206: THE STRESS EFFECT. Pt. 3 w SOG Leader, Dick Thompson. Why Smart Leaders Make Dumb Decisions.

0:00:00 - Opening 0:01:18 - Dick Thompson. SOG. The Stress Effect. 2:30:24 - Final Thoughts and take-aways. 2:33:43 - How to stay on THE PATH 3:09:04 - Closing Gratitude Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 206 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:09Jocko Willink?

  And back for a third time is Henry Dick Thompson. I have to throw Henry in there just to make sure when people look for your book, they'll be able to find it.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 0:22Jocko Willink?

  So Dick Thompson, SOG Warrior, was on Podcast 203 and 204. If you haven't listened to those, just go and listen to them immediately. And you'll realize the magnitude of the fact that this individual is sitting here alive, talking to me is just an absolute miracle. So go listen to 203, 204, where you can hear about Dick's experiences as a SOG team leader and team member in Vietnam.

• 0:56Jocko Willink?

  Where we left off was home from Vietnam and now checking in as a Ranger instructor, which for you was a great deal because you were going to have the opportunity to take the lessons you had learned, teach them to the Rangers, and also hone them for your own experience because you figured you were eight months away from going back to Vietnam.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yes, so this was my opportunity to get ready and so I could be more focused next time and I could do a better job.

• 1:29Jocko Willink?

  Now, when you said eight months, what is it, what was that based on? What was that, when you say I was probably going back over in eight months, what was that based on?

• 1:37Speaker 01

  At that time, that was about the turnaround rate. You come back from Vietnam, they give you a little time to recover and, you know, eight months or so, you're going to get orders to go back again.

• 1:50Jocko Willink?

  And you're now, did you make captain yet or are you still?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a captain.

• 1:54Jocko Willink?

  So now you made captain.

• 1:58Jocko Willink?

  You must be looking around at the guys that you deployed with and that you knew. I mean, you must be missing a lot of guys now. I mean, wounded, killed, or missing in action. This has got to be just a tremendous number for you.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  When I, when I look at the ones that, that I knew, that I consider teammates. I mean, we did things together. We knew each other. I have a list that I run for. Thirty-five names on it. Those are just the ones that I considered, you know, my personal friends and teammates. Now, at CNN, we lost a lot more people than that. I just, I didn't know them very well.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  But just the time I was there, you know, I got thirty-five names that I run for.

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  And you've got to have that in your back of your mind when you're training these young Rangers. You know what they're getting into, even if it's not SOG. You know, you want to prepare them to the best of your ability for what they're going to face.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I knew at that time, I mean, they were going to Vietnam. I mean, there was no, no doubt, especially if they made it through Ranger School.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  I mean, they were going. So the question for me was, in addition to the personal things that I wanted to do, like, you know, improve my skills, what could I do for these guys to help them have a higher chance of surviving once they get there? So I kind of made that my mission. So you got, you got the normal instruction from a Ranger instructor plus.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Then I added other things on it. And I said, you've got to do this, learn how to do this. This is how you talk. This is how you lead. So they got a lot of extra coaching and training whenever I led their group. And I just, I felt responsible, you know, to do that.

• 3:58Jocko Willink?

  What were some of the leadership principles that you focused on teaching the young Rangers?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Some of it was, you know, you've got to be accountable. These are your guys. You've got to be accountable. You've got to take responsibility. If you're gonna lead them, you got to make sure you know what you're doing. You gotta be physically fit, you gotta be mentally fit. You need to know the tactics, techniques. You need to enforce them, you need to encourage them, you need to build a team, you need to take care of them. You need to know everybody on your team. If you've got a platoon, you need to know everybody in the platoon. And at that time, the Army used to issue a little green notebook, pocket-sized notebook, hardback, that you put in your pocket.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  And, you know, I would tell them, "You need to have your people in here, you know, in peacetime. You need to know who they are, know something about them, so you can relate to them when they're having problems, and how to train them, you know, the best. Know what their weak areas are, how you can build them up, because you're accountable for them. They're your people. And you're the guy that's the leader. You need to be the first one out there. And, you know, for me, I'm not gonna ask you to do something I won't do. I'm not gonna go to you and say, "Hop out the door of the airplane here." If I'm not gonna do it, you know, I tend to do more of, "Follow me.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  You know, I'm going out there, I'm gonna do it too. And I'm gonna set the example for you. This is how I want you to do it." And so, trying to get that through to them, and trying to get through in terms of, think of yourself as a professional. Think about, you're a medical doctor. Every day, you should be reading, learning, studying, getting better. Every technique that you know, you should be trying to improve it. Every day is about practice. Whatever it is that you're doing, ask yourself, "Is there somebody else better than you?" Then you need to be practicing.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  You know, you gotta get as good as the best, because you wanna be that person. And you don't get there by just wishing, hoping. You gotta get out and take the action. Some of the things that you're gonna be doing, particularly if we think Ranger, Special Forces, SEAL.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  All that stuff's a mindset.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  It's a mindset. You gotta think like that. You can be in the greatest physical condition in the world, but if you don't have the mindset, you can't do it. And you guys are already seeing here in Ranger School, how many of your buddies have already dropped out? Now, when I went through Ranger School, we started out with 248 people. When we finished, we had 175 actually make it to the end of the course. Seventy-five of those got a Ranger down. The rest of them didn't. So there are only 75 Rangers, you know, produced. And it was mindset. It wasn't that they were bigger, stronger, faster. They had the mental capacity

• 7:17Speaker 01

  to keep going on one meal a day, three hours of sleep at night, keep pushing and still be able to think cognitively enough to put together a good tactical plan, communicate that plan, execute that plan.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  And it takes work. And you need to be the leader so people follow you. So, you know, whatever it is that I'm gonna do out there that I expect you to do, I wanna be doing it to the utmost of my ability. If you're gonna jump out of an airplane with a rope tied on to you to pull the parachute out, I'm going out from 30,000 feet halo. Yeah, and that's, that's what I do. If you have to have a landing zone the size of a football field to get into, I'll cut it down to a third of that and do it in the dark. You know, I want you to say, "It can be done better." And if you can beat me, more power to you. You know, 'cause now what you've done just told me I need to practice more.

• 8:17Jocko Willink?

  But you're gonna make a mark for it.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's the, the part that you said about being a professional and when I talk to young SEALs or young Marines or soldiers or airmen, sailors, whoever, you know, I always say, I always say, "You're a professional." And then I tell them, "This is your life. This right here is your life." Everything else is secondary to what you're doing right here. And you need to study, you need to learn, you need to read, you need to practice, you need to rehearse, and you need to do that all the time 'cause you're never gonna be good enough. And you need to make this right here your life.

• 8:55Jocko Willink?

  You got a couple other notes in here. One of them just says Staff Sergeant Shelley. What's that all about?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  When I, when I went to Ranger School in the mountain phase, there was an African-American Ranger instructor there. Called Sergeant Shelley. Hardcore. Hardcore dude. Rarely did he pass anyone on patrol. And I had him, he graded me one time and I passed. When I came back from Vietnam and went to the Ranger Department, I ended up in the mountains. He ended up on my team. So now I've got the famous Sergeant Shelley on my team. And I thought, man, this is cool.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  We, we go on a patrol where I'm grading the platoon leader, he's grading, grading the platoon sergeant.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  It's 18 degrees outside.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Shelley shows up. He's got his fatigue shirt on, but he's got his sleeves rolled up.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  I said, where's your parka?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  I don't have a parka. Where are your gloves? I don't need gloves. It's 18 degrees. And he said, okay. I'm fine. Hard dude. You know, and then we're out on patrol, the snow is almost knee deep. We're dragging the Rangers through it, they're tired, they're cold. And, you know, so I called the next patrol leader, uh, next person who's going to take over the, the platoon. And I said, all right Ranger,

• 10:39Speaker 01

  take out your map.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  And I want you to show me 10-digit coordinates to where we're standing right now, because you've got to know where you're starting from. And he kind of looks at me and I said, take your map out. I don't have a map, sir.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Why don't you have a map? He said, "Well, Sergeant Shelley took my map when we stopped back there and we had to go admin because of the guy getting a frostbite. He took my map. We didn't go ask Sergeant Shelley to give you your map back. Tell him you need it." "I can't do that." "Why not?" "Sir, he built a fire with my map." I said, "Okay, then you need to find somebody here that's gonna loan you a map. If you're gonna be the patrol leader, you gotta have a map." Back then, you could do a lot of things that, you know, you can't do now.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Sergeant Shelley would take onions, cut them in half, rub them all over them. He would eat garlic. He would take in some Kentucky Fried Chicken with him in a bag. And so when it was dark, and the Ranger students, you only had to feed them once every three days back then. If they forgot to call in resupplies, they didn't get any food. Or if they called in for resupplies and they didn't ask for food, they just got ammunition. So they were always hungry. And you get under a poncho at night, Sergeant Shelley would say, "All right Ranger, show me, show me where we are on the map." And the Ranger would start to point out where we were, and nobody under the poncho can breathe.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  You know, Shelley smells so bad, you're just taking their breath, their eyes are watering. And the guy starts to point to where they are on the map, and he drops his chicken leg on his finger. And he said, "Don't you touch that chicken leg. Don't you dare lick your finger. Now show me where you are." I mean, he'd do things like that to them all the time. And he was, he was very good, but he was very hard. And then as I started to develop a similar reputation, they would hear about it at Fort Benning, and when they got to the mountain phase, and Shelley and I would walk in to take over the patrol for the next 24 hours, and we'd introduce ourselves, you could see the looks on their faces. "Oh, no.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  One's bad enough, we got both of them at the same time. No one's gonna pass." But, uh, yeah. That, I mean, Shelley was a super guy, and really smart. And got another name down here, Bob Howard. Uh, Bob Howard, Medal of Honor winner. Um, he was SOG down at, um, Contum.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Wounded like thirteen times, eight Purple Hearts. Um, he was a, he was a tough guy. And he came up and flew a visual recon with us one, one time and, you know, I had already heard some things about him and I thought, man, I'm kinda nervous about getting in a helicopter with him because, I mean, he just draws bullets. I mean, you know, I, I'm sure he's gonna save most of us, but you know, I might not be one. He's a hard dude. And then, he came through Ranger School when I was an instructor. So I, I mean, I already. He came through Ranger School? Yeah. So you're an instructor?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  He came back from SOG, uh, and, uh, was coming through Ranger School, you know, and I ended up grading him. Uh, you know, so I, I mean, he, he did a, you know, a great job, but, um, he was, he was a hard dude. And then we went to the Infantry Officer Advanced Course. He was the, the company commander of my class. You know, so we were there for a year together like that.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  You know, he didn't believe in foul language. You're gonna clean your language up if you were in his organization. Did a lot of things. He, you know, he, he was promoted, um, to captain and retired as a full colonel. Ran the airborne school for a while. Uh, did all, did all kinds of things, but, you know, he, in eleven months, he was put in for the Medal of Honor three times.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Got it, got it once. I got, you know, DFCs for the other. Uh, a warrior. At one time he was, I think he was the most decorated person on active duty. And then, you know, after him, after, I mean, he, he got cancer and passed away and then I think, um,

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Bargewell kinda took over as the most decorated for a while. Wow. So hardcore SOG guy.

• 15:34Jocko Willink?

  So at what point did you decide this is going to be your career? Have you already decided that? Are you still thinking, well, I'll do another tour in Vietnam?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  No, I'm in.

• 15:43Jocko Willink?

  You're in.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  By the time I got through with SOG, I mean, what would I do if I got out?

• 15:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  You know, I want to go do some other things. In the interim, I'll do the Ranger stuff to get ready to come back. I'll do another tour here and then figure out, you know, where I go from SOG.

• 16:02Jocko Willink?

  So now, so now it's 1970.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Right. And...

• 16:08Jocko Willink?

  Are you seeing the war wind down yet or not really?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  It's still, still going pretty strong from where I am, you know, what I'm seeing. So I'm still expecting to get orders anytime and, you know, that happened. But before that happened, I got a call from Dick Meadows one day.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  And he said, "This is me.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  I can't tell you anything, except you're going to get orders. And you really want to do this. I need you." Click. So then I got orders to go somewhere on temporary duty. Another guy in the Ranger Department got it. And Meadows was in the Ranger Department at the time. And then he'd already been moved out on temporary duty for some reason. And then two more of us get orders like that. The Ranger Department Commander said, "What's going on? Somebody better tell me what's going on." And you started raising so much, you know, disturbance about not knowing what was going on that they canceled our orders, mine and the other guy, because of security.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  They didn't, they didn't want people asking questions about something might be going on. So, you know, several months later, that was the raid into North Vietnam, into San Tey, to, to the POW camp.

• 17:36Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  So, you know, I had been picked for that and, you know, just didn't get to go. Unbelievable mission. Probably one of the most successful missions we've ever had. Except no, no prisoners.

• 17:52Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  They had just been moved, but the training, the knowledge and stuff that came out of that and the way those guys trained, you know, having to build the POW camp every night in the darkness so they could practice on it because daytime the Russian satellites could see it. So you had to time all of that stuff.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  And then talking about practice. Once they figured out how they were gonna do the mission. They practiced the mission over a hundred and seventy times.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  And it took a long time to do a mission. So it was most of the night. And they were just, every day, every night, they'd go practice that mission. And, you know, training during the day with their skills. Everybody knew their job. I mean, one of the guys, when they landed in the compound, one of the guy's job was to take out a guard tower. And the helicopter was gonna land and he had a certain number of steps to run to, to get down behind a big tree that was there and use that as cover while he took out the guard tower. Helicopter lands, he runs over, gets down, needles down, starts firing, taking out the

• 19:08Speaker 01

  guards up there and then something says, hey dude, there's no tree here. Where's your tree? And look, it'd been cut down. But he was right where he was supposed to. If the tree had been there, he was in the right place. He'd rehearsed it so many times. And all the stuff was like that, you know? You got Dick Meadows out there doing his thing. So, anyway.

• 19:32Jocko Willink?

  Then, um. When, when did you get orders to go back?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Uh, about, I'd been there about eight months and, and I got orders to go back. I had actually signed out and was starting to go on leave. I was gonna get, you know, you get thirty day leave before you have to go.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  And then I got orders, revoking those orders.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Because at that time to be an instructor in the Ranger Department, you had to have combat experience. So, and they're running out of people with, particularly officers with combat experience because they're getting out.

• 20:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  So they put an operational hold on myself and I think about three or four other guys that said, nope, you're not going anywhere. You're gonna stay right where you are. Keep doing what you're doing.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  You know, so I was already set to go back to go to SOG, had everything set up. And then they said, no, you're gonna remain in place. So.

• 20:35Jocko Willink?

  So how long did you end up staying as a Ranger instructor?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  A little over three years. Yeah, a long time.

• 20:40Jocko Willink?

  And now you definitely are seeing the war wind down.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  I'm seeing the war wind down. I'm seeing the protest. I'm seeing a lot of different things now. But still, I'm very, you know, proud to be in the military, proud to be a Ranger and Special Forces and whatever. So I'm not thinking about getting out now.

• 21:02Jocko Willink?

  And, and you got married sometime around this timeframe?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  That deal was confirmed right after I got orders revoking the trip back to Vietnam. So, yeah, so I got married.

• 21:17Jocko Willink?

  The deal got confirmed. I like that.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, because what I had said was, it would probably be better, let me do the tour, and when I come back, you know, then we can get married, rather than, you know, something happening to me and you becoming a widow and all that kind of stuff. Let's, let's not do that. But, you know, once my orders were revoked, then, okay, now we can move forward. We'll go ahead and do it.

• 21:45Jocko Willink?

  And then your next tour was, went to Korea?

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Uh, yes. Well, I went to the advanced course down at Benning for a year and then went from there to Korea.

• 21:56Jocko Willink?

  What were you do, what, the, uh?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  The infantry officer advanced course.

• 21:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's to prepare you to be a company commander?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Uh, company commander or, yeah, really to start moving you up toward the next level. If you, if you're gonna get promoted, you know, you gotta go to the

• 22:10Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  advanced course. You know, and that's when Bob Howard was down there. There were some other people from SOG that I knew there.

• 22:19Jocko Willink?

  Was it interesting to see the guys, like the guys from SOG, the guys from Special Forces in there, now they're teaching the company commanders for infantry? What kind of, what kind of lessons were going back and forth from those two elements?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  You know, being there, I learned a lot about, you know, just the mechanized units and things like that, you know, because I, I'd never been in one. I'd been in, you know, some kind of special ops group. I didn't, I didn't understand about people outside of special ops. I didn't understand about someone that you could say, okay, we gotta get this accomplished this afternoon, Sergeant Jones. And this afternoon, I go, look, and it's not done. What? How could that happen? I mean, you tell a special ops guy, I mean, this needs to be done. It's done. I mean, it was a different mindset, different.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  I'm not trying to demean anybody that wasn't in special ops, but it's just a different mindset. So, getting used to that. When I got to Korea, I had, well, ahead of time, I had written a letter to the commanding general. I found out I was going to the 2nd Infantry Division and, and he was part of SF. So, I had written a letter to him and said, you know, I'm coming. I want to command a company, but I want to command a Ranger company. I think the 2nd Infantry Division could benefit from a provisional Ranger company. So, what I'd like to do is take over a company and let me convert it.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  And, you know, if anything happens with North Korea, I'm out there. You know, you put us in there first, I mean, we'll go do it. And they created a lot of controversy with the staff and other people that found out that I had written the commanding general a letter. In fact, in the battalion that I was assigned to, there was a couple of weeks there before I got to take over the company, the battalion commander brought me in, you know, right off the bat, and he said, "Let me tell you something, Thompson. You've never been in a real army unit. You won't last a month. You'll be relieved of your command within a month. You're a snake eater. You don't know how we do things, and you're not going

• 24:48Speaker 01

  to survive here. And I'm sorry that I'm not going to be here to see it, but, you know, I'm leaving Korea in about a week or so, but my replacement will see you." And I thought, "Yeah, that's a motivational way to greet a new guy coming in." Anyway, a company called Bunky Bravo became my company, and within a few days, we painted the wall of the building, you know, black and gold. It became Bravo Rangers. And we had a game there. It was called combat football. You had forty people on the field

• 25:33Speaker 01

  from each team with two balls in play at the time. So it's forty people per side? Yeah. So platoon strength. And you had ten substitutes that you could use. So before I took over, I went down and I got a new first sergeant. He and I came in at the same time. So I said, "Let's go down and watch them play this combat football game, see what's going on." So we go down. Bravo Company couldn't get enough people on the field to play the game. They had to forfeit the game because nobody would go out there, except, you know, half a dozen people. And I'm thinking, "What?" Why are they not going out there?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  And I told the first sergeant, I said, "Top, when we take over, things are going to change around here. This company is going to see the world differently." So, once we took over, we had a combat football game a couple of days later. So, took the company down to the field, and they're all standing there, and I walked out onto the field, and I faced them, and I said, "Okay, I'm number one. Top, where are you?" First sergeant went running out. And I said, "Okay, Top, you're number two. Where are my lieutenants?" "Lieutenants, get out here." "Okay, now we got some more players. Where are the NCOs? Why are there no NCOs out here? All the NCOs, get on the field."

• 27:00Speaker 01

  "Okay, Top, figure out how many spaces we have left in case some of the troops want to play." Boom, they were all out on the field wanting to play. I said, "Man, if all the officers and NCOs are going to play, you know, it's like we were talking about before. I'm not going to put you out on a game like that where you could break your leg or something if I'm afraid to go out there." You know, that's leadership. You get out there, follow me. I'll show you how to do it. I might not be the best player on the field, but I'm going to give it my best. Won the division championship twice while I was there.

• 27:34Jocko Willink?

  How did, uh, how did, two, two parts. When you took over Bunky Bravo, which I'm, I'm imagining is a pretty slack attitude for them, and, you know, sometimes people get the impression, "Oh, well, when you come in like that, you got to drop the hammer on everyone." How did you balance dropping the hammer to everyone, creating a distance between you and them, and actually, you know, and you just described one way that you did it, which is, "Hey, I'm going to be the first one out here. I'm going to, I'm going to lead from the front." Was there any other techniques as a leader that you utilized to turn that, to turn the, the, the folks that forfeited matches to the folks that win the championships two times?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  There were several things that happened, as you can imagine, with Bunky Bravo. There was a lot of drug uses, particularly marijuana. So, I was walking through the company area. About a week before I took over and I was walking by the barracks and I was, the window was open and I was listening and they were talking about this new guy coming in as company commander and they were talking about, you know, we have to get rid of him and they were talking to a Korean guy and they were talking about what's it gonna cost us to have something happen to him. So I hear that for a little bit and then all of a sudden I just

• 28:55Speaker 01

  kicked the door open and I step in and I said, you know, we haven't met yet. I'm Captain Thompson and I'm curious, do you have enough money to pay this guy to take me out because if he don't, let me loan you some money so he can try to do that. But you won't notice, you know, drugs are gonna be out of here. Everything's gonna change around here like that. So you get with the program, you're in good shape. You wanna use drugs, you're gonna have a real problem. And I'll fast forward just a little bit, but what I found was you could catch someone with marijuana and as a company commander, I could fine them. I could take

• 29:36Speaker 01

  their money, I could reduce their rank, but I know that had no meaning to them. So then I thought, what do they value the most? Their free time. So, you know, the guy gets caught with marijuana and he comes in and he says, how much is it gonna cost me, sir? I said, I don't want your money. And he's, what? I said, I don't want your money. But at seventeen hundred, you report here to the first sergeant. I said, look out my window. You see that big creek right next to the area here? Yes, sir. I said, you see all those rocks on the creek

• 30:17Speaker 01

  bank on the other side? He says, yes, sir. And I said, tomorrow they're gonna be back on this side. What you can't do that, I says you can. I can give you extra duty and that's what's gonna happen every night for a while. I can give you seven days of extra duty and you won't be going to the village. And the word spread like wildfire. He's a crazy man, you know? He doesn't want your money. He's gonna keep you here, moving rocks back into war. So, we started to get the drugs out, things like that. You know, we had the combat football. I was able to get extra helicopters. So we could, you know, they got to play with helicopters. They got to learn how to build rope bridges.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  We put on a demonstration for the president when he came over. Different things like that. And then one of the techniques.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Excuse me, this one won't show up. But I just want to give you an example of the power of motivation. Looks like I get in trouble here.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Company formation and I said, all right, you guys need to understand. You belong to Bravo Rangers. You're better than anybody else here. You can outperform them, you can outrun them, you can outdo whatever. This is a special company that you belong to and the rest of them don't. So, when I finish talking, I want you to report to the herd sergeant. And he's gonna issue you a Bravo Ranger card. And this card says that you are a member of Bravo Rangers. And you need to understand. If anyone in this company, including myself, catches you down in the village and says, "Show me your card."

• 32:06Speaker 01

  And you can't produce it, you're gonna buy everybody at that table a round of whatever they're drinking. And also understand, if you lose this thing, you have to come to me to get a new one. And explain to me how you, how you lost it. I won't, I won't say necessarily on. The podcast here, what it says on the back of this card, but I'll let you look at the back of it. They got so excited about those cards. That was the most valuable thing that they owned in the company.

• 32:45Jocko Willink?

  Well, the, I'll, I'll, I'll read one part of it. You've never lived until you've almost died. And until you fight for it, life has a special flavor that only a Ranger will ever know. Bravo Rangers. And then there's some various, there's some various special activities that the Bravo Rangers are, are capable of executing. And they're not all legal, I'll say. So that's, that's outstanding.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  But the, but the power, it hasn't happened to me for some time now. But in the nineties, I mean, and I was in Korea in the seventies, in the nineties, I'd be walking through the Atlanta airport and a guy would say, hey, sir, you know, and I'm, you know, Sergeant Jones or whoever. And he'd introduce himself and the next thing out of his mouth was, you got your card? And he would have his card. I mean, it was amazing how many people I would run into over the years. And one of the first things they would say, you got your card? I got mine. They were still carrying these cards. That's why it's in here. First thing

• 34:01Speaker 01

  they're gonna do is ask me about it.

• 34:02Jocko Willink?

  That, you know, I'm a, a big, I don't know what the right word is, but I learned a lot from David Hackworth, from Colonel David Hackworth. And one of the things that he did was rename the hopeless battalion in, in Vietnam that he took over into the hardcore. And like when I took over for Task Unit Bravo at SEAL Team Three as the Task Unit Commander, I immediately changed the name to Task Unit Bruiser instead. Same exact idea. And I've, I got a great email recently from a guy that had changed the name of his, his, he's at a big construction company and they had his team, changed the name of his team and it like changed the attitude and all of a sudden they started completing projects and just

• 34:45Jocko Willink?

  that, that little element. And there's a part, an important part to it. Is you can't just change the name and expect like, oh, now everything's different. That's an element of it. Right. You have to do the other things. You have to say, oh, we're going to work hard. We're going to fight hard. We're going to, we're going to win this championship. We're going to, we're going to be the best here. You can't just change the name and expect that to happen. You're going to have to do work behind it. You know, pride comes from, pride comes from struggle and, and overcoming struggle. That's what pride comes from. So when people ask me, how do you develop pride in a team? Cool. You want to develop pride in a team? You make them do hard stuff, hard training, go through, you know, even with military units that have battle streamers, that's, that's the pride that they've carried for 50 years,

• 35:28Jocko Willink?

  a hundred years since they did whatever, you know, thing in World War I or World War II or Korea or Vietnam. That's something that that unit achieved and that gives them pride. So you can't just change the name and expect, oh, cool. I changed the name. Now I'm good to go. No, you need to change the name and then you need to give them something to be proud of, which means some kind of struggle to get through, some kind of pain to get through that not only does it give them the sense of achievement, it also brings them together. Right. Because when you, when you, that shared suffering that you go through, whether it's boot camp or airborne school or special forces selection or a hard training mission, all those things, what they do is bring you together. And the ultimate form of that is, is combat, you know, which is why you can, you can go

• 36:11Jocko Willink?

  through a, be a member of, of a guy that was in SOG and you reach out to Tilt, you guys never met before and all of a sudden, hey, yep, we'll, we'll meet up at some point and you can move forward. You guys have that camaraderie because of what that unit achieved and the struggles that you went through. So, uh, the other question I want to ask is with, when it relates to going, how do you keep that in check at least, well, from your perspective for you? Cause now all of a sudden you got guys that are walking around with their chess boat out and you start getting professional jealousy from the other company commanders and they're going to try and make you look bad and they're talking behind your, how, how did you contend with that kind of thing? And keeping your guys from becoming arrogant, which is a possibility.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  It's a real issue, a big issue. And it also happens internally. So, uh, we're, we're out on, on a range practicing and, and we were out there for a week. And all of a sudden, the first sergeant says, "Sir, you need to come with me. We got a little issue going on out here." And there was a little bank that had a road on it, and there was a little road, you know, thirty, forty feet below. Third platoon was coming down the road, first platoon was going the other way. Third platoon made some little comment to first platoon, and a hail of rocks came down. You know, and you know, we had to go break up a rock fight because they were so pumped

• 37:37Speaker 01

  and, "No, you're not better than that. You can't call this name." "Oh gee." You know, "All right, guys. These are your own people." Yeah. The enemy's outside the wire. Yeah. And you can be fired up, but, you know, and other company commanders, even in other battalion commanders were upset because the general, I mean, I'd been there maybe, well, a week, and all of a sudden, I mean, in command, and all of a sudden, the siren goes off. And the siren is, "Deploy to your battle positions." And you don't know if it's real or not, it's just deploy.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  So I run back down to my, you know, my headquarters, and the first sergeant's there, and I say, "Okay, what's up?" And he said, "You know, you got to deploy to the battle positions. I think you need to go to battalion commander's office and find out which battle plan we're implementing. Don't worry about the company. I know we have to be out the front gate in two hours. We'll be there. You go find out where we're going and what we're gonna have to do. I'll make sure we get everybody here, and we load up everything and take it with us." So I go get it, and I come back, and we're in the head of a whole battalion.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  So we're gonna lead the whole brigade out of Camp Hove to where the battle position is. And... Just as we start to move, a jeep runs over my, my radio operator's foot, breaks his foot, so I gotta throw him in the, in the ambulance. But we go and, and we get, you know, late at night, we get up on a mountain in the, in the area that we're supposed to defend, and we have to dig in, dig fighting positions and everything. It's just getting daylight. I got everybody dug in and they're putting in firing stakes, aiming stakes and all that. And I hear this whoop, whoop, whoop, and a helicopter pops up, sets down on a ridge.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  This guy gets out and all I can see are those stars on his, and he comes, comes over and, you know, I'm saluting and he says, you know, "Captain Thompson, I, I wanna see your fighting positions." So he walks around the ridge and we talk about him and he's asking me, "Why did you put this in here? Why is it oriented like this?" He asked the soldiers in the fighting positions some questions here and there. And, you know, it takes about thirty minutes and he comes back, he gets in his helicopter and he leaves. And I said, "Wow, I wasn't expecting the division commander to show up all of a sudden." It, it wasn't twenty minutes. Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. Here's the helicopter back up there again.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  He gets off, his boss, a three-star, steps out with him and he comes to me and he says, "I want you to take us around. I want you to show him your battle positions." So, and they get in the helicopter and leave. And I was here. I mean, he's ranting and raving to the whole division about how great, you know, Bravo Company looked and all this stuff and patting the battalion commander on the back and throwing my name out. And then he starts showing up, uh, at least once a week at my mess hall. The division commander walks into my old company mess hall to eat breakfast on a regular basis. And, you know, and he talks, we talk about the things I've got the company doing and what I need them to do.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Uh, and you start to share that. I said, you know, you get the company together, you say, "Why do you think the division commander comes down here?" Does he go to other people's mouth or something? No. He's coming to Bravo Company. Look around you. What do you guys do? I mean, you're ferocious at combat football. Combat football is his thing. He invented it. And you guys are animals out there and he loves it. And we, we won, you know, best tactical platoon in a contest that was had. I, I called Private Jones up and I said, look, Jones won third place in the, the division Christmas card drawing contest. Third place, guys. Out of about 10,000 people in the division, he got third place.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  I mean, it doesn't matter what we do. You guys are winners. We can do it. We, we just keep this up. And, you know, so there's just constantly having things to, to do. And like I said, we won the football championship twice. We won the taekwondo championship. You know, I was a player coach on, on our team. We won the champion taekwondo championship in the division. And just all kinds of things because they were so pumped up and they do whatever you point them at. And they, it was like, they couldn't lose except, you know, you had to put up with the people who were jealous. Because he was standing with us all the time.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  And then, you know, they sent us to, they sent us to, to be the immediate reaction force for the nuclear sites. You had to rotate, they had to rotate people through there. Uh, so you're on 30 minutes notice to deploy to wherever, whatever nuclear site might be under attack. So I walked in and we're, we're looking around and I'm looking at the battle plans. And I'm saying, you know, this, this is pretty cool. You know, I mean, maybe they'll activate us and we'll have to go do something.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  I said, you know, I would feel better. If I could see the live ammunition that we have for the mission.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Well, you can't see it. It's, you know, it's got, it's in, they're in foot lockers. The magazines are locked up. They have steel bands around them. Um, you, you can't really see it. I said, get a pair of ball colors. I want to see it. Open those boxes up. Nobody had opened one of those boxes in 10 years. The magazines were rusty. The ammunition wouldn't feed out of it. Created a major stir when I reported that we needed new ammunition because it wasn't functional. A few days later, I said, you know, we've got a battle plan here that says we're supposed to fly into this LZ up here in support around this nuclear site.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  I said, get a helicopter, get some choppers. Let's load up the first battalion. I want to make that insertion. You couldn't land. Trees had grown up since that plan was written. There was no LZ there. You know, so I reported that and battalion commander said, Thompson, back off. Try not to find anything. Just back off. You got me in so much trouble. I said, it's not trouble. I mean, what if we had to do something?

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Anyway, that's, it's a lot of.

• 44:32Jocko Willink?

  Well, all those are awesome leadership lessons. And then after that, you go back to brag and emergency deployment readiness, exercise, evaluation for special forces and Rangers. So you're like an evaluator at this point?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, all the special forces and Rangers, you know, came under the 18th Airborne Corps. The division commander from Korea is now the 18th Airborne Corps commander.

• 45:02Jocko Willink?

  So did he call you out by name and bring you back there?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he, he had me brought there to do special projects and things. So, um, and one of them was you got to be on this team. I want somebody that knows about special ops that can deploy. You know, so I would show up at a Ranger Battalion Headquarters at two o'clock in the morning, hand the CQ a, a paper classified document that says, uh, wheels up in two hours.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  And, you know, kind of get out of the way because that place was going to come alive. And then I would go with them, I'd, you know, be one of the evaluators. If they put in a halo team, I would jump with the halo team and evaluate them. We'd take them on classified missions sometimes. There's a lot of things that, you know, we would do with them that I just ate up because, you know, it was all special ops stuff. So I got to do that. That was a lot of fun. And, you know, the sniper team came under us, sniper, all the sniper training at Fort Bragg, that was under us. So I could go out and play with the snipers and, you know, shoot and improve my skills.

• 46:15Jocko Willink?

  And so what are you at this point? At this point, are you a major?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Excuse me.

• 46:18Jocko Willink?

  Are you still?

• 46:19Speaker 01

  No, I'm still a captain.

• 46:21Jocko Willink?

  And then what about the next time that Dick Meadows called you up? Circa 1978?

• 46:28Speaker 01

  He actually showed up at my house.

• 46:31Jocko Willink?

  Okay. One better.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  I, I, I have several people like that, that if they called or they showed up at my house, my wife was not happy because she knew they were there for one reason. They were something they wanted me to do that she was not going to want me to do. So Metta shows up, I didn't know it was coming, you know, pulls up in my driveway. I was outside and I saw him. So we go talk and he said, I need you. Said, we're putting together a special group. I need you to come in and be part of my cadre to help set this thing up and also evaluate

• 47:15Speaker 01

  and train the people and be an operator in this group when we get it set up.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  And he said, "I really can't tell you any more than that. It's you the guy I want." And I said, "Does it mean right now?" And he said, "Yeah." And I said, "My wife is pregnant with a third child. I just sold my house here. I just bought a house in Athens, Georgia. I just got accepted into the doctoral program in the University of Georgia." And named off a bunch of things like that. And I said, "I can't just stop this process right here." And he was not happy. And, you know, his final comment to me was, "You hung up your guns."

• 48:09Speaker 01

  And I said, "I haven't hung up my guns. I just, I need to delay it for about, you know, two years. And I can come back and do anything you want." He said, "No, I need you right now." And that was the last time we had a face-to-face encounter.

• 48:26Jocko Willink?

  That was it?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  And the group he was setting up was Delta.

• 48:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you said that was the last time he ever asked you to go anywhere with him?

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:40Jocko Willink?

  That's crazy. Now, what had made you want to go to college? And what were you going to study?

• 48:48Speaker 01

  You asked me early on about going to OCS and only having a year and a half of college. When I left the Second Infantry Division as a captain and, you know, came back to the States, I was assured. Secondary's on promotion. I was going to make major way before any of the other captains in my year group and stuff. It was a done deal. Promotion list came out and I wasn't on it.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Which is not bad because many people, only a few people get a secondary. But I was not. So when I called Milperson and at DC and said, "What happened?" And he said, "Well, you know, you were not considered. Why not?" He said, "You know, first thing we did was we went through all the records and divided you into two piles. College degree, not a college degree. You don't have a college degree. You were not eligible. You wasn't even looked at beyond that." So that irritated me, you know, I said, "Look at my performance. Nobody's outperforming me and all this stuff."

• 50:04Speaker 01

  So then eventually I talked to him and I said-

• 50:07Jocko Willink?

  You wasted all your luck staying alive in combat.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess I did. And I said, "You know, okay, then I'll go to school at night and I'll finish this degree." So I did. And then once I finished this degree, then I got a call from them saying, "How would you like to go get a master's degree?"

• 50:29Speaker 01

  I said, "You wouldn't let me get an undergraduate, but now you want to send me for a master's." And I said, "Okay, I'm interested in that." My plan was, "Why do I want a master's? Let me find a school that has an ROTC program, that I could get a follow-on assignment to you after I finish the master's program." So what I do is I enroll in a PhD program, complete the master's along the way. You know, I'll have a two-year or more assignment with ROTC. I'll be able to finish out the doctorate. So the next time you want to ask about education, you know, I'll have it.

• 51:10Jocko Willink?

  You can call me Doctor Major.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  That's right. You know, so here I come. Like I said before, you know, if you're going to do it, you do it. You practice, you do whatever you have to do. You take the lead.

• 51:22Jocko Willink?

  And what did you get your doctorate in?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Psychology. So, you know, I think we talked before about, I started out in chemistry. And I found myself on the battlefield, leading men in combat.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  And I was kinda looking around and thinking, I need to learn how to motivate people. I need to understand the psychology of motivation, the psychology of people. Human nature. Yeah, if I'm gonna be a leader, I need to learn about that, not chemistry. So when I went back to school, I went back to school with psychology so I could learn how to do that stuff with them. And in reality, I think I've gone full circle. And now I understand it's the chemicals and things in your brain just driving all this other stuff. If you deal with those, there's a lot you can do. But, you know, I got to do a lot of things.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  I helped put together the Air-Land Battle of 2000, how we're gonna do war fighting in the 21st century. I got to do all kinds of research on sleep, on stress. How are we gonna fight? Because we were predicting, in the 80s, we were predicting the next ground war was gonna be 100 hours straight, you know, before there was any break. So how are you going to keep people awake that long and keep them effective, perform the mission? How are you gonna create high-performing leaders, high-performing battle staffs, high-performing teams? What does that mean? So I got to go all over the place, you know, meet really smart people, I learn from them,

• 53:05Speaker 01

  and work on projects like that, do research like that, a lot of which was, you know, used in some in the Falklands, because I worked with the British Army staff on, and, you know, the head general at the time there said, "We're not doing that. They're just gonna stay awake." I said, "They can't stay awake, not that long." So there's some things you have to do, but he discovered that in the Falklands. You have to do some things to keep them going. And then, you know, the Gulf War, the ground phase was 100 hours. My brother, you know, Butch, helicopter pilot, or Apache pilot.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  He didn't get out of the aircraft. He would come in to refuel, they would feed him. You know, while the aircraft's rearming, refueling, and send him right back out. Uh, and, you know, using, you know, some different things to, excuse me, keep him awake. So, anyway.

• 54:05Jocko Willink?

  So then, you, was the, was the Command and General Staff College, was that your final tour?

• 54:11Speaker 01

  No, um, that was one where, you know, my luck had run out. So when I finished, I was going back to, to a regular unit. And then they realized that I was the only infantry officer in the class that had a PhD.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  And the, the general out there, the commandant, said, "You're not going anywhere. You're staying here to work with me on this airland battle stuff. I, I need somebody that thinks like you do and has the combat experience and everything to work on this with me." You know, so they kept me there for four years, counting the, the year I was in school. Uh, and then they called me up and said, "How would you like to be the professor of military science at the University of Georgia?" So, you go back, and I said, "Why are you calling me? Why, where's this coming from?" And they said, "Well, actually, the university is turning down everybody we send. Every applicant to be the professor of military science.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  They're finding a reason not to, uh, not to accept him. But they can't do that to you. You've had an ROTC assignment there. You've been the XO of the department. Uh, you got a PhD, a master's and PhD from there. You know, academically, you've got everything that's, and so your name's all, all this stuff. And he says, "They'll have to take you." And I think, oh, okay, I'll try that. So they took me and I, you know, just finished up there because I had started high performing systems kindly on the side. It's just something to play with, but it started growing so fast and you know, you can't have an engagement

• 56:00Speaker 01

  with a client and then the general decides, I need you at Fort Bragg for a meeting on Monday morning. And you can't do that. I mean, you can't turn the clients down if you want to keep them. So now I'm having a conflict. So I decided, you know, 21 years, that's enough. I'll get out and go do the company because I've set the company up to be able to do the kinds of things I like to do. I mean, I don't get to shoot at people, but they don't get to shoot at me either.

• 56:29Jocko Willink?

  Which is also nice.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, but at that time, outdoor training was a big deal. Ropes courses and all that kind of propelled it. Throw in the bribe patch. I mean, I can do that stuff in my sleep and I enjoy doing it. You know, so we had executives jumping off cliffs and going down rivers and rafts and all this stuff. That played out, you know, toward the end of the nineties, people started saying, been there, done that. I want something different. So, you know, we changed up a little bit.

• 57:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So somewhere along the way, you wrote, you wrote this book, The Stress Effect.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:07Jocko Willink?

  Which, which I read and definitely has some, some, some really good information in it. And I wanted to hit some of the information that you put in there, just to kind of give people a feel for the book. I'm not going to do as much of a detailed as, well, as I would do with, with like the document that we read about rest and recuperation on the last podcast, but you know, just to give people some feel for what you're, what this book contains. So I'm coming out of here, out of the gate, researchers Shelley Kirkpatrick and Edwin Locke state, it is unequivocally clear that leaders are not like other people.

• 57:47Jocko Willink?

  Leaders do not have to be great men or women by being intellectual geniuses or omniscient prophets to succeed, but they do need to have the right stuff. And this stuff is not equally present in all people. So this is interesting because you're saying something that a lot of people don't want to hear.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:08Jocko Willink?

  Which is, hey, There are certain leadership traits that you may or may not be born with. And that's the reality of the situation. Now, I talk about this a lot too, and I actually say the same thing. And I have this description that I used in saying that, you know, you're going to get different capabilities that you have as a human being. And what you can do as a leader is if you have an area of weakness, if you're smart, you'll bring people onto your leadership team that complement your areas of weakness. But you can only do that if you have the humility to admit that, hey, I'm not that great at planning, or hey, I'm not that great at paperwork, or hey, I'm not that good at talking to the troops. Whatever areas of weakness you have, if you can admit to them and bring people onto your team that can complement that and say, hey, you know what?

• 58:54Jocko Willink?

  I'm not great talking to the troops. Dick, you know, can you get out there and deliver the work? And you go, yeah, I got it. And that's fine, as long as I can admit it. But if I won't admit it, and my ego's in the way, and even though I'm not good at communicating with the troops, I decide I'm the one that has to get up there and do it, and I bumble around and leave them walking away, not feeling confident about it. That's bad. So this, this idea right here that we all get, you know, you're going to get some qualities, but you're going to be missing some too. And so that's something we all have to admit.

• 59:29Jocko Willink?

  You go here, you talk about learned ability, which includes job knowledge, skills and experiences, critical component of leadership and decision making. Selecting a former GE executive just because she was an employee of GE to run a hospital corporation or a publishing company does not make sense. Just because someone worked for an organization without, with an outstanding reputation doesn't necessarily mean that individual will become, will become an outstanding leader who makes outstanding decisions, especially if she does not have the learned ability for that role, level and industry. This is not to say that high performing leaders can't successfully switch organizations and assume higher roles. However, it's not a given. Right. Important point there.

• 1:00:15Jocko Willink?

  I have a company where we place veterans into organizations. And a lot of times, people think, oh, well, the person has veteran experience, so they're going to be 100% good to go. And as much as I would love to say that, you can't say that. That's why we do a screening process and we actually train them to for that transition. But this is the same thing. People, just because people are from an organization like, you know, GE has that reputation for their leadership. But that doesn't mean that that person is necessarily a good leader. And you have to be careful of that. Um, and, and, and this section here.

• 1:00:55Jocko Willink?

  I have to say was, I found very interesting. Individual leader complexity, find the person who can do the work. And so you get into this topic here, simply put, leader complexity refers to a leader's ability to handle the acquire, the requirements of his or her job. Depending on the size and type of an organization, a leader's job is often enormously complex. Two factors determine ability to work at a particular level of, of complexity. Learned and innate abilities. So once again, you're talking about innate abilities, meaning that people have limitations. Right.

• 1:01:35Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, my big point to that, or my, my, my thoughts around that. Is the people that really have problems aren't the people that don't realize that they have limited, that they have limited innate capabilities, which means everyone, we all have things that we're not good at. The people that can't admit that are going to have real problems. Now you get into this, all leaders have limitations to what they can learn and how far up the leadership ladder they can climb. Innate ability as it pertains to leadership consists of four major factors. Cognitive ability, emotional intelligence, motivation and personality. And this is the most, this, this is the section that I really was.

• 1:02:18Jocko Willink?

  Very interested in because I work with a lot of different leaders all the time because I have a consulting company too, and we work with leaders all the time. So this topic here of cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is how a leader processes, organizes, stores and retrieves information, thus determining how she creates the world she lives in, makes sense of it and acts on it. Cognitive ability is a key determinant of a leader's ability to be successful at different organizational role levels. Unlike learned skills, cognitive ability is not trainable. It is a hardwired ability that unfolds through a natural maturation process across one's

• 1:03:03Jocko Willink?

  lifespan. A leader's cognitive ability determines how she approaches problem solving, decision making and interpersonal interactions. Let's look at the general characteristics of cognitive ability going from high to low. So now we start talking about the actual person that has high cognitive ability. And this is interesting and we may have to come back to this one, that it's not trainable. That's an interesting statement because I would think, and I've seen people get better at, you know, coming up with simple solutions and dealing with stress. So maybe that doesn't fall, those things don't fall quite in the category of cognitive

• 1:03:48Jocko Willink?

  ability. But here's what you say about the higher, the higher leader's cognitive ability is, the lower the need for consistency in the information being processed. This is a very important thing, right? I'm going to read it again. The higher a leader's cognitive ability level is, the lower the need for consistency in the information being processed. What that means to me is, and this is very, very prudent on the battlefield, is like you're not going to get consistent information out there. And if that bothers you, if you can't wrap your mind around different pieces of information coming in that are contradictory to one another, you're going to have a problem making a decision. That's what you're saying right there.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Yes. You, you need to be able to hold on.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Have contradicting thoughts, ideas, concepts, information in your mind, both of them at the same time, and still function. And they, you know, they're opposites of each other, but you can still deal with that. It's not going to stop you from moving forward. And you'll find a way to use that information to fit in with what you're trying to do.

• 1:05:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the hopes that I have in going through this with a little bit of detail is that people recognize this. People recognize what we're saying, I wrote, one of the books I wrote is called The Dichotomy of Leadership, and it's, it's about this idea that you as a leader are going to have different forces pulling you in opposite directions. And you need to learn how to balance those different opposing forces with just about every trait that we have. That's what you need to be able to do. So I hope when people hear this, that they say to themselves, oh, I get wrapped around the axle if, if two different pieces of information are opposing each other. This is really important.

• 1:05:41Jocko Willink?

  I hope that even though it's not trainable, I hope that you can actually, when people get recognition of it, they can go, oh, you know what? I know what's happening right now. I'm hearing two different pieces of information and my tendency is just to want to focus on one or ignore them both. But I don't make a decision where I, what I need to do is think about how both these things are actually true or possibly true. Or you go on, and this is a great example, consider the question, do cell phones cause brain cancer?

• 1:06:12Jocko Willink?

  You can find as many studies that say it does as it does not. At lower cognitive ability levels, most people would find the inconsistency in the research confusing. Their response would be, there must be a right answer. The low cognitive ability leader may choose to ignore the data altogether or pick the data that support her position. So there you go. Classic example, hey, look, there's got to be a right answer. We need to know what the real deal is. When, as you know, you can Google, and right now you can Google anything and you can get supporting data for any hypotheses that you have.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:57Jocko Willink?

  And if you have low cognitive ability, whichever one you think is right, that's where you'll pull all that data to back yourself up.

• 1:07:05Jocko Willink?

  It says this, "In contrast, the high cognitive ability leader understands that there is no single answer and tends to look at the implications of cellphone use in the organization, or how to put in safeguards just in case the phones do cause cancer. She does not let the inconsistency prevent her from making a larger decision in which cellphones play a role." So you can still function, as you said. Almost any topic contains some level of data inconsistency. What financial markets are going to do in the future? When the construction industry will rebound? Which airlines will survive?

• 1:07:47Jocko Willink?

  And whether we need more FA22 Raptors? Which is currently the world's most advanced fighter? The key is that high cognitive ability leaders rise above the level of inconsistency and make decisions. They're not waiting for everything to be perfect.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  And I would just add to that. There's a level of cognitive ability that you get to where you realize there is no single right answer for anything. Therefore, any answer that you choose, any solution that you choose, will have a downside. At some point in the future, there will be unintended consequences for whatever you choose now. So, in a lot of cases, with the people who can think forward, they're looking at which unintended consequences am I willing to accept? You know, at some point?

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  If I have enough time between now and then to begin to put in something that may, you know, counter that. I know they're coming. It's gonna happen. But I'm gonna make a decision, we're gonna move forward. It's worse not to make a decision, because that's an unintended consequence too.

• 1:09:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there'll be unintended consequences for no action.

• 1:09:09Jocko Willink?

  You go on here, "Leaders with lower levels of cognitive ability are constrained by the information they receive. Information must be consistent for them to make sense of it. High cognitive ability leaders, by contrast, rely on themselves to provide missing information, look for more novel information, and search across more domains to find information." Which is interesting, "Search across more domains," that means there's a problem over here that's in a certain arena, and a high cognitive thinker will look at that arena and go, "You know what, that reminds me of this other arena." And I can apply this and overlay it to this arena that I'm looking at right now, and further my decision-making process.

• 1:09:54Jocko Willink?

  Add color to it.

• 1:10:00Jocko Willink?

  The greater, they show, and this is again, the high cognitive ability leaders, they show greater certainty in judging inconsistent information, and are more focused on long-term strategies than low cognitive ability leaders are. The low cognitive ability leaders are looking at the short-term game.

• 1:10:19Jocko Willink?

  "The leader with high cognitive abilities uses multiple dimensions when processing information. These multi-dimensional, this multi-dimensional approach creates a high probability that the leader will match some facet of herself with a facet of another person during interpersonal interactions. This leader is more inclined toward assimilation of information about herself than a leader with lower cognitive ability is. Thus, leaders with high cognitive ability show a propensity for receiving feedback. They seek out information about themselves, are open to feedback, and assimilate this information into knowledge about themselves." This goes back to me talking about being a humble person.

• 1:11:02Jocko Willink?

  If you're a humble person, you can take feedback and you can put it into your world. And the other, the part that I found interesting about this is that the high probability...

• 1:11:14Jocko Willink?

  The high cognitive leader will match some facet of herself with the facet of the other person. So when they're, when, when I'm having a discussion with you and you're, you're, you have a different perspective that, or you're opposing me, you're arguing with me, instead of me saying, no, you're wrong, I, I will look at you and say, oh, what's, where are they getting that perspective? Oh, I see where he's getting that perspective from. That actually makes sense because he's on the front lines and he's doing this. Oh, okay. So I actually will put some facet, I will match some facet of myself to you so that I understand your perspective better. With this expanded knowledge and confidence, they can more easily find some aspect of others with which they can connect. And this connection

• 1:11:57Jocko Willink?

  allows them to gain more feedback and knowledge. Again, one of my things that I talk about all the time is just humility and how leaders have to be humble. And which is actually one of the cool things that you said about Barzwell, and we never talked about it, but you said, you know, hey, he was really tough, he was super smart, and he was humble. Those are, those are the qualities you called out. And, and that's what this represents to me. You continue here. A leader with high cognitive ability perceives herself as being more complex than the average individual. In a decision-making situation, she might delay longer and submit a more complicated decision. Now, when I originally, originally read that right there,

• 1:12:39Jocko Willink?

  I had a problem with it. Because, because one of the mantras, age-old mantras of leadership, combat leadership for sure, is simplicity, right? You've got to keep things simple. So I'm going to come back to that one. Because my immediate reaction to it was, wait a second, I don't know if I agree with that, because we're talking about this person with a high cognitive ability that's coming up with a more complicated decision. But I'll get back to it here. Her interpersonal reactions, interactions tend to result in greater perceived similarities between herself and more senior people. She may perceive differences between herself and others more accurately than a leader with lower cognitive abilities does. This complex internal structure results in a greater perception of the external environmental

• 1:13:24Jocko Willink?

  structure, which can manifest in interpersonal conflict.

• 1:13:30Jocko Willink?

  So again, we have someone that can, that can sense what someone else's perspective is. And this is where I come back to the, um, the simple thing. The high cognitive ability leader recognizes when she is communicating with others who are at a lower or higher level cognitive ability. When talking to a lower cognitive ability leader, she recognizes that person's simpler language structure, linear thought process, and shorter term focus, and will understand that the lower cognitive ability leader might not get what she's saying. So what that tells me, you take that one step further.

• 1:14:10Jocko Willink?

  What a really good, high cognitive ability leader will do is take the complex answer and simplify it down so that this lower cognitive ability leader can actually understand it. So even though it might be a more complicated decision, the lower cognitive leader below me doesn't need to know that. They're going to get the simplified version that they can grasp and make sense to them, and then move forward. Continuing on, when she is talking to someone of equal or higher cognitive ability, she may find that the conversation moves faster and is more enjoyable and stimulating. Low cognitive ability leaders tend to use fewer dimensions when processing stimuli,

• 1:14:51Jocko Willink?

  resulting in fewer and less complex information domains and a lower probability of matching some facet of themselves with that of another person. And again, see, this is, this is why I think it's important to, to talk about this because if you can't relate to other people, if you're having a hard time talking to people up the chain of command, talking to people down the chain of command, talking to your peers, if you're saying, oh, they don't get it. They don't understand. How can they think that way? If you're thinking that, if that's going through your mind, that's a little red flag

• 1:15:32Jocko Willink?

  that you are, that's, it's, it's a, it's a little symbol or a sign of low cognitive ability.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  You're the one that's not getting it.

• 1:15:40Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  They don't understand.

• 1:15:42Jocko Willink?

  So when you get there, instead of continuing to point the finger outward, take a look at yourself. And recognize the fact that there's, you need to try and find some common ground with other people. And the fact that you can't find common ground with other people is a sign that you have low cognitive ability. And that's a problem. So I'm hoping, again, I know this can't be trained, but I'm hoping that when you become aware of it, you say, oh, that's me. That's me. And this is the worst part about this whole section. The worst part about this whole section is this. What I'm hoping for is that the people with low cognitive ability will recognize that

• 1:16:27Jocko Willink?

  this is about them, right? This is about me, okay? I tend to do this sometimes. I, I can't connect with other people. I can't see their perspective. You know what? That's, that's my, that's me. That's on me. That's what I'm hoping people say. Unfortunately, people with low cognitive ability have a much lower chance of actually being able to recognize this. So that's the problem. It's a catch 22.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:16:59Jocko Willink?

  Continuing. They tend to contrast themselves with others that are, and are less open to feedback. Another great point. If you're not humble and you're not, again, I use the word humble. If you're not open to people telling you, hey, you know what? You could do this better. That is an actual sign of low cognitive ability. I hate to break the news to you. The next one. In their interpersonal interactions, they tend to perceive themselves as being more similar to their peers and less similar to their superiors. They are predisposed to be more rigid and concrete in their thinking. This is another, this is something that you can recognize in yourself. This is something I can recognize in myself.

• 1:17:44Jocko Willink?

  When I'm going, no, we gotta do it this way. No, this is the way it's gotta be. That's an indication to me that I am tending towards low cognitive ability. And what I need to do is open my mind and try some new things, accept some new ideas. Otherwise, I'm putting myself on report for being a low cognitive thinker.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Let me, let me share one thing. If you're a high cognitive ability person, if you become angry, the tendency is for you to start to drop in levels in terms of your response right now, the interaction right now, the more angry you get, the more you drop way really low. And when you hear people arguing, very often, you know, if they're angry, very often, they both drop way down here. And that's where, where the problem is, we gotta get you back up. And you hear it all the time in, in meetings and between people, and you just listen to what they're focused on. Listen to the timeframe that they're focused on.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  Listen to the concreteness of what they're focused on. And, you know, you can, you can figure out where they are. Now, how can we elevate? If you and I are having this conversation, and I'm down here and I'm really, I've dug my heels in, you're just, you're just wrong, Jaco. There's something wrong with you. If you can't see my point here. If I'm dug in down here, we're not gonna, we're not gonna be able to resolve this.

• 1:19:24Jocko Willink?

  Yep. I, I just had a discussion like this with a client. It's like, the best thing I can do when you say, "I don't like this. I don't like your plan, Jaco." The best thing I can do isn't, "Well, that's because you don't understand it." The best thing I can say, "Well, hey, can you, can you give me some feedback on what it is you don't like about my plan?" Because now, instead of you digging your heels in and looking how you're gonna strike me, you're, you're actually looking to formulate a legitimate answer to a legitimate question. And by the way, when you ask that question, I'm not just asking you this question so I can trick you. No, I'm legitimately asking for feedback because maybe you know something that I don't know, or maybe you see something that I don't see.

• 1:20:06Jocko Willink?

  So I immediately get us to start moving up that ladder again instead of down, where when you say, "I don't like your plan," I say, "That's because you're too dumb to understand it."

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:18Jocko Willink?

  Where's that conversation going?

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  You just dropped all the way down. Yeah.

• 1:20:22Jocko Willink?

  You continue on here. The accuracy of their predictions, this is again, low cognitive. The accuracy of their predictions about others is directly proportional to the amount of information they have about others. Their concreteness filters out more aspects of the external environment structure, particularly when they're under stress. Low cognitive ability leaders tend to have a relatively narrow set of interests and knowledge domains, although they may have an in-depth knowledge in a few areas. Consequently, they look for others who share one or more of their interests. Unlike the high cognitive ability leader, they do not have a broad range of areas of

• 1:21:04Jocko Willink?

  expertise they can use to connect with others. The bottom line is that leaders with, and what that tells me is, hey, you know, I need to get outside my zone, right? Cool. I like jujitsu and I like war, but if that's the only people I hang around with, I'm not expanding my horizons. So I need to go and play in a band and draw and write and hang out with people that are doing those other things as well. The bottom line is that leaders with high cognitive ability are able to possess greater amounts of information and operate more successfully in complex environments with

• 1:21:47Jocko Willink?

  a higher level of inconsistency and ambiguity than can leaders with low cognitive ability. As they rise to higher roles, role levels in an organization, the problems they face become more complex and ambiguous. These leaders with high cognitive ability tend to perform well at upper organizational echelons. So true. I mean, you can think about just the difference in any, any job, right? Your frontline troops is concerned with, you know, this part of the manufacturing line. It's relatively, it's not a complex thing. And then the more higher up you get in the organization, the more complex decisions are being made and whatnot.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  And the, the good thing is, when we think about cognitive ability, is there's a place for everyone. You have a real need for everyone. Someone has to do that day-to-day, hour-to-hour work and be happy with it. Be good, be happy, and go home at the end of the day saying, yes, I knocked that out of the park.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Above them, you need somebody with a little bit more that's really good at that level. And you know, so getting the right person into the right role level at the right time. Because if we think about cognitive ability for a lot of people is continuing to change. So there's like a growth curve that you can see, it'll flatten out someplace. But as long as they're growing, they can take on higher and higher role levels.

• 1:23:20Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  As they cross those different thresholds. Eventually, they're going to hit a point where, I mean, this is it.

• 1:23:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  They need to be happy here because if you move them up to the next one, they're going to fail.

• 1:23:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and what I've seen with people is there's a certain spot where they go, yeah, this is where I'm at. And I'm comfortable in this area, not comfortable in a bad way of like, oh, in my comfort zone. But you start to move them outside that cognitive ability level and all of a sudden they're stressed.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:50Jocko Willink?

  Because they're trying to make decisions on inconsistent information and it's too much. And you know what? That's like you just said, that's actually good because now we know what the limitations are. And now you can focus on this cognitive ability level where you excel at. Because by the way, you get somebody with really good cognitive ability and you put them in a job that doesn't require as much, well, now they're going to be bored. And you use a term in this book, which I had never actually heard before. It's not burnout, it's the opposite of burnout, it's called rust out. So that's all good. And like I said, we work with all kinds of organizations. And the other interesting point I got to make is the cognitive ability doesn't measure your intelligence.

• 1:24:34Jocko Willink?

  It measures a bunch of different things that, and just like some people are more articulate and some people are taller and some people are shorter, like this is one of those things where it's some components combined together. And you could have somebody that went to an Ivy League school, and I know I got to see this in the SEAL teams. People that went to Ivy League schools, they scored super high on whatever IQ tests there are. Their cognitive ability is not high because they can't look at complex things. They get wrapped around minutia or whatever the case may be. So this is a really interesting thing. I would like to think, and maybe it's just because I'm a...

• 1:25:16Jocko Willink?

  Positive thinking person, I would like to think that if a person has humility and they say, you know what, when I hear that my, that, that when I hear it being described that having concrete ideas probably means that my cognitive abilities are a little lower, maybe I need to open my mind up a little bit. And maybe they can. I know that I saw leaders, and I still see leaders, I know for a fact, I see leaders get better, become better leaders and, and be able to look at complex things and, and start to understand that information doesn't need to be perfect. And even if I look at myself, when I was, when I first got to the SEAL teams and I

• 1:26:00Jocko Willink?

  was a new guy, I couldn't look at a complex problem immediately and go, oh, okay, you know what, oh, that, these two pieces of information are kind of different, but I can make a, a sound decision that will make sense right now and we can make some adaptations later. Got it. No, I would have been looking for, hey, what's, is this right or is that right? I don't know which one, okay, I gotta move forward with it. So I think that, that idea that you can improve it is a positive thing, even though, I don't know, does that mean it's trainable?

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  What happens is I, I'm growing and I cross a threshold, um, and I don't realize it. I don't realize that I have more ability all of a sudden, because it, it's like a stair step. It jumps up, it goes along, it jumps up, and when it makes that jump, I might not realize it initially, and so I might need a coach. I might need you to come in and work with me to help me start to use this, this increased ability that I have. Because I don't, I don't realize how to do it. So, you know, we work with leaders a lot, uh, helping them be able to take advantage of the abilities that they have. Because a lot of times, they don't know it.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  They don't know they can handle more ambiguity, they can think further into the future, because in their job... They're not allowed to.

• 1:27:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  You're in a role level where they, they keep pulling you back down to here, even though you have a lot more ability. So, one of the things that, that we're looking at with people in an organization is, are you working at your potential?

• 1:27:34Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Do you have unused potential? That if we could help you to start to use it, you raise the whole bar for the organization. Performance level for the organization goes up. You know, because now you're operating closer to your full potential than you were before. So...

• 1:27:52Jocko Willink?

  We were doing immediate action drills. I was task unit commander, the platoon commander. My two, two platoon commanders were Seth and Leif. Leif wrote the books with me. Seth was the other platoon commander, the delta platoon commander. And you know the deal with immediate action drills. There's a, there's a standard operating procedure. There's a place where you're gonna go on a peel left, on a peel right, on a center peel, on a flank right, on a flank left. There's, there's positions for you to go into. And so, I was watching him in his platoon. And basically, the call would get made, whether it was him, or whether it was the leading petty officer, or whoever, someone would make a call. And I'd watch him, and he would, he would stay like in the precise position that the standard operating procedure dictates him to be in.

• 1:28:37Jocko Willink?

  And so, which meant that if he ran down a ravine and was facing the, the six-foot wall of a ravine, ravine and couldn't see anything, he was gonna stand there, because that's where he was supposed to be. And I said, "Hey, man, what can you see right now?" You know, it's like, "Well, nothing." "Well, why don't you move a little bit?" "Well, because that's not the standard operating procedure." "Well, guess what? You're the platoon commander." "It's okay. You can have someone fill in here, right? And you can go, and you can crawl up this little, this little part of the ravine, and you can actually see maybe an out where you can direct your guys, so you can get out of this cone of fire. How does that sound?" So, that becoming aware that you're allowed to move, that you're allowed to think, that you're allowed to take action...

• 1:29:22Jocko Willink?

  Reminds me of what you just said about a leader being able to step up, suddenly realizing that, like a stair step up. As soon as he realized that, he's like, "Oh, oh, I can move around." And yes, as a leader, yes, you can. Talk about emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence focuses on the interpersonal and emotional aspects of innate ability. It can be defined as a person's innate ability to perceive and manage his own perceptions in a manner that results in successful interactions with the environment, and if others are present, to perceive and manage their emotions in a manner that result in successful interpersonal

• 1:30:01Jocko Willink?

  reactions. Emotional intelligence, being able to read people. You talk about the innate ability to do this, but can you learn it? To some degree. Okay, good. I'm glad you said that because I've talked to people and helped people. Yeah. Like, let me give you a big hint on emotional intelligence to anyone that's listening. If you want to get better at it, here's a good step to take. Be quiet and listen to what people are saying. You know, when you actually shut your mouth and listen, people will, and you truly listen to what they're saying, you can hear what their tone sounds like and pay attention to it. You can watch their facial expressions and pay attention

• 1:30:44Jocko Willink?

  to it. You can watch their body language and pay attention to it. When you're not listening, when you're on transmit instead of receive, you're not gonna, you're not gonna perceive as much about their emotional state at that time, which means you're gonna react badly to it. So, instead of being on transmit mode, for those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, when you're on a radio, as a radio man, when you're pressing the push to talk button, you're transmitting information. Don't be on transmit, be on receive. That's my advice. That'll improve your emotional intelligence in the next five minutes.

• 1:31:23Jocko Willink?

  Motivation. Motivation is a combination of work aspiration, the role level, the role level the leader aspires to reach, motivators, what drives the leader to be fully engaged at work, demotivators, what causes the leader to lose interest in work, and drive for results the leaders need to achieve. In general, motivation is highly associated with job performance and promotability.

• 1:31:48Jocko Willink?

  I think Jordan Peterson calls this conscientiousness, like, are you going to do your job? Personality, a leader's personality tends to be hardwired so that most of his core preferences for interacting with people, gathering information, decision-making, and general orientation to life, change little over the course of his life. You kind of get what you get.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:14Jocko Willink?

  Do, how often do you see people's personalities change?

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Not much. We're, we're asked all the time, you gotta, you gotta fix Echo Charles. You gotta, you gotta fix him. And, and we tell him, you know, we can work with him. We can smooth off some of the edges.

• 1:32:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  But he's still gonna be Echo Charles when, when the dust settles. Because that's who he is.

• 1:32:35Jocko Willink?

  That's a sad fact that I've been dealing with for quite some time.

• 1:32:40Jocko Willink?

  Here, here's, here's what I have, here's what I have seen. One, I have seen people change personality from some kind of event that takes place in their life, like usually a traumatic event. Something happens, bad, good, chance, luck, and they, they end up, it's not gonna drastically change their personality. Because over time, people will be, the gravity of their personality will draw them back to who they are. But occasionally, the times that I've seen personalities change the most is something happens and that changes their personality. But it's hard.

• 1:33:23Jocko Willink?

  It's hard to change, it's hard to truly change someone, you know? The, that story about the, what is it, the frog and the scorpion? And the frog says, I'll take you over. Or the scorpion says, can we take me over? And he says, no, if I take you over the river, you'll, you'll sting me and I'll die. And he says, no, why would I do that? We'd both die and they go across. And of course, the scorpion stings. He says, why'd you do that? Because I'm a scorpion, what'd you think I was gonna do? So. The fundamental core of leadership is decision making. Everything a leader does or does not do is the result of decisions. Everyday leaders are called upon to make decisions, routine and non-routine. And then you say, problem solving is just a series of decisions. Good point. You have these steps, the seven step problem solving model. One, identify the problem.

• 1:34:09Jocko Willink?

  Two, gather the information. Three, redefine the problem. Four, generate alternatives, courses of action. Five, evaluate alternatives. Six, select and implement the solution. Seven, evaluate the results. And then back to one again. So that's what we're doing all the time. And you talk about the OODA loop in here, which we've talked about a bunch on this podcast. And then you talk about the other, the loop that, what is it? The PAMA loop. What's that loop?

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  That's where you're perceiving information.

• 1:34:43Jocko Willink?

  Which is, so this one reminded me of the OODA loop, right? They're, they're very similar.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  To some degree, yeah.

• 1:34:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  So you perceive information. It comes into your system. You appraise it, you know, make sense side of it.

• 1:34:54Jocko Willink?

  Which is like orient, right? So observe, orient. So those two are pretty close, right? Perceive and, and observe would be the P and the O. And then you get to A, which is, what is it in the PAMA? What does it stand for? Assess?

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  Appraise.

• 1:35:12Jocko Willink?

  Appraise, and that's very similar to orient. Okay, then what's the M?

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, then we, we get into, to the motivational part. And then we, we get to get into the action. And then we're back in the loop again.

• 1:35:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and even the last one is action in the PAMA loop. And in, and in the OODA loop, it's act. So you go through, you know, kind of dissecting what these two, the differences are, the similarities. And that's, that's definitely an interesting thing. Cause again, see for me, I always have this, I guess, positive outlook on things that if you know something. You can at least try and apply it, right? So people do the Oodle loop, people do the Pama loop. But they don't know it. And so therefore, when they miss it, or they do it, or they, or they get caught in some meaningless cycle of it, if they don't know that that's what they're doing, they can't even correct it.

• 1:36:12Jocko Willink?

  But if you're aware, oh, you know what? I'm, I'm not acting. That's why I'm sitting here. I'm not acting. So I need, I need to take action. So I think being aware of things, just like being aware of low cognitive ability, if you're aware of it, even if you're aware of it, hopefully you can make some adjustments in your life to get it moving in the right direction. You talk about rational strategies, which is logical, sequential, analytical, conscious, well-thought-out process that takes time and typically involves others. So this is, hey, we're going to come up with a rational decision for our problem.

• 1:36:54Jocko Willink?

  And the other one is intuitive, which is intuitive decisions are made quickly, automatically, emotionally, mostly unconsciously. And this is the type of decision usually made in routine or emergency situations. So these, again, these are two, if you understand these two things, that you can make a rational decision, or you can make an intuitive decision and understand what the shortfalls of each are, because you can make two rational decisions, right? You can analyze things to death, or you can just look at the numbers, or, and you just make that kind of decision, it can be wrong. Or you can make an intuitive decision, which can also be wrong. Right. And it can be right. So what are the shortnesses?

• 1:37:38Jocko Willink?

  And this is again, stuff that you cover in depth in this book, which is very, a very interesting book, and I believe will raise people's awareness and make them more capable of making decisions. And by the way, right now, this is page 35 in the book. The book is actually called The Stress Effect. How, why smart leaders make dumb decisions and what to do about it. So all you've done up until this point is explaining

• 1:38:05Jocko Willink?

  What types of leaders there are, what types of decisions are being made. So that way you can then explain what stress is. And what stress does to your decision-making process. Many of the things of which we've already talked about.

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Stress destroys your decision-making process. As the stress level goes up. Your cognitive ability goes down. Your emotional intelligence goes down. The quality of your decision-making goes down. So managing stress is really key. If you're in a combat situation. You're gonna make a lot of intuitive decisions. When I get on my feet and I look and I see there are two NVA standing there and they look at me and they turn their weapons. I'm not gonna say, okay. Let me see here now. What do I think the problem is?

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  Let me, are those NVA, what's gonna happen? I don't work through that big problem-solving process. I see it, I see the answer, I pull the trigger. And I've gotta do it.

• 1:39:13Jocko Willink?

  And you better, yeah, that's absolutely the right answer.

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  And but when I ask somebody, and I do this all the time. Somebody will talk about a decision like that and when I say. How did you make that decision? They immediately launch into that problem-solving model. And I said, you did it in less than two seconds. You didn't have time to do all of those things. What you're doing is you're using the solution that's sitting on the top of what I call a dominant response hierarchy. You have trained and trained and trained to produce a certain response. When you see them. Squeeze the trigger as you're going down. That's setting up there and that's what you're gonna execute.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  If you want to execute a different plan, you're gonna have to train in something else up there. Because it's gonna come so fast. And that's how you survive in a life and death situation. You gotta make a decision and you gotta do it very quickly. And if you have time. You got a week or so to make a decision. You can bring your team in, you can work through that problem-solving model. And you know, come up with a good decision. If you got two seconds, you can't do that. You got it intuitive because it's so much faster, but it's going to grab whatever setting at the top. So you better be training for the right response. And that's where the

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  training comes in, over and over and over, and that's automatic. When you, when you watch pro athletes, they train all the time. And they train for particular responses. And that's why they can do it so fast. If you like to play golf, and you play golf with someone, if you want to give yourself an advantage, and the guy you're playing with is a really good putter, so you get on the green, and you say, Jaco, I have always been impressed with your ability to make those long putts. I mean, we're friends.

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  Help me out here. Tell me what you think about. I mean, when you're getting ready to putt, talk me through the steps that you go through to make that putt. He's gonna blow it. Because now, he's thinking, rather than executing. You know, pros execute. It's automatic. They don't have to think about it. You make them think about it, they'll blow it. When singers are singing the national anthem or something, if they make the mistake of thinking about what, where it's coming next in the lyrics, they're gonna blow it.

• 1:41:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:51Speaker 01

  It's gotta be automatic.

• 1:41:53Jocko Willink?

  I, uh, well, we, we train a lot of jiu-jitsu, and, you know, I talk about jiu-jitsu with the laws of combat and leadership in life, and how it all is intertwined. And a guy said to me, hey, what, how does decentralized command fit into jiu-jitsu? I don't see where the, I see where prioritize and execute is, I see where simple is, I see where cover and move is, I see where those are in jiu-jitsu, but where's decentralized command? And I said, here's exactly where it is. You need to train enough that your body parts know to execute without being told what to do. So when it comes time to defend your arm, you need to move that arm, you don't have time to think about it. Just like you don't

• 1:42:35Jocko Willink?

  have time to tell the platoon commander, or the squad leader, hey, take and put down cover fire as we move to the flank. No, they've gotta have the instinct to make that happen, without you needing to tell them. So that's where decentralized command comes in to your, to your jiu-jitsu game.

• 1:42:53Jocko Willink?

  You talk about this recognition, prime decision model, or RPD, and just hitting a couple of things here. Here's what you do. Assess the situation, evaluate a course of action, select an option, develop a solution set, generate and evaluate options, adjust the option, take action. And again, these are very similar ideas, but there's little nuances that you spell out pretty, that you spell out inside the book. Here's one. The technique of sufficing allows a solution to be chosen that is not perfect, but is sufficient to provide a satisfactory solution to the problem. The RPD model chooses the first solution that might work, a sufficing approach.

• 1:43:39Jocko Willink?

  In most cases, trying to choose a solution using a maximizing, which is optimal or perfect approach, tends to be unrealistic and inefficient because the leader is making decisions in an environment where all the information about the problem and possible solutions are unknown. So this is a great thing that I think I have always used. Sufficing, like, yeah, that's a solution. It's gonna be good enough. We need to go with it.

• 1:44:10Jocko Willink?

  You talk about cognitive intelligence, and now this is a little bit different. Cognitive intelligence, a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings. And then there's these terms, catching on, making sense of things, or figuring out what to do.

• 1:44:53Jocko Willink?

  So this is a different type of intelligence, which obviously is very important.

• 1:45:02Jocko Willink?

  That definition is an excellent starting point for about, for thinking about leadership and decision making, especially the last point about a figuring out. Cognitive intelligence doesn't begin and end with having some smarts. An individual must know what to do with his or her cognitive intelligence. And this is, once again, you get these smart, young officers that, and at a certain point in the SEAL teams, I mean, we were getting these incredibly qualified on paper individuals that were, you know, they, they should be the smartest people in the, in the world. But you'd see them have problems. Not all of them, of course, some of them were great, you know? Some of the guys went to Harvard and Yale and everywhere else and they were fantastic. But some of them, it wasn't all like that, it wasn't across the board. And that's exactly what you're talking about here.

• 1:45:46Jocko Willink?

  You gotta, you gotta be smart, but you gotta do, know what to do with those smarts. Just some of the, some of the things that, that the cognitive intelligence, some of the, some of the abilities that includes fluid reasoning, crystallized intelligence, visual processing, auditory processing, processing speed, short-term memory, long-term retrieval, quantitative knowledge, correct decision speed. Again, these are, as you think about these things, and if you're a humble person, you'll think to yourself, you know what? I, I need to learn to, I need to, I don't process things very well.

• 1:46:30Jocko Willink?

  What, what should I do to counter that? Maybe I should prepare more, maybe I should study more. My, my auditory processing. Hey, how well do I actually listen? What can I do to improve my listening skills? If you don't admit that you don't listen well, you're not going to get any better at it. Cognitive intelligence moderating factors when all things aren't even, so, so, here's some things that you talk about when it comes to cognitive intelligence, the factors that come into play. One of them is environment. And you, you've got a very interesting study and you've got all kinds of studies in here. But one of them was like, they looked at,

• 1:47:11Jocko Willink?

  Groups of kids that they gave better opportunities for to, you know, like low income kids, they gave really good opportunities to some and didn't give them to the other ones and actually didn't have that much of an effect, which surprised me. Like there was a little bump in the beginning, but then it just leveled out.

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  Most, most of those studies are short-term studies. So they, they create those environments, um, you know, a few months later they test and they say, wow, this group really improved, but then they don't come back. Two years later, three years later, uh, when you find those studies, they, everybody's back to the same as, as they get older, by the time kids are 15, uh, most of the stuff, this enriched environment, kind of work that you do with them when they're, they're young, everybody's back to the same. I mean, but they've all matured back to the same place.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  So you, you can't just look at what happens the first few months, but nobody wants to do that. They want to publish their study and want to move on. Hey, I got great results that work.

• 1:48:21Jocko Willink?

  They want to sell you the Einstein music for your kids. Baby Einstein or whatever it's called.

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  Baby Einstein.

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  Little Einstein.

• 1:48:28Jocko Willink?

  Little Einstein. Yeah. You talk about age.

• 1:48:34Jocko Willink?

  Here's some things, if you want to help preserve cognitive intelligence.

• 1:48:41Jocko Willink?

  Cardiovascular, the absence, here's some things that, that, that specific factors that seem to help preserve cognitive intelligence as people age. The absence of cardiovascular and other chronic diseases, a favorable environment, above average education, occupational pursuits, pursuits involving high complexity and low routine, above average income and the maintenance of intact families, a complex and intellectually stimulating environment, a flexible personality style at midlife, being married to a spouse with high cognitive intelligence, maintain, maintenance of high levels of perceptual processing speed, being satisfied with life's accomplishments.

• 1:49:20Jocko Willink?

  Important things.

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  And some of those things are hard for you to do. I mean, they happen.

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  The most important thing that you can do to maintain your cognitive ability, your intellectual ability is aerobic exercise. Nothing has been proven long term to have a greater impact on your, how your brain's operating, particularly delaying the onset of dementia or Alzheimer's. Nothing does better than aerobic exercise where you're pumping the blood, you're pumping the food into your brain, you're cleaning your brain out. Aerobic exercises will do it for you.

• 1:50:05Jocko Willink?

  Good, good information. Talk about memory. Yeah. And then you talk about physical conditioning, which I'm a big supporter of. Nutrition, obviously, if you're not eating clean, sleep, getting good sleep. There's, there's one of my weaknesses. I don't sleep very much.

• 1:50:27Jocko Willink?

  Cognitive intelligence can be a double edged sword. A leader with high cognitive intelligence can possess, can process information rapidly, solve complex problems quickly and make effective decisions. He might also be perceived by his team as arrogant, condescending and impatient. The leader knows he can do the work better and faster than his team members and may forget sometimes that they don't have his ability.

• 1:50:55Jocko Willink?

  This is one of those where I'm worried about saying that one because what this does is it makes someone say, well, you know, people think I'm arrogant because I'm so smart because I have high cognitive ability. That's everyone else's problem. But as I've said to many smart people over the years, if you're so smart, why aren't you winning?

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we see it all the time. That double edged sword, you come across as a jerk, you come across as arrogant and you, you're condescending toward people.

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  What's taking you so long? I mean, this is simple. Well, for you it might be, but for the average person it's not. And when you start putting that kind of feedback out, you're just taking too long. I don't understand what's wrong with you. You know, you're just killing their motivation and causing them to see you more as a jerk.

• 1:51:50Jocko Willink?

  Yep, that's, that's gonna hurt your leadership capital.

• 1:51:55Jocko Willink?

  Talking a little bit about emotion here, all human decisions have some emotional component. That's the way the brain is wired, as you're about to see. The more a leader understands the emotional component of decision-making, the more effective her decisions can become.

• 1:52:10Jocko Willink?

  Emotions happen. Emotions are neural impulses that happen inside the brain and trigger a motivation to reach a goal. Emotions are goal-oriented. Whenever you try, whenever you experience an emotion, there is an end goal that the emotion is trying to move you toward. Emotions have their beginning in the unconscious, and most of them stay there. When an emotion becomes conscious, we have a feeling. For example, when the emotion of fear becomes conscious, I feel scared. Emotions can be viewed as providing situational reports about what is happening in the body. Why am I shaking? I feel scared. Emotions have survival value.

• 1:52:50Jocko Willink?

  David Caruso and Peter Salovey, researchers and educated, and educators, provide the following linkages between emotions and survival. Fear, from a survival standpoint, is, let's get out of here. Sadness is, help me. Disgust is, don't eat that. Anger is about fighting. When you get angry, your anger raises your energy level to overcome an obstacle in your path. So, there you go. You gotta recognize what's going on with these emotions. Emotional intelligence has always been present and identified, but not valued as intelligence.

• 1:53:30Jocko Willink?

  1995, Daniel Goldman brought emotional intelligence into the world's consciousness with the publication of his bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. His books quickly spawned a periflation of articles, books, workshops, training materials, assessments, and conferences on emotional intelligence. A cottage industry sprang up almost overnight. The term "emotional intelligence" is used to describe a non-cognitive type of intelligence. I define it as a person's innate ability to perceive and manage his or her own emotions in a manner that results in successful interactions with the environment, and if others are present, to also perceive and manage their emotions in a manner that results in successful interpersonal interactions.

• 1:54:16Jocko Willink?

  Note that this definition does not require interaction with another person. Emotional intelligence involves managing and controlling the awareness and appraising of emotions and the resulting motivation and action in a manner that produces successful outcomes, whether in the presence or absence of others.

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  As a leader, I need to understand my emotions and how they impact me and what it causes me to do, or how I can use it. I need to understand yours, so that if I want you to proof a document for me, if I make you really happy and then say, "Proof this," you'll miss most of the typos. If I make you irritated, you'll find them all. You'll rip it apart. If there's something in there, you'll find it. So, understanding the impact that the emotions are having on you and your performance, and which way it drives you, you know, that's using emotional intelligence to be successful, to help you be successful.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  You know, same on the battlefield. I need to understand the emotions that you're probably going to experience, and what are they going to do to you? How do you need to adapt them? How do you need to redirect them? Understanding that fear takes away, you know, your fine motor skills. And I need to train you to be able to operate without those fine motor skills, to be able to use the gross motor skills and still perform just as well. You just have to perform the task a little differently. So, shoot without aiming. You learn the quick kill technique.

• 1:55:53Jocko Willink?

  You talk about hijackers of emotional intelligence.

• 1:56:00Jocko Willink?

  When the hijacking occurs, it sets up an opportunity for your evil twin, Skippy, to come forward. Skippy is the bad side of you who says and does things that are uncharacteristic of you. It was not Mike Tyson who bit off a piece of Evander Halliford's ear during a championship fight in 1997. It was Tyson's evil twin, Skippy. So then you just go on to describe the fact that you've got to keep your emotions in check.

• 1:56:29Jocko Willink?

  And

• 1:56:31Jocko Willink?

  something we all need to look out for, especially Mike Tyson.

• 1:56:39Jocko Willink?

  Stress interferes with decision making. And again, now, you know, I've already talked about a bunch of stuff and now we're sort of getting into some of the book. More control equals less stress. I really like this part. Data collected over the years on stress levels within the baboon population reveal that the higher a baboon is in the hierarchy, the less stress he experiences. These results suggest that the amount of control you have over your situation influences the amount of stress you experience.

• 1:57:10Speaker 01

  Just to give you an example, in the in the old days with a SOG team, you got on a helicopter. You flew out to do your insertion. You found out what was going on at the LZ when you got there. And one day I asked the crew chief, I said, you've got an extra headset up here. Can I wear that headset? And he said, sure. So when I put the headset on, all of a sudden I'm listening to Cubby talk. I'm listening to our gunships talk. I'm listening about what's going on at LZ. Are they prepping it? Are they seeing anything? Did they receive any aircraft fire on the way out there?

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  If the LZ is hot, I know it. I know which side is hot and I may have a plan that we're going to exit the aircraft and and go east. I really need to go west. All of a sudden, I've got all this information that I can use to make decisions and I could just literally feel my stress level coming down. Okay, I understand what's going on now. I don't have to figure it out in two seconds when I get there and I'm being shot at. Now I've got a plan. So giving myself control. I don't know why we didn't do that right from the beginning. But I know for me, once I Once I I could get access to that information, it just made all the difference in the world.

• 1:58:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  There was a like study and I'm trying to remember it all. It was something about like, I think, I don't know if they use cats or people or what, but it was like they'd get a shock.

• 1:58:43Jocko Willink?

  No, this is the rats.

• 1:58:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:58:44Jocko Willink?

  I talked about this at the muster.

• 1:58:46Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, yeah, like so they'd they'd shock them with a like a certain strength, right of shock?

• 1:58:52Jocko Willink?

  No, so this is the deal. There's a cage with two sides to the cage. Each of the each of the floors in the cage deliver a shock. One of them has a stronger shock, but there's a light that comes on before the shock goes off. And so they're they're able to like expect it and understand it.

• 1:59:12Speaker 02

  Know when it's coming.

• 1:59:13Jocko Willink?

  The other side, less of a shock, but it's just completely random. And there's a there's a pathway to get between the two areas, but you can't like hang out there. So the the rats basically have to decide which side they want to be on. The stronger shock that they are prepared for or the random shock that's less. And the rats always pick the the side that has the warning, so they know what's going on.

• 1:59:39Speaker 02

  Even though it's worse.

• 1:59:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, even though it's worse.

• 1:59:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:42Jocko Willink?

  I I I just talked about this. I was talking to some army troops out in Hawaii, as a matter of fact, and talking about, you know, you mentioned earlier that the the thing that you can take away from troops that they care about, money more than money and rank is freedom. Contrary to that, or or I guess the the other side of that is the best thing you can reward someone with is more freedom in the form of, and when you can do it at work, because you can only give someone so much free time, but you say, give them control over the exercise, give them control over the training, give them control over what time they get done, give them control over where they go. The more control people have, the the the more satisfied they are, the better they're going to perform.

• 2:00:25Jocko Willink?

  And so that way you can use that, you can you can take control away from them, and that's the worst punishment you can give them. The best reward you can give somebody is give them freedom, give them control over their fate. I think that's the most powerful driver. I think that even drives people generally more than money. Um, so I talk about that with companies that they, you know, wait, we, we can't afford to pay anyone. It's the same, we can't afford to pay our employees more than X, or we'll go bankrupt, or in the military. I can't go and, you know, I can't pay my corporals more. It doesn't work that way. What do you do? How do you reward them? You give them freedom. You give them control over their destiny. That will drive people. And it's the best thing you can use.

• 2:01:08Speaker 02

  But that stress element, like it's almost, even in Jiu Jitsu, you have that if you compete in Jiu Jitsu. If you don't know like when you're gonna go on, you know, cause it's like, oh, I'm supposed to go on right now. But then they're not calling your name and you're like, you get all stressed. But then if you know, oh, it's your time, then you're like less stressed. It's almost like if you're in the dark about something, you're just more stressed. So the more information you have about it, so that's why like people when they're worried, they're like asking all these questions. Like, how's it gonna go? They just wanna know how it's gonna go, you know? So yeah, that makes sense. I feel that.

• 2:01:36Jocko Willink?

  Check out this dichotomy. A lot of people think dichotomy my favorite word, but.

• 2:01:41Speaker 02

  It is.

• 2:01:42Jocko Willink?

  Check out this dichotomy. As the number of choices increases, the autonomy, control and liberation. This variety brings us is powerful and positive. But if the number of choices keeps growing, negative effects start to appear. As choices grow further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates us. It might even be said to tyrannize. So that's why discipline will give you freedom. And that's why giving someone, you know, if you have too many options, it can turn out to be a bad thing.

• 2:02:19Jocko Willink?

  There's a definite dichotomy there.

• 2:02:23Jocko Willink?

  Here's another, again, I'm jumping around a bit. Um, a key point to remember is that all models, whether mental, physical, mathematical or iconic, have blind spots. When you choose a model, you choose your blind spots.

• 2:02:38Jocko Willink?

  That's powerful. So whatever you're thinking, you're not necessarily, you're not going to be 100% right. There's going to be things that you don't see, that you don't understand that you miss.

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  And what's critical is understand the models, understand the one that you choose. And so what are the blind spots that I've just chosen? What am I not going to see by using this? And whenever you can, if you can use multiple lenses, and we do that a lot when we're assessing people. I don't want just this one assessment instrument because it's got all kinds of blind spots. So I pick another one that's going to close some of those blind spots because it covers those. And you know, so I get a better picture of what you look like by using multiple lenses to look at you with. So I don't, I don't have just one. I give you this one test, I don't, I miss all this stuff over here.

• 2:03:31Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, if you don't have a high cognitive ability, when you see these two reports about someone that might have contrasting information, you won't be able to, oh, this report doesn't make any sense. And you'll lean towards the one that makes the most sense to you, that fills the vision that you've been looking for.

• 2:03:50Jocko Willink?

  Here's the thing that I just had to read.

• 2:03:54Jocko Willink?

  Catastrophic, when catastrophic leadership failures occur, it is sudden and causes a catastrophic change in the leader's ability to perform successfully. The leader will exhibit some or all of a characteristic set of behaviors. And here's those behaviors. And this is to me, these are like red flags. These are things that if you're paying attention right now and you're listening and you want to improve your leadership capabilities, pay attention to these things. And when you notice yourself doing them, check yourself, detach, take a step back and, and correct your, your, your trajectory. Cause your trajectory is not good. Number one.

• 2:04:34Jocko Willink?

  Not listening. That's number one, not listening. Overanalyzing, failure to make decisions, low-quality decisions, emotional decisions, flip-flops, short-term decisions and focus, reactive decisions, defensiveness, rationalizing, self-satisfying, hedonism, denial, inattentional blindness, fear-based decisions, anger-facilitated decisions, automatic decision-making, and mental paralysis. So there's a list of things that you can identify about yourself when there's a stressful situation going on and you start making a rational decision, or you start making an emotional decision, or you're not listening to anybody else anymore.

• 2:05:19Jocko Willink?

  Time to take a step back, detach, and get yourself, get your mind right, because it's not right to make decisions at that point.

• 2:05:30Jocko Willink?

  These are similar list of behaviors that will get you thinking about how you behave in stressful situations. Aggression, loss of humor, taking offense. Isn't that a great one? We take offense, right? And that's a sign that says, oh, you're stressed out and you're not about to make a good decision. And in my opinion, when you're taking offense, that's rooted to something that we call ego. It's gonna be something that's brushing up against your ego. Here's another one, wanting to be right. Oh, that's also ego. Wanting the last word, that's also ego.

• 2:06:10Jocko Willink?

  Flooding with information to prove a point, that's ego. Holding a grudge, that's ego. I know that, that's ego. Jealousy, that's ego. Playing poor me, sarcasm, blaming.

• 2:06:29Jocko Willink?

  Being too nice, that's an interesting one. Being too nice, you're just gonna, okay, yeah, I'll do it. It's like, oh, you're just broke. So there's a dichotomy, right? One of them is, one of us, we're getting aggressive. The other one is I'm just cow- cowering down. There's a little dichotomy there. If you're doing well, you'll be balanced.

• 2:06:49Jocko Willink?

  Here's, here's Echo's favorite. It's my, it's my personality, it's just the way I am.

• 2:06:56Jocko Willink?

  Don't lecture me. These are all just classic, just classic things that you do that should be signs that you're, you're not doing well.

• 2:07:08Jocko Willink?

  Chronic stress is a constant drain on a leader's overall capacity. Accidentally leaving the car light on begins to drain the car battery. Here you do a great job of, you know, talking about the comfort zone. And we don't want to be in the comfort zone all the time. We want to be pushing out of it a little bit. That, that forces us to, to step up our game. But if we spend too much time up there, out of the comfort zone, we'll get burned out because we're having to be undergoing all this stress all the time. The other one I already talked about is rust out. And that's when you're, you're just, you're doing something that's too easy. It's not challenging. You're, you're so deep in your comfort zone, it's so easy for you that you don't care about it anymore.

• 2:07:49Jocko Willink?

  The further the leader moves into the burnout zone, the faster you will burn out. His performance, job satisfaction, interpersonal relationships, motivation and health will begin to deteriorate. Dropping below the comfort zone takes the leader to, into the rust out zone. There, the leader will experience boredom, loss of motivation and lowered sense of purpose. So those are important things to look for with your troops. You see someone that's bored, not motivated, cool, put them in a leadership position, let them step up.

• 2:08:18Jocko Willink?

  Stress is not just a nuisance designed to frustrate humans and shorten their lives. And this is again, I'm jumping through this book, quite the opposite. The purpose of stress is to help people increase their odds of survival by providing quicker response time, more alertness and ability to focus more narrowly on the environment. The trick is to keep stress as an ally, not an enemy.

• 2:08:41Jocko Willink?

  So stress is not bad. It's not necessarily bad all the time. It will make you better with, with some, as long as you get breaks from it.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and you can, you can adapt to stress. So it's like, you know, if you, if you lift weights and you're gonna do curls, and you get so-

• 2:09:03Jocko Willink?

  Echo approves of this.

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you can, you can get so you're using 35 pounds and you're doing 10 reps. And if you just keep doing 10 reps for 35 pounds every day, you don't get better.

• 2:09:20Speaker 01

  What you have to do is stress yourself. So you have to, excuse me, increase the weight. You can increase the reps, adapt to it, then you increase again. And what, what your body's doing is adapting to that stress, a little at a time. So you keep it within a range that it can adapt to, and you'll keep getting stronger and stronger. Same with running. You don't go out and run 26 miles the first day. You kind of build up to it. And you're, you know, so you're stressing the body as you run longer distances, or if you run hills, or you're running sprints. You do a series of things that stress you to help you get so you can

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  go farther and you can go faster. And eventually you can do the 26 miles. But if you just, you run three miles every day at the same pace, you're gonna max out right there. And the 26, it'll just eat your lunch when you try it.

• 2:10:19Jocko Willink?

  You know, this is, this is, when I was talking about me being, you know, having a positive attitude earlier, being an optimist, and I was thinking about this quote because I knew I was gonna get to it. When Collins asked Stockdale, this is Admiral Stockdale, who's a POW. When Collins asked Stockdale which POWs didn't make it out, Stockdale responded, "That's easy. The optimists." The optimists were the prisoners who believed that, believed and would say that the North Vietnamese were going to release the POWs by Christmas. When it didn't happen by Christmas, they would say it'd happen by Easter. Then Thanksgiving. Eventually, the optimist would die of a broken heart.

• 2:11:00Jocko Willink?

  The solution, according to Stockdale, is that you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.

• 2:11:17Jocko Willink?

  That's important right there. Yeah.

• 2:11:22Jocko Willink?

  We say in the 1980s, I worked at the Center for Army Leadership at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a subject matter expert on leadership and stress on the battlefield.

• 2:11:32Jocko Willink?

  Research indicated that people high in psychological hardiness differed from people with low psychological hardness in four primary ways. A stronger commitment to self, an attitude of vigorousness toward the environment, a sense of meaningfulness, and an internal sense of control. Continued research narrowed these differences to three factors. Commitment, the ability to feel deeply involved in life's activities. Control, the belief that you can control or influence stressful events in your life, and challenge the anticipation of change as an exciting challenge for further development.

• 2:12:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, those are, those are key. That challenge thing, instead of looking at everything like, oh, no, this is happening to me, and instead saying, oh, this is, oh, this is an opportunity for us. I, you know, I had some client ask me the other day, well, what would you do, you know, if your, if your team got assigned like the hardest job? And how are you gonna break the news to them?

• 2:12:37Jocko Willink?

  You know, and I said, oh, we gotta sign the hardest job? I'm gonna walk in there and be like, hey, guys, guess what? This company knows that there's only one team that can get this done. And they're saying it's gonna take three months to get it done, and guess what? We're gonna get it done in two months. And it's gonna take everything we've got, but we are gonna crush this thing. And we're gonna show, not only we're the only team that can do this, we're the only team that can do absolutely anything. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, cuz that's the attitude you gotta have. This isn't a challenge that we're gonna shy away from. This is an opportunity for us to, to get after it.

• 2:13:18Jocko Willink?

  Most people who study resilience agree on a core set of common factors. Flexibility, adaptability, meaning, value, determination, strength, and recovery.

• 2:13:32Jocko Willink?

  So, talking about resilience, those are some things to think about. That flexibility one isn't one that you might think of. It's a little counterintuitive to think, well, I'm resilient, so I just keep going the same direction. It's like, no, actually, I'm flexible and I'm going to adapt.

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  Got to adapt.

• 2:13:47Jocko Willink?

  As opposed to burning yourself out, beating your head against the wall.

• 2:13:53Jocko Willink?

  You talk about this, this acronym you use here, Stress Resilient Emotional Intelligence. The ability to resist the negative influence of stress on the emotional aspects of decision making by flexing and adapting to sudden change.

• 2:14:09Jocko Willink?

  As the stress level goes up, particularly toward the extreme level, people lose their access to emotional intelligence.

• 2:14:20Jocko Willink?

  If you can't take a step back, take a breath, and get control of your emotions, you're going to have problems. There's no doubt about that.

• 2:14:29Speaker 01

  You have to learn how to breathe. Breathing is a big deal. Tactical breathing, where you inhale for four seconds, you pause, and you exhale four seconds. Very quickly, that will help calm you down, slows your heart rate back down. We used it with sniper training. You know, when you're reaching out those distances like they do today, you know, with a 50 caliber, you know, I mean, you can reach out and touch somebody two miles away. But the pressure of the pulse in your finger is enough to change the trajectory to cause you to miss it. So slowing your heart rate down, causing it to be a little weaker, being very controlled, and squeezing it off.

• 2:15:13Speaker 01

  And, you know, the Canadian guy, I don't remember his name right now, I think he has a record of a kill like 2.2 miles.

• 2:15:23Jocko Willink?

  That's a crazy shot right there.

• 2:15:25Speaker 01

  That's a long way. But, you know, there are ways to do that.

• 2:15:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I always talk about the fact that it was always our goal to never sound excited on the radio. And in order to do that, you're going to have to get control of your breath, when you get control of your breath, and you get control of your voice. That just calmed you down instead of, hey, we need help over here. Just, hey, we're gonna need two more guys down this hallway, please.

• 2:15:51Jocko Willink?

  That's a way to stay calm.

• 2:15:54Jocko Willink?

  You get in here to the seven best practices to prevent stress.

• 2:16:01Jocko Willink?

  And it said, a leader can get caught in an ever accelerating downward spiral. And it starts with rising levels of stress. At first, the leader might think, I can power through this. I'm tough. That's how I got to where I am. But this, as his stress levels begin to rise, he finds it more and more difficult to maintain the lifestyle that helps keep the stress manageable. The diet quickly turns unhealthy. There's no time or energy for exercise, no time for sleep or rest, no time for family or friends. His attitude turns negative and learning halts.

• 2:16:34Jocko Willink?

  A reinforcing loop emerges that sends the leader into a downward spiral like an airplane that has lost power and is out of the pilot's control with little hope of recovery unless the leader can break the cycle and begin to climb again. And this is your, something that you call arsenal, which is another acronym, the seven best practices, awareness, rest, support, exercise, nutrition, attitude, and learning. And, you know, you, you, you go through each one of these and talk about how, you know, some steps to take for awareness. Dedicate time to stepping outside yourself, observing your actions, for rest, you know,

• 2:17:17Jocko Willink?

  you give great little sections of what to do to rest, force yourself to take breaks, include personal time each day. Like, you, you go through support. What does support mean? Support is psychological, emotional, and physical people that help you in those categories. So, significant other, family, friends, colleagues, coaches, mentors, et cetera. And, and what can you do? Identify these people. And you get, again, you do that for each one of these. For exercise, you talk about what, you know, how do you start an exercise program? And I think you use a couple. You, you give, you give one thing is 60 days, go 60 days, do not miss an exercise session

• 2:18:01Jocko Willink?

  during the first 60 days, not even one. While some say new habits are created in 21 days, I find that for most people, 60 days tends to firmly transform any new behavior into a habit.

• 2:18:12Jocko Willink?

  So, and, and you obviously are a little bit of an exercise fanatic because you, you still run an Ironman?

• 2:18:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:18:21Jocko Willink?

  How'd you get into that?

• 2:18:24Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I've always been physical. And about 10 years or so ago, I had my other son-in-law go do a triathlon. And he got with Eric and I and he said, we gotta do this. This is a lot of fun.

• 2:18:43Jocko Willink?

  So wait, how old are you right now?

• 2:18:45Speaker 01

  Seventy-two.

• 2:18:45Jocko Willink?

  So at sixty-two, you decided it was a good time to start triathlons?

• 2:18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:49Jocko Willink?

  Got it, okay.

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  Well, then, you know, got into that. And then, you know, triathlons are okay, but I thought, you know, Ironman, the distances are considerably, you know, farther, so I got into that. And, you know, it was pretty cool. I mean, it's, it's a tough day.

• 2:19:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and especially at sixty-two, when's the last time you did one? A year ago?

• 2:19:18Speaker 01

  Hmm, less than a year. I mean, this year.

• 2:19:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  Won this year, and, you know, maybe I'll start back again.

• 2:19:26Jocko Willink?

  Are you, are you like ranked in the world?

• 2:19:28Speaker 01

  Um, I was until, I think, last year. You have to do a certain number.

• 2:19:34Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:19:35Speaker 01

  A year, and then, then you can total up points and they rank you. So, you know, I think the last, my last ranking was fifth in the US, fifteenth in the world in my age group, so.

• 2:19:50Jocko Willink?

  So you definitely recommend exercise?

• 2:19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:53Jocko Willink?

  Apparently.

• 2:19:55Jocko Willink?

  You talk about nutrition, you know, eating the right stuff. This is all stuff that we know, but we, we don't want to do. You talk about attitude. Engage in activities that build your self-confidence and self-esteem. Jiu-Jitsu. Smile. See the glass as being half-full. Talk directly to the person you are unhappy with, not to your coworkers about that person. Become a team player. Ask fellow team members what you can do to help them. That's a good attitude adjustment. And then the last one you've got is lifelong learning. And again, I'm breezing through these things right now. And that's why people need to buy the book so that they can get the menus themselves and read through. Lifelong learning.

• 2:20:38Jocko Willink?

  This is just such an important thing. Set daily, monthly, quarterly, and annually annual learning goals. For example, read two books monthly or improve a foreign language skill over the course of a year. Spend time with others who like to learn. Spend time with someone you consider intelligent. Get out of your comfort zone. Learn something you have always wanted to learn, but keep putting off. Exercise all parts of your brain by choosing a variety of learning goals. So those are... That's your arsenal approach to controlling stress. Awareness, rest, support, exercise, nutrition, attitude, and learning. Here's the takeaway on Arsenal. These are cool.

• 2:21:22Jocko Willink?

  An unaware brain is a surprised brain. A tired brain is a grumpy brain. An unsupported brain is a sad brain. An unfit brain is a slow brain. A hungry brain is a distracted brain. A negative brain is an angry brain. And an unused brain is a forgetful brain. Anything I'm missing on Arsenal?

• 2:21:45Speaker 01

  No, that's good. I mean, we have an actual assessment that you can take online. Shows you where you are. So I mean, we use it quite a bit with our clients. Stress is always an issue out there. So if we can help them find a way to bring the stress down, they'll perform better, particularly as a leader.

• 2:22:07Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna wrap up with this book here. Training leaders is similar to training parachutists. You have to train them to jump before pushing them out the door. And then you say this, closing out this book. In preparing for the future, we should keep in mind the old Native American analogy that describes the past, present, and future as a log burning in a fire. The part of the log that has burned into ash is yesterday. The part that is burning is today, and the part that will burn soon is tomorrow. We are the fire. We can only live today, and what we do today determines whether our fire will still be burning tomorrow.

• 2:22:50Jocko Willink?

  Well, that wraps up this book. And again, I mean, I breezed through this thing. There were some points that I definitely wanted to talk about and let people know about. The book is called The Stress Effect by Henry L. Thompson. And it's available on Amazon.

• 2:23:14Jocko Willink?

  What else? You know, we've covered a ton. You know, we've merged a bunch of podcasts here. What else do we need to know about what you've got going on? What about High Performance Systems, hpsys.com? That's your company, and this is what you do.

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what we do. We work with leaders around the world. We do a lot of work helping them improve their performance. We look at their cognitive ability. We can measure that, then we can work with you to make sure you're getting the most out of it. We work with manufacturing and building those high-performance work teams. So a while ago, when you were talking about giving people control. If you take a high-performance work team in a manufacturing plant and you say, "Okay, you guys can start making decisions." So you can even decide that Eccle Charles gets tomorrow off because he's got something

• 2:24:16Speaker 01

  he has to do and Eric's gonna come in and work his shift so he can go do it. And you don't have to come to me, the supervisor, to ask permission to do that. You guys are already authorized to do all kinds of things like that. If it's gonna make the team perform better, you guys do it. So you run yourself. You take care of yourself. And I'm available. If you need to ask me questions or maybe there's some resources you don't have, then let me know. I'll go find your resources for you. So we do a lot of work like that. We do a lot with stress management. We do a lot with decision-making under stress. So nuclear operators that are making decisions about whether or not the plant's gonna melt

• 2:24:58Speaker 01

  down, because sometimes the stress gets really high in the control room when they have an incident. So teaching them how to get control of the stress and not lock up. Law enforcement, for the most part, I mean, law enforcement has a different approach to dealing with bad guys than the military does. I mean, a law enforcement SWAT team, it's a different approach when they go into a room. When they kick a door down and go in, it's not like having a special ops team, SEAL team, come through that door. You know, when you go through, you're gonna take out everything in there.

• 2:25:43Speaker 01

  You know, when the police SWAT team goes through, there's a bad guy in there they want and they're not gonna take out everybody that's in the room necessarily. So they, it's a very different approach going in, but it's very stressful and there's things that they can do and things they need to understand about what they can do when a stress level goes up, what it's gonna do to their decisions. So we work with them on that. We can train them. Firefighters, same thing, EMTs. So we do a lot of work like that. We also work, you know, with vets, vet organizations. So we have this thing going on, you know, 22 push-ups because we have 22 vets a day committing suicide.

• 2:26:24Speaker 01

  So the 22 pushups is an awareness thing. So we get that all over social media. People doing pushups. You know, you had said something earlier about, you know, Echo Charles is probably gonna knock out 22 for us through video, so we can post him out there tomorrow. And, you know, we had the challenge coins, and I have a group of people around the country that have some of our coins, and if they run into a vet that they think, you know, may be on edge, they give him a coin. It says, "Welcome home. Thank you for your service," all that kind of stuff. And they reach out to him. Sometimes, all

• 2:27:04Speaker 01

  you have to do is smile at somebody. There's a, there's a person out there today that is on a mission to end their life before the day is over. And very often, they set up a condition. "I'm gonna ride the bus to this place where I'm gonna terminate myself. If nobody speaks to me, if nobody smiles at me, nobody recognizes my presence, between now and the time I get to this place, I'm gonna take my life. But if I get some kind of interaction from somebody, I won't do it." And they, they get on the bus, they go, nobody acknowledges them, you know, and they commit suicide. Just reaching out, just

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  talking to someone, sometimes can turn them around, and all of a sudden, they don't do it. You can take them off of that list of 22. So we do that.

• 2:27:58Jocko Willink?

  Is there a, is there a website to go for that? Is that like a, is that a nonprofit?

• 2:28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a Mission 22 website. On our website, we put, on our Stress Effect website, we put things you can do to recognize vets. Not just vets, but firefighters, police, you know, so there are other groups that are doing it, but particularly the vets. Particularly, it's not just the older vets, but sometimes it's easier to see in them.

• 2:28:34Speaker 01

  But if you watch, you can see people that are not acting quite right and they may have on their, their hat. Uh, you know, you can see they've been in Afghanistan or wherever they are and you need to talk to them. And you, you had one, a person, uh, on one of your podcasts very recently who is a suicide su- survivor. Uh, the person attempted the suicide and, and somebody, you know, snatched her up and got her out and, and she's doing all kinds of things that she wouldn't have done.

• 2:29:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt about it.

• 2:29:13Speaker 01

  Uh, so, um, everybody has a purpose. There's a reason that you survived as long as you have and to go out and terminate yourself. I mean, all of a sudden, all those things don't happen. I mean, you, you might be the person that saves a lot of other lives if you stick around. And I don't think we as a nation do very well, uh, taking care of the vets, uh, doing the transitions. And I know a lot of the, uh, vets who do take their own lives or, you know, they, they're not in the VA program. They're just trying to do things on their own and, you know, they get in that downward spiral. But if we see one, we talk to them.

• 2:29:56Speaker 01

  And it's amazing, some of the stories I'm getting back from, uh, some of the people that's kind of joined me in the, in this program, women, uh, who are out walking or running and they'll see a guy with his veteran hat on or something that clues them in and they just talk to them. And the guys just, they turn around. I mean, all of them don't, but, you know, as military people, I think, you know, we have an obligation, we have an accountability, you know, to take care of our people. So anyway, we, we do thing, a lot of things like that.

• 2:30:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's, uh, I mean, that's awesome that you already, you served your country, you know, in so many other ways and continuing to serve the, the vets and I don't know, do you have any other final thoughts?

• 2:30:52Speaker 01

  I really appreciate the opportunity to come, you know, talk about some of the things that went on in SOG and some of the leadership and other topics that we got on today. I appreciate you giving me that opportunity. You guys have been great, great questions. It's been a fun day.

• 2:31:10Speaker 02

  I have a question. What's a snake eater? You said that a few times. Snake eater. He's a snake eater.

• 2:31:17Speaker 01

  Special forces.

• 2:31:18Jocko Willink?

  It's like a term. It's like a term for like a special forces guy. They'll say it about seals. They'll say like, oh, that guy's a snake eater.

• 2:31:26Speaker 02

  You're kind of saying it in the context like it was bad almost. Like from who was saying it in your stories?

• 2:31:33Speaker 01

  Competition.

• 2:31:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 2:31:35Speaker 01

  So I'm a ranger and you're special forces.

• 2:31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:31:38Speaker 01

  So I'm better than you.

• 2:31:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gotcha.

• 2:31:42Speaker 01

  So when I call you a snake eater, it's bad.

• 2:31:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:31:44Speaker 01

  You know, when I call myself one, it's good.

• 2:31:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Cool. Right on. Right on. Thank you.

• 2:31:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:31:52Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, thanks to Eric for getting you out here. And I'm telling you, this is just a total honor for me to be able to sit here and hear your stories and pick your brain. And so thank you for coming on and sharing everything with us. And, you know, more important, and I think it's pretty obvious, thank you for your service. And thank you, when I hear your stories, and I think about the times that you thought you would not come back, and you went anyway. And you did that for me, and for my kids, and for our country.

• 2:32:35Jocko Willink?

  And I just wanted to say, thank you. And it's been an honor to talk to you. And I can't wait to hear feedback from people. And I'm sure they'll have so many questions that I'll have to drag you out here again at some point.

• 2:32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I appreciate your service and thank you for that. And all the things that you've done and you're doing for the vets. I mean, people listen to these podcasts. They listen to what you guys say. And it makes a difference. And you're

• 2:33:04Speaker 01

  You know, you just, you don't realize when you help most of the people that you help. Because you don't know where they were when they listened to your podcast or listened to you talk. But you're impacting people all over. And, you know, I'm glad I could come in and, you know, just hang out with you guys. And watch how you do this, because you're really making an impact. I appreciate it.

• 2:33:30Jocko Willink?

  The door is always open to this podcast room. The microphone will be waiting for you anytime you want to come back. And I'm sure that the amount of people will hear what you've had to say and see what you've been through. And you're going to help infinitely more people. And it's so appreciated, again, not just for what you've done in the past, but for what you're still doing now. So, thank you.

• 2:33:51Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you, Eka.

• 2:33:54Jocko Willink?

  So, once again, Dick Thompson has left the building. And, once again, I cannot even get my mind around what he's done and what he's learned and what he is passing on in these lessons. Because, really, there's no better way to learn and there's no better teacher than learning from those who have gone before us. Who have tested the limits of human capacity for performance and leadership and decision making. And here we are, we get to sit here.

• 2:34:38Jocko Willink?

  We get to actually sit here and absorb the knowledge of these great men. Who paid dearly for this knowledge. And, as we know, many of their comrades paid with their very lives. So, let us never forget that. That for every lesson, there was blood spilled for every story.

• 2:35:12Jocko Willink?

  There is a man who did not return.

• 2:35:16Jocko Willink?

  So, value

• 2:35:21Jocko Willink?

  these lessons, lessons that we can apply to our lives, to our family, to our businesses, to our communities.

• 2:35:30Jocko Willink?

  Everything we do, we can apply what we're learning here. Don't squander these lessons.

• 2:35:38Jocko Willink?

  Pay attention to them.

• 2:35:42Jocko Willink?

  Be aware. We talk a lot about awareness. Be aware of your own shortfalls.

• 2:35:50Jocko Willink?

  And then apply these lessons. That's what you have to do. You have to actually apply them. You can't sit back and listen to them.

• 2:35:57Jocko Willink?

  Gotta actually apply them.

• 2:36:02Jocko Willink?

  So, Echo.

• 2:36:05Jocko Willink?

  We are all looking to learn. We are all looking to

• 2:36:11Jocko Willink?

  somehow make up for our own shortfalls.

• 2:36:16Jocko Willink?

  And apply things to our lives that will make us better. Do you know of anything?

• 2:36:25Jocko Willink?

  Softball coming at you. Do you know of anything that broadly speaking can make our lives better?

• 2:36:31Speaker 02

  Yes, broadly and narrowly.

• 2:36:33Jocko Willink?

  Okay, that would be?

• 2:36:35Speaker 02

  Jiu Jitsu.

• 2:36:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:36:37Speaker 02

  By far.

• 2:36:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, okay. Now, is it possible that you're just a person that's just into it and so you're you're biased because you like Jiu Jitsu and now you think everyone could gain from it and benefit from it, even though that could be wrong? Is that a possibility?

• 2:36:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:36:51Jocko Willink?

  That's a possibility.

• 2:36:52Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:36:53Jocko Willink?

  Actually, I was gonna say that's actually not possible.

• 2:36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I I'm more saying yes to the biased part of it.

• 2:36:59Jocko Willink?

  Okay, you are biased, but even if you're biased, then that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong. I would tell you this, you're biased, you're biased in favor of Jiu Jitsu. And that doesn't affect the outcome of someone starting Jiu Jitsu and really gaining a ton from it.

• 2:37:19Jocko Willink?

  In making their life better.

• 2:37:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:37:21Jocko Willink?

  Across the board.

• 2:37:22Speaker 02

  It's kinda like, you know how, um, hmm, like the sun. If I say, hey, the sun is warm on my face today. And I really like that.

• 2:37:33Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:37:33Speaker 02

  And I'm biased towards the sun.

• 2:37:35Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:37:36Speaker 02

  What if someone doesn't like that? It's still warmer in their face, seems like.

• 2:37:39Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:37:40Speaker 02

  Let's say, not only that they didn't know, no, Brad, that was a perfect analogy. Yeah, actually, that was pretty bad, but nonetheless, short notice, that's sort of how it goes.

• 2:37:48Jocko Willink?

  Hey, we'll take a leak.

• 2:37:50Speaker 02

  Factually, factually, jujitsu will improve your life.

• 2:37:53Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:37:53Speaker 02

  Factually, unless you do it wrong, here's the thing, unless you do it wrong.

• 2:37:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, I guess that is possible.

• 2:37:57Speaker 02

  Yes, and I don't mean do jujitsu wrong, I mean, approach.

• 2:38:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:01Speaker 02

  Jujitsu wrong. So like, okay, so you mentioned before how,

• 2:38:06Speaker 02

  how the person, like, a person, in the beginning, you, your confidence go, like, can go backwards one step because you're like, uh-oh, like, how many people know this? And I didn't even realize it, so you're kinda apprehensive, just in general. That is yes, if you approach it correctly, in my opinion. Cause if you approach it wrong, you're kinda like, oh, I, I know a, a choke now. I know arm lock, now I'm better than everybody, you know, kinda thing.

• 2:38:34Jocko Willink?

  That's the reality of jujitsu, that you won't feel that way, cause you'll get, before you choke, you learn a choke, but then you get choked and arm locked and commured fifteen times in one day. So you don't feel more confident out of the gate.

• 2:38:45Speaker 02

  I didn't, no.

• 2:38:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, but then again, no, you know what, a small part of me did, did.

• 2:38:51Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:38:51Speaker 02

  Only if I knew the other, yes, it totally was, but on top of it, I would know, you know, I know who, in my little, what do you say, in my circles, like, I knew who didn't train and who did, just like we all do, you know? I mean, strangers, I'd all be, I'd always be like, man, like.

• 2:39:07Jocko Willink?

  You know what that guy does?

• 2:39:08Speaker 02

  You gotta watch out, yeah, just like, you know how like, sometimes you're like, you don't know if that guy has a weapon or something like that, that feeling, it's that feeling, you know? A little bit worse, because. If a guy has a weapon, you can kind of run away. If someone has you in any kind of jujitsu scenario, like mounted or in an arm park.

• 2:39:23Jocko Willink?

  Isn't it weird you can be mounted and you can't get away?

• 2:39:25Speaker 02

  Literally can't get away. You can scratch, bite, go for groin and stuff like, you cannot get away. You will not get away. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's bad and I, and I would think about that stuff too, man. It's scary, but.

• 2:39:38Jocko Willink?

  It's just like the whole concept of passing the guard, right? It doesn't seem like it, if you said, okay, the idea of jujitsu, one part of jujitsu is you have to get around the other person's legs.

• 2:39:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:49Jocko Willink?

  That's the whole, that's what you gotta do. You'd think, oh, well, how long is that gonna take? Four seconds, three seconds, maybe even two seconds, whatever. I'll get around their legs. And then you realize it can take years and years and years of trying to get past one person's guard.

• 2:40:02Speaker 02

  If not, never sometimes.

• 2:40:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's a crazy thing.

• 2:40:06Speaker 02

  Very crazy. It was like, I think it was you at the muster where I was like, we were talking about that. I forget if you were saying it or I was saying it. I think you were saying it and I was like, maybe add it. I don't know. Nonetheless, I was like, cause technically getting past someone's guard is just getting past their legs, just like you said. And you can use this whole room. I don't care if you walk out the door and sneak back in the back door. You still can't do it. And like you can, like I was, and I did a little demonstration where I'd be like, okay, this is like, all I gotta do is get past your legs. Guard, no guard, I just gotta get past your legs, right? So I backed way up and I started like walking around. All you do is like turn. And it just, it's, yeah, it's crazy how just, how impossible that can kind of seem, you know? But that's the jujitsu, you know?

• 2:40:48Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And that's one tiny little sliver of an aspect of it is just passing the guard.

• 2:40:53Speaker 02

  Yep. Yes. It gets, goes deep. Nonetheless, but yes, if you approach it correctly, I have no doubt in my mind, I don't know under any circumstance where it wouldn't be an improvement in your life. Net, net. Cannot think of one.

• 2:41:11Jocko Willink?

  So, so overall, we're saying do jujitsu.

• 2:41:14Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:41:14Jocko Willink?

  And once we decide to do jujitsu, which we just decided, now we need to get a gi.

• 2:41:19Speaker 02

  Yes. We get an Origin gi from originmaine.com. You get a lot of stuff from there, but yes, you get your gi from there, many different options.

• 2:41:28Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of keys.

• 2:41:30Speaker 02

  I've been noticing people getting blue belt, winning tournaments, saying, hey, I joined jujitsu because of Jaco.

• 2:41:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:40Speaker 02

  Because of this.

• 2:41:41Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, so there's, there's a, at camp this year, there was people that were like, I'm a Jaco blue belt.

• 2:41:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:41:49Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, what is that? And they say, I started training because of the podcast. I was like, oh, awesome. And I've met, I think, two Jaco purple belts now. The podcast has only been out for, four years?

• 2:42:02Speaker 02

  Four-ish, yeah.

• 2:42:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we're coming up on four years. So I mean, someone out of the gate was like, okay, I'm getting, because you gotta, you know, it takes about four years to get a purple belt. If you're like, training hard, right?

• 2:42:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:12Jocko Willink?

  This is no slack. Someone that just jumps in. So I think I've, I've met two, like, Jaco purple belts.

• 2:42:21Speaker 02

  So legit.

• 2:42:21Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, that's, that's super cool.

• 2:42:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:42:24Jocko Willink?

  So, so you're not alone. Don't feel like, you ever feel like, oh, I don't, I, no one's really actually doing that? So I'm not doing it. No, people are absolutely doing it.

• 2:42:33Speaker 02

  Doing it, yes, 100%.

• 2:42:36Jocko Willink?

  My, my, my wife just, uh, was in England. She delivered a friend, she delivered an Origin Gi to England for her friend's husband, Anthony. He's obs, he's, you know, he's like, whatever, 50, he's like my age, 48, 52, something like that. Obsessed with the jujitsu.

• 2:43:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:01Jocko Willink?

  He's been training for six months. Jaco wet belt. He's like in the game, right?

• 2:43:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:06Jocko Willink?

  At some point, you commit. You say, you know what, I'm gonna do this.

• 2:43:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:10Jocko Willink?

  Just do it.

• 2:43:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:11Jocko Willink?

  Just do it.

• 2:43:12Speaker 02

  This is how you know you, and we haven't used the expression jujitsu bug recently, but this is how you kind of know, when you're sort of trying to figure out moves, when you're like, in bed, or driving, or this kind of stuff, what is like constantly rolling in your mind? It might be, this is a good feeling.

• 2:43:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:29Speaker 02

  Because it does translate, when you go back in, like you work it out, it's good, man. But yes, people are in the game.

• 2:43:36Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, and you're gonna train gi, so get a jiu-jitsu gi from originmaine.com. Get a rash guard, so you can train no gi, which is also important.

• 2:43:46Speaker 02

  Very important.

• 2:43:47Jocko Willink?

  As Echo would say.

• 2:43:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:43:48Jocko Willink?

  I would just say important.

• 2:43:51Jocko Willink?

  But he would say important.

• 2:43:52Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't hear the difference.

• 2:43:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:54Speaker 02

  Feel the difference.

• 2:43:54Jocko Willink?

  That's because you don't hear anything. And then, then the problem is, the problem is, you're gonna wanna represent.

• 2:44:03Speaker 02

  Off the mats.

• 2:44:04Jocko Willink?

  Off the mats, right?

• 2:44:05Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:44:05Jocko Willink?

  And we could go into the whole thing about how you can't wear a gi to the club, right?

• 2:44:09Speaker 02

  Most of the time, yes.

• 2:44:10Jocko Willink?

  You can't wear a gi to the grocery store. Generally speaking. Now, you can get away with gi pants, let's face it. Let's face it, let's face it, I think most of us have been into a grocery store in gi pants. I know I have.

• 2:44:22Speaker 02

  Especially the black ones, the origin, black ones, they look kinda dumb, you know?

• 2:44:25Jocko Willink?

  You could probably go to a club in the origin black gi pants.

• 2:44:28Speaker 02

  You could pull it off.

• 2:44:28Jocko Willink?

  What kinda level, what kinda fashion, you know, you're a fashion guy, but what, where does that, where does that fit into the fashion world? Like, what would you wear with black gi pants to a club, to, no, to a, let's say a bar? You're going to a bar, you put on the gi pants, and you just, what are you, you're wearing a t-shirt? There's an origin t-shirt.

• 2:44:47Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:44:48Jocko Willink?

  Just a deathcore t-shirt.

• 2:44:50Speaker 02

  Let's clarify, first off, I'm not a fashion person, but if I was, I would say there is no fashionable, unless you're going extreme new age fashion, which I can dig, then yeah, you could wear, you know, a shirt.

• 2:45:04Jocko Willink?

  You know what's funny, you ever heard of this, uh, store called Patagonia?

• 2:45:08Speaker 02

  It's.

• 2:45:09Jocko Willink?

  They make outerwear and stuff.

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:12Jocko Willink?

  Outdoor clothing, right? Well, Patagonia used to have pants, that maybe they still do, that were called gi pants.

• 2:45:20Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:45:20Jocko Willink?

  That's what they were called, they probably still have.

• 2:45:22Speaker 02

  Right on.

• 2:45:22Jocko Willink?

  So, maybe, you know, they're over there wearing their gi pants out.

• 2:45:28Jocko Willink?

  Maybe we just need to get in the game and represent even harder.

• 2:45:31Speaker 02

  But are they called Gee Pants?

• 2:45:32Jocko Willink?

  Yes, they're called Gee Pants.

• 2:45:34Speaker 02

  Or are they called G.I. Pants?

• 2:45:35Jocko Willink?

  They're called Gee Pants. They're, they're, when you, I remember back in the day, I would read the little description. And it would say, you know, the Gee Pants is based on the loose fitting martial arts pants. Yeah, I would say that in the little description.

• 2:45:50Speaker 02

  Yes, okay.

• 2:45:51Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah.

• 2:45:52Speaker 02

  Alright, well, yeah, I mean, man, it's kinda like whatever you did. I mean, it wouldn't be a violation overall, especially if they were the black ones. The blue or the white, hmm, maybe. The kind where people will look, like if you wear-

• 2:46:03Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, no, you couldn't wear white Gee Pants out for just no reason. But the black, you could kinda be alright with.

• 2:46:09Speaker 02

  Pull off, yes, sir.

• 2:46:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so anyways.

• 2:46:12Speaker 02

  But-

• 2:46:12Jocko Willink?

  If you don't wanna wear your Gee Pants and you still wanna represent, that's fine. You can get a pair of Origin jeans, which are also made in America. The little brass rivets are made in America. The zipper is made in America. The thread is made in America. And they're sewn by craftsmen, craftswomen, up in Maine. That's what, that's where they're made. So everything is, they're, there's, they're as American as American can be. That's what those jeans are. They, when you put them on, you are embracing America to its core. And you're rebuilding America. Cause you gotta remember, all those, none of those people had jobs.

• 2:46:56Jocko Willink?

  None of those people at Origin had jobs five years ago, three years ago, two years ago. Because all the jobs have been taken overseas. We're bringing them back. So embrace America and embrace Origin jeans. Two kinds. There's, there's the heavy, there's the, there's the factory jeans is what we call them.

• 2:47:21Speaker 02

  The OG, the original.

• 2:47:23Jocko Willink?

  The original ones. And then there's the Delta 68, which are mine, my signature jeans. But they don't say Jaco on them, cause that's not, no, they say Delta 68, named after my forefathers in the SEAL teams in Vietnam. That wore jeans into the Mekong Delta to hunt down the enemy.

• 2:47:46Jocko Willink?

  And they did it because they were more durable, they lasted longer, they were quiet. So that's what we did. We brought them back. Delta sixty-eight, represent.

• 2:47:55Speaker 02

  Yep, good ones.

• 2:47:57Jocko Willink?

  Get some. What else?

• 2:47:59Speaker 02

  Well. From origin, well. Supplements, of course, keeping us in the game. So, you know, fifty years old, your friends, your wife's friends, husband, you know. What was the name again?

• 2:48:13Jocko Willink?

  Anthony.

• 2:48:14Speaker 02

  Anthony, fifty, we'll just say fifty, around fifty. So, cause people will ask, like, am I too old to start? Forty.

• 2:48:22Jocko Willink?

  You're not.

• 2:48:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, negative. I know a guy forty-one and started and is kind of a little bit of a handful to deal with. Forty-one, which, you know, that's not terribly old, but it's not terribly.

• 2:48:35Jocko Willink?

  Well, no, actually what surprised me is just a handful to deal with. That means, cause there are some people that whether they're twenty or whether they're forty, they're, they just have a little something. They have a little, they have some skills, some inherent good instincts. They have some inherent strength.

• 2:48:49Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Yeah, man.

• 2:48:51Jocko Willink?

  Flexibility. They got something.

• 2:48:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:48:57Speaker 02

  The point is for everybody and you can even train hard, but if you do, you do have to mind these things like, okay, I'm not twenty years old anymore. I'm fifty years old now. So you gotta, you do have to mind those things, not nothing.

• 2:49:10Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:49:11Speaker 02

  So if you're going death matches, eight rounds, six minutes, okay, that's gonna, that's not nothing there either. So, but here, good news. Joint Warfare, Krill Oil, these things will keep you deep in the game. Take from me. I can turn up the workout. Personally, I'm speaking for myself. I'm no anomaly. I can go deep hardcore on a workout, week after week after week. Difference is if I do take Joint Warfare Krill Oil and if I don't take Joint Warfare Krill Oil, I won't be able to go if I don't. If I do, I can. This applies to everybody, like I said. So that question is, sir, answered.

• 2:49:51Jocko Willink?

  Yes, and if you, if you wanna make it a little easier to maintain, then just get the subscription. We have the subscription now. So that way you can just, here comes joint warfare. Once a month, you get your bottle. There you go. You start to get your krill oil. You get it. And you, and you actually save money. So check out the subscriptions there on originmaine.com. And don't forget about Molk, which is additional protein, which you also need if you're, if you're lifting, if you're training, if you're running, if you're alive. And on top of that, if you get done with a really good dinner, even if you had some delicious like steak,

• 2:50:32Jocko Willink?

  and then you got done and you still have this little, this little thing in the back of your head that you just need a little, little bit of sweetness, a little bit of that hitter. You can just mix it with one scoop hitter. Just mix yourself a one scoop Molk hitter. And you'll go to bed completely satisfied. You'll feel like, look, I, I'm, I'm completely satisfied with what I've eaten.

• 2:50:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:50:58Jocko Willink?

  And, and you're stronger and healthier.

• 2:51:01Speaker 02

  On your way to recovery.

• 2:51:02Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:51:03Speaker 02

  To, um, you will not relate to this, but people might be able to. Okay. So when you get on the path from not being on the path, your initial get on might include quitting drinking, cutting down drinking, but probably quitting drinking. Okay. So here's a common thing that I heard and experienced with quitting drinking, where you kinda crave like sweets or like desserts.

• 2:51:29Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 2:51:29Speaker 02

  Something that'll like give you a, like a, what a dopamine or whatever the chemical hit.

• 2:51:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So you'll want that. Like you'll want like cookies or stuff, you know, cause you're not drinking anymore or whatever. That'll be like a result.

• 2:51:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:51:42Speaker 02

  This is what I heard and literally experienced. And it's, it was like stronger than I expected to.

• 2:51:49Speaker 02

  Now, if you have the mulk, boom, problem solved, hundred percent. Because it does supply that, you know, the dessert kind of scenario. Especially if you've put some peanut butter in it. Put some peanut butter in there, no factor, right? You're on the path, hundred percent, no, no side effects, no drawbacks.

• 2:52:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Speaking of no side effects, no drawbacks, if you get the RTD, the Ready to Drink Discipline Go in a can.

• 2:52:13Speaker 02

  RTD?

• 2:52:14Jocko Willink?

  RTD.

• 2:52:14Speaker 02

  Did you speak that up?

• 2:52:15Jocko Willink?

  No, no, that's a thing, that's a product name, it's like, oh, this is an RTD.

• 2:52:19Speaker 02

  Sounds like you made it up.

• 2:52:20Jocko Willink?

  I didn't make it up.

• 2:52:21Speaker 02

  It just sounds like you made it up.

• 2:52:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay, it's, it says it right there on the page.

• 2:52:26Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, high speed, low drag, RTD. Do it, make it happen.

• 2:52:29Jocko Willink?

  RTD, no, but speaking of that, when, when I was, when I went up to Theo Von's podcast, and he was drinking it, and he started getting that, you know, you start feeling it.

• 2:52:41Jocko Willink?

  And he was pretty funny, and he says, he said something along the lines of, you know, I might find myself back on cocaine after doing this, so, he, he, he started feeling like the, and I said, no, you don't need to go back on cocaine, you know, thinking to myself, you don't need cocaine, you just need a little bit more Discipline Go.

• 2:52:59Speaker 02

  RTD, yeah, man.

• 2:53:00Jocko Willink?

  Which is not, and it, it won't make you.

• 2:53:02Speaker 02

  It's not a gateway drug.

• 2:53:03Jocko Willink?

  It won't, it's not a gateway drug, it's not gonna make you end up sleeping on a park bench somewhere.

• 2:53:07Speaker 02

  No, no, the opposite, actually, you might lift up the park bench.

• 2:53:10Jocko Willink?

  You might buy the park, which is probably gonna happen. So, there you go.

• 2:53:15Speaker 02

  Also, Jaco White Tea, speaking of picking up park benches and whatnot.

• 2:53:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:19Speaker 02

  Jaco White Tea, boom, and it happens to taste good, and it happens to be certified, organic.

• 2:53:24Jocko Willink?

  You like mentioning that.

• 2:53:25Speaker 02

  I, yeah, man, I do.

• 2:53:27Jocko Willink?

  It was a big deal to get that little qualification.

• 2:53:31Speaker 02

  I dig it, it's good, it's very good, actually, because here's the thing, like, yeah, you, well, even when you first.

• 2:53:37Jocko Willink?

  Do you think people, do you think people in Nebraska care if it's certified or organic? Or you think it's only forty mile radius around LA?

• 2:53:44Speaker 02

  I think some people in Nebraska care, that's what I think.

• 2:53:47Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 2:53:47Speaker 02

  And this is why, because, because when you first announced that you're drinking pomegranate white tea.

• 2:53:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, people were asking, is it organic, is that what you're gonna say?

• 2:53:59Speaker 02

  That, that's part of it, yes, I'm saying that whole experience for, well, primarily, it was like, alright, that's surprising, that doesn't sound very hardcore. You would think maybe you're drinking something else, but, when you're like, pomegranate white tea. Okay, now we can do that, or we could admit we drink these white teas, which is good. But, a lot of our wives drink white tea. And they tend to care about certified organic, in my experience, which is very limited, by the way.

• 2:54:32Speaker 02

  So, I'm saying pomegranate white tea, Jaco white tea, is for everybody. And just because you're not all, "I don't care about certified organic", just because you're like that, doesn't mean everyone else. In fact, I would think the majority of the people would rather it be certified organic than non-organic.

• 2:54:50Jocko Willink?

  I would agree with that. And I would say that the root of me drinking pomegranate white tea is when I used to debrief SEAL platoons out in the desert. After they would get done with their brief, and I would drink Jaco white tea during it. But by the time I get done with all these notes, I'd just get into it. But yeah, so check that as well.

• 2:55:11Speaker 02

  That's good. Also, Jaco's store, it's called Jaco Store. So you go to jacostore.com. We do have t-shirts, hoodies, rash guards, hats. Three kinds of hats, by the way. Three types of headgear, by the way. Women's stuff, you know, decals and stickers, these are all things if you want to represent while you're on the path. Discipline equals freedom. Def core, to the core.

• 2:55:38Jocko Willink?

  I like it.

• 2:55:40Speaker 02

  Good, all these things. And that's one that's gonna permeate kind of everything, the good. You know, when you find the good in this situation, all these things you can represent. Get your stuff, jacostore.com. If you like something, get something on that one.

• 2:55:51Jocko Willink?

  Also, I gotta mention that I have a little, I have some events I'm gonna be doing around the country. Starting in January, around the time the book comes out, a little bit earlier. I'm gonna be in Washington DC, Austin, Texas. I'm gonna be somewhere in the vicinity of New York, I'm gonna be somewhere in the vicinity of LA. Somewhere in the vicinity of Seattle, Washington, and somewhere in the vicinity of San Francisco. So, I will let you know, but just pay attention. I just got an email right before we started recording this, that that is actually factually happening. I don't even know what I'm gonna call it yet. So, I will be live, on stage, interacting. So, there you go.

• 2:56:32Speaker 02

  Boom. Also, speaking of live...

• 2:56:35Jocko Willink?

  But I imagine when I do those live events that there will be lots of people representing.

• 2:56:41Speaker 02

  Representing big time.

• 2:56:42Jocko Willink?

  They will be representing in their garments.

• 2:56:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 2:56:46Jocko Willink?

  That they're on the path.

• 2:56:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:56:47Jocko Willink?

  We normally see a lot of people that are wearing something that says Defcore or. Yeah, so there you go.

• 2:56:57Speaker 02

  Big time. Also, subscribe to this podcast if you haven't already on your iTunes. If you listen to iTunes, Google Play, if that's what you listen to Stitcher, if you have Android.

• 2:57:06Jocko Willink?

  What's with the voice, bro?

• 2:57:08Speaker 02

  No, I'm just, just delegating the listening avenues. And leave a review if you're in the mood. If you're in the mood, leave a review. Reviews are welcome.

• 2:57:18Jocko Willink?

  I haven't read reviews lately on the podcast, but I've done that before. I'll do it again. I see some good ones, some, some ones that kind of nail it.

• 2:57:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57:27Jocko Willink?

  Kind of have layers. We're looking for layers primarily.

• 2:57:30Speaker 02

  Yes. So, and you notice they said welcome, reviews are welcome. Cause the difference between welcome and accepted. So I already know reviews are accepted. I already know you can write a review.

• 2:57:40Jocko Willink?

  Are they expected? They're not expected either.

• 2:57:42Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say expected, no. Yeah, welcome, meaning like if there's a review that's like, we kind of like that. Like we kind of, you know, like we're kind of, you know, it puts a smile on, on certain people's faces and we're gonna go ahead and read that one.

• 2:57:56Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget that we have another podcast called Grounded. It's just a podcast called Grounded where we talk about other things. And I think that's the way you, you said this on the last little support section. Cause how do you describe what we talk about on Grounded? And I think the answer is we talk about other things.

• 2:58:15Speaker 02

  Yes, other things.

• 2:58:16Jocko Willink?

  You know, what does that mean? Well, it's other things. I think that pretty, I think that spells it out.

• 2:58:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. Yeah. As opposed to what? These things?

• 2:58:23Jocko Willink?

  It's not these things. It's more other things.

• 2:58:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's other things. Yeah, for sure.

• 2:58:27Jocko Willink?

  Equally important things. Maybe not.

• 2:58:29Speaker 02

  Well, varying levels of importance.

• 2:58:33Jocko Willink?

  Maybe not equally important, but interesting.

• 2:58:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:58:37Jocko Willink?

  And here's the, here's something that is important. I will say this. Even though they might not be of equal importance. They are things that will grant you a better understanding. A broader understanding of things.

• 2:58:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:58:55Jocko Willink?

  Of other things. The more you understand other things, the more you'll understand these things.

• 2:59:02Speaker 02

  That is true.

• 2:59:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:03Speaker 02

  Very well put. Thank you.

• 2:59:04Jocko Willink?

  Do you need to change whatever that little, you know how they, you know how a podcast has a little, you know, blurb about what it's about?

• 2:59:11Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:59:12Jocko Willink?

  And I don't think you've changed the Jocko Podcast one since you wrote it when you were nine years old. But you should make the grounded one say, "A podcast about other things."

• 2:59:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Alright, I'm gonna do it. That's actually a good idea. I do too. So, for example, Jason Gardner talking about how he lives up in the mountains and when they go jogging, they gotta carry guns just in case they get attacked by freaking mountain lions. Those are other things we talk about. You see what I'm saying?

• 2:59:38Jocko Willink?

  But it's important to understand that.

• 2:59:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:59:41Jocko Willink?

  We also have a Warrior Kid Podcast. This is a great podcast, not just for kids, but if you're a parent, you can use it to help you parent, but you can also learn from it. I am a parent. I got four kids, two of which are over the age of eighteen, twenty, eighteen, got a sixteen-year-old and got a ten-year-old. I'm passing on some lessons learned covertly, flanking you with some lessons learned that will help you. And I wish I would have had this podcast when my kids were younger, but Warrior Kid Podcast, let your kids check it out. And don't forget to get yourself some Warrior Kid Soap from IrishOaksRanch.com, where young Aiden has got his own business.

• 3:00:22Jocko Willink?

  And it's not just a business that's making money, it's a business that's helping people stay clean.

• 3:00:29Speaker 02

  That's good. Yeah. Speaking of staying clean, go on YouTube.

• 3:00:37Jocko Willink?

  There's a rough transition, then there's just bad ones. You just called for bad.

• 3:00:41Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. It does anyway. So, yeah, so, yeah, if you want to watch the podcast, watch and listen. Put on your smart TV in your office, gym. It's a place of, you know, a place of workout. You see what I'm saying?

• 3:00:57Jocko Willink?

  I know what you're trying to say.

• 3:00:58Speaker 02

  Or if you just want to watch it on TV anyway, it's a video version. So yeah, man, you know, because some people, because video, watching video, smart TVs, the permeation, permeation?

• 3:01:08Jocko Willink?

  I don't know what the hell you're talking about.

• 3:01:10Speaker 02

  Prevalence of smart TVs is what I'm saying.

• 3:01:16Speaker 02

  You're gonna have more YouTube is what I'm saying. You're gonna have more, you know, see what I'm saying? So boom, subscribe, put it up, put it on there. Listen to it.

• 3:01:24Jocko Willink?

  Do it.

• 3:01:24Speaker 02

  See what I'm saying?

• 3:01:25Jocko Willink?

  Do it. And if you need some, some psychological help, getting through a moment of weakness, you don't have to be alone. You don't have to be alone. You don't have to fight that fight by yourself. You can get fire support when you press play on your phone of an album called Psychological Warfare. The artist known as me, Jaco, laying down tracks, no music, just voice, just me talking. And telling you, hey, this is what you can do to overcome that particular moment of weakness. Whether it's you're thinking you don't want to go to the gym, whether it's you think you're gonna eat a donut. You gonna eat a donut? No, press play on your phone and take a listen.

• 3:02:06Jocko Willink?

  Take a listen, we'll get you right, we'll keep you on the path. And if you need a visual reminder to be on the path, to stay on the path, check out flipsidecanvas.com with Dakota Meyer. It's Dakota Meyer's company. And he's creating graphic visual designs that will help remind you where you are, where you're going, and where you want to be. Flipsidecanvas.com. Also, I have some books. The first book is The Stress Effect, written by Colonel Henry Dick Thompson. So we just reviewed that. It's an outstanding book. There's all kinds of information in there. I only read a small percentage of it,

• 3:02:49Jocko Willink?

  but tons of knowledge. So order that. You can find it on JacoPodcast.com under Books from the Podcast. And then there is Leadership Strategy and Tactics, which is my newest book, coming out January 14th. I just opened up the index, opened up the index, and what do I see? Here's some sections, some sections you can read about.

• 3:03:20Jocko Willink?

  Fear inducing moments, failure, feedback, fighting, fire teams, flanking maneuver, foot patrol, friendly fire, leading from the front, front lines, FTX, full mission profiles, good teams, gossip, guidance, Hackworth, David, hands-off leadership, headcounts, heavy-handed approach, high ground, high-risk operations, honesty, hope, humility. These are some of the topics that get covered in the Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. I wrote this so you can refer to it. You can open it up and say, hey, I got a person that is, has a negative attitude. What should I do with them?

• 3:04:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I'll open up the field manual and follow the directions. So that's what that book is. Tons of good information in there for you. Don't forget, if you've got kids, or you know kids, help those kids out by getting them the knowledge that they need to live a better life. Where are you going to get that? Warrior Kid 1, 2, and 3. Warrior Kid 1,

• 3:04:28Jocko Willink?

  Way of the Warrior Kid, Warrior Kid 2, Mark's Mission, and Warrior Kid 3, Where There's a Will. These books are the books that every human wishes they had when they were 8 years old, 9 years old, 10 years old, 11 years old, 12 years old. Make that wish come true for someone that you know, for a kid that you know, your kid, some other kid's nephews, nieces. Bring it to the library. Whatever you can do to spread the word. And then there's Mikey and the Dragons, which is a book that teaches even littler kids, maybe 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, how to overcome fear, which is what you have to do when you're growing up as a human being. You've got to learn to overcome fear. That book actually teaches little kids how to do it.

• 3:05:12Jocko Willink?

  Mikey and the Dragons. Get that for every kid you know. Get that for the library. Get that for the classroom. Spread the word. And then there's the Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. You don't know what to get that person for Christmas. Cool. Do you want that person to be weak? Do you want that person to be out of shape? Do you want that person to have mental trauma? Or do you want them to be on the path?

• 3:05:41Jocko Willink?

  Give them the gift of discipline.

• 3:05:44Jocko Willink?

  Give them the gift of discipline. Discipline equals freedom field manual. There's no book like it. It's, it's a different. It hits you in a different way. It's not, it's not normal. And that's why it's effective. Discipline equals freedom field manual. Get that also, the audio version of that is not on audible. It's on MP3s through iTunes or Amazon Music or Google Play. Also, we have extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership. Where Leif Babin and I wrote to explain what we learned from a leadership perspective on the battlefield and how you can use those same tools in whatever doing in leading whatever situation you are leading in. And also, we have Echelon Front.

• 3:06:29Jocko Willink?

  Leadership consultancy where we solve problems through leadership. That's what we do. We come into businesses and we help with the problems that the businesses have. We help them solve those problems. 100% based on fixing leadership, improving leadership, aligning leadership. When you align and you fix and you improve leadership, that turns businesses, companies and teams around. So go to echelonfront.com if you want some of that. EF online. You don't necessarily have to bring us in to speak to every person in your company. You can go to EF online.com. And we can train your people or you virtually. That's what it is. It's a virtual training. It's interactive.

• 3:07:14Jocko Willink?

  You actually get put in leadership scenarios inside that training online. And you've got to make decisions. It's like choose your own adventure. So that's EF online.com. We have the muster dates coming out shortly for our leadership conference. Extreme ownership.com for that where we come with the entire Echelon Front team live.

• 3:07:34Jocko Willink?

  And in person, and we bring the knowledge that we have and share it with you.

• 3:07:41Jocko Willink?

  And then we have EF Overwatch and EF Legion, where we are taking selected military personnel. We are ensuring that they understand the principles that we talk about. The principles of extreme ownership, the principles of the dichotomy of leadership. We make sure that they know and understand those. And then we place them into companies in the civilian sector. So that those leaders can lead and help those companies win.

• 3:08:12Jocko Willink?

  Go to EFOverwatch.com or EF Legion for that. And if you, if you need more of us, which is really just hard to even imagine that someone could want to hear more of either of us. But if you want to find us, you can, we're on the interwebs. Dick Thompson, Colonel Dick Thompson, Colonel Henry Dick Thompson. He is on Twitter. He is at HPS underscore CEO. And he's at HPSYS.com, which is for High Performance Systems. If you want to check him out and learn from him.

• 3:08:56Jocko Willink?

  He's just an unbelievable human being. And it's an honor to have sat with him. As far as Echo and I, we are also on the interwebs. We are on Twitter, we are on Instagram. And we are on that Facebook.

• 3:09:14Jocko Willink?

  Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. And once again,

• 3:09:21Jocko Willink?

  just complete thanks, sincerest possible thanks. Gratitude to Dick Thompson for coming on this program. And sharing his lessons with us. And of course, we thank him for his

• 3:09:41Jocko Willink?

  incredible service and sacrifice to our great nation.

• 3:09:48Jocko Willink?

  For what he's done inside the military and for what he's done since he's left the military.

• 3:09:53Jocko Willink?

  So, thank you Colonel. Salute. And appreciate it and obviously an open door anytime you want to come back and to the rest of our servicemen and women out there who stand watch for us every day. Thanks to what, thanks to you for what you do. And the same goes to our police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and Border Patrol and Secret Service and all the first responders out there. You also make sacrifices to protect us.

• 3:10:35Jocko Willink?

  So, thank you.

• 3:10:37Jocko Willink?

  For what you do and to everyone else out there.

• 3:10:42Jocko Willink?

  Just stay aware.

• 3:10:45Jocko Willink?

  To be aware, be aware of what leadership is, be aware of what stress is.

• 3:10:52Jocko Willink?

  Be aware of what cognitive ability and emotional reactions and be aware of stress and the impacts that stress has on your decision-making process.

• 3:11:09Jocko Willink?

  And think about that and also

• 3:11:13Jocko Willink?

  think about this.

• 3:11:16Jocko Willink?

  Think about the fact that you're free.

• 3:11:21Jocko Willink?

  You're free. Our country is free and we are free because of the heroism and valor of those warriors that faced fear and horror and death.

• 3:11:35Jocko Willink?

  And still moved forward.

• 3:11:39Jocko Willink?

  And got after it.

• 3:11:43Jocko Willink?

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