292: The Secret to Life is Don't Quit. With Admiral Joe Maguire.

0:00:00 - Opening 0:05:34 - Admiral Joe Maguire 2:28:12 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:50:50 - 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 292 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  August 2nd, 2006 was the worst day of my life.

• 0:19Jocko Willink?

  Ryan Jobe had been gravely wounded by a single enemy round that hit his weapon as he looked down its sights and then ripped into his face, rendering him blind and critically injured.

• 0:35Jocko Willink?

  And then soon after Ryan was wounded, Mark Lee, who had stepped into the enemy line of fire to engage the enemy and protect his teammates while assaulting a building, was shot and killed.

• 0:56Jocko Willink?

  Mark was a larger than life character in every aspect, smart, athletic, charismatic, charming, talented, tough, and also hilarious and faithful and loyal and obviously brave.

• 1:21Jocko Willink?

  Now he was gone.

• 1:24Jocko Willink?

  And in Task Unit Bruiser, we closed ranks to get through it.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  We celebrated his life. We mourned his loss.

• 1:38Jocko Willink?

  And then we loaded him on his last flight home.

• 1:44Jocko Willink?

  His angel flight.

• 1:49Jocko Willink?

  And we got support from our chain of command, from my commanding officer at SEAL Team 3, our command master chief, the operations master chief, and the rest of SEAL Team 3 backed us up and assisted us as we worked through this devastation.

• 2:08Jocko Willink?

  But it didn't stop there. I got a, I got a call in my tactical operations center.

• 2:15Jocko Willink?

  It was from Admiral Joe Maguire. The senior SEAL officer in charge of, in charge of all of naval special warfare. In charge of the SEAL teams, in charge of the boat teams, in charge of the training center, in charge of everything. And I had previously worked for him directly for 13 months.

• 2:38Jocko Willink?

  As his aide de camp and I knew how busy he was. And I knew what his daily schedule was like and I knew the demands that were upon him.

• 2:48Jocko Willink?

  But I also knew that he cared.

• 2:52Jocko Willink?

  He cared deeply about the SEAL teams, he cared about his SEALs.

• 2:59Jocko Willink?

  And he cared about me.

• 3:03Jocko Willink?

  And he called to check in with me.

• 3:07Jocko Willink?

  And to check on me.

• 3:10Jocko Willink?

  And when he called, he, he told me that he was reviewing the Silver Star that I had submitted for Mark. And he was about to send it directly to the Chief of Naval Operations for a signature based on my recommendation.

• 3:27Jocko Willink?

  And he told me that he was sorry for our loss.

• 3:32Jocko Willink?

  And he assured me that he would take care of Mark's family.

• 3:42Jocko Willink?

  He also told me that we were doing the right thing.

• 3:46Jocko Willink?

  And to keep doing it, to keep taking the fight to the enemy, to keep eliminating enemy fighters, to keep protecting the local populace, to keep the pressure on.

• 3:59Jocko Willink?

  Because the war wasn't over.

• 4:02Jocko Willink?

  And the enemy wasn't going to stand down. We still had work to do.

• 4:09Jocko Willink?

  Lots of it.

• 4:13Jocko Willink?

  And he knew that.

• 4:16Jocko Willink?

  And so did I.

• 4:19Jocko Willink?

  And that meant a lot. To know that the Admiral in charge of all the SEALs was there for us, was there for Mark.

• 4:31Jocko Willink?

  Was there for Mark's family.

• 4:39Jocko Willink?

  About three months later, October 21st, 2006, my plane landed at Naval Air Station North Island with the last members of Task Unit Bruiser to come home. And Admiral McGuire was there to welcome us home, to be sure that we were okay, because he cared about his SEALs. He cared about his troops. And that meant a lot.

• 5:18Jocko Willink?

  And soon, I was hugging my wife and kids on the tarmac. But even as I embraced my family, I knew I hadn't brought all my men home. And that, that burden will always be present. But it helped to know that leaders like Admiral McGuire were there. Were there to help shoulder that burden, to support us, and to take care of the families of our fallen.

• 6:01Jocko Willink?

  And it's an honor tonight to have Admiral Joseph McGuire here with us to share some of his experiences and lessons learned from his 36 years of military service and his experiences in the civilian sector. Admiral, thank you for coming by.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Jaco, it's an honor to be with you. It really is. It's been entirely too long since you and I've been together. We've been through an awful lot together, but it's an honor to be with you and an absolute honor to be with you on this podcast. So, thank you so much for those kind words and thank you for the warm welcome.

• 6:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit more, but to start off with, let's start at the beginning, which I believe is in Brooklyn. That's where you were born, right?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  You got a problem with that? Nah, Jaco, forget about it. That's where I'm from.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, America's fourth largest city, four million people. I was a street rat, you know, grew up, grew up in New York City. And, um, uh, you know, people don't understand that actually Brooklyn is on Long Island. So, um, I spent my time in the ocean. I started surfing when I was 16 with the money that I bought my first surfboard with the money I got from shoveling snow.

• 7:19Jocko Willink?

  And that's pre-wetsuits, or at least pre-good wetsuits.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Well, they were loose, you know. But I'll tell you this though, Jaco, when I went to, uh, you know, Bud's and they, you know, folks out there, I'm sure you know this from listening to Jocko's podcast, but, you know, when you show up, they, they shave your head completely bald. And, uh, when I had my head shaved by the instructors, all of a sudden they were calling each other over to take a look at my skull. They said, it's clearly a city kid.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  I had three concussions, but, uh, yeah, no. But, uh, between growing up in Brooklyn and, um, going to Catholic school, uh, the SEAL instructors were, it's absolutely nothing to do with it, but yeah.

• 7:58Jocko Willink?

  What, what'd your parents do?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Well, uh, my dad was a World War II veteran and, uh,

• 8:03Jocko Willink?

  What'd he, what'd he do in World War II?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  He was, he was, uh, military police. So my father was, uh, in Patton's 3rd Army, which till the day he died was the proudest thing he ever did in his life. And, um, uh, but, you know, war was different back then. That my father was there, but I mean, everybody was there. My uncles were there, uh, but flight surgeons and, and they went to war together. Uh, and, um, he spent about, uh, he actually joined the army in 1940 before the war started. And, um, you know, came home from, uh, Europe after being deployed for four years. Uh, and, uh, in, uh, end of July and, uh, married my mother a week and a half later.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  They'd been engaged, uh, and on the 15th of August, he was shipping out to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. Uh, and, you know, so fortunately he, he didn't have to go and do that. Well, my father then joined the reserves after that, and he spent thirty years in the United States military. And my brother Ben spent twenty-six years in the Navy as a supply corps officer. He retired. And my other brother, Bob, was an enlisted guy for six years as well. And when I took my uniform off in July of two thousand and ten, it was the first time in seventy years that an immediate member of my family was not wearing the cloth of the nation.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  So, and I can say, we haven't won them all, but the Maguires were integral in winning the Cold War. There's absolutely no doubt about that, so.

• 9:41Jocko Willink?

  So, you're going up to high school. Did you play any other sports besides surfing?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  No, I swam. Yeah, no, I was a swimmer, and it's one of those things, not so much in high school, but I would say, if it wasn't for swimming, I never would have gotten a bachelor's degree. So, you know, the season would go in the fall until the winter, and I would, you know, be on the dean's list while I was swimming and disciplined, where you know about discipline, you teach the whole time. But once the swimming season took a lapse, so did I. And I just kind of got by in the spring semester. But, no, I spent, I swam for, you know, my college. I was the captain of the college team, and I also swam for the New York Athletic Club.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  And to be honest with you, I thought, like most New Yorkers, that I was going to just live and die in New York City. So, being a member of the New York Athletic Club, we were all on scholarship, and the New York Athletic Club, they just took the top swimmers from all of the colleges and put us together after the college season, and back then it was AAU. And we'd have a swimming practice at the New York Athletic Club. We'd have to go in coat and tie to practice, but it was right next to Central Park South. But we had a stipend, a credit card for X amount of dollars a month. So, after swimming practice, we went down to the bar.

• 11:07Jocko Willink?

  To refuel.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Oh, it is. So, so the court, over the course of a couple of years for the New York Cavalry Club and graduating from college and there were a couple of businessmen that I knew there, and they said, Joe, we want to take you to dinner. Okay. So, we're at dinner in one of the steak houses in Manhattan, and, you know, my friend made the pitch, he said, we want you to come into the advertising firm. Well, you know, guys, I'm not even a business major. He said, what is it that you want me to do? Joe, all we want you to do is entertain the clients, and we'll teach you the business. I could do that, man. So, you know, I'm getting ready to be a madman, and I'm going into Madison Avenue. My brother is-

• 11:50Jocko Willink?

  What year is this?

• 11:51Speaker 02

  This is 1974.

• 11:53Jocko Willink?

  So, so, when, when you were growing up, I mean, Vietnam is going on-

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Both brother, my brothers served Vietnam, yeah, both my, both my brothers. And, obviously, you know, I had to make that decision, either graduate from college or, you know, go into Vietnam as an enlisted guy, but my father being a Colonel and my other just said, look, you're not the just, I mean, you know, you were enlisted man yourself, that's the hardest part, but in Vietnam, it's the NCOs that are the military, and it's the NCOs that do the fighting and dying. But, my father encouraged me to finish college, and then go, if you, if you really want to go into the service, you know, then go in with your college degree. So, I graduated in 1974, but the war was, was over by then.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  And, so, my brother, from my father, heard that I was going to go into Madison Avenue. So, he was stationed here in San Diego on the USS Ranger, and flew to New York City, and arranged for an officer candidate school test for me. And, I did not participate in this decision. So, I was sitting at the kitchen table, and my father goes, Ben, what do you want to tell your brother? You're going to take the test for officer candidate school tomorrow.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  He's five years old. My father's looking at me. Okay, you know, so, I mean, so I went down there. Now, keep in mind, I'm swimming. I got hair down to my shoulders back then. It's all bleached blonde from the chlorine. And so I go down and I take the test, which are like the SATs. And I'm very deliberate, actually, slow. There were a lot of big words that I had to sound out in the test, you know. And so you turn the, you turn the paper in, and they graded the paper and debriefed the individual based on, and I was one of the very last ones to finish. And it was a crummy office there in Manhattan. It was downtown Manhattan, right by City Hall. And all they had was little, little crummy office dividers

• 13:53Speaker 02

  that, you know, it's like eighteen inches below, and it only goes up to about four and a half feet. And they got folding chairs on the other side, and you could hear everything on the other side. So they're bringing them in, and the guy sits down, he says, well, you know, Mr. Smith, you could take the test again next year. Oh gee, Mr. Brown, you could take the test again. So nobody was passed on the test. So I'm there, I say to my brother, I, I don't think I passed. He said, well, we'll see. So I go in and I sit down, and the recruiters go, so Joe, you want to join the Navy? No, man, I just took the test. My brother smacks me in the head. He goes, you're joining the Navy? Okay. And the recruiters

• 14:37Speaker 02

  are looking at me like, what do you want to do? Now, my brother was a supply corps officer. He wants to be a supply corps officer. So, yeah, that's what I wanted to do. So they look at the score, and they look at my brother. This is my brother's proudest moment. Your little brother didn't score high enough. He can't be a supply corps officer. So, and I said, well, what do you want to do? I mean, this, this has only been about fifteen hours. So I got the wheels turning, and now... Back then, we were doing the Apollo recoveries. And the astronauts would land in the water, and sometimes the recovery carrier wasn't there.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  So they had these B-roll human interest stories. So recently, there was a human interest story about the recovery, and there were two SEALs, who were on the Olympic team. Now, I was not on the Olympic team, not of that caliber, but because they were, I knew of them. And one was in SEAL Team 1, and one was in UDT 13. And they did a human interest story on the SEALs. Now, keep in mind, Jaco, this is 1974. We have less than 800 people in the community. Nobody knows what it is. And they said, "So what do you want to do? You know what I want to do? I want to be in UDT and SEAL Team." Give them a hard one, right?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  So the two of them, I mean, they're just looking like, now, these guys were aviators in surface warfare, guys. So they just turned to my brother, they said, "Well, we'll be back." So, now, they went back for about 10 minutes. It was probably like, you know, buying a car, where, "I gotta go talk to my manager." They come back 10 minutes later, they talk to my brother, and meanwhile, my brother hasn't sat down, he's still standing over me. And I'm sitting in the chair, because I was told to sit. And they talked to my brothers first, and they turned to me, they say, "Well, sorry, Joe, but there's no commissioned officers in UDT or SEAL Team." And I proceeded to tell them, "That's BS." But I didn't say BS, right? And of course, my brother smacks me in the head again, and he goes, "Joe, they wouldn't lie to you."

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Now, here, I'm a civilian, and I turn to my brother, I go, "They're recruiters. That's what they do." And they were lying. They were lying to me, as you know. I wound up going to surface warfare, to the USS Coronado, and I spent time on that to become a surface warfare officer before I got to Coronado, California, to become a SEAL. And I will tell you this, that the demanding life onboard ship... By the time I got to Bud's training, I thought that was good duty. And when guys were quitting, I was putting my arm around them to give them the counseling session. It's just like, you don't know what it's like out there. Look, we got a mini mart down the street. Life is good.

• 17:30Jocko Willink?

  Did you have to go to OCS? Did you go to OCS?

• 17:32Speaker 02

  I did.

• 17:32Jocko Willink?

  Is that what you did?

• 17:32Speaker 02

  I did, yeah.

• 17:33Jocko Willink?

  And how was the, how was that shock and awe experience?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Uh, well, you know, you realize like in the first couple of days that you've been duped. It's five o'clock in the morning and they're waking you up and you gotta be outside in five minutes and your PT gear PTing. Come on, you know? So, no, that was a great experience, actually. And it was the beginning, it was a tremendous maturation start for me to actually join the military, go to OCS, have drill instructors teaching you. They had expectations, they had standards. And then also, you know, you were measured and you had to live up to something. And really, it was transformational for me.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  And I wound up doing pretty well in OCS and did well onboard the ship. And, you know, when I got, by the time I got to Bud's class 93, we had the usual bit. You know, we started off with 147 guys in the class and finished with 17. And I was standing there and, you know, be honest with you, Jaco, nobody, but nobody was more surprised than I would to be in the honor man. Because I told Kathy, I was not married.

• 18:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you were the honor man?

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. But I mean, I told Kathy, I mean, we came back from San Clemente, she goes, how you doing? Oh, they're gonna catch up to me this week. I know I'm gonna get canned this week. You know, you just never know until you graduate. And when they announced who the honor man was, I was just kinda like... It must be some mistake, you know, but yeah, so that was a great experience. As you know, BUDS is a defining thing and Hell Week is a defining thing for all of us. But the one thing about that is it all starts there, it all shapes it. And, you know, every one of us, whether you are the Admiral with his folks in Ramadi and Fallujah, or the guys at Ramadi and Fallujah, whether you are the guy with stars in his

• 19:30Speaker 02

  collar, or the guy with chauverines on his collar, we all wear the same warfare insignia. There is no difference between a SEAL officer and a SEAL enlisted man as far as what he had to do to earn that. Now, the career is different over the time, but it's one thing that we all understand it was the crucible, it's a defining thing, and you go through that and, you know, it starts your journey. That doesn't really make you a SEAL. When you get tried and pinned on you, that's your beginning of learning how to really become a SEAL. And it takes, and I'll tell you, till the day I took off my uniform, I learned every single day, and as you know, the saying goes, you've got to earn it every single day.

• 20:11Jocko Willink?

  Was there anything at BUDS that was hard for you? Because if you were a collegiate swimmer, the swims must have been like a break for you.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. Next question.

• 20:22Jocko Willink?

  What about, were you a good runner?

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Oh, no. No, so that's the part that really, really upset me, Jaco, is that BUDS is a running club, it's not a swimming club, you know, but that is what saved me. Because I don't think I ever told you this either, but I wound up with a broken leg in third phase. So a severe stress fracture. And, you know, I was not a bad runner. We were up there at the third phase, we probably had about 20 guys, 24 guys in the class, and I was up in the top five. Whenever finish time runs, or, you know, when you do your run and that's run back to the compound, you run your own. But...

• 21:06Speaker 02

  I was having a lot of trouble and I didn't know what it was. By a lot of trouble, I'm ten minutes behind the class. But I'm running. And you know, you know, you know, the instructors watch this stuff. So, back then, we did not have the facilities and the help that our young candidates have. And we had an ESIX corpsman. And he told me, he said, I want you to come in. I had to leave the class. Now, we're well into third phase. We hadn't gone to the island yet. But he said, I want you to go across the street and get an x-ray. Yes, instructor. That's always the right answer.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  So, I come hobbling out of the third phase office. And the senior enlisted guy, Senior Chief Johnny Johnson, outside smoking a cigarette like any good SEAL back then. And all of a sudden, he says, you know, Mr. McGuire, stop! You know, and when instructor tells you to stop, you stop. He said, get over here! So, I go over to him. He says, where are you going? I said, well, Senior Chief, I'm going across the street for an x-ray. No, you're not. Of course, I'm not Senior Chief. He goes, what's up? I said, well, you know, I got a little trouble. He says, I tell you what, Mr. Mac, you got a broken leg. He said, there's no doubt in my mind, you got a broken leg. So, here's the deal. You go back in there, you put your medical record in there. I'm not getting any guarantees.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  But if you're willing to gut it out, we'll see what we can do. Yes, Senior Chief. And so, went back in there. And I actually, you know, was able to, I was always behind in the runs. But I was able to hop on the obstacle course and still finish in the top five in that because that's all technique. But we used to run, as you know, Jaco, from the compound down to the center beach in Coronado, which is probably a little over a mile. Something like that, yeah. And then, you know, and then in the water. So, I would be the last one in the water by light years, but I would be the first one out of the water. So, at least the instructors knew that, hey, I'm putting out. But the other thing, I think that they were thoroughly entertained, that they really didn't want, didn't want me out of the class.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  But, you know, the folks who are out there, instructors are the ones that really, they are the gatekeepers for who's going to wind up going to a SEAL team. And they are instructors for just a limited period of time, and then they go back to the SEAL team, and the young men that they're training are going to become their teammates. So, for the most part, they're sizing them up not only to meet the standards, but also to kind of say, is this somebody that I want to be a teammate with? And if I get into trouble, and I'm a left, I got one of these guys on my left and my right. And I think that even if I was having a difficult time there, I was most fortunate to have good instructors. And back then, I mean, everybody was Vietnam veteran.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Everybody, everybody had a Silver Star. And I was blessed to have a Medal of Honor recipient as one of my instructors, Mike Thornton. And that helped shape me as well, in more ways than one. But these guys had known the crucible of combat, and they were looking at students, and nobody really cared if nobody graduated back then. But they were looking at, you know, can we trust this guy in combat? And I think that was the standard. But I have to say, in retrospect, it wasn't me. It was the instructors that really showed me tremendous kindness. But, you know, just, it was not easy being able to do the stuff that we needed to do at the end of training.

• 24:46Jocko Willink?

  There was a class, must have been just before, wasn't it, wasn't it class 85 or 86 where literally no one made it?

• 24:52Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 24:53Jocko Willink?

  What class, do you know what class number that was?

• 24:55Speaker 02

  I don't, but I think you're close. But the other one was Admiral Eric Olson's class, wound up with four people in Hell Week. And the instructors... Had to help them carry the IBS because they couldn't, four guys couldn't carry an IBS and instructors made up their mind, "We're never gonna let..."

• 25:13Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna keep at least six.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  There's gotta be at least six guys here to get through hell week. But yeah, Eric had four guys when he was his graduation picture and one of the, uh, one of the, uh, students is a foreign student in his class, so three Americans and one foreign guy, uh, but it was a different, different, different time back then. But you know, the instructors out of the back of their belt, uh, their, um, um, ball cap, we made them quit, you know? So, uh, there were standards, uh, but they were pretty much were on their own as far as what they wanted to do. But I'll, I'll be honest with you, these are instructors that I had tremendous respect for and, uh, respect for their combat experience and they were, they were great instructors

• 25:56Speaker 02

  because they were intense and if you didn't have the standard, uh, even if you were making the standard and it was tough to see a classmate go, but in retrospect, you know, they were right. Uh, this guy would not have fit in to us, but yeah. And then, um, so graduating and then off to jump school, which was always a...

• 26:15Jocko Willink?

  Airborne.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it, you know? One week cost crammed into three.

• 26:18Jocko Willink?

  So you hit airborne school. I'm sure it was the, uh, the, the challenge to keep your, I'm sure there's a lot of challenges at airborne school for you. I can imagine the runs were not as challenging as trying to control your mouth talking to the army folks.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  No. Nah, I, I got called into the colonel a couple of times. So actually, so, uh, for, for those of you out there have been through Fort Benning, you understand this, um, uh, you know, the, the, the, the army's a little bit different than, uh, the, the SEAL teams, uh, to some degree. And, um, uh, they'd have an evolution and then what they would do is they would have the, the class line up and you'd go online and you'd pick up trash. And these guys are walking, picking up trash and the black hats said, "Mr. McGuire, what are you doing? You're supposed to be picking up trash." "I'm not picking up trash."

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Pick up, I'm gonna pick up trash, off to see the Colonel. Okay, so I'm at the Colonel, you remember, standing there, tension, puts me at parade rest, "What's up?" I said, "Well, Colonel, I'm a commissioned officer in the United States Navy, uh, did you ever see Bridge on the River Kwai?"

• 27:37Speaker 02

  "Yeah, what's that got to do with it?" I said, "Do you remember when the Colonel wound up in the cooler because they were making his officers work because it was a violation of the Geneva Convention?"

• 27:47Speaker 02

  And he's looking at me, I said, "So to have your commissioned officers picking up trash, you realize that you've got a violation of the Geneva Convention?" So, he threw me out of his office, but me and the other SEAL officers with me did not have to pick up trash.

• 28:02Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's insane.

• 28:06Jocko Willink?

  Alright, so you get done with airborne school, and then it's off to what, UDT 21?

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Off to UDT 21, so it was underwater demolition team 21, and, um, but, uh, just like in SEAL training, uh, all of the guys there, for the month, now, there were guys there from the Korean War, who just stayed UDT, didn't go to Vietnam, they went to Vietnam as UDT, but they were former SEAL Team 2 guys, so we had SEAL Team 2 and UDT 21, and they went back and forth. But, uh, so, you wind up getting five or six jumps at basic airborne, and, um, then we had a jump scheduled shortly after, uh, I, I got, uh, back to the team from, from Fort Benning, and we went up to Fort Lee to, um, uh, to, to, because, in, in the teams

• 28:52Speaker 02

  back then, you get your 10th jump, and you had to buy a keg of beer. So they got the Lieutenant JJ, the Nugget there, who's, "So they're gonna get me four jumps today." And, uh, so, it was an old UH-1, Vietnam, single-engine, and, uh, they, they take the doors, put them all the way back, and you're sitting there, this is a static line jump, and they take your static line and they hook you into a cable, uh, just below the transmission on, on the helicopter, and you sit with your legs outside the helicopter, and there's just a little, um, uh, tape that goes across you.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  And you get on board at first and the aircraft is not doing any turns up. So then the aircraft commander starts doing the turn up and the helicopter starts racking back and forth as the, you know, and all of a sudden I look around now, these are all senior enlisted guys. And they one by one take their teeth out of their mouth and put it in their pocket for the jump. I was the only one in the stick of eight that actually had teeth in his mouth when we went out there. And I'm thinking to myself, what did I get into? Is this in the UDT or are they hockey players? So, well, make a long story short, it was a long day, but I bought a cake of beer at the end of that day.

• 30:09Jocko Willink?

  And what was the, what was the, what did you do at UDT 21? Did you go, what were you doing for deployments? Were there shipboard deployments?

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were shipboard deployments. I made quite a few deployments to the Caribbean. You know, back then we had a much more robust fleet. So we actually made Caribbean deployments, European deployments, Northern European deployments. So I made several Caribbean deployments and South American deployments, but in addition to that, we also had time to be able to go to schools. And, you know, just to some of our CIA schools and these other things in regard to, you know, how to do targeting and, and really, it was all explosives. It was underwater demolition and CIA were really good at their combat demolition, kitchen demolition, these other things.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  But I also then, at that point in time, Jaco, with some courses, decided to take some intelligence courses. And just kind of, well, I think that intel and naval special warfare kind of go hand to glove. So I want to learn as much as I can about the intelligence community while I'm there. But I had an opportunity to, you know, be a department head there as well and then, you know, be in charge of a UDT platoon, which back then was, you know, 25 men. So it was good. And of course, my chief and my LPO, you know, both of those guys who've got Silver Stars and, you know, they, school was in session. You know, you're in charge as the officer, there is absolutely no doubt about it, but

• 31:41Speaker 02

  you better know what you don't know and be willing to listen to those who do. And these guys. Very lovingly, I mean necessarily, took me under their wing and adopted me. And I'll be honest with you, even back then, Rudy Bosch, who was the command master chief at SEAL Team Two, he became the command master chief in 1962 and left in 1987. You know, talk about basketball ball hogs, but I mean, you know, Rudy. But even if I was in UDT, my LPO and my chiefs who were SEAL Team Two guys, that's how I met Rudy, and Rudy and his wife then mentored Kathy and me until, you know, we

• 32:23Speaker 02

  were close friends until he, you know, started suffering from Alzheimer's disease. But it doesn't hurt to be a young officer who wasn't in Vietnam, you know, to have these folks here who take you under their wing and teach you. And the best thing, it was not necessarily the operational things, but I think the thing that I owe them most for, Jaco, is like at 2 o'clock in the morning when they put their arm around me saying, "It's time to go home, sir. Time to go back. Thank you." That's the New York kick, didn't it?

• 32:56Jocko Willink?

  New York comes out around 2 o'clock in the morning after X number of beers. So you did met, so you were married to Kathy before you went to BUDS?

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Well, I tell you what, you know, people ask, "Well, you know, where did you honeymoon?"

• 33:12Jocko Willink?

  Coronado, California?

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Coronado, California. No, so the, it's kind of interesting that, you know, I was on the ship and we're deployed to the Mediterranean. I held orders to BUDS and I came home, flew in on a Mac flight into Philadelphia, Kathy lived in New Jersey, and I went to see her first. Now, this is a dangerous thing. Clearly, I've been overpaid all my life, and at that point in time, I was making the princely sum of $8,000. But when you transfer a PCS, you're able to take what's called an advance pay.

• 33:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Which is sort of an interest-free loan, except you gotta pay it back. So, I got, I don't know what I got. I probably got $1,000, $1,200 or whatever. So, now, I'm in New York, I'm walking down Fifth Avenue with my honey, and we walk into Tiffany's, and I say, "Let's get engaged."

• 34:16Speaker 02

  So she picks out a ring, I get engaged in Tiffany's, we get married two weeks later. We go on a short honeymoon to St. Croix, come back, pack up the car and drive out to SEAL training. And it's kind of a shock when you go off to work one day and you come back after the instructors have shaved your head.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  What happened to my boy?

• 34:41Speaker 02

  But I will tell you this, yeah, I mean, it was, it was a different thing back then.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  People didn't know about SEAL training, but it was helpful to me to be married during that timeframe. But as I said, later on, years on, when we went through so much stuff, that she'd been there from day one and she understood the community, she understood how the community was built. And people even today rely heavily on her for that. But yeah, it's not something I would recommend for everybody to be honeymooning as you're going through SEAL training. But we did, God bless her. Well, the thing about it is that neither of us had any idea we're getting into, you know?

• 35:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you must have known very little about SEAL training back then.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:32Jocko Willink?

  I mean, even I, when I went through, I went through in 1991.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:36Jocko Willink?

  And I had seen one, you know, the Be Someone Special video. That's it. There were no internet, there was no books, talking about it. Now, I mean, there's so much information out there, you can watch all of BUDs and guys know what the schedule's gonna be and all that.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:49Jocko Willink?

  Back then it was just blind, they just ripped the blindfold off you and shaved your head, that's it.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. So fast forward 20 years, and now I'm the commander, commanding officer of the Naval Special Warfare Center of BUDs. So Kathy comes to meet me for lunch, we're gonna go out to Coronado and have some lunch. And I'm on the telephone, you know, she comes to the office and the secretary says, you know, he'll be with you in a few minutes. So she's standing on the balcony overlooking the grinder as the instructors are motivating, this is how we speak, a first phase class, right? And so come out, off we go, go to lunch. Sitting there at lunch, now we've been married 20 years, went through training with me, and she said, I need to ask you a question.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, what sweetheart? Did you have to do that when you went through training? No. I said, "Sweetie, even then, they knew 20 years later I was gonna be the commanding officer of this place." And they, "Of course I did that." I'm so sorry. Because I'd come home, and she'd go, "Let's go to dinner." "Okay."

• 36:58Jocko Willink?

  So how long did you do at UDT 21?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Uh, I did, I did, I guess about, uh, two and a half years, maybe three years. And then, uh, back then, uh, we were, for the longest period of time, just, we, we, we got decimated after Vietnam. I mean, not just UDT, but the whole community. So we only-

• 37:16Jocko Willink?

  Well, the whole Navy. Isn't it safe to say the whole Navy and the whole military after Vietnam?

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true. But then, the, the target was Russia. And we were gonna handle Russia with the ballista, with the, uh, nuclear triad.

• 37:28Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Right? And so if you're not part of the nuclear triad, although, I was in a nuclear weapons program at UDT. I mean, we had to deliver the B-54s out of them.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  And, um, so, uh, uh, the, we had 306s then, that's it. And the three of them got together and decided that we needed to send some junior officers out into the fleet as flag lieutenants. And, so, uh, now this is always a bad sign, when I'm, I'm deployed down to the Caribbean, and the XO, Tom Richards, uh, you'll wind up, Tom Richards comes down to visit, and he thinks, "This is odd, that the XO is kinda..." So, we, he spent the day with us, doesn't say anything, and we're, we're flying back up to Norfolk on a C-9, we've got the whole plane to ourselves, and I'm sitting against the window, and the XO comes and sits next to me.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  I mean, I mean, like, I'm a popular guy, I know that, but, you know? And I figure, I knew something was up. He goes, "Hey Joe, um, have you ever thought about being a flag lieutenant?" "No, sir."

• 38:32Speaker 02

  No, you seriously think about that? No, sir. You know? And I tried to be persuasive to him. I said, "Look, I was in the fleet for a couple of years. I'm in UDT right now. I need to get, you know, after this, I gotta go to a SEAL team." He says, "Well, the Commodore wants to see you tomorrow." Right? This was Stormy Norman Olson, who, God bless him, we just had a memorial service for Norman. And really, he was one of the guys that shaped this. He said, "You're gonna be a flag lieutenant. It's as simple as that." Yes, Commodore. It's true. So I wound up going to Japan as a flag lieutenant and wound up working for the first admiral that made, a helicopter pilot that made admiral. And he made all of the Apollo recoveries. And every day was a space mission for me with this guy here.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  It had to be exacting it had to be, you know? And, you know, we're driving along one day and he goes, "I'm gonna make you the best flag lieutenant in Seventh Fleet, even if it kills you." And I turned to him, I goes, "Sir, you're well on your way." But I will tell you this, you learn, you learn, as you know. Yeah. You learn. And, but the interesting thing is now, I endeared myself to all of the admirals out there. And we had the Fleet Readiness Board up in Yakushka, hosted by the Seventh Fleet Commander. So there's about thirteen, fourteen admirals there. And at breakfast, you know, they sit there together and all, you know, all of us bag carriers, we go off to the side.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  And as I'm walking by with my tray, the Fleet Commander goes, "Hey, Joe, come join us." It would be an honor. What's wrong with this picture? Right? So they went around the table and they're telling me that, and this was really true at the time, you can't go back to SEAL Team right now. You're a surface warfare officer, you've got tremendous potential. If you go back into the SEAL Teams, you will never, ever, ever get promoted. This was in 1981. And true, at that time, most of the commanding officers of SEAL teams were lieutenant commanders passed over for commander. We only had a handful of captains and there was no real

• 40:43Speaker 02

  career path, you know, for that. But I told them, I said, "Well, look, I'm going." And the only advice they gave me then, "Well, go to PG school." Okay, that was a good trade-off. But that was true at that time. And, you know, backing up a little bit about my father being a colonel in the reserves, he said the same thing back then. That, you know, you'll have a couple of good years, but, you know, you'll never be promoted past lieutenant commander. It's as simple as that. And, you know, I went to his grave one time and put my three-star shoulder boards on his tombstone.

• 41:21Jocko Willink?

  So that's, how long are you doing that, how long are you doing that job as the aide? The flag aide?

• 41:29Speaker 02

  A hundred years.

• 41:30Jocko Willink?

  I know the feeling.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  No, that was 25 months, but I will tell you, Jocko, one of the best things about that, I mean this sincerely, is that I was the aide for CTF 76 and a young, a first lieutenant named Joe Dunford was the aide for CTF 79. And Joe and I spent 25 months together in the Pacific, traveling everywhere together. And then after we both finished that tour, you know, during the course of our careers, we stayed close. And we'd see each other in deployment. He's a battalion commander. He wound up, you know, being the speechwriter for the commandant and a lot of other jobs that it well-deserved. But

• 42:17Speaker 02

  it was actually Joe Dunford and Jim Mattis that asked me to come back into government. And I hate them both for that. No, but, no, but the thing about it is with both those of two men that I hold in the very highest esteem. And I also figured, well, you know, General Mattis, Secretary Mattis came back into government and Joe's been there for 39 years. And, you know, I just said to them, "Well..." If you guys are taking one for the team, I'll give it a go. We'll see how it goes. But I just could not say no to those two men.

• 42:50Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  But just what an honor. And then to actually get into the administration and be the Director of National Intelligence, sitting at the National Security Council meeting with Joe Dunford to my right. It's a small world and you just don't know. But yeah.

• 43:07Jocko Willink?

  But you didn't take their advice and you did go back to SEAL Team? That was your next tour?

• 43:11Speaker 02

  I did, I did. As a matter of fact. And so the journey continues. So I went into SEAL Team Two. And at that time, Commander Rick Woolard was the commanding officer of SEAL Team Two. And rightfully so, he wanted to develop an undersea capability. So we wound up, now, to be honest with you, back then, we were not very good. We had good swimmers, we had good athletes, we had rotten equipment. We didn't have tactics, techniques and procedures. We really didn't know what we didn't know. And rec through our senior officers and the Chief of Naval Operations,

• 43:53Speaker 02

  we were able to establish a personal exchange program, PEP pilot, and bring over a French commando from Commander Hubert. And in my estimation, Commander Hubert are the best combat divers in the world. Military combat divers. And Francois was charged with establishing a combat swimmer program that to this day was the most arduous program that I'd ever been through. And extremely high attrition rate. But not everybody could do it, but not everybody could swim oxygen either. But in addition to that program, then Rick also, you know, looking back on this,

• 44:34Speaker 02

  it seems hard to believe, get permission to buy foreign sales things. So we were able to, the first was to get the Dregger, it's German. And then we, of course, the Dregger life jackets, French. And there was a prohibition against that because we'd buy American, but it was the best technical, undersea combat swimmer stuff that we had. And we did extremely hard work up and I was just most fortunate that, you know, I had a department head tour there and then platoon commander. And in October of 1982, we just got fast ropes. So, hard to believe.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  And fast ropes were classified insertion means. And we got it from the British SAS, used. Spend a night, not a fortune. So, we're up at AP Hill and Rudy Bosch brings the rope up. We got a helicopter and we're doing, first we do it, Rudy is the rappel master. He's the rope master. Talks to us about this and, now I used to be on the ship, you know, as a deck officer. So, I know lines and stuff. So, I said, "Hey Rudy, what's the tensile strength on this? How many can hold?" "Don't worry about it, sir. I'll hold your whole platoon. Forget it." You know? That was Rudy, right?

• 45:57Speaker 02

  So, now Rudy, at this point, he's probably knocking at the door to 60. So, we did a couple of runs and he's the first one out. And then after about four or five runs, I just say, "Hey, Master Chief, this isn't too damn hard. You know, we can figure out how to curl a rope and throw it out when the helicopter flares." Alright? So, he sits this one out. And so, my chief, Bud Dennehy, is gonna do it. I'm following Bud and I've got, you know, I've got four or five knuckleheads, you know, behind me. And we go out and for some reason or another, you know, Bud, the operative word is fast rope.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  So, he's just kinda going slow and then all of a sudden, I don't know what was going on. I thought the helicopter was crashing and I just knew that I was in free fall. And, you know, getting back into Fort Benning, I kinda criticized a little bit there, but the thing that saved me is just going to a good PLF. I put my legs together, I put my arms in and for one brief second, I avoided the chief below me and I hit and for one nanosecond, I go, "I'm good." Then I had five big frogmen land on top of me. So I broke my back and that broke my pelvis. Uh, so we're all lying there, uh, as a bunch of, um, uh, rag dogs and it's dead silent. I still don't know what happened.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  So, well, obviously with the rope broke, uh, the helicopter went up because of, uh, no longer had that weight and then he just flared it and went off. But all I could hear then was, uh, you know, my teammates, my platoon, everybody just kinda quietly moaning and, and I just said to the guy, "Don't anybody move." Right? And then he goes, "Mr. McGuire, we can't." You know? And then all of a sudden I realized, "I can't move my legs." Uh, and, uh, so typical back then, our ambulance was a nine passenger van and the only thing we had, uh, the only thing we had on, on the LZ was one bodyboard. You know? So, you know, we had to have ambulances come in.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  So I got rigor taped to the bodyboard, uh, you know, with your head down and just to, so that your spine's not moving. But every time they moved you, it was like with the pelvis, it was like cracking your knuckles, you know, you could hear, you know? Uh, and, um, then the helicopter goes back and it's land. So the Colonel from AP Hill comes and typical back then, we never told him we were doing air ops, which he did not think was a good idea. Uh, but he directed, uh, the helicopter pilot to take us to Mary Washington Hospital, which is close up there, not, not the closest, the closest, uh, trauma hospital. And, uh, so there were five of us loaded into the, uh, the helicopter and, um, you know, the, I'm a lieutenant, these guys are lieutenants and I, I said to the pilot command,

• 48:50Speaker 02

  you know, meanwhile, I'm strapped to the bodyboard and I said, "Take us home." I said, "Take us to Portsmouth." I said, "We're gonna be in the hospital for a long time." I said, "I don't, my wife, have my wife in a motel." I said, "You know, just gonna take a little bit more, but ta- take us to Portsmouth Naval Hospital." So we flew there and, you know, we got taken in and taken off and, um, you know, they, they cut your uniform off and do all sorts of stuff. But, uh, as we're waiting for x-rays, we were all in this little waiting room together. The other guys in wheelchairs, uh, and, you know, there were two of us with broken backs and, uh, one, one guy, Kevin Blake, uh, Kevin wound up breaking both of his legs.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  But when he came down, he then hit, but his face went into his knees.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  And but, you know, we still didn't know what was what. So we had one corpsman from the hospital helping us out. And Kevin says, man, I my nose is so stuffy. He says, hey, doc, do you have a tissue? Can I have a tissue? So the corpsman gets him a tissue and Kevin blows his nose. But he broke all of his sinuses in his face and his whole face came away from, you know, from from the skull. And we're all laughing like. And and the corpsman just running out. It was like it was like a Jim Carrey movie there. His face is out here. We got broken bones and broken backs. We're all laughing.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  You know, always look for the bright side of life.

• 50:26Jocko Willink?

  So would everyone eventually was able to heal up? No, no permanent injuries?

• 50:31Speaker 02

  No, no, a couple of those guys left. But it was a different time back then. I'm sorry to say that I wound up being admitted into an officer room with some retired Navy captain. But the troops wound up being on a ward. And there were probably 20 patients on the ward to include some sailor who had been in a motorcycle accident and he's on a rotisserie. But it's pretty much a death watch. So George Ann McRaven and Kathy, the two of them were the very best of friends. And as you know, Bill and I are best of friends.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  And they come to visit me and now Kathy's, of course, been with me the whole time and George Ann. I said, hey, do me a favor. I can't get out of bed. Would you go down and check on the guys and see how they're doing? So they went down and Kevin Blake is in traction with two hair dryers on his on his cast and.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Kathy said, Kevin, what are you doing? The doctor said I could get out of here as soon as my castra. But neither of them had been washed. So they'd been, we'd been in the field for eight to 10 days. They had camouflage on them, your hair. So, I mean, now, these are two sailors, mothers, sons, that'd been in the hospital for a couple of days, and they've still got matted hair. So Kathy and George M. Craven, you know, got, shampooed the guys, washed their camouflage off them, and, you know, just do what you need to do for a fellow teammate.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  And, you know, I'm glad to say, you know, I've been in the hospital since then, unfortunately. And Navy medicine is really superlative now. But it was, again, once again, after Vietnam, where the entire military was suffering. But I deployed, that was in Halloween of 82, and I deployed to Europe in March of 83, five months later, and jumped into McRahan, Scotland, and then also conducted a major exercise, a flintlock exercise, with my swim partner, Chuck Williams, and we, from a U-boat, a German U-209, that we, you know, we, it was a, so we had to lock in and lock out through

• 53:02Speaker 02

  the German torpedo tube, which was an excellent adventure. It's not for everybody. But when we left the submarine, we were in the water for 13 hours in the Baltic. So this is in, you know, late March or early April of 83. The surface temperature was 39 degrees, but obviously we're down about 10 feet. And I was just really glad that, you know, I had an Olympian towing me. But, yeah, we were able to do everything that, you know, we were taught to do, and the two American swim pairs successfully completed the mission. And the Germans, who, the comp swimmers were very, very good swimmers, neither of their swim pair were able to do it.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  One swim pair wound up not finding the harbor and wound up in the hospital with hypothermia, and the other swim pair bailed. And it was... Really kind of a defining thing for the SEAL community, uh, to be able to just say, you know, we did that, but, uh, the Germans couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak German. To be able to do lockout from a German torpedo to, yeah, something got lost in translation a couple of times.

• 54:12Jocko Willink?

  And you were diving draggers?

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:15Jocko Willink?

  Man, and so that's like eight, yeah, so the wetsuits back then were junk.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:20Jocko Willink?

  So I grew up surfing in Maine and, and I had saved.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  That explains a lot.

• 54:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know. I had saved all my money and, and bought one of these modern wetsuits at the time. It was an O'Neill Source was what it was called. And it had an, it had an embedded hood or, or a hood that was part of the rest of it. It had a dry suit zipper, even though it was a wetsuit, it had a dry suit zipper just to keep as much water in there as you can. And I showed up to SEAL Team One with this wetsuit, which was like the most modern technology. And we were doing swimmer lockouts and I remember just that I was in heaven with this wetsuit. Cause the wetsuits back in the early eighties, which you were wearing, just junk.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and even when we went to Buzz initially, you didn't get a wetsuit, you know?

• 55:04Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys get no wetsuits during Buzz?

• 55:06Speaker 02

  You did eventually after, uh, as, as, you know, Jaco will tell you folks, the, one of the big defining things there in SEAL training is the cold. And, um, you know, you, you, if you show up to Southern California to see palm trees, don't be deceived. That water is cold. Uh, yeah. And, um, you know, it was probably several weeks into training. Uh, before they, and of course it was just pick something off the shelf, whether it fits or not.

• 55:31Jocko Willink?

  Well, we got wetsuits, but the wets, again, I knew from surfing in Maine and I was kind of, uh, on the forefront of wetsuit technology. And then I show up at Buzz and they're issuing these wetsuits, which they don't fit you. It was an old school beaver tail with a zipper up the front. I mean, they barely helped. They barely, I mean, they provided some, some bit of warmth, but barely.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  What's the swimmer lockout?

• 55:56Jocko Willink?

  So you're in a submarine. And then underwater, you get out of the submarine and you go and it's a it's a very common was like on the U-boat, but for the American subs, they have an escape chamber, which is a little ball. It's a little, it's a little sphere that you're sitting in and it's probably what six, eight foot diameter inside that ball smaller.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  On the ballistic missile submarines it is, but on the attack boats, it's probably about four feet across.

• 56:21Jocko Willink?

  It's tiny and you're in there and so you get in there from inside the sub and then that thing fills up with water and as it fills up with water, the pressure, the pressure equalizes with what's outside and you end up with just a little bit of air, a couple inches and then then it equalizes and then you can, the door opens up and you you swim out of the submarine.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  So I I I deployed on 12 submarines. So but back then, once you get, you know, no good deeds goes unpunished, you know that. But so that's how I wound up doing the German U-boat and it was different now. The U-boats up in the Baltic, they're electric. So it's shallow up there as well. Our submarines are deep, deep draft, but they're silent, just like trying to listen to a battery. And so it was a completely different experience in that German 209 have got eight torpedo tubes up in the bow. And what they did is

• 57:24Speaker 02

  in port, they took a torpedo out of the port side and the starboard side. So there's no torpedo. Now, keep in mind, folks, that this is only 21 inches wide and I guess about maybe 21 feet in length. So we had to link up with the German U-boat in the middle of the Baltic. So now this was, you know, planned exercise. So we fly out of Macrahenny, Scotland in a air force penetrating aircraft, low level, over Europe and then over the Baltic. By low level, I'm talking about 100 feet or so. And we get ready to go. You've got your parachute on. You've got your limpets. You've

• 58:07Speaker 02

  got your weapons. And the door opens. You're still at 100 feet. And they tell you to get ready. You stand up. And then the aircraft comes up. Just think like a bell curve. It gets to about 900 feet or so. And everybody just jumps out. So the last man's out. The aircraft dives back down. Right? So you know, you wind up in the water. Ditch the parachute. You link up. And we all get together. And then I start taking one of my weights and banging it against the oxygen bottle.

• 58:41Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  So that the submarine can can through, you know, sonar, pick us up. So we're in the water for about an hour and a half to two hours. And all of a sudden, it's out of nowhere.

• 58:53Jocko Willink?

  Periscope.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Periscope up. It just scares the daylights out of you. So this is the best part about it then, right? So now, we're in the middle of the Baltic. The submarine is there. I've got to go to the side of the submarine and tap on it in a certain signal to let them know that it's us. Who else is it gonna be?

• 59:10Jocko Willink?

  (laughing)

• 59:11Speaker 02

  Who else is out there besides us? Right?

• 59:14Jocko Willink?

  (laughing)

• 59:15Speaker 02

  So, so that when they do that, they the torpedo tubes have already been flooded. They open the shutter doors. And this is not without great risk. So the first swimmer went in, feet first. And that was be my swim partner.

• 59:34Jocko Willink?

  And that was Chuck Williams?

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Chuck Williams.

• 59:37Jocko Willink?

  Who's a beast in the water, for sure. He's at Team Two when I was at Team Two. Just a stud.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Taught him everything he knows. And then I would go in next to Chuck. And we're right next to each other. That I mean, we can kiss each other. Now, keep in mind, we've probably had 300 hours together underwater so far. Now, then the second swim pair comes in, feet first. And that he puts his fins on top of my thighs. Uh, and then the last guy comes in and once he comes in, once he's clear of the shutter doors, you know, he squeezes his buddy who taps me on my thighs. I've got the weight and then I tap the submarine so that they go close the shutter doors. So, all right, we're in now.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  The torpedo tube is designed to let absolutely no light escape. So even if you had a flashlight, you can't see anything inside. And now keep in mind it's 21 inches. We're next to each other and Did you have to take your dragger off to get in there? No. Okay. So I mean, no, so, no, because the thing is, so now it comes to the life or death situation. So, so the reason why we figured we could do this is because an oxygen bubble is smaller than the nitrogen bubble because of what's going to happen next. So, um, we, now we've got to lock into the submarine and come into the, um, torpedo room. Now the torpedo room and the submarine is pressurized to sea level, but we're at 14 meters.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  So, um, it was, so you, you depressurize, then you de-water. So I got a tap signal, we're all in and then he said, you know, whatever it was, get ready to go. So get ready to go means we all had to breathe our, our airbags, our, you know, down to as thin as, uh, paper. Now our, our folks out there, our, our bags were about the size of a football. But that, that's it. But it had to be, you know, really sincerely, uh, paper. And once you had it down, then my, my partner would squeeze me and then the guys would kick me, right? And then it was a, and, and then I would squeeze her, are you ready to go? Are you ready to go? And then I would tap them, we're ready to go, right? And he goes, here we go.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  And then they would pressurize the torpedo tube that would, would take us from 14 meters to the surface in one second. So with the gas expansion, um, you know, that, so it was equivalent, I mean necessarily, I can't, could you, you know? It was equivalent to, you know, having a, a small quarter pound, half pound block of TNT go off in the, in, in the, um, uh, torpedo tube. It picked the four of us up, uh, and just the pressurization just rattles you.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Right, and you can hear the other guys, hmm. So, but it was that, you okay, you okay, you okay? So then, then they have to de-water, and you come out. So, um, you know, Chuck Williams comes out, and then I come out, the other guys come out, and he'll look at me like, "Mr. McGuire, you gotta do something about this," you know? And that's just your... That's it, we're just coming... That's just getting into the boat. You haven't done, you haven't done anything yet. Oh, no. This is showing up. Oh, no. So now we got a, now we got a three-day transit to the target onboard this, you know, German U-boat, which is, if you've seen Das Boot, I mean... All about it. Everybody on the submarine is at a central casting.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  I mean, the captain is thirty-five years of age, he's got the white turtleneck, he's got the beard, he's got the, hey, he's got the jackboots, um, and there's sausages hanging, uh, back and forth. Now, uh, it's a small crew, it's probably only about, uh, maybe thirty, uh, and around the clock, these guys are working. But we were supposed to be trying to sleep, right, right by the, uh, torpedo room, which is also the mess deck. So, we'd get about two hours sleep, and wake us up, because they'd have to set up for a meal, and then, you know, go back to, so we didn't actually sleep, you know, for a couple of days. But then, as we start getting into the target, they take mattresses and blankets and put them all on the deck.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Now, uh, and, you know, we have our wetsuits and everything, which was a mistake, in the torpedo.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  You know, you're putting on a wet, wet, wet suits that, you know, in thirty degrees, but we can hear the, um, uh, ASW craft, um, uh, overhead. So as the submarine's coming in, you hear the ping, ping, ping, and the submarine would just sit on the bottom, and then you hear, whoom, whoom. The propeller going by, once the propeller would by, the submarine would come up and take us a little bit further. Now, the Germans are helping us get dressed, putting our stuff on, and because the mattresses are on the floor and the blankets are on the floor, so the sonar for the surface ships, they're not picking any of that up.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  And then, uh, one by one, they pick us up to slowly, you know, load us in to, so I'm the last guy to go in. And, um, I mean, it's just, so as I'm going in, the captain comes and, uh, you know, to wish me well, and he could say a couple of things, you know, you know, Joe, you know, target bears one three zero at, good luck and good hunting. Then he gives me a plaque. I got a stick in my wetsuit, right? So, we, you know, so we go through the reverse and then we're, you know, we're at, uh, fourteen meters, and then we have to go get pressurized, or no, we're surface, then we have to get pressurized.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  So, that was not, that wasn't as bad because you're getting pressurized as opposed to depressurized, you didn't have the gas expansion on that, but you had to worry about squeezes and some of the other things. And then you come to the surface, and, you know, we're probably about, oh, maybe five miles out, and we weren't supposed to be five miles out. What happened was that, and he couldn't speak to me on that, that, uh, he, uh, viewed the threat from the ASW boats and the picket boats too great to bring the submarine in and get, uh, get, get, without getting compromised. And we're out there, and, you know, now, you're five miles off the coast and you're in the water, and you're looking, and, you know, you've got your little Ben's compass you try to figure out, and, you know, where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where's the target?

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  And I, and I, and I said to Chuck, that's gotta be it, buddy. See that one area that's totally black? That's a giveaway. That's gotta be the target. So, we started going towards that, and sure enough, there were picket boats there. So, we had a planned dive that was supposed to start pretty much at the mouth of the harbor, and we had to start way before that. So, we actually spent a little over three hours submerged in this harbor in Alplinets. And as we're coming out, Chuck, you know, we didn't need to talk anymore. I mean, we could squeeze and anything, and, you know, we did what we needed to do. We put the packages on the ships, and he signals to me on Friday,

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  which was, you know, this guy's Olympian. And I said, "So, okay, let's go over to the side." So, now, we go to the side of the harbor, and he takes his mask off. He goes, "I'm screwed." He said, "I've got this pounding headache. I've got narrow vision. I can't see much of anything. What we did, we screwed up." We brought additional oxygen bottles onboard the submarine, but we didn't bring in additional sodasorb, the scrubber. So, what Chuck had done, working so hard for that much time in the water, is that he over breathed his rig. I mean, we're working hard. And then, the scrubber that takes the nitrogen out of your rebreathing,

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  although he had more oxygen in the bottle, was no longer working. So, he was having a tremendous nitrogen buildup. And he said, "I just can't go on any further."

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Now, we've only got about a, maybe a little quarter mile more to get out of the harbor, but we're not going to... Now, there's pickets up on the seawalls waiting for us. So, we just kinda sit there, and you figure, "All right." So, this is a Northern Europe harbor, and the seawall is probably 12 feet high, maybe six to seven feet wide. And I figured, the only way we're gonna do this is we gotta get over the seawall, get to the ocean side, and see what we take it from there. So, Chuck's a tall guy, and I was able to get on Chuck's shoulders and jump up to the top.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  And then, you know, he handed me, you know, my dragger, his dragger, and then I was able to, you know, pull him up and that the two of us just, you know, lying there, then we rolled over to the other side and they just kind of dropped down with, with all of our toys and just laid there for about 10 minutes to see and, you know, nope. I mean, they had flares going off and other things there. And now, the rendezvous, we had a fishing boat that was from Danish intelligence that was supposed to be at a certain place. And you're looking there and they're not at that certain place, but there is one boat out

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  there that is another couple of miles away. Right? So I go, now, if we didn't make the rendezvous, then you had to go into the E and E net. And these are folks, they fought World War II. So this was, you did that. I mean, you know, I don't want to go into the E and E net. So I said, Chuck, it's not where it's supposed to be, but that's about right. Close enough. But I said, that's gotta be it. So let's go. So we take off surface swimming, you know, on our back. And now he's kicking out with Olympic quality. And now, now my, my hip from my broken pelvis is, is kind of, I'm spent. So all I'm trying to do, because

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  of my swim is getting to trim and not hold him up that much. So we get to this boat and before we get to the boat, we have to go back on back and we have to go underneath the, this, the fishing boat. And underneath the fishing boat, there were chem lights that displayed that told us this is the right boat. Now here it gets fun again. Right? So we go up to the fishing boat and there's a ladder over the side and The guys in the fishing boat, who were Danish, um, you know, we had to give them a certain bona fide, you know, no, I've got a gun, you know, supposed to, if we're compromised, right, I figured, there's two things, one, I'm getting, I don't care if it's Russians, I'm getting on that boat, and two, if they won't let us on, I'm shooting myself.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  That's it, you know, so, now, here you, you're, you're, you're freezing, you're dehydrated, you've been in the water for thirteen hours, they take you below deck, and it's a real fishing boat, so they add an artificial side of the boat, um, that they take off, and put against the skin of the ship, and they put the two of us leaning against the skin of the ship, and give us a couple of these big beers and chocolate bars, and then put the back on there, and then put fish on top of the, no, I want a blanket, I want a gallon of water, said, the two of us just had to hug each other all the way into Denmark, but, you know, um, it's one of those things that, uh, you know, recruiter doesn't tell you this.

• 1:11:08Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like a Navy Achievement Medal, at least, maybe?

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  No, no, they didn't give out medals back then, you know, no, no, I got the breast fig leaf with bronze oak leaf palms, I think that's what it was.

• 1:11:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's brutal.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  It was brutal, but, but, you know, you know this, Jaco, sincerely, uh, it was, but just to be able to come back in and just go, mission accomplished, we did it, man, and we, we did it the hard way, but, but we did it, just the tremendous satisfaction you get from being a SEAL, and being able to do a really hard mission, and, you know, even in my fitness report, you know, when that, and, uh, you know, Rick Waller brought in there, there, there are very few people, if any, in the world, that could do what, what these guys did, this exercise, so.

• 1:11:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's a freaking rough one.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:54Jocko Willink?

  I, I did a, was on an ard platoon, I did a, a, a recon, we dove into a harbor, we took pictures, and... Of whatever ship. It was up here at Camp Pendleton. You know, we dove in, we got out of the water, we took pictures, and this was the old school, you know, film. And we come back out, and I had gotten, I had gotten like perched in the perfect spot. I was able to keep the shutter open for like minutes and just hold it perfectly. And so I took a bunch of pictures. We came back and then, and then the report I got back from, from my platoon commander was that, you know, the, the amphibious ready group commander said, I thought these guys went in there during the night. And the, and the platoon commander said, they did go in there at night. This, this is good photography. But yeah, same kind of feeling. And I used to tell guys, when you're doing a water op, it's

• 1:12:38Jocko Willink?

  a real world op. Like there's a, there's all kinds of things that can kill you when you're out there, especially in third degree water and 40 degree water and, you know, doing the, in and out of the submarine.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Jocko Willink?

  No joke.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, a class ahead of me and Bud's, we lost a young trainee, uh, doing surf passage, um, uh, with, uh, those big heavy rigs that we had, uh, through the plunging Coronado surf. He hit his head on the back of his, um, regulator and knocked him out, but then they picked up the swim pair and, uh, the, tore the buddy line. And they lost him and finally got him sometime later. But, uh, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's for real. And the ocean could kill you or the weather. You know, it used to be the patrol leaders card that we had years ago. Uh, the first thing it started off was listing enemy. And the first thing we listed was weather.

• 1:13:28Jocko Willink?

  Weather. Yeah. Uh, so, so what'd you do after that deployment?

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Uh, well, I, that's when I went to, um, graduate school. So I, I, I went to, uh, Naval Postgraduate School and studied, uh, scientific and technical intelligence. And I thought, all right, I got 18 months of surfing and screw it off. And, uh, so my brother went to the University of Michigan, got his MBA. For 24 months, he took 40 credits. I went to the Naval Postgraduate School and in 18 months took 96 credits, of which I had three electives, three, three credit electives, that's it. And, um, a good portion of it was in the physics lab. Uh, and you know, we're designing the shape of scientific

• 1:14:17Speaker 02

  intelligence. I kind of miss that, you know? So, um, but, uh, it was a great education.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  And, you know, I really, one, I enjoyed living in central California, dude, I mean, we wound up doing triathlons and some other good stuff. But being able to complete that curriculum then, and then leaving there and getting all of the intelligence accesses, that, you know, you don't realize that those things exist and so you get into the secret clubhouse. And then I was in the secret clubhouse, and I left there and went to Naval Special Warfare Group Two in Virginia Beach, which is the Oversight Group Command for the SEAL teams on the East Coast, as the intelligence officer there. So it was a very, very good time to be the intel officer, because we were involved in

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  1986 El Dorado Canyon, the Libyan campaign, we had the Central American Wars, and also we did a significant amount of work in other areas there. But, you know, that really is when I first got involved in, deeply involved in intelligence. But to me, it just went hand in glove with being a SEAL, that you know what to ask for, that we didn't, we didn't really know what the menu was, because we didn't know. We just kept ordering burgers and fries. Well, once, once, once you realize exactly what the intelligence community has got in its capability, you can really refine. And the other thing as well, more importantly, as you know this, Jaco, it doesn't matter

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  what you got on your collar, it doesn't, it's who you know in relationships, it's all about relationships. And when you had, you know, folks who were there, the N2 of Second Fleet, and I went to graduate school with this individual, you know, that, that really paid off great dividends, you know, for the community. But, you know, when it came to what we were doing in, you know, Benghazi and all of these other places, you know, I mean, we had built target folders for, for all of that stuff. And when it comes to Final Jeopardy, if it's a geographic question, I probably had a target folder on it.

• 1:16:18Jocko Willink?

  And then, didn't you end up going to now back to SDV? When did SDV, when did SDV form up? SDV Team Two?

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  Uh, SDV Team Two formed up, uh, in about nineteen, uh, seventy-nine, seventy-nine or eighty. Because we had a UDT, uh, we had an SDV detachment in UDT twenty-one. And that was siphoning off so much of our money and so much of our time. Uh, because, uh, a great idea, but, uh, we did not have the technology. And, uh, the guys spent a great deal of their time switching out the bow hulls because they kept crashing into piers and rocks and some other things. But cold and miserable, uh, but the other thing as well, it was a really good time for me to, to go to SDV. Because that when we first started to modify the nuclear powered submarines to carry us. As opposed to just having us go on there and putting towels on the deck and tell us not to make a mess.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  And, um, we just, we just had the dry deck shelter. We had the mobility improvement project. Uh, which was a, a national mission, uh, to the first, uh, uh, dry deck shelter, which is, this is a garage, folks, that we put on the nuclear submarine, uh, and we put our submersible boats in there. And we, we come out of the submarine and into that, it's like a garage. And then we go off on a mission, probably about ten to twelve hours and, um, uh, in a cold, wet submarine. And, um, uh, it really, I'm glad that I had that other background, uh, in, in that,

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  that I was able to bring an awful lot to comfort the commanding officers of the submarine that, you know, what you guys are gonna ruin my career. It's gonna be okay, Captain. We probably will, but it's gonna be okay, you know? But, uh, yeah, and, uh, Bill McRaven was there ju- just before me as, uh, as a platoon commander and Evan Thompson. But, um, you know, also at that point, I didn't wanna be that ambitious, uh, Jaco, I mean necessarily. But I just figured, you know, if I ever do wind up being in charge of the community, I'd like to know something about everything in the community. And I, and I really strive to, uh, at least have one tour and have a, a good sense of what it's all about.

• 1:18:29Jocko Willink?

  At what point did you realize you were just gonna do as long as you could do?

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  Oh, uh, when my wife told me that.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  I mean this sincerely. So, um, I, I guess I was at the ten year point, uh, we, we just, we, we, you know, we, we did Grenada, uh, Vietnam is over and we're gonna do anything ever again. And it was kinda unlikely. I mean, we're doing exercises and everybody was bored. And I was not, well, I don't know if my old former senior guys listened to this, but yeah, we're not a whole lot of folks who were inspirational leaders, Adam, let me put it to you that way. And I just figured, okay, uh, I'm gonna go to law school. So I was applying to law school and, um, uh, I'm, I'm dead serious. I'm gonna go be a lawyer. And I finally get this counseling session from Kathy. She goes, you're not

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  going to be a lawyer. She said, you are a SEAL. You are a good SEAL. Every friend we have are SEALs. I'm not gonna give that up for you just to become another crummy lawyer. Sorry, counselors, but, so, so I just said, you know, just like any good husband, okay. So I just decided to, you know, jump back in with both feet. And then, you know, you take it as it comes. Uh, you know, at the 20 year point, we've all gotta decide whether or not we're gonna retire. But, uh, as you know, the service is like, they put that carrot out in front of you. You know, okay, I'll take that promotion and then I'll get out. Then they put another carrot out. Next thing you know, you're old and ugly and you got 36 years in the Navy.

• 1:20:04Jocko Willink?

  So was that your, was that your XO tour at STV team?

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  It was. It was. And I had a lot of time at sea, uh, you know, onboard the submarines and doing, uh, operations. Uh, so yeah, that was good. That really was a really, really good tour. Uh, really become, um, uh, was, was the first deployment that we ever made with the dry deck shelter. And, you know, when you, we do do the first, uh, there's nothing. I mean, you had to write everything. You had to write the tactic, these procedures. And the procedures, working from a submarine or life and death procedures.

• 1:20:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  And you really had to know and be extremely cautious. And it really was the unknowns. And you just like, you go back and forth and... In the community, you know, we are a risk-taking community, but you never take a risk you don't have to. So we really had to put, you know, pros and cons of most experienced folks and then sometimes, honestly, pretty much we knew it, it was gonna be okay, but you still were rolling the dice sometimes. But the credit really belongs to those guys, you know, the pilot navigator and the STVs, to be able to go from a nuclear submarine submerged in the middle of the ocean and go, you know, into, do a target and come back 10 hours

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  plus later and find that submarine is a remarkable feat, it really is. So, you know, really the credit goes to those young operators, hard men. I still think that, you know, that is probably among our hardest missions that we've got. And as you know, there is not a wetsuit thick enough to keep you warm.

• 1:21:45Jocko Willink?

  And so then what? Did you go, is that when you went to detailer after you got done with that tour?

• 1:21:48Speaker 02

  No, I became the Maritime Special Purpose Force Commander.

• 1:21:51Jocko Willink?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I deployed for a year with, you know, the Marine detachment and with our detachment and got over to the Mediterranean, got involved with another submarine operation there for the evacuation of the embassy in Beirut.

• 1:22:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  Because this was the second time that I was in Beirut. I evacuated when I was in Ensign aboard the ship in 1976.

• 1:22:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  Because they were at war and the ship pulled in in the middle of the night and all of Beirut was on fire. And the Palestinian Liberation Authority gave us permission, you know, be able to have one boat command and a junior officer to take the Americans out, who include the United States Ambassador. And I'm in my whites with my little shoulder boards and, you know, the PLO were pulling these guys out from line, not letting them get on board our boat. And I'm on the walkie-talkie calling them back to the ship and talking to the XO. I said, "Sir, you know, they're pulling people out. Just do anything we can do." "Don't do a thing, Joe. Just, just don't. Don't leave that boat. And, you know, don't do anything until the Americans are on board and the ambassadors are on board."

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  But it really, to me, this was in July of 1976 with the, you know, 200th anniversary of our nation. And I'm thinking, here we are, the United States of America, and we've got these folks dictating to the American ambassador, who represent the President of the United States and us, whether or not he can get on board an LCU. And that was a pretty defining moment for me. But, so then, did it again at that timeframe. And I had the opportunity to go back to Beirut when I was the SOCOM commander with the JSOC commander, and had lunch with the Lebanese commandos. And it was a great lunch, we're sitting there, and I'm talking to the Lebanese commander

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  who's, you know, hosting the lunch. I said, "Well, I'll tell you, General, this is my fourth trip to Beirut, and the other three times I've been here, I never spent more than an hour out of the three trips." You know, we're in and out, and, you know, so we spent probably, you know, better part of a day there in Beirut. But it was just interesting, when I went into 1976, to see it as a collapsed city on fire, and to go back in 2019, I guess, and just see, it looks like Hong Kong, except that they're bankrupt. But, no, it's funny how, from Ensign to political appointee, but it all, you know, it's always been a troubled spot.

• 1:24:27Jocko Willink?

  What was the, when you, when you went there and pulled guys out, or did the embassy evacuation with, from a submarine, what was that operation like?

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  We can't talk about that right now, necessarily.

• 1:24:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. So then what was after that? So you did that deployment with the, as the special force commander?

• 1:24:46Speaker 02

  Yep, and then, and then from there up to DC. So it was my first Washington tour, and as the assignment and placement officer for the community. And it was an awful lot of fun, that, you know, you're the one person in all community making all assignments, from Ensign to captains, and everybody hates you. Hard to believe, isn't it? But that was, that was a really good one, I did the best I could, even the playing field and distribute. But the other thing is, I had an opportunity to work and serve on selection boards. So you're a junior officer and you're supporting the senior of the captains and the admirals as

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  they make their selections. And you see the selection board process and then you see who gets selected and who doesn't get selected. And you could just sit back there after a while and go, "Don't sweat the load, man. Just do your job. It's as simple as that." You know, because everybody's record, you know, when they're up for flag, just about every one of those captains, their records are like manicured lawns, but not everybody's gonna get it. And it's just forget, it doesn't matter. If you're gonna get it, you're gonna get it. But if not, just relax and just do your job. It really took an awful lot of pressure off there. But yeah, that was a time that then we wound up with First Gulf War.

• 1:26:13Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  So wound up leaving there and going down to Dev Grue as the deputy commander.

• 1:26:17Jocko Willink?

  And then how many, how many years did you spend down there?

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  I spent two years down there. And then left to take over commanding officer SEAL Team Two.

• 1:26:27Jocko Willink?

  Now during this time, would you say that this is a time where, you know, you had the First Gulf War happen? Are SEALs starting to kinda, kinda become popular yet? I mean, I came in in 1991, as we mentioned, as I mentioned earlier. I mean, there was the Navy SEALs movie, which I'm sure Echo Charles likes. The Navy SEALs movie, I think, came out in 1991.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it makes sense. Chuck Forrest movie.

• 1:26:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. But there was still not a lot of, not a lot of popularity. It wasn't a big deal yet.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  No. So, you know, I don't want to have a history lesson for everybody out there, but because of the failure of the Iranian hostage rescue mission in April of 1980, and then compounded by what happened in Grenada, that the civilian side of the house made the decision that, especially because of the failure of the Iranian hostage rescue mission, that if we as a nation want to have an organization that be able to conduct no-fail missions, that we need to be serious about this. And there has to be... One command that's organized, trained, and equipped to be able to do that. That started shaping the, the community.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  But we were still in the Navy, the Army was still in the Army. And through the Department of Defense Appropriation Act of 1987, Senators Nun and Cohen tacked on the end of that appropriations bill, the establishment of United States Special Operations Command, and bringing in the Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, Rangers, and, and as 160th, and Air Force Commandos under United States Special Operations Command. So then we had our own line of, of, of money for, for, for unique. But be honest with you, um, at that time, uh, my friend Tom Coulter, who mentioned that, you know, okay, once, once the SEALs came into United States Special Operations Command,

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  Tommy goes, "Well, congratulations, we're now in the bottom of two food chains." (laughing) Pretty much we were, you know? But, um, uh, we still, in spite of that, uh, the, the resources didn't flow. And, um, uh, the active duty military did not necessarily want to have this. And if they did, they wanted to have it, three-star command, you know, it's close to Washington. And it was our civilians, uh, that said, "No, we know the military, it's gotta be a four-star." And, um, well, actually, probably had an awful lot to do with the powerful Florida delegation more than anything else that we wound up in, in McDill. But, um, it, it took quite a while and we would just be coming.

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  And, uh, but, uh, the leaders of the community made very, very good decisions on, with the limited resources we had, uh, and we had other opportunities to do away with certain types of things that we as a community did. And one of them was, you know, unconventional warfare, that, that the specialty, Green Berets were, were going to do away with that. And luckily, they decided not to. So when 9/11 happened, and they were able to send the 5th Special Forces in, you know, with John Mulholland as the group commander and the other young folks that wound up being the horse soldiers. But that war was the defining thing for the community. Unfortunately, we paid a heavy toll to be where we are today.

• 1:29:47Speaker 02

  But, uh, when the opportunity presented itself for both Afghanistan and Iraq, um...

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  Special Operations mentality and capability was at a premium and we were ready at that time to do that. And luckily, the active duty military had come around, as well as the senior civilians, and completely changed the resourcing for United States Special Operations Command. And I have to say, really gave us all the tools necessary and bent over backwards to make us as successful as we possibly could be. And we were carrying all the water. And so, she said, "Back then, nobody knew who we were. Now, everybody knows who we are, but that also has got to do with the tax that we paid and the brave people that you mentioned a little bit earlier."

• 1:30:39Speaker 02

  And if I could talk about that just a little bit, with Mark Lee and Ryan. So, you know, Jaco mentioned about me welcoming the men home from combat, but I also, Jaco was already deployed to Iraq, and I would also see all of the guys off before they got on the plane and left. So Jaco's got a bunch of guys from his task unit, I didn't want to bother them, they're talking to their wives, and then it's time to kind of go out to the plane. And so we're standing around, went on the plane, I said, "Look, guys, one last thing." I said, "The genie's here, rub the lamp, make your wish." You know?

• 1:31:19Speaker 02

  And guys, some folks are reluctant to talk to a guy with two stars in his collar. And now, Mark Lee was a new guy, this was his first deployment. And Mark Lee comes up, he says, "Hey, Admiral, I want to talk to you." "All right, what is it there, Petty Officer Lee?" He says, "You know, we're over there, we're fighting the war, and we're with these Humvees, and these Humvees are not air-conditioned. We need air-conditioned Humvees." "Well, Mark, I'll tell you what, you know, you're in a war, and you just can't stick an air conditioner in there because if a bomb goes off, you might wind up eating it. So let me do this, let me go to United States Special Operations Command, I'll talk to General Brown, and see what we can do." And I went back to my office, I called General Doug Brown, who was our SOCOM commander, he says, "Look, got it, I got it." That was his big, "I got it."

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  But he said, "But we have to do this smart." And we wound up with air-conditioned Humvees in Iraq because Mark Lee asked for that. Now...

• 1:32:17Speaker 02

  And to me, you know, as the admiral, you work for the men. And if that's what they needed, that's what they got. But one of the most moving things in my life was when Mark came home to San Diego. So when you come home, you get flown into Dover, and then from Dover to San Diego. So there were a bunch of us that went down there to meet his body as it came off this commercial plane. And there were folks at San Diego Airport were very kind to us and let us, you know, come down. So now, everybody had to remain onboard the plane, with the exception of our escort officers that escort Mark's body back.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  And I'm down there with the Master Chief, and the body comes off, and, I mean, all of a sudden, I realize it's dead silent in the airport. There's no planes moving, there's no cars moving. I mean, I just, I was so focused on the coffin coming off, and then I look up in the terminal, and everybody's pressed against the glass, I mean, everywhere. And I, one of the airport, I said, "What's going on?" He said, "We stopped everything. We stopped everything." And they made an announcement in the airport, "The first SEAL who was killed in Iraq is coming home. We want to all go out there and welcome him home."

• 1:33:45Speaker 02

  And that really, that was remarkable. And as far as, you know, Ryan Joe, I mean, you had to know Ryan, folks. I mean, Ryan was just indomitable, absolutely indomitable. So, now here, he lost his vision, and he's in a Bethesda Naval Hospital. So... I, just coincidentally, I had to, I was gonna be there anyhow because we had a Navy Cross ceremony for two of our SEALs that were with Michael Murphy in Operation Red Wings who were killed in that, they were posthumously receiving the Navy Cross. We had a big ceremony planned at the Navy Memorial. So, few of us were in town. We go to visit

• 1:34:30Speaker 02

  Ryan, who is at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. Now, we go there, and Kathy's with me, and he's asleep, and there's a woman there. Turns out to be Ryan's mother, alright? So, go up, and he wakes up. And he goes, "Hey, hey, hey, guys!" So, of course, all the knuckleheads go in, and we start talking. Now, he's, he's blind. And, but he's, he's himself. And so...

• 1:34:59Jocko Willink?

  Even maybe a little more.

• 1:35:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know, I don't know who did this. Now, I'm talking to, you know, Mrs. Jobe, and, you know, take good care of your son, and we still didn't know what his disposition was gonna be. I mean, he just came out of combat, he'd only been in the hospital for a couple of days, and, um, so somebody says to him, "Hey, Ryan, we're gonna have a major ceremony at the Navy Memorial for the couple of guys there receiving the Navy Cross. You wanna come?" "Yeah, I'm in!" Now, he's blind, so he can't see this. His mother just points to me with the old "you" outside. So, she drags me into the lobby, and she has got her fingers in my chest, right? "My son just lost his vision!" He

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  goes, "Yes, Mrs. Jobe, I got it. Yes, Mrs. Jobe, we got it. Yes, Mrs. Jobe, we got it." So, um, I said, "Mrs. Jobe, look, I'm not gonna, but if, if our teammate wants to go, I mean, it's up to you. I'm not gonna get involved, but I guarantee you, we will have a car for him, we will have a place for him, and we will have a big bad SEAL who will escort him." Do you remember who you sent home to be his escort?

• 1:36:05Jocko Willink?

  I sent three guys home. I'm, I'm not sure which one.

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  Well, one was the American Sniper, alright? So, um, so, um, so I, I don't know what's gonna happen. But, I mean, this is a very moving thing because we got the Gold Star families there, and everybody was there. It was a sunset ceremony in Washington DC. And the Secretary of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations, all of Washington Senators. And I come out and the lights are on me and it's a semicircle amphitheater. And as I'm talking, welcoming everybody, I start over the right. Where is he? Where is he? Where is he? Where is he? And as I'm talking and I'm scanning the crowd and all the way over the left at an end seat, there's one individual who has his head turned to the side. I realize it's Ryan so he can hear me.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  And I'm kind of looking and I figured, right? And then who stands up behind him? Right? I got him.

• 1:37:00Jocko Willink?

  Chris.

• 1:37:01Speaker 02

  I got him. Chris Kyle. I got him. Okay, he's in good shape there. You know? So we went through that and I gotta tell you, the ceremony was moving, but we had a reception after that. And then we went down to the memorial for reception and, you know, dumb frogmen that we are, you know, we got, you know, he's blind, you know, put him in a chair. So it was almost like Animal House when they come into Delta House, you've got the nerds that they just kind of stick to the side, just sit, you know? So we keep trying to get Ryan. And meanwhile, now keep in mind, he's two weeks since he's lost his vision and there are hundreds of people there and he's just walking around the crowd and of course, I'm on him now. Now everybody's, you know, I'm on him.

• 1:37:46Speaker 02

  And he bumps into this woman and, you know, he goes, oh, excuse me, you know, hi, I'm Ryan. Who are you? Hi, Ryan, I'm Barbara Boxer. He didn't have a clue that it was a senator and he just starts chatting her up. I figured, my God, you know? So it was a wonderful reception and I stayed till the last Gold Star parent left and I'm fried. I gotta be honest with you because I had to do Navy business there the day and then, you know, and you're on it and it was emotional as could be, as you could imagine, that emotionally it's just raining. So I figured if it was Danny Dietz's family or Axelson's family that left the last and I just figured, okay.

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  I turned to Kathy, I said, all right, baby, let's get back to the hotel. She goes, oh, no. She says, all your men are at the Irish pub. You gotta go have at least a beer with the boys, you know? You know, my name is McGuire. I didn't take. So, I go into this bar and it is packed, packed. So, of course, the guys are being nice to kind of make a way for me and Kathy. And up against the bar with the beer in his hand and his elbow on the bar is Ryan Jobe, drinking a beer, just being one of the boys. But, one of my favorite stories about Ryan, after he got medically retired, he became very good friends with our first star commander, General Doug Brown.

• 1:39:13Speaker 02

  And, so, he calls up General Brown and he says, "Hey, sir, I'm gonna climb Mount McKinley. I'd like you to come with me." "Uh, well, you know, Ryan, I'm, uh, I'm, uh, in my sixties right now. I don't know if I could do that." Did General Brown tell me this? He goes, "General Brown, I'm blind. You've got no excuse." You know? So, just, I mean, it was indomitable. Just wonderful, just an inspiration.

• 1:39:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  One inspiration, both with Chris, Chris as well, an inspirational person.

• 1:39:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, I remember, you know, you said he was medically retired, but there was a time where he was not sure if he was gonna medically retire.

• 1:39:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:39:55Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, I, he, he said to me, he said, "Well, you know, can I stay in?" And I said, "Well, I don't know, but I know someone that does know. And I, I came by to see you and I said, 'Hey, there's a chance that Ryan wants to just stay in.'"

• 1:40:07Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:08Jocko Willink?

  And you looked at me and said, "Then he stays in."

• 1:40:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. And my thought was, um, when you look in your mirror, uh, and, and you see yourself, you see a seal. And, my thought was, I don't have any one of us telling our teammate, "He no longer can do it." Our teammate has to come to that realization on his own. And I just thought, sooner or later, I mean, it's just hard to make that break, especially, you know, you're coming from combat and going through all this stuff. Sooner or later, you realize, you know, because I learned that from Tommy Norris. Uh, Tommy was, uh, one of our Medal of Honor recipients from Vietnam. And, uh, Tommy was, um, severely wounded, uh, but because he was a Medal of Honor recipient, that, you know, Tommy, you could stay.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  And Tom made the decision, "Uh, I could stay, but I, I don't think I'm a full-up round anymore." And I just, you know, and, so he made that decision as well. So, I learned that years ago and I just thought... Let my teammate decide when it's it's time for them to go.

• 1:41:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was that was awesome for him to have that option and for him to know that as long as he wanted to be in the teams, he would be in the teams. That was freaking awesome.

• 1:41:23Jocko Willink?

  Where were we? We were at what? You were you were about to take over SEAL Team Two?

• 1:41:28Speaker 02

  Well, I took over SEAL Team Two and left there and I had the misfortune of getting deep selected for captain.

• 1:41:38Speaker 02

  But, um, yeah, so I'm I'm deployed in another submarine with the with the SEAL Team down in the Caribbean. So we've been we've been at sea now, probably submerged for a week. And, you know, as you know, Jaco, when you finally finish, you come to the surface, they put the antenna up and you download the traffic. So we're just we've gone ad mid now. We're up in the sail that the submarine is running on the surface and, you know, you folks, you see pictures like that and recruiting things where the folks are up there. So I'm up in the sail with the commanding office of the submarine and the guys are in the just after the sail, putting our, you know, boats together and some other stuff. And the sound powered

• 1:42:18Speaker 02

  phone rings, which on the on the submarine, you know, the captain picks up the phone, you know, captain, and he's listening and he starts looking at me. And I figured, oh, God, what did my guys do now? You know? And he hangs up the phone and he looks at me goes, we just got a message. You just got selected for captain. I said, that can't be. I'm not eligible for another two years. He goes, well, what's your year group? I told him, he goes, damn, Joe, so is mine. So so with that, I wound up, you know, not staying

• 1:42:57Speaker 02

  as long as I would have liked to, but I left there and then went to got selected for Harvard as a national security fellow up there. And that was another remedial education program for me. The part that gets me about Harvard, really, I mean, it's got a good reputation, but who knew the spelling counts?

• 1:43:19Speaker 02

  So, what do you, how long were you up there for? Yeah, thirteen months. So it was a one-year fellowship, but it was remarkable. So, I had, I had officer rank, I was a member of the faculty club. And it was just great to be able to have my mother, take my mother to the faculty club, and just tell her, you know, even C students can make it to the Harvard Faculty Club, my mama.

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  But, it was really great, because it was small seminars, focused, and what I was up there really to do is advanced research in national security. But the folks that I had up there at the Kennedy School is really the holding tank for government. They were the former secretaries, former ambassadors, and I became, because, one, you're a SEAL, and I just, and had the rank, that I was included in everything there. It was just really remarkable. That, you know, some of the seminars I was in, I had to put a, maybe once a week, because we had to take turns submitting a memorandum.

• 1:44:23Speaker 02

  And then go to the two professors who, one would be the former Deputy Secretary of State, and that was, you know, an undersecretary of Defense. And they'd go through this darn thing, and they'd go, "Joe, you dope. You can't say that. They're gonna leak that to the Washington Post." And honest to goodness, like, here's how you say it, without, you know, indicting, I mean, just really good, practical stuff. But, because I got included in everything, this is at a time when Ted Kennedy was still alive, and the Senator from Massachusetts, and John John was around, and they'd come to the Kennedy School all the time, but Senator Kennedy's sister was the ambassador to Ireland.

• 1:45:05Speaker 02

  And the Kennedy family invited Jerry Adams to come to Boston. And then he gave a lecture in the evening at the Kennedy School, and then a small dinner. So, you know, these were all emeritus professors. Would you like to come, Joe? Boy, would I, you know? And we had dinner, there were only about eight of us at dinner. And he was holding court. And I gotta tell you, I was just sitting there watching, thinking, no wonder. I mean, this guy, these are all senior, meritus Harvard professors, and they were eating out of his hand. Uh, I don't think this guy's good. This guy's real good. So then, our, our four star at that point in time, General Downing, came up to visit. He came up on a regular basis to Harvard.

• 1:45:50Speaker 02

  And so, what have you been up to? Well, I had dinner with Jerry Adams. Ooh, that didn't go good. You know? Because he says, you know, Joe, he's one of the biggest terrorists in, in the world. I said, well, you know, the thing about it is, boss, what an opportunity to learn about him. You know, I mean, you just can't, I'm here to learn. And even if it's an unpleasant, or you're here to learn. And I learned an awful lot, just about maybe the couple of hours that I spent there, listening to that guy, just how good these folks are. But tremendous education. And then from there, I went to become the deputy of Sock Pack. So, I had all of these beautiful suits and overcoats and things that I wore at, at Harvard.

• 1:46:29Jocko Willink?

  And then you're in Hawaii.

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  And then I'm in, you know, Aloha attire. Don't throw anything away, you never know.

• 1:46:35Jocko Willink?

  And, and then what you're, you're doing the deputy. What's the deputy position like out there in Sock Pack? What are you doing?

• 1:46:42Speaker 02

  It was wonderful. Um, so, uh, in, in, in the Pacific, uh, Sock Pack was co-located in the same building as the Pacific Commander. So, we actually were, although as separate, sub-unified command, Admiral Preer, who was the, um, uh, Pacific Commander, actually made us a part of his staff. So, well, we, we had the best of both worlds. That, uh, in the morning, you know, I'd be up there, uh, because the general traveled a great deal, and I would be the one that represented, sit there, you know, with the four star and his, his staff, getting the, all of the classified briefings up in the SCIF, and then down to, uh, another conference room, where broader audience, where the, um, uh, less classified things were discussed.

• 1:47:27Speaker 02

  But going through interesting things with sending two carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait, just seeing that unfold. But we also had a situation where, this was the first time I really became aware of beheadings. We had a group of Westerners, this is in August of ninety-five, on vacation through the Hindu Kush. And this was up in the line of control in Srinagar. And they were captured and held ransom by Muslims up there.

• 1:48:06Speaker 02

  And one of the captors, a Norwegian, ran away and they caught him. And they cut his head off, they put one, his body on one part of the town and the head on the other part of the town with a ransom note, you know, on either. And the Indian military then came to the ambassador, who was the senior ranking ambassador in the United States State Department then, who went to the secretary. And we had to deploy a Delta Force assault team there with General Pete Skoomaker, who was the JSOC commander. So, we were doing, not command and control for them, because the Pacific Command was

• 1:48:50Speaker 02

  doing that, but there was nobody in the Pacific Command that understood that. So, I was standing next to the four stars desk, this before Admiral Preers showed up, this was Admiral Mackey. And he had to draft a personal form message to the Secretary of Defense and to the Chairman every day. And I drafted those messages for him. And, you know, he changed a little bit, but it was that time I had in Harvard. I mean, necessarily, I never would have been able to do that before, as I said, spelling counted. But, you know, he would change a couple of things. And they were deployed there for forty-some odd days. And we never got the hostages back. So, when, just the...

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  Were there this now it is September so it is the anniversary of the end of World War Two and the President is there the Secretary of Defense everybody's there just this is Bill Clinton and and this is so this is ninety-five so and now I've been locked up for thirty forty days I'm as white as a sheet but because I wasn't going anywhere you know I'd go home for four hours and sleep and shower and come back I'm in my you know Aloha I'm in my flip-flops I'm in my board shorts and I'm in my T-shirt now the Pacific

• 1:50:19Speaker 02

  Commander is down there with the President and nobody having breakfast but his aide is up there and I've got to run all of these things by him and I'm explaining said okay you know what they're asking for is they want to go forward and be with the Indians are going to do a takedown and they want to have our guys to be with them during the takeout and I'm trying to explain it to him and and he's in you know an attack pilot and he finally now keep in mind he's in chokers with all of his medals and the big gold agulets that the aide wear and he finally says to me I can't get this you gotta come with me all right so I'm following him again flip-flop I got you know this bag handcuffed to my hand right and we jump in the car and as I'm in the car I'm trying to I can't get

• 1:51:04Speaker 02

  it you're just gonna have to explain it yourself now I completely forgot what was going on but as I get down there you got all the Secret Service agents you got metal detectors right and and you've got two you got an aircraft carrier on one side of the pier and two cruises on the other right and they're all a dressed ship and everybody's standing along manning the rail so Bud jumps out of the car and he just runs through the metal detector and they've seen him for several days so to know he's good And I come after him and the Secret Service guy said to him, "I'm with him, man. I'm with him. He's with me." So we're walking down the pier and we're standing there and again, everybody's at

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  dress ship. I mean, folks, you've got to understand just how impressive this is. You know, you've got several hundred guys in an aircraft carrier, the cruiser, you've got the flags up. And then the armored vehicle comes down initially and these guys jump out. It's all the Secret Service guys. And then down comes the beast. So the President and the First Lady are in that. And then you hear from the aircraft carrier, a bugle, everybody for attention, right? So everybody's attention and Bud Langston, he's saluting. I'm in my flip flops and stuff and the President gets out of the car and I figured, be inappropriate to salute, so I'm just waving.

• 1:52:33Speaker 02

  And the President comes up and he shakes my hand. "Yes, sir. Thanks, Mr. President," you know. So they go, he goes on board the ship. And meanwhile, he went on and then the rest of them had to walk down. So down comes the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of Defense, the four-star commander. So Bud goes, "Okay, you've got to brief the Admiral." So we pull him off to the side and I try to give him the disposition of what they're asking for. And, "What is your recommendation, Captain?" I said, "Sir, I think you need to support the guys and approve the decision." "Well, that's about the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life." "Do I get a second guess?"

• 1:53:15Speaker 02

  He says, "No." He said, "That thing will go south and who are they going to blame?" You know? "No, Joe, you go back and tell the General, permission denied on that." And I get to think in retrospect, he was probably right, but you know, what do you think? I guess wrong.

• 1:53:32Speaker 02

  But it was, it was an interesting job and the last thing that we did before I left is we had to evacuate Cambodia. So there was a coup in Cambodia and the embassy needed to be evacuated. So we deployed to Cambodia and that was the last thing I did. Then I finally left and then took over the center. And so, you know, I was sleeping in my office, working around the clock, just in operational command, and now I take over the training command. And I've probably been there for a month and a half. And one of your previous guests, Bill McRaven, is driving along the strand. It's about 7:30 at night. He's going one way and I'm on the other side. He takes his Jeep and he makes a U-turn. He says,

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  Joe, what are you doing? Coming home from work. Get in the car. So, get in the car. Joe, it's 7:30 at night. You're on show duty. You're driving everybody crazy. You gotta take a deeper breath and maybe just kind of pace yourself a little bit more. But Joe, they're not keeping up this pace here. But thanks for the feedback, buddy. Appreciate that. But you come from an operational command. When you're doing something like that, it takes you a while to decompress and become a human being again.

• 1:54:44Jocko Willink?

  Right. And how was Bud's? From, from now, from the perspective, I mean, the last time you were there was as a student.

• 1:54:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:51Jocko Willink?

  And now you're back there as the, as the senior guy. You know, people talk about the changes at Bud's.

• 1:54:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:58Jocko Willink?

  And there's other people that go, hey, look, it doesn't matter. There's little changes here and there, but the outcome is the same.

• 1:55:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:03Jocko Willink?

  What'd you say?

• 1:55:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it changed dramatically in that, as I said, nobody really cared about the numbers back then. That if nobody graduated, nobody graduated. But at that time, we actually, and appropriately so, people were looking for return of the investment. And, you know, we still had a really terrible attrition rate. But we also had some other things that we did that, you know, when, when I finished hell week... You know, I had to cut my boots up so my feet could fit in the boot. And, you know, I had cellulitis, and just, that's it. I mean, so, and, and that was inappropriate that, you know, we had to do that. But, and then, you know, the, the young troops back then, you know, every day that they'd

• 1:55:47Speaker 02

  come in and they'd change their socks out for them and give them dry socks and just some other things. But, I mean, the mission of the command is to qualified, to, to graduate qualified individuals to go to the SEAL team, not break them and bust them. So, you know, whatever's gonna take they, to get them there. But, um, it was, it was really still pretty much the same, but, um, um, it needed a little bit of tightening up, just a little bit. So, you know, we had some structures there, and what I just thought we needed to do, uh, you know, you know, I'm not too into this, as you know, Jaco, but I'd say, again, you know, I kinda have to drive a little bit of fear into these guys, just, I mean, you know, a little bit too relaxed. So, I went to, uh, you know, the guys at the development group, and I said, can you

• 1:56:31Speaker 02

  send me a couple of warrants, or maybe some senior guys that, you know, would like to come on out here and help shape the community for the next couple of years? So, um, we had some of the DevGru senior listed guys come out, and, um, so one of the guys showed up, a warrant officer, uh, who's a, a dear friend of mine, um, and we were, one of the final days of Hell Week, and the kids are in the demo pit. And the kids were in the demo pit, was setting off explosives around them, uh, and these kids are still singing now. This is probably Thursday or so, I kinda forget, uh, and, they've already lost about a hundred people in the class, so these kids aren't gonna quit, but they are, they are beat up.

• 1:57:15Speaker 02

  And the instructors are doing their thing, and, I mean, he just arrived at the command, and I said, hey Danny, we're down there, you wanna come with me down to the demo pit and watch? He says, sure, I'd like to come along. So, you know, I'm just doing there, I've got the Master Chief, and, again, I'm not interfering, I'm, I'm watching, and I look over at this guy who is a DevGru warrant officer, and he's got tears in his eyes.

• 1:57:37Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  And I didn't say anything, and on the way back, uh, he said, Danny, how'd you, how'd you feel about that? I forgot. He says, "I forgot what it was like." He said, "I forgot." He said, "For a little while, I was there." And he said, "Yeah, it's the same." And, you know, Master Chief Tofelski, who was a streetwise force master chief, he really mudsucked our instructors. So, you know, we all go through training, and as we look back on it in the rearview mirror, we were faster, smarter, stronger, better.

• 1:58:18Speaker 02

  And so, he's the master chief in charge of all of the instructors at Bud's training. And they're constantly complaining to the master chief about the quality of the individuals. "They're not making this, and if they don't do this, they shouldn't be able to contribute." So, Tofelski, really a smart guy. On a Friday afternoon, we have one big classroom. It probably seats about a hundred. So, he's got all the instructors in there. He made everybody come. It was mandatory. And he's got the chalkboard up there. He said, "All right, first phase. What is the minimum standard that you need to have for the four-mile run?" And it went down to swim, the Yoke course, and the second phase, third phase.

• 1:59:01Jocko Willink?

  And everyone wants everything to be... You've got to do better, got to be faster, got to be stronger.

• 1:59:05Speaker 02

  Right. So, he really mudsucked them. So, he said, "Let me understand this now." He said, "Because I'm going to go talk to the captain, and we're going to change things here. But I want to make sure that everybody agrees. If you can't do this in first phase, if you can't do that in second phase, if you can't do that in third phase, you should never be a SEAL. Is that correct?" "That's right, Master Chief. You're right." "Well, gentlemen, it just happens I have every one of your training records here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to give each and every one of you your training record, then I'm going to walk out of the room. Once you're finished looking at it, and you see what you did, just put it back in the box, and I'll see you Monday." You know, because it was true. You know, it's humbling to go back and look at your own record and see what the instructors said about you. You know, "Okay, it's all it. We still have the same...

• 1:59:49Speaker 02

  We've got every single record from day one on." So, as a matter of fact, when I was there, I tried to burn down the room there that had my record. So, I don't...

• 2:00:04Jocko Willink?

  Hey, when did you leave BUDS?

• 2:00:06Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 2:00:06Jocko Willink?

  When were you done at BUDS as the commander?

• 2:00:09Speaker 02

  Well, I was there for thirty-nine months, which is a really good... Honestly, it was just a fantastic tour. Not one that I wanted to do, because I was gonna go someplace else, in Virginia Beach. And we had trouble with our attrition rate and getting folks through. So I got changed from going out to Virginia Beach to the center. But it turned out to be probably the most rewarding tour I ever had. To have people like Marcus Luttrell go through training. And, you know, I remembered Marcus because not many students break their femur in training. And so, you know, not a good time when, you know, the senior instructors and the doctor

• 2:00:54Speaker 02

  and the master chief come to talk to you about, "All right, he broke his what? He broke his femur." "How?" "Stress fracture."

• 2:01:04Jocko Willink?

  Ooh.

• 2:01:06Speaker 02

  Well, BS, right? So, I mean, we went through it, and I'm going through this stuff. So what happened was, I mean, right? I mean, and they were covering for him, and he did break his femur. So, I mean, Marcus, if you're listening... So the instructors, you know... "And if any of you think that you could beat me..." Of course, Marcus raises his hand. This is the obstacle course. So we have, it's all technique. And now you're dealing with a SEAL that's been doing this obstacle course for years. And now, Marcus was good, but you've got a guy who, you know, these guys are like pixies going over this darn thing. So you climb to the top of the cargo net. Was that about thirty feet, Chaco?

• 2:01:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's about thirty feet.

• 2:01:51Speaker 02

  Right? And you throw yourself over, but you do it in a technique that then you drop down a little bit, and you could grab onto the rope and work your way down. So Marcus got there, and he noticed the technique, and he threw himself over. The only problem was, he didn't grab it.

• 2:02:10Speaker 02

  And he went down the thirty feet and hit, boom, and he broke his femur. So, I mean, to his credit, though, went out, got rolled back and came back, but, I mean, that, that's a good old boy there. But they lied to me, as any good teammate should do, because, you know, because they didn't want the instructor in trouble, and, and I bought it, unfortunately, and it wasn't until later on that actually Marcus told me the story that I broke my leg. He's the one that came clean, you know?

• 2:02:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's epic. Yeah, this must be like the, uh, the, the glimpse that you get at human psychology when you're, because I never worked at Bud's, you know, I went through it, but I never saw it from the other side. The glimpse of human psychology of what people are capable of and what breaks them and, and that's gotta be a, that's gotta leave a mark.

• 2:02:56Speaker 02

  Well, absolutely, and, you know, you literally learn a lot. I mean, now, you know, you and I go through it, but you go through it as different, you're experiencing it, but when you have an opportunity to watch class after class after class, you know, I just remember, you know, the, my first Hell Week class, and, um, this is Monday night of Hell Week, so they started off at Sunday, they've been at it for about, you know, twenty-two hours, twenty-three hours, they're having their evening meal, and, um, the class, you know, outside, and there's a couple of students staying behind in the chow hall, putting the chairs back into the table. Now, I thought that this was somewhat odd, so I'm sitting there with the instructors having, uh, uh, dinner, I said, "So, what are these guys up to?"

• 2:03:40Speaker 02

  "Yeah, they're just waiting for the rest of the class to leave so they can quit." And, and, and it was true. So, you could just see, but what it was is, nobody ever quit in the evolution. Everybody quit before the evolution in anticipation of what was gonna happen. And, and just, now, you can argue whether or not it is the most demanding physical...

• 2:04:08Speaker 02

  Of course, in the military. If it's not, it's close, alright, so I won't argue with anybody. But I will tell you this, it is a far more psychological program than it is a physical program. Because it's designed to keep you off foot, and the standards are raised, and raised, and raised, or you're told that this is going to be the evolution today, and then they change it. But specifically, can you adjust to that? Can you adjust to that? So, it really, it is, most of the people who quit, no. I had a three and a half hour

• 2:04:50Speaker 02

  briefing today, down there with our teammates, an update on what the committee's up to, and Beef Dreschler gave me the pitch, and Beef just took over the center on Friday. And they bring in, oh, close to 900 students a year, to get 180 out. 187 is his demand signal, and 900. So, it's still, in spite of everything that we've done, in preparation issues, when you went through, nobody knew. When I went through, it was a Trivial Pursuit question, you know? But, these guys are prepared, they know what to do, and they all, I said

• 2:05:30Speaker 02

  to them today, what is it? They self-select, they raise their hand, and we lose a couple from academics, we lose some from pool comp, but the vast majority of it, this is not for me. And when I used to get the young men in the, you know, now I was not an instructor. And I would get them all, after the instructors talked about Hell Week, I'd go in there, and I would just talk to these guys. And Marcus talks about that in his book. I just said, "Look, it's as simple as this, guys. You know, every one of you guys can make it through, otherwise you wouldn't be here. I mean, you've already been here now for several weeks. If you're not gonna make it, you're the one who decides you're not gonna make it. It's not gonna be us, at all." And, you know, "It's as simple as this, guys. I mean this

• 2:06:15Speaker 02

  as surely. The secret to life is just don't quit. Just don't quit." I said, "Don't doubt yourself." And, you know, these guys, they doubt themselves, but it's, "Why am I here?" And I used to say to them, when they first came, you know... BUDS is not the SEAL team. BUDS is BUDS. It is where you need to spend 26 weeks to get where you want to go. But don't even think for a second that this is SEAL team. But I will tell you this. You put up with this for 26 weeks and you get to that SEAL team. It will make everything that you did here worthwhile. Trust me.

• 2:06:59Jocko Willink?

  I was down there a little while ago and, you know, I was walking around and there was just with one of my friends that works there. And there's 100 helmets by the bell. 100 helmets by the bell. And he says, you know what? I said, I said, that's a lot of quitters this, you know, whatever it was. Two weeks in, I said, that's a lot of quitters. And he says, you know what? Every one of those guys is a stud.

• 2:07:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:23Jocko Willink?

  A stud. And he's, he's basically referencing compared to us when we went through. You know, when I went through, I thought if you did a, a pull-up workout where you did 30 or 40 pull-ups, that that was a pretty good workout. And you don't realize when you get to BUDS, you're going to do 300 or 400 or 500. You just didn't know. We didn't know back then. But every one of these kids now, they're studs, physical studs. But they still quit.

• 2:07:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. But the difference though physically, I would say, is, you know, when I went through Eric Olson, Bill McRaven was two classes behind me. The way Eric put it, and I think this is right. Back then, it depends on your parents were, if you're going to make it through BUDS. Because it was endurance. Everybody had to run forever and everybody had to swim forever back then. So it was a different type of body type. Now, not everybody looks like you, John. But, but as you know, when, when, you know, when, when I took over the center and these young men lined up next to the pool in just their, their swimsuits, it was a completely different physique on those young men. But we were preparing them for different things as opposed to no long-range patrols,

• 2:08:32Speaker 02

  you know, no, no, no 10 to 12 days in the field, no 13-hour swims. You're going to go to the Hindu Kush and you're going to go to Balad and you're going to go to Ramadi and you're going to go to Fallujah. And you gotta wear heavy equipment and you gotta carry a lot of stuff. So it, it changed. And I don't know what's going to happen now that, you know, we're, we're changing and Admiral Howard, rightfully so, is going back into strategic competition, great power competition, and putting the community back into a maritime focus.

• 2:09:00Jocko Willink?

  Get those wet suits ready, boys.

• 2:09:04Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely. Uh, did you, you know, it's interesting, you know, people always ask who's gonna make it through, who's gonna make it through. And I would never put a bet on anybody one way or the other of who's gonna make it through or not. I don't care where they came from, what their background was. I, I remember one of, one of my commanding officers, Captain O'Connell, he had, he, he, he told this story to me and I, I never forgot it. He had, he had, there was some officer that was put in a package to go to BUDS and he said, I've never backed anyone before. I've never, I've never backed anyone. I've never said this guy's gonna make it. And this guy had this pristine record. He was an athlete this, he was captain of that, he was all these things. He spoke two languages, maybe even three languages, just a complete stud. And finally, O'Connell, you know, signs off

• 2:09:47Jocko Willink?

  his package and says, yeah, take this guy to BUDS. And the freaking guy quit on him. And he said, I will never, ever back anybody again. And to me, that, you know, that was a captain that had been in the teams forever and denied all these packages. And even with that level of discretion, you can't tell who's gonna make it and who's not gonna make it.

• 2:10:05Speaker 02

  That's Jim, Jim O'Connell?

• 2:10:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:09Speaker 02

  No, no, you really can't. Uh, and, and because you really don't know what's going on behind the eyes. So, uh, we've got members who are on the national teams, um, whether it's the national swimming team, that, you know, I mean, these are very accomplished people, division one athletes. And, but the other thing as well, you get some kid that comes out of high school, goes to boot camp, uh, did interval sports and he's standing tall on graduation day.

• 2:10:35Jocko Willink?

  That's me. Hundred percent, hundred percent. And I had a, I had an, I had an Olympic alternate gymnast in my BUDS class, quit. And I had the NCAA water polo team captain in my class, quit.

• 2:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:52Jocko Willink?

  And like, like I was that guy that I was an, a average, if not slightly below average athlete in high school. And hey, stuck it out. They weren't gonna make me quit. That's the way it is.

• 2:11:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:05Jocko Willink?

  Where were you when September 11th happened?

• 2:11:08Speaker 02

  I was assigned to United States Special Operations Command. And, excuse me. I was assigned to United States Special Operations Command. And, you know, we talked a little bit earlier, Jaco, about the community and what the fleet commander said, what my father said.

• 2:11:28Speaker 02

  And here I am, I got promoted to one star at the end of August of 2001.

• 2:11:33Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 2:11:34Speaker 02

  And a little more than three weeks later, I'm sitting in my office, United States Special Operations Command. And, you know, one of the troops comes and he leans against the door jamb. And I said, "What's up?" He said, "A plane just hit the twin tower." So, you know, being a New Yorker.

• 2:11:52Jocko Willink?

  Yep, yep.

• 2:11:53Speaker 02

  And I'm thinking, "Okay, you know, this is foggy day and you got a small aircraft there." And he's not leaving. Uh, you know, and just like, "Okay, I got a TV." I said, "Do you want to turn the TV on?" He said, "Yes, sir." So, I'm behind the desk, I got the TV over there, and I look up, I go, "It is a perfectly beautiful day in New York." And, I mean, shortly after that, I mean, with moments, I see the other plane flying south on the Hudson River. You don't fly south on the Hudson River. The plane's going into Newark, you gotta fly north or you gotta go around. And I'm thinking, "What an idiot. That guy's flying that plane around just to get a better look at that, how stupid." And then, boom, he goes into the second tower.

• 2:12:38Speaker 02

  Uh, and I mean, immediately. And I get up and I ran into the SOCOM commander's office. Uh, General Holland. And I said, "General, we're under attack, we're at war." He said, "What are you talking about, Joe?" I said, "Turn the TV on." I said, "We're at war." And, um, so, obviously, that was a long day to kind of sort everything out. And, um, I finally got home about maybe 1 o'clock in the morning, 2 o'clock in the morning of, um, of the 12th. And, uh, so, I'm just having a little bit of orange juice and maybe an English muffin or something, trying to get a couple hours before I gotta go back into work, and the phone rings.

• 2:13:22Speaker 02

  And I pick up the phone, I figured it was the headquarters, and there's this shrill voice on the other side, uh, just kind of screaming. And all of a sudden, I realize, it's my brother. And my brother was at two twenty Church Street, which is a block down from the Twin Towers. And he was at a meeting and saw the first bill. He didn't see the plane hit, but he saw the, the, the building on fire. He said, well, maybe we should adjourn. You know, I mean, nobody could believe that it was happening. And, you know, he said, so by the time they adjourned, he went out to the street. You know, he actually, you know, viewed, you know, the people jumping for their lives out of, out of the Twin Towers, which is pretty traumatic.

• 2:14:04Speaker 02

  But then he had to walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge all the way to his home, which probably wound up being, well, I don't know, maybe about twelve to fifteen miles. Uh, cause there was no transportation, everything shut down. So by the time he got home, that's when he calls me. And it, it kind of broke down to Joseph, get them. I know what you do. It's up to you guys, get them. I think I'm just trying to calm him down. Um, cause okay, Bob, I'll do my best, you know? And, um, so, uh, one, I never thought I'd be an admiral, never. Uh, and I certainly never thought I'd be an admiral when our nation was at war.

• 2:14:44Speaker 02

  And, uh, to have that opportunity to, you know, actually be a flag or general officer, serving in the United States military when the nation's engaged in, you know, decisive combat operations was, you know, quite an honor, but also, as you know, Jaco, quite a challenge. And, uh, you know, it took us a while, but we finally, we finally did it. And after it, and, uh, May second of two thousand and eleven, I called my brother. And it took a while, Bob, but we got him. And I'll tell you what, when that happened, and now I retired, uh, in July of two thousand and ten. And, um, I'm up early in the morning, uh, not as early as you, but probably about five thirty.

• 2:15:29Speaker 02

  And, um, I'm, I'm, uh, in the kitchen and, uh, you know, got a little bit of a cup of coffee. So I'm putting my running shoes on and I thought I heard something on the radio about Bin Laden. I mean, I just wasn't paying attention. That doesn't, I, so, um, I just waited till six o'clock to hear the news and, you know, folks who stayed up late the night before, they knew, and I still had no idea, and I heard what had happened, and, um, I was just thinking, I mean, I just sat down there, I couldn't go for a run, I mean, I just had tears in my eyes, um, and that, I know full

• 2:16:12Speaker 02

  well, and so do you, the heavy road, the toll that was paid to get to Abbottabad, all of the blood and all the lives and all the brave men and women, you know, who got there. And so, by the time I got to work, you know, everybody's jubilant, and, um, they're saying, you know, I had quiet pride, with pride because it was our teammates, and then the 160th, and the CIA, but, um, it was really emotional for me, just thinking about whether it be Matt Axelson, Danny Dietz, uh, or all of the other folks that, uh, you know, uh, bourgeois, uh, uh, all the, all the, all the men that we lost there, uh, in Afghanistan, and, um,

• 2:16:56Speaker 02

  so, yeah, that was, uh, you know, people be getting my haircut, and how long you been in the Navy? Uh, thirty-six years? Well, how'd you stay so long? You know, we've been at war for the last ten years, buddy, you know, and, uh, it was on our shoulders, yeah, but, um, you know, when you know full well, this war was personal to you and me, and to many of us, and the other thing as well, it's just hard to explain to people how you could become friends through death, that you meet parents and you meet family members that you never knew, but you knew their son, and you buried their son, and you were on

• 2:17:36Speaker 02

  your knees giving a mother the flag that was on her son's coffin, uh, and you get to know these people, and you stay close to them, you know, for, for a long, long period of time, so, um, and I wound up there at SOCOM, and, um, you know...

• 2:17:56Speaker 02

  It was an interesting time for me. I was a baby, baby one star, and it was a small place. We only had five, five flag and general officers then. The four star, the three star, two green beret, two stars, and me. I was the baby. But we, it was a great place to learn. And one of the officers there, Eldon Bargewell, was a special forces general officer. And up to that point, Eldon was the most highly decorated soldier in the United States Army. And, you know, school was certainly in session for me, you know, working, working with Eldon. So that when I left there and then went to Naval Special Warfare to take over the community, I left there as the deputy commander under Admiral Eric Olson, and came

• 2:18:41Speaker 02

  back, you know, close to four years later. And I just remember, you remember Captain Barbara Ford, just said after that, she goes, "Oh, my God, you turned into an admiral." World War, you know, you had to. Yeah, so.

• 2:18:57Jocko Willink?

  My, my commanding officer at SEAL Team Seven, I was on deployment, I was in Iraq, having just the best deployment ever, just having a great time doing a bunch of operations. And, and he says to me, "The last thing I do as commanding officer of SEAL Team Seven is I'm going to make sure that you become the admiral's aide." He pulled it off. So that's where, that's how, that's how you ended up with me.

• 2:19:20Speaker 02

  Well, I'll tell you what, it was wonderful. You know, you know, between you and, you know, and Beef Dreschler, you know, you know, folks out there, you know, you've got a good idea what Jaco looks like, I'm sure. But Beef used to be the center for Navy. And he's also a, a pretty, pretty strong guy.

• 2:19:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, my name is Jaco. His name is Beef. Kind of says it all.

• 2:19:43Speaker 02

  But when, when, when, when Jaco, when Beef was replacing Jaco, we had the families over for dinner. And we're there at dinner, and my daughter is sitting there, and she's probably about 10 at that point in time. And she looks at the two of these guys, and she honestly asks, Beef and Jaco, are you guys my daddy's flag lieutenants or you guys my daddy's bodyguards? And the two of them go, yes. I said, you guys screwed up. You should have told my daughter, your daddy doesn't need a bodyguard. But the truth of the matter is, I sure did. And if I had one, these are the two guys that could do it. But, um, no, you know, what I, what I, what I always asked, I never interviewed anybody to be the, the aide, the flag lieutenant out there, folks.

• 2:20:27Speaker 02

  What I would do is go to the senior officers. I go, send me a champion. Send me somebody who's just come out of combat, somebody, somebody who's got a future ahead of them, somebody, somebody who's willing to work really hard. Um, and because I, you know, don't use the flag lieutenant and the aide to carry my bag. I carried my own bag. What I needed was to bring a lieutenant into the meeting to hear what was being briefed or what was needed to be resourced. And be able to turn to that lieutenant and say, do the med need this? Is this what they want? Or what do they want that we haven't? And, you know, I, because that individual, whether it was, um, Jaco or Beef, came right out of the battlefield. Um, and had that credibility.

• 2:21:09Speaker 02

  It was only a year, their turn in the barrel, and it's a very demanding job. I had been a flag lieutenant myself, I understand that. But, um, uh, it was just, Jaco was a tremendous resource for not only me, but the community. And then as well, when Jaco then went back into, you know, his SEAL team and became a task unit commander, he almost becomes like an apostle to the rest of the community to explain why we do what we do, because now he knew, he'd been to the inner sanctum. But, uh, it was an absolute honor. And, you know, the way I considered to be, uh, you know, you and me, our relationship is just like in any relationship of the teams, we were swim buddies. In that necessarily, we had each other's sex, we had each other's back, but I leaned very, very heavily on you and you never, never, never let me down.

• 2:21:54Speaker 02

  You always came through, Jaco.

• 2:21:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and then, um, obviously when we were going through that deployment in Ramadi, it was just awesome. Like I, like I started this off, you know, this, the support that you gave me and thereby the rest of my, my task unit was just, it was awesome.

• 2:22:10Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we were a community at war. It was on our shoulders. And I know that you were taking it very hard because, you know, we were taking some heavies. But when you're at war, you have to realize you're at war. And, you know, there's going to be casualties. And but, you know, at the end of the day, you were highly successful in your mission. And you came out of that with extreme high regard. But, you know, to me, you know, several years later, as you know, we're christening a Navy land attack cruiser up in Bath, Maine. And one of the great honors that I've ever had was normally when you

• 2:22:52Speaker 02

  christen a ship, I mean, everybody there, senators, congressmen, and the Secretary of the Navy is the guest speaker, the main speaker. And because of my relationship with with Mikey Monsour, and with you and Task Unit Bruiser, that the Secretary of the Navy asked me to be the guest speaker there. But I think I also mentioned the speaker. It was Task Unit Bruiser. If you got any questions on why we call it that, look at Lieutenant Commander Wellack.

• 2:23:22Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's awesome. I know we probably could talk for another few hours. And I know that you got to go, which pretty much to me means at some point, you got to come back and we can tell the rest of your story. Because this was not the end of your career of service. And you ended up doing much more. And yeah, you'll have to come back. And next time you're in Coronado, we'll come up and finish the rest of the story.

• 2:23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I tell you, Jaco, I'd love to come back. And we've had a great visit here in Coronado with the Center Change of Command, visiting our teammates, spending, you know, three and a half, four hours, getting briefs from on the community this morning. It's inspirational. But, you know, I believe in a life of service. And as far as a leader is concerned, you know, you've got to be a, you know, a leader who sacrifices, you know. And when I was asked to come back into government, it wasn't on my scope at all. But I came back in and wound up being the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, which I was very comfortable in that. It was my strike zone. But then, when the President asked me to become the Director of National Intelligence,

• 2:24:27Speaker 02

  not necessarily my strikes on him there, but I will tell you, to start off and have a rubber boat in your head, and then years later, you know, you're sitting there as the President's Intelligence Officer at the National Security Council, and even, you know, I had an interesting time there, as I'm sure you know, that I had a testimony there for three and a half hours in the House Select Committee on Intelligence, had to do with the whistleblower complaint. But, you know, for three and a half hours, you're on camera, and you've got some, you know, very, very bright and talented people asking you some demanding questions, but it was the very first time that I was really, really happy that I went to high-risk SEER.

• 2:25:10Jocko Willink?

  (laughing)

• 2:25:11Speaker 02

  And understood interrogation techniques.

• 2:25:14Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you what, even as that, I knew that was happening, and I sat down to watch it, and you can, you know, they look like sharks in the water, you can see them, they're thinking they're gonna, I go, you don't know who you got. Number one is from Brooklyn, number one. Number two is in the Teams, Harvard, the whole nine yards. I said, this isn't gonna go as well as they think it's gonna go.

• 2:25:33Speaker 02

  No, I didn't, you know, I'll tell you what, no, I mean, it was, because, I will tell you this, though, Chaco, there, not only was I representing the entire United States Intelligence Community, but having spent thirty-six years in our community, you know, I really feel like, you know, here I am, I know I'm on national TV, and it's gonna be a pretty important hearing, which probably would lead to what it did. And I just figured, I'm still representing the United States Navy and our special operations community. So I just figured, all I'm gonna do is tell the truth, play it straight. It's as simple

• 2:26:11Speaker 02

  as that. And I did, and I think at the end of it, I felt like I did my job, and I was able to leave with my head held high.

• 2:26:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that was the other thing I knew. I knew you were from Brooklyn, I knew you were from the Teams, I knew that you went to Harvard and the whole nine yards, but I also knew that if they were looking for something that you had done that was immoral, illegal, or unethical, I knew that they could not find it, and they would not find it, because I know you, and I know that you do the right thing. And so that's why I watched that with, with great joy.

• 2:26:49Speaker 02

  Well, just before I got the job, it was the White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney did the vetting. And Mick told me, he said, you know, I've talked to everybody, especially everybody in the special operations community, and I couldn't find one person to say something negative about you. Now, I hadn't been offered the job yet. I said, Mick, give me a day. I'll give you a list of people. I didn't necessarily want that job, but I got it and it went okay. But Jaco, it's been a great honor. It's so good to be with you, and it's always good to be with a teammate. But I'm so proud of you for not only what you did when you were in uniform, but you know, what you have accomplished as far as just not only personally, but the way you've been offered to give back with your leadership and what you're sharing with the world, whether

• 2:27:33Speaker 02

  your books, your podcast. And there's so many people that I know that listen to this podcast, read your books, and really learn a great deal about leadership. And, you know, folks, I tell you, when people ask me, do I know him? I do. Is he the real deal? He's the real deal. And I'm honored, more than I could possibly tell you, to be with you today. And folks, you know, I do plan on taking Jaco back up on this offer and come back and visit you with you sometime in the future. So, thank you, my friend.

• 2:28:00Jocko Willink?

  Be outstanding. And the things I say today are the things I learned from people like you, from our great community. And thanks for coming to talk to us. More important, thank you for everything that you've done for America, for the Navy, for the teams, and of course, for me. It was an honor to serve with you, and I look forward to talking to you again.

• 2:28:19Speaker 02

  Likewise, Jaco. Thank you.

• 2:28:21Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Admiral, Joe Maguire has left the building. And Echo, you didn't even get a chance to sort of ask a question. We were moving pretty quick, and he had another event to attend. So, you have to save your whatever. Did you have any questions?

• 2:28:38Speaker 01

  Not at the mo... I actually asked the one, what's the lockout thing? There's a lot of little stuff, man, that, you know, that I'm like, hey, wait, what is that? Not even necessarily because I don't know what it is and I need clarification. A lot of times, it's like, I don't know what that is, but it sounds kind of interesting. Maybe not to you guys, because that's part of your guys' everyday thing at the time. But for me, it's like, man, even that lockout thing, bro, that's interesting.

• 2:29:01Jocko Willink?

  And I think it's one of those things where imagine if you were hearing a jujitsu story about like you're caught in an arm lock and you were then they had the triangle too and you're and you all I would need to tell you since you know jujitsu if I was like hey I was caught in the arm lock and the triangle both at the same time I started having the walls close in you would know what that meant

• 2:29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah

• 2:29:25Jocko Willink?

  Someone that doesn't understand jujitsu is just like oh like kind of it doesn't really mean that much to me in fact it almost means nothing to them So when the Admiral was talking about that whole lockout thing in the German U-boat

• 2:29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah

• 2:29:39Jocko Willink?

  That is a crazy story that is a crazy story the cold the the the claustrophobia the changes in pressures Did that come across could you recognize how freaking crazy that was

• 2:29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah so it it did come across but you know what else was clear to me that that what you're explaining right now that was the case and and I did not want to interrupt at all I mean aside from at least so I can grasp an understanding of what the lockout procedure is so I know even more but Yeah so the claustrophobia thing anytime you guys talk about submarines I do remind myself because my friend Jeremy would tell me about like these submarines and there's those little diver vehicle things or whatever so

• 2:30:18Jocko Willink?

  Seal delivery vehicles

• 2:30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah so he'd tell me about that and it's like bro it's not like it's not like cool like on the movies you guys are cruising in the office with the thing brother the thing is like super cramped and super and bro I don't like that claustrophobia stuff

• 2:30:32Jocko Willink?

  I know you don't

• 2:30:32Speaker 01

  We'll put it this way I'm attuned to certain cramped

• 2:30:36Jocko Willink?

  Twenty one inch tube by the way twenty one inch tube

• 2:30:41Speaker 01

  Yeah yeah so you guys are talking about that and I'm like boom and then yes then you guys are talking about like these procedures like kind of like oh we all know what those procedures are I'm like wait a second we have claustrophobia you got freaking the submarine you're underwater you're doing all this stuff but I want to kind of want to hear more it's kind of nuts you know But that's not that wasn't the point that he was making at the time so it's like yeah I don't want to derail the momentum of the conversation

• 2:31:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah well at some point maybe we'll go into a little more detail about what those types of operations are like I was lucky because when I came in to the teams we still did that in the normal teams and once the war kicked off we didn't really do submarine lockouts in the normal teams very often if at all not to mention we used to just dive like it was going out of style Like it was going out of style. And once again, once the war started, we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. We're not doing a bunch of combat swimmer dives to prepare, training dives to prepare to go to Iraq. Like there's some rivers, but we're not doing harbor infiltration on Dragers. That's, but I was lucky enough to be able to do that a bunch, a bunch.

• 2:31:47Jocko Willink?

  And just get some of that, get some of that. It is a freaking hard job, man. It's a hard job.

• 2:31:54Speaker 01

  You mentioned something, uh, kinda, kinda in passing, like kinda quick, where

• 2:32:01Speaker 01

  you, you have the operation, but all the steps to go through the operation are just completely painful, like completely painful. So like, you know, you talk about the temperature of the water. If you haven't swam or been in forty, thirty something degree weather, I have ice baths scenario, whatever, but nonetheless, I know what that feels like on that prowl. What if that was just your world, you know?

• 2:32:25Jocko Willink?

  That's your world. That's your world. And that was what was interesting. He was talking about getting into the submarine. After jumping out of an airplane and then landing in the middle of the ocean, then you lock into the submarine going. One person goes in fin first. It's crazy. And by the way, then you're just on the submarine. You still haven't even done the mission yet. You're not even close. You're not even close. You haven't even started the mission yet.

• 2:32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah, so yeah, so it's like that kinda stuff where it's like, man, you could elaborate on the feeling of like a ten second period for a long time and really paint that picture. That would be interesting. That'd be nuts.

• 2:33:03Jocko Willink?

  We'll have to get to it at some point. Nonetheless, as you like to say, we, uh, we, we might not be in those scenarios, but we want to be ready for various scenarios. We want to improve our capabilities for diving, swimming, shooting, living, fighting, whatever we're doing, whatever we're doing.

• 2:33:25Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 2:33:25Jocko Willink?

  How do we, how do we improve our capabilities a little bit here and there? What do you think, Echo Charles? Where should we start?

• 2:33:29Speaker 01

  Interestingly, you talk about diving and swimming. I bought a mask a few months ago. So I didn't know that masks. For like, you know, diving and stuff, had like that many levels to.

• 2:33:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh, there's levels.

• 2:33:42Speaker 01

  Bruh, there's like some good mass anyway, but I got a good one and I was like, alright. Makes you kind of want to go swimming more too, by the way.

• 2:33:49Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:33:50Speaker 01

  So it's like when you get these things, you it kind of pushes you into the game a little bit more.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:33:57Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example. Alright, so what are we doing? We're working out, we're reading, we're listening.

• 2:34:02Jocko Willink?

  True.

• 2:34:05Speaker 01

  When I say working out, there's various kinds of workouts. Obviously, there's jujitsu, there's weights, running, cardio, metcons, all this stuff. Nonetheless, you can take some damage on the way.

• 2:34:15Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:34:16Speaker 01

  Got some doms right now, by the way. Squats yesterday, side note, all day. And conditioning. Nonetheless, you might need supplementation. So, good news is Jaco has supplementation. So first, we'll start with the cognitive and physical stuff. Discipline, go.

• 2:34:33Speaker 01

  Kind of groundbreaking in a way.

• 2:34:35Jocko Willink?

  Very.

• 2:34:36Speaker 01

  Yes. So, let's start with the cans. So, energy drink. Boom, it's the new energy drink already, established already.

• 2:34:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:34:42Speaker 01

  The new one, the new wave, the new paradigm.

• 2:34:45Jocko Willink?

  Isn't it funny? There was all these other companies making quote, "energy drinks", and none of them saw this big, just giant gap in the market. They were just saying, "Oh, we'll put more sugar and more caffeine."

• 2:34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:57Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and more people will buy it.

• 2:35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:00Jocko Willink?

  And they didn't see this big hole. A bunch of people actually wanted to drink things that were healthy and actually gave them real energy, not just a freaking sugar rush multiplied times a, a caffeine jitter and call that energy. So anyways, they didn't see it. Cool, we did. Here we are.

• 2:35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I get it, because like, you know, as a company or whatever, like you kind of, some, let's just say some groups kind of play off of weaknesses of our brains or whatever and go for that superficial, um, you know, whether it be palatable, you know, just that easy, that easy win.

• 2:35:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  Tactical. And they can play off of that and you can get some good numbers with that. That's the thing. So they play on like people's weakness in a way.

• 2:35:44Jocko Willink?

  Play on the short term gratification of human beings.

• 2:35:47Speaker 01

  Yes. So if you could, you know, if you call that a weakness, we'll play on their weakness, right? But the good thing about this is you don't play on people's weakness. You actually play on their strengths, to be honest with you.

• 2:35:58Jocko Willink?

  You help their long-term strategic goals.

• 2:36:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. But you, but the good thing, or one of the many good things about this is that it's both short-term and long-term.

• 2:36:07Jocko Willink?

  It's amazing.

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  Discipline, go the energy. And actually, the one that is the most short-term payoff, as far as taste goes, is the mango, factually speaking.

• 2:36:19Jocko Willink?

  Even though you're drinking a whoop-ass watermelon right now?

• 2:36:21Speaker 01

  Well, you know.

• 2:36:21Jocko Willink?

  You ran out?

• 2:36:23Speaker 01

  It was in short supply.

• 2:36:24Jocko Willink?

  I will say this one thing that's cool about these drinks, the different flavors taste, actually taste different. It's not like the, some other quote, energy drinks that you can, there's a bunch of flavors, but they're all just basically taste like sugar water.

• 2:36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:41Jocko Willink?

  Whatever.

• 2:36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, um, it's been a long time since I had any other energy drinks, but yeah, I can remember that that was kind of the case in one way or another. Nonetheless, okay, so Discipline Go, this is, if you haven't gathered already, it's a healthy energy drink that you will, you will literally be better off after you drink it than before you drink it. And it fulfills all your energy drink needs.

• 2:37:03Jocko Willink?

  Very legit.

• 2:37:04Speaker 01

  Very legit. There's also like the mix, Discipline Go, the mix, mix it up with water, whatever on the go, and capsules. So keep this in mind for cognitive and physical supplementation in general.

• 2:37:16Jocko Willink?

  Also get your immune system in check. Vitamin D3, we got some Cold War, we got the joint maintenance and repair, kind of both in one. Get some joint warfare, get some krill oil, uh, and of course, of course. Glory be to the protein gods. We have milk.

• 2:37:34Speaker 01

  Yep, it's true. Right. If you're trying to, and here's the thing, I don't know if we talk, yeah, we talk about this where, yeah, if you're trying to like build muscle, which I think is a very worthy goal, by the way.

• 2:37:44Jocko Willink?

  We are in support of building muscle.

• 2:37:46Speaker 01

  You want more muscle? You want less muscle, right? The dich- not dichotomy, what do you call them? The simple decision. What do you call that kind of decision?

• 2:37:52Jocko Willink?

  Binary decision.

• 2:37:53Speaker 01

  Binary decision, right? You want more or you want less? Alright, so if you want more, you need extra protein to add to the muscle that you're trying to build. So do you know the minimum amount of protein you need?

• 2:38:04Jocko Willink?

  One gram per pound of lean body mass? Oh, Jaco coming off the top ropes with some bro science from 1996.

• 2:38:12Speaker 01

  From what I understand, that's on the high end for sure.

• 2:38:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well.

• 2:38:15Speaker 01

  But, keep in mind.

• 2:38:16Jocko Willink?

  Let's round it up, right?

• 2:38:18Speaker 01

  Well, let's say, what, let's say the average, let's say someone weighs 180 pounds.

• 2:38:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:38:22Speaker 01

  So you need 180 grams of protein. You know how much protein that, that's a lot.

• 2:38:27Jocko Willink?

  It's a lot of protein.

• 2:38:28Speaker 01

  It's a lot of steaks in one day. And steaks are pretty high in protein, see what I'm saying? So the milk, this serves, this serves that purpose very well. Here's a good thing about milk, like we already know, it actually tastes good, like actual dessert. So now you can have two desserts in one day. You'll be better off than you were. And if you're trying to build muscle, boom, facilitates.

• 2:38:50Jocko Willink?

  You can have breakfast, dessert, lunch, dessert, dinner, dessert.

• 2:38:55Speaker 01

  Snack dessert.

• 2:38:56Jocko Willink?

  Get yourself some milk. But you get all this stuff, JacoFuel.com. If you subscribe, if you want to get it shipped to your house for free, subscribe at JacoFuel.com. We'll send you all the stuff that you order for free. You can also get the drinks at Wawa on the East Coast. Vitamin Shop, you can get all these products as well. And, and a lot of people hitting me up like, hey, can you get this drink, you know, in Milwaukee and in Tucson and in LA? We're working across the country. We're literally having meetings all the time to get this stuff propagated throughout the nation. Cause we don't want, we want everyone to be stronger, faster, smarter and better.

• 2:39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:33Jocko Willink?

  So, we'll let you know as we, as we get out there.

• 2:39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is about the long term and being prepared, 100%. Also, Origin USA. So you go to OriginUSA.com. This is where you can get your American-made stuff, apparel. Got some boots on there, boots and jeans. They'd say that's the, what do you call the flagship? Kind of scenario?

• 2:39:56Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:39:58Speaker 01

  There's some jujitsu stuff on there. Pete was on there. He's demonstrating, or how should I say displaying? Showing, whatever. Some new pants.

• 2:40:06Jocko Willink?

  The new work pants?

• 2:40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:07Jocko Willink?

  I got them.

• 2:40:10Jocko Willink?

  They're freaking legit. I am so stoked.

• 2:40:12Speaker 01

  Brother, there's some, you were talking about wet suits earlier today. And to me, this is kind of the, the image I got. It's like you were talking about those old wet suits and your new high-speed wet suit. It's kind of like.

• 2:40:24Jocko Willink?

  Source, yeah.

• 2:40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So these pants that Pete, Pete was showing, the little video?

• 2:40:30Jocko Willink?

  They're the new work pants.

• 2:40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's like, oh, if you get regular work pants, cool. Eh, it's cool. It's better than no work pants.

• 2:40:36Jocko Willink?

  It's actually not. It's like having one of those old wet suits.

• 2:40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's better than no wet suit is what I'm saying.

• 2:40:41Jocko Willink?

  Marginally.

• 2:40:42Speaker 01

  Okay, there that and that's my point.

• 2:40:43Jocko Willink?

  And there's no reason to. It's not like there's gonna be, um, you know, there's no reason to. Back in the day, it was, hey, this is the cheapest government contractor that can build us wet suits that suck. And then other manufacturers are out there making badass wet suits, but we didn't get them yet. So there's no reason for that.

• 2:41:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So now you got the same deal. Boom. You want the new, the, the, the updated, effective work pants. This is, this is the kind of stuff Origin does. Straight up. That's the game.

• 2:41:12Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna make everything, by the way.

• 2:41:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:41:14Jocko Willink?

  Everything. Uh, also make gis. And hey, if you want to put your gi to the test, come to the Origin main jujitsu camp retreat. Intensive.

• 2:41:27Speaker 01

  Immersion.

• 2:41:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, immersion camp. That too.

• 2:41:31Speaker 01

  And here's the thing about that too, because some, sometimes people will be like, oh, is that, is that thing just super intense? Or like, what is it like? What's up? Like three, jujitsu three times, two times, whatever, a day? They're like, man, like I like jujitsu, but I don't know if I'm down for these, you know, this hell week Navy SEAL.

• 2:41:48Jocko Willink?

  Thirty percent of the people that are there will have less experience in jujitsu than you, even if you only have two weeks of jujitsu.

• 2:41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and.

• 2:41:55Jocko Willink?

  And there'll be some freaking awesome badass black belts and brown belts and purple belts for sure. But there'll be a lot of people that are just getting their start in jujitsu. So come and check that out if you want to. Origin. Check originusa.com.

• 2:42:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's not like it's this big competition, training all the, bro, I, I've, and I'm not gonna name any names. And actually, it's cool. You can go there and not, not spar with people. Go there, just learn, learn the technique, talk with some people, go swim in the lake, straight up. Like, it's a jujitsu vacation.

• 2:42:27Jocko Willink?

  We should have called it the jujitsu vacation.

• 2:42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and, and.

• 2:42:31Jocko Willink?

  You could even call it a va- depending on your, your, your intent going there, you could call it a vacation with some level of jujitsu, depending on what you're curious about.

• 2:42:39Speaker 01

  Whatever level jujitsu you want. You can go level 10.

• 2:42:41Jocko Willink?

  You can go level 10?

• 2:42:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can train three times a day.

• 2:42:44Jocko Willink?

  You can train, you could train probably 14 hours a day if you want to. And you could train zero.

• 2:42:49Speaker 01

  Zero.

• 2:42:49Jocko Willink?

  It's up to you. And it's just kind of a va- it's a vacation with some level of jujitsu involved if you want.

• 2:42:56Speaker 01

  And lobster.

• 2:42:57Jocko Willink?

  And lobster and steak. So check it out, originusa.com. Also, we have a store, by the way.

• 2:43:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:43:03Jocko Willink?

  What's that store called, Echo?

• 2:43:04Speaker 01

  It's called Jocko Store. So anyway, jockostore.com is where you can get your shirts and hats and hoodies, light and heavy. Rash guards on there, some shorts on there. I'm gonna update some shorts. Get some new shorts on there, too.

• 2:43:18Jocko Willink?

  Are they the ones that I've been asking for?

• 2:43:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:43:20Jocko Willink?

  Okay, that's good to know. As soon as those come out, I need five pairs.

• 2:43:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:43:24Jocko Willink?

  Just kinda FYI.

• 2:43:25Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 2:43:26Jocko Willink?

  Just kinda FYI.

• 2:43:27Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. There's a lot of cool stuff on there. Discipline equals freedom, good, anything. When you want to represent while you're on the path, this is where you get your stuff.

• 2:43:34Jocko Willink?

  Are the new shorts gonna be the same material as the old shorts?

• 2:43:37Speaker 01

  You tell me.

• 2:43:38Jocko Willink?

  I say yes, because their material's good to go.

• 2:43:40Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, I agree. I agree. Um, yeah, so, yeah, some shorts on there as well. Um, yeah, if you want something, get something. That's a good way to represent. Also, we have the Shirt Locker. The new shirts, the subscription situation, new shirt every single month. Different designs, not as...

• 2:43:58Jocko Willink?

  Good job.

• 2:43:59Speaker 01

  Good designs.

• 2:44:00Jocko Willink?

  You're hired, for sure. That was a great description.

• 2:44:03Speaker 01

  We collectively have been struggling to demonstrate or to explain the, the, uh, the qua- quality of these new designs.

• 2:44:11Jocko Willink?

  You say we got some cool designs?

• 2:44:13Speaker 01

  They got some, we do.

• 2:44:14Jocko Willink?

  You could have said that.

• 2:44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 2:44:15Jocko Willink?

  You said, you said there.

• 2:44:16Speaker 01

  But that doesn't, that doesn't capture it, though, see? Because every time people are like, "Hey, that design is cool, can I have it?" And I'll be like, "Well, that was two months ago."

• 2:44:24Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:44:24Speaker 01

  See what I'm saying? So I gotta convey it accurately so people know going in. It's an element of trust, for sure.

• 2:44:30Jocko Willink?

  But they're cool designs. Check it out, the Shirt Locker.

• 2:44:33Speaker 01

  Yep, it's on Jocko Store.

• 2:44:34Jocko Willink?

  Hey, also subscribe to this podcast. Don't forget, we have some other podcasts. We got Jocko Unraveling with Daryl Cooper. We got the Grounded Podcast, which we haven't done in a long time. We got the Warrior Kid Podcast and we also have the Jaco Underground Podcast. JacoUnderground.com if you want to subscribe to that thing and get on board and help us build the underground where we're going to be laying in wait and things if things go sideways, we'll be there. We stockpiling material.

• 2:45:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:45:03Jocko Willink?

  We got food, we got water, we got content.

• 2:45:09Jocko Willink?

  JacoUnderground.com if you want to check it out. Eight dollars and eighteen cents a month. Some people know what that eight dollars and eighteen cents represents. Not many though.

• 2:45:19Jocko Willink?

  Take a guess and if you can't afford it, hey, look, we, we want you in the game, even if you can't afford that eight dollars and eighteen cents a month, we'll still just email assistance at JacoUnderground.com and we'll take care of that.

• 2:45:33Jocko Willink?

  Also, we have a YouTube channel. We have a YouTube channel where a lot of the videos, some of the videos, I should say, some of the more premier videos have, I'm the assistant director on and it's very obvious when they're awesome.

• 2:45:45Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, they, uh, I, I released a video recently.

• 2:45:49Jocko Willink?

  Mango Mayhem?

• 2:45:50Speaker 01

  Mango Mayhem. So people are catching on to the whole assistant director thing.

• 2:45:57Jocko Willink?

  Why you say it like that?

• 2:45:57Speaker 01

  Because, well, because people I think give, might give you, uh, well, then again, I guess it's not undue credit because the author, I know you say this is kind of a joke, but like every once in a while you'll add like a little detail.

• 2:46:16Jocko Willink?

  I add a critical detail.

• 2:46:17Speaker 01

  That turns out to be kind of critical. So, okay, so in that video.

• 2:46:21Jocko Willink?

  It hurts you so bad, it hurts you so bad that whatever I add is usually critical.

• 2:46:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so here's the thing. You're, you're right in a way. It doesn't hurt. Okay, we'll use the word hurt. It hurts me not because, ooh, Jaco did it, thought of it and I didn't. It's more that.

• 2:46:39Jocko Willink?

  Jaco thought of it.

• 2:46:44Speaker 01

  It's hard to explain.

• 2:46:45Jocko Willink?

  Bro, that'd be like if I was writing a book about leadership and then you added it, you were like, "Hey, you need to discuss this thing right here." And I couldn't not do it because it made so much sense. And you know what? My ego would be affected by that.

• 2:46:59Speaker 01

  That's okay.

• 2:46:59Jocko Willink?

  And that's where you're at.

• 2:47:00Speaker 01

  That's the part like I, well, maybe it is, but I don't feel overtly that it's my ego. It's more that like, oh shoot, I didn't even see that like frick.

• 2:47:08Jocko Willink?

  How can I be so stupid?

• 2:47:09Speaker 01

  How can I be so stupid?

• 2:47:11Jocko Willink?

  How could I be so pathetic at my job?

• 2:47:13Speaker 01

  No, no, no. How can I not be?

• 2:47:16Jocko Willink?

  Better.

• 2:47:17Speaker 01

  Better.

• 2:47:17Jocko Willink?

  Not a loser.

• 2:47:18Speaker 01

  So you know, you walked up, like in that video, you walked up right at the beginning when you walked up and you're doing this, this part?

• 2:47:26Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:47:27Speaker 01

  Like that? That's pretty good. I gotta give it, I'll hand it to you. Assistant Director Jocko over here.

• 2:47:32Jocko Willink?

  So anyways, we got a YouTube channel. You can subscribe to that. And we also have an album that's called Psychological Warfare that will help you get little moments, get through little moments of weakness. I'll kind of get in your head a little bit. Press play. Go to your MP3 platforms to get some of that. If you need a visual representation of the path, cool.

• 2:47:53Jocko Willink?

  We got that for you too. Well, Dakota Meyer does. Flipsidecanvas.com got all kinds of cool stuff to hang on your wall. I've written a bunch of books. The, the, the latest edition, oh, I don't have it on my table. It's Final Spin. It's a book. I mean, it's hard to describe. It's a transcript. It's, it's a novel. It's a poem. We don't even, the publisher doesn't know what to call it. They've never seen anything like it. All they know is that it, it, they, they are impressed. All they know is that they are emotionally moved by this piece of work. So if you want to get some of that, order it now. Final Spin. Get that first edition. You're going to want the first edition of that because listen, hey, I'm going to write another leadership book, but guess what? That's another leadership book.

• 2:48:39Jocko Willink?

  So even though you get the first edition of a new leadership book, it still is the first edition of a series of leadership books. If you want to get in early on the novels, the first edition. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, The Code of Evaluation and Protocol, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. Way of the Warrior Kid, one, two, three, and four. Mikey and the Dragons, About Face by Hackworth. I wrote a little foreword to that. What an honor that was. And then the OGs.

• 2:49:05Jocko Willink?

  Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership that I wrote with my brother Leif Babin. We also have a leadership consultancy called Echelon Front where we solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. EF, oh, sorry, Extreme Ownership Academy. Go to extremeownership.com if you want to get, if you want to go to the Leadership Gym. Leadership, you don't learn leadership in one day or by reading one book. You gotta get in the gym. You gotta be consistent. Go to extremeownership.com. Check out our online training platform. All kinds of activities going on there. We also have a live event.

• 2:49:44Jocko Willink?

  Next one is Phoenix, August 17th and 18th. We are not sold out yet. People are a little bit nervous, some people, I guess, about Miss Rona. But we are getting close. So that's Phoenix, August 17th and 18th. After that is Las Vegas, October 28th and 29th. Those of all sold out in the past, these will too. Get in on it early. Go to echelonfront.com. Check the events. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom. You heard about Mark Lee today. What a freaking hero he was. And his mom has been carrying on his heroic

• 2:50:27Jocko Willink?

  attitude with her charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And if you, well, let's face it, if you want any more of my tedious testimonies, or you want to have, for some reason, you want to hear more of Echo's ridiculous reflections, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, which Echo only refers to as the Gram, and Facebook, Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to Admiral Joe Maguire for coming on, for sharing his experiences. But more important,

• 2:51:09Jocko Willink?

  And I think you realize this, thank you to the Admiral for your incredible service to our great nation. And to the rest of the military out there right now, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, thank you for your service as you protect freedom and democracy around the world. And the same goes to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all the first responders out there. Thank you for protecting us here at home. And to

• 2:51:43Jocko Willink?

  everyone else out there, think about the impact that you can have. And yeah, think about it, your own life, and you want to have a positive impact in your own life, but think about the positive impact that you can have on others. Think about what you can do by reaching out to people, by supporting them, by doing like Admiral McGuire did for me, by being there for people, by helping them shoulder some of that weight. It isn't

• 2:52:22Jocko Willink?

  about you, it's about the team. So support your team, support your family, your friends, your community, by going out there every day and getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.