183: Remember Your Mission and Remember Your Cause, And Be a "True Believer" With Jack Carr

0:00:00 – Opening 0:07:33 – Jack Carr. Navy SEAL, Author. 1:45:30 – Final thoughts and take-aways. 1:56:25 – Support: How to Stay on THE PATH. 2:23:53 – 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 Jaco Podcast number 183 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  Not one of the guys on the ground had liked this mission. Now, moving to within a click of their target, they had pushed that distraction from their minds and were solely focused on the deadly challenge before them. Glancing at the GPS attached to the stock of his rifle and scanning the terrain ahead, Lieutenant Commander James Reese called a quick perimeter. Snipers were already moving up to the high ground as team leaders joined Reese for a last quick update before the final push to the objective. Even with all the technology at their disposal, things could go wrong in a heartbeat. Their enemy was cunning and highly adaptive.

• 0:55Jocko Willink?

  After 16 years at war, the Afghan saying, "The Americans all have the watches, but we have all the time," rang a bit more true than it had in the early days. "What do you think Reese?" asked a huge beast of a man looking like a creature from another world with his AOR1 patterned camouflaged body armor and Ops Core half-shell helmet with nods firmly in place. Reese looked at his most seasoned troop chief. The light green glow of the nods illuminated through the beard on the man's face. A slight smile that could not be mistaken for anything other than the confident look

• 1:40Jocko Willink?

  of a professional special operations soldier.

• 1:45Jocko Willink?

  "It's just over the rise," Reese replied. "Predator shows nothing moving. No sentries, nothing." His troop chief nodded. "All right guys," he said to the other four men in the circle. "Let's do it." They rose with resolve and moved with the poise of men who are comfortable in chaos, moving up the rocky ridge line to get their teams in place before approaching the target to make entry. "This is too easy. You're thinking too much again. It's just another mission."

• 2:20Jocko Willink?

  Then why this feeling? Maybe it's just the headaches. The headaches had plagued Reese for the past several months, finally prompting a visit to Balboa Naval Medical Center before this deployment for a series of tests. Still no word back from the docs. Maybe it's nothing.

• 2:40Jocko Willink?

  But maybe it's something.

• 2:43Jocko Willink?

  Reese had learned a long time ago that if something didn't look right, then it probably wasn't.

• 2:49Jocko Willink?

  That judgment had kept him and his men alive on many a deployment.

• 2:54Jocko Willink?

  Everything had lined up a little too easy for this target. The intel, the offset infill, the current state of the objective area.

• 3:05Jocko Willink?

  And why the pressure from higher authority to go after this target? When was the last time a flag-level command injected itself into a tactical planning process?

• 3:16Jocko Willink?

  Something wasn't adding up. Maybe everything's fine. Maybe it's the headaches. Maybe it's a bit of paranoia. Maybe I'm getting too old for this.

• 3:31Jocko Willink?

  Focus, Reese.

• 3:34Jocko Willink?

  This wasn't the first time that they had approached a target they suspected was a possible ambush. At one point in the war, when intel had pointed to the high possibility of an ambush, corroborated by multiple sources, both human and technical, Reese would have knocked on the door with a thermobaric AT-4 or a few 105 rounds from an AC-130 gunship. This was the first time that actual tactics had been dictated from higher, from men who would not be on the ground.

• 4:10Jocko Willink?

  Focus on the mission, Reese.

• 4:13Jocko Willink?

  One more check with the Tactical Operations Center. A forward-based command also called the T.O.C. And a look at the Predator feed. Nothing.

• 4:26Jocko Willink?

  Another check with the sniper teams. Nothing moving.

• 4:31Jocko Willink?

  Reese glanced up at the military crest of the hill in front of him. Through his nods, he could see the assault teams set and ready to move.

• 4:42Jocko Willink?

  He couldn't see the snipers. Which gave him cause for a thoughtful smile. Best in the business.

• 4:53Jocko Willink?

  Reese keyed his radio and opened his mouth to give the order to move.

• 5:02Jocko Willink?

  Then it all went black.

• 5:05Jocko Willink?

  The explosion knocked Reese back ten yards and ripped his helmet from his head as the entire military crest of the hill in front of him erupted in a concussion of violence and death.

• 5:18Jocko Willink?

  Teammates, friends, husbands, and fathers who one moment earlier had represented the best Special Operations Force in the world were gone in less than a second.

• 5:50Jocko Willink?

  Somewhere, a true believer is training to kill you.

• 5:58Jocko Willink?

  He is training with minimum food or water, in austere conditions, day and night.

• 6:06Jocko Willink?

  The only thing clean on him is his weapon. And he made his web gear.

• 6:14Jocko Willink?

  He doesn't worry about what workout to do. His ruck weighs what it weighs.

• 6:21Jocko Willink?

  His runs end when the enemy stops chasing him.

• 6:27Jocko Willink?

  The true believer doesn't care how hard it is. He only knows that he wins. Or he dies.

• 6:39Jocko Willink?

  He doesn't go home at seventeen hundred.

• 6:44Jocko Willink?

  He is home.

• 6:47Jocko Willink?

  He only knows. The cause.

• 6:55Jocko Willink?

  And.

• 6:57Jocko Willink?

  Those right there are two excerpts from two books. The first one, a book called The Terminal List. And the second book, a book called True Believer.

• 7:10Jocko Willink?

  And these books are.

• 7:13Jocko Willink?

  Fiction. They are novels and with the exception of. The novel Musashi.

• 7:21Jocko Willink?

  By Eli Yoshikawa. I have not covered any novels on the podcast. But I'm actually. Not here to talk about those novels, the. Novels, these books. Were written by a SEAL. A SEAL that I knew. And a SEAL that is here with us tonight. To share. His experiences in the teams, what he learned. How he ended up where he did. As a retired SEAL officer. A husband, a father. And a writer. Of fiction. His name is Jack Carr.

• 8:04Jocko Willink?

  Welcome to the show.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me on. It's great to be here.

• 8:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, man. Good, good to finally get you out here. I know we tried to hook this up for a little while.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 8:13Jocko Willink?

  It's, uh, it's good and, and you sent me your latest book and I said to myself, okay, well, let's just make this happen.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, man, let's talk a little bit about you.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Well, that's hard to, but. I've never heard that, uh, True Believer read quite so well. So I used to read that to my guys in the teams and then read your, uh, Laws of Combat. Read those to them, kinda to, and, and that one would, you know, just kinda set the stage about what the theory, who we're going after here.

• 8:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Uh, and then your Laws of Combat, which of course I, um, yeah, pass on to everybody I ever worked with, uh, ever since.

• 8:47Jocko Willink?

  Right on, man.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Probably found a couple of them in the book for, for those that, uh, that read them. There's a couple. I put them in italics, you know, to give you credit, so.

• 8:56Jocko Willink?

  Check. So let's, let's talk a little bit about, you know, where it all started. You were like, you're, what year were you born?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, seventy-three.

• 9:04Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  So I-

• 9:05Jocko Willink?

  You're kind of a young'un.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  I'm a, well, what are you, are you one year old?

• 9:08Jocko Willink?

  Seventy-one.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Okay, got it, yeah. No, I'm a child of the eighties though, you know, those formative years were like eighty to eighty-nine.

• 9:15Jocko Willink?

  And you grew up in NorCal?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  NorCal, and my mom was librarian from a very early age.

• 9:20Jocko Willink?

  Were you rural area or city area?

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Uh, rural, yeah. But not too rural, small town, I'd say.

• 9:25Jocko Willink?

  Small town?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, so north of San Francisco.

• 9:27Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Um, but, uh, well, today is D-Day, um, so probably appropriately talk about that. My grandfather was killed in World War II. So very early age, uh, was surrounded by those silk map, he was an aviator, marine, uh, flew the Corsair, which was that plane that had the, the gull wings that would fold up. Um, right about that time, there was a, the show Black Sheep Squadron on, on TV. I went to an airshow and met, uh, Pappy Boynton before he passed away, got his book signed and, um, so I always knew that, uh, the military was where I was going. Um, just earlier on, I didn't know exactly what that was gonna be, but, uh-

• 10:00Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever think about trying to be a pilot?

• 10:02Speaker 02

  You know, fleetingly, I'm sure I did, but-

• 10:04Jocko Willink?

  What about Marine Corps?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Uh, fleetingly as a pilot, just to follow in the footsteps of my grandfather. Um, but, and it became very obvious that, uh, that my skillset lay at a more, uh, primal level on the ground. I was just attracted to that for some reason. Uh, probably a lot of, you know, well, in the DNA for sure, but also the influence of popular culture, the books and movies that I read and growing up. Um, those are the guys that I, that I wanted to be like and, and had backgrounds that I, I wanted to have one day, but, um, my grandfather didn't make it back from, from World War II, so he was killed off Okinawa in nineteen forty-five in May, so near the end of the war. And, uh, but his, his wings made it back, old pictures of his, uh, black and white pictures of his squadron, him by his plane, the silk maps they give aviators back then, because they hit the water with paper, they'd just disintegrate, so they had these silk maps.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Um, so I just grew up with him really as kind of the, the ideal hero, I guess. Um, obviously, never met him and neither did my dad, because he was, uh, born while, while he was deployed. So, uh, so grew up with just knowing that the military was my calling. There was never anything else I wanted to do and then- Early on, I found out what SEALs were.

• 11:07Jocko Willink?

  And your mom was a librarian?

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, still is to this day.

• 11:11Jocko Willink?

  And so were you into reading?

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Yep, yeah, I grew up surrounded by books and yeah, just always naturally gravitated when I got to be about fifth grade, I'd say towards the things that the adults are reading at the time. So Tom Clancy, David Morell, Nelson Demille, A.J. Quinell, J.C. Pollock, Mark Olden, these guys in the eighties that had protagonists with SEAL backgrounds or CIA backgrounds or Special Forces backgrounds. So not having the internet and not having that many nonfiction books written about SEALs, that's what I read and I knew this is where I'm going. And then after that's done, I want to write fiction like these guys. So those are the two things that I wanted to do with my life.

• 11:48Jocko Willink?

  How old were you when you actually found out about the SEAL teams in fifth grade?

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Uh, seven, so second grade.

• 11:55Jocko Willink?

  Second grade?

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:56Jocko Willink?

  You found out about the SEAL teams?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:58Jocko Willink?

  From what?

• 11:58Speaker 02

  So back then, there were four channels back then growing up. So there was ABC, CBS, NBC, and then that one outlier channel that always had some World War II movie on it going all the time. And I was at a remote control back in the late seventies. So Sundays were football days and I was not interested in football at all. But I was interested in that war movie that was playing opposite football. So at a commercial, my dad would look at his watch, I can still remember it to this day, sitting on the couch, and he'd say, "Go." And then I'd have two minutes to run up, change that channel to that outlier channel, and then sit back down, watch that movie, and then he'd say, "Turn it back, back to football two minutes later." So I got to do that and then I'd just wait through the football parts and then run up and change it to whatever war movie was playing.

• 12:40Jocko Willink?

  So this causes attention deficit disorder without question?

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd be trained for early age.

• 12:44Jocko Willink?

  Incredible patience and imagination. You got to fill in the blanks during the play.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  That might be it. And yeah, so one of those movies was The Frogman. And it showed these guys climbing up over the beaches ahead of a conventional force landing and putting explosives on these obstacles. And I asked my dad, "Hey, who are these guys?" And he said, "Those are frogmen." And I said, "Okay, what's a frogman?" He said, "Ask your mother." So I did. And then we went down to the local library because she would take any excuse to get us to the library and do research, show us how to use the Dewey Decimal System, pull out the card. Things, the whole deal and did a little research and there was hardly anything written back then. There was a couple of magazines that had mentions of seals, um, a couple of nonfiction books that had a chapter or a paragraph or two on seals.

• 13:27Jocko Willink?

  That was not much.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Not much at all. And, uh, but my takeaway was that these guys are touted anyway as one of the most elite fighting forces in the world and the training is the toughest ever devised by our modern military. Arguably, that was my takeaway.

• 13:39Jocko Willink?

  Of course, that's the same thing. We all know that's, that's all arguable now.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 13:43Jocko Willink?

  There's all kinds of different hard parts of all different training.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:46Jocko Willink?

  I, I'd never went to Ranger School and if I did go eat an M R E, one M R E a day, I would not, I would not be a happy camper.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Brutal.

• 13:53Jocko Willink?

  But, you know, so everyone's got their little, their little challenges.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:57Jocko Willink?

  I heard the same thing.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Exactly. So they had me.

• 13:59Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, and you find out that it's a, so what did you do? Did you start preparing for it physically?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Yep. Oh, yeah.

• 14:05Jocko Willink?

  What did you start doing?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Everything I did from that. So I guess I do an early form of CrossFit, I guess, uh, before, uh, before CrossFit was a thing in high school. So not in the, you know, in the younger years, junior high, I was still playing soccer.

• 14:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Running around cross country, doing all that sort of, but I do credit cross country, uh, and those hills in Northern California with giving me for whatever reason that, you know, never quit. Uh, I'd see people stopping on the hill that would just give me energy.

• 14:28Jocko Willink?

  Were you like a pretty good runner?

• 14:29Speaker 02

  I was okay. Yeah, I was good. But there were some guys that were really, really good. Um, mine was just, you know, dogged determination really. Um, so I was pretty good, but not the greatest. Um, and, uh, you know, but I love it when I'd see people walking, especially on the hills, when people from the flatlands would come up to our course and, uh, and they'd hit that first hill and just walk. It would just devastate them and that would just, I just feed off that, kind of like a hell week when people would quit. And I always feel bad talking about this, but I mean, it's true. Some people would say, come back, you know, don't quit, come back. I didn't say one word.

• 14:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. See you later.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  This is, this is.

• 14:59Jocko Willink?

  So solid.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. This is what this program is designed to do. Uh, and so I kind of fed off that, I guess. I loved it. Especially when the biggest, strongest, fastest guys for those first three weeks or whatever it was, uh, buds, uh, quit the first couple of hours.

• 15:12Jocko Willink?

  What's up with just studs just quitting?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  First couple of hours. I don't know. People said that was gonna happen.

• 15:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  And, uh, and it did.

• 15:18Jocko Willink?

  And studs where I thought to myself, wow, this guy seems like a complete stud.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:23Jocko Willink?

  Mentally, physically.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:26Jocko Willink?

  Just legit and then just quitting.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Yep. Right away.

• 15:29Jocko Willink?

  How is that?

• 15:30Speaker 02

  I don't know, but I would look at these guys when I first showed up to buds, I'm like, man, that guy's huge. Wow. And he, and he's doing crazy, climbing these ropes and he's not even using his legs and like, oh my God, looking to go on those monkey bar things and. Geez, how am I gonna make it through if this guy, this guy like, there's a guy like that here? And then he quits. I'm like, I see how this works.

• 15:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're mentally weak.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. I could do this. Yep.

• 15:52Jocko Willink?

  So, so you did running?

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:54Jocko Willink?

  You did cross country?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Yep, early on, did that stuff, soccer, lacrosse in, in high school. But then I'd ride my bike to school, which was, I don't know how long, at least 10 miles, I guess. So, early morning, Northern California, cold, and, cause that was part of training, and then I'd get home, and we had this kind of playset, whatever, from when we were kids, and, and I'd do, you know, pull-ups, so I was holding different, you know, trying to, trying to make an obstacle course for myself when I got home. And I would be knocking out like 20 pull-ups at whatever, 13, 14 years old. And then go have like some pasta, or a piece of bread with butter on it for my snack.

• 16:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  And, and started training, started training martial arts pretty early, too. But I was searching, cause a local Taekwondo place, right? And you're doing some kata stuff, and you're learning a little bit.

• 16:43Jocko Willink?

  And you, even you're, how old were you?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Uh, that would probably be freshman, 14, let's say.

• 16:49Jocko Willink?

  So even as a 14-year-old, you're like, wow, like, this seems like, it may work, but it also seems like...

• 16:56Speaker 02

  What if someone hits me in the face?

• 16:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Maybe it won't work, even as a 13-year-old.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:01Jocko Willink?

  Kind of picked up on that.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:03Jocko Willink?

  Which is, I give you credit, cause them guys can be convincing, you know? I mean, that's how you see these videos of people online that are making people fall down by pointing at them and yelling their ki eye at them.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  I know, it's hilarious.

• 17:16Jocko Willink?

  People literally fall down and start shaking.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  It's crazy.

• 17:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  It's crazy. But I think I grew up also, like, talk about that, the influence of popular culture. So, Rocky movies, I was just, wow, man, that's fighting right there. I wanna learn how to do that. How do I learn how to do that in Northern California? Well, there wasn't really a place to go, but that, that tenacity, you know, like getting up every time you get knocked down. Like, I think those things really wore off on me. Like, I took that seriously, and still do to this day.

• 17:46Jocko Willink?

  What kind of music were you listening to?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  I didn't really do the music thing till the last few years, really. I was just like, quiet. Yep.

• 17:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I realized I'm starting to give music less credit than I used to first. I used to look, I used to, when I meet people and talk to them for a little bit, I'd go, how kind of music did you listen to growing up? Because it would always kind of fill me in about kind of who they were because when, when we grew up, you, you only listened to what you kind of, you, you didn't get exposed to a bunch of stuff. You kind of had to figure it out and go down that channel. And so if you listen to heavy metal, okay, I see, you know, I see what you were doing, or you listen to, you know, Lynyrd Skynyrd, okay, cool, I get where I get, I could, you could just kind of know, because people wouldn't say, because what does everyone say now? What do you listen to? They say everything. Because everything's free and they can listen to all these different kinds and it's just wide open. And that's what all these kids say nowadays.

• 18:36Jocko Willink?

  I listen to everything, a little bit of everything. And so.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Don't offend anyone.

• 18:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. And so you just weren't even into music?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  No, not until I got my driver's license and then I kind of, you know, had to because you had other people in the car and they'd bring a cassette tape, a mixtape. And put that thing in and for whatever reason, when I grew up, people listened to stuff like sixties, seventies.

• 18:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, same to me. Well, my dad had a, a Barracuda. And the, the car.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Like the sports car type thing, muscle car.

• 19:04Jocko Willink?

  Three Barracuda, yellow with, and it, and you're saying it impressed.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:09Jocko Willink?

  But it was not, because it was, it was my dad, being a broke teacher, needed a new car and went out and paid whatever, eighteen hundred bucks for this car that was rusty. But it had an eight track in it. And so, and my dad, I think he had one eight track and it was Hank Williams, like Hank Williams.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  That was it.

• 19:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Hank Williams senior. So we listened to a lot of Hank Williams when I was growing up.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  We had Kenny Rogers. Yeah, we had the Gambler.

• 19:33Jocko Willink?

  I'm sorry to hear that.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  We had the Gambler every morning getting dropped off for school. It wasn't an eight track. I think my dad was an early adopter, but yeah, he got a cassette.

• 19:41Jocko Willink?

  Crazy with the cassette player.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Exactly. And I remember to this day, every day on the way to school was the Gambler.

• 19:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. All right. So what did your dad do?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Uh, he was an attorney at that time and then got into real estate later on and then retired early.

• 19:55Jocko Willink?

  It's okay. So you're you're now at what point did you say, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go for sure. Like, what point was this 10 years old? Was this 12 years old?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Seven.

• 20:05Jocko Willink?

  Seven years old. All right. Yeah, this is what I'm doing.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  I'm going.

• 20:08Jocko Willink?

  And what made you decide? Any anything else significant from high school? You're you're playing soccer, you're playing lacrosse, you're running, you're doing pull ups on the monkey bars, whatever.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Trail running, all that sort of thing, just getting ready, thinking about about my next steps. And knowing that there was going to be a little bit of pause there to go to college first, just in case, because we have to have contingency plans.

• 20:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you looked and said like, okay, I'm gonna go to college.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that person, I needed to do that because I needed to get stronger, bigger, faster. Um, and I thought I needed to anyway. I don't know if that's the case or not, but.

• 20:39Jocko Willink?

  Probably not, but you were just more humble and you were thinking, hey, I need to be in better shape.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I thought there was eight guys on a SEAL team and I was going to be one of those guys. And if I was going to be one of those guys, I needed to be in the best possible shape. And at that time, the best possible shape looked like Stallone and looked like Arnold. So I did not look like either of those guys. So and I still don't, I never did. But but I thought I need to hit the iron here. I need to get boxing. And I did a little bit in high school. So so go back to that martial arts school, the Taekwondo thing. There was an instructor there that kind of knew that this wasn't quite the deal, like a brown belt in Taekwondo. And then for my last, I guess, year and a half of high school, he wanted to start his own thing. And so I'd go pick him up in my car because he didn't have one, and we'd go to local park and we'd box.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  And it was like jab, reverse, hook, you know, and the basics. And and that was awesome. I loved it. I absolutely loved it.

• 21:36Jocko Willink?

  That wins a lot of street fights.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:38Jocko Willink?

  The one, two, three.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yep, my learned about a takedown was, you know, like, because he did some wrestling. So I had to do a little of that.

• 21:44Jocko Willink?

  This guy was an early MMA pioneer.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yep.

• 21:47Jocko Willink?

  He told me he had a car.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:50Jocko Willink?

  He could have really made something happen.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Such a great and he's still doing it today. Yeah, Mike Valentine is now. I haven't seen him in years, but he has a a place up in Northern California. And he's still still doing it. And as soon as he found out about jujitsu, he was doing that.

• 22:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh, good for him.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  He was driving to San Francisco and working out with whoever was the San Francisco guy in the early 90s, I guess. And yeah.

• 22:08Jocko Willink?

  Maybe we're talking about health, Gracie.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 22:11Jocko Willink?

  Charles Gracie, maybe. There's a bunch of options up there, yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  But nobody was really doing that. Nobody was mixing stuff up like that I knew about anyway. In my little town of whatever, you know, however many people it was. But then I just kept on that path, just kept and I thought it was gonna be a lifelong path. And, uh, but I peaked in about 95.

• 22:28Jocko Willink?

  And that was in college?

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:29Jocko Willink?

  So you, so you ended up going to college. What do you, what'd you go to study college for?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Uh, well, I wanted, well, I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible so I could get to the SEAL teams. Um, and so justice studies seemed to be, the criminology seemed to be the thing that you could just, hey, that's kind of interesting and, uh, I can get through this thing in four years and get to the teams.

• 22:46Jocko Willink?

  And your backup plan would have been, been some kind of cop or something like that?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  I guess, but I didn't really waste too much time thinking about a backup plan. I just knew that college, having that degree was the backup plan, but I figured that out later. It was full on devoted to figuring out how to get to the teams and then being in the best shape I could mentally, physically, spiritually before I got there.

• 23:05Jocko Willink?

  When did you go to a recruiter? What year of college?

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Uh, after I finished.

• 23:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so after you finished college?

• 23:10Speaker 02

  I thought it was gonna be like Forrest Gump, like you, you go to the recruiter and there's a bus waiting outside and you walk through and you get on the bus and off you go. Like I didn't know.

• 23:17Jocko Willink?

  Totally ignorant.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 23:20Jocko Willink?

  Till you do it.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I did research enough to find out that there was something called a dive farer program. And my, uh, my recruiter didn't even know what it was, but I was in the back of a book and I forget the name of the book, a paperback book that talked about all sorts of different special operations. And again, it had like one paragraph on how to get to those places. And, but the SEAL, it said dive farer program. So I went in there. It was a kind of a scam.

• 23:42Jocko Willink?

  I did, I did that program too.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Total scam. Like they get you to sign on for six years and, uh, they say you get, you guaranteed a chance to try out. And that's all I need. That's what I want. I want the guarantee to try out. That's all I need. And, uh, then you get to boot camp and everybody got a chance and when I was there anyway to try out. I signed up for six of these guys for four and we all got the chance. Dang it. Uh, but anyway, ended up spending the, uh, the 20 years in anyway.

• 24:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you, you, what year was it that you actually enlisted in the Navy?

• 24:09Speaker 02

  96. 96. So got out of college. I thought, like I said, I thought I was gonna walk on that bus. And then I'm training and I roll my ankle and I'm like, oh man, this is gonna be the end. And I can't believe it's like this huge. I thought it was broken. Uh, ended up just being, you know, whatever.

• 24:23Jocko Willink?

  Bad sprain?

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, nothing.

• 24:24Jocko Willink?

  Plus your 20, whatever. How old were you?

• 24:27Speaker 02

  21. And uh, yeah, so you think, you know, you think it's black and blue ankle, that's huge. And uh, it's like, oh man, what did I do? I was running, why was I training that day? I should have just taken, I should have just relaxed, not gotten hurt. And then so I was on crutches for a couple of months and uh, then got back after it and got in the pool.

• 24:43Jocko Willink?

  How long was it from the time you enlisted until the time you shipped out?

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Uh, gosh, you know, there's all those things you're supposed to do ahead of time when you're on, uh, what do they call it? When you're supposed to be going to classes?

• 24:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  I didn't do any of that.

• 24:56Jocko Willink?

  Maps.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Maps, I think. Yeah, I didn't do any of that stuff though, cause it was encouraged, but somewhere I found out it was not mandatory. And I was like, okay, good, cause I don't wanna have to, you know, do whatever, these 10 pushups with these people. I need to be actually training.

• 25:07Jocko Willink?

  Was it in months though?

• 25:08Speaker 02

  No, it was uh, it was months. Yeah, it wasn't years. No, it was like five months.

• 25:12Jocko Willink?

  Like five months or something. Yeah, that's just like a little heads up to people. Like you think, what, like what you thought, which is what I thought. Hey, once I sign up, I'm just gonna get on a bus and that's cool. I'm good.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:22Jocko Willink?

  And really you gotta go survive for another five months or six months as you're waiting to go. Cause they have certain billets allowed and all this stuff, so it's kind of a pain.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Yep, and you gotta do the medical stuff, the dental stuff, take the ASBAB, uh, and all that sort of thing to get ready. So those uh, I think a couple of trips over to the main recruiting station to do all those sorts of things. Get every, the paperwork in line and then uh, then off you go. So, and then I was, and now they have every, all the people that are gonna be in some sort of naval special warfare.

• 25:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Something altogether.

• 25:50Jocko Willink?

  It's more squared away now.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so.

• 25:51Jocko Willink?

  They go through like, they go to, they go to Chicago, I think, for eight weeks.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 25:57Jocko Willink?

  To get ready for BUDS.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 25:59Jocko Willink?

  So you showed up to BUDS, were you ready for BUDS?

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Uh, as, as, I was as ready as one could possibly be. You know, with all that training and all that thought. And then I knew, hey, there's no way I'm quitting. Cause all my friends from growing up knew that I wanted to do this since I was seven. And uh, so there's no way I'm quitting, I'm gonna die. I can't go home.

• 26:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  And tell them I didn't make it.

• 26:15Jocko Willink?

  You know what's weird is people do that right there and they still quit.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:19Jocko Willink?

  Which, which boggles my mind. I, I, the, the quitting thing is hard for me to comprehend. And when I hear about people doing it, like people like that, you know, there was a guy that killed himself recently. And he was that guy and, and he had told everyone, I'm gonna be a SEAL. And he had trained for it and he prepared for it and he looked like a stud. He looked like a beast of a kid. And he played lacrosse and he was varsity this and captain of that. I mean, and then he got to BUDS and for whatever reason, he quit and then he, and then he killed himself. Uh, and you just think, man, like.

• 26:57Jocko Willink?

  Whatever they're telling you in BUDs, don't quit.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 27:01Jocko Willink?

  Just don't quit.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  It's pretty easy.

• 27:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just do not quit. And I know they play psychological games on people of saying, you know, they'll say, you don't belong here and all this kind of stuff. I don't even remember if they said that to me. I didn't care what they said to me. It wasn't even penetrating, you know, anything in my brain. But, but you know, that's what they do. They, they'll say, oh, you don't belong here. We don't want you on the team. And somebody that's sensitive to that, it can get through to them.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 27:29Jocko Willink?

  And make them start believing that the instructors actually, the instructors are going to leave and go order a pizza. They don't, they're not actually thinking about that, you know?

• 27:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 27:36Jocko Willink?

  But they take some kid and they quit. And, and you know what? Good. Like you said, like, good. If someone has that, if someone is gonna quit, please quit during BUDs.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:45Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Didn't those guys watch Full Metal Jacket? I mean, there's all these movies that, that show drill instructors and what it's like.

• 27:52Jocko Willink?

  People are gonna yell at you. People are gonna scream at you. It's gonna be a big game. Did you have any trouble with anything at BUDs?

• 27:57Speaker 02

  So I swam before I got there and I'd, I'd wake up super early, meet the master swim program at five in the morning. Cause I knew swimming was my weak point. I mean, I swam, had no problem swimming, but I wasn't a, a competitive swimmer.

• 28:10Jocko Willink?

  You were so much more prepared for BUDs than me. I'm just like, even the fact that you analyzed like what your strengths and weaknesses were, I was just super dumb. I was just like.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  That's another way to go. And it worked out.

• 28:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was young too, which is beneficial. You know, it's beneficial just to be young because you're just going to adapt.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:29Jocko Willink?

  I mean, your brain isn't even completely developed until you're what, 24?

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Something like that.

• 28:33Jocko Willink?

  So I was 18, 19 years old. I was just full, full adaptation to whatever they're telling me.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  And that's what you have to do in life in general. But, but remember, I distinctly remember going to the pool. So I'm rehabbing my ankle at this point. And I'm going to the pool now and it's, it's outdoors and it's frost.

• 28:51Jocko Willink?

  Pre-BUDs?

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Pre-BUDs. Yeah. So there's like not snow, but that frost, layer of frost on the pool deck. So once you got in, it was actually kind of warm. But you still have to walk across that pool deck and jump in with these people that are way older, but way faster. I was definitely the slowest person in this masters swim program. Cause these people had, you know, swim competitively. Now you're, they're 40, which was old at the time, 42 years old.

• 29:11Jocko Willink?

  Oldest person you've ever seen in your life.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  And they're swimming at five in the morning. Dang. But, so I, so I did that. So I was prepared. For the water and I grew up in the water essentially scuba diving at age nine so I was comfortable in the water which helped out later.

• 29:24Jocko Willink?

  Once again, you are so much more prepared for bugs. I was like, you know, well, I mean, I knew I was, I could swim and I surfed as a kid and that helped, but I definitely wasn't scuba diving.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was free diving for Avaloni up north. So that's been with all those guys. Now, I would, I don't know if I'd do that now. It's like a great like breeding ground up there.

• 29:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  But Avaloni was amazing. I loved it. We camp out up there and just have a great time. But, but even though I prepared like that, the swims were hard. And that first swim, because it's that underwater recovery stroke in 1996, they didn't teach you. Now they teach you how to do this thing. Now they get in the water. Here's your little basics. Here's how you do it. Bring your head up, whatever. So I'd like, what stroke is this? None of the books talked about this. Let me try to do it.

• 30:02Jocko Willink?

  We get this in the masters program.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, not in the master swim program. And I was third to last. I remember getting out of that first swim where they pair everybody up and whatever they call it, the two weeks before you class up, whatever that thing is called. And I was like, man, I'm third to last. And I can stagger out of the water. Like I put out on this thing. And I'm like, wow, what's anyway, they pair me up with this really slow guy. And I think he quit right away. So then they pair up with somebody else who was faster. So I'm barely making the swims in first phase. And then one of the guys in my class was a water polo player from like USC or something like that. And he's like, hey, do you want me to teach you how to do this stroke? I'm like, yeah, it'd be great. And so we went out behind the barracks thing and went out in the ocean. And he just showed me how to do it. And I went from being

• 30:47Speaker 02

  third to last to the next swim, I was third.

• 30:49Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  That was awesome. And I was never third again. I was like fifth or sixth, whatever. But from going from third to last, I distinctly remember to then coming out third after learning the stroke. I was like, I got this.

• 30:59Jocko Willink?

  It's different to swimming with fins too.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  And the way they they teach you to do it is a little bit different, whatever. But now they prepare. Now you're prepared going in physically, like that, that eight weeks they spend in, in Chicago, they learn the strokes, they learn how to lift the logs and not hurt themselves and how to, you know, use the boats.

• 31:15Jocko Willink?

  There's instructions on how to lift the logs.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Pretty sure.

• 31:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, wow.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  How to climb the ropes, mental toughness, classes, all that stuff. Because they went, but you know what happened, of course, once those guys showed up and they were expecting a lot more seals to come through now because they needed more in 2003, five, four, five, six, we need more seals. So let's do this program. And now we just got the fitter quitters. And so same essentially.

• 31:37Jocko Willink?

  That's the crazy thing.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 31:38Jocko Willink?

  The crazy thing is the attrition rate doesn't change.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 31:40Jocko Willink?

  Fitter quitters.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Fitter quitters.

• 31:42Jocko Willink?

  I like that. Because it's, it doesn't matter how many pull ups you can do. I mean, it does matter. And people say, is it mental or physical? It's definitely both. If you can't do, if you can't climb a rope, you're not making it through. It doesn't matter how bad you are. If you haven't put in the work, you're not going to be able to climb a rope.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:57Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, you can get some fitter quitters.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Exactly. I always said that any average high school athlete physically can make it through.

• 32:04Jocko Willink?

  Totally agree.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  It's, uh, but it's the, the, obviously the mental part there that comes in. And you get guys that are in amazing shape, guys that were Olympic athletes or whatever it is. And they quit right away. And I think a lot of that, like the guy that killed himself, maybe, maybe he hadn't, you know, faced adversity.

• 32:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  And the, uh, in the, the ways that you need to, to figure out how to actually overcome it and how to get knocked down and keep moving forward. Um, and you know, you're gonna get hurt, you're gonna play hurt. And, uh, a lot of these guys aren't used to that. They're used to be being treated in a way where if they're hurt, they have a, someone's right there.

• 32:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  They're, they're making sure that they're okay and they're going to rehab and all that stuff. It's not, you know, they're like Lamborghinis. They're going to the shop a lot.

• 32:42Jocko Willink?

  There's no one that really crushes buds.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so.

• 32:46Jocko Willink?

  That just like, oh yeah, everything was easy. Cause there'll be some really good athletes and I did have some stud athletes in my, my, my honor man was a guy named Keith Kamira, who was just a beast. He just fast at everything and strong. He was just a beast, you know? And so I would say there, I guess there are a few guys that crush buds, but most people, they're gonna have some, they're gonna, they're gonna pick apart some weak points in you.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Yep. And that's what you want. I wanted to be tested. That was the whole, that was one of the, the main draws. It's like, I want to see if I can do this.

• 33:13Jocko Willink?

  Did you make it through first time every time?

• 33:14Speaker 02

  No, so I'd, uh, after hell week, uh, my, this legs weren't working, whatever stress fractures, whatever, whatever it was. Um, so they yanked me off the next swim because I was just, I don't know, sinking probably. And said, you're going to medical. And of course you're like, no, I'm not going to medical.

• 33:27Jocko Willink?

  Never.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Exactly. Never.

• 33:28Jocko Willink?

  I will not take me alive.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, I remember them pulling me out onto the boat and being like, you are going to medical now. And I was like, dang it. So I went in there and, but it worked for me. Whatever they did, like some people stayed there at that time, like you could have a guy there for like a year, just kind of hiding out. Um, but for me it worked. It just, they legs needed a little rest and then classed up with the next class.

• 33:48Jocko Willink?

  The next class.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 33:50Jocko Willink?

  What was your attitude when you got rolled? Was it like the end of your life? Were you like, oh my God? Or were you like, okay, cool. Cause I guess there's so many people get rolled back.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you know, I was a little bummed because I had friends with all these guys. They're going on to dive phase and you're like, you're watching them go on to dive phase. And you're like, fuck. But then a lot of them get rolled back for pool comp and then you got half your class back again. So that was great. And pool comp was my favorite like that. And drown proofing, because that's the only time you get to get physical with an instructor. The other time, like you're just there, you're getting, you're getting yelled at. You're being told you're worthless, you know, whatever. But this is the time where it's mono, we mono. It's like you against them and you know, it's a little bit physical. So I love pool comp, past first time, I was comfortable in the water. Uh, but then the drown proofing also, that's where you really get physical. They have those different types of bodies that you have to save.

• 34:38Jocko Willink?

  You mean life saving?

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Life saving, yeah, yeah, that's it. Life saving. So they have the guy that's just there, you know, just like dead weight. And then the one that's fighting you. And that's the one I liked. That was awesome. And they drag you to the bottom and I just be like, and this is probably the martial arts stuff. Just relax because he's working, he's working to keep me down there at the bottom. And then when he comes up for air, then I just go a little, little more. And then he'd get his air and he'd drag me back down. But it was like us together, like I love that part. That was my favorite part of it.

• 35:03Jocko Willink?

  You know what I figured out? I figured out what the choke hold, right? I figured out like, okay, this is a choke, like a rear naked choke that I can use. And the recovery is you, you, I think you put your arm over like almost the same, but you grab them like by the lat on the other side. And I just realized, oh, if I just put my arm over here, it's going to choke this dude. And it's going to make him like get under control and then boom, I can go back to the position. But yeah, I had a good time with that. I failed pool comp.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:29Jocko Willink?

  Because the former UDT guy from NOM who ended up working for me at Trade Ed. And, and, and one day I asked him, I said, you know, do you remember failing me in pool comp? He goes, oh, yeah. I was just messing with you. I was like, oh, cool.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 35:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome. Appreciate it. And then I passed the next time. But yeah, those, those, the water I was pretty comfortable, comfortable in from surfing growing up. But for me, everything, I had to work hard. I had to run hard, all that stuff.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. That's the whole thing. That's what it's all about.

• 36:02Jocko Willink?

  So you get done, you get done with BUDS and where'd you end up going?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Going to Team Five and, uh, you know, back then you're like, oh, what's gonna happen? Oh, North Korea's gonna happen.

• 36:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  So I've gotta go here reading stuff in the ads and it's still gonna happen if you read the news. Uh, so, uh, I went to Team Five. That was my first choice. Um, and just because of that.

• 36:21Jocko Willink?

  So now it's nineteen ninety?

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Ninety-seven.

• 36:24Jocko Willink?

  Nineteen ninety-seven.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Yep, showing up there.

• 36:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so I was still on the west coast at this time. I was over at Team One.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 36:30Jocko Willink?

  And I was, I was in training cell. Probably got, that was right around when I got picked up for a commissioning program. So I'm just trying to think timeframe like all the guys that I know from Team Five were all there.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, old school nineties.

• 36:41Jocko Willink?

  Welcoming you aboard.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. That was great.

• 36:43Jocko Willink?

  Very gentle, welcoming environment.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, actually I loved it, you know, and I thought we'd get there, of course, and get issued a pager and then they'd give us all this awesome gear and we'd be at, you know, the bar drinking and all of a sudden they'd go off like in the movies and we'd fly off and, you know, save the princess and get back in time for beers the next night.

• 36:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  And then, uh, then I get there and it's like, hey, new guy, uh, clean that toilet and paint that wall, change those light bulbs. And I was like, Roger that. Let's do it. I'm gonna change, I'm gonna be the best light bulb changer that, uh, that you've got here. And, uh, so that was a little different, a little.

• 37:15Jocko Willink?

  Did you go through SQT at Group One or did you go through it?

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Second time. Yeah, it was the second class at Group One.

• 37:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  And, uh, yeah, so I went through that one and it was good. There was professionalizing it, standardizing things. Obviously it's, uh, more professional now, but, uh, yeah, it was a great time. I loved that. I had a blast.

• 37:32Jocko Willink?

  And then you rolled into a platoon. What was your, what was your position in your first platoon? What'd you do?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  I was the, uh, assistant comm guy. So, uh, for whatever reason, they're like, oh, college, you're going to comm school. I was like, dang it, I wanna be the point man. Exactly. You must be smart.

• 37:45Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, you must've wanted to be a point man.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. You read those books, read Point Man, of course, by, what, Patches Watson? And that's what you wanna do, watching all those movies. So when they told me I was gonna be a comm guy, I was like, dang it. You know, that's the guy that, well, one, it's the guy that gets shot first in all the Vietnam movies, right next to the LT.

• 37:59Jocko Willink?

  Be edumacated, we making him a com guy.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got the antenna sticking up in the jungle and over the grass and that's where they, so anyway, but I did that and it was actually a great experience being a com guy because you're part of the planning process as a new guy. Um, and then you learn in the radios. Yeah, it was great. So, um, going through that coms course and then bringing back the, the newest, whatever newest radios, newest techniques, whatever it is to the platoon. So even though you have a, a primary com guy, um, you kind of know, you know what's going on after that. That's a good course. It was anyway. It was a long course. Um, so it was good to be part of the planning process. So as for someone that was going to be an officer at some point, I got to experience.

• 38:33Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you even have that in your brain?

• 38:35Speaker 02

  I knew it was an option. Yeah, it was an option. So it was either that or the other east coast SEAL team. And, uh, you know, I wanted to do both of those things, I thought, uh, but I figured, hey, let's give this a, let's give this a, oh, let's check it out. I'm brand new. Figure this out and see if, uh, I'm going to be an officer one day or go to another SEAL team or move on and go to the, you know, the central intelligence agency like all the people I read about and, and watched in the movies. Um, so, and there's nothing going on, right? There's nothing going on.

• 39:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's nineteen ninety seven, get some.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. Nothing happening. You know, some ship boarding, like one platoon did a ship boarding.

• 39:08Jocko Willink?

  Was it your platoon?

• 39:09Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 39:09Jocko Willink?

  Cause I did, I did some ship boarding, Burke in the dirty.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  I, well, I did them right after September eleventh, but this is before that. So it was like, wow.

• 39:17Jocko Willink?

  Pre, pre September eleventh doing ship boarding. It was like, you know, I was walking around like I was damn, you know, the, like whoever I was walking around like I was. Yeah, good, we had big combat experience. It's like, no, you're a loser.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  But back then, that's what you wanted to be doing.

• 39:34Jocko Willink?

  No, and, and to be quite frank, we weren't walking around like, but we were, I mean, I was completely stoked that we got to do something real, that I got to lock and load my gun. Like that was cool. And it was good. It was, you know, good enough. Cause most guys didn't get to do that. Most time you, many guys would just go on deployment and they would train other, other, you know, foreign militaries on how to do stuff. And that's cool. Build relationships with other countries. Cool. All that. Do some big exercises. Cool. But to actually lock and load your weapon and get, have a real loadout was pretty, was like a, a, a big step back then. And it felt. Great for me, but this was, so this is 97 and where'd you go on deployment?

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Uh, so that was a pay comm. So it was uh.

• 40:16Jocko Willink?

  Was it shipboard or no?

• 40:17Speaker 02

  No, not, no, no, this was all the things you just talked about. Yeah. Training in South Korea, doing, yeah, Australia, wherever else. So just the, the normal pay comm type thing. Well, pre-September 11th with not much going on.

• 40:30Jocko Willink?

  And then you come back from that deployment and roll right into another platoon because that's what you guys do. They become a one cruise wonder. You get promoted to one cruise wonder.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:37Jocko Willink?

  Were you the primary comms guy or did you skate out of comms?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 40:40Jocko Willink?

  Did you get any good schools in between?

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Yep. Free fall sniper.

• 40:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 40:45Jocko Willink?

  Double trouble.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So sniper is what I wanted.

• 40:47Jocko Willink?

  You must've been squared away because they don't just give those schools away.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know. Yeah, it's my chief, but uh, yeah, I was.

• 40:53Jocko Willink?

  I did. I checked with him.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  He was a crazy man, that guy. But uh, yeah, so right to, right to sniper school, which is what I wanted, which I always wanted to do. So uh, so got there, did uh, what 73 days, I guess, and what Kalingo or you got the valley fever. Going on. So uh.

• 41:09Jocko Willink?

  But you passed?

• 41:10Speaker 02

  So I passed, but I didn't pass stalking because I didn't grow up uh, doing that sort of thing. So I was shooting, you know, that was good. I grew up shooting. Um, so I had, yeah, no problems there. Uh, but then the stalking was a, was a shock to me. I didn't really understand what was going on. I was crawling. I was crawling for a thousand meters, you know, out to do this and you can just walk for most of that, you know? I didn't know that at the time, you know? Those of us that didn't know what we were doing were just crawling in Nailand in the summer and just, so I came back and did it again and then knocked it out the second time.

• 41:39Jocko Willink?

  We just had, we just had Jason Gardner on and same thing. He, you know, he, he's like, yeah, I was shot fine, but failed stalking.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Hell, no kidding.

• 41:47Jocko Willink?

  And, and then he came back on again and was talking about, well, he talked about some of the mistakes he made and it was very similar to what you said, but they would tell him like, hey, figure out where you're trying to get to and actually analyze the situation before you start moving. And of course, when he was younger, he was just. I'm just gonna go.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:03Jocko Willink?

  And so he just went and he wouldn't make it in time where people would see him. So yeah, that stalking thing is no joke.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the second time was complete opposite. I think I just relaxed.

• 42:11Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you go, did you, when did you go through it the second time? When, when did you go back for stalking?

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Right before, I think we deployed. Yeah, right before we deployed.

• 42:20Jocko Willink?

  You did it during that same workup?

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay. That's cool. That's awesome.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So right back. But yeah, I think I just relaxed and I got there and knocked them all out. Had, oh, you have to get points for people that don't know. We build up points as you stalk or whatever. So the last, I think, couple stalks, I'd already had all my points. So I'm just trying to help other guys.

• 42:36Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  You know, I, yeah, looking back, I'm like, should I really help these people or should they have, you know, should I have gone back to my seal, my buds thing like, but you're different.

• 42:45Jocko Willink?

  How would you help them? Like by trying to distract the instructors or?

• 42:48Speaker 02

  By finding that, that OP, uh, but you have to crawl and get within a certain distance.

• 42:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  And then let them know, hey, no, you're too far, you're too close. Um, risking.

• 42:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  By like, oh, there it is. So he didn't have to risk and look.

• 43:01Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Uh, that sort of thing. So, um, should I have done that? Maybe not. But, uh, anyway, but it, and it gave me good practice too, because I got to push the limits then, which gave me a lot of confidence in what I was going to do later.

• 43:13Jocko Willink?

  That's pretty awesome.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  And then I paid for myself to go to some, uh, some urban sniper course at Pendleton, some, uh, you know, one of these kind of fly by night operations that was going on back then, uh, to teach people how to do whatever. So I went to an urban sniper course that I paid for because I was curious. I didn't do that at the time at Sniper School. So, uh, got to learn about urban hides and all that sort of thing, which was pretty cool.

• 43:33Jocko Willink?

  Sweet. Who's running it?

• 43:34Speaker 02

  I forget the name of it. I think it had like.

• 43:36Jocko Willink?

  But like who were the people? Were they?

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Former, I think former marine snipers, I think that were out.

• 43:39Jocko Willink?

  Well, if it was at Pendleton, I guess it probably was.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  They had some connections there or something. Exactly. Exactly. So, and then they, then free fall too. And free fall was a crazy one because, uh, that was, um, I came back to the team one day and I didn't, I didn't get free fall right away. I did sniper school and then usually kind of like one or the other.

• 43:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Um, for a new guy coming back. Um, and so my friends went and I came back from, and this was the first time that they'd done the civilian, uh, deal where they were training.

• 44:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  At wherever that was. And, uh, so I came back from lunch. It was like, you're back, you know, you're kind of, you have people going to schools and it's, you know, some people that can leave or whatever. Got married. Um, and so I came back and I see Andy Stumpf, who you know.

• 44:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  And, uh, he's got this look on his face and I'm like, oh. That's weird. I parked my truck and you know, there's no, no gate guard at the time. You just drive onto base. Remember that?

• 44:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  And he told us one of our dear friends had burned in and died in freefall, like in that first week. And I was like, and then of course, what does the team do? After night, you know, I go to the family, we're, you know, dear friends and do the whole, all that stuff is my first experience with that.

• 44:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  And so what does the team do? Oh, you're going to freefall.

• 44:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Like a week later after the funeral, I'm like, dang, okay, let's do it. So, uh, so yeah, went to the Yuma, not the civilian one, but went to, went to Yuma, stopped at Bragg first for the, for the air tunnel that they thing that they did back then, the wind tunnel.

• 45:01Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  And then, uh, then onto Yuma. So did those before my, uh, my second platoon.

• 45:06Jocko Willink?

  And then you go on your second, you go on your second deployment now?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 45:09Jocko Willink?

  And when did you go on deployment?

• 45:11Speaker 02

  So a couple of weeks before September 11th.

• 45:12Jocko Willink?

  Oof.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Yep. So Guam, expecting a, uh, one like the first one. Just they were going to train some people and finally get to go to Thailand. Uh, and yeah, two weeks into it, September 11th happened, people start banging on doors up and down the barracks. And we didn't have TVs in our room then. So, uh, you know, phones are ringing because it's midnight, I guess in Guam and, uh, you know, nine AM on the east coast. And we all get up and go down to the basement of the barracks in Guam where we had one TV and we all watched the, the twin towers fall on TV. And I was the intel guy too. So I was comms and intel. And so I'd been reading, I just, you know, read, uh, what the bin Laden book was for that previous year, the man who declared war on America, I think it was called. And so I was doing, I was always reading this stuff. I was always fascinated by it. I was always reading about

• 45:55Speaker 02

  terrorism insurgencies, wanted to make myself the best SEAL I could possibly be. So I knew what al Qaeda meant. You know, I knew it meant the base. And, um, so I gave a, a brief right away and nobody knew that. I remember the CO of, of Guam had no idea who al Qaeda was. And, uh, so I gave my brief and obviously I've been studying it ever since, but, um, that was, we thought we'd be on planes the next day. Thought this is on, let's go. We start palletizing, getting ready. Uh, but it really took a couple of weeks and then, then off we went. And that's when I did the shipboardings, um, because we took over for team three who went into Afghanistan and we ended up taking their shipboarding mission, which actually looking back was a good one because that was my only shipboarding experience. And it was interesting because. It's like a cop pulling over, pulling over someone in the middle of the night. You don't know what you're walking up on. You have no idea.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  And instead of a car and a cop, this is a, uh, a class three tanker that's heading for Iranian waters. And you have a certain amount of time to get on there and turn it around. And it was an E5, I'm turning around a class three tanker, using my GPS and a compass and turning this thing around. It was always, it was pretty cool doing that.

• 46:57Jocko Willink?

  And there's some good coordination that has to happen on those. So it's as a comm guy, you're, you're working a bunch of different networks and then you're, did you end up? Yeah, well, you just said it. You end up a lot of times being the person that knows how to work GPS because you're the comm guy. At least it used to be that way.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Now everybody, that's all they know.

• 47:13Jocko Willink?

  Now, now everybody knows how to do it, but yeah.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Actually, the map and compass, that's why when I, later on, jumping ahead, I had to relearn map and compass. Like, cause I got so dependent on GPS and there was a book, I think it's called, uh, Be Expert With Map And Compass. So when I took over the junior officer training course before I got out, um, we had a really good, uh, map course that we did.

• 47:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, of course, the, the map and compass, like, so I was a comm guy. And when we first started getting issued, this was in like 92, we first started getting issued the big GPSs. And they were, they were like the size of a, and they were big. They were like the size of two shoeboxes, maybe. They were big. The PSN eight with this big giant antenna that was like the size of my water bottle. But, but what was interesting is they, they say, okay, Jaco, you know, you gotta figure out how to work this thing. So I figured out how to work it. And then I said, well, all it does is tells us where we are. And they're like, yeah. And I said, if we have a map and compass, we're good. Like I know where we are on a map and compass for sure. I'm like, I know.

• 48:11Jocko Willink?

  I would see it's different when you bunch get over the horizon, but anyways, so it was kind of always surprising to me that it's so much easier. If you do a good terrain study, you can just walk and you can look at your compass occasionally and you know where you are. Rather than constantly looking at a GPS and getting your night vision trashed from that or whatever. It just, just was a different transition. I mean, and, and then obviously GPS has became so good that, yeah, I mean, they're, they're pretty awesome.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Everyone has one on their watch.

• 48:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they're pretty awesome now.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  But I, but I did like the map and compass stuff because I grew up doing it in the, in the Sierras. I grew up backpacking and doing, but before I came, after college, I went to Alaska for three months and backpacked around up there. Did a, did a national outdoor leadership school up there. And once again, training, getting ready.

• 48:53Jocko Willink?

  You were so ready for buds. I went to high school. That's what I did.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  But that just goes, oh, it doesn't matter. You know, it's all the metal part. It doesn't matter how much you prepare, how little prepare. It's all, if you want it, if you're an average athlete and you want this thing, hey, just don't quit. You'll learn along the way. You'll get in better shape when you start running in that sand. Just don't quit.

• 49:13Jocko Willink?

  That sand will get you in good running shape. So at what point did you put in for an officer package?

• 49:18Speaker 02

  So that's spring before the September 11th deployment. It was, we had a, let's say, a chief that was interesting, a leadership team, I'd say that was interesting. And, you know, the E5 Mafia was not happy. They were, and it was, it was one of those things like, hey, I can complain about it like everybody else, or I can put in this package and, and go and do it better than it was done for me. So, so that's what I did.

• 49:45Jocko Willink?

  And you got picked up first time?

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you already had a college degree and all that?

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. So put in, did, got my, I remember there's, I won't say who he is because I think he's an admiral now, but he was an XO at the time and going for my interview. And it's a Friday afternoon. So Friday afternoon, Team Five workout, included a keg. And so, you know, I didn't, I did the workout, but then I changed into my whites. So now I'm in my whites in the spring and those things are horrible. I hate those uniforms. But so I'm in my whites, getting them all perfect. And I go in to do my interview with the, with the XO at the time, Admiral now. And he's got a beer in front of him and his PT stuff. He's like, I just want you to know how this is going to go. And if it's any indication, this beer should be an indication of how this interview is going to go. And I was like, ah, but I was still, you know, doing military bearing and the whole, the whole thing. But yeah, of course, they, I did, I had a good first two

• 50:32Speaker 02

  platoons as a new guy with no war going on. And so I got, yeah, I got picked up the first time.

• 50:37Jocko Willink?

  And then you went to OCS?

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. After I got back. So, but of course, September 11th happens and I'm like, dang it, I made the wrong choice. Because if, where you want to be is you want to be an enlisted guy. You know, it'll be in the fight for a while first anyway. So, but. It ended up working out well because I got right back from that deployment, did, well, I did a little training trip to, to a place and that was a great experience and then classed up for OCS at, in Pensacola.

• 51:04Jocko Willink?

  Pensacola?

• 51:04Speaker 02

  And did the same things.

• 51:06Jocko Willink?

  I did that too.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  It was awful to do the same things we did in boot camp, folding underwear, folding t-shirts, making our bed, you know, all those things that somehow qualify you to lead men in combat and then right to the SEAL teams, right back to SEAL teams and ended up at a great team that kind of, well, CO had just come back from another East Coast SEAL team. I think he spent almost a year deployed after September 11th and brought his lessons learned back and then he sent me to that team and right downrange. So as a brand new officer, I was, I was downrange fairly quickly. So, timing wise, it worked out well for me.

• 51:38Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's, that's beautiful.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. I got learned, learned a ton on that deployment and then brought that back to my team and then deployed again, right, right away to Iraq. So I got a good.

• 51:47Jocko Willink?

  Then you deployed as an assistant platoon commander.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  I was kind of like a third, what, a third O.

• 51:51Jocko Willink?

  Third O, that's right. There was a time where there was a third O.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  Yep. Third O. So you ended up doing a lot of the admin stuff and you still learn a lot. But that's when, as an extra guy, essentially, that's when Najaf happened. So that's when I had probably the most, the most formative time in uniform was taking a sniper team into Najaf. So it's, you know, pitched combat for, I think it was a two week campaign. So it was 11 days and it was one of the first times, I think, that, that we really went to the conventional side and said, hey, how can we help? You know, we're here to support you in this campaign. Here's, here's what I'm bringing to the table. These snipers, JTACs, we can control aircraft for you. We can pre-plan air and, and this is, this is what we can offer. How, how can this augment you? How can this help? And I'm sure this happened before, but that was the first time that, that I was involved in something like that

• 52:37Speaker 02

  and had a great relationship. Colonel Rainey was the guy's name. He must be a general now or retired, probably retired now. But I had a great relationship with him and we just got after it for 11 days out there. It was great. It was absolutely incredible.

• 52:50Jocko Willink?

  How many, how many team guys did you have with you?

• 52:51Speaker 02

  We had six, I think. And then we had some Polish Grom guys and then Marsoc Det 1, because they were part of that deployment with us. It was the, it was the, I guess, trial run or whatever you call it.

• 53:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I, I, so I, those guys turned over with me in Baghdad and you, because when you guys got to Baghdad from your team.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:10Jocko Willink?

  You went to Mosul.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Yep, first.

• 53:12Jocko Willink?

  And I was down in Baghdad doing the turnover with the Marsoc guys, which I knew a bunch of the Marsoc guys from the old days of doing shipboard deployments with them. And they were a bunch of awesome guys.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 53:20Jocko Willink?

  And then. Yeah, and then I went home and then I guess you came down to Baghdad right before I went home.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Take the PSD thing, take that mission and while that was going on, we were standing that thing up and I learned a ton there too. Cause you're like, uh, what are you, what are we doing? We're protecting the inter Iraqi government officials and we're not turning over with anybody because it hasn't been done before. And the last guy before Alawi just got blown up by an ID. Uh, okay, let's do this. Let's figure it out. And, uh, so I mean, we started with one computer, uh, and my CO from team two and it was, I was at that computer, just like he'd be talking to me, dictating things and putting together the mission, blah, blah, blah. And I was just learning and, you know, chiming in where I could, where I thought I could help.

• 53:58Jocko Willink?

  So you were there when PSD got stood up?

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. With one computer in one small office and then it grew into this huge monstrosity, which it eventually became. But still learned a lot, but that also meant that I was an extra, extra dude as we kind of figured out what was going on. And then I got to go up and, uh, help out with Marsoc Det one because one of those guys had to go back and do something. So I got to go up and help them out for a little bit on the intel side of the house for a few weeks. And while I was there, that's when the job kicked off and they're like, we need snipers. And so they just grabbed snipers and threw us together. Yes. Awesome. Awesome. Yep. I remember the, uh, the CO of team one, so he was attached to that Marsoc thing. So I was essentially working for team one at the time. And I remember him distinctly calling me in because I was the, I was the O and I was taking these guys to do this thing that was kind of ambiguous.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  We're taking over a city as part of a bigger campaign with, uh, uh, two, seven cav. And he said, Hey, whatever you do, and whatever this means, I didn't really know what it meant. I just nodded, but he's like, whatever you do, don't go forward of friendly lines. And I was like, uh, okay. Like, what does he mean? So within hours of being on the ground, we are pushing forward, taking, pushing the enemy back, going up, getting high ground and calling in the Bradleys and Abrams and coordinating all that stuff. So right away I'm disobeying his order and, uh, and getting the job done because that's what it, that's what it took. Uh, but it was, it was incredible to work with those guys and, um, and it was a, a hot pod of people. It wasn't just two, seven cav.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  It was army national guard units. It was air from everywhere, um, all coming together, working together for the first time and making this thing happen and pushing the enemy back towards the Imam Ali. Mosque, which is one of the holiest sites in all of Islam. And on that 11th day, we had that place, all of them in the Imam Ali Mosque. So we worked every day. We'd push forward a little bit and then go up, take the high ground. Everybody'd come up. We'd do that. Maybe they'd be there for a day, though the water would come up. The food would come up. That army logistics train would keep us moving. And then we'd push forward again. And it was incredible to be part of that and help out where we could. But then, of course, we have them right where we want them. And as a brand new guy, I just want to bomb it. I want to drop a bomb on the Imam Ali Mosque. Looking back, you know, that probably not the right decision.

• 56:06Jocko Willink?

  That would not have been.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  No, no. And but.

• 56:10Jocko Willink?

  Tactical call, but not the best strategic.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  No, definitely now, in hindsight, and with what I've studied since, you know, bombing one of the holiest sites in all of Islam probably was not, would not have been the right move. So that was, that was denied.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  But but Matan Al-Sadr was in there, although the Mahdi militia was in there. And then they did some sort of a peace agreement ceasefire-ish thing or whatever. And then we got to watch them all leave and turn their weapons over to the Iraqi National Guard or somebody. And that was the end of that. So and then we dealt with repercussions for a while. But it was a good tactical experience.

• 56:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  Because I got to come back and talk about having, you know, sniper weapon systems, but also being able to have a red dot on those things to clear rooms because we were clearing rooms and then using those same weapon systems to set up and do the job. So got to bring a lot of different ways to make the little, what would become loopholes or whatever in the walls. And, you know, all that sort of thing. So got to bring back and share a lot of that experience.

• 57:05Jocko Willink?

  How much longer was deployment once you got done with that?

• 57:08Speaker 02

  I think like a month or so.

• 57:09Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  So it was kind of like eh.

• 57:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you were just like so stoked.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was pretty good. And yeah, it was a formative experience. And then it was, they called it, it wasn't the surge, but in the SEAL teams, we called it the surge. So we got to deploy a year later instead of a year and a half later. That's really all that meant. So I got to get right back after it.

• 57:30Jocko Willink?

  So yeah, because then you came home.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:32Jocko Willink?

  Now, did you get platoon commander? Was it your?

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Now I'm a second O, the assistant.

• 57:37Jocko Willink?

  Now you're the official assistant.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Working my way up.

• 57:39Jocko Willink?

  The second.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Now I'm in charge of eight guys.

• 57:41Jocko Willink?

  Actually awesome.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  That's great. It was amazing.

• 57:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're super stoked. You're like, well, I just had that awesome deployment.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 57:46Jocko Willink?

  And now I get to do another assistant platoon commander.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Pretty much.

• 57:49Jocko Willink?

  No factor. And this time you got to do an actual workup, or you did a workup the first time too?

• 57:54Speaker 02

  Ish, but I was that, that third O, so I was doing admin stuff here and there, and it wasn't quite the way it is today where you're only doing admin stuff, is that kind of guy attached to the task unit, head shed, or whatever. But essentially, I was doing a ton of the admin stuff.

• 58:06Jocko Willink?

  But you still doing all, you still did the workup?

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:08Jocko Willink?

  You still went to Sea, you still went to Mount, you still went to Land Warfare?

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Not all of them.

• 58:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 58:11Speaker 02

  Nope, because I had my deployment with the other East Coast team in there. I came back, I did Haiti when that went down, because I was an extra guy, so I got to go down there, which was pretty cool.

• 58:20Jocko Willink?

  You make a good strap hanger, huh? You're one of those guys that kind of like...

• 58:25Speaker 02

  I didn't, I actually didn't plan it like that. I was always kind of like, oh, man, I'm not in the, you know, I'm not the second, I'm not in AOIC.

• 58:31Jocko Willink?

  You're giving Good Deal Dave, Good Deal Dave Burke a run for his money.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  It was, it was not a bad time to be just a dude hanging out that they could grab at any time. And of course, I'm like, can you go? Yep.

• 58:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  Of course, I can go. Hey, sweetie, I'm leaving this afternoon for Haiti.

• 58:47Jocko Willink?

  So you, so now you're in your, now you're doing an actual workup, you get to do all the training, and then you go on deployment, and you go back to Iraq again?

• 58:53Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, and hit Ramadi this time.

• 58:55Jocko Willink?

  Sweet.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  So going into Ramadi.

• 58:57Jocko Willink?

  So now it's oh five?

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Oh five, yep, fall of oh five, and that's where I wanted to be. And of course, it changes throughout that workup, you're going here, you're going there, whatever, but I forget at what time it turned to, you were going to Ramadi now. But that's where you, that's where you wanted to be in oh five, oh six. And so we got to get in there. And, you know, it was interesting, because I forget if there was someone there before us or not, I can't, I don't know why I can't remember if there was a turn, there must have been somebody there, but it doesn't stand out in my head, anyway.

• 59:23Jocko Willink?

  I think it was a much smaller depth before you guys were there.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe. And I wasn't part of that initial, that first, when the head shed goes over first, like, the head shed went over, and then I was the senior guy that came over with the rest of the guys. So I didn't really do, when I got, when we got there, most everyone was gone, and it was, it was just time to, time to figure it out. So we got to do a few cool things.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Like going out with the Marines, dressing up like a Marine, getting left behind, do the sniper stuff. You know, not, not exactly what you guys did, because you guys really got after it, but, you know, baby steps.

• 59:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, right on.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  So it was, you know, going, just going out with the Marines in the day, you know, doing those patrols, like... Where this where the IED threat is high and one of the most dangerous cities in the world at the time like that was legit.

• 1:00:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a that's a get some evolution.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, or just being on the base essentially, I mean with mortars coming in at night and I stayed, I didn't stay in that that whatever the the

• 1:00:16Jocko Willink?

  The building.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  The building. Yeah, I stayed out in the tents with the guys. Yeah. And yeah, there's nothing there to protect you from a mortar coming in like you're just sleeping and all of a sudden one little land on you.

• 1:00:27Jocko Willink?

  Mortars suck.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, on the receiving end anyways. And then you and then during that deployment as well, you also went to Baghdad and worked with an indigenous force there too.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. So that's why I didn't see you in turnover. Got to do the second thing in my time in the military that was the most formative and yeah, go do some stuff in Baghdad with a

• 1:00:45Jocko Willink?

  Doing DAs basically.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. Doing that with a more of a civilian type organization and yeah, with a little less, I guess oversight you'd say. So I loved it. Just did fit my personality and my my drive, I guess, like I was a perfect fit for me at that time. Actually, one of the things that happened during that time was the inspiration for the second book. One of the guys that I met there, one of the Iraqis that I was working with. But yeah, that was a that was a great time, learned a ton. We're right there next to guys from Great Britain, other army guys from their their, I guess, premier special operations unit. So and we're doing stuff together and we're training together and

• 1:01:27Jocko Willink?

  Guys had a really good off tempo, if I remember correctly.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  It was a good time to be part of that. Yeah. So I had a blast doing that, learned a ton and I got to stay active. Got to got to got to stay getting after it. Not every night, but you know.

• 1:01:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Good, good off tempo.

• 1:01:40Jocko Willink?

  Good off tempo. And then you wrap up that deployment, which again, these are, these are, you got some choice deployments.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  I got a few good ones.

• 1:01:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Choice deployments.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  It was a good time to to be in. My timing was good there. But then I get back. So now I've done five deployments in a row.

• 1:01:57Jocko Willink?

  And you're married?

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  I'm married. Yep. Got married after that first deployment.

• 1:02:00Jocko Willink?

  And what's the kid count at this point?

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  We are at one.

• 1:02:05Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  One and then two for the next one and then three for the next.

• 1:02:09Jocko Willink?

  So what'd you do when you got home from that deployment to?

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  When you got done with your assistant platoon commander tour. So this is where my good deal train ends and I get back and now I've done five deployments in a row. If you count the enlisted ones, three as an officer, all of them getting after it. And they're like, you need to go somewhere and get some professional development. Oh yeah, they did. Somebody call wind to your scam and they're putting a hope on that thing. Yep. And so my XO had done was the ops, had been the opso in Germany. So he's like, you need to go to Germany and you need to learn what a unit does. Like, ah, unit two, what? Like, that's a place to be in 1944. That's where I want to be, not in 2007. And so I went kicking and screaming and I probably should have just said, Roger that, you know, but you know, I have

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  five deployments in a row and those last three being fairly intense. I didn't want my guys to go back without me, you know, I felt like you're abandoning them to go to Germany and go like taste wine and look at like castle walls in these different towns like that. No. But you gotta go. But since I'd worked with that other government agency, I got kind of, I guess you'd say recruited by them. And while I'm waiting to go to Germany, I go up to DC and do my bunch of tests that they put you through up there. And get a class update to go to, to that organization. And so I get to Germany, I'm there for a few months, it's horrible. I, well, they sent me to French language school first because they thought I was going to go to North Africa, West Africa. How long is French language school?

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Six months, six months. That was actually good, you know, good, whatever, good family time, all that stuff, but I still wanted to be in Iraq. Straight up DLI in. Straight up DLI. Monterey. Yep. Yep. Luckily I was at an offsite, so I didn't have to go on base. So that was, that was good. So I guess, I guess. Another keeping it, keeping it good. Yep. And of course now I find out about CrossFit. So I found out about CrossFit in Ramadi. So now I'm just crushing the CrossFit. And people think I'm insane because no one really had seen that yet. It's 2006, 2007 and they're like, what? Especially outside of the SEAL teams or outside of, you know, firefighters and all that stuff, just the regular gym. They see you doing all the swinging bell bells around like they're kettlebell or whatever. So, so I'm getting in shape. I'm training for my next whatever deployment, trying to make myself better.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  But we go to Germany, get there, hate it. A lot of people there were loving it and that made me hate it even more. And I probably, you know, I probably should have just said, this is where the government needs me. So I'm going to do the best I can while I'm here. And I did the best I could, but. You're not doing anything. It was awful. I shouldn't say that. It is a very important place to be and they have a mission and that's great, but it wasn't for me. So I dropped my papers to get out to go to that, because I always wanted to get back to what I was doing in Iraq and Baghdad in 2006, getting it. And so I dropped my papers and I'm gonna go, just get out and go do that. And then two weeks later, they called me, the CO called me back in and says, hey, there's OIC at Team Seven, got out, there's a spot open, do you want it? And I was not expecting that at all. And I said, whoa, my mind was already

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  set. I was essentially mentally, I was out. I was training, I was getting ready for to go back downrange with this other group. And so I went home, talked to my wife, she was pregnant again with her second child, and we decided to stay in. I'm like, okay, I can get back after to do that leadership role that I became an officer to have. And we went to Team Seven, and that's where I met you.

• 1:05:35Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  So now I get my first taste of Jaco and some finally some actual professional development that mattered. And it's up until that point, it's baptism by fire. Like you show up at Team Two, hey, you're going to Afghanistan. Boom. No training other than the T-shirt folding and underwear folding at OCS. Luckily, I had some really good guys on those deployments that had already been to Afghanistan, that took me under their wing, that showed me how, here's how these nods work. The point man only had them in your last platoons before September 11th. Here's how you use these things.

• 1:06:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and that's kind of the way it used to be. It was OJT and the young junior officers or even the young enlisted guys, you just get trained by the more experienced guys. And that works great if you're lucky enough to have a good experienced guy that has the desire to teach you, that really cares about the job, that wants to do a good job, that recognizes the importance of leadership, and then it works fine.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:06:32Jocko Willink?

  The problem is that's not, it doesn't always work like that. You get a guy that's a knucklehead, you get a guy that doesn't care, you can just end up in a bad situation. And then, and then some young kids, we're young, we're influenceable. What?

• 1:06:46Jocko Willink?

  We're, we're, we're very easily influenced.

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:50Jocko Willink?

  And we see how a bad leader acts and they tell us that that's how we're supposed to act and we start acting that way. It's very, I've seen that happen many times. You know, I'd meet a guy, I'd meet a guy that would be coming through my training and like he wouldn't quite be a good leader. And I, you know, I'd say, just be talking to him like, oh, who was your platoon chief when you were a new guy? And they'd name a guy and I'd say, okay, well, I, you could very easily find the root problems here. Or I'd get a young, oh, I get a platoon commander and I'd say, well, who was your, you know, who was your platoon commander when you were in AIC? And they'd give a name. And they, the guy would be a bad leader and you'd say, okay, well, I know where you got this from. And they'd give me the ability to actually steer them in the right direction and say, hey, you know, I wouldn't be offensive about their old boss or anything, but I'd start like saying,

• 1:07:34Jocko Willink?

  hey, there's another way to look at these things. So, yeah, sure.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:07:38Jocko Willink?

  But it sounds like, but you got lucky. You had some good leadership. I mean, I know who your CO was at Team Two. He's freaking outstanding. And yeah, so you had some good, you had some great mentorship.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he cared about it. He cared about mentorship. And his, the senior guys that he brought with him from his other command also cared about, those senior chiefs, they cared about what the next generation of both enlisted and officers were going to do and how they were going to lead. And so I was very fortunate to be the recipient of that mentorship and that guidance.

• 1:08:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  And, and that, that served me well. And I had a good foundation anyway, but, but, but having that, have somebody that cared, that put a little structure, I mean, not, not, a little structure behind it was, was refreshing. And yeah, I just took all that on board and just, you know, want to be the best leader I could for, for my guys. But now at Team Seven, so that's, now it's, well, it was a good, it was a great experience as an OIC, but most of that was due to the, the training that you brought. And so now I got to professionalize things a little bit, think about them. And now my deployment, my good deal train, I thought ended. And it spiked a little bit and we thought, oh, we're going back to Afghanistan. Yes. And it's going to be you guys. Cause you got,

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  anyway, so it didn't end up being my platoon. So I got to go to the PI, got to go to the Philippines. And at first I'm like, ah, that's a bummer. But. It ended up being a great experience at an outstation, had more special forces guys working for me than I had SEALs working for me. I had multiple outstations that reported to me and we were there to assist, they assisted and advised type of thing, but it was with a Philippine Marine general and he'd been down there fighting that insurgency in the southern island chain since he was an ensign, whatever they, you know, a second lieutenant. And so I took the role of a student with him and amazing guy and just I really

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  learned the area, learned what they were up against, learned how the enemy was adapting to them and how it had changed over his thirty some years of doing that. And of course, he was mentored because they'd been doing that for over a hundred plus years, they'd been fighting that thing. So he was a recipient of mentorship and lessons from the people that came before him. And I took that time because I noticed that the SF guys, the Army SF guys, particularly the warrant officer that was there with me, knew a lot more about counterinsurgency than I did. Like I had the tactical kick in the door, I had that experience, but I didn't have that broader piece yet. And so I took that time in the Philippines to study and read a ton. And who are the foremost experts on counterinsurgency out there? Where are they? How do I get in touch with them? Do they have anything I

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  can read? And so I just really schooled myself up and so it became a kind of a competition between me and him and discussions about counterinsurgencies worldwide, but particularly where we are, but how that applies more broadly. So I took it as a time to, and we did get to go do, they got to do some things down there, the film Marines with us just, you know, helping with some more technical things. But they got to get after it and they lost guys and we were there doing the medevac and doing all that sort of thing. You know, the bodies lined up, the whole deal. And it was, so it was, it ended up being a very, I guess, another formative experience for me. And then I got to use what I learned

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  about working with the Army once again, but in my next deployment as a troop commander, where once again I had, I went back to Iraq and had more SF guys working under my command than I had SEALs. So it was a good, it was a good run.

• 1:11:11Jocko Willink?

  So you, you went through that workup when you were a platoon commander in 2008?

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Eight, yep.

• 1:11:18Jocko Willink?

  Cool. Yeah. So I was pretty settled in because I'd come home in 2006 and 2007, I took over the training. So yeah, we were, we were, we were going hard.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. My first experience, I heard all about this Jaco guy. Like, what? Who is this guy? And, uh, and, uh, the first time I met you, you walked into that room, that briefing room at Fort Knox. The stadium seating and they have the diorama things up for the sand tables up front. And, uh, you know, you came in and gave us this, this talk and I was like, dang.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's go get it. It was awesome. But I had one of my more formative, uh, experience in training in that particular,

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  urban warfare environment thing where I, you probably remember the, the scenario because you probably did it for, for most, uh, the platoons and troops coming through, but you have a mission and you go out there and you're doing that mission. And I'm the ground force commander now, the GFC, and I'm there in my, my vehicle and helicopter crashes, like a few buildings down, a few blocks down. And, uh, that comes over the, they're radioing for help for a couple of blocks away. And we, we still have guys in the building and our guys are taking contact in the building. It was all set up, whatever. And I'm like, I'm hearing that, and I'm not going. I'm going to, I'm going to deal with this problem first. We're going to prioritize and execute. Yes. But I wasn't quite doing that yet. I wasn't quite, I'm listening to the radio and I'm hearing they have a woman screaming,

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  helicopter pilot, female screaming like, ah, they're, they're surrounding us with the, the whole thing. And like, ah, what do I do? And I split my force.

• 1:12:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. I split my force. And, uh, so I, these two vehicles breaking off, you're going to go to the crash site, secure the crash site. We'll then meet you at that crash site and we'll X shell together. So you know what happens next?

• 1:13:01Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yes, I do.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Disaster. Disaster strikes. Everything goes. And that was the point of the, the exercise. I think if you split your force that, I don't know if it happens every time, but, but, uh, in this case it did. It was, it turned up being a disaster. We get out, we leave guys behind. We have to go back in, the whole thing. It was, it was great. It was great. But, uh, I remember sitting down with you afterward and, uh, it really drove home. Yeah. Prioritize and execute. And, uh, if you split your force. Better have a damn good reason to split that force.

• 1:13:32Jocko Willink?

  Just had a guy named John Stryker Meyer on the podcast, the last podcast, you couldn't have heard it yet because it's not out yet. But he's telling a story, he's in Vietnam and this guy's just incredible, sog, just the most insane stories ever. And he's telling a story and he goes, yeah, so I split my forces and I put, you know, four guys on one side of the valley and four guys on the other side of the valley. And we started moving and I had to like find out, bro, because I mean, like this is, this is disturbing to me. And so I said, I was like, hey, explain to me, you know, what, what made you decide to split your forces? I said, I never liked, and he goes, I never, he goes, I split, no, that's what he said. He goes, I split my forces two times in Vietnam.

• 1:14:14Jocko Willink?

  Other than that, it's horrible idea because I didn't even like doing it here. I didn't have a choice. So that is a true statement. That is a true statement. If you can avoid splitting your forces, avoid splitting your forces. And if you have to, you better have a damn good plan. You better have a damn good reason. Cause when, then when you add enemy fire into it, trying to link up forces, friendly forces under enemy fire, I believe that's the hardest thing to do in combat. I think that's the hardest thing to do in combat is separate forces trying to link up with enemy contacts is a freaking nightmare. And so if you can avoid it, avoid it.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  Yep. I had to do that in Baghdad once with a QRF that we'd just talked to on the radio before. And so that was a little, little dicey, but, but yeah, that not splitting your forces, prioritizing, executing, I'll never, never forget that. I never forget that experience. And luckily up until that point, I hadn't been in a situation where I had to do it down range. Cause I probably would have done it. But after that training, I was like, I would think, I think long and hard. Maybe not long and hard, I would think, think it through. Before doing that.

• 1:15:20Jocko Willink?

  It's a tough move to make.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  Yep. That was a great one.

• 1:15:23Jocko Willink?

  For me coming back from Ramadi, I was like super.

• 1:15:27Jocko Willink?

  Paranoid about stuff and really into the fact that like I wanted people to not make dumb mistakes that I made or that I could have made or that I saw other people make like so I was pretty adamant to make sure that guys were learning lessons.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, no, it was amazing. That training was great. And then we went to Nyland, of course, and did the land warfare thing. And I was very comfortable with that because we'd a team on the east coast, we'd done that IMT, individual movement technique, earlier on, I guess, maybe than the west coast. So I had it, I'd done it a couple of times already. So some of my junior officers that had never done it before, and they were like, what are we doing? What? It's not just just online and just the old school. So they didn't quite, quite get it. But I was as a platoon commander, I was very comfortable with that at Nyland. So and it was, it was, yeah, obviously amazing training, especially with the technology that that came along at that time where there was no, there was no hiding from any mistakes that you might have made out there. You got the GPS on you and you go back and you debrief.

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  There's none of that old school 90s like, no, that wasn't me. I think it was so and so over there. I would never do something like that. Oh no, here it is. Here's your number, whatever it was on there. And, and you can watch it all in the debrief.

• 1:16:36Jocko Willink?

  Watch your little, watch your little, your little, what's that, what's that term? Your little icon move around on the battlefield and watch your little icon engage your own forces. Watch that over and over again.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  Right. Yep. No, exactly. And then going through the second time, you know, things evolve and change and, and all that. But going through the second time as a troop commander, then I was even more comfortable with it, particularly in those, those situations. I knew the lessons we wanted to get out of there. And then I could do it a little better even than when I was a platoon commander because I'd already learned some of those in those particular scenarios. But yeah, that was amazing training. And there's no, there's no question the impact that has had on the, on the SEAL teams for the, in a positive way.

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  That was awesome. Yeah, everybody, everyone's down. Oh my gosh. Yeah. A lot of down man drills.

• 1:17:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was a lot. I mean, especially and then what was cool for me and people always remember that, but, but, or they talk to me about it. And, and sometimes even then, you know, this is too much, you know, and the fact of the matter is, if you, if your leadership did a good job inside of a task unit or inside of a troop, if the leadership did a good job and the, and they used decentralized command and the fire team leaders got up and made things happen and they kept things up, like if they did those things, you couldn't, we, the trade at guys, the trade at cadre couldn't take, they couldn't, they couldn't put a bunch of people down because they would get their asses kicked by the troop. The troop would crush them. And, you know, that would usually not happen early on because they would have to figure this out. But once they got good at it,

• 1:18:12Jocko Willink?

  like the trade at guys would say, you know, they'd be calling up myself or the, or the master chief running it and be like, hey, can you bring me back to life? Can you bring me back to life? And be like, no, man, you, you know, you got killed. Of course, sometimes we would bring them back to life to press the platoon harder. Of course, I'm not, I'm not going to claim that we didn't do that because damn, we're going to put the pressure.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:30Jocko Willink?

  But, uh,

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  That was amazing. The down man drills. Yeah. Get you, get you in shape and then, but then it, it gets people pissed off. Like I came back to life and you're pissed and you're not making good decisions. And, you know, and the other thing, it's that you taught me and I passed on and it's I still think about today and it's like it's in the book. Uh, you know, take a breath, look around, make a call. As easy as that. It's like, I think about that a lot. Like, all I gotta do is sit back, get off my gun, look around, what's going on? What's the tactical situation? And make a call. That's it.

• 1:19:03Jocko Willink?

  So, simple, so not easy. So not easy to do. But it's cool when someone like, likes for someone like yourself that's a sniper that likes to shoot and now all of a sudden you're a task unit commander, it's real easy to get to go right back to what you're super comfortable with, which is, hey, I'll just get on my gun and start killing bad guys. But you got 40 other guys that are doing that. And none of those 40 guys are actually making a decision about where you're going to go next to save everyone. So you're the guy that has to do it. So that's, that's a good one. Yep. For sure.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  Back at old pictures, I see that how my loadout changed over the years. Uh, and how by the time I was a troop commander, you know, my, I'm a lot lighter. Well, I have radios now, two of them. And then my mags, I'm like, ah, only, you know, three in one of the gun or whatever it was. But there's a reason for that. It's because that my job is now to control this element and crush the enemy, not to be on the trigger.

• 1:19:53Jocko Willink?

  And then, uh, what was your, what was that deployment like? Where'd you go as a TUC commander?

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  So that was interesting because it was the, uh, it was the withdrawal from Iraq.

• 1:20:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  So, uh, we were there six months. Um, but, uh, it was, because we didn't know if we're staying, if we're going, if we're staying, where our authorities were going to be. Um, where we were going to be based. Uh, there was a lot of questions. Um, so we had to prepare both to stay long-term and to get up, pack and come home. Uh, which is what ended up happening. Um, so I think we got, they made us, our element actually ended up going to the, leaving at the end of November, I guess. There was another month there, but it was getting, packing up and going home essentially. Um, but you're working with a partner force and you're using your, um, technical intelligence to try to prosecute targets. So that, uh, this wasn't going to become a highway of death on the way out of there as the enemy just sets.

• 1:20:44Jocko Willink?

  Did you drive out of there?

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  No, we flew.

• 1:20:46Jocko Willink?

  You guys flew out? No, I was, they drove out pretty peacefully too.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Jocko Willink?

  It was just a big massive convoy. I'll see you later.

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  Exactly. It was not, uh, not what we expected. Uh, so, but, uh, but it was cool for a little bit because you got, uh, I think they, they got a little more liberal with some of the targets there for a while. When they're like, okay, we don't want this highway of death. That's not going to be on me because I denied, I didn't want to let a unilateral op go.

• 1:21:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  When we're leaving anyway. Uh, so, so got for a little, we got to do a couple of ops, but, but, uh, mostly it was, uh, a leadership challenge to keep the guys focused on their mission. While at the same time, getting ready to go home for almost the entire deployment. So it was an interesting time. That was Basra, Southern Iraq. So I hadn't been down there before. The Brits had been there first, of course. Um, totally different terrain than anything I had dealt with before. And, uh, it was, but it was good. It was an interesting deployment. Had a great, uh, senior chief, um, and, uh, who's still in, who's still in crushing it. And yeah, came home and that was the last time I'd ever tactically lead guys on the battlefield. And I knew that. And pretty much as soon as we were airborne on the way home, like. Getting out.

• 1:21:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so that was it, huh? How many years were you out at that point?

• 1:21:53Speaker 02

  I think I was at 16 right there.

• 1:21:55Jocko Willink?

  And what was your family situation at this time?

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  So, three kids and right, it was during the second work, so in my OIC workup, the one where I met you and then went to the Philippines. That's when our middle child was born and we found out, I think it was at the eight month checkup, that something wasn't quite right. And he ended up, well, I'll get to what he had, but we couldn't, didn't know what was going on. He wasn't eating, wasn't eating milestones, there was something off. And my wife knew right away, but I was just like, I was just a kid, he'll eat when he's hungry, that sort of thing. And we didn't know what was happening. So, all during that second, that deployment, they put me in that exceptional family member category five because he was, you know, pretty severely disabled.

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  And which means that you're not going anywhere outside of your current medical situation for your family. So, it essentially takes the, the decision out of the service member's hands, which is a good thing.

• 1:22:49Jocko Willink?

  Meaning, meaning you're gonna stay, you were in San Diego.

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  You're staying there.

• 1:22:52Jocko Willink?

  So, that exceptional service member thing says, okay, we gotta take care of this guy. He's gonna stay in San Diego.

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. So, that's, there's different levels to it, but ours was the most severe.

• 1:23:01Jocko Willink?

  They did that during your second, during your OIC tour or during your TU commander tour?

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  I think during the TU commander tour. The first, we're still trying to figure out what was going on during that first one and, and nobody knew what was going on with him. So, it's, it's a lot of, a lot of doctor visits, all that sort of thing. But my wife did it all because, as you know, when you're in, that pendulum has to be on the team. That's your responsibility as a leader. You owe it to the, to the mission, you owe it to the guys, you owe it to their families, you owe it to the country ultimately, to have that be your sole focus. And that's how it was. The pendulum is over there and my wife got that. That's, that's what you do as a leader, obviously. So, when I got back, well, yeah, when I got back, we still don't know. So, now I've done two workups with this situation, two deployments with this situation. My wife's handled it the whole time, super strong. Get back and I go to BUDs as the OpsO.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  So, now I get to see people ring the bell outside that office and put the, put the helmet down. But in my head, I know I'm done. And I even, I didn't make a, I didn't hide it. A lot of guys will hide it if they're planning on getting out. They won't say anything to anybody in the chain of command because they might stay in or whatever it is. But I'm like, yep, I'm getting out, that's 20. And they're like, no, you gotta go be an XO. No, I'm getting out at 20. And it kind of surprised people when I'd say that. Because BUDs is a machine, that thing's running. And as an OpsO, it's Fairly, I don't know, it's not as dynamic, let's say, as a SEAL team. And it was during that, well, a little after that, that someone told Ross Perot our story, the Ross Perot in Texas, the guy. About your son? Yep, about our son.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  Because you still didn't know what was going on? Right, so this is six years. Taking him to a bunch of different hospitals, and he's six years old. Yep, no idea what's happening, all sorts of different diagnoses. Paid for Cedar Sinai, going up there, who we thought were the foremost experts. Oxygen, my wife would take him to an oxygen tank, 30 days, two hours a day, or whatever it was, that we paid for, just to see if anything would help. Someone tells Ross Perot our story, and this is December of 2013, I want to say. And I get a call, out of the blue, from Ross Perot, who sounds exactly like Dana Carvey impersonating Ross Perot in the 90s. And I'm like, what is going on? And he's like, I'm gonna, we're gonna fix your son.

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  Like, wha- what? And he's like, yeah, we're gonna send the jet, I'm gonna assemble a team of doctors here in Texas, and we're gonna fix him. And then he hangs up. Like, what just happened? That was wild. And about an hour later, his lead doctor at Southwestern Medical Center calls, and says, hey, I know Mr. Perot has called you, we're not gonna send the jet tomorrow, but we are gonna send it. And in the meantime, send us everything you have on your son, any medical records. And we'll assemble a team of genetic specialists here, that will take a look at everything, and we'll bring you guys in for some testing, and see what we can do. And it's like, wow, amazing. So a month later, they send the jet, G550 lands, and we get on, and head off to Texas, and go to a week of testing in Dallas.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  And they sent our blood all around the world, and found a genetic specialist in the Netherlands, who had just discovered this certain genetic mutation that helps form the brain at birth. And that now has a name to it, it's the three doctors that discovered this, but when we found out about it, he was the 13th person in the world, so number 13 in the world they found with this. And it was just called NR2F1, which is the gene that this mutation affects. And being able to put a name to it... For us, especially for my wife, that was so liberating. I can't really describe what it means. Just to put a name to it. It seems like a simple thing, but not knowing for six years and then being able to put a name to it and know that, hey, this is just one of those random freaky things that

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  happens and there's nothing you could have done about it. And that's it. Just we had to put a name to it. So it was like, Roger that. Okay. Now what do we do? And for us, that's our mission in life. He gave us purpose and that purpose and mission is to make sure that he reaches his full potential, whatever that may be, but he needs 24/7 full-time care for life. So, and we have two kids bracketing him on either side. So the real challenge is raising those kids so that their childhood is not solely defined by their brother's condition. And hopefully it makes us all more loving, more compassionate people. And so far, it's worked out that way. But once again, my wife still bears the brunt of that every day because I'm out here. You know, I'm having a nice dinner last night. I'm here hanging out with you and she's at home dealing

• 1:27:28Jocko Willink?

  You make me sound like the bad guy.

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  I go on book tour. How about that? I go on two weeks of book tour and you know, I'm shaking hands and saying hi and all that. And she's, she's got it, you know?

• 1:27:38Jocko Willink?

  The wives, the wives are incredible, you know, mine included. She raised four kids and you know, I was barely ever around. So, and you know, same thing with every guy that we have on here that talks about what their wives had to. And I think Jason Gardner, when he was on, he said, the first time he was on, he said, put up with. His wife had to put up with a lot. And then he came back on and said, like, he didn't mean it like that. It's like actually had the strength to handle is what the appropriate statement is. Hey, you know, the wives, the wives that stick around, which isn't a big number. Most, most women don't have the strength to get through this and deal with this kind of thing. But you know, obviously your wife is a saint and as is mine and like, okay.

• 1:28:23Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna be gone all the time? Cool, I got this. I'm gonna handle it.

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  Yep, and that's how it has to be. So now, hopefully the pendulum is not quite like this. See, like I'm not dealing with life and death situations, so I can, I can help out a little more. But I'm still, this is an entrepreneurial type venture. Riding is not just riding in a cave somewhere and sending it off to New York. It's everything that goes along with building a small business. So right now, it's a, it's a full-on sprint. We have momentum and I don't really have any other speed besides just all in. So, uh, so building this thing and, but it's not like you're deploying for six months. Although things do shift now. So now, uh, even a, like a two-week trip, that, that's like a six-month deployment relatively now, because it's not the country asking you to do this. You don't, you don't owe it to the guys or the mission anymore,

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  uh, type thing. But, uh, yeah, no, I'm super, uh, super fortunate to have the wife that I do. She's so strong. And, um, yeah, our son is, so he's 11 now and has the mental capacity of a two-year-old, I'd say. And, um, but with only, so few people in the world diagnosed with this. I think now they're probably up to, must be in the seventies now. But, um, uh, you know,

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  he just, every day is a, every day is still a struggle. And, uh, but that's our mission. You know, we got him for a reason and that's, I look at it as, we got him because we're strong enough to, uh, to handle it. And that's, I don't know how else you'd have, how else you do look at it. I don't really know.

• 1:29:46Jocko Willink?

  And then, so as this is going on, was that one of the things that made you think about getting out of the Navy?

• 1:29:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. So I didn't think about it while I was doing that OIC platoon or doing my troop commander tour, because I was just all in. But once I got back, like when that plane took off, when we landed in San Diego, when I took a breath, realized I'm going to BUDs. I see people, guys running on the beach, you know, doing the, doing the BUDs thing. Um, that's not why I came in. Um, I came in to do the job. I'd done the job. Now I owe it to my family to, uh, to let that pendulum go back and take care of them. So it was very obvious to me. It wasn't like, it wasn't, it wasn't something I struggled with. Uh, I think a lot of guys like, should I get to stay in? Should I get out? Uh, what's my, a hard time with that transition? Mine was not difficult. Neither was the decision to get out because I was handed my next mission,

• 1:30:32Speaker 02

  really. We just taking care of the family and especially our middle child. So, um, in that respect, my transition, um, easy is the wrong word, but, um, I knew what I needed to do.

• 1:30:43Jocko Willink?

  The decision was clear.

• 1:30:44Speaker 02

  Yep. There was no, no wavering.

• 1:30:47Jocko Willink?

  And then?

• 1:30:49Jocko Willink?

  You knew from your previous, from your childhood, that the job you were gonna take, the job you were gonna go after, after you retired, was gonna be a writer.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. And of course, you can't say that, especially at that time in the SEAL Teams. Like, you know, the, uh, the Bin Laden stuff is going on and, and all that. So, uh, that's when I played very close to the chest, I'd say, uh, to the vest. Um, so I knew what I wanted to do my whole life. I didn't think about it while I was in the teams. It was just like, that's what I'm gonna do next. That's the amount of thought I put into writing when I was in the teams. Um, but everything that I read growing up was part of that education. All the reading nonfiction that I did on insurgencies and terrorism, um, all that fed into it and all the personal experience downrange. So it's almost like, um, I could not be more prepared for what I'm doing now as a writer. Um, but, uh, I didn't, during those last couple of

• 1:31:41Speaker 02

  years, I was just like, okay, ops, so at Bud's, then to junior officer training course, OIC, which was great, but it was only for a couple of months, but I loved that because you get to pass on some lessons, um, and then, you know, move on out. But that last year in the Navy, and I, I think I've heard you talk about this before, uh, and that you didn't do all these things that you're supposed to do when you get out. Like, I had went into the, what are the TAPS, whatever that course is. It was awful. Like, I did all those things that you're supposed to do. I know, I heard you say that. I'm like, you could, how did you get out of that? Well, no one's gonna tell you what's, I mean, you're a big dude. You're not, no one's gonna tell you, you gotta do this. But, uh, I went, I did that course and I went to medical and I went to dental and I got all the signatures and I got my paperwork in order. And that was like the whole last year in the Navy. Uh, I had some spine surgery, had spine surgery in

• 1:32:26Speaker 02

  there last year. Yeah. So that was good. Um, and so got all that taken, taken care of. Uh, but it's during that time where I'm like, okay, my job's to get out of the Navy now? Well, now I'm gonna start thinking about this writing thing. And, uh, that's when I wrote down about seven different ideas. Uh, I put them on the table in front of me, like one-page synopsis type things. And I chose the one that I thought would resonate with people the most. And that's that, that theme of revenge. Cause that's, that, uh, has resonated with me as a kid, growing up, both in movies and books. And it's something that just resonates with people in general, is that, that theme, for whatever reason. So I knew the first book would be, well, that would be the theme of the first novel.

• 1:33:03Jocko Willink?

  And then when did you start?

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Actually writing it. During that last year. So yeah, outline, synopsis, started writing, title came really quickly, all that sort of thing. But then submitted it. So I got out, summer of 2016 was my retirement, and submitted it to Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2016. And I got very lucky, very, very lucky, in that a friend calls me out of the blue and he says, hey, do you know this author, Brad Thor? And I said, oh, yeah, of course, I know him. And he said, well, I know you're writing this book. Do you want to talk to him? Maybe he has some advice for you. And I said, will he talk to me? And he said, let me set it up. Yeah. It's a former SEAL who's out in the finance world now. And they sat next to each other at some fundraiser or something.

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  And so I get on the phone with this Brad Thor guy, and he could not have been more generous with his time. It was kind of like an interview. It was kind of like a why do you want to write type thing. That was the underlying kind of theme of our conversation. And I think he wanted to make sure I was doing it for the right reasons. And I told him the truth about my mom being a librarian and reading all this stuff growing up and all these authors I loved and wanting to do this forever. And he's like, all right, I'm not going to help you as you go along. So don't send me chapters. Don't ask me questions. But if you write a book, if you finish a book, I will let Simon and Schuster know that it's coming. Can't guarantee they'll open it. Definitely can't guarantee that they'll like it if they read it. But as a thank you, your friend told me some of the things you did in the teams. And as a thank you for that, I will let them know it's coming. And I'm like, Roger that.

• 1:34:34Speaker 02

  And he said, when are you going to be done? I said, one year from today. And called him back one year to the day later. And I was like, do you remember me? And he sure did. And I said, it's done. And he said, well, is it done? He says, the best it can possibly be. I was like, well, no, no, I can still work on it a little more, but it's done. He said, well, call me back when it's the best that it can possibly be. And I said, Roger that. So it took another four months of reading, editing, rewriting, getting it to, you know, if you held on to it for 10 years, you could probably make it better by degree. But I mean, it was at that stage where it was ready for another set of eyes. And called him back four months later. And he said, okay, I'll let my editor know it's coming and shipped it off. And she read it.

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  Next thing you know, I'm on a plane to New York and we're having coffee and I think she wanted to make sure I wasn't a crazy person. And she said, hey, I want this thing, but, but you need an agent. And I'm like, well, how do you get one of those? And so she introduced me to four agents and then I, I chose one. Next thing you know, we're off to the races. So I got very lucky.

• 1:35:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's awesome. It does take a little bit of luck. How do you, how do you actually mechanically write? Like, what do you actually do?

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  Yep. So all those seven different synopses that I had ahead of time, where I picked the one. Now all those other ones are turning in to these next novels, even though I might have different characters or whatever. I can morph those ones. So I have about seven different novels in, in the pipe, ready to go. So start with that, that idea, the synopsis, like a one pager, two pager, then an outline. And then as I write, I fill in that outline because new things, new ideas come up, new chapters, new characters. And I add it to that outline. So, and it was in Word up until very recently. And I, so I have a visual representation.

• 1:36:15Jocko Willink?

  What's, what'd you switch to from Word?

• 1:36:17Speaker 02

  To Scrivener.

• 1:36:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:36:18Speaker 02

  Which I'll get to here in a second. Game changing. So yeah, in Words, you're scrolling, copying and pasting, moving chapters around. And then, you know, I said, I don't want to cut and then have it disappear because I'm nervous. Is it backed up? Oh my God. So, so yeah, so I'm filling that out.

• 1:36:33Jocko Willink?

  I know that paranoia.

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  Exactly. Don't, don't want to cut and paste. I want to copy.

• 1:36:37Jocko Willink?

  Copy it, just in case.

• 1:36:38Speaker 02

  Just in case.

• 1:36:39Jocko Willink?

  The power goes out at that moment.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  Something. I hit the wrong thing and it's gone. So yeah, I fill in that outline until I'd say about 75%. And then it becomes not as efficient for me to continue to just have an outline that's now very complete. Now I can just transition to just the story about that point. But yeah, recently I found out about this thing Scrivener. And that it's set up very much like Word, but you, it's broken down by chapter. So you can drag and drop chapters and see how it looks. You can have each one of those chapters have a synopsis. So it shows up as essentially like a card or a yellow sticky. And you're looking at this whole thing and think, oh, you know what? Chapter six should really be chapter three. Drag, drop, and you can move in research.

• 1:37:22Speaker 02

  So you can drag in articles from online, pictures, video into research folders. So it's all right there instead of like, what file was that? Did I copy?

• 1:37:31Jocko Willink?

  You are like a day late and eight bucks too late for me at this point.

• 1:37:40Jocko Willink?

  Seriously, like that sounds like brilliant.

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:43Jocko Willink?

  And I could so use that. And I just finished my eighth book.

• 1:37:47Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:37:47Jocko Willink?

  So that sucks.

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:50Jocko Willink?

  That sounds awesome.

• 1:37:52Speaker 02

  For nine.

• 1:37:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  You know.

• 1:37:53Jocko Willink?

  For nine.

• 1:37:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:37:54Jocko Willink?

  Which I started yesterday.

• 1:37:56Speaker 02

  Yep, and you can import from Word. So I had about half of the.

• 1:37:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  You import from Word and it breaks it into chapters. You just put an icon and let it know whatever that little symbol is where you want the chapter breaks.

• 1:38:06Jocko Willink?

  And then can you export it back to Word?

• 1:38:07Speaker 02

  And I haven't done that yet. So I will be doing that in the next couple of weeks for book three. But I have not actually have imported from Word. I have not exported. So.

• 1:38:16Jocko Willink?

  But you can.

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  You can. Yep. They say you can in the tutorial video and they show you how, but I have not yet done that.

• 1:38:21Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 1:38:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'm all over it.

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  Cause my editor likes it in Word. So.

• 1:38:25Jocko Willink?

  Before we nerd out too hard on this, we'll move on to something else.

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:30Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with these and where did you, I mean, what did you do with your family once you retired? Cause you had the mission of your kid.

• 1:38:40Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:38:41Jocko Willink?

  And your kids.

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:42Jocko Willink?

  You had the mission now that you gotta finish this book. Did you finish that book while you were still active duty?

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  Nope, nope. So finished it just four months afterward.

• 1:38:49Jocko Willink?

  So you set yourself up financially somewhat that you were in a survivable scenario even without alternate income besides your retirement?

• 1:38:56Speaker 02

  I had other businesses.

• 1:38:58Jocko Willink?

  You had some other little, you had some other little side things going on to give you enough money to float this gig?

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  Yep, I have an operation in Hawaii, a hunting operation out there with a couple of the partners. Every so often someone would ask me to do some speaking or whatever, that sort of thing, did some tactical training. Little things like that. But I was set up to be able to move into this financially.

• 1:39:20Jocko Willink?

  And then where did you, where'd you move to?

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  So we got out and we weren't planning on moving because our son, we thought, hey, we have this support network built up now over the last six, seven years. It's here in San Diego and we can never move. We can't, we definitely can't go someplace where it's cold because he just lies down and just. Anyway, it's uh, it would be very difficult to take him to a place where it was rainy, where it was snowy, uh, where you had to put extra clothes on him, like that sort of thing. And then we go to Park City, Utah, the uh, the winter after I get out. And we took our son on vacation with us for the first time. And we started going to Park City during my last couple of years when I'm not, so I built up a ton of leave, I never took leave, uh, until those last couple of years. Um, cause those last couple of years, I'm like, well, I'm not taking guys down range anymore. Um, let's start taking some leave.

• 1:40:07Speaker 02

  Uh, we have all this on the books. So we uh, we'd go to Park City with a few friends from San Diego, cause it's easier to fly to Salt Lake and drive to Park City than it was to drive through bands of traffic to get to Mammoth or Big Bear or whatever else. So uh, so we started doing that the last couple of years. And then we took our son on vacation with us and I mean, we took someone with us to help, so we had an extra set of hands. But we got there and we spent two weeks up in Park City and we thought, you know what? We can do this. We're not tied to San Diego. Uh, we brought someone, yes. That was here full time, yes. Um, but we did it. And that was like, ah, that opened just a few doors for us that we didn't think were open to us ever. And while we were there, I opened this, opened this magazine and said, hey, look at this, look at this house around the corner here. Let's go check this thing out. So we drove around the corner, checked it out.

• 1:40:52Speaker 02

  I'm like, let's move. And we decided right then and there to move and uh, got the house and six months later we're there. And I think it helped to make a physical and psychological break with the military for me. Um, because I was in Coronado and as the op so of buds, I saw so many guys that couldn't let it go. And obviously it's a huge part of who I am. It's in my, in my novels and, and all that stuff is a huge part of me. Um, but I saw guys that kept coming back to buds, kept calling me as the op. So, hey, can I get a tour? I want to show somebody around. Hey, no problem. Come on in, you know? I'm all about it. Um, but I saw they just couldn't let it go. Um, going to all the charity events, uh, going to the same bars, going to the same grocery stores, especially in Coronado. Yeah. Um, so I think for me, it was healthy to say that was one chapter of my life. Obviously a huge influence on me.

• 1:41:37Speaker 02

  I wanted to do it my whole life, but now, now we're moving forward. And now there's a new chapter, and that's as an author, and that's taking care of my family and raising our kids to be good citizens and good people. And that's what I'm gonna do next. And I think it just helps to not run into somebody at the grocery store from a platoon and say, oh, what are you doing? Who's your CO? And all those sorts of same questions that just keeps that tie. So being able to say goodbye to San Diego, and I know San Diego was great to us. Love San Diego, love Coronado, but that was one part of our life, and our new life is in the mountains, raising our kids in a ski town.

• 1:42:09Jocko Willink?

  And you're super stoked right now on that?

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Love it up there. Love it up there. And we got there, we drove, you know, we got the U-Haul, and we drove through the night and all that. And we get there, 13 hours later, because we're chugging along with this U-Haul, and we unload it, and the next day, we go to the grocery store, and we look around, and we're like, man, people in Park City are in good shape. Like, we thought we were in pretty good shape in San Diego. Like, these people are insane in Park City. It just draws these people that want to raise their kids in ski towns. Usually, they've done something somewhere else where they, you know, they're not, whatever, they can live there. And they're really into being in shape, and being the best people physically, mentally, spiritually, whatever, just being the best, most efficient people they can be. And luckily, I had some friends up there

• 1:42:56Speaker 02

  already, and this insane group of guys that works out in the morning, we wake up at 5:00. And once again, that pendulum, this last few months, has been on the writing. But when I first got there, I start working out with these guys that I knew from before. And Hopi Darling is kind of the leader that, he used to be the CEO of Skull Candy. And I know he's CEO, or he has a bunch of other ventures, but this guy is in insane shape. And he's there every morning at 5:30 with some crazy workout. Like, picture your hardest CrossFit workout, and then times it by three or four, add some trail running. It's crazy. And so I showed up with these guys, and they're awesome. But they're all about just human potential, I think is the best way to put it, and maximizing that potential, whether

• 1:43:39Speaker 02

  it's your family, whether it's in business, personally, whatever, just, and staying up to date on the latest and the greatest, and testing things out. And they're an amazing group of people. So I'm very fortunate to get to work out and spend time with them. It's all high performers. We all push each other. And even though I'm not the fastest anymore, certainly not the strongest, especially with this crew, it's cool to get out there and then just be, you know, just be together. It's like a cool team.

• 1:44:05Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Well, I mean, it looks like we're at a pretty good, that gets us to today, you know, where you're at. Probably a good place to wrap the books. Tell us just a little bit about the books. What do we need to know about book one, book two?

• 1:44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the first one's The Terminal List, which I didn't say it out loud for about, for the first year I was working on it. Then I said it out loud for the first time. There's two L's next to each other. And I said it for the first time. I was like, dang it! Like, it's a tough one to say, The Terminal List. But at its base level, it is a story of revenge without constraint. And that's what I wanted to explore. And I think it was I adored a Team Five Ops 1997. I saw there had somebody Xerox'd, copied a thing from the brand new internet that had a picture of a Samurai on it. And it said something about a Samurai going into battle, thinking they were already dead. And, you know, I

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  went back and looked at all my old Bushido books from high school and college. And I thought, oh, wow, they did that because they thought it made them more effective and efficient warriors. They're going into battle, already dead. And I thought, how do you do that with a modern warrior? How do you do that with someone that has a background similar to mine? So I can explore these feelings and emotions behind different experiences that I had downrange in a completely fictional sense. But how do I make him already dead? And then I thought about the church hearings in the late 70s and how the government had tested certain drugs on our nation's soldiers, on mental institutions, college students, without any review, any sort of structure in place with how that's gonna go down. And

• 1:45:42Speaker 02

  things changed after that. And I thought, well, what if somebody didn't get that memo? What if there was something they wanted to test out? They wanted to test it out on some of our nation's most elite soldiers, and then something goes wrong. So how do I free this guy up to think he's already dead and come back and have to use the tactics, techniques, and procedures of the enemy on home soil? So essentially, I wanted someone that thought they were already dead, that now gets to bring what was so effective against us in Iraq and Afghanistan to home soil as he works his way up a list, putting the bad guys in the ground, one by one. So that's really what the first one's about. And then, I mean, if you dig a little deeper into it, more...

• 1:46:23Speaker 02

  Like psychological wise, I guess, it's about a veteran that comes home and brings the wars from Iraq and Afghanistan home to people that have been sending young men and women to their deaths for close, well, coming up on 20 years now, pretty soon. So you can read it like that, too, but that's, that's deep. That's deep. See, and where'd you pick up with True Believer? So it's a continuation of the story. So in high school, I saw it's a, it was on PBS and it was a special with Bill Moyers and he had an interview with a guy named Joseph Campbell, who wrote a book called The Power of Myth and The Hero With A Thousand Faces. And I was fascinated by it because, well, I already wanted to write one day and I remember they talked about George Lucas being influenced by this for Star Wars and kind of the Samurai aspect of different things.

• 1:47:08Speaker 02

  And then how across culture, the hero's journey is similar, very similar with cultures that had never touched each other before. Yeah, China, Native American Indian, Africa, Northern Europe, they all had this similar journey and usually it's a reluctant hero that goes on a journey, emerges transformed at the end of that journey. So that was a big influence. So in writing these- A little something called Mikey and the Dragons. I was just reading that to my kid the other night. And yeah, so he, so he has to go, you had to go into the cave and you have to emerge transformed. But how do you do that with one book? And then how do you make that overarching a series as well? So there's two things I think about as I'm writing. I think about that hero's journey in the context of one singular story and then over

• 1:47:52Speaker 02

  what I hope will be a long-term series. So that's what I'm, what I'm thinking about as I write these things. And then True Believers, the continuation of that story, but it's, I was inspired by somebody I met in Iraq in 2006. And I thought, what if I made this interaction and what I, what I heard through the grapevine later, what if I made this a lot more interesting and fictionalized it? And so that's where the, the second one picks up and it's really a story of redemption. And taking the, still taking the emotions and the feelings behind certain things that happen downrange, but also now exploring what that transition was like, because the hero here in the story, James Reese, has to go through a transformative journey. And the second one's all about redemption.

• 1:48:33Jocko Willink?

  And when is, when does book two, when's True Believer come out?

• 1:48:36Speaker 02

  July 30th.

• 1:48:37Jocko Willink?

  July 30th, that comes out, the terminal list is out right now.

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  It is out, yeah. Second one should have come out April 2nd, but the Department of Defense took seven months to do a 30 day review. I just wanted to make sure I was honoring my former security clearances by submitting it to the Department of Defense.

• 1:48:52Jocko Willink?

  And you just leave, the stuff that they tell you to take out, or the stuff that they tell you to redact, you just, you just black it out?

• 1:48:57Speaker 02

  I just black it out. I didn't know if I write around it, am I still?

• 1:49:02Jocko Willink?

  You did that in True, in the terminal list too, when you sent it to me, I, you gave me a heads up, you said, hey, I just blacked things out. And, you know, obviously my books have been, well, not my kids' books, but my other books have been through the Pentagon Review, and they tell you that could remove certain things, and we would remove it and change it, so it's acceptable to them. But you just blacked it out.

• 1:49:18Speaker 02

  Just left it blacked out, yeah. Cause I was worried, like, if I write around this, and then I publish it, and then, but they come back and say, oh, you didn't quite write around that enough.

• 1:49:27Jocko Willink?

  Did you do that just to be cool, kind of?

• 1:49:29Speaker 02

  And it also adds a little authenticity, helps with the marketing.

• 1:49:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it's like, I mean, I was, I was looking through it and looking at like, what, and I can, I can figure out a lot of them. I go, oh, they, they, they didn't want them to say that. Oh, they didn't want them to say that. So, it's pretty cool. But you can still, I mean, obviously you can still understand all the context around it. You just don't know a certain, like, specific term, or a certain specific location, or a certain specific name. But, yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty cool. Pretty cool that you left it in there. And the books are available everywhere.

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  Everywhere. Yeah. People love the audio. Ray Porter does the audio. He's an awesome dude. He was up for audiobook of the year, this year. So, we're in New York, and it's up there. Well, I texted you, cause you were up there for audiobook, and, you know, you're in your, in your category. So, I was texting you, I took a picture of the screen and everything. But it was cool seeing it up there next to Stephen King. Like, I was like, dang.

• 1:50:16Jocko Willink?

  That was pretty cool. That was pretty cool. You, to find you, you got your website, which is officialjackcar.com.

• 1:50:27Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:50:28Jocko Willink?

  Because you didn't buy the URL jackcar early enough.

• 1:50:31Speaker 02

  I think an insurance guy has it in Nebraska or something.

• 1:50:33Jocko Willink?

  Some guy's holding it from hostage, and you're never gonna get it. Well, maybe you will. Never say never.

• 1:50:39Speaker 02

  Yep. So, that's, yeah, that's a, and that's one that's, if people want to geek out a little more on the weapons, the knives, that sort of thing, the website goes deep dives into a lot more of that stuff than the books.

• 1:50:51Jocko Willink?

  Cause you get your nerd on. You get your weapons nerd on. You're like, you bring the librarian of your mom. To the, to the, the damn Jack Carr weapons scene.

• 1:51:03Speaker 02

  That's it. That's it. So it's on there and, and then on, on the socials, which I am very new to. I'm about a year and a half into this now. It's Jack Carr USA on the socials. And there is a Facebook, but three was just too much. Like, so somebody else just copies and paste things from into there. But on Instagram and Twitter, Jack Carr USA, and those are the ones where I interact with people.

• 1:51:25Jocko Willink?

  You're interacting in the game.

• 1:51:27Speaker 02

  That's it. I'm in on those, but three was just too daunting. Just couldn't handle it. Nope, nope.

• 1:51:31Jocko Willink?

  You know what I do? All three.

• 1:51:35Speaker 02

  It's next level.

• 1:51:36Jocko Willink?

  I'm crazy like that. That's how super motivated I am. I'm on three social media platforms. Kill me now.

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  Man, well, you know, usually I have a, every now and again, I have a hard time going to sleep. My mind's racing. I'm thinking about all these things, thinking about storylines, solving problems on the written page here aggressively like I used to do on the battlefield. But usually I don't have a problem staying asleep. Once I get there this morning up 3:07 a.m. And I'm like, dang, and I took a picture of it for you. So I'm like, dang.

• 1:52:04Jocko Willink?

  Did you post it?

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  No, no, D-Day today. So I didn't, you know, think that would be, you know, so, so I kept my, my D-Day post on point. But I will, I will post it.

• 1:52:14Jocko Willink?

  D-Day. Awesome. Yeah. So I think that's a good place to wrap it. You know, Echo? Jack was just talking about fitness. He's talking about being prepared.

• 1:52:27Jocko Willink?

  Opened up, talking about being a true believer that knows the cause.

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully.

• 1:52:32Jocko Willink?

  You know, what do you know about, you know, sort of that cause, being on the path, believing in it truly?

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully. I do want to comment on how you blacked out the, the classified parts of your book. It's kind of like in the movies, right? Or when they want to, you know, they show movies on HBO or in the cinema, whatever. It's all good. They put it on USA or one of these, you know? Networks, they gotta edit it, right, edited for television. So there's three ways they do it in the movies. They either just take out the whole scene, which is like what they do with books, right, sometimes, like.

• 1:53:05Jocko Willink?

  I guess they could, yeah, usually change it.

• 1:53:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:53:07Jocko Willink?

  Which they do that in movies too.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  In the movie version, they have a dubbed voiceover for the swearing, right? And every once in a while, you have a movie with an actual different scene. Like if you watch Trading Places or something, they have actual different scenes like that they redid. Then the third is the blackout version, what you did, which they just blank it out. So if they're swearing, he'll be like, what the, and the mouth will show it, but they just won't have the audio, right? To me, that's the best way to do it, because it keeps you in the story. You're like, okay, he swore right there. I get it. You can't swear on this network or whatever. But in my opinion, this, the blackout, the physical, like I just saw it in there, it's physically blacked out. Anti highlighted, low lighted.

• 1:53:49Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:53:50Speaker 01

  If you will, it gives it the mystique.

• 1:53:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  Kind of like there's something hidden under here that's classified that you can't know about.

• 1:53:57Jocko Willink?

  So classified.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  You can't know about, you can't even know about it.

• 1:54:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  Even, even that it's fiction, which is even a level up, like a half level up even from there.

• 1:54:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, they're like, wait a second, they're redacting fiction?

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:10Jocko Willink?

  What does that mean?

• 1:54:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I noticed you laughed when you said, when he said like secret, because you and I both know what gets redacted.

• 1:54:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, ridiculous.

• 1:54:20Jocko Willink?

  And it's not really all that.

• 1:54:21Speaker 02

  I know, I don't want to build it up too much, so when we talk about it, I always want to make sure.

• 1:54:25Jocko Willink?

  We'll edit this out. Well, it's so top secret.

• 1:54:29Speaker 02

  So the first one, I didn't, I didn't appeal, so you have a year to appeal these things. And I didn't do it the first one because I didn't have any, enough money. Um, so second one, though, they took out a lot more in this second one. And I'm appealing this one. So, and what you do for the appeal is you find the information on government websites. You can't just go to Wikipedia, whatever else, but on actual government websites in congressional testimony, um, out there via the government. Um, so we're appealing this one and almost everything in there except for one little phrase. Um, we found it on government websites. So we're appealing so that if the paperback comes out in this, now you can see what the government didn't want you to see. But it's, I don't want to build it up too much because it's really.

• 1:55:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's not as cool as it sounds.

• 1:55:14Speaker 02

  No, but, uh, the one thing that they, they took out was so surprising as I made up. So I made up a location because I'd been there before I came in the military. So I used it as a location in the novel because it made sense where it starts. Second one is kind of starts in Africa and then it goes up here and you know, goes into whatever. But I'm like, this would be a good place for kind of the cave. Got to go there and change, got to transform. And so I just made it up because I'd been there. I could describe the rocks, I could describe the mountains, I could describe the architecture. So I put it in there, they blacked it all out. It's totally made up. They blacked it all out, but they left in by accident. The, uh, the capital of that country.

• 1:55:53Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 1:55:53Speaker 02

  So I blacked it out for them, knowing the intent.

• 1:55:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:56Speaker 02

  Knowing their intent, I took it out for them, but they missed that. They took out the type of architecture. They took out the mountains. They took out any reference to the country, which is so strange, but they left in by accident. The capital.

• 1:56:07Jocko Willink?

  So you know what that means, right?

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:09Jocko Willink?

  That means somebody else was up in that cave getting their retransformation going on.

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  Yep. Exactly.

• 1:56:16Jocko Willink?

  Truth is stranger than fiction.

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's good. That's another selling point in a way when you can say this, like I'm revealing in this book, what the government didn't want you to see factually.

• 1:56:26Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly. So the paperback, the, yeah, yeah, we'll see how it goes.

• 1:56:31Speaker 01

  Cool, man. Well, one day, what, did you revisit jujitsu or what? I mean, I know you're doing these hard exercises.

• 1:56:36Jocko Willink?

  About to take heavies right now.

• 1:56:37Speaker 02

  I know, I know. So I dabbled through the years. Um, but essentially what I did up until 95, that's really my base. And I gotta, I'm obviously shooting, well, not obviously. So I'm shooting all the time, staying shape, that sort of thing. But, uh, the jujitsu is wherever I am right now, that is where my martial ground fighting skills are going to remain.

• 1:56:58Jocko Willink?

  Wait, wait, why are you committing to that right now?

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  Well, one, the spine surgery. Two, uh, two, just time wise and knowing where my focus needs to be right now.

• 1:57:07Jocko Willink?

  What do you think, what do you think's worse for your spine? Cleaning jerks or grappling?

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  Cleaning jerks.

• 1:57:15Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna have to agree.

• 1:57:15Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:57:16Jocko Willink?

  And I love cleaning jerks. I don't, I don't actually think cleaning jerks are bad for your spine. I think they're good for your spine, but grappling.

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  We'll say it's more taxing.

• 1:57:22Jocko Willink?

  That's the, this is to delve into how you get your information for your little books, right?

• 1:57:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:28Jocko Willink?

  You sent me a text, whatever, like two years ago. Hey, if a guy was in Virginia, wanted to train with like the best. On the east coast, where would he go and train?

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:57:39Jocko Willink?

  You sent me that text, I'm like, send him to Henzo Gracie.

• 1:57:42Speaker 02

  Sure did. He got right back to me. I appreciated it. And it went right in the book.

• 1:57:46Jocko Willink?

  That's the easiest research you've ever done.

• 1:57:49Speaker 02

  It was great.

• 1:57:49Jocko Willink?

  Text Jaco.

• 1:57:50Speaker 02

  Perfect. Yep. And it made it right in the book and then I moved on.

• 1:57:53Jocko Willink?

  Bro, I feel bad when people text me and I don't text them back like right away.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  Oh, really? So you must feel real bad with me then?

• 1:57:59Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  The whole right away thing is real foreign to me.

• 1:58:03Jocko Willink?

  But sometimes it just doesn't, like getting a lot of texts and like you gotta sit there and, you know? But I try and text people back eventually, or you might need to hit me with a little reminder. You'll follow up.

• 1:58:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. Well, hey, um, well, doing jujitsu and peaking at 95, staying there is better than not taking jujitsu and not.

• 1:58:21Jocko Willink?

  What about the kids?

• 1:58:22Speaker 02

  The kids were in it. Yep. Right away. Daughter in it, uh, from maybe age four.

• 1:58:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh, just in the game right now.

• 1:58:29Speaker 02

  In Park City, she's not. Yeah. So now that we're in.

• 1:58:33Jocko Willink?

  We need to talk, bro.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So she's, uh, into snowboarding now and tennis. So she turned 13.

• 1:58:39Jocko Willink?

  That's cool and everything.

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  But I think age 11 or maybe 12, 11, I think she might've stopped. Uh, she kinda, yeah. It's tough. That was tough.

• 1:58:48Jocko Willink?

  Is there jujitsu in Park City? I know there's full on jujitsu in Utah. You got Pedro Sauer up there. You got all kinds of good jujitsu people up in Salt Lake City.

• 1:58:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Yep. No, we sure do. And there's one, I think Pedro Sauer has, I think a, a little offsite in Park City, maybe or he did. So, uh, of course we checked it out before the move. Uh, they've moved since, so I haven't followed where they moved to, but I think there's one still there. Um, but it was important to me because at the time we moved, my daughter was still in it. Our little guy was in it, uh, our eight year old, now eight year old. Um, so it was important to me that there was jujitsu where we were moving and, uh, but now that we moved, I would get there and it's gone. It's just like an empty space. So I think it's still there somewhere, but the kids, you know, they're doing their other things unfortunately, you know?

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  With the scheme.

• 1:59:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot to do, lots to do up there. But, uh, but no, I dabbled over, over the years. We're still doing it. I was at an opso or an an XO as right before I got out. Um, in Coronado, because it was right there. I'd go at lunch and roll with some guys.

• 1:59:42Jocko Willink?

  I'll do some research. I'll figure out where we can get you, get you and your family back in the game up and so, up in, uh, Park City. Cause I, I, I personally feel like. Guilty to have your family not training, to have you not training.

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:59:55Jocko Willink?

  We need to get that squared away.

• 1:59:56Speaker 02

  I know. You're taking some extreme ownership right there.

• 1:59:58Jocko Willink?

  Jack Carr.

• 1:59:59Speaker 02

  You're taking some extreme ownership of that.

• 2:00:00Jocko Willink?

  Reese needs to be getting in the game.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, in the story, yeah, the fictionalized, yeah, James Reese is on it.

• 2:00:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:07Speaker 02

  He's in, he's training his jujitsu.

• 2:00:08Jocko Willink?

  But you gotta get, you know, you talk about transferring those emotions, right?

• 2:00:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:12Jocko Willink?

  From real world.

• 2:00:12Speaker 02

  I remember how, I remember what it feels like to get, you know, just, just thrown around the mat, the floor wiped, you know?

• 2:00:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:19Speaker 02

  I was worried, that's why I didn't tell you I was coming in last night.

• 2:00:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I noticed I didn't get that.

• 2:00:23Speaker 02

  I didn't, I was worried that I'd be up at three something, getting just destroyed on the mat in here. Yeah.

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  Well, Jocelyn's knee is out, so, you know, either way.

• 2:00:31Jocko Willink?

  That knee is rapidly.

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:33Jocko Willink?

  Approaching.

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's been rapidly.

• 2:00:35Jocko Willink?

  Cleared hot.

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  For a long time.

• 2:00:36Jocko Willink?

  Status.

• 2:00:37Speaker 01

  On that one, so, all good, and we're gonna look forward to that, so. Back to jujitsu, when you get back into jujitsu, you're gonna need a gi. Or if you're getting into jujitsu for the first time, you're gonna need a gi. Do gi, no gi, do both, that's the best, 100%, by the way.

• 2:00:51Jocko Willink?

  Especially if you're in Park City, Utah, if you get in a fight in Park City, Utah, the other person is almost guaranteed to be wearing a gi-type outfit, right?

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:01:01Jocko Willink?

  Straight up wearing a jacket.

• 2:01:03Speaker 02

  Good point.

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  Wait, is it always called?

• 2:01:05Jocko Willink?

  Straight up wearing a North Face parka, right? Just Patagonia, boom.

• 2:01:11Speaker 01

  It's very possible.

• 2:01:11Jocko Willink?

  You ever grab the lapel on a Patagonia jacket? Yeah, let's get some of that. Put some on your sleeve.

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  What's a Patagonia jacket?

• 2:01:19Jocko Willink?

  It's just a jacket, it's like a parka, this is another, I had to explain to him what a parka was on one podcast.

• 2:01:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:01:24Jocko Willink?

  He's from Hawaii.

• 2:01:25Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:01:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know, I'd never heard of that, but, nonetheless, sounds nice, sounds good, uh, similar to a gi top, good. All right, we're gonna do gi, what kind of gi we're gonna get? Do you know?

• 2:01:36Speaker 02

  I know, origin.

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  Origin gi, made in America, 100%.

• 2:01:39Speaker 02

  There's only one.

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  Best one in the world, why would you not get the best one in the world?

• 2:01:43Speaker 02

  There's no reason.

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  100% get the best one in the world.

• 2:01:45Jocko Willink?

  Is it, is it because the best one costs five times more than the not best one?

• 2:01:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:01:50Jocko Willink?

  Or is it all the same?

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  No, same, same cost, well, you can choose, you can grab the, the big deluxe, uh, what do you call, what's the word you always use? Not always, but you did.

• 2:02:00Jocko Willink?

  Premium?

• 2:02:00Speaker 01

  Oh, no, luxurious, I think you want. Unless you can grab that one if you want, good, good, up to you, origin gis have various, uh, uh, what do you call, like, options of gis, all made in America, though, by the way.

• 2:02:12Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of made in America, you get other clothes made in America. Namely. T-shirts, yeah, sure, but also sweatshirts, yeah, and also newest, latest jeans.

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  Which I have some on the way, by the way. Be Little, we teamed up, we teamed up.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  But we're in a secondary group, me and Be Little, Brian Littlefield. And, you know, we're, we're tight, we're in the game, whatever, right, but we're always last to get the cool new stuff. Jaco always first, Pete always first, right, us always, we're not even second, we're not even third, we're last every time. Nonetheless, we banded together and now I have a pair of Origin jeans, made in America, American denim jeans on the way to me. So, boom, happy to announce that one to everyone. Also, rash guards, of course, other Jiu-Jitsu stuff, so also sup- supplements.

• 2:03:06Speaker 01

  The most important kind of supplements, boom, joints keep you in the game, protein keep you in the game. Jaco White Tea, is Jaco White Tea a supplement?

• 2:03:14Jocko Willink?

  Yes, cuz, yeah, because it has to be a supplement, cuz what else would give you an eight thousand pound deadlift?

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're, you're absolutely right.

• 2:03:22Jocko Willink?

  Nothing.

• 2:03:22Speaker 01

  And it's certified organic, so the whole water thing, no.

• 2:03:26Jocko Willink?

  How did you like your first Jaco White Tea? I loved it, yep, I couldn't do the podcast without having one, so. People, some people don't, it's not sweet, you know, there's no sugar in there. Nope. It's just tea. It's great. But it tastes, but it has the pomegranate little fruitness to it. A little bit, keeps you wanting more. Yeah. Makes you want more, no, I'm a big fan, I'm a big fan, I'm gonna have to. You know, you should do some of that deadlift and then go write, cuz whenever I, whenever I write, that's guaranteed, that's guaranteed like at least three hundred words coming, coming at you live. Easy, smooth, just rubbing it off your fingertips. I like it, I like it. Into the computer. I've got my marching orders.

• 2:04:03Speaker 01

  Also, discipline, by the way, speaking of writing, oh, that's a good one, I found, and I don't write as much as you. You might not have known that, but, you know, but I make these videos every once in a while, if you're on the discipline.

• 2:04:16Jocko Willink?

  Videos are awesome.

• 2:04:16Speaker 01

  Even that kinda comes a lot easier, boom, boom, when you're doing, and, yeah, so stay on that.

• 2:04:22Jocko Willink?

  My favorite one, we lie to ourselves.

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that is a good one.

• 2:04:26Jocko Willink?

  That is a good one.

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, accurate representation of yourself, can't grow, otherwise, it's true, it's absolutely true, but yeah, discipline, that's a good one, and discipline, go. If you don't wanna, you know, mix it up and do all that stuff, if you're on the go, essentially, right, that's, that's the way it goes.

• 2:04:42Jocko Willink?

  Just hit some of that and then you get. Makes sense.

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  And then you just go.

• 2:04:44Jocko Willink?

  You get Molk, which is. Additional protein for your life because we all know we're eating steak. We're eating chicken. Some people are eating sushi.

• 2:04:54Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, we are. A lot of sushi.

• 2:04:57Jocko Willink?

  That all gives you protein, which is good. Sometimes you need a little bit more or sometimes you just want it. It's dessert, straight up. Have you tried the? I have not yet. Looking forward to it, though. Just, just, it's ridiculous. You ever had a Nestle's Strawberry Quick? Yes, it's been a long time. I'm, did you like it? I was, yes. I like the chocolate one, I think, though. Okay, you like the chocolate better? That's cool. Some people are like that. Remember, I tried them both, but I go back to the chocolate. Yeah, the strawberry slayer. Molk tastes absolutely delicious. And then we have Warrior Kid Molk. So for your kids, yeah, totally good to go. I keep meaning to get that too because our kids, man, they do not, anyway. Yeah, yeah, because your kids want to eat cake. They want to drink Nestle's Quick because it's tasty.

• 2:05:42Jocko Willink?

  They don't have to do that. They can get protein. I'm gonna get some of those for sure. No sugar.

• 2:05:49Jocko Willink?

  What's up? And it tastes delicious. All right, cool, cool. So there's that Warrior Kid Molk, Molk. And then if you want like this shirt that Echo is wearing, this good shirt. Then you can go to our store collectively, everyone's. This isn't, no, because you keep calling it my store. It's not my store.

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  What has your name in it?

• 2:06:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, but everybody goes there. It's not just me in the store by myself. The store is for everyone.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  Yep, that is true.

• 2:06:13Jocko Willink?

  It's not your store. It's not my store. It's our store collectively as a group.

• 2:06:17Speaker 01

  The Jack Carr store?

• 2:06:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  Damn right, huh? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So that is at JacoStore.com if you want to represent on this path, right? Discipline equals freedom, the good mentality, right? Looking for the good in the bad, quote unquote, bad.

• 2:06:32Jocko Willink?

  I get it.

• 2:06:33Speaker 01

  You know, whatever you want to represent, that's where you get your stuff.

• 2:06:36Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of which, you were talking Jaco White. I don't know if you saw this Tom Clancy fan that you are. Did you see that in the latest Tom Clancy novel? The Jack Ryan, you know what he drinks? I saw this.

• 2:06:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:52Jocko Willink?

  But I didn't read it, but I saw it. Somebody posted about it. Took a picture and put it up there.

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:56Jocko Willink?

  Jocko White.

• 2:06:57Speaker 02

  I saw that. Yep.

• 2:06:58Jocko Willink?

  Jack Ryan's in the game. We're wondering what James Reese is gonna be drinking in book three.

• 2:07:03Speaker 02

  You're gonna have to stand by, find out. Yeah, what Ghee is he gonna be wearing? I know what Ghee is gonna be wearing.

• 2:07:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, definitely we know what Ghee is gonna be wearing. Like the Warrior Kid three book. You know what? You know what Ghee's being worn? Origin.

• 2:07:14Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 2:07:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:16Speaker 01

  Boom. There you go. So yeah, everybody's representing. So yeah, you want to represent, even if you're already representing, you want to re-represent, represent more. JockoStore.com. Boom. Hoodies, t-shirts, rash guards, hats, everything, patches, everything.

• 2:07:28Jocko Willink?

  Subscribe to this podcast so you can hear Jack Carr and others talking about their experiences. And then leave reviews so that I can laugh at your funny reviews or be like, you ever head nod to your computer?

• 2:07:44Jocko Willink?

  Like you're looking at your computer, you read, you read a solid review and you just give that review a little, a little head nod.

• 2:07:51Speaker 02

  Actually nod.

• 2:07:52Jocko Willink?

  A little head nod for that thing. Like somebody wrote a damn good review the other day and I read and I was like, you know, gave him one of those.

• 2:07:59Speaker 02

  Physical.

• 2:07:59Jocko Willink?

  Nice. Physical movement at my computer.

• 2:08:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:02Jocko Willink?

  It's 11 o'clock at night. What am I doing reading reviews? Trying to go to sleep? You're talking about how you have no problem going to sleep. Sometimes I do.

• 2:08:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:08:08Jocko Willink?

  I have some trouble going to sleep.

• 2:08:09Speaker 02

  Well, I have trouble going to sleep, not wait. It's, it's, it's trouble waking up.

• 2:08:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:08:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you have trouble waking up?

• 2:08:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I'd rather sleep in, but, but I do get up, but well, at 5 a.m. It comes quick.

• 2:08:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:20Speaker 02

  At 5 a.m. And not at 3 a.m. like you, but 5 a.m. Meet the guys at 5:30, knock it out, home at 7, help with the kids, then start writing.

• 2:08:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's solid right there.

• 2:08:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:29Jocko Willink?

  If you remind me, we'll get some stuff for your crew up there.

• 2:08:32Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 2:08:33Jocko Willink?

  Get them in the game.

• 2:08:34Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's good.

• 2:08:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  The head nod, that's like level one, um, like, like. What do you call, like, there's base level respect, right? There's extra respect, and then there's the ceiling. Above the ceiling, there's level one respect. When your physical head nods for computer.

• 2:08:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  Level two, claps. Claps for, you see what I'm saying? You clap for the performer.

• 2:08:56Jocko Willink?

  Nah, but that's different, bro.

• 2:08:58Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 2:08:59Jocko Willink?

  I would never in a million years clap at my computer.

• 2:09:01Speaker 01

  I know, cuz I don't think. I don't know, man. That's level two. But someone's gonna come up with like a review or something, and it'll warrant a clap. That's my contention.

• 2:09:10Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:09:11Speaker 02

  I had a good one there. I nodded yesterday. Did a little head nod.

• 2:09:14Jocko Willink?

  At your computer?

• 2:09:15Speaker 02

  Yep. Somebody wrote, uh, Jack Carr has a graduate degree in the art of war.

• 2:09:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:09:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you liked it.

• 2:09:22Speaker 02

  I was like, give that a nod. Positive head nod, yep.

• 2:09:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:26Speaker 02

  Someone else said one, uh...

• 2:09:27Jocko Willink?

  Racking them up.

• 2:09:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, someone else wrote one about if John Wick the Punisher and somebody else had a child, it would be James Reese. I'm like, yeah, it's going.

• 2:09:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:09:34Jocko Willink?

  Check this out.

• 2:09:35Speaker 01

  Head nod worthy, a hundred percent.

• 2:09:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, so yeah, subscribe, man. If you're into it and you wanna write a review, do it. Also, don't forget about Warrior Kid Podcast, which is not dead.

• 2:09:44Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:09:45Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's being resurrected. Well, it was never dead, so it's not resurrected.

• 2:09:50Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:51Jocko Willink?

  It is alive and well.

• 2:09:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:54Jocko Willink?

  However, there hasn't been a lot of new additions lately, but they're coming. They're coming.

• 2:09:59Speaker 01

  Boom, there you go.

• 2:09:59Jocko Willink?

  I was mentally going through

• 2:10:04Jocko Willink?

  possibilities for the next story from Uncle Jake.

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:10:08Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah.

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  So the pendulum was just away.

• 2:10:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, pendulum's away from Warrior Kid Podcast.

• 2:10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:15Jocko Willink?

  Actually, now that book eight is almost wrapped, that's, that's what the, that's what the prioritize and execute is on.

• 2:10:23Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say it. You beat me to it. I was waiting to get in there with prioritize and execute. Yeah, exactly.

• 2:10:28Speaker 01

  Yep, that's good.

• 2:10:28Jocko Willink?

  So that's Warrior Kid Podcast, and, and if you wanna support a Warrior Kid, then you can get some...

• 2:10:35Jocko Willink?

  Jaco Soap. Warrior Kid Soap. From IrishOaksRanch.com. Young Aiden Warrior Kid making soap. And don't forget about YouTube channel.

• 2:10:47Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget to like, subscribe and click.

• 2:10:49Speaker 01

  Bruh, you can't say that.

• 2:10:52Jocko Willink?

  What do they say?

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  I think they say like, subscribe and no wait. Yeah, something like that.

• 2:10:57Jocko Willink?

  There's some other thing that you're supposed to do.

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:00Jocko Willink?

  If you're that. Okay, so anyways. Check out the YouTube channel. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah. So if you want to do those things, whatever. And that's where you can get Echo's. Echo's videos that he spends allegedly so much time making. And they come out once every. Every four years, like the Olympics. Like the Winter Olympics in Park City.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:11:20Jocko Willink?

  Every four years, a good video is gonna come out.

• 2:11:23Speaker 01

  Whatever Jack Kerr likes on soap. Boom. I do. I reposted that one. Boom. Reposted. We lie to ourselves. Boom. There you go. See, thanks. Thanks for that, by the way. Also, Psychological Warfare.

• 2:11:34Jocko Willink?

  Go ahead. No, I'm giving it to you. I put your name there.

• 2:11:36Speaker 01

  Psychological Warfare. If you don't know what that is, this is what it is. It's an album with tracks. Jaco tracks. Anyway, he, on those tracks, he tells you how to get through moments of weakness. Like if you're about to eat the wrong thing. Because for the short term, because the short game, long game.

• 2:11:52Jocko Willink?

  I need to listen to this.

• 2:11:53Speaker 01

  Bro, yeah, and it hundred percent works, by the way. So if you're like, okay, I'm gonna. In life, this is what I learned. It's one of the biggest things. People ask me this all the time. I would say literally anyone who has questions, quote unquote, for me, this is one of the questions they'll ask. What's the biggest thing you learned from Jaco? I'll tell you right now. Here it is. If you look at things. Short term versus long term. Small picture, big picture. Oh, and then there's like another one, whatever. But either way, it's all the same thing. Short term. So in Psychological Warfare, if you're going short game, if you're gonna start playing the short game for that moment, this will.

• 2:12:24Jocko Willink?

  If you're gonna lose the short game in the moment. Oh, I see what you're saying. If you're gonna, if you're gonna take a short term path, that's gonna have immediate gratification, but it's a long term down.

• 2:12:33Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly right. And most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time, short term, if you play short, short game, you lose the long game with that play. It's like you take a short term step forward and take a long step back. It's one of those deals. Usually you can break things down into that. So this what this does.

• 2:12:49Jocko Willink?

  I'm getting that because I I need to li- listen to that while I'm at Whole Foods and I'm getting up there ready to get to that register and they have those peanut butter cups.

• 2:12:57Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:12:57Jocko Willink?

  The all natural. They throw all natural on them. Like, that's okay.

• 2:13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:02Jocko Willink?

  Exactly. I'm like, it's better than that orange Reese's. You know what else is all natural? Heroin is all natural. You know, it's the same thing. What are we doing over here? Yeah, I just gotta listen to that as I'm checking out.

• 2:13:13Speaker 01

  Bro, that's perfect, actually, because actually it's good because you can actually have it in the queue, you know, because a lot of times like you're just in the pantry, wherever you are, and you're like, boom, I'm looking for the good stuff, whatever, boom, I see the the Oreos.

• 2:13:25Jocko Willink?

  Bro, my.

• 2:13:26Speaker 01

  I can't just go, let me queue it up. Sometimes it gets hard, is what I'm saying.

• 2:13:29Jocko Willink?

  Bro, my son, okay, can drive now, right? Which means he can go to the store, which means he can shop for food, right? We're talking sixteen year old boy. What does he get at the store?

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  Reese's.

• 2:13:42Jocko Willink?

  Just, we're talking. All natural? Oh, oh, he just gets crazy, you know? So good. He'll he'll be like, I'm hungry, go into the store, comes home, what does he come home with? Half gallon of whatever, ice cream.

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  Makes sense, bro, you know, because you know, supermarkets, they they they formulate or they design the store and the products a certain way. So like boom boom, that's why they put the Reese's peanut butter right at the at the checkout. They call them impulse buys, right? And that goes for everything, little magazines and balloons and all these little things.

• 2:14:12Jocko Willink?

  That is, that's their psychological warfare.

• 2:14:14Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, it is.

• 2:14:15Jocko Willink?

  It's their psychological warfare. And you gotta combat that.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:20Jocko Willink?

  With psychological warfare.

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  We're talking psychological warfare.

• 2:14:22Jocko Willink?

  It's like they're flanking me, they're like, they're flanking me. Oh, absolutely. Because I can avoid the aisle, I can avoid the aisle. Yeah, yeah, you can skip that whole snack aisle. But I gotta check out. But you gotta check out. Gotta check out. And that's why they got them, that's your weakness, bro. They're so good.

• 2:14:35Speaker 01

  But that's what your boy is essentially falling for. When he goes in, he's like, hey, I'm gonna go.

• 2:14:40Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no, no, no, you're, that's where you're wrong. He's not going up there on the impulse buy. No, he's going to serve, he's leaving the house, he's leaving the house and he's thinking, you know, briers.

• 2:14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, gotcha, okay.

• 2:14:50Jocko Willink?

  That's where he's at.

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  That makes sense, dude, yes.

• 2:14:51Jocko Willink?

  He's, he goes and gets cakes, like, you know.

• 2:14:54Speaker 01

  The plan is cakes.

• 2:14:55Jocko Willink?

  Honestly, the the ice cream thing has really taken a down hit at my house because milk, right? Because everyone's just kind of on the milk train.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:15:02Jocko Willink?

  But like, but my my son will get straight up chocolate chip cookies, just, that's what he did last night. That's why this is fresh in my mind. Comes home, nine o'clock, goes to the store at eight forty, like, we already ate dinner. Okay, where are you going? I'm just gonna go to the store. And he's only thinking about one thing. He's not thinking about lettuce.

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  He's not thinking about apples. He's thinking chocolate chip cookies. Coming back with the big chunks in them.

• 2:15:28Speaker 02

  Like the pre-made?

• 2:15:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then this evil little kid brings them into my house. You know what I mean? It's a good way to get shanked, actually.

• 2:15:37Speaker 02

  He needs some psychological warfare.

• 2:15:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, oh yeah, big time.

• 2:15:41Speaker 01

  Probably get to that home all the time.

• 2:15:43Jocko Willink?

  Hey, if you want to go visual, visual psychological warfare for yourself, check out flipsidecanvas.com. My brother Dakota Meyer, who's awesome, veteran, marine, incredible guy, started this company

• 2:16:02Jocko Willink?

  making art to hang on your wall. And you can, it says cool stuff on it, like good, like discipline equals freedom. He's got a whole array of different stuff, so check that out. Flipsidecanvas.com. And if you want him to make something, tweet him. Tweet Dakota Meyer. Say, put this on a canvas. He'll figure it out. Make it happen.

• 2:16:22Speaker 01

  So true. Also Onnit. So you go to Onnit.com/choco. This is where you can get your kettlebells. You getting kettlebells? You know, Onnit, right?

• 2:16:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. There before.

• 2:16:31Jocko Willink?

  Do you guys work at the home gym? Where are you guys working out at?

• 2:16:33Speaker 02

  No, no, we go down. It's really cool. They have a full-on like CrossFit type setup at the gym and there's an indoor track. There's, it's amazing. They had a pool right there, but it's a, it's full-on like CrossFit-esque style thing and you can go get it. Yep.

• 2:16:46Jocko Willink?

  And they leave you alone.

• 2:16:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:16:48Jocko Willink?

  I was in the gym the other day and guess what? No chalk was allowed.

• 2:16:51Speaker 02

  Really? No, this is, yeah, this is.

• 2:16:52Speaker 01

  What gym?

• 2:16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, this section.

• 2:16:53Jocko Willink?

  I'm not gonna talk about it.

• 2:16:55Speaker 01

  Was it a hotel gym?

• 2:16:55Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no. It was a, it was a proper gym. Hey, it was a gym that had bumper plates. It was a gym that had six squat racks. No, four squat. No, six squat racks. I'm in this gym. No chalk.

• 2:17:09Speaker 01

  If they have bumpers and no chalk, that's weird.

• 2:17:11Jocko Willink?

  Kettlebells. No chalk. They had pull-up bars. No chalk. That's a real problem.

• 2:17:16Speaker 01

  I can see like a, you know.

• 2:17:18Jocko Willink?

  Hey, if you're at 24-hour fitness and you've got the, the, the universal machines or whatever that echoes out there to jam you on.

• 2:17:28Speaker 01

  Anyway, no, nothing against universals, by the way, but you know, let's keep it real. Anyway. On it kettlebells, you've seen them or whatever. Yes. So that's where I get my kettlebells. Kettlebell routine in general is good. Do kettlebells?

• 2:17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:42Speaker 01

  What, as far as your spine and whatever, and I was gonna ask you earlier, but what, um, what does that like, keep you from doing mainly?

• 2:17:48Speaker 02

  Well, I wake up, but it hurts all the time, but uh, every time I turn my head and I realize just how lucky I am that after 20 years and all those things, like that's all I have to deal with. So it's uh, it's mobility, it hurts.

• 2:18:03Jocko Willink?

  What kind of surgery did you get?

• 2:18:04Speaker 02

  But uh, C6, C7 spine, they went in and uh, no, the military wanted to defuse me, but luckily I had a, got a second opinion and they went in and shaved off a, a bone spur in there that was crushing a nerve that was making my left arm.

• 2:18:15Jocko Willink?

  Was it like a frame anotomy?

• 2:18:17Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't think they've used that term.

• 2:18:18Jocko Willink?

  That's what I got.

• 2:18:19Speaker 02

  But uh, I'd have to go back.

• 2:18:20Jocko Willink?

  C6, C7?

• 2:18:21Speaker 02

  Yep. C6, C7, gotta go back in there, but uh, every time it hurts, I'm just like, you know, there's guys out there. PTSD, TBI, missing arms and legs, just destroyed. And uh, this is all I have.

• 2:18:31Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:18:32Speaker 02

  And hey, good.

• 2:18:33Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:18:33Speaker 02

  And seriously, that's, yep, absolutely. Um, so it doesn't really keep me from doing anything. It just reminds me. So I use it as a, as a reminder that I'm very lucky, very fortunate.

• 2:18:43Speaker 01

  So you can, you can push it, but just not get nuts and re-.

• 2:18:46Speaker 02

  Well, I still got, you know, I keep, try to keep up and anything I'm trying to take it easy on goes out the window.

• 2:18:52Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah.

• 2:18:52Speaker 02

  Just like, let's just roll, let's just roll at 20%.

• 2:18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, let's roll like.

• 2:18:55Speaker 02

  I remember those. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's not happening. So I remember.

• 2:18:59Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, good. Then kettlebells, right? I mean, my point was you do kettlebells, you get that functional strength back, whatever. Boom. Non, I mean, your back's not prohibiting, boom, you're into kettlebells.

• 2:19:08Speaker 02

  Yep. Absolutely. Almost every day when we're working out with the, with the crew.

• 2:19:12Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. So yeah, all my kettlebells, all on it kettlebells.

• 2:19:15Jocko Willink?

  And we got some books, if you want books, if you like books, first of all, The Terminal List and True Believer by Jack Carr. Check those out. Get into the, I believe you just said like the psychological minefield.

• 2:19:29Speaker 02

  Oh, I like it.

• 2:19:31Jocko Willink?

  Of this dude who's on the serious warpath already dead. Yep. Get some way the warrior kid three is out. It's live. And you can get that on amazon.com where there's a will is the subtitle of that book. Find out what happens to young Mark, how Uncle Jake helps him out way the warrior kid one and then way the warrior kid two marks mission. Those are also available. Mikey and the dragons. You can get that one for any kid between the ages of zero and 150. And they're going to get something out of it. The discipline equals freedom field manual. Get that. That's what you want to get your kid that just graduated. That's what you want to get your employee that seems to be sliding off the track.

• 2:20:13Jocko Willink?

  That's what you want to get your friend that is letting themselves go down the slippery slope. Yes. Taking the short term gratification on stuff. No, you get them the discipline equals freedom field manual. The audio version of that is on iTunes, Amazon music. It's a MP3 format. Then there's extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership where you can take these lessons from combat. Me and my brother Leif Babbin wrote that book, those books, and how you can apply those lessons to your business, to your life. We got Echelon Front Leadership Consultancy and what we do is solve problems through leadership. We also have EF online where you can, you can continue to train leadership because you never master it.

• 2:20:56Jocko Willink?

  You never ma- you never even really get good at it. It's you always have to be working at it. So EF online, work at it, work at it every day. Do you, what happens if you stop working out? Do you stay in shape? Echo Charles? Negative. What happens if you stop trying to become a good leader? Same. Same thing. You go backwards. Get rusty first. Beyond rusty. Yeah. We're talking catastrophic. You just lose it. Yeah. Yeah. We're talking, you turn into a leadership slob. Yes. You don't want, no, you want to be sharp. You want to be in tune.

• 2:21:27Jocko Willink?

  I experienced this because I get to see it all the time with the companies we work. I see someone that's like really in the game and they're sharp.

• 2:21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:35Jocko Willink?

  Their leadership is sharp and then all of a sudden they slack off for a while and they have a leadership problem and they handle it wrong.

• 2:21:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:21:42Jocko Willink?

  Just like they couldn't max, they couldn't do 42 pull-ups like they could before. Now they're doing 32. Why? They haven't been training. Gotta keep your leadership brain sharp.

• 2:21:52Speaker 01

  You ever done 42 pull-ups?

• 2:21:53Jocko Willink?

  No, mine was 30 something was my best, I think.

• 2:21:56Speaker 01

  That's still good, man. 30 something?

• 2:21:58Jocko Willink?

  But in high school, when I was very, very light, I remember two sets of 20. I still remember that was my thing. Came home on that bike. Two sets of 20. That's what's interesting. That was getting ready for buds essentially. That was high school. But so I still had a little time, but yes, I was still training. What I was gonna say is like for me, getting ready for buds was I was like, bro, I did, I did three sets of pull-ups today. Because we didn't know. I didn't think you had to do 250 pull-ups per workout, 350 pull-ups per workout. I didn't think of that. It didn't even make sense to me. Right. It was 19, it was 1989, 1990. Wow. It was, there was no way to access this information. Nope. So. You're not gonna be doing the same number of pull-ups as your class number. Yeah. Like, what? Yeah. How, how many? That's what we're gonna do. Yeah. By the way, we're doing it tomorrow too. By the way, we're doing it after lunch. Yeah.

• 2:22:43Jocko Willink?

  So get some of that. So that's the same thing. Physical, mental. Get your leadership mindset sharp. Keep it sharp. EF Online. If you want to come to the muster, you better sign up now because they're all sold out. They all sell out very quickly. Chicago sold out. Denver's heading that way. That's September 19th and 20th. And then Sydney, Australia. Looking forward to that. Coming down and meeting y'all people in Australia again. If you want to come to that, extremeownership.com and then EF Overwatch. If you are looking for someone in your company that knows how to lead,

• 2:23:19Jocko Willink?

  then check out EFOverwatch.com where we got special operators and we got combat aviation leaders that are transitioning into the civilian sector and can help you and your team using the principles of combat leadership that we write about in Extreme Ownership and the Decademia of Leadership. So EFOverwatch.com. And if you want to hear more from us, if 500 hours of listening isn't enough, then we are on the interwebs, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

• 2:23:54Jocko Willink?

  Echo is at Echo Charles. I am at Jocko Willink and Jack is at Jack Carr USA. Echo, anything else?

• 2:24:02Speaker 01

  Nothing else. Thank you, Jack Carr.

• 2:24:04Speaker 02

  Thank you guys so much for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. I feel very fortunate that getting out, we were able to kind of make the life we want on the outside, kind of defy a few odds along the way. And that's all because, because my wife, 19, coming up at 19 years.

• 2:24:21Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding.

• 2:24:21Speaker 02

  This month. And, and yeah, so because of her strength, raising those kids allows a way now I can tell about it a little bit. Hopefully not mess it up. Getting into her routine. But yeah, she's amazing, super strong, love with all my heart. My next, this next mission in life really is all about her and them.

• 2:24:38Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. Well, thanks once again for coming on and obviously thanks for your service to America.

• 2:24:48Speaker 02

  As with yours, my friend.

• 2:24:49Jocko Willink?

  You had an awesome, awesome run and you were deployed over and over and over again. And even though we joke about, you know, what a good time it is, and we did have a good time. I know you had a good time, but at the same time, you know, you're making sacrifices, your family's home alone. And, and that's huge. So thanks to you. Thanks to your family. Thanks to your wife for, for having the strength to deal with that. And appreciate you and, and it's awesome to see what you're doing right now.

• 2:25:18Speaker 02

  Thanks, brother. Appreciate it.

• 2:25:20Jocko Willink?

  To anyone else that's listening that is serving right now or has served, thanks to you for keeping us free. And to police and to law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service and all the first responders that are out there 24 hours a day. And they're training and they're preparing and they're on call so that we can be safe here at home. Thanks to all of you for that service and for that sacrifice.

• 2:25:54Jocko Willink?

  And to everyone else that is listening, remember that there's always somebody out there with their sights on you.

• 2:26:07Jocko Willink?

  And maybe it's a competitor in business, maybe it's an enemy insurgent, maybe it's some criminal thug, maybe it's someone that's just looking to do harm to you or your family.

• 2:26:21Jocko Willink?

  Or maybe, maybe that someone is you. And maybe you're your own worst enemy. Sliding into the depths of complacency, allowing yourself to wander down the easy path.

• 2:26:41Jocko Willink?

  Say no to that.

• 2:26:44Jocko Willink?

  Remember why you're here, remember what you want to do, remember your cause. Be a true believer.

• 2:26:54Jocko Willink?

  And then live that belief.

• 2:26:58Jocko Willink?

  By getting up every day. And getting after it.

• 2:27:05Jocko Willink?

  And until next time, this is Jack Carr and Echo and Jaco. Out.