man later.

• 1:57:21Jocko Willink?

  And, and then hey, you asked about workouts too. While we're in the field and, and this is a good one. Cause you know, like firefighters, right? Firefighters are on duty for 24 hours. So that means they're gonna get a workout in. At some, sometimes they do more than that, but they're doing 24 hours on, on, on duty where they're at the station waiting for a call. Are you gonna do? Uh, uh, let's say one of the workouts from this equals freedom field manual, are you going to do the three sets of 20 rep squats with 20 minute rest in between?

• 1:57:50Leif Babin?

  Think they call those widow maker?

• 1:57:51Jocko Willink?

  Are you gonna do that? If you, if you, if, if within like 15 minutes, you might be called on to carry a kid down a ladder? Don't do that workout then, because you won't be ready. And that's kind of the attitude in Ramadi. It was like.

• 1:58:07Leif Babin?

  Yeah, we, we, we trained hard certainly, and you know, we talked about that on, on podcast 65, the, the things they carried and, and how we had to be, we had to train hard, but you had to always hold a little back because you never knew when you were going to get the call and, and you certainly, after a big blowout squat workout like that, I mean, you, you weren't going to be able to run through the streets and run upstairs and drag your 215 pound buddy with 60 pounds of gear on, you know, for 50 yards across the open street while shooting with the other hand. So, I mean, those are the kind of things where you got to be ready for, for that and you could, you had to leave a little reserve in the tank, um, just in case, uh, because we got often, we're like, oh, we don't have an op tonight. Oh, we do have an op tonight, get ready.

• 1:58:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yes, you do. Right on. Yeah, so leave a little in the tank, that's a good way of putting it. Okay, here's a good one. Uh, next question, this is for both of you. Did either of you ever get into serious trouble as a teen before joining the military? Or were you always exceptionally disciplined from a young age?

• 1:59:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's Rafe Babbitt. Exceptionally disciplined from a young age.

• 1:59:09Leif Babin?

  The reason I'm laughing, if my, if my parents, uh, are, are listening to this, then they're probably laughing hysterically right now, so.

• 1:59:16Jocko Willink?

  As, as are mine.

• 1:59:17Leif Babin?

  This is, yeah, I got in all kinds of trouble, all kinds of trouble, all the time. I was a total wild man, I'm.

• 1:59:23Jocko Willink?

  Did you shoot your brother with an arrow in the leg or something?

• 1:59:26Leif Babin?

  No, he stabbed himself.

• 1:59:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:59:29Leif Babin?

  He stabbed himself. We used to shoot each other with BB guns though, in the legs all the time. That was, and we threw spears at each other.

• 1:59:34Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:35Leif Babin?

  Uh, you know, in high school, I drove around with an old beat up pickup truck and I heard it from my, my uncle who had inherited from my grandfather and smashed road signs and just knucklehead stuff and, and, uh, yeah, I was a complete idiot and, um, but, uh, And the military helped square me away, certainly. And it was, uh, I'm lucky that I didn't do something that caused me to have, you know, lifelong injury or death or, or, or damage, you know, I think.

• 2:00:01Jocko Willink?

  Or do something that you get in a bunch of trouble for.

• 2:00:02Leif Babin?

  For sure. That would have changed trajectory, prevented me from going to the naval can, prevented me from going to the military and, and, and would have, that would have redrafted my, my whole life. So, um, I, I think, um, uh, you know, if, if you're in that stage and you're, you're a wild teen, you need to think clearly about the long-term consequences, uh, because, uh, you definitely can pay the man now and pay later in that situation, for sure.

• 2:00:24Jocko Willink?

  One of the things that we do as, as young boys, I'm speaking from a boy perspective because I'm not a girl. And when I was growing up and with the way I look back on it now, a lot of the stuff that we did, dumb stuff that we did as teenagers was, uh, we were testing each other and we were trying to prove ourselves. Like, I'm tough, watch me do this. Like, um, it's almost, it's almost like if you go instinctually as a tribe member, you're proving that you're willing to sacrifice, you're willing to take risk and sacrifice. That's what you're proving to your peers. Like, I'm gonna, like what you just said, pickup truck, I'm gonna drive down the road and I'm gonna, I'm gonna run over this sign. Well, okay, it's funny, but you're also proving to your friends that you don't really care and you'll take risk and you'll do things for the tribe. That's kind of what you're

• 2:01:06Jocko Willink?

  proving. So I, I think, again, I, I, I don't want to sound like, uh, going back to the same broken record, but if you want to get your kid, or if you're a kid and you want to prove yourself, guess what you can do? You can go take jiu-jitsu. You can learn how to fight for real. You can learn how to defend yourself. You can learn how to take care of your tribe, take care of yourself, take care of your family. You can do, you can learn how to beat up other people, which is an important thing. I wish I would have known it. When you know jiu-jitsu, you have less of a chance of getting into a fight because the way you act is different. You don't act like a jackass because you realize that you might get stabbed. And so you act respectful to people and people can tell that and you're respectful back to you. So, yeah, it's just another thing I think helps out a lot with kids because I think boys are always trying to prove themselves to

• 2:01:51Jocko Willink?

  each other and to themselves, that you're tough and that you're brave. I'm trying to prove that. You know, how many, that's just, that's just survey. How many times did you jump off the roof of, you know, buildings?

• 2:02:04Leif Babin?

  A lot.

• 2:02:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's like, why are you doing that?

• 2:02:06Leif Babin?

  We actually used to go when I was, we'd go fishing on the, the oil rigs off the coast, uh, go deep sea fishing. You might run 40 or 50 miles off and, um, you're not supposed to get on the rigs. There's all these signs and stuff, but we totally get up on the rig and just jump off 60 feet off the top of the rig. Which was awesome. It hurts a little bit, but it's, it was good times.

• 2:02:24Jocko Willink?

  But we do things to prove that we're tough. I did a lot of dumb things when I was a kid and most of them were to prove to, to myself and to my friends that I was tough and that I was committed and that I would take risks, which are all.

• 2:02:38Leif Babin?

  That was crazier than them.

• 2:02:39Jocko Willink?

  Which are all positive qualities, right? That you want, like when we're in the teams, what kind of guy, what kind of teammate do you want? You want a guy that's aggressive? You want a guy that will take risks if he needs to? You want a guy that's committed? That's what you want. So in these little weird tribes that we have as teenagers, that's what we have. And what are you going to do to prove? Well, let's go get in a fight with somebody. Let's go beat someone up. You know, there's all those dumb things that you do. So be smart, be smart. Neither one of us, uh, were model children to say, to say the least. All right, Leif, next one, Leif. First off, thanks for picking up the spear. I'm interested to hear more about the Mujahideen in Ramadi. How did they stack up against US forces? Was it like an NFL team playing against a high school team? Or did they have tactics, training and discipline equal to our own?

• 2:03:26Leif Babin?

  Well, first of all, I appreciate the thanks, but it was an honor for me to carry the spear. And as, as we said, uh, we'd go back there in a heartbeat, certainly. This is a great question. It's, it's, it's a great question. I think it really gets to the heart of, uh, what we talk about all the time is the greatest quality in a leader and that is humility. Um, and when you look at the Mujahideen, uh, or the Muj, as we call them, right? The enemy fighters who control Ramadi, there were several thousand of them by, by, uh, US intelligence reports, uh, estimates when, who controlled two thirds of the geographic area of the city when we first arrived in the spring of 2006 with Task Unit Bruiser. When Jock and I were there and, uh, you know, we were showing up, our, our SEALs are some of the best shooters in the world. They're some of the best.

• 2:04:07Leif Babin?

  Combat troops in the world. We have a highly screened group of guys who've been through the all the SEAL training pipeline. That's a year and a half long, probably at a minimum. And and then we've worked together for almost a year as a as a SEAL platoon. We've got guys with extraordinary physical fitness. We go to these awesome shooting schools. We train together. We have, we have the best budget and gear, you know, that that all the giant special operations, you know, budget can buy, the best training and equipment. And so when we get over there, we're, we're ready to go. And and pound for pound, if you take, you know, a SEAL operator from Charlie platoon versus one of the Moog fighters that we're going up against, that SEAL operator can do hundreds of pushups. He can do hundreds of pullups.

• 2:04:50Jocko Willink?

  That's NFL versus grade school.

• 2:04:52Leif Babin?

  Exactly. And that, you know, the the Moog fighter, he, he has virtually no training. He, he probably can't do 10 pushups. He's, he has none of the gear and awesome gear that we have. And and it's so it's pound for pound, it's not even comparable. And yet, to think about this from, from the reality perspective, right, in my, in Charlie platoon, we had 16 SEALs and five of those guys were brand new, straight out of training, never been, never been to combat before, never been, never deployed to Iraq, five of us. And we're going up against the enemy that has had three years, at that time, three straight years of nonstop, real world combat experience. And so the, the experience level

• 2:05:35Leif Babin?

  is not even comparable. When we're going up against these guys, they know the city, they, I mean, and they're able to use our weaknesses against us, whereas we got to carry all the heavy weight and, you know, the body armor and the helmets and, and we're not acclimatized to 115 or 120 degree high during the, during the day in the heat of the summertime. They are. And they live there and they don't have to carry water on them. And they don't have to carry body armor and helmets. And they, they, they, they can just throw a backpack with seven RPG rockets and a, and a rocket tube and roll out with their flip flops and knock off Adidas tracksuit, which is what they generally wore. And, and, you know, are there belt fed, you know, Russian machine guns that they use? They weren't near as good as the ones we had, but they were, they were deadly and they could use them and they could shoot. And, and so you could never, ever, ever take those guys for

• 2:06:20Leif Babin?

  granted. And I think that's the, if, they would always be looking to probe weaknesses and they weren't there to fight us head to head. They, they would try to take advantage of our weaknesses. They were very good at analyzing a situation. Looking at a weakness and taking advantage of that weakness and probing for them. And if you ever took them for granted, I mean, they were gonna, you were setting yourself, they might hit you hard anyway. And you might get, lose guys, even if you were prepared. But if you weren't prepared and you started taking them for granted, you started getting complacent. And not respecting them as an enemy, then you were gonna fail.

• 2:06:57Speaker 02

  And they kinda, I mean, for lack of a better word, they cheat too. That's the thing, right? Like you guys have rules of engagement, like all this stuff, and they just straight up.

• 2:07:04Jocko Willink?

  And what's, I would say even more important than that is they don't have value for human life. They don't value their own lives. They're literally suicide bombers. And so, you know, they could lose five, they even wanna die. They wanna, they wanna achieve martyrdom, in many cases. And so, you know, them dying is not a huge impact. And then obviously, for Americans and American soldiers and our friends, it's epic. And crushing loss of life every single time. And so, that is the biggest difference, is that we have to...

• 2:07:47Jocko Willink?

  It's like being, it's like, you know, he says, this is what he says, he says, it's his NFL versus high school team, right? Well, if the NFL should destroy that team, right? Completely destroy it. But if the high school team scores a single point, they kick a field goal, they get lucky and kick a field goal. That's a win. And that's crushing. And that's kinda what it's like. They're not gonna win, they're not gonna win the game. But even when they put a score on the board, man, it's crushing.

• 2:08:19Leif Babin?

  And one thing that, you know, as I think about it too, what was unique about that task unit Bruiser deployment to Ramadi in 2006 was, you know, I deployed three times to Iraq, had quite a, you know, Jocko made multiple deployments to Iraq. We, a lot of, you know, we had a handful of guys that had been there multiple times, the guys who went later to Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, and saw significant combat operations. But what was unique about that was, we were going on foot. You want to drive because you're going to get blown up with these horrific IEDs are going to destroy your vehicles. So we park our vehicles. We had to carry everything on our backs and walk into deep, deep enemy territory in places where we knew that it was very unlikely that that tanks could even get to us to help us out in some cases. And if they did, if

• 2:09:03Leif Babin?

  they were going to try to come in, they might very well get blown up and killed. So what was interesting about that is, you know, we might have eight or 10 or, you know, SEALs. Sometimes it maybe it was 20 SEALs, but that's a fairly small group. You know, we had some Iraqi soldiers with us, but we didn't count them when it came to, they didn't count when it came to, hey, who's going to actually be able to defend this position. But I had to have the expectation that that we might very well have 50, 60 enemy fighters surrounding our position, attack us, and they could easily overrun us. And what was unique about that, the point was, we didn't have dedicated air support. We didn't have a dedicated quick reaction force that was going to come out and help us, that only was supporting us. Unlike, you know, some other SEAL combat operations that have happened elsewhere,

• 2:09:47Leif Babin?

  and it was, or on other deployments that I was on, and we were on our own. We had to plan for that. And you had to recognize that they could, they would absolutely bring it, and they would try to kill you, overrun your position, and kill everybody, capture someone. And that was a real possibility that we had to be, we had to recognize could happen at any time, and we had to be ready for it.

• 2:10:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, just to, just to state, the statement of fact on top of what you're saying, the enemy did, the enemy did overrun friendly positions multiple times while we're there, and kill dozens of people. And some of those, you know, some of those heavily fortified ECPs would get completely overrun, attacked, overrun, vehicle borne IEDs. So, yeah, it wasn't like, this could happen. This is actually happening. While we were there, friendly positions got overrun by the enemy. And so, yeah, it was not just it could happen, but it is happening, and it's a, it's a. It could happen to us tonight, tomorrow night, whenever.

• 2:10:45Leif Babin?

  Yeah, they were good. They used cover and move. I mean, they laid down fire and supported each other. They, they They put together plans.

• 2:10:51Jocko Willink?

  They had combined arms. They had combined arms, you know, they'd come in with the, the machine gun fire and then the RPG fire and the mortar fire and then all of a sudden there'd be a VBID. That's, that's what they do.

• 2:11:03Leif Babin?

  And there were different levels within there as well. I mean, sometimes you get shot at and it was kind of a spray and pray as someone dumping an AK in your direction. And then other times you'd have multiple belt fed machine guns hitting you that were, you know, coming through a little, you know, three or three by four foot window from a hundred yards away. Uh, and they're coming inches over your head and you're looking at each other like, man, these guys know what they're doing. They, they, uh, so you, you could tell when, you know, the, the, the guys who've been there for a while, maybe come from elsewhere. Uh, they brought it and you could never take them for granted.

• 2:11:32Jocko Willink?

  And also luckily for us, even though we might not had a dedicated QRF, we had the best damn QRF in the world, which was

• 2:11:37Leif Babin?

  Absolutely.

• 2:11:38Jocko Willink?

  The, the one, one AD and they were awesome and never failed to come and, and save the asses of TU.

• 2:11:46Leif Babin?

  They braved those roads over and over and over and over again, jumping in their tanks, taking such tremendous risk or driving in Humvees down these horribly dangerous roads. We didn't want to drive to come help us out and they did that all the time. They were, they were awesome. And we couldn't done any of our operations without, without them.

• 2:12:01Jocko Willink?

  Next question. And this is actually a good question. It's, it's how did the Naval Academy prepare you to lead? And actually a lot, a lot of listeners at the Naval Academy and a lot of listeners at West Point. Um, I hear from them and actually I got sent, that's actually the helmet I got sent. Somebody sent me a, a hand painted Navy football helmet. It's pretty awesome with a warship on it. Yeah. I'll, I'll show it to you this afternoon. So thanks for sending me that, by the way. It's awesome. So like, like I said, a lot of listeners, we've had Brian Stan on, you know, he talked about his experiences there and a lot of leadership he got from the Naval Academy was actually from playing football. When you listen to him, he's playing football at the Naval Academy, which was, was a challenge for him.

• 2:12:44Jocko Willink?

  But he learned a lot of leadership lessons there. How did the Naval Academy prepare you to lead?

• 2:12:50Leif Babin?

  Well, first of all, I love my experience in the Naval Academy and for me that was all about the people that I served with, you know, and the folks that I met and the things that we went through together. I got in a lot of trouble at Naval Academy. I struggled with my grades, something we talked about previously. I had a big conduct record because I still did some of those knucklehead teenage things and rebelled against authority. But frankly, you know, look, there's great people there. You know, there's great people on the staff. I've got a very close friend. There's a battalion officer now and it's awesome to have good people there that are passing lessons on to, you know, to those young midshipmen as they graduate and for every academy or RTC, you know, for that matter. I saw, you know, because you

• 2:13:32Leif Babin?

  have such a wide swath of officers from all different, you know, from all different, you know, Navy, Marine Corps, I mean, every, every kind of different branch of within those services as well. And also you have a midshipman leadership hierarchy. So you've got someone who because they made good grades or had a good conduct or ever got promoted into this kind of make believe position.

• 2:13:54Jocko Willink?

  Did you see that right there? A little bit of, a little bit of, you know, a little bit of anger about that one right there. Just because they got good grades or they didn't have a good conduct record. They're going to be in charge of me?

• 2:14:04Leif Babin?

  Listen, there were some resentful.

• 2:14:06Jocko Willink?

  This is a new life. I just met a new life. Resentful life.

• 2:14:10Leif Babin?

  I'm actually not at all resentful. I could tell you, I had some, I had some good friends who were in those positions and it was great for them, you know, good for them. It's, it's kind of, it's just, it's funny looking back now because it's completely meaningless, right? When you're

• 2:14:22Jocko Willink?

  Do you have a regimental commander there?

• 2:14:24Leif Babin?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:24Jocko Willink?

  Is that guy in charge of all the students?

• 2:14:26Leif Babin?

  Yeah, there's, there's, you know, there's regiment, brigade, battalion.

• 2:14:30Jocko Willink?

  At OCS they have it too. When I was at OCS, I was the man. I was called

• 2:14:36Leif Babin?

  You were the regimental winner?

• 2:14:37Jocko Willink?

  I was RegCom.

• 2:14:38Leif Babin?

  So, so no wonder he's a little sensitive to this. He's a little sensitive.

• 2:14:41Jocko Willink?

  RegCom. Coming in hot. Oh, they also called it the five bar. Cause you're the only person with five bars on your little uniform.

• 2:14:48Leif Babin?

  Did they, did they call you captain big time?

• 2:14:50Jocko Willink?

  No, they called me all Presidente. I was a president in my class too. We had a good time at OCS.

• 2:14:56Leif Babin?

  So, so now, now we see the sensitivity there.

• 2:14:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:58Leif Babin?

  Listen, I, you know, great.

• 2:15:00Jocko Willink?

  Maybe you should have studied harder. Like I meet some kids now, or I hear from, I get, I get correspondence from people at the Naval Academy. And like, I can see that they're in the game. I can see that they're like, oh, this is going on and I'm gonna, I'm gonna, like, you know what I'm saying? Like, you think you could have been, you could have had that.

• 2:15:15Leif Babin?

  No question about it. Now, would it have mattered at the time? I, I don't know, you know, failure, as we say, is often the, the best teacher. Look, I, I made, I made great grades in high school and did well on my SATs and ACTs without, with almost no study. Uh, I got super, um, uh, I, I, I didn't have the discipline that was in place. Uh, once I got to the Naval Academy, that structure, it was, it was difficult for me. It was very hard for me as I went into assistant engineering program and, and those sort of things. So, so I struggled with that. So, that could have helped me if somebody had, if I'd have learned discipline equals freedom at, at a young age and recognized the, the power in that. I'd be way, way more ahead, you know, in life.

• 2:15:50Jocko Willink?

  And we all.

• 2:15:51Leif Babin?

  For sure.

• 2:15:52Jocko Willink?

  What about playing the game?

• 2:15:53Leif Babin?

  Yep, and playing the game as well, right? That I'm gonna buck authority of like, you know what, actually it's gonna be a lot worse for you if you just, you know, even from a just personal perspective, not only worse for you, but you're for your squad or for your, you know, these folks that you care about. If, if you just build a better relationship with the folks above you, instead of being the, the, you know, hard-headed argumentative guy, for sure. It would have been way better for me.

• 2:16:12Jocko Willink?

  I, I don't know when I figured that out. I mean, it was definitely, it was definitely in my enlisted time, I started figuring out that, oh, I'm working for a guy. And I can either make my life, I can either tell him he sucks and then my life is gonna suck. Or I can figure out how to work with him and that's gonna make my life better. And by the way, it's not just gonna make my life better, it's gonna make us do a better job as a team. So it's interesting when you pick up on that in life. And obviously if I would have been going to the Naval Academy at 18, you know, I was a knucklehead, you know, I would have been in the same boat of like, oh, I'm gonna stick it to the man, right? I mean, I'm still listening to Tenacious D at age, whatever, and we're still sticking it to the man.

• 2:16:48Leif Babin?

  Well, I, I'll tell you, the people that I really like, like my upperclassmen I really like, we have some that are, you know, still serving the SEAL teams and, and, uh, are great guys that helped influence me. And, and I expected, when I showed up there. I wanted to be a SEAL.

• 2:17:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:01Leif Babin?

  I wanted to go to war. That's what I wanted to do. And it was very hard for me to recognize that like, not everybody wanted to do that. It was exactly like me. It was so it was, you know, some people were a little more academic or wanted to be on the intelligence side or wanted to be, you know, they wanted to drive a ship or they wanted to be on a submarine or that, you know, they, those things that, you know, fly a plane. I mean, Top Gun had come out, but you know, we had a whole bunch of people that wanted to be, you know, pilots that had gone to school. So it was, it was interesting. People were a lot different than I expected. And, and, and some folks didn't quite have the, the warlike mentality that, that I expected everyone might have, um, you know, going, going into that environment. But there's no question that, uh, if, if I'd have done a better job of, you know, you caught playing, playing the game, just seeing that, you know, detaching and seeing like, hey, listen.

• 2:17:46Jocko Willink?

  Thinking strategically.

• 2:17:47Leif Babin?

  Yeah, thinking strategically.

• 2:17:48Jocko Willink?

  If we want to see, if we want to, don't want to say play the game because that sounds too, too.

• 2:17:51Leif Babin?

  Yeah, I want to build relationships. Devious. That is it.

• 2:17:55Jocko Willink?

  Too devious.

• 2:17:55Leif Babin?

  Not, I didn't recognize that it was not in my benefit or the benefit of the people around me to, to create antagonistic relationships. And that, so rather than deescalate those situations, I rebelled against them and pushed against them and it, it, it was a struggle for me.

• 2:18:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:10Leif Babin?

  Uh, and it took me a long time to figure that out. That, that being said though, there, there, you know, there's, it, the naval cap is no different than anywhere else. There was great leaders there who mentor people and, and train people and represented, you know, folks well that were both officers on the staff and, and enlisted on the staff as well as, uh, you know, as, as midshipmen. So, uh, but I think what, what was a lesson for me and looking back on it now that I recognize, it's great to identify who you don't want to be. And if someone does something that's looking out for themselves or throws people under the bus or, you know, those, those leaders that you start losing respect for, it's great to actually identify that.

• 2:18:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:42Leif Babin?

  And, and that's a good lesson to learn to say, okay, good. I, I want to make sure I don't be that, that way. But what, what I have learned is that I can't be. We talk to leaders about this all the time and I get people like, what do you do? You know, when your boss, it just isn't a good leader. You're like, guess what? The SEAL Teams is one of the most highly screened organizations in the world. What's, uh, what's the percentage of senior leaders that I work for that I had respect for? That I'd go and work for again? You know, that's maybe, maybe 20%. Maybe 20% of the people I worked for during my time. And guess, that's about average. As, as you talk to people, you know, it's about average in the business world. It's about, it's certainly at the Naval Academy, any of those places. So if you're expecting that there's most of the world out there is not going to be a good leader. They're not going to be a good leader and that doesn't matter.

• 2:19:27Leif Babin?

  And that shouldn't affect your performance. You should be able to do, you know, something that I learned from you, which has probably been the most helpful thing that you ever taught me was that I should try to have the same relationship with, with every boss. You know, whether I had deep respect and admiration for them or whether I despised them and thought they were, you know, egomaniac who, you know, or a coward who, you know, couldn't mitigate risk. So, and that is, it's in my benefit and my team's benefit to build that relationship with, with my team. And that was, that was a lesson that I, I had not learned in. So yeah, those negative, those negative lessons learned were, were, were good for me. And also, uh, I would have had less negative lessons learned if, if I'd have, I'd have figured this out earlier.

• 2:20:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, uh, same, and really we got time for like one more question. But it's almost the same vein. So I think it's a good question to ask. It says, Leif, at what points did you become enlightened to extreme ownership? And how did you respond to the philosophy? Kind of same vein of what you were just talking about.

• 2:20:27Leif Babin?

  Exactly. I mean, I, I clearly didn't have that fully at the Naval Academy, but I started to understand through the kind of school of hard knocks and falling on my face and getting in a bunch of trouble and realizing, hey, it doesn't benefit me to rebel against authority or, you know, not do what I'm told or be seen as, you know, as someone who's, you know, doesn't respect the rules or whatever and, and, um, I think I started to learn that a little more in the surface fleet because I my goal I went out and served it was crushing to me to not be selected out of the naval academy and to go into the SEAL program. So as I went out and served on a couple of different surface ships, I recognized like the what is the pathway for me to the SEAL teams? My lifelong dream, that's all I want to do. And it was be the best freaking surface warfare officer.

• 2:21:10Jocko Willink?

  Because now you gotta, just so everyone knows, now you gotta earn a recommendation to go and do this. So if you're not the best fleet officer you could possibly be, someone's gonna go, why would you why would you send to the SEAL teams and you're not even doing a good job here? No.

• 2:21:21Leif Babin?

  So you gotta earn a reputation. You also have to and a recommendation for sure. You so you have to build that trust with your bosses and you have to get qualified. So they've got to trust you and you have to achieve that qualification. You're not even eligible until you achieve your warfare qualification.

• 2:21:35Jocko Willink?

  So when you when you report aboard a ship, you have to do certain qualifications that say, okay, yes, you are now a surface warfare officer, qualified surface warfare officer. There's a bunch of boxes you gotta check.

• 2:21:47Leif Babin?

  And those boxes, you gotta learn all kinds of information about all the hundreds of different systems.

• 2:21:52Jocko Willink?

  And until you get that, you're not even gonna get you're not getting a recommendation until you get that. You're not even eligible.

• 2:21:57Leif Babin?

  You're not even eligible.

• 2:21:58Jocko Willink?

  So you had to just you had to get some.

• 2:21:59Leif Babin?

  I had to embrace it and that and that helped me and I still had frictions certainly and but I started recognizing like what works and what doesn't. And but it wasn't really until Task Unit Bruiser. That's where you really quantify that for me and you know, as we were going through, I was in my second platoon, so I'd already been through a previous platoon. And and I didn't even realize like as in that second, the second platoon is we were working a task unit Bruiser with Charlie platoon. I was like, man, we're good. We're performing well. And when we started having, you know, a few months into the workup cycle, we'd have, you know, training instructors be like, you guys are the best task unit we've ever seen come through here. And it was interesting to me because I was like, well, I don't really, I mean, we have some amazing guys in this task unit, but I had

• 2:22:42Leif Babin?

  amazing guys in my last task unit, too. We had very talented. So it's not really the talent factor that broke us out, you know, and I didn't even realize, it certainly wasn't that we didn't make mistakes because we made all kinds of mistakes in Task Unit Bruiser and, you know, disastrous. Training operations where we had to come back and revamp our training process and and make sure that we dialed in standard operating procedures. Just what training is supposed to be.

• 2:23:03Jocko Willink?

  Exactly.

• 2:23:04Leif Babin?

  And.

• 2:23:05Jocko Willink?

  Right, exactly. That's the difference, really.

• 2:23:07Leif Babin?

  Yeah, and that was it. It was it was this idea that we now call extreme ownership, which is we're going to take ownership of this. And instead of being like, hey, we're going to push back against people that are telling us we need to be better, or we're going to maybe even deny that we're as bad as we are. We're going to take a brutally honest assessment of ourselves. And that that was one thing that really stands out to me as I think about it. Do you remember our debriefs? The the training instructors, they're usually have a super lengthy and critical debriefs. We would debrief ourselves after a run because they let the they let the platoons and the task units go first. And so often, it was the only time I ever saw it throughout my, you know, my nine years in the SEAL teams, that that that most of the time, we would get done debriefing ourselves

• 2:23:48Leif Babin?

  and and the training instructors did not have, they had either nothing to say or maybe just a couple of sentences and that was it.

• 2:23:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because we'd rip ourselves to shreds.

• 2:23:56Leif Babin?

  Because we we we were, that was such a brutally honest assessment of, and sometimes they'd be like, hey, I actually thought you guys did pretty good.

• 2:24:02Jocko Willink?

  Shut up.

• 2:24:03Leif Babin?

  No, we're, yeah, we're working, and that's actually, you told, you told them, right?

• 2:24:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:07Leif Babin?

  They say the worst thing, you don't ever tell my guys that they're they're doing, you know, they're they're amazing, that's the best friend they've ever seen. Because that that that allows us to not get better, to not grow, to get complacent. So we always did that, and I think that's, I was starting to, I I recognized just how powerful that was to our performance. So, again, we were never flawless. We always made, we made mistakes, but we learned from those mistakes. We got better, we grew all the time, and we were able to run circles around everybody else. As a result, and and deliver some exceptional performance on the battlefield with that attitude. And that's, you know, that that mindset and attitude is is the game changer. That's why we called the book Extreme Ownership. And it's what we impart to people as we as we we see in the business world. And it there's, at the end of the day, there's what works, and there's what doesn't work.

• 2:24:50Leif Babin?

  But that, tasking a bruiser and working with you and recognizing what that is and how powerful that is, that's that's made all the difference.

• 2:24:59Jocko Willink?

  It's crazy to see, and I'd see this all the time, that, well, you just think about what you're saying. When the when the training cadre, for instance, tells you, hey, it took you guys a long time to get a head count. Meaning, you're on the target and you want to leave the target, before you leave the target, you've got to know that you've got all your people, so you want to get a head count. So the training cadre says, hey, it took you guys a long time to get a head count. Now you can do one of two things here. You can say, okay, that's criticism. How could we get a faster headcount? Hey, guys, anyone ever done this a different way? Yeah, I have used this process in the past. It works really good. Okay, let's try that. Oh, that worked better. And we've do this one little thing. It can be even a little bit faster. Okay, let's rehearse it. Let's actually try and rehearse it. Okay, boom, now we're getting really good.

• 2:25:42Jocko Willink?

  So, so we take that and all of a sudden, the next time we go out, we do a little bit better. And then we modify a little bit more and all of a sudden, we can get a headcount in 15 seconds instead of four minutes, which is a huge difference when you're trying to leave a target. So that's one attitude to have. That's like, we're gonna take ownership of the problems. But I would see this all the time, which is, hey, guys, your, your headcount was a little slow. And guys go, wasn't that bad? Wasn't that bad? It only took us four minutes. Four minutes is not that big of a deal. Uh, we, we, like, or, or, like, that guy's saying that right now, but I'd like to see him get a headcount faster than that. And we did it as fast as we could do it. Everyone counted as fast as we could and we made it through the first time. That took us three minutes and they're gonna say that's not good enough.

• 2:26:25Jocko Willink?

  Hey, don't worry about that. And so, so you're gonna stay on that pattern.

• 2:26:28Leif Babin?

  And you never get better.

• 2:26:29Jocko Willink?

  And you're never gonna get better. And it's because you're not looking, you're, you're not accepting criticism from the outside. And it's like.

• 2:26:35Leif Babin?

  When we see that with leaders now, I, I start laughing about it. Dave, Dave and I were just working with, with, with a team and, and, uh, we had to say, it comes up all the time and, and it's funny when you see people pushing back against some, some real constructive criticism. And my question is always like, oh, okay. I said, I just, you know, that battle of egos there, I look at that and say, okay. What you're telling, just, just let me understand. You're telling me that you, you are at absolute optimal performance and you could never improve in any way. Is that, is that, is that what you're saying? And, and obviously then they recognize like, of course not. So, so that kind of opens the door of, yeah, you can improve and you should improve. And if you're not, what you taught me is not only should you improve. I think the big lesson that I learned from you and that we now, you know, teach here with, with Ashlan Fran is,

• 2:27:19Leif Babin?

  is that if, not only should you improve, but if you're not trying to do better, if you're not doing everything you can to have the most efficient and effective headcount. That you can and improve in every aspect of your game all the time that you're actually failing as a leader and you're failing your team. And I think that's a very fundamental difference of looking at it.

• 2:27:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:38Leif Babin?

  That it's not just, no, I should be doing that. But no, if I'm not doing that, I'm a failure as a leader and I'm failing my team.

• 2:27:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and all this is weird. You know, talking about this headcount thing, it's a great example. I'm surprised I haven't talked about it very much because it's a really big deal. Like, for instance, when you leave a target, you can't leave until you know that you have all your guys. So you gotta get a headcount. There's multiple different ways to get a headcount. And the easiest way is you use decentralized command and every little team leader counts their three or four guys and they go, yep, one's up, two's up, three's up, and they report in up one level. And by the time I would need a headcount, I'd look at Leif and the Delta Poon commander and I'd be like, hey, are we up? And it would take them 10 seconds to be like, we're up. The worst way to do it, which I would also see, would be you would literally count from the lowest guy, there's 36 guys in the troop, and someone would say, hey, headcount.

• 2:28:28Jocko Willink?

  And the back guy would go 36, 35, and you'd have assigned numbers. 35, 34, 33, 32.

• 2:28:38Leif Babin?

  Hey, who's 31?

• 2:28:39Jocko Willink?

  Who's 31? Oh, over here. Wait, you're 31? No, I'm 32. Did you count? And so it takes three minutes, four minutes. And yet, it's like, well, that's a very sensible way on paper to do it because you know you're gonna have all your people. But in reality, it doesn't work. And that's that one, so this is that one little thing, right? This one little thing, one little improvement you can make. But that's not the only improvement you can make. You can improve every little thing that you do. And every little thing that you do as a team, everything that you do as an individual human being, you can make it just a little bit better. And the minute that you're sitting back and you're going, you know what? I'm not gonna make this change anymore. I've reached my pinnacle of performance in this category.

• 2:29:22Jocko Willink?

  The minute that you do that, it's not just one category that you're slacking off on, it's all of them. And I was telling you guys the other day, I'm like, you know, when you see me post a picture in the morning, saying that I'm getting up, I'm not getting up at 4:30. If it says the 4:35, that means I got up at 4:30 and I got out of bed and I went in and I took a picture of my watch and I posted. When I'm posting it at 4:08. That means I woke up and I was like, I gotta get busy. It's like, it's not an alarm, it's not alarm clock. I'm gotta get, I gotta go do, I gotta go make these things happen. I gotta look and see where I can improve my method for getting a headcount. How can I make it that much faster? That one little thing. And when you look at your array of what's going on in your business, and it's also in your life too, what can you do a little bit better?

• 2:30:07Jocko Willink?

  You attack those problems. You accept the criticism when it comes at you, which is so hard for everyone to do, myself included. You accept the criticism, you listen to it. And then you modify and you make these little iterative changes. And at the end, instead of being a decent task unit, or instead of being a decent person, or instead of running a decent team, you can be the best. And that's only happens if you take ownership of what's going on in your world.

• 2:30:40Jocko Willink?

  With that,

• 2:30:42Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles.

• 2:30:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:30:45Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of taking ownership, trying to get better.

• 2:30:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:30:49Jocko Willink?

  Maybe you could help us out with that a little bit. I don't know.

• 2:30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's interesting though, like where, when you put it into perspective, right? The extreme ownership, because you know how you say the biggest, or one of the biggest, best qualities of a leader is humility.

• 2:31:01Jocko Willink?

  Humility, yeah. You see the tie-in right now, right?

• 2:31:03Speaker 02

  More so even, yes, because you figure, okay, so you have, yeah, a little bit.

• 2:31:09Jocko Willink?

  Another stripe, another stripe on the, on the leadership white belch.

• 2:31:12Speaker 02

  There you go. So you, you get a team, you know, a team of people, all different, you know, personalities, whatever, egos, varying levels, right? So for little, there's gonna be all these little problems. No one's perfect, no one's optimal, right? That's kind of the goal, even if it's unattainable perfection, right? That's kind of the goal, optimal. Then you have a team with however many mistakes they make. And then as they train, perform, all this stuff, all the little mistakes get pointed out. And it's almost like this self, uh, self-correcting organism.

• 2:31:45Jocko Willink?

  We hope it is.

• 2:31:46Speaker 02

  Like, that's why, yes, you hope it is. So like, if you compare it to like a machine learning situation, it does that. Because it doesn't have an ego. It doesn't take things personal. It's kind of like, let me just solve all the little problems and then that's why. They can what grow at exponential rates, right?

• 2:31:59Leif Babin?

  The thing that's awesome about that though is that you get, I think what you're talking about is building the culture, right? So you get if the leader's doing that and you get the team doing that. Once, once people recognize like, hey, look how much better we are at head counts now. Even if I resisted that, then you start getting junior leadership who, new, you know, frontline troops, new guys who, you know, they come up with an idea, hey, here's a way we can do this a little better.

• 2:32:19Jocko Willink?

  They're solving problems that you don't even see.

• 2:32:22Leif Babin?

  Yeah, it's a.

• 2:32:22Jocko Willink?

  I was saying that the other day, you know, I was,

• 2:32:26Jocko Willink?

  I was in a training situation the other day and I saw things go bad for this group. It was a military group and, and things were going bad. They were, they, they all dropped the ball. They all kind of didn't drop the ball, but there was slack there. There was slack. And I was thinking to myself, I wouldn't see a, a young, new guy, machine gunner, not get in a good position. I would never see that with my eyes because the guy that was immediately senior to him would, would straighten him out. There would be no slack right there. There would be no slack. He'd get straightened out. So by the time I show up and I look around, everyone's doing amazingly well. Everything's the way it should be. It's not quite optimal, but it's damn close.

• 2:33:07Jocko Willink?

  And why is that? It's because of what you just said, Leif. It's because every leader, every individual leader and every person is, is adjusting and making things, making adjustments that I'm not even seeing. And why are they doing that? Number one, because they're all humble enough to look that they need to change things. And number two, everyone in the group has their ego in check. So when someone says, hey, shift your field of fire a little bit to the west. The guy doesn't say, why?

• 2:33:30Leif Babin?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:31Jocko Willink?

  No, he goes, I wonder why. Oh, I see. Cause he's got another guy over there that's covering that field. I got it. Got it, boss. That's, that's what, that's it. Now we have like, like a machine that's just improving all the time.

• 2:33:41Leif Babin?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:41Jocko Willink?

  Which is what we're going for. And if you lack humility in any, in any one of those levels, you're, you're, you're going to slow down that machine's progress.

• 2:33:49Speaker 02

  That process fully done. Yeah. So it's weird when you look at it from the big picture, you know? And you see like, just like how you're saying, when you kind of mentally compared your current team with, you know, teams in the past, like, oh, there was talented guys on the other side, on the other teams that I was on too. But you kinda understand and recognize that one factor is that everyone's kinda humble and is always constantly like, what can I do better right here with my, you know, situation in my own little world here? But everyone's doing that. So it's like this, if you, if you kinda collectively consider this group, they're just boom, boom, boom, self, self.

• 2:34:24Jocko Willink?

  And I'll take it one step forward, just, just one step further, just so everyone can think about how to implement this in your world. The way you implement it isn't by saying, guys, the headcount was slow, you need to fix it. It's not by saying, hey, the approach to the target was too loud, you need to be quiet. That's not how you fix the problem. You say, hey, guys, our headcount is taking too long, I need to come up with a better way to do it. I need to, I need to, I need to figure this out. Or, hey, guys, we were too noisy going to the target, I need to make sure that you have the gear that you need and I need to make sure we all understand how important it is to be quiet going to the target. I think I was too loud.

• 2:35:07Jocko Willink?

  Right? I think I was too loud. Now everyone says, damn, Jocko's like, he's blaming himself for being too loud, but I'm the one that was over back there, my, dropped my canteen, it made a bunch of noise in the rocks, that was my fault. I'm gonna tighten myself up. As opposed to blaming everyone, and we talk about this all the time. The minute you're blaming everyone, everyone's just, you know, they're looking for excuse, they're blaming you, you don't understand how hard it is to carry that canteen quietly and I was thirsty because I've been carrying the machine gun and I needed to get water right there, I was gonna get dehydrated. They're just making excuses.

• 2:35:33Speaker 02

  Yep. And the machine can't self-correct.

• 2:35:35Jocko Willink?

  The machine can't self-correct.

• 2:35:37Speaker 02

  Can't do it, just stays in the one inefficient, ineffective place.

• 2:35:41Jocko Willink?

  Mode.

• 2:35:42Speaker 02

  Speaking of machines, machines need oil. Not necessarily krill oil, but we need krill oil.

• 2:35:50Jocko Willink?

  B+ on your transition.

• 2:35:51Speaker 02

  If you didn't know already, Jocko, Jocko has supplements, good news. I just took my Jocko Krill oil this morning.

• 2:35:58Jocko Willink?

  Gets up.

• 2:35:59Speaker 02

  Me too. Always, every day, don't forget. Um, can't slack on that. Thanks for bringing me some krill oil in New York too, by the way.

• 2:36:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think you still owe me a bottle for that.

• 2:36:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, no problem. I know a guy. His name is Jocko and the krill oil is called Jocko. Super krill and joint warfare, by the way, which is another joint supplement. You know, maintain the physical capabilities of your body. Um, I said, don't forget to take it and don't run out, by the way. I ran out before, but if you're running out, there is a subscription option.

• 2:36:33Jocko Willink?

  By request.

• 2:36:34Speaker 02

  By request, yeah, you get it, what, every month?

• 2:36:36Jocko Willink?

  You can get it every month, every two weeks. This, uh, this was cool though, because the indicator was when people order krill oil, joint warfare. Guess what they do? They order more.

• 2:36:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:49Jocko Willink?

  And then they order more. And so then the, the requests were, can we just put it on subscription? So.

• 2:36:53Speaker 02

  Is there a, I mean, I don't, I just take three of them, three of each, boom. But I had never read like, how much should I be taking? Cause it's a little bit more like strong, right? Like there's more.

• 2:37:02Jocko Willink?

  I, I'll tell you what I take. I take three of each in the morning and I take three of, three of each at night.

• 2:37:10Speaker 02

  So you're, yeah, you're full on. That's good and that's fine, but what is the recommended?

• 2:37:14Jocko Willink?

  You're also talking to the guy that, you know, orders the 40 ounce steak too. More is better.

• 2:37:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, after a 48 hour fast or some.

• 2:37:22Jocko Willink?

  I would say, I would say depending on your weight, but I'd say like two and two. Take two of each in the morning, two of each at night. And also you can do this.

• 2:37:29Speaker 02

  For a day, okay.

• 2:37:29Jocko Willink?

  You can also do this. You can also, you know, see where you're at, right? Like you know what it feels like when you haven't been taking, you're like, eh.

• 2:37:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:36Jocko Willink?

  So then up the dose. That's what I did and I've been real, real confident with where I'm at.

• 2:37:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too. Three and three for me, not twice, one, one time. Three and three, boom, morning.

• 2:37:46Jocko Willink?

  I gotta get on the subscription though. That's good. I, I like that option cause I, I, I run out and, uh, and then, and then it takes, you know, days to.

• 2:37:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:54Jocko Willink?

  And it, you, well, that's what, that's what sucks is it takes like three days, right? Three days, you're like, ah, my, oh, I haven't been taking it. And then you gotta get back on it and it takes another couple of days.

• 2:38:04Speaker 02

  It's whack. Get the subscription if you're into it.

• 2:38:08Jocko Willink?

  Well, where can you get that anyways? You like that?

• 2:38:11Speaker 02

  So, well, there's more stuff. What? Yeah, yeah. If you want to go get it right now, originmaine.com. That's where you get it. Also at originmaine.com. Also Jocko supplement. It's called discipline. It's a pre-mission.

• 2:38:25Speaker 02

  Cognitive enhancers, microdose of caffeine, if you're into it, just like Jocko White Tea.

• 2:38:30Jocko Willink?

  Leif, you're all up on it.

• 2:38:32Leif Babin?

  The bottle, just sample some.

• 2:38:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, see tasty, which is, I mean, maybe it's, yeah, I mean, again, I know I said it before, but it, it, it doesn't seem like you're all like focused on taste. Cause you're not focused on looks.

• 2:38:46Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:38:47Speaker 02

  See what I'm saying?

• 2:38:47Jocko Willink?

  Not at all.

• 2:38:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you like to taste good stuff. Yeah, yeah, here to win and make sure stuff tastes good, apparently, but uh, it is good stuff.

• 2:38:57Speaker 02

  I take that one every day too.

• 2:38:58Jocko Willink?

  When do you take it?

• 2:38:59Speaker 02

  Morning, now.

• 2:39:01Jocko Willink?

  Pre?

• 2:39:02Speaker 02

  Pre day.

• 2:39:03Jocko Willink?

  Pre life.

• 2:39:04Speaker 02

  Pre day, man. You know why? The way I see it is like, there's no caffeine or there's not like huge amounts of caffeine. So it's like, okay, if I'm gonna.

• 2:39:11Jocko Willink?

  Microdose.

• 2:39:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:12Jocko Willink?

  I ripped that off from Tim Ferriss.

• 2:39:14Speaker 02

  What, microdose?

• 2:39:15Jocko Willink?

  Cause they talk about microdosing LSD and microdosing psycho drugs and whatever.

• 2:39:21Speaker 02

  Sounds cool.

• 2:39:22Jocko Willink?

  That's not really my thing.

• 2:39:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:39:24Jocko Willink?

  But I'll take a little microdose of caffeine.

• 2:39:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:26Jocko Willink?

  Fifteen milligrams.

• 2:39:27Speaker 02

  Sure, but.

• 2:39:28Jocko Willink?

  Give you a little glimpse into the spirit world.

• 2:39:32Speaker 02

  I don't think you'd do it. Well, the LSD might, yes, for sure.

• 2:39:35Jocko Willink?

  The twenty rep squats will do it.

• 2:39:36Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:39:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:39:40Jocko Willink?

  Come and get some of that sometime.

• 2:39:41Speaker 02

  I just figured the, like the cognitive, um.

• 2:39:44Jocko Willink?

  Enhancers.

• 2:39:45Speaker 02

  Enhancing nutrients. I figure that's like a thing. That's not like a drug, right? It's nutrients. So it's, you take it every day. So your brain is just generally more capable.

• 2:39:57Speaker 02

  It's just what I figured. I don't know.

• 2:39:58Jocko Willink?

  He's answering all these good questions. They got the discipline in them.

• 2:40:01Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 2:40:01Jocko Willink?

  The neur- the neurons are firing.

• 2:40:03Speaker 02

  I've been on it.

• 2:40:04Leif Babin?

  That's, that's why I got those stripes.

• 2:40:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:06Leif Babin?

  Nineteen percent increase in performance.

• 2:40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for, and the rush cards do that, by the way. Also, anyway, um, get them at originmaine.com. Also at originmaine.com is where you get your key straight up.

• 2:40:22Speaker 02

  You have an origin gi?

• 2:40:23Jocko Willink?

  I do have an origin gi and they're awesome. I get comments on it all the time. They're uh, they're great gees. They're, they're super lightweight, but they're super strong and, and uh, yeah, definitely my favorite gi. I'm, I'm looking to get another one.

• 2:40:34Speaker 02

  Mine too, and made in America, by the way. Brian emailed me yesterday.

• 2:40:38Jocko Willink?

  You might think that's the best thing about origin gees. That it's just made in America, but then it's not because you get the gi and you realize that.

• 2:40:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:45Jocko Willink?

  It's awesome.

• 2:40:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, because if it was made in America and then you were like cluster full baker or something.

• 2:40:50Jocko Willink?

  Ghee the other night. I was rolling in the def ghee.

• 2:40:54Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:56Jocko Willink?

  The, the interesting thing, we obviously, we know I'm not a fashion guy, right?

• 2:41:00Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:41:00Jocko Willink?

  I mean, clearly I'm not a fashion guy.

• 2:41:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, we know that big time.

• 2:41:03Jocko Willink?

  Leif can tell, you want to see your stories, you can tell Leif to tell stories about my fashion uh escapades.

• 2:41:08Leif Babin?

  1987 tapered jeans and danner combat boots.

• 2:41:12Jocko Willink?

  Hey, that's how I roll. But when you put on the def ghee, everyone says something. Why is that? It's just because it looks, because it's not flashy. It just says discipline equals freedom. And then it says get after it.

• 2:41:25Speaker 02

  On the back, yeah.

• 2:41:26Jocko Willink?

  Every time I walk by people, when I'd walk by, then I'd hear him going, get after it.

• 2:41:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And you know what? Pete is like that though. He has like an element of fashion in his stuff.

• 2:41:36Jocko Willink?

  No, I know. I gotta put him in check on that. Him and I have been going back and forth a little bit. I'm like, hey, you gotta put that in check. You, you wanna, because he made some,

• 2:41:45Jocko Willink?

  he made some spats.

• 2:41:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, spats.

• 2:41:47Jocko Willink?

  Which is an approved term now.

• 2:41:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:41:49Jocko Willink?

  Leif.

• 2:41:49Speaker 02

  Compression pants.

• 2:41:50Jocko Willink?

  Compression pants. Tights is what Superman would call them. Spanx. But anyways, he made some that work.

• 2:41:56Leif Babin?

  Is that like jeggings?

• 2:41:58Speaker 02

  No, that's way too far. They're jeans, but they're like, it's, I know this because my daughter has some and it says jazz. Like, what is it?

• 2:42:05Leif Babin?

  Teenage girls, you don't know what jeggings are? Come on. They're like leggings slash jeans.

• 2:42:12Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, Pete has more fashion sense because he's got that whole design thing going on.

• 2:42:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:17Jocko Willink?

  Like, he's a designer.

• 2:42:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. He's a creative.

• 2:42:19Jocko Willink?

  I know you're listening, Pete. We know you're all designing stuff up there. Me, I'm like, make it black.

• 2:42:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:25Jocko Willink?

  What can we add to it? More black?

• 2:42:26Speaker 02

  And what kind of shape do you want in the waistline or it just like, I don't, I don't know about that kind of stuff, but Pete's like, oh, don't worry, I got it.

• 2:42:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:32Speaker 02

  And that's why.

• 2:42:33Jocko Willink?

  Until he designed the, the multi-colored spats.

• 2:42:37Speaker 02

  Wow, that's just like, just taking it in a different direction.

• 2:42:40Jocko Willink?

  I can't even, I can't even, I'm not even, I have to put myself in check here. Because I realize that that is beyond my domain of competency, right there. That is way beyond my domain of competency. So if you want to get those spats, go for it.

• 2:42:53Speaker 02

  Dig it.

• 2:42:53Jocko Willink?

  But, to Pete's credit, guess what they have now?

• 2:42:56Speaker 02

  Black.

• 2:42:57Jocko Willink?

  Black spats.

• 2:42:58Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:42:58Jocko Willink?

  If you need them, you can get them.

• 2:43:00Speaker 02

  Boom, but even his, even the other geez though, people, before I got the Deaf One, people would be like, oh, that's a nice gee.

• 2:43:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, what's really interesting is when you see the weave.

• 2:43:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:10Jocko Willink?

  The weave is what makes it.

• 2:43:12Speaker 02

  Gorilla weave.

• 2:43:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but there's like this little pattern in the weave. Actually, the first, one of the first ones I actually held was yours, like, because you've, you've had that Origin gee for a long time.

• 2:43:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:21Jocko Willink?

  Because you asked me a long time ago, before I was even with Origin, you're like, hey, what kind of gee should I say? Get a damn Origin gee.

• 2:43:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, you were like, this is an awesome company, you were telling me about it, and, uh, you know.

• 2:43:29Jocko Willink?

  You went and got one?

• 2:43:30Speaker 02

  I went and bought one, it was good.

• 2:43:32Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, oh damn, this thing is nice. But yeah, there's a little pattern, alright, cool. We get it, sorry.

• 2:43:36Speaker 02

  What I'm just saying, even though you don't care about the fashion, Pete will sneak it in there, just for like the perfect amount of fashion.

• 2:43:42Jocko Willink?

  I gotta watch out for Pete.

• 2:43:43Speaker 02

  Subtle fashion, it's good. Keep it upbeat, I think. Also, some rash guards there, all made in America, and some other stuff. Check it out, if you like something, get something. originmaine.com is the website. Also, onnit.com slash Jocko, okay? On it, this is where I get my kettlebells, kettlebells?

• 2:44:00Jocko Willink?

  I like kettlebells.

• 2:44:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I got the whole set, primal bells, all that stuff. Also, maces and other workout stuff, if you want to, you want to switch it up. You don't want to do a boring workout anymore, or you're bored with your workout, switch it up. onnit.com slash Jocko, check out the workout gear, it's good, get something. Also, when you buy Extreme Ownership, Way the Warrior Kid, or any of the books Jocko may or may not review on this podcast, um, don't worry, I organize all those books. I made a shirt too, by the way, it's a whole nother story, I'll go into that later. But I organize all the books by episode, by the way. Um, get them through there, good way to support, it'll take you to Amazon, get your book, get whatever else you're getting, and, uh, you know, carry on.

• 2:44:43Jocko Willink?

  Lawnmower. I ended up noticing that lately, a lot of lawnmowers, people buying lawnmowers, ready for spring.

• 2:44:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:49Jocko Willink?

  Through the Amazon click through.

• 2:44:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I'd say that.

• 2:44:52Jocko Willink?

  Good way to support.

• 2:44:53Speaker 02

  Can you buy a driving lawnmower? Because when I think lawnmower, I think driving.

• 2:44:57Jocko Willink?

  On Amazon, you probably can.

• 2:44:58Speaker 02

  Probably, huh? John Deere, something like this. I bought a leaf blower, and I'm not joking.

• 2:45:03Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:45:04Speaker 02

  My daughter plays with it. Free chargeable ones.

• 2:45:07Jocko Willink?

  Can you get an eighty-four millimeter recoilless rifle? Carl Gustaf? I don't think so.

• 2:45:13Speaker 02

  No, no, you gotta go somewhere outside of hell.

• 2:45:15Jocko Willink?

  That is a damn shame. One of my buddies was asking me the other day, he was gonna go shooting. And, and he's a, he's a British guy. And, his name is English Pizza.

• 2:45:24Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:45:25Jocko Willink?

  And English Pizza, he know English Pizza. He's like, I'm gonna go shoot.

• 2:45:28Speaker 02

  Do you call him English Pizza?

• 2:45:30Jocko Willink?

  That's his nickname, English Pizza, P E T A H, English Pizza. And English Pizza was gonna go shooting with, with someone. And he says, hey, you don't wanna go, he says, hey, I'm gonna go shooting. Would you like to come? Maybe we could work on some cover and move. And, and I was like, I was like, I was like, I can't make it. And then I saw him later. And I said, oh, how was the shooting? He says, oh, we didn't get to go, mate, couldn't go, couldn't go. And I said, oh, that's a bummer, I said, you, you're gonna like it. And he goes, all I really want to shoot is like the RPG.

• 2:46:00Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, that's gonna be a little tricky to get, so. I'll check Amazon for RPG.

• 2:46:04Speaker 02

  Backblaster, it'd be clear.

• 2:46:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, let's get some.

• 2:46:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, Amazon, yeah, I don't think they provide that kind of stuff. But, if they do, hey, whatever, you know, when you buy your book, buy one of those. Cool. Also, subscribe to the podcast. If you haven't already, Stitcher, iTunes, Google Play, Spotify. You know Spotify?

• 2:46:24Jocko Willink?

  I do. There's some more, you know what, there's a bunch of other podcast apps, and I don't even know what their names are. I need to start tweeting the, the locations of those. I gotta figure them all out.

• 2:46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and.

• 2:46:36Jocko Willink?

  There's a bunch.

• 2:46:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they're coming out with new ones, it's like, that's just, you'd think, we, well, we kinda said before, you'd think, oh, iTunes, right? That's where podcasts are, but podcast is a podcast.

• 2:46:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, hey, what's interesting, and I, I haven't seen this factually, or I don't know where the number came from. So, like, two years ago, eighteen percent of America was listening to podcasts.

• 2:46:55Speaker 02

  Eighteen?

• 2:46:56Jocko Willink?

  Eighteen, like, when we started, that's the number I got. I, I was like researching, oh, how many people are listening to it? Right now, so it's been two years, forty-eight percent of America is listening to podcasts. And that right there is explosive growth. It's pretty amazing, because it's a great medium.

• 2:47:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, it's like, kinda like having a convers- well, I guess it depends on the podcast, but yeah, I agree, fully. So yeah, subscribe if you want, good way to support. Also, YouTube, subscribe to YouTube, if you want. If you're interested in the video version of this podcast, wherever guests, Leif Babin. The guest episodes, that's when people watch them typically.

• 2:47:29Jocko Willink?

  Mostly.

• 2:47:30Speaker 02

  Mostly.

• 2:47:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:31Speaker 02

  Well, I don't want, yeah, not even really mostly, I'm just saying, we see more people watching the episodes with, with guests. I wanna see what they look like apparently. Yeah, nonetheless, if you're interested in that, and excerpts, if you don't wanna necessarily watch the whole podcast, you watch just like little clips of it, or whatever, you wanna share them with your friends, whatever. We provide that as well. Also, enhanced excerpts, that's what we're calling them now, some of that too. Anyway, various video types on there.

• 2:47:56Jocko Willink?

  And you've been, you've, I've seen you've been a little bit more, you're, you're throwing more punches now.

• 2:48:00Speaker 02

  Sure, let them go a little bit more, yeah.

• 2:48:02Jocko Willink?

  Let them go more?

• 2:48:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're gonna keep that going, so yeah, there'll be more clips to choose from, you know, you wanna listen or watch, whatever. Yeah, so yeah, subscribe, good way to support. Also, Jocko has a store, it's called Jocko Store, of course, jockostore.com, that's where you can get Discipline Equals Freedom shirts, Victory MMA shirts, someone Jocko wears every day, while we do the podcast, and otherwise. And, you know, get out, anyway, there's shirts on there, there's podcast shirts, Jocko gear shirts, also rash guards, also hoodies, also hats.

• 2:48:38Jocko Willink?

  Did you mention a new shirt? Is there a new shirt?

• 2:48:40Speaker 02

  I mentioned a new shirt, okay.

• 2:48:41Jocko Willink?

  Is it out? Cause I haven't approved or seen anything lately.

• 2:48:44Speaker 02

  You'll approve, it's good.

• 2:48:45Jocko Willink?

  Unapproved, unauthorized.

• 2:48:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's in the limbo right now, but I, I'm very, we're confident.

• 2:48:50Jocko Willink?

  It's like, it's like the patches, he secretly wants you to do it.

• 2:48:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, this one, he's gonna openly, I think you'll approve, cause there, there's no colored shirts.

• 2:48:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay, good, approved.

• 2:49:00Speaker 02

  And then, you know, actually it's called Back to the Book. No surprise. We talked about it before.

• 2:49:06Leif Babin?

  Said that before.

• 2:49:06Speaker 02

  But I think it's coming along. There's a few layers on there and, um, you know, I'm gonna go ahead and offer it. Offer it up.

• 2:49:11Leif Babin?

  Yeah, you can't release it until there's enough layers.

• 2:49:14Speaker 02

  Yes. No, yeah, layerless shirts are unapproved.

• 2:49:16Leif Babin?

  Who has the most, the shirt that I designed is the most layered shirt. Is that correct?

• 2:49:21Speaker 02

  Yes, I think.

• 2:49:22Leif Babin?

  Ah, yes, that's good. You submitted quite easily there.

• 2:49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true, the truth. You have the, what do you call it? The gift of truth or what was it?

• 2:49:31Leif Babin?

  I don't know.

• 2:49:32Speaker 02

  You know, when, when they're like, hey, what if the, our competition is gossiping about us? You have the.

• 2:49:36Leif Babin?

  Oh, yeah, they have the big weapon.

• 2:49:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, the weapon of truth.

• 2:49:39Leif Babin?

  The high ground.

• 2:49:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you got numbers on your side. Nonetheless, jockostore.com, that's where you can get all the cool stuff. Check it out. If you want something, get something. Also, Psychological Warfare. If you don't know what that is, it's an album with tracks, Jocko tracks.

• 2:49:56Speaker 02

  When you run into those moments of weakness in your campaign against weakness.

• 2:50:01Leif Babin?

  Speaking of which, uh, so I get in my car, you know, I've got thousands of songs on my iTunes.

• 2:50:06Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:50:07Leif Babin?

  I get, I get in my car, you know, I have my Bluetooth on and I didn't realize it, but it just automatically synced up to my trucks. I jump on my truck and, and I didn't realize the radio was at kind of a high volume, apparently. I think my kids were probably screaming in the backseat, so I'm playing like some kid tunes. But I get in there, I get in there and, uh, and all of a sudden it's like Jocko's voice. I mean, I get it, I'm not paying attention, backing up, and it's like.

• 2:50:32Speaker 02

  It's kind of loud.

• 2:50:33Leif Babin?

  Where does discipline come from? And of all the random, you know, thousands of songs that I have on my iTunes, like that comes up. I was like, what are the odds? And it was actually something I needed to hear at that moment, uh, and, and to, to remind me to get back on the path. So.

• 2:50:49Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:50:49Leif Babin?

  That is something that's extremely helpful.

• 2:50:51Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 2:50:51Leif Babin?

  Um, and, uh.

• 2:50:54Leif Babin?

  The universe.

• 2:50:55Jocko Willink?

  The universal lines.

• 2:50:56Leif Babin?

  The universe, the lines.

• 2:50:57Jocko Willink?

  Thank Echo Charles for that.

• 2:50:58Speaker 02

  And it make-

• 2:50:58Jocko Willink?

  Cause Echo Charles originally said to me, like, hey, what do you do here? And I answered him some question. It was, it was like-

• 2:51:05Speaker 02

  When I skip workout.

• 2:51:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, what do you, he's like, well, how do you not skip workouts? And I was like, I ba ba ba ba ba. He's like, bro, we need to record that and put it out so people can listen to it. And he's like, and you should answer the rest of them. You should, what, what, how do you get out of bed? So I was like, alright, ask me the questions. And that's where it came from, Echo Charles.

• 2:51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little additional thing where, you know how the kind, I don't know if you've run into this, where you're, you're like, I have, I don't, I'm confused or I don't have the answer for this thing. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask Jocko, what is, just what does he think? Right as you're asking him, you're like, oh, I know what he's gonna say already, right? So this one, he was like, I was like, oh, I know what this guy's gonna say right now. He's just gonna say, stop being weak or some, something like that. So it was more like, I get it, stop being weak, okay. But there's a little bit more to that, like, what do you say? Like, what do you think or whatever, you know? So I'm like, alright, yeah, we're gonna record that. And these Jocko tracks, they have it for anything, not just skipping workouts, for procrastination, getting up early, all this stuff. So it's kinda like, even if your volume's not turned up,

• 2:52:03Speaker 02

  it's kinda like Jocko's actually telling you, like, how to not skip the workout. It's good.

• 2:52:08Leif Babin?

  It's encouragement.

• 2:52:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say more-

• 2:52:12Jocko Willink?

  You know what's funny is how come people are always like, oh, you should make a thing of you yelling at me to get out of bed?

• 2:52:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:52:17Jocko Willink?

  I, you know, I'm not a big yeller.

• 2:52:19Speaker 02

  That would work, but it would only work like a few times. After a while, it's kinda like, oh, you know, alright, you know, like, cool.

• 2:52:26Jocko Willink?

  Shut him up.

• 2:52:27Speaker 02

  Recording of Jocko yelling, but if you're, you know how like you're talking like, um, you know, so like, it's kinda like you're explaining practically. You know, like, this is, this, what's going on, this, what you kinda think.

• 2:52:36Leif Babin?

  It's enough a reminder of like, hey, get back on the path.

• 2:52:39Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:52:40Leif Babin?

  Do it.

• 2:52:40Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:52:41Speaker 02

  But yeah, good one, get that one on. iTunes. Basically, anywhere where they sell MP3s.

• 2:52:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:52:47Jocko Willink?

  It's available.

• 2:52:48Speaker 02

  Psychological workforce. Good way to support.

• 2:52:51Jocko Willink?

  The, also, when you're on Amazon, you can get Jocko White Tea. Now, the good thing about, there's some good things and bad things about Jocko White Tea. The bad things are you gotta mix it up with hot water, that can take a little extra time. The good thing is, once you drink about a half a cup of white tea, and this is what we're finding now, when you drink about a half a cup of white tea, you are then able to deadlift 8,000 pounds. A lot of people are wondering how much you had to drink, and the answer is, you can drink a half a cup, and you're there. So, you can get Jocko White Tea, and it's also legal, which a lot of people are trying to get it outlawed right now by, you know, the Athletic Commission and the Olympics, they don't want people breaking all the records and everything, so yeah, they're trying to just ban it. But get it while you can, right?

• 2:53:35Jocko Willink?

  Get it while you can before it gets banned.

• 2:53:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:53:38Jocko Willink?

  Before it gets banned, and then you're just done. Also, some books, the books that I read on the podcast, for sure, there's also a book called, a lot of the books I read on the podcast are for adults, clearly, a lot of them are very, you need a mature audience, but kids also need to know how to get on the path. Am I right? You've got kids, you've got kids, kids need to know how to get on the path. How are they gonna get on the path? Well, number one, they can get the book, Way of the Warrior Kid, and they can get on the path with that, and now, there's another book coming out. It's Way of the Warrior Kid 2, sequel.

• 2:54:12Speaker 02

  The sequel.

• 2:54:13Jocko Willink?

  Could it be a Jaws 2 fail? There's always that chance.

• 2:54:18Speaker 02

  There's that chance.

• 2:54:19Jocko Willink?

  If I would've listened to my publisher. Yeah, cuz what do they wanna do? They want you to churn out, hey, you got a little bit going here, let's get another one, let's ride the wave, right? And by the way, let us help you shape, you know, where we think this could go. Oh, so you just wanna take it down that path? No, we're not going down that path. Life's hard. Mark's gonna face some more struggles, and he does. Luckily, he's got an Uncle Jake, comes and helps him out. Way of the Warrior Kid, Mark's Mission, you can preorder it right now. It comes out April 24th is the date that it comes out. You can get that. Also, if you're an adult and you wanna get on the path, stay on the path, be on the path,

• 2:55:03Jocko Willink?

  move down the path, you can get a book called Discipline Equals Freedom, Field Manual. Which Echoes apparently knows all about field manuals.

• 2:55:12Speaker 02

  My favorite kind of manual.

• 2:55:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, favorite kind of manuals. This is gonna help you stay on the path. That's what it's gonna do. Not only what you should think about in a section called Thoughts, but also the actions you should take if you want to proceed to get stronger, faster, smarter, and all around better. And if you want the audio version, don't look for it on Audible because it's not there. This is an album also with tracks. And it's available in MP3 format from Amazon Music, from Google Play, from other MP3 platforms.

• 2:55:51Jocko Willink?

  And actually, Leif, why don't you talk a little bit about, I don't know, a couple of books we wrote, a little company we got, maybe a little event that we're doing?

• 2:56:00Leif Babin?

  First and foremost, if you want to dive deeper into the leadership principles that we've been talking about and referencing, get Extreme Ownership. That's, we have people ask us like, hey, where did you make mistakes in your career? We wrote a whole book about them. That's what Extreme Ownership is about. The mistakes we learned on the battlefield, the things that happened to us, what we learned from them. And then how that principle applies to business and life. So go get that book on Amazon or anywhere that you can buy books. And if you're like me and you're super busy and you don't have a lot of time to read, then you can get the Audible book. The audiobook, it's on Audible, it's on anywhere. And get that version.

• 2:56:35Jocko Willink?

  And we read it, by the way.

• 2:56:36Leif Babin?

  We read it. James Earl Jones wasn't available. So apparently.

• 2:56:40Speaker 02

  Texas Batman was.

• 2:56:41Leif Babin?

  We, we, we had to read it. I didn't realize it was the Texas Batman until people were listening to this book.

• 2:56:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you are.

• 2:56:47Leif Babin?

  That's where that was born on social media.

• 2:56:49Speaker 02

  I hear good things about the audio version, though. Straight up.

• 2:56:52Jocko Willink?

  There's little, there's little surprises in the audio version. That it, once again, we didn't listen to our publisher. Our publisher was like, well, that's kind of weird to put that. Well, we, well, what would you rather hear for gunfire? You know, me going bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, or would you rather hear gunfire? What would you rather hear for an explosion? Leif going kaboom? Or would you rather have explosion? What would you rather have for the call to prayer? Leif talking about the call to prayer coming because it's, it can be pretty eerie in those situations? Or would you rather actually hear it? So there's, what would you call that? Audio theater?

• 2:57:26Speaker 02

  Sure. You make it into like a.

• 2:57:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, audio theater. Okay.

• 2:57:31Leif Babin?

  And they did a great job with that with the audiobook. So get that. That's certainly an option as well. And if you have a company or you want to work, work with us, Echelon Front, that's our, that's our company, Echelon Front. And if you're looking to, to implement these leadership programs into your team, learn from us, learn, learn those same principles that we talk about, then that's what we do at Echelon Front is we, we come out and work with your team. We, and, and we come out and work with your team and, and get these principles applied to your particular challenges that you can lead and win on your battlefield. And that's just that, that what Echelon Front is, is our company. It's Jocko, it's me, it's Dave Burke, it's JP Donnell, guys that you know from, from this podcast, and, and a

• 2:58:16Leif Babin?

  whole team of folks. As Jocko talked about the tank, where we talk about these leadership problems, we solve those problems and, and we help you lead and win. And it's awesome. We love that. So if you're interested in, in working with us, go to echelonfront.com. And of course, the muster, which we talked about, this is the ultimate leadership conference. And, and we've had four of these so far. Every single one of them have sold out. Every single one of them sold out. So don't wait. If you are interested in coming, we're only doing two this year. We're only doing two. We had a lot going on for us and we said, we're going to do two amazing musters. That's what we're going to focus on. We did three last year, but we're only doing two this year. And that's in Washington DC, May 17th and 18th. And that's in San Francisco, October 17th and 18th. And that's it. If you want

• 2:59:00Leif Babin?

  to, if you want to come and be a part of the muster, go to extremeownership.com and get registered and we'll see you there.

• 2:59:07Jocko Willink?

  And until the muster, if you want to kind of continue this conversation that we're having right now, you can find us continually conversing on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagrammy, and on the Facebook.

• 2:59:30Jocko Willink?

  Leif is at Leif Babin, Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. Echo Charles, anything else?

• 2:59:38Speaker 02

  No. A self-correcting machine. That's what happens when you start doing the extreme ownership thing. That's the added layer I gathered from today.

• 2:59:47Jocko Willink?

  Legit. I like it.

• 2:59:48Speaker 02

  Thanks for helping clarify. Always good to see you.

• 2:59:52Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:59:53Speaker 02

  Maybe not always, but.

• 2:59:54Jocko Willink?

  Leif, any closing thoughts?

• 2:59:57Jocko Willink?

  Good to be on again. Looking forward to the next time. I suppose we'll do one more when we're up at the muster. We'll talk more, maybe we'll talk more about, probably talk a little bit about extreme ownership, maybe we'll talk a little bit more about the new book, which will be done for the most part by then. Awesome. Obviously, thanks for coming on. Thanks to everyone out there, especially those of you who are out there in uniform, who have basically said, "I am willing to give everything I have for freedom." "We're here today because of you, so thank you." "Thank you to the police and the law enforcement and the firefighters and the paramedics and the rest of the first responders that do their job every day,

• 3:00:43Jocko Willink?

  every day, to make sure that we are safe here at home." And everyone else out there that's listening and sharing and supporting this podcast, thank you. But don't just listen and don't just support and don't just share. But instead,

• 3:01:09Jocko Willink?

  wake up every day with a mission.

• 3:01:13Jocko Willink?

  Wake up every day with a goal to be a little bit better than you were yesterday and become the self-correcting machine.

• 3:01:26Jocko Willink?

  That's not going to bring you to perfection, but it's going to bring you to a place that's a little bit closer to get out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Leif and Echo and Jocko. Out.