476: Dog Ain't Got Nuthin' For Ya. With Retired SEAL Harold "Dog" Underdown.

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Harold Underdown (aka Dog) is a co-founder of Four Branches Bourbon, where he brings his 30-year career as a Master Chief Naval Special Warfare (SEAL) to the company. As a former Navy SEAL Command Master Chief and VP of the UDT/SEAL Association https://www.udtseal.org/, Harold leads Four Branches Bourbon's efforts to support special operations veterans and causes. He manages collaboration ventures and giveback initiatives, promoting the company's message of Drink Honorably. Currently, Harold is working onboard at Baker's Bay Golf and Ocean Club https://bakersbayclub.com/ in the Bahamas as a Security Training Consultant for logistics, safety, and security. He's always down for a good pour and cigar, fishing, shooting, and anything outdoors. Go Navy! 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 476 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. I was a new guy in the SEAL platoon, which means keep your mouth shut, keep your ears open.

• 0:14Jocko Willink?

  I did that to the best of my ability. Wasn't always the best at it, but I did my best. And you get, when you're in your first SEAL platoon, you get a lot of your DNA in your first SEAL platoon. You're kind of watching what's going on. You're watching what the old guys, and by the way, the old guys are like 22 or 23 maybe for me. I was 19, you know, so an old guy is 24, 25, maybe. Your platoon chief might be 33, something like that. But you're watching them, how they're acting, what they're saying, what they're doing, and you're modeling your behavior off them. And when I was in my first platoon, we had a, the corpsman of our platoon, you know, corpsman is Echo Charles?

• 0:56Jocko Willink?

  It's a medic. So the medic was a guy. He was one of the old guys. And he was a southern man from North Carolina, called North Cackalacky. You ever heard of that before? Yes, sir. North Cackalacky, alright. So his name was Harold Underdown. And in SEAL teams, you're going to get a nickname at some point, and I believe Harold Underdown, because your last name is Underdown. Now, did you ever hear of a TV show called Underdog? Yes, of course. So that guy, I believe, morphed into Underdog, and then eventually that just came, became Dog or Doggy. So he was an old guy at the time. He was probably, I don't know, like, maybe around 30, maybe. He had an old school mentality.

• 1:37Jocko Willink?

  And it, it became very clear what his attitude was like when someone needed medical attention. Because as our platoon corpsman, if someone got sick, or someone got dinged up, or someone needed some kind of medical help, Dog would take a look at the individual, you know, look at the sprained ankle, or the cut hand, or the sick belly, or whatever. And he'd do an assessment.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  And then he'd say, Doggy ain't got nothing for you.

• 2:11Jocko Willink?

  You know, and that that was his way of saying, if you got a problem, you know, suck it up. And if you got a problem, you got to get that problem solved yourself. Doggy ain't got nothing for you. I'm not over here to fix you. I'm not even, you know, to baby you. You got to take care of yourself. You got to make sure you're good to go. You got to solve your own problems. And that was a great attitude for me to see as a young guy, and I definitely carried that attitude throughout my time in the teams. As did Doggy, who went on to have a incredible career with deployments all over the place, all over the world. Spent time at the Navy's JSOC Special Mission Unit. He deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and he was the Master Chief of the Command of SEAL Team Four.

• 2:58Jocko Willink?

  He carried on to do other things in the SEAL Teams, and it's an honor to have him with us here tonight to share some of his experiences and lessons learned. Here he is, Doggy. Thanks for joining us, man.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Wow. What a pleasure being here with you, Jocko. And, you know, let's have some fun, right? As we talk through this,

• 3:17Speaker 01

  you know, it was a heck of a ride, right? You know, I ended up with 30 years and one month. After they took the, you know, they do the arithmetic of how many active duty days you had, and I had eight years of National Guard, right? When I came in. So I was 25, right? I was one of the older guys at that first, you know, first platoon. But they took, they took the eight years National Guard, and they couldn't calculate that before I retired officially. And I called the lady and I go, hey, can you tell me kind of a ballpark where that would be? And she goes, no, Master Chief. She said, we'll do the, we'll do the calculation at your retirement date, right? So once the retirement papers got put in, it came back, I had 28 years, 11 days, active duty Navy at the time.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  At the time, they wanted me to leave the East Coast and go to the West Coast, right? Like the Group One Master Chief. And I just told the Force Master Chief at the time, I can't do that because. I'm gonna lose about $300,000 of equity in my house. And it's just not worth it at this time and point. So I'm gonna bow. I'm gonna bow out, right? Because at the E9 level, we only have so many Master Chief billets. And that's the thing to do, right? You need to move aside and let these other E8s come up to, you know, promote the Master Chief. But the lady called me back and I remember I was sitting at my desk on a Friday. She goes, "Master Chief", she says, "I got good news." And I go, "What's that?" And she goes, "Your final calculation for retirement is 30 years and one month."

• 4:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  And I went, "Roger that." That was great, right? Because, you know, that's a full, that's a full career, right? So it was awesome. So.

• 4:54Jocko Willink?

  Let's get back, let's get to how it started. So you were born down, like I said, down in North Cackalacky. And what was growing up like? What'd your, what'd your mom and dad do?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Oh, mom and dad were, you know, they were, they were great supporters of my brother and I, Mike. And basically, we lived in a little town there called, you know, Mount Holly, right beside Belmont, which is about 30 miles or, you know, 30 minutes south of Charlotte, North Carolina. And so we grew up in a little small neighborhood, you know, running around. And we had this road that cut up through the neighborhood called Hickory Grove Road. And on Hickory Grove Road is where I met all my buddies, right? You know, we would play, we would play all kinds of crazy stuff out in the woods and we would, we would play basketball, football, you know, tackle football back then in the backyard, right? Especially when it was muddy. We had a lot of fun with that. But growing up, my mom and dad were awesome.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  My mom worked in a mill, like a cotton mill for eons. And my dad was a, basically dad had an eighth grade education, but he could, he could do anything. Mechanic, carpenter, plumbing, you name it, he could do it. But he worked for a utilities plant, you know, like a water utilities plant down in McAdenville. A little town, uh, south of us and but, you know, it was just work, work, work and, uh, you know, I think they paid fifteen thousand dollars for the house that me and, you know, me and Mike grew up in, one bedroom, right? So you know, we had a lot of wrestling going on. But, but yeah, I mean, very modest, right? Very modest.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Both, both parents worked and then, uh, supported Mike and I as we came up through school and got into sports and, uh, played little league baseball. Had lots of friends that would come over to the house, would have barbecues in the back and it was very simple life, but, but very, uh, satisfying, right? As far as growing up under a high, and then, you know, they made us, made us go to church, right? Back when we were young. But at a certain point in life, you know, my mom said, hey, you don't, you don't have to get up Sunday morning, go to church anymore. So basically she just turned the tables on us, right? And said, I don't, you know, I'm not making you go to church. So you make up your mind. And we did, and I've been going to church ever since, right?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Because, you know, hey, if it's a part of your life, you're a believer, you, um, you jock up and show up, right? So I'd jock up on Sundays and go to church and, um, uh, but mom and dad, um, they worked their whole, their whole adult lives, right? Uh, my dad passed about two years ago and my mom's still with us and she's still living in that, that, uh, little small house there off Hickory Grove Road. Good thing is my brother Mike lives about probably about four miles away. So Mike's always checking on her and Mike just retired. He's a, uh, he was with Freightliner.

• 7:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Built trucks.

• 7:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  So he, he had a great career with them, about forty-two years. He just retired and he's enjoying it, right? He's enjoying his transition, right? But, uh, but yeah, for North Carolina, I, I have, I have great memories of, um, growing up, going to high school, uh, playing football, do, had, wrestled for one year and understand the, the wrestling mentality, right? I mean, it's, uh, You know, it's the long two minutes, right? Or two or three, right?

• 8:23Jocko Willink?

  Three, yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Three, I mean, it's just long, right? It seemed like hours. Uh, when you're going toe to toe with somebody of your own weight class. Uh, but, uh, you know, it, it, it was awesome. We had a great, uh, uh, being kids coming up, you know, it, it's not like it was, i- is today. We'd basically leave the house and we wouldn't come home until dark. And, um, of course, mom always had food on the table and, and then just repeat, right?

• 8:53Jocko Willink?

  When, when you got to high school, how good were you at football? Were you playing? Like varsity your freshman year or anything crazy like that?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Uh, the first, first year, I mean, I, I did really well, you know, as a Pee Wee ball and then midget ball played. I was a running back. So I was running back and then I switched over to defense, kind of a defensive back. So high school, I went straight to defensive back. We had some really hardcore running backs and really fast. But I was fast enough to play defensive back and they would move me up in a hawk position, they call it, right? So the hawk position was good and bad because the hawk means you had to go in. And if they run in a stampede run, I was the first one, right? I'm the first one to try to break up that stampede coming around the end. And a lot of collisions, right? So, uh, and then back then we didn't really have the technology as far as concussions go. I mean, I remember a couple of times I could hear the birds tweeting.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  And I was on the kicking team and kickoff, I was receiving the kick. So you get your bell rung, you know, when you're doing those type deals, you know, at that high speed, but, uh, but I remember, you know, I thought, I thought I was pretty good, right? But it pretty much ended after high school. I played a, a couple of teams who had picked up, remember the USFL?

• 10:05Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  New Jersey Generals and all of that. They had Herschel Walker. We actually did a, um, it was called a Lincoln and Bandits. And I was on, I was a defensive back again, but I was tackling these running backs and these guys were 220. They looked like Herschel Walker. And I was getting my bell rung like probably every other contact and I'm like because nobody was making a tackle up on the line, right? I remember they were saying, I remember our coach when I played high school, he goes, guys, if a lineman misses a tackle or a linebacker is six yards, if you miss a tackle, it's six points. So he really taught us to face in, you know, make sure you get the guy down, right? Whatever you gotta do. So just get him to the ground.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  So, um, it was a lot of fun, but I think football, the team mentality of football, uh, and, and basically any sport in, in high schools and college, it prepares you to go into something like a Navy SEAL program, right? Because.

• 11:01Jocko Willink?

  Now, what was your, what was your plan when you were getting rid, when you were going through high school? Were you planning on going to the military? What was the plan?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Well, I have an interesting story with that. I was, uh, when I was probably, uh, eighth, ninth grade, we were standing at the end of the road, right? Hickory Grove, Hickory Grove Road. And, uh, we had some firecrackers and we was doing stupid stuff, right? Kids. And we're throwing, my, my buddy said, I double dare you to light this little blackjack, you know, firecracker and throw it at a car coming by. And I'm like, well, you know, it doesn't seem to, because we're behind hedges and they ain't gonna see us. So sure enough, lit the firecracker, threw it on a car. Uh-oh, that car was a black and silver state trooper.

• 11:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Not good, right? Bad timing, right? So guess what? The trooper goes down a block, turns and he's triangulating the position, right? I go running down the road and go into the woods. Next thing I know, I'm standing and all of a sudden I hear whoop, whoop. And there's the state trooper sitting right on the road and he was stepped, he stepped outside of his car and he's staring into the woods, looking right at me. I go, man, that was quick. How did that happen? So I had a couple of options, right? I could either bag it, right? And run through the woods and double back around my house or I could walk out there and.

• 12:20Jocko Willink?

  Face the music.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Face the music. Well, I chose to go face the music and, um, I walk out, I, I came out and he goes, did you? And I go, yes, sir. And you know, cause there's another guy with me. I could have said, no, it wasn't me. It was Bobby.

• 12:34Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  It wasn't Bobby through, he threw the, you know, the crash on the, on the patrol car. It was me. So I stood there and he goes, you know what? That's very dangerous. And he says, you just happened to choose the, the wrong vehicle, but in a way it was a good vehicle. Because I'm just, I'm telling you, this is very dangerous. I could put you in a car and I could take you to your house and we could talk to your parents. Or you can take this as a learning experience and have a great day.

• 13:01Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  And I looked at him, I said, I choose to have an experience. And, but he taught me one, right?

• 13:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  I mean, this guy was squared away. It was a black, it was a black individual freaking squared away, had a Smokey Bear hat on. Uniform was freaking, you know, decked out. So ever since that day, that stupid move, I wanted to be a highway patrol, state trooper. Because he was such a professional. I mean, it could have went really sideways, but he was, he taught me a lesson and moved on. Right? And I still, I still think about that, but growing up through high school, that's what I wanted. I wanted to be a North Carolina highway patrol.

• 13:38Jocko Willink?

  And so then what was the path to that, to make that happen?

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Well, you had to take a, take a test, a written test, and then they, they, I remember going up to, uh, Lincolnon, I think it was, and I had to go through their, their physical part of it, physical exam, you know, eye test, all that stuff. And then you had to do the written exam. And then right after that, we'd go outside in a parking lot and they had a highway patrol car sitting there. And we had, they had a dummy, you know, one of these crashed dummies that was behind the wheel and it was seat belted in. So one of the drills where you had to start about 50 feet behind the car and they had you on a clock. And they would say, go, you would run down to the side of the vehicle, open the door, reach across the, the dummy. As it was a passenger, you know, in distress or whatever, it'd wreck.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Undo the seatbelt, get your arms underneath the armpits of the, of the dummy. And you had to drag that dummy back to that about 50 to 60 feet behind the car, right?

• 14:34Jocko Willink?

  That's a freaking good, realistic test.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that, that dummy was about, you know, I'd say about a hundred and 80 to a hundred and 90 pounds. So it wasn't, uh, wasn't anything small or light. So you did that and then you had to push the patrol car. And then a couple other agility, I think you had to run like a half a mile, push-ups, setup stuff. And then that was it. So I'm just waiting then, you know, once you finish all of the tests, they either give you a thumbs up or thumbs down. And I got thumbs up. And they said, uh, the academy will be reaching out to you when, when it's ready for you to go to Raleigh, North Carolina and go through the Highway Patrol Academy. But for whatever reason, they, they had a hiring freeze. They had some administrative issues or something.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  They needed to hire people, but at the same time, uh, the state was looking at it and from the state's standpoint, they were like, look, we don't have, uh, you know, diversity or whatever was the issue. And they had promotions, people were quitting, so they were trying to figure out what was going on. So, but that was, that took about a year. So here I am, as I'm waiting on this.

• 15:37Jocko Willink?

  And you had already graduated high school, so now.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Graduated high school, I'm in the National Guard, right? So, uh.

• 15:42Jocko Willink?

  So you're already, when did you join the National Guard?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Joined the National Guard in, in, in seventy-nine. It was Army Guard out of Charlotte, North Carolina.

• 15:50Jocko Willink?

  Did you do that in between your junior and senior year of high school?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:54Jocko Willink?

  Damn, that's such a good program.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is, it is, it's a great program. You had all of the, you know, the GI Bill that you could use for college. So what I did was, since I'm rolling down this Highway Patrol path, I go to a local college, Gaston College, community college, and I went after my criminal justice degree. In the same time, I was doing night courses to be a, um, a medic, right? To get my medical, it was, um, I forget the actual name of the course, but it was, you know.

• 16:25Jocko Willink?

  Damn, you were, you were squared away, other than hucking some firecrackers at the car.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Well, other than the bad decision doing that that day.

• 16:31Jocko Willink?

  That, that junior year, going to the Army Boot Camp, that, that's gotta square you away as a young kid.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  That was, I went through that in Oklahoma, Fort Seal, Oklahoma. And we were, we were kinda artillery. We were forward observers. So we would be out there in the front and we'd call in fire from, uh, one-five-five pilots or.

• 16:50Jocko Willink?

  And so you were like seventeen years old?

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Seventeen.

• 16:52Jocko Willink?

  Damn, that's so freaky.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  And me and three of my buddies, and we're still good friends today because we lived through all of that. And then about four years after that, I joined the Air Guard, basically walked across the street and got into a C-130 outfit that had medics, flight medics.

• 17:05Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  So I was on flying status and I was a medic.

• 17:08Jocko Willink?

  And meantime, you're just wait, you're going to college and you're waiting.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Waiting for, for the call, right? Waiting on the letter to say, hey, come and join us at the academy. Uh, but like I said, it just kept going and kept going. Um.

• 17:19Jocko Willink?

  Do you have a civilian job at this time?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I was working from four in the morning till eight at UPS, you know.

• 17:26Jocko Willink?

  Doing what? Driving, sorting, what?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  I started out unloading, unloading trucks. Then I started loading trucks and then I was a sorter. Sorter is the job you want, right? Cause basically you stand there, they unload the truck. You read the zip codes and I'm still, I got zip codes in my head today, right? Colorado eight zero. North Carolina is two, two eight zero. Just a state, you say Florida, three, three, two, five. I mean, I got that stuff in my head and it will not leave, right? So anytime I see a male, I look at the zipper and I go, I know where that's at. But it, but it just, it, you know, working and then trying to go to school, I sleep in half the classes, right?

• 18:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  So basically what I did was instead of the guard GI Bill, I said, to heck with that. I'm not disciplined enough that I'm not spending their money like this. This is ridiculous. So I stopped and then I started paying myself for my, my, my classes. And I finally made it, but it took me six years, right? And remember the saying for that, right? Six years in college for a two-year degree, you must be a doctor. Well, no, I'm not a doctor. I am a doc though on the corner, right? On the corner side of it, I'm a doc. But, but yeah, I mean, uh, so that was some, uh, uh, being very patient, waiting on, uh, the highway patrol thing. The academy up in Raleigh. And then one Sunday, I remember this like it was yesterday.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  There was a parade magazine inside the, the Sunday paper, you know, the Sunday papers are really thick. And, and I pulled that little parade magazine out and on the front cover of that magazine, it had a, uh, one of the candidates and buds was climbing underneath the barbed wire. And what, I don't remember that. I don't even know what the name of that obstacle was.

• 18:59Jocko Willink?

  I think it was just called the barbed wire.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  You had to get down on your face, right? And, and I saw the name was stenciled on his chest. He had a nice haircut, right? High and tight. And I go, you know what? And it, and the caption on the front of that magazine said, are the Navy SEALs the toughest men alive? So I, at the time, I had a girlfriend and she wanted to get married and, and all I had seen was North Carolina and Oklahoma, um, and we, in the air guard, I got to go to Germany. So I kinda got the bug. I'm like, man, I like this traveling, you know, the air guard, you know, flying on C-130s and, you know, uh, back in the day, 141s when we'd go over, cross the pond. But, uh, I really liked that and I go, and then when I read that article, I'm like, that's it. I'm done. I'm, I'm going to, I'm joining the Navy because I had two

• 19:45Speaker 01

  choices at the recruiters, right? I talked to the Army guys about flying Apaches helicopters. Well, they were going, hey, that's great. We'll get you at Rucker Flight School, but before you go to Rucker, we want you to go to Army Ranger School. So I had a Ranger buddy of mine I played football with, uh, in, in high school and I called him and go, hey, you know, uh, Jeff, what's the deal with the, the, they want me to go to Ranger School before they, they'll sign me for a flight, flight spot. And he goes, don't do it. He says they get you in a ramp tight and you're not leaving. You're not going to leave for about four years or a couple of tours. And at the time I was 24, 25, right? And I'm like, no, I'm not doing that. Went straight into the Navy and said, hey, I wanna, I wanna be a SEAL. They look at me kinda funny and go, can you swim? And I go, yes. And they

• 20:28Speaker 01

  went, all right, let's do this. But back then, right? We didn't have contracts, right? There was no guarantee. So what you had to do is join the Navy, get a rate, right? I think I was a boatswain mate at the time when I went in because I just, it's a, you know, one of those deals where you just get in, they'll sign you a rate. So I was a boatswain mate when I went through a boot camp. And then comes to the point where you raise your hand, do you wanna go SEAL, EOD, you know, diver, you know, all of those, uh, communities? And I went, well, I'm, I'm signing up for SEAL. Went through the process and then, and then the next thing you know, you're, you get orders.

• 21:03Jocko Willink?

  Did you train, like, once you made that decision, did you train any extra? You just freaking knew it was gonna be dog.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  You know what? I just figured, you know, I played football. I was lifting weights a lot. So I was probably a little more muscle than I needed to be, if I knew what was coming. If I knew that being a sugar cookie was gonna be on a, a daily basis, salt water is gonna be part of you. Uh, and pool too, right? Because I've been in some pool, uh, situations where, you know, it just, it, it rips your heart out. Doesn't it? I mean, when they, when they put towels in your hands and say do the butterfly, and I go, wait a minute, I can't do the butterfly without towels, right? Well, do, do the best you can, shut up and jump in the pool, right? And, and get the towels going. But that, that was, um, that was something that was, uh, you can't train for that. Yeah. What, what year was it? So what year did you join the Navy?

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Eighty-seven, May of eighty-seven. So I, so at that point in time, I got a letter in the mail. Once I shipped out to boot camp, I got a letter from the Highway Patrol. Damn. But it was a, a month late, right? A day late and a dollar short. That's right. Uh, that, no, no turning back at this point, right? So, uh, as I look back on that, you know, I could have been a Highway Patrolman and then, you know, done a long career, but what would I have seen? I'd have saw North Carolina. I'd have probably moved around to different counties. They got, you got a hundred counties in North Carolina. So I'd have probably bounced around three, four, 10 counties and, you know, in a patrol car and whatever, right? And, uh, and I look back on my Navy career and as you well know, we're global. Mm-hmm. Right? I mean, so, you know, uh, out of North Carolina.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  They lured to see. North Cackalacki's in the rear view, right? So, but you know, back then though, Jocko, uh, wasn't a lot of talk about Navy SEALs. You know, we didn't have any, uh, like it is now, you know, with the movies and all of these, uh, series that are out about Navy SEALs, uh, the UBL mission, all of that. And then now it's all like, you know, hey, what, what did you do as a SEAL? And so people have a certain, you know, perspective of, of Navy SEALs, um, when, when you talk about it today. But when I went in, you, you could say Navy SEAL. Yeah, no one knew. You know, when I met Lisa over in Guam, we said SEAL and, and she's like, what, what is that? In, in the water? The SEALs are in the water?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So they, you know, the public awareness at that time was like zero. So, you know, Echo, I mean. Yes, sir. You know, I know, how, how old are you? Forty-seven. Forty-seven? So, you know, and now it's, it's all over the place, right? Good or bad, right? Yeah. The good is that, you know, we still need people. We need young men to step up and take on this ultimate challenge. Uh, and the bad side of it is, is we don't want to be looked at as people that, uh, That are not silent professionals, right? Because you know, when I was at SEAL Team One, it was all about being a silent professional, not about beating your chest when you go down

• 24:04Speaker 01

  to the bars or in Coronado and go, hey, I'm a Navy, you know, you didn't say that, right?

• 24:10Jocko Willink?

  No, Team One was definitely tight on that stuff.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  That was a tight command, right?

• 24:15Jocko Willink?

  That was a tight command.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  I think that's what basically broke me from haircut, because I love haircuts.

• 24:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  And I started loving them when I was at SEAL Team One. So if you didn't have a haircut, you were going to be doing some pushups.

• 24:31Jocko Willink?

  When you, when you went to, when you went to Navy boot camp, how was the contrast like? Because you already had been through Army boot camp. You must have been in Navy boot camp just going, what is this?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  It was a cakewalk. And then I got, you know, since I was 25, when I went through, or 24 at the time, I believe, I was ARPOC.

• 24:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  So I'm not sure what ARPOC stands for now.

• 24:54Jocko Willink?

  It stands for Recruit Chief Petty Officer, and it's still a thing.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's what I was. And I had two, two of the, you know, the boot camp instructors that were great guys. And they just basically, hey, you got it, ARPOC, I'm leaving. So, you know, it's basically about, hey, just making sure people are squaring away their gear, keeping the place clean. And then if we go anywhere, make sure we're accountable and we check out every day, right?

• 25:18Jocko Willink?

  And then you, when you show up to BUDS finally, what was your first impression of BUDS?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a rude awakening, right? And you cross that quarter deck, because as soon as you cross the quarter deck, somebody's got, somebody's got you, right? They, they got eyes on you. It's like this place got cameras all over the place. But them is instructors. You know, we had an old Master Chief that was, you know, he was, welcome aboard, you know, he says, you know, who are you? Where are you from? Good, right? Go sweep this hallway or go do something menial. So it was a awakening, right? And then, of course, you walk out on a grinder and you see all those helmets, the classes are in front of you. And I was like thinking, what, what is that? Are those winners? Is there a reason that those helmets are laying on the ground and all lined up perfectly? Nope, those are not winners.

• 26:06Jocko Willink?

  No, those are quitters.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  They're going home. They decided to go home.

• 26:10Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you have any major issues at BUDS?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  I, I don't think so. Physically, I held up pretty good because you know, you, you, um, you have to, you have to know when to go and know when to hoe. Right. And you had to be clandestine when you're hoeing, right? Because you get an instructor seeing you hoeing and then he's going to turn you into a go-go. Right. You're going to go to the surf, right? So, but, but I did have a, uh, one thing that, uh, drown proofing. I know you remember drown proofing and I got rolled back on that. Okay. And it was a nightmare, right? They tie your feet together, uh, they tie your hands behind your back. And then they introduce you to the pool, which was about what 20 feet deep on that deep end, maybe? I think it's 15 feet, nine feet and four feet. Yep. So there's no standing on your toes. Might as well be a hundred.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  I get ready to say it. Might as well be the abyss, right? So, um, doing that, I mean, I, I did it. I mean, I, I would come undone. I would, I would get out of the ropes behind my back somehow. I don't know how I did it. You mean like, like panicking scenario? Yes. Like you were freaking out? Anxiety, bad anxiety. And I did that like three times in a row. I came out of those ropes and that one instructor said, you will never come out of this knot. He said, this is a, he said, get your ass in back in the water. So I go back in the water and I get halfway down the pool. You know, we're doing the dolphin, dolphin kick. And I came out of them again. And. Full Incredible Hulk. So. Panic mode. Panic mode. So after drinking, felt like half of the swimming pool.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  I got out and they rolled me back, right? So here I am now, I'm sitting in a barracks across the street on the amphib side. Waiting to get classed up with class one, five, two, right? So, and you're talking about some, you, you, you know, you're thinking about, hey, I want to be a Navy SEAL now. Now it's all about. It's all in question. You gotta be comfortable in the water and drown proofing is one of those evolutions that has been proven to. It, it seems like torture, but it's not torture. It's just to get you to relax in the water and trust yourself with, with filling up your lungs. Lungs being that buoy for you and doing that dolphin kick. Because you did it. And then I think there were two or three of us that failed.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  I was, I think I was the only one that actually got rolled. But that whole time, that six weeks, I was waiting on Class 152. I would go over on the weekends and I'd tie myself up and I'd jump in the pool. Well, when I was doing this, there was this older gentleman working at the pool at the time, retired SEAL. And he goes, hey, under down. You can't do that. You're gonna get me fired. And I go, hey, Charlie, you know, Charlie. I go, I gotta do it. I said, I'm getting ready to go through this again. And I said, I'm not failing this. You know, so I'd get in there and I said, hey, just get your little, you know, he had a little hook on the end of a pole.

• 28:56Jocko Willink?

  If needed.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  If needed, he could pull my drowning ass out of the water, right? But we didn't need it. I just kept doing it, kept doing it. Charlie kept telling me, no, no, you can't do this. You know, you're gonna get me fired. And I just worked through it. And I remember the evening that we did drown proofing. And I was in 152. And I was like, man, I was leading up to this, right? I said, I've got to, I've got to do this. I got to get through this. Passed it the first time. Cause I was totally relaxed and had the confidence to do that evolution. Which is, you start in the deep end, you dolphin kick all the way down to the shallow side of the pool. And this is a 50 meter, right? 50 meter pool. And then you turn around and you come all the way back down. And then you had to

• 29:36Speaker 01

  do amount of little ups and downs, right? Ups and downs. And then, and then once the instructors are confident that you finished doing what you needed to do, boom, you're out of the pool, you passed. So I passed and I got out. And I remember, we were doing an evolution and we were down on the Steel Pier over amphib side, right? And we're on our backs, we're doing flutter kicks. And of course, then again, you got your name stamped across your chest.

• 30:00Jocko Willink?

  Was this hell week going on?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  This, I think it was hell week.

• 30:03Jocko Willink?

  Steel Pier, Steel Pier is definitely, I mean, that's like part of hell week.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  It was a part of hell week, right? And I remember, you may remember this, we had a lieutenant. Um, thinks he's uh, Lat Thompson, but he had these glasses, mirror glasses, right? He looked like, he looked like somebody off of the movie of uh, what's Steve McQueen? What's that movie?

• 30:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, uh.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Shaking the tree, boss. Shaking, you remember what I'm talking about, where you eat all those eggs?

• 30:27Jocko Willink?

  Classic movie.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:28Jocko Willink?

  What is it?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Well, he looked like that guy, one of the prison-

• 30:31Jocko Willink?

  Failure to communicate.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Failure, yeah. Well, we have his, a failure to communicate. Well, that guy looked like him, right? He looked like that prison guard and he says, under down. And he's looking right down at me with them glasses and I look up at him and I go, oh, here's, you know, LT. He says, get up. So I stand up and he goes, come up here. He says, put the blanket on. I go, I don't need a blanket. You know? He said, here, have some hot chocolate. I said, I don't need any hot chocolate. You know, and he says, he said, let me tell you something. Let me tell you a story. And he starts to talk and he's looking off into the distance, looking across the bay. And he's looking down at me and he goes, I'm disgusted. And I'm like thinking, you know, what the heck's he disgusted about, right? And I ain't done anything, you know, I ain't done anything wrong. He goes, I have this neighbor. My neighbor's name's Charlie.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  And I go, uh-oh, here we go. He says, Mr. Charlie told me we had an individual, a candidate, who was going over to the pool on the weekends and tying himself up and jumping in. That's totally illegal. You cannot do that if you're put, Char- Charlie may lose his job. He says, do you know what I'm talking about? And I look up at him, I go, yes, sir. And he goes, he says, guess what? And I go, what? And he goes, I like it. It shows that you've got a little bit of fire. He says, you may, may make it. He says, you may get through this. And he said, now get your ass back down on the pier and join your class. And I went, hoo-ya, hoo-ya.

• 31:58Jocko Willink?

  Good times.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  But that was scary, right? And, and they would always do that, right? Where they're blowing smoke and they're smoking cigars and blowing smoke in your face and telling you, in the unlikely event-

• 32:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Until the day-

• 32:08Speaker 01

  You make it.

• 32:08Jocko Willink?

  Like when you're getting ready to graduate, when you're lining up, they're like, well, hey, in the unlikely event that you graduate today, you're gonna have to have this admin stuff by, done by the afternoon. I'm like, what else are these people gonna do to me? Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:21Jocko Willink?

  It's scary though, like I failed pool comp. Uh, and when I failed pool comp, like all of a sudden-

• 32:29Jocko Willink?

  Because you're on track. You're like, you think you're gonna make it, you know?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  You're getting the rail.

• 32:33Jocko Willink?

  And it's like, oh, my entire life, everything that I want in my life is, is like at jeopardy. It's a nightmare. It's a lot of pressure, like it's a crazy pressure.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  And you put it on yourself too, right?

• 32:46Jocko Willink?

  A hundred percent.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  You know, because once you fail something and, and, and you know, you, I talked to young, young, young men today that want to be a SEAL. You, you can't really prepare them for what they're going to go through, you know, it's like a buzzsaw, right? You just, you just really, they just gotta, they just gotta face it, right? They gotta face the deal.

• 33:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, check.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  But.

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so you graduate and you say you get, you go to orders to team one. Did you pick west coast?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Uh, I did.

• 33:14Jocko Willink?

  How come you picked west coast being most guy, I mean, generally speaking, when guys are from the east coast, they pick east coast. When guys are from the west coast, they pick west coast.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Well, growing up in North Carolina and then being out here in, in San Diego, Coronado. You got, you're looking at these beautiful palm trees. I mean, it's beautiful, right? So I'm just, I'm just like, you know what? I want to be somewhere that I haven't lived my whole life, right? So I, I chose west coast.

• 33:38Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  And got, got, got picked, you know, um.

• 33:41Jocko Willink?

  Now, did you know anything about like team one? Did you know, did you know the reputation or anything like that? You just.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  No, no, I just knew they were one of the originals, right? Them and SEAL Team Two were OGs, right? As far as SEAL Team One, SEAL Team Two, I don't, I think SEAL Team Two may have got commissioned before.

• 33:58Jocko Willink?

  I guess it's.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  It's real close.

• 34:00Jocko Willink?

  Coast time or something like that.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, east coast, west coast. Uh, but yeah, I mean, I'm walking in, walking across quarter deck. I had no idea that SEAL Team One was, they were very, uh, strict.

• 34:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we used to call it stalag team.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Stalag, yeah.

• 34:14Jocko Willink?

  And there was one other good name for it anyways. Yeah. So actually I think you're the person that originally told me. Team one, it's not just a number, it's an attitude.

• 34:29Jocko Willink?

  You took that shit serious.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:31Jocko Willink?

  Team one.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  And I, um, I really enjoyed, looking back on my career, uh, SEAL Team One, I had a lot of great mentors, uh, there, great, a lot of hardcore, uh, operators that I learned a whole lot from. And, you know, like you said earlier, you got two ears for a reason, right? So, and that's the way it was at SEAL Team One. It's like, shut up, shut up and just, you know, listen and do what we say to, you know, and train. So.

• 35:00Jocko Willink?

  So did you roll right into a platoon when you got there? Or did you have to do STT?

• 35:03Speaker 01

  I had to do, I had to do STT, right? Back then they call it SEAL Tactical Training, or, but it was kind of like SQT, but it's still the same. It was, you're basically, your trident is put in a box, you know, Command Master Chief's got the box, or the platoon, right, has the box with your trident inside, and you have to prove yourself basically for six months. And you do the workup, you know, from cold weather training to combat swimmer, uh, to, to jumping, uh, land warfare, and you go through all of those evolutions of training. And then when you finish that six months, then they give you your, they have a celebration, uh, a little, little, um, ceremony and, uh, give you your trident.

• 35:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. There's controversy because now when you get done with SQT, you get your trident. And so then when those new guys started showing up at the team with their trident, the team guys were like, oh no, we didn't, you don't get your trident. So they took them off of them. And that still happened depending on the team. But then, you know, you can see the commands are like, wait, you're, you're undermining, you know, the authority of the.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Fifty-three twenty-six, right?

• 36:09Jocko Willink?

  System.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  They already got.

• 36:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they've been awarded this. They've been approved by the SQT instructors. Those are, you know, Master Chiefs and, and, and senior NCOs that are awarding them. They're trying to, now you're saying that they don't. So there's a little bit of controversy around that about the way it goes down. Uh, you know, I was the same way as you. Like when I showed up, no bird. You didn't get your bird when you graduated. Do you, you went to your team, you went through SQT, you got in a platoon, then you did a, a board, where you had to program radios and assemble weapons and get asked a bunch of questions and put tourniquets on and all this stuff. And then, and then you got your trident.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 36:46Jocko Willink?

  And you got your trident. Like punched into your chest, which you punched my trident into my chest with the entire SEAL team, the whole SEAL team lines up. It's freaking, it was freaking awesome.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was. It was. I remember that. The old blood, blood bird, right? Blood bird. So, but, but you know, now the, the young guys now, they think the platoons take them and they put them in a birdcage. So they've got this birdcage in their space and they got all these tridents hanging in these birdcages.

• 37:13Jocko Willink?

  I've seen birdcages. I've seen aquariums.

• 37:19Jocko Willink?

  They're all kinds of little things that they got. I've seen them painted blue because it's inert. So you don't, you know, you get a blue trident. It's not real. It's like, like, you know, a blue gun, a gun that's not real. They painted blue for training. They, I've seen a trident painted blue because it's inert. They really have it. So they got all kinds of little tricks they do to them. So when you showed up, you get into your first platoon, um, what, what year is it now? Is it like, it's still 87?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  It's 88.

• 37:42Jocko Willink?

  88?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  I think it was August of 88 when I checked in SEAL Team One.

• 37:47Jocko Willink?

  And how's, how's being a new guy at SEAL Team One?

• 37:50Speaker 01

  You know, it's, um, basically, you know, these older guys, right? Uh, SEAL Team One members basically say, you know, just keep your mouth shut and pay attention, right? And then we're gonna, we're gonna train you. We're gonna mentor you. Uh, I don't know if they actually said mentor at the time. They just said, you just, you just do what you do, right? You got, you show up for work, get a haircut, check to watch bill.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, SEAL Team One, right?

• 38:14Jocko Willink?

  What was your job?

• 38:15Speaker 01

  I, uh, you know, I came in and I was still bosom mate at the time, right? Which was, you know, back, back then you had to have a rate to be assigned to you, a job title, right? To be a Navy SEAL. Um, so I was a seaman. I think I was just a seaman E3.

• 38:32Jocko Willink?

  Did they make you a pig gunner in the platoon?

• 38:34Speaker 01

  I was. I was a 60 gunner. But what happened early on, I had a senior chief who had some time in Millington and knew a lot of people in the detail shop and stuff. He says, dog, um, the best thing for you since you was a flight medic in the Air Force, air guard. He says, you already got all the medical training because I had to go to Shepherd Air Force Base and, and get, go through the medical training, right? For the air, air guard. So I already had the medical stuff, plus I was a EMT. Um, and he goes, we're gonna send you to corpsman school in Balboa. And you graduate corpsman, I think it was six to eight weeks. And when you graduate, we're going to reinstate you to E5.

• 39:09Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  And I'm thinking, gee, I'm a E3 now. That'd be great. So I did it and you know what? He kept his word. I graduated corpsman school and I was automatically promoted to HM2.

• 39:21Jocko Willink?

  Damn dude.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  That was like, that was a blessing, right? That was a blessing as far as being able to get promoted because you know, in the teams back then, your rate was your fate.

• 39:32Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Right? If you're a certain rate, you may not promote as easily as a corpsman, right, at HM. Um, and I was blessed with that rate and I had that all the way up to Master Chief. Took me a while to make E6, had to do some crazy stuff for that. Had to go to Florida and sit through a, a week long course with this old retired Master Chief that was basically teaching, teaching.

• 39:53Jocko Willink?

  Teach you how to pass.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  How to pass the test, right? And how to do it effective. And I actually scored like a 77 out of 80.

• 40:00Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  It worked, right?

• 40:02Jocko Willink?

  Doggone it.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  I got promoted to, uh, but I had to do that, right? And, and, and Dam Neck paid that. They paid me to go down to Florida and sit down with this guy. He had a classroom.

• 40:11Jocko Willink?

  So, so where'd you go? Where'd you go on deployment? Like your first, your first deployment?

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Philippines, went over to, went over to PI.

• 40:20Jocko Willink?

  Anything go down? Was that the volcano or anything like that?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  You know what? No, I think we were either before or right after that and, but it was still, it was fine. You know, we, we'd go outside the gate a lot, uh, did a lot of training on the beach, Green Beach, Red Beach, all of those beaches that would go shoot live fire. Um, and then do a lot of, uh, water work as well over, over in Subic. But, uh, that was a great, great base, but that was right after, you know, we shut that down, right? Not too long after that.

• 40:47Jocko Willink?

  So you did, was that when, so you got done with that deployment and then you did another one? Where was your next deployment?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  My next deployment was Guam.

• 40:56Jocko Willink?

  With me?

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah. With you. That was my second, you know, second deployment.

• 40:59Jocko Willink?

  I always thought that was your third deployment.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  And then I did one more.

• 41:02Jocko Willink?

  You were just a one cruise wonder.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Oh, you know what? Hold on. No, two, that, that was right. The third, that was my third deployment because we did, I did an ARG.

• 41:11Jocko Willink?

  Got it. Okay.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  So they needed a corpsman, so I joined the, the ARG platoon and, and basically I did back to backs, right? And then that's when I met you, when we did that, uh, third deployment over to Guam, right? Because I screened for Dam Neck and went to, you know, went to back to Virginia.

• 41:27Jocko Willink?

  So when, one thing I was thinking about when you were talking about that, uh, police officer that like. Basically taught you a lesson was cool to you. I was thinking about when you were, you know, when I was a new guy and look, I was about as, you know, a new guy as a new guy could get, dude, I was freaking 20 years old and, and you know, young, dumb and full of motivation, as they say. Oh, yeah. And what I remember about you though is like, you would, you wouldn't, you weren't like,

• 41:56Jocko Willink?

  you, you were trying to like, help, help us new guys be better. You weren't just like, shut, you know, you said, hey, let me show you how to do this. Hey, here's something to think about. You, you were, you were truly like, again, you didn't use the word mentor, but you were actually trying to get us good at being frogmen, not, you weren't just Hammer. beating the shit out of us and being an asshole. And there's plenty of guys like that too, you know? But yeah, you were, you were always like trying to help us. And I think that makes a, a big difference. I think it took me a while to find that for myself. Cause I know I, I was a little bit of an asshole. By the time I was in my second and third platoon, you know, myself and my run mates and a bunch of guys that were in that platoon with us, you

• 42:40Jocko Willink?

  know, we, we were definitely hard, probably too hard on some of the guys. But you know, as I got a little bit older, I realized, oh yeah, if you want these guys to be good SEALs, you should be helping them. And you want to have a good relationship with the dudes, you know, you don't want them to be mad about coming to work and you don't want them to not be able to come to you and say, hey, how do I do this? Cause they're scared they're going to get beat down. Matter of fact, I remember one time, I forget when, no, we were doing, we were doing ship boarding, just training. And one of the other older guys started making a scene about some shit he's yelling. And, and you were just like, shut the fuck up, man. You don't know what you're talking about. And you, it was funny because you defended,

• 43:23Jocko Willink?

  it was actually me. It was, you were actually literally defending me. To another guy because you know, I had done something and you know, what I did, what I thought was right. And you thought what I did was right too. And this other guy didn't think it was right. And he was having to go at me and what am I going to say? Well, I'm not going to say shit. I'm going to say Roger that. But then you stepped in and I was like, Doug, Doug, doggy just put, put out the word right there. He's looking out for his boy over here.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's part of being a platoon, right? We, we take care of each other. Uh, but if, if we see somebody, you know, they always said, well, we're, we're only as fast as our slowest man, right? So we always had to work to make sure that slowest man understood that he had to perform, right? Yet you got to get up here, right? Cause you're slowing down this whole train, right?

• 44:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's wild. Just how, how, uh, that, how platoons come together and how you just so damn, uh, you're so, you're so engaged in being in a platoon, you know, it's just such an awesome place to be. And you're trying to do a good job and it doesn't matter where you are. I mean, I went every, everything from the new guy to the platoon commander, to tasking commander. Doesn't matter. Like you're still trying to do the best you can possibly do that whole freaking time, which is.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  And you know, we were talking here before the show about, uh, your reputation. And I think there's no place like the SEAL teams when it comes to you are graded on your reputation, right? Especially when, you know, when you come, when it comes time for you to get orders and you go to another SEAL team. All those people at that SEAL team want to know.

• 44:54Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Can he pull, can he, yep, can he pull his weight, right? And they get plenty of, they get plenty of intel, right? It's just word of mouth, right? Your reputation is going to precede you and you, you know, it's just very important. And it's the same in, in business, right? It's the same in business life as we transition out of the military. Your reputation speaks for itself, right? So.

• 45:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. And we had like that platoon that we were in, dude, I mean, it was a pretty wild platoon. That we had some wild dudes in there. I mean, I was wild as hell. I'm actually, I would say I got wild as hell because I wasn't old enough to drink when I got in there. I was a kid. And then went, you know, we went on deployment. And it was interesting because you mentioned that the Philippines had shut down. So we were the first platoon to deploy straight to Guam. Like we didn't, because I think the platoons before us deployed to the Philippines and then they left and went to Guam. We deployed straight to Guam. And there was a lot of people, look, the Philippines was like a great place for guys to go and a lot of guys loved the Philippines and guys would get stationed there

• 46:01Jocko Willink?

  and they do multiple deployments over there. And we got sent straight to Guam and there was a lot of people that were pissed. You know, like they didn't want to be in Guam. They wanted to go to the Philippines. I didn't know any better. And some of the other old guys, like from other platoons or other teams, you know, they're so mad. Like they were literally mad, like, I can't believe we're here. This sucks. Meanwhile, Guam is like a tropical paradise island. There's surfing, there's a sick gym, there's, you're getting per diem. There's like, you know, we're young, there's bars to go and there's women there. It's like kind of an awesome place. Then, and so I'm like, some of the older guys from, some of the other guys were mad.

• 46:44Jocko Willink?

  I'd be like walking out with my roommate. We'd be like walking out to go out and they'd be like, you know, where are you guys going, going out? They're like, oh, this place sucks. And I'm like, okay. Yeah, if you're sitting in the barracks, right? If you're sitting in the barracks, it does. It does suck. Remember they got the blue hole there too, right? Remember the diving, blue hole? That place, that's unbelievable. Yeah, they had this blue hole, like you, you can swim down to it. It's 65 feet. I remember we had a, uh, one of the officers that worked there was like a, like a swim guy from the Naval Academy. And so we all went out to the blue hole. And he swam down to the top of the blue hole, which was 65 feet. And he just like sat on the edge of it and looked up and waved. And then came back up, you know, all chill. So I was like, of course, like, okay, now I gotta do this, right? It brought, went down.

• 47:30Jocko Willink?

  I tried to try as hard as I could to look out.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  You look down that hole and it looks like something that that's like a laser cut a circle. I mean, it looked like a drum, right? And it had that arch on the front of it. And then it opened up to the ocean. But on the other, when you got down to that bottom is 150, I think about 150 feet down. We did a bounce dive down there. You can climb over the edge and look down. And that's all you had time to do because you have to go back up, right? On your stops going back up to atmosphere 66 and 33. But when we were down there, I climbed out over the edge of that cliff and looked down. That's Marianas.

• 48:04Jocko Willink?

  That's the Marianas trench, like 30,000.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  That water went navy blue to black.

• 48:09Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  That was just, that was scary. That was a little scary.

• 48:13Jocko Willink?

  So that's Guam. Like you got all this cool stuff going on and, and we did, we did like one trip as a platoon. And then we didn't do any more trips and that was very early in our deployment. And so then we were just in Guam. So like we'd go shooting, but you can only like, there's only so much stuff that you can do. You run through all your ammo. Now what are you going to do? Okay, we'll, we'll go jumping. Cool. There's no helicopters. Like at a certain point, there's only so much you can do. And then what are you going to do? Well, you're a bunch of, bunch of freaking frog man hanging out at Toomam Bay.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's beaches, they bars on the beach, which is, you know, that's not a good ingredients for seals.

• 48:53Jocko Willink?

  It's either not a good ingredients or it's the best ingredients when you're 21 years old or 20 years old. And so that's what we were doing. Uh, and that's where, that's where you met your wife.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  I met Lisa on the beach down at, uh, you know, the beach we'd always go to, right? Uh, and you know, she was down there throwing football, you know, with this, with this other girl, I think. She was, uh, she was stationed on the, um, the submarine tender. So her and Lisa hanging, that's when Lisa goes, well, who's seals, you know, what? And the girl goes, well, the seals are here. And Lisa's like looking around going, where, where, where they at? I don't see any in the water, right? And she goes, no, no, no, I'm talking about the Navy SEALs. These guys, they always, you know, would take over, right? As soon as we hit the beach, he would plant a flag and go, this is it.

• 49:43Jocko Willink?

  And I, I, I remember, uh, when you met Lisa, just how, dude, you were, you were hook, line and sinker. You were done training, bro.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:51Jocko Willink?

  It was game over for you. And she was, cause she was a knockout and she was a, you know, we all knew immediately she was a Seattle Seahawks cheerleader. And she was a badass chick and all of a sudden doggy's just, he's just frigging hook, line and sinker.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Dog gone, dog gone.

• 50:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh, classic stuff, man.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, uh, that was something else. Uh, met, met Lisa and I remember I ended up, as we, uh, left, of course, Lisa, uh, went back to Seattle, uh, after our deployment finished, I think it was in July, cause I remember having the July the 4th twice, right? And then of course Lisa was pregnant, so she went home off the work site there. She was working with her two brothers, who were doing, um, Stucko work in Guam. They had contracts on both the commercial side and then they're looking at getting some Navy housing contracts. So they were full on busy and, um, uh, so Lisa went back, I ended up flying back from, from Guam as we went back to SEAL Team One.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  And I remember it was crazy cause we, we flew across the date line, right? So we celebrated the 4th of July in Guam. I went back to San Diego and, and did it again.

• 51:01Jocko Willink?

  Let's do it again.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Do 4th of July one more time. And, uh, but we, we got married shortly after that and then, um, that's when I got orders to go to Dev Group. So, uh, Lisa and, uh, Lisa's dad and I drove, uh, drove our forerunner and, uh, we had a Nissan Pathfinder. Lisa had that over there. So we drove that bad boy across country in a U-Haul. You know, and then we were pulling one vehicle and then we'd drive the, you know, the forerunner.

• 51:29Jocko Willink?

  And so what now it's like 1993?

• 51:31Speaker 01

  94, 94. I checked in at Dev Group, uh, January of 94.

• 51:37Jocko Willink?

  And, and you, you had already screened for that, I guess, prior to us going on deployment. So now you're out there going through selection. In 94 and how was selection?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Oh, it was another, it was another kick in the jimmy, right? Just like anything else, right? And as soon as you think you're, you got to a point, you know, I was a HM2 at the time. Check in the damn next same thing, you know, shut your mouth, you know? You're, you guys are, we're supposed to be door kickers, right? They, they brought in, I think there was 22 of us, 21. And we all check in and when Master Chief came up in, in the classroom, he says, guys, so I got good news and bad news. And we're like, what's that? And he goes, good news is you're, you're at this command, you know, tier one command. He goes, bad news is, is you're not going to be door kickers, you're going to boats. So we went, we were the first time that they'd pushed that many seals in the gray team, right? Into the gray team where we have the 40 foot, you know, eight sacks, go fast boats.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  And they asked the question at the, at the screen, you know, at the interview, they said, uh, you like boats? I'm like, I love boats. I mean, what are you going to tell them? I don't like boats. Because if you don't like boats, guess what? You're not, you're not going to get ordered, you know, you're not going to get ordered. So, uh, I just, but I, I really did, I really liked boats and, uh, I had a great time. And those boat, and then they, they sent us all to Florida for a two week course, US, US Coast Guard captain license.

• 52:58Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  So we were all US Coast Guard, a hundred ton near coastal captain license, which is pretty awesome to, you know, it's a great, it's a great certificate to have. But, uh, but yeah, that was it. You know, we, I left the west coast and went out there and I ended up finishing my whole career, you know, on the east coast.

• 53:16Jocko Willink?

  And in the nineties, again, it's like pre, pre nine 11, what was the, uh, like what, what were you guys doing? Were you, you guys were doing, uh, didn't you guys do stuff for Bush up in, up in Maine, up in Kenny Monk?

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did the, I did that three times. When I was at trade at, we would go up there for basically, we were the water protection for the president as he fished, right? They were fishing, uh, off the coast up there in Kenny Butthorn, Maine. And his dad, 41, had a house on Walker's Point. And we would go over to the house every day. They had these segways, they just came out these segways and they were riding these segways around. And, and I remember the president, you know, 41, uh, He came out, George Ace, and he goes, guys, he said, he said, I want you to ride these segways. I just got this as my birthday gift. And he says, you guys can ride them around. He said, just don't hit the beast. And I'm thinking, what, what's that? The beast? And he goes, yeah, that armored, the armored Cadillac, right? Yeah.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  President's car. And we're like, Roger that, sir. We won't, we won't hit the beast. So we were doing that, but we were, or mainly up there just to be protection as he was fishing with his dad. Right. So we had two presidents. We had forty-one, forty-three. And we'd, we would jock up in the boats. We had Pelican cases. We had rifles in boats. We had sixty guns in the, in the Zodiacs. And I remember we're having a discussion, right? So I'm, I'm up there as a master chief and I'm, we got, we got these two-way walkie-talkies just talking back and forth. And I'm on the, uh, the Secret Service's, uh, they had a rib boat out there. It's about a forty-five foot boat. But it was, it, it couldn't keep up with the, with the Bush's fishing boat, because they had a, they had a fountain boat. Hmm.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  So that fountain boat was about a thirty-six footer and he had like three big time engines on the back of it, right? And it, they would take off and I'd be on the, the rib. And I told the guy, I said, does that make any sense? You guys need to, he said, well, we, you know, we'd like to have the hard boats up here, you know, but damn that was no, we're not bringing hard boats up to run around with the president as he's fishing. But, so we did the best we could. And I remember they had a wedding on the peninsula. So everybody was driving from Walker's Point over to this peninsula for the wedding rehearsal. And we're all, we had the peninsula basically surrounded, one-eighty security ring about a mile off the coast.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  And we're just out there. We had our weapons with us and we're just watching for any, anybody that would possibly break through the perimeter and get onto the rocks and climb up to interrupt or, you know, harm anybody. So we were on the radio and remember the, the, this was forty-three, George W. was in the car with his, with his primary guy, right? He's got the, the guy that's his pocket man. And he was listening, they're listening to our chatter too, as we were talking around, you know, the perimeter. And one of the guys in the Zodiac who was up against the rocks, who was, you know, near, near shore, he basically said, hey, uh, hey, dog. If, uh, if one of the, of a high, high-speed boat comes, what, what do you want me to do? And I go, well, you got a weapon. I go, smoke it.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  And when I said, smoke it, of course, I didn't realize this, but it, they picked it up in a, in a, in the beast, right? Inside the, the president's car and, and George W. looked over at the secret service guy and he goes, you hear that? Those seals are gonna smoke something. You know, he said, that's why those seals are up here, right? He said, I feel safe, but it was, it was funny, you know? But he asked me later, he said, who, who, which one of you said, smoke them? And I went, eh, that was me.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  He said, that was a good answer, by the way. He said, the president really loved that.

• 56:43Jocko Willink?

  That's good commander's intent right there. Dude, when I was a good, so my dad worked in a, in, I'm from New England and my dad worked in a, in a camp, a summer camp in Kennybunk. And so when I was a little kid,

• 56:57Jocko Willink?

  Vice President Bush was, you know, he did be the same thing. Like we'd see the secret service up there and he gave a speech in, you know, the little town of Kennybunk, little Kennybunkport, right? He gave a speech in that little square and my, my dad took me and we had one of those little disposable cameras. And my dad says, hey, you know, get, you know, get a picture of him. And there's a real big crowd and, and I said, okay. And I said, well, I really can't see him. He's, and, and I climbed up on this windowsill. And so now I'm, I'm probably like, I don't know what the math is, but I'm probably eight, nine years old, something like that. I had some kind of camera. Anyways, I get up on this windowsill. So now I, I can see above the crowd and I have a really good view.

• 57:40Jocko Willink?

  And Vice President Bush is up there and I'm a punk ass kid. And so I go, and it's, everyone's quiet, listening to him. And I go, hey, George, and I shit you not, he like stops, looks over at me and I took a picture of him. And my dad's freaking yanking me down. You freaking disrespectful little idiot. What the hell's wrong with you? So yeah, there you go. That's my, uh, that's my George Bush.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Break the silence.

• 58:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. I, I'm surprised the secret service didn't freaking smoke me.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. You probably had a red dot on your chest and didn't know it.

• 58:15Jocko Willink?

  And, and so you, you spend these years, it's like, um, where, so where are you when, when September 11th happens?

• 58:21Speaker 01

  September 11th, we were at the command and we're in a classroom. I can remember it like it's yesterday, right? Like the space shuttle, uh, blowing up. Uh, you know exactly where you were at and what you were doing when that tragic hit. But when nine 11 hit, I was in a classroom, we were doing public speaking with a outside contractor. And the guys flew into the room and said, hey, you guys have got to watch the TV. So we went into the operational side where they had the big screens up and we could actually see the airplanes flying into the second tower, I believe, at that point. And it was like looking at something like, what, what is this? Is this a movie? I mean, what, you know, doctored movie? What, what's going on? And then we, you know, sadly come to the realization that it was real and that both

• 59:05Speaker 01

  of those buildings were struck by airplanes. And then the other one that went after the Pentagon, I think, hit the Pentagon. And then they say the one that went down in the field in PA was targeted for the White House, right? It was going to hit. I mean, that, it, it, it was just really bad. And of course, we went straight through the ceiling as far as spin up goes. And we kicked, all the contractors had to leave and all of that. And we got, went on lockdown and then we started getting briefed right away. And I think we had boots on the ground within probably two weeks, you know, in Afghanistan when that went down. And where were you in the hall? Well, I was still gold, right? I was gold team. So we were second, we were standby, right?

• 59:48Speaker 01

  So they sent, I think it was blue team initially went out the door for that mission to, to hunt these guys down. And we were just on standby to standby, right? We already had everything back off our bag for pack. We're the flyaway package, right? So we, we could go anywhere at any time. But yeah, I'm at, that's, that's where, that's where it was at. And yeah. And then how long until you rolled out? After, after blue came back, then they sent red. And then of course, I, you know, I was gold. But the feather that I had in my hat was I was a corpsman, right? I was a medic. And at the time, you know, because I went through independent duty corpsman school, which is a year long school over in Portsmouth. The Master Chief at Danak said, hey, all of you guys, because they shut down the goat lab

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  down at Fort Bragg, they rebuilt it, so it was shut down for a year. So during that year, he looked at us and the, you guys are all going independent duty corpsman school over in Portsmouth, then you're going to thank me later. And we're like looking at him going, because you know, you have to wear uniforms every day, and we had fleet instructors and they were hammering us. So that was one year long school, right? Damn. It was, but it, but it, like the Master Chief said, I made, I made chief first time, senior chief first time, but not, not just because I was a independent duty corpsman had combat experience, it was because, because of the, the way it went was, you know, you go to promotion boards, right, and they, they rank and rack and stack your, you know, as

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  far as score, but a part of that, being promoted too, is you need to be in a position of leadership, right? You know, I was in the positions of leadership every time, so it just worked out for me to get that chief's job, and then to get the senior chief job, and then for Master Chief, that's when I went over to Training Command, you know, debt, East Coast, you know, trade at, and that's when I made, picked up Master Chief, you know, the first time, but yet as I look back at, at the career, it was because I was in those positions of leadership that, that helped me to get promoted. And also been to three promotion boards, right? As a Master Chief setting on a promotion board, you really appreciate the process

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  that we go through, reading records, I mean, we show up at 7:30 in the morning and we, we don't stop until 5:00. I mean, that's all day long looking at a computer screen, reading people's records, right? Because if I'm grading out Jocko, I'm looking five years behind you. And then it brings me all the way to the point where you're up for promotion, and we have to make the decision, and we rack and stack it, and the computer does it for us. After we grade your paper, you have five Master Chiefs and an officer on the board, and probably seven of us total. And then once we rack and stack you, the computer does the math for us, and it builds a ladder. It builds a ladder, and you get to the final part, say we got 80 Chiefs to promote. We get down to 79, 80, 81, and

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  then they start asking questions like, why didn't candidate 81 not 80? And why are you going to stop at 80 and promote 80 chiefs or promote 40 senior chiefs? Or the numbers go down, right, as you go up? And why is, you know, you're promoting 20 master chiefs? How do you do that? And then we have to stop what we're doing. After we build a ladder out, we've got our top 20. Now they start asking questions. How about number 18? Is 18 better than 20? Is 20 better? You know, so it just goes back and forth. But as we build a ladder, that ladder stands on its own, right? We've already did the work. We did the hard work of ranking them, racking and stacking them. And then it's all that. But that's just another education as you move into the leadership side of your career.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  You get opportunities to do that. And we call that doing big Navy work. Because it is, right? Because we have to go down and we get to meet a lot of good people, you know, good master chiefs and officers who has basically taken, I think it's about a two-week process, but I mean, two weeks and you're in that office every day. Just my pencils, I got number two pencils. I actually kept them as trophies. Now I've got them about two inches long with a little eraser on them. And I go, that right there, that's the pain. That's administrative pain doing that job, right? So it was quite the experience.

• 1:04:03Jocko Willink?

  So I was, you know, you were mentioning, you go on this deployment. I always tell people, like, I was in the SEAL teams for 13 years before I actually shot my weapon at the enemy. Because I came in in 1990 and wasn't until 2003. So for you, it's even longer. And you've, what was it like? Like, okay, now you're going to Afghanistan for the first time. And by the way, the other interesting thing is, and I've thought about this a lot, like no one had combat experience at this time. Like, very, very, there were some people that did some snatches in Bosnia. There's a couple of people that did some stuff in Somalia, maybe some leftover guys from either Panama or Grenada. But broadly speaking, you could be in a SEAL platoon that had no one that had ever been

• 1:04:48Jocko Willink?

  in combat before. And... It was, that's not, well, we all pray for peace, maybe, but it's not great to have a unit where people don't have combat and they're supposed to be combat warriors. So, how, what was that like for you?

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Well, um, you know, I, I did grow up, you know, at SEAL Team One, we, we didn't have anything going on as far as, um, you know, being in the arena, right? Being in a gladiator or being shot at or engaging the enemy. So when I went to Dev Group, uh, I was there for about six months and then we got spun up for Haiti. Remember the Haiti mission that went down and, um, we were gonna go down and it was gonna be heavy, right? Because they had, they had, uh, they had us onboard the USS America aircraft carrier at the time. And that was the first time ever in Navy history that they had an aircraft carrier solely dedicated for special ops. They had, they had, uh, gold team was on there. We had

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  red team and blue team. I mean, this thing was loaded down with tier one operators. We had our Humvee, our mobility package on there. We had the boats on there. We had TF-160 aircrafts on there. We had Army Ranger Battalion on there. I mean, this whole thing, but you couldn't look anywhere.

• 1:06:06Jocko Willink?

  That's what happens when you don't have war for freaking 20 years.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Everybody had paint on, right? And we moved all the way to the part where we were test firing our weapons on the elevator of this aircraft carrier. We had the Humvees, we're gonna sling them with 47s side by side. I remember we had boat, we had boat fenders in between the vehicles and they were gonna hoist them up with these Kevlar straps and drop us off. And the mission was fairly clear, right? Hit the deck, assimilate ourselves, little birds come over. We had a, a gunship up and, and then we had the Black Hawks coming in with guns, right? Guns on. And we were gonna roll straight from the pad that we're gonna be dropped off on, straight to the, the president's palace. And we're gonna kill anybody that give us any resistance. They had a weapon, basically drop them, right?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  So, we were gonna do that, but right at the last minute, after we'd already test fired and everybody looked at each other and went, we're ready. And we're going up the elevator, actually, to come up and link up with the helicopter chalk. And, uh, all of a sudden, we got the call to stand down. And we're all looking at each other like, what, what's going on? And come find out it was President Carter and Colin Powell, who called the Haitian government at the time and says, I want you to look outside your window. You see that aircraft carrier sitting out there. And they went, yes, sir. Well, and he says, there's 13 or 16 aircraft C-130s just left Fort Bragg with 82nd Airborne. And he said, in about two hours time, you're

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  gonna have 82nd Airborne dropping in, and then you're gonna have Tier One forces on your back door. And we're not coming down there to eat MREs, right? So that was the deal, but they shut it. They shut it down. We immediately reconsolidated. We held out there for about a week, I believe. They sent us back to the beach to stand up the package, right? Our blowout package. But the rest of it, one of the teams stayed on that carrier and they rode the carrier home because it still could have went sideways, right? And we'd had to go back in anyway. But it didn't. The government kept it a word. But, you know, Haiti's just a, it's a, it's a bad place.

• 1:08:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then, but, so that's really the closest you got prior to 9/11?

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Yep. Other than test firing our weapons, we didn't see anything with that. And then when 9/11 hit, that's when we rolled over and took Blue Team's spot. And it was, it was 100 days. I think we did 100 days in the theater, but it was busy. So, you know, I got on, I remember sending back a high side email to my buddies back at the Gold Team. And I said, hey, life is good on two-way rifle range. Because it was really, that was the first time I'd been shot at, you know, doing these missions, you know, because they would, they would hear the helicopters coming in and they would run. So we would have to chase the squirters. And we were on the outside, you know, great team. They

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  used us for outside security. Assault force would blow the walls, the adobe walls, and then they would go inside and looking for this deck of cards of people we were looking for, the bomb makers and the bad guys. So the outside, we got busy outside, right? We had some, we had some squirters running around contact, trying to contact us. So we would, we'd light them up. Then we had a gunship above us with a predator. I mean, the sky was stacked up, right? Fast movers up top. But, but that kind of opens your eyes to all of the training that we do in a SEAL team. It's really amazing because we, when I hit the ground, when I rolled out of the back of the helicopter, I picked up a position on my knee and there was two guys, I mean, fairly close, right?

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Running away from me. And I could tell one of them had a weapon, but I had an opportunity there to shoot somebody. But I'm like, I'm not going to shoot a man in the back, right? He could be a farmer, he could be a doctor, who knows, right? Who he is. It ended up being two bad guys because as we pulled back the security and perimeter around the, around the house that was the target, these two knuckleheads that I think I saw running away from us, we had, we had nods. And I'm looking at them and they're, all of a sudden I hear this snapping sound and I look up at one of my guys who were standing up and I went, hey, uh, hey, you may, you may want to take a knee or take, you know, get some dirt on your chest because we've got, we've got incoming. And he looked over at me, we're wearing Peltor

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  right, headsets, but I could hear it clear as day. And I go, hit, hit the deck, knucklehead. So he gets down and we back in, I get into a ravine and I start engaging the target that was, you know, because I knew exactly where they went to. So I start lighting them up and then I call Cass, I call our CCT guy and he goes, he goes, what you got, dog? And I went, hey, we got, we got incoming over here. These guys were in a ravine. They must've went through the cache and they're shooting back on, on the target. And he goes, stand by. And he had hammer, you know, the gunship upstairs. And all of a sudden you saw this, all this heavy, I think they were 105 rounds coming down.

• 1:11:00Jocko Willink?

  105s.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  They're coming down in that ravine.

• 1:11:02Jocko Willink?

  Early in the war, bro. We get that chance to clear hot those 105s. It's coming in hot, boy.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  105s and 40 mic mic.

• 1:11:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  They were doing, then you could hear the minigun too. It would wind up, but that, that we never had anymore. Those, those gentlemen were out of business. They closed, they closed their gun shop up. But it but what I think the point was I was trying to make is is all the training that we do through our careers, you know, you don't want to ever, you know, pray for war or run to war because when you get there, you know, you you have the training to be as calm and I mean, I felt I felt totally calm. Our technology with our weapon systems, our lasers, our nods, and the way we communicate with each other, it's it's just unbelievable. The the type of lethality that we bring to the battlefield when we're fighting these

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  guys who may be farmers, they don't know how to shoot that well. And and it's just a it's a smoke show for us, right? Because we're we don't miss much, you know, we if we do miss, we miss small. But but it's just, it's just good to feel, though, right? All the training that you've done, it's like these football players that train and train and train and never get to the Super Bowl. But when they step on that Super Bowl field, you don't want them to totally clam up on you, right? You want them to be able to do their job. And and we we did our job, right? And and every mission was different, and I know you know this, but you just have confidence in yourself. And, you know, they say the professionals or, you know, the tier one guys or, you know, where you were at in your

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  career, we we see things slow, it slows down for us. Even though it may be chaotic as shit, people shooting RPGs and shit blowing up all over the place, it just seems like you can just, you know, we can.

• 1:12:47Jocko Willink?

  Take a wrap off, take a step back, look at what's going on, make a call. Yeah.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:12:53Jocko Willink?

  And it is because, I mean, even something going all the way back to like Hell Week, there's freaking total chaos going on. And like, you have to learn to process what's going on and what to block out and get that little portion of the job that you got to do, which is, you know, moving cam lights or, you know, moving the boat over here, you got to learn how to focus and get that thing done. And then you just get fast forwarded, that gets expanded on as you go through training, you go through workup, you know, it's the same thing that's going on in workup, you know, you got freaking explosions, the trade act guys are putting gas bombs all over the place, there's artillery sims going off, and they're down men. It's it's total chaos and you learn to, okay, cool. What I gotta do now?

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Well, well, you know, getting back and I want to say this real quick before we get going and and you know, we mentioned our our wives. I just want to put a a thank you out to my wife, Lisa, who stuck by my side during all these deployments, you know, and and I remember like it was yesterday when I when I got the the call that I was gonna go with red team, right? You know, when the master chief said, hey, you know, dog, go, go, I want you to be an E5. And I'm like, hey, that's a good, that's good. I like that. I like being a good E5 because that means the leadership is taken away from you. I just need to be a sixty gunner or a sniper or a medic, medic all the time, of course, but I'm gonna go do that and I'm gonna do it well. But but my wife took me to the gates at the command before we were

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  flying over to Afghanistan. And she she just kind of looked up at me. She goes, I'm I'm proud of you. And and I kind of looked at her and I'm like, proud of me for and she said, no, I'm I'm proud because you're volunteering, you're volunteering to go do this because you think you need to go validate yourselves or whatever. But she says, I'm very proud of you. She says, don't worry about anything back here. I've got this, right? She's got the compound, right? The home. And I call her, she's in my phone, Homeland Admiral. So when I call my wife, that's her, her basically in in my in my, you know, my phone, she's a Homeland Admiral.

• 1:14:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  And she's really been a good one, you know, for that. But

• 1:14:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's that's definitely, you know, when when I would be on deployment, you know, whatever was happening at home, broken water heaters, flat tires, kids getting in trouble, kids sick, what you just, you know, any problem that was going on, my wife never told me about it. Like, it was just, how's everything? She, you know, I'd ask her everything. She was, everything's great, you know? There ain't no way you got three freaking toddlers in a house, in a nine hundred square foot house.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  Whatever.

• 1:15:26Jocko Willink?

  That was built in nineteen forty and everything's great. Like, that ain't happening. Like, it's just zero chance.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  But it's, but you know, Bravo Zulu, good job for them to be able to allow us to step away and not have to worry, because you don't need to worry about that stuff, right?

• 1:15:42Jocko Willink?

  No, we got enough on it.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  I mean, I've had that, I've had that situation happen. I was over in the Philippines on a deployment and I was walking home from being outside the gate and I came up the backside stairwell and I walk up and I hear somebody chattering. And this is like two in the morning, right? And I hear somebody chattering, so I walk into the laundry room that we had there at the barracks and here was one of our sailors, SEAL Team One sailor, underneath a blanket, talking on a phone and he was crying, "Oh, I won't do that again, I just want to be with you, blah, blah." And he was going on and on and on and I'm like, "Dude, you can't, you can't do this. You can't do this." And he, he ran up like a $4,000 phone bill.

• 1:16:18Jocko Willink?

  That was back in the day.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  That our command had to engage.

• 1:16:21Jocko Willink?

  Ooh.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  We had to engage in that and pay that. Of course, he ended up having to pay, right? He paid, he paid his piece. $4,000 phone bill from talking from Philippines back to San Diego to his girlfriend or his wife. And I'm like, "Dude, you can't do that. You need to be locked in of what we're doing over here. You can't, just tell her you love her, we'll be home in five months," or whatever it was. You can't, you can't get rolled into that.

• 1:16:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  And I think he learned a lesson with that, but...

• 1:16:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think it's real important that like your, you know, your wife doesn't get jealous of the team, of the platoon, because you know, it, it's hard, you know, like here you are, you marry a girl and then you go, "Yeah, by the way, I'm married to you, but I'm going to spend all my time with these dudes over here."

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:17:05Jocko Willink?

  And when you call, I might answer. When they call, I will answer. Like when your work calls, you're, you answer the phone. If your wife, if you're at work and your wife calls, you may not be able to answer it. So they're, they gotta have a, a certain level of emotional independence and also just like being a, a, a stable person, confident person that knows, "Okay, well, you know, you do what you gotta do and I'll be over here doing, I got, I got the home front on lockdown."

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that just gives us the ability to just totally focus on what our mission is because, you know, any given night, right, we step out the door, we don't know if we're, but you know, that never cross, I wouldn't let that doubt in my mind at all. I'd just like, "Hey, let's go kick ass on target and let's come home and repeat, right? Get the intel, go back out, find it, fix it, finish, right? And we're the finishers, so we, we gotta get back out there, so."

• 1:17:57Jocko Willink?

  And then what'd you do after, after you got back from that deployment?

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  I got back after that deployment, basically I already strapped in with orders, right? So I, I ended up having to execute those orders to trade at.

• 1:18:08Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you went to trade.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Because back then it was like, look, we've got to get these tier one guys to come out of the tier one, because I was already there for eight years. So it's time to start rolling some of this subject matter expertise that we have. And fortunately for me, I got that a hundred days on the ground running operations and combat experience to go now teach the young SEALs. And I was the senior chief in charge of SOCS.

• 1:18:33Jocko Willink?

  Perfect.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  So SOCS was CQC and Military Operations Urban Terrain. We did a little VBSS, but that wasn't, VBSS wasn't my deal.

• 1:18:42Jocko Willink?

  And we weren't focused on it too much at the time.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:18:45Jocko Willink?

  Because then once that, once that kicked off, it was like it was.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Boots on the ground.

• 1:18:49Jocko Willink?

  And what, you know, I always found, I was real lucky because I was at Team One. I got to work in training cell. So, and I found that I learned so much when I was in training cell. Number one, because you're teaching it. And number two, because you're watching it and you're getting to see like what a bad leader does, what a good leader does, what a bad chief does, what a good chief does. And you start going, okay, I don't want to do what that guy just did because that didn't work out too well. But I see that this guy over here is doing it well. Did you find that like being in that instructor mode, running those trips, you just get better and better?

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  You do. I mean, I think you just kind of hit the nail on the head. You know, when you're an instructor, you're teaching, right? And they send us through, I went through Navy Instructor School, right? And then I was a master, master trainer.

• 1:19:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Training, yeah, MTS.

• 1:19:34Jocko Willink?

  Specialist?

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Yep, MTS, right? So I got that, but, but you're right. When you're teaching something, I was, I was, you know, I went through sniper school. Then I went through, I was a sniper instructor. But when you're a sniper instructor, you really get to take, because you, you know what the, the stresses are. The stresses with the crawls, you have to do the stalking, the shooting aspect of it. And you're there to help people, right? You're, you know, watching people and, you know, lots of times we have these civilian shooters come in and teach us. And, but we're just passing that information on, right? But, you know, from, from our standpoint, we're just trying to make sure, looking into a person go, hey, does he have the field crafts? This, this, now he's a good shooter, but now can he take that, being a good shooter?

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  And move into the stalking side of the house, which means you gotta learn how you can basically crawl to a target within 300, you know, yards or meters and then be able to make the shot, right? Without getting caught. And we're, we're looking at you through a spotting scope. So even with the ghillie suits on and stuff, you get rolled out on a pool table, we used to call it pool table, because you'd get out on a piece of ground that was, you didn't have any vegetation. So you're, you look like a polar bear, basically climbing across a, a, a flat deck with, with a ghillie suit on, right? We're gonna catch you, right? We see you. So we get the walkers over there, pat you on the head and go, hey, you, you gotta do better than that. So we'd send them back to restart. But it's all timed too, right? You only have like three hours to make the shot. So.

• 1:21:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that SEAL sniper school is no joke. That's, that's a freaking great school.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and then as you're running, as you're running trade at, what's going on with your career? Did you make Master Chief when you got there, you said?

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  I did. I made, uh, once I checked in at, uh, trade at, I was a senior chief in charge of, um, assault cells. So I had, uh, a warrant officer that was working with me and we got another chief from, uh, damn night to come over and help. But yeah, that, but, but you know, checking that block, being that senior chief for that training command, you know, being a trainer is another, you know, avenue that you need to really come off the SEAL team, right? Quit being an E5 shooter and go do some of these, these jobs that we need you to go do, right? And then when you do those jobs though, you get rewarded for it. And that's when, you know, I made Master Chief. Um, then, then, you know, then I got, uh, selected to go to the, um, uh, Command Master Chief Cobb Training Course up in Rhode Island.

• 1:21:55Jocko Willink?

  How long is that?

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  That's about, I don't know whether it's two to six weeks, but it's, uh, that's where you learn all the resources that the big Navy has for you to be a Command Master Chief. You know, you have to be able to deal with, uh, these young sailors and their families. You gotta get them, uh, resources like through the Navy College, um,

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  They got all these grants out there that you can help people with. All the plethora of reasons why a sailor would come offline. You know, whether it's self-generated or what. They give us the resources to help with that. You know, and then of course, for us, we're very fortunate because we got the Navy SEAL Foundation, who also has a whole lot of resources that they can throw at problems.

• 1:22:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt. And so you go to that school and then you go to SEAL Team Four and now you're the Command Master Chief, which for anybody that doesn't know what that is at a SEAL Team, that's basically the freak, that's basically God. Like when you're a young SEAL and that Command Master Chief, that's the senior enlisted guy. He's the guy that has all the clout, has all the experience and he's the, he's the senior advisor to the commanding officer and he's, and he's really driving the enlisted troops. He's making sure that the right enlisted guys are platoon chiefs. He's making sure the right enlisted guys are leading petty officers. When there's problems, he's the guy that sorts the freaking problems out. He's the guy that's getting the phone call from the police.

• 1:23:22Jocko Willink?

  He's the guy that's getting the phone call from the girlfriends, from the wives. Just he's the guy that's making things happen. And you had to, that's gotta be pretty a heavy weight when you're rolling into that position.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  It is, you know, because you're selected by the other Master Chiefs that, you know, like the group level and War Comm, of course, you know, our top, our force Master Chief. So they take that very seriously when they assign a Master Chief to be a Command Master Chief. That means you have to go to the, the Command Master Chief Cobb. Cobb is, stands for Chief of the Boat. So that's the Cobb. Those guys go to be Cobbs of submarines, right? So that's, that's where you get to CMC Cobb. But it's a great force.

• 1:24:02Jocko Willink?

  On a submarine, same thing. Like that dude's a god when you go on a freaking sub.

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  He's got a lot of experience. And, but, but yeah, as you, as you step into that position, and I stepped into it a little bit early because I actually went down range with SEAL Team Four when they were in Iraq and we were doing that PSD.

• 1:24:20Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Mission, right? So I was kind of a backup. I was incoming. I was the incoming CMC and they already had a CMC at four, of course. And then all I did on that deployment was I had another Master Chief with me and an officer who was a force protection officer. We were going around all of these ministers' houses where they put their heads down. But we had protection on them 24/7.

• 1:24:44Jocko Willink?

  And by ministers, you mean, you mean the, so this is the time where the SEALs were in charge of protecting the senior political class, the senior political appointees and officials of Iraq at the time, I think we had eight of them.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25:00Jocko Willink?

  And these guys had to go to bed at night. And so you were, at that point, when you went over there, you were, you were checking out where they were living and sleeping and getting their area secured.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  You know, back in, back earlier on, they, they, they tasked that with the State Department. The State Department did a quick assessment and turned around and kicked it back to the DOD and said, hey, we can't do this mission. We don't have the skill sets. We have armored cars. We got a lot of resources, but we don't have the, the people that can do this mission.

• 1:25:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I heard that. I don't know if this is true enough, but I also heard they like, put it out for contract and Blackwater came back and said like, oh, it's going to be 12 billion dollars or something like that.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:36Jocko Willink?

  And the, the State Department said, we got a cheaper solution? And someone said, how about the freaking SEAL teams? You know, they've been doing so, so much with so little for so long, they can probably figure this shit out. And that's what we did.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  We fit right in. And I remember the day that, that I went back over, as far as being the Master Chief of SEAL Team Four, we still had that mission. And we got a Blackhawk inbound and it was McChrystal, you know, the general with his Sergeant Major, Jody. So he walks up to him and he goes, he goes, hey, dog, how you doing? And I go, good, good Sergeant Major. And he goes, tell you guys to lose the sunglasses. And I turn around, look behind me, you know, and here's all the SEAL platoon standing out there and they all wearing Oakley sunglasses. So I walk over to them first thing, say, all right, guys, lose the glasses. And I had one guy go, why? And I go, this is not a good time to ask me why? I said, this shit can of glasses right now. So that's when McChrystal came into our

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  little talk area there and briefed us on this. And he said, basically, this is, we can't afford to have the one, one scratch on any of these eight individuals who have been selected as the cabinet of this new Iraqi government. He says, you guys have the toughest mission in the country. Just do it. He said, the only, he says, you got it for a reason. He says, take care of these people. I'm going to give you the resources to make it happen. So we had a full platoon of MPs, military police with up armored Humvees. We had, you know, they had all the weapons on the top, the turrets. We also had two of the helicopters were flying Cobras and Apaches.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  So the Army and the Marine Corps would rotate week to week on, on who was covering us when we moved. Especially with the president because the president at the point at the time, he lived outside of the green zone down by the Tigris River. So we'd have to take him through a gauntlet. We ended up cutting trees down, down that, that lane. They, we, we got a lot of pushback on that, of course, environmentally speaking, right? Cause you don't, but the trees were bad, right? For us, I mean, we had to drive too close to them. They're in, in the middle of the median. So we took those things down. So we didn't have, you know, a, a person with, up in a tree with an RPG or whatever he wants to take up with him. Uh, so that mission was so, so stressful because every three days I would go into the platoons and say, hey, I want three of your guys to come out.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  So I'd bring three of them out and I'd rotate it, right? Every, every three or four days I'd pull three out, bring them back to.

• 1:28:05Jocko Willink?

  Just to like let them breathe?

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Let them have a beer and get some sleep and get out of kit, right? Cause they're wearing a kit every day, you know? So get out of your kit, get in PT gear, have a beer, relax. And then they'd, they'd relax for about 48 hours. Then I'd bring them back in and bring them back out. So I was mainly just dealing with that, right? Just trying to keep the morale up because it was such a taxing. You know, you think about it, you know, you, you, you gotta wake these guys up and you gotta put them to bed.

• 1:28:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And plus you're on defense, which being on defense sucks, you know?

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does.

• 1:28:36Jocko Willink?

  A frog man wants to be on offense, wants to go out and do the killing, not the waiting to get killed, which is what that job was.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  That's right. And you know, for them, they, they gotta be right once, right?

• 1:28:47Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  We have to be right a hundred percent of the time, which is stressful, right? I mean, it wears you out.

• 1:28:52Jocko Willink?

  And it was amazing, looking back that no, none of those Iraqi officials got killed. And, cause they got killed before we took over some, several of them were killed. Everybody wanted to kill them. The Sunnis wanted to kill them. The Shia wanted to kill them. Like there was, they, they were just like, it was a, it was a disaster waiting to happen and it never happened.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. They had a target on their backs for sure. And, uh.

• 1:29:14Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys take over for team one? Is that who you guys took over?

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Uh, it may have been three.

• 1:29:20Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  It could have been team three in there, but, but yeah, but the second time I went back for the Master Chief job, we're, we're at Biop, right? So we're at Baghdad International Airport and we were doing a lot of anti, uh, because, uh, the skipper, my skipper had a lot of connections and the, um, the outside organizations who were tracking the influence from Iran and Iraq, right? They would come in with their proxies and

• 1:29:43Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  create havoc and then jump back across. So we were trying to mitigate that. Uh, and that was kind of a, it, it was a crazy thing that we were doing, but lots of intel driven heavy. Uh, so I would stay down at, at the camp at, you know, Baghdad where the SEAL team was, was, was at. And then the, the skipper had to go up to, uh, up north and run that Iranian influence thing.

• 1:30:08Jocko Willink?

  What year was that?

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Uh, that was probably, uh, 2005, 2006.

• 1:30:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  That was my tour for, from being a command master chief. I was there from oh five to oh seven.

• 1:30:20Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  So that was right in that window.

• 1:30:24Jocko Willink?

  You guys, I'm trying to think of, cause I was, I was in, in oh three and oh four, I was in Baghdad. And then in oh six, I was in Ramadi and I'm just trying to think of when you guys rotated through. Cause we were there with 10, when we were, when we were in Ramadi, we were 10, when we were at, when I was at team seven, there was no one else there.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:42Jocko Willink?

  And eventually the east coast guys started rolling in. But, uh, what was, when you're the master chief, any, uh, you know, you got, you got, you know, you're handling the operational side. What about just when guys do dumb shit? What's that look like?

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  Well, I got a good dumb shit story. Um, when I was, before I, I was actually in the command master chief job at SEAL Team Four, I was over, like I was saying, I was over early, right? I was doing half of the deployment and then I would come back and take SEAL Team Four and I'd have to rebuild the manning of the platoons. But as I was at Baghdad, you know, over in Iraq, we had some, uh, young SEALs, uh, that were living in a house that was outside the green zone, which means, you know, it's not really all that protected, right? Um, they had some issues where they took a suburban, a white suburban out for a joyride and they blew through a army checkpoint and they got lit up.

• 1:31:38Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  So that's not good, right? That's blue on blue, basically. But the question was, why was one of our vehicles? Being driven outside of the green zone and was contacted. It doesn't make any sense, right? So I got assigned to be the investigator along, had an officer with me. And I believe, uh, we had that force protection officer that was with us too, so there's three of us. Uh, we drove out to the, to the house. And before we, we got to the house, we stopped at the gate where we had Tennessee National Guard guys protecting that green zone gate. That was a in and out for that one cabinet member's house. Uh, and I stopped and I got out of the vehicle and I looked at these, uh, Tennessee National Guards. I go, hey, guys, did anything weird happen last night between 12 and 3 o'clock in the morning?

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  And they went, yes, Master Chief, uh, we had a, a white suburban come through here last night, but it was, looked like it'd been contacted. It was shot, had some bullet holes in the back of the vehicle. And this was an armored, you know, suburban. So we drive through the gate, we go down to the house and I get all three of these young SEALs. There was, I think there was two from, um, SEAL Teams, uh, West Coast and then one of our guys, SEAL Team four guy was there. And I noticed, uh, we were walking around in the house just kind of observing, right? And see what kind of lifestyle they're, they're living. And went over to the trash can and looked down and we had Red Bull cans all over the place and vodka bottles. So I'm thinking, I guess this new generation likes to drink, uh, Red Bull with vodka.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  So that looked like what, what was going on. And, uh, when I set them down, I said, okay, guys, this is your, your one chance to tell the truth. I want to know, was this vehicle that's sitting outside right now with bullet holes in it, was you guys driving outside the green zone last night? And was contacted by anybody? So what happened? And they're, they're like, well, I would think we heard some shots last night. Maybe somebody shot our vehicle. I go, so somebody shot your vehicle as it parked outside? So that's what I'm hearing. So they stuck with their guns, they stuck with their story. And I went, okay, guys, I'm, I'm getting ready to leave and I want you to make sure that you understand this is your one chance to tell the truth. And they all kind of shook their, yup, yes, yes, Master Chief, yes, Master Chief. And I said, okay, have a good day.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  So I was already building a story, right? And it didn't look like it was lit up by a local, somebody out there shooting, you know, celebrating a wedding. So I go back, I'm driving back through the gate. And I get a phone call. Hey, Master Chief, we want, you need to come back. We want to tell you something. We want a second chance. We want a, we want a second chance. You remember to give us one chance. Can we get, can we get one more? Can we do a rerun? So I go back to the house and I walk in and we, we, we sat there with them and I go, okay, so what's the story? And they go, we were, we were driving last night. We were a little antsy. We were getting bored. And I'm like, no, this is not sounding good. And we went out and drove. We went down this one road called Michigan Road and we turned left and we went back through a gate and we didn't know it was a gate. We

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  had some Army guys jump up and they shot, they shot at the vehicle. And we kept going. So I said, you didn't try to de-conflict as you pulled up on these people that were basically guarding the gate. No, no, no, Master Chief, we didn't, we didn't do that. So of course we wrap up the investigation and sure enough, they did that. And we're thinking, man, that was stupid. So we ended up doing a DRB in Iraq, right? So DRB is a disciplinary review board, right? So I was in charge of the board. We had a guy, SEAL Team Five, CMC was on the phone with me. And we basically said, you guys are done, right? We're, you can't operate like this. This is, this is, you're, you're, you're lucky to be alive or, you

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  know, this is blue on blue, right? This is unsat. So we process our SEAL Team Four guy, we process him out, get him out of country as soon as we can, within the next 24 hours. He goes back to Virginia Beach. He had temporary orders over to a ship that was sitting in Norfolk. It was a LPD. Out. Ship, right? And I don't like doing that. Yeah, but no, but I mean, dude, you can't look. Yeah. So we, we pushed him over to this ship and, and I, and I don't, you know, me and you talked about earlier, Jocko, I don't like passing trash. Usually if somebody messes up and if, and if I have to get medieval with them and pull their trident off their chest, I'm ad supping them, right? I'm administratively separating you from the Navy. We can do that very quickly. What, what happens? I'll pull your trident off. The admin shop basically

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  does the paperwork to shut down all your special pays. So basically you're, that's a, that's a shot to the heart, right? Career ender and you're out of the community, right? You're out of the Navy SEALs. So this guy went over to the ship. I finished out my three or four months with the SEAL Team Four that was downrange. I come back to take my duties as a command master chief. And I'm sitting at my desk, I think it was a Friday, I get a phone call and it's the Master Chief on the ship. And he called me and he says, "Master Chief, he said, "I've got one of your, your boys over here. He's done great things for me." He, he went on for about two minutes telling me how good this person was doing and how squared away he was. He was teaching force protection on the ship, teaching them small arms, shotguns, all of

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  this stuff. And I go, "Well, that's good to hear." You know, I said, "Let me come over and have a cup of coffee with you and we can talk through this." So I get over there to the ship and I'm sitting down and at the mess deck, we go in the chief's mess and we were having a, having lunch. And right as we were finishing up with lunch, he says, "I'm, I'm bringing Jared down." And I go, "Yeah, please do. I'd like to, like to see him." So Jared comes down, you know, and he's got his dungarees on. And you know how, you know, you know how that, how bad that is. Did he have his trident or no? Did you pull his trident? No, you know what? He didn't have his trident on. So he, he stood there and he, he said, "Hey, you know, Master Chief, it's good to see you. I'm very sorry, you know, for what happened.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  I, I just wish I could redo it and blah, blah, blah." So I, I just kind of thought, I looked, I was looking at him up and down, right? He had nice, nicely looking, clean pressed uniform on, conducted himself really well, spoke really well of what he's done to help the ship, you know, the sailors on the ship, you know, with their training and stuff for force protection. And I go, "Okay." I looked at the Master Chief and I go, "I really appreciate you giving me a phone call." And that's part of being a Master Chief, right? We have to make decisions. Sometimes they're, they're, they're not good outcomes, but sometimes you gotta see somebody and look them in the eyes and understand where they're at in their life.

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  So I decided, when I got back, I told Jared, I go, "Stand by." And the reason I told him to stand by was because the Master Chief had shared with me that he was getting ready to detail the boat. So when he says detail the boat, that means everybody on that vessel was going bye-bye. And when they do that, that, that they getting, they're getting detailed to the na, the knees of the Navy. So. The big Navy don't care about young stuff. They don't, they ain't got nothing for you. They gonna send you to where, whatever billet they need you to fill. It doesn't matter whether it's in Japan or Italy, it doesn't matter, right? So. So I understood the gravity of that. So I went back to SEAL Team Four. I got on the phone with their detailer. I go, "Look, I need this individual detailed back to four ASAP."

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  So when you say ASAP, and I'm talking to the guy that's got his fingers on a computer, they make it happen, right? So I said, "He belongs to me now, so bring him to SEAL Team Four as soon as you can." So Detailer did their jobs. I had him back the next week. I had him in my office. I said, "Hey, this is the reason I made this decision." I said, "Now, I really feel that you've learned your lesson, so go be a good SEAL." And I said, "My door's always open to you," right?

• 1:39:30Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  "Go be a good SEAL."

• 1:39:32Jocko Willink?

  What would you pull a guy's bird for?

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  Uh, when we pull a bird, the guy was either mixing it up with law, you know, police officers, or had a domestic dispute where he punched his wife and actually shot himself in the hand with his pistol. Said he was having a dream. He was back in Vietnam. And I'm like, "Well, you're not old enough to be back in Vietnam." But I can tell you one thing, you're stupid. You're dumb, right? So what I'm gonna do for you is, we don't need you.

• 1:40:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  This is a $1.5 million asset that I'm getting ready to pull his bird, right? Because when you pull a bird, you're done, right?

• 1:40:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  Administratively, we take it, you're done. I'm sorry. It hurts, you know, it hurts, but guess what? You did it. Sometimes I give them three chances.

• 1:40:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but once you punch your wife and shoot yourself in the hand and talk about Nam when you're 24 years old?

• 1:40:25Speaker 01

  You got some issues. Well, and you know, you feel for them too, right? Because you don't wanna totally derail this person, right? Because, you know, it's bad. I always have the analogy when you have to clean somebody up, right? Like if they've had something bad in their... Their, their lives, their, their relationships with their, you know, being married goes, go sideways. It's hard work, right? Cause you're dealing with people and you're dealing with, with things that you don't really see. Right? You don't know what's going on behind the curtain. It's like a train, when a train runs off the railroad tracks, it takes a lot of work to get those trains back on that railroad track.

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  Right? Same when people do, when people run through the rare patches, that's why I refer to when people have squirrels in their sea bags. Right? You're supposed to be squared away, right? We're taught in boot camp how to fold our underwear or skivvies in your T-shirts. But sometimes I open up a sea bag and I got a damn squirrel in there, right? You got a squirrel in a sea bag. Cause this guy's such a shit show.

• 1:41:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  So. And that happens in the military and it happens in civilian life as well.

• 1:41:30Jocko Willink?

  And it's weird too, because you know, people, people think about SEALs and they think, oh, they've gone through all this training and they've been weeded out. And you know, this person, they got it, you know, they've been academically tested and physically tested and they've been through some kind of psyche eval. And they think that that's because a guy's a SEAL, like he's good to go.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:41:50Jocko Willink?

  No, they, nevermind squirrels, they might have raccoons and freaking bobcats in that sea bag sometimes. This is freaking disaster.com.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  Oh, it is, it is. And you just have to clean it up, right? You gotta clean it up because we're all responsible. And I remember when I took that job at SEAL Team Four, I had them all in a classroom. All, we had all of our new guys in from BUDs, we had everybody in a classroom. I told them, I go, look, I said, I want you to look yourself in the mirror. Because be accountable for your individual actions. Because if you're not, that's when I get involved, right? So be responsible for your individual actions when you make decisions. And I go, when I say this, I'm looking at you and I'm looking in the mirror to myself. I said, I can go out and get a DUI with the best of them, but I'm choosing not to do that. Because as soon as I do that, my command master chief job is gone, right? You're done, right?

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  So there's decisions that you can, you can skirt around and be okay, but there's some decisions that when you, when you make those bad decisions. Your, your career is, is stopped.

• 1:42:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know when I was in leadership positions, you know, sometimes I'd say, hey, listen, you, you guys know, like, I'll take care of you guys. If, if, in these events over here, you give me some something, I don't mind being the senior guy with a secret. I don't mean saying, yup, yup, you did that was stupid. You, you know, here's, here's, here's your little punishment I'm going to give you. You're going to stand extra watch out at Nyland or you're going to, I got, I got that. I go, you do some of these things over here? You're, there's nothing I can do for you. Doesn't matter whether I like you or not. Doesn't matter whether you're my, my number one guy. If you do some of these things over here, there's nothing I can do for you and I'm not going to do anything for you. And I think it was very important that people understood what, hey, I got your back.

• 1:43:36Jocko Willink?

  Doggy, I got your back. You work for me. If I'm the, if I'm the skipper and you work for me, I got your back. If you make a mistake, I got your back. You do something, you, you know, okay, that wasn't the best move. I got your back. Now, if you do something that is like illegal or immoral or unethical, there's nothing I could, Doggy ain't got nothing for you.

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:43:53Jocko Willink?

  There's nothing I can do for you. And, and I remember I had a guy who, I'll, I'll abbreviate the story, but he got into a fight and left his wallet at the scene and came to me, you know, with his chief and said, hey, boss, here's what's going on. Guy got in a fight, you know, in a public place and left his wallet at the scene. And I said, all right, well, here's what we're going to do. And I had my master chief in the room with me. I said, here's what we're going to do. I said, if you're lucky and no one pulls up this wallet, no one pulls up security cam and comes back and says, you know, oh, we have this guy. Here's who did it. If we don't hear about this again, nope, no factor. I said, if the police are knocking on my door, coming looking for you, we never had this conversation.

• 1:44:35Jocko Willink?

  Isn't that right, Master Chief? And my Master Chief said, Roger that, sir. And so I didn't mind saying, hey, look, I, you, you made a mistake, but you know, and it wasn't like some grievous thing, got into a little scrap outside of whatever bar, you know, like, okay. But he knew, and also him and his chief knew, oh, this could come back because idiot dropped his wallet. So they gave me the heads up of saying, hey, look, boss, this may come at you. Now, if it had been something like, oh, you got arrested? Cool. That, I already know what's going to happen. I'm calling the Commodore. Hey, there's not, that's coming back a hundred percent and I'm not going to let my boss get blindsided by this crap. So you gotta make sure, and I think that's another important thing. When I talk to the younger guys today.

• 1:45:17Jocko Willink?

  You gotta have the the damn courage. If people are doing dumb shit to say, uh, we shouldn't be doing this dumb shit. Stop what you're doing. Well, I'm not gonna do that. You shouldn't do it. We shouldn't be doing this. You have to have that kind of courage to do that because otherwise what you get is you get a little mob mentality, right? Like, oh, we're doing some dumb shit like, okay, hey, my, you know, I'm a new guy. My LPO is doing something that's I know is stupid, but I'm not gonna say anything because I'm just, you know, I lack the courage. And I look back at my own career where I had that happen to me, you know? I was telling you earlier, uh, I was in a situation. I was a new guy when in our platoon. And one of the guys was gonna drink, was gonna drive drunk.

• 1:45:59Jocko Willink?

  And I hadn't drank at all. And I said, hey, you know, boss, like, it wasn't my, it wasn't the officer, but it was like a senior guy. I said, hey, dude, I can drive, you know, I haven't been drinking at all. He's like, no, I'm driving. And instead of me having the courage to go, hey, negative, like, give me the keys. Instead, I was a new guy. I was like, Roger that. And here I am letting a guy drive drunk with me in the vehicle. This total, a total idiot, like a total idiot, never should have done that. And, but I did. And that's the kind of thing I look back and it was just, you know, being a new guy, not having the, not having the courage to stand up and say, hey, dude, no, you can't drive. You've been drinking for eight hours. You're, you're drunk by any measure. Give me the keys. I'm gonna drive.

• 1:46:41Jocko Willink?

  And instead I was more, well, you know, don't wanna make a ruckus here. I'm a new guy. I get in line because that's what you get told. Yeah, you're a new guy. Keep your mouth shut. Okay. And that's what I did. And so little situations like that, if, when you're in a, in a subordinate position, you still gotta have the courage to go, hey, no, this is stupid. We're not doing it. And what was interesting is even as I became more senior, like there was, there was issues that would come up where I know that me saying something was, I was the only person that was gonna say something, you know, like, I was the only person that would be able to say, hey, we're not doing that thing right there. Stop. If anyone else, you know, because it's because I was the boss and, and not only the boss, but I was like a prior enlisted guy.

• 1:47:25Jocko Willink?

  And I trained jiu jitsu. And I was like, oh, I'll choke your ass. Wrap your ass up. Exactly. And, and so that does make an impact. And so, yeah, when you, when you get with your, when, you know, when you, that's just, makes me think when you take over as the command master chief and you're like, hey, You better be doing the right things. And if you're not, there's going to be hell to pay. And that's all there is to it. And listen, you make a mistake. Cool. I got you. You do some dumb shit, illegal, immoral, unethical. I ain't got nothing for you. Not going to be able to help you and I don't want to help you. So, good, good leadership lessons there.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think with, whether you're in a SEAL team, or whether you're a tier one or regular SEAL team, or in a business environment, there's times when we have to, you know, we have to set back our, our course, right? Our course of direction, which is a professional course, right? So I refer to that as snapping a blue line, right? The old carpenters use that, right? Snap the blue line. So I say it's time to snap the damn blue line, right? And I'll also refer to the Coast Guard and the Coast Guard, um, uh, rules, rules of the road, right? You take that test, rules of the road, you have to know the buoys, you have to know everything out there at sea that you navigate off of. And you, you have to make an eighty some point, you know, you, you missed like one or two questions.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  You failed the test. So that's how much you need to know that, right? So the Coast Guard says when entering a harbor, you shall, instead of may, right? You shall pass port to port, right? Port to port. Port and starboard, right? Port to port. So when I have a situation going on in a SEAL team, I said, I look at my XO or my skipper and go, it's time to snap the damn blue line. And they just look at me and go, oh yeah, I'm with you. Cause it is time to snap the blue line. And let's make it clear, guys. You cross this fricking line right here and your ass is mine, right? Or you shall be responsible for your individual actions. You shall.

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  This is, this is Coast Guard. I'm going Coast Guard rules on your ass, right? Because that's how, that's what keeps people safe, right? That's what keeps people in the, in the deal.

• 1:49:32Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Get rid of the gray zone.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  I remember, I got a story for you. And this was, this is, this was a good one. Uh, setting in a jump master brief, right? You set in these jump master briefs and this was a double stack boat drop in Guam. I think you may have been, been on that. So this is a twilight drop, right? It's almost dark. You know, we try to get out of the bird before it's totally black. You know, we got a little bit of sun simmering on the, on the horizon, a little bit of visibility. And this night was a double stack boat drop. We had two of them, right? So we had two C-130s, you know, drops, or we had, we may have had both boats, you know, all, you know, both boats rigged up inside the 130s. So we, it's a platoon drop, right? Four boats. But I remember sitting in the jump brief, and they were talking

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  about if you, unlike, you know, unlucky a counter, if you go face to face with a paratrooper, both of you turn right, right? And that way, you miss each other, right? And then another one was, if you find yourself entangled in a parachute, if a, if a jumper comes right at you and goes below you, but your feet hit the parachute, you bicycle kick across that parachute. And I remember listening to that, and I go, that shit ain't happening. That don't happen. Well, guess what? That night drop, I left that aircraft, and I got about, you know, you, cause we're following the duck, we got chem lights on top of our boats, and the parachutes are all up, you know, the G11s or whatever we had on there.

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  And no shit, I look up, and all I saw, the, the sky was night, little bit of sun, you know, you know, the daylight or coming, light was coming from the stars. And I saw a canopy. I mean, it was right, I mean, right at my freaking face, and I'm going, oh shit, here comes this jump master brief. I've got a canopy on my freaking face. And I'm, and I start bicycle kicking, and I know shit, I walk all the way across this parachute. I went across the apex, and I couldn't believe it. I saw the apex on my feet, and I go, holy shit, I'm actually running across a parachute. And I got to the other side, and boom, my parachute inflated. And we hit the deck, and you know, hit the water, and we went over, and we're de-rigging the boat, and I go, boy.

• 1:51:44Speaker 01

  Was that something? So you just never know, right? You never know. So that's why you have to pay attention.

• 1:51:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, follow those basic rules, man.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  I know. That's that blue line, right? There's certain things that, you know, you gotta pay attention to and you gotta be able to react when something happens, you know, when something goes sideways. So.

• 1:52:01Jocko Willink?

  And when you, so you get out on that deployment, now you're the command master chief SEAL team four. And did you guys do, was it PSD for that whole deployment?

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  No, this one, this was more of a, a regular operational deal where we were running missions to try to find these bomb makers.

• 1:52:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right. You guys started doing the counter Iranian.

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  And then the counter Iranian thing was a little more high speed, right? Because they had tier one units were taking care of some of that, right? Because it was so intel driven. And back where I was at with the, with the SEAL team platoons that was at Baghdad International Airport, we were pretty much executing most of the bombers, right? The people that were building the bombs, the IEDs.

• 1:52:45Jocko Willink?

  Do you guys have an Iraqi partner force at the time?

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:52:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  Yes. And that was comical, too, trying to teach those guys how to shoot. And they were, it was unbelievable. Like teaching third graders how to, how to shoot, right? As soon as you thought you could, they could hit something, they, they were stealing bullets. And I'm like going, why are you stealing bullets? They said, well, we can sell them.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  And I go, don't do that. Right?

• 1:53:08Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys have the Iraqi force that had like M4s and US weapons? Or did you guys have, did you, were, were with straight just Iraqi Jundis with AK-47s?

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  You know what? I think they just had the AK-47s, which are dangerous.

• 1:53:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  Right? Some of them were China, you know, built in China and they were pieces of dunk.

• 1:53:28Jocko Willink?

  And they're just rusted, like sites, just they're not gonna hit anything.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  No, no. But that's a, that's a powerful round, though, as you know, right? That's a 762 by, what was it? 69 or 39?

• 1:53:39Jocko Willink?

  39, yeah. And, and how was the, the op tempo was good for those guys that were out there getting after it?

• 1:53:44Speaker 01

  It was. It was, they stayed fairly busy. You know, I was having to try to keep the Seabees alive because the SEALs wanted to kick them off the island, right? And I'm, and had a meeting with them and I'm like, what, what are you talking about? They go, those guys don't do their job, Master Chief. You know, we go out on these operations at night and we come back and I go, do you do a post op of your vehicle? Before you turn it over to the two CBs that are here working through tonight to try to, whether it's a half shaft that's broke, you know, this is freaking serious work, right? And these two CBs are putting out, cause why do I know that? Because I stay up when these, when these SEALs are finished with their mission, they take their, you know, they clean their gear first, right? It's always team gear, personal gear, and then you finally get to take a shower and go to, go to bed.

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  So they're in the bed, these two CBs are cranking in this little, you know, shanty garage they've built, and they're replacing half shafts. I mean, this is a major operation, right? So, uh, so they didn't know that. So when I'm in the tent talking to them, the senior chief's got them pumped up, right? And he, I was into his backside too, because I go, don't ever get your platoon fired up. And I said, this is horse shit. I said, you're, you should be focused on operating and your guys, when they finish a mission, should come in and turn over a good post op to these CBs so they know what's going on with their vehicles. And you're part, you know, that's part of it, right? That's part of responsibility of being a mobility, you know, uh, when you use these vehicles to go hit targets, you know, you're not in a helicopter, you're in a, you're in a freaking Humvee.

• 1:55:13Speaker 01

  So, uh, I just had to tell the senior chief, look, you're, you're, you're making my job difficult. So when you make my job difficult, I'm gonna put some pressure on, on you being a leader, right? Because I don't need to hear this shit, right? You're telling me that I need to fire the two CBs that are with us, what you want me to do? Me pour some water in a bowl and generate two more? I said, cause they, they don't have anybody to send, you know? The battalion or, you know, back at Log Sue, I called them, they go, Mayor Chief, I don't have anybody. And it, and by the way, the two guys we had were, were doing great. It was just the SEALs getting on a, you know, little tantrum. And I told them to shut the hell up. And I go, the next time you bring this to me, I said, I'm gonna have all of you in a garage. You're gonna be fixing your own shit, right?

• 1:55:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, uh, my CBs, dude, we had, I think we had 17 generators, just, just generators. Something like 22 air conditioners, 30 something plus vehicles, like, and I had six CBs. You know what I mean? These guys were working. Oh, they're, they're badasses. The maintenance schedule alone is not, you can't, you can't do it. They have to work 24 hours, they were just busting their ass the whole time. And my guys knew it, I mean, it's just like that, you rely on, I mean. You those vehicles are a life-saving piece of equipment, you know, that thing goes down in the street, you're you're screwed. So those CBs were freaking awesome. I'm glad you took care of your CBs.

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  They, yes, I'll tell you what, man, CBs, I've always, um, you know, I've always took care of them and because they just work, they did work, they did come in, they build our fobs, they build anything, they fix anything. Like you said, whether it's a generator or Humvee or, you know, whatever.

• 1:56:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they get it though.

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  They're bad, they're badasses.

• 1:56:57Jocko Willink?

  Uh, as you get done with that SEAL Team Four, what's next for you? What was next?

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  I get, um, I get moved over to Log Sue.

• 1:57:06Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:57:07Speaker 01

  So that's when I really had a liking to the CBs because I had a lot of CBs working for me. Log Sue is a logistical command that supports the SEAL Teams. Um, and I got to work with sailors, right? Regular sailors and it really brings out the, the Master Chief training that I got when I was up at the academy because you know, you have to, and we had some issues with those guys too, right? We had this one CB, um, he hadn't been coming to work. So I had the Master Chief come over, the, the Master Chief CB that we had, you know, running the, the shop over there at the mechanic shop, comes over and sits down with me and says, Master Chief, I want to, uh, kick this guy out of the Navy. I go, what, what, what you got? He goes, well, he's not coming to work. His uniform looks like he

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  slept in it, blah, blah, blah. Just, just written down a whole list. And I go, well, let's bring him in, let's do a DRB, let's find out where his headspace is, right? Because that's what you need to know, right? And I wasn't trying to step on the Master Chief. The Master Chief CB is, you know, he, he's very capable Master Chief. So I knew if he's got an issue, there's, there's, there's problems there, right? So he brings him over, we get in the conference room, we had the front table set up and, um, there was about seven of us, you know? So I was the Master Chief that was chairing this. I had the CB Master Chief sitting right beside me, had a Senior Chief CB right here on this side of me, had another Chief, uh, Pear Rigger from the Pear Shop, and had another Chief down here that

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  was with me. And, uh, and I was the only SEAL. I was the only SEAL on the, on the panel. So the Mastered Arms at the time, who is the popo, police of the military, escorts this guy in. So when Mastered Arms escorted him in, I was kind of, you know, I kind of sat back in my chair like going, what, what we got here?

• 1:58:49Jocko Willink?

  That's an indicator.

• 1:58:50Speaker 01

  You know, is this a, what, what we got going on here? You know, if he has to have an escort by, by, uh, Mastered Arms?

• 1:58:56Speaker 01

  So he sits down in his seat and all of a sudden he's uh the senior chief beside me uh start they started going off. They said, you know, you look like you slept in uniform. You look like blah blah. You haven't shaved. Your frickin' uniforms a mess is wearing uh uh cracker jacks. You know, the old white sailor uniform, but it looked like it was almost beige. It wasn't white. So I'm looking at him and and I start, you know, after they they've been firing off some salvos on him, you know, calling him a dirtbag and all this stuff. And I and I kinda like said, okay, okay. I said, let's uh stop stop this a second. I said, I need a cup of coffee. And I told him, I said, Master Arms, I said, take uh

• 1:59:38Speaker 01

  take the sailor, you know, to my office. And I go, stand by. I said, just take him to my office and stand by. So he gets him up, parades him, you know, he's walking right beside him like he's a prisoner, takes him to my office and I'm sitting there with the panel and I told I told the guys, I go, guys, I go, I appreciate your your um motivations, you know, I appreciate you being, I said, but you we're being really hard on this individual. And I said, what I wanna know is is what what he's what's he got going on? What's going on, you know, behind the uniform as, you know, speaking? So I told these guys, I said, hey, just take the take the day off, this thing this thing's done. I said, this guy's got problems that probably

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  go a little bit far than we sit here and chew his ass all day long, but he ain't gonna make a better dick. He didn't have one impression on his face the whole time we were going at it, right? These guys were basically attacking his integrity and his uniform and and uh him him not being at work, you know, he's got problems. So I get in the office and I'm sitting there in the master arms, I said, you can leave. I said, just I said, just be outside. I said, you know, I want you to escort him back over to the CB um the garage area, right? When we're done. But I started, I said, hey, I said, talk to me, man. I said, talk to me. I said, you've got some shit going on. You got squirrels in your sea bags or raccoons or something in the bag. I need to know what I'm what I'm dealing with here. And he started,

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  he had had a couple tears, started crying. And um I said, calm down. I go, I said, everything okay at home? You know, he said, yeah, everything's, everything's okay. He said, my, my marriage is not going all that well. And he said, I've got five cars. And when he said, he's got five cars, I go, why, why do you have five cars? He goes, well, I like them, I like cars. He said, I rebuild them. So he said, I'm kind of in debt, in debt with the cars and, um, the people at work. He says, I'm not getting any sleep, you know, my wife, we're having some issues with our youngest kid. And it, it just went on and on and on, right? As far as he's got problems at home, he's, he's got financial issues because he has five cars. And, you know, you can't support five vehicles, right?

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I know how expensive vehicles are, paying insurance and all that. So I said, uh, what can we do to help you? And I said, you know, you know, I said, your uniform, I said, you want me to, I said, I can, I can get those, your uniform cleaned up for you. I said, what, I said, what, how can we help you? And he, he just said, you know, I, I need some help financially. I need to consolidate these vehicles. I need to be a better dad. I need to be a better, you know, husband. You know, I need this, I need that. So I'm like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna do that. We're gonna take care of that. And I said, uh, I want you to go back over to, to your garage and talk to the master chief. And I want you to take a couple of days off.

• 2:02:29Speaker 01

  Cause you know, we're not fighting, you know, we're not, we don't have people shooting at us back at the beach, right? And I go, take a couple of days off and I go, let me find somebody that can help you with the vehicles. And, um, well, I've got some resources that Navy resources here on base that we can help you with your finances. We get a, we get you a financial advisor and, uh, try to get you, get you squared away. Because right now you just can't, you can't deal with these vehicles. And, and I don't, I don't know what kind of problems you're having with your wife and all, but we've got people that can help you with that. So basically give him a couple of days off. Um, and then I told him, I said, next week, I want you to come back in for the DRB. But I want you to understand the gravity of this. I said, you need to be squared away.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  I said, you need to have the right command rocker on your uniform. Your uniform needs to be cleaned, like in dry cleaned. Your, your shoes need to have a, some Kiwi. You know, polish on them, give us some effort and let me see that you're doing what you're gonna do. And I said, I'll give you everything we have. We'll, we'll throw resources at you and we'll get this cleaned up. That takes work, right? So I talked with the Master Chief Seabie, who was a great guy. I still run into him, date, you know, sometimes back at the P. He's, he's a great guy. And I told him, I said, this is gonna be hard work, but this is gonna be a little, little project, little pet project to see if we can get this train, you know, out of the woods, out of the briar patches and get it back on the railroad

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  tracks and see if we can save this sailor. I said, we may not be able to, but I said, the big, a, a, a big part of this is gonna be how he presents himself next week. If he comes in and he looks good. And I said, I don't wanna turn into shouting. I, I just want him to open up to us and tell him what he needs so we can set some resources up to help him out. So he came back in that next Monday. Totally different. Dialed in, squared away? Dialed in, dialed in. I, I think he even bought a new set of Cracker Jacks, had the right rocker sawing on, his ribbons were a quarter inch. You know, I know all that shit about uniforms, right? So I just looked at him, had a brand new T-shirt on, had a brand new white hat. Check.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  I mean, shoes had Kiwi. Yeah. Effort was made, right? Just to, to bring a, a different presence. So we sat there and instead of yelling at him, we, we listened to his story and he taught us something, right? We don't know what's going on with our employees or our sailors or our Marines or Army soldiers and, and all of this, right? But it takes leadership if you do it right. It's, it's a little work, you know, other than chewing somebody's ass out and kicking them out to the curb and say, you know, you messed up. Go, go square your shit away and then never engage again. So we engaged with him on that, that second time that he came in, he looked, he looked a lot better.

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  And then we continued to follow up with the finances, dealing with the vehicles and stuff. So I think we have a success there.

• 2:05:24Jocko Willink?

  Hopefully that guy figured out what Auto Trader was.

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  Well, he needed.

• 2:05:29Jocko Willink?

  Dumped some of those vehicles.

• 2:05:31Speaker 01

  I mean, he had all muscle cars. These cars were 20 to 50,000. You know, one of them, I think he said he paid a hundred thousand dollars. I'm thinking, damn, how are you paying a hundred thousand dollars for a Chevelle? Yeah, E5.

• 2:05:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he wasn't paying a hundred thousand dollars. He was, he was running up credit cards.

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  He was.

• 2:05:48Jocko Willink?

  With his old lady for sure.

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  He was.

• 2:05:50Jocko Willink?

  That's chaos.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  But that was a success story.

• 2:05:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's always, yeah, it's always, uh, what's, what's this other person got going on? You know, what's going on in that world that's making them do this? And that's why it's important you got to know your people too, so that you can go, oh, there's something going on. Hopefully you can pick it up on the second or third car and not the fifth, you know, once it's in the fifth car zone, you're like, yeah, we got issues.

• 2:06:11Speaker 01

  You're done.

• 2:06:13Jocko Willink?

  So, so you, you, didn't you end up, you did some time as an Ops Master Chief at a, at group?

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I, when I left, um, Log Sue, I got a phone call from the Force Master Chief and he goes, dog, I, I need you to go to SOC South.

• 2:06:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:06:27Speaker 01

  So when he said that.

• 2:06:28Jocko Willink?

  Was that in Florida?

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  Well, that's what I said. I said, where's that at? He goes, Homestead, Florida, which is right on top of the Keys, right? Homestead is right below, it's Homestead, it's called Harb, right? It's Homestead Air Reserve Base. But T SOC sits there, right? So what a T SOC is, is a Theater Special Operations Command, who is run by a one star, this was, uh, you know, Hector Pagan, one star general, Army Triple Tabber, right? Special Forces guy. So he was the, you know, the commanding officer or general. And then we had, uh, it's a joint command, right? So you have Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps. Uh, and we had some Coast Guard people that, that we were helping train, uh, with them down in Miami area for BBSS.

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  Uh, but it, I went down screaming and kicking, right? I'm, you know, I'm like, my Force Master Chief said, I'm not, this is not a, uh, you know, I'm not, this is, this is orders, right? Orders are orders are not imitations. So I took them, within two weeks I was down in home.

• 2:07:23Jocko Willink?

  Did you move the family down there too?

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  This was a geo batch. So Lisa stepped up to the plate once again and said, I got this, I got the home, you know, the compound. You go do what you have, you know, you need to do. So I went down there screaming and you know, this sucks, you know, blah, blah, blah. I just got back. So I go down, I meet a group of Sergeant Majors. First time I've ever really worked that close with Special Forces guys, squared away guys. We had three or four different SEAL officers down there working in the J3 shop. I was the J3 Master Chief. Nice. Which is a very important job, right? We haven't filled that job within probably 10 to 20 years. So when I got the call from Force Master Chief, he said, "We gotta get senior enlisted

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  people like yourself outside of NSW, Navy Special Warfare, and go down and do these T-SOC jobs because I need people sitting in those seats to help me understand how we can deploy our SEALs better, right?" And the Special Forces guys. It's a good call. So what the T-SOC does is basically, we in-brief all of the teams that are going south in SouthCom, right, into the SouthCom Theater, whether it's Panama, Colombia, Chile, or Honduras, any of those places down south. And so we had SEAL teams roll through and we would brief them. These are your rules of the road as far as what you shall do and what you shouldn't do. And then, and then when they go do their deployment, whether

• 2:08:48Speaker 01

  it's a 30-day deployment or a two-week deployment, they come back to the T-SOC at Homestead and debrief us, you know, give us actions, you know, after actions. So we can build, we build these folders up. So we understand who we're training down there. Is it the Panamanians? What is that? Is that security around the Panama Canal? Or, you know, what are we dealing with? The same with Bogota. You know Bogota, you have all the drugs and all that stuff to be concerned about and, you know, kind of stabilizing their government and working with their, their military personnel. The same with Chile, Argentina. But it, but it was really a good job for me because I would, I would set, every Friday would have

• 2:09:33Speaker 01

  a, a call with the generals, three, four stars at SOCOM.

• 2:09:38Speaker 01

  SOCOM would talk directly to us since we're a T-SOC, you know, we're down here doing, doing special operations in the southern, what is it, operational?

• 2:09:48Jocko Willink?

  Theater.

• 2:09:48Speaker 01

  Theater, right, so it was very educational at the high level, right Clay? I'm sitting right there with a one-star general and I remember we were at a meeting and we had a three-star general, Keane was talking, Army, another Army triple-tabber, special forces. He said, "Hey, Master Chief, good to see you, good to see Colonel, you know, I worked for Fullburg Colonel, he was a J-3, I was a J-3, you know, Master Chief." He goes, "Why are you two guys sitting here?" And I, you know, we're always sitting there, right? So I look at the screen at the end of the table and I'm looking at General Keane and I look over at Colonel and I go, "You want to answer that or should I answer that?"

• 2:10:31Speaker 01

  And he goes, he says, "You got this, dog." So I look at the screen and I tell the, I go, "General, we're always here at this meeting for situational awareness." And he goes, "No, no, no." He says, "That's not what I'm talking about." He said, "I just sent a C-130 down to pick you and Colonel up. You're going to Haiti. This was after the earthquake in 2010."

• 2:10:52Jocko Willink?

  Damn, okay.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  So I'm just looking at Colonel like going, and I look over at the one-star sitting at the table with us and I go, "I didn't know we were going to Haiti." And he goes, "I didn't either." So here, he said, "You guys can leave." You know, General Keane said, "You guys can leave, go pack your stuff. I want you on the ground within 24 hours. We're going to bring in assets." He says, "We already got a hospital ship down there. The country just suffered a huge earthquake. We got tons of bodies all over."

• 2:11:18Jocko Willink?

  How many Richter was that earthquake, you remember?

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  It, uh, it was seven, I think it was a 7.3 initial, right? Because you had the 7.3 then the follow-on aftershocks. So here we go, we're loading a C-130. We already had one SEAL officer in the field down there. So we fly down in the 130 and it was a complete shit show, right? We show up on the tarmac, we got, the, the air traffic control was down, we got a CCT Air Force guy calling air traffic control down there. You got Jimmy Buffett on his seaplane, you got, um, Bill Clinton landed in a, in a 7.7 or 7.57. So we got all of this shit going on, everybody's bending over backwards.

• 2:11:57Jocko Willink?

  What did Jimmy Buffett come down there for?

• 2:11:59Speaker 01

  Just to help. He just wants to hand out some t-shirts and some, I don't know, flip flops. So, so we're down there and we're seeing this shit show at the, at the airport. So we get out of the airport, we go up to link up with our SEAL who had, who had set a flag in the ground for us at a Christian school. A bunch of missionaries up there and had doctors from around the world, right? The, the docs that traveled all over the world, they were in, they had all these medications, they had these tents. So here comes the Seabees again, right? So the Seabees came down from Virginia Beach and they built these temper tents because they had to have the medication in a temp controlled environment, right? Cause it was hot, you know, even, even in January, it was hot down in Haiti. So we were looking around,

• 2:12:41Speaker 01

  they had, you know, like I said, they pretty much cleaned up most of the bodies that were, that were crushed, you know, uh, with, these parking decks were like, you know, 10 stories high. They were just pancaked. Damn. Right? So the stuff that you saw was just unbelievable. And the education I took away from that was, and me and Colonel would go to a meeting every day in this big tent with General Keen, running the show. And, um, we had USAID, World Food Organization, the World Health Organization. I mean, all these three letter acronyms, you know, uh, other than, right? The ONGs of the world were all there. And it was just crazy. So we'd go to meetings

• 2:13:23Speaker 01

  after meetings after meetings. And our job from us, from a Navy SEAL and, and special forces deal was, we had helicopters, we had 53s off of one of the LHA's that was down there. We were moving food and water and, and, uh, bunks to these field hospitals that they already tried to establish. And it was interesting, right? Because we had, uh, Sean Penn down there. Sean Penn was running around and I remember we was getting on a 53 to fly up to one of these hospitals. But you know what? God bless him. He was working. He had his little entourage with him, but he was working. And I remember one day we're loading up a 53 helicopter to fly up to one of these field hospitals. He was smoking a cigarette. And I walk up to him and I go, "Hey, hey, uh, Sean." And he looked at me, you know, and

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  I go, "You need to shoot a can of that cigarette." I said, "You're standing way too close to this." I mean, we were right outside of Rotorua, right? And I go, "See all that slick shit on the back of that ramp of that 53?" He goes, "Yeah." And I said, "That's either hydraulic fluid or fucking go gas or whatever, right?" And, you know, I said, "You don't want to smoke anywhere near this thing." So he, he put it, put it out on his boot, but we were doing that. But, but, but the, the experience you take from a national disaster, right? I mean, it's just, it's crazy, right? Um, uh, because I, I learned so much and we're, we're having a meeting with the world food guy. And, uh, I said, Hey, I noticed, uh, we've been on the deck for about three days. And he sat down at a table with us and he came across from Dominican Republic, right?

• 2:14:47Speaker 01

  Don Rep, he came over the mountain, come down and you can see Haiti because they deforested their, their mountain, right? They're, they don't have any trees. It's mud. It's a freaking shit show. So he comes over, they fly them down, seven group guys, they land in Don Rep, they had five Humvees. They brought them over to pass and they came down to link up with us. Uh, and, uh, they were going to be a part of the deal where we were, we're looking for displaced people up in the hinterlands of the upper, the epicenter was down at Port-au-Prince, down by the port. And, uh, and the earthquake is, it was devastation. So we go up and we're looking for people who, who need medical help or medicines. And we're having meetings with all of these local mayors that were around these little towns.

• 2:15:31Speaker 01

  And, um, so when the, the guys showed up, I met them at the gate at midnight one night and they come in and they get out and a major get, gets out, major special forces, major guy, he kind of reminded me of you, you know, he's, he was, he's freaking hyped up. He was, he, he had Copenhagen in, drinking a Red Bull and he was smoking a cigarette. And I go, can you get anything else going on, man? I said, you got caffeine, you got nicotine going? I go, I said, Kai, he said, dog, he said, I got one question. And I go, what's that, sir? And he goes, why is a damn special forces and Navy SEALs sitting in freaking Haiti? Ain't nobody down here to kill. He said, this is not our mission. And I went, well, I said, it is now. I said, you need to go talk to Colonel Stoltz because, you know, you, you, you know, you gotta go do that.

• 2:16:16Speaker 01

  I said, you know, but he was a, he was a hard hitting dude and he, we got the mission done, right? I mean, that's, uh, we stayed down there for about 50 some days. Damn. Before we, we got relieved and it was, uh, it was educational, but man, it was. It was a disaster. Oh, yeah. Fucking horrible. And then what was after that? Where'd you go next? After, uh, the, uh, T-SOC, I did that for about two years and I got a call from, um, Master Chief at Group, Group Two at the time, Britt. So Britt said, hey, dog, I need you to come home. And he said, I'm bringing you home a month early. And I go, I don't have any problem with that. Right. So, so we were pretty much calm, you know, after we finished the Haiti mission, it really,

• 2:17:01Speaker 01

  you know, we're just doing normal debriefing and in briefing to the, to the guys going down south. So, uh, I, I'm like, okay, I'll come back to Group Two. So I was a Group Two Master, Master Chief.

• 2:17:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, right on.

• 2:17:11Speaker 01

  So I did that for two years. And then after that job, and then that's when they wanted me to come to the West Coast. And I was like, negatory. So I went to, I did the senior enlisted job at ATC.

• 2:17:23Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:17:24Speaker 01

  Advanced Training Command. And we moved to command from Little Creek to Fort Story.

• 2:17:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17:29Speaker 01

  And that was me and John.

• 2:17:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, awesome.

• 2:17:32Speaker 01

  Me and John did that, you know, John was coming off of his deployments and stuff over Dev Group. And, uh, basically it was our, our, you know, that was it for us, right? We're, we're.

• 2:17:42Jocko Willink?

  That was your Twilight Tour.

• 2:17:43Speaker 01

  That was Twilight Tour for us. And, uh, but it, it was a great job, you know, back into the training side again, right? So it was good.

• 2:17:51Jocko Willink?

  And so then you retire. What was, what was your first, what'd you do when you retired?

• 2:17:55Speaker 01

  Well, when I retired, I was, um, I made connections with people from the Navy SEAL Foundation. Um, I met these basically five guys and, and, uh, I call them high, very high, um, um, they're just very talented people and they're very, um, you know, successful. I had a little acronym for them, but it was highly successful individuals. So, but they were good, right? But they, they plugged me into some positions. So I got my first job when I got out was, uh, I went to work for a security company out of Roswell, Georgia. And we had about 50,000 security officers who would watch, watch, let, you know, they were, they were in the corporate 500 companies, right? Coca-Cola, Hollywood Squares, we had

• 2:18:40Speaker 01

  the 9/11 museum, we had the Empire State Building. So I'd go all over the United States and they hired me as the Senior Vice President to. Run the professionalism, you know, professional training and leadership with the security officers. Got it. So, you know, the difficulty of that is, is, you know, we pay these security officers who watch front doors and lobbies and man the desk at these big businesses about ten to fifteen dollars an hour. So, how do you motivate somebody like that to, to, um, increase your retention and decrease your turnover? Yeah. So, that's big money in between those two things, right? So, I worked with our training academy, which was in Roswell.

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  We pushed out a lot of courses, active shooter, first aid, uh, just security courses, right? And we, we built a library up and, um, had some very talented people working down in Roswell at this, uh, little academy we had. So, what I come up with was, I go, "Look, you know, security officers, they have a uniform. I'm just gonna give them a medal." So, I come up with this medal. It's about the size of jump wings that, that went right over top of their pocket, right? I could put it right on the top of a pocket. Quarter inch? Quarter, quarter inch. Quarter inch above that? Yeah. Pocket? Quarter inch above the pocket. And, um, we had five stars. You could earn a star, right? You had that little silver plate and it was red, white, and blue had security stars on it.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  And then above that, we put stars. So, if you finish your five courses, initial five courses, which were active shooter, uh, hazardous waste, you know, medical courses, you would get, you'd earn your first star. And then we would just up the ante, would have, you know, active shooter number two. A little more in-depth about what you do other than run, fight, fight in height, right? Or, you know, run, hide, fight. So, we did that and we'd, we'd get it up. So, I got to about two stars in that program and we really saw retention go up. And our turnover rate was going down, which is, that's where, that's where you find a margin of money. Did they get anything besides the, the, the metal? They've got the metal, but we dialed into the metal. Did they get them a raise or anything like that? We did. Okay.

• 2:20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, once you had the two stars, you got a raise. So there you go. Right, so there, there you go. That's, that's what it all boiled down to, right? And, uh, I would travel all over the country and I'd do these penning ceremonies. So when I would show up, all of- Get their blood wings? They would get their blood wings, but you know, it was working because they would see me on social media. Yeah. Out in the field, whether it was Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, or I was in, you know, um, Sunoco Fuel out in, uh, Texas. Or I'm at a star, Walk of Stars out in, uh, Hollywood. They would see these ceremonies going on and all these other people, all these other managers of all around the United States were saying, I want Dog, we need Dog. We need Dog to come in and put the pens on my people.

• 2:21:35Speaker 01

  So I was doing that and I was running ragged, man, because I'll tell you, I'd wake up in hotel, but you know where I was at. Yeah. I'm like, I have no idea where the heck I'm at. I had to look out the window and go, oh yeah, this is New York City. But it was a great job. Uh, we, we did meet the goal to doing that. So about three years into that, uh, we had, we, we got acquired. But we set the company up for success, right? Awesome. And, and we, we got acquired, we sold to, um, Allied Universal, which is a huge security company. And a part of that was, was my contract was you either keep the senior vice presidents on board or you sever them out. One year, one year pay, uh, severance, right? So they kept me on board for about eight months and they didn't adopt the security stars program because they, they didn't see the value in it.

• 2:22:20Speaker 01

  Uh, I really thought it would, it would work, but they just didn't see the value. So they said, hey, you know, Dog, we're paying you this amount of money. We can hire three people to do that, you know? We're going to give you your severance. And I went, thank you. Bye bye. Bye. So I was making, you know, making good money and then I got that and I got to go home. Plus my master chief pay, right? So I, you know, I don't, I, I, Doggy was eating good.

• 2:22:45Speaker 01

  I could have probably bought five cars if I wanted to, but I wasn't, I'm not, I'm not into buying that many cars. But, um, so that happened. I'm sitting at home relaxing because I'm, the mailbox is full of money, right? So I don't, I don't need to do a whole lot, but you gotta have a purpose. So I get a phone call from one of our captain, I'm sure you know Captain Bam Bam. Captain Bam Bam calls me and goes, Doug, uh, I got an opportunity for you down in the Bahamas. And I go, hmm, I go, what, what, I said, what? I said, what you got? He goes, well, we have a resort down there. It's a high end resort. It got hit by a cat five hurricane. Uh, this happened in 2019, September the first, 2019.

• 2:23:26Speaker 01

  It sat on top of this Abacos, uh, region of the Bahamas for about 36 hours, about 200 mile an hour sustained winds, tornadoes raced through, just D, just took pine trees and, and just, and, and houses and roofs and just shat, I mean, just blew it out. It looked like a J, Jdam hit. Just some houses were somewhat intact. Some houses got totally blown up because the, you know, the, the, either, you know, these, um, trees flew through or wood from another house, you know, broke the windows. And then once that happened, it over pressured and just blew up. So they, they said, hey, we want you to fly down, take a look at it. And if you want, they, they want to bring you down and you can run the workforce

• 2:24:11Speaker 01

  for the restoration project to rebuild this island. And that's going to take, that's a job security, right? Cause that's about a two to three year dealio, right? So I went, okay, I'll fly down. So I go down to, um, Fort Lauderdale, you know, meet one of the partners of the company that builds these resorts around the, around the globe, right? They're, um, it's a beautiful place called Baker's Bay Golf and Ocean Club down in, uh, Abacos. So I go down and take a look at it and it was jacked. I mean, you know, we had, we had debris all over the place. We had houses that were totally blown up, some houses that were okay, but had water damage, a lot of tarps on roofs and all that stuff. So they brought in a, um, a vessel that it was a, it was in a barrack. It was a barracks.

• 2:24:55Speaker 01

  It used to be an old machine shop vessel, right? So that was the barracks. And then we brought in a hundred and thirty, uh, Hispanic workers come from Cabo St. Lucas, Mexico. Cause we have a property down there. They brought these guys in to expedite the work being done. And these guys were like, these were, these were top. I mean, these guys were master carpenters, you know, they, they can do it all, right? They built a house from the ground up. So they brought these guys in and we worked them. They, they stayed on this boat, right? This, this little boat, we had them isolated over there, but they were great people. I actually speaking some Spanish, not a whole lot, but I was, I was kinda saying, hey, I'm gonna take advantage of this, right? And I'm gonna try to learn Spanish. I'm gonna talk to these guys and befriend them and help them, you know?

• 2:25:40Speaker 01

  Cause I know they, they're, they're getting, they're doing most of the work here. So we, we did that. I did that for about two years. We ran into COVID.

• 2:25:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right.

• 2:25:49Speaker 01

  Boy, that was a, that was a interesting time because, um, four of the, four of those supervisors on that boat were sick. So I got Jay, Jay was the golf superintendent. He spoke, he's, uh, spent a lot of his time in Costa Rica. So he speaks really well Spanish. So he came with me and said, Jay, ask this guy, why does he have a fever? How's he feel? And he said, I feel like shit. And I'm like, well, that, that guy's probably got COVID, right? So we, we shook down the whole boat, but we stopped it. We, we actually had to have a fire line, right? We're saying, okay, these supervisors are up on the front bow up high in their living quarters. We, we took up, we took down all of those rooms. We quarantined those guys in RVs and put up yellow tape.

• 2:26:31Speaker 01

  I mean, we'd bring them meals every day, but we had to do that, but then we had to go in and spray all those rooms down and basically sanitize all of those rooms on the fourth part of that boat. And then, but we saved that ship. That ship would have lit up.

• 2:26:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:45Speaker 01

  Would have lost that workforce for a month or two before we could recover and get back, you know, get back to, to rebuilding the property. But we pulled through that. Uh, I took a, you know, my dad passed away, so I came home to take a, take a knee for uh, about a year. And I got bored and my wife looked at me and said, you need to do something. So I called back down, didn't burn any bridges, right? I called back down, I said, we got, he said, we, we got a great job for you. Come down here and be the logistics guy on our pier. When we, they get all these 40 foot containers, 20 foot containers, flat racks, the palm trees, they get, they get 20 foot mail vans full of food, reefers, you know, refrigerators. So I went down and learned how to move freight and I had to open the boxes up to

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  inspect them because they were losing money. They lost $300,000 for like people taking high end wines, you know, um, tomahawk steaks, just disappearing.

• 2:27:43Jocko Willink?

  I might be disappearing tomahawks.

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  Well, I know, I know. So they put me down there. I went down and I put up a camera. Well, the camera didn't work, right? I didn't have any feet, they didn't know that. So I put up a camera. I got some lights on the pier and I'm, I was on there every time a boat pulled in, I was on that pier. And I was asking, what's in that box? What's in that box? Check this box. And then when a box leaves the pier, I open the box. So as soon as I started that, the theft shit stopped. Cause they knew that they got somebody paying attention. Don't, don't get the chops, right? Don't get the, you know, the tomahawks.

• 2:28:18Jocko Willink?

  Leave those tomahawks for me.

• 2:28:20Speaker 01

  That's right. Oh, those things were awesome. About this, about that thick, you know, you know, the deal.

• 2:28:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, all right. So then this, this bourbon comes into play. Wow. Four branches bourbon. How did you, how'd you get, how'd this whole thing get initiated?

• 2:28:37Speaker 01

  Well, this is, uh, it's all started back at Bahamas, right down at Baker's Bay where I met, uh, Rick Franco. Uh, Rick's a VMI graduate, uh, Marine Corps officer. And then, uh, he, uh, transitioned over to the, uh, CIA, GRS contract world. And now Rick is a, um, security, um, head of security for Troubadour Club, which is another one of these, uh, beautiful resorts that they, you know, Discovery Land Company has them all over the world. But during my time down there, I got to spend, you know, me and Rick both lived in a house that was affected by the hurricane back in September 1 of 2019. So the owner of the home, the member of the club there said, hey, I want, I want security to stay

• 2:29:22Speaker 01

  in my house to make sure, you know, that it's taken care of and it's, of course, you have security people living in your house. So you feel pretty safe that nobody's coming in and doing anything to your

• 2:29:31Jocko Willink?

  Cause Doggy'll smoke them.

• 2:29:33Speaker 01

  That's right. We'll, we'll smoke you from a ways off. But I met Rick, we, you know, Rick was doing like a 60 day rotation that another person would come in for 60 days and, you know, just contractors back and forth. And during that time, you know, after about two years, you know, Rick came to me after having a conversation with Mike. Mike Trot is the

• 2:29:55Jocko Willink?

  He's the Air Force guy, right?

• 2:29:57Speaker 01

  He's the Air Force founder and Mike is really our managing principal of the business. And he's a, he's very hardworking, attention to detail, Mike and his wife Cheryl. And so Rick, Rick came to Mike and I and said, hey, I want to do a barrel of bourbon and pay tribute and honoring our men and women that we've all worked with. And it's in the shadows. Hadn't got the accolades that some, some of the people do, the operators and stuff. And I go, that sounds good. And he says, uh, yeah, I want to do a, you know, do a barrel, buy a bottle, simple bottle, slap a sticker on it, you know, a, you know, a label and

• 2:30:39Speaker 01

  sell it on Facebook. So Mike and I are looking at each other and go, well, Rick, you know, I don't, you know, there's lots of regulations with spirits, you know, brown water. And each state is different. So I said, that's, that's, you can't do that, right? Probably can't sell it on Facebook, number one. And number two, it's kind of a half ass approach of, you know, buy, buy just any bottle. So we kind of put our heads together and said, let's, uh, let's create a brand.

• 2:31:07Speaker 01

  So this was when it got very interesting and it was, a lot of homework was done, a lot of being on fire hose. So we reached out, Rick reached out to us several distilleries around our country. We got about 300 distilleries that produce bourbon in the United States. So he started calling and nobody would pick the phone up. So we were thinking, you know, this is, this is kind of tough right off the get-go, right? We're trying to communicate with people and they're not answering their phone or they're not getting back to us. So Rick finally made a phone call and this person called him back and this was Barstown Bourbon Company in Barstown, Kentucky. Barstown, Kentucky is considered the capital of bourbon, the creation, you know, where it started.

• 2:31:51Speaker 01

  So, so we took that, took that phone call and then we made a trip out to Louisville, Kentucky, because we were meeting with Savor Glass, which is the company that we purchased our bottles from. This particular bottle here is called a diamond bottle, it's a premium bottle, which means, see how thick it is at the bottom?

• 2:32:13Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:32:14Speaker 01

  So it's pretty, it's a, it's a really nice sturdy bottle, premium bottle, because it's got four sides to it, right? Four sides aligning with four branches, right? Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force.

• 2:32:25Jocko Willink?

  You didn't mention RJ, he's the Army guy.

• 2:32:28Speaker 01

  RJ Casey is our Army.

• 2:32:31Jocko Willink?

  Navy, RJ Casey is Army, Mike Trot is Air Force, and then Rick Franco, that's Marine Corps. You've got the four branches of the service.

• 2:32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, four branches of the service. And we're reaching out to Coast Guard and also Space Force because we don't want them to think that, you know, we're just about four branches. It just so happens that the four of us is friends who've worked together and our boots have crossed the same paths over in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across the Asia, you know, Pacific. It's four branches because that was the brand that we, we started to build, right? So with, with the walk on this was find a bottle, we, we found a bottle, then you go, okay, what's the label going to look like? We started out with a tree, with four branches coming out of the tree, kind of coming together like a spear, almost like a SOCOM spear.

• 2:33:21Speaker 01

  We kinda, we shit canned that and we're like, ah, you know, that's, that's, that doesn't, we didn't wanna, we didn't wanna have a eagle, you know, on the bottle. We don't want it to scream, you know, military, right? Because, uh, we look at it as, we wanna cast a larger net for customer base. We wanna, we're reaching out to all patriots of the United States, which is everybody that's got a, you know, that's, that's in the United States is a patriot, as far as I'm concerned. Um, so, uh, with the label, we, we went to a, another artist and we, we got, uh, we said, hey, we want a four, the number four on here, but we want that four to represent each one of the branches, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force. And what

• 2:34:06Speaker 01

  we did with it here, you can see at the bottom, we, we drew this line here, it looks kinda like a, a hill or a ridge line on a map, grid lines, that's the US Army. And it's the foundation of this four, because the US Army was the first founded, DOD service, right? Back in seventeen seventy-five. The centerpiece coming up in the middle here kinda looks like a, a Navy mast of a ship from a shoreline, or a submarine con coming out of the water. Yeah, it does. US Navy. US Navy was the second founded. Coming across horizontally, you got this horizontal piece that looks like a bayonet knife, or a sword. That's US Marine Corps, cause they're the leanest, and me, I, I tell Rick, I said, I'm gonna say this anyway, but Marine Corps is the leanest and meanest.

• 2:34:49Speaker 01

  We support the Marine Corps. Oh, you gotta support the Marine. Once a Marine, always Marine, right? So then the swoop up into the sky here with this four is Air Force, cause Air Force provides air power for, our air cover for all of us, right? Cover. And then you see it's got a black spear comes down in the middle to create the opening inside of four. And what that spear is, is half of it you can see, the piece that you can see is honoring our men and women who are still fighting for our freedom around the globe today. The piece that's missing is for our fallen. So, after all the thought that went into this, each piece of this, this bottle, whether it's a label, or whether it's the colors, and moving up, uh, to the neck here. A lot of thought in this, right? Because we're thinking, you know, we've got to put a bottle

• 2:35:33Speaker 01

  on the shelf that not only is going to catch the eye of someone, but also looks very clean, right? And doesn't scream military, because lots of people see four branches of things, what, four branches of a river, four branches of a creek, a tree. So they don't really tie it in until they see some of it. And this is like our neck tag on here that kind of shows, you know, this is a, and we're the, we're the first company in the spirit world, really, to have all four founders be four branches of the military, right? There are a lot of bourbons out there that are, you know, created by veterans, but it's a one-service type of deal, right? It's not all, all four branches like, like we are. And then the top, you see our label at the top's got four branches on it. And then below, it's got this ring

• 2:36:17Speaker 01

  here that has serve honorably and drink honorably. And we use that, you know, we've all served honorably. Everybody serves the community or whatever it is. We want you to serve honorably. We want bartenders to serve it honorably. And, and more importantly, we got, you know, drink honorably, not to replace drink responsibly, because that's been around for, you know, decades, right? So, but we still have issues with military personnel, veterans, suicide, 22 a day or up or down, whatever that, that number fluctuates around from time to time. Still a concern of ours. We don't want to say, hey, you know, we want you to buy our great bourbon, it tastes great, but we, we don't want you to drink it down to the bottom as fast as you can. We want, you know, instead of, instead

• 2:37:02Speaker 01

  of drinking to forget, the ethos of our company is, we don't want you to drink to forget. We want to start sipping to remember. And we always are going to remember our fallen. Not a day goes by that I don't remember one of my friends, one of my comrades that didn't come home. It's just there, right? It's with us. But, on the other hand, there's lots of victories in life that we should sip to remember. Our promotions, weddings, babies.

• 2:37:34Speaker 01

  Victories, right? We can't let the, you know, the negative stuff that's happened to us, you know, drag us down a certain path. We've got to stay positive. And, you know, when I do this with, with a cigar or just having a bourbon, I try to understand the process that it took to get this liquid in this bottle. And it's a long process and it's a, it's a beautiful, and you always hear, you know, trust the process, right? Whether you're shooting sporting clays, or whatever it is, jujitsu, trust the process, right? Because if you don't, you're going to start getting out of bounds and it's just not going to go well. So with this, with this bourbon, this juice, what we've done, instead of building a distillery, because for us to build a

• 2:38:18Speaker 01

  distillery, it would cost forty to two hundred some million dollars. There's already three hundred out there. So for us, we acquire, right? We resource. We go, we go out for sources. We've got, we've got people in the, in the bourbon business, whether they're, we got it, we got a, a really good friend of ours now that we built a relationship with for the last couple of years. His name's Jeff. Jeff is out of Nashville, Tennessee. He, he happens to be a bourbon broker. So what that means is, is Jeff has acquired hundreds, thousands of barrels, and he's sitting on them just like gold, right? Liquid gold. Every year, when this juice ages, the price goes up on that barrel. It's just like oil, right? A commodity. So-

• 2:39:01Jocko Willink?

  Does that happen indefinitely? Like, if it's sitting in a barrel, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, it goes up every year?

• 2:39:07Speaker 01

  It goes up, it goes up a little bit.

• 2:39:09Jocko Willink?

  Does it ever go bad?

• 2:39:11Speaker 01

  Well, there's, um, I'm probably not, uh, I think it does. I think after twenty, twenty-five years, you, the people, people who, and of course, you know, you're gonna have angels cut, right? Because the evaporation of that liquid after years and years and years, you may only have a quarter of that barrel left after sitting there for twenty-five years.

• 2:39:30Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:39:30Speaker 01

  Because that wood, that juice is going in and out of those, those, uh, American white oak saves, right? The saves in a barrel. And it's, it's getting that color from the wood, it's taking it out of the wood, right? Uh, and I'll talk about the charring of barrels and stuff and what that does, but- This juice here is, uh, the age statement on our juice is about six years old. Six years is really good, really good juice. Um, as we, we purchased about fifty some barrels from MGP. MGP is a distillery out of Indiana. We brought those fifty barrels down to Barstown Bourbon Company. Uh, and then we purchased, um, some, uh, some wheated barrels that was about seven years old and we got that from Wilderness Trail Distillery or Green River out of Kentucky.

• 2:40:15Speaker 01

  And we bring those two together at Barstown to blend. Now, we were very blessed by being at Barstown when we started putting our mash bill together. Your mash bill is basically your ingredients of what you're putting into the, um, to cook, right? Because you bring in the, the elements of it. You bring in your grains, you, you got, you got, uh, corn. Corn is where you get your sweetness from. And then you have rye. Rye is spicy, spiciness, right? From, from, uh, cinnamon to peppers. And then you have your malted barley. Malted barley is like oatmeal. You can put it in your mouth and chew on it and it flavorings like oatmeal. Smells really good aroma. And then you, and then we brought in wheat because we were talking with Steve Nally,

• 2:40:58Speaker 01

  who's a master distiller at Barstown Bourbon Company. He used to work with, uh, Makers Mark for thirty some years. So Steve's a Hall of Famer. So while we were in this room, it looks like a chemist's lab, and we were working with Dan, who's the master blender at, uh, Barstown. And Steve walked in, we thought he was just coming in just to shake our hands and meet us. He, he heard that there was four veterans there starting a business, a, a brand. So he just wanted to come up and say hello. We figured he'd come in the room, shake our hands and leave. He's busy. Uh, but he didn't. He's, he stayed with us. He goes, guys, he said, I heard your story. Um, I want to help you with this. I want to help you, you know, with the, with the mash bill.

• 2:41:40Speaker 01

  And he was the one who really said, uh, uh, four branches, four branches military, why don't you guys have four grains? Let's go with four grains. So we're looking at each other like, wow. Why didn't we think of that? Yeah, why didn't we think of that one, right? Um, so, so basically he said, let's, uh, he was talking to Dan, Dan's, he's the blender. He's over there having these little, he's got these little cups and he's blending this stuff up. And he says, put five percent wheat in, put five percent, that seven year old wheat we got, put that in there. He put that in there, we tasted it, we're like, ooh, boy, that's really good, right? So the guys were beating me up and they, they, they probably should because they mixed this thing, took them about 30 minutes or so to mix this 5% wheated that we were tasting.

• 2:42:22Speaker 01

  And I looked at it and they handed it to me and he said, and before that happened, he said, this is for all of you, but I want you to, and to give it to me, right? So Harold, try this. So I look at this little, it looks like about an ounce and a half or something, right? One, even two ounces, I don't think. So I took it and went, I dumped it back, right? And all the guys were looking at me going, what are you doing? You know, damn it, you know, Harold, you know, what, what, you just took the, you took the sample that we wanted to taste. And I'm like, I'm sorry, man. You know, it wasn't that much, you know? But anyway, they still give me a hard time about that. But we, we ended up staying in that room with Steve for about two hours and, and Steve, Steve said, hey, let's go 10% on the wheat, aged wheat, right? So we put the 10% in there. We're like, man, that's really

• 2:43:05Speaker 01

  good. It's got, it's got the sweetie notes to it. It's got vanilla. It's got caramel. It's got the spiciness of cinnamon and some peppers. It's got that oatmeal aroma, you know, of oatmeal, the, the barley. And, and the wheat really kind of rounds it off, right? So it kind of rounds it off and softens it. It's like butter, right? And that's what I refer to this juice. It is kind of like butter, but it's dangerous though, right? Cause it's 96 proof. And we, we toyed with that, right? We're working on that 80%. We started within a range of 80% proof or 120 some proof, right? And by the time we hit about 95, we're thinking, oh boy, that's about right. Because you know, if you get up into the higher, higher deal, it starts to taste like race car fuel. You know, it'll,

• 2:43:49Speaker 01

  it'll kick you in the butt. But it depends on if you can tolerate. If you can tolerate the higher alcohol proof, you know, some of it's really good juice. Uh, but this is 96. The reason we landed on 96 was, is in the military, you have 96 weekends, right? 96 hour? So when you get a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday off, that's a 96er.

• 2:44:08Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:44:09Speaker 01

  We like 96ers, right? We get to go home and relax. But so, so that's how it, that's how it all came about. We got some, a little more of our story on the back of the bottle talks about the age of the, of the juice and stuff. But, uh, boy, what a process this has been about three years, three, three and a half years into the making from the marketing standpoint. Uh, we've got a great marketing team down in Nashville, Tennessee, Double Diamond. They're really family and we got, we got the, the brokers to help us to acquire the right barrels. Not just any barrel, but the right barrel to, to meet our standards here with this four grain, six-year blend, age and being 96 proof.

• 2:44:54Speaker 01

  And we, I think they're running today. I think they're running a batch today to, to back it up, right? Cause you gotta have inventory. Yeah. When did you, when did you start really getting into bourbon?

• 2:45:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I had a, a bad experience with, with brown, brown liquid when I was in high school. I had, I drank about a fifth of it. It's not good. It took me about three days to pull out of that and, and I, I couldn't even smell it. It'd make me sick to smell it. But as I got older and especially my tour down in the Bahamas, working down there at the resort, we'd have Scotch, you know, we'd do Dew or Scotch and cigars. And then we started migrating over to bourbons and we were drinking some bourbons, Woodford Reserve and Basil Hayden, some of the other bourbons we'd get our hands on down there. And, uh, most of the guys had them on their yachts. So we'd go to, sit on the back of a yacht with one of the members and we'd have, have whatever they had, right? Angel's Zambi or whatever.

• 2:45:51Speaker 01

  So, a- and then I started learning the process of what it takes to make a barrel bourbon and, and what it, you know, what you're tasting when you pull this bourbon from a thief. You know, you stick the thief down in the, the, the hole, you know, the port hole, boom, pull it out and then taste that. And it's probably 120 proof, right? Because it's barrel strength. But understanding that the corn goes in for the sweetness, the rye is for the spice. Malty barley is like that oatmeal rum I was talking about and then the wheat kind of rounds everything off. And then when you drink it, you can taste those notes. Some, some pallets are different. You know, some people say, I didn't, I didn't taste. And then some people kind of shoot it. You know, you don't shoot that, right? You don't shoot bourbon.

• 2:46:35Speaker 01

  Just like you don't really shoot tequila, you know, because you know, we did, right? You just shoot tequila. You're trying to get it to the

• 2:46:43Jocko Willink?

  We shot everything, bro. Come on, doggy.

• 2:46:45Speaker 01

  You're trying to get it to the bloodstream ASAP. You're not waiting on it. You're not, well, we would be an IV in that stuff. But, um, but now the process is really interesting, you know, and bourbon, bourbon has rules to it, right? So to be a bourbon, you have to be at least 51% corn in your mash bill, in the ingredients, 51%. It has to be laid down, rested in, uh, American white oak barrels. You have to have a certain char and chars go by numbers, you know, that, that, that is when they, they stick the flames inside the barrel and they turn the barrel and they burn, they burn the barrel, right? They burn those oak saves.

• 2:47:23Speaker 01

  And what that does is, is I was thinking that that burned part of those saves inside the barrel when they toast, they toast it or either they char it. So if you, this is about a three char in this, but, but you would think that you would have a smoky taste or something like that, right? Like, you know, like scotches, you'd smoke like peat, but you don't. All that, all of that charcoal does, that black, when you burn those, that first layer or so of that quarter inch into the wood or whatever, that acts as a, a filter. A natural filter to filter the impurities out of the juice, out of the bourbon. And it, as it sits there for two, three, four years, five years, six years, whatever it is, the more that fluid moves in and out of those wood saves, and that's where you get your caramel, your vanilla, your, your, your color.

• 2:48:09Speaker 01

  See, this has got really good color to it, right? Uh, so it's six year juice, so it, it should have a good color. You get a little bit lighter than that, you get two, two year stuff and it's lighter, right? It's just not, it doesn't have the darker tones to it when you, when you look at the juice. But, uh, a lot goes into it, you know, from, from marketing to finding investors, uh, to then getting, we call liquid to lips. And that's when you go out into the stores, you go, and you call it on premise, off premise, right? On premise is where you can actually drink the juice where you're at, restaurants, bars, hotels, right? That's on premise accounts, they call it, and sales.

• 2:48:51Speaker 01

  Off premise is where you go to the liquor store, whether it's a liquor store, uh, mom and pop shop, or a chain liquor store in certain states. Or in control states like Virginia, it's all ABC stores. So that's off premise for us, right? And we're in Virginia, ABC store, about 205 stores. And you go to, you go to the liquor store, you pick up the bottle, you take it and you, you're moving off premise. You can't drink it at the store, but, uh, but unless I'm in there doing a tasting, then you can have liquid lips with this, with me.

• 2:49:20Jocko Willink?

  Right there in the store.

• 2:49:21Speaker 01

  And I tell the story, right?

• 2:49:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:23Speaker 01

  I tell the story. So I probably told this story, I don't know how many times, right? But the more you tell it, just like being an instructor, right?

• 2:49:30Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:49:30Speaker 01

  You're teaching.

• 2:49:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:31Speaker 01

  I just did one Friday before I came out here, uh, and I had a special agent, DEA agent came in and he said, tell me your story. And I told him the story, right? And he goes, he said, boy, you's really, he said, you, he says, uh, you own this? And I said, yes, sir. He said, you talk like you do. He said, because I didn't figure somebody they hired to do a tasting would know as much as you do. And I went, well, thank you for that, but, uh, that's what it takes, right? Attention to detail. And we chose purple on the top, uh, for joint. Since we're joint, you know, joint color is purple.

• 2:50:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:05Speaker 01

  Right? So we chose purple up there and plus you don't see purple on many American spirit bottles. You do see them Crown Royal, you know, Crown Royal has purple, but you don't see it. So that, that's just another factor we, we weighed in saying it's an eye catcher. You know, something, something different, right?

• 2:50:26Jocko Willink?

  And what's your, what's your experience been with light? Cause this is, as I'm sitting here thinking about, this is your first business, right?

• 2:50:32Speaker 01

  This, yeah, this is. This is my first business as far as being a founder.

• 2:50:37Jocko Willink?

  Lot of stuff going on in there.

• 2:50:39Speaker 01

  Being responsible for your investment monies.

• 2:50:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:43Speaker 01

  Um, understanding the, um, you know, profits and, you know, how much money does it take for marketing? How much money do we spend for meta ads? You know, uh, we pay a PR firm out of, uh, Phoenix, Arizona. But you know what? They've been, they've been hitting home runs for us. They got us on today's show this past Veterans Day. Our sales went, you know, ballistic.

• 2:51:07Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 2:51:07Speaker 01

  So we were on a nice little level and then all of a sudden boom, straight up. So we've been very blessed with the people we have around us. We have in our dugout, um, our panel, we got Nick. In Kentucky, we got Johnny, who lives in Dallas. Tim is, I think Tim's in Florida. And you know Jeff, of course, he's in Nashville. We got Angela, who does our marketing. And Claire is our PR person. But you know, it's just a team, you know, and we communicate. We try to over-communicate because you need to in this business. Because if you're not out there, you know, creating new customers,

• 2:51:45Speaker 01

  it ain't gonna sell itself, right? The distributors will put it on a shelf for you. They're not telling a doggy story, right? They're not talking about four branches. They'll say four branches of veteran on. And that'll get you for a little bit.

• 2:51:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:59Speaker 01

  You know, people really appreciate it. I think people in our country love veterans. But if it's, if it's, if it don't taste good, if this tasted like swamp water, we, we wouldn't see the sales that we have right now because we're putting quality juice in the bottle. And like I was saying earlier, it's like butter. It's really, it's really good. It's a good bourbon. We'll continue to do that. We had a LTO we released shortly ago. It's a Black Ops. Black Ops was a book written by Rick Perotto. Rick Perotto was a 10-year-old little boy down in Cuba when Castro started taking over. So basically Castro took his, his family's businesses, took his dad's coffee shop, his grocery store,

• 2:52:42Speaker 01

  his little, his little hardware store. And he said, now these belong to me. You work for me now. So they saw the writing on the wall. They got Rick out of country, flew him to Miami. On America was doing flights to get the kids out. So Rick went to Miami. Then he was moved to Denver, Colorado at an orphanage. And he lived in an orphanage out in Denver for about a year. And then his mom and dad made it to Miami and bought a home, started to get, got, got jobs. And then the first thing they did was sent for Rick, brought him home. Rick was growing up in Miami. Figured he's gonna get in trouble on the streets. He joined the Air Force and became a parajumper, pararescue man.

• 2:53:18Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 2:53:19Speaker 01

  He spent about 10 years as a pararescue guy. Then he was recruited by the CIA. He ran a lot of operations down in Honduras and Nicaragua. And he just retired, uh, I think it was last year after thirty two years of service. And we, we did the bottle for, you know, to pay tribute to him and his career. And the book and we sold the book and the bottle of Black Ops. Uh, and the Black Ops was a hundred proof and it was nine year old, nine year juice.

• 2:53:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:48Speaker 01

  It was awesome. It was, it was really awesome.

• 2:53:49Jocko Willink?

  How many bottles did you run of that?

• 2:53:51Speaker 01

  We ran a hundred and eighty three cases, I believe.

• 2:53:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, damn.

• 2:53:54Speaker 01

  We sold, so it's, it's, it's pretty much gone.

• 2:53:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was supposed to, you know, well, he was supposed to come on the podcast at some point. Rick Prado was, it's just, you know, this like, oh, it's all scheduling. Unfortunately, this, well, unfortunately, unfortunately, this isn't my like job. You know what I mean? I have a lot of other jobs. And so sometimes just getting synced up with somebody, but I'm sure we'll get it done at some point.

• 2:54:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:54:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, cause he's got a great story.

• 2:54:17Speaker 01

  Well, like I said earlier, I really appreciate this opportunity to be on here with you. Cause it took us a while.

• 2:54:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, I know. That's a great case in point. You and I, you and I linked up at the Free New York. Navy SEAL Foundation thing.

• 2:54:30Speaker 01

  Back in, I couldn't tell you when.

• 2:54:31Jocko Willink?

  Probably over a year ago.

• 2:54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:33Jocko Willink?

  And we, we swapped numbers and then it was like, oh yeah, let's do it. And then here we are, a year of something.

• 2:54:38Speaker 01

  That's right. Then I saw you, I saw you at the Army Navy game.

• 2:54:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 2:54:41Speaker 01

  Bout of time.

• 2:54:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:42Speaker 01

  That was my first ever Army Navy game.

• 2:54:44Jocko Willink?

  It was my second, well, maybe my third.

• 2:54:46Speaker 01

  That was, that was a bucket, that was a bucket list fricking check off. What a, what a experience. I mean, that, that was just beautiful.

• 2:54:53Jocko Willink?

  You know what's funny? I was in a car, cause I was out there for the Travis Manning Foundation. And dude's walking down the sidewalk and I'm sitting there and someone, you, I hear like, hey Jocko. And I didn't know who it was and it wasn't, cause you had sunglasses on, a hat. I couldn't really see you.

• 2:55:07Speaker 01

  And that was Rick, I think. Rick Franco said, hey, that's Jocko. And I go, you kidding me?

• 2:55:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then, and then I didn't know who you were. I go, hey, how you doing, man? Good, good to see you. And you go, what's up Jocko? And I was, as soon as I heard your voice, I was like, dog.

• 2:55:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was kind of a, it was pretty cool. And then, then I just call you, I'm calling you, trying to get this thing set up, man. It's just, you know, um, we're, we're busy, right? Everybody's busy trying to get stuff done. But, but you know, the, the bourbon thing is, um, you know, the business is another, uh, reason, you know, for me to be engaged, right? To have a purpose. It's, uh, and our purpose is to build a, build a badass brand, uh, and put good juice in the bottle. And then hopefully one day somebody will go, hey, I like this, I like the story, I like what you guys are doing. They come in and help us, right? Whether it's, uh, uh, it's just big investors that, that want to see us be successful and they, and they help us.

• 2:56:04Speaker 01

  They help us with the monies, of course, you know, that's, uh, on us, right? To, to build this brand where it's, um, it's attractive enough for somebody to be interested in, uh, partnering with us so we can blow it up a little bit. Because right now, it costs so much money to go into a market, right? We're in seven markets now. We're in Tennessee, Kentucky, Arizona, Florida, Virginia, DC, and Maryland. And we're really only starting to scratch the surface, right? So what our subject matter experts, our panel people tell us with all these years of, um, of brown, brown spirits, uh, experience, we're saying, hey, be careful not to, you know, you don't want to be an inch deep and a mile wide.

• 2:56:47Speaker 01

  Let's just take it easy, let's be methodical about where we want to grow. Florida, we, we got a, we, we just went into 50 some stores, ABC. So Florida's kind of a hybrid. They're controlled ABC stores, but they also have a lot of, uh, liquor stores that are privately owned. Virginia's just ABC. You don't move brown liquid and you got to go through ABC, right? But Florida's a multi-pronged type of deal. And we're into the NEXs and we, we're going into AFEs down there. So it's mainly monies to put boots on the ground, to help us with the liquid lips, you know, the tastings telling our story. And just, just re, you know, wash and redo, right?

• 2:57:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:28Speaker 01

  And just go, go, go. But it requires a lot of, a lot of traveling, a lot of thought. Because when we all four to get together, we want to go do bottle signings and, you know, uh, uh, and then we, we give back too. I mean, our give back was over $400,000. I mean, unbelievable. For a company, starting, you know, back in May of 23 until the end of calendar year 2024, we have raised over $400,000 and given back to 16 or so nonprofits.

• 2:57:58Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 2:57:59Speaker 01

  Organizations, right?

• 2:58:00Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:58:00Speaker 01

  We're trying to, to balance that because we're getting a lot of people reaching in now wanting to,

• 2:58:05Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:58:05Speaker 01

  They want to, they want to ride, ride with us and that's fine. But we have to figure out, we want to go four pillars. You know, let's give to four of our primary pillars, right? Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps.

• 2:58:15Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:58:16Speaker 01

  And then we find out these other organizations that are out there doing some incredible work, like Samaritan's Purse and, uh, Red Cross that are taking care of the, of the flood victims up in Western Carolina and the fire out here in California. We want to get, and we gave money to some organizations, I think they were firefighting, uh, organizations for that, right? So we're trying to really give back to our, our veteran communities and our, um,

• 2:58:42Speaker 01

  other, you know, organizations that are helping our communities and, you know, to give, give to them.

• 2:58:48Jocko Willink?

  We had a, we, we sent a truckload of, uh, Jocko Fuel up to the firefighters up in, uh, up in LA and.

• 2:58:55Speaker 01

  Sweet.

• 2:58:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was pretty awesome, Joe. They said, we sent them hydrate and we sent them, uh, energy, go. And pretty, pretty awesome that, that we were able to pull that off and a bunch of people like, uh, actually it was the, got a, uh, guys I'm making a movie with. So Chris Pratt and McG and Ben Everard and they live up there, right? They live up in the LA area. And so they hit me up like, hey, cause when we were making this movie, everyone's drinking this stuff, you know? So they're like, hey, we should get some of the stuff for the firefighters. So I talked to my team at Jocko Fuel and they jumped on it. And then our logistics partner sent it all out there for free, whole, you know, big giant was 21 pallets worth of stuff. It's a lot of stuff.

• 2:59:36Jocko Willink?

  It was gone, but it was great. Uh, Ben was up there filming like they're, they're firefighters just walking out with the stuff on their shoulders to take it out to the front lines. It was awesome.

• 2:59:44Speaker 01

  That is awesome. When you, when you can help, right?

• 2:59:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 2:59:48Speaker 01

  When you're successful and, and you can help, it really, it really matters. And it goes beyond us, right? And that's what we say with our give back is beyond the branches. And I was a part of a, I went up to Boston to do a, we had a bottle that we donated and a case. We had this beautiful wooden case built. I sent my trident up there. They put my trident in the box. So we had a ripstop cami shirt that was, that was placed, you know, we cut it, of course, and it was the backdrop and we had, it was John Connors, officer that was killed in Panama. Yeah, yeah. So a close friend of his, Tom, Tom is doing a fundraiser for John to erect a life-size statue up in his hometown. That's awesome.

• 3:00:29Speaker 01

  And we were a little part of that, but that bottle sold for $15,000. That bottle and that box went for $15,000. And I sold, I was down in Florida. We had 15 bottles. We had all the veterans there. We had these chefs from in town in Stewart, Florida. We had four chefs that came in for restaurants. And with each one of the chefs, they placed a military cook with them. A chef, military chef now, because you know, I think the military is trying to transition over to civilian sector jobs, right? Titles, right? And help them transition. So we had all those military chefs come over, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, Coast Guard, and they signed the bottles that were being auctioned off as a package. It

• 3:01:11Speaker 01

  was a $5,000 purchase, but your $5,000, you'll get a bottle of signed Four Branches bourbon by all those veterans that were there, plus a handmade knife. That was beautiful. And it went to children's scholarships. Yeah. And that was $75,000, just for that one evening. Man. So, you know, people, people are getting behind it. And, you know, is it, is it difficult? Because you know, you think the, if you go out to a liquor store, you see all the mini bottles of bourbon. So we're in a crowded space, right? But, you know, how do we stand out? How do we continue to?

• 3:01:52Speaker 01

  Be loyal, you know, and, and.

• 3:01:56Jocko Willink?

  Well, what it sounds like to me is Doggy's finally got something for you.

• 3:01:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:02:01Jocko Willink?

  Finally. He's got something for you. It's a little Four Branches Bourbon.

• 3:02:05Speaker 01

  And if you have some aches and pains and, you know, you just got knocked down, just, just go out and sit down and, you know, have you a cigar, be with a great friend or two or three, your wife or whoever it is and, and enjoy some of this bourbon. I would enjoy it neat, which is just in a glass. I, I use a small rock sometimes because you don't want to water down too much, but the water, the cold water and ice cube helps pop some of the flavors. That's good. It'd be, it'd be good.

• 3:02:34Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 3:02:35Speaker 01

  But no.

• 3:02:36Jocko Willink?

  And people can, can people get it online or is that not possible?

• 3:02:39Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. They can get it online through our DTC, which is, stands for, uh, direct to consumer. Uh, we shipped to about 32 states. So all you have to do is go to fourbranches.com, which is F O U R branches.com and you will see a little drop down window. You can say purchase near me or purchase and it'll take you right through, uh, what you need to, and they'll ship you a bottle right to your porch.

• 3:03:03Jocko Willink?

  And there it is. Doggy's got something for you.

• 3:03:07Speaker 01

  Right on, man. That's awesome. After all those years, I finally do have something for you.

• 3:03:12Jocko Willink?

  Does, uh, does that get us up speed? Is that where we're at? We're good?

• 3:03:16Speaker 01

  I think so, man. We're.

• 3:03:18Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, just, just so people can find you. So it's, it's, uh, you got fourbranches.com. You're on Facebook, Four Branches Bourbon. You're on Instagram, fourbranch, at fourbranchesbourbon. You got a YouTube channel, which I checked out some of these YouTube videos, uh, good, real, real, uh, good behind the scenes of how you guys put it together. That's, the YouTube is at fourbranchesbourbon. And then you have your own Instagram.

• 3:03:44Speaker 01

  I do.

• 3:03:45Jocko Willink?

  And your own Facebook.

• 3:03:46Speaker 01

  That's amazing, isn't it?

• 3:03:47Jocko Willink?

  Which is at Harold dot under down. So that's where people can find you.

• 3:03:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:03:54Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, you got any, uh, you got any questions?

• 3:03:56Speaker 02

  Quick question.

• 3:03:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:57Speaker 02

  So I know you had the special edition for this. Um, do you, uh, plan on, you know, how there's like different ages, you know, you got the 18 year and then, you know, the, the, like, what's your thoughts on that?

• 3:04:09Speaker 01

  Well, looking, looking forward, we just had our, our two day meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, where we talked about those, uh, Off the bow, right, off the bow, looking forward, you know, where are we headed? We're going to continue to drill down with this Founder's Blend. This is our, our one SKU that we have right now that are in the seven markets and in online sales. The LTOs will continue, that's the limited time offerings. We did the black ops now where you're thinking, this coming year, we have something for you. We got a little surprise for you. We're working on that project right now. We're looking at doing some barrel picks, doing some single barrel delivery. And we're working all that through DTC, our, our direct to consumer vendor.

• 3:04:52Speaker 01

  And also, we, we're looking at a different SKU. We're looking to bring the price down a little bit. The price on this Founder's Blend, this six-year-old juice is about eighty-nine ninety-nine. You can get ten dollars off sometimes in an NEX and APs is about seventy-eight forty-nine. But this is really great juice. We're looking at maybe coming out with another SKU that's going to bring the price down. So, we're gonna, we're gonna have it like enlistment or something, your entry. So, we're gonna get you on the entry level.

• 3:05:20Jocko Willink?

  The E1 beverages, the E2 beverages.

• 3:05:23Speaker 01

  That's right. We're gonna get you on the entry level.

• 3:05:25Jocko Willink?

  Recruit.

• 3:05:26Speaker 01

  And we want you to come on up to Founder. So, I'll have something for you.

• 3:05:31Jocko Willink?

  No matter what, no matter what pay grade you are.

• 3:05:34Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:05:34Jocko Willink?

  We got you covered. Then you have to come out with the Admiral's Blend. That's gonna be two hundred and thirty dollars. So, maybe that's fourteen years old over here.

• 3:05:41Speaker 01

  Did I, did I answer your question?

• 3:05:43Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Yeah, yeah, very much so, yeah. A lot of times when those numbers get higher, that's the more special a dish.

• 3:05:48Speaker 01

  Oh, well, it, it really is. Depending on the age statement, of course, and then, you know, if it's a Pappy or something like that, it can get, it can get really crazy expensive. But people, people don't, you know, people that like bourbon and they're, they're hunting for, and I didn't realize this, but there are so many collectors out there. I mean, people that don't drink, they don't drink at all, but they collect. They, they collect these special bottles and special bourbons. If they like it, they'll continue to do that.

• 3:06:18Jocko Willink?

  That's good to know.

• 3:06:19Speaker 01

  It is good to know.

• 3:06:19Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any football questions? Normally, he's got any football related.

• 3:06:23Speaker 02

  I, I think, you know, respectfully, I think like we have, we have different generations because you were talking about like the Hawk and all this stuff. I was like, bro, I never heard of the, the Hawk.

• 3:06:31Speaker 01

  The Hawk, yeah, Hawk position. Yeah. Well, the Hawk position was for me, when I played, is kind of like an outside linebacker. So, what I had to do is I had to break. Whatever they ran at us, I was basically going straight to the ball.

• 3:06:45Jocko Willink?

  The freaking hawk, man.

• 3:06:46Speaker 02

  Strong safety kinda?

• 3:06:48Speaker 01

  Strong safety.

• 3:06:49Speaker 02

  Okay, okay.

• 3:06:50Speaker 01

  So they wanted me to, and I would float, right?

• 3:06:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:06:52Speaker 01

  I would read the formation, wherever their split out would go, I would usually go to the split out side.

• 3:06:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:06:57Speaker 01

  More than likely they come that way, right?

• 3:06:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:06:59Speaker 01

  With their runs. And I was supposed to be the, you know, kinda like the breaker, the icebreaker.

• 3:07:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07:04Speaker 01

  And I felt it a lot too, cause I had a lot of, uh, birds twerping in my head sometimes. I'm like, boy, that wasn't smart.

• 3:07:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's probably just different terminology, cause yeah, strong safety is kinda, I mean, you're describing a strong safety essentially. Yeah, it's like, could be an outside linebacker, but could be a straight up safety, you know? So yeah, makes sense, makes sense, right on. Cool, yeah, no, no, that's the only thing I was wondering football wise.

• 3:07:27Speaker 01

  And a floater, right, I was floating around a little bit, so that was, that was good. Stop the run.

• 3:07:31Jocko Willink?

  Anything else, Echo? That's it, good to meet you, sir.

• 3:07:35Speaker 01

  Nice to meet you, Echo.

• 3:07:36Jocko Willink?

  Closing thoughts, brother?

• 3:07:38Speaker 01

  Well, uh, closing thoughts is, uh, my, my prayers go out and, and, um, to, to the people in North Carolina and to, uh, California for the devastation, the loss of homes and stuff, um, prayers would definitely be, uh, continue to go up with that. I pray for our government, you know, we just had a, uh, a change in administration. I just hope that people can be adults, um, they know that, um, we have a great country, but we have a lot of big decisions to make, you know, moving forward. We gotta square away our borders, we gotta make sure our economy can get on track. What does that look like? You know, because American people are, I think we're getting fatigued a little bit with the people pointing fingers at each other.

• 3:08:21Speaker 01

  We just need you to do your jobs, you know, before we have to come up and do it for you. You know, get some seals and firefighters and police officers will come up and run the place, right? But I don't wanna do that. I, I trust these men and women that we have in office. They love our country, they just need to.

• 3:08:38Speaker 02

  Quit the pointing fingers and let's just get, you know, take care of business, right?

• 3:08:42Jocko Willink?

  Take care of business so Doggy can drink some bourbon and smoke some cigars.

• 3:08:47Speaker 02

  So I can have something for you, but I really appreciate the time, Chaco.

• 3:08:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, man. It's awesome to see you, brother.

• 3:08:52Speaker 02

  And Echo, really appreciate it.

• 3:08:54Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, yeah, thanks for coming down. Thanks for joining us. Thanks to Lisa, man. It's so cool because when I saw you guys at that New York thing, I probably hadn't seen Lisa in 25 something years. And it was just like, it was like we were all on the beach in Guam again, just having a good time, hanging out. She's such a great, great woman. It's awesome to see that you guys stuck it out for all those years. And that she stuck by your side. It's awesome. And, uh, you know, thanks for your service to the country, to the Navy, to the teams. Um, thanks for pushing me in the right direction as a young new guy. Appreciate it. And thanks for continuing to represent the teams in a positive, in a positive light, man, and setting a great example for America and for Americans.

• 3:09:33Speaker 02

  And thanks to all of our service, men and women out there today that are protecting us. We really appreciate you.

• 3:09:38Jocko Willink?

  No doubt about it.

• 3:09:39Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 3:09:40Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Thanks, Doggy.

• 3:09:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. Thank you.

• 3:09:43Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Harold Doggy Underdown has left the building. Now, I'm not going to be able to judge things because I just, I just don't really like the taste of alcohol.

• 3:09:57Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:09:57Jocko Willink?

  You tasted the four branches.

• 3:09:59Speaker 02

  Four branches, yeah.

• 3:10:00Jocko Willink?

  What's the, what's the assessment?

• 3:10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was all, yeah, it was, it was all that he, uh, explained it to be. Here's the thing. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, both. I don't know. Two things can be true at the same time, by the way.

• 3:10:13Speaker 02

  Just be careful is what I'm saying. You could get yourself in trouble because yes, so like, okay, so there, there are weaker bourbons out there, many. That taste.

• 3:10:23Jocko Willink?

  Weaker, weaker in terms of alcohol content?

• 3:10:25Speaker 02

  Alcohol content, that have way more of like a burning edge to it, which is a bad thing, by the way, for tasting. And they're weaker and they have more of a burning edge to it. This has less of a burning edge to it and it's stronger. So you see how that can be a problem if you don't watch out. So I would say watch out, but yes, it does taste very good.

• 3:10:43Jocko Willink?

  And I'm like, can you taste like the notes?

• 3:10:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:46Jocko Willink?

  You can taste them.

• 3:10:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, fully.

• 3:10:47Jocko Willink?

  I think I'm one of those people that just doesn't have a good palate for tasting things.

• 3:10:50Speaker 02

  Okay, so did you know there's a technique to tasting shit?

• 3:10:55Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a technique.

• 3:10:56Jocko Willink?

  Well, okay, here's my technique. Open my mouth, put it in. That's what I do.

• 3:11:01Speaker 02

  Exactly right. So yeah, fully. Um, and you know, not to go too deep into it. It's like, you can't just pound it.

• 3:11:06Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like you're about to.

• 3:11:07Speaker 02

  But you can't just pound it. You gotta take a little bit. You gotta, you can do like certain thing. I don't explain, but you can do a certain thing with it, like in your mouth and then you swat and then you kind of breathe out with it. It's like a technique or whatever. And then that's when you can taste the most. But yes, certain people's palates are more refined than others for sure. But yes, I could taste.

• 3:11:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I mean, to me, this would, uh, there's no sense in me tasting it.

• 3:11:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:11:28Jocko Willink?

  Just because I won't be able to judge it. Number one, I can't even judge anything when it comes to taste, or at least I'm not that great at it.

• 3:11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. But you smelled it. Like that's a, that's a big part of it.

• 3:11:37Jocko Willink?

  It does, it does smell, even when I smelled it, I was like, oh, this smells, smells pretty good.

• 3:11:42Speaker 02

  A little something.

• 3:11:42Jocko Willink?

  You know, smells pretty good.

• 3:11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:11:44Jocko Willink?

  So there you go.

• 3:11:46Speaker 02

  Good work.

• 3:11:46Jocko Willink?

  The four branches, bourbon.

• 3:11:48Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 3:11:49Jocko Willink?

  If you want to get in on that. And you know what's another thing you're gonna need to get in on? Getting after it.

• 3:11:55Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:11:55Jocko Willink?

  You know, look, you're gonna drink some bourbon, you better be working out to make up for it. You also better get some clean fleet fuel in your system.

• 3:12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:12:03Jocko Willink?

  I recommend. Jocko Fuel. Hey, go to jockofuel.com, check out what we got going on there. We got, we got energy drinks, we got hydration, we got protein, we got time war. We got joint warfare, super, we got everything that you need to make you feel better. Make you healthier, make you stronger, make you faster, make you smarter. We got it. So go to jockofuel.com, check it all out. We're also in Walmart.

• 3:12:30Jocko Willink?

  We are in Wawa, we're in Vitamin Shop GNCs, Military Commissaries, Afees, Hannafords, Dash Stores down in Maryland, Wakeford Shop Right, HEB down in Texas. Yeah. Meyer up in the Midwest, Wegmans. Out on the East Coast, Harris Teeter on the East Coast, Publix, you know what Publix is? Publix is like the big, the big one down in the Southeast. So we just got into Publix, crushing it in Publix. So if you're down there, we appreciate it. Crushing it, just crushing it, making the good clean fuel and y'all are utilizing it. So thank you. Lifetime Fitness, we're in there, we're in Shields and we're in a bunch of small gyms. No matter what kind of gym you got, you got a Jiu Jitsu Academy, we're in there.

• 3:13:12Jocko Willink?

  We got a powerlifting gym, we're in there. No matter what you got, we're there. So if you're not there, you can email J F Sales at jockofuel.com and get it in there. Also, originusa.com, that's what we got going on. We got American made boots, jeans, hoodies, t-shirts, shorts, hunt gear, Jiu Jitsu gear, belts. Did you get your black belt yet?

• 3:13:40Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, the, no, I saw them though. I saw an email, you know, the emails come through and I see them all. I'm like, oh, bro, I need one of those.

• 3:13:48Jocko Willink?

  What should I do? Give me some advice, because you know, I got, I have one black belt that I've had since I got my black belt.

• 3:13:55Speaker 02

  I know.

• 3:13:55Jocko Willink?

  It's all ratty and old.

• 3:13:57Speaker 02

  I got you.

• 3:13:58Jocko Willink?

  But now I have a nice, beautiful, new Origin made in the USA, made by Origin belt, made by Jiu Jitsu people. It's a big difference.

• 3:14:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:14:08Jocko Willink?

  Like the people that made my original black belt, they weren't Jiu Jitsu, it wasn't a Jiu Jitsu person. It wasn't a Jiu Jitsu company.

• 3:14:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:14:15Jocko Willink?

  It was like, oh, we're a martial arts company. Who knows?

• 3:14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:14:18Jocko Willink?

  Let me know where it's from.

• 3:14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:14:21Jocko Willink?

  But. How do I make the transition?

• 3:14:23Speaker 02

  I got you.

• 3:14:24Jocko Willink?

  What do I do? What's your recommendation?

• 3:14:25Speaker 02

  So one is the functional belt and one is the media belt. So one is like it's it's built for use. It's this whole purpose of its existence. So when you're rolling gi, you use the used one because it's for you.

• 3:14:37Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna go opposite.

• 3:14:39Speaker 02

  Well, you could, but here's the only reason why. And at the end of the day, it's probably not a good idea. This is why, because that's what that one is originally for. It's the the original one. If it gets more worn out and ugly, it's kind of like boom, that's part of the gig. Any that's part of its purpose. See what I'm saying? Then this new one, the origin one, bro, let's face it. It looks good, looks way better, has the leather on the end, the other end. It has the origin. It's like, cool, you can use that hundred percent. Probably use it, but that's not comparatively. Or if you want to differentiate like its purposes, it's not what it's for.

• 3:15:06Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna throw this out there. I don't, I think you're wrong. Now that you've presented your case and the facts of your case, I must think you're wrong because I don't want a wall hanger. Okay?

• 3:15:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:15:16Jocko Willink?

  Have you, have you ever seen me? Hold on, let me get my media T-shirt out. Has that ever happened? Have you ever seen me? Hold on, let me get my media flip flops out for a picture?

• 3:15:25Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:15:25Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever seen that from me?

• 3:15:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:15:27Jocko Willink?

  Have I ever said, hold on, let me get my, uh, let me get the haircut going? Has that ever happened?

• 3:15:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:15:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:15:33Speaker 02

  But there's a lot of things that I've never seen you do, say, uh, you know, until you did them, said them and, you know, showed them.

• 3:15:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Well, I don't think I got a jujitsu belt that's made to wear around the gi so I can hang it on my wall or only wear it during the media shoots.

• 3:15:50Speaker 02

  That's up to you, bro. That's up to you.

• 3:15:52Jocko Willink?

  You know, you're wrong now. You know, as soon as I finished that last sentence, you're like, I'm wrong. You know, you're wrong.

• 3:15:56Speaker 02

  You're saying you should never do it because you've never done it? Is that what you're saying?

• 3:15:59Jocko Willink?

  I'm saying I have a jujitsu belt.

• 3:16:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:16:03Jocko Willink?

  That is made to wear on a jujitsu gi.

• 3:16:07Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:16:07Jocko Willink?

  That is made to do jujitsu in. And what you're telling me is I should take pictures only with that thing. You see, you're wrong.

• 3:16:13Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 3:16:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:16:14Speaker 02

  There's more to it. There's more to it.

• 3:16:16Jocko Willink?

  Credit, you helped me through the case.

• 3:16:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:16:18Jocko Willink?

  You helped me through the case. You helped me see the light by presenting an adverse scenario, which would be me going, hold on, photo shoot.

• 3:16:24Speaker 02

  It's not adverse.

• 3:16:25Jocko Willink?

  Let's do a media photo shoot.

• 3:16:27Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, look here. Okay, you're correct in that little like, but the bigger picture, I'm correct. Look, at the end of the day, that's the choice that only you can make, not me, for you. That doesn't make sense. See what I'm saying? Look, you probably, maybe you do, maybe you don't, I don't know, maybe you're different, maybe you're the same as all of us. But a lot of us have more than one gi, maybe more than two, maybe more than three.

• 3:16:48Jocko Willink?

  And guess what? You know how many of them are not being used for jujitsu?

• 3:16:51Speaker 02

  How many?

• 3:16:51Jocko Willink?

  None of them.

• 3:16:52Speaker 02

  Okay, well, some of us have a gi that's like, you know what, this is a good gi. Right, this is a good gi. It looks better when it's like sparkling new and it looks better in pictures. See what I'm saying? So it'll be like the media gi, not freaking, what do you call?

• 3:17:05Jocko Willink?

  Now, now, now, the truth comes out. Echo has a freaking media gi.

• 3:17:09Speaker 02

  I'm saying I do, I'm saying some of us do. When I say us, I mean us, the people. See what I'm saying? May or may not refer to me.

• 3:17:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:16Speaker 02

  See what I'm saying?

• 3:17:17Jocko Willink?

  If you're not like a four-time world jujitsu champion with gi, and you have a media gi, I question your scenario.

• 3:17:26Speaker 02

  First off, I'm not saying I have a media gi. I'm not saying I don't, but I'm just saying, I'm saying as a principle. You see what I'm saying?

• 3:17:32Jocko Willink?

  Like, it's not- I'm anti-media gi, I'm anti-media gi belt.

• 3:17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17:37Jocko Willink?

  Anti.

• 3:17:37Speaker 02

  So I guess at the end of the day, the question is, why is that? See what I'm saying? But hey, look, like I said, that's not my question. That's not my question, yep.

• 3:17:44Jocko Willink?

  What about a media kettlebell? You got like a nice, clean kettlebell for the media?

• 3:17:48Speaker 02

  It's different.

• 3:17:48Jocko Willink?

  Uh?

• 3:17:49Speaker 02

  It's different.

• 3:17:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:17:51Speaker 02

  But either way, hey, look, like I said, look, at the end of the day, here's my answer to your question. Thank you for asking, by the way.

• 3:17:58Speaker 02

  That's only a question you can answer.

• 3:17:59Jocko Willink?

  Yes, I just did.

• 3:18:02Jocko Willink?

  OriginUSA.com, get yourself a jujitsu belt. Get yourself a gi, get yourself whatever you need. Don't use it for media, don't use it for photo shoots. Use it to train, use it to hunt, use it to work. That's what we're doing. OriginUSA.com.

• 3:18:18Speaker 02

  I say use them for both. Use them to work, whatever, but bro, when the camera comes out, bruh, represent. You see what I'm saying?

• 3:18:24Jocko Willink?

  Dude, that's totally, that's totally different.

• 3:18:26Speaker 02

  That's all, yeah, that's all I'm saying.

• 3:18:27Jocko Willink?

  You're changing your tune. The tune just went from freaking country western to heavy metal like that.

• 3:18:32Speaker 02

  That's all I'm saying.

• 3:18:33Jocko Willink?

  You change the tune.

• 3:18:34Speaker 02

  Anyway, also, Jocko's store called Jocko Store. JacoStore.com, say, look, whether the camera's on, off, you're out in the wild, you had them at home by yourself, you in your home gym, or commercial gym.

• 3:18:49Speaker 02

  You want to represent when you're on the path. This is where you get your stuff, jocko store.com. Discipline equals freedom. Good. Stand by to get some, by the way. We just restocked that. A lot of people were hitting me up to stand by to get some, you know, some sizes off. Hey, boom, we're back. Also, we have these hoodies.

• 3:19:03Jocko Willink?

  Look at you just right on top of stuff.

• 3:19:07Speaker 02

  We've got these hoodies, Jocko. They're quick flip hoodies. They turn magically into a drawstring backpack. Yes, exactly right. We're out of a lot of those sizes. Boom, we back.

• 3:19:16Jocko Willink?

  We're back.

• 3:19:16Speaker 02

  We're back in the game.

• 3:19:17Jocko Willink?

  What do they say on those ones?

• 3:19:18Speaker 02

  Discipline equals freedom, of course, all day.

• 3:19:20Jocko Willink?

  Jack, I like it.

• 3:19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So anyway.

• 3:19:22Jocko Willink?

  What about those little like wind jackets?

• 3:19:24Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, the windbreaker ones. Those are, those, we're getting more of those in too. Some sizes are sold out, you know? Hey, look, we love them. We love them. But yeah, we're getting them back in. A lot of stuff on there. Go to jocko store.com.

• 3:19:38Jocko Willink?

  What about, if only you had a subscription thing.

• 3:19:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, different designs, like every month or something. Okay, okay, good. Good news. There's something called the Shirt Locker. Same thing, jocko store.com. There's another top right Shirt Locker. Boom, check it out. It's a subscription scenario, new designs every month. A little bit different from, from some of the main designs, but yeah, people seem to like them, so check that out as well.

• 3:20:02Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Also, primalbeef.com, coloradocraftbeef.com. You need steak in your life. You need steak. You need some beef jerky from Primal Beef. You need some meat sticks from Colorado Craft Beef. You need beef bacon, steak bacon. That's Colorado Craft Beef right there, dot com. Primalbeef.com, that's what you need. Go check those out. Great companies, great steaks, great people. Check those out. Get yourself the steak that you need. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also jocko underground.com. Also YouTube channels. There's one for Jocko Podcast. There's one for Jocko Podcast Clips.

• 3:20:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 3:20:40Jocko Willink?

  There's Jocko Fuel and there's Origin USA. So check those out. Psychological Warfare, you can get in on that. We got a bunch of books.

• 3:20:50Jocko Willink?

  I've written a bunch of books, so check them out. Leadership Strategy and Tactics.

• 3:20:56Jocko Willink?

  Final spin, Way the Warrior Kid, check out the kids books. You don't have to wait for the movie to come out. There's a movie coming out, by the way. It's already been filmed. It's wrapped. Yeah. All things wrapped, which is a big deal. Cause when you're making a movie, anything can go wrong. And now all of a sudden you don't get it wrapped. Yep. You see what I'm saying? Like, oh, you're making a movie. The funding gets cut. Oh, you're making a movie. Your, your star breaks his leg. You, oh, you're making a movie like the, there's fires in the set and like, you see what I'm saying? Yes. And these things are severe problems and maybe you never get that movie made. Yeah. Well, when you, the day you get it done, you're like, all right, we're done. This thing is gonna, is done. It's a huge, it's a huge step.

• 3:21:36Jocko Willink?

  So you don't have to wait for it though. We don't know when it's coming out, but until then we got a bunch of books, kids books. Way the Warrior Kid, one, two, and three, and four, and five. Check those out. Also, Mikey and the Dragons. Also, Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. We do have some seats left in San Diego for the muster, February 23rd through 25th. If you want to go get there quickly, go and register. We got some seats left. Go get in there. FTX Council, a bunch of events. If you want to come to one of our events, go to echelonfront.com or if you need

• 3:22:19Jocko Willink?

  help in your organization from a leadership perspective, go to echelonfront.com and we will handle it. We will help you handle it. We will teach you how to handle it. That's what we're doing. Also, we have online training, extremeownership.com. That is where we provide these skills through an online training program. So go to extremeownership.com and check that out. Also, if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families. Want to help Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org.

• 3:23:02Jocko Willink?

  Also check out heroesandhorses.org, Micah Fink up there in the mountains. And then Jimmy May's organization, beyondthebrotherhood.org. Check all those out. And if you want to connect with four branches and you want to connect with Doggy, the interwebs, fourbranches.com, Facebook, Four Branches Bourbon, Instagram, @fourbranchesbourbon, YouTube, @fourbranchesbourbon. And then Doggy, he's also there on Instagram and on the Facebook, @herald.underdown. And for us, you can check out jocko.com. You can also find me on social media. I'm at jocko willink and echoes at echo charles. Just be careful because there's an algorithm there.

• 3:23:45Jocko Willink?

  It'll try and ruin your life. Thanks once again to Harold Underdown, Doggy, for joining us tonight. Thanks for sharing your experiences, your lessons learned. Thanks for your service to the country and to the teams. And thanks to all our military personnel out there right now, keeping us safe, protecting our way of life. We are grateful for all of you. Also, the same for our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for keeping us safe here on the home front. And everyone else out there, Doggy ain't got nothing for you.

• 3:24:26Jocko Willink?

  No one does. Hey, listen, if you've got a problem, you're gonna have to fix it yourself. You have to solve your own problems. And in order to do that, what you gotta do is go out there and get after it. Until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.

• 3:25:11Jocko Willink?

  The.