241: There Will Be Pain. Life is Rough. Lessons From Being Shot 27 Times. "Perfectly Wounded" with Mike Day

0:00:00 - Opening 0:08:15 - Mike Day. "Perfectly Wounded" and shot 27 times. 2:50:24 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 2:58:06 - How to be capable and STAY ON THE PATH. 3:15:52 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 241 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  I was the number one man on the door in my train, which meant I would be the first man into the room.

• 0:16Jocko Willink?

  Missions often included debates as to who would get to go first. All these guys were fearless and liked to train hop to the front of the stack, the most dangerous place to be first into a room.

• 0:32Jocko Willink?

  SEALs love to fight. We all want to be the first into the fight and every SEAL is willing to accept the greater risk, especially for his buddy's sake. I had no apprehension about the possibility of my own death.

• 0:49Jocko Willink?

  My concern was for my platoon mates. While I can't speak for everyone, their actions this night proved they all felt the same way.

• 1:00Jocko Willink?

  Clarky and I looked at each other.

• 1:03Jocko Willink?

  He smiled back at me. We had practiced this maneuver a thousand times and had successfully done it on hundreds of missions just like this one.

• 1:14Jocko Willink?

  There was no rush of adrenaline or anxiety. We were composed, relaxed and professional. We would simultaneously breach our respective doors and go to work clearing the rooms of enemy fighters and other potential threats.

• 1:33Jocko Willink?

  We launched on the signal, a mutual wave of our rifle barrels. I breached the door to my room, it swung open to the right. I followed the door in as it opened, looked down the right wall and saw it was clear. As I pivoted off my right foot to move down the left wall, I had the sensation that my body was being slammed with a dozen sledgehammers. My entire body was now in the room and the men behind me in my room clearing train were attempting to follow me in.

• 2:05Jocko Willink?

  The room was small, 12 feet by 12 feet. My night vision goggles illuminated the darkness and I saw in clear view, four of our targets aiming at me. All of them armed with automatic weapons.

• 2:21Jocko Willink?

  And all of them firing at me.

• 2:29Jocko Willink?

  That right there is an excerpt from a book called Perfectly Wounded by a retired SEAL named Mike Day. And I knew Mike when he was a young SEAL. He was maybe 10 classes ahead of me going through basic SEAL training. He started his career at SEAL Team 3. I started my SEAL career next door. I don't know, 50 meters away, 100 meters away over at SEAL Team 1. We crossed paths on what was my first deployment. We'd see each other around from time to time.

• 3:09Jocko Willink?

  He was always very cool to me. From what I could tell, always cool to everyone, nice guy.

• 3:19Jocko Willink?

  No ego, no attitude.

• 3:23Jocko Willink?

  And on the day that Mike writes about in that book,

• 3:29Jocko Willink?

  those insurgents that were shooting at him,

• 3:34Jocko Willink?

  they hit their mark.

• 3:37Jocko Willink?

  And not just once, not just twice, not just three or four or five or 10 times, but

• 3:46Jocko Willink?

  27 times.

• 3:51Jocko Willink?

  27 times Mike was shot. 11 times in his body armor and 16 times in his body.

• 4:04Jocko Willink?

  And you have to keep in mind,

• 4:08Jocko Willink?

  and this is a strange thing,

• 4:11Jocko Willink?

  but one single round

• 4:15Jocko Willink?

  or one single tiny piece of fragmentation can kill you.

• 4:25Jocko Willink?

  So to receive that many shots and survive is

• 4:37Jocko Willink?

  well, it's some kind of miracle.

• 4:40Jocko Willink?

  And then to go beyond that, because the story doesn't end there, but to receive that many shots and actually fight back is beyond a miracle. And that's exactly what Mike did.

• 4:54Jocko Willink?

  He fought back and he won.

• 5:00Jocko Willink?

  And it is an honor to have Mike here today to tell us about his experiences, his life, and his lessons learned. He's got a bunch of them. So Mike,

• 5:15Jocko Willink?

  thanks for coming on, man.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  I appreciate you guys having me.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, getting you out here. I know we're in the middle of, middle of COVID right now. You've been driving across country. I know you just got done with the Total Archery Challenge up in, up in Utah. I, I wish I could have grabbed you there so you'd have to come all the way down here, but now you're telling me you're gonna try and look to surf a little bit, which is awesome.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Well, I'm trying to. That looks like the surf's gonna be picking up in Virginia since I'm not there. We got a hurricane coming up.

• 5:49Jocko Willink?

  That's the way it works, isn't it? You should have been there.

• 5:55Jocko Willink?

  Well, hey, man, I want to jump into this. Your book is, first of all, it's, it's just, I mean, everyone, obviously, I'm not gonna read the whole book. I'm gonna read some of it. Just go and, go and get the book right now. The, the detail that Mike goes into, this is a historical document about being in the SEAL Teams, about being in combat. And, and then what's, in addition to that, the life stories that you bring to the table are important for people to understand, understand what, how people grow up in different situations, what it does to them, and how to get through those hard situations, because you definitely went through some hard situations. So I'm gonna jump into it, man.

• 6:41Jocko Willink?

  Jump into this book and kind of talk about your past and how you grew up. And it starts off like this, "He looked huge, like a damn monster. She was screaming and fighting back, which only made it worse. I was frozen in terror. He bent her arm over his knee and like a twig, cracked it.

• 7:04Jocko Willink?

  I watched him break her arm. He yelled at me, "Go get me a glass of water." I ran to the kitchen, filled a glass and ran back to hand it to him. He drank it, then smashed the glass on a nearby table and held the broken shard like a knife. He went after her again with this newly created blade. I jumped on his back to stop him. I think that's what finally snapped him out of his uncontrolled rage. I flew off him as he swung his arm and I landed on the ground on my back. He spun around to attack his unknown aggressor and realized it was me.

• 7:39Jocko Willink?

  I clearly remember seeing his expression dissolve from rage into one of guilt and shame.

• 7:46Jocko Willink?

  This is my earliest memory and my first encounter with a terrorist. It was 1976 in New Jersey and the terrorist was my father.

• 7:59Jocko Willink?

  His victim was my mother.

• 8:03Jocko Willink?

  I was five years old.

• 8:11Jocko Willink?

  That's your earliest memory?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  SEAL teams were easy.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  He made it easy.

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  And this, uh, this is, I believe, pretty prevalent in our society now. A lot of us have just terrible parents. And, uh, one of the, one of the best books I've ever read is, uh, "The Body Keeps a Score." And he says in that book, "The largest medical issue, the largest medical problem we have in this country is childhood trauma." Because you learn what you are in the first seven years.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  You know, for me, luckily it wasn't to the point where I became more of a victim. And worried about what things were gonna happen. My response was just to fight. So when I get scared or angry now, I I fight when I get scared. A lot of people, when they get scared, the the fight or flight is is to cower. You can see in a lot of a lot of gunfights with people that aren't trained. One of the most prominent places to get shot, uh, somebody that doesn't know what they're doing is in their in their forearms and their hands. It's because they're cowering.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  And our, when we get triggered, like, people know that you don't jump around a corner to scare me because I'm gonna smack you upside the head. That's my response. I don't I don't flinch. My response is to go forward. And, you know, my father ingrained that in me. Then I got in the SEAL teams, and that was ingrained in me. And that night in that gunfight, it was, there was no thoughts. That was all reaction. That was all muscle memory. Uh, I was terrified. I went through it terrified, a little bit of terr- terrification. That's a new word.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  And, uh, once I got past that, I was just angry. And then everything was automatic.

• 10:13Jocko Willink?

  You go on, um, you go on here in the book. My parents divorced not long after my father broke my mother's arm. My mother would soon start dating and eventually marry Tom, a black man, a rare union in the 1970s. My father held racist beliefs and my mother's marriage to a black man inflamed my father's racist sentiment. The divorce included a custody hearing. I was young, but I can distinctly recall someone in court, a lawyer, possibly the judge, asking me strange questions about Tom. Like, have you ever seen Tom naked? Have you ever seen Tom and your mother sleeping together? The focus of the custody battle, which should have been my father and his treatment of us, was instead trained on me, an innocent bystander.

• 10:58Jocko Willink?

  Interracial relationships were not the social norm in the 1970s. I'm sure the court knew my father beat my mother and us kids, but they still awarded him full custody regardless. My hunch is that the courts were so biased at the time that they decided my younger brother and I would be better off with a wife beater and abusive father than be raised by an interracial couple.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  All speculation, but I mean, the seventies were kinda like that.

• 11:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, where was, where was this?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Uh, this was, uh, New Jersey.

• 11:30Jocko Willink?

  Still in New Jersey?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they're still married and I got two brothers, one, one's in the Coast Guard, uh, from that marriage. And, uh, he's a rescue swerver. Oh, not a rescue, he's a, a crew chief on the birds that go out, that carry the rescue swimmers.

• 11:47Jocko Willink?

  So how old are you at this point? You must've been six years old or something like that?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, right about then, about six.

• 11:56Jocko Willink?

  I'm thinking, um, you know, when I, when I picture you, I don't picture the, the old bastard that I see in front of me right now. I picture this young kid, uh,

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Curly blonde locks.

• 12:07Jocko Willink?

  With blonde hair and, you know, blue eyes.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  There's a picture of me in there.

• 12:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's when I opened, I was like, oh yeah, I know this guy. Um.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Not this one.

• 12:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So I'm sure you're looking at me thinking the same thing. You know, my dad was driving around his hometown.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  We haven't changed that much, really. Have I shaved this?

• 12:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. No, you do, you, you don't look that much different, except for you, you used to have the freaking, uh, the blonde locks. Bright blonde locks.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  I do, I do miss them.

• 12:38Jocko Willink?

  No, what I'm thinking, you know, you're, there you are in court, this little Aryan kid. And the judges are looking at, you know, the, the interracial couple. And like you said, the, I mean, you said it's a, what'd you say? It's an assumption, but to think of any other reason why they would decide to send you with a known child abuser is, it's hard to come up with a different reason.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Well, that's another reason why this book's really good. I don't think anybody'd be able to pick that up. Nobody gets through this life without trauma. And, uh, it, it's a lot more prevalent than I think we understand, child abuse and. Geez, look at the child trafficking going on right now. I mean, there are just some really bad parents, really bad people out there. And people are gonna suffer trauma.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  You gotta build the resiliency. It's training. They helped us build the resiliency we required to do what we did in the SEAL teams. And it's just training. If you sit on the couch and eat Twinkies all day and watch TV, anytime something other than that comes up that causes stress, you're just not gonna be able to handle it. You gotta train to be able to handle stress.

• 13:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and then, I mean, the... That sounds awesome. That sounds awesome, but the reality is, I mean, you're probably this small percentage of people that can get out of a situation like this and move in a positive direction. I don't know what the percentage is, but obviously, there's some percentage of people that go through these traumatic experiences as kids. And they end up, you know, they end up in jail on drugs and whatever else and...

• 14:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, there's something along the way that made you...

• 14:24Speaker 01

  There's not a whole lot of difference between me and 80% of the prisoners here in California.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I just

• 14:32Speaker 01

  had the proper opportunity at the right time. Because if I didn't join the Navy,

• 14:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  I might be...

• 14:39Jocko Willink?

  I...

• 14:40Speaker 01

  I'd be running MS-13. They're gonna come after me.

• 14:44Jocko Willink?

  I...

• 14:47Jocko Willink?

  The amount of SEALs, and this sounds freaking horrible to say. Look, there's some guys that are saints in the SEAL teams for sure. But the amount of guys in the SEAL teams, just if you just took a broad cut of the SEAL mentality, there is an element of criminal mentality in there. Like, oh, if you want to join the Navy, we know where this is gonna end up, for sure.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Well, we have to deal with criminals.

• 15:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yes.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  I mean, a lot of people think that when we go to war,

• 15:16Speaker 01

  I'd venture to say that 75% of the people that we're dealing with are not ISIS or Al Qaeda. They're just the criminal element that are profiteers off of the current... I mean, look what we got going on in this country.

• 15:31Jocko Willink?

  Whatever mayhem's going on.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. They... Theologically, they don't care. There is like, hey, I can make some money off of that.

• 15:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Looking at the religion in this country. You know, we've got how many Christians? And then what level are they practicing? You know, it's the same thing with Muslims. Yeah, they're Muslim, but are they really practicing? Are they really going to follow what they think is right? Or are they going to take the path of least resistance? Which is what humans will do.

• 16:06Jocko Willink?

  You continue on here, fast forward a little bit. My father was a sailor. When the Navy issued him new orders, we moved to Pennsylvania from New Jersey. After the divorce, my father remarried. Our new stepmother soon became pregnant, giving birth to my first half-sister. Two years later, she gave birth to my half-brother. Trauma attracts trauma. It has its own distinct language and behaviors. We would be raised by two people who'd been severely traumatized as children. My new stepmother was a natural fit for our family. She, too, had a history of childhood abuse, both physical and mental. I don't know much about her, the early years of her life, other than her parents would lock her in a closet for long periods of time. She was put up for adoption and taken in by a loving couple. My stepmother would grow up to be both victim and perpetrator.

• 16:52Jocko Willink?

  She would alternate between coercing my father to beat us and slapping us around herself.

• 17:00Jocko Willink?

  She and my father would get into their own fights, too. She would fight back, even though she had no way of winning. He was six foot two and weighed 240 pounds.

• 17:10Jocko Willink?

  One of the worst beatings I ever endured was when I was eight. My brother and I had gone out on a winter day and pelted a car with snowballs. The driver was pissed, as if, but if he'd known the price we were about to pay for our transgressions, he may have given us a pass. We ran to our house with the driver of the car chasing us. He knocked on our front door and told my parents what we had done. My father and stepmother had a friend over at the time. They were all drinking. My parents were outraged. Our father sent us to the basement, an ad hoc torture chamber of sorts, where he made us strip naked before tying our hands to a pole so we were facing each other. He whipped us with his belt so hard, after another 15 minutes, we'd worked up, he'd worked up a sweat. All the while, my stepmother and her friend sat on the basement steps, sipping their booze, urging him to beat us harder and longer.

• 17:55Jocko Willink?

  When he was done, my brother and I were both badly bloodied and bruised.

• 18:01Jocko Willink?

  My father's violence escalated as we grew. He would smear toothpaste on the nylon belt when he whipped us so it would sting as it cut and bruised us. I'm not sure where he picked up this technique, but it worked. His routine was to bring me into the basement and make me drop my pants so that my bare ass was available. He would wind up and rip into my bare backside with that belt holding on to my arm as I twisted in a circle trying to escape. I recall a week that was prefaced with him telling us, "I know that you will be bad kids this week." He beat us bloody and then he went back to work. This was some crazy stuff. He was so nuts, he set his alarm for 4 a.m. to wake us up and beat us for no reason whatsoever before he went to work. We

• 18:45Jocko Willink?

  got beat and we went back to bed. Hardly a typical morning routine for a first grader. My childhood was a real-life horror movie. I couldn't escape.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  It was terrible about that. A lot of people have it worse. I got out of it. A lot of people don't.

• 19:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, um, where this ends up, you say, "Finally, at the age of 12, after years of enduring its drunken rages and endless beatings, I decided to fight back. One night, I found him passed out drunk on the couch. I knew that he was passed out because the crotch of his blue jeans was darkened from having wet himself. I grabbed a baseball bat and walked back and forth for about five minutes debating my intentions until finally I mustered up my courage and with an overhead ax swing, I drilled him hard on the chest with the baseball bat. It felt great, a totally empowering rush. I didn't kill him, but I sure surprised him because he immediately woke up from his booze-induced blackout with a look of total confusion that quickly turned evil. He looked at the bat in my hands and realized that I was what, that that was what

• 19:50Jocko Willink?

  just bounced out off his chest. I knew by the look in his eyes, he was going to kill me. He chased me upstairs to my room where I jumped out of my second-story window into a thorny rose bush. I looked up to see my enraged father stick his head out only to pull it back in. I could hear his pounding footsteps from outside as he ran downstairs. He was determined to hunt me down, chasing me through the woods around our house in the dark. He couldn't get through the thick underbrush, but I was too terrified to slow down. He never caught me. I spent the night at a neighbor's house and the next day when I returned home, he had forgotten all about it."

• 20:23Jocko Willink?

  In 1983, my father was transferred to Miramar, near San Diego, California. That's where he totally lost it. He was drinking, causing problems at work, had been arrested several times for defeat, defecating in the aisles of stores. Some mental health professionals describe this peculiar public display as elimination disorder. It's a behavior that's been identified in several serial killers and manifests out of extreme anger at someone or something.

• 20:53Jocko Willink?

  I was 12 years old when my stepmother received word that my father would be medically discharged from the Navy and institutionalized with schizophrenia and a host of other psychiatric conditions. He would spend the rest of his life in an inpatient facility or an assisted living environment.

• 21:09Jocko Willink?

  My father has since died. He was very sick and really broken. He did a terrible job as a parent. However, I know now that he did his best, that he did the best he could. I don't hold any harsh feelings toward him.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  He really sucked as a father.

• 21:27Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 21:29Jocko Willink?

  So, I mean, it's just, it's beyond, he had like legitimate, serious mental issues.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Well, hi- his father was worse than him. He just wasn't the one that was able to break the cycle. I think he tried to, it just ate him up. I mean, his father used to chase hi- him, his brother and his sister around with butcher knives and threaten to kill him. He never actually threatened to kill us. I mean, but that thought's always there. His father used to actually make that threat. I never, I never met my grandfather.

• 22:05Jocko Willink?

  And was your grandfather already dead or was?

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Quite honestly, I don't know if they just kept us from him or, or if he was, or if he had passed. I met his mother, you know? Looking back on that, as a kid, it was strange. She was, she was broke.

• 22:23Jocko Willink?

  Just a broken, broken woman?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Just strange, you know?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Just not normal. I mean, go over for Thanksgiving dinner and everybody's eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, which I don't want to complain about it. I mean, you got, you got food, but, uh, not going to complain with having food, but it was just...

• 22:46Speaker 01

  It was not a normal atmosphere. You could just feel that it was weird.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  I mean, and his sister grew up in a psychiatric ward. She went in when she was really early, uh, really young. So I don't know what kind of, what was done to her.

• 23:00Jocko Willink?

  So I mean, some serious darkness there.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  I mean, we, we got that going on now in the world. It's, it's pretty prevalent, you know, just shitty parents that abused their kids. Don't know how to be parents because they were abused.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Really not an excuse. I mean, my kids tell me, well, I've got old kids. You got a 20 year old and a 29 year old. And they've always told me, we wish you would spank us rather than yell at us. And I was like, it's because you never been smacked. You might change your mind if you got, got an ass whooping.

• 23:37Jocko Willink?

  You call on here. I was about 12 or 13 years old when my stepmother became our legal guardian and seized her newfound freedom by dating a guy in a local, in a local rock and roll band named Beechey. And hosting parties at our house. Our home quickly turned into a constant party with its own in-house band and all the characters that came with it. People, strangers would sit around my house all day getting drunk and stoned. On one particular occasion, my stepmother was partying with Beechey and his band of losers. When she tried to smack me, I caught her arms, spun it behind her back, then swept the legs out from under dumping her on her ass. That episode got me and my brother sent to Maine to live with our maternal grandparents who we hadn't seen in years for that summer.

• 24:20Jocko Willink?

  My half siblings were still young at the time. I still remember looking over my shoulder and seeing my half brother lying in his crib and my half sister lying in her bed. As I made my way out of the house.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  That is the funny thing about trauma because that's the only thing I remember those two. I mean, I talk to them now, but it's as if they weren't even in the same house with us. I don't, I don't remember them.

• 24:46Jocko Willink?

  Were, were they getting any different treatment?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't remember them.

• 24:51Jocko Willink?

  That's wild. And so you, and you were like 12, 13.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  I don't know. You were, what team were you at? Two?

• 24:58Jocko Willink?

  I was at team two. Was it team one, team two, team?

• 25:01Speaker 01

  My brother did like eight years at team two.

• 25:03Jocko Willink?

  From win to win.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Sometime after 2010.

• 25:12Jocko Willink?

  I was gone.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  I got out in 2010.

• 25:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I retired in 2010.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  He was in the teams for like 10 years.

• 25:21Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. But just no memory of them?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  None at all.

• 25:27Jocko Willink?

  That's so wild.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  The only thing I can remember is looking over my shoulder when I was walking out of the house.

• 25:31Jocko Willink?

  Now, I can tell you, this is what I think about memories.

• 25:36Jocko Willink?

  Like, I don't go back to the town where I grew up very often. And so I don't, because I don't like fi- when I say very often, I mean for 10 years at a time, right? And I don't see all those people that I kind of grew up with. So, I don't fire those memories, right? I don't fire those memories very often, so they just like fade. And I'll go back there and see someone, they're like, "Oh yeah, I remember when you did this, oh, I remember that girl, remember this and this thing over here?" And I'm always like, I feel bad. Because they're telling me vivid stories about my own childhood, and I just don't remember it. I think it's because I just don't, didn't fire those.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  You can read studies on people's memories, especially in stressful situations. And, like I said, my citation's not accurate. They gave me credit for saving six women and children that were supposedly in the same room. And I was in a gunfight with four dudes with automatic weapons. They'd all be dead. The guy that saw that looked past one of our guys that had been shot and killed. To see the six women and children in a totally different room, didn't even see the guy laying in the doorway. He just saw the six women and children and superimposed them in the room that I was in. They'd all be dead. Hundreds and hundreds of rounds were fired in that room. In a matter of minutes.

• 26:53Jocko Willink?

  So now you're heading up to Maine. That fall, my brother and I moved to Maine from Virginia Beach to live with our mother and her second husband, Tom. It was only after we arrived that I learned about how my stepmother and father deliberately and systematically tried to alienate me and my brother from our mother. She showed us a box filled with years worth of Christmas and birthday cards had been returned without the check she'd written for us. My father and stepmother had cashed them all and kept the money for themselves. Despite this, I feel the same about my stepmother as I do about my father. She survived my father's violence and did the best she could. I don't hold any harsh feelings towards her either. Tom and my mother never hit us. They were patient and did their best to parent some severely abused young minds. If the courts hadn't been so biased, we could have skipped the seven years of abuse and

• 27:37Jocko Willink?

  lived in Virginia Beach all along. But as I would learn, everything happens for a reason.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Everyone made it through BUDS.

• 27:48Jocko Willink?

  I made it through eighth grade and entered Green Run High School where I lasted until my junior year. When my wrestling coach caught me smoking pop in the school bathroom. This caused my expulsion. Was that a public school, Green Run?

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard to get kicked out of that one.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  It's actually, it was actually called Gang Run. It's hard to get kicked out of that one.

• 28:10Jocko Willink?

  Shortly after being expelled, I had a run in with the police. A cop busted me with a bag of weed. At the time, any amount over an ounce was a felony. The cop grabbed the bag and said, is this an ounce? I said, yes. He opened the bag, grabbed a pinch and chucked it onto the street. Then said, is this an ounce now? No, I replied. That cop saved me from a felony charge and may have even saved my life. I'd like to find that guy one day and thank him. It was a good cop. Trying to take care of this freaking knucklehead kid.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  I was like 14 or 15 years old.

• 28:40Jocko Willink?

  So from, so you get kicked out?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  I spent almost 30 days in jail now. That's where I learned how to play, what was it? Pea knuckle?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Learned how to play a bunch of card games.

• 28:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man. So then you end up in-

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Spades. I learned how to play spades.

• 28:56Jocko Willink?

  Spades. That comes in, that comes in handy on the, on the ships. Once you're in the Navy. You ended up in the Job Corps, which is like, you know, you're doing vocational training.

• 29:07Jocko Willink?

  That doesn't seem to work out too great. 1990 or 1988, you got a neighbor, retired Navy diver, who tells you, you're gonna end up dead or in jail if you keep this up. You should join the SEAL Teams instead. They'll pay you to do all the things you're doing to get in trouble right now.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  He was, he was giving good advice.

• 29:27Jocko Willink?

  Accurate statement.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  He totally saw it. He totally saw it. His kids were crazier than me.

• 29:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man. You know, there's that attraction of violence, man, and just mayhem when you're a kid.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Well, it wasn't violence. It was just, you know, tying ropes in one tree and lowering another one and sliding down it on handlebars and just jumping over ridiculous jumps on our bikes, you know, smashing frames on our bikes and just stuff I won't admit to and.

• 29:59Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, you, you, you head down and you're gonna join the Marines.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  I did. I tried to.

• 30:04Jocko Willink?

  And then you got rejected by the Marine Corps for?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Having a GED. And I actually met a guy that was a recruiter back then. That was in eighty-eight or eighty-nine. And they, they had a restriction. You had to have a high school diploma.

• 30:18Jocko Willink?

  A GED wouldn't get you in.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Uh-uh. Which I'm,

• 30:23Speaker 01

  my guardian angels knew. I'd have done four years in the Marine Corps. I would have got out of there.

• 30:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  I couldn't have done that. There's no way I could have done that.

• 30:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  I mean, I like working with them, but pre nine eleven,

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Marine Corps was a lot different.

• 30:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  I mean, we didn't get along too well pre nine eleven.

• 30:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, um, the Marine Corps is a completely different environment.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:44Jocko Willink?

  And, and.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  I mean, they do what they do. It's actually more, it's more dangerous than what we do.

• 30:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and their day-to-day life freaking, uh, uh, more Spartan life, you know, especially if you're an infantryman, like, that's.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Patrol to contact?

• 31:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, go get some.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Wait till someone shoots you?

• 31:02Jocko Willink?

  It's, uh.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Sucks. I like to wait till they're asleep.

• 31:07Jocko Willink?

  That's the goal.

• 31:11Jocko Willink?

  You wrap up here saying, "My childhood was not exactly idyllic, but it's what happened to me and I'm very grateful for all of it. The wounds of my childhood trauma served as the foundation of some truly excellent resiliency training." That's a very positive way of looking at this, Mike. Resiliency is a conditioned response to physical and emotional trauma and stress. It's, it's a never-ending process of understanding, endurance, evaluation, acceptance, and.

• 31:35Jocko Willink?

  Application that continues to help me get through some very difficult situations. Childhood trauma, especially the kind perpetrated by parents can be some of the most damaging. Because it can cause children to feel unlovable. Some children who feel unlovable can become unlovable adults. And some of those become unlovable parents, thus repeating the cycle. The unlovable live lonely tragic lives. If my hurts, mistakes, butt whippings and insights can help you overcome yours. Then this book has value for both of us.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  And I'm not the only one with mommy and daddy issues.

• 32:12Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I got some, I got some codependency shit going on. You know, I tell people, uh, I mean, we all got insecurities. And they're like, oh, Navy SEALs got insecurities. That's one of the most insecure people I know are Navy SEALs. They're like trying so damn hard.

• 32:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Can't let anybody know I'm weak here.

• 32:32Jocko Willink?

  I always laugh in the teams if someone says, hey, you know, Mike, Mike Day's really good at parachuting. Someone will chime in the back, yeah, but he's a slow runner. Yeah, exactly. But somebody's gonna let you know.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, but running breeds cowardice, so. Bunch of cowards.

• 32:48Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and so now you go to boot camp to BUDS. After signing on the dotted line, I spent the next six months working out, doing my best not to get in trouble until I finally boarded the bus for MEPS and facility in Southern Virginia. MEPS is the way station for all new military recruits. There I found myself part of an interesting blend of Americana, one that included all shapes, sizes, colors and temperatures of young men and women who were leaving for the civilian, leaving the civilian world, getting the first taste of the US military.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  You know what? That's an accuracy because I went to Great Lakes. Well, there you go. I did have a writer with me. I missed that one. That was all dudes up there. All the women were going to Orlando.

• 33:23Jocko Willink?

  What about MEPS?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, MEPS was.

• 33:25Jocko Willink?

  Even, even, even at MEPS?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Uh, at MEPS, yeah, they were sending all the women at the time to Orlando. Everybody goes to Great Lakes now. That place sucks. What is MEPS? I heard that before. Military.

• 33:37Jocko Willink?

  Military Entry Processing Station.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  So you, you actually enlist. And you wait a period of time before you go. They just snatch you so you don't go out. Go do something else. Like a halfway house. Kind of situation. Well, you're not under any kind of restriction or any kind of order or under the, the UCMJ yet. You've signed a contract.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  And they give you a date that you're gonna leave. So I was only on in maps for like six months. I've talked to kids that been, you know, eighteen months. They hit some kid in high school. You know. Waiting for him to graduate.

• 34:16Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. Get him young.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  I was seventeen years old when I joined. I didn't have anywhere else to go.

• 34:23Jocko Willink?

  Uh, this, I found this funny and this is also probably why you say that the Marine Corps wouldn't have worked out great for you over a long period of time. It's you say, I never in my life wanted to quit anything more than I did Navy boot camp.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Miserable.

• 34:38Jocko Willink?

  Bro, yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, there's.

• 34:42Jocko Willink?

  Folding underwear.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Oh, and in Great Lakes too. January, January fourth, uh, five feet of snow, thirty below.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  I hate the cold weather. I'd rather sweat.

• 34:58Jocko Willink?

  You end up, you said, I think the company commander saw some potential in me and knew that I was bored because I kept volunteering to wake up at four AM to do what most people dreaded. They decided to give me some extra responsibility, made me the division's recruit, the division's recruit master at arms. I was like your first, when I was going through boot camp, I got made like a squad leader or something.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  I got fired from that one.

• 35:17Jocko Willink?

  Oh, bummer.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I talk about that in the book. The guy wiped a booger on my pillow and I, right as the company commander was walking in the door, I punched him.

• 35:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and so that, so you got, so you got rolled back from that, right?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Graduation week of boot camp. And then I get, well, I got rolled out of, in Bud's out of one sixty-six and the one sixty-eight and I got rolled graduation week of one sixty-eight.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Just irony of that.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  They both made me cry.

• 35:47Jocko Willink?

  Before, before you went to Bud's, so you get rolled back in, in, um, in boot camp, which I didn't even know there was such a thing as getting rolled back.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  It was only one week though, which was cool.

• 35:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Because, where did you go? Great Lakes or?

• 35:59Jocko Willink?

  I went to Orlando.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  But you still had to do that stupid passing review, all that marching garbage. Uh, well, nobody was coming to visit me for graduation. I got into that fight because he put a booger on my pillow.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  I did knock him out. I knocked that kid out. Well, he was not a kid. I was a kid. He was a lot older than me. And, uh. So I didn't have to do the pass and review. They just made me like a parking lot attendant. I didn't want to do it anyway.

• 36:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  All that practice.

• 36:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  And we were in a Nazi company too. They all the flags. Remember those stupid flags for, I don't even remember what they were for.

• 36:36Jocko Willink?

  Bro, I actually.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Best marchers, best, you fold your underwear the best.

• 36:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is not, like, I have very limited memories of boot camp.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  I hated it.

• 36:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know that I hated it, but I don't remember a lot about it. I remember like the highlights of it. Probably the biggest, I remember just.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  You don't remember shoveling snow.

• 36:54Jocko Willink?

  No, I definitely don't remember not in Orlando. I remember sweating. I remember like sweat, big giant pools of sweat.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  I would have rather gone there.

• 36:59Jocko Willink?

  I remember the space shuttle took off while we were standing out there. Like there was a space shuttle launch and we.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  That's totally cool.

• 37:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was like, oh, that's cool. But don't remember much from boot camp. Uh, so you go from there to C school and then you get orders, get orders to go to the USS Carl Vinson.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I.

• 37:17Jocko Willink?

  Which is.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  My first set of orders were to, uh, the Carl Vinson via nuke C school, nuke machinist mate C school.

• 37:27Jocko Willink?

  So basically for everyone that doesn't know, that means hello, regular Navy, no, no, no buds, no SEAL teams.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  And I got to watch those guys go through school there. That was at the same place I was going through A school. They were a bunch of zombies, like 12 hours of class.

• 37:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's free.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  They had a night class and they had a morning class. I don't want a nuke.

• 37:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's a freaking hard job, man. It's a freaking hard job.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  I got kicked out of high school. They wanted me to be a nuke.

• 37:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, whoever was running your career corp consulting was not doing a great job, dude. They should have beelined you straight to the freaking buds. Uh, but then you, did you, this is kind of crazy though. You like requested captain's mask.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  No, I just went to his office.

• 38:07Jocko Willink?

  So you didn't even, so that's even better. You didn't even request captain. As you said, I'm going to go talk to the old man.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, kind of like, you know, like group two, you know, what was her name that was up there for like longer than anybody was in the SEAL teams, the secretary.

• 38:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  So I talked to the secretary and I was like, I got a problem with my orders. I had my orders. And, uh, I don't know how I got in there, but she let me get in there. And I think the guy was just amazed that some E2 was coming to his office. Some boot, like real boot.

• 38:34Jocko Willink?

  That's insane dude.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  And I told him, hey, look, I passed the test for the screening test for BUDS. There was 50 of us, only like 10 of us passed. I was told I was gonna get this on my, on my contract and this is what I got. He was like, do you understand that you're not supposed to be doing it this way? That's kinda how the conversation, it was like, I kinda played in between. I knew it was wrong, but I didn't care. Uh, because there was no way I was going to Nuke C school. So whatever I had to do, I was gonna, I was gonna do it.

• 39:04Jocko Willink?

  And then the dude was cool and just said, all right, and he took care of you.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  I got beat a little bit, but well, beat, not like BUDS. I mean, did you ever try to count how many pushups you did in one day in BUDS?

• 39:15Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  And you get up to a thousand.

• 39:17Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever?

• 39:18Speaker 01

  I tried.

• 39:19Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  You know, you'd lose count.

• 39:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I never even thought about.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  2082s hitting or 72s hitting the back of the head. Forget what number you're on.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Geez, I, I drove the chow once and this guy didn't make it through. He was such a big teddy bear cruise, just couldn't run. Uh, and we were late for chow and I had a Volkswagen Beetle. I was like, oh, we'll go get chow. Class was already gone.

• 39:44Jocko Willink?

  So, so, so now we're fast forwarding to BUDS. We're jumping to BUDS. This is his first phase. I'm gonna say, no, it's cool, man. So this is his first phase?

• 39:51Speaker 01

  This was.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  I can't even remember.

• 39:57Jocko Willink?

  So you.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  But the brakes went out on the thing and you know, the cross, the cross intersection at 75.

• 40:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  So I crash into that thing because my brakes go out. I only hit it at like 25, 30 miles an hour. Both of us hit the windshield, starred the windshield, windshield's out in the middle of 75. As the BUDS class and the instructors drive by us and like, oh God. 1500 eight count bodybuilders that weekend.

• 40:20Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  That weekend, both of us, we cheated.

• 40:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you pay for it.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes you can't buy threes, sometimes you can't buy fives. You can't do 1500.

• 40:32Jocko Willink?

  Did you just stand out of the first phase, outside the first phase office or something? And just sit there and do them?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was first phase, yeah. It was right by the bell.

• 40:39Jocko Willink?

  How do you remember, was it like, did you do like 750 a day or something like that?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Uh, no, we just, when nobody was looking, we just counted.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Sometimes they sat in front of us, we'd count by ones. As soon as they left, we were like, ah, five hundred and five.

• 40:56Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any idea what you were getting into when you went to BUDS? Like, what comprehension level did you have? I basically, yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  I, I heard it was gonna be hard.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  And it's kind of a mindset I've always, I've always gotten out. And it works. I don't know if it worked for other people, but I always think it's gonna be worse than it really is. So, a lot of times it's just hard to get started.

• 41:20Jocko Willink?

  Like, how good of a, I know you only were in high school for a couple of years. But how good of a, how good, well, did you, I know you wrestled.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  I played football, I wrestled. When I grew up, I, I played all sports, soccer, I boxed a little bit.

• 41:34Jocko Willink?

  Hence the knockouts.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  I remember almost knocking myself out playing football. I was, I was vicious.

• 41:41Jocko Willink?

  Just getting after it?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  I played basketball, never really scored a point. My coach would just say, go foul that guy.

• 41:50Jocko Willink?

  So, so, but you had, you had, you had some good athletic background.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like playing sports.

• 41:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you, but you had no knowledge of BUDS, like, hey?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  None at all.

• 42:01Jocko Willink?

  Did you do, did you, did you think about, like, I was, I was, talk about, you know, when I was quote, getting ready for BUDS? No idea what to expect. I just knew that you ran a lot and you swam a lot. So I ran a lot, I swam a lot. But I would do, you know, four sets of pull-ups and be like, alright, you know, that was a good workout. And just had no idea that you were gonna get to BUDS and you were gonna do hundreds of pull-ups in an hour. Like, more, more than you could count.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Well, they do, don't expect you to be able to turn a fourteen mile run when you show up. It is progressive.

• 42:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  I think they're even getting smarter about it now.

• 42:40Jocko Willink?

  They're definitely getting smarter about it. But, um,

• 42:43Speaker 01

  I mean, I showed up.

• 42:44Jocko Willink?

  And guys are, the guys are getting smarter about it. I guess that's my point.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Some of them abuse it, too.

• 42:50Jocko Willink?

  What do you mean?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  You can only keep me in the water for ten minutes because the water's fifty-eight degrees. They know that.

• 42:56Jocko Willink?

  When do you think that chart became a thing?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  After us.

• 43:03Jocko Willink?

  Are you being serious? Like, do you think it is after us? Because I-

• 43:06Speaker 01

  It is after us.

• 43:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, I mean, they would just, it was no freaking rules, it seemed like.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  They probably looked at-

• 43:14Speaker 01

  The student body is a curve. And if somebody went into hypothermia, they're like, hey, you might need to take them out now.

• 43:20Jocko Willink?

  I remember that part. I remember them walking down the line and being like, you could hear him like, hey, brother, this man is getting raw.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  They shine the flashlight.

• 43:26Jocko Willink?

  Yep. They're like, hey, this guy's getting hyped. And if, but if no, if you didn't hear that, then it's like back in the water. And they would just keep you doing that until someone started getting hypothermia. Maybe two people started getting hypothermia and then they'd be like, on to the next evolution. There was no graph that they were following.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  No, they do now. I think it's good. There's good and bad to it. I wish the students didn't know it. That's part of the game, not knowing.

• 43:51Jocko Willink?

  And you also met your wife. While you were in fourth phase, so the old fourth phase was you were there basically standing by to class up. I don't know. I don't know what they call it now.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Fourth phase.

• 44:01Jocko Willink?

  It's still called fourth phase? So you were, you were there.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Which is weird.

• 44:05Jocko Willink?

  And, yeah, okay. And that's when you, you, you met your future wife. And then rolling into first phase. Drown proofing.

• 44:23Jocko Willink?

  You call rescue swimmer, life saving.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I did work with the writers. So some of the stuff is, is changed a little bit. The whole, the whole process of going with this. What is that award program? That you gotta use when you're editing. Sometimes some things just get by. Like, man, I can't figure it. It's program.

• 44:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a, it, plus when you look at something over and over again, you're just gonna miss stuff. It happens.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Well, and when you work with a civilian, stuff that they think's interesting. Oh. Is, I'm like, why do you want to talk about this?

• 44:58Jocko Willink?

  Jack.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  So it was, there was something that the guy I worked with, uh, felt was interesting and, and to get the proper terminology. Because to me drown proofing was, we didn't lose many people to that.

• 45:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, drown proofing, drown proofing was pretty easy. You'd lose a few guys. Yeah, you lose a few guys in knot tying, lose a few guys in.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  The underwater swim.

• 45:17Jocko Willink?

  The underwater swim. We did lose a few guys in life saving. Because life saving was.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  That is interesting.

• 45:24Jocko Willink?

  Cause it was a subjective thing where they could look at a guy and be like, hey, this guy, we don't like this guy.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  They're just trying to drown you.

• 45:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then they're gonna drown you when you, they don't like you. Cause they have that power.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  And to do the whole waist push and go down there and tug on their shit and make them comply.

• 45:41Jocko Willink?

  It's a scrap for sure.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  It is. I mean, that's what they teach lifeguards. You don't let them grab on to you. You gotta get them away from you and sometimes you gotta hurt them.

• 45:48Jocko Willink?

  But man.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  A good punch to the gut, you know, that'll calm them down.

• 45:52Jocko Willink?

  They definitely.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  They're gonna live.

• 45:53Jocko Willink?

  There were some guys that they just weren't gonna make it, you know, like a guy that they didn't like or whatever, had a bad attitude or they thought it was a punk. He wasn't gonna get out of the water.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Those people have a history too. It's not just one evolution. It's a repetitive, poor performance.

• 46:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I think that it seems like there's, you think they're stricter about that now where there's less subjectivity? Or you think it's the same?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I would just have to say that I know there's some things that have changed and a lot of guys will be like, oh, I think Bud's is easier. But the attrition rate's the same.

• 46:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  So they're not making any more SEALs.

• 46:30Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  I mean, even with a class that's twice the size. I mean, we would start with like 125 guys to get 20. Now they're starting with what 200 something?

• 46:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, I think they start with 165 and they still get whatever, whatever 20% of that is.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  They're still only getting that. It's still 75, 80% of attrition. So it's still, I don't think it's any easier than it used to be.

• 46:53Jocko Willink?

  No, I, I've gone down there. I talked to friends that are down there. They're like, no, it's not, not easier. The other thing that's.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  One of the evolution might be different. That's like, for instance, when, when I went through, we had twin 72s. They're not as buoyant as the twin 80s. So it was a little bit harder to tread water with those damn tanks. Cause they're steel and they weren't as buoyant.

• 47:12Jocko Willink?

  You know what else? They wear, um, like lightweight boots now, not jungle boots, not old school jungle boots.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  That was a difference too, that when I was going through is everything was in boots.

• 47:21Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  They were getting ready to transition to the shoes. So the times were different. And it almost didn't translate, you know, going from boots and then lowering the times because you're in sneakers. It was almost harder.

• 47:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I just know we wore boots and then when I eventually picked up what they started wearing, I was like, oh, that's way nicer.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. They were issuing those, those garbage New Balance, which gave me shin splints.

• 47:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, just the running shoes?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like when you, they didn't.

• 47:56Jocko Willink?

  My legs were better off in boots than running in sneakers. The sneakers hurt me more.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  So what a 710 pace, that's not bad in boots.

• 48:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but the thing, that's the other thing that's, uh, what is it deceiving? The thing that's deceiving about buds is they go, hey, it's only a a 32 minute, four mile timed run. That's an eight minute mile. When you first get there, you go, oh, that's, I can do that no problem.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  You just did a two mile swim this morning.

• 48:22Jocko Willink?

  You just did a two mile swim and then you did.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  And then it's five miles, just five miles to go to chow, three times a day. You run five miles every day just to eat.

• 48:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And not to mention that four mile timed run ain't four miles. I don't know what they do now, but I know that there was times where I run as hard as I could and I wouldn't be able to, I would be like barely passing.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Well, they do that to every class. They have that one run that's long, so everybody fails. It's a mind game.

• 48:46Jocko Willink?

  Psychological.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  We were doing the five mile timed run and that extra mile was so much harder exponentially, just to put out for that much longer, just one mile. And they actually had to get rid of that because it was injuring people and a lot of people were failing it.

• 49:02Jocko Willink?

  Crazy.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  That's what they were pinging me on, trying to get me kicked out. But I brought a watch. I was passing.

• 49:07Jocko Willink?

  Yes. So how, so how did that happen? You, so, so you brought a watch? Cause that's another thing that's hard is you don't, you're not allowed to have a watch.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  And we were running the UDTs.

• 49:18Jocko Willink?

  So you're, what, what phase is this? Do you remember?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  This is third phase, uh, which was die phase back then.

• 49:25Jocko Willink?

  And so you failed one run?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Uh, he was failing me on all of them and everybody behind me.

• 49:30Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you had a beef with an instructor?

• 49:32Speaker 01

  With, uh, we're not going to mention names, but he was the phase officer. He was the die phase officer. And, uh, you know, you know, the game that, that used to be played there on room inspections. I mean, you're going to fail, you're going to get wet and sandy. And he, he was in front of me and he was like, why do you have all this stolen equipment in your locker? I'm like, God, I don't know what you're talking about. So he's talking about like extra knives, UDTs and COTs garbage.

• 49:56Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  And I was like, I don't have any of that stuff in my locker. I was just up there. And the conversation just got to the point where he was like, well, one of two things is happening. You're lying or I'm lying. I was like, well, it's not me, so it must be you.

• 50:07Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  But it wasn't like a disrespectful thing. I was answering a damn question. I was just answering his question. He said, one of one of two things is happening. What is it? I was like, well, it's not me. It must be you.

• 50:19Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  E two.

• 50:21Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Narcissistic lieutenant.

• 50:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  At the time.

• 50:25Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking crazy. You had like, you had more balls than me going through buds.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  That wasn't balls. I was just answering a question.

• 50:32Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, man. I don't know if I would have said, it ain't me. I guess it depends on how you said it too.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  It was not coming from a place of disrespect. It was, I was just totally answering the damn question.

• 50:44Jocko Willink?

  You're just like, I'm not lying.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  I'm not lying. It's you. You asked. I'm answering your question.

• 50:49Jocko Willink?

  So he didn't like that. And so now he kind of had it out for you.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  And then he sicked that guy we were talking about earlier. On me. So he started just harassing me, you know, third phase was a lot of classroom. You know, dive physics and all that garbage. Uh, but every break, I was getting wet and sandy doing pull ups, doing pushups. She was just beating me up. And then he started failing me on the runs. And I talk about it in the book. I think I actually named him a guy named Doc Flynn.

• 51:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Uh, I went and told him, I was like, hey, look, I brought a watch. They're failing me. I mean, I'm passing these things by like two minutes and they're failing me and everybody behind me.

• 51:25Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of a weird move because you were breaking the rules.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Well, I had to.

• 51:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know. But that's a weird move, man. That's a weird move to be like.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  I've always done it though. I went and talked to the commanding officer.

• 51:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, dude, like I said, you got more balls than I had.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  I just didn't know any different.

• 51:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  I wasn't doing it because I thought it was having balls. It was just, I don't know how else to get out of this. Or fix this.

• 51:47Jocko Willink?

  So you're not allowed to bring a watch and you brought a watch. You timed yourself.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I timed it. I tied it to the, you remember the buckles on the UDTs?

• 51:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  I tied it to a piece of like 550 cord and hung it down there.

• 52:02Jocko Willink?

  Cool. And so you, how did you, how did you single out Doc Flynn as the guy that you would trust?

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Uh, he was just one of the guys in the phase that. Really never beat us up for no reason.

• 52:16Jocko Willink?

  He seemed like a fair dude.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there was two kinds of instructors there. There was guys hiding out that never really did anything. And then there was guys that, back in those days too, there wasn't a whole lot going on, but guys that were operational that just needed a break. So, you know, some of them just beat us up just because they thought they were the gatekeepers, you know, kind of like going to some of these army schools. I'm the gatekeeper. We have to have an attrition rate and I'm going to make sure you go through something as hard as I used to. Or I did, because their fish story is Bud's was a lot harder when I went through. And this guy, this guy was a skinny little punk, but he, he later got administratively separated for something else he'd done. So karma's a bitch.

• 52:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So then, but Doc Flynn was like, all right, cool. And then.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  He ran the next run and he said, I'm a run, I'll run the pace. And if you finish in front of me, you pass.

• 53:08Jocko Willink?

  Doc Flynn, legit.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  So he ran it and this was a five mile time run, which they got rid of.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  He came across the finish line and you know what happens when you're the cutoff guy? How many times can you be the cutoff guy? Every damn time.

• 53:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, that's a, one of my LPOs who you know, um, he, you know, when I, he was my first LPO. And I was like coming out of Bud's, I'm asking him Bud's questions. Like, did you ever, were you ever in the goon squad? And he goes, I was the cutoff for the goon squad. He said every single run he was the cutoff for the goon squad.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Didn't like him. You know what? That was the only time I got into the goon squad too, the whole time through Bud's was on those timed runs. And, uh, what I was good at was winning that first race.

• 53:53Jocko Willink?

  So you could get secured from the goon squad?

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:57Jocko Willink?

  So then, so then what happened?

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Uh, well, he came across the finish line and when you're the cutoff for the goon squad, you get sent to the water. That's where you wind up when you fail that run. He comes across, you know, a couple of minutes after we finished and we're getting hammered. And he was like, what's going on with those guys? And he was like, well, they all failed. And Flynn was like, I just did it. I just passed it. They're like two minutes in front of me.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  But it got hidden because I went to a review board and still got rolled back.

• 54:28Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  I got rolled back. That was graduation week. And I got rolled back to Dreggerface. At least I didn't have to do the open circuit garbage again.

• 54:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and this was when this was when dive phase was third phase. When I went through a year or two later, dive phase was second phase because they would still get rid of a lot of guys during dive phase.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, to me, I thought it was the hardest phase.

• 54:53Jocko Willink?

  Dive phase?

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think I think that's why they moved it to that.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  But we lost more people there. You don't lose people in land warfare.

• 55:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  You gotta be pretty stupid, dude.

• 55:05Jocko Willink?

  I think we lost two guys.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  You gotta be pretty stupid.

• 55:08Jocko Willink?

  One of the guys was a good dude. I think he did something that they didn't like and they got rid of him. He was an officer, too.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Personality difference. That'll happen.

• 55:18Jocko Willink?

  Crazy.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  It's a pretty critical community.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  It self-regulates, though. It works.

• 55:24Jocko Willink?

  Indeed.

• 55:27Jocko Willink?

  And then where are you at? SQT?

• 55:30Jocko Willink?

  Did you go through? You went through STT, right, at a team?

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Well, it was it was kind of a weird one. It wasn't SQT like it is now. It was kind of thrown together.

• 55:39Jocko Willink?

  At the team. Because you went to Team Three.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they they cooperated with the other teams. So I went through whatever they go. I think it was called STT at the time. And it was just because we had training sales at each of the teams and they would run it.

• 55:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  So we were meshed together with Team One, Three, Five, and it was kind of ad hoc. And then they jammed us into the platoons and the platoons pretty much took care of us. We didn't have our tridents back then either. Guys show up at the teams now with their tridents. We actually had a different NEC when we should. What was it? Fifty-three, twenty?

• 56:12Jocko Willink?

  Fifty-three, twenty, yeah.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  And then it was up to your platoon to decide when you got it.

• 56:17Jocko Willink?

  They started giving the guys tridents in SQT so they'd show up to the team. Guys were taking the new guys that showed up with their tridents and making them painting them blue for inert.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  But then they still kind of kept up the tradition. Like, you can go back into platoon huts now and they'll... The platoons with the new guys, like you don't get your trident, even though it's been put in your admin record, we're not going to give it to you until we say it's, and then they'll have like the fish tank or you've seen one of those Pac-Man frogs. I've seen a Pac-Man frog with all the tridents in it and they gotta keep the frog alive.

• 56:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's legit.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a fun community.

• 57:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and there's, you know, you talk about some of the fun in the community.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Best college I ever went to.

• 57:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, um, some of the fun of the community, which is called hazing.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Zero tolerance, it never happens.

• 57:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, uh, yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  See, that's a good, good thing about hazing, especially, well, probably now also. I know there's a zero tolerance and it doesn't happen, but if you don't get hazed, they don't like you. They don't trust you. So if you get hazed, you're like, okay, this guy's all right. So it's like a privilege.

• 57:33Jocko Willink?

  Thank you, sir. Can I have another?

• 57:35Speaker 01

  There ain't enough of you to hurt me. Not enough of you.

• 57:39Jocko Willink?

  One of the things you said here is you're getting your bird and um, this all sounded good. I just, this brought back memories. The, the commanding officer was the last guy to pound in my trident. He had a big grin on his face as he approached. He pulled the trident out of my body because this is after you, when you get your trident, you know, well.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  We used to have quarters too.

• 57:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, at quarters, you get your trident and then the first, you know, I don't know who, I think it was my platoon commander. But anyways, the whole team freaking lines up and pounds that thing into your chest, you know.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  And that doesn't hurt.

• 58:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, well, okay, maybe it didn't hurt you, it hurt me.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I mean the punch, but you don't actually feel the prongs after.

• 58:22Jocko Willink?

  Yes, you don't feel the prongs after the first eight.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're bleeding.

• 58:27Jocko Willink?

  But then, but then guys start pulling it out and like, oh, it's a little crooked, Jaco. And they get you again.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  That hurts worse.

• 58:34Jocko Willink?

  But what I like, yeah.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Cause he's got like those little nubs on the end of them or the little widgets attached to. When you pull it out, you can feel it pulling your.

• 58:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you feel your chest coming out. But you say your commanding officer, he pulled the trident out of my body, straightened it like he was fixing it a bent nail. Then he placed it on my chest and slowly pushed it back in.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  That hurts worse.

• 58:56Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, that's freaking good times from the old man right there.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  That's back in the days where the back forty was uh where attitude adjustments were made.

• 59:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh now you're going on peacetime deployments. You say this, my peacetime deployments took me around the globe. Asia, Middle East, Egypt, Kuwait, Japan, Korea, Guam, points beyond, in between, conducting joint country to country training on my deployment to Bahrain. We patrolled the Persian Gulf enforcing oil embargoes. We would boy board oil tankers that were in violation of various infractions. Most of the time, the infraction was that they didn't identify themselves because their radio didn't work.

• 59:33Jocko Willink?

  We would catch tankers, we would catch tankers bearing the Iranian flag uh filled with embargoed Iraqi oil. All sorts of shenanigans going on. Um so what'd you do? Four deployments?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Eight.

• 59:47Jocko Willink?

  What'd you do in that in that first run at team three?

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Four.

• 59:50Jocko Willink?

  Four.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  And the first one was Southeast Asia. That was like right after the Gulf War.

• 59:56Jocko Willink?

  Did you go to the PI?

• 59:57Speaker 01

  I went to the PI.

• 59:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so then I think your next.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  That war happened so fast. We couldn't get there.

• 1:00:03Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. Then you end up, you're, it looked like you were gonna go to BUDs and be an instructor?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Jocko Willink?

  But you.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Actually had orders.

• 1:00:10Jocko Willink?

  You had orders to BUDs and then what, what, how did you, how did you hear about the leapfrog tryout?

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  I was just by chance. Uh and I only had like thirty, thirty-five jumps.

• 1:00:18Jocko Willink?

  That's insane.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  I had no idea what I was doing.

• 1:00:20Jocko Willink?

  That's insane. I mean, those guys at that time had thousands of jumps.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Well, there was, there were some guys on, on that team that had uh what was that program? We used to have our own, well, we still do the, the original free fall program that we had.

• 1:00:36Jocko Willink?

  Just the military free fall that was out?

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Like three something, three M, three T. I can't remember what it was. But it was our own program out there at uh El Centro.

• 1:00:44Jocko Willink?

  El Centro, yeah.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  You know, so a lot of those instructors were on the team with me. Dwight Saddle, Andy Crowdhammel.

• 1:00:51Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  You know, Clay Jackson, they all had a couple thousand plus jumps.

• 1:00:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, those are the guys I'm talking about. Like they were freaking out.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  I had thirty.

• 1:00:59Jocko Willink?

  So you decided, hey, what the hell, I'll go get a bunch of jumps in.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  I had no idea.

• 1:01:03Jocko Willink?

  At the minimum, right?

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I think I got like 45 jumps tryouts with the cool parachute.

• 1:01:10Jocko Willink?

  And then you ended up making it?

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking crazy.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Clay told me he could teach a monkey to fall out of an airplane if he had enough bananas. That was his, because I didn't think I was gonna make it. I thought I was going to bust. And I really didn't want to. The jump team was, was some of the most fun I had, probably one of the most dangerous jobs I had until combat.

• 1:01:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the jump team at that time, man, they were pushing the envelope hardcore.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had some injuries. Uh, we had, we had a death when I was on the, on the jump team.

• 1:01:41Jocko Willink?

  I remember I was doing like my, whatever, my jumps to get my gold wings when I first got the team. Like I didn't, I tried it, but I, they sent me down to the freaking brown field to go get some jumps. And the jump team was jumping and they did like a down, I'd never seen a free fall person in my life. Never seen a free fall jump and I, I landed and got my chute all packed up or whatever. And then in come the leapfrogs and they did a down plane. They were going a thousand miles an hour as far as I could tell, and I, they were so close to the ground. And I, I, I could hear them say break.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, holy shit, this is insane.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  We had a guy shoot himself. He broke too low and went into this stadium, which at the time was, uh,

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Jack Murphy. That was a long time ago.

• 1:02:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  Uh, and he, uh, hit like four seats and ripped them out of the ground. Those things are bolted into the crown and the concrete and he walked away from it.

• 1:02:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Tommy Marquis.

• 1:02:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Did you know Tommy?

• 1:02:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  He could hit that dude upside the head with a bat.

• 1:02:46Jocko Willink?

  What a beast, man.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  He's gone now. He was a good dude.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Um, couldn't hurt him.

• 1:02:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, that's what I mean. He was just a monster. Uh, and nice, nice as hell.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Teddy bear too.

• 1:03:00Jocko Willink?

  You got this little section here while we were falling towards the earth. So you guys are doing all kinds of crazy jumping. While we're falling through the earth, another guy and I had to crawl out from underneath canopies to clear airspace. So you guys were doing crew relative work. You're all freaking wrapped up. I can't say exactly how fast we were falling as we were, as there were fully and partially inflated parachutes, but even slowly falling out of the sky can be deadly. I was still recovering from the terror of my first cutaway when my second happened a few days later. Me and another guy got tangled up and caught in a helicopter spin. The deployment bag retraction system on the tops of our parachutes had somehow gotten tangled together. We were twirling around opposite each other, falling. He was looking directly at me and I at him and we yelled back and forth at each other.

• 1:03:45Jocko Willink?

  Cut away. No, you cut away. Like the world's most high stake game of rock, paper, scissors. He won and I cut away.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  He's a good, long time friend of mine. He's a big pussy. He should have cut away. He was scared. I don't even know how that happened.

• 1:04:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, how you guys got all wrapped up?

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, I know how the rap happened, but the where our parachutes got connected to each other was ridiculous. So that those are canopy relative work parachutes. So that usually when you open a parachute, there's a trailing pilot chute. Well, on those, because you're doing crew, you don't want that stuff trailing. It has a retraction system on a three ring retraction system that pulls it up to the top skin of the, of the parachute. And that's what got connected on both of ours. It was a rap. We were doing like eight man stack rotations. Guy peels off the top and flies all the way to the bottom. That's how it started. And you get into a rap of like five, six dudes, some get shot out.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  And some get wrapped up and we, everybody broke out of that and we were just stuck.

• 1:04:48Jocko Willink?

  Did anyone have that on film?

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  No, because we, you know what? Back then.

• 1:04:53Jocko Willink?

  There was no such thing as a little GoPro. I mean, guys were still taking, I think I remember going from, Paul Robinson was one of our camera guys and he had this ginormous fricking, when he opened his parachute, he had to hold his head, his, pull his head down because he had all this weight up there, he'd break his neck. They used to jump, it wasn't filmed, so I think we had a Hi-8, which is a pretty large camera. It's not GoPro. Any clown could jump a GoPro.

• 1:05:26Jocko Willink?

  So, uh,

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  They had blow tubes on the camera. You had to take a picture.

• 1:05:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that was like,

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  You had a reticle.

• 1:05:33Jocko Willink?

  That's how you, uh, fired the, oh, no kidding.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  You'd have to start the camera before you went out, but the still camera, because they would have a video and a, and a still, and they had a blow tube. You'd have to blow into the tube to take a picture. And then you had a reticle here.

• 1:05:49Jocko Willink?

  I remember seeing guys jump those little reticles, so they knew where to aim.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Jocko Willink?

  Crazy. Yeah, you guys were pushing the envelope back then with the, with the jump team. Um, you did three years there, and then you go, uh, back to the teams. And where'd you go? Did you go to, you went to the East Coast?

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  I went to Team Eight.

• 1:06:06Jocko Willink?

  What year was that?

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Uh, 99.

• 1:06:10Jocko Willink?

  Check. And you?

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  And that was Kosovo.

• 1:06:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, you rolled on there. Um, NATO was allied with the ethnic Albanian forces and we were tasked with working with NATO to assist them in apprehending suspected war criminals and keeping an eye out on the movements of various warring factions. Kosovo was a real world test. We would do 72-hour special reconnaissance missions in rugged terrain full of natural and man-made threats. We did 25 SR missions in six months, averaging about one a week with one day of prep, three days on and a debrief on the other end. It was a kick in the butt deployment.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  And conventional forces don't react to anything inside of 72 hours. Yeah, I'll tell you that.

• 1:06:52Jocko Willink?

  It's better than sitting around. So you'd get, yeah. That's, that's still, I mean, at that time, doing real missions was awesome.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Well, we thought that was the game.

• 1:07:00Jocko Willink?

  For sure, for sure.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  You were Camp Bond Steel.

• 1:07:03Jocko Willink?

  Freaking get.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  The restrictions that they had on the guys. Out there it was ridiculous. I mean, they, they had to put Rigger's tape over their magazine well. They had to put Rigger's tape over their magazine. Uh,

• 1:07:16Jocko Willink?

  Who?

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Everybody that was out there was supposed to do that. We didn't do it.

• 1:07:20Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not unusual to have, I mean, they had a dude that had an AD at the front gate with a 50 cal. But that's their clearing process.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  At the end, they pull the trigger.

• 1:07:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Why do you gotta pull the trigger to clear and save a weapon?

• 1:07:37Jocko Willink?

  Well, at least you got it. I hope you had a point in a safe direction.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  He did.

• 1:07:40Jocko Willink?

  Okay. We'll take it.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  You ever seen a 50 cal shoot 10 feet in front of you?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Pretty impressive.

• 1:07:50Jocko Willink?

  So that's 99. Come back from that plan. Again, I'm skipping a bunch of stuff here. Really cool information about what those deployments were like. That's why people gotta buy the book to get some of those details. Jump ahead a little bit.

• 1:08:04Jocko Willink?

  Reported to Naval Special Warfare Group Two Training Detachment on September 8th, 2001. New instructor role. Be there for two years.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  That was the week 9/11 happened?

• 1:08:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was gonna say September 11th. So you just check into Trade at?

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Nobody wanted to go there.

• 1:08:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, of course not.

• 1:08:24Jocko Willink?

  When, when did you?

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  It's the model now.

• 1:08:26Jocko Willink?

  When did you, uh, what were you teaching?

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  I kinda bounced around. I got over there, did all the air stuff at first. Then I did land warfare and CQC. I just kinda bounced around all over the place.

• 1:08:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, Trade at has become such a great place to develop SEALs. I mean, it really has. And back in the day, like when, when you and I first got to the team, I know no one wanted to be in training cell. And, and I did.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  The old guys did. The old warrants.

• 1:08:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they, they did.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  The old Master Chiefs. That's when Master Chief, you couldn't figure out what a Master Chief did in the SEAL teams.

• 1:09:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'll tell you, I got some good advice from some of those old Master Chiefs and warrant officers that would say like, hey, if you wanna learn this stuff, you gotta go teach it.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Jocko Willink?

  And I was lucky enough to go into. Training cell at SEAL Team One, spent a couple of years there and it was, I did, I learned. I was trying to figure out the other day, I'd made some estimate, like 50% of what I learned in the, in the entire teams was, was working for whatever it was, three years or two, two and a half years in training cell at SEAL Team One.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  And watching 10 groups do the same thing.

• 1:09:30Jocko Willink?

  10 groups.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Who does what best.

• 1:09:31Jocko Willink?

  Teaching, teaching the junior officers that are going through STT how to do an IAD, like how, what to react in these different situations, then watching them and seeing the mistakes they make. That was 40% of what I learned. Another big chunk of what I learned was when I was a tradet later on, uh, you know, same thing. You're teaching guys, you're watching them do it, you're seeing the mistakes they make, you're putting them through drills, you're seeing the same platoons go through the same training evolutions, what the leaders do, what mistakes they make. So yeah, going into training cell and training detachment is a great step and it's a great system now because guys go, they, you know, they get there in E5 and then they go there, they make E6 and then they, when they're a platoon LPL, they just got done teaching this stuff, man. They're ready most of the time.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, they're getting there a little bit faster than we used to also.

• 1:10:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a little more, it's way more formalized the way it all works now, which is freaking good for them.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Well, I just left tradet. I was a contractor there. Well, when I left the CARE Coalition after seven years, I went to teaching military freefall, had an injury and then went to CQC Salk. And it was interesting seeing guys that when I was the platoon chief are now like leaders.

• 1:10:38Jocko Willink?

  For sure, man.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Guys that were E6s when I was a platoon chief are now master chiefs and, uh, some of the new guys are doing their platoon chief slot. It was fun to watch, watch them go through and it's, I was terrified too, when, when I was doing my platoon chief slot. You know, like I said, we have earned securities. I, I didn't want anybody to get hurt. I want to make sure I provided everything that the guys needed. Uh, they used to tell me, when I started the micromanage, hey, chief, get out of my back pocket, uh, because you can't manage all that crap. Quite honestly, the, there were guys that were more experienced that were junior to me when I was in charge. And you just gotta know when you know what you know and what you don't and. Let the people that are more experienced, you know, take those reins.

• 1:11:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you gotta be, uh, you gotta have the confidence in your leadership that you know, oh, you, you're, hey, you've done this sort of thing before. You run it. No, no factor, no problem. Good to go.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  That's micromanaging hurts.

• 1:11:36Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Freaking, it's a disaster.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  A lot of hours.

• 1:11:41Jocko Willink?

  So, um, so then you get done with trade at, you go to team four. You're, you're, you go, you go on deployment. Where'd you go? Baghdad?

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:11:55Jocko Willink?

  You go, you go into Baghdad. I know you got into some.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Team four at the time was actually, they had nine details, which was huge. It was, nobody, nobody in the SEAL teams wanted to do the PSD.

• 1:12:07Jocko Willink?

  Yep. So, yeah, for people that don't know, one of the major taskings that the SEAL teams got in 2005. It's, I think it started 2004 and five was to protect the senior leadership of the new Iraqi government. Everyone, well, not everyone, but a whole bunch of people wanted to kill those guys. And, uh, the people that got the job to protect them was the SEAL teams. So that's what, you know, you did. And then of course, there's a whole.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Out of doing that.

• 1:12:37Jocko Willink?

  Well, there's a whole lot of things that, that are, that are wrapped up in doing that because if you're proactive about it, that means we're going to go try and capture bad guys or kill bad guys that might be trying to target our people. We're also doing intelligence gathering. We're going out and figuring out who's trying to kill these people.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  It's a great setup. That's what I did.

• 1:12:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  I didn't do the actual inner ring of protection. I was far outer ring, uh, looking for threats that were going after, uh, targets within those PSDs.

• 1:13:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  And we had nine and they all, every, every one of those politicians, I want my Navy SEALs. We don't want to work with you people.

• 1:13:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was a harsh, harsh one, harsh pill to swallow for a lot of guys. I got lucky. I was, it started right after I left and it ended before I came back.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Well, I think it all got turned over. There, there's actually military units that, that's what they do.

• 1:13:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  And they got turned over to them.

• 1:13:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Jocko Willink?

  You did have some good times on that one. Here we go. We were speeding down the road and slid to a left turn as soon as we made the corner and nearly smashed into a makeshift roadblock. We must have been moving too fast as we caught the roadblock construction crew off guard. We still had their, who still had their AK strapped to their backs. Their friends had all taken up positions on the right side of the road and had their weapons trained on us, ready to shoot as we sprinted around the corner. In a split second, the construction crew found themselves in a very awkward position, pinned between us, their friends, and their friends who wanted to shoot us. In the confusion, we managed to get the jump on them. The lead Humvee was equipped with a minigun.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Those things are awesome. We never, we never got them.

• 1:14:12Jocko Willink?

  I know. I have to use a certain level of reverence when I say that because it is so awesome to have a minigun on a Hummer. And the gunner had the reflexes of a mongoose. Forty feet away, the targets and their rifle wielding friends, I had a front row seat to the action when the gunner opened up on all of them. I had not seen a minigun in live combat before, so I was a little surprised by what happened next. By the way, there's nothing mini about a minigun. It's a pedestal mounted six barrel rotary machine gun that shoots as many as 6,000 rounds of 762 by 51 every minute. And the bullet is about the size of a AAA battery. Bullet spits so fast, fast out of the Gatling style rotating barrels that it looked like a red laser beam and sounded like the mating call of some bizarre

• 1:14:54Jocko Willink?

  prehistoric bird. The first volley of bullets hit one guy in the chest as he practically vaporized in a burst of red mist. As this was going on, about 50 yards up the road, another enemy fighter popped up and fired an RPG directly at the lead Humvee, the one that was firing the minigun. I couldn't see the RPG, but I saw the Humvee 10 feet in front of me lift up, drop back down with a crash and catch on fire. The gunner didn't even flinch. He just kept on shooting. In 30 seconds, the 25 or so ambushers, including the RPG trigger men, had all been killed and were all red piles of flesh spread over the street. When it was over, we secured the area, salvaged what we could from the still burning Humvee, and then destroyed it with a thermite grenade. The minigun turned 25 human beings into shredded flesh in less than a minute. That was quick, I thought.

• 1:15:40Jocko Willink?

  And then I felt weird because the next thought I had was that was awesome. Awesome because we did not get killed and because the power of the minigun. It was, this was the first time I had seen people in the process of dying, but it was the, not the first time seeing dead people. My life and training had prepared me for these situations. My constant inoculation of violence and stress made what would have been grotesque and unbearable to many, an acceptable situation to me. My trauma had conditioned me to accept the unacceptable. That's what war does. It changes the way you view the world. I found no pleasure whatsoever in killing the enemy. However, this was an outcome of war. Everyone at some point was someone's child, but that thought is lost in war. The most profane aspects of war is that it deletes the humanity from humans.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  You pretty much forget about everything you believe.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  You're not, you're not thinking about that when, when you're in a gunfight.

• 1:16:36Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Theology, religion.

• 1:16:39Jocko Willink?

  Political, whatever.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Politics. Dude's trying to kill me. Uh, I'm gonna go work on him.

• 1:16:47Jocko Willink?

  You get home from that deployment and then, then you did, is that when you get rolled into doing a platoon chief?

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:16:59Jocko Willink?

  Do your workup.

• 1:17:01Jocko Willink?

  How was the workup?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Uh, well.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  The workup prior was pretty interesting, uh, because I interfaced with all the guys that were going to be in the platoon when I was a platoon chief. And I remember breaking, uh, one of the guy's nods on, right before an op. He didn't know I was going to be his platoon chief. He kind of chewed me up. I was like, dude, don't put your stuff on the ground. I won't step on it.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  I did feel stupid about that though, but the workup is, you know, pretty, pretty standard. We were on an 18 month cycle, I think, on that one. I think it was 18 month cycle. So it's a year long workup, you know, broken up into the three, into the three parts, you know, pro dev, everybody going to schools.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  And ULT, just doing all the standard CQC, SALC, Air.

• 1:17:49Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys know that you were going to Iraq when you formed up?

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  We were kind of the bastard children too. Everybody was looking for the shiny object and at the time that was some task force and we got what was

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  thought to be the least of the shiny best deployments, which was Fallujah. And they, the guys that were there weren't doing anything. But we, we, we worked different. We worked intel different than they did and we were really busy. And I did 140 DAs on that deployment, which is talk to guys in the SEAL teams to do 100 DAs on the deployments unheard of.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  And then on top of that, teaching medical classes to, to the military units that they're, you know, second and fourth Iraqi Army Brigade and teaching tactics and how to patrol and trying to work with the MIT teams. It's, you know, when you run a target for your regular job, it's kind of hard to come and be a MIT team in Fallujah proper. And run a military unit, especially when they don't speak English. Their standard of work is not what.

• 1:18:56Jocko Willink?

  No, it is not.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  And that was one of the hardest things for us to, to get to was we, when we first got there, we, we had these expectations that they were going to get to the level that we were at least close and

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  that's just not going to happen. You've got to see, okay, this right here, this is what we want them to be at, but right here's got to be acceptable.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  It's just kind of the way it was over there.

• 1:19:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You've got to definitely adjust your standards in a real big way. But it's kind of cool because I'm thinking about, you know, your last, your previous deployment where you were kind of gathering a lot of intel and stuff like that. And then you roll out because as you know, we drive our own operations and if you can make, if you can find intel and you can put it together, you can put up a target package, let's go hit it, you know, that's, you know, to get that, to get a bunch of DAs done like that, it's.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  It's not the sexy thing to do.

• 1:19:40Jocko Willink?

  The hard part is getting the target packages put together. The fun part is going out and hitting them.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Most team guys are like, just, just show me what door. I don't even care. Just show me what door.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  It's, it's a lot harder to get the information.

• 1:19:54Jocko Willink?

  So you're on this deployment, you're doing all these DAs. And now we're going to get into.

• 1:20:03Jocko Willink?

  April 2007, northeast of Fallujah, when the shooting stopped, I was still on the floor, lying on my left side. So this is picking up where we started the, this whole, this whole podcast out. When the shooting stopped, I was still on the floor, lying on my left side. I pushed myself up to my knees. I don't remember hearing any of the gunfire, but now the sounds began to register in my ears. The two men who had stacked up directly behind me in my room clearing train were our Iraqi scouts. The second man in our train took a round to his chest plate, and it knocked him clear out into the foyer. Ironically, that round may have saved his life. He'd originally been within an arm's length behind me as we'd entered the room.

• 1:20:48Jocko Willink?

  The third man in my stack had been shot as he entered the room. An AK-47 round smashed through his bulletproof chest plate. He'd fallen dead in the doorway.

• 1:20:59Jocko Willink?

  The chance factor was insane. Once fired, a bullet can be unpredictable. The internal milling of a gun's barrel causes bullets to spin in flight. Some bullets will begin to tumble through the air at low speeds, while others are designed to tumble and cartwheel after hitting a target, which can cause some brutal damage. It's likely that we were all hit by the same type of bullets at nearly the same time, shot from the same gun, but the damage to each of us was significantly different. The balance of my room clearing train, five or six other guys, hadn't been able to get in the room because of all the volume of fire.

• 1:21:33Jocko Willink?

  I moved from my knees and stood to my feet.

• 1:21:37Jocko Willink?

  Felt like there were 200 pounds on my back. I took off my helmet and used the white light on my damaged pistol to survey the room. One of our other Iraqi scouts entered the room. He had been behind Clarky and followed him into his room. The bullet that hit Clark bypassed all three of the Iraqi scouts stacked up behind him. These three made it into Clarky's room and had gotten trapped in the back of the house when the shooting started. The scout had been part of the original group of 10 recruits who had been with us since the first day. He spoke decent English and gave me a report.

• 1:22:10Jocko Willink?

  One SEAL killed in action.

• 1:22:13Jocko Willink?

  One Iraqi scout killed in action, two detainees, and six women and children.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  At this point, I actually didn't even realize that they had left.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  It didn't register yet.

• 1:22:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is, um, you know, when we started getting reports about what had happened during this, you know? And, and I just remember thinking, this is just, hey, this is just pure insanity, you know? And, um.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  A lot of guys felt guilty for leaving me in there, but I can, I mean, I had to talk to a lot of guys like, hey, we didn't do anything wrong that night. Nobody saw me go in there. You guys followed protocol that we would always follow.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  You didn't blow up the house because you didn't have a full head count. You did that right. You know, so everybody did everything right. And I don't know, NSW sometimes with the knee jerk reactions that we would have to, try to make everything as safe as possible, which we're good at. But even if you do something,

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  everything's right, bad things can happen and you just can't.

• 1:23:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Can't minimize all the threats to the point where there's no more threat. You just can't do it.

• 1:23:33Jocko Willink?

  And you can also do really dumb things and make big mistakes and everything turns out perfect, you know? And you can do everything perfect and things can go wrong.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Perfect plan goes to shit in the first 30 seconds, right?

• 1:23:47Jocko Willink?

  Rewind it a little bit. This is what you said. "It was surreal like something out of a movie. Time slowed down almost to a stop and everything happened in super slow motion, almost as if I were watching a scene unfold frame by frame. Seconds seemed like minutes. A slow motion torn of bullets flew at me. I could clearly see all the bullets coming at me. I had total auditory exclusion. There were no sounds. I'd never been shot before, so I had no idea how it felt. In this strange, slow motion scene, I had a mental conversation with myself. Hey, am I actually getting shot right now? It occurred to me that those sledgehammers smashing all over my body were bullets hitting me one after another. It was in this moment that I said my first real prayer. God, please get me home to my girls.

• 1:24:33Jocko Willink?

  My wife and two young daughters were halfway around the world. In that instant, I felt them and they felt me." I felt like a bullet dodging character in the movie The Matrix, only I wasn't dodging any of the bullets. They were hitting me. My rifle was shot out of my hands. Bullets whizzing past my head, hammered into the men entering the room behind me. Even as I continued to penetrate down the left wall, nobody else in my train would be able to make entry, as all four of the enemy continued to fire directly into what is known as the fatal funnel.

• 1:25:04Jocko Willink?

  The dimly lit doorway in which I was standing.

• 1:25:10Jocko Willink?

  The enemy bullets triggered my rage and drove me to act. It was then that my body became, became my mind and took over. I suppose that's what habit is, when somebody, when the body overrides the mind and acts without specific instructions from the brain. My right hand instinctively reached down for my secondary weapon, a pistol. My hand was on autopilot as it unhooked the rubber strap I'd fashioned to keep my pistol secure. And with a fluid push, fluid forward push and pull, the very same motion that I'd done a hundred thousand times in training, my weapon released from my holster. I aimed my pistol, engaged the enemy fighter directly opposite me down the left wall. He was glaring at me with his weapon throwing rounds directly at me. I returned fire, four or five rounds from my weapon and caught him in the face and chest

• 1:25:53Jocko Willink?

  as he stared at me. His head jilted back, I saw the life leave his eyes like a light going off. I knew he was dead as he melted into a pile in front of me. I landed next to the dead man on my left. Years of training and muscle memory without any direct orders from my brain lifted my arm, arched it, and aimed my pistol at a young male figure, maybe in his early twenties. As he stood up and moved toward the doorway, I was still on the floor when I watched him pull a hand grenade from the front of his vest and pull the pin. My right hand pointed at him, my index finger squeezed the trigger. I saw the bullets exit my pistol and spin clockwise as they flew toward him, leaving a green vapor trail in their wake. I watched my bullets punch into one side of his head, and exhausted blood and brain

• 1:26:36Jocko Willink?

  matter instantly exiting out the other side. I shot him dead as he attempted a suicide mission to run out in the foyer with a live grenade where my fellow SEALs and Iraqi scouts had stacked up, attempting to enter the room. My rounds dropped them in his tracks. As he fell forward, I saw the grenade release from his hand and roll toward me, then it detonated.

• 1:27:05Jocko Willink?

  This is crazy. One of our newly arrived SEALs from Team 10. So these are the guys that just showed up. This is probably this kid's first op.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he was, he was the platoon chief.

• 1:27:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay. So he was good to go. Uh, one of the newly arrived SEALs.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  Shitty first night though.

• 1:27:17Jocko Willink?

  It's still a rough first night.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Their first night.

• 1:27:21Jocko Willink?

  One of the newly arrived SEALs from Team 10 was outside under the carport, looking into the room's only window when he saw my bullets enter the enemy's head. He watched as the enemy fell. The ensuing grenade blast shattered the window spraying shards of glass into my teammate's face. This was his first mission in Iraq. New way to start, great new way to start a new job.

• 1:27:41Jocko Willink?

  Grenade blast knocked me unconscious. When I awoke a few minutes later, I was fully lucid and lying on my left side, looking across the room at two men. Both were firing their weapons over my head, out the window directly above me.

• 1:27:53Jocko Willink?

  The grenade blast had twisted my helmet, rendering my night vision goggles unusable. The light from their muzzle flashes and the dim glow of the gas lamp in the foyer were enough to clearly illuminate the men standing no more than 10 feet away from me. I heard no sounds. It was totally silent. I was in a very bad place in the middle of a gunfight. If the enemy caught a glimpse of me glaring up at them, all it would take for them to finish me off were both of them to point down, pull their triggers and unload high velocity bullets into me. If I could clearly see them, then they could see me too. For an instant, I thought about playing dead, but in that same millisecond, before the thought could be fully evaluated, my anger rejected it outright.

• 1:28:33Jocko Willink?

  I had never been so angry, a feeling of determined ruthless rage. It seemed to be stored up somewhere deep inside me and something just snapped. In that moment, my rage consumed me. My world closed in and nothing else mattered to me but destroying the two men standing still in front of me. I would fight back and kill them before they killed me.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  Another crazy thing about this is there were some holes in me that don't line up. Like I get two holes in my back.

• 1:29:05Jocko Willink?

  You think they shot you when you were unconscious?

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  That's the only thing I can come up with.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  I had two rounds in my back that shattered my right scapula. And there's no holes in the body armor, so I think they took the pistol and shoved it in there. And then they shot me twice in the butt. The only way I could have got shot in the butt is if someone stood over top of me. I don't know why they didn't put one in my head. Should have looked at the helmet more. Maybe they tried to shoot me in the head and the helmet just got in the way. Uh, but this, this round right here.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  Four months after the incident.

• 1:29:42Jocko Willink?

  This is a round you're wearing around your neck?

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  It's a nine mil round that I got shot in the butt with. And I didn't know about it, that it was still in me until I went to a procedure to get a stint pulled out of my bladder four, four and a half months later. And they took an x-ray of it and came back in, the x-ray tech was like, hey, you know, there's a bullet in your hip? That's how I found this bullet. But, uh, the way the hip is, you know, that, that arch right there? So it was right there and it

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  from 2007 to like two years ago, I was at a chiropractor and he took some x-rays and it had moved and he took a side profile and it was literally at the surface of my stomach. And then we had, I had some medics cut it out.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  We thought it was gonna take like five minutes. I'll show you the pictures. Got a video of them cutting it out in the back of the suburban.

• 1:30:30Jocko Willink?

  Oh, there you go. Proper dinner break.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  Proper surgery.

• 1:30:38Jocko Willink?

  Going back to this, I didn't know it at the time, but I was lying unconscious on the floor. While I was lying unconscious on the floor, my SEAL teammates were outside the door of the room trying to get a shot at the enemy. Two of our Iraqi counterparts were the only eyes that saw me enter the room. In the chaos that ensued, they were unable to communicate my location to anyone. The volume of fire coming from the room through the door and out of the window was so excessive that there was no way anyone else was getting into the room. The team decided to pull everyone back and call an airstrike to neutralize the target.

• 1:31:08Jocko Willink?

  And me with it.

• 1:31:11Jocko Willink?

  As the team pulled back from the house, Connor, my other SEAL teammate, was shot and wounded by one of the two remaining enemy fighters firing over my head and out the window. While I lay on the floor, my teammates worked their radios, calling for the status of each other and what was going on in the house. I heard nothing.

• 1:31:27Jocko Willink?

  As the remaining elements of my assault team departed the house and moved to a safe dropping distance from the target, I was lying on my left side with my pistol still in my right hand. Just like before, my arm reached up and aimed at one of the men standing in front of me, and my finger pulled the trigger. I couldn't hear the gunfire, but I felt my hand jump. Rounds exited my weapon, and I watched the projectiles fly in slow motion as they punched into his body. Small holes burst open in the fabric of his shirt where my bullets entered. His face contorted into a bizarre combination of surprise and pain, more surprise than pain. In less than five seconds, I ran a magazine dry, completed a magazine change before the two enemy fighters figured out I was still alive and I was shooting back at them. My

• 1:32:09Jocko Willink?

  bullets drew their gunfire away from my departing teammates. Their full attention and bullets were then directed back at me.

• 1:32:25Jocko Willink?

  The enemy fighters were now both so close to me, I remember the stunned look on their faces as they pointed their weapons back at me and fired. A round from one of their AK-47 struck the bottom of my pistol and dislodged my gun's magazine. My pistol jammed, and I felt the gun's grip crumble in my hand. Another enemy bullet sailed clear through the foot of my magazine. I opened my hand slightly to release the shards of broken plastic that were once my pistol grips. The grip seemed to absorb the shock, shattering like an armor plate. I was fortunate to have this type of weapon, any other model would have been smashed to bits or been shot out of my hands.

• 1:33:03Jocko Willink?

  My palm was now pressed against the gun's internal springs.

• 1:33:08Jocko Willink?

  The bullets that struck my pistol caused my weapon to malfunction. I squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. I quickly cleared the malfunction with a tap of a, on the bottom of the magazine to firmly reinsert it into the pistol, a rack of the slide, then squeezed the trigger. I had done this tap rack bang malfunction drill so many times that it happened automatically. All the while, I was still being shot at from no more than 10 feet away. An instant later, well before the human brain could process what and how it had happened, my hand aimed the pistol at the other man standing across from me. My finger squeezed the trigger. I saw the rounds twisting as they exited my pistol, flying toward him and entering his body, then a round tunneled into his face.

• 1:33:52Jocko Willink?

  I emptied the magazine to both men as they crumbled on the floor in front of me. I loaded my last magazine into my damaged pistol. I was lying on my left side, leaning against the man who I had first shot when I entered the room. I pushed myself up with one hand and reached behind with the other, placing my pistol against my dead enemy's motionless body and fired several more rounds.

• 1:34:12Jocko Willink?

  Seconds later, all four enemy fighters were silent, their dead bodies laying pools of their own blood and piles of spent bullet casings. A metallic odor filled flooded the room. Blood and urine leaked from their bodies onto the floor.

• 1:34:26Jocko Willink?

  I knew I had been shot. I felt heavy, like there was a few hundred pounds sitting on my back. It was difficult to breathe. The fight was not over, and the worst battles were yet to come.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Crazy gunfight.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  My left thumb was almost shot off too. I got, I had a round go through this, this joint right here.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  When I, I didn't figure it out until later, after I got up and walked around, tried to take my gloves off. Uh, but I put that pistol in this left hand and reached up and shot somebody like this. My thumb was like almost hanging off. The only thing it was holding on was my glove.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  I mean, look how lucky I am though.

• 1:35:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  It just won't bend.

• 1:35:27Jocko Willink?

  Crazy. Yeah, the, the, the weapon functioning. I mean.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  I still have the magazine. I did go back.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  After about five months and I was like, hey, I want that pistol. You know, we already cleaned it up and put it back in circulation. So somebody else was using it and I was like, I want that pistol.

• 1:35:45Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever get it?

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 1:35:47Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:35:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, um, I was thinking about this, you know, we started off, when I started off, I was talking about how, you know, you can get shot. One person gets shot. One person can catch a little tiny piece of frag like the size of a freaking, the size of a pebble.

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:03Jocko Willink?

  And kill him.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  You popped the femoral artery or you popped an artery up here? That's what happened to Clark. We, he had one around.

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  Basically just go right through his neck right here.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  It was just, it hit that artery.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  It was quick. I mean, when I found him, he still had a smile on his face. Sitting in an upright position. He was 27 years old at the time. Got a shirt on.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  That was his second deployment.

• 1:36:43Jocko Willink?

  I need to secure the building myself, so I moved to the foyer with its glowing lamp and then to the room directly beside where my gunfight had happened. There were six women and children all sitting in the far corner screaming and crying. I pointed my white light at them and yelled, shut up. None of them spoke English, but they all became silent.

• 1:37:04Jocko Willink?

  That's also the room where I found Clarky.

• 1:37:08Jocko Willink?

  He was just inside the doorway, sitting down with both legs spread out in front of him, resting upright and leaning back slightly on his rucksack.

• 1:37:19Jocko Willink?

  Clarky's trademark smirk was frozen on his face with his lips curled in a smile.

• 1:37:25Jocko Willink?

  He looked so peaceful, he'd been killed instantly by a round that had come out of my room.

• 1:37:31Jocko Willink?

  I tried to move him from the view of the front door, but he was too heavy.

• 1:37:38Jocko Willink?

  Clark Schredler was 27 years old. It would take over a decade for the magnitude of Clark's death to penetrate me. My tears now are often spontaneous, triggered by a fleeting memory, a mixture of accumulated losses, or just a random thought.

• 1:37:55Jocko Willink?

  At that moment, though, I couldn't stop and grieve over Clarky. I needed to secure the building and protect my teammates.

• 1:38:04Jocko Willink?

  In another room in the back of the compound, I found two enemy detainees. Our Iraqi scouts had made entry into this room, discovered the men and cuffed them. I checked their flex cuffs and put one of our Iraqi scouts in place to guard them. I positioned our other Iraqi scout at the front entry with specific orders to shoot anyone who tried to come into the house. I knew that I was shot up, I walked around and cleared the house with my damaged pistol. Each time I turned my head, I could feel my radio earpiece snag on my body armor.

• 1:38:32Jocko Willink?

  I plugged my earbud in and keyed the radio to ask for a status in the house, but no, but my radio had been shot. It still had a tone, but no signal. My radio was smashed and I needed to contact the team. I tried to swap out my radio with Clarky's, but my gloves were slippery from all the blood. I just started to pull off my left-hand glove when I saw that my thumb was barely attached to my hand. It flopped into my palm. There was a bullet hole through the glove. I must have been shot in the thumb when the enemy shot at my pistol, destroying my gun's grips. I decided to leave my gloves on. Eventually, I managed to switch out my radio for Clarky's. I moved back into the room where my gunfight had happened. I felt safer there, as I knew everyone and it was dead.

• 1:39:11Jocko Willink?

  It was there that I made radio contact with the rest of the team. "Hey, this is Mike. I'm still in the house. It's secure. We've got four enemy killed in action, one Iraqi scout killed in action,

• 1:39:25Jocko Willink?

  one SEAL killed in action,

• 1:39:28Jocko Willink?

  two detainees,

• 1:39:33Jocko Willink?

  six women and children."

• 1:39:40Jocko Willink?

  Man.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  They called a QRF that night. Took them hour and fifteen minutes to go like five miles.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  Five miles.

• 1:39:52Jocko Willink?

  When did they activate the QRF? When they probably when they started backing out of the house?

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  Uh, as soon as the, we always initiated the QRF as soon as a gunfight started. Soon as there was a tick, we would initiate QRF. Uh, so they would get ready and then we could launch them. But back then, I mean, that that area was so, we went after this target one other time. We got ID'd on the way in.

• 1:40:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and those are some of the cool details that you put in the book, which, like I said, that's why people have to buy the book if they wanna wanna get the rest of it. Cause the background behind it, you know, you explain the efforts that you guys had made to hit this target and.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  It was a terrible area. Pretty much one way in, one way out, unless you wanted to do like an extra seventy-five kilometers to get. And that, if you didn't get lost back there, because the, I mean, the maps were inaccurate and.

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  I mean, your greatest threat over there wasn't getting into a gunfight. It was going to and from. That was your biggest threat. We got ID'd, I think.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  Six times on that deployment. And you know, when that, when that happens over and over again, they start looking, who's here every time? And I was one of the guys. Okay, Mike's possible. One of the two possible ID magnets. Cause every time we get ID'd, one of you two is there, or both of you are there. Actually, we were both there for all of them, so.

• 1:41:10Jocko Willink?

  How big, how many SEALs did you have with you? How many SEALs were on this op?

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Uh, our normal force, uh, we could take a little bit more if we had birds, but, uh, a normal force and a half of it had to be Iraqis.

• 1:41:23Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  And we don't give them mods and radios, so you have to make corrections for that. Like, we have to drive the vehicles.

• 1:41:31Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  So it'd be like twenty-two guys, but that would include a TERP, you know, half Iraqi force.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Occasionally we brought this Marine that had a dog that never found anything but a pistol holster.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  He did say that dog might have got baked in the car. I mean, it gets warm out there. Yeah, like 22, but we go out with six Humvees. There's only four seats, well, five. You got the gunner, but the way we work, you know, six people in a vehicle, you're only getting uh, four people that are actually gonna work, maybe three, inside.

• 1:42:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  I have worked with other units where they leave, everybody gets out of the vehicle and only the gunner stays. I didn't like that.

• 1:42:16Jocko Willink?

  No, that's not our plan.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  Say he does that, but.

• 1:42:21Jocko Willink?

  We don't like that plan. The, um, man, for you to like, just go back into full-on team guy mode of, okay, here's what's going on. I'm shot up. I gotta finish clearing this house by myself, get the house cleared, do an assessment, set security, and then contact the team and say, hey, it's Mike, target secure.

• 1:42:49Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  I was there, I don't believe it.

• 1:42:53Jocko Willink?

  Freaking legit, man.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  I was definitely in shock. Uh, I did miss a room. I missed the stairs upstairs to the prayer room upstairs. So they had to clear that. I missed it.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  But I de-conflicted the front door. They came in, they re-cleared the house, because I had to pull the guy off the front door that I told, shoot anybody that came through. Because they were taking fire from the outside. You know, when, when the neighbors know that you're there, some people like to shoot out the window at you. Which was a lesson that we learned early on, because who doesn't like to blow up a door? But sometimes you don't have to blow it up. Sometimes you just turn the doorknob.

• 1:43:32Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes that doorknob works.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  And uh, when you blow up a door, the whole neighborhood knows you're there. People take pop shots at you.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  Freaking awesome, man. Awesome work.

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  I also got an AK round. That's where I got the idea for this necklace. The guys found when they took my body armor, an AK round fell out of it. And it's slightly flat on one side.

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  And it's got rifling on it. So that's how you know that it actually came through a rifle barrel.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  But that one hit me inside of 10 feet. And it's completely intact. I mean, it's like barely flat on one side. I can't explain that one either. But I did get shot in the right places, like. I know guys that get shot in a femur. You hit bone, it changes everything. And I only had two bones hit, my left thumb. And my right scapula.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  I did have a round go up inside of my right thigh. Which is probably the one the doctors are the most amazed about because. If you know about. Kinetic energy, it's not the energy that's being pushed in front of a bullet. It's what's being pulled. And all the cavitation. And how it ruptures organs and ruptured blood vessels and arteries. That should have popped my femoral artery.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Cause that ran from my knee. Right above my knee, all the way up to my inner thigh.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  And that was definitely an AK round because.

• 1:45:01Speaker 01

  The hole in my leg. It looked like someone took a cookie cutter of an AK round.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  And cut it out. And the gunshot wounds healed weird. They started off small. And then they got bigger as they healed and then they shrunk. I didn't have any bad exit wounds. Everything went through me.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  I got a bad exit wound out of my right armpit that blew out.

• 1:45:29Speaker 01

  But it's kind of actually hard. You know, I'm claiming 27 and it's the best of my knowledge. But you know, the one that went through my left thigh might've been the same one that went through my scrotum. I don't know.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  But I'm not going to ruin a good story.

• 1:45:41Jocko Willink?

  Hey, bro. I say we round up.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  And quite honestly, those ones that hit the body armor. I was more aware of the ones that hit the body armor. I had no idea where else I'd been shot until I pulled my glove off. I knew I'd been shot in the chest and back. I could feel it. I mean, I had, I had a bunch of broken ribs. And I had a contusion on my right lung. So when I, when I called those guys, I was like, you guys gotta hurry up. I can't breathe. I think I got a sucking chest wound. You know, they pulled my body armor off and there's two holes in my back. And they tried to get a reclusive dressing on it. An old one that we used to use and they couldn't get it to stick. So luckily it wasn't a sucking chest wound.

• 1:46:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you got shot with green tip too, right?

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they took my body armor after that. Whatever company does the investigation and they took it apart layer by layer. So the other layer of body armor is falling. It's that black stuff. It kind of looks, I don't even know how to just, it's the stuff that holds everything together. So it's a ceramic plate. There's multiple layers. Uh, plus I had to carry her on and at the time we were doing the soft armor, hard armor. The four alpha with the soft. I can't imagine getting shot in the chest with standalone four alpha armor piercing protection without that soft armor. It's going to break every one of your damn ribs. Every damn one. I only had, I think, four broken ribs.

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  I mean, you, just so you pop a rib out every once in a while. It sucks.

• 1:47:18Jocko Willink?

  It's freaking horrible, man.

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  You get that, that top of your breath and you can't, oh, someone's stabbing me.

• 1:47:24Jocko Willink?

  No, you don't want anyone to make you laugh or cough or anything like that. But the, yeah, the weird thing about green tip is that if you don't know anything about.

• 1:47:31Speaker 01

  It actually penetrated more through the body armor than the AK did.

• 1:47:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I totally believe that. So green tip is American and, and.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  Five, five, six.

• 1:47:40Jocko Willink?

  Five, five, six. It's what, it's kind of the standard round for America. We got a bunch of other ones, I know, but green tip is kind of the standard round for, let's say, an army infantry unit. And so you might wonder, how does Mike end up with green tip in his body or in his body armor? And the answer is they recovered the weapon and.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a, this. All this guy's equipment to include his name, his LBE, his load bearing equipment with his magazines in it, still had his name on it. They had his night vision goggles, they had his pistol. Uh, they had a bunch of this guy's stuff and it was, from what we figured out,

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  ambushed out in Ramadi, uh, army unit in Ramadi.

• 1:48:25Jocko Willink?

  So an army unit in Ramadi got ambushed, they captured this guy's equipment and then they put it to use and they put it to use on you, man.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  And the green tip was the only one that penetrated through the plate and made entry into the soft armor. It got about halfway through all the plies on the soft armor.

• 1:48:44Speaker 02

  You mentioned the green tip, like, um, that it's standard, but what's special about green tip as opposed to?

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  It's 556, uh, it's the standard ammunition that we use. It's, uh, we had a lot of problems with it in different, different places, like Somalia.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  What a terrible place to, they were using women and children in shields, but the, the green tip was such a hot round, meaning hot, it's, it moves so fast that sometimes it just goes right through people and it doesn't, doesn't get the, a lot of the damage from a bullet happens after it passes through and it's the cavitation and the cavity it creates behind it. It's really not what it does in front of it.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  But the green tip's so fast, it doesn't create that cavitation, it just cuts through stuff. Uh, but it's also, it's armor piercing, right?

• 1:49:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's, it's fast and it's small. So if it's, and it's made, it is, yeah, it punches through armor a lot as, you know, this, it's not, it's not supposed to punch through 4A.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, who knows when I got hit with a green tip because I had three rounds in the chest. And if you look at the body armor, it's already,

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  it degregates with each one. They, they, they're only going to say, yeah, this will save you from one round. That's what they'll tell you. After that, we don't know what the hell it's gonna do. Because if it's, I mean, if you get, if you take one in the 10 ring, and that damages everything, you know, maybe that does more damage equally all the way around, but I, I got hit like here, here and here.

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  And maybe the green tip wasn't the first one. Well, maybe it was the first one before the AK hit it before it was so degraded that it was useless. I'd hold one of those plates in front of my face and let you shoot nine mil into it all day. It doesn't make a dent. It doesn't even make a dent. You can barely find the dent from a nine mil and that stuff.

• 1:50:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, pistols are just a lot weaker than rifles are and then.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that argument too. What round or shot placement? Um, shot placement.

• 1:50:45Jocko Willink?

  You're all shot placement, huh?

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you're not good at shot placement, then just put a lot there. You know, can't tie knots, tie a lot. When in down overload.

• 1:50:58Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, 15 minutes after I'd called the team to let them know I'd been shot, the medevac landed. I had to say that because that's freaking awesome. Jack asked if I need any help as we walked together to the bird about 150 yards and all. I felt heavy and slow as we walked together over the freshly plowed field. I put my left arm over his shoulder to steady myself as I moved. Jack instinctively reached up and grabbed my hand, which almost ripped off my dangling thumb. Jack let go of my thumb. Connor, my SEAL teammate, who was wounded in the arm exiting the house, jumped on the bird for the short flight to the hospital in Baghdad. He was another one of our team's medics and I thought that's why he was with me. I didn't know that he had been shot until we were in the hospital together in Bethesda, Maryland.

• 1:51:38Speaker 01

  That was a new guy on his first deployment.

• 1:51:42Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the flight medic was very efficient crawling all over me to cut off my clothes and gear to get to my wounds, inserting his knee into every bullet hole. In the process, in his defense, there wasn't much he could touch that didn't have a bullet hole punched out of it.

• 1:51:56Jocko Willink?

  My SEAL teammate, Chris Till, had been assigned as my casualty assistance officer and would accompany me all the way back home. Chris was standing next to me with a satellite phone. You have to call your wife, he said. I refused at first, but then I remembered that my next of kin must be notified within 24 hours of an incident. Brenda was back in Virginia Beach, shopping with the girls when she answered. "Hey," I said, "I don't have a lot of time. I'm coming home early. I got shot, but I'm fine. I've got all my limbs. My face is fine. And the doctor said I'm going to make 100% recovery. I'll see you soon." I handed the phone back to Chris and the medical team stacked me on the plane. I must have passed out because my next memory is waking up in the United States at Naval Medical

• 1:52:41Jocko Willink?

  Center, Bethesda, Maryland.

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  Talked to a good 50 people that talked to me in Laundstall.

• 1:52:51Speaker 01

  Don't remember.

• 1:52:51Jocko Willink?

  Don't remember them.

• 1:52:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, one of those people is, uh, was, was Admiral McRaven.

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:52:58Jocko Willink?

  So that's cool. And, um, and you guys knew each, you guys knew each other from team three.

• 1:53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, my first three commanding officers were McTie, McNally and McRaven. A free, three mix.

• 1:53:14Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah, you do, you do that and, and you, you talk about that visit from, from the Admiral again.

• 1:53:21Speaker 01

  Well, that was, uh, from, I think I did some plagiarism, plagiarizing from his book.

• 1:53:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you pulled, so he's got a book out called Sea Stories and it's one of the stories in his book is, you know, visiting a guy that just been shot 27 times. So, yeah, but yeah, you put it in this book as well.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  He's a good dude. I mean,

• 1:53:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  Some people might think he's got some swayed political views right now, but uh, he, I watched him take care of people and that's kind of how I judge people.

• 1:53:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:48Speaker 01

  It's like, if you care about people and you take care of them.

• 1:53:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:51Speaker 01

  And you're not doing shit to feed your own ego or your own agenda. I mean, you gotta have your own agenda. I got mine now. I mean, it's part of the reason why I sold the book. I want to go surfing all the time.

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  That's all I want to do.

• 1:54:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a pretty interesting story. Um, I guess, from your perspective, blessed to have this story and be able to talk about it, you know?

• 1:54:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:23Speaker 01

  It's, uh, very few people be able to pick this up and not find something in it that they're going to be able to relate to in their own life.

• 1:54:29Jocko Willink?

  Bro.

• 1:54:32Jocko Willink?

  You got shot 27 times, you know, and you did your job. I mean, it's freaking.

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  That's the least interesting thing in that book, I think.

• 1:54:38Jocko Willink?

  Um, but, but just, yeah, you put the whole story together and, um, yeah, man, it's powerful. And like you said, there's all kinds of stuff for everybody and, and you know, I'll get into some of it, but a lot of it is, is you trying to explain how you got through this stuff and, you know, how you got through your childhood trauma and what that trauma turns into. And I mean, we'll get into some of it, but that's just a whole nother reason. But even if you, even if you're a hippie that doesn't want to read a single thing about war. Okay, skip those parts because you're still gonna get something out of the rest of it.

• 1:55:10Speaker 01

  Well, my publisher, when we were working through this, we're like, Mike, does this say a Navy SEAL book or a self-help book? And I was like, leave it ambiguous. I don't care what you call it. I don't care what you call it. You know, and I'm doing pretty good in the uh

• 1:55:26Speaker 01

  the PTSD section.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  Trailing after, I'm trailing after you, bumping at your door on.

• 1:55:35Jocko Willink?

  I have a PTSD. There's a PTSD section?

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  No, yours, your books are uh number one in uh war biographies and

• 1:55:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  Your books do awesome.

• 1:55:47Jocko Willink?

  I don't, I, in the PTSD section?

• 1:55:49Speaker 01

  No, not PTSD. In the PTSD section, Vanderkolk, uh Body Keeps the Score, which is one of them.

• 1:55:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay, that's the book that you talk about.

• 1:55:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's one of the, everybody should read that book.

• 1:56:02Speaker 01

  Couple of things in there. If you understand your trauma, uh your childhood trauma, then your behaviors are predictable. You know, so if you understand that you've become the person that you're taught to be inferred and inside of the first seven years, and you know what your reaction's gonna be to it, then it's predictable and then you can work on it. Like, my trigger is, I don't like anybody poking me in the chest. And when I get scared, I don't cower. Sometimes I might over push back.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  I don't like to be called names and uh I got cursed out by a little 22-year-old kid in Starbucks a couple of weeks ago. And I had to ask him, I was like, boy, how old are you? He's like, I'm 22. And this kid's flipping me off because I wouldn't put on a mask. And I was like, you wouldn't be talking to me like this if we were outside.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  But, you know, I think that's a problem with a lot of people in this world right now. You know, the keyboard, the keyboard bullies, and they get behind the wheels of their car and they act like a bunch of assholes. I, you know, a lot of people just don't know that if, if you could get punched in the face for being as rude as you are, you wouldn't do it.

• 1:57:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:13Speaker 01

  We got a society, it's just so rude now. I mean, every time you get in your car, it's a damn NASCAR race, people cutting you off. And, uh, I mean, I've, I've kind of slowed down. I was that type A driver. In a rush to get everywhere, even though I didn't have a schedule.

• 1:57:31Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you, you, well, so you talk about, like I said, you talk about some of this trauma and whatnot.

• 1:57:39Jocko Willink?

  And here's like, here's a, here's a little sample of sort of how you start looking at this stuff. I would spend the next 18 months training guys, shuffling papers and administrative duty at my new command. So this is, this is now your, I think you're back at trade debt again, right?

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went back to work inside of five months, about four and a half, five months. And I was in that course that we talked about earlier, that communications course.

• 1:57:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, my physical-

• 1:58:01Speaker 01

  Good way to call.

• 1:58:02Jocko Willink?

  My physical therapy team became an important part of my recovery in life. My team was made up of doctors, nurses, physical therapists, chiropractors and clinicians who specialize in all types of care. Most importantly, this group understood SEAL culture. SEALs tend toward the extreme. We think if one repetition is good, then 500 must be great. I was blinded by my own bias and it wasn't the first time or the last. One day, long into my recovery, I confided to my nurse that I may have been experiencing symptoms related to PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. I had been sitting in my truck, listening to a radio talk show when the, when the expert being interviewed began describing the common symptoms of PTSD. The voice spoke in a calm, matter-of-fact tone,

• 1:58:42Jocko Willink?

  talking about the autonomic nervous system and how sleeplessness, constant irrational fears, and hypervigilance are often normal and predictable responses to trauma. I listened to a stranger's voice describe me to me. And I was both relieved and confused. When I told the nurse, who was a friend and someone I trusted, she smiled and chuckled. Good to hear, Mike. We all thought that you actually enjoyed what happened to you in that room. She seemed to understand- That being profoundly affected by my experience of war was normal and not being altered was abnormal. This was the first time that I considered the concept of emotional invisible wounds and that I had them.

• 1:59:26Jocko Willink?

  I have come to understand that if the experience of war does not profoundly alter you in some way, then you may actually have a problem. When the doctor said that I had been perfectly wounded, it seemed like a metaphor for my life. I had been beat up just enough not to kill me. And through the process, I earned the perfect scars of wisdom to survive my next thrashing. I still had no idea how the events of my childhood influenced my thoughts and behavior. I'd become very good at compartmentalization. My self-awareness grew as I uncovered layers of trauma. I later found that my childhood wounds had prepared me for a career in the SEAL teams, but they also became my most haunting ones. Ironically, it took being shot 27 times to uncover my original wounds,

• 2:00:09Jocko Willink?

  the ones that I never considered or knew I had.

• 2:00:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so you know, you start looking at what's going on. And this is, this is cool. It's gotta read this, bro. Um, cuz it's a one, one-page chapter called "The Enemy Within." "I fully accepted all the hazards of my chosen occupation. Being wounded was no big deal to me. At no time during or after I was shot did I ever think I was going to die. I was provided the best medical care available and was sure that my physical wounds would eventually heal. The real battle began when I returned home. The war in Iraq was straightforward. I was expertly trained and had the unconditional support of a community of like-minded, highly motivated professionals. As a SEAL, I'd been institutionalized, in a sense. I knew the culture, the people, the rules, and the objective.

• 2:01:03Jocko Willink?

  After leaving the military and returning home, my life became a confusing, frustrating, and stressful mess. I was a prisoner who'd been released from the institution into a strange new world. There was a distrustful, a distrustful cynic slowly working his way inside me. His voice sounded like my own, and each day he became more convincing. I was surrounded, isolated, and desperate. This enemy knew all my weaknesses. He was relentless, and he eventually overpowered me. This enemy was me."

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  So a couple of things I want to say on the PTSD. At that point, it really wasn't PTSD, at least clinical, because I haven't had any dreams about it. I don't mind talking about it. It doesn't bother me. It bothered more the people around me more than it bothered me. It was more of a hindrance, you know, that I had to live in a recliner for three months. It bothered my kids because they'd never seen me get hurt or sick. It pretty much was my first injury ever, other than broken fingers and toes. I did pinch it from oral nerve. That put me down for about two, three months at one point, doing a PT thing. But that was really my only, my first

• 2:02:22Speaker 01

  injury, because the fingers and toes don't count. I don't count. But what had happened to me, at this point, well, I want to talk about what I call false anxiety first. Just bad health, eating terrible, dehydration, drinking too much. Your physiology, when you're in that kind, in that state of health, feels like anxiety. The increased heart rate, the sweaty palms, the whole physiology that goes along with anxiety, because of bad health. It's your physiology reacting to what people are dumping in their bodies. My particular

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  issue, and what I think healthcare should be, is individual evaluation of each person to adjust their medical care for, for that. Because I watched for years, people take medication for, for migraine. And then migraine doesn't go away, but they get another symptom. So here's another medication for the symptom. Eight medications later, the guy's telling me, I still got a migraine and I can't remember what I did 15 minutes ago. I'm taking eight meds for it.

• 2:03:34Speaker 01

  I had, in your stomach, you have flora, bacteria that breaks up the food so your intestines can take the vitamins and nutrients. And I had no good flora in my stomach. So my body, physiologically, couldn't even break down the food. So when I got tested, my urine, my stool, my blood, and they also used epigenetics, which says, your epigenetics, your genetics, say that your body will consume and utilize certain types of food because of your genetics and where you're from. We see a lot of guys in the SEAL teams, everybody's on keto. Well, how do you know keto is good for you? You might be hurting yourself. Or, hey, the Greeks lived for a long time, I'll just eat a Greek diet. It might not be the one for you, because

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  your genetics don't, I mean, it might work, but it might not be the optimum. So I went on to fix mine. All I had to do was take antibiotics for a week, and then I rebuilt it with diet, you know, just probiotics and...

• 2:04:36Jocko Willink?

  This is to repair your gut flora. After you did these tests, they study everything that's coming out of you. They go, oh, yeah, this is what you need.

• 2:04:44Speaker 01

  So my body couldn't even give me those nutrients because it wasn't physiologically working. And I was completely B deficient, D deficient, had all kinds of spikes and heavy metals.

• 2:04:55Jocko Willink?

  Was this while you were still in, or is this after you retired and you started working for the CARE Coalition?

• 2:05:00Speaker 01

  It was when I was working for the CARE Coalition. I'd been there for probably six, a little over six years.

• 2:05:06Jocko Willink?

  So you retired in 2010?

• 2:05:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:09Jocko Willink?

  And where did you spend your last, so this incident happened in 2010, where did you spend your last three years?

• 2:05:14Speaker 01

  At Little Creek.

• 2:05:17Jocko Willink?

  And you were...

• 2:05:17Speaker 01

  So I taught that course.

• 2:05:18Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  And then I was the operations officer, which was the worst job I ever had, I think.

• 2:05:23Jocko Willink?

  And then you but so then you retire out of there and you get this job at the Care Coalition, which is work in Special Operations Care Coalition.

• 2:05:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:30Jocko Willink?

  Where where where are you located when you're doing that job?

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  Well, I'm still living in Virginia Beach, but I'm a the job changed. Uh, when I was initially hired for that job, I had all the MSW and Marsoc guys. And that is wherever they were. So Marsoc is on both coast. So I'd go to Lejeune once, once a month, I'd fly out to San Diego once a month to meet the guys out there. And SW and Marsoc. And we were putting guys in, uh, if we could find a quality of care that was sufficient, we would put them somewhere, you know, where they were from so they can hang out with their family and.

• 2:06:05Jocko Willink?

  So you're you're when you're in that job, you're an advocate for all these wounded guys?

• 2:06:09Speaker 01

  Correct, non-medical case manager.

• 2:06:12Jocko Willink?

  Non-medical case manager going, okay, and this guy's this kid will tell you, hey, you know, I'm having problems with my ex-girlfriend and I need help with that or I mean, just I I need, I want to get back home to my family or whatever issues that they're facing. Is that is that right?

• 2:06:25Speaker 01

  Was I ran guys through their, uh, they were going through a medical retirement board. I was the advocate for that and I was the interface between them and and the PEBLOs, the Physical Evaluation Board liaison officers, which weren't really good at what they did. Uh, so I did VA disability. I did, uh, wellness trips. There was a lot of care that, you know, you know, paraplegic doesn't care that it's a test, a test medication or test treatment. They just want to walk again. And, you know, sometimes our medical system is not going to facilitate that, so others will, so we would facilitate treatments outside of network.

• 2:07:11Speaker 01

  Uh, so it was my job, as I described it, was to improve somebody's situation. And I did everything from babysitters for people to, uh, you know, medical retirement boards. I mean, I was a better social worker than I was a SEAL.

• 2:07:31Jocko Willink?

  You, you talk about some of the cases, you talk about, you talk, you know, you go through this, um, you talk about some of the people that you helped out. Holly was one of my first clients. When I met her, she was only able to lie in bed and scream at the top of her lungs. It was scary. Holly was raised in Port Angeles, Washington, enlisted in the Navy after high school. She joined the military to create a future for herself and her family. When I met her, she was still the breadwinner for most of her family. She had become an independent duty corpsman, which is the highest enlisted medical care provider in the Navy. She had graduated the program and become an Arabic linguist. Hospital corpsman chief petty officer Holly Crabtree was assigned to work with a SEAL team as they conducted various operations in Iraq.

• 2:08:14Jocko Willink?

  It was April 15th, 2010. I'd just joined the CARE Coalition and Holly was nearing the end of her deployment. She was out doing a medical civilian affairs operation when she was shot. The bullet pierced her helmet, fractured her skull, and settled behind her eye. She was not expected to live. Her crew realized that she was expectant and coded Holly's condition as "hope trauma." She proved everybody wrong. Holly would not give up or stop working. She would have to relearn how to talk, walk, even swallow. I watched her do it all. It was both sad and humbling, but most of all, it made me very proud to know her.

• 2:08:56Jocko Willink?

  Holly has since made an impressive recovery and is medically retired after 13 years of service.

• 2:09:03Speaker 01

  I had another guy. He's in there, Sam. Same thing, shot in the same place.

• 2:09:09Jocko Willink?

  Both, both, um, did he have to relearn everything as well?

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they both stroked.

• 2:09:18Speaker 01

  Paralyzed them on the right side of their body. He's a, he's working in a program right now where he goes after, uh, child pornographers and traffickers, which is a huge problem in the country right now.

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  Like, what, 500,000 children go missing every year in this country?

• 2:09:37Jocko Willink?

  That's insane.

• 2:09:38Speaker 01

  I mean, I'll show you real slavery that's happening right now.

• 2:09:44Jocko Willink?

  As you're doing this stuff with other people, this is when you're starting to realize that, you know, you should get checked out yourself. Am I getting that right? Like in the timeline, like this is when you start going, hey, man, I should get these tests?

• 2:09:57Speaker 01

  Well, the only reason I did these tests was because I was having issues and people around me were like, you gotta go, go get help, go talk to somebody. And I refused to. And the reason why I went with this doctor was because it was least invasive and all I had to do was talk to him on Skype. He wasn't even in the same state. And to my honesty, I kind of half-assed it. And it worked. I've seen other people go through this, to include people in my own family. And everybody's issues could be different. Mine was bad gut flora. I've seen people that have had H. pleori, which is a parasite,

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  which is pretty prominent, which would, the symptoms really look like you're having issues with thyroid. So your initial reaction would be, well, you're having these issues, I'm going to take you to endocrinologist and then we're going to make you take these medications so that we fry your thyroid. When the whole time it was just a parasite, that you could just stop eating sugar and kill it and fix it. And it's what healthcare should be. Healthcare right now is completely reactive. They don't treat the source of the illness or disease. They just treat the symptoms. What is it, like 250,000 people die every year because

• 2:11:26Speaker 01

  of medical mistake? And we're listening to these people? They almost killed me, too, with potassium. Almost had a heart attack because I had an overdose of potassium. When another seal who'd been shot in the eye right next door to me was almost overdosed. Ryan Jobe was overdosed when he went in to get surgery, just plastic surgery. And then, and then they tried to lie about it.

• 2:11:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and those were, that was civilian hospital.

• 2:11:52Speaker 01

  It was.

• 2:11:53Jocko Willink?

  That wasn't, that wasn't the military, that was civilian hospital.

• 2:11:57Speaker 01

  Medicine's not an exact science, everybody's body's different. And that's why it should be evaluated individually, because I'm pretty narcotic resistant. I wake up in the middle of surgeries. You gotta give me more narcotics to knock me out if you want to do a surgery on me, or I'm gonna wake up and fight.

• 2:12:17Jocko Willink?

  Good luck getting somebody to do surgery after, after you make these statements.

• 2:12:20Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna get hurt anymore, I don't think.

• 2:12:23Jocko Willink?

  I hope.

• 2:12:26Jocko Willink?

  So you're learning a lot about that, you're also doing all, like you said, you're doing awesome stuff with, with some of the people, setting them up. You know, you're doing hunting trips, you end up climbing Mount, Mount Rainier.

• 2:12:39Speaker 01

  Ryan Jobe climbed that blind.

• 2:12:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  The year before I did.

• 2:12:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, you, you say this about that, you say, "Our climb had been honored by Ryan Jobe. Another Navy SEAL had been wounded in Iraq by a sniper, an injury that had left him totally blind. I had met Ryan once at Mike Monstour's Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House." Which I think we were saying today, that was the last time I saw, the last time we saw each other before, right now.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  It's a good party.

• 2:13:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was, um, good times.

• 2:13:08Jocko Willink?

  In 2008, Ryan Jobe climbed to the summit of Mount Rainier blind. A year later, in 2009, he died as a result of hospital error. Most people know Ryan from the books, American Sniper and A Warrior's Faith. He was the character Biggles in the film, American Sniper. On my way down, I closed my eyes once and gained a new profound respect for Ryan Jobe. I couldn't take 10 steps without opening my eyes.

• 2:13:38Speaker 01

  There's some bad parts of that. You're tied to a damn rope, too. I hated that when we did that in the SEAL teams. Cold weather training.

• 2:13:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, I actually never did cold weather training.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  I hate it. Hate it.

• 2:13:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, I was in some cold spots, but I never, you know, I got snowed on plenty. I froze plenty of times out in the sleet and snow, but I, I never, I never did the cold weather, uh, the actual cold weather training.

• 2:14:04Speaker 01

  Team two guys, the old team two guys used to love that stuff.

• 2:14:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, for sure. When I got there, when I got to team two, you know, I was hoping that I would get to be able to do that. But it was already, um, that program was, it was no longer like SEAL Team Two was that.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  It's all different.

• 2:14:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:22Jocko Willink?

  You end up going to, you end up checking out some kind of, I guess, what is it called? Alternative medicine treatment, alternative options.

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:14:33Speaker 01

  I went full hippie and I went to a place that was, I mean, I like those things. I, I like the mindfulness practices. I should get back to meditating regularly. It, it does help. Uh, but I was introduced at this place to, you know, shooting with the recurve. You know, walking those paths, you know, that made with rocks that Indians used to do. Uh, so they teach a bunch of mindfulness practices and they were teaching transcendental meditation. And I think that's the part you're getting to where I.

• 2:15:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, it sounds like it was like, I mean, the first thing that happens, you're doing this stuff.

• 2:15:05Speaker 01

  Acid trip or something, but there's no drugs involved.

• 2:15:09Jocko Willink?

  You're looking at a chair and all of a sudden the chair turns into human bones. And then you guys are going down to do some, some, some, uh, therapy with horses. And then I'm going to go to the book here while the other participants went to the pen with the instructor. I stood outside the corral. When I turned and looked at an instructor's face, it was like some type of Hollywood special effects scene. I was staring at him with his damn face, when his damn face morphed into an evil demon. I froze terrified and trembling. It felt like every cell in my body was vibrating violently. I just stood there, closed my eyes and prayed, God, please help me.

• 2:15:47Jocko Willink?

  I was sure these people were going to hurt me. When I opened my eyes, everyone was gone. I needed to get out of there. I saw the group standing in front of the corral and I said as calmly as I could, hey, guys, thanks for everything. This has been really good, but I need to leave, uh, right now. The instructors tried to talk me out of leaving, saying that it wasn't safe for me to go. And I stood there thinking, well, it's definitely not safe for me to stay here with the demon dude. I tried to hide it, but I think one of the instructors may have known that I was freaked out. One of the female instructors gave me a ride back to my cabin. I made her use her GPS. So I knew she was take, where she was taking me. When I arrived back at the cabin, I grabbed my bag, chucked it in my truck and immediately started driving back to Virginia Beach.

• 2:16:28Jocko Willink?

  That was his, that was like fully real in your head.

• 2:16:32Speaker 01

  And I did a bunch of research after that happened to me. That's when I started, I had trouble sleeping after that and started doing research and it's a, an event quite a few people have.

• 2:16:42Jocko Willink?

  You, well, you, the, the, I thought it was interesting. You immediately went and got a drug test, a full drug test because you thought maybe you had been drugged.

• 2:16:49Speaker 01

  I thought I was drugged.

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  I actually had to stop at a car accident on the way.

• 2:16:56Jocko Willink?

  That's right. Yeah. You stop at a car accident and so you kind of knew that you could, you weren't on drugs because you were doing normal things.

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  Well, I get into it.

• 2:17:09Jocko Willink?

  You, you said you, you knew you weren't insane.

• 2:17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:12Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's why you thought it was drugs. That's what it was.

• 2:17:14Speaker 01

  Cause I was able to still be objective.

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  That's when you know you're crazy, when you can't be objective. Like, am I crazy? Like if you're, if you're just completely denying the fact that you might be crazy, then you know, maybe you are. You got to actually investigate it.

• 2:17:33Jocko Willink?

  That's a scary test, dude. I don't know if I passed that all the time.

• 2:17:37Speaker 01

  But I mean, this, if you, all the research I did on it, it happens to a lot of people, prominent people, educated people. Uh, and I say in the book, you know, I either saw it happen. Uh, cause I have some people that were like, hey, you just have the ability to see evil. It was a temporary psychotic break, which hasn't happened since, which I've tried to, like, man, I don't think that's happened again. Uh, with meditation, because I think it was the meditation that did it. And I popped open different parts of my brain that I never used.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  But I cover my ass in there.

• 2:18:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  So people don't think, hey, oh my God.

• 2:18:15Jocko Willink?

  The Kundalini awakening.

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:17Jocko Willink?

  Which I had to go check that out. I watched some YouTube's, I watched some YouTube videos to figure out what a Kundalini awakening looked like. And it's like a yoga, like you just, we, it's a weird like spiritual trip, I guess.

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. And I would say I'm, might confuse people. I wear, I wear this ring, but I'm, I would say I'm a recovering Christian, don't like religion. I'm a spiritual person. I know there's a God and I just, he hasn't, she hasn't, whatever it is, hasn't talked to me yet. So I don't know, I don't know who's right. What is it like 10 religions on this rock?

• 2:18:48Jocko Willink?

  I do more than that.

• 2:18:52Jocko Willink?

  I guess because that bad trip, you decided you were gonna still keep getting after it.

• 2:18:59Jocko Willink?

  There was Elliot Miller, another awesome SEAL.

• 2:19:04Jocko Willink?

  He'd been through some, some TBI, like treatments.

• 2:19:08Speaker 01

  He was, he was wheelchair bound for a long time. He was really overweight.

• 2:19:15Speaker 01

  So he went through that program at Carrick. That's what I did the fundraiser for.

• 2:19:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. So you, so you did this, you end up doing this, um, you end up trying to figure out how you can raise money. And, and the way you figure out you can raise money is, uh, is by doing a triathlon.

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  I did a half Ironman.

• 2:19:34Jocko Willink?

  Half Ironman. So.

• 2:19:36Speaker 01

  Tried to do a full. That's, that's when I was training for that, that's when everything came down.

• 2:19:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you, so you end up doing the, the, the short one. I'll call it short. I mean, it's freaking long. I guess 13 miles and whatever.

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  It is short.

• 2:19:47Jocko Willink?

  It's short for a triathlete.

• 2:19:49Speaker 01

  Doing two in a row is exponentially so much harder that I induced diabetes because I didn't know enough about nutrition.

• 2:19:57Jocko Willink?

  Did you induce diabetes before the first one or while you were training for the second one?

• 2:20:01Speaker 01

  For the full Ironman.

• 2:20:03Jocko Willink?

  So you do the, you do the first one and everyone's all happy. You raise a hundred and thirty five thousand dollars. Uh, folks at Ironman contact you and say, hey, you're great. You got us a bunch of publicity and it's awesome and you raised money.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  Well, it's because Chris Pratt did it with me too.

• 2:20:17Jocko Willink?

  Chris Pratt did it with you. I'm sure they wanted to get some of that in there.

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  I didn't even know who he was.

• 2:20:23Speaker 01

  Guardians of the Galaxy? Oh, that one stupid movie with a wreck, talking wreck. They're good movies now. I like them. I'm a, I'm a fan of Chris though.

• 2:20:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, he seems like a great guy. I haven't met him.

• 2:20:38Jocko Willink?

  But then this happened. So you, so they tell you, hey, you can do another, you know, we'll sponsor you or whatever. You can do it. And so you start now training for this and here you go. I was totally exhausted and burned out before the half Ironman. Now I was troubling for double the distance. After the race, the first race, the word spread about what I was doing and new donors came to my crowd rise page to support me doing the full Ironman. But I was at a point where I just could not do my job anymore. I was totally burned out. And the Ironman fundraising and training did nothing but add to my stress. Everything started to escalate in my mind. I could feel something was on the verge of breaking. The stress of work, training and financial obligations were all becoming too much. I couldn't sleep, becoming edgy and difficult to get along with on the best of

• 2:21:22Jocko Willink?

  days. Forty-five days before the Kona race, I emailed the Ironman folks to thank them for the opportunity and backed out of the race. I contacted every donor and offered them to return all their money. I was a mess. At work, I couldn't, I would get urgent calls from shrinks who would say stuff like, come get your guy. Some of my clients would scare the medical staff. And the doctors knew if they called the police, all hell would break loose. So they called me instead. I would have to go diffuse the situation. These evolutions were exhausting and looking back, they were all well beyond my area of expertise. I would do the minimum reporting at work, then try to sleep or play video games and attempt to distract myself from the constant fear of something bad happening. I was trapped without an escape route. Stress accumulates and it was

• 2:22:07Jocko Willink?

  all piling up inside of me. I had no financial help and I'm not one to ask for any. I was sure that I was going to get fired from my job. This was only the second real job I'd ever had in my life other than being in the Navy. I felt embarrassed and ashamed and emasculated. I would not leave my home for days on end. I avoided talking to people, even turned off my phone. Brenda was troubled. She knows me so well. She was gentle at first, asking me if I wanted to talk to someone. As I became more isolated and combative, she reached out to my friends and coworkers. They joined with her and together they all hounded me to get help. In a year, I'd gone from training to do an Ironman triathlon to not being able to get off my couch. I was in a dark, dangerous place. My life had become unbearable. There was guilt.

• 2:22:52Jocko Willink?

  But I think the real culprit was shame. Guilt and shame are very different and controlled my thoughts and behaviors in distinct ways. Guilt was about what I had done, or in my case, what I hadn't done. Shame was about who I was, or at least who I thought I was. I felt like a prisoner being brainwashed every day. My mind seemed to be stuck on a one-track narrative that became darker with each episode. Every minute of every day, there was this weird, repeating, internal monologue that opened with guilt, which created a feeling of shame. I would fixate on things that supported this monologue, like bailing out of the Iron Man, which I was sure disappointed the donors, the treatment facility, my clients and my family.

• 2:23:34Jocko Willink?

  My anemic efforts at work reinforced my shame. That's when all the what-ifs began chiming in. What if I get fired from my job? Will we lose the new house and all my money? What if the people who donated to my fundraiser think I'm a fraud because I didn't do the full Iron Man? These thoughts would lead to embarrassment, which deepened my feelings of shame. I was trapped in this desperate, repeating, irrational monologue that sounded all rational to me.

• 2:24:02Jocko Willink?

  I personally knew people like Dan, Mark, Holly, and Tyler, who had far worse injuries than me, had far more stressful lives, and who were all managing themselves well, but for some reason, I just couldn't put things in perspective. I was locked in an irrational, disproportionate, escalating mental prison. I sat in my truck.

• 2:24:22Jocko Willink?

  I had researched how to do it, exactly where to place the barrel and how to angle the gun. I had practiced it with a cleared weapon and pulled the trigger. I didn't want to leave a mess for someone else to clean up.

• 2:24:36Jocko Willink?

  I would not do it in my truck so someone else could use it. The bullet would go through my heart, there would be an instant of pain, and then I would be gone.

• 2:24:45Jocko Willink?

  I would do to myself with one bullet what four enemy fighters failed to accomplish with 27.

• 2:24:53Jocko Willink?

  I stared at the black gun in my hand. I had used one like this to kill before. I was numb and sad, confused and tired. I had cried alone so many times. My downward spiral had come to its final resting place. At the bottom was hopelessness. The built-up stress, the lingering effects of trauma, my psychological deficits, all colluded to create a condition of hopelessness. My mind worked trying to come up with an explanation to justify my final act to my two beautiful daughters. Years ago in that room at that compound, the thought of not being able to see their faces again terrified me.

• 2:25:28Jocko Willink?

  Images flashed in my mind, holding my daughter's little hand in her own as we sat together. The way the girls would wrap their arms around my neck and hug me, their soft little voices called out, "Oh Dad."

• 2:25:40Jocko Willink?

  Their smiling faces repeatedly flashed in my mind.

• 2:25:47Jocko Willink?

  There was the disproportionate feeling of guilt and shame that relentlessly stalked me. I felt trapped in a life layered with overwhelming stress, endless responsibilities, meaningless tasks and toxic people of whom I felt I was the most toxic.

• 2:26:03Jocko Willink?

  It was all my fault. I felt I was my own worst enemy. This time there was a bullet in the chamber. I was beyond contemplation. My mind was made up. I mentally paced back and forth, working up the courage the same way I had when I hit my father with the bat.

• 2:26:20Jocko Willink?

  I was getting out of my truck when my phone rang. I looked down at the number.

• 2:26:26Jocko Willink?

  It was Scott Heinz, my boss.

• 2:26:30Jocko Willink?

  I picked up the phone in one hand and held a gun in the other. I let it ring, not wanting to answer. I couldn't do it with Scott calling, so I put down the gun. I answered, "Hey Scott, what's up?"

• 2:26:45Jocko Willink?

  And Scott says, "Mike, I want you to take the next three months to chill out. I'm gonna pay you. Relax, take your time and find a new job. I'll help you out however I can. You're beyond burned out. You did amazing work, but there's a time limit for how long you can do this job, and you maxed it out."

• 2:27:03Jocko Willink?

  My boss and good friend had just given me the hope I needed to climb out of the very deep hole I'd found myself in. In that instant, I could not have answered my phone for anyone other than Scott. Scott had seen it all before. He knew that I was surrounded by wounded, sick, and injured people all day. Scott also knew that many of the people who I'd been meeting with every day for years, including patients, their family members, veteran service members, and hospital staff, were struggling with depression. It's like an alcoholic tending a bar, you can only hold out for so long. If you're around depressed people all the time, you become depressed too.

• 2:27:42Jocko Willink?

  I suspect that some of you reading this may now think that I'm crazy and write me off. Thank you for coming this far with me. For the rest of you who have ever been depressed or suicidal, I can tell you that while I fully believed at the time that I was thinking rationally, I know now that I was not. My irrational thoughts had started repeating themselves. "The world will be better off without me. I don't care anymore. I just want out of here. I'm a horrible person. My future will just be filled with more of the same stress." These thoughts seemed totally rational and true in my compromised state, but I had no idea that my thinking was compromised.

• 2:28:21Jocko Willink?

  What scared me the most about these thoughts and the entire experience is what happened to me just a few months later. Brenda, in her desperation to help, convinced me to visit a physician who had a protocol to treat depression and other conditions. I resisted at first, of course, but finally agreed to work with the guy, if only to get Brenda and everyone else off my back.

• 2:28:48Speaker 01

  That's why I did it.

• 2:28:54Jocko Willink?

  Man.

• 2:28:59Jocko Willink?

  You uh, get, it's, it's interesting, you know, you talk about the um,

• 2:29:05Jocko Willink?

  like now you can look back and see that you weren't rational.

• 2:29:08Speaker 01

  Oh yeah.

• 2:29:09Jocko Willink?

  But at the time, there's just, you know.

• 2:29:12Speaker 01

  It's a chemical imbalance, I mean it.

• 2:29:15Speaker 01

  It, it's be, more people are coming aware of it now, the, the gut-brain axis. Uh, I mean.

• 2:29:26Speaker 01

  The gut is probably a smarter brain than the one in our skull. Uh, it can't operate properly unless, unless you put proper nutrients and

• 2:29:40Speaker 01

  and vitamins and this doctor is also really big into the EMF, electromagnetic fields, you know. You know, how we're affected. I mean, we had radio antennas over in Iraq and Afghanistan, you could put popcorn kernels in it, pop, popcorn. What do you think that does to your? What do you think that does to your skull and your organs and your cells? Uh, we already use resonance as a weapon. You can use microwaves to make people sick.

• 2:30:09Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, I was a radioman, unfortunately. Loved the job, but.

• 2:30:13Speaker 01

  I mean, sat.

• 2:30:14Jocko Willink?

  All, all those antennas, man, I was constantly. I mean, as a young guy getting.

• 2:30:20Speaker 01

  We took the, what was that thing called? The bat wing?

• 2:30:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:23Speaker 01

  The vehicle antenna for the satellite? And we figured out, well, one of our new guys put it on, on the radio with a switch. So this, Y C's running around, he looked like Inspector Gadget, you know, with the helicopter. And he had that bat wing hanging out over top of his head. Uh, I don't, I don't think sat transmissions are very healthy.

• 2:30:46Speaker 01

  But frequencies, you know, resonance, we can use it as a weapon, it could be used for the heel.

• 2:30:55Speaker 01

  Microwaves, they've been used a lot to make people sick.

• 2:31:00Jocko Willink?

  So you go through all that, you kind of get this doctor, Dr. Beck sort of puts you on a path, like a new mission of you're going to clean up your diet, you're going to stay away from these

• 2:31:13Jocko Willink?

  situations, the Bluetooth, limit your, limit your exposure to wifi and all this stuff.

• 2:31:18Speaker 01

  Which is hard.

• 2:31:19Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, for sure.

• 2:31:20Speaker 01

  The EMF is hard, so.

• 2:31:24Speaker 01

  I pretty much blew that off.

• 2:31:27Jocko Willink?

  So what did you mostly, what did you mostly fix, your diet?

• 2:31:29Speaker 01

  Mostly it was diet, got my gut back right so that it, because the way that works, your gut prepares the food for the intestines, for the intestines to do what they do. And if the stomach doesn't work, then it just, it's going to pass through and the intestines are not going to be able to pull the nutrients and vitamins. And I mean, I don't take any medication now. I, I am taking Mitch's Smashing Greens. I started off with, this doctor put me on a stuff called Green Juice from Organifi. So it's, it's got all the, you can have in one shake, all the nutrients, you know, with one scoop of protein and one scoop of greens, that's all you need. Pretty, I mean,

• 2:32:13Speaker 01

  we could live on algae. And you look at all these school lunches that these kids were getting, not now because of COVID, but I mean, they were feeding them crap. They're actually making them sick. They're not helping them.

• 2:32:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:25Speaker 01

  I mean, like Doritos with like crappy hamburger meat on it?

• 2:32:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, if it's even hamburger meat.

• 2:32:31Speaker 01

  If it's hamburger meat, it's not high grade.

• 2:32:35Jocko Willink?

  So, so you get done, you go on this protocol and you say this, it took about two months and even then I, I would shop for all the foods, meticulous repair, the meat, measure all the meals, keep the detailed food log. I'm sure the process was gradual, but one day I woke up and felt like the black cloud that I had been hovering, that had been hovering over me for years was gone. I was able to function to move and think, think clearly. The fog had lifted and the constant negative internal monologue inside my head stopped. I felt strong, clear and confident enough to get up and start moving forward.

• 2:33:11Jocko Willink?

  Grabbed my phone, opened up my contact list and started sending text messages and making calls. I needed a new job. And that's when you ended up going to Trade Ed. Back to Trade Ed as a contractor.

• 2:33:25Speaker 01

  I went back to teach in military freefall where a prior injury. I had three events where I couldn't open my main parachute because my right scapula would seize up my whole back and my hand wouldn't work. So I had three high speed malfunctions. Went to reserve and the last one ripped my pack off my connects between your arm.

• 2:33:46Jocko Willink?

  Did you get surgery?

• 2:33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, they reconnected it. But it was a slap tear. The whole pack came out of right here.

• 2:33:53Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 2:33:54Speaker 01

  So then I went to CQC in South.

• 2:33:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, which is.

• 2:33:57Speaker 01

  Which was awesome. Because the TTPs changed because of me.

• 2:34:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's perfect place for you to go and teach. I mean, what better person to be teaching about how to handle close quarters combat than someone.

• 2:34:11Speaker 01

  Don't do what I did.

• 2:34:14Speaker 01

  I mean, we still teach that, but there's, there's better ways to do things and different tactics you can use in different situations. You can't just do the same thing every time.

• 2:34:24Jocko Willink?

  And then how, how long did you stay there for?

• 2:34:30Jocko Willink?

  Cause you're, you're, you're retired now from that job as well, right?

• 2:34:33Speaker 01

  So what is it? 2020, quick 18. I was, I was probably at Trade Ed between those two jobs for about three years.

• 2:34:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Awesome. Yeah.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  And I just left that like last October, I think.

• 2:34:47Jocko Willink?

  It's a cool thing that the teams do, bringing older guys back that have experience that some of the younger guys might not have, especially someone with experience like you and bring them in there to teach and pass on those words. Man, that's freaking awesome that, that we do that in the teams.

• 2:34:59Speaker 01

  Well, I learned a lot there being an instructor, like you were talking about earlier, you know, watching 20 different groups come through. People do different things, different ways. And like, man, that was really stupid or man, I wish I would have thought of that.

• 2:35:15Jocko Willink?

  You ended up getting some tattoos and this was cool. You know, Mike Martin, who's a master chief team guy that was in Vietnam, who had gotten out of.

• 2:35:24Speaker 01

  Gotten out.

• 2:35:24Jocko Willink?

  Gotten out for like a long time.

• 2:35:26Speaker 01

  Well, he was at training cell at team three when I got there.

• 2:35:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. He, he had gotten out for a long time, then he'd gone, rejoined the Navy.

• 2:35:34Speaker 01

  Went back through buds. I don't think they made him do. Like real buds.

• 2:35:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they they he's like one of a few people that went through like a gentleman's course of buds. You know.

• 2:35:44Speaker 01

  Well, we had a retread in my class that didn't make it.

• 2:35:47Jocko Willink?

  Was he a retread Vietnam vet?

• 2:35:49Speaker 01

  Uh, I believe so.

• 2:35:51Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 2:35:52Speaker 01

  He was terrible.

• 2:35:53Jocko Willink?

  Dang, that's kind of crazy.

• 2:35:56Speaker 01

  Well, he passed away last year on that motorcycle ride.

• 2:35:58Jocko Willink?

  And and I'll tell you what.

• 2:36:00Speaker 01

  He was only sixty two.

• 2:36:02Jocko Willink?

  Bro, we were I was he was he was gonna come on the podcast and and like I was lining up with, you know, one of our mutual friends and and we're just, you know, just trying to find the date and boom. Yeah, I was freaking so bummed out.

• 2:36:16Speaker 01

  That was the first Navy SEAL book. I haven't read many, but Navy SEALs don't read Navy SEAL books.

• 2:36:23Speaker 01

  Even though there's so many of them, so many jokes. I was just hanging out with Black Rifle and I was like, hey, you guys want to sell books in here? You know, all the military books? I was like, yeah, it's a good idea, but we'll have to reinforce the shelf for all the Navy SEAL books. Like, you're an asshole, dude.

• 2:36:35Jocko Willink?

  Well, I was sitting down with the Black Rifle guys up in Montana and it was me and Dudley, the archery guy and and then and then Jack Carr.

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  Was what's his name? The other owner, Small or?

• 2:36:51Jocko Willink?

  It was Evan. It was Evan. That was who was there.

• 2:36:53Speaker 01

  So Evan was because the other guy got hurt. I thought he got hurt up there.

• 2:36:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Matt got hurt. Yeah, so he couldn't come. But anyways, we sit down and and, you know, Evan makes a joke about SEALs writing books.

• 2:37:04Speaker 01

  He did it to me, too.

• 2:37:05Jocko Willink?

  And then, of course, I looked at him and I was like, because because, I mean, it's a funny joke, yes, but then we were actually sitting with two SEALs that have written books. I was like, oh, this is really embarrassing. I go, real funny, Evan.

• 2:37:20Speaker 01

  They're a great group of guys. They're definitely doing their job, paying it forward.

• 2:37:23Jocko Willink?

  For sure, man. For sure. I mean, I was really bummed out when I saw. Well, first of all, when I found out that you went to the Total Archery Challenge there and I just did. I don't know why I didn't put two and two together.

• 2:37:33Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't find out until after you left Montana.

• 2:37:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so I was like, but then the other thing I didn't know is I I knew I knew that they were doing something with with the wounded warriors.

• 2:37:44Jocko Willink?

  I didn't know what they were doing. I didn't really grasp it again. I just didn't pay enough attention, but I should have gone down there for that. It looked freaking awesome.

• 2:37:51Speaker 01

  Well, that rolled into a huge archery event afterwards. So we, there was 25 of us. I was one of two guys that wasn't an amputee. There was a dude there that didn't have a right arm.

• 2:38:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I saw videos of him.

• 2:38:03Speaker 01

  You bite that thing.

• 2:38:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:05Speaker 01

  He's good too.

• 2:38:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:07Speaker 01

  Hitting shit at like 108 yards.

• 2:38:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's something real cool about archery that, uh, that it has a lot of similarities, you know, to the old job, you know?

• 2:38:16Speaker 01

  I like shooting a bow better.

• 2:38:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I do too. I like shooting a bow better. The main reason is because it's quiet. It's like, there's no like little shock. It's just nice and quiet. You can do it in your yard.

• 2:38:26Speaker 01

  And it's harder, actually.

• 2:38:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is harder. Well, it's definitely harder at range.

• 2:38:32Speaker 01

  And then you can pick up a recurve.

• 2:38:34Jocko Willink?

  I haven't done the recurve thing yet.

• 2:38:35Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 2:38:36Jocko Willink?

  Or is that what you're like primarily shooting is a recurve?

• 2:38:39Speaker 01

  These were compounds, but I've got a couple of recurves and it's all instinctive.

• 2:38:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, you just aim and...

• 2:38:44Speaker 01

  Well, you can't aim. There's no sights.

• 2:38:46Jocko Willink?

  Well, let me rephrase that. You Kentucky windage and go.

• 2:38:49Speaker 01

  It is totally Kentucky windage.

• 2:38:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's a couple of guys that were trying to do some long shots up in Montana with the recurves, man. Yeah, it looks fun. Looks fun. I don't know if I gotta, I got a lot of work to do on the compound before I decide I'm gonna make it even harder.

• 2:39:04Speaker 01

  You just turn up the juice on that thing.

• 2:39:06Jocko Willink?

  Man, uh, yeah.

• 2:39:08Speaker 01

  One arm guys hitting stuff at 108 yards. How hard can it be?

• 2:39:11Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking awesome.

• 2:39:12Speaker 01

  He's only got one arm.

• 2:39:13Jocko Willink?

  Freaking awesome, man. Just freaking awesome.

• 2:39:16Speaker 01

  Lopez.

• 2:39:21Jocko Willink?

  Getting close here, but you know, you say this, "It may seem strange, but being shot 27 times, then having a hand grenade blow up next to me was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was the start of a personal revolution that continues today and hopefully will go on until I take my last breath. I say revolution rather than evolution. As a result of my experience, I have tossed out and/or abandoned every bias, relationship, belief, and dogma that has blocked my self-awareness and joy."

• 2:39:53Jocko Willink?

  Again, I'm reading this stuff because I know that there's people, I mean, people talk to me all the time about what they're going through and you know, what you say here, I think is really important. I burned through a number of therapists. Some were good, most didn't have what I needed to help me understand how the traumas of my childhood shaped me as a person and how those same traumas make some of my behaviors predictable. At times, I had to be pushed into seeing therapists and doctors by people who loved and cared about me. I don't know if I can ever thank these people enough for not giving up on me when I was so rude and resistant toward them. I say all of this so you know that, at least for me, there has been no magic pill, quick fix, or one size fits all solution to

• 2:40:36Jocko Willink?

  finding peace and joy in my life. These things have come to me slowly over the past decade as I grew in self-awareness and courage. I suspect your personal peace, if that's what you're searching for, may be gained much the same way.

• 2:40:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, I think that, that, uh, just letting people know, like, somebody thinks, oh, I'm gonna go see a therapist, and it doesn't work out because that therapist doesn't have what that particular person needs, and then they go, oh, see, I can't be helped, instead of saying, oh, you know what, I gotta try some different people.

• 2:41:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's societal, too. People think that they, you know, it could take you years to get into a terrible mindset, face training, telling yourself, doing all the things that make you believe the things that, that you're telling yourself. And then you hit rock bottom, or what you think's rock bottom, and you're like, I gotta go get this fixed, I'm gonna go to this one-week program. You know, it took me two years to turn into this disaster area, and I'm, I think I'm gonna go to a one-week program that's gonna fix it. And a lot of these programs that I watched when I was at the Care Coalition, it does help, but there's no follow-up. So there's an improvement while they're there, because everybody's, you know, feeding them good food, teaching them the

• 2:41:54Speaker 01

  things that, that they can use to, you know, relieve stress, and they do that while they're there. And then they go home, and they just fall back into the same routine, training themselves to get further into that hole. I mean, that's what medicine is right now. People get sick, they think that they can take a medication that's gonna make, make the sickness go away. You're not even addressing why you're sick, you're just...

• 2:42:22Speaker 01

  Hiding the symptoms.

• 2:42:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was gonna say hiding the symptoms.

• 2:42:26Speaker 01

  I mean, like earlier, I said, I actually induced diabetes. And it was because I didn't know enough about nutrition. And the only thing I knew about nutrition is if I was hungry or not. And my favorite restaurants were the ones that gave me the most food. I didn't care what it was.

• 2:42:42Speaker 01

  I mean, eat an extra large pizza by myself, gallon of ice cream and 12 pack of beer. You know, it's.

• 2:42:48Jocko Willink?

  That's the winning path, but maybe not.

• 2:42:50Speaker 01

  Definitely not.

• 2:42:54Speaker 01

  It's funny too, because we all know.

• 2:42:58Speaker 01

  Even since we were little kids, you are what you eat. But we know it, but we don't practice it. And then you got the FDA with that stupid food pyramid. You know, you've got people now, oh, my stuff's FDA approved. I'm like, so what? A corrupt organization. Go eat five loaves of bread like they told you to. No wonder everybody's fat.

• 2:43:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Can you say prediabetic?

• 2:43:21Speaker 01

  Well, and then they take medication. I mean, type 2 diabetes, all you gotta do is change your diet, it goes away. I did it. I induced it with Cliff bars, Gatorades. I wasn't eating Twinkies.

• 2:43:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:35Speaker 01

  I was just.

• 2:43:36Jocko Willink?

  You're thinking, what seemed like it's cool.

• 2:43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I was also being trained by an ultra-thonner. And they're dumber than we are. Who goes and runs a hundred miles?

• 2:43:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:50Speaker 01

  She kicked my ass, man. And I just didn't know enough about nutrition. And I was just dumping carbs and sugars into me. And every time I stood up, I was almost passing out. That's diabetes.

• 2:44:03Jocko Willink?

  Freaking crazy.

• 2:44:04Speaker 01

  Soon as I fixed it, it went away.

• 2:44:09Jocko Willink?

  Here's another little section that I think people should hear. I have a way, I have way more stress and uncertainty in my, in my life today than I ever did in the SEAL teams or when I was suicidal. The difference is that I now have a new resiliency portfolio of people, tools and skills that allows me to effectively manage stress almost effortlessly. While I do have bad days and very bad days, they don't control me or impact my outlook on life. I'm also keenly aware that most of my troubles are self inflicted. If you're honest with yourself, you may find the same is true in your own life. Adversity is either a privilege or a tragedy, depending on how you respond to it.

• 2:44:51Jocko Willink?

  Choosing to be a victim of the events and circumstances in my life would have been the real tragedy. What if we all viewed adversity as an opportunity for personal growth? To define our life's purpose and to help others. The reality is that we can, but we can't do any of these things as victims. If I am to evolve, which is my life's mission, I can't be a victim. Even if my problems are the result of someone else's actions, I found it easier to find myself than to rely on the perpetrator to repair the damage.

• 2:45:27Speaker 01

  Well, that's what a lot of victims do. You're a victim because you're blaming somebody else and you're expecting them to fix it. And there's just nobody's coming, you know, they're not going to fix it.

• 2:45:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:37Speaker 01

  So you might as well just take the blame.

• 2:45:39Jocko Willink?

  Take, take, take the ownership and solve the problem.

• 2:45:45Jocko Willink?

  After everything that I've come through, I'm grateful. I think that the gratitude and service are, I think that gratitude and service are inseparable. The more I serve, the more grateful I feel that I can still serve and care for my family, my warrior brothers and sisters, and continue to be of service to all of you. These days, I spend my free time hunting for perfect surf and spending time with great friends. I set up a nonprofit to help shorten the distance to recovery from trauma and depression. We join with people who truly want to help themselves. We offer these adventurous souls a community of the right relationships and a portfolio of resiliency skills and tools.

• 2:46:27Jocko Willink?

  What's the name of that?

• 2:46:28Speaker 01

  It's a little bit of forethink. I'm just on the Earl right now. Putting in the paperwork. It's called Warrior Tribe.

• 2:46:35Speaker 01

  And the focus is going to be a little trauma metal on this and I want to get into

• 2:46:42Speaker 01

  at-risk youth.

• 2:46:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Freaking awesome, man.

• 2:46:46Speaker 01

  The kids that were like me that are one decision away from winding up in the in the federal prison system.

• 2:46:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, or winding up on a great career in the military or some other path.

• 2:46:58Speaker 01

  It only takes one decision.

• 2:47:01Speaker 01

  I got lucky, you know?

• 2:47:05Jocko Willink?

  You know what?

• 2:47:07Jocko Willink?

  I just want to close it out with what you close this book out with. Joseph Clark Schwedler.

• 2:47:16Jocko Willink?

  It comes in waves now and again. There's an overwhelming feeling of disbelief that gives way to frustration. Then my eyes usually well up.

• 2:47:27Jocko Willink?

  It's been going on for years now. I've lost so many people. It takes a toll.

• 2:47:33Jocko Willink?

  Clark was the kind of man you want your son to grow up to be.

• 2:47:38Jocko Willink?

  He was smart, driven, had a great sense of humor, was tough, but thoughtful and responsible.

• 2:47:47Jocko Willink?

  He was a born leader and he made us all better people. After missions, we'd be tired, but Clarky would be working out, so we'd work out too. He was like a Swiss army knife. He was our navigator, our intel, our intel collections guy, a team leader, sensitive site exploitation officer, and one of our Iraqi army combat advisors. He picked up everything fast and became great at whatever he did.

• 2:48:13Jocko Willink?

  Clark's dream was to be a Navy SEAL. He was a midwestern kid from Crystal Falls, a northern Michigan town of 1,469 people.

• 2:48:26Jocko Willink?

  He was a senior class president, played high school football and basketball and ran track.

• 2:48:34Jocko Willink?

  He did two years at Michigan State and joined the rowing team. Knowing Clarky, he did it because the workouts were grueling and he wanted to stay in shape.

• 2:48:44Jocko Willink?

  He followed his heart, abandoned college,

• 2:48:49Jocko Willink?

  and enlisted in the Navy to fulfill his dream of becoming a SEAL.

• 2:48:58Jocko Willink?

  Clarky got to live his dream and did what he loved to do. Every time I saw him, he had a smile on his face.

• 2:49:10Jocko Willink?

  What gives me peace is knowing that if I died doing my job as a SEAL, I would have no regrets. And I know Clarky felt the same way.

• 2:49:23Jocko Willink?

  For those of us who have lost friends and family members in this war, the losses connect us.

• 2:49:31Jocko Willink?

  While we may be strangers, we know each other well.

• 2:49:36Jocko Willink?

  There is a surprising comfort in being together in this painful club. We don't have words to describe the depth of our grief, but we don't need them.

• 2:49:46Jocko Willink?

  Because we can feel each other's sorrow.

• 2:49:52Jocko Willink?

  There's a saying, "Time heals all wounds."

• 2:49:59Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't.

• 2:50:03Jocko Willink?

  It only makes them slightly less painful.

• 2:50:10Jocko Willink?

  I may again meet up with Clarky on the other side of this life.

• 2:50:16Jocko Willink?

  And I'm looking forward to it.

• 2:50:28Speaker 01

  Know a lot, don't we?

• 2:50:30Jocko Willink?

  A lot.

• 2:50:35Speaker 01

  They just put some new stars and pause on the Naked Warrior in Virginia Beach. I didn't even know about the dogs that passed.

• 2:50:49Speaker 01

  I think one of them was a suicide. Died by suicide.

• 2:50:59Speaker 01

  Terrible place to be, but since I've been there, I know I can't get there again.

• 2:51:05Speaker 01

  And that was one phone call from one person that stopped me, so I almost didn't answer that phone.

• 2:51:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I think, um, obviously the lesson there is, uh...

• 2:51:19Speaker 01

  Well, it messes a lot of people up. The secondary tertiary effects.

• 2:51:28Speaker 01

  I told our nutritionist about it, who helped me out with the guys that I was assigned to.

• 2:51:34Speaker 01

  Told her what I had almost done, and she was like, "Do you know how many people that would have hurt?" I never considered that. I thought I was doing people a favor. That's how irrational I was.

• 2:51:47Speaker 01

  But I've been around families where there's been a death by suicide, and it's terrible what it does to the people that are left behind.

• 2:51:57Speaker 01

  It's, uh...

• 2:52:02Speaker 01

  They don't recover from it.

• 2:52:06Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, I, you know, this, this kind of tribute that you wrote there in the end to Clark is awesome. But, you know, from my perspective, there's, there's no more powerful tribute than you can make than, than doing what you're doing right now. You know, trying to help other people out.

• 2:52:26Jocko Willink?

  Trying to live a good life, take care of your family. And, and really

• 2:52:32Jocko Willink?

  sharing all the things that you've been through and how you made it through them with other people. And I, and I think there's nothing better that you could do to truly honor Clark's...

• 2:52:47Jocko Willink?

  His sacrifice.

• 2:52:50Speaker 01

  And I do want to make it clear too that I am still seeking a continuum of care.

• 2:52:56Speaker 01

  I'm recently looking at a program called Sable Warrior, which a handful of guys have gone to.

• 2:53:05Speaker 01

  The last three years of my life, probably be a lot better book. The stuff that I've been dealing with these last three years and the fact that I'm able to manage it is is pretty incredible to me, but

• 2:53:18Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think some people think, oh, I've had my ass handed me up into this point and nothing else is gonna happen. I mean, shit's still gonna happen.

• 2:53:28Speaker 01

  And I've just been able to get to the point where no matter how bad it got my ass handed to me, I somehow fixed it or somebody helped me fixed it and I just had that mindset now. I don't care if the rest of you turn into zombies. I'll figure it out when it happens.

• 2:53:43Jocko Willink?

  But your point, your point in saying that you're still, you still are on the path of, you still know you need help now.

• 2:53:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think everybody does.

• 2:53:54Speaker 01

  There was a point in my life where I would have said, no, I'm fine, but there's always room for improvement. That's an easy way for, for someone to say, you don't have to say you need help. Hey, there's room for improvement.

• 2:54:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's a, that's a better team guy way of saying it. Cause a team guy never wants to say, I need some help. But if you say to a team guy, don't you want to get, don't you want to improve? Ninety-nine percent of team guys say, hell yeah, I want to improve.

• 2:54:19Speaker 01

  And another thing with that too, it takes you a while to get to a bad state. You know, that one week program's not gonna do it. A continuum of care and that's working out, good diet. You know, taking care of the things that, that lower the stress hormones. Uh, it's, it's not just one thing. It's, it's a lifestyle change. Uh, you can't expect to be well if you're taking down a fifth every day. And I'm not gonna be a hypocrite. I probably drink too much beer. But, but I also taken all the nutrients and vitamins I need to before I drink too much beer.

• 2:54:56Jocko Willink?

  Well, hey, man. Look, we've been going at it over three hours right now.

• 2:55:01Jocko Willink?

  Where can people, people can find you? Instagram?

• 2:55:05Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, my Instagram handle is Mike Day 5326. Uh, my social media is a train wreck until I hire somebody. I don't know what I'm doing. And my website, I have a website. My daughter, who used my GI Bill to get a graphic design degree, uh, did my website. Uh, it's perfectlywounded.com.

• 2:55:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so that's where people can find you.

• 2:55:27Jocko Willink?

  Any other, any other closing thoughts?

• 2:55:31Speaker 01

  No, I just, there is no easy button. Nobody's coming. Uh, nobody's gonna take care of you better than you can take care of yourself.

• 2:55:41Speaker 01

  Uh, it's, there, I can't say enough, there's not an easy button. You trained yourself to get yourself to a certain point. That's your mindset. That's training. And if you just look at it like that, if you can train into a bad mindset, you can train out. And if you are hanging out with a bunch of depressed people, or people that are like-minded, that, that are negative, you're gonna catch it. I mean, we used to kill that stuff in the SEAL teams. There was always one, that one guy, that bitched and complained about everything. And if you didn't stop it, then his buddy started bitching and complaining. And then it was like a damn disease.

• 2:56:20Speaker 01

  The negative thoughts and negative actions are not gonna fix. And a fifth of Jack Daniels every day doesn't fix it.

• 2:56:30Speaker 01

  You're eventually gonna have to still deal with it.

• 2:56:34Jocko Willink?

  Right on, man. Those are, those are freaking good, good guidance right there. And, uh, man, thanks for sitting down here. Thanks for talking with us. Thanks for coming all the way out here. Thanks, thanks for everything you did for the teams and for the Navy and for America. And man, the example you set for, you know, for people. Not, not just for what you did in the teams, but like the example you're setting right now, being, putting yourself out there, explaining how to overcome things. It's freaking awesome, man. I appreciate it.

• 2:57:05Speaker 01

  I don't like giving advice. I'll try to live by example. You know, who just came back from Black Rifle? Those, those people. Yep, amputees, still going through surgeries and their lives are so much harder just to get up out of bed, you know, a paraplegic, what a pain in the butt that is, but they, they still fight through it and they're living by example. And when I was at the care coalition, it did kinda help me for a long time. How can I complain when, you know, Dan Kanasen's above, double above any amputee, Taylor Morse is a quad amp, and I've never seen the guy be upset. So it is, it is inspiring to see people that we assume have a worse deal, which is a hard

• 2:57:49Speaker 01

  thing for people to get across too. Like, I don't have the right to feel this way because that guy's worse, or that girl's worse, which is not true. You know, everybody's issues are their issues and they have to be addressed, even though you don't have the worst deal. You know, be happy you don't have the worst deal. You don't have to fix that one.

• 2:58:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you might not have the worst deal, but it's your deal and you gotta deal with it. Awesome, man. Appreciate it, brother.

• 2:58:15Speaker 01

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:58:16Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Mike Day has left the building. Awesome to see him and that ends up being yet another excuse removal podcast.

• 2:58:31Speaker 02

  What does that mean?

• 2:58:33Jocko Willink?

  Meaning, it's kinda hard to make excuses when you're get done talking with Mike Day who's been through a lot and he's not making excuses. So, well, Echo Charles?

• 2:58:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's, uh, it's almost like you can kinda just refer to that every single time, you know, something's going wrong for you and probably others too. We'd be like, well, at least I didn't get shot 27 times, you know?

• 2:59:00Jocko Willink?

  True statement.

• 2:59:00Speaker 02

  My thumb almost ripped off. Yeah, it's weird you can keep, or that he can keep his head straight when he looks down and be like, oh yeah, my thumb's almost off as well, you know?

• 2:59:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, I said this, I said team guy mode.

• 2:59:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59:14Jocko Willink?

  And I don't use that term lightly, but just from reading it and talking to him about it, you're using full team guy mode, which is when you're just like, alright, I'm gonna make things happen right now. So.

• 2:59:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59:27Jocko Willink?

  Well, speaking of excuse removal, what do you think we can do to help?

• 2:59:36Jocko Willink?

  ourselves and each other, remove some excuses and stay on the path.

• 2:59:41Speaker 02

  Stay capable, I think. Stay capable. Of course, you're not gonna, well, we all have our challenges, right? Like how you guys were saying, uh, like people's challenges are more or less or whatever, but they're ours. We have our, that's what you're saying.

• 2:59:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they're my challenges or our challenges. Anyway, so we're all gonna have our challenges, but we wanna stay capable.

• 3:00:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:05Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 3:00:06Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 3:00:07Speaker 02

  With capability comes exercise, I think.

• 3:00:12Jocko Willink?

  Well, you heard, you heard Mike mention about a thousand times, working out, right? Staying in shape, eating good food.

• 3:00:17Speaker 02

  Eating good food.

• 3:00:18Jocko Willink?

  Supplementation.

• 3:00:19Speaker 02

  Supplementation is a thing. Very helpful thing. Anyway, so yeah, supplementation, Jaco has fuel. By way of supplementation, Jaco fuel. So what kind of supplementation for your joints is a big one. Keep your joints in the game. My kids saw a guy do a backflip. It was a big muscle guy. And he was doing a bunch of other stuff and there was a kid involved in the video and, um, he was doing so. And my daughter, you know, she's curious, she's seven, so everything the guy did, she was like, hey dad, can you do that?

• 3:00:52Speaker 02

  And the answer was yes, every single time. And she would be like, hey, prove it. So I'd have to like prove it, you know? And there was like a rope in it too. So we, I didn't have to prove that part of it. And he, she was like, he was doing like a bunch of stuff and I was like, it was, the list was going on and on. And I was like, I was doing good at first, but after a while I started to get nervous. Like, bro, this guy is pretty.

• 3:01:11Jocko Willink?

  He started getting outside of your realm of capability.

• 3:01:14Speaker 02

  It looked like he was about to, you know, cause he just kept doing stuff. And I looked at him, I was like, he was in good shape, one of those athletic shapes too, muscle guy. I'm like, okay, all right, all right. And then finally, the last thing he did was this backflip, sort of the finale of the video, like saying, thanks for watching. And he does a backflip.

• 3:01:32Speaker 02

  And I remember back in the day, I could do a backflip straight up. What do you call it? A tuck? I think it's called. You know, the kind of backflip. Yeah, so. But I'm like, oh, man, if I were to bust out a backflip right now, because of course she wants to see it right now. I'd probably hurt myself. But if I warmed up a little bit, I think I could do it.

• 3:01:51Jocko Willink?

  Right on. I'm surprised you didn't go for it at the pool's edge and say, hey, listen, P, I can do it. But I'm gonna do it over here by the pool, just because I'm cold right now. See, this guy warms up a lot.

• 3:02:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's all right. That's actually what I said. I was like, yeah, he's warming up, of course. You know, she's like, okay. So now every once in a while, she'll be like, hey, just warm up, do it before your workout. And I'm like, I gotta bust out the excuse. It's been about 10 years since I did it. And you can get hurt if you don't do it correctly. So the last thing I need is for me to double down and get injured in front of my daughter, you know, kind of blow her whole image of me. But she knows I can do it in the pool. She already knows that. So like, I don't think I could get away from the pool thing. Nonetheless.

• 3:02:33Speaker 02

  If I practice when she's not looking, like in the pool or whatever, I'll pull it off. But here's the thing. I'm a little bit older now. So my joints

• 3:02:44Speaker 02

  could take a beating if I wasn't on the supplementation. That's one of the things I was thinking about as I'm explaining it to her. Like, I could pull it off.

• 3:02:52Jocko Willink?

  Just need to up your joint warfare.

• 3:02:54Speaker 02

  I might have to, you know, just to first, you know, for safety sake, as it were. Nonetheless, yeah. So take the joint warfare, just in case somebody asks you to do a backflip.

• 3:03:03Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 3:03:03Speaker 02

  Tuck, whatever, not inside the pool or other things. Let's face it, you try to climb a rope or something like this, your shoulders get hurt. But if your joints are good, you're good. Also krill oil, super krill oil. And also that vitamin D.

• 3:03:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, get on that vitamin D. Mix a little vitamin D with your cold war. Immunity system, strong.

• 3:03:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, boost the immune system. Also milk.

• 3:03:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, don't forget about, uh, disappointment, discipline go. Discipline powder. We've got all kinds of discipline.

• 3:03:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03:36Jocko Willink?

  Little bit of that. When you need that little. Accelerant.

• 3:03:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03:43Jocko Willink?

  To to kind of ignite things. Try it out. You might like it.

• 3:03:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the and the the Jaco Palmer, both powder and the cans, I think it's sort of the leading flavor. It was the tropic one, but I think, you know, I think I think that kind of it's set in stone. I think in my.

• 3:04:01Jocko Willink?

  Sour apple apple sniper.

• 3:04:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:04Jocko Willink?

  I'm out right now, by the way. JP Danel's custom.

• 3:04:07Speaker 02

  I didn't know that.

• 3:04:08Jocko Willink?

  Signature JP Danel signature line.

• 3:04:11Speaker 02

  Sure. Signature line. Well, it does a good deal, Dave.

• 3:04:15Jocko Willink?

  Good too. I've tried, you know, I try, obviously I tried the the sour apple sniper and it's really good.

• 3:04:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:22Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna, it's really good. It's really good. And and yes, Dave Burke.

• 3:04:27Speaker 02

  Good deal.

• 3:04:27Jocko Willink?

  Yes, he also has a flavor coming, a signature flavor.

• 3:04:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those are interesting too, because you get like.

• 3:04:36Jocko Willink?

  This is gonna be orange.

• 3:04:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:37Jocko Willink?

  Afterburner orange.

• 3:04:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:41Speaker 02

  You, um, these energy drinks, the RTD cans, you kind of, and I kind of forget this from time to time too. I'm like, okay, I need an energy drink, but it's not just an energy drink. You get the discipline and you don't get like for real chemicals.

• 3:04:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, you don't. That's that. So, yeah, there's no sugar in it. It's sweetened with monk fruit. Still tastes good. And but what's even next level is that it's pasteurized. So there's no chemicals that keep things stable, which we had to go through a long period of of testing and to find the place and to make the drink the way it is. So, yeah, check that out.

• 3:05:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, um,

• 3:05:21Speaker 02

  it'd be a disservice to call it a health drink, even though it essentially is a health drink.

• 3:05:27Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm starting to feel over here is that when we do a podcast like this, where you don't say much during that podcast portion, maybe that sort of builds some pent up conversation in your head where where where you want to converse with me about stuff.

• 3:05:43Speaker 02

  Oh, that, yeah.

• 3:05:44Jocko Willink?

  Cause it seemed like you had plotted out a whole kind of topic here that we were gonna go into or that you were gonna go into.

• 3:05:49Speaker 02

  You know, I feel it too, but and that. You know, now that you mention that, you're right. You're actually in real life, you're right.

• 3:05:56Jocko Willink?

  And here's what's crazy. That's a long podcast. That's three hours, right? So I'm thinking, okay, cool. We're just doing a three hour podcast. And I'm like, echo, you know, we'll, we'll just kind of burn through. People kind of know what's up. They want to support the podcast. They're going to get in the game. They know to go to originmaine.com. We can just kind of let them know.

• 3:06:11Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:06:12Jocko Willink?

  But then we're talking about backflips. That's what we're talking about.

• 3:06:16Speaker 02

  Really? You know how like, um,

• 3:06:18Jocko Willink?

  And see, then what I do is I screw up because then I bring it up. I should just keep my mouth shut. Be like, yep, backflip's cool. Yep. RTD, yep, good. Warrior kid, Mulk, get it. Yep. Mulk, yep. But I don't. I've, I,

• 3:06:30Speaker 02

  You take the bait.

• 3:06:31Jocko Willink?

  I take the bait.

• 3:06:32Speaker 02

  It's kind of bait because,

• 3:06:33Jocko Willink?

  It's a hundred percent bait.

• 3:06:35Speaker 02

  Well, okay. So we're all at home, you know, a lot of us. I mean, you know, some, some of us are going out a little bit more than others. But like, I'm one of the people who I'm at home a lot. So I take, I talk to the same four people in my family, varying levels of age, you know, and maturity levels. So after a while, it gets repetitive. So when I see you, you know, once a week, I'm like, hey, man, let's, let's talk. Let's face it. And that's not, that's a common thing. Like, cause sometimes we can go straight up two hours before we've even pressed record. Because we're, you know, whatever, whatever. And when you think about it, I'm just realizing this just now. Like, we kind of rolled in, we're like, kind of all business. So you're correct.

• 3:07:07Jocko Willink?

  You don't like that. You've got a whole sort of like excess of conversations floating around your head that just need to come out. I don't.

• 3:07:15Speaker 02

  All in the tank.

• 3:07:15Jocko Willink?

  I'm over here with just zero. I'd be just as soon like read off the stuff. You tell them where to go and we leave. I'd be down with that.

• 3:07:21Speaker 02

  I understand. Okay. All right. Well, hey, let's speed it up. But hey, let's, you know, bear with me if you will. So yes, discipline, can, powder, all that. Good for your brain, good for your body. Keep it, keep, keep yourself on the path. And capable, by the way, Mulk, extra protein in the form of a dessert. Eating dessert, like what? Ice cream or, uh, Snickers bars for dessert? I guess that's not really a dessert. That's more of a candy bar, but like a cake, a bunt cake. But don't do that. Cause that'll take you off the path.

• 3:07:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Jocka white tea. Don't forget about that. Organic. And you can get all this stuff at originmaine.com. Or you can go to the vitamin shop right around the corner. If you've got one around the corner from you, you can go check it out there. And then we also at originmaine.com, we make all kinds of stuff for you to wear on your body.

• 3:08:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 3:08:13Jocko Willink?

  Things that you can wear when you are doing jujitsu, like jujitsu gees, like rash guards. T-shirts if you're not doing jujitsu you you still need to wear something on your body wear a t-shirt you probably need something on your legs sometimes where some origin jeans where some origin boots if you need something on your foot

• 3:08:34Speaker 02

  they got your whole body covered

• 3:08:36Jocko Willink?

  your whole body covered beanies do and and here's the thing this is you've kind of throw it in there in the end like it's no big deal everything that I just said is 100% made in America without compromise you're supporting America you're supporting local people that are making things happen our people

• 3:08:54Jocko Willink?

  bringing back this industry being bringing back manufacturing to America so go to origin main.com get yourself some of that stuff if you need to cover up your foot

• 3:09:07Speaker 02

  or other places also speaking of clothing let's just say clothes apparel if you were actually apparel seems more like a like a like a spectacular yeah we'll just say close how this okay speaking of which Jaco has a store called Jaco store some new things on there but this is the place where you can get discipline equals freedom good uh get after you know representing while on the path with closing from Jaco store so go to Jaco store.com discipline equals freedom shirts hats jackets

• 3:09:41Jocko Willink?

  you know a lot of times I say like oh this is ours

• 3:09:46Jocko Willink?

  but let me ask you a question is my new t-shirt up yet

• 3:09:50Speaker 02

  yes

• 3:09:51Jocko Willink?

  all right good yeah t-shirt is up

• 3:09:54Speaker 02

  yes some people have noticed it too oh and they knows and they text me you know Jack Daniel Hill yeah so he text me he was like hey I hope you're doing good that new shirt is awesome and it's not like he texts me every day too so it was like a thing

• 3:10:07Jocko Willink?

  so

• 3:10:10Jocko Willink?

  after many years of planning because I've been wanting to do this for you how many years have we have been planning that t-shirt

• 3:10:14Speaker 02

  three

• 3:10:15Jocko Willink?

  three years I've been planning this t-shirt so it's a t-shirt on the front of the t-shirt it says two words hardcore recondos you all know where that comes from if you don't don't worry about it you'll figure it out at some point and on the back it's got the it's got phonetic letters

• 3:10:38Jocko Willink?

  the phonetic letters it has on the back

• 3:10:41Jocko Willink?

  are November foxtrot Sierra

• 3:10:47Jocko Willink?

  And if you don't know what those mean, don't worry about it.

• 3:10:50Speaker 02

  Don't worry.

• 3:10:52Jocko Willink?

  If you do know what those things mean, then you'll probably be, when you see me, you'll be seeing me wearing that t-shirt. Get some hardcore condos.

• 3:10:59Speaker 02

  Well, yep, that one is there. JacoStore.com. If you see anything else on there, hey, man, get it. Good way to represent while on the path while supporting. Also,

• 3:11:11Speaker 02

  if you want to get the book Perfectly Wounded by Mike Day, we got it on the website, JacoPodcast.com. In the sections where the books are, you see it. Books from the episode, we got you there. Just click through there. It'll take you to Amazon. You can buy it, boom, straight from Amazon. Also, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already on your iTunes or Stitcher, Google Play, you know, wherever you listen to podcasts, you know, subscribe, man. Easy. One click. Boom. Easy money.

• 3:11:41Jocko Willink?

  And there's not just this podcast. We also have the Unraveling Podcast, which is gonna have its own, what's it called? Its own feed at some point. Right now, we're kind of dual broadcasting. Get people in the game a little bit. Make sure that you know it's out there, but eventually we'll break that off. So look for the Jaco Unraveling Podcast. We got the Grounded Podcast. We got the Warrior Kid Podcast. We got Warrior Kid Soap from IrishOaksRanch.com. You can get soap so that you and everyone you know can

• 3:12:15Jocko Willink?

  stay clean. We got a YouTube channel. This is where Echo puts tons of special effects into two-minute videos and then puts no special effects in a three-hour video. Lot of people, a lot of people don't agree with that, but that's what Echo's doing. And according to him, that's the way it should be. So whatever. Also have an album called Psychological Warfare, where I will tell you some little things to do to get through moments of weakness, which we've all got little moments of weakness. Attack them. That's what I'm saying. If you need some support, attacking, you need support by fire position, press play. Listen to some Psychological Warfare. If you need a visual signal for...

• 3:13:00Jocko Willink?

  Overcoming in a moment of weakness. Go to flipsidecanvas.com Dakota Meyer. He's making all kinds of cool stuff. Also made in America to hang on your wall and remind you that you need to stay on the path. Got a bunch of books. Obviously, Mike Day's book, Perfectly Wounded. We got The Code. We got Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. We got Way of the Warrior Kid 1, 2, and 3. We got Way of the... We got Mikey and Dragons. We got Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. We got the Dichotomy of Leadership and then the OG book, Extreme Ownership, written by me and my brother Leif Babin. We also have a leadership consultancy called Echelon Front,

• 3:13:42Jocko Willink?

  where we solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. And also, we have an online training program. And I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do some Jaco Live events on EF Online. Jaco Live events. So if you missed the world tour that I did, if you missed the world tour that I did, where I went around America, talking to everyone, meeting everyone, I'm gonna do some of those on the internet. So you'll be able to tune in live, ask questions. I'm gonna do those through EF Online. No dates scheduled yet, but it's coming. And by the way, you don't have to wait, because if you want to talk to me,

• 3:14:25Jocko Willink?

  go to EFOnline.com and I'm there answering questions. The whole team's there. You can interact with me right there. So check that out. Also, if you want to see us in person, go to, you can go to extremeownership.com and come to our muster, which is a leadership conference. Next one is Phoenix, Arizona, September 16th and 17th. December 3rd and 4th is gonna be in Dallas, Texas. They've all sold out. These are gonna sell out too. If you want to come, get there early.

• 3:14:59Jocko Willink?

  And of course, we also have EF Overwatch. If you need leadership inside your organization, we have connections from the military that understand the principles we talk about. Go to EFOverwatch.com if you want to support. If you want to support service members around the world, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. It is Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, and she is doing her best to provide for people in the military, their families, Gold Star families all over the world. You can go there and either donate or you can get involved. And if you're a glutton for punishment,

• 3:15:40Jocko Willink?

  and you want to hear more of my cretinous contentions, or perchance, for some strange reason, you'd like to hear more of Echo's risible reflections, then you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, and on Facebook. Echo is at EchoCharles, and I am at JacoWilling. And of course, Mike Day is at MikeDay5326. And speaking of Mike, thanks once again to Mike for setting such an awesome example, not only for his deeds on the battlefield, but for the example he sets in life,

• 3:16:22Jocko Willink?

  putting the word out there, explaining what he's been through and how he has gotten through it. And to all of our other military members of the past, present, and future, thanks to all of you as well for also setting an example of service and sacrifice, and for allowing us to live in freedom, and to police and law enforcement, and to firefighters, and paramedics, and EMTs, and the dispatchers, and the correctional officers, and the Border Patrol, BORTAC.

• 3:16:59Jocko Willink?

  Secret Service and all the other first responders. Thanks to each of you for your service as well. And thanks for keeping us safe in our times of need. And to everyone else out there. We know life is rough and we know there will be pain. And whether that pain is at the hands of an abuser, at the hands of an enemy, or at the hands of nature, or time, or disease, there will be pain.

• 3:17:31Jocko Willink?

  But with a man like Mike Day as an example. You can overcome. You can get through it. You can drive on and you do that by getting up every day and getting after it.

• 3:17:49Jocko Willink?

  And until next time. This is Echo and Jaco. Out.