64: The Value and Cost of Real Freedom. "A Debt That Cannot Be Repaid", With Andy Stumpf

0:00:00 - Opening: "A Debt That Cannot Be Repaid" 0:08:48 - Intro to Andy Stumpf 0:18:04 - New Guy at the SEAL Teams 0:22:18 - Deployments 0:26:38 - September 11th / Learning through experience. 0:40:49 - Iraq, Afghanistan, and Getting shot. 1:00:12 - Recovered and Getting Back After it. 1:23:02 - Andy's Retirement and Life after the Teams. SEAL Foundation, Base Jumping. 1:40:13 - Support, Cool Onnit http://www.onnit.com/jocko, Amazon https://www.amazon.com/?&tag=jocko20-20&camp=216797&creative=498533&linkCode=ur1&adid=1DKYGWXQBV0KNEZ3MZZX&, JockoStore http://www.jockostore.com stuff, with Jocko White Tea http://www.jockotea.com and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes) https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/psychological-warfare/id1183222322. Extreme Ownership (book) http://amzn.to/2jonHTx and The Muster002 http://www.extremeownership.com 1:51:59 - 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 64 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:13Jocko Willink?

  In a country that most people would struggle to find on a map, in a compound that few possess the courage to enter,

• 0:24Jocko Willink?

  men from my previous life took the fight to our enemy.

• 0:31Jocko Willink?

  In that compound, they found men that pray five times a day for your destruction.

• 0:41Jocko Willink?

  Those praying men don't know me, they don't know you, and they don't know America.

• 0:49Jocko Willink?

  They don't understand our compassion, our freedoms, and our tolerance.

• 0:58Jocko Willink?

  I know it may seem as if some of those things are currently missing, but they remain at our core and always will.

• 1:09Jocko Willink?

  Our capacity for them is boundless and is only dwarfed by the hatred in those men hiding in that compound, the hatred they have for you.

• 1:24Jocko Willink?

  Those men don't care about your religious beliefs, they don't care about your political opinions, they don't care if you sit on the left or the right, liberal or conservative, pacifist, or warrior.

• 1:40Jocko Willink?

  They don't care how much you believe in diversity, equality, or freedom of speech. They don't care.

• 1:51Jocko Willink?

  I'm sorry you have never smelled the breath of a man who wants to kill you.

• 1:59Jocko Willink?

  I'm sorry you've never felt the alarm bells ringing in your body, the combination of fear and adrenaline as you move towards the fight, instead of running from it.

• 2:13Jocko Willink?

  I'm sorry you've never heard someone cry out for help, or cried out for help yourself, relying on the courage of others to bring you home.

• 2:26Jocko Willink?

  I'm sorry you've never tasted the salt from your own tears as you stand at flag draped coffins burying men you were humbled to call your friends.

• 2:39Jocko Willink?

  I don't wish those experiences on you.

• 2:45Jocko Willink?

  But

• 2:47Jocko Willink?

  I do wish you had them.

• 2:52Jocko Willink?

  If you had them, it would change the way you act.

• 2:57Jocko Willink?

  It would change the way you value, it would change the way you appreciate.

• 3:03Jocko Willink?

  You would become quick to open your eyes and slow to open your mouth.

• 3:11Jocko Willink?

  Most will never understand the sacrifice required to keep evil men like those from that distant compound away from our doorstep.

• 3:21Jocko Willink?

  But it would not hurt you to try and understand.

• 3:25Jocko Willink?

  It would not hurt you to take a moment to respect the sacrifices that others make on your behalf, whether they share your opinions or not.

• 3:37Jocko Willink?

  It would not hurt you to take a moment to think of the relentless drain on family, friends, and loved ones that are left behind. Sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, sometimes for years. Sometimes forever.

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  Ideas are not protected by words. Paper and ink may outline the foundation and principles of this nation, but it is blood, only blood,

• 4:17Jocko Willink?

  that protects it.

• 4:21Jocko Willink?

  In that dusty compound, a man you have never met gave everything he had so that you have the freedom to think, speak, and act however you choose.

• 4:38Jocko Willink?

  He went there for all of us, whether you loved or hated what he stood for.

• 4:47Jocko Willink?

  He went there to preserve the opportunity and privilege to believe, to be, and to become what we want.

• 5:00Jocko Willink?

  This country, every single person living inside of its borders and under the banner of its flag, owe that man.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  We owe that man everything. We owe him the respect that his sacrifice deserves. Saying "thank you" is not enough.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  We send our best and lose them in the fight against the worst evil this world has to offer.

• 5:35Jocko Willink?

  If you want to respect and honor their sacrifice, it needs to be more than words. You have to live it.

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  Take a minute and look around.

• 5:47Jocko Willink?

  Soak it in. All of it. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

• 5:56Jocko Willink?

  You have the choice every day as to which category you want to be in, in which direction you want to move.

• 6:06Jocko Willink?

  You have that choice because the best among us, the best we ever had to offer fought and bled and died for it.

• 6:22Jocko Willink?

  Don't ever forget that.

• 6:33Jocko Willink?

  Now...

• 6:36Jocko Willink?

  Those words were in a piece that was called "A Debt That Cannot Be Repaid",

• 6:47Jocko Willink?

  which was written by a fellow SEAL

• 6:52Jocko Willink?

  and a friend of mine named Andy Stumpf

• 6:57Jocko Willink?

  when he heard that we had lost another Frogman, Chief Ryan Owens, during a daring raid on an Al Qaeda compound in Yemen.

• 7:15Jocko Willink?

  And it was a very fitting tribute.

• 7:22Jocko Willink?

  Another fitting tribute.

• 7:26Jocko Willink?

  Yet another fitting tribute to yet another great warrior who sacrificed everything

• 7:38Jocko Willink?

  for us.

• 7:41Jocko Willink?

  One of the hardest truths is, is that I know, we know,

• 7:51Jocko Willink?

  that this will not be the last great warrior to fall.

• 8:01Jocko Willink?

  And those warriors still on the line close ranks to fill the void left by the fallen.

• 8:12Jocko Willink?

  And they continue to march forward

• 8:17Jocko Willink?

  into the dark and into the dust, looking for and hunting for evil.

• 8:29Jocko Willink?

  And those warriors,

• 8:32Jocko Willink?

  regardless of what they come up against,

• 8:38Jocko Willink?

  they will not stop.

• 8:49Jocko Willink?

  And this evening,

• 8:53Jocko Willink?

  while that hunt continues and while evil lurks out there in the world,

• 9:00Jocko Willink?

  I am lucky enough to have one of the good guys here with me. The man that wrote those powerful words and that powerful tribute. As I said, a friend and a former SEAL teammate of mine, Andy Stumpf. Andy Stumpf, welcome to the show, brother.

• 9:20Andy Stumpf?

  Thanks for having me, man.

• 9:22Jocko Willink?

  There was, um, that was a, that was incredible piece, man, really was. And, uh, thank you for writing it. I think, uh, it got around and I hope more people get to hear it now and, and spread it and share it about that, you know, another, another brave warrior down.

• 9:41Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, it, uh,

• 9:44Andy Stumpf?

  like we were going back and forth over texts, I think, took off like wildfire. I, I was eating breakfast with my sons and had received the news from a buddy before it had broken on mainstream media. And it was just one of those moments where I couldn't get the thoughts out of my head. So I cracked open my laptop, literally took one stab at that, one pass, and just hit the post button and walked away, came back four or five hours later, and my phone was just exploding. And, uh, yeah, I mean, it, it was cathartic for me to write it. And I do hope that more people can understand the message and take just two seconds out of their day to realize what's happening all around them, all around the world at any given time.

• 10:29Jocko Willink?

  Any given time, it's happening.

• 10:30Andy Stumpf?

  Yep.

• 10:31Jocko Willink?

  The sacrifices are there. And it's, you know, speaking of social media, it's been a lot of people been requesting, they've been asking, do you know Andy Stumpf? And Andy Stumpf, do you know Jocko? So yes, we do know each other, that is confirmed. And they've been asking you to come on the podcast. So thanks for coming on, man. I know, I know, we haven't really seen a bunch of each other in the last few years.

• 10:52Andy Stumpf?

  I think it's been like five years.

• 10:54Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's ridiculous.

• 10:55Andy Stumpf?

  And for all those people who've been asking, you can stop now. The answer is yes, I know Jocko. We've known each other for a while and here we are, so stop.

• 11:02Jocko Willink?

  We're good to go. Yeah, but I really appreciate you coming on. So um, let's get into it, man. Let's talk about, let's talk about, you know, give us your basic background, you know? Tell us about growing up in Santa Cruz. What's up, Santa Cruz?

• 11:16Andy Stumpf?

  Man, what a great place to grow up. I mean, Santa Cruz is amazing with an asterisk. And that asterisk is whether or not at some point in time in your life, you leave Santa Cruz. Because it's a bubble, but for me, it was awesome. I have family roots there from not only my father, but my grandfather. They had one of the first construction companies there. Built the high school that my father attended. Uh, built a lot of the infrastructure, uh, and also had a lot of ties to like law enforcement and firefighters, which would help me out when I would get rides home, when I would get in trouble. Uh, you know, advantages that other people didn't have. But I mean, I consider my, I mean, my background is very, uh, generic. I mean, I played water polo and baseball in high school.

• 11:59Andy Stumpf?

  I'd give myself a C as far as being an athlete, like very average junior lifeguard, so comfortable uh, in and around the ocean, which was a skill that obviously paid off, uh, in training.

• 12:09Jocko Willink?

  You didn't surf it. Did you surf in Santa Cruz?

• 12:11Andy Stumpf?

  I did surf quite a bit and I'm sure you've surfed up there. As you know, it's extremely territorial. Uh,

• 12:16Jocko Willink?

  It's good waves.

• 12:17Andy Stumpf?

  It's good waves, but like when you're 150 pounds, you know, and you're 17, 18 years old, I just really wasn't into, uh, you know, fighting for waves.

• 12:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 12:25Andy Stumpf?

  So I'd surf a little bit, a little longboard stuff down by Cowls, maybe steamers if it wasn't huge. And it just played sports.

• 12:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 12:32Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah. I mean, it was super casual. Worked for my dad's construction company.

• 12:35Jocko Willink?

  Santa Cruz has a dichotomy too in it, in the fact that especially when you were growing up, there was mad, like, okay, there's that basically, I don't know if you want to call it the haves or the have nots, but we're not talking about money. We're talking about like massive drug use, right?

• 12:47Andy Stumpf?

  Still exists to this day. Yeah. Uh, and it's, it's, it's like an undercurrent that not a lot of people know about Santa Cruz. Most of the people who live in Santa Cruz don't work there. The money all comes from the Silicon Valley. They go over the highway 17. I mean, the, the median cost of homes in Santa Cruz, I think is near $800,000, which is crazy. Cause the city was kind of built around UC Santa Cruz. I mean, it's a college. I mean, who's going to afford that stuff? But in the surfing scene, I mean, that's where a lot of the drug, from my understanding, that's where a lot of the drug stuff started. And then it just pushed itself out. It still exists. It's really bad.

• 13:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it can be, it can be a, it's, you, you'd think Santa Cruz is nice beach town, but it can be a rough town. I mean,

• 13:24Andy Stumpf?

  You make a wrong turn, you're going to be in trouble. But I mean, the same can be true here in San Diego or anywhere you may want to go.

• 13:29Jocko Willink?

  So when did you hear about, when did you hear about the teams? And decide you're gonna get it on?

• 13:34Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, you know, uh, so I come from a military family. My grandfather was in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. He was a twin 50 cal gunner on the Mark I's in Vietnam. The first squadron of patrol boats with the Jacuzzi jets, which he said had a failure rate of about 90%.

• 13:51Jocko Willink?

  That had to be fun.

• 13:51Andy Stumpf?

  And of course, they didn't fail at the time that you'd want them to.

• 13:54Jocko Willink?

  Like pulling away from the dock while you're...

• 13:56Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, no, just in the middle of a firefight, you know, a complex ambush that you're trying to get out of. Uh, so you can, I mean, I don't think, I actually had no for a fact. My father...

• 14:05Jocko Willink?

  Did your dad work with SEALs?

• 14:07Andy Stumpf?

  That's, yeah, that's what I was getting to. That's how I heard about it. Um, my father probably didn't want me to join the military. I mean, I, I don't want my sons necessarily to, however, I would never stand in their way. Just like my father allowed me to pursue what I wanted to do. But I started working for him when I was 11 and learned some of the best lessons of my life with bricks in my hands. Cause he was a mason and I basically moved bricks for a long time. Uh, but it was hard work and it paid off later in life. And I remember we were driving back from a job when I was 11. And he mentioned SEALs and with no understanding of what they are, just his description of what they did, how they, he was, it was like, you know, they were in the water. They would get them onto the boats, they'd drop them off.

• 14:52Andy Stumpf?

  It was intriguing to me. So it led me to trying to search for as much information as I could find out about them. And in the early nineties, the Intranet was not what it was today. So of course I found the book that almost every team guy has read, The Men With Green Faces. All about Vietnam, but it's an awesome book. So I read that and then unfortunately stumbled across the Rogue Warrior series, which as I was saying before we started, I made the mistake of thinking that it was a nonfiction work.

• 15:23Andy Stumpf?

  And find out until a little bit later that that was incorrect, but I was hooked. From that moment on, it was every piece of information that I could find. It's all I wanted to do. It was like a magnetizing force. I don't have the vocabulary to describe it. People who don't come from our worlds, it's very uncommon for them to hear that, but you know as well as I do. The SEAL Teams is, is full of people with the same narrative. Oh yeah, I've just always wanted to do this. It was a calling. But yeah, I mean, the idea was sparked from my dad and I was 17, still in high school, a junior in high school. And I went to the Navy recruiter and brought the Navy recruiter home because my parents had to sign for me. And I had my mom, who was an Army brat, and my dad, who was, like I said, served in Vietnam.

• 16:05Andy Stumpf?

  And I'm sure that they were not extremely excited, but they both signed for me. So I enlisted actually when I was a junior in high school and then left just a few days after high school graduation. That's so legit. Yeah, it was awesome. And I look back now, I'm like, why did I do that? Why did I enlist a year early? All I did was give a recruiter, I filled their quota for the month. I couldn't leave. It's like, yeah, I still gotta wait till I turn 18 and graduate. But I mean, the recruiter was happy. But I mean, I, I never took the SATs. I had no plan B. It's what I knew I wanted to do and I, I never even considered anything else. I enlisted August 1st of 96.

• 16:44Andy Stumpf?

  Awesome. And so then you showed up at Bud's? Showed up for Bud's, January of 97, get some winter. Were you still, were you still 17? I was 18. Yeah, I got some, uh, got some winter class action on.

• 16:58Andy Stumpf?

  Well, you're from Santa Cruz, so it was not that big of a deal. Yeah, I never really laid in the ocean for extended periods of time without a wet suit.

• 17:06Andy Stumpf?

  But you know what? Even the training was everything that I thought it was gonna be. I mean, I was happy to be there. And it hurt every single day and it was extremely hard.

• 17:16Andy Stumpf?

  But God, I'd pay money. I'd give you every penny I have right now to go back. If I could turn back the clock right now, I would make exactly the same choices up until that point in my life. Maybe they would change a little bit later on, but until that point, we're still going down the same road.

• 17:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just I had somebody ask me that the other day, some kid, I was talking to some school kids and one of them said, you know, what can I do to get ready for SEAL training? I was like, man, SEAL training is awesome. You get paid, you work out, you literally work out all day long. They feed you three, if not four meals a day of all you can eat, just get after it. It's, it's awesome, man. It's so fun.

• 17:50Andy Stumpf?

  With aggressive A-type motivated largely personalities surrounding you, it gets better as obviously the days and weeks go on in training. Some of the people who shouldn't be there weeded out, but and then even the teams, it's like it's, it, it can be everything that you want it to be.

• 18:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you show up, so you get done, you show up at the teams, you're a new guy. How's that new guy experience?

• 18:11Andy Stumpf?

  Man, well, I don't know the statute of limitations on some of the things that were done to me, but uh, I mean, again, but it was, it was awesome. I was surrounded by my heroes. I didn't know anything about anything. Uh, I didn't realize that at the time, uh, but

• 18:27Jocko Willink?

  Cause in your head, cause, cause in our heads, we know everything about everything.

• 18:31Andy Stumpf?

  I had been to BUDs and airborne school at Fort Benning. I am the most highly polished soldier in the world.

• 18:38Jocko Willink?

  And you just FYI, for those people that don't understand, when you get done with BUDs and airborne school, you know, you know, nothing, you, you know, nothing, you know, nothing tactical, you know, nothing. And it's pretty ridiculous that, that it's got the prestige.

• 18:53Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, people call BUDs a school and I, it's again, you gotta air quote that, cause you don't, you don't know how to be, that's another one I get all the time. You don't, you're not a SEAL at the end of BUDs. I always tell people it stands for basic underwater demolition SEAL with the emphasis on the B. It's basic. You can run and do pull ups and you look great with shorts on at the beach. I mean, but you don't know anything. Yeah. So, I mean, I checked in, uh, you know, pre nine 11.

• 19:18Jocko Willink?

  Although they are better now. I just, I have to say that they're, they're, they're way better now. I was talking to some guys that, um, recent graduates that are now in the pipeline, they're getting trained and I told them, I said, you guys are getting trained infinitely better than what we got infinitely better. Now, it has to do with the timeframe that you and I came in, the nineties, there was no, there was few. Very few Vietnam veterans left. You'd milk what you could out of them, but you weren't going to get like now every single guy that's teaching every single Bud's instructor are all combat veterans that have experience. So it's it's a different game now. They've

• 19:49Andy Stumpf?

  And I think we were taught infinitely better than the people before us. I'm glad to see that that cycle repeats itself. I mean, it's a matter of technology and understanding and I mean, they've changed the pipeline a little bit, especially what happens after Bud's. Cause I went to team five and we did our own Trident board, you know, and we did our own trading. And then you could talk to the guys like down at team three, they're like, oh yeah, we didn't do any of that.

• 20:14Andy Stumpf?

  Well, that just means I'm better than you, obviously. No, but yeah, there's no competitive nature of the teams at all. But I mean, it was, I mean, I looked at these guys who had been in SEALs for like five, six, seven, eight years, or there was like a Vietnam vet walking around like you're just, I just wanted to breathe the same air as those people. And I mean, it's a, you realize incredibly fast that you don't know anything. And you realize that because you get taped up for your mistakes.

• 20:42Andy Stumpf?

  Cause you're you're reinforced every time that you make a mistake and he's just like, I couldn't do anything right for like years because I didn't know anything. The biggest, if we had been fighting an enemy, I would have been more of a danger to the people that I was with than the enemy that we were fighting. It just, I mean, I tell people it takes five to seven years to even understand what it really means to be a SEAL. And then probably at the 10 year mark, you're at the top of the bell curve as far as what you're going to be able to do operationally. But still, I mean, I was in heaven. I was in my, I was, I wasn't even 21 yet, living in an apartment in Coronado, riding a bike to work.

• 21:16Jocko Willink?

  Richest guy in the world.

• 21:19Andy Stumpf?

  Well, until I got paid. Yeah. And then I would be the poorest guy two days after that.

• 21:24Jocko Willink?

  It's, it is like for most guys that come in out of high school, because when you're in high school, you know, even if you're working at Wendy's. Like I did.

• 21:31Andy Stumpf?

  Hell, yeah.

• 21:32Jocko Willink?

  You're only making whatever, four twenty-five an hour and that amounts to, you know, whatever. You know, you're getting like eighty bucks every two weeks. You you show up in the teams and all of a sudden they're giving you real legit money. You they're filling your pocket up every two weeks. You are the richest.

• 21:47Andy Stumpf?

  You are.

• 21:48Jocko Willink?

  Kid in the world.

• 21:50Andy Stumpf?

  Not if you're a new guy, because you're paying for everything.

• 21:52Jocko Willink?

  You buy a lot of other stuff. You buy you buy some beers. You buy some beers.

• 21:56Andy Stumpf?

  Learned a lot of stuff in bars over beers.

• 21:59Jocko Willink?

  Indeed.

• 21:59Andy Stumpf?

  Learned a lot of, I mean, you listen to a lot of history. Uh, you learn a lot about yourself. You learn when you should keep your mouth shut because it gets shut for you. I've been taped up in a bar, maybe. It's.

• 22:11Jocko Willink?

  The, uh, the, uh, the hazing was pretty good in teams back then.

• 22:16Andy Stumpf?

  Yes. Reinforcement, lesson reinforcement.

• 22:18Jocko Willink?

  So you need a couple deployments, a couple deployments.

• 22:21Andy Stumpf?

  Two pre nine eleven deployments. Uh, and, you know, again, the life as a new guy is amazing. Like, here's a rifle. It's yours. And then my first, uh, department I worked in, I was a secondary comm guy. So I think I had like a PRC seventy-seven.

• 22:37Andy Stumpf?

  Like rotary, you know, rotary dials and whip antenna. I hadn't even been to comm school, but it's like, this is my stuff. And I got, remember going, getting issued my first set of gear that I look back at now and it's like, I couldn't sell it if I wanted to. So antiquated, but I was so happy to be where I was. And we, you know, we trained for eighteen months and we deployed for six, but my first deployment was to Japan, to the Kadina Air Force Base. And we experimented with how much we could drink and how much we could work out, like which ratio is best? Eighty, twenty, seventy, thirty?

• 23:11Andy Stumpf?

  And we'd go train our partner forces, but I mean, we just, I mean, we lived life hard. It was exactly the brotherhood that I thought it would be. I was surrounded by my best friends. We all had the same drive. You could have told us to go build sand castles. We would have had the best sand castles in the world because we just go and go and go and go until we get it right. Surrounded by like-minded, motivated people. Come back, did another eighteen month workup as like a. Kind of new guy, one platoon wonder, if you will.

• 23:40Jocko Willink?

  Wonder.

• 23:41Andy Stumpf?

  If you will. Again, you know about 20%, but you think you know about 80. The ratio is just a skew.

• 23:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Andy Stumpf?

  Uh, went through the whole workup again and then, uh, deployed to Guam for six months. And at the same time, we'd go to Australia for a bit. We'd train with the, the partner forces there. We'd go to the Thailand's, we'd go to Philippines. And then we'd go back and we'd just train and talk about how awesome we were going to be when the big mish. Remember the golden conax box?

• 24:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Andy Stumpf?

  Big mish and the golden conax.

• 24:07Jocko Willink?

  Leif and I have talked about that on here is, you know, back in the day, pre, especially pre nine 11. We were all preparing for the one big mission that was going to go down, the big mish.

• 24:18Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 24:18Jocko Willink?

  And you know how, and what was interesting is because we didn't have any combat experience, at least from my perspective, we trained freaking hard because we thought like it was going to be even harder than anything we could imagine. We don't know how hard it's going to be. So we're just going to be like, it's not sandcastles.

• 24:35Andy Stumpf?

  Yep.

• 24:35Jocko Willink?

  Cause we would have prepared for that hard too, but it's real. This is what we're prepared for. So we trained as hard as we possibly could.

• 24:41Andy Stumpf?

  In every arena.

• 24:42Jocko Willink?

  In every arena to be ready for whatever was going to come, which we had no idea. I don't know if I've talked about this before, but we finally got my first, my first deployment, deployed to Guam.

• 24:53Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Jocko Willink?

  And I'm ready for the big mish, bro.

• 24:55Andy Stumpf?

  Totally.

• 24:55Jocko Willink?

  I'm, I'm ready.

• 24:56Andy Stumpf?

  It's going down from Guam.

• 24:57Jocko Willink?

  There. We get there and we have, you know, we get issued beepers. So you know it's real now because you're getting issued beepers because this back in the day, no one had beepers back then unless you, unless some shit was going to go down. So they give us the beepers and we're like ready to rock and roll. And finally, actually I was surfing. And I come in and someone's waving, one of my buddies waving him to the beach like, hey, I run up, what's going on? Hey, we got a page. So we get the page, we get the page. We know, we get the nine one one page.

• 25:27Andy Stumpf?

  Oh dang.

• 25:28Jocko Willink?

  Bro, get, but we, you know, get, haul ass to base. We get there, we get in, the LPO is sitting there. I, I look at his face and I go, this doesn't, this doesn't look like the kind of face I anticipated seeing right now. And I've been in Guam. This is my first deployment. I'm two days into Guam. So I, I think, man, this is exactly like you, you're saying.

• 25:47Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, the blue one.

• 25:48Jocko Willink?

  What's it going to be like? Of course, man. I just got on deployment. It's going down. So no kidding.

• 25:53Andy Stumpf?

  The president knows that I'm on deployment. He's ready.

• 25:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 25:56Andy Stumpf?

  We're gonna action that target.

• 25:57Jocko Willink?

  So what I failed to mention was that we were like our second or third day in Guam, the first day in Guam that we were there, we went and sighted in our weapons. So we got a recall, emergency recall, 911, go back into base. Guess what we didn't do? We didn't clean up our brass. So I'm not kidding. We went and cleaned up our brass. They, they made it. They recalled us, emergency recall to go clean up our brass on the range.

• 26:19Jocko Willink?

  After that, the, the beers got cracked open and it went sideways real quick for the rest of that deployment, but.

• 26:26Andy Stumpf?

  Isn't it amazing what used to constitute an emergency?

• 26:32Jocko Willink?

  That was, uh, that was a rough one.

• 26:33Andy Stumpf?

  Oh, man.

• 26:35Jocko Willink?

  So you end up, so those are your couple, uh, pre nine 11. Where were you when September 11th happened?

• 26:42Andy Stumpf?

  Uh, I was stationed at, uh, team five still, and I was living in the Archstone Apartments right by Ikea in Mission Valley. Watched the second one go in live.

• 26:51Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 26:52Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, I remember it, uh, was living with a buddy and, uh, my wife, we'd been married for

• 26:59Andy Stumpf?

  six months and watched the second one go in live.

• 27:02Jocko Willink?

  And then you knew immediately. Did you know, did you think, were you thinking on the first one? Cause I wasn't, the first one, I was like dang.

• 27:07Andy Stumpf?

  I didn't see the first one going live. I turned it on just in time to see the second one. I, but I think it caught most people like the first one. They're like, oh, wow, that pilot's probably in trouble. It's gonna be a lawsuit on that one. And then the second one, there was no doubt whatsoever. And I didn't know, I mean, looking back, I didn't have the mental capacity to understand the difference that it would have in my life, but I knew that something was gonna be different. I mean, I think I realized that we were passing from the conceptual phase to the practical phase of what we had trained to do for a really long period of time.

• 27:38Jocko Willink?

  You know who didn't know that? So the D, the officer D, so I was going to college at the time and I called the officer detailer who was a friend of mine who I knew who I'd worked for, who is an outstanding guy. And I called him up and I was like, hey, sir, I'm in college. Get me out of college. I'll finish online. I'll do something. Just get me out of here. Send me to a team immediately, please.

• 27:57Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 27:57Jocko Willink?

  Please. And he, and he says to me, Jocko, don't worry. This war is gonna last a long, long time. And of course, I didn't believe him.

• 28:06Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 28:06Jocko Willink?

  But damn, was he right.

• 28:07Andy Stumpf?

  He was, but I mean, I can only imagine being in your shoes. I would have been like, I don't really care. This is what my calling in life is to be. I don't, I don't care if I'm in line to get the Nobel Prize for something like, we'll just put that on the shelf and I'll come back and get it.

• 28:20Jocko Willink?

  Nobel what?

• 28:21Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Jocko Willink?

  There's a war going on.

• 28:22Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 28:23Jocko Willink?

  And so you get done with that and then shortly thereafter, you ship out to the East Coast, right?

• 28:29Andy Stumpf?

  Yep. Go out to the East Coast and did the vast majority of my combat deployments out there.

• 28:37Andy Stumpf?

  And wow, I mean, what an eye opening experience, you know, it from, like I said, going from conceptual, shooting at paper targets and, and training hard and realistic to, to being on a two-way range for the first time. I mean, uh, the, the first target I ever was on, uh, I think my helicopter had 27 rounds in it and the dork gunner got shot in the face right in front of me. And I'm in MOP level four.

• 29:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. For those of you that don't know that, what that is, that's the, that's the chemical, biological and radi- radiological suit protection that you wear.

• 29:14Andy Stumpf?

  And highest level.

• 29:15Jocko Willink?

  Level four is you're wearing your mask. You're wearing everything. So it's, it's a horrible, uncomfortable, miserable thing to do and.

• 29:25Andy Stumpf?

  We had a four hour 47 flight on the way to the objective and 30 minutes out, we got all of our stuff on to include our gas masks and the blowers.

• 29:34Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, if you had the blowers, that does make it a lot nicer.

• 29:36Andy Stumpf?

  Well, unless you put your weapon strap over the hose.

• 29:43Andy Stumpf?

  I could go on for days about mistakes I've made in my life. Uh, so yeah, I would skip breathing and occasionally the glass would touch my eyeball. I couldn't breathe, but I mean, this is my first real target ever and it's, uh, we're hitting the number one chem bio target in Iraq. Uh, right after the war kicked off and I was on the third 47 that came in and they blew the power grid. But an A-10 strike before we landed and then they landed the helicopters in between the fireball and the city. So we were backlit. So each subsequent helicopter that came in took more rounds. And by the time ours came in, it started taking rounds at about a minute out. I didn't even know what they were. I'm just sitting there looking through straws,

• 30:25Andy Stumpf?

  you know, through my gas mask, through my night vision goggles, suffocating myself because my weapon strap is over the hose that's supposed to be giving me the air. And, you know, there were some sparks. Nobody, nobody heard on the bird. Not a single one of our guys shot. And then right before we touched down, the door gunner just falls over. And then, you know, the top of his head kind of came off and tied my, you know, tied my jacket around his head and it just took off. And away we went on our first combat operation. But the whole thing was just surreal. And that, that leap, I didn't realize how surreal it was till the next morning when I woke up and I was like, man, I hope this is survivable.

• 31:05Andy Stumpf?

  Because that was just one of many in the target deck. And it continued for months and then years and, you know, two decades now.

• 31:15Jocko Willink?

  Decades.

• 31:15Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah. And it was, and it took me a little bit of time to get up and running to be, to be comfortable in that environment. But I, I developed a level of comfort in that environment. And if I'm being totally honest, I mean, I loved it. I loved it. It was, I mean, I, I understand that it's high consequence and that it's high risk and that there's, there's matters of life and death and decisions that are being made. But that's where I want to be. I mean, it that I was like, yes, this is what I came to do, to fight for the values that I believe in and to fight for people who can't fight for themselves. And, uh, it was awesome. Loved it.

• 31:55Jocko Willink?

  It's interesting how you talk about that, um, transition from like, from training, which is what we all lived. There's very few people that, this is another thing that it's hard for people to understand about, especially about the early days of the SEAL, well, for us, the early days of the SEAL teams is there was so few people that actually had combat experience. And that went all the way up to the leadership. A lot of leadership had no combat experience. And so for us, all of a sudden, in a very quick learning curve. You know, you spend two weeks on deployment, you had more combat experience than, you know, than anybody else in the SEAL teams at that time, you know, other than the guys that were deployed right before you, but you had, that's how quick the learning curve was.

• 32:34Andy Stumpf?

  And things were changing. I mean, look at what we trained. I mean, we were doing OTB and exhaustion dragger dives and I'm doing river and stream crossing and island.

• 32:42Jocko Willink?

  Bro, I'm not kidding. Before my first deployment to Iraq, I took my SEAL platoon, we went onboard of an amphibious landing ship in San Diego and went and no kidding, did lead line and slate beach reconnaissance at Camp Pendleton. That was, that was less than, it might've been a month and a half before deploying to Iraq to do operations. That's how, that's, that's, that's the lag time in the big bureaucratic machine in the military. Hey, you know, we got this big fleet exercise, you guys can go participate in. One of, one of our, one of my guys in that platoon, I come down and go, hey, break out your lead line and slate. So again, for those of you that don't know, there's the, a very prehistoric type operation that was.

• 33:27Andy Stumpf?

  Excellent descriptor.

• 33:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's, it came from World War II. It came after the Battle of Tarawa. At the Battle of Tarawa, the Marines went in and as they went into the beaches in their landing craft, they hit reef and the, they opened the gates of the, of the landing craft. The Marines got out and unfortunately the reef ended. And so these guys, these Marines went out and they went into, you know, 10, 12, 15 feet of water instead of two feet of water and many, many Marines were drowned.

• 33:55Andy Stumpf?

  Heavy gear. It was not buoyant. It was not designed for swimming.

• 33:59Jocko Willink?

  It was, it was meant for beach landing, not for a swim. And anyways, that was kind of the, one of the precursors to the UDTs and, and what, so what our, our predecessors used to do was go in with a lead line, which is a piece of string with a lead on the bottom of it. And it's got little, uh, marks on it called bunting, little marks on it that tell you how deep it is. And you go in as a big team and you drop these lead lines and you figure out how deep and you, and your slate is a piece of plexiglass that's been sanded down and you write with a pencil on it, how deep it was in this particular location.

• 34:30Andy Stumpf?

  It's like trying to do calculus with an abacus, basically.

• 34:35Jocko Willink?

  So we are, you know, like less than two months from deploying to Iraq for the first time. None of us had ever been in combat. Not one single person, zero, not one single person in my platoon had ever been in combat before, including our task unit commander, no one. And so we say, oh, you know what we need to do right now is we're going to do a hydrographic reconnaissance. That's what it's called with lead line and slate. But one of the guys might be, what are you doing? What are you talking about? And I go, bro, we're just gonna do it. And it was like, you've gotta be kidding me. What is wrong with us? But so that learning curve was fast. But then, but I also to kind of emphasize what you're saying. And I look at it, when you said, you know, your first like platoon, you know, like 20% and then your second platoon, you know, for me, because

• 35:20Jocko Willink?

  I have four kids, it's very similar to what you learn with kids.

• 35:23Andy Stumpf?

  Yes.

• 35:23Jocko Willink?

  Your first kid, you're like, oh, wait, what? You don't know how to do anything. Everything is hard. You don't, you're worried about everything. Your second kid, you're like, I'm pretty, pretty much good. Your third kid, you're like, okay, you know, I think we're comfortable. Your fourth kid, you're like, I got this, whatever.

• 35:36Andy Stumpf?

  Fourth kid, you're like, hey, first kid, go take care of your sibling.

• 35:38Jocko Willink?

  Exactly. Which is, which is really, which is really exactly what you do in the teams. You're like, hey, you know, you know, one cruise wonder, go show that new guy what's up because you don't have to do it anymore. And you want them to learn the experience. But that's the same thing with the combat operations that you do. And over, you know, a period of a couple of weeks, all of a sudden you go from being, you know, I'll give you another good example. From my perspective, my first deployment to Iraq, when every operation we would go on, like the first, like, let's call it five or seven operations that I did, every piece of gear that I had to change the batteries, change the battery of my nods, change the battery of my lasers, change the battery of my flashlight, changed every single bit. I need a brand new battery in every one of these pieces of gear. Well, I was doing it because that's, that's when we talked about the big miss. That's what we would

• 36:22Jocko Willink?

  think, you know what, I gotta have this 100%. We realized after a week, if everyone does that, we're not going to have any batteries left in another two weeks. And so we all realized, you know what, you're going to have to wear, use that battery and keep track of how long you're using it for, because you don't want it to fail. But you're going to get, you know, 12 or 15 or 25 uses out of this thing. But that's the kind of lessons that we learned. And that's the kind of comfort level you got. Like, okay, if my nods fail. I'll stop, I'll put a new battery in my nods and we'll move on. So those are the kind of things that you learn in that steep learning curve that all of us, our whole generation went through that real quick.

• 36:55Andy Stumpf?

  And you only learn that with time in the saddle. Like it takes experience to understand like, okay, I can use this lithium battery that probably costs nine dollars. And I didn't turn it on the whole time and I'm gonna huck it, you know? I think I can use it again. I mean, but I mean, everything changed. The tactics changed, the gear changed, the way we trained changed. It was amazing what happened post nine 11. All the stuff we thought was gonna be crazy effective because it worked in Vietnam. Guess what? Doesn't work in the desert.

• 37:24Jocko Willink?

  Let me ask you this. When you say that you only learn it in the saddle. When you were, when you went through training, when I was, when I was running training. You were able to convey a lot of that information to those guys, though.

• 37:38Andy Stumpf?

  I tried.

• 37:39Jocko Willink?

  I think, I think you were. And maybe you couldn't give them every single little tiny thing.

• 37:42Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 37:42Jocko Willink?

  But what I'm saying is, there was no one to teach us that stuff.

• 37:46Andy Stumpf?

  Yes.

• 37:47Jocko Willink?

  In, for me, it was in 2003. There was no one to say, hey, you don't need to change your battery on every operation. You're gonna need those batteries, you need to make them last. So we did get, we did get some fundamental knowledge back from.

• 38:01Andy Stumpf?

  For sure.

• 38:02Jocko Willink?

  From those early times.

• 38:03Andy Stumpf?

  And then you still gotta add that experience, though. The people, I mean, like you could, you could read a book. And then go do it for real. And you need the combination of the two to have that confidence. And then you can impart it on somebody else. And, you know, history, just like, like you said, the Vietnam guys, like, they were just timed out. We didn't have access to that. And I look at the pre nine 11 training that we did.

• 38:26Andy Stumpf?

  It was awesome. But don't get me wrong, I loved it. But man, it doesn't work in Baghdad.

• 38:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Andy Stumpf?

  You know, and then we had a tactical shift again in probably 2006, 2007, you know, it's just, it's. That, I think, is what separates our community from a lot of other ones. Like, we're malleable. Like, we have leadership that's like, listen, this isn't working in real time. We need to create a solution for it right now. And we're willing to do that. We have just a little bit more. Control of the wheel.

• 38:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, part of the reason is because we had no doctrine.

• 38:54Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Jocko Willink?

  Whereas the other service branches, many of them have this beautiful, really well-written doctrine on this is how you do this type of operation. And we didn't have that. So guess what? For us to say, you know what? That didn't work yesterday. We're going to change it today. They didn't have that capability. They were like, hey, this is the way we do it.

• 39:11Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Jocko Willink?

  And we never really had this is the way we do it.

• 39:14Andy Stumpf?

  I mean, think about before trade at, I was at team five, right? So we would go to Alaska and do cold weather training and the team three guys were off driving DPVs. I mean, there wasn't even talking in between the team. So there was so much skill set and of course, I mean, if you were a team through, I wasn't telling you shit. Yeah, I'd give you the wrong information because we're competing with ourselves. But yeah, that like you said, no doctrine. And then finally we had, you know, the trade at, you know, east coast and west coast and, you know, sharing information and coming together and lessons learned and all that stuff that I think largely professionalized the force from a paperwork perspective, but has impact on the battlefield as well, too. It's not sexy and it's not fun, but it keeps people alive.

• 39:54Jocko Willink?

  No, there's no doubt about that. The amount of interoperability we would do as the different training departments was, was awesome. It was awesome. And bouncing lessons learned and the feedback loop with that we got going was definitely far superior to anything than, like you said, when we had the teams going all different areas and not talking to each other.

• 40:11Andy Stumpf?

  I mean, I got issued over whites at team five. They wouldn't issue us tan BDUs because we were a Southwest Asia platoon. And I'd look at the guys wearing the chocolate chips. My God, I want to get a pair of those. I'll trade you for these woodland cameras.

• 40:27Andy Stumpf?

  It's just a different world, but I'm actually extremely grateful that I got to see both sides of the coin because if you never got to see that evolution, you're missing a huge piece of who we are as a community.

• 40:40Jocko Willink?

  And also I believe it would be easier that you would, that we could let it slip back in that direction. If we don't, like we said, capture those lessons and be able to pass them on. So how many, then you got out to the east coast, how many deployments did you do out there?

• 40:55Andy Stumpf?

  Uh, I bounced back and forth from Iraq to Afghanistan for basically four years straight. It'd be anything between three to.

• 41:05Andy Stumpf?

  Four months. They were shorter in duration. So I ended up, in my career, I've been to Iraq three times and Afghanistan, five.

• 41:14Jocko Willink?

  And at one point there, you kind of got a little setback.

• 41:18Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, I equated to going to Vegas and you can play craps for a really long time and you can be on a great heater and then a seven's gonna come up and bite you and hopefully you don't have a lot of chips on the table. Yeah, I got, I got shot from about 15 feet away by a guy in a window that I didn't see and I was staring at that window for 10 minutes before I, I was sitting on a ladder looking into a courtyard where they were trying to determine which building was the one that we were actually going to make entry on and they determined that the building that I was looking at was the one we were gonna make entry into. Actually, I gotta back it up a little bit. So we walked by this building originally. The lights were off because I was walking point at the time.

• 42:01Andy Stumpf?

  So we went down an alley. You know, we're not always the best ninjas. We made a little bit of noise. So a guy comes out of a house. We pursued him into the house and made additional noise while we were doing that, securing that to make sure that maybe it wasn't the guy. We weren't exactly positive of the location. So maybe that could have been the guy. So it wasn't and we backtracked and went back down that alley. And the guys who were doing the, they were fixing the target, trying to determine which building it was gonna be. They needed some time, so I threw ladder up on a wall because I'm not a huge fan of not being able to see over things, climbed up on the ladder and was just looking at the outside of a building and the lights were on this time, which defeats a lot of the technological advantage that I have. So I was kind of just looking underneath my nods

• 42:45Andy Stumpf?

  and I could see plainly into the window. I never saw a shadow. I never saw a curtain move. I never saw anything. And they finally gave me the go-ahead, hopped off the ladder and I remember being in the corner of the courtyard by myself for a little bit before two other guys came over with me and I almost approached the door on my own because I had before and it was dark and I had the shadows and it was kind of like an American house where there's, it was like an L, the long end of the L being the garage and then there's the path that goes to the front door and then it breaks off and then there's that window right there. That was the window I was looking at. And I was just gonna go to the corner to set security for the breach and I almost left the shadows. It's like, you know what? Not today.

• 43:29Andy Stumpf?

  So I waited for two more guys to come up and right at that corner that I was gonna post myself up on, there was a window and I wasn't gonna turn my back on the window without taking at least a quick peek in it. And as soon as I turned my head to look in that window, I heard a crack and the round hit me high up on the hip and spun me, and then this is the only time I've ever felt it in my life, the true sensation of time slowing down. It really, it was, it was almost like the movies. Probably the only thing I can say was ever like the movies, but it slowed down and spun me towards him. And when it hit, I pushed off a little bit with my right foot, I think just instinctually, kinda kinda pushed me down. And there was a vehicle in the driveway and I ended up stuck underneath the vehicle. I had a shotgun on

• 44:11Andy Stumpf?

  my right hand side and the bungee cord got stuck on the undercarriage. I'm laying on top of my gun, can't get it, staring at full auto fire from like 15 feet away out of a window. Guy's just up on his knees, just hosing. And probably three seconds occurred or expired and, I mean, obviously all hell broke loose from people on our side engaging the window. They made entry from the other side, ended up having, I think it was eight American servicemen get wounded on that target alone. Some of it was, our guys were too close to a breach. I mean, a lot of it was, it was some fog of war stuff from a unit that you wouldn't associate necessarily with the fog of war, but it, you know, it happens.

• 44:56Jocko Willink?

  I, um, I associate the fog of war with all units, unfortunately.

• 45:01Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, but you know, it surprises you at some levels more than others. And it was, you know, they were trying, they wanted to get internal. They want, get the breach on the door, get the breach on the door. So we put a C6 strip charge up, which is a very large explosive charge that runs the length of the door, put it on the hinge side. And when they set it off, there was a unit that had entered on the other side of the building without telling anybody, standing about three feet from it. So there were some people who were shot on the inside. There were some people who were shot on the outside and then there were some people who were hurt from the explosion. So they had little birds coming in grabbing people. I ended up getting thrown in the back of a Bradley. With a guy who jabbed me with a 14 gauge needle and hadn't prepped the bag. So he pulled it back out and I told him at that point, you're done with any medical treatment at this point.

• 45:44Andy Stumpf?

  I'll handle my own stuff from here on out. Really like an army medic, he was just shaking. I'm like, you're good. I'm gonna live, I think. So just take it easy. Take it easy. But, uh, I mean, I didn't do anything differently that night that I hadn't done before hundreds of times. You know, I just, I was on the wrong side of the bullet and it, it, uh, it actually really rocked my confidence. It was, I was young, I was my mid twenties where I wanted to be operating at the level that I wanted to be operating at. And I mean, I couldn't walk for almost a year. I had, uh, hemiplegia, like paralysis of one side of my leg. I had dropped foot for a year.

• 46:21Jocko Willink?

  Is that because it obviously hit nerves then?

• 46:23Andy Stumpf?

  They don't know if it, they, I mean, they don't know. It either hit the sciatic nerve as it went through or the shock wave short circuited it. Either way, the result was the same. It fried it all the way down to, uh, my ankle. So when I was in the back, when I got to the hospital in the green zone, my biggest complaint was that my ankle felt like it was snapped in half. And like, I still have never had a surgery, never broken a bone. Everything is still inside of my pelvis. They just wrapped the wound with Ace Wrap and drug me out of the compound. I mean, that's literally it. And then they went back to business. But I, I thought that I was like, my ankle has got to be destroyed somehow. So they cut my boot off like very gingerly and they're looking at it like your ankle is totally fine.

• 47:06Andy Stumpf?

  But that was by far the worst part of it was the, the neuropathic issues for like a year and a half, almost two years. It felt like I had dipped my leg in gasoline and just lit it on fire 24/7. And so the Navy, I mean, I had like 14, 15 pill bottles. Uh, I mean, I was taking two, three, four Ambien, staying awake. Of course, the only way to up that game is to combine it with Captain Morgan, which I did in a variety of dosages. Uh, so I would sleep, but wake up exhausted. I mean, it was, it was rough. It rocked me as a person and as a, as a SEAL.

• 47:42Andy Stumpf?

  I didn't know if I was gonna ever come back from it.

• 47:44Jocko Willink?

  Where were you stationed at that time? Were you still out on the east coast or did you go to Bud's?

• 47:48Andy Stumpf?

  I was on the east coast. I went to Bud's as a, basically a break to rehab myself.

• 47:56Andy Stumpf?

  I mean, like, so even still today, I can't feel my left leg from the kneecap down. I roll my ankle all the time. I'm just used to, I'm used to it.

• 48:03Jocko Willink?

  You somehow compensate for it the best you can?

• 48:05Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't do any like lateral stuff because if I catch my left foot to the outside, that's the rule that I can't stop is the one at the outside. So, I mean, I still train as hard, if not harder than I used to. I'm just super cautious with what it is that I do. And I tailor it all towards the, the stuff that I do now. But, yeah, you want to talk about, you know, you watch all these movies where, you know, guys are just getting drilled and they're running at it like, I'm gonna be the biggest warrior ever. And like, I was flat on my back. I mean, I was fricking done training. There's nothing I could do, pinned under a car. Needed a buddy of mine to come over and pull me around in the middle of a firefight to get me out of, out of harms way. I mean, I got super lucky. The, the belt I was wearing that night has the second round that the guy shot at me. It burned the belt for like two inches and then the copper jacket is still in the, the belt itself.

• 48:50Andy Stumpf?

  That's how close I got to getting hit even higher up in the hip. Like the pelvis, I, I don't think I would have survived that one if that would have hit me. Cause there's an AK from like three times the distance from me to you right now. It was spicy.

• 49:03Jocko Willink?

  So, so when you, they're just, I mean, I'm not trying to say anything super negative about the care that you got, but they're like, okay, take this pill, take this pill, take this pill, take the, you're in pain, take this pill.

• 49:14Andy Stumpf?

  It was early. So I was, um, I got home about two days after it happened. They flew me, they medevac me to Launchstool. I decided I didn't want to stay there, so I checked myself out and got a Delta ticket and flew into New York. Got picked up by another plane and my wife met me at the stairs of the aircraft in Oceana, the Naval Air Station there with my son in a stroller and she was pregnant with our second child. And about a week after that, my resting heart rate was sitting at like 150. I was sweating profusely in a ton of pain and they take me to the hospital. And I remember talking to like this, I think I was an E5 at the time.

• 50:00Andy Stumpf?

  So I was talking to this little punk E2 corpsman who was checking me in.

• 50:05Andy Stumpf?

  And he's like, you know, what's the nature of injury? I'm like, you know, gunshot wound to the hip. And I kid you not, he's, he's like writing this stuff down. He stops and he looks at me and he goes, self inflicted?

• 50:19Andy Stumpf?

  And my wife's sitting there looking at this. She's just like, what's, what's going on? Like she has very little understanding of the military medical system. I sat in the waiting room while they took people in with the sniffles and the flu for four hours. Before they took me in and my wife finally just started losing her mind on them. And like, you know, they, it was a training hospital as most military hospitals are. They had never seen a gunshot wound because it was relatively early. Uh, in the war, you know, given where we were at that time. And they wanted to come have all the doctors, all the residents come in. They're like, hey, can they come in and check out the wound? Like we'd never seen a gunshot wound. I'm like, sure, if you bring a pint of morphine with you and juice me up first, I don't care what you do. Like, I just couldn't sleep. I was in so much pain.

• 51:05Andy Stumpf?

  The treatment that I got from the military was not awesome.

• 51:11Andy Stumpf?

  It, it was frustrating at the time, but I also.

• 51:13Jocko Willink?

  This is just to make sure this is oh five, right?

• 51:15Andy Stumpf?

  Oh, five, yeah, early oh five. It wasn't awesome. They weren't used to seeing a lot of that stuff. Yeah, I got pills and I got sent home and kind of largely left to my own devices, which was not a smart call at the time.

• 51:28Andy Stumpf?

  I mean, I, in my career, I felt like I was a race car in fifth gear going around turn four. And then somebody dumped the tranny into reverse and there was just pieces everywhere. And I had to kind of put it back together myself and it sucked at the time. My wife still, I mean, she's pissed about it, the, the treatment that I got. But I mean, the military did what they were doing at that time. You know, I don't hold them against it, hold it against them at all. But it sucked for sure.

• 51:55Jocko Willink?

  And I do know we've made vast improvements since then.

• 51:58Andy Stumpf?

  Huge.

• 51:59Jocko Willink?

  You were one of the guys that.

• 52:00Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Jocko Willink?

  The reason why there's been so many improvements because you know, guys were coming back and getting the kind of treatment that they would definitely deserve better.

• 52:07Andy Stumpf?

  You know, one of the worst things about the whole thing was actually the flight out of Balad and a C one forty one full of stretchers of people that were wounded far worse than I was, just the noises that were being made on that flight from Balad to Landstuhl. I was very fortunate. I had a doc who was assigned to me and I was just like, hey, knock me out right. Like, I don't want to hear this anymore. And I had the guy just basically just juice me up until I fell asleep for the whole flight. But what an experience that you'll never forget. Just a tube full of bleeding Americans, you know, on their way back to try to put their lives back together. People missing. I mean, I was right next to

• 52:52Andy Stumpf?

  a guy who was standing in a turret of a Humvee when a suicide bomber clocked himself off and every inch of his body from belt line up was just completely tattered. I mean, another guy who had his legs blown off. I mean, like, I'm sitting there. I'm like, I'm like, okay, I thought I was injured. You guys, you guys are way worse off than I am. It was a very sobering experience.

• 53:14Jocko Willink?

  How did you? So you go, you go kind of pretty far down the road of booze and pills?

• 53:21Andy Stumpf?

  I can give you some good recipes if you're interested. Three blues, a red, two bottles of Captain Morgan.

• 53:28Jocko Willink?

  How did you? Okay, we'll, we'll take it for granted that you went pretty far down that road being that, you know, you've got the, the team guy personality of, okay, I can't do this. So I'm gonna, I can't do this to the extreme. So I'm gonna do something

• 53:39Andy Stumpf?

  I have two speeds. I have go and stop.

• 53:42Jocko Willink?

  How did you figure out? Okay, you know what? What, what was the slap in the face that made you say, you know what? This, this is not where I want to be?

• 53:49Andy Stumpf?

  I was in the car with my wife. So one of the pills that they gave me was Narotin, which is a anti seizure medicine for children, but it has a secondary or tertiary side effect, side effect of neuropathic pain control. It was an attempt to try to get that burning feeling to stop in my leg. And I kept signing waivers for the dosages because they were, we were off the charts. Like, we were making medical history with the dosages that I was on. And another side effect of it is central nervous system suppression. And I remembered going by the gasoline or going by the gasoline, going by the gas station and looking at the sign for the prices of the gasoline. And my wife asked me a very rudimentary mathematical problem and I couldn't, I couldn't figure it out. Uh, and I'm certainly not the

• 54:34Andy Stumpf?

  smartest guy in the world, but like, I should be able to add two plus two and you know, maybe multiply that out a little bit and I, I couldn't do it. And I recognized that in and of myself. Uh, so that night I stopped drinking and basically started weaning myself off of the niratine because you can't stop at cold turkey because if you do, uh, your propensity for seizures goes through the roof. So you had, you gotta graduate yourself out of it. So it took me like six to eight months to get myself off of the niratine, off all the pills. Uh, and I just started working out like a maniac and that's how I got myself. I did, I did it all on my own. They didn't get on any protocol from the Navy, but I remember that moment where I just couldn't answer that question. I was like, okay, time to, time to shift course.

• 55:18Jocko Willink?

  And you know, a lot of people always, a lot of people ask about, um, you know, when you're injured, what they ask me, you're, you're, what are you doing? I always say, hey, I do what I can do. If I got a blown out knee, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna do one leg of squats, the other leg, I'm gonna do pull-ups. Was that your, your attitude? It was like, okay, what can I do?

• 55:33Andy Stumpf?

  You know, that's, that's how I found, uh, CrossFit was through, uh, getting shot. That's what I used to, and again, I could care less. People get very excited about the term CrossFit, functional training, whatever you want to call it. To me, it was really new at that time. Like I was on the bodybuilder routine, you know, chest and tries and back and buys.

• 55:51Jocko Willink?

  The nineties team guy routine, or otherwise known as the Echo routine.

• 55:55Andy Stumpf?

  Or you run on Wednesdays. Uh, but yeah, so like, and I had never done squats before. So I literally held on to a pole and lowered myself down into a squat and I picked myself up and I just, I just changed stuff so I could do it. And, uh, I remember the first night of sleep that I had that was really good. And my wife could probably point to it on a calendar because I came back from the gym. Like I had no responsibilities at work because they, my, my squadron was still deployed. So I mean, I literally was like, hey, come in on Thursdays and we'll give you some e-stem on your leg. That was, that was the therapy. So I went into the gym and I just crushed myself, came home

• 56:34Andy Stumpf?

  like covered in sweat and just passed out, slept good and just continued that routine on. And you know, they were saying it would take me. A couple of years, if ever, to get back on full active duty because they didn't know. I mean, because of nerves, they're like, eh, you reached the end of the medical practice. When you start talking about nerves, I've never had, I mean, the doctors with probably a decade of medical experience is saying to me, I don't know. I'm like, hey, doc, I don't have an MD and I could tell you that I don't know. Could I get a better answer out of you than that? Like, come on, man. But yeah, I mean, I worked myself back. I wasn't done. I didn't want to be done and I worked myself back to a point where I felt confident again that I could deploy and I was still continuing.

• 57:17Andy Stumpf?

  So I left and went to BUDs in 2006 as an instructor. Used that time to rehab myself and then by the time I got to team three, it was about four, four or five years after that injury where I was going through training when you were the OIC to trade at.

• 57:32Jocko Willink?

  And also you became an officer at that point when you were going to BUDs?

• 57:35Andy Stumpf?

  I did, I did. I didn't have a, it's not that I didn't have a choice. It was the best choice that I had at that time. So when I got shot, I was on my LPO tour. And for people who don't understand the military, it is a mandatory go, no go, wicket for advancement. And they counted it as me not successfully completing it. So to advance, so I was in E6 at the time and I was trying to walk the ladder.

• 58:02Jocko Willink?

  I'm sorry for laughing. For those of you that think I'm an evil bastard because I'm laughing, I'm not laughing because I'm laughing at the old, the ridiculousness of the system.

• 58:10Andy Stumpf?

  So if you want to march your way from E1 to E9, you have to hit these mandatory career wickets and the jump between E6 to E7 for the enlisted guys is the large jump from middle management to the C-suite of the enlisted realm. They judge you only by your service record unless you have these mandatory wickets, you're getting swept off the table. And so I submitted my chief package twice with a good, awesome evaluations. I mean, I was doing some, some awesome stuff in my career. I had good awards, good recommendations, good evals from everybody. And two years in a row, they're like, nope. And so finally I started calling people who probably shouldn't have told me the answer. I'm like, hey, what's going on there? They're like, oh, you know, your LPO tour is getting counted against you.

• 58:55Andy Stumpf?

  And I didn't, yeah, and I, and I didn't want to be done with being in the military. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, okay, how, what can I do here? If I want to continue on and I want to have impact? So I decided I needed to maneuver. So I researched officer programs and stumbled across the limited duty officer program, which is traditionally for E7, E8s and E9s. Uh, and there had never been an E6 candidate picked up. And so I threw my package in the next year that it came up. And was actually selected first out of the whole stable of people that were selected that year ahead of like five or six other chiefs, uh, who ended up getting picked up

• 59:37Andy Stumpf?

  for LDO. But for me, it was, I'm looking, I'm like, I want to stay in and I want to have an impact. This is the only way that I can do it. So that's why I submitted my, my officer package. It was never any burning desire of mine from like years before that. It was just that I, I need to do something to keep moving. And that was my, that was my route to do it.

• 59:55Jocko Willink?

  Did you, when you were, so you get wounded, right? And obviously you could have said at that point, hey, you know what? I'm done, you know? When you look at the various reasons that a person could choose from why you said like, you know what? I'm not done. Cause friends that, you know, other guys that we both know that I've talked to, they have, you know, various reasons. Some of them are straight up vengeance. Like, oh, I'm going to go back and I'm going to get after it. These people are going to pay. Some of it, hey, for myself, you know, kind of like what you were saying, like I, I feel like I, I, I can't do what I am supposed to do. So I want to prove that I can go back and do it. What, what was like the driving reason for you? If you had, if you had to pick one, maybe it's just all those things, which is a perfectly

• 1:00:40Jocko Willink?

  acceptable answer to.

• 1:00:41Andy Stumpf?

  I mean, vengeance is certainly a part of it, right? Like, how dare you? I'm the only one who gets to do that to people. Uh, you know, yeah, what a crazy, uh, crazy thing to think like that. But you kind of do like, you think you're invincible, right? So. I needed to prove to myself that I could still do the job that I wanted to do. I was pissed about it and I was at a point in my life where I was still very tied to what the job meant. I derived so much of my personality and who I was from that job because it was all that I had focused on for the vast majority of my life at that point that I didn't, I didn't know who I would be without that.

• 1:01:24Andy Stumpf?

  So it was a combination of all of those things that just kinda kept driving me towards going back and there was, I mean, there was never a second's hesitation. I like, I knew I was gonna not stop. I just didn't know that the road, the road which I was gonna take to not stop.

• 1:01:41Jocko Willink?

  You know what's weird too is and I, you know, for guys that like you and I that are full on institutionalized in the military, it's almost like, when I was in, I didn't understand other options. Like it wasn't like, well, I could do this. Like right now, we can sit back, you know, Andy, you could have gotten out back then. It's so clear to see that now, but when you're in, you're just, no, no, well, if you can't do this, well, then you did, there's nothing else that you actually can do. This is the only option in the world.

• 1:02:11Andy Stumpf?

  And if we're being totally honest, a lot of that is by design.

• 1:02:15Jocko Willink?

  I'm sure it is.

• 1:02:16Andy Stumpf?

  The military and especially the SEAL teams. What do we do to our buddies who wanna get out? You know, like I am thinking about getting out. Hey, fuck you, quitter.

• 1:02:24Jocko Willink?

  Quitter.

• 1:02:24Andy Stumpf?

  You know what I mean? Like we, I mean, we're the most.

• 1:02:27Jocko Willink?

  I did 20 years and one of my buddies was like, I said, hey, man, yeah, I'm, I'm like at the 18 year mark, I told one of my close friends, I'm like, yeah, man, I'm, I'm gonna retire at 20. They're like, quitter.

• 1:02:38Andy Stumpf?

  But think about, think about the training from day one. It's about the guy to your left and right, right? And then you get back from a mission, you take care of the team gear first. You know, the last thing you do is you take care of yourself. So we're.

• 1:02:48Jocko Willink?

  You are the bottom of the priority list.

• 1:02:51Andy Stumpf?

  You're the bottom of the priority list.

• 1:02:52Jocko Willink?

  Life. Is the bottom of the priority list in the SEAL teams.

• 1:02:56Andy Stumpf?

  And that has secondary and tertiary effects when it comes to understanding what you can do or options that you would have outside of the military. I'm not saying they do it by design, but the system that we come from naturally puts on a set of blinders, which I think is essential to make us as effective as we are.

• 1:03:12Jocko Willink?

  You're right. I think, I think it is a, a complete secondary effect. It's not like there's some evil training person in the sky that's going, okay, the way we can get these guys to stay in is do this. No, the way that the SEAL teams has evolved to be the best we can be in combat is to make this thing your number one priority, which I say that all the time. I got asked this the other day. I was doing a, uh, working with a company and you know, some guy was asking me, you know, how did you do your work-life balance when you're in the SEAL teams? And I'm like, you know, this is an answer I shouldn't be giving. I'm not authorized. The only, you know what you do? You marry an awesome girl and then you focus on your job. That's what I did. I married an awesome girl and I focused on my job and my wife knew. She knew. It wasn't like I covered up and said, no, no babe,

• 1:03:54Jocko Willink?

  you're my number one priority. It was like, no, no, no, no. The teams. And then the teams. And then the teams, then everything, then like jujitsu and then everything else. And then you're, you're down here. That's the way it is. And I'm not trying to be an asshole. That's the, that's the reality of the situation. And that's why, yeah, it's, uh, that's, that's why, another reason why when, when guys get wounded and they go, yeah, well, what else are you going to do?

• 1:04:18Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Jocko Willink?

  So you get to team three. What, so what was your position? When you, cause, cause, so by the way, so just saying, so people understand this LDO thing, which by the way, I don't know if you know this, but it's completely gone.

• 1:04:32Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah. They shut it down.

• 1:04:33Jocko Willink?

  They shut it down.

• 1:04:34Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah. It's one of the, if not the only way to get commissioned without a college degree. I'm, I'm working on a high school diploma here, people. Public school education, barely. Santa Cruz.

• 1:04:45Jocko Willink?

  Ed, but you showed up and like to this day, right? At this moment in time, and I was quote unquote, running the training. I have no idea what your job actually was.

• 1:04:55Andy Stumpf?

  How awesome is that?

• 1:04:56Jocko Willink?

  That is pretty awesome. Well done. But you know, I know I could tell you exactly what role you fulfilled, you know, as a leader, but I don't know where you would have broken out on an org job. What was your actual job?

• 1:05:06Andy Stumpf?

  Training officer.

• 1:05:07Jocko Willink?

  For a task unit?

• 1:05:08Andy Stumpf?

  For the SEAL Team Three in general.

• 1:05:10Jocko Willink?

  How come you were running around with a machine gun dude during workup?

• 1:05:14Andy Stumpf?

  Because they would have failed their ORE.

• 1:05:17Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:05:18Andy Stumpf?

  I mean, the platoons would come or like, you know, uh, The SCA would be like, "Hey, uh, we failed land warfare. Will you come out to Nai Allen with us for the OREs?" Absolutely. I'll come out and sling blanks. If like, I mean, for one, like, I, I have, I never wanted a desk job. I, I loved, best job in the SEAL Teams, and you know this, as an E5 shooter.

• 1:05:42Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:43Andy Stumpf?

  When I, my first combat deployment, my responsibility was a sledgehammer. Then I moved up to a hooly, and then I moved to a shotgun. And then I could do whatever I wanted to do, and it was the best job in the world, and like, I, that's all I wanted to do. So although I was an officer...

• 1:05:57Jocko Willink?

  You get to be, by the way, you get to be a master with a sledgehammer, or a master with a hooligan tool. You just become, it's your life.

• 1:06:07Andy Stumpf?

  Precise, efficient. Uh, and so, you know, like, I put my officer package in, but let's say, like, 20% of me was like, "You know what? This is just a means to an end. I'm gonna figure out a way to get back on the battlefield." Because LDOs are not supposed to be tactical leaders at all. You're a line officer. But I should have never been, well, I should have never been by the letter of the law of the LDO manual in a tactical leadership position, which I eventually worked, uh, my way to, not by any kind of design. But I went to Team 3, the training O, and, you know, they're getting ready to send people to Afghanistan, and no one's ever set foot there.

• 1:06:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Andy Stumpf?

  And, you know, this, the skipper wanted to send me there, and then the troop commander I had a great relationship with. And they were short an officer here and there, so I'd like, "Ah, maybe I'll just go out to San Clemente Island for a little bit." You know, "Maybe I'll get on the roof and throw some grenades in the window. It's hard to say what I'm gonna do." And so I just like, just kinda started going out there again, and then like, went out to Nai Allen when they, when the, the troop failed their land warfare. I went out with them and tried, just to try to go and do smart stuff to help them out, to relieve some, give the leadership some distance and space.

• 1:07:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it was awesome. I mean, it's awesome when guys that were experienced would come through, like yourself. It's just so good to have guys like you coming through, especially because you were, you were super experienced, really good tactically, and super humble. It wasn't like you were out there like, "No." You were like, "Oh, this is awesome training. Let's, oh yeah, this, hey, we need to do this." It was just, it was just so good for the troop to see that type of leadership out there.

• 1:07:39Andy Stumpf?

  Plus, I like offensive maneuvers. And when I'm telling guys to move forward, they're like, oh, we can do that. I'm like, oh, yeah.

• 1:07:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:07:46Andy Stumpf?

  Oh, yes, we can do that. And you should. And then they just, they weren't because that, you know, you get a junior officer in a community full of A types and most of the people that work for them have more experience than them. They're hesitant to make a call because they, we eat our own because we're the most voracious community ever. So they're afraid to make an offensive call when they should make an offensive call. Like I've heard you say before, and I know we have the same position, like, the default move should be aggressive, drive forward, not away. Like, put your enemy on their heels. You don't need to be on your heels at all. Like, take their space and time away to make a decision. Shorten their, shorten your Oodle Loop and get in the middle of theirs and just start wreaking havoc. But you gotta have,

• 1:08:29Andy Stumpf?

  again, time in the saddle to be comfortable making those calls. And a lot of it, I noticed, was pattern recognition. Like, oh, I've seen this. Okay, high ground's over there. Sure, let's get some guys over there. Hey, they're gonna come around this building. Don't ask, don't, don't ask me now. Just go over there. Just go over there, please. Like, you can see, it's pattern recognition from time in the saddle. And because I was exposed to awesome people throughout my career, and I watched them, and I wrote down what they did, and I just have always tried to be a sponge. You have to be a sponge and suck up knowledge.

• 1:08:58Jocko Willink?

  And so then you, you do another deployment, and you do end up in a leadership position.

• 1:09:02Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Jocko Willink?

  Which, again, good job. You said it was, what'd you just say? It was unintended or something like that?

• 1:09:07Andy Stumpf?

  It was relatively unintended.

• 1:09:09Jocko Willink?

  Relatively. Like, okay, you qualified it now. Thank you. Because I was gonna have to call bullshit on you.

• 1:09:16Andy Stumpf?

  You know, so I went through the last, you know, the troop commander from that troop was like, hey, we're, you're gonna come over. I was supposed to be the opso on that deployment at a firebase that was in between the two platoons. One of the officers was having a kid. He wanted to stay back for about the first month, month and a half. And so they had no AOIC. I'm a minted O1 at this point, freshy, butter bar. One of my favorite things to do, totally in the side, was to put my camis on with my butter bars, and I'd go to the ops meetings over at group. And I'd let, like, E6s and E7s, like, talk to me like I was a brand new guy. Because I always, I mean, I looked relatively young, and they're like, you know, later on, once you got some, you know.

• 1:09:56Jocko Willink?

  And these guys are actually guys that you would probably, or in many cases have been in the teams longer than.

• 1:10:02Andy Stumpf?

  Oh, for sure. Hundred percent. And I'd be like, uh huh, tell me more. And like, and then I'd catch them later on in my khakis and they're like, oh.

• 1:10:10Jocko Willink?

  I gotta admit, I had some fun as a butter bar as well. I gotta admit.

• 1:10:13Andy Stumpf?

  I mean, I was like, oh, that's awesome. Thank you so much for the guidance. I hope one day I know as much as you do. And they're just like, yeah.

• 1:10:20Jocko Willink?

  I told, I told, I told a chief, a senior chief, actually, that was kind of calling me out like butter bar. At when I was at team two, and I was telling him in front of my platoons there and they all, they all knew me. And I go, well, you know, you know, senior, you gotta, you gotta understand, ensigns run the Navy. And he, he is, he went, you could see him turning red.

• 1:10:42Andy Stumpf?

  Instantaneously into orbit.

• 1:10:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, instantly in orbit. He actually said, you know, you guys need to straighten this ensign out. And I said, hey, why don't you do it? I'll meet you out the milvans. Let's call it noon. I'll be out there warming up.

• 1:10:53Andy Stumpf?

  You'll be out there by yourself.

• 1:10:56Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that was so good.

• 1:10:58Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah. So, you know, the, the true commander was like, hey, do the last month of training with us, which was the San Comeney block. Uh, so we went out there with the San Comeney block. The skipper was like, hey, go over there as the op so, but we're going to slide you out with this platoon. We're having some potential leadership issues with the OIC.

• 1:11:18Andy Stumpf?

  A man that I know you're familiar with. Cause we experienced them largely together.

• 1:11:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Andy Stumpf?

  Uh, and I think, I think, and this is me speaking for why I think he did that. I think he did me, he put me out there as a as a safety mechanism. I don't know. I don't think he had anything else to do. Uh, so I went out there and, uh, he ended up being relieved. And then, uh, the skipper, I mean, I was an O1 wearing O3. Uh, and O4 when Scott wasn't paying attention, because I would just take his collar devices off. Whatever. It's not like I'm an O3 either. So I would just put on whatever collar device I could get my hands on.

• 1:11:55Jocko Willink?

  Good thing there was no kernel bars available.

• 1:11:57Andy Stumpf?

  Oh, I'd have been wearing, if I could find some general stars, I'd have been rocking those things. And, uh, I mean, it was one of the best deployments of all the stuff that I did while I was in. I think what I was the proudest of is a lot of the guys I deployed with were people that I had put through BUDS. And to see them overseas on their first deployment. Uh, and the only word for it is, is afraid to do something because of the consequences, you know? There's, there's, as you know, there's a lot of oversight. If you pulled the trigger on somebody, you had better be able to articulate why you did that. Uh, you need to be able to conduct yourself over the radio. You have to be able to paint the picture. There's a correct way to brief.

• 1:12:38Andy Stumpf?

  There's the ways that, you know, you gotta play, you know, it's mental judo, you know, and, and interacting with people. And to see these young guys who had no experience and afraid to, afraid is not probably the best word, but hesitant to make decisions. And then at the end of the deployment, just sharp teeth out, knowing what they need to do. And I can just sit back and it's not, and again, that's a lot of that is them getting that experience. But I was just glad that I was able to be there to provide that buffer. Because I wasn't going to let anything happen while I was out there to the best of my ability. Like I always picked the most dangerous place to be. I always wanted to be in the position where there's going to be a decision to be made.

• 1:13:23Andy Stumpf?

  Like that, that's just the way that I want to be like, where's the most dangerous place to be? Where's the most optimal place to be? Put me in coach, I'm going to be right here. And then to try to teach other people to do that exact same thing. And then to step back, that to me is probably what I'm the most proud of, of the, is the growth of the people that I was there with.

• 1:13:41Jocko Willink?

  You know that you talk about that mental judo thing, which again, this is one that's going to be hard for civilians to understand. How much, you know, it's like a bureaucratic force that exists in the military. And really you have to be, you have to be able to, to navigate through that. And that was, that was the thing for me that I always look back and I go, I wish I would have done a better job of teaching that to guys. Cause I had no problem teaching them the tactical side of things. And then if I really was close with someone or I really spent some time with them, I'd be able to get through the rest of it and say like, okay, by the way, this is how you have to do this. This is, this is how you have to walk this line.

• 1:14:23Jocko Willink?

  This is what you have to say in these situations and they'd be great, but some guys would catch like. Some guys would catch the, uh, the, the surface Jocko, right? Just like the surface Jocko, which is like, kill, right? Which is, which is awesome, right? That's absolutely part of, part of it, right? But guys that only caught the surface Jocko, sometimes they'd get caught up later because they'd say, you know, oh, this guy was a, this guy was, you know, risk averse. I'm like, well, you know, here's what you gotta do and you gotta guide that to risk averse. Or this guy's an Eagle, well, here's what you gotta do and he's gotta handle them. So that's something that when I had the opportunity in the time, but that thing, the other thing about it is, there's no, there's no training for that. That's just, you wanna talk about being in the saddle?

• 1:15:08Jocko Willink?

  Like that is, there is no one that says, and it's hard to even simulate, because that means you gotta simulate some other human beings' rank and characteristics and personality.

• 1:15:16Andy Stumpf?

  That might change halfway through your deployment.

• 1:15:18Jocko Willink?

  That might change halfway through your briefing. You know, you can brief a guy that's all in a good mood and all of a sudden he turns, because he saw you said something and you gotta learn how to deal with that. And that political side of, that's what it is, basically. It's political and it's relationships, building those things up. That is so key. And once you get into the leadership position, I hate to say this, I hate to say it. Once you're in the leadership position, that is at least as important as what you're gonna do tactically.

• 1:15:47Andy Stumpf?

  I mean, the SEAL teams have made their mark kinetically, but we get our go, no-go off of PowerPoint.

• 1:15:55Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely.

• 1:15:56Andy Stumpf?

  I mean, that's, I've had briefs come back because the helicopter was facing the wrong way on the insertion slide. I've almost gotten into fistfights. I'm like, listen, it's Helvetica 12, not 11. We're not doing Times New Roman shit now, all right? The new battle space.

• 1:16:14Jocko Willink?

  Get out of my face with that Times New Roman, son.

• 1:16:16Andy Stumpf?

  The battlespace commander said it's Helvetica, bold, sometimes only on the X fil slide. But like, I mean, it's insane. Like, we, we have, we can bring some of the most amazing combat power to bear, but only if the leadership can articulate and navigate.

• 1:16:34Andy Stumpf?

  What the battlespace owner wants, because we don't make sense to a lot of people who don't come from our background and you gotta learn to, you gotta learn to read what they're saying and speak their language. And then you just, you gotta maneuver. I mean, that's the biggest thing is you gotta maneuver and then, then you can be so wildly effective. It doesn't matter how good you are tactically, if you can't get outside of the wire. I mean, and it's truly, if, I tell people this all the time, you want to shut down the SEAL teams? Kill Microsoft Office. We're done.

• 1:17:02Andy Stumpf?

  We're done.

• 1:17:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the whole military is actually very, you know.

• 1:17:06Andy Stumpf?

  It is a bureaucracy. You said it's kind of a bureaucracy. It is the biggest, I mean, it's 100% bureaucratic. I mean, it's amazing. And as an E5, you're like, I just want to go jam my mags up and then make them empty. And you're like, yeah, that's awesome. I'm going to be up for 12 hours looking for the appropriate helicopter icon. And I may get sassy and have it move in with helicopter noises. It depends on how sad. And then you gotta be able to brief it, right? Because then there's a whole other skill. Like, I don't know how many times you have to go and not only present the brief, but like, talk to the guy who's going to say yes or no and develop that relationship.

• 1:17:40Jocko Willink?

  You're selling your operation. In many cases, you're selling your operation until you get that relationship where they're coming to you and saying, this is, hey, this, which is the best possible case. And I was blessed to end up in that situation where it was just a total mind meld of, hey, whatever you guys want to do, what can you do here? Can you, that's, that's when you, that's when you just are loving life and it doesn't get any better than that.

• 1:18:05Jocko Willink?

  Good times with PowerPoint.

• 1:18:06Andy Stumpf?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:18:08Jocko Willink?

  So you got, you got done with.

• 1:18:09Andy Stumpf?

  The control key and the arrow, it only moved a little bit.

• 1:18:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, if you need to move that icon just to get it centered.

• 1:18:17Andy Stumpf?

  I know so much about PowerPoint that I could never forget if I wanted to.

• 1:18:20Jocko Willink?

  So horrible. You, so that was, that was an awesome deployment, though.

• 1:18:25Andy Stumpf?

  It was awesome for different reasons. I mean, don't get me wrong. I, as an O1, I was carrying generally my 300 one mag and two Javelin missiles to high ground positions and coming back with them all empty. The majority of the time, so I got to have a

• 1:18:38Jocko Willink?

  So yes, that does go in the awesome deployment box. Yes.

• 1:18:41Andy Stumpf?

  So I got to have a little bit of what we'll call a hoot and then, but again professionally developing for me too, because I didn't have any experience being an opso for a task unit. And you want to talk about relationship stuff, the sometimes, you know, the base that we were on, I just developed a relationship with their N3 or S3 and ended up, I was selling myself. We had a great relationship. I could come to him the day before, but like, hey, we're looking at doing this. He's like, yep, no problem. Let me know. Let's line up a QRF and it just, it so much, pulling the trigger is easy. All the stuff you gotta do to get to that point is so hard and it just doesn't make the movies because it's boring.

• 1:19:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, there's, there will, there will literally never be a movie yearbook about that crap.

• 1:19:22Andy Stumpf?

  Why can't we have a movie about a 72 hour planning cycle? I don't understand. Where's the three meter imagery? God damn it. This is five.

• 1:19:29Jocko Willink?

  I heard one of my platoon commanders, not Leif, the other, the Delta platoon commander was telling someone and he goes, he goes, you know, someone was like, oh yeah, you guys got to, and he said, I watched Jocko literally beat his head up against a wall for every single operation that we did. I was like, oh damn.

• 1:19:48Jocko Willink?

  And that wasn't the conventional side that I was beaten up against. It was, you know, it was our chain of command, which is very, um, which can be very micro focused on little things from time to time occasionally.

• 1:20:00Andy Stumpf?

  You get the broad spectrum of leadership inside of the teams. Not all of it is good.

• 1:20:05Jocko Willink?

  But you, whichever, whichever game you gotta play, that's what you gotta play. And that's exactly what I did. And that's, you know, that's why I always say the, I had the same relationship with every boss I'd ever have.

• 1:20:14Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15Jocko Willink?

  No matter who they were or what, how crazy they were, or how awesome they were, they trusted me and they're gonna give me what I needed to do my job.

• 1:20:21Andy Stumpf?

  Yep.

• 1:20:23Jocko Willink?

  So that was your last deployment then?

• 1:20:24Andy Stumpf?

  It was.

• 1:20:25Jocko Willink?

  And then you went to?

• 1:20:26Andy Stumpf?

  Trade at.

• 1:20:26Jocko Willink?

  Trade at. And I was gone.

• 1:20:28Andy Stumpf?

  Uh, you were check, I got there in August of 2010.

• 1:20:32Jocko Willink?

  Yep. I was, well, I

• 1:20:34Andy Stumpf?

  I think the last time I literally saw you before today was in the hallway, right by your old office. You were walking out and I was coming back from deployment and we like, hey, what's up dude?

• 1:20:42Jocko Willink?

  Later.

• 1:20:42Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah. So like five years ago, that's not my deal. Actually seven years ago.

• 1:20:46Jocko Willink?

  What'd you do there?

• 1:20:47Andy Stumpf?

  Uh, it was the opso.

• 1:20:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:20:49Andy Stumpf?

  I think, I mean,

• 1:20:50Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you get to go out at all?

• 1:20:51Andy Stumpf?

  I didn't do anything. I augmented the leapfrogs.

• 1:20:56Andy Stumpf?

  I'm not, I don't do good when it comes, I mean, I did my job, but like, I'm not a paperwork, you know, ninja at all, nor is there really, it's not really an op so, much like the trade at guy is not the CEO, he's the OIC. So a lot of those positions, there's redundancy, there was a training warrant, you know, it like, there was

• 1:21:15Jocko Willink?

  Also, it's fairly repetitive. So there's not like, um, at a team with the first time you're gonna go through this and now it's everything.

• 1:21:21Andy Stumpf?

  You get through two or three cycles and it's like, okay, you could put this thing on autopilot, it's the same thing every three, six months, whatever it is. So I got medically retired. Uh, I was going to just get out of the military. Uh, I came back from that deployment and I was talking to, uh, the officer detailer about what I would need to do to continue my career. And she said, well, you know, since you haven't done your AOC or your OIC tour, what we're gonna need you to do is two back to back, AOC, OIC, then you're gonna do your, you know, your disassociated tour. I was like, we, we can stop right now. Like, my wife's not gonna tolerate that. Like, I think she's at the vast limit. I was at the limit, my body, like my ankle, I almost had to medevac myself out a couple of times, like roll my

• 1:22:04Andy Stumpf?

  ankle extremely bad on a, on an offset patrol in, like, laying on target with my foot up in the air. It just, I was, I recognized it like my time was over. Uh, so I researched what it would take for me to stay in and continue, and it was not tenable. So I was just gonna get out of the military. And I was five days from my separation date and went to go get my physical and the doc is like, no, I'm not signing this.

• 1:22:29Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Good for him.

• 1:22:31Andy Stumpf?

  Uh, they extended me a year. I mean, I had to go, I went out to the NICO out at Bethesda, did that as far as the kind of the horsepower for the ride up, got the whole full assessment done and end up getting, uh, medically retired, which was a huge benefit to myself, all thanks to that doc who was like, no, I'm not, I'm not gonna sign this.

• 1:22:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that is awesome. And there's plenty of team guys that, you know, spend their entire career, I'm not going to the doctor, I'm not gonna, and that's another thing that gets conditioned into you going through basic SEAL training, which is don't go to medical no matter what.

• 1:23:01Andy Stumpf?

  I was in the same way, even after getting shot, my medical record was thin. And, you know, I was going through the questionnaire and the interview at the actual discharge's physical and he's like, what? Like, you couldn't find any of the documentation. And then I left NICO with like 300 pages. Uh, and if you read that thing, it's like this guy will never, I should be in a wheelchair right now with a straw. Like you read that thing. I'm like, oh my gosh. Uh, and then you get away to bureaucracy, submit a package to the med board and six months later, they're like, okay, you're out.

• 1:23:30Jocko Willink?

  And that was it?

• 1:23:31Andy Stumpf?

  That was it. No retirement ceremony. I just was like, hey, uh, went and talked to the, oh, I see. I was like, hey, um, it's almost lunchtime. I'm going to leave now and I'm, I'm never going to come back.

• 1:23:44Jocko Willink?

  How many years was that for you?

• 1:23:46Andy Stumpf?

  One month shy of seventeen.

• 1:23:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah. And so I literally went in, I was like, hey, it's almost lunch. Um, I'm leave, I'm not going to come back. He was like, all right, cool.

• 1:23:54Andy Stumpf?

  I had some terminal leave saved up at like 90 days worth. I just gone, never went back in. I think I went and got my DD two 14 or like my retirement ID card like a year later. Just never went back.

• 1:24:05Jocko Willink?

  That's crazy, man. It's crazy how you do that time and then it's over like that.

• 1:24:10Andy Stumpf?

  In a blink of an eye.

• 1:24:11Jocko Willink?

  Blink of an eye. I remember that. I was all big, did the retirement ceremony, did that, came back. All my, the rest of my gear, which was all packed up in my drying cage, went up, grabbed it, pulled it in the back, threw it in the back of my van, drove out the gate. That was it.

• 1:24:25Andy Stumpf?

  Yep.

• 1:24:25Jocko Willink?

  No more.

• 1:24:26Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:26Jocko Willink?

  Badge is gone. That's it. Done.

• 1:24:28Andy Stumpf?

  Never do, never to be back.

• 1:24:29Jocko Willink?

  20 years, done.

• 1:24:30Andy Stumpf?

  Yep.

• 1:24:32Andy Stumpf?

  It's bizarre.

• 1:24:33Jocko Willink?

  So then you get into the afterlife.

• 1:24:37Andy Stumpf?

  Indeed.

• 1:24:38Jocko Willink?

  And what's that been like? So what, what year did you, what year was that that you retired?

• 1:24:42Andy Stumpf?

  I got retired the last day of June, 2013. So I'm coming up on, uh, this year will be four years. Uh, I had, fortunately I was kind of double dipping on weekends. I had a, a job that I was doing on the weekends. So I transitioned to doing that full time. Uh, and I dabbled in a lot of stuff. I mean, I got 3,500 hours of flight time. I type rated in a Gulfstream jet, a Citation 525 jet, which gets me like five other jets I could fly. I did.

• 1:25:10Jocko Willink?

  When did you rack up all those hours?

• 1:25:12Andy Stumpf?

  What I do on my weekends is not, you know, the business of the Navy.

• 1:25:18Andy Stumpf?

  I flew hard. I mean, I was just flying a ton. I got my pilot's license on my own when I was in and then all the rest of the licenses came in the two to three years after. After I was in, but I just was cranking out hours. I had a company that I was working for that was paying for all the training so I could fly as much as I wanted to. So I dove into the bucket both feet. I did charter flying for a bit. I mean, I was managing licensing and sponsorship deals for an organization. And it just, everything kind of just morphed. I left that organization, got back into teaching. Military guys a little bit on the jump side of the house. I've been passionate about jumping ever since the first jump that I did. How many jumps do you have right now? Uh, just over 6,000. Which seems like a lot. Yeah, guys that have 29,000.

• 1:26:03Andy Stumpf?

  Oh yeah, I mean, I jump at Scott at San Diego all the time. And if you work in the sport for any period of time, you'll be at 10, 15, 20,000. It's not. It's not uncommon, but in the military, it's just, that's the school bus to get to work. So it's an ancillary skill set at best. So I couldn't pursue it until I got out. But I, uh, when I got, it was hard for me when I got out, if I'm being honest. I got to a point where I couldn't watch the news anymore. You know, 2013, all of the ground in Iraq that was sweat. And blood and tears of people that we know to gain was being eroded. And I describe it like watching the tide go out an inch at a time until all of a sudden it's gone. And I used to make the news and now I'm sitting here on the couch watching it and I had to turn it off and I really struggled with finding.

• 1:26:49Andy Stumpf?

  Something that I thought mattered and it's, it was tough for me. I didn't think a lot about what I was going to do when I was out, when I was in for reasons that we kind of already talked about. It's a natural. Path that you take when you're in. Uh, but it took me like a year and a half to really get my head on straight and figure out what it is that I want to do. I still don't even know how I'm going to do it.

• 1:27:11Andy Stumpf?

  But I know that I want to make a difference. I want to do, I want to make this country a better place than it is right now. I want to take the awesome stuff that I was exposed to when I was in the teams, from the people that I was fortunate to be surrounded by, and, and make people better with that information. How I'm going to do that, I don't know, but that's kind of the circular path that I'm on, like, half of my year. The other half, I just dress up in a squirrel suit and jump out of airplanes and off of cliffs.

• 1:27:40Jocko Willink?

  Which is nice.

• 1:27:42Andy Stumpf?

  It doesn't suck. I'm not going to do it forever, though. I mean, I look at it as something that's enriching for me and empowering for me, but there's a, there's a timeline for how long I could do it. I mean, I'm a bad landing away from not being able to jump anymore. And I, and I take it very seriously. I have a very structured training protocol. I don't let myself get out of currency, whether it be jumping or packing parachutes, or, I mean, I treat it like a military operation. It doesn't make it safer for me, but I try to pay attention more than anybody else who is around me. And my goal is to never be surprised. Like, I don't ever, I want to understand what's coming, and I, and I don't like, and it happens occasionally, you'll, you'll jump off of a cliff, or you're, jump out of an airplane, or something will happen that surprises you, and I try to avoid

• 1:28:25Andy Stumpf?

  that at all costs, because I find that, you know, that's when the catastrophic stuff can occur. But it's, you gotta find the next step. I mean, you and I both know people who derive their entire identity from what they used to do, and it's tough to sit back and watch them not be able to depart from that, because it becomes, it's self-destructive.

• 1:28:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because it doesn't last forever.

• 1:28:49Andy Stumpf?

  It can't last forever. I mean, you're renting your trident. It's not yours. You're, at best, you can move the marker in the SEAL teams, hopefully in the right direction, maybe leave a little bit of legacy if you did, you know, the legacy that you should leave is making it better than when you got there. But that's the best you can do. And then you gotta put it away. Even if you do 20 years, with the average lifespan of an American, you got some time left. And the military retirement check, it's not massive.

• 1:29:21Andy Stumpf?

  So you're gonna need another J O B, uh, but what I needed, I needed a purpose. And that's where I started doing, you know, fundraising for the SEAL Foundation. That to me was huge, teaching the military guys, which kind of felt like I had, not a foot in the fight, but I had some impact again, and just trying to shorten their learning curve. Uh, cause I mean, they expect these guys to know so much stuff. That if you could just shorten their learning curve and give them a little bit of space to breathe, you know, to take the stress off.

• 1:29:47Jocko Willink?

  And that stuff's real.

• 1:29:48Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:49Jocko Willink?

  Like that stuff is real. And when you, when you impart that knowledge on young guys, it is real. When you make that learning curve shorter and steeper and faster, that is real. That has a real impact on those, on those kids going out there. And it's those little lessons that they learned. And I, I mean, I, I still hear that from guys that come back and, and they say, yep, yeah, we did this. Cover move, you know, I'm like, yes, like I, I'm so happy to hear that. Cause I know, it's kind of like the early days of jujitsu in the fact that we didn't really, in the early days of jujitsu, there, there wasn't as much knowledge as there is now. And now the first three days you go to jujitsu, you're going to learn about underhooks. You're going to learn about body position. You're going to learn about hip movement.

• 1:30:33Jocko Willink?

  I didn't learn, no one taught me that stuff back, back in the day. No one, no one taught you that stuff. You just had to figure it out. And if somebody teaches it to you, it's like you take a quantum leap.

• 1:30:45Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:45Jocko Willink?

  You know, and it's the same thing with the, the guys that are in the military. And they can get that quantum leap just by saying, oh, here's a perspective of leadership that it took me, jackass Jocko, you know, 14 years and screwing up a bunch of things to go, oh, this is what you need to do in these situations. So to be able to say, look, you don't need to be the jackass that I was. All you need to do is know this little bit tidbit right here and this whole thing over here. And that definitely has a, has a huge impact on those guys. And it's, it is awesome to feel that.

• 1:31:13Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah. And it makes them better learning the other stuff because they're less stressed out. They have a better understanding and it's just, and I, the like 90% of the stuff I teach, I'm like, listen, it's pattern recognition. I saw this so many times and then I did this and it defeated that. So just do this. Just trust me and do this and you'll be better. And then they do, and they're like, oh, wow, that was awesome. Like, yeah, I know. That's why I told you.

• 1:31:36Jocko Willink?

  How about the, you talk about the foundation?

• 1:31:38Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:38Jocko Willink?

  What are you doing in the foundation? Tell us a little bit about the foundation and how, if people want to support the foundation, what's the best way to get that done?

• 1:31:44Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, uh, so obviously there, I think their last stat I heard, there's 40,000 service-based organizations that help people peripheral to the military. So there's a variety of choices. And if you're from an army family, awesome, go support an army charity, right? I obviously have a, a close DNA tie to SEALs. So, uh, a buddy of mine recommended, uh, trying some stuff, skydiving in the skydiving world to try to drive attention to fundraise for the SEAL Foundation. Because just like, I've never had, I think, a unique thought in my entire life. I swear that every idea I've ever had came from somebody else. It was like, this one was his.

• 1:32:25Andy Stumpf?

  But to me, that was the link to finding a purpose again, because I realized that, okay, my, my days of putting my toes on the line are over, but there will always be people with their toes on the line. And the next best step is, let's create a buffer for the families to step in. Cause I mean, you've seen it, it's a, I, the knock on the door is a tornado wrapped inside of a tsunami with a hurricane at the same time. And it is destructive. So let's try to do something that helps the families.

• 1:32:53Andy Stumpf?

  And that's what the SEAL Foundation does. Everything from educational support to legacy preservation, uh, and everything in between. I mean, you can go, the Navy SEAL Foundation has an awesome website. And there's people who do GoFundMes, which is what I did, or go to the foundation and donate directly. Cause I mean, that there, you can look at their rating as well too. It's like 96 cents out of every buck goes to what they espouse it's going to go to. It's awesome. Like, it's a great foundation.

• 1:33:21Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, do some research on it, get involved and skip a latte one day, you know?

• 1:33:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Andy Stumpf?

  Donate five bucks. And it goes to, it goes to a good, it goes to a good cause. Uh, I've been into some houses where, you know, kids are getting raised by a memory of a father and a picture over a fireplace. And no money will ever replace that, but it maybe will make their life a little bit easier.

• 1:33:42Jocko Willink?

  No doubt about that. What was the, what was the record you were going after?

• 1:33:47Andy Stumpf?

  Ah, yes, the completely arbitrary distance lateral measurement of distance in a wingsuit. So I, that was the idea where all the good ideas start, which was in a bar over a cocktail. Buddy was like, hey, man, you should go try to set a world record in your wingsuit. I'm like, well, I don't even own one yet. So what are you talking about? I'll do it, of course, but like, what's the record?

• 1:34:08Jocko Willink?

  Sign me up. And what is it? A wing? What?

• 1:34:10Andy Stumpf?

  I was like, I mean, yeah, obviously crush it. But what is it exactly again? And where do I get one of those? Uh, and it was, uh, trying to set the, um, furthest distance, or farthest distance, sorry, the farthest distance flown in a wingsuit. So, uh, I bought a wingsuit and after jumping it for less than a year, which I don't recommend to anybody to do this ever. Uh, I got hooked up with a really good mentor, the guy who actually taught me how to base jump, taught me how to fly the suit and we went up to Davis, California and I jumped out of a caravan at 36,500 feet, got into a lovely spin, which I had, it's never happened before. So that was a great experience. It was new for everybody.

• 1:34:53Andy Stumpf?

  And, uh, got out of it and then just flew the suit as far as I could and ended up breaking two world records. One for the distance that you fly before opening your parachute. And then the second one is they tack on the distance, uh, from when you open your parachute to when you touch the ground.

• 1:35:07Jocko Willink?

  So you keep flying forward?

• 1:35:08Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah. And I had an onheading opening. So it just opened up in that direction and I was exhausted. So I just laid there like a limp piece of meat and augured into the ground into a farmer's field because I had no, I like my landing zone was earth.

• 1:35:23Andy Stumpf?

  I couldn't see the airport that I was, I had some visual indicators.

• 1:35:26Jocko Willink?

  Was it like, how far was it?

• 1:35:28Andy Stumpf?

  18.25 miles. So I got out of this bird and I passed.

• 1:35:32Jocko Willink?

  Did you really get into a spin when you came out?

• 1:35:34Andy Stumpf?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:34Jocko Willink?

  What happened? Just no air?

• 1:35:36Andy Stumpf?

  I'm just not really good in a wingsuit. And I didn't have the requisite skill or competence to be attempting what I was attempting.

• 1:35:44Andy Stumpf?

  But it was a challenge thrown in front of me and I was like, of course I'm gonna do this. I hadn't, I literally had not been jumping wingsuits. I did that jump in August. I got my first wingsuit in December of the year prior. It's not, not recommended for people. Uh, so I got in the spin and I got out of it, but I got out of the plane. I, I knew where the airport was. And I knew I was gonna fly in that direction, but I passed the airport at over 10,000 feet in the air. And then I was just looking at fields and data. So I just put my head down and was flying. I didn't have an altimeter on me. It was awesome. There were so many things that were just, I was eyeballing it, calibrating before I went. I was like, camera one, camera two, camera one. Alright, let's go. But I had just come back from a base jumping trip to Europe. Thank goodness I had, cause I'm flying. I'm like, those trees are looking really big.

• 1:36:30Andy Stumpf?

  Oh yeah, those, those trees are looking really big. I'm gonna pull, you know, moderately low opening altitude, flew straight into the dirt and yeah, people like, oh, you're gonna, cause it's been broken since then. A marine did. And people like, oh, are you gonna go for it again? I'm like, no, never, ever will I try. I got into the spin because the plane, the, the Cessna 206, the caravan is not designed to be that high. Like it had a supercharged engine, a different propeller system. Everything was stripped out of there except for the huge oxygen bottle. It was just the pilot, the oxygen tech and me. And, you know, normally when you're Scott having, they'll pull back on the throttle to slow down. It, you know, it's called giving you a cut, a cut of the airspeed.

• 1:37:12Andy Stumpf?

  Well, if he would have done that at that altitude, we'd have fallen out of the sky. So he's like, got his fist on the throttle, with his foot on the dash pulling back and I opened the door and I stuck my head out. I was like, oh no.

• 1:37:25Andy Stumpf?

  Oh no. And I'm jumping like the biggest wingsuit on the market. And they're like, they're a combination of a prom dress and a straitjacket. And I got out of the plane and it just inflated and like, oh boy, here we go.

• 1:37:42Jocko Willink?

  That's good times right there.

• 1:37:44Andy Stumpf?

  Whoo, yeah, coming at you full speed.

• 1:37:46Jocko Willink?

  But you you raised some money for the for the foundation?

• 1:37:49Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, that's like a hundred and fifty thousand bucks for the foundation. And, you know, from that I developed a great relationship with them. The CEO of the foundation is married to my first troop chief that I had when I was at the East Coast. So there's a great tie in. And anytime, yeah.

• 1:38:05Jocko Willink?

  I know that guy well.

• 1:38:06Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah. But so anytime that they call me, though, like, my default answer is yes, like, of course, I'll help out anything that I can do. And I mean, honestly, like, I won't say that it saved me, but it helped. It helped get me back on the road that I should have been to have a purpose like that. And then, I mean, I bet you I'd hypothesized that for you, working with organizations and leaders and seeing the light come on. Makes you, you know, I mean, it's it gives you a purpose in life again to impart those lessons. It's exactly the same thing for me. So one built to the other. They kind of got my feet in the in the pool of interfacing with people like that. And then I realized that it makes a difference and it's important.

• 1:38:44Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. Well, it's been awesome to hang out with you.

• 1:38:48Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Jocko Willink?

  I appreciate it.

• 1:38:49Andy Stumpf?

  Once every seven years, we should do it.

• 1:38:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, seven years we'll do it again. And and speaking of purpose, Echo Charles,

• 1:38:57Jocko Willink?

  we know you have one purpose, and that is to kind of inform anybody that might want to support this podcast.

• 1:39:04Andy Stumpf?

  Yep.

• 1:39:04Jocko Willink?

  On how they might be able to do that.

• 1:39:07Speaker 02

  Just to clarify.

• 1:39:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, oh, here we go.

• 1:39:10Speaker 02

  My purpose to inform is part of a greater purpose.

• 1:39:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:39:15Speaker 02

  Undisclosed for now.

• 1:39:17Jocko Willink?

  Understood.

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  Hey, when you jumped out with the wingsuit.

• 1:39:20Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:21Speaker 02

  And you went into the spin, did you think that that was that was it for you?

• 1:39:24Andy Stumpf?

  No, I never think like that.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  Straight up, dang.

• 1:39:27Jocko Willink?

  I would say so many comments, I said the other day on, I forget. I don't know if we had someone on the podcast, but I was saying that. Like when I'm flying in an aircraft in a, in a commercial airliner, I think if this thing crashes, I'm gonna live.

• 1:39:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Jocko Willink?

  Of course, yeah, like, oh yeah, I'll, yeah, I'm gonna grab this chair seat and I'm gonna turn it into something. I'm gonna throw it in the water. That's gonna break the surface tension. I'm gonna live.

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  No worries.

• 1:39:50Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, I mean, like, I'm not saying that it was gonna work out great for me, but I'm gonna die missing my fingernails because I'm clawing my way towards victory. Like, the thought never enters the mind like, okay, I need to give up now because it's over. Negative.

• 1:40:04Jocko Willink?

  Not that you have that much of a choice.

• 1:40:05Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, but you still fight. Period.

• 1:40:08Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 1:40:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's good. Cause, yeah, yeah, I'd probably be the same way. You know, that's how I am too. Anyway.

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  Let's talk about some support.

• 1:40:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  Let's talk about Onnit. You know Onnit? You heard of Onnit?

• 1:40:25Andy Stumpf?

  I do, yeah.

• 1:40:26Speaker 02

  Of course, of course you have. Everyone has.

• 1:40:27Jocko Willink?

  There you go. You're good. Just checking.

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  I don't need this.

• 1:40:31Jocko Willink?

  Okay, hey, hey.

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  I need it. Anyway, Onnit, uh, I got some more krill oil, so I'm good to go. Baseline.

• 1:40:41Speaker 02

  Onnit is a, what do you call them? A sponsor?

• 1:40:46Andy Stumpf?

  Supporter?

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  Supporter. Yeah. So if you want to support, uh, this podcast and/or yourself at the same time, and you're into supplements, you work out a lot, um, we recommend Onnit supplements. We take Onnit supplements. It's the only one, the best one. Anyway, if you want 10% off, Onnit.com slash Jocko. Let's say you get the 10% off. Anyway, yeah, that's a good one.

• 1:41:09Jocko Willink?

  By the way, the last podcast, as people noted,

• 1:41:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:14Jocko Willink?

  we had Colonel Reader on here, you know, a Vietnam veteran, and I pre-briefed Echo. I said, look, this guy's flying in. He got up at three o'clock in the morning. He's coming in here at six o'clock at night to do a three hour podcast. He's been in a conference all day. When it comes to, you know, time to go through your stuff, go through it quickly. And people have said, hey, did you have Echo on a leash? And I said, we just pre-briefed. We're just respecting the Colonel's time. So I get the feeling right now, we could be paying for that.

• 1:41:40Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. Metaphorically, I did have a leash for sure.

• 1:41:44Andy Stumpf?

  Get it out there, man. Explain it up.

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  Usually, usually I tell a, a cool story because it's not like, hey, take, uh, krill oil. And then I don't take krill oil or I take it and I'm like, whatever. This doesn't work. It works. So during the week, I work out and I kind of talk about my experience. Positive or negative, but in this case, never negative because it actually works. It's one of the only supplement companies that you know will work. Anyway, I'm not going to go into any stories. I only worked out a few times this week and it's all the same story.

• 1:42:19Jocko Willink?

  Why did you only work out a few times this week?

• 1:42:20Speaker 02

  Oh, various things.

• 1:42:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:42:26Speaker 02

  I worked out today, what?

• 1:42:27Jocko Willink?

  Okay, no, I'm just making sure it sounds like there might be some slack in the Echo's world right now.

• 1:42:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, maybe, maybe not. Nonetheless, even if I told you the story, it'd be a redundant story.

• 1:42:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:42:37Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying? Like my joints feel good, you know? People know that already, taking Kroyo, that's what happens. Anyway, if you like these supplements, if you don't, actually, if you don't know about the supplements, get them, make your own evaluation, you don't gotta listen to me anymore. Anyway, so let's switch over to Amazon, Amazon click through. So how that works is if you want to support this podcast, before you do your Amazon shopping, go to jockopodcast.com, click on the Amazon banner, then do your shopping. Supports.

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  I made the sodium in the water analogy, you know, you know, when you, it's like, it's not just sodium, it's like potassium, it's like heavy metals, I think it's called. You throw them in water, boom, big explosion. I make the analogy that clicking through Amazon is a small action, takes what, three seconds? Right?

• 1:43:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, maybe not even.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  And you think, oh yeah, I'm gonna, you know, click through and I'm gonna do my shopping that doesn't, because of my action, my small action doesn't, it's not a big deal. But here's the thing, that small action is a big deal, just like sodium in water.

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  So be the sodium, if you want to support. Um, so click through and do your shopping, boom, that's a good, good, good way to support podcasts. Also, subscribe if you haven't already on iTunes. Leave a review.

• 1:43:58Jocko Willink?

  iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, not everyone has an iPhone.

• 1:44:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I always

• 1:44:03Jocko Willink?

  Somebody asked about some other thing to SoundCloud?

• 1:44:06Speaker 02

  SoundCloud, so I'm not 100% sure of how that works. Um, I explored SoundCloud before, um, unless it's like a separate thing that does

• 1:44:17Jocko Willink?

  I'm sure someone will let us know how to do that.

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, if we're missing on SoundCloud, then, then yeah, I'm sure that that should, should be where we should be as well. Anyway, subscribe.

• 1:44:29Jocko Willink?

  In the meantime, subscribe.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, to whatever the one that you're doing, uh, Google Play, iTunes, whichever. Subscribe if you haven't already. Leave review if you feel like it.

• 1:44:40Speaker 02

  YouTube, we have a YouTube channel. Subscribe to that one. Put more videos. I know before, when you were watching, you were like, hey, these are just podcast videos, right?

• 1:44:50Andy Stumpf?

  Now, there's some good stuff. You got some good stuff.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  We do now, and that's the point. That's the point I'm making. So we put more videos on there now. Just made one, uh, what, yesterday? Yeah. Um, that'll be up soon. Anyway, subscribe to that if you haven't already. You'll get that little alert.

• 1:45:03Jocko Willink?

  There's a new, is that one gonna be out by soon?

• 1:45:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, a few days.

• 1:45:06Jocko Willink?

  A new Echo Charles video?

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's more mellow, more cerebral.

• 1:45:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh. Stand by.

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, then, yeah, watch it. It's, it's cool. It's fun, I guess. Anyway, if you, if you have, um, the inclination to get a T-shirt as well. Jocko has a store. It's called Jocko Store. URL jockostore.com.

• 1:45:29Speaker 02

  T-shirts, rash guards, patches, Velcro patches as well. The delivery time now, from purchase to delivery is quicker now. Know that. Um, so yeah, go on there, jockostore.com. If you like what you see, go ahead, grab one of that. That's a good, uh, way to support. There you go. Ah, but psychological warfare.

• 1:45:52Speaker 02

  If you don't know what the, you know what psychological warfare is?

• 1:45:54Andy Stumpf?

  Yeah, support it.

• 1:45:55Speaker 02

  Oh, there you go. See? How can you not, really? You know?

• 1:45:58Andy Stumpf?

  I mean, that's a rhetorical question.

• 1:45:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're right about that. So, yeah, if you don't know, it's, you know, when you have moments of weakness, if you're, what, getting up early in the morning, it's hard, I'm tired, I wanna press snooze or whatever. Or you're gonna, you know, you're about to work out, but you'll skip the workout because you're not feeling like it. Moments of weakness. You get this album. You can download each individual track or, um, the whole album, whatever. Jocko will get you through it. It's like a spot. Makes you wanna do the workout, wanna wake up early. Anyway, iTunes Psychological Warfare, search Psychological Warfare, Jocko Willink.

• 1:46:34Jocko Willink?

  We're actually getting some requests now.

• 1:46:37Speaker 02

  For?

• 1:46:38Jocko Willink?

  Other moments of weakness.

• 1:46:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:40Jocko Willink?

  People are like, hey, this moment of weakness, we need to track. This moment of weakness need to track. So.

• 1:46:45Speaker 02

  Like what?

• 1:46:46Jocko Willink?

  I'm logging those down. Someone was saying, when I get tired.

• 1:46:51Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 1:46:51Jocko Willink?

  In other words, it's 10 o'clock at night, I'm getting tired. I still have work to do.

• 1:46:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:57Jocko Willink?

  I think I'm just gonna blow off the work and just go to sleep because that's the easy route.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:02Jocko Willink?

  Maybe we need to track for things like that.

• 1:47:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:05Jocko Willink?

  As possible.

• 1:47:05Speaker 02

  And, cause you know, the whole thing biologically, when you hit the wall, right? That's your body really in a way saying like, hey, you're, you're going too far. But nowadays in our environment, going too far is beneficial because you have this like other goal that your body in a way doesn't really know about. So Psychological Warfare will, will help you get past that natural.

• 1:47:27Jocko Willink?

  Body in check.

• 1:47:28Speaker 02

  Exactly, right.

• 1:47:29Jocko Willink?

  Get your mind in control.

• 1:47:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. So anyway, jump on that, man. That's, that's one that's supporting yourself fully. Anyway, it has been number one since the day it was released, straight up.

• 1:47:42Jocko Willink?

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  I, I'm not mad at that at all.

• 1:47:45Jocko Willink?

  You know why that is?

• 1:47:46Speaker 02

  Why?

• 1:47:47Jocko Willink?

  Cause.

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  Useful.

• 1:47:47Jocko Willink?

  People are supporting the podcast and that's.

• 1:47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:50Jocko Willink?

  That's pretty cool. So thank you for supporting the podcast.

• 1:47:52Speaker 02

  Way less people skipping workouts, way more people waking up early, obviously. There you go. And those are the ways.

• 1:47:59Jocko Willink?

  Also, while you're clicking through Amazon, you can pick up the books that we review on the podcast, right? We just did My Captivity in Vietnam, Through the Valley, My Captivity in Vietnam. And it's a great book, but there's all the other books that we reviewed on there are on there, on here are on there. So pick those up. Extreme Ownership. There's a little book. It's about combat. And it's about leadership. It's about combat leadership. Well, what else is there? What else would you want to read up about Jocko White Tea? A couple of things. Jocko White Tea, some people call it Jocko White Tea. Some people call it the 8,000 pound deadlift solution.

• 1:48:45Speaker 02

  Yep. Hell yeah.

• 1:48:47Jocko Willink?

  Some people call it Camira tea because apparently you're hitting Camiras very solid.

• 1:48:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I get.

• 1:48:55Jocko Willink?

  When you get the tea on. Also, I've heard it called problem solver tea because the problems that you have, little bit of tea, all of a sudden, problems are getting solved. So you can do that. And, and by the way, it sounds like, oh, this is, I'm just being, you know, exaggerating or whatever. Factual.

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:17Jocko Willink?

  Hundred and forty seven percent factual.

• 1:49:20Jocko Willink?

  Order tea, Amazon. You can also preorder Way of the Warrior Kid. And when people read this book, it's sort of like when people tasted the tea, we're gonna have a supply issue. I'm telling you. So just order it. If you order it now, that way you get a copy and that way you won't be wondering why all these kids are out there getting after it and you're going, what's happening? No, you'll know. You'll know why they're getting after it. Way of the Warrior Kid. And lastly, also, if you haven't signed up to come to the muster, number three muster in New York City, May 4th and 5th. Do it ASAP. I've been seeing a bunch of folks on social media, they're saying that they're

• 1:50:06Jocko Willink?

  gonna be there. So look forward to seeing everyone. It's gonna be awesome. Obviously, I'm gonna be there. Leif is gonna be there. JP is gonna be there. Dave Burke is gonna be there. You haven't met Dave Burke yet. He's coming.

• 1:50:16Speaker 02

  I hear good things.

• 1:50:17Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, you're gonna hear some real good things from Dave Burke. And

• 1:50:22Jocko Willink?

  if none of that really motivates you and gets you in the game, because not hardcore enough and you really need to get nuts, well, guess what? Don't worry, we got you covered because Echo Charles is gonna be there. Echo Charles is gonna be there. Come on down. There's not gonna be any hiding behind a curtain. There's no backstage divas at this gig. We're gonna be out front with everybody, interacting, solving problems, finding solution, and basically just getting after it. So come on down to the muster.

• 1:50:54Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to give us feedback

• 1:50:58Jocko Willink?

  or comments, or continue this little conversation that we're having right here, you can find us on the interwebs. That means basically, we're talking about Twitter. We're talking about Instagram as well. And then again, we're also talking about that Facebook.

• 1:51:17Jocko Willink?

  So Andy, what do you on those?

• 1:51:19Andy Stumpf?

  Oh, man. Uh, on the Instagram, it's my name, Andy Stumpf 212, very original. And I think Twitter is Andy Stumpf 77, also original.

• 1:51:30Jocko Willink?

  And you're on Facebook?

• 1:51:32Andy Stumpf?

  The Book of Faces, yes. I'm contractually obligated to be on there.

• 1:51:36Jocko Willink?

  Nice. And Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. Echo?

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:51:43Jocko Willink?

  Do you have anything this evening that you want to add to this podcast?

• 1:51:48Speaker 02

  Man, that's it. You know, usually I have some expounding, like some expanding question, but man, you nail it. You're very articulate. Yeah?

• 1:51:56Andy Stumpf?

  I use the words I understand. It's two syllables or less.

• 1:51:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, dang. Solid. Man, thanks. Thanks for coming.

• 1:52:04Andy Stumpf?

  Great to meet you, man.

• 1:52:04Speaker 02

  Right on. You too.

• 1:52:06Jocko Willink?

  Andy, any closing thoughts you want to throw out there?

• 1:52:09Andy Stumpf?

  Uh, no. All I can say is thanks for having me on, man. So in 2024, we'll do it again.

• 1:52:18Andy Stumpf?

  No, it's great. Great to meet you, Echo. I mean, I, I sit back and I love what you guys have going on. So just keep driving ahead, man. It's awesome. People need to hear it.

• 1:52:26Jocko Willink?

  Well, I appreciate the feedback you've been giving me on the podcast and obviously thanks for coming on. Sorry it took so long. Sorry everyone it took so long to get you on. And you know what? Bullshit on 2024. We'll, we'll get you back on here and we'll, we'll do this again.

• 1:52:38Andy Stumpf?

  Like 2020.

• 1:52:41Jocko Willink?

  And, um, you know, obviously, man, thanks for your service.

• 1:52:46Andy Stumpf?

  And it was my pleasure.

• 1:52:48Jocko Willink?

  And your, and your continued contribution to the teams and to, and to our country. So thank you for everything you've done. And, you know, we started out tonight talking about a debt that cannot be repaid.

• 1:53:09Jocko Willink?

  And that is very true. We cannot.

• 1:53:14Jocko Willink?

  We cannot repay that debt. We owe too much to those that have fallen for our freedom.

• 1:53:26Jocko Willink?

  But you know what we can do? And what we must do is try. Try, try to live every day with that thought in mind, that thought of the service and of the sacrifice of those that gave their last full measure for us. For our freedom. Freedom.

• 1:54:07Jocko Willink?

  This nebulous concept that can be so hard for some people to grasp, but I will tell you, it is a real thing. And it's a thing that's hard to recognize until it is taken from you and the chains of oppression control your body and your mind. And then, when your freedom is taken away, that is when you realize that freedom is the most important thing.

• 1:54:46Jocko Willink?

  The singular thing that gives each of us the divine opportunity that only freedom can give. To think and to speak and to do as we wish. And to do all of those things beholden to no man.

• 1:55:23Jocko Willink?

  And yet while with that freedom,

• 1:55:31Jocko Willink?

  we are beholden to no one,

• 1:55:35Jocko Willink?

  let us choose.

• 1:55:39Jocko Willink?

  Let us consciously and deliberately choose to be beholden, forever beholden to those men and women who have relinquished their lives so selflessly

• 1:56:00Jocko Willink?

  upon the altar of freedom.

• 1:56:07Jocko Willink?

  For them, beholden to them, let us live.

• 1:56:15Jocko Willink?

  With purpose and with passion, let us live.

• 1:56:24Jocko Willink?

  Live lives worthy of their solemn sacrifice.

• 1:56:34Jocko Willink?

  Let us live lives worthy of the price that has been paid, worthy of the freedom we are blessed with, and worthy of those heroes.

• 1:56:47Jocko Willink?

  We are forever beholden to.

• 1:56:58Jocko Willink?

  Let us live for them.

• 1:57:07Jocko Willink?

  And I think that's all I've got for tonight. And so until next time,

• 1:57:17Jocko Willink?

  this is Andy and Echo and Jocko.

• 1:57:23Jocko Willink?

  Out.