208: March Forward, One Foot In Front Of The Other. With Jason McCarthy

0:00:00 - Opening 0:03:29 - Jason McCarthy from GoRuck. 3:21:46 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 3:26:42 - How to stay on THE PATH. 3:51:13 - 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 208 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

• 0:11Jocko Willink?

  Let me have your attention.

• 0:15Jocko Willink?

  At this point, you must complete a 12-mile tactical foot march in three hours. You must wear all equipment properly. You must have Kevlar helmet on your head and you must carry your M16 rifle at the ready position. This means that the rifle must be ready for use against the enemy.

• 0:39Jocko Willink?

  Discuss appropriate safety precautions and candidate's responsibilities for helping injured candidates. Then say, what are your questions?

• 0:52Jocko Willink?

  If anyone has questions, repeat the instructions, but do not elaborate on what you have read.

• 1:01Jocko Willink?

  Pause five seconds and then say, begin.

• 1:10Jocko Willink?

  And those right there are the instructions to be given by the cadre to candidates for the EIB, the Expert Infantry Badge and the US Army. That's a qualification that requires

• 1:29Jocko Willink?

  knowledge in a plethora of different weapons, including pistols, rifles, machine guns, grenades, anti-tank weapons. It requires skill in combat medical care, skills in coordinating and calling for supporting arms, land navigation, chemical and biological operations amongst other things and

• 1:53Jocko Willink?

  A 12-mile foot march. That is one of the evolutions that you are not allowed to retest on. You either make it or you don't, and that makes sense. Because the foot march, and I think that's really a nice way of saying it. So what we used to call a forced road march is a physical and mental test of will. And I talked about, I talked about the road march in podcast 38. The patrol, patrolling in teams, patrolling with my family.

• 2:38Jocko Willink?

  And I started off that podcast with a little reading of Infantry Columns by Kipling.

• 2:47Jocko Willink?

  Boots.

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  And I explained that marching, or humping, or patrolling, or rucking. Explained what it meant to me.

• 3:01Jocko Willink?

  How it impacted me, and how in many ways, it can be a bit of a metaphor for life.

• 3:11Jocko Willink?

  And I'm not the only one who feels that way. And with me on the program tonight is a former special forces soldier, who's also impacted by the patrol, by the hump, by the ruck. And who has made his new mission to spread the power of the ruck.

• 3:39Jocko Willink?

  So here we go. Jason McCarthy, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Jaco. Thanks for coming on, man. It's good to meet you. Likewise, likewise. So let's just jump in to figure out. Sort of how you ended up, how you ended up? Where did it all start? Where were you born? Where were you raised?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Born in Dayton, Ohio. Right, so Southern Ohio and but never really lived there. Mom and dad were both really young when they had me. Mom was.

• 4:06Jocko Willink?

  Like how young?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Mom was eighteen in five days.

• 4:08Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Right, so.

• 4:10Jocko Willink?

  How old was dad?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Dad was nineteen.

• 4:12Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Right, and you know, as you might expect, marriage didn't last super long. Grandparents weren't super happy about this, but you know, they they ended up taking very vested interest in me. But my mom was was actually, she was the real athlete in the family. She won Junior College Nationals in tennis after having me at Sinclair Community College.

• 4:34Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Right there and then got a full ride to go play for the the Gators down in Gainesville. So we moved to to Florida and then just bounced around.

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  And so who was raising you?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Well, I was with my mom.

• 4:44Jocko Willink?

  And she's so she's going to college, winning national level tournaments in tennis and raising you?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:52Jocko Willink?

  And so she's a bit of a trooper, huh?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  She's very much a trooper.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Very much. And so, you know, I mean, I some of my earliest memories are are going to to her tennis practices and her tennis matches. And my grandparents flying down to take care of me while.

• 5:06Jocko Willink?

  Now, was she raised like a tennis kid?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, sort of. I'm an athlete.

• 5:11Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh. And just across the board?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Just across the board. And then she ended up being really good at tennis. She was number one in Ohio her whole youth, and so it just extended from there. When you're really good at something.

• 5:22Jocko Willink?

  And then she just managed to have a kid. So was she in high school? Was she in high school when she had you?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, managed to.

• 5:29Jocko Willink?

  Was that like her senior year?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yes. So she ended up graduating early and then almost went into hiding sort of at my dad's house with my dad's parents, who were, you know, a little more okay with the situation than my mom's parents. It was tough.

• 5:47Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  No doubt.

• 5:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's tough. Can't even imagine. This is what year were you born?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Nineteen seventy nine.

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So it was like, society was still a lot more, I'd say.

• 6:00Jocko Willink?

  Hard to deal with from that perspective of like a young mom in high school.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  I mean, single moms. I mean, it's, that's tough. And the older I get, the more respect I have for how tough kids are and especially, you know, especially a single mom with, with a young kid and still trying to live your life and go to college and then get a job and do those kinds of things.

• 6:22Jocko Willink?

  So you, so you have memories early on, you're like one year old and you're going to tennis tournaments with your mom.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Well, I was.

• 6:30Jocko Willink?

  And all the other little eighteen, nineteen year old college girls are like worried about their hair. And your mom's like, hold on a second, I gotta feed my kid.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Something like, yeah, it's like, I was two or three and I remember the, the tennis coach at Florida, he used to always pull my ear. His name was Andy Brandy and he would pull my ear before the matches and you'd say, are you going to behave today? Right? And so it was, it, it inspired behavior that was good for me.

• 6:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, cause like, but once again, I'm picturing these girls playing your mom. And you know, they're worried if there's, there's some distraction over on the side is like a camera going off. Meanwhile, your mom's got the screaming baby. That's nuts, man.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  She had a lot on her plate.

• 7:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, she did. And so then, and so at what point did she kind of give up tennis? And move into, or did she like become a tennis pro at a club or something like that?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, I'm convinced that without me, she would have at least tried to go pro. And she was really good, you know, um, and, and she just, she had me and graduated in what eighty-five? So I would have been six years old when she graduated from Florida and you can't go.

• 7:41Jocko Willink?

  Graduate from Florida University.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  University of Florida, go Gators. And so instead, you know, she ended up getting remarried and did become a, a teaching tennis professional and did that for about twenty years. So, yeah, we, we moved around, we moved to Texas and Tennessee and back to Texas and then settled in, in Jack's Beach, Florida.

• 8:00Jocko Willink?

  How old were you, settled in Jack's Beach, Florida?

• 8:03Speaker 01

  We moved there in nineteen ninety-two.

• 8:06Jocko Willink?

  And what, how old were you?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  So I was eighth grade, was my first year in school there. Sort of how I associate. I remember the grades where I was and which city and.

• 8:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but so you did your full high school career in Jacksonville, Florida?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  I did.

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  And so you were born and raised kind of with a tennis racket in your hand, I assume.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Tennis racket and a basketball and tennis eventually won out, but.

• 8:27Jocko Willink?

  How?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  I got cut from the eighth grade basketball team. So it's weird because I was the new kid and I moved and I was, I did really well in basketball when I'd moved from Texas and I just, I moved to Florida and it just didn't click for tryouts and didn't know anybody. And they're like, sorry. And it was kind of a crushing blow. And this is not one of those things where, you know, the Michael Jordan story takes place and I, and I doubled down on my training and practice and became a great basketball player. I played pickup ball, pickups up, but I, yeah, I quit, Jack. Quitting is forever and I quit. Uh, but I still played tennis and that was, you know, easier to make the team and stuff. So I did that and did that through college.

• 9:08Jocko Willink?

  So you played tennis in college?

• 9:10Speaker 01

  I did.

• 9:11Jocko Willink?

  One of my friends played tennis at the Naval Academy and his sophomore year, he lost a match. And he stood in the court and threw his five tennis rackets out of the court into the woods and never played tennis again.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Quitting is forever, right?

• 9:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I mean, he was in the team. So he was a great guy, but he just, he could never wanted to pick up a tennis racket again. And it'd been obviously to play at the Naval Academy, it'd been a big focus in his life for a frustrating sport.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  It's a frustrating sport. I mean, and it, it, it teaches you to,

• 9:48Speaker 01

  makes you very sensitive to what you think are your needs too, right? Cause you're alone and you're an individual and you're out there and you take everything so seriously. And, you know, one of the things that the military culture would bring out is that you, you have to be able to overcome the little stuff, you know, someone, someone clapping too loud, two courts over, that can just ruin your life. If you're playing tennis and that's, you know, like be quiet, be quiet. It's, it's ridiculous. And, you know, you, you have to learn how to fight through that kind of adversity.

• 10:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The other thing about tennis, like in jujitsu, if you make generally, if you make a little mistake, you can kind of recover from it. You can make it adaptations and, and usually one mistake. Now look, you can make a mistake in jujitsu and that's it. You can get arm locked or you can get choked. It happens, but you can also make a mistake and you can recover from it. And it's not, and it will have not a big factor, but you can, you can hit a ball into the net. That's it. You just lost that point.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. The point, but not, not the game, not the set, not the match. You can, I mean, you can come back from huge deficits in, in tennis. And it's really like everything else, it's mental.

• 10:59Jocko Willink?

  So you played tennis in college?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I did. I went to Emory in Atlanta.

• 11:04Jocko Willink?

  And then were you thinking that you could be some kind of a pro tennis player?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. I was just, I mean, so I love the the team element of tennis. I kind of stopped enjoying the individual part of it. It's a lot of travel. It's a lot of, you know. It's just the process of playing tennis in my youth was, I really enjoyed the team part of it. And so that continued through college and I really enjoyed it with my team in college. I just, I wasn't good enough. It just wasn't gonna happen. Now, I did consider, hey, maybe I'll go down to South America and like try to play some tournaments or something after college, but I tore my rotator cuff my senior year and couldn't, you know.

• 11:49Jocko Willink?

  So when you're trying to measure yourself at that juncture in life,

• 11:55Jocko Willink?

  are you looking at, hey, I'm this powerful or you're serving, let's just try and break it into something that a normal, non-tennis player, human can understand. Let's say your serve, a good serve is 120 miles an hour?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  That's a big serve, yeah.

• 12:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Or let's say 100 miles an hour is like the minimum to be a pro. And you're serving, let's just say, I'm not saying you in particular, I'm saying a human serving 90. And they're trying and they're trying all these different things and they just can't really make it happen. Is that basically what happens? I mean, at some point are you saying, look, it doesn't matter how much I practice. I don't have the physical aptitude to be top level.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you get into really, really thin air, you know. And just like in BUDs or in the training that I went through, there's physical capabilities that will limit certain people, but there's also mental stuff that will limit certain people. And mine were Mostly physical. I just wasn't fast enough on the court. I wasn't. I mean, you get in a really thin air where, I mean, these guys that are great at tennis and girls that are great at tennis, I mean, they were kind of always really great, you know? But I think that it's important to find something, to be a part of a team throughout your life and to do more of that. And so, for me, it was really just a vessel. I mean, I don't want to confuse

• 13:20Speaker 01

  myself even with my mother. My mother was a great athlete and when it came to tennis. And, you know, I just, I didn't get the same degree. My grandfather was in, played basketball growing up, but you know, he was, he was drafted to go play for the, for the Lakers, but couldn't afford the bus ticket from Colorado to California and so went and got a job. I mean, times were very different back then. Can you imagine?

• 13:49Jocko Willink?

  That's crazy. And so then, so when you go to college, are you, what'd you go to college for?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Uh, studied economics.

• 13:56Jocko Willink?

  And what were you thinking your future looked like?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was thinking, I didn't really know, but I thought I would do something in business or consulting or I had these, you know, these, it's a really tough state to be in when you're in your early twenties and you're, you're going to college or you're trying to figure out your life and you don't know where it's going to go. Those are hard years and you, you look at them from an older vantage point and you say you kind of had to go through that and it doesn't make it any easier when you're going through it though. And so I just, I really didn't know. I wanted to do something special. I wanted to do something more and I, I just had no idea

• 14:39Speaker 01

  what that would, would mean. And so, you know, you just sort of say, oh, maybe I'll go work at Goldman Sachs. That's a great place to work. Or I'll go work at McKinsey and be a problem solver or something to that effect. And I just didn't, I didn't know. I didn't know. And so graduated two thousand one, May, and still didn't know. But you know, a few months after that, it was going to be a very different world.

• 15:03Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. So did you get a job right after college?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  I did. I went and traveled a little bit around Central America for like a month or two and it that type of stuff gets. It gets kind of old. You don't really find yourself when you go far away. It just sort of amplifies what you're already thinking. And I I needed to do something. I needed a mission. I needed a purpose and I needed a community.

• 15:28Jocko Willink?

  And did you, I mean, obviously, your mom wasn't in the military. Your dad, your grandpa, was there any military roots that you had in your family?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  So my, my grandfather was an artillery officer in Korea, never talked about it. Ever, right? My uncle was a naval aviator. He was a class of seventy seven Annapolis grad, but never really saw him. So it wasn't part of my, the decision making process of my life. This is what I can go do. It was just. It was a bridge too far, right? I didn't understand. What the military did, frankly, I mean, yeah, defend America, but how? What's what does that mean for a life, right? I mean, when I grew up, it was peacetime. I mean, it was. Aside from.

• 16:17Jocko Willink?

  What year did you graduate high school?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Ninety seven.

• 16:20Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Right? So, I mean, this is not a time when the military is front and center as it is now. And in fact, if. Anything, what was the military's purpose at that time? It didn't have a ton of. There weren't wars being fought. I, I, basically what I'm saying is, is I didn't get it. It was naive. But I didn't get it.

• 16:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it seems like it was just kind of outside your. Purview of the world, right? I mean, it wasn't on the news every day. You weren't seeing military operations on the news every day like you'd see now. So it just, you're growing up and it wasn't a thing that was really part of your world.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Look, there was no John F. Kennedy at the time, you know, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. That wasn't part of the discussion. In our country, and I think that's, that's a problem and that should always be a part of the discussion. And that just wasn't the landscape where we are. So, or where we were. So it took nine eleven to really bring that to the forefront.

• 17:22Jocko Willink?

  So wait a second, South America, did you go solo down there? Who'd you go?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  I went with a buddy. We just sort of backpacked quote, quote, around.

• 17:29Jocko Willink?

  And you're thinking you're gonna see the light and find your future?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  You know, I'm gonna just find this magical adventure like DiCaprio did in the beach or whatever. And it's gonna be life changing and whatever, you know, all who all who wander are not lost. Yeah, that's true, but some that wander are lost, right? And you know, part of it is you want to have an adventure. You don't know exactly how to do it, but you gotta do something. You can't just sit around and do nothing. So.

• 17:58Jocko Willink?

  Did you come to any conclusions on your backpacking?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  I did. I needed a mission. I needed.

• 18:04Jocko Willink?

  So you actually figured that out?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  You like, I just, it was, it was awesome, but so boring. I just, I needed to be part of something bigger than myself. You can't backpack around the world for the rest of your life. You just can't do it. It's, it's, it's easy to sort of glamorize and, you know, but it's, it gets old.

• 18:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Too much freedom.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Too much freedom is right. There's, there's a lot of time in the day. And, and we, we oftentimes think, oh, man, this happens so fast and, you know, today's gone, tomorrow's gone. I don't have time for anything. You have a lot of time. It's just how you prioritize it.

• 18:44Jocko Willink?

  So you, so did, when you came back from that trip, did you actually get a job somewhere?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  I did.

• 18:49Jocko Willink?

  And where was that?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  So I was working at a call center in Daytona Beach and was doing kind of research around car dealerships and who we could call and target for stuff like you're, you're sensing my enthusiasm. But at the same time, I was grateful to have a job and I needed a job. And so that.

• 19:08Jocko Willink?

  So were you hammering the phone lines?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  I was.

• 19:11Jocko Willink?

  So, so you started off as a nug, okay, call these, call these numbers, ask these people what kind of interior they'd like in their vehicles or whatever?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  It was actually direct to the dealership. So I was trying to figure out, you know, I, I can barely remember. Trying to get more dealers on to, to this marketing campaign that, that the company was running.

• 19:33Jocko Willink?

  Check. And no part of you was thinking, here I am, I found it.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  I had very much not arrived.

• 19:42Jocko Willink?

  And then you had that job, is that when you had that job is when September 11th happened?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 19:49Jocko Willink?

  And what was your, what was your thought pattern once September, once you saw the, the towers get hit?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  So i- if you remember JFK Junior had died in a Cessna, Cessna plane, I think it was a Cessna that he, you know, he was piloting and it went down and

• 20:06Jocko Willink?

  Like off the coast of Long Island.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Something like that, right? And, and so, you know, that was kind of the initial reaction. And I think there was just general confusion. I mean, I woke up, I was getting ready to go to work with my, you know, button down and my khakis and stuff, right? Eating my cereal and I had the news on. And so I remember watching stuff go down and it just, there was just general confusion. And so I was confused as well, like, oh, this is an accident. And then you just sort of watch it escalate and it was obviously very clear that it wasn't an accident.

• 20:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for me, first plane hits, which I think I heard on the radio. So even when I hear a plane hit their, you know, one of the twin towers, I'm like, oh, Cessna. You know, pilot doesn't know what he's doing, was probably foggy, whatever. He's taking a joy rod. That, that's horrible. And then, then I saw the images like somewhere, you know, saw the images on TV or something. And of the first building of the first tower getting hit. And I thought, oh, wow. How, how does that happen? As soon as I saw the second

• 21:10Speaker 01

  You see that plane come in.

• 21:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. As soon as I saw the second one hit, I was like, oh, that was, that was, this is pre-planned terrorist attack.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  I just got goosebumps thinking about how much rage I felt at that moment in time.

• 21:24Jocko Willink?

  So how long did it take you to say to yourself, you're going to go in the military?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Right. So the initial reaction was I gotta, this is, this is my mission. I gotta figure out how to serve America, something greater than myself. The, the more practical side was joining the military in a time of war was scary. There was fear, human fear that was running through my veins about this is That's a real decision. And the other part of it was, you know, the first death was Mike Span. So Mike Span was in, worked for the CIA. And, you know, before that was a Marine. They sort of glossed over that in the telling of it. You know, he was a, he was, worked for the CIA and he was in Afghanistan, one of the first in.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  And so I took a lot of inspiration from that and sent my packet in to the CIA and a couple other of the alphabet soup agencies that were generally speaking in the DC area. And that's a really long process. So, you know, went through that entire process and met some good people along the way, met some of the, the hiring folks at the agency. And I kept asking about, I didn't know anything, okay? I heard about, you know, SOG and like the, it's called ground branch, right? That's the paramilitary branch of, of the CIA. That's where I wanted to be. And so I didn't know how to get there. And finally, you know, you make it through round after round after round of interviews

• 22:59Speaker 01

  with the agency and they get more sort of specific and you have one-on-one time with interviewers and you're encouraged to ask questions, which you should. I'm like, hey, so how do I get to do that kind of stuff? Like the mission that Mike Span got, how do I do that? And there was this guy and we were in, you know, some office space, very, as you might expect, sterile looking office space in Northern Virginia. And this guy sitting at a desk, not, not too dissimilar to how we're sitting right now, looked right at me, he's like, look, we don't train our guys in the military. We take from the special operations branches and then they come and work for us.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  And I had this moment in my head, I'm like, damn man, why didn't you tell me this like a year ago? Right? And, and so that's when it clicked for me. And so now I'm resetting the clock though, because I start going through military application processes at that time. And that's, you know, 2000, late 2002. And you know, there's this perception out there, was this perception. I think there's a lot of us who are working really hard to dispel it, that you either go to war or you go to jail. The military has a last option resort of you can't get a job somewhere else, so you should go join the military. And that's just patently false. And so, you know, it was

• 24:22Speaker 01

  one of those things where a lot of people wanted to join the military. A lot of people with really, really stellar resumes in the aftermath of nine eleven. We had a nation of people who said, send me. I want to go to war to fight for my country. Now, that's great for the country. It's hard if you want to go join the military. So, you know, I just graduated from college. Of course, I'm going to become an officer. And of course, I don't tell anyone in my family, anything that's going on, right? So, my hair was grown out. I was working out a lot to sort of do the kind of physical training or physical fitness that I thought I needed to do in order to join the military and be of some

• 25:01Speaker 01

  value to someone in some godforsaken place downrange. And so, they thought I was just going off the deep end. You know, I just graduated from this expensive college. I sort of didn't really have direction or purpose.

• 25:16Jocko Willink?

  Are you still working for the, in the call center this whole time?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  No. So, I actually moved up to be closer to DC. I wanted to be closer to where I thought the action was. And by action, I meant where service was happening. And to me, that was, that was New York and DC. And so, I moved up to DC. I had some family up there. I worked as an analyst at a bank then, right? Which is a great way to work a hundred hours a week by Wednesday, right? And sleep on the floor, you know, for a couple hours before your bosses, all eighteen of them, come in the next morning with more stuff for you to do. And so, I was up in DC for that period, because the interview processes were long and drawn out. And I didn't know where I wanted to go, but all those places

• 26:03Speaker 01

  were in DC. So, it was like going through those processes there was a little bit easier. And also, the military process. So, my first place that I applied was to become a Marine Corps officer. And that just... Kept going through, hey, you've been selected to go to basic officer candidate. Officer candidate school. Right, and that just kept not happening and eventually I was like, man, the wars are just passing me by. Like, it's time. So do what you gotta do, but you need to do it now or you will regret this for the rest of your life. So I went down and then I started talking to, I went and was gonna go to the Navy recruiting center, which I did, and asked

• 26:47Speaker 01

  about becoming an officer in the Navy and how do I become a SEAL? And they're like, well, that takes forever, right? And I'm like, well, I don't have forever because I want to go fight a war, right? So I walked next door to the Army recruiter and he said the same thing, right? He's like, this takes forever, right? If you want to go be in Special Forces, that's, you can do that when you're a captain promotable or O3 promotable or, sorry, O2 promotable about to be a captain, I think was, was the timeframe on that. So that's years away. Now, the idea of going and joining an infantry unit or something, it didn't appeal to me. I wanted to be, I mean, you have these grandiose notions of

• 27:27Speaker 01

  what you're capable of, and I wanted to be the guy in the mountains hunting Bin Laden. That's what I wanted to do with my life. And, and so the guy sensed this, you know, these recruiters, they, they know when they've got something. He's like, well, we've got this special program, right? You can go straight off the street and join Special Forces. It's an enlistment. I'm like, ooh, that kind of sounded like a bad word to me. Enlist, right? I mean, college degree, you have all these senses of what you're entitled to or what you should be doing with your life. And part of those are pressures that you're felt from outside forces and there's no doubt expectations that family and loved ones,

• 28:11Speaker 01

  they have for what your life should be, you know, the perfect life, like Edward Norton in Fight Club, right? Assigning value to the furniture in your house and what apartment you have and all these things that really don't matter, but you think about what you should do in life in order to be happy and. Enlisting to go be a ground pounder in the army was was a little bit removed from what I thought my direction should be. And yet, that that was my choice. It was do this or sit around and wait forever until they call and say, okay, now you're you're validated and can go to become an officer. And, man, I didn't know anything about this process. I didn't have anybody that

• 28:55Speaker 01

  I talked to about what people did in these jobs.

• 28:58Jocko Willink?

  Did you know any SF guys at all?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  No, and and the total.

• 29:02Jocko Willink?

  Did you know any Marine Corps officers?

• 29:03Speaker 01

  No, no. And so it's like what you see on the movies.

• 29:07Jocko Willink?

  Did you listen to Jocko Podcast?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  So the irony is that my next door neighbor that I lived next to in Florida, growing up for, you know, since 92, was an officer, a special forces officer in the army. And it took until my mom found out, because I told her that I'd enlisted, which just to jump to the the the end a little bit here, I ended up signing a five year contract, enlisting into the army where they guarantee that you can go to the schools. They, of course, don't guarantee that you'll pass.

• 29:44Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  And if you don't pass.

• 29:46Jocko Willink?

  18 X-ray.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  18 X-ray. So X-ray just basically means that 18 series is the MOS and the X-ray is the designator for we don't know what your job specifically within the within special forces will be. If you pass it, we'll assign it to you later.

• 30:01Jocko Willink?

  This is one of those questions I get asked all the time by people, which is, you know, should I go officer? Should I go enlisted? You know, this is just really common for people to ask. And, you know, I was really lucky because I wouldn't change a I enlisted and I wouldn't change anything about my career. My career was ridiculously awesome and super lucky. And people ask me that question all the time. Um, it's really hard to get a SEAL officer billet. Like as a, as you join the Navy. It's, I think they, I think there's about 30 a year. And there's thousands of people that apply for it. Like the Naval Academy takes 15.

• 30:40Jocko Willink?

  I think it's 15 from the Naval Academy and then 15 from ROTC and OCS combined. So this is a tiny number. And so I always tell people, look, you can apply for that, but if you want to be a SEAL, you, you may end up just having to enlist. And the, the same token is, I'm so glad, I, I didn't want to go to college. Like, I wanted to, same as you. I mean, there was no war going on, but I wasn't smart enough to figure that out. I thought that there was, I thought that there were SEALs all over the globe, conducting covert operations, and I was gonna go get some of that.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 31:15Jocko Willink?

  But, you know, so I was like, ready to enlist, and I wouldn't do it any other way. And I would, I ended up going to college when I was like, 28 years old. And by then, I was like, okay, I can, I can sit in a classroom now. When I, when I was, 18, 19, 20, I didn't want to sit in a classroom. I wanted a machine gun, you know, like a normal kid. So, yeah, so I, I think for people that are on that fence, for, and anybody that knows me, or listens to me at all, I mean, all day long, I'll tell you that, being a, being a infantry soldier, being an infantry Marine, I mean, those are, being a machine gunner in the Marine Corps, I mean, any of those jobs,

• 31:54Jocko Willink?

  are awesome. And they'll lead to real leadership, enlisted leadership positions. And, and it's a great experience and a great jobs. And, I wouldn't have it any other way. I mean, um, and then on the officer's side, is like, well, you know, you're gonna, if you go in as an officer, you're gonna obviously be put in charge earlier. You'll end up with more leadership situations sooner. So there's, there's benefits to it. But at the end of the day, I think what happened to you is what happens to a lot of people. It's like, the, the path becomes clear, not because of what you want, but because of the way the world works. And so, when, you know, figure out what your path, that path should become clear at some point. And then you say, okay, cool. That looks like my path.

• 32:38Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna go. And one thing that I will say is, in the SEAL teams for sure, I'm pretty sure it's this way in the, in the Army and the Marine Corps. If you're a good enlisted human. And you make an effort to become an officer, it's easier to become an officer when you're an enlisted person than it is to do it coming from straight out. And I don't know if that's a hundred percent true in the Army and the Marine Corps, but in the SEAL Teams, it's absolutely true. It's, you know, you, you will have an easier time getting selected if you are already in the SEAL Teams for six years and now you want to become an officer. It's, it's a little easier, but you can't count on it because the program that I did, they took 50 people to become officers out of the whole Navy. So out of 250,000 people in the Navy, they

• 33:22Jocko Willink?

  took 50. That's not, those aren't great odds, but I don't know. I think the path, I think what happened to you is what happens to a lot of people and you gotta say, okay, that my path has been revealed by circumstances and I'm gonna go for it.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, you gotta do something. I mean, there's lots of other alternatives. You can do nothing and you can regret it. And that's a really, that's the worst path of all.

• 33:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that's another good point that you bring up. And this is something else that people ask me, you know, oh, should I do this now? Or I got a good job offer, but I really want to be in the military, or I want to go to college, but I, whatever. They have a million, I don't want to call them excuses. They have a million legitimate, what they believe to be reasons on why they should postpone or possibly not even go into the military. And from my perspective, all these other opportunities you have in life will be there for a long time, but the military will not be.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  That's a very true. I mean, I've, I've yet to meet the person who served in the military that regretted it. Everybody says, I learned so much. And what you really learn is a perspective on life. And I don't care if you're an officer or you're enlisted or whatever. You, you learn about teamwork and camaraderie, not as posters on a, on a, words on a poster in a bathroom, but as just what it feels like. And, and that becomes your northern star in life. You want to chase that for the rest of your life. I want to be a part of a team. I want to feel that reward of service to, to a higher purpose than just myself. I want to help other people. And when you connect those dots, you, you just,

• 35:02Speaker 01

  you need to go do it. Now, I, I really, I caution people against thinking, oh, well, I'm going to enlist so that I can become an officer. It's, it's very rare. And so. You sort of say it's not about the actual mechanics. It's about service and you you get to pick your path. And you need to pick your path wisely and you need to do it when you're young. When you're 20, here's what nobody tells you. You graduate from college or you're 20 years old or whatever. Your your basic value in in the universe is nothing. You're just you don't have wisdom or perspective. You don't know yourself and that's the biggest part of this.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  You you haven't been through enough adversity at a mature enough age. Even if you've got a horrific childhood. You're not at a mature enough age to know yourself well enough as you get older. And so what the military does is it forces you through adversity. To learn more about yourself, to how you'll respond to these kinds of challenges in life and and life's a really hard place for for all of us. And you don't get good at doing hard things by only doing easy things. So take this job offer and this cush whatever that you got and wad it up and throw it away. And find some cause that you really believe in to serve.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  And go go do that and see what path that leads you to. Because for me, it's it's got nothing to do at this point about, oh, well, you know, the specifics of well, a career or however many years in the army. And it's got everything to do about the way of life that I want to lead, that I want others to lead with me, which is based upon the time that I spent in special forces.

• 36:57Jocko Willink?

  You talked about a five year enlistment, which when I joined the Navy, I've signed a six year contract.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  God bless you. Your recruiter got he was he got some high fives and some atta boys on that one.

• 37:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this the program that I do was called the Dive Farer Program. And it was a six year enlistment, that same thing. It gave you an opportunity to do the screening test to go to BUDS. So this is just completely ridiculous. But I remember thinking it seemed like a lot of people just couldn't, especially people like you're saying that were my age, whatever, 18, 19, 20 years old. For them, for them and a little bit of me was like six years seemed like this eternal length of time. And the reality is, man, six years is a joke. I mean, six years of my 20 year career went by and I can barely even remember six years. So that's another thing that people got to overcome.

• 37:50Jocko Willink?

  They got to overcome the fact that this seems like a huge chunk of your life, but, but the value that you're going to get out of it is infinitely worth way more than.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  For the rest of your life.

• 38:02Jocko Willink?

  Rest of your life.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  What else, where else are you going to find this in your twenties?

• 38:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, you're not.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  You're not.

• 38:08Jocko Willink?

  You're not.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  And it doesn't just have to be the military. There are a lot of other organizations that, you know, you can serve that are American needs. You can go be a teacher, you can go, there's lots of things that you can do. But ultimately you need to find something with a mission and purpose that you really believe in and just pour your heart into it. Work really, really hard, learn what that feels like.

• 38:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I think you're, you make the good point of it. Working, working really hard at something. Well, working really hard at being a soldier, if that's what you are passionate about is a lot easier than working really hard in a call center. When you, when you don't like it or working really hard as an analyst when it's like it's not what you want to do and you don't see any greater purpose behind it. I mean, you give me all day long to teach people about leadership, which is what I do right now. I do that and I can't even stop doing it. I mean, it's like I, I work with a company and I'm, I'm so engaged with them. It's like awesome, but then you, if you were to remove me from that and put me into a, you know, staring at spreadsheets for, for a bank.

• 39:17Jocko Willink?

  It would be hard for me to, you know, really find the passion in doing that.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and people are built differently as well. I mean, some people are, you know, some people love the idea of going straight to college at 18 and, and working really hard at college and, and doing really well and they could do that. And that was me as well.

• 39:35Jocko Willink?

  I was, I was doing, I was working with a, a company that made candy. Candy. Good candy? Um, not really like what you think of when you think of good candy, more like just sort of the the normal, when you, when you go to a restaurant and you leave and they have like mints. Oh, I see. And you grab a handful of mints or whatever. They make that kind of candy. So this isn't like some gourmet candy that they put on a pedestal and talk about. No, it's not that. But anyways, I'm, I'm, I'm so speaking this company, I'm, I'm with them, I'm working with them. And they were talking about this candy and all their different variants of candy and what they're going to do strategically and where they needed to improve the market share. Man, they were into

• 40:18Jocko Willink?

  it. They were into it. And so I, that, that's, they found something and they were into it. I was like, okay, I was like, this is awesome. I'm glad that these folks are totally into this. And so I guess to your point, if you are into, you know, if you're into economics and you go to a bank and that's what you're into and you love trying to figure out trends and you, hey, that's awesome. And, and, and you should proceed down that path. But if you're not into it, then maybe you should look for a different path. So I'll tell one more story about this because it, this is important, I think, for kids to, to understand. So I'm in the, in the Navy, I'm in the SEAL teams,

• 41:00Jocko Willink?

  I'm on a ship, we're out in the middle of the ocean, it's pitch black, there's massive waves, it's raining, and we're getting ready to launch our little Zodiac boats, you know, and you're just, you're just launching into death. I mean, not, not really, you're launching into just complete darkness, right? And there's huge waves and they're, and it's on a, on a ship that has a well deck. So the, the ramp is going to go down on this thing and, and we're just going to have our boats there and just jump into the ocean. And there's a, there's a Navy guy, a bosun's mate, which means he's like a deck hand guy. But he runs all the, all the launching of, you know, ships or launching of the little boats and bringing boats back on, you know, he runs all

• 41:42Jocko Willink?

  that stuff. It's important job in the Navy, a bosun's mate. So as the, the ramp's going down, the rain's pouring in, the waves are crashing. And this guy looks at me and he says, and you know, it's a hard job being a bosun's mate because you're doing all this kind of work of, you know, loading vehicles, unloading vehicles, loading boats, unloading boats. You're in charge of making sure that the, the equipment is maintained. I mean, it's like a hard job. Anyways, the boats, everything smashing and crashing in water. And the guy looks at me and he goes, man, I'm glad I don't have your job. And I looked back at him and I said, well, you know what? I'm glad I don't have your job.

• 42:28Jocko Willink?

  So let's make a deal. You do your job and I'll do mine. And, and it was totally, it was awesome. It made sense. And the guy kind of laughed and we smiled. And then I launched out into the middle of the ocean to go out and spend, you know, four hours in a transit to get to the beach, to swim across the beach, to get onto the beach, to do a three day reconnaissance, freezing cold. Hey, that's what we do. And that guy was gonna, you know, be on that ship. But that's another thing that just, I, I was in a perfect place. I loved doing what I was doing. And he was in a perfect place because he loved doing, you know, he was part of something that was big and part of something that was bigger than himself, you know, being in the Navy. It was cool. But you gotta find, if you can, find something that you really like doing.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Just don't hate your life.

• 43:10Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  I mean, do not hate your life.

• 43:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we do not recommend hating your life.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Never. If something goes on for too long and you do not like waking up in the morning, then you've got to change something.

• 43:22Jocko Willink?

  Yes. And just to make sure, because I'll get asked this about a million times and I've been asked it, that doesn't mean you walk into work tomorrow and throw your, um, computer at your supervisor and tell him, I'm going to do something I love. And then you're homeless. No, don't do that. What you do is you figure out an exit strategy. You come up with a plan. You actually think about it. You take a year to save money. You figure out what you're gonna do. That's what you do.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Two jobs, one paycheck. Sometimes the second job is, moonlighting is a passion, a hobby. You try to turn that into reality. Work really hard.

• 43:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  There's not shortcuts in this. It's not, hey, let me, let me fire up a brand new Instagram account and that's my new passion in life and I'm gonna become a millionaire. It's ridiculous. Right? Find something that you really love to do and two jobs, one paycheck. That's the deal.

• 44:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Or. Four jobs, one paycheck.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Or more, sure. Ten jobs, one. Dude, I mean, figure it out. And by the way, traveling the world in hopes of finding yourself is not a good plan. That's my general, that's my general experience.

• 44:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's interesting. You actually found yourself while you're sitting in a, being an analyst, or sitting there on a call center. You're like, okay, this much I know. I don't want to do this.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I kind of knew I didn't want to do that. I just think there's a lot of people out there that, that want, especially in America, where there's so much opportunity. We can do so many things with our lives here. There's just so much freedom we don't even realize. And yet, we feel enslaved to other people's expectations. And so we start falling into that trap of, well, I gotta go do this, and I gotta earn this much, and I gotta chase that.

• 45:04Jocko Willink?

  Did your, did your family, meaning your mom, your grandparents, your friends, did they have enough understanding of the military to realize that, were they disappointed when you enlisted? Were they like, oh, no, you're officer material, son?

• 45:18Speaker 01

  They were absolutely like, my mom cried in the kitchen. She would have cried if, she would have cried if I wanted, if I told her I was becoming an officer either, uh, as well. I mean, it was just one of those things where it was a time of war. And that's hard for moms. And God bless moms, I think they have the hardest job on the planet. And, and so, you know, that was just a really difficult time. You know, we had, it was October of 2003 that I, that I enlisted. And you know, the war in Iraq had kicked off. I felt like I'd missed it. You know, you see them toppling the statue of Saddam. And I felt like I'd missed it. And, you know,

• 46:01Speaker 01

  yeah, so I came back from the recruiting station, and I told my mom in the kitchen, and my brother was sitting on the, my brother's younger. And he was sitting on the counter, and I, I'd missed some calls and some stuff. And my mom was upset with me. And generally, my mom just didn't know what I was doing with my life either. Right? Because she had expectations that I was going to do something important with my life, and I wasn't doing that. And I told her that I'd enlisted to go join special forces, and she just lost it.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  And then there were this sort of-

• 46:32Jocko Willink?

  How long was it between your enlistment and when you left for boot camp?

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Like, three weeks.

• 46:36Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 46:37Speaker 01

  So, maybe I was here around October 1st and I left 28th of October.

• 46:42Jocko Willink?

  Pretty quick turn time there.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so mom's soul is crushed.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then there's the aftermath with the grandparents and my, just the family. So, as we talked about earlier, I mean, my mom was really young when she had me. And so, a lot of the rest of my family took a very vested interest in me. And I'm the person that I am. I know such thing as a self-made man. And I'm a product of the time and effort that they spent to help raise me. And, including my dad. I've spent tons of time with my dad in Ohio in the summer and his parents. And I just had a lot of people in my life. And there was just a lot of questioning about this decision.

• 47:24Jocko Willink?

  Was there anyone that said, "Right on. Good call."

• 47:27Speaker 01

  My dad was actually almost relieved.

• 47:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  He just said, "Okay, that sounds about right."

• 47:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  And, but, you know, everyone worries. You have to just accept that. And, so selfishness is something that gets thrown around as a very negative thing. And, you know, part of what you have to do to make yourself happy is you have to be selfish. You have to say, and call it whatever you want, "But this makes me happy. I need to do this regardless of the consequences." And it's not just a soldier that goes to war. The family is very much a part of that experience. And I completely shut them out throughout this entire process and then just dropped a bomb on them.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  And said, "I'm leaving in a month. I'm gonna go to boot camp and then I'm going to war." And, you know, there was a part of me that really felt like that. I knew I needed to do it. But it's a scary thing. I mean, it's a lot less scary to me now. I mean, the idea of, "Hey, you've gotta go back on the next smoking bird to Afghanistan or Iraq." I mean, it's still something, if you're not scared, at least a little bit. If you don't get an adrenaline rush, if someone's shooting at you, there's a problem. You know, like, if you're not mortally aware of what's going on.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  There's probably something not quite right. And, and yet at that time, it was just so unknown. I mean, I, I pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I was gonna die.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  And I'm sure my mom did.

• 49:11Jocko Willink?

  All right. So you show up at boot camp. How many hours or days was it into boot camp that you said to yourself, oh, man, I screwed up?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  I could not believe how hard boot camp was. I mean, how miserable it was. It was, and I was a little older, so I was 24. And I was like, had a little bit more perspective, maybe than some of the, the guys were 17 and 18, which maybe that wasn't a good thing.

• 49:43Jocko Willink?

  I, I love the fact that I was really young going through all, cause you're just too dumb to figure. I mean, I just, I would, I would not want to go through, when I was 24 years old, I wouldn't have wanted to go through boot camp. I mean, I would have done it, of course, but it would have sucked even more because you understand the world a little bit, a little bit better. You, you've had some kind of a taste of freedom. And I mean, I just was like, hey, okay, you want me to do this? I'm gonna do it. It was like, I was the perfect recruit, really, in a lot of ways, because I was just young and dumb.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  So I suffered. The, the, the biggest thing I suffered from was just overthinking stuff. Because I, I would sit and why are they doing this? That's the worst thing you can ask yourself. Why? It doesn't matter.

• 50:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Just do it. You have to learn how to just do. And so this is one of those things that you need to learn in your twenties. So the, what will make a huge impact is who is telling you what to do. Because if you align yourself with something that you don't believe in, with a person you don't really respect, and they're telling you what to do, you're gonna adapt your life to their way at that time. And the, the military, it, it's, it's got a very powerful way of creating.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Very strong people. Wherever you started, you will end up stronger for your time in the military. And that all begins with this basic, common experience of basic training. And I, I just, I couldn't believe how, how hard it was and how, just it was completely void of all social norms and etiquettes and all of those things. I mean, nothing was off limits in terms of their ability to denigrate you for any reason whatsoever.

• 51:27Jocko Willink?

  In Navy boot camp, you are in open bay barracks, obviously. And then the toilets are just on the wall. There's 20 toilets in a row. Like you're going to sit down on a toilet and then you're going to be looking at 19 other people that are also sitting. There's no privacy whatsoever. Zero. It's all gone. It's just zero. And then the other thing is, because this is, people always, you know, they listen to podcasts and they, hey, I just didn't listen to Marine Corps. Hey, I just listened to the Army. They'll send me that message. And I'm like, okay, 72 hours into boot camp, you're going to hate me. Like just give it another few more weeks.

• 52:08Jocko Willink?

  Cause the thing that we're not used to, even as an 18 year old, is you're not used to your freedom being completely gone, completely. There's zero freedom when you get to boot camp. None. Zero. You're going to be doing what someone else tells you to do. You have no freedom to do anything. You can't even go to the bathroom when you want to go to the bathroom.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Drill sergeant, can I go use the latrine?

• 52:30Jocko Willink?

  You have no freedom whatsoever. And that is, as you said, very important lesson to learn on life. You, you learn to appreciate your freedom and you also learn to deal with the fact that, hey, just because I can't control this aspect of my life, doesn't mean I can't control other aspects of my life. And that's an important thing to figure out as a young person. And you kind of learn to play the game too, right? Like, look, there's no way around this. This drill instructor, this instructor is gonna do this. And the only possible thing I can do, I mean, other than quitting, is just to shut up and just do what you're supposed to do. It's like, okay, cool.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  No options is a great option. Do it or do it or quit and you can't quit boot camp. You can quit BUDS or Special Forces Qualification Course. You can't quit. You're you literally go AWOL. And then they go find you and one guy went AWOL and they found him at the gas station, you know, off base or whatever, trying to get someone to buy him some coffee or something, whatever. And they brought him back and, you know, then he was back into it except he was a guy with a bullseye on him because he's the guy that went AWOL and they dragged him back. And it's it's I can't stress enough what you just said. You have zero privacy. And and this is a culture shock for a lot of people because this is the whole,

• 53:57Speaker 01

  everything that we do, our system is based around a culture of of I, right? At its basic level now, you have your iPhone, you have your individually wrapped everything. You have, you know, me, me, me, right? And that's going to make you happy or that's, you know, you, everything is is just centered around the individual. And the the Army just doesn't prescribe to that privacy. I mean, there's all these privacy debates now, social media and your data and all of the privacy, as if that's just some right that you have. And that's fine. There's there's some nuance to that. Well, let me just tell you, zero percent of that exists in the military, zero. Like you said, I mean, there's just a lot of naked dudes, you know, with with open

• 54:42Speaker 01

  latrines and and it's just that's what it is. And you learn that that's kind of a primordial way to exist. And you are much more in touch with how our species evolved over our entire evolution of of Homo sapiens when you join the military and you you just become in tune with that.

• 55:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I think the most important message that gets relayed into your brain, whether you're conscious of it or not, is crystal clear. And that is, this team and this organization is more important than you are. And your little wants and needs and desires and your personality doesn't matter when it's compared to the needs of this team and this group and this mission. And that's important, another very important thing to learn as a young person. You're not at the center of the universe, period.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  The end. And so now as that evolved for me, one of, one of the most important lessons, and this is where you have to spend a lifetime mastering it, is to understand that to be a great teammate, first you have to be a great individual and then you have to submit to the team. Because anybody on your SEAL teams or my special forces teams, they're, these are people that can do anything with their lives. They, if they commit themselves, they will do it. And so you have to become a master of your trade, a true professional. And, and that, that requires the discipline that you have as an individual, when nobody's

• 56:18Speaker 01

  looking over your shoulder, to just continually refine and sharpen, sharpen the, the blade, right, your own. And then though, you have to realize that it's not about you. It's, it's a, it's a balancing act for an entire lifetime. And the more that, the more that you do both of those in concert, the more rewarding life will be.

• 56:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And really the thing that drives you to be as good as you can is because you know your teammates are going to be relying on you. And if you can't deliver, that's like the worst thing in the world, me being in the SEAL teams, like the worst thing in the world for someone in the teams, for a good SEAL, is like, oh, my teammates were counting on me and I couldn't deliver for them. That's the, that's the lowest of the low. Hey, look, somebody looks at me and says, oh, Jaco's not that fast or Jaco couldn't do enough pull-ups or whatever. It's like, oh yeah, that's on me, no big deal. But when they needed me to climb that ladder, they needed me to finish that road march or move to that position and I couldn't do it.

• 57:22Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's what always, always drives like a good team guy to be better is like they don't want to let their friends down, period.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  It's the ultimate motivation.

• 57:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Like to be a part of that community and in the community, sharpens itself. I mean, you get guys and competition, competition breeds excellence.

• 57:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  And, and so you've got this world, whereas iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend. And that is just every day on the team. Everything's a competition.

• 57:49Jocko Willink?

  Everything's a competition.

• 57:52Jocko Willink?

  So when you get done with boot camp and then what, you go to A I T?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, I, they kind of were lumped in together because you know, it was infantry, boot camp and infantry, A I T, whatever it was, it was just the same entire crew at the same place in Fort Benning over the winter in Georgia, which was just, I mean, it's, it's horrible. It's really, really cold and they just, they, they put you in formation at Odark thirty four, whatever.

• 58:20Jocko Willink?

  Stand there.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  You just stand there and shiver. I mean, it is just horrific.

• 58:25Jocko Willink?

  The army, the army beats the, the, the navy at that as far as just formations and just standing there. Cause I, the only, the only real, I guess the only real army school I ever did, that's like sort of a, a basic army school is like, I went to airborne school at Fort Benning, Georgia. And like, hey, we're going to, we're going to formation and we're going to stand out here until when? Until we're done standing out here.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:51Jocko Willink?

  Standing at a position of attention. That's another thing you like, learn to deal with the fact that you, you're not always going to be in control of what's happening and how are you going to deal with it? You're going to suck it up and stand there. Guess what? Stand there.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Suffer in silence.

• 59:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  You know, this, this is where all of these phrases come from.

• 59:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Right? You've got, you've got so much creativity because from these guys standing in this formation with all this available time to sit and think about how miserable their life is, right? And then you say, how do you come up with something sort of cute? Oh, suffer in silence, you know, just stuff like that and. Yeah, there's a lot of line thoughts of formation.

• 59:28Jocko Willink?

  Like the more horrible things that happen to you, the more proud you are and the more you relish in those old days and that's where pride comes from, you know, pride comes from like, oh, we did really hard things and they sucked and we're proud of them.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Yes. And, and so the other part is this is how you become a better leader. It's how you become more confident. It's incremental. You don't just wake up one day and all of a sudden you're Abraham Lincoln. Right? It doesn't work that way. You can't just sit and read books all day. You have to actually take books and apply them to harder situations incrementally. And what the military taught me that teaches all of us is what you're capable of doing and what you're capable of enduring. And it pushes your body and it pushes your mind in miserable horrific ways. And you gain confidence from that and you just, you climb one rung higher on the ladder. And then when life gets really, really hard, then you can draw upon what you learned throughout

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  that process of the last rung that you, you climbed.

• 1:00:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, people, I got asked that recently. Um, you know, people are always looking for kind of this sound, a good soundbite, a good clickbait title for an article. But, you know, someone asked me something along the lines of, so like, what was the moment that all this leadership stuff came, like became clear to you? And I was like, there wasn't one moment, you know, I learned this stuff, one mistake over a little mistake, over a big mistake, over a little mistake, over years and years and years and years and going, okay. And even now, I'll make a mistake tomorrow. I'll do something dumb this afternoon and learn something else. And that's, you're right, that is what the military does.

• 1:01:09Jocko Willink?

  And it is important that when you realize something as stupid as, hey, you're going to stand in formation. Until it stops and that could be two hours, three hours. You don't even know how long it's going to be. And guess what? When you get done with that, okay, cool. Now we're done with that. And now the next thing you face, you go, oh, you know what? I, um, I can get through this. I can get through this. I can keep my mouth shut or I can drive forward or I can stand here or I can stay in the push-up position or I can stay awake on this patrol or I can sit here and, and freeze in this cold weather layup position in the mountains. I can get through this and it won't

• 1:01:52Jocko Willink?

  make a difference when I'm done. So let's, let's just buckle in and get it done.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  So the evolution of that for, for me was we were the early phases of the, the special force qualification course, the cadre lined us all up and not just for formation, but he goes, all right, here's the task at hand. You're going to lunge around this building until I get tired. And like, so, you know, at that point, standing in formation didn't sound so bad. You know, lunge around the building until I get tired and you're sitting there thinking, of course, you don't say it, but, but cadre, how are you going to get tired? You're not doing the lunging. And of course that's the point. And so you just sort of do it until, until you don't.

• 1:02:34Jocko Willink?

  Until it's over. So that's, so that's how you kicked off the Q course? Is that the next thing?

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Well, so I went, well, I went to airborne school next. So, you know, went straight from graduating boot camp to then, you know, you're checking in over at those barracks airborne school and that's three weeks. And, and then I got the, made the trip to, to, uh, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. So I drove from Benning to Bragg and checked in. And so part of the 18 x-ray program is, is that there were preparation courses. So, you know, special forces selection is done out at Camp McCall, but there was a prep course that happened at Fort Bragg.

• 1:03:10Jocko Willink?

  It's a prep course for selection.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Correct. Because you're coming just off the street.

• 1:03:14Jocko Willink?

  So how long was that?

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  That was three weeks, maybe?

• 1:03:17Jocko Willink?

  And were they trying to teach you anything or they just trying to get you physically ready?

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  So the main skill that they had to show you was rucking and land navigation. So all land navigation for us is 45 pounds dry in the, the pine forests of North Carolina. And you do a lot of rucking, but, but the skill is how to, how to use map and compass in order to find points. And besides that, they just, there was a lot of training quote, quote, to get us ready for, for the real selection.

• 1:03:45Jocko Willink?

  Which is what? They're making you hump, basically?

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Well, no, there was a ton of of PT. I mean, a ton in in that period of time. And these were so part of This was you said this was called the prep course? This was called SOPC. So Special Operations Preparation and Conditioning. And so what was really, really cool. In other words, get some. It was just get some all the time. And and so what was really, really cool, though, was you had this was early 2004, spring of 2004, and our cadre were some of the guys who had been first into Afghanistan. They were the horse soldiers in there that had literally come back. I mean, those are the guys that I wanted to be.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  They were my heroes. And everybody gets uncomfortable. If they're sitting here, it would be hardest to say you're my hero, bro, right? But, you know, I'll tell you that they were my heroes. Because that's where I was in life. I mean, they had they had gone and fought the Taliban for us to to avenge what happened on 9/11. And now they're telling me to go run and rock and do pushups. And half the time, they're doing it with us because they're about to go back to war. I mean, the way this works is you come back and you do some time as a cadre or as an instructor. And then you go back on on an ODA, on an operational detachment alpha, an A-team, if you will, and you deploy again. So, you know, they were going to stay in physical, great physical shape as well.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  They didn't do everything with us, of course, roll around in the gig pit and do all that stuff. They they spent their time doing that already. But, you know, how do you not? How do you quit on them? I mean, these are the things that went through my head. I mean, it was just. Do people quit during the prep? Oh, so it ended up being the prep. The prep course was a lot harder than actual special forces selection for me. And for most of us, I mean, the pass rate for those of us who went through this prep course was something like 95%. And how many people did you start the prep course with? And how many people washed out? Um, the prep course, there was significant, I don't remember all the numbers exactly. Let's say we started out with

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  200 and not, you know, maybe 60 passed or something, the prep course, and then all 60 of us passed selection. I mean, it was something to that effect, right?

• 1:06:04Jocko Willink?

  Does everyone go through the prep course?

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  No, it was only for the guys that came straight off the street. And so the, the army would pull, I mean, any job you have in the army, you can put your packet in to go to special forces selection. You don't get to go to the prep course because you're supposed to know rucking and land navigation, or you have to train on your own to, you know, you want to do that, two jobs, one paycheck. You figure it out. And you, you find time when you're at your unit deployed in Korea to go rock and to learn land nav because it's, or to, to stay proficient. And, and so, yeah, so the prep course ended up being, it was one of my favorite schools in the whole army. I mean, I just loved it.

• 1:06:41Jocko Willink?

  How much did you guys rock?

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  It was just,

• 1:06:45Jocko Willink?

  Would you guys rock every day?

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  So, short answer is if it's not every day, it's just about every day. And, and so, for us, I mean, the, the mechanics of the Q course are all land navigation based in the pine forests of Fort Bragg. You always have, you start out on the kind of timed iterations, it's 45 pounds dry. Right? So that means not counting water, not counting consumables, uh, stuff like that. But land navigation meant, you know, you go from point A to point B, point B to point C, and when you, you meet Cadre at the various points, or you meet them at the end and you, you show them the codes that you found on the, the spots that you went to, whatever the case may be, they verify that you did the route correctly.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  You're doing all of that with a rucksack on. So you just learn the way of the ruck. I mean, and it just becomes a, an extension of your body. You're moving with that ruck and it is just a really, Powerful experience to have that with you and to get so strong with that ruck on your back all the time. And then there's ruck PT. You know, you take your Alice pack and you put it above your head and now start lunging or you know, you're, it's just, the ruck is just your thing. It's, you have your rifle, but we didn't do a lot of marksmanship stuff in the Q course at all. I mean, there's a couple of days at the range, but once you get to your, once you get to your team, there's a ton, you know?

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  But everything is just with the ruck. And then you, you advanced to patrolling and the rucks get even heavier. And then you have, you know, your MOS phase. I went and became a, a communication sergeant. So it was radios. 18 Echo, exactly. So that was radios and stuff, but you know, there was rucks and it was a ton of PT.

• 1:08:31Jocko Willink?

  I was a radioman too. And I didn't go to the 18 Echo course, but I went to the, the SEAL equivalent at the time, which was on the East Coast. And yeah, well, to say that you carry a lot of weight is a very broad understatement.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Batteries don't weigh nothing. Radios don't weigh nothing, just like bullets and, and all of that stuff. And they don't weigh nothing. So you have to get comfortable moving weight and they don't explicitly teach you how to ruck. This is one of the things that I'm, I, I want to help impact that part of it because they don't, there's not a sit down lesson. Hey, this is how your body's going to adapt to rucking. This is the weight you should start at. This is how, this is how you, you grow that over time. They just say, hey, this is all the stuff you're going to carry. Go do it or, do it or don't, right?

• 1:09:22Jocko Willink?

  Now, when you haven't put a ruck on for a while and like, this is something I always remember, like, let's say I was out doing uh, close quarters combat or mount or something where we weren't really wearing a ruck. And then all of a sudden it'd be like, okay, well now we're going to the desert and it's time to ruck up. The first, when you put that thing on and you take, cause when you first put it on, you're like, oh, okay. No factor. And then probably like the first 45 minutes.

• 1:09:51Jocko Willink?

  Of a of a rock hump, you go, this is just gonna suck. And then over a couple of days, you're like, okay, this is just the way it is. And then eventually, after two weeks or three weeks of that kind of training, you actually become accustomed to it and you come used to it. And that's where, when you're talking about getting strong, you you can, you get strong. Your body, your body adapts to this, this weight that you're gonna have on your shoulders and your back, your hips and your legs.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  I mean, the other part of this, though, is the military takes the fun out of just about everything. Okay, they can't take the fun out of camaraderie, but everything else, like, oh, you wanna go jump out of airplanes? It'll be awesome. Was airborne school awesome? Because for me, it wasn't awesome.

• 1:10:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, no, no, no.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, wanna go be scuba diving master, right? Was was that fun, Jaco?

• 1:10:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, people ask me all the time, like, oh, so do you still dive? I'm like, no, that was, for me, diving is being at 12 feet in the water, complete blackness, staring at a compass for four hours and freezing. That's what diving is for me, like this, every time I see like a person in the tropics looking at fish and they're in.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Their little fins.

• 1:10:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, their little fins, it's just like, you have no idea.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  So, so rucking is not as simple as, oh, it's, it just sucks when you first do it. I mean, the military, 45 dry and you're expected to move really fast. That's a, that's not what I would recommend as a beginner's weight, right? Now, it's just in the army, that's kind of what it was.

• 1:11:16Jocko Willink?

  How good were you at rucking?

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  So I was not good at a lot of things. I was, I I had to learn how to not overthink stuff, you know, rucking was my thing. I mean, I'm, I got really long legs and it just, it came easy to me. So more weight load me up and, you know, when we would go on our patrols, they would not put me at point, right? Because when you're at point, you're sort of setting the pace and getting the hay slowed down. I mean, I'm just, my, I'm 6'4", my legs are really long. I don't. You know, other things came a lot harder to me.

• 1:11:51Jocko Willink?

  Can you win a sprint? A two hundred, a one hundred meter sprint, will you win that?

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not.

• 1:11:57Jocko Willink?

  Will you win a, will you win a six mile run?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  No, I would, I would do okay at, at the running part. I mean, there is a cardiovascular part to, to rucking and, and at the time I-

• 1:12:09Jocko Willink?

  Would you win a ten mile ruck hump?

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  So I was, I was always very, very competitive with that. I mean, top few guys.

• 1:12:19Jocko Willink?

  I, I'm similar to that. Like I was not the fastest sprinter at all. I was not the fastest, you know, six mile run. But with a rucksack on, it was like an equalizer for me. And, uh, ended up, our physiolo- physiological guys were like, yeah, you have medium twitch muscle. That's what they said, which they, they didn't really discover this medium twitch. They're like, yeah, you're not super fast in a sprint and you're not great with this long endurance. But this thing where you have weight to move and for a long time, that's what you're good at. And I was like, okay, that's cool. Cool with me. And it was really good for being a radio man because I always had all this extra weight and I could always kind of do good with it, you know?

• 1:12:59Jocko Willink?

  And not that I'm some stellar ruck humper, but it was better, I was better at that than I was at sprinting. I was better at that than I was at the distance running. And it was something that was very, I was very lucky to have that because like I said, carrying a radio is, uh, sucks, carrying a radio. And if you're not like have, if you don't have some kind of propensity for it, it's going to be a real problem.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you know, the rucks are really heavy. I mean, the, the heaviest ruck I carried in the, the Q course was a hundred and twenty-five pounds. We had to jump in with that and then ruck that for a day. And that was the culminating exercise called, called Rob and Sage. And so when a lot of times military folks will say rucking sucks, it's like, yeah, that kind of rucking really sucks, right? And then what you do is you, you show up to where you're supposed to be and you dig fighting positions, right? And you, you know, and then the cadre comes and, and he blows you out of those fighting positions with arty sims. Right? Okay. Time to go, right? And then you go and you dig more fighting positions and you don't sleep and you don't eat. And you got a rucksack on your back and you say, man, rucking sucks. Like, well, it's not just the rucking that sucks.

• 1:14:07Jocko Willink?

  It's it's um another one of those things where yeah, I guess the military makes it bad. But yeah, when you get done with it, you feel good.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Some of the best physical experiences of my entire life have come after a long ruck. And you take that ruck off and you sit down, sort of the rucksack flop. It's called you just sort of sit down on the ruck and then you take the shoulder straps off. And you can feel the blood flow just going back everywhere in your body. And it's like your whole body feels like it does after you take ski boots off. And it's just so awesome. You can just feel what you did. I just love it.

• 1:14:52Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so how long is the communications part of your like, how long was the 18?

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  18 echo course. It was like three months. And so it was.

• 1:15:03Jocko Willink?

  Did you learn Morse code?

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  I was the first class that did not learn Morse code, so it would have been six months.

• 1:15:09Jocko Willink?

  Week.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Week.

• 1:15:12Jocko Willink?

  I I had to learn Morse code, which I thought was completely stupid. And the guy that was teaching us the class was like, in the event of a nuclear holocaust, Morse code will be the only thing punching through the ionosphere. And I'm like, sounds good to me, bro.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  I mean, look, life has risk, right? And when you're when you're running the schoolhouse or whatever, you have to weigh however many thousand guys a year. Wasting or not wasting, but spending three months of their life on Morse code versus going to fight the war.

• 1:15:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, don't get me wrong. I support this decision. It was not very, it didn't make a lot of sense when I did it. So it's so it's a three month school that you went to?

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  It was three months and it was run by these, God bless them. It was these two third group guys named Blade and Razor. I mean, just you you run in your military career and you have these instructors that really just teach you things about life. And it's it's never because they make it easy, but they they give you a why. You know, this is important because and you know, they had just, they were dive, they were dive guys within SF, which is just, it's just another suck school that you go to down in Key West. And it's a real suck school, not a gentleman's course at all. And you're already a Green Beret and you go do that. And then you join a dive team and it's just another sort of notch, right, that you have. And so they take their physical fitness within our community, even just a little bit more. And they come back and they basically said, hey,

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  there's going to be no slugs that come through this course ever. Right? And so, I mean, it was just, you would show up first thing in the morning and Blade would drive his F950 or whatever it was. This thing was just enormous. And he was blasting his music and he would say, welcome to pain roulette. Right? And it was basically like, we're going to play a song and you're going to do an exercise for that entire song. And you know, when Stairway to Heaven comes on and you're doing pushups, that sucks. But the thing was is he was doing it with us. It's like, look, I'm going to go back to third group when I'm done here. I'm going to take a team and we're going to go back to Afghanistan. And, and we need to be ready and you all need to be ready.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  And those who stressed the, the seriousness of the job and the ways that you can become a professional in your trade, those are the ones that you respect the most, that you, you, you yearn to please them because you respect them. And, and that was how I felt in that course. So it was, again, physical fitness was just the foundation and you have to have it in the community. You have to be able to do the work physically in order to fight for your, for your country. And so, yes, we learned some skills, but most of the training was kind of outdated, right? We didn't deal with gun trucks setups. We didn't deal with any of the things that we were actually going to go do in war. We learned the basics of radio functionality and stuff like that. And we learned how to carry really heavy rucksacks full of batteries and radios.

• 1:18:04Jocko Willink?

  Did you string up HF antennas?

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  We did. Yes. That was one of the go no-go events and it's.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  You know, there's a lot of excuses that you can actually claim that are reality when it comes to being a radio guy, because how all that stuff happens, it's sunspots and, you know, the universe didn't want this com shot to happen.

• 1:18:27Jocko Willink?

  The 11 year sunspot cycle?

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  Uh, sir, there's sunspots in the AO today and, you know, but ultimately you have to just keep trying. It's like anything else. You have to just persevere and figure out how to make your shots.

• 1:18:38Jocko Willink?

  I used to be so kind of psycho and fanatical about making coms. Like, that was my job and I was gonna make coms. And I had in one of my evaluations, it said, "Made communications 100% of attempts." And I was like, "Yeah." Because they asked, you know, they asked for us to submit bullets, you know, like, you know, what, you know, I was like an E4 in the teams. And they're like, I said, "Made communications 100% of the time," which I was very, very proud of, because as you know, that was not an easy task to accomplish.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%, that's the standard.

• 1:19:16Jocko Willink?

  100% coms. I was like, because I would just be a psycho about, and what that meant was, see, what that really meant was, I would come up with communication plans that had, you know, multiple backups where, hey, look, this, this com window didn't work, so that's, then you'd bump to this one, and that one didn't work, you could bump this one. So eventually, I'm gonna get coms. I'm gonna make it happen. 100% of that.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  But, so, look, did you gain confidence from that? Of course, of course you did, right? And is that the kind of confidence that you, you draw upon later in life when life gets really, really hard? I mean, all you had to do was figure out how to move, move a little bit and, you know, make sure the canopy wasn't covering wherever your shots had to be made or whatever. But later in life, life gets really hard and you draw upon, hey, I know how to do this. I just keep persevering and I'll get it. We'll get it.

• 1:20:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Was there anything else in the Q course that kind of surprised you or you had like trouble with?

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  So it goes back to kind of overthinking stuff. And the best example that I have of this is, you know, you learn the differences in ambushes, right, techniques. There's a linear ambush and there's an L-shaped ambush, right? And there's sectors of fire and where's the enemy coming from? You know, it's terrain and all these various factors dependent. And the cadre, there was, you know, our team of say 15 or so, and he's giving us a class on this, which is sort of what you referenced in the intro here. Sure, you have the opportunity to ask questions, don't ask questions, you know, that kind of deal. And of course I ask a question, you know, college boy, right? I'm like, so cadre, I don't really understand the difference or why we would choose a linear ambush here instead of an L-shaped ambush.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  And it was, hey, you go drag your face in the dirt and until you reach that spot over there and think about it because this is, this is the ambush as I've taught it, right? And that was one of those moments where I'm like, you know, I'm not going to ask any more questions. I'm just going to do exactly what I'm told. And, and that, that took time to really sink in. And, you know, special forces in theory is a place where you're supposed to think critically and you're supposed to ask questions and you're supposed to do all these things. And you are, you just have to learn when to do that and when not to. And you have to trust the judgment of the guys around you. And you know, that took some time for me.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  And then the, the other two big things were that infill in Robbins Sage with 125 pound rucksack for a day. And then, you know, that, that was, that was horrific. And every Green Beret you ever talked to, if you mentioned the Sage infill, they will cringe just a little bit.

• 1:21:59Jocko Willink?

  What's the distance?

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it was, all I remember is you're maybe moving a mile an hour. I mean, 125 pounds patrolling through the pine forest and you're doing it for 18 hours.

• 1:22:14Jocko Willink?

  So they eventually put me in charge of the communication course SEAL Team One. And I only ran two of them, I think. And we would weigh the guys on insert. It was a six day recon and they would all be 110 to 130 pounds of gear. And it was, it was so savage, this course that I put these guys through, that, you know, when I look back at my life.

• 1:22:45Jocko Willink?

  I think, man, those guys were ready for anything. And this is like 1997. Like, there was, I was, I was,

• 1:22:56Jocko Willink?

  we'll say I wanted them to be ready, and they were ready. They probably never got tested that way again for the rest of their lives. So.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  I mean, the Sage Info was the culminating exercise of the Special Forces qualification.

• 1:23:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  You gotta bring it, right? If you're up there and you're setting the training agenda, you say, this, this needs to be something memorable, and it was.

• 1:23:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, these guys came out of the field like new people and, and had, they had, it was pretty awesome. It was pretty awesome. These one guys lied to me. And, um, I, they, they, I got up to their layup point, and I said, hey, you guys missed a comm window. Wha- what happened? And they kind of looked at me. And so I separated the team. And I started asking, what kind of antenna, you know, well, no, we were up for the comm window. We just didn't make comms. And I was like, oh, because meanwhile, I'm monitoring everything.

• 1:23:51Jocko Willink?

  And they said, so one groups, I said, what kind of antenna did you set up? And one guy said, like, a long wire. And then I said, they asked the other guy, what kind of antenna did you guys set up? He said, oh, a horizontal, dip, bipolar, whatever. And I'm like, oh, that's not what the other guy said. So they knew, they just knew. And I was like, get your gear ready. Get ready to move out. And they're like, oh, God. So I had these guys hump to this water tower on the top of a mountain. And they were already on the top of a different mountain. And then, and then they got to the water tower as soon, they, I didn't let them put the rocks down. They got up and I was like, go back to where you just came from.

• 1:24:31Jocko Willink?

  And they were like, they went back. And then they get back, I'm waiting for them again. And they come walking up. And I said, go back to the water tower. And I saw the look on one guy's face. And I said, if you don't want to go, you can just throw your ruck in the truck here and we'll be good. I'll take you back to camp. And the other guy was like, negative, Jaco, we got this and they moved out. So I was pretty stoked, but yeah, don't lie to the Condrey is what I'm saying.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  No, integrity violations are a big deal.

• 1:24:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, don't lie to the Condrey. And anyways, you know, you can move with a lot of weight, you know, those guys humped, those guys, I forget, I measured out. They, I put those guys through a ridiculously punitive road march. And they still made their extract, which was cool.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think in the higher echelons of leadership, there, there should be thought given to how do you reduce the load of soldiers? Because there's an inherent bravado element that comes from being the guy that carried 125 pounds. That you don't, I, the idea, we were borderline combat ineffective throughout this.

• 1:25:36Jocko Willink?

  What's good about carrying 120 pounds is you realize, hey, this is dumb. This is actually not smart. And if we got into a firefight right now, this rucksack is getting left. And we, if we lose the firefight, or if we have to break contact, I'm never going to see that thing again with my radio, with my water, with whatever else. So yeah, you should realize that, that this is dumb. And carrying that much weight is not going to be smart. You're going to be fairly ineffective. And are there times where you got to do it? Yes, absolutely. But you got to really, really think about it. So it's a good lesson from that perspective to minimize the amount of weight that you have to be like, like, I never, I would carry so little food. I'm sure you were like this too, because we just, I mean, as a radioman, you had batteries, you had radios and I carried water and like, that's it.

• 1:26:22Jocko Willink?

  And because I would carry one MRE meal, just the main meal, just the, just that, whatever that main thing was, I'd carry one of those per day. And that's it. That's what I go in the field with because I couldn't carry anything else, any extra weight, just didn't want it, wasn't worth it.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so we just see though that even in combat, there's not enough. There's, there's planning for everything. Like you have to have everything on you all the time. And you know, speed is security, right? That's one of, that's a foundational doctrine thing, right? The faster you can move, the safer that is. There's more security inherently. And when you weigh more, you have more stuff weighing you down, you're not going to move as fast. So, you know, I mean, I think this is just one of those things where in the military, some conversation around that is good because bravado is great. 125 pound training rucks,

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  great. That's a, that's a lesson in the suck, right? We couldn't fight with that. It's too much. It's too much.

• 1:27:26Jocko Willink?

  So when you get done with the Q course, how do you guys figure out what, when do you get orders?

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  We got orders. Yeah. So they just tell you. I mean, so for us, we also have language training and stuff like that.

• 1:27:36Jocko Willink?

  What language did you do?

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  So I actually passed out of German. And so that assigned me to 10th.

• 1:27:42Jocko Willink?

  Where did you learn German from?

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  Uh, I lived in Germany for about a year.

• 1:27:45Jocko Willink?

  When was that?

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Uh, in college, I studied abroad there. And then I had a buddy who was a, he was a border, a exchange student in America, my high school. And so I lived with him for a summer while I was in college and lived in their house and picked it up. So just passed out of the language portion. And so that, that got me to 10th group, which the classic area of operations is Europe. And then there's, you know, in the global war on terror though, you get pulled everywhere. And so ours ended up being Iraq.

• 1:28:13Jocko Willink?

  So that's, so that's when you showed up there. What's it like when you get there? Are you just immediately put into an ODA team?

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  You're supposed to be. I hung out on the B team for a little bit because the, for whatever reason, sometimes you get not the best spot to get put on. Um, and there's one B team that supports all the A teams in a company. So there's six, six ODAs or six A teams and one B team, AKA headquarters support. And so, you know, no matter what, it's. It's like you graduate and you think you're this great Billy badass Green Beret and right? And then you find out that in your company where you're showing up, everyone's a Green Beret and they've actually done stuff as a Green Beret in war. And you've done none of that.

• 1:28:56Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  And so, you know, the floors are never clean enough, the heads never clean enough. Like, that's your, that's your job and you're supposed to shut up and learn from the people that are around you.

• 1:29:05Jocko Willink?

  And so, how much time did you spend in the B-team?

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Um, probably five months and then we deployed. Yeah, so about five months and I went to some schools in that process though. They sent me to a school called SOTAC, which is the Army Special Forces equivalent of JTAC. So, Special Operation Terminal Attack Controllers Course. So, learn how to call in bombs out in Yuma, Arizona. And so, spent some time and went to a shooting school and did that type of stuff, but didn't, didn't join a team until the, the spring of 2007 in, in Iraq.

• 1:29:43Jocko Willink?

  And then what was that deployment like?

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  Right, so this was the, you know, this was the surge, right? This was a messy time in Iraq. I know, I know, I don't have to tell you that. And we were down in the south, started out in Basra, which was just, you know, I mean, for, for people out there, right, I mean, Basra was more aligned with Iran through the Shia connection than it was with the Sunnis that were coming out of Baghdad, right? In, in Ambar Province. I mean, so anytime historically Saddam had issues, he'd just send his henchmen down to Basra and show them what's up. And there was just a lot of, it was just a chaotic, I mean, that IEDs, so roadside bombs and then specifically EFPs, so explosively formed penetrators, right? I mean-

• 1:30:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think it's a, it's supposedly formed projectiles?

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  Projectiles.

• 1:30:33Jocko Willink?

  Or is it penetrators?

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  Some.

• 1:30:34Jocko Willink?

  It's one of those two.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  You get the point, right? It's, it's, it's an IED, it's a, it's a roadside bomb rather that would cut through anything. So, it would, it would- Cut a hole through a Humvee like you would cut butter with a knife, right? And those were coming out of Iran and that's, that was sort of RAO and those, the, the missions out of, out of Basra were just loaded with, I mean, big convoy stuff, lots of IEDs. Um, and then I got sent to a team in, that was operating in, out of Taliyo Air Force Base, so Nazaria area.

• 1:31:08Jocko Willink?

  So were you replacing somebody? Did somebody go home? Did somebody get hurt?

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  So they were basically alone as an ODA and this is, you know, the early days of, this was a PIC province, so provincial Iraqi control. Basically what that meant, and you talked a lot about this in extreme ownership, was you couldn't go out without the Iraqis. The Iraqis had final say, the governor of, of the province determined the missions that would go out. And so there was this one ODA there and the regular army that was stationed there was, was not infantry or they, they just didn't have approvals to go out at all. And we were working with the local police force there, so this by with and through mission. That was, that's, that's what SF, that's what special forces is all about, right? Is working with local indigenous forces to achieve a, a greater desired end state.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  And so that was our mission. We were working there and there, it was, it was not busy until it was, but I got sent there because they didn't have the ability to call in bombs. If they would go out on a mission. So I had this designator, this school, that I thought it was a horrible fate to get sent to the B team. When I first showed up at group at Carson, cause you know, you, you can't be Jason Bourne on the B team, right? You gotta be on the A team, guys. And, and so that is another blow to the ego, but what do you do? You suck it up and you do the best job that you can and you learn how to get, you gotta build trust, the guys around you. So sometimes that means you, you do a really good job of cleaning, mopping the floors.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  You do a really good job of staying in shape. You control what you can control. And people will eventually take notice of that and they'll say, hey, we want to give you more responsibility. So anyway, I'd been sent to this school and had this designator and got sent to a team in, in Nazaria. And that's why I got sent out there.

• 1:32:58Jocko Willink?

  So the guys in Nazaria, you guys are living in like a little tiny fob of some kind?

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  So we had rotated back and we were in a bunker on base and this was one of those instances where-

• 1:33:10Jocko Willink?

  Was it an Iraqi controlled base or was it an American controlled base?

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  No, it was an American controlled base. So large, you know, large runway, stuff like that for supplies and I mean, C-130s would land there, take your pick. There was a whole, we were just a 30 minute car ride or truck ride, you know, the helixes around the whole airfield and stuff and-

• 1:33:30Jocko Willink?

  But that was all, there was a big American presence there?

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:33Jocko Willink?

  And then you guys were embedded inside the wire with those guys. Were there Iraqi troops? Were Iraqi police in there? Too? Or were they in another base like out in town?

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  They had their own compound in town and this is one of those things, it was kind of a coming of age story, so they thought, right? You know, okay, this is now a pick province and the team before us had lived with them and amongst them, but we don't need you guys anymore.

• 1:33:55Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  Go back to your base. We'll, we got this. We're, we're good to go. And-

• 1:34:01Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and it just, it's one of those things where then they wanted cash and guns, right? We need cash and guns in order to provide security in the town. And we were just, you know, paying them and we were giving them training, which was just sort of part of the deal and train them on basic tactics and, and all of that stuff. And that was our, you know, we were just doing that.

• 1:34:24Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys do, were they doing raids or anything? Were they trying to capture bad guys?

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So to get to the sort of crux of this, you know, it was, it was quiet until it wasn't. And, you know, when you go to war, you want to be in war. It's one of those things, be careful what you wish, what you wish for, but you want to prove your metal. I mean, it's just inherent in anybody, especially when you go through the type of training that you go through in that community, you're- You've either been to war and seen real combat, or you haven't. And, you know, to really earn the respect of the guys around you, you need to do that. And so, we wanted to do that. I mean, I was new, some other guys had kind of been there, done that, but they were comfortable in this environment. They viewed it as making a difference, getting out and doing stuff in town.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  So, there was this one morning I'd woken up from radio watch, which, you know, you always have someone on radio watch, 24/7, around the clock, the team rotates through. And, it was, we got an intel, or, sorry, our local police force called us and said there had been, you know, an attack, and they'd tried to assassinate the "they", right? Had tried to assassinate the police chief in town, who were training his troops. He was the colonel, and were training all of his troops. And, what it turned out to be, you know, and, oh, by the way, we need you to come and help us, right? Because now they need us, right? Their guys are pinned down, a bunch of them got killed, they're in a hospital in the

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  middle of town, and chaos, just chaos, right? So, you know, you start to activate the intelligence networks that, you know, other guys on our team had been developing throughout that time. And, you know, the intel that we got, of course, later, was that Mokhod El-Sadr, Mooki, had sent down, whatever, 1,500 troops to assassinate the local police chief and rain chaos down on that part of town, institute whatever he wanted to do to destabilize the region. And so, our job was to make sure that it would stay stable. I mean, you don't want to give up ground in war, especially not a whole city, or else you got to go back and retake it, and that's really messy. You got to meet violence with violence sooner. So, we had to, you know, go through all these approval processes to get out, and to go

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  out into the town, and, you know, with our partner force. And it just, it turned into a...

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  It was a very Wild Wild West type of.

• 1:36:54Jocko Willink?

  So, did you guys push right into the hospital where they were located?

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the crazy part was the bureaucracy was still just rearing in full swing. I mean, we had to get the governor of the of this province to sign something that would let us go outside. Like, we went out to the the police compound and then had to come back in order to get this this signature or whatever. And you can imagine the amount of complaining that's going on from our guys. Like, we're losing momentum here.

• 1:37:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  Right? You don't want to let more people come in and take more ground in a city. And so, you know, we eventually got to go back out and we had our partner force there. And, you know, we're just working with the the guy who was in charge of the police colonel. And it was like, we're pulling out a map on on the hood of a Humvee saying, where are the bad guys? Like, where are they? And then you get in your your trucks, your gun trucks, and you line up. And, you know, there's realize the the stakes here. There's three or four gun trucks and there's, you know, 1,500 bad guys, maybe? And that's that's a not good odds, right?

• 1:38:04Jocko Willink?

  It's a rough one.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Now, that was the intel report. And of course, you know, the the headquarters is scrambling to get us any type of support that we needed. And, you know, what we needed was obviously air support. And so that was my role on our team was to ensure that we had cover from above from the air force.

• 1:38:22Jocko Willink?

  What time of day? Was this during the daytime this was happening?

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  So it started in in the morning, this kind of spin up.

• 1:38:28Jocko Willink?

  That's right, you woke up.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  We, yeah, so, well, I kept going. I was on radio watch, so it just sort of extended through. And and so then, by the time it really started to to pick up, by the time we got to the hospital with our Iraqis and, you know, we got our Humvees and they got their pickup trucks and there's, you know, it's.

• 1:38:49Jocko Willink?

  How many Humvees would you guys have in a 12 man team?

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  Uh, I think we had three, maybe four, cause yeah, three or four.

• 1:38:55Jocko Willink?

  And then you'd load Iraqis in the back?

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  So they had their own pickup trucks.

• 1:38:58Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  And so they're, you know, they're riding around in their pickup trucks and they got, you know, a saw.

• 1:39:03Jocko Willink?

  Lux on.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And they got their saw mounted in the back and, you know, their windows are down and

• 1:39:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  all that stuff. And, you know, at that time, it's, and it still is, but the IEDs were just, that was, I mean, it's the same destabilizing battlefield force as a sniper. It's just such an unknown thing. You can do absolutely everything right and you will just still die.

• 1:39:24Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  That's, that's just the reality that you face. And so at some point, you know, in this process, everybody has to say, you know, I'm, I might die. I am absolutely 100% mortal. I've seen that this is, this is very much a contact sport. Other guys playing it have died in this contact sport. And you have to just remove that from your brain and you have to go do your job and you have to be smart and calculating about the risks that you're willing to take. Because there's this perception, and I certainly had it, that Green Berets and SEALs and all of these types are just out there taking all of these crazy risks to take on these crazy missions.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  And that's just patently false. There is so much risk mitigation, both through training and planning and just the amount of time that you spend working with each other to learn tactics and techniques and procedures in order to reduce risk to achieve the mission. And it's, it's a, it's a lot different than what I had expected and it's a lot more effective.

• 1:40:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And to your earlier point, you can mitigate that risk. You can train, you can plan, you can do everything possible.

• 1:40:39Jocko Willink?

  But you can't mitigate all the risk and you can just roll down the street and you guys, you can have a vehicle get hit with an IED and everyone in that Humvee can be dead. And that's what can happen.

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  War is just a metaphor for life, right? War, business, love and life are all the same thing to me. If, if you, if you don't risk anything, you will not gain anything. No risk, no reward. If you're not willing to quit some job you hate, if you're not willing to tell the girl that you love, that you love her and ask her on a date Romeo, right? If you're not willing to go after what you want most in life, you're, you're not going to get it. There's risk involved with that of, of what? Failure, humiliation?

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  None of those is as bad as, as regret. And we have regrets when we don't risk anything. So make sure that the mission and the purpose is worth the risk and do everything you can to mitigate the risk. And then do everything you have. There's a lot worse things than dying.

• 1:41:36Jocko Willink?

  So you guys made it to the hospital?

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  So we got to the hospital, you know, we recovered. There's a lot of wounded guys that were pinned up there. They're loading them into the back of the, back of the pickup trucks and it's, it's dark out, you know, and there's, you know, I'm, I'm scanning because my basic only job, realize this is my second mission out. I mean, it's first mission out. I mean, there's sort of some pseudo missions, but we didn't do sort of recon by fires. Like you talked about with, you know, when you had your, your guy, his first showed up in Ramadi and he had this really complex plan to drive all over town. And you said, hey, how about you go 600 meters out and 600 meters back or whatever?

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Like we would do that stuff, but we just weren't getting shot up. So this is my first real mission of any kind. Right? And it, it was just,

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  you know, it was one of those things where.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  My only job was to focus on the aircraft. I don't know anything about conducting wartime operations yet, nothing. This is my first real mission, so I just had to focus on the task at hand. And my job for our team, in order for me to not let our teammates down, was to do everything I could, to trust in the training that I had, and make sure that the aircraft was doing everything that they could do to support us, because they have a great vantage point up there. They can see lots of stuff, and if you've ever had a, you know, hammer was the callsign, the AC-130 gunship, I mean, that is just, I mean, that as a battlefield asset is unrivaled.

• 1:43:16Jocko Willink?

  It's unrivaled.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  It is unbelievable.

• 1:43:20Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  What that can do.

• 1:43:22Jocko Willink?

  Salute to the AC-130.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  I mean, God bless the Air Force. Literally, I mean, it is just a vital support role that they play. I mean, you know, there's this idea of you want this kind of fair fight in life. It's more, no, you don't want that at all.

• 1:43:37Jocko Willink?

  I want an AC-130, that's what I want.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  I want the most unfair fight possible. And so, you know, they don't play by the rules, the enemy does. I mean, the rules are win when you get into combat. I mean, there's a reason, all's fair in love and war, right? All's fair in war, there's no such thing as unfair. So, I want, I want a gunship.

• 1:43:55Jocko Willink?

  So you guys had an AC-130?

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  We had a huge stack.

• 1:43:59Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  I mean, so you're basically stacking all sorts of different aircraft at different levels.

• 1:44:05Jocko Willink?

  Did it turn out that there was this many enemy fighters heading your way? Was it 1,500 or was it like 40?

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  So, we'll never fully know. What we do know is that the first building, we started taking contact as we were moving, and you know, the local fighters, we don't, we assumed that they did not think that there was Americans here, right, in this section of where they were. Oops is right, because you know, the Iraqis also had Humvees that we had given them. And we're not here, I mean, like, my favorite color is red, white, and blue together in the American flag. That's my all-time favorite color. But when we go to war, we're not going to go fly that proudly on the back of our Humvees and say, hey, the Americans are here, right? We're going to wait until you shoot at us from behind and in front,

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  and then that big building where there was lots of barrel fire, that's going to go away, right? Or it's going to have, it's going to look like Swiss cheese at the end of it. And this was not one of those. Very complicated wartime situations. I mean, we were there to support our partner force to provide security in this, in this part of the, the world. And, you know, they had been shot up by outside force. And we were there to provide stability when we're getting shot at with them with us. Like, that's obviously an enemy trying to kill us, and our job is to kill you. And that's, that's basically what it was. But it was, you know,

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  a lot of rounds, the city where we would go back to the, back to his base and put the map back on the, the trunk of the Humvee. And I, we'd say, where are the bad guys? Well, it's amazing what kind of intel you can get from, from a source when you're gonna help them go do something that they need you to do, right? Though, they won't know anything until something like this happens. And so, you know, my job was to, to basically sit there and call the coordinates up to some of the fast movers, so some of the jets. And they would go recon that part of town, and they would say, nope, no activity there. What's the next coordinate you want me to go check out? And then, you know, they would say, okay, well, go check out this coordinate, point on the map, and I'd send that up and

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  be like, yeah, there's a war party there. And so then we'd go drive over to that war party, and that's, that's how the night went. And there was a lot of loops around the city. And then, you know, you pull back in to base, and you got that, that chemical dump, and you're just sort of, you see out there how guys can go on these missions and then just fall asleep. It's not because you're just so physically tired. I mean, it's part of it, maybe. But there's just this huge kind of, okay, we're back on base, or we're back wherever. And you can just fall asleep so quickly because your body is allowed to relax

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  of sorts. You feel safe again, right? And, but we come back and, you know, then it's right back to the priorities of work. You've got to gas up the trucks, because you're going back out, by the way, because it's not like, one night, you just, the multi-headed Hydra is just dead now. That's not how it works. But, you know, our headquarters element had sent all sorts of- Other A-teams and, you know, the Iraqi commandos were there. And then it was for the week, the next week, it was just a lot of actioning, all sorts of new intel that came in and, and, um, yeah, it ended up not being some sort of martial law type situation that we were fighting, but it's also kind of a doctrine-based thing where if you meet

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  violence with violence and speed of action, you can, you can take back the high ground, high ground, or take back the, the town itself. And so that's, you know, who, who knows? Who knows what would have happened if they would, the, the insurgents would have been more successful and would have taken over the police compound and would have done these various things? Who knows? I mean, then you got to fight to take the, the ground back.

• 1:48:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, they would have taken over the compound, the vehicles, the weapons. Oof, that stuff gets really scary really quick.

• 1:48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:15Jocko Willink?

  So then that, so then you guys got the city back under control. And this was Nazaria, you said, right?

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  This was Nazaria.

• 1:48:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:22Jocko Willink?

  And then once you had it back under control, did things kind of settle down?

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  They did. What the, the interesting part was that this is how we had developed rapport with our partner force, right? So when you do hard things with people and you do them well, and you build trust with them, then they want to work with you. And, and that, that cuts across all different lines, right? So whether it's Navy working with Army and Marine Corps, or whether it's, you know, you, us working with the Iraqis and working with the Australians that were on base at that time as well. And they were, they were great in, in support of, of the mission that we were there as well. And when you do hard things, you, you just develop a bond with people. And that's foundational in the military.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  And, and so we found that we were much more effective training them. We, we were much more. They were much more receptive to the intelligence gathering in their town and just working with us in general. And so then we could go on patrols with them or go on missions with them in their town, going after the stuff that they wanted to go after, you know, and that was effective because we were better at the tactics, but they were better, they were better as the first guys in the door. They speak the local, they have, they know all the local stuff.

• 1:49:51Jocko Willink?

  We always found it funny, like, early on in our deployment to Ramadi, like, our breachers would go up to a door and, of course, they look at the door, "Oh, it's okay, we can't open it, cool, sledgehammer." But sometimes they would just have, like, these little Iraqi mechanisms, and like, an Iraqi soldier would just walk up and, like, push a switch or whatever, pull a lever, and the thing would open up, be like, "Okay, cool." And also, like you just said, they could easily identify if this person was from Ramadi. And if they weren't from Ramadi, and they were living in a house there, they're probably a foreign fighter and probably bad. So, but we can't tell the difference any more than someone from Iraq could come here and tell the difference between someone from New Jersey and someone from Boston and someone from Alabama. Like, even if, even if you speak the language, you

• 1:50:35Jocko Willink?

  don't understand those kind of dialects. And so, whereas Iraqi people, the Iraqi soldiers, they'd walk in and be like, "Oh, this guy's not from here." He's, you know, I always use the example of what you have for breakfast. Because they knew, you know, if you ask what you have for breakfast in South Carolina, you get a different answer than when you say, "What did you have for breakfast in Maine?" Right? You eat different things in California. Like, out here, it's like, "Oh, I had a breakfast burrito." If you ask someone from Maine what they had for breakfast, they're not going to say a breakfast burrito, it's not happening. So, yeah, they can identify those things. So, did you guys end up doing, like, just for the rest of deployment, were you guys doing just, like, targeted raids to go and get rid of bad guys?

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  So, ours was kind of the full-scale, all-encompassing special forces mission. This was not some...

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  Hugely kinetic driven operation. We didn't have the commandos. That was a good mission to get. That was not what our team had, right? So the commandos were a national level Iraqi force and you would assign one.

• 1:51:33Jocko Willink?

  Were you guys, was your partner force was a police force?

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Our partner force was a police force and over there, I mean, what's the difference between soldiers and police? You know, very little. I mean, in a lot of ways.

• 1:51:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:51:45Speaker 01

  They, they carry around machine guns. They, you know, it's.

• 1:51:48Jocko Willink?

  The difference is one wears like a blue shirt.

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:51:51Jocko Willink?

  And the other ones don't. The other ones wear a cami top.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:51:54Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of the difference.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  Yep. And so, you know, we were, we were training them up.

• 1:51:59Jocko Willink?

  Was your Iraqi police force from, um, Naziriyah?

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  They were.

• 1:52:03Jocko Willink?

  See, that's another, that, that is another big difference is that the, the local police forces are generally from that local area, which gives them even more of a sense of what's going on, which is important. Whereas, you know, in Ramadi, the soldiers, the army soldiers were coming in from, you know, all over the country, coming in from Baghdad, also vastly Shia. And so now you got them coming into, you know, Sunni homes inside Ramadi. So there was a little rift there, whereas the police were from Ramadi and they were Sunnis. And so they, they'd immediately almost have a better relationship. Once we built up that police force. And when I say we, I'm definitely not talking about just us SEALs. In fact, I'm talking about everyone else that did more, much more of that than we did.

• 1:52:46Jocko Willink?

  But, so you guys were, were more doing this full spectrum. So you guys are training them. You guys are teaching them how to gather intel. You're teaching them how to do simple things like logistics and all this kind of thing?

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  Well, we're also running our own, and then there's a guy on the team who's, his job, he's the intelligence sergeant. And he's running, you know, assets and all that stuff in the town. And so, you know, it's the by with and through mission. So we're gathering intel in town through random sources, not random, but various sources. And then what you try to do is you try to train your force up by doing stuff, right? You don't just.

• 1:53:21Jocko Willink?

  OJT.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  On the job training, exactly. You, you, you don't just gather all your intel and just keep it to yourself. You need to get your force out doing stuff. That they can gain confidence from doing stuff in life. That's how this works. And so it just sort of turned into, hey, you know, here's some, here's some intel on this and then we would go out with them. And they're the first in because that's what you want. I mean, you sit and think unless you've got some really high value target. Where you're going to send in your own very best guys because failure is not an option. I mean, bin Laden raid is of course a good example. You're going to send in the people, you're not going to let your partner force go in first. You're going to take care of that.

• 1:54:06Jocko Willink?

  In fact, you're not even going to tell your partner force.

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you're willing to live with those consequences because it's that important. In this case, you know, thi- this was part of the coin strategy, the counter insurgency, right? You, you need these local trained up police forces to, to go out and be able to police their own areas. And it's less sexy in some ways than hey, I got my beard and I got my guns and we're going to go after bad guys every single night. But it's a lot more effective. Train the trainer. And so our job is to go out there and, and basically show them how to do this. And this is how you, here's the tactics and, and this is what we do.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  And so they're the first in and you know, you get good if you're a cop or you're a soldier. It's kind of the same thing. There's, that's why there's such a bond even i- in America between cops and soldiers. You, you go into a house, you can smell what that house smells like. And if, if the hair in the back of your neck stands up, it's probably not good. And you can walk into some house and you're like, no, I can just tell this isn't it. Well, their sense of smell, quote, quote, is, is a lot better than ours. And ours is pretty good at times, but they're able to go into a house and you know, by the way, the, the doorways are really narrow. There's 25 people sleeping on the floor. You know, half the time they're on the rooftop naturally because it's cooler because it's a hot country, right? So how are you kind of assessing?

• 1:55:33Speaker 01

  Everyone's got a rooftop, so if you're dealing with aircraft above, who's on the rooftop? It's not like they're up there as snipers all the time. They're just on the rooftop.

• 1:55:41Jocko Willink?

  They're sleeping.

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  Like, they're sleeping.

• 1:55:43Jocko Willink?

  With their kids.

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, with their kids. And, and so it doesn't work to go in to these places with, with your, you know, just guns and do more than you should. And so, you know, part of what, what going through elite style of training brings is the confidence to know when not to pull the trigger, when to assume greater risk to your own life, because you should not just go out and pull the trigger. And the more confidence you have in your weapons and in your sense, and that's really important. And, and it's a much more stabilizing presence there if you don't kill a bunch of innocent people. Right? It's, there, there is collateral damage in war. It's just, it, it happens.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  But you have to do almost everything that you can to minimize that, because the second, third order effects of, of dead women and children are, are not good.

• 1:56:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. That's the, the US military goes through incredible lengths to prevent that from happening. And, you know, and, and you're in an environment, that this is a good example, you know, um, Nazaria at that time, this is a good example. It's like a transitional phase. And, I mean, when the Marine Corps pushed into Nazaria in oh three, it was, you know, like a legitimate war battle going on. And now you fast forward four years, it's a different situation. It needs to be handled with more discrepancy. So, so that's, yeah, that's, that's the way it works out, which is the way it's supposed to work out. That's what counterinsurgency is. The, the level of violence

• 1:57:16Jocko Willink?

  gets less and less over time. And hopefully, well, hopefully it does. And then also hopefully the, the capabilities of the host nation forces get better and better. And eventually they reach a point where we're not needed anymore. That's what's supposed to happen.

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  That's what's supposed to happen, you know? It's, what year is it? We're 18 years later?

• 1:57:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, we made some, you know, we, we got Iraq to a fairly stable position. And then unfortunately, we completely left. And situations like what you just talked about, that's a classic situation where it's like all of a sudden, whoa. We're about to, you know, we've got a real problem here. And when we left, there's no one to call. When we're still there, we go, okay, cool. Cause what we just said is, hey, if Sodder's troops had come in and taken the police building down and gotten those weapons and gotten those vehicles. And now they're going to start to empower themselves over the people inside that city. That's where, that's where you have a real problem. That's kind of what happened with ISIS after we pulled out of Iraq. So yeah, that's what's supposed to happen, but you have to continue to provide support to that host nation.

• 1:58:18Jocko Willink?

  Because even once you mitigate the levels of violence as much as you can, you need to make sure that they're gone. And that takes a long time. That could take 10 years, it could take 15 years. We're still in Germany. You know, we're, we're, we're, we were in Japan for a really, really long time. And so these things can take a long time and they shouldn't be. You know, if we would have stayed in Iraq in, after 2010, if we would have been there in 2012, 2013, 2014, if we would have just stayed there, I bet those guys, I mean, even Leif, who wrote Extreme Ownership with me, and he went in 2010. And in all of Al-Anbar province, when he deployed with SEAL Team One in 2010, in all of Al-Anbar province for his six-month deployment,

• 1:59:03Jocko Willink?

  there was one friendly casualty and it was from a vehicle rollover. And you compare that to when, when he and I were there in 2006, when there was a casualty or two, or three, or four, or five, every single day, just in the city of Ramadi. So we were heading in the right direction. I mean, that's a massive switch. Uh, but again, if you, if you assume that, okay, well, it's good enough. And now we can just walk away. That might not be the best policy. So you need to think through those things a little bit better than we do. I think some of those decisions were made based on, uh, political decisions based in, instead of based on, you know, everybody that was on the ground that was saying, no, no, we're not quite ready to leave yet.

• 1:59:46Jocko Willink?

  Need to give a little more time, need to, need to stay, keep our presence here, be a backup force. You know, be able to support the local Iraqi soldiers and police if they need it, which they probably won't. I mean, they already, they already said, hey, we don't need you guys. That was 2007. They said, hey, we don't need you guys living with us anymore. That's cool. In Ramadi, they weren't saying that. They wanted us there. And every time we turned over a police station to them. I think almost, I think every single time that we turned over completely a police station to them in 2006, it got overrun. So they weren't ready for that yet. So it's gonna take more time. Eventually, in 2007, 2008, they turned over all those and there was no more coalition forces outside in the city. It was all Iraqis. So we can get there,

• 2:00:30Jocko Willink?

  but a counterinsurgency takes time. And you have to, you have to give it time. You're not on, you know, it's kind of like, kind of like standing on the dang cables at airborne school. This is, you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to stay here until it's time, until it's done, until it's ready. It takes some time.

• 2:00:48Speaker 01

  Then you start to get into what's the expectation that people back home have for how long this should take and how much does it cost? And is it really worth it? And, you know, I mean, it was just a really, it was just a really hard time, you know, my, it's, and it's, it's also hard when you're fighting and my, my family was hugely supportive and yet, at that time, it was all about the casualty counts, the body counts of American soldiers in Iraq. And you got a lot of moms, and you got a lot of moms who can really relate to the moms that are suffering from losing their children. And, I mean, what's the, what is

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  the desired in-state? Like, what is our actual goal? Is it, is it to turn Iraq into Germany? I mean, if so, good luck. Or is it, we don't want places to be able to export violence? I mean, destabilization? I mean, I, I kind of never fully understood what the actual desired in-state was that was realistic.

• 2:01:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, America did a bad job of stating what that was and clarifying the mission and clarifying the goal. And then they also have, you, you, you also have to be able to explain that, look, as we dive into a situation, our expectations are gonna change. And to your point,

• 2:02:14Jocko Willink?

  Um, when you look at an Iraqi army unit, let's say, or Iraqi police unit, if you think that you're going to turn them into a Western military unit, or a Western police force, you're not going to, because they have a different culture. But what you can do is figure out how an effective police force, or how an effective military unit fits inside their culture, and then they can do an excellent job. But you have, you have to be malleable. I know, like, for instance, just the way that they would gather intel. And we'd be trying to teach them how to do their intel gathering. And it's like, actually, let them, these people know how to talk to their own people. They know how to figure this stuff out. They know how to document it.

• 2:02:59Jocko Willink?

  Let them run with it. And instead of trying to force our methodology on top of them, take advantage of some of the, some of the cultural advantages that they have inside their own country. Let's do that. So you, you have to be able to adapt as you see a situation unfold. But then you have to, just like, just like as a leader, when the priorities change as a leader with your team, you have to explain to everybody, hey, okay, I didn't see this coming. This is a little different than I thought it was going to be. A little different than we thought it was going to be. Here's what we're trying to make happen now. Okay, everyone says, okay, let's, let's move in that direction. So I, I think not only does, did America do a bad job of coming out of the gate saying,

• 2:03:42Jocko Willink?

  hey, hey, okay, here's what we're trying to get done right now. It's also, okay, look, didn't really see this coming. Here's what we're going to try and get done. Here's where, here's the direction we're moving now. This is what we're, this is what we're going to do. And we, we did not do a great job of explaining that to the public. Because, man, when I went over in 2006, and it was the same way in 2007, like, you're talking about the public opinion had massively. Not universally, but a lot of public opinion had turned against the war. For sure. That was the TV that was, you know, an entire half of the country was like, oh, we shouldn't be there. Okay. So how do we explain to people, okay, if we don't want to be there,

• 2:04:27Jocko Willink?

  what do we do to leave? What's the best way to leave? How do we get out of there? How do we get out of there in such a way that it doesn't turn into a problem again? So these are all things from a really grand strategic perspective that hopefully we can learn lessons from. And, you know, I'm sure you've seen some of the reports coming out of Afghanistan right now about what, what was being said on the ground and what was being told to America. And there's obviously some really stark contradictions between those two things. And it's horrible to read about. You know, you can look at the entire Vietnam War and, you know, what the whiz kids were saying about Vietnam and about, hey, all we need to do is

• 2:05:12Jocko Willink?

  kill more of them than they do of us and we'll eventually win. It's like, no, that's not actually true. And, you know, this is one of the reasons that, you know, I've, I've got my kind of personal mentor who I've never met before, but Colonel David Hackworth, who came out at the end of the Vietnam War and said, you know, if we don't change the way we're fighting, we're going to lose. And he got drummed out of the army and no one wanted to hear that. And even, even in the nineties, he was viewed by the army, by some large portions of the army, as sort of a traitor. Strong word, but they, they saw him as sort of a traitor. Well, he was the guy that was telling the truth. He was the guy that was saying, listen, we're not doing this right.

• 2:05:56Jocko Willink?

  And if we keep doing this, we're not going to be able to win. So these are all things that, yeah, as, as a nation, leadership, military and civilian communicating to each other openly and trying to work together to find solutions, trying to work together to adapt your, your mission to something that's achievable, to something that we can do, to something that's worthwhile. These are all things that we need to do a better job as, as a country, for sure.

• 2:06:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so relating back to Vietnam and then to Iraq, though, to our country's credit, and this gets, nobody ever likes to say, hey, America, great job, right? But when you sit and think about how far we as a nation came from Vietnam, where they would spit on soldiers when they came home, to Iraq, where half the country disagreed with our presence there in 2006, 2007, around that timeframe, I mean, there was still separation between the soldiers and Marines, etc., and the actual support of the war. And that, you know, I felt very supported. And so, as far as I knew, did every, everyone that was there with me did as well. Just the American public was not taking its anger out on us.

• 2:07:11Jocko Willink?

  No, America has definitely learned an incredible lesson from Vietnam in that perspective, yeah.

• 2:07:15Speaker 01

  That meant everything. So, you know, I cannot imagine what those soldiers went through in Vietnam when they would come back and it was just, they were spit on. Can you imagine?

• 2:07:28Jocko Willink?

  It's insane to think about. It's insane to think about. I mean, I covered a book on here. Guy came home with a severely wounded arm, you know, and he goes to college. And sure enough, he's, you know, getting called the baby killer and all that. And you just think to yourself, wow, that's, that's just unbelievable. And then you had Jim Sersli come on here, who was in Vietnam, was a soldier in Vietnam, who, in his 11th month of his deployment to Vietnam, stepped on an IED, lost both of his legs, like, basically at the hips almost, lost one of his arms.

• 2:08:06Jocko Willink?

  And I don't know, I don't know if a human being can face adversity. Let me put it this way. If that guy's not a model of how to face adversity, I don't know who he is. Because he came home, did nine months of rehab, got done, left his rehab, went to college, got a job, started a roofing company, started doing real estate, and carried on with the rest of his life. I mean, just like, the most unbelievable.

• 2:08:39Jocko Willink?

  Face to adversity and you know, we've had plenty of other guys on here that have been incredible. Just the way that they face, I mean Travis Mills, I don't know if you know Travis Mills is but you know, he's a quadruple amputee. The, the guy is, his, his just unbreakable spirit. I mean, just facing adversity every single day that we can't even fathom. We can't even fathom the, the tiny little things in his life that he has to struggle with, that he won't, never say a word about, and he does it and he carries on and, and when you meet him, you think, man, I wish I could be as happy as, as he is. I wish I could go, I wish I could get along in life as well as he is doing right now.

• 2:09:22Jocko Willink?

  So, a lot of that does come from the fact that America learned its lesson from Vietnam, at least from the perspective that you just gave, which is, we treat our servicemen and women with respect, regardless of what you feel about the war, okay, got it, but we treat our servicemen and women with respect, which is a, which is a high praise for the way that we are operating in America now, for sure.

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  I, I think it would be great to even take that one step further and just those who serve, tho- those who, that's the fabric of what makes America, America, strong communities. We have aligned purpose, our values are, are really clear, you know? As an American, as, as America, what we stand for. And, and yet, there's a lot of people that make that happen at the local level. There's teachers, there's fire, there's cops, there's first responders, there's all sorts of people that work in also dangerous jobs out of DC and, and

• 2:10:27Speaker 01

  it, it's just, we need a call to service. In, in this culture where there's just a lot of emphasis and value placed on being the best individual, we need to reawaken those calls to where it's, it's a very noble thing to go and serve your country.

• 2:10:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I'll tell you right now, I mean, the idea that you're gonna get real satisfaction from taking care of yourself, it pales in comparison to the satisfaction that you get when you help other people. No doubt about it. And if people don't understand that, you know, I get, I get asked sometimes, you know, well, I don't know what my next, next mission is. I don't know what to focus on. I'm like, okay, if you don't know that, cool, go help other people. Go down to a damn soup kitchen and volunteer and, and you'll start to figure something out. And if you don't, cool, you're helping other people. Either way, we're in a better place because of it.

• 2:11:23Speaker 01

  It's kind of counterintuitive, though.

• 2:11:24Jocko Willink?

  It is.

• 2:11:25Speaker 01

  Because you, it, it's so people, and I, I did this as well. We, we struggle to make that connection. Where we say, I've got to be better. Me, me, me. Now, how do you do that? Is you find a mission. And if, if you have a purpose and then you have a mission on top of that purpose, that's, you're, you're hitting home runs. Regardless of that, if you just dedicate your life to serving something greater than yourself, it just, it opens up a way of, of life that leads to a lot of great things with a lot of great people. And I, I just, I've never met the person at the end of their days who said, you know, I was just, I, I served too much.

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  I, I gave too much to other people. I wish I had just done more for me, me, me. I just haven't met that person. And so, you know, we have the ability and, and the potential to change our lives for the better with just a mindset shift. Just to say, dedicate yourself to, to a greater cause. There's lots of ways to do it. The military is a very romanticized way, especially in our society. We, we uniquely love our military and I do too. And there's just, it's not for everyone and it doesn't have to be and it shouldn't be. So instead of

• 2:12:48Speaker 01

  kind of using this, oh, the military only affects 1% of the population, like it's some sort of judgment on our entire country. Like, that's okay. The military is 1%. That's, that's awesome, right? And if it needed to be more, it would be, but it's 1%. That's okay. There's a lot of ways to serve. And, and that's where the bridges between.

• 2:13:14Speaker 01

  The Americas that we love, that represents the best America, and where maybe we've, we come up a little bit short from time to time. If we just dedicate ourselves to serving, instead of to, to being angry at the TV news at night. Like, go, turn the TV off and go find something to serve that will benefit your community in our country. Go do that.

• 2:13:35Jocko Willink?

  That would be helpful.

• 2:13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, you know, instead, it's, let me, let me see how many dopamine hits I can get through my brain from the likes that I'm gonna get on Facebook if I go, publish some anger-ridden ad that's divide and conquer tactics, where you're just a pawn. You're a pawn. Someone's, someone's written some article that's, that's gonna just divide people. And we share that stuff, and people like it. And we think, wow, I'm, I'm part of a community that's, that's talking about these important things. How about you go, stop doing that first? And how about you go do something that actually helps other people? And I don't sit here saying, this is all I do with my life. I don't just, you know, go from orphanage to orphanage, right? All day long, every day, right?

• 2:14:22Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm, I'm human-like, all of us. And yet, you know, when I have these kind of, this, these times when I think and reflect, usually outside with a ruck on, like, am I doing what I can do to make my community, my family, my community, my country stronger? Because I just, I feel like I owe. And, and that's the, the bug that I caught through, through service. I did not foresee that. I thought it was gonna be about me, me, me, getting my revenge for what happened over 9/11. And what I got instead was this, this really basic primordial reaction that I just, I owe more. And I can't shake it, and I'm grateful that I can't.

• 2:15:06Speaker 01

  It makes me just wanna keep doing the things that are rewarding. And that involves other people and building communities and building a bridge between the military and civilian worlds, instead of using these divide and conquer tactics.

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:23Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:15:25Jocko Willink?

  How long is this deployment to Iraq to take us back to Iraq? How long were you over there?

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  That was 2007. And I don't know, seven months?

• 2:15:34Jocko Willink?

  So you guys were on like a seven month rotation?

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  Right. And then we, we came back and that was. Coming back was a weird thing. I mean, we stopped in Shannon Airport in Ireland and drank a bunch of beers in the, the airport there because we had rented a civilian aircraft and it was just a bunch of Green Berets that flew back. So there's sort of a mad dash for the bar if we got there. And, and, uh, you know, then we got back and my car was at Fort Carson. My car was the same place where I'd parked it. I disconnected the battery. You know, the battery was, I had to connect the battery back. We're sort of in this parking lot. Uh, around our compound at 10th group. And it was just sort of like, oh, I guess I, I went to war and came back. And it just was kind of.

• 2:16:23Speaker 01

  It was kind of weird. And you know, there was this other compounding part of my life, which was, you know, I was married to Emily. And we had started dating, finally told the girl I love, the love of my life that I loved her. Oh, and oh, by the way, I'm going to boot camp. Right? So we had gotten married while I was in the Q course and she had then gone through the, the CIA training pipeline to become a case officer. She graduated from, to become a case officer five days before I became a Green Beret. Right? And so she got sent to Africa and then I got sent to Colorado and then to Iraq and. You know, talking over secure lines with your wife and while you're at war and.

• 2:17:04Speaker 01

  She kind of had some access through her friends to some of our situation, our sit reps, situation reports from. War and there was, it was just kind of. It was surreal, but um, so I also felt just really kind of lonely. I mean, our team was there, but then they went off and they had their families, their families greeted them. And that was just kind of, it was a lonely ride. And oh, by the way, right when I get back, I have my truck and driving off base, thankfully I waited to see this off base. But you know, in Iraq, when you're in a Humvee and you're driving, you go down the middle of the road. It's a tactic because most roadside bombs are on the side of the road and you don't want to go.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  Anyway, you just dominate the road. That's how it is. Get out of my way. I've got a bigger truck than you do and that's what's happening. And so I defaulted to that on the highway right off Fort Carson. And it wasn't some sort of, oh, huge flashback or something. It was just kind of, I wasn't home yet. I wasn't home yet. And it was just all of these, all of these weird emotions going through my head. And I had to kind of click my brain and say, hey, I need to slow down. Stop flooring it because that's also how you drive there. Speed is security. Go as fast as you can and get to the target, right?

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  And move over into the right lane, take a deep breath, it'll be okay. And that's more than the actual fact that that happened was just the weird feeling that that happened. And then, you know, I didn't have a cell phone set up or anything and all that stuff. It wasn't quite as simple as it is now. So I went back. I was staying with my great aunt and uncle in Colorado Springs. And then I called, you know, had a calling card number to call Emily. She was at, working out of the embassy in Abidjan, West Africa. And it was just sort of this, I'm back. And it was, it was very anticlimactic, just to be on the phone.

• 2:19:13Speaker 01

  It's not what you see in the movies where, you know, you land and there's the big parade and all of that stuff. And you know, your loved one's sprinting for you and you know, you swoop her off of her feet and do all of these things. It was none of that. And then, you know, then the next day, what do you do? Go back to work. Go back to work and inventory all your stuff and make sure that your team room's clean and do all of that stuff. And that's, you know, that's the next couple of weeks of your life. And so. Yeah, so that and then eventually, obviously, I saw Emily. I flew over there for for Christmas. That was a

• 2:19:50Speaker 01

  that was the kind of vacation because she's in war torn West Africa. It almost was more comfortable to go visit her.

• 2:19:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you felt a little more normal?

• 2:20:00Speaker 01

  Well, it was like, you know, so we talk a lot about PTSD and all that stuff this day and age, and it's become this kind of thing where every veteran probably has it. So I shouldn't hire a veteran or there's something wrong with them. I'll donate money, but I'm going to kind of put them on the leper colony and let them struggle with their PTSD and send them a paycheck every once in a while. That's that's the situation at its worst. Now, there's there's obviously various levels of of that. But it's just, you know, when you came back from war and say, World War Two, you know, you're on a ship with everybody that you went to war with. There's decompression time. Whereas for us, you know, we're we're getting on a plane, we're

• 2:20:41Speaker 01

  having a couple beers in Shannon, we show back up at home and then we're at home and this is America and it is very, very free. Right? And, you know, there's not trash everywhere. People don't just, I mean, in Iraq, everyone's got that, what, eight foot wall? If you've got a house and any money, you got eight foot wall with concertina or probably barbed wire around the top of it. And when you have trash at your house, what you do is you walk out in your front yard and you throw it over your wall because you don't really care about what happens outside your your little wall. Well, here, it's just, you know, that Colorado air is pretty awesome. And, you know, you can stop anywhere you want and there's no roadside bombs and, you know, it's like what you saw in Hurt Locker.

• 2:21:22Speaker 01

  The guy goes in and he's staring at all the cereal and there's 10 million things of cereal. That's not the decision that you're used to making and it feels weird. Just it's it's and it happens so fast. And and so I remember I got off the tarmac, I was on the tarmac in in Abidjan and I'd flown over there. You know, they love a good coup in Africa. This it's always kind of semi permissive and it's never perfect. And they could have RPGs and AKs in the street at any time and you'll be the last to know. Right? And so got there and it just it smelled tropical and it smelled just sort of

• 2:22:01Speaker 01

  like like not America and rolled in and it's just there's just all this commotion at this African airport and, you know.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  Riding back, getting in her car, you know, gave her a big hug and a kiss in the airport. And then got in her car and drove home and there's checkpoints and, you know, there's guys with guns at the checkpoints. And then you pull into her house and it's, there's two layers to the compound. And she was not on an American compound per se, it was American housing, but not a compound. But it was within a compound with other locals and there's one layer of quote, "security", where there's a local with a pickup truck and if you're white, you're, you're fine to go in. I mean, it's, it's just how it is there. It's, and so, you know, so we drove in and they obviously knew her in her car at that point. And then, you know, she's got a second layer of quote, "security",

• 2:22:54Speaker 01

  and it's a rent-a-cop basically, and they've got a stick, you know, they're not doing anything with that stick, but it's, it's faux security. And, but it just, it, it felt more normal to me than coming back to America so quickly. And it was just sort of some decompression time. But then, you know, you've got the sort of relationship side and life's hard. And, and so, you know, she's in that job, I mean, the CIA works its people really hard. You have a lot of people, young people, old people, whatever, that serve America, that work really, really hard and that are true patriots. And they're really committed to our way of life in America.

• 2:23:36Speaker 01

  And if, if you go that route, you are, it's a 24/7 job, just like Special Forces is. And so she's working 100 hours a week by Wednesday. Our, it's, it was not a traditional marriage, you know?

• 2:23:54Jocko Willink?

  And was it alright? Were you guys getting through it? Was separation a good thing? Sometimes, you know, the best thing that can happen between some couples is they're not around each other. Sometimes that's horrible and it doesn't work.

• 2:24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we had spent...

• 2:24:10Speaker 01

  You know, the first four years of our marriage, we did not live together at all. Zero, living together. I was at Fort Bragg, she was in Florida, teaching, she was a eighth grade Spanish teacher. Right? So for the first year of the Q course, I'm driving back to Florida every single weekend that I have off. So if I'm not in the field, I have the weekend off. So drive back, you know, second year, she's going through, she's working out of Langley and then, you know, out of, out at the farm. And so kind of doing some of driving north, five, six hours every weekend to go see her there. And then, you know, she's in West Africa and I'm in Iraq and then I'm in Colorado and it's, you know, you're, we're, iridiums were the thing back then, you know, these sort of,

• 2:24:55Speaker 01

  because it, it wasn't as simple as everyone's got data connections, just pull up FaceTime or, or Skype, or whatever the case may be. So, you know, it's iridiums and there was, you know, a strand of probably a hundred numbers I had to dial to get the access to get, to call her cellphone or her whatever at her, at, at the embassy. And if you go to the well too often, eventually the well runs dry. And so when that Christmas, it was just kind of weird with, with her. It wasn't bad. Like we, she babysat my siblings growing up. She was great friends with my family and my mom and all these things. Like we really were in love.

• 2:25:36Speaker 01

  And, and so we knew each other as friends for almost a decade before we started dating. And it, it just was kind of weird when that, that Christmas. And so it was kind of like, okay, I was going to get out of the army in October of the next year. And it's like, okay, well, we, that became the target, right? Everything's going to be better at that time. And so, you know, I was there for a month and we had fun. It just was kind of weird. Like life was kind of weird though, too. Right? I mean, she's in kind of war torn, I'm going to war, coming back, flying over for some quote vacation, you know? And we're finally together and there's just so many balls in the air.

• 2:26:19Speaker 01

  It's hard to make sense of what's going on. And so went back and, you know, back at base. Well, we ended up forward deploying to Stuttgart to do a backfill for our, uh, our commanders and extremist force that was in Stuttgart. So was stationed there for, I want to say four months, something like that. But in that time also went down to a different part of West Africa on a mission to work with the Mauritanian troops out of Nwakshat, except we were in Akjut, which is, you know, a few hours through literally camels and desert in, in Mauritania. And, you know, we trained up their commandos and we were out there. And the interesting part is that in much of the world, you know, the US has its diplomats and it has its soldiers and there's kind

• 2:27:04Speaker 01

  of a stark difference between those two. In much of the world, the soldiers are where it's at. You know, the, the diplomats, they don't have the real power because they can't, they can't take their soldiers and go drive to the middle of the capital and say, hey, I'm in charge now. And so, you know, to go back to follow up on some of the earlier points about, you know, should we be in Iraq or Afghanistan? Or I, I think special forces in some capacity should be everywhere. Special operations and, and people who are serving this purpose of working with other host nations. I mean, that was also the lesson of post nine 11 Afghanistan was you have no presence there. You're going to have to recreate it

• 2:27:44Speaker 01

  in time of crisis and that's very challenging. And so to have some, some presence between militaries, between, hey, the US military has, is working with these locals that are in the military and pick your country. That's important because you, you, it's constant, not like spy stuff, but you just It's just relationship building around the world. That's it. Which is a really positive thing. Very positive. And so you're also able to, to be there just in case. And so in those kinds of countries, you know, there's a role for There's definitely a role for the military. Anyway, I was there and even while I'm on that

• 2:28:25Speaker 01

  deployment, you know, M flew up on African air, whatever, from Abidjan to Nuwakshat and my captain gave me the time off to go, you know, hang out with Emily in the capital Nuwakshat for a couple of days while she was in town. Then our whole team went to a soccer game there in some Chinese-built stadium because the Chinese are moving into Africa big time. But they, they move in and they set up their own base and they bring their thousand Chinese and they're not doing anything with the locals except extracting what they can from there. And they're building relationships that way with, with money and with their presence.

• 2:29:06Speaker 01

  And they build soccer stadiums and the locals love soccer and that's kind of what it is. Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent, but it's just to say that our marriage was kind of, it was atypical. And so, you know, I went back and what I did not expect-

• 2:29:23Jocko Willink?

  And was part of the reason that you decided that you were going to get out of the army? Because this, you know, your marriage, your wife being in the CIA, being on deployment, traveling, and you being into doing the same thing and in the army was just going to look long-term, this just ain't going to work?

• 2:29:38Speaker 01

  We just knew it wasn't going to work long-term. The, the hope at the time was that it would, we would be able to sustain it until it, it sort of ended. Now, what I did not foresee was the idea of how much I loved serving in the Army Special Forces and how great and, and what an honor that was and, and how impactful those men in that community were and will forever have been on my life. And that became something that I, I dreaded.

• 2:30:13Speaker 01

  Leaving that job and it would sort of just felt like this guillotine that I was facing as I, you know, cause it's not like you just show up one day and you say, all right, peace out, guys. Like you have certain dates and you have to re-enlist prior or you do all these things. And, you know, they were really trying to keep guys in because they'd invested a lot in us. And, you know, the mission wasn't stopping. And so it, everybody around me understood what was going on with my life. My wife's in, in the CIA. She's in West Africa. Like, we can't make this work. It's just not possible to, to be married

• 2:30:50Speaker 01

  in these kinds of jobs or roles in life. And so everyone was supportive. But at the same time, I felt like I was quitting. And, and so I started to go through that process and eventually, obviously, did go through that process. And when I, I pulled off base, I had my same green Nissan Xterra I'd had throughout my whole training life in, in Fort Bragg and then at Carson. And your car is just this very safe place, you know? When you, you can turn the AC on if it's hot, if it's cold, you're warm. It's, it's this small notion of privacy. You don't have a car in basic training where you have zero

• 2:31:32Speaker 01

  privacy. But when, when you have a car, you have a little bit of freedom. And, you know, if you're able to use your car, for whatever reason, before formation or just in general, you have so much that is just creature comforts. And drive, driving off base in Colorado with basically everything I owned in the back of that truck. And I just, I cried on the way off base and I couldn't believe it. Cause this was supposed to be this really positive step in my life. I was gonna go get reunited with the love of my life. And it was gonna be.

• 2:32:14Speaker 01

  It was supposed to feel different and I already just hugely missed my, my team. I missed that way of life and I'm, I felt like I was abandoning them and they were going to go back to war and I wanted to go with them and I was, you know, uniquely, not uniquely. I was well-trained in America's eyes to, to be on the front lines and to continue to serve and I believe in our mission and regardless of, you don't always get to choose the destination that you go and that's fine, right? I believe that when America says it's time to go, I, I want to be the kind of person that says, send me.

• 2:32:55Speaker 01

  And so that, that was the sacrifice of the individuality that I was very willing to submit to, to the team and to the mission and to our country. And it, it just felt like I was losing all of that. And, and so, you know, eventually your tears dry and you wake up and you, you learn how to be resilient again, but it was just, it was very-

• 2:33:18Jocko Willink?

  Where'd you go? Where was the plan?

• 2:33:20Speaker 01

  Right, so I, I drove back to Florida where my mom was and I was just gonna put my stuff, my car in storage and then I was, I was getting on a plane to fly to Africa to go live with Emily, cause you know, I was now her dependent, right? So it just was atypical because I had not gone with her out of the gates. I mean, it was, you know, you're supposed to be together, that's kind of how this stuff works. I mean, a community of two, that's a foundational community. Sometimes it's you and your dog, sometimes it's you and your family, but it's, that's a community and, and that is very important in not only my life, but our lives. And so, you know, that was the plan, drop my stuff off, get on a plane and fly over.

• 2:34:04Speaker 01

  Well, I did that and it was just, as weird as it was that Christmas before, it was just a lot weirder. Just everything was, it just, nothing felt right and, you know, I didn't have mission or purpose and she, you know, she, she was used to operating alone. I mean, it was her and her dog, Java, right? And so, you know, that was her life, 100 hours a week by Wednesday, 24/7 all the time and then I'm showing up almost like dead weight because I got this, I got this sort of chip on my shoulder because I just gave up everything to be with her. And, you know, it, it was just- Very, it's just not fun.

• 2:34:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, this, this sounds like a nightmare because you're showing up there, you just got out of special forces, you just got back from these deployments and you have been turning and burning and working 20 hour days for the past however many years. And then you show up and she's in the middle of that exact lifestyle and you're like, I'm gonna watch more TV right now? I mean, this is just a nightmare.

• 2:35:11Speaker 01

  It was horrible. There was nothing to do, right? So I even applied for jobs at the embassy. I'm thinking, how do I serve for the next year? Cause she was gonna be there for the next year. How do I do something here for the next year? And literally, the only job available that I could get was as the janitor of the embassy.

• 2:35:32Speaker 01

  And I'm, as, as referenced earlier, I'm not above mopping the floors and cleaning the head. I, I was not ready for that at that time in my life, though. That's just not what, I couldn't go from this, this thinking that, this, this vision that I had for myself and, and for working with these guys on this team to, I'm, I'm the janitor pushing the mop at the embassy. And oh, by the way, you know, my, my wife's on the top floor in this, you know, really cool job.

• 2:36:00Jocko Willink?

  She's saving America.

• 2:36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, on the front lines.

• 2:36:04Jocko Willink?

  On the front lines.

• 2:36:05Speaker 01

  And I'm, and I'm doing nothing but cleaning the head. And so.

• 2:36:08Jocko Willink?

  You're watching Netflix.

• 2:36:10Speaker 01

  It didn't even exist at that time. So there was Armed Forces Network was all that we got. And, you know, so then it's, it's me and Java at the house, right? And this is where, this was the beginning of my life turning into that bad country song where a guy's got his dog and, you know, his sort of bottle of whiskey and all of his sorrows. And, you know, I ended up only being in, in Africa for about two months. And then I, it was like, we're, this just isn't working. This is too miserable to endure. And it, it wasn't sort of.

• 2:36:49Speaker 01

  Like we, we didn't hate each other by any stretch. And oh, by the way, I'll, I'll get to the point somewhere down the line where we got divorced and then we eventually got back together and we're together now. Right? So it's, it's even 10 times messier. But at, at this point, you know, we were just really good friends and we had gone to the well for too long and I just didn't. I wasn't a part of her journey and she wasn't a part of mine and we were trying to make it work and we said, okay, well, we'll skip to the end and that just didn't work. And so I'm, then I'm flying back to, to solo.

• 2:37:24Jocko Willink?

  When you left, were you like, yeah, this is, did you leave on, hey, this is probably not going to work? Or did you leave on like, okay, well, I'm going to go figure some stuff out in America. She's going to stay. Were you guys still thinking it was going to stay together at this point?

• 2:37:36Speaker 01

  Hope is not a strategy and we were at best hoping and it just, it felt like a sledgehammer.

• 2:37:41Jocko Willink?

  So when you rolled out, were you kind of like, yeah, this is probably the end of it? Or do you not want to say this on the air right now?

• 2:37:47Speaker 01

  No, no, I mean, I think it was just very, it was just very confusing. I mean, for me, and this was very mutual, by the way, this was not all me or all her. This was both of us and it, it was, you know, she didn't want to, she didn't want to bend her lifestyle for me.

• 2:38:07Jocko Willink?

  Was she thinking she was going to stay in the agency forever at this point?

• 2:38:10Speaker 01

  Right. So I mean, this is how, this was the ultimate irony was that, you know, part of the journey that I wanted was to go join Ground Branch. The CIA, that's where it started. Mike Span, you know, rest in peace. When, when we honor our heroes, it will inspire further service and, and that had inspired service in me. And so I didn't know anybody in that process of hiring to get to Ground Branch. I didn't know anybody and I eventually started and made it through and became a Green Beret. And in Emily's training, I met lots of people in Ground Branch and they became friends of ours. And so it was kind of, hey, why don't you just come back and go through the process? And that's how it works, right? If you know someone,

• 2:38:53Speaker 01

  you're more of a trusted person and especially in, in that place, the, the agency is always looking for things to do with spouses. I mean, if you can, because you're already trusted, right? I mean, there's risks in that job of, of leaks and all that stuff, but you have to trust your spouse. And so. It felt like, okay, well, I guess I can go do that. And so started reapplying for some of that stuff. But frankly, I mean, I was not in the, I did not have the headspace at that time to, I went from hero to zero real fast. And I'm sleeping on my buddy's slanted floor couch, you know, apartment with a slanted floor on his couch in New York and

• 2:39:37Speaker 01

  Lower East Side for four months. I mean, he's a bartender. Most of the only times I'd leave the place, I'm, I'm going for his shift to, you know, drink free booze at where he was working. I mean, like, it was just, it was, I mean, call it what you want, some state of depression or not having mission or purpose in, in my life and feeling like now I don't have no job, no mission, no purpose, no wife, which I was kind of banking on as the foundation for the rest of my life. You, you expect something to go a certain way and it doesn't. That's harder than just knowing that something's going to be miserable the whole time. And so it, it was just one of those things where Em and I stayed in touch.

• 2:40:22Speaker 01

  We even, you know, took a trip to Morocco together and it was still weird. And then eventually, you know, she came back to-

• 2:40:29Jocko Willink?

  Eventually you guys need to go to a place like Hawaii or, you know, the Bahamas. You guys keep going to random African nations that are in turmoil.

• 2:40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:40Jocko Willink?

  Might want to think through that a little bit.

• 2:40:41Speaker 01

  So I'm actually-

• 2:40:42Jocko Willink?

  A little counseling from Uncle Jaco over here.

• 2:40:44Speaker 01

  Well, the other part of this is I'm actually insufferable on a beach with nothing to do. Right? Insufferable. Like, what am I supposed to do?

• 2:40:50Jocko Willink?

  You can surf.

• 2:40:52Speaker 01

  Ah, I wish I could.

• 2:40:53Jocko Willink?

  You can try.

• 2:40:55Speaker 01

  I can try. You're right. I can be really bad at it until I'm less bad at it.

• 2:40:58Jocko Willink?

  I'm just saying places without security checkpoints is what I'm advising.

• 2:41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, got it.

• 2:41:02Jocko Willink?

  Future reference.

• 2:41:04Speaker 01

  So we're kind of, you know, in touch again and doing this weird long distance thing. And it just, it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And it's sort of confused. She comes back to America and has Java. And Java, I'd formed a really big bond with him while I was in Africa because he was kind of my only friend. Java and Francis, Francis was our, our housekeeper and sort of like, almost like Em's chief of staff for the house. She would have parties to, you know, over to her house or she would host people or whatever. And he was just make that train roll. And I became really good friends with him and he was my best friend in Java. And I was at the, the house all day and for a period of months.

• 2:41:48Speaker 01

  And this is anyway, really fast transition to, to doing nothing and having no purpose. So eventually she comes back and it's still really bad. And we're, we're just sort of subjecting ourselves to further misery. Right. But you say, you, you hope, oh, this is going to get better. It's going to get better. Well, how's it going to get better? Right. I mean, something's got to give. And then eventually you, you just, you can't endure it anymore. And so it's like, you know, she's like, Hey, I'm, I'm done. And so went through that, I stalled that because I'm the eternal optimist. Right. I mean, this, everything can work out if given enough time. And, and then it almost becomes a competition of who can suffer more.

• 2:42:29Speaker 01

  Right. And I, I think I can suffer a lot and I'm willing to kind of be that kind of martyr. If, if left to, i- i- if left in a situation where I want what I want, I'll suffer almost anything. And so eventually you, you just move on. And, you know, I started business school, which I had applied to. And I also had this little hobby for Goruck that was kind of nothing at that time. But she had actually recommended it.

• 2:43:04Speaker 01

  The first time I went to Africa, because I built her a go-bag. I built her a go-ruck. And that was a something that then, I just was applying what I did in war. You have a go-bag. You put it in the trunk of the Humvee in case your vehicle gets disabled and you gotta fight. Right? So you have bombs and guns and batteries, all that kind of stuff. And it's just extra supplies that you don't want to have on your back all the time. And you might as well have more if the, if the truck's gonna carry it around with you. So, or for you. So I'd have done that for her and made one at her house and made some others for some of the other folks that she was working with at the embassy.

• 2:43:43Speaker 01

  And when I was trying to figure out what to do, we were trying to figure out what I could do. She's like, you should do the go-ruck thing. And that just kind of meant, teach people what you know from special forces, or build them go-bags, or whatever, figure it out. Like, here's something, do, do that. And that idea had kind of stayed alive as I came home. And, but I, I was not in any position to commit to anything as significant as kind of starting a business and, and going full throttle.

• 2:44:18Speaker 01

  And? Then? Yeah, so, so I'm sleeping on my buddy's couch. And I'm kind of trying to figure out, okay, well, I got this go-ruck thing, and I'm applying to business schools, and I'm applying to the CIA, which is just another re-up process. It, nothing happens fast, even when you're a spouse. And I'm still technically a spouse, so it's, it's easier. And I know all the right people through, through Emily, which, you know, because I'm her dependent now. Like, we joked, because one time when she was at the farm and we went to, uh, we went to Busch Gardens in, in Williamsburg. And we, we got a discount on the, the entrance, because we were active duty, I was active duty military, and she was my quote dependent, right?

• 2:45:03Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a military term. Like, it's not a, it's not, like, we're equals. Emma and I are very much equals and always have been. But she's my dependent legally, and I was then later her dependent legally. But at Busch Gardens, they gave her a necklace that said, "Hero dependent."

• 2:45:21Jocko Willink?

  She loved that?

• 2:45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we both just sort of chuckled about it. It was, it was a

• 2:45:26Jocko Willink?

  Did she turn it over to you like eight months later when you got out? She's like, here you go.

• 2:45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was in a box somewhere like everything else. I still, I still have it in my work desk at now at GoRuck. And it's, uh, it's something that makes both of us smile now. But so basically I had these, these kind of, I'm applying for more stuff, trying to do something. I mean, the idea of filling out an application to go to grad school was just a hugely daunting task. This should take, you know, two or three hours. It was months indecisiveness, inability to function. And you know, we talk about military transitions are hard. Like whoever you are, if you lose all of your support structures, everyone's got a breaking point.

• 2:46:14Speaker 01

  I mean, this is one of the lessons of SERE school, survival school. No matter how tough you think you are, you are breakable. And, you know, all of my support structures were gone and but GoRuck became a hobby. So I had this idea for, okay, well, I guess I'll try to figure out how to design a backpack or a rucksack. And thankfully, I actually unbeknownst to me almost knew a lot about this topic. I just sort of gravitated toward it because I knew a lot about it, even though I didn't have some conversation that said, I really know about rucking and rucksacks. I, I was not my own id boosting my own, my own, you know, sense of self-worth through something that I thought would be a great way to spend time.

• 2:46:56Speaker 01

  It was just something to do. And so, you know, didn't know anything about manufacturing, didn't know anything about anything. But eventually it was like, okay, well, I got, I'll start doing something with this. Put an ad in Craigslist, New York City for a backpack designer. And like, all right, well, let's see what we get. I got kind of some sketches and I got some samples and I want something that's kind of like these. And got a response back from this team in Montana that was basically trolling the internet for work because in 2009, the economy was not in a good place. So you have to put yourself into those kinds of perspectives, you know, you like to say good about a lot of stuff,

• 2:47:37Speaker 01

  you know, bad stuff happens, good. Well, look, the economy was in a really bad spot. Good.

• 2:47:44Jocko Willink?

  People are looking for work.

• 2:47:46Speaker 01

  Good if you're trying to do something awesome because there's a lot more opportunity. Whereas when nobody's looking for work and everything's really expensive and you can't find any deals because the economy is just purring forward, it's harder. You gotta, you gotta speed things up faster. So anyway, found this great team out there and basically worked on the rucks and how to do them throughout my first year in business school.

• 2:48:15Jocko Willink?

  And then when did that develop into, or how long was business school?

• 2:48:19Speaker 01

  So business school was from 2009 to 2011. And so even business school is I applied to a couple of schools and it's like, I don't even know if I want to go to business school. I mean, it's like, it's so weird to think about now. I've got these chapters in my life and I look back at them and it's hard to relate to myself now in some of those chapters. It's like when I, I think about deploying to war and all the training that I went through and, and the people that I served with, it feels like I'm reading my own book sometimes, right? My own kind of narrative in my head. I don't wake up like Rambo every day or anything,

• 2:48:58Speaker 01

  you know? I've taken a ton of lessons from that, but I don't, I don't, like, I also can't relate to being just depressed. Like, why don't you just stop being depressed? That's what I would sit and just stop doing this. And the, the right answer is move forward any way you can. If you're feeling sorry for yourself, go do something for someone else. And, you know, eventually M came back, we sort of separated our ways, we, we fought about, this is in the middle of business school. So I went to business school at Georgetown because they gave me a full ride, a scholarship. Right, in no small part because of my military service. And that was one of those decisions in life, a lucky break. Where they just made the decision for me.

• 2:49:40Speaker 01

  Like you, I mean, how do you conceivably turn down a full ride to go to business school at Georgetown? Well, the answer is you don't. You, you, you send thank you letters and you're very grateful. And, you know, also the post nine eleven G I bill. And, you know, transitioning veterans out there, you should use that. It is a great way for you to buy some time and re-acclimate yourself to America and gain a skill, some knowledge, some whatever. And it's structure. And so I'm grateful to the American taxpayer for, you know, they pay for some housing allowance and some books and it de-stressed my life a little bit at a time when I needed less stress in my life.

• 2:50:23Speaker 01

  And so going through business school and Em and I had gotten officially divorced, but she was waiting to go on another assignment. She was going to go somewhere else down south, either Brazil or Mexico or something. And, you know, she had Java and she's living in a hotel in DC because she's only supposed to be there for a few months. And Java was the fight between the two of us is the only, we never fought about money. We, we always loved each other. We were always friends, but Java was the fight because there's not two Javas. And so, you know, I'll never forget this moment where I was staying and I had a condo in not too far from Georgetown, the university in Georgetown. And she was staying at a hotel on P Street.

• 2:51:08Speaker 01

  It's a hotel Palomar because it's dog friendly. And we're sort of have dual custody of our dog, Java, right? And it's like, this is what we both got really emotional about because he had been with her. He was kind of her dog, but he also was kind of my dog. And he had been on, you know, so just to put some of her work in perspective, you know, she's going as a hundred and ten pound girl out to go on termination meetings with assets. Meaning you're, you're telling them you're not going to pay them anymore, which is their only livelihood in life. Thanks for your service and the, the intelligence that you got us, but we don't need you anymore. That, that's, you're threatening someone's livelihood. Be very careful how you are around them.

• 2:51:53Speaker 01

  And in her case, there was Java in the backseat. With fangs at the ready, should anyone get elevated or escalation of tone, temper, or whatever, Java was back there and he was very much her protector. And they had, obviously, a very close relationship as well. And so, it just got so bad about Java. She gave me a really big hug. We were standing on the sidewalk off of her hotel, so a little bit closer towards the Georgetown side on P Street. And she goes, "You need him even more than I do, so here you go."

• 2:52:35Speaker 01

  And then, you know, then it was, Java was mine. And, you know, I felt guilty, right? And it was just really, I didn't, but I was also really happy. But you still took him. I still took him. You are absolutely right. I still absolutely took that dog. And that dog is uniquely responsible for my turnaround in life. So, because here's the thing, you need mission, you need purpose, you need community. You and your dog, that's a community of two. And that is a lot, that is a million times better place to be than... A community of one. Which is not a community at all, right?

• 2:53:17Speaker 01

  It's even, like, the military side of it, if there's two of you, you can cover 360 degrees of security. If there's one of you, you can't. You're alone. And that's not a good place to be in life. You need other people. We are hardwired for this, and it is better for us to be around other people. And so, now I have Java, and, you know, dogs have to do things like go to the bathroom. And Java needed exercise. And he would let me know, in no uncertain terms, that he needed to go out, and that he wanted to go to the creek, and that he wanted to then go a little bit further down the, down the path. And, you know, I just, I poured all of my grief into that dog, and I felt so much better for it.

• 2:53:59Speaker 01

  And then, you know, you start, you take one step, and you can take many. And so that was just the start of kind of slowly and it doesn't happen like that. It's like, when did you become a great leader? I mean, if people ask you that, you're like, it doesn't work like that. It doesn't work like that. You've got to just take one step forward and see where that path goes. And when, when you're at a low spot in life, I mean, get a dog, work hard, stuff like that. I mean, Java got me out and was just my absolute rock in life for the next several years. And he passed away in 2013, got sick and passed away of something. We don't know what, but anyway, by that, by that point, I was doing much, much better.

• 2:54:44Speaker 01

  And used the time in business school to kind of incubate GoRuck and met a lot of people there that, that hugely impacted the, the direction that GoRuck would take.

• 2:54:54Jocko Willink?

  So how did GoRuck get to, get from this idea of teaching people about a go bag to what it is right now?

• 2:55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it started out with one rucksack, GR1. And you know, there's an, I did a napkin sketch of it and eventually figured out how to get that through the process of you get something R and D'd and then you find a factory that will build it, which is by the way, a completely different process. And then there are things like order minimums and you have to spend all, I spent every dollar I had to get any inventory at all.

• 2:55:31Speaker 01

  And the thing is, is at that point, that was May of 2010 was when the, the first rucks were for sale. And I, I thought, man, we've been working on this officially since, you know, the original idea was late 2007, officially started the company in February of 2008. It's just a way to, while I was in, while I was still at Green Bray, it's just a way to catalog costs. Like, oh, there's, I gotta take a trip here. I gotta pay this person to design these things. I guess it's a company, right? I, I never had a lemonade stand as a kid, okay? I was not some. Eager entrepreneur, like this is what I have to do in my life. I just kind of backed into this and then I have a company and then, you know, it starts to kick in.

• 2:56:15Speaker 01

  I hate to lose. I hate losing. Hate it. Right? And so I don't want to lose. I don't want to quit on this. I've already quit on a marriage. That's how it felt. I already quit on a team. Already quit on what I held most sacred in life and that's what it felt like. And so I don't want to quit on this. So I took all of my kind of perception of failure and I had my dog by my side and I just refused to quit at this. And so in May of 2010, the rucks came out and I thought, oh, this is awesome. I spent a lot of time developing this. Everyone's going to want one of these.

• 2:56:52Jocko Willink?

  How are you going to keep inventory up when this demand comes?

• 2:56:57Speaker 01

  It's just going to fly off the shelves like magic. I mean,

• 2:57:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I can't believe I thought of this. I'm so brilliant.

• 2:57:04Speaker 01

  Yo, yo, the name is great. The every pixel on our one-page website is perfect. And you know, it's silence was the world's answer. It just was absolute silence and nobody bought anything. And I was like, man, this is terrible. So I had this great, and by great, I mean horrible idea, to drive around the country to 48 states, by the way, with my dog, Java, and go meet anybody I could meet that would possibly be interested in buying a rucksack. I felt like Willy Loman, except I wasn't selling shoes in Death of a Salesman. I'm like selling rucksacks out of the back of my trunk.

• 2:57:45Jocko Willink?

  Which actually, everyone needs shoes. Everyone doesn't necessarily need a rucksack. So you're already starting a rough spot.

• 2:57:52Speaker 01

  So did that, drove to 48 states and went to sort of small retail shops and got the Heisman from everybody, right? Like, no, you know, arm out front, this is too expensive. You know, the retail price was 295 bucks for a rucksack. And they're all, they were all made in America and they're, it's just really expensive. When I first saw the cost side of what it was going to cost, like this is insanity. And, and basically it was. So Luckily, you knew that everyone would want these. Exactly. So the question became, what I did not know how to do was anything related to business doctrine.

• 2:58:34Speaker 01

  I don't know anything about online advertising. I don't know anything about wholesale. I don't know anything about ads. I don't know anything. But what I did know how to do was to to work with this, these designers. And they, they gave me a heck of an education in just the manufacturing world. And I'm just grateful that I found them. Just huge education about all the trade offs in product and, you know, what you can and can't do. And that became my foundation. They became teachers to me for two years as we were developing this. And eventually got a great piece of gear. And that wasn't enough, though. And so went back to the, back to the basics and said, what, what do I know how to do?

• 2:59:19Speaker 01

  Because I don't, I didn't wanna slave over a computer and figure out Facebook ads. I just didn't. And I, I should have probably, except maybe I shouldn't have. Because what I did know how to do was to, to teach others and how to, how to train others and how to build teams. And I learned that from the guys who had taught me that in special forces. And then working with them by with and through partner forces in Iraq and in Africa. And so came up with something called the Go Ruck Challenge, which was a rucking based event. Imagine that. Because that's all my training was, and now we have rucksacks. And anybody could sign up and it would be led by a special forces guy. And at that time, it was just me.

• 3:00:03Speaker 01

  And so, you know, it was sort of details not forthcoming. And you show up at one in the morning and this could go a very long time. There's no published route. There's no published distance. It's just us. And you're gonna do what?

• 3:00:21Speaker 01

  Is is you're gonna do what's told of you lunge around the building till I get tired style, right? And yet, the other part of it was, I didn't want it to be like boot camp. That was the one thing out of the gates was yelling and screaming has its place, but in boot camp. And because you have to get people's attention and you have to tear them down. You just don't have that time when people are actually giving you their time and paying you to be there. So, you know, it was, we weigh the rucksacks down and they would put bricks in the rucks and then we would do PT and a guided tour of the city and they would face a lot of adversity. And I would just apply the lessons that I'd learned in my training to building a team out of this small crew.

• 3:01:04Jocko Willink?

  And then that started to expand.

• 3:01:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what turned out to happen is that those people did the work for me. They went on Facebook and Google and used their networks and told people about Goruck. And oh yeah, there's gear that we manufacture. Like at a foundational level, we design and manufacture all of our own gear and it's meant to withstand this really difficult and challenging stuff and it's really good at carrying weight. All the things that I would have wanted out of an assault pack, that's kind of what we did with this. We just sort of streamlined it so it didn't look like a military assault pack, right? And, and so-

• 3:01:42Jocko Willink?

  What year was that first Goruck challenge?

• 3:01:44Speaker 01

  That was September 25th of 2010.

• 3:01:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:01:48Speaker 01

  So it happened pretty fast.

• 3:01:49Jocko Willink?

  When did the next one happen?

• 3:01:51Speaker 01

  So the next one happened the next month. And it was basically in, it was in DC.

• 3:01:57Jocko Willink?

  After the first one, were you like, okay, this might be a path right here?

• 3:02:02Speaker 01

  I was in the parking lot of like, right along the ocean, just west of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. They have, you know, parking for beach access. And that was a start and end point. And it was, I don't know, 12 or 15 people were in that first class and-

• 3:02:18Jocko Willink?

  Where'd you advertise it? Craigslist or?

• 3:02:21Speaker 01

  So we had a partnership with a, an event series called Tough Mudder. And, and so we were actually meant to be the prequel to the Tough Mudder that was gonna happen in Lake Tahoe in that region. Like a little Fight Club, if you will, that would then show up and do the Tough Mudder together as a team there. And it was something for them to talk about and it was obviously good for us. So they had, they had hit a home run on their, their first event, which was in, in, uh, May of, yeah, it was May of 2010, cause that's, we went to that as well. Got together a bunch of my special forces buddies and put bricks in our rucks that we had and went and did Tough Mudder together. And it was sort of something to talk about.

• 3:03:04Speaker 01

  And of course, nobody bought anything. We had inventory. That's where I thought everyone's gonna buy everything. Nobody bought anything. I think one person named Neil bought one rucksack at half off. Right? So I almost got my money back or so for, for the rock. And it was just, you know. So anyway, we had kind of attached ourselves to a bigger organization. And they drew, we got a little bit of their press and so people showed up. And, but that first one, I actually had to really hustle to get people out there, cause it was just a proof of concept. And it was crazy. This idea of unknown distance, unknown time, unpublished route, and some special forces guy is gonna put you through special forces style training. That was the marketing.

• 3:03:45Speaker 01

  And so that will speak to a certain kind of person. The question becomes, how do you reach them? And, you know, Tough Mudder certainly helped in, in that. And then, you know, you get one person that signs up and they wanna bring in a buddy and that's kinda how that worked. And, and so did the first one and, and, you know, we went over Golden Gate Bridge and back and, you know, they rolled around in the sand and did, you know, all that Navy SEAL style stuff in the ocean that I was less familiar with ocean PT. So, you know, there were a couple, you know, hey, I, I had to learn how to make sure they locked arms when the, the surf was coming, right? Like lock elbows and, and everybody make an unbreakable chain. Well, that became sort of the, the teamwork part of it. And when we were done.

• 3:04:29Speaker 01

  We hung out in that parking lot and drank beer together for hours. And everyone was just sort of had this huge smile on their face and you know, brought some peanut butter and jellies and people were eating that and drinking beer and everyone was smiling. And we were talking about how bad it sucked, you know, and it was just awesome. And it's like, this is how we're gonna build Go Ruck. These are our people. You know, the people that that wanna push a little harder, a little tougher, demand a little more and wanna be around, just have that sense of camaraderie. Just push a little harder, find something hard and do it because it's hard. It's very counterculture these days, right? Everything is sold on being easy.

• 3:05:10Speaker 01

  And you know, we build gear that's designed for the toughest situations on planet Earth, like war. And we put on events that are designed to challenge people and push them harder. And and now we have a lot of different events, but at that time, that was it and it sort of made the the rounds. And the people that did it, they told the people that they thought, I know. Cause when you're done, you say, I know just the person that needs to do this, right? And so, you know, the next one was again, a really small class, like six people in DC, four of whom were personal friends of mine. But it was about-

• 3:05:47Jocko Willink?

  You roped in two randoms, though.

• 3:05:49Speaker 01

  Two randoms, right? I mean, I probably, you know, and at that time, the the price of the event was half the price of the rucksack and you got to keep the rucksack. So I'm making no money on any of this. And I'm spending to travel and and go places, but you have to bet on yourself sometimes and you have to bet on something that you believe in. And I felt it, I felt it in my gut that it felt really good to give back to people. To show them not only what this bridge between the military and civilian worlds look like, but but just as individuals, how to push a little- Further in life, in this small microcosm of special forces training. And you know, that was very just rewarding.

• 3:06:34Speaker 01

  So come what may, this is what I want to do. I don't, I don't want to sit in front of a computer and figure out how to do AdWords. I don't. That's not, I want to be out and use, and I'm going to lose that fight. I'm going to lose because there's people who they just grew up on that stuff and they've been doing it for forever. And that's sort of fighting a war on their terms, a business war. Now, I wanted to fight this on my terms and my terms were I have this background and I can apply what I know and I can provide real value to people. And if you're starting a business, think about that first. Provide real value, get real feedback from people and, and follow that, do more of that

• 3:07:18Speaker 01

  and good things will happen. And so there were some startup costs to this though, you know, traveling around and, you know, it's, the events were 12 and then 14 hours and, you know, they were really, really challenging and every single time it was like a little Fight Club that happened and there was just a very passionate base that became the foundation for this GoRuck community. And if that would not have happened, I would have gone back and figured out how to serve America in some other capacity, you know, ground branch or go back into the military or whatever. I mean, that's what I wanted to do, but I just got that sense of satisfaction from, from this.

• 3:07:59Jocko Willink?

  So that you have your first event in 2010. How many events are planned roughly for 2020, 10 years on?

• 3:08:06Speaker 01

  So we have about a thousand events a year now. And they're, they're led by current and former special operations guys. And so that means just, I mean, we have SEALs, Green Berets, Delta guys, we have, you know, PJs from the air force, we have all, you know, we have Force Reconnaissance Marines. And what's important is empowering veterans to give back on the home front because all of us are united in this belief that we owe, we owe more, we owe.

• 3:08:43Speaker 01

  You think back to the friends that you lost. And when I say that, I know for a fact in your head, you're thinking about them right now. And you think that they died in service to our nation for values that we hold dear.

• 3:09:00Speaker 01

  And what they wanted to do was to continue doing that for the rest of their lives. That's what they wanted to do. And so, we honor their memory by continuing that mission as us. And we get huge inspiration by drawing upon the fact that we owe. We just owe them. And not just for their memory, but for our way of life and the generations that will follow. Because if we don't honor their memory, then we'll forget. And not, this doesn't mean just write it down and forget about it. It means you have to live it and you have to talk about it. And you have to share what you've learned.

• 3:09:45Speaker 01

  And you have to get out there with other people that maybe have not been exposed to that. And you have to, you have to show them what that, why that matters. And why service is so important. And for me, that, the inspiration is the guys that I served with and that, that way of life that they taught me. And so, everyone in our community has that. We have that deep inside of ourselves. And this is just an opportunity for those in our community to build a bridge between the military and the civilian worlds. And to get that feeling of making a difference on, on the home front. And so, Goruck became this bridge for me.

• 3:10:31Speaker 01

  I was part of the building of this bridge, along with the people who showed up for these events. We were building it together, along with my dog. And every, every event, I just, my, the well that was empty in my life, it just filled up a little bit more. And a little bit more, and a little bit more. Because I gave back what I knew. And people said, "Thank you." If someone says, "Thank you," take them at their word. You did something good. Do more of that. This is, doesn't have to be that, that hard, right? And so... That, that is something that we're just passionate about. We, we put veterans as the face of our organization at all of these events all over the country and the world.

• 3:11:15Speaker 01

  And it's just, it's, there's just a little bit of magic that happens. And we're all, we're all strengthening and reinforcing that bridge. And it's, it's a very different thing than, than getting angry and talking about how different we are. I, I just, I don't see it. I see, we, we literally don't care if you are young, old, black, white, male, female, gay, straight, military, civilian, pink, purple, polka dotted, striped, whatever, right? If you want to show up and be a part of this team and do the work, we want you on our team. It's just that simple. And there's something very liberating about that. It's apolitical,

• 3:11:53Speaker 01

  it's, it's pure. And, and that's what the military in its best form represents. There's just absolute purity. It's, it's, to be a part of that is just, it's great. And so, to be able to lead that for others is just hugely rewarding.

• 3:12:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's powerful. Um, I got another question for you.

• 3:12:20Jocko Willink?

  Lessons learned wise. How did you manage to get your wife back?

• 3:12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good one. Um, so, what was it? So, I'm in-

• 3:12:34Jocko Willink?

  You took her dog.

• 3:12:36Speaker 01

  I took her dog. She-

• 3:12:37Jocko Willink?

  You're just batting like real low right now, man.

• 3:12:40Speaker 01

  I was so, I was so desperate.

• 3:12:42Jocko Willink?

  You got no job, you're going to school, you're, I mean, you took her dog. All right. How did you manage to dig yourself out of that hole?

• 3:12:49Speaker 01

  So, I was so desperate, she, she gave me her dog, right? Um, so she moved down to, uh, she moved down to South America, got remarried, had a, had a daughter, Natalie, who, who lives with us now, still visits her father. Her father's in the, the military in Brazil. So, he's a Brazilian officer. And, um-

• 3:13:13Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, that's just sort of what happened at that time. But the chaos train continued a little bit for both of us. And it just, it was, it wasn't just easy. There was just, it just wasn't easy. And, you know, I'm driving around with a dog to 48 states trying to start a backpack business. Good luck, by the way, right? Against all odds, you know, and, you know, she fell in love, got remarried and had Natalie, who's just the world's greatest big sister now, because we have two other boys, or two boys, I should say, Jack and Ryan. But so how did we get back together? You know, we just kind of stayed in touch.

• 3:13:52Speaker 01

  We were always friends and it wasn't some kind of... What happens when you make decisions in the moment is that when they're, when they're big decisions and there are forks in the road and you go left or you go right, or one of you goes left and one of you goes right. I mean, eventually you will get perspective on your own decisions. And you have to come to terms with that. And the thing that I really try to avoid in life at all costs are regrets. And I just, I don't, I think about, will I regret this with either my time

• 3:14:36Speaker 01

  or my effort or energy, whatever, before... And this is fast forwarding to just sort of business or life or whatever decisions. But at that time, you know, I don't know. I really don't know what it was. I remember she wanted to see Java because she was back in America one time. So, so we met and I saw her and we had Java and it's like, we're crying again. I mean, it's just, the, the love never really dies. I mean, you, you fall in love with someone. I, I hear these stories, you know, you love someone and then you hate them because whatever. I, I'm, that's not my story, right? My story is, we were really good friends for a really long time. And...

• 3:15:21Speaker 01

  We hoped that our strategy of having this fairy tale ending skip to the end with these chaotic, crazy lives, which then the plan was I was gonna join the agency where we were gonna be a tandem couple in the agency, and that didn't happen, of course, right? But we stayed in touch, saw Java, and then at some point, she was, she sent me a handwritten letter, which is a really, you know, it's one of those things that if you want to get someone's attention in a very busy world, send them something that you've actually written by hand. It implies a degree of time and thoughtfulness and all these things. And so we traded a couple of notes. It's not like this is just radio silence, but she

• 3:16:04Speaker 01

  sent me a note and, you know, it was just like, I'm moving back to America and I would love to see you. There's probably more to it. I don't wanna, you know, it was, it was complicated. But, you know, I mean, and then we saw each other and it just kind of clicked again, like the love came back. And, and the love never left, but it was, I don't know, Jaco, it was just magic. It was just magic. And it's just one of those things where the surprising thing, I guess, was that, you know, she had gotten remarried and she

• 3:16:46Speaker 01

  got divorced, right? And then we got back together and, you know, I had not moved on. I mean, I had dated other people and, and I wasn't really ready to, to really move on. I had not gotten over her by any stretch. And so that kind of held me back and lots of other things, especially the, the love department of life. But I also was very skeptical. I didn't really want to just throw myself back into what our relationship was in 2008 and 2009. And

• 3:17:21Speaker 01

  So it it it took time after that. We it's it was actually, you know, work. We had to talk about stuff and get stuff out there. Imagine that. Like, if you're gonna get remarried to your ex-wife, you you've got some work to do, right? And and, uh, you know, now we have two boys and she works at Go Ruck as well. And it's it's not some perfect life that everyone thinks that everyone else has because nothing is perfect. But we're really happy.

• 3:17:51Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Um, one last thing I wanted to ask you about is the, uh, I know you you and I kind of linked up to begin with through Ryan Mannion and the and the Travis Mannion Foundation. What's how are you tied into supporting that unbelievable cause um, in in memory of of Travis?

• 3:18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that was one of those situations. It was one of the easiest. Some things in life are really hard and you've got to do them. Some things that are hard in life you should not do because there's probably other things that you could spend more time on. This was one of those situations where they do at their core the very same thing in so many ways, right? They empower veterans to give back, right? They they operate from this assumption of we we owe. We owe and let's be servant leaders and let's get out into the community. Let's be more physically active. Let's build communities. Let's show the next generation what our values are and let's let's allow them and afford them the opportunity to become servant leaders themselves. And so our

• 3:19:00Speaker 01

  community basically linked us up. I mean, there was a Heather who works at Travis Mannion Foundation was doing Go Ruck events and TMF or Travis Mannion Foundation was was putting on these heroes runs over nine 11 every year to get people and bring them together in in honor of the their cause, right? And and so

• 3:19:26Speaker 01

  It just kind of happened. I mean, the communities, they're doing service projects. We have communities, the communities just sort of aligned and then we partnered officially on these nine 11 heroes runs and turned them into rucks or runs or walks, whatever. But it's about bringing people together and, you know, raising awareness and spreading goodwill around the veteran space. And so, you know, we had been working together as partners on this stuff and service stuff at the community level, ground up, long before I'd ever met Ryan. So, you know, since then, I've gotten to spend a lot of time with her and we just rucked the Marine Corps Marathon together, which was awesome. Awesome. Yeah, it was great. You know, you, you spend some time with someone doing something

• 3:20:11Speaker 01

  hard, you get to know them and it's great. You develop a bond and that's, you can't get it if you don't do something hard together. So, that was great and we just share a lot of the same values. And so, you know, they're part of our vessel for fundraising and for getting people out and getting people active and aligning around a cause. And one of the things that I love about her, her story and the story of the Travis Mannion Foundation is that she goes, Travis would hate the fact that we've called this organization, the Travis Mannion Foundation, because, you know, he, she's like, it's not about me, right? That's the sort of way of life that you live and you really do live it when you, when you

• 3:20:55Speaker 01

  serve in these kinds of communities in, in the military. And, and so, their other, their, their other thing that they say, these last five words that he said before his, or these five words he said before he deployed on his last deployment to Iraq was, if not me, then who? And, you know, the way he said it, it wasn't really a question. It was just, I'm gonna go because this is what I'm trained to do. And if not me, then they're gonna send someone else. That's why I'm going. Like, this is, this is my mission. America's sending me and these are the values I hold dear. I'm gonna go forth and, and go. And so my, I've kind of, the idea that now his kind of cross to bear, if you will, sitting up, talking to the big guy upstairs is if not me, then who? It might as well be my

• 3:21:40Speaker 01

  name on the organization to represent this sort of veteran space and trying to get more of us out there to raise awareness and to really empower the next generation as well. And so we're just so aligned that it's such an easy rewarding partnership for us.

• 3:21:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Awesome. No, it's just so awesome to have Ryan on this podcast and hear everything about the foundation, what they're doing. I did like a, a, a video that they present to schools for kids, you know, talking about discipline and integrity and leadership. And so they're just getting the word out there and I appreciate that you guys are helping spread that word as well. So that's awesome. Um, well, we're looking at a little over three hours right now. Uh, you, you made this really easy. The website is goruck.com.

• 3:22:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 3:22:37Jocko Willink?

  The Facebook, the Twitter, the Instagram, the YouTube channel, it's all at goruck and people can find you. People can participate in these thousand events you got coming up. What do they do? Just go out? Where do you sign up?

• 3:22:52Speaker 01

  So it's also on, on the website. There's events that are, that are on there. I mean, there's, you'll, if you go to the site, you'll see a lot of gear and stuff as well. Like that's, that's the other part of what we do. It's kind of complicated like that, right? It's really like a fitness thing with backpacks though, right? We manufacture gear. You've got this rucksack or this backpack. You can do a lot with it. And so, um, yeah, there's a lot of events and nobody wanted the name goruck except for us. And so all of our social media stuff is, is goruck.

• 3:23:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that, that made it really easy.

• 3:23:22Speaker 01

  Except, there was this Hungarian photographer early on.

• 3:23:27Jocko Willink?

  Whose name was like?

• 3:23:28Speaker 01

  Goruck.

• 3:23:28Jocko Willink?

  Goruck.

• 3:23:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so he, he had the Twitter handle and I've pestered him for forever. And eventually he canceled his account and then that triggered all these other things. Eventually we claimed it. We're not hugely on the Twitter space, but it's, everything's goruck.

• 3:23:43Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. Uh, Echo, you got anything?

• 3:23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. What, what kind of dog is Java? Java is a, so Java was a chocolate lab. He, he passed away in 2013. It was one of those situations where. Man, we had this really big event. We'd done an obstacle course race out in, in uh, Virginia, like a confidence course. I mean, wood trees with nets and stuff and, you know, balance walks and all this stuff. And it was our first venture into that as a way to get people out there. We ended up never doing that again because it was just too labor intensive. But Java got really sick right before that and spent a lot of time and I slept on the floor at,

• 3:24:28Speaker 01

  at the, at the vet's office in Northern Virginia for like two weeks, became really good friends with Heather, who was the veterinarian there, still a really close, personal friend of mine. Um, but he, it was basically diagnosed as by exclusion. They, it just got some autoimmune disease like lupus and I just watched him wither away to nothing. And so, that's the sad part of the story. It comes to all of us. You just have to kind of, deal with it. And, and then we got Monster. So if you go to our, our site or you see pictures now, most of them are of Monster. He's also a, an English chocolate lab. So he's got this kind of block head and those two dogs, they look kind of similar, but Monster is literally the nicest dog ever. I mean,

• 3:25:11Speaker 01

  Java was kind of had those fangs at the ready and the great protector and Monster just he'll roll over on his back with, you know, all four paws in the air and just no, no predator to that dog exists whatsoever. And, you know, life's a funny place like that. Sometimes they're, they're both great. They're just complete opposite.

• 3:25:34Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Anything else Echo?

• 3:25:35Speaker 01

  No, man. That's it. Good to meet you. Thanks for coming. Thanks so much for having me, guys. This has been, this has been fun.

• 3:25:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, man. Any, anything else? Any closing thoughts? Anything we missed? Uh, at least on this round?

• 3:25:46Speaker 01

  You tell me. You got any big advice for me? You, I'm sure you've dug into Goruck and you've seen sort of our, our stuff with a fresh set of eyes. You, you do a lot of business consulting. You, you solve a lot of problems. You've seen a lot of leaders along the, the way. I mean, what do you see of, of what we're doing and what are we doing well and what, what could be, be doing better?

• 3:26:04Jocko Willink?

  I think what you're doing well and what I, what I'm glad that you already figured out is like, you're focused on helping people out and you're exposing them to. I don't know if I want to call it a form of exercise because it's really a lot more than that, you know, going out on a on a ruck hump. Like I said, I've talked about it before. It had a big impact on my life. It has a big impact on the way I think about things in general. So I think the fact that you're taking something that helped you and is opening the doors to a lot of people. I don't think there's a better business plan than that, man. So keep getting after it is what I always say.

• 3:26:38Speaker 02

  All right. We'll keep getting after it then. Thanks.

• 3:26:40Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, thanks for what you're doing there. Thanks for helping out the TMF, the Travis Travis Mannion Foundation. That's awesome. Of course, thanks for your service, man. Appreciate it.

• 3:26:51Speaker 02

  Likewise, Jaco. Thanks for what you're doing.

• 3:26:52Jocko Willink?

  All right, brother. We'll talk to you later. And with that, Jason has left the building. And while while Jason has left the building, I'm going to be entering some buildings around America, speaking to people. Yes, going on tour.

• 3:27:14Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:27:15Jocko Willink?

  All right. Live gigs, if you want to come. January 6, Washington DC. January 11, Austin. Already sold out. Sorry. January 16, New York. January 20, LA. January 27. And then January 27, Seattle. And January 28, San Francisco. So looking at the maps of the assorted event venues.

• 3:27:49Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:27:50Jocko Willink?

  They are. One is sold out. Like I said, Austin, the other ones are in the process of selling out. So if you want to come, jump on there. Go to jacolive.com and get yourself some tickets to come hang out. I'm gonna talk. Echo is gonna be there. Some of them. I think that's what we're planning.

• 3:28:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're sorting that out, we'll say.

• 3:28:17Jocko Willink?

  Maybe all of them. Maybe some of them. Not none of them.

• 3:28:21Speaker 02

  Not none of them, yeah.

• 3:28:23Jocko Willink?

  For people that like Echo, hopefully it's one of the ones that you're going to. For those people that don't like Echo. There are people out there like that.

• 3:28:33Speaker 02

  I believe so, yes.

• 3:28:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. If you don't like Echo, well, you're all right. You can still come.

• 3:28:42Jocko Willink?

  And alright, so we talked a lot about rucking, which we've talked about before. Certainly a good way to make yourself better. Not the only way. There are some other ways to make yourself better. There's ways to provide yourself support. While you're actually supporting what we're doing here, kind of this whole thing.

• 3:29:04Speaker 02

  Yep, it's true.

• 3:29:06Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, let us know how.

• 3:29:08Speaker 02

  Rucking, like you know when I think about rucking is in the airport.

• 3:29:11Jocko Willink?

  To me, when I think of rucking and you, I think you have no idea what this is.

• 3:29:16Speaker 02

  Yes, I do cuz uh my camera bag is pretty heavy and then my computer bag is pretty heavy. It's heavier than a regular computer bag. Well, my computer is kinda heavy cuz it's big.

• 3:29:26Jocko Willink?

  Even though it only has four terabyte drive?

• 3:29:28Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah.

• 3:29:30Jocko Willink?

  Weak.

• 3:29:31Speaker 02

  Anyway, it's still a heavy computer, is what I'm saying. So when you carry the camera bag and the computer bag when you travel, you walk from terminal to terminal going here, uh you know, to all these different gates.

• 3:29:42Jocko Willink?

  This is it. You've basically been through the special forces Q course, is what I'm hearing.

• 3:29:46Speaker 02

  Pretty much, is what I'm saying.

• 3:29:48Jocko Willink?

  That's what I'm hearing.

• 3:29:49Speaker 02

  And hey man, I don't know. How a real ruck feels. I don't.

• 3:29:55Jocko Willink?

  That's what I was thinking, like you'd have no idea what we're talking about.

• 3:29:57Speaker 02

  I have an idea.

• 3:29:58Jocko Willink?

  We might as well be talking about, you know, walking around on Mars in low gravity or whatever gravity they have on Mars. I don't know. Walking around on the moon with low gravity where you're like, I can imagine what it's like, but I have no idea.

• 3:30:11Speaker 02

  I disagree because when I walk around with that, it's like a little like workout. So then what I do is.

• 3:30:17Jocko Willink?

  So I was right. You kinda know what the deal is.

• 3:30:19Speaker 02

  My mind like where it's like, hey, this isn't really a workout. It's a workout, but it's not the workout.

• 3:30:24Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, special forces Q course dominator via.

• 3:30:29Speaker 02

  Carry on luggage.

• 3:30:30Jocko Willink?

  Carry on luggage.

• 3:30:31Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. And it's very true because I'm just trying to get from point A to point B.

• 3:30:37Jocko Willink?

  Are you gonna start a company called Go Luggage? Where you carry luggage around an airport for a workout?

• 3:30:44Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 3:30:45Jocko Willink?

  Just wondering.

• 3:30:46Speaker 02

  I know exactly what's going on, but it's kinda like.

• 3:30:49Jocko Willink?

  You just say you know exactly what's going on.

• 3:30:52Speaker 02

  Well, maybe not exactly, but it's it's like, you know, like that you could you could isolate that as a work cuz like when he's talking, oh yes, actually I do know what's going on because when he explained how it feels to take off like. The rucksack when you're done, I was like, bro, you're talking about me. You're talking about me when you get in your plane.

• 3:31:08Jocko Willink?

  You wear a backpack for, let's call it seven minutes as you get through there. And then you finally get after that treacherous journey. You get to your first class seat on the airplane. You get to unload that burden.

• 3:31:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You feel the blood go back.

• 3:31:27Jocko Willink?

  And then the girl comes over and says, would you like a champagne, sir?

• 3:31:31Speaker 02

  No, man, I'm too busy rocking, you know?

• 3:31:33Jocko Willink?

  Basically, you're right. I think, I think that's the SFQ course.

• 3:31:36Speaker 02

  It's the same thing.

• 3:31:37Jocko Willink?

  I think that's Ranger school you just completed.

• 3:31:39Speaker 02

  Anyway, I'm doing jujitsu. I don't know about you.

• 3:31:41Jocko Willink?

  Change the subject. Good call.

• 3:31:45Speaker 02

  And sometimes I'll do it with a rucksack on.

• 3:31:48Jocko Willink?

  You do jujitsu with a rucksack on?

• 3:31:49Speaker 02

  If you had a rucksack on, did jujitsu, if you, if the rucksack was like streamlined. I don't know like how, but I mean, they get, there's varying levels of bulk, right? Which I mean, there's levels, right? But if you had a streamlined rucksack, jujitsu might, it might benefit you.

• 3:32:06Jocko Willink?

  Cause you get used to the weight?

• 3:32:07Speaker 02

  You get used to the weight, sure, but no, no, no, as far as like performance goes, because you'd be heavier on them. To go, uh, like they couldn't really stay on your back. You see what I'm saying?

• 3:32:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kind of unrealistic, but nonetheless, I do jujitsu. And you know what? I don't wear a rucksack most of the time. I wear a gi some of the time, half the time.

• 3:32:26Jocko Willink?

  Where do you get your gi from?

• 3:32:28Speaker 02

  Origin. So you go to originmaine.com.

• 3:32:30Jocko Willink?

  And what is important about Origin? Why?

• 3:32:33Speaker 02

  Well, depends on who you are, but in my opinion, what's significant and significantly important is that they're made in America.

• 3:32:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay, made in America sounds cool. I appreciate it, but what if we want high quality?

• 3:32:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, same deal. So I was gonna say the second most significant thing is the made in America, the high quality. That's the first most significant thing. You see what I'm saying? That's what I was gonna say.

• 3:33:00Jocko Willink?

  So originmaine.com, get your gi, get your rash guards, get your t-shirts. And by the way, since we can't walk around America wearing gi pants. You can get a pair of Origin jeans.

• 3:33:16Speaker 02

  Same deal, made in America from the materials, materials, raw materials, raw materials.

• 3:33:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the cotton and whatnot.

• 3:33:25Jocko Willink?

  The what?

• 3:33:26Speaker 02

  The cotton.

• 3:33:29Speaker 02

  Whatever, right? You were talking to somebody and you said it like that.

• 3:33:31Jocko Willink?

  I only say cotton to, to, to imitate you.

• 3:33:35Speaker 02

  No, you were real, yeah, I don't know if you were imitating me.

• 3:33:37Jocko Willink?

  I was a hundred percent, because otherwise there would be no T's.

• 3:33:40Speaker 02

  I rubbed off on you legit, but it wasn't cotton, it was button. You said button.

• 3:33:44Jocko Willink?

  That same thing. I'm just doing that to bother, to, to imitate you.

• 3:33:47Speaker 02

  Whatever, bro. That's your jam now? So go ahead and run with it, I think. Anyway, jeans, yes. Good jeans, too. Not just some rant, like junk jeans. They're good.

• 3:33:56Jocko Willink?

  Turn them inside out like Pete says, and look at the quality on the inside. These aren't normal jeans. These are the best jeans in the world. That's, that's where I'm gonna say.

• 3:34:04Speaker 02

  Agree, actually.

• 3:34:05Jocko Willink?

  And also, we have a lighter weight jeans that are out right now. At least they're close to being out. They're called Delta 68. But I have them. They're out for me. They've been out for a while.

• 3:34:17Speaker 02

  Good, one, one pair out, good.

• 3:34:18Jocko Willink?

  No, no, they're, they're in production for sure. That's a hundred percent. So if you want to get a pair that's a little lighter weight, it's weird too, right? Because here I am, Mr. Heavyweight hoodie.

• 3:34:29Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:34:30Jocko Willink?

  But I like lightweight jeans. I guess that's the way things are gonna shake out sometimes. You know how many times I've ever been cold? You know how many times I've ever been in my life? Said, "Ooh, my legs are cold."

• 3:34:42Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 3:34:42Jocko Willink?

  Zero. Never.

• 3:34:45Speaker 02

  Alright, well, yeah, I mean, it, it kind of makes sense if you look at it practically, because if you're gonna be in a situation where like the weather and the temperature is this thing, you're not gonna be like, "Yeah, let me get my heavyweight clothes, but not my, my pants." Like, it just doesn't make sense like that. See what I'm saying? So anytime where it's like a, a, a, a temperature dictated scenario, you'd never really have the opportunity to have your legs cold. See what I'm saying?

• 3:35:11Jocko Willink?

  Hmm, okay.

• 3:35:12Speaker 02

  Like, if you're going to Monaka.

• 3:35:13Jocko Willink?

  Point taken, point taken.

• 3:35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:35:15Jocko Willink?

  Going up top.

• 3:35:16Speaker 02

  So it's like, cool, that's cool and everything, but...

• 3:35:19Jocko Willink?

  So I really didn't say much.

• 3:35:21Speaker 02

  You didn't say much, exactly, right.

• 3:35:22Jocko Willink?

  Well, we got lightweight jeans, Delta 68, named after my forefathers and the SEAL teams who wore jeans in the Mekong Delta Nam.

• 3:35:33Speaker 02

  Also supplements, by the way. And which I dig, I dig the, you know, the genes, but until they come out, you know, I can't get too emotionally, uh, moved.

• 3:35:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:35:43Speaker 02

  By it. The last supplements I can, because these supplements are, as it turns out, the most important supplements that, that there are for your joints, joint warfare and super krill oil. Cold war, by the way, which is really putting in work recently. My son is sick, so you know, I'm using this a lot.

• 3:36:04Jocko Willink?

  The cold war to prevent and head off any sicknesses that might be coming your way.

• 3:36:10Speaker 02

  Immunity supplement.

• 3:36:11Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:36:12Speaker 02

  As it were. Also milk, additional protein in the form of a dessert.

• 3:36:16Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:36:17Speaker 02

  Stick with that one.

• 3:36:18Jocko Willink?

  Ready to drink. Discipline, go in a can. Tropic thunder. Citrus, we got, that's kind of mine. My go-to is psycho citrus. It's sort of like a lemon lime. Tropic thunder is kind of like a, a pineapple coconut. And then of course we have Dax Savage. Is that your personal favorite?

• 3:36:41Speaker 02

  Uh, buy a little bit, but yes.

• 3:36:44Jocko Willink?

  So there's not a huge margin of favoritism?

• 3:36:46Speaker 02

  Close, close, close, close.

• 3:36:48Jocko Willink?

  Did you see Dakota posted on his Instagram account, which I know you refer to that as the gram, but he posted like, he just got, I don't know, like an entire pallet of Dax Savage to his house.

• 3:37:02Speaker 02

  Good move.

• 3:37:03Jocko Willink?

  Cause Dakota's not playing around.

• 3:37:04Speaker 02

  No, but yeah, uh, yeah, first and then close second is, uh, Tropic.

• 3:37:09Jocko Willink?

  And don't forget about Jocka White Tea. If you need to improve your deadlift. I mean, yeah, it tastes good. Yeah, it's certified organic.

• 3:37:17Speaker 02

  Big deal.

• 3:37:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's got a little caffeine. Yeah, it's got antioxidants in it. All that's cool, good, but let's face it, you're getting that for that 8,000 pound deadlift. Gears all. And strawberry and chocolate warrior kid milk.

• 3:37:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, what if you came home and you're like, oh, well, what do you want to give your kid to eat right now? How about poison?

• 3:37:37Speaker 02

  No, no, no poison.

• 3:37:38Jocko Willink?

  No one says that. And yet they give their kids sugar filled desserts, treats, snacks.

• 3:37:46Speaker 02

  Funyuns.

• 3:37:47Jocko Willink?

  Whatever those are. I kind of do, but I don't think I liked them.

• 3:37:51Speaker 02

  For real. Yeah, they were kind of, that was like a love hate scenario for sure.

• 3:37:56Jocko Willink?

  Well, anyways, don't give your kids any of that stuff when they want something tasty. Give them some Warrior Kid Molk.

• 3:38:01Speaker 02

  Also, Jaco has a store. It's called Jaco Store. Jacostore.com JP Donnell. Shout out by the way. He was, well, you know, doing his workout.

• 3:38:14Speaker 02

  Apparently, he posted a picture of post-workout, posted a picture of post-workout.

• 3:38:20Speaker 02

  Picture. Wearing one of the mini shirts.

• 3:38:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the new. The new death shirt.

• 3:38:27Speaker 02

  There was the new death shirt and there was also a lightweight hoodie scenario.

• 3:38:32Jocko Willink?

  So he's just getting after it.

• 3:38:33Speaker 02

  He's getting after it and representing.

• 3:38:35Jocko Willink?

  Wait, is he on the path?

• 3:38:36Speaker 02

  He's on the path.

• 3:38:37Jocko Willink?

  So he's representing while he's on the path.

• 3:38:40Speaker 02

  That's exactly what he's doing.

• 3:38:42Jocko Willink?

  That is JP.

• 3:38:43Speaker 02

  But someone did ask, hey, where do you get that? So, you know, we say it every week, sure, I'm saying it again. Jaco Store. Jacostore.com So you can get the stuff to represent while you're on the path.

• 3:38:56Jocko Willink?

  T-shirts, rash guards, truckers hats.

• 3:39:01Jocko Willink?

  Flex fit hats.

• 3:39:02Speaker 02

  Flex fit.

• 3:39:02Jocko Willink?

  If that's your thing. Beanie's.

• 3:39:05Speaker 02

  Beanie's.

• 3:39:05Jocko Willink?

  Hoodies.

• 3:39:06Speaker 02

  Lightweight. And heavy.

• 3:39:10Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 3:39:10Speaker 02

  Depends on what you mean by heavy. Anyway, a lot of cool stuff on there. Check it out. If you like something, get something. There's women's stuff on there too, and for the Warrior Kids.

• 3:39:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:39:19Speaker 02

  Everything.

• 3:39:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:20Speaker 02

  But it's Christmas time.

• 3:39:21Jocko Willink?

  How stoked are you when your little kid opens up a Warrior Kid package and it's a T-shirt for your kids walking around school representing? Now your kid's on the path, representing while he's on the path.

• 3:39:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:39:31Jocko Willink?

  Or she's on the path.

• 3:39:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Big time. So, yeah, all that stuff. Jacostore.com Also, you want to subscribe to the podcast, or should I say, if you want to subscribe to the podcast, go ahead and do so. I'm not like, I'm not going to sit here.

• 3:39:44Jocko Willink?

  You don't think that someone's on podcast 208? And they, there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of us talking? And you think they didn't get to the end and like hit subscribe?

• 3:39:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, I don't know, but it's possible or it's possible that maybe someone just had stumbled upon podcasts in general.

• 3:40:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:40:05Speaker 02

  You see what I'm saying?

• 3:40:06Jocko Willink?

  Yup.

• 3:40:06Speaker 02

  Is that possible?

• 3:40:07Jocko Willink?

  I sat next to a woman on the plane.

• 3:40:10Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:40:11Jocko Willink?

  And, and she was older than me. And she asked me something and somehow she asked what I was doing because I was like preparing something.

• 3:40:20Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:40:21Jocko Willink?

  And I said, oh, I'm writing this for a, for a podcast. And she goes, oh, and I said, do you know what podcasts are? She didn't like that I said that.

• 3:40:30Speaker 02

  Did she say, of course?

• 3:40:31Jocko Willink?

  She goes, she goes, of course, I know what a podcast is. She said, I'm not that old. And I said, I know you're not. I said, but a lot of people don't know. And by, by the way, I said, I'm probably older than you. And she said, there's zero chance that you're older than me.

• 3:40:46Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 3:40:47Jocko Willink?

  But.

• 3:40:48Speaker 02

  Were you?

• 3:40:49Jocko Willink?

  No, I was not.

• 3:40:50Speaker 02

  Or you're scared to ask her?

• 3:40:51Jocko Willink?

  Uh, actually she told me her age.

• 3:40:55Speaker 02

  And she's older than you?

• 3:40:56Jocko Willink?

  She was older than me.

• 3:40:57Speaker 02

  Alright, well, there you go. But here's the thing, you really didn't gain much information because it's not like you, you said, do you know what podcasts are? You gotta ask her, do you know whether or not to subscribe? Do you know that it's possible to subscribe to podcasts?

• 3:41:09Jocko Willink?

  You know what I did? I took her phone and I showed her Jocko Podcast.

• 3:41:14Speaker 02

  Oh, you brought it up, okay.

• 3:41:15Jocko Willink?

  And I pressed subscribe for her because she was already in, kind of in the game.

• 3:41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:41:20Jocko Willink?

  She was interested in what was happening.

• 3:41:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. And now she's in the game fully. And either way, whether she knew to subscribe or not, she subscribed. But the question still remains, does everyone know about podcasts and the subscription option?

• 3:41:33Jocko Willink?

  If you don't know to subscribe, then subscribe. And also you may not have been aware because this was probably the worst launch in the history of launches randomly.

• 3:41:43Speaker 02

  Maybe ever.

• 3:41:43Jocko Willink?

  Echo's big effort to make a impact in the world. We have another podcast which is called Grounded. And we talk about casual things of life, including jujitsu and not so casual things, but it's a little bit, not quite as heavy or structured or, yeah, as this podcast. It's called the Grounded Podcast. You can subscribe to that one too. You can also subscribe to Warrior Kid Podcast. There's gonna be some new ones coming out.

• 3:42:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:42:13Jocko Willink?

  The worst was when that kid sent me a letter that said, I'm wondering why you don't make more podcasts. That one hit me right in the heart.

• 3:42:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:42:21Jocko Willink?

  And don't forget about Warrior Kid Soap. Go to IrishOaksRanch.com. Aiden is up there making soap. And we got a new soap coming out, by the way.

• 3:42:30Speaker 02

  Damn, what's it called?

• 3:42:31Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna be out pretty soon. You wanna know what it's called?

• 3:42:32Speaker 02

  Yes, sir, I do.

• 3:42:34Jocko Willink?

  It's called Killer Soap.

• 3:42:38Jocko Willink?

  It's called Killer Soap.

• 3:42:39Speaker 02

  Is it antibacterial or something?

• 3:42:40Jocko Willink?

  It's antibacterial, antimicrobial.

• 3:42:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:42:44Jocko Willink?

  It's got tea tree oil.

• 3:42:45Speaker 02

  See, that's good.

• 3:42:46Jocko Willink?

  Activated charcoal. So it's gonna be coming out soon. Check out the Killer Soap.

• 3:42:53Speaker 02

  That's a good one, actually.

• 3:42:54Jocko Willink?

  Does this make me a marketing genius, is the question? Kind of.

• 3:42:57Speaker 02

  Well.

• 3:42:57Jocko Willink?

  You're kinda looking like it was a marketing genius move.

• 3:43:00Speaker 02

  It's a good product, we'll say that. You conveyed that message very clearly. And so, yeah, I guess so. Genius? Well, you know, maybe.

• 3:43:06Jocko Willink?

  I don't know. What would you have called it?

• 3:43:09Speaker 02

  I...

• 3:43:09Jocko Willink?

  Something lame. Is what I'm feeling.

• 3:43:13Speaker 02

  Anyway. We have a YouTube channel. How about that?

• 3:43:17Jocko Willink?

  That's good.

• 3:43:17Speaker 02

  Marketing genius. Guess what? YouTube channel. Video's the thing nowadays, right? Marketing guy, right? Video.

• 3:43:23Jocko Willink?

  It's a good addition. For instance, if someone's listening to this podcast and they wanna see what Jason looks like, they can go on there and they can see what Jason looks like. They can also see what I look like. And in fact, they can see what you look like.

• 3:43:35Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:43:35Jocko Willink?

  Which most people don't think you look like what you sound like.

• 3:43:39Speaker 02

  That's what I've heard.

• 3:43:40Jocko Willink?

  That's the consensus.

• 3:43:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:43:42Jocko Willink?

  Don't be worried about it, bro.

• 3:43:44Speaker 02

  I'm not worried. All good. Wait, should I be worried?

• 3:43:47Jocko Willink?

  Would you prefer to have the current scenario, which is you sound small, weak, and frail? But you're actually kinda jacked?

• 3:43:58Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:43:58Jocko Willink?

  Or would you rather sound like the Zico Charles, but then you are skinny and weak?

• 3:44:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:44:03Jocko Willink?

  Besides your knees?

• 3:44:04Speaker 02

  Well, you know. I, yeah, well, I think the answer is obvious. Or would I rather look how it, well, no, cuz this is a knock on how I sound, really. So technically, the dichotomy, or the other side of the dichotomy, would be like... Would I rather sound, yeah, yeah, would I rather sound big and look small? Or look big and sound small? Cause that's kind of

• 3:44:31Jocko Willink?

  What would you rather? You're good with where you're at.

• 3:44:34Speaker 02

  I'm good at where we're at, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:44:35Jocko Willink?

  I'll take that.

• 3:44:36Speaker 02

  You know, so yeah, YouTube.

• 3:44:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and Echo makes like videos, not just of this podcast, but also

• 3:44:43Jocko Willink?

  enhanced videos and Mikey and the Dragons, which is a children's book that I wrote that John Bozak did the artwork for. We, we just posted the entire thing, cover to cover on YouTube so that kids around the world can watch and learn how to overcome fear.

• 3:45:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, my kids love that video, by the way. Cause they've been watching it even since before we posted it.

• 3:45:09Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:45:10Speaker 02

  It's very good.

• 3:45:11Jocko Willink?

  Uh, psychological warfare, got a little album out and it has tracks. And if you have a little moment where you're like, man, I wish Chaka would just kind of like, give me a little, give me a little talk right now, get me in the game. That's what it is. You think you're gonna not, you think you're not gonna work out. You think you're gonna lay in bed. You think you're gonna grab all of that doughnut? No, I'm gonna stop you. Just press play on your, on your listening device. And listen to that MP3. You can get that on the MP3 dealer, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, whatever, leave reviews. Actually, it's not Stitcher, it's iTunes, Google Play, whatever MP3 platforms. Don't forget about Flipside Canvas.

• 3:45:52Jocko Willink?

  Maybe you need a visual, kind of a visual reinforcement of the path. Cool, go to flipsidecanvas.com, which is run by my brother Dakota Meyer. And you can get yourself some, some graphic representation of what we call the path.

• 3:46:12Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:46:12Jocko Willink?

  It will remind you and it'll keep you on it. Got some books, got Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. Pre-order it now, so that the publisher knows how many to print. Cause otherwise, they're over there rounding down, right? They're like, well, we probably will get away with this. No, they don't understand. Let them understand. Pre-order it. Get one for you. Get one for your, your significant other. Get one, get one for each of the people on your team. Get one for your, just get some. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. All the little questions that we have about leadership are in here indexed heavily. So you can look through the index.

• 3:46:56Jocko Willink?

  Making an ultimatum as the boss. Hmm. Making an ultimatum as a subordinate. Okay, th- those are interesting, right? Dealing with an ultimatum placed on you. That's, these are, these are important things to know and understand. Balancing praise. That sounds like a good idea. Tactfully delivering the truth. I'm just looking, giving clear guidance. Keeping the troops informed. So these are all.

• 3:47:25Jocko Willink?

  Punishment.

• 3:47:28Jocko Willink?

  How to, how to meet out punishment? You liked that. You made that little video of this.

• 3:47:33Speaker 02

  Yes. For the book.

• 3:47:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, of me saying, when do I punish people?

• 3:47:39Jocko Willink?

  So that's good. Leadership Strategy and Tactics. Check it out. Way of the Warrior Kid Series, one, two, and three. All available. All the best books that you would have wanted when you were a kid. If I would have had these books when I was a kid, my life would have been better. And that's a bold statement. So Way of the Warrior Kid, Way of the Warrior Kid Two, Mark's Mission, and Way of the Warrior Kid Three, Where There's a Will. Get your kid on the path. Look, I know you want them on the path, but it's hard when you're a parent. Cause your kids don't really want to listen to you. They don't. They'll listen to Uncle Jake, though. For some reason, they'll listen to Uncle Jake. So get them those books. And then Mikey and the Dragons. Look, cool. Watch the video. Cool. We put it on YouTube for free, obviously.

• 3:48:22Jocko Willink?

  But what you can do is you get your kids the book and then they can read along and they learn to read. They learn to read while they learn to overcome fear. You're welcome. Merry Christmas.

• 3:48:36Jocko Willink?

  Then there's Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. There's the holiday gift. Give the gift of discipline. Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. The audio versions are on MP3 platforms. Then Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership that I wrote with my brother Leif Babin. Leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield. These books will show you the principles that we used on the battlefield that you can use in your business and life. Echelon Front, Leadership Consultancy, We Solve Problems Through Leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. EF Online, you know, I used to be able to say to people, "Well, you know, got some good leadership lessons. Oh, you got some questions about Extreme Ownership?

• 3:49:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you got some, oh, cool. Here, go to, you know, go listen to my podcast." And like, "Okay, cool." What does that look like now? I say, "Go listen to the podcast," and what does that turn into? That turns into 700 hours of training for your people. Not always the most efficient way. It's a good, whatever, doctorate level, but let's get this thing concise. That's what EF Online is. EF Online is, boom, here you go. Here's some pragmatic training information for you and your team. You can get on there. You're going to be put in leadership situations where you have to make decisions. It's interactive. It's entertaining. You get to see the Echelon Front

• 3:50:02Jocko Willink?

  team putting out the word. So, check out EFOnline.com. And then muster2020 dates are coming. We're actually finalizing those right now. If you want to come to a leadership event slash seminar slash conference with me and the rest of the Echelon Front team, go to extremeownership.com. So you're aware when the details come out. And then, of course, now we have EF Overwatch and EF Legion. We are placing military members that have leadership skills and experience and that understand the principles that we teach. And we are placing those military personnel into civilian businesses to lead those businesses so that they can dominate their battle space.

• 3:50:46Jocko Willink?

  So, go to EFOverwatch.com or EFLegion.com. And if you want to follow, follow up with us, if you've got questions or answers or comments or whatever, if you want to connect.

• 3:51:02Jocko Willink?

  If you want to be part of the community. No, we're not saying that. If you want to connect with us, well, Jason and GoRuck, all channels, at GoRuck. And then we are also on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, and on this fragenbezo. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. And once again, thanks to Jason McCarthy for coming on the podcast and sharing his experience. And of course, thanks to Jason for his service in the Army and for what he is doing now. And thanks to all the men and women out there that have served and that are currently serving.

• 3:51:46Jocko Willink?

  Going through the long nights, the early mornings, the cold, the heat, the risk of life and limb. All to protect freedom and democracy. Thanks to all of you. And to those brave individuals doing that same thing here in America. To keep us safe at home, our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics and EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. Thank you for what you do. And on top of those two, I want to also give credit to our intelligence community out there in America and overseas.

• 3:52:29Jocko Willink?

  Doing work to keep us safe, taking the fight to the enemy by knowing and understanding who they are and what they do.

• 3:52:39Jocko Willink?

  And to everyone else out there.

• 3:52:43Jocko Willink?

  Things aren't always going to go the way that you think they will. There will be challenges and there will be obstacles and there will be unexpected problems and you will sometimes have to carry more weight than you want to. You might have to carry more weight than you think you can. And when that happens.

• 3:53:07Jocko Willink?

  Remember to take that weight.

• 3:53:10Jocko Willink?

  Take it on your shoulders, stand up, put one foot in front of the other. And keep getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.