383: Wisdom of the Bullfrog. Lessons From SEAL Admiral and SOCOM Commander, William McRaven

Admiral William McRaven shares wisdom and lessons from his new book, "Wisdom of the Bullfrog". 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 383 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  Ambush right ambush right someone screamed from the high bush on my right the sound of blank fire erupted in a deafening roar the ambush was on simultaneously all the men in the platoon dropped to the ground and returned fire into the tall grass grenade grenade another voice shouted out to my immediate left just to the side just to the side of the point man a grenade simulator exploded first one then another booming in my ears with stunning effect on the ground around me my platoon continued to fire changing magazines and waiting for me to give the order to move we couldn't counter attack through the brush brush it was too thick we couldn't move to the right the instructors had sealed off our exit it

• 0:50Jocko Willink?

  appeared our only choice was to move left and try and get out of the kill zone in my mind I knew that was the textbook answer but I had a better idea without hesitation I jacked another magazine into my M16 jumped up from my prone position and ran around the left edge of the heavy brush nodding to the point man as I bolted past him I would flank the instructors circle around the bushes come up from behind them and counter ambush them myself this was going to be awesome like a man possessed I charged past the row of bushes jumped over a few small boulders and found myself unopposed on the high ground behind

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  the instructors flipping my selector switch to full auto I pulled the trigger and raked the bodies of the seven men lying behind the high brush I moved forward continuing to fire as it methodically shot each man with blank ammunition we had won what the hell are you doing Mr. Mac instructor faculty yelled jumping up from the ground killing the bad guys was my quick and proud retort Doc Jennings one of the few black frogmen of the Vietnam era stood up from where he was lying and gave me a complete look of disdain.

• 2:06Jocko Willink?

  Sir, you're a damn fool, he said, or words to those effect.

• 2:11Jocko Willink?

  You left your platoon lying in the kill zone. Did they know what you were doing? Somehow, this wasn't going as I had imagined. Get back with your platoon, Mr. Mac Jennings said sternly. I thought the worst of my ass chewing was over. Surely, the platoon would appreciate my quick thinking. They would understand what I was trying to do. I had defeated the instructors. That must count for something. Sir, what the hell were you thinking? Varner said, echoing the words of faculty. We had no idea where you went. LeBlanc, LeBlanc piped in. I quickly tried to explain. Look, guys, I saw an opportunity to flank the enemy and save the platoon. I reacted. Well, sir, that's just fine, but we had no clue what you were doing or where you were going. Marshal Lubin had swung around to join in the conversation.

• 2:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, man, I thought you were running away from the firefight. No, no, no, come on, guys. I was trying to save the platoon. Sir, with all due respect, Varner said, a little less caustic now. Your job was to get us out of the kill zone, to communicate your intent, so we could all move together and survive. I just nodded. I knew they were right. Jim Varner's words stayed with me for the rest of my career. Your job was to get us out of the kill zone, to communicate your intent, so we could all move together and survive.

• 3:30Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a new book that is out. It is called The Wisdom of the Bullfrog, which was written by Admiral William H. McRaven. Admiral McRaven spent 37 years as an active duty SEAL officer, becoming eventually the commander of the United States Special Operations Command, four-star admiral in charge of all American Special Operations Forces. He oversaw.

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  Thousands and thousands of missions during the global war on terror, including organizing and overseeing Operation Neptune's Spear, the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. And he has been on this podcast before, episode 290. If you haven't listened to it, go listen to it. It's just outstanding to hear, to hear his stories. He's written a bunch of books, a book called Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Theory and Practice, a book called Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life and Maybe the World, a book called See Stories: My Life in Special Operations, a book called The Hero Code: Lessons Learned From Lives Well-Lived, and finally, and most recently,

• 4:42Jocko Willink?

  this book, The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple But Not Easy. And that is where that opening came from, from a training mission. And that one kind of cracked me up, and I heard you laughing as I was reading it too, sir. It's an honor to have you here once again to talk about some of your lessons learned in your life and, and pass on some of that wisdom from the bullfrog.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks Jaco. Yeah, always good to be with you.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, so I ran training for, for the West Coast for the last three years I was in. And I got to see so many young Lieutenant Rambo's get up and decide.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  It seemed like a good idea at the time, you know?

• 5:23Jocko Willink?

  It certainly did. The Bullfrog, I, we, we touched on it last time you were on, but tell us what the Bullfrog is.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the Bullfrog, as you know, Jaco, is the title given to the longest-serving Navy SEAL on active duty. And for your listeners, of course, as Navy SEALs, we are first and foremost Navy Frogmen. So when you are the senior Frogman, you are the Bullfrog. But what a lot of people don't know is, when you become the Bullfrog, they give you this god-awful trophy. And I think a little bit of it is to make sure you don't get too full of yourself. So the trophy looks like it was made at some, you know, dime store, but it's got a big toad on top of it. You know, it's not some grand bullfrog, it's a toad. So it's like, okay, brother, yeah, you've served longer than anybody else, but that doesn't mean a whole lot, you know, other than the fact you've been around for a while.

• 6:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that, that's definitely, we always kind of knew who the Bullfrog was at any given time in the SEAL teams. I actually know who it is right now. Uh, now, listen, the last episode, we, we, we went through basically your life chronologically and your upbringing, how you ended up in the teams, you know, growing up with your dad as a, a war hero himself, a fighter pilot, and what your experience was like in the teams. And if people want to get that background, which you definitely do, I, I actually re-listened to the podcast and it's just, it's awesome to listen to. Uh, it's episode 290. So if you want to hear, you know, all the, the backstory from the Admiral's life growing up,

• 6:51Jocko Willink?

  then, then go check out episode 290. But look, this is a, a new book. Though it's called The Wisdom of the Bullfrog, and there's certainly a lot of wisdom in it. And so, uh, let's get into this thing. Um, when this come out? Came out April 4th? It just came out a couple of weeks ago, yeah. Yep. So you say here in this, "Leadership is difficult, but not complicated. To do it right doesn't require a sophisticated chart, a calculus formula, or a complex algorithm, but it does require some guidance. So how do we make the difficult nature of leadership simple? Well, for thousands of years militaries have relied on mottos, creeds, parables, and stories to inspire, to motivate, and to guide leaders and followers alike. These sayings

• 7:35Jocko Willink?

  serve to reinforce certain behaviors. They provide a memory prompt, a Pavlovian response, and an inspirational surge that helps direct individual actions in the midst of uncertainty." So that is the basis of this book, is that there's these military mantras that you hear, and you're definitely going to hear them. And depending on what unit you're in, you may hear, hear certain ones more often than others. But what's, you can, you can definitely take those things and kind of shrug them off like no big deal. But what you've done in this book is pointed out how they truly can be a, a mental checklist about how you

• 8:15Jocko Willink?

  are going to function and what decisions you're going to make. And I often say, uh, "Culture, good culture is the ultimate form of decentralized command." So if, if, and I, I actually talk about the Marine Corps a lot because the Marine Corps has such a strong culture that every Marine understands what a Marine Ultimately should be doing and they know when they're doing right. They know what they're doing wrong and they can make decisions based on just the culture of the Marine Corps. And a lot of that culture comes from these mantras that they have even right down to, you know, Semper Fidelis, always faithful. So that's really the basis of this book and, and, and, you know, taking these mantras and mottos and breaking them down and talking

• 8:56Jocko Willink?

  about how you discovered them and then you let them guide you.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's a couple of years ago, my publisher got ahold of me and said, hey, what would you think about writing a leadership book? And of course, the other books, as you pointed out, Make Your Bed Hero Code, they're, they're different styles. They're not really leadership books. They are books about, you know, various qualities and traits and things that I think make for, you know, good heroes and, but it's not a leadership book. And I said, yeah, I'd love to write a leadership book, but I struggled with it because I had so much I wanted to say about leadership that I couldn't figure out how to frame the book. I actually had to push it off for a year. I, I wrote my, uh, got back ahold of my publisher and said, I can't do this just right now. I haven't figured it out yet. Well, at one point in time, I think it was after a couple of martinis

• 9:43Speaker 01

  or a couple of beers, I, I started thinking, okay, so how did I learn leadership? What were the things that resonated with me? And I remembered very distinctly when I was a young officer, at one point in time, I was getting ready to do something and, and the guy that was kind of my mentor at the time said to me, hey, if you do this, can you stand before the long green table? And so that quote, which has been around for a while, really kind of comes from World War II and, and back in the day, and even actually even when I joined the, the teams in the early seventies, we still had them, the conference tables in the, the conference rooms, long, you know, piece of wooden table, but it had a very thin green felt that was on top of the conference tables. And so whenever there

• 10:24Speaker 01

  was some sort of official proceeding or something, you as the officer who was being questioned would come and stand before the long green table. And the implication of that saying, can you stand before the long green table is, look, if you're about to make a decision or you're going to take an action, if you had to stand before reasonable men and women who were judging those actions, could you do it and make a case for it? Because if you can't, then you better rethink your actions. And so again, for some reason, when I was an ensign, this came up and ever since then, When I had a very difficult decision, when something seemed very risky, or I would say

• 11:03Speaker 01

  to myself, okay, if this goes south, which it very well could, can I justify why I took these actions? And then I, and that was kind of the epiphany for me in terms of, well, shoot, it's not only the long green table, of course, it's the SEAL mantra, the only easy day was yesterday, because we as SEALs, of course, understand immediately that every day's hard. So then I started thinking, well, what are the other quotes and mottos and, and as you said, mantras? And that became the framing mechanism for the book. But the first one that jumped out was this long green table.

• 11:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a good one. There's a modern version of that that I used to tell guys, and that is, you're out there in the field and you do something, you have to assume that it's going to be on CNN.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, it's the Washington Post CNN test, you're right.

• 11:48Jocko Willink?

  They're going to be sitting there, there's someone with a camera, that person that you think is just, you know, running away, they're actually filming, and so you got to think, it was what I'm, is what I'm about to do, am I going to be proud of this if it goes on, you know, viral over and everyone watches it? And that, you know, some people might say, well, that's not, that's not the right attitude to have, because that means you were thinking about doing something bad. Well, if it's the thing that keeps you in check and from doing something bad, then so be it.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:17Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and speaking of which, this is the first one that you go over, and this is, is kind of the, it might be the most classic of these mantras, it's death before dishonor. And honestly, you sent me a PDF of this, and, and I was reading it, and I said, oh, that's a, he's coming out of the gate with death before dishonor, okay. And you say this in the book, legend has it, that the phrase death before dishonor began with the Greek Stoics who were prepared to die rather than compromise their values. Later Julius Caesar is quoted as saying, I love the name of honor more than I fear death. The Samurai of Japan were steeped in the tradition of honor and always prepared to die rather than dishonor their service to their emperor.

• 13:00Jocko Willink?

  And in modern times, the United States Marine Corps has unofficially adopted the saying death before dishonor after legendary Marine Sergeant John Basilone had the motto tattooed on his left arm. So that's like the hardcore take. Um, but what I think the, the, the slant that you put on this, or the, the perspective that you put on this is applying this not to, oh, I'm facing the enemy and I'd rather die than run away. But hey, I've got a hard decision to make and I'd rather do the right thing, the honorable thing than, than, and have to suffer a little bit than take the easy way out.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, um, and, and I, I struggled early on with deciding whether or not that should be chapter one. And frankly, even the term death before dishonor, I'm thinking, okay, somebody's going to pick up this book and go, you gotta be kidding me. This is, as you said, right out of the gate. Uh, we're going to come on hard, but I realized, and, and you know this exceedingly well, Jaco, at the end of the day, the great leaders, the men and women that we respect are those people that are honorable, that are honest, that are trustworthy, that kind of respect the people they work for. Now, we all have our foibles and I point out in the book several times, look, I'm, I'm very cautious about, you know, offering advice to people, recognizing my own shortfalls.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  But if you don't have a code of honor, a personal code of honor and pick something, and I, I list a lot of them in there. It's not just, you know, death before dishonor. I mean, the boy scout code, the girl scout code, the Hippocratic oath. I mean, there's a lot of things out there that recognize the value of honor. The one I kind of pull out is, uh, is from West Point. When I went up there, uh, to do what's called the 500th night, I had an opportunity to talk to the juniors that were going through West Point. And the, the kind of honor code for West Point is about as simple as it gets. It says, "I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do."

• 15:04Speaker 01

  And I thought, that's it. It doesn't have to be death. You know, it's not about dying. But it is about doing the right thing. And you always know, you know, people have asked me before, well, you don't always know what the right thing to do. Oh, hell, yeah. Of course, you know, the right thing to do. It's just hard to do. And in fact, the beginning of the book, I start off with a quote from Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th century Prussian general who wrote the book On War. And in the book On War, which is why the subtitle, he says, "Everything in war is simple. It's just the simple things are difficult." And I remember, I was heading back to Afghanistan in about 2009. I'm on a plane and I'm reading

• 15:47Speaker 01

  some foreign policy magazine. And this is when we had just begun kind of a surge to Afghanistan. And these two kind of East Coast academics are talking about the fact that, you know, the military, a little condescending, the military just doesn't get it in Afghanistan. If they would only build roads, they could connect the villages to the districts and the districts to the province, and then, you know, build more roads, the province to the central government. The military just doesn't get it. You know, why don't they build roads? Well, no shit. Why didn't we think of that? And the answer is, we did think of that. It's just that when people are shooting at you and trying to blow you up, it's a little hard to build roads. And so this was a little bit of the foundation of my thinking on leadership. You say, hey, be an honorable man or woman. Well, that

• 16:31Speaker 01

  sounds easy. You know, I could get up on a chalkboard and say, you know, lead from the front, take care of your men and women, you know, be men and women of a good character. It's just hard to do. It's hard to do because we're humans. We make mistakes. We have our foibles. You know, you say, well, lead from the front, except when people are shooting at you, sometimes you have the courage always to lead from the front. When all of a sudden you realize your reputation, or your advancement, or your promotion hinges on something, some action you're going to take, are you going to do the honorable thing? But what I've found over time, and frankly, the older and more experienced I get, the more I think this is true, is yes, there are captains of industry out there who have built, you know, billion-dollar enterprises. There are, you know, companies, there are universities, but invariably,

• 17:15Speaker 01

  if they have not been honorable, it's a house of cards they're building. It's the Enrons of this world. It's the Lehman Brothers of this world. It's the universities that are seeking a national championship but have recruiting violations. Pick something. Invariably, those organizations, or those people, will have an existential event because they were not honorable, because they thought the ends justified the means. And so this idea of honor is not just some kind of Pollyanna-ish view. It's really something that you find if you do it, and you do it well, and even when you go off track, if you know what's right, you can kind of come back and do the honorable thing again. And it'll make for a better organization, it'll

• 17:59Speaker 01

  make for a better culture, it will make for a better human being. Not easy to do, but you know what it looks like.

• 18:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I think another thing that I think about as well, similar to what you're saying, is usually the unhonorable thing, the easy road, is going to be a short-term win. It's going to be a short-term gratification. But like you just said, ultimately strategically, it's going to be a loser. So when you're taking that, when you cave to the pressure, when you make a decision that you know is not the best way to go about this, when you make those mistakes, or you make those decisions, you're going to find out in the long run that that was not the right thing to do. I had my platoon commander, and we were on an ARG platoon, my platoon commander was CB. And so we

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Oh, by the way, so I'm sorry to interject here, but you know, CB and I were sharing the bullfrog for the first year.

• 18:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  One of the finest officers I ever served with, as you know.

• 19:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So CB, he was my platoon commander and we were on an ARG platoon. So we go in to do a hydrographic reconnaissance. There's big waves. It's up at Camp Pendleton. It's miserable. It's freezing. We're in the boat. I'm in the boat pool because I'm a radio man. We suffer through the night. The swimmers are getting washed up on the beach. It's just a, it's just a horrible event. It takes us all night to get it done. We get it done. We're freezing cold. We get back to the ship. The, the cartographer from the platoon, the two guys, they go and make the chart. They give it to the Marine Corps. We go back in to the beach. We call in the Marines, the Marine, we're freezing, we're suffering. It's just miserable. We get

• 19:43Jocko Willink?

  done. The Marines land and an hour after the Marines land, they turn around, go back. They said they, they go back out to the ships. We're going, what's, what's happening? Turns out the Marines didn't like the way the, the landing went down. They say we're, we didn't do a good job. We want to do the whole thing again. So we get tasked once again, but we're going to do repeat of the operation. So we're doing another hydrographic reconnaissance. We all pile in the Zodiac boats. We do the 12 nautical miles over the beach to, to, to get to the beach. We put this, we're, we're sitting there in this boat pool. And we just did, we just did this hydrographic reconnaissance, not, well, I guess it was 36 hours before. And it's hard work. You know, this is like six or seven hours of swimming and terrible.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  I've done a couple of ARG platoons.

• 20:31Jocko Willink?

  So we're sitting in this boat pool and, and there's kind of a silence. And finally someone, thank God it wasn't me, says, you know, uh, hey, are we actually going to do this again?

• 20:46Jocko Willink?

  And there's silence and then CB says, well, we don't have to. But would that be the right thing to do? And as soon as we heard that, everyone was just like, oh, whoever said that's a terrible person. We all were so glad we didn't say ourselves.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  But we're all thinking it, right?

• 21:03Jocko Willink?

  That, so that for me, that was the quote that you heard of the long green table. That for me, that was my second platoon. And that for me, is this the right thing to do? And, and there's an easy way to do it. And, and I actually, we just did hydrographic reconnaissance. It was totally good to go. We could have easily sat in those boats and relaxed for a little while. But it wouldn't have been the right thing to do. And that guidance from, from CB stuck with me for, for the rest of my career and to this day.

• 21:32Jocko Willink?

  That's where those things come from. But that's one of those situations where, look, he's feeling the pressure from, from the platoon. That's gonna be suffering for the next five hours, six hours, seven hours. But he knew it wasn't the right thing to do. And what the interesting thing was, all he had to do is ask the question, would that be the right thing to do? And we all knew that wasn't the right thing.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  So that's why Brian Seaball was one of the great officers in the SEAL teams.

• 21:56Jocko Willink?

  Oh, absolutely. I've, I've tried to steal as much leadership as I possibly could from him. And he was the guy that made me realize what, first of all, he's the guy that made me want to become an officer. Because I said to myself, we, we had, we had fired a platoon commander and he took over. And, and when he took over, I was like, gosh, this is awesome. Like this is so, it's a totally different world. And I said, if one day, maybe I can make the world good for 16 guys in a SEAL platoon, that's what I'm gonna do.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  I think you did that. I think you did that, Jaco, for, for more than, more than a few guys.

• 22:31Jocko Willink?

  Sent me down the path, but all thanks to CB, all thanks to him and, and just the example that he set as a, as a, as a leader. And as a frogman, he was also just awesome at everything, you know? He was just awesome at PT and we of course, of course, thought he was an old man. Cause he was, cause he had gray hair, he must have been at least.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Well, he had been a senior chief, I think, before he, yeah, before he became an O.

• 22:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so, um, and so there you go. That, that attitude right there. You say, you wrap, I'm not going to do this for every chapter, but you, you have a little wrap up in these chapters. You say, "It's simple. To be, be fair and honorable in your business dealings, it's the only way that you and your employees can leave a legacy to be proud of. Never lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. The culture of your organization starts with you. Own your lapses in judgment. It happens to everyone. Correct the problem and return to being a person of good character."

• 23:32Jocko Willink?

  How does that mesh up with, "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying?"

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I never liked that saying. So Jaco was referring to a saying when we, when we go through SEAL training, a lot of times I say, "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying." And I, and it concerns me that this continues to be kind of discussed and bought into in the training. To me, it was about, are you being, are you being flexible enough? Are you being creative enough? It wasn't about cheating. It was about being creative. It was about having this kind of commando mentality that says, "Okay, you want me to go from point A to point B, but I understand the best way to do this isn't to go from point A to point B. It's to go from point A to point A and a half and do it faster than you would think," you know? And, and you would find creative ways to

• 24:19Speaker 01

  solve problems. Sometimes people said, "Well, the instructor said to do it this way. So if you're not doing it that way, then you're obviously cheating." And you know, that's, as you know, as a former instructor, that's not exactly what you were trying to do. You were trying to find out who were the leaders in the class that could think on their feet, that could be creative when they were, when they were given a challenging problem. But from the student's standpoint, they're like, "Well, I'm sorry, the instructor said do this exactly, and now you're telling me to do something different, you, the O, and the class." It's not cheating. It is about, you know, thinking differently and thinking creatively. And, and, you know, this is what's expected of, of all leaders, particularly

• 24:59Speaker 01

  those of us in the, in the kind of the commando, broad commando ranks. So, yeah, the cheating piece, I never liked that saying. Don't like it today because I think it implies that you are circumventing

• 25:13Speaker 01

  The, um, you know, the, the ground truth of something, you're trying to do something illegal or wrong in, in terms of cheating, you're violating the rules. Now, you're not violating the rules, you're playing within the rules, you're just being creative in how you do it. And, and it sounds nuanced, but I do think it's a, it's a different approach to things.

• 25:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, when I went through, we, we, we'd heard it, we said it, and then eventually the instructors would say, you're only cheating yourselves.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:40Jocko Willink?

  Which, which made sense to me, but I, I totally agree with what you're saying. I was going through Mount Warfare, like so urban combat training, and I was assistant platoon commander, and I was out at Team Two, and the, the, uh, role players, you know, the other SEALs that are acting like bad guys, they captured one of our guys. And they had him in like the third, third story of this building. And they were, you know, it was getting all theatrical, they had him yelling for help and all this stuff, and we're all, you know, like, oh, we gotta get him. And we had been taught, hey, you know, when you enter a building, you clear, you clear the first floor, then you move to the second floor,

• 26:22Jocko Willink?

  you clear the second floor, then you get to the third floor, you clear the third floor. And to me, it was like, oh, they were gonna wait, and they were gonna cause problems for us, and they were gonna kill this guy. And so I said, hey, here's what we're gonna do. I said, we're just going straight to the third floor. We're gonna get on this outside stairwell, we're gonna go right to the third floor, and don't clear any of the other rooms, because we could tell what, what room he was in. I said, we're just gonna go straight up there, we're going right to that room. And sure enough, I mean, this was within two minutes, you know, they, they expected us to come up with a plan, and then reassess, and then go clear the building from the top to bottom. So within two minutes, we're in that, on that ladder while heading up. And sure enough, we, we literally walked into that room and just shot all the bad guys in the back, and, and surprised them. To me, that's what that

• 27:06Jocko Willink?

  motto is about. It's about thinking about outside the box.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely right. Being creative, thinking outside the box, getting the problem solved, uh, without necessarily following through the, all the steps that you think are necessary. I mean, that, that's what's expected of good officers and good leaders.

• 27:21Jocko Willink?

  Uh, next one. You can't surge trust. And in this one, um, and again, yeah, I'm obviously skipping around this book, get the book, there's all, every, every one of these, you give really good, one, two, maybe three examples of where these things played in history, where they played in your career. They're just, it's just a great compilation of these things. The, the crux of this one, to be a great leader, you must be trusted by your employees. If they do not trust you, they will not follow you. It takes time to build trust, but it is time well spent if you intend to lead effectively. Now, you say employees in this.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:57Jocko Willink?

  It's actually not just your employees, it's your peers and it's the people above you in the chain of command. And you go into that and that's one of the major points of the entire book. This idea of building relationships. And you talk about building trust and, and I've been talking a lot lately about what relationships are. What, what, what are they? And I talk about, well, trust is definitely one of them. If you don't trust me and I don't trust you, we don't have a relationship. Listening, if I don't listen to you and you don't listen to me, we, we don't have a relationship. Respect, if I don't treat you with respect and you don't treat me with respect. And it doesn't matter if, if you're the admiral and I'm the chief. I'm going to treat you with respect and you're going to treat me with respect.

• 28:41Jocko Willink?

  And if we're not treating each other with respect, we don't have a good relationship. And by the way, if you're the admiral and I'm a chief and you don't treat me with respect, we don't have a good relationship.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 28:48Jocko Willink?

  You're not going to get much from me beyond what you mandate. Uh, being able to influence, so if you've got to, you've got to actually open your mind and allow other people to influence you. So that you can have influence with them. If I don't listen to anything you say, or I don't allow you to influence my ideas, we're not going to move forward. And the last one obviously is take care. If you don't care about me, I don't care about you, we don't have a relationship. Um, this idea of trust, and this is a question I've gotten asked many, many times. Is, you know, my boss is telling me to do something that doesn't make sense. What do I tell the troops? I've already told my boss that it doesn't make sense, but he's just saying, go ahead and do it anyways.

• 29:30Jocko Willink?

  And I always tell people, yeah, when that would happen to me, and it, believe me, it happened to me, just like I know it happened to you. It's gonna happen with, no matter what career you're in, I would get told to do something that didn't make sense. What did I do? Did I go back to my troops and say, hey, this doesn't make any sense. The boss is stupid because that's the truth? No. What I'd say is, hey, listen, here's what the boss wants us to do. I'm not exactly sure why he wants to stick with this plan, but I do know this. I want the boss to trust me. And what we're gonna do is, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do the best of our ability, we're gonna knock it out of the park, so that the boss realizes that we're a good platoon, and we can get the job done, and he trusts me. And that way, the next time he's got a wild idea like this, he'll hopefully listen to me a little bit more.

• 30:11Jocko Willink?

  So, being able to tell the truth is so important, and there's really no reason to deviate from that.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, certainly in my time in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, there were times where we were looking at doing pretty complex missions. And sometimes, a lot of times, you know, you're putting the troops at high risk. And I always felt that, as the commander, I had an obligation, and you talk about the trust, I had an obligation to sit down with the platoon, the unit, the tat, whatever it happened to be, and say, guys, here's why we're doing this. And you've got to be prepared to hear their concerns. I mean, to your point, you gotta listen. You've gotta listen to their concerns. But what you hope is that the good leaders, and I talk about Sergeant Major Chris Ferris in here a lot. So, the Sergeant Major, as you know, was my Command Sergeant Major, both at JSOC and

• 31:00Speaker 01

  then at SOCOM. And Ferris never hesitated, never hesitated to come into my office, close the door and say, hey, sir, this is a bad idea. Or, have you thought about it this way? And you need someone like that, that is, that is gonna tell truth to power. And you expect, certainly as a leader, I always expected, and I encouraged, the, you know, the officers that worked for me, the senior enlisted that worked for me, to say, hey, look, boss, you know, I need to tell you something. Good. Tell me. You know, I won't wire brush you for it. I need to know what your concerns are, or I'm gonna make a bad decision. And Ferris would always come in and we'd have the conversation, but once I made the decision, and this is an important part of leadership, is the followership part of

• 31:44Speaker 01

  it. Once I made the decision, even if Ferris disagreed with it, or even if the Master Chiefs that worked for me before disagreed with it, they would say, "Okay, sir, I got it." They'd kind of salute smartly and move out, and they owned that decision. In fact, I talked about this discussion at West Point. So I have all these, you know, a thousand kids or whatever there were, juniors at West Point cadets. And I said, "You need to be very careful about kind of becoming as a junior officer," because I know I fell into this trap. When I was a young junior officer, the commanding officers of, you know, my teams, they were old guys, you know, they were probably in their 40s or something. And, you know, they were balding and maybe they'd put on a little weight. And, you know, as a junior

• 32:27Speaker 01

  officer, you tend to kind of make a little fun of them and, you know, their spouses weren't exactly, you know. And you get a little too righteous, you know, I mean, you're like, "Oh, you know, this guy just doesn't understand how things are done," you know? And I told these young cadets, I said, "Be careful about being too righteous and thinking that you know more than the commanding officer or the person senior to you." Because when you get to be that person, and if you're lucky enough to be that person one day, you will find all of the things that are impressing upon that individual to have them be forced to make certain decisions, why they're doing things certain ways. And really, you know, you have an obligation as a leader to explain the decisions you're making. People say, "Well, as a leader, you don't have to explain anything." "Oh, yeah, you do. Of course you do." Particularly

• 33:12Speaker 01

  when people's lives are at risk. You have to explain why you're doing it. But you hope that once you've explained it, and once people have talked it out, when the decision is made, the good kind of follower leaders, they say, "Okay, boss, I own that decision, just like you were talking about. Hey, if the commanding officer wants this done, we're going to do it to the very best of our ability." And, you know, that served me well both as a senior leader and as a follower leader.

• 33:40Jocko Willink?

  Have good conversations with people and along these lines. And they'll say, yeah, but you know, what if I go into explain the why we're doing something? And I start getting asked questions. And I don't know what the answer is. And I always say, well, maybe your idea is not that great. Maybe you need to rethink what your actual plan is. If I can't articulate to you. Hey, this is why we're attacking this target from the north. Or this is why we're moving on to this target from the south. This is what, this is why we're using helicopters. If I can't articulate that to you in a way where you nod your head and go, yeah, okay. I understand that makes sense.

• 34:22Jocko Willink?

  Well, maybe I should actually listen to a little bit more to what you have to say. I've been, I've been using this, uh, my, my latest patented invention, invention is called the explanation effort meter.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:34Jocko Willink?

  And what this is, is how hard is it for me to make, to explain why we're doing something? And at a certain point, if I'm exerting so much effort to try and explain something.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Maybe you need to rethink it.

• 34:47Jocko Willink?

  If that meter starts getting in the red, I might need to rethink what, what my decision is.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Well, actually, when I became the chancellor of the University of Texas system, uh, my first day on the job. So now all of a sudden I'm in charge of 230,000 kids, 100,000 employees, 14 different institutions. I've got no experience in higher education or healthcare and, and, and this was, you know, the huge part of the university system. So I come in to meet my staff and I had met them a little bit ahead of time, but this is really my first meeting. And as I had done frankly at SOCOM, at JSOC, at every command I'd ever been to, I sit down with them and I said, okay, folks. Let me tell you how this works. I said, you know, there are going to be times when I'm making decisions. And if I'm making the wrong decision, please tell me, give me your input. I want your input and I want you to feel free and comfortable to talk to me if things don't seem right.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  But here's the other part of this. If I find out later on that you knew I was walking into a minefield and you didn't tell me, you and I are going to have a conversation. And so it was one, you've got to, as a leader, you've got to create an environment where, whether it's your staff or the platoon or whoever, is comfortable talking to you and saying, hey, this is all screwed up. But at the same time, they also need to know that there's a little bit of pressure that if they see you doing something wrong and they don't tell you, guess what? That was their responsibility too. And again, that's served me well over time, both in the military and out of the military.

• 36:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that comes into play is, do you really think, you know, when the boss tells me to do something that doesn't seem to make much sense, is that because the boss wants us to lose a bunch of money or not be able to take care of a client or make a bad product or in combat? Does that mean, oh, the boss just wants us all to get killed? That's why? No, that's not happening. They just don't see something that you see. Or you haven't done a good job communicating up the chain of command so that you can explain, hey, boss, actually, here's a new TTP that the enemy's been using. This is not a good idea. Oh, well, thank you for telling me that. So, all good stuff. Next one. When in command, command, and this is, like I said, you've got a bunch of stories in here, some

• 36:59Jocko Willink?

  of them history, some from your experience. This one here is from, it's actually you going to college and you're learning about, learning about Admiral Nimitz. And you hear this, in the spring of 1942, the intelligence on the Japanese intentions at Midway was anything but solid. Many in the admiral's own ranks questioned the strategic benefit of trying to save Midway. And even more officers feared that an American defeat at Midway would mean a quick Japanese victory in the Pacific. The ramifications of a bad decision were calamitous. But the ramification of no decision might be an existential disaster. Nimitz reviewed the intelligence, consulted with his staff and talked with his commanders, but the ultimate

• 37:41Jocko Willink?

  decision was his. He anguished over the decision for days, what would happen if he were wrong? Thousands of sailors might die, thousands more would perish in fighting on Midway and the island chains leading to Japan. The fate of the entire Navy and perhaps our nation rested on this decision. Legend has it that during a conversation with Admiral Bull Halsey, Nimitz confessed his apprehension. The weight of the decision about Midway was overwhelming him. Halsey, blunt as ever, reminded the Admiral of Nimitz's own personal conviction. "You once told me," Halsey began, "that when in command, command." It was the clarion call that Nimitz needed.

• 38:24Jocko Willink?

  He understood that commanders are expected to make the tough decision, to act with purpose, to be confident and lead from the front, to accept the challenge and steel yourself for the rough waters ahead. A commander must command. Command the situation, command the troops, command your fears, take command.

• 38:47Jocko Willink?

  And like I said, this was a, this was a course that you got when you were, I think, a freshman or midshipman at ROTC. And what, what I really found just pretty amazing was, I'm going to read a little bit more of the book here. It says, "38 years later, as a four-star Admiral and Commander of the US Special Operations Command, I walked into my office in Tampa to find a new desk waiting for me. I was a bit confused as the old desk had seemed perfectly fine. When I inquired about the desk, my administrative assistant, Senior Master Sergeant Dana Hughes, smiled and said, 'Well, sir, we thought this might be a better fit for you.' Perplexed, I looked at the desk again.

• 39:27Jocko Willink?

  It was older than I first realized, a large executive-style desk with deep-grain wood and leather side panels. As I approached the desk, there was a small framed picture resting on the edge. The man in the picture was unmistakable. It was Admiral Chester Nimitz, and this was his desk. The Navy archives had been kind enough to loan it to SOCOM for my use. I was humbled beyond all measure. For the next three years, I sat at that desk, and whenever I thought I had some difficult days, I would remember where I was sitting. I would remember the lives that hung in the balance, the decisions that affected millions, the sense of loss and the sense of victory that Nimitz must have felt.

• 40:11Jocko Willink?

  And on those days, when I felt indecisive, when I took too much counsel of my fears, when worry threatened to stall my actions, I hearkened back to Nimitz's words, 'When in command, command.'"

• 40:26Jocko Willink?

  And with those words as my guide, I always tried to do the right, do right by the men and women who served me.

• 40:36Jocko Willink?

  Man, sometimes people really do the right thing, don't they? Whoever figured, hey, we got the four-star admiral that's now running all of special operations, we need to get him Nimitz's desk. That's incredible.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  So Dana Hughes was this remarkable senior master sergeant, as I mentioned, the Air Force senior master sergeant who worked for me out in my front office. And, yeah, at one point in time, I think I had flippantly said something about, you know, I need something naval around here, you know, because as you know, SOCOM, now Eric Olson had been right before me, but historically SOCOM had been an Army command. And frankly, still was adorned with a lot of Army, you know, memorabilia. So I'd gone away on a, on a trip for a couple of weeks, if I was heading over to Afghanistan or something, and I come back and, and here's this desk. And of course, nobody says anything when I come in, but I could see a little grin on Dana's, you know, face as I, as I come back out and say, what is this desk? And she said very, you know, straightforward, she was, well, you said you wanted something naval.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  She says, it's Nimitz's desk. And I was like, you're kidding. And as you point out, it really was for me, it was kind of a physical manifestation of the difficulty of command. But of course, my decisions as the commander of SOCOM paled in comparison to any decisions that Chester Nimitz had to make. And so, you know, you realize, look, you have an obligation as a commander, as any leader. I don't care whether you're leading Starbucks, or whether you're leading, you know, a hamburger joint. People expect you as the leader to make the decisions, to make the hard decisions. And yeah, it's hard. Good luck. You're in command. You're

• 42:18Speaker 01

  in charge. Make the hard decisions. And there were times, you know, as the SOCOM commander and as the JSOC commander, you, you struggle with these things. But when you realize that people have come before you that have had to make really, really, you know, monumental decisions, and they did the right thing. Then you need to do what is right by the people that work for you. You need to make the decision. You're gonna be wrong a lot of times. I was wrong a lot of times. But frankly, they appreciate the decisiveness of the people in leadership positions. Now again, this also assumes that you've taken all the advice and as I talked about the little story about Nimitz ahead of time, his staff had told him, sir, we think this is a bad idea. You know, sailing the fleet out to Midway, this could be a Japanese trap. The folks in

• 43:02Speaker 01

  DC, the senior officers in DC did not think it was a good idea. But Nimitz's experience at that point in time, you know, he'd been in the Navy for 30 plus years at that point in time. He really had an understanding of what the right thing to do was. He just, he struggled with making that decision. Of course, as you know, Jaco, Bull Halsey, Admiral Bull Halsey was this kind of bigger than life figure in the Navy, brash, very, courageous and not risk adverse. And he had this kind of gruff demeanor. And so when Nimitz comes in, he goes, well, Admiral, you always told me, you know, when in command, command. And so that has stuck with me all these years that from my time as a midshipman,

• 43:43Speaker 01

  again, getting this course in the ROTC. Yeah, you gotta make tough decisions when you're in command. That's what's expected of you.

• 43:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And you mentioned the fact that you've, look, this is after you've listened to people and you gotta, in your breakout here, you say, be decisive. Don't take too much counsel of your fears. Be thoughtful, but not paralyzed by indecision. Now, this is a much, well, not much, but this is a slightly different version of Patton's, what Patton gets attributed to quote of, do not take counsel of your fears. Period. Do not take counsel of your fears. What you say is don't take too much counsel of your fears. This is why I wrote a book called The Dichotomy of Leadership, because if you're not balanced, and if someone reads this, if you're a young junior officer right now in the military,

• 44:35Jocko Willink?

  and you say, hey, when it's time to command, command, I'm gonna just make decisions. That's not what we're, that's not what the Admiral's saying.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 44:43Jocko Willink?

  It's actually, listen, make sure you assess. And then when you, when it's time to make a decision, you make a decision. Don't take too much counsel of your fears. That means you should actually listen to your fears. If something is, if you're saying, I don't know if this is the right thing to do. Okay, what is, explore that. Don't just say, oh, I'm a commander, so I'm just gonna command.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Well, let me dovetail off that because later on in the book, I talk about who dares wins. And as you know, the Special Air Service, British Special Air Service, that's their motto, who dares wins. But I'm quick to point out in the who dares wins piece of this is, yes, you want to be aggressive. Yes, you want to take risks, but they need to be calculated risks. And, and so I also want to make sure that the reader understands, and, and part of this, of course, is talking a little bit about the bin Laden raid. And I said, look, everybody, and I'm not sure I talked about it in the book, but everybody that's seen the movie Zero Dark Thirty, which I have not seen, by the way, a long story behind why I haven't seen it, but I have not seen the movie.

• 45:42Jocko Willink?

  That makes two of us. I haven't seen that either.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  So, but, but I know in movies about seals, you know, what they show, of course, is, you know, the daring do and the sexy stuff that makes movies or books. What they don't talk about is that three quarters of your time is spent planning and rehearsing, right? You know, nobody wants to see a bunch of seals on a whiteboard with gutter markers, but as you well know, if you don't do that upfront work, then the mission goes awry. So this understanding of yes, who dares wins, or when in command, command, to your point, Jaco, you bet, you know, you want to be decisive, but you want to be decisive after you have thought through all the risks, after you have taken all, as much of the risk out of it as you possibly can, then be prepared to move out. Listen to the people that are

• 46:25Speaker 01

  providing you that counsel. Listen to your fears. I mean, you have reason to be, you know, counsel of your fears. You ought to listen to that little voice in the back of your head that says, I don't know here. Sooner or later, though, you've got to say, you've got to resolve that. Okay. If the little voice in the back of my head says, hey, you know, you guys are jumping out too high, or you're jumping out too low, or you're going into a risky situation to get the shadow governor of this province, and do you really want to, you ought to think through that. But then, once you've thought through it, you can't be paralyzed by your decision. You know, it's a, you know, you can't have this analysis by paralysis and continue and continue and continue. Sooner or later, you've got to make the decision to move out.

• 47:07Jocko Willink?

  Here's a little trick I used to play on the junior officers. When, when they were coming through the JOTZI course, the junior officer training course. So I was over running trade at my buddy Leif was running the junior officer training course. And I would set the scenario up for him. It was a scenario that we lived through, which was we were, we were. Got a, got a mission in Ramadi for hostage rescue. We get the word that this guy had been kidnapped somewhere in Fallujah. And now we have the location. He had been moved by these insurgents to Ramadi. And he was being held hostage and they wanted $50,000. Money that was going to finance the insurgency. We, the, the first thing we got when we got this word, I said. Let, let's just wait, let's get this confirmed. This sounds, it sounded a little bit wild.

• 47:50Jocko Willink?

  So sure enough, we wait 24 hours, we gather more intelligence and it gets more solid. More solid, more solid. And we've got great, now we have really good intel. You know, the, probably the best intel that you can get, we have. That this guy, where he is and what's going on. So, okay, they, we're going to go rescue this guy. We.

• 48:11Jocko Willink?

  You know, the platoon does their platoon planning, they're, they're briefing the mission. I'm sitting there and, and there was a bunch of things that happened on this that made it a very interesting mission. So we come up with a plan, we're going to go hit this target. And. We get done with the brief. And the ensign, I had the intel, you know, I was at a, I was a, a task unit of 40 SEALs. You know, we, our intel officer was an ensign. A great guy, but he comes running in and, and he, sir, sir. And I'm like, what's going on? He goes, we, I just got more intel. And I'm like, okay, what is it? And the Leif standing there with me and he says. We just got intel that. They have IEDs planted throughout the yard and they have. Heavy machine guns.

• 48:54Jocko Willink?

  And if anybody comes to try and rescue this guy, they're going to kill everyone and they're going to kill him.

• 49:00Jocko Willink?

  And at that point, so I would tell this story to these junior officer training kids. And I'd say, all right, who would go on this mission right now? And half of them would raise their hand and say, yep, we're going, we're going to rescue this guy. That's what we do. The other half would raise their hand and say, I wouldn't send my guys, you know, we're not going to go take a bunch of risks to get blown up by IEDs to, to rescue some random Iraqi kid. And so we'd, we'd always get that you always get, and both those answers, you know, you can see where they're both coming from. And my point in, in setting them up like this is I'd say, hey, that's great that you guys think this. That's great that you other guys think this. Here's the reality, this isn't a black and white question.

• 49:41Jocko Willink?

  What we can actually do is we can mitigate risk and that's exactly what we did. You know, so what we did was we put an overwatch on the building. We observed the fact that there was people walking around, we, that mitigated the fact that there was IEDs. We couldn't see any, we would put air assets overhead. We realized there wasn't any machine gun on the net, on the, on the roof of the building. And then we did a massive explosive breach on the gate, which we normally wouldn't do. Normally we'd climb into a building, but we did a massive explosive breach, which would disrupt IEDs. We sent dogs in first, then Iraqis, our Iraqi counterparts, we sent them in and then we went in. So my point was, hey, guys, look, this, this is not always like a yes or no answer.

• 50:23Jocko Willink?

  A lot of times you just need to rethink things and how can you mitigate this to the best of your ability? And, and all that being said, we would also add on the point that you can never mitigate all risk. You, you can't mitigate all risk. And what you do is you mitigate what you can. And regardless, if we were going on that target or some other target, we would make adjustments based on the threat level. And so, yes, when you're in command, command, but think.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Right. It, it seems intuitive, but it isn't always, you're right.

• 50:53Jocko Willink?

  And the, the really scary thing is when people let their ego get wrapped around issues like that. And I've been, I've been pointing out to people lately that there's countless, you wouldn't think that your ego would get you killed. Or you wouldn't think that you wouldn't make an egotistical decision that would get thousands of men killed. But there's just example upon historical example of combat where people let their ego just drive people to their death. And sometimes including themselves.

• 51:20Jocko Willink?

  All right. Speaking of ego, you got it. The next one is we all have our frog floats, which actually told the story on the, on the first time you came on the podcast, but it's worth rehashing. You got your, you first show up at a SEAL team or as actually a UDT team. And of course you expect the big mission is coming and you get recalled. And by the way, you get recalled by a guy named Petty Officer Larry L. Jones comes and tells you, hey, they need to see you right now. The skipper needs to see you. And interestingly, with one of these crossover things, this guy's a guy that was known in the SEAL teams as Double L. And when I was,

• 51:58Jocko Willink?

  when I got to SEAL Team One, there was a SEAL Team One ball at the Hotel Del Coronado and we had a cake and the cake cutters were the oldest SEAL at SEAL Team One and the youngest SEAL at SEAL Team One. And Double L was the oldest SEAL at SEAL Team One and the youngest was me. And so we cut the cake together. Yeah. So there you go. So you get recalled for this big mission and the big mission that you get recalled for is to build a parade float of a big frog for the 4th of July. That's what you get tasked with. And obviously it wasn't going into, you know, Soviet harbors

• 52:39Jocko Willink?

  or something like that. So you're kind of bummed out. And I'll just go to the book. You see this, this, you hear this, this deep raspy voice behind you in the locker room as you're walking around all bummed out. He says, what's the matter, Ensign? I turned around to see Master Chief Herschel Davis, the senior enlisted man from our sister team, UDT 12. Davis was the personification of a frog man. Tall, lean, tan, with a ruddy face, steel gray eyes and a huge handlebar mustache. He had seen more combat action than any 10 men I knew. Nothing important, Master Chief. Uh huh, he said in a fatherly tone as he took a seat beside me. Why did this feel like I was in the confessional? I confessed. Skipper just called me into his office and told me he wants me to take charge of building.

• 53:24Jocko Willink?

  Building the frog float for the 4th of July parade. Hmm, the Master Chief grunted, and my guess is you would rather be jumping out of airplanes, locking out of submarines, going on a mission to save the world. Exactly right. I told him. Let me tell you something, Ensign. I've been in this canoe club for almost 30 years. Sooner or later, we all have to do things we don't want to do. But if you're gonna do it, then do it right. Build the best damn frog float you can. And there it was. Build the best damn frog float you can. Throughout the rest of my career, I would be asked to build a lot of frog floats. Asked to do those menial tasks that no one else wanted. Those tasks that seemed beneath the dignity of my rank, but each time I remembered the

• 54:06Jocko Willink?

  words of the Master Chief and tried to do the best I could to be proud of whatever job I was given. I found in my career that if you took pride in the little jobs, people would think you worthy of the bigger jobs. On July 4th, 1978, the UDT Frog Float was awarded the top prize in its category and the picture of my first mission hung proudly in the UDT 11 compound for years afterwards.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  It was funny, so as I was promoting this book, I think it was Fareed Zakaria was my first TV spot a couple of weeks ago. And Fareed had read the book and the, and I think people wondered, not necessarily Fareed, but people wondered, okay, was this just some story or was it really a frog float? And of course, I had a picture of the frog float. So I, I sent it after the fact, I sent it to Fareed and he was like, whoa, that's a big float. I said, yes, it was a, so you may recall, because I think it went out to the island. The frog eventually went out to the island. So later on, so it was this giant papier-mache frog that we had built around a four by truck. And, and then we pulled a flatbed and on the flatbed, we had the capsule from one of

• 55:16Speaker 01

  the, the Apollo missions, I think. And then we built some, you know, fake wave and there had a bunch of guys on an IBS. I mean, it was quite, quite the new, but, but after that, that was the last time that frog float was used. Well, eventually they took the papier-mache frog off of the chassis of this truck and they sent it out to San Clemente Island. And they put it on the top of the hill where when I went through training in class 95, we used to do what they called airplanes. You'd take a pallet, wooden pallet, put it on your back and run up the hill.

• 55:44Jocko Willink?

  We did it too.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  So later on, when the frog finally got out there, the guys had to carry frog eggs, you know, which were big boulder, find the big boulder and carry it up the hill to the frog, you know, to the mother frog. But eventually a storm came in, wiped out the frog, and it was never seen again. But you know, the point of that chapter, as you all know, is like, you know, all of us, and it goes back a little bit, what you said earlier about kind of leadership and when your boss says, asks you to do something. You don't always know the reason. And the point I'm making there is, look, if at the end of the day, it's best for the organization, and look, my commanding officer thought building the frog float was good for UDT 11 and good for the teams, and it was going to represent

• 56:28Speaker 01

  us in the city of Coronado, that was, you know, his idea, the Commodore's idea, well, I mean, if that's what they want done, and I've been tasked to do it, then just do the best damn job you can. And throughout the course of my career, I said, you got tasked to do a lot of things. I remember as a SEAL one time on deployment, I had a Marine Colonel come to me and he says, "Look, you know, you guys, you got this crackerjack SEAL platoon here, elite commandos, I need you to clean up the beach." And we were in Colombia, and the beach had been, you know, polluted, it had, you know, trash all over the place. I'm like, "Really?" I mean, we're like a world-class SEAL platoon, and you want us to skin dive and pick up trash on the beach? And the Colonel said, "Yeah, we need you to do this. Great for community relations."

• 57:13Speaker 01

  And so I had to back to you, I had to go back to talk to the platoon. And needless to say, my SEAL platoon was not too happy that we were going to go clean up the beach. But an interesting thing happened. We got out there, and of course, I said, "Sir, if that's what you need us to do, well, we'll clean up the beach," you know? And I had to explain it to the platoon. I'm not sure I ever explained it quite well enough. But we got out there, we cleaned up the beach, and of course afterwards, the locals come out, and they brought us beer, and we had a little picnic afterwards, and it turned out to be a great community service project. Guys had a good time, and actually, we felt pretty good about cleaning up the beach. I mean, we picked up a lot of trash. And you had a lot of those. Then, you know, you get into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. You think there's no small things to do, but there's a lot of small things.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  People ask you to do things that you think, well, you know, I'm supposed to be out here saving the world, winning the war in Iraq, winning the war in Afghanistan. No, we need you to do this thing that seems insignificant, but may actually have a much bigger, bigger role to play. You just do the best you can.

• 58:10Jocko Willink?

  I know. I was also tasked for the Fourth of July.

• 58:15Jocko Willink?

  I wasn't an officer. I was just an E-Dog. So I had to put on a PRC 77 and we got, put a bunch of camouflage paint on and drove, you know, at high speed toward the Boy Scout landing and then got out and patrolled through the crowd.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  What year was that, Jaco? Cause I was probably in charge of that Fourth of July demonstration.

• 58:35Jocko Willink?

  19, it would have been 1992. So I got the SEAL Team 1 in 1991. And yeah, cause you were the XO there in 88.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  89, 90.

• 58:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So I missed you.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause we, you know, back then.

• 58:50Jocko Willink?

  Which is a shame. Cause a lot of people said that I was actually outstanding in the Fourth of July.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  But you remember before nine 11, for your audience listeners, I mean, Fourth of July, the SEALs, every Fourth of July, we'd put on a big demonstration, Glorieta Bay. And it was it. Cause later on, when I became the SEAL, SEAL Team 3, and then the Commodore, I ended up doing it five times, being in charge of it five times. I kept trying to get out of it. Say this isn't fair. I mean, I've been doing, because it was like running a complex tactical mission. You know, we had free fallers, we had static liners, we had SDV guys, we had guys on, you know, the, the fast attack vehicles. And, and if you screwed this up, you know, 40,000 people were going to be watching SEALs screw up. And, and, and some of it was pretty dangerous trying to jump into Glorieta Bay and all this.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  So it was my first opportunity to run a complex SEAL mission in front of a lot of people. And I remember Admiral Ray Smith, who was the Commodore one point, or was the Admiral.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  We had done a demonstration and, and a Connex box I had on a platform out in the middle of Glorieta Bay caught fire. And there was this huge, black billowy smoke that just went from Coronado all the way over to San Diego. And needless to say, that did not go so well. The Admiral and I had a conversation, Bill. You know, this is not supposed to be sure I got it. Well, we'll get it fixed.

• 1:00:09Jocko Willink?

  Those things were, uh, it was even so. I did it in 1992 and there was like the massive crowd. I mean, when I got out of that little Zodiac boat and started patrolling, like there was a crowd pressed up against the shore. It was very popular evolution. But yeah, since I don't know, we stopped it. We stopped it once September 11th happened. Uh, next one. The only easy day was yesterday. Uh, and this is something, you know, that obviously is, it comes from buds. I think it comes from buds or originally it comes from buds. But, um, you say this here in 2002, when I was serving in the Bush White

• 1:00:49Jocko Willink?

  House, the commander of the East Coast SEAL, SEALs invited me down for a conference. As was typical, the SEAL gathering, we started each day with an hour of calisthenics followed by a long run. And again, listen to the podcast 290, you talk about this parachute accident that you had, a terrible parachute accident. You were all messed up from that. You weren't really healed yet, but here's this, you know, here's this PT. And so what are you going to do? You're going to man up and, and go do the PT. So you get done with the PT and now it's time for a run. And you say this, as my fellow SEALs started off in a sprint, I was only able to keep up for the first hundred yards and then began to fall back. Within a few minutes, I couldn't even see the pack anymore. The course was five laps

• 1:01:31Jocko Willink?

  around a two mile stretch of state park. As the minutes passed and I lumbered along, the first runner, a young SEAL lieutenant began to lap me, slowing momentarily. He pulled up beside me and knowing about my parachute accident, gave me a penetrating and confused look. Sir, what the hell are you doing? He asked. What do you mean? I responded. He shook his head and said, sir, why are you even out here? You don't have anything left to prove. Before I could answer, he bolted away and ran off into the distance. I was a Navy SEAL captain at the time. I had already completed my major command and important milestone in an officer's career. And to this young lieutenant, I had nothing left to prove. But I wanted to tell him, what I wanted to yell at the top of my voice was how very wrong he was.

• 1:02:16Jocko Willink?

  The day you no longer believe you have something to prove, the day you no longer believe you must give it your all, the day you think you are entitled to special treatment, the day you think all your hard days are behind you, is the day you are no longer the right leader for the job.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and you know this better than most, Jaco. The fact of the matter is, and I tell folks, look, you gotta bring it every day. Every single day. And sometimes, you know, as you become more and more senior, you think, well, I got here, maybe there's some perks. No, the only perk you have is working hard, working harder than everybody else.

• 1:02:56Jocko Willink?

  It's more people watching you.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  More people watching you. You know, the, you should be honored to lead. And again, whether you're leading a coffee shop or a burger joint, or whether you're leading, you know, all US special operations, you should recognize that it's an honor to lead. There are no special perks. Come in earlier than anybody else, work harder than anybody else, stay late, come in on the weekends, do whatever it takes to take care of the men and women that are working for you to get the job done. The only easy day really was yesterday. Every day is gonna be hard. And the day you start thinking that, hey, man, my easy days are behind me, you know, I've made it, you know, I got money in my pocket, I'm a four-star admiral, I mean, things

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  are good, I really don't have to work too much harder. No. That's not the way it works. You just gotta work harder.

• 1:03:49Jocko Willink?

  This led me or maybe think about something again, going back to this junior officer training course that I used to go and guest lecture at, if it can be called that, when Leif was running. I did it when the other guys were running as well, but one thing I would tell those guys is, you have nothing to prove, but everything to prove. And the reason I would tell them that is because you'd get these young officers sometimes and they would feel like they had to prove that they were in charge. So they would dictate everything and they would impose their will on the team and they would make these decisions that didn't really matter. I mean, like, really, does it matter what, you know, I want to meet at 7 o'clock in the morning? And the chief says, you know, we're going to meet at 7:15. You're like, no, make it 7. Like, there's really, you just lost so much leadership capital trying to prove that you

• 1:04:32Jocko Willink?

  were in charge. So you have nothing to prove, but the interesting dichotomy is you have everything to prove. You have to prove that you're going to do the right things at the right time, make the right decision, that you're going to take care of the team, you're going to get the mission accomplished. That's what you're trying to prove. So, and that's the external, what you're trying to prove. And then you've got here, you know, what you're talking about, this internal thing of like, hey, every single day.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Every day.

• 1:04:54Jocko Willink?

  And they did a good job with the SEAL ethos of, you got to earn your trident every day.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Every day.

• 1:04:59Jocko Willink?

  That's, that doesn't go away.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Well, because, you know, you earn your trident every day because you owe it to all the people that came before that wore the trident. And all the people that are going to come after you. And I just tell people, it ain't your trident. Yeah, I got it. You know, it's on your chest, it's got your name, but it's not really your trident. It's everybody that ever wore a trident. It's the team's reputation. And so, you better wear that trident and remember the people that came before you, remember the people that you're going to represent in the future. Do it with honor, do it with integrity, do it with all the right intentions. Because at the end of the day, you know, it's all of our tridents. You're just lucky enough to be wearing it.

• 1:05:43Jocko Willink?

  That's the truth right there.

• 1:05:48Jocko Willink?

  Next one.

• 1:05:50Jocko Willink?

  Run to the sound of the guns and you've got a whole section here about. One of my favorite leaders of all time, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. We go, we go out to Gettysburg and we take people out there and we do a battlefield, you know, review. And just, it's just awesome. You can actually right now, right now, at this moment, Little Round Top is closed because it's they're, they're doing a bunch of work up there, but usually we get to go right up on Little Round Top. Right now, we take people up to Devil's Den and you can look across at Little Round Top, but we've done a bunch and we've, I've, on this podcast, we've covered the book, Bayonet Forward. We've gone through that thing in great detail. I also did six podcasts, taking us up to the Battle of Gettysburg with a friend of mine named JD, who's a

• 1:06:35Jocko Willink?

  Marine, retired Marine that worked at the Naval Academy, who's a fanatic Civil War history buff.

• 1:06:45Jocko Willink?

  So yeah, this is, this talks about that event happening and, and what happened at the Battle of Little Round Top. Again, you do a great job of, of capturing the essence of that.

• 1:06:59Jocko Willink?

  And, and you take this run to the sound of the guns and break it down and you're, and you're kind of capture here, you say, be aggressive. When you see a problem, do something about it. That's what is expected of leaders. Move to a place where you can best assess the nature of the problem and provide guidance and resources to resolve it as quickly as possible. And number three, communicate your intent every step of the way.

• 1:07:25Jocko Willink?

  I was, I was at a team and we were talking and, and just reviewing some tactics and stuff. This may be like two, three years ago and there was, I got presented with this argument of, hey, where should the, where should, if we got a, if we got a troop out there, where should the task unit commander be? We, I think it should be up front. And the other guy was saying, I think you should be in the back or whatever, whatever they were saying. And I said, uh, who, you know, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? And finally, I said, hey, that task you knew commander should be where he can best like, see what's going on, not get totally overwhelmed with what's happening right in front of them. Shouldn't be, shouldn't have to be handling prisoners and, and shooting his gun, but he shouldn't be so far away that he can't understand what's going on.

• 1:08:09Jocko Willink?

  So that's when you say move to a place where you can best assess the nature of the problem and provide guidance. That's it.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and I think you captured it well there. You know, I talk about run to the sound of guns and, and the implication is, again, go to solve problems. I used to see folks more so after I left the military. Uh, but there were times when I was, uh, you know, in charge of academics when I would see a problem at a particular university and I would call up and talk to the president. And I'd say, uh, okay, uh, so what do you plan on doing about this? And they would say, well, you know, uh, I'm gonna let the chair or the dean or the provost handle this. It's like, I don't think so. Uh, this is, this is kind of the Washington Post test, as you mentioned, you know, this is, this is not good and you need to move because you can solve this as the president,

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  where the chair and the dean probably can't. But of course, a lot of times leaders, and not just in the academic world, leaders are afraid to move to where the problem is because they know that then they own the problem. And so you see it in the corporate world as well, you know, things get dirty and get ugly and it's like, oh, I need to distance myself from that. No, no, that's not what you need to do. You need to move right to where that is so that you can garner all the resources so that you can make the decision so that you can solve the problem. Now, will you get painted with that brush? Absolutely. Guess what? You're the leader. That's part of the job, right? And I, I talked in there, uh, the story about the deep water horizon. So the oil rig that blew up in the Gulf several years ago and, um, and there were, you know, I remember pictures on the, on the news at night, you know, the mom and pop stores that were flooded

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  with oil, the birds that were lying dead on the beach. And, um, and the, the CEO, you know, was a long ways away in the UK and did not come to visit, uh, the, the site there on the, on the Gulf of Mexico. And at one point in time, uh, somebody stuck a camera, uh, and, and a microphone in his face and said, you know, what are you doing? Why aren't you coming to this? What's going on? And the CEO said, you know, this, this has been really busy for the last couple of weeks. You know, I'm really tired of this. I just kind of want to get back to my life.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Ouch. Ouch. Needless to say, he did not last as a CEO. Now, he eventually did go down to the Gulf, but it was by that time it was too late. And the point is, hey, something bad happens in your organization, boy, you better move to where that problem is quickly. And again, I was fortunate, you know, growing up in the teams to see this time and time again. Then after 9/11, of course, I worked for some remarkable Army generals and I watched, again, part of the culture in the Marines as well. And, you know, part of the culture for the big generals was, hey, you know, Jim Mattis would be in Ramadi and in Fallujah. Stan McChrystal would get down in Afghanistan. Ray Odierno would walk along the markets in Baghdad. I mean, these guys understood, hey, be forward, be up front.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  And when things go bad, you're right, you don't necessarily need to have a Jim Mattis picking up a gun, shooting, but you've got to be in a position where you can see what's unfolding so that you're in a position to make the best decisions to resolve the problem. But, but once again, my time in the corporate world and in the academic world, I found the same problems. Again, this is, the book, yeah, I pull on military examples, but at the end of the day, this is, this is about leadership. It's fungible. You know, whether you're in the military, whether you're in the corporate world, whether you're in the academic world, no matter where you are, the leadership principles are the same. I used to get asked all the time, you know, when I, when I was the chancellor of the University of Texas, I'd be talking to large donor groups or something like this, and invariably, somebody from the back would ask what they thought was a rhetorical question.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  And they would say something about the fact that, you know, well, you know, Admiral, you know, when you were in the military, of course, you know, you just told people what to do and they did it. But now that you're in charge of all these faculty, you know, and they're kind of eccentric and they don't, they don't, you know, like discipline, you know, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with these people that don't just follow orders like they did in the military? And I would pause and I'd say, well, let me tell you, if you think that when I was in the military, you just told people what to do and they did it, you never spent a day in the military. Because you know, you know, no matter where you are in leadership position, you have to inspire people. You have to manage people. Every once in a while, you've got to kind of kick them in the fourth point of contact. But at the end of the day, this is, I don't know in my 37 years that I ever gave anyone

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  an order. You know, again, the order was implied, but leaders, you've got to inspire and you've got to manage and you've got to to help people understand the nature of the work they're trying to do. And that's good leadership. And again, so I think those principles apply kind of wherever you go.

• 1:12:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, two things for me. Number one, if your boss calls you and asks you about a problem, you need to go address that problem. That's like if my boss calls me and says, hey, Jocko, what's going on with this thing? I'm on it. I'm gonna go figure out what's going on and I'm gonna get that problem solved. So if your boss is calling you, that's his very nice indirect way of saying you better get this squared away right now. And yeah, I spent quite a bit of time now working with civilian companies and right out of the gate, one of the first CEOs that I had a call with to set up, I was going to work with this company. And he said, you know, I just can't wait till you come up here and whip my people into shape. And I said, hey, listen, if you're looking for someone to whip your people into shape, you should call someone else. Because if we're whipping is what you do to dogs

• 1:13:36Jocko Willink?

  and horses and slaves, and you don't get results that you want, and you definitely aren't going to form a world-class organization. So yes, leadership is required. And another thing I'll tell people is, you know, you think you could just tell people what to do in the military, you're telling them to do something that might get them killed. There's actually no place where people will push back more than when they're being told to do something that could get them killed. That's where they say, hey, you're an idiot. I'm not doing it. That's what that's what happens. And actually, that does get reflected in in movies from time to time. They show, you know, the especially they show the Vietnam area, I'm not doing that. That's ridiculous. So yeah, it's too bad that we have that reputation. And I think it does come from all the boot camp scenes, right? All the boot camp scenes, yelling and screaming. So.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  But you know, your point about, you know, when things go wrong, and you and I were talking before we started the podcast, you know, the nature of combat is always challenging. And unfortunately, we have civilian casualties. And I can tell you, you know, when I ran my three-star command in Iraq and Afghanistan, just the nature of, you know, 10,000 guys out there conducting combat operations every night in Iraq and Afghanistan. We had civilian casualties. And every time we had these, as I mentioned, you know, we did a thorough, thorough investigation. But when those casualties were significant enough, I mean, I would be the guy that would move to, you know, the side of the casualty, or I would talk to the general. You can't avoid the ugly problems.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  And the uglier and the harder they are, the more you as a leader need to be right up front. And again, will it potentially cost you your job? Will it cost you your reputation? Will it cost you? It could cost you all those things. But if you do it, it will also gain you the respect of the people that work for you because they know that you took on the hard problem. You knew the ramifications because you're going to own that problem. And if it turns out that problem is really ugly and it's on you, yeah. But the people that work for you, they expect you as a leader to get out there, to address the problems, to be the face of both the problem and the solution.

• 1:15:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's one of the good things I learned from the Army. We had, you know, we're in combat all the time and people are getting killed and people are getting shot. And one of the things I learned from the Army was, oh, the best thing you can do if something happens is say, hey, come investigate this right now. Like if something happens, let's do an investigation because I want to know what happened. I want to make sure everybody knows what happened. I want to see what we learned from it. And our motto, one of our models was investigate us. Come and investigate us. You want to see what we're doing? You want to understand what we're doing out here, how it's happening, how these things transpire? Come investigate us. And sure enough, I mean, number one, we did shooter statements all the time for all of

• 1:16:24Jocko Willink?

  our engagements for that reason, to make sure people knew, like, here's exactly what happened. Here's the, here's the enemy tactics, techniques and procedures that were witnessed. Here's the rules of engagement that were followed. Here's what happened and here's how, and here's how it happened. And then when we did, if anything expanded beyond that, it was like, yes, please come and investigate us. And I learned that from the Army. The Army, the Army said, hey, if anything happens, you should raise your hand and say investigate. And that's the best possible thing to do. Get someone else down here. Cause if you look like, if you look like you got your hand down and you're looking in the other direction and you're saying, I don't want to get investigated. You're you're gonna you're gonna sound guilty and there's probably a reason that you're gonna sound guilty probably because you're doing something stupid. So we would raise our

• 1:17:09Jocko Willink?

  hand. Yep, this is what happened. Come investigate, come and check it out, come and give us your two cents. We want to know that you know what's happening. So I love that attitude. It's also a really good attitude that everybody in my, everyone that works for me knows that that's my attitude. Like every single person knows what I'm gonna do. There's not gonna be any cover ups. We're not, you know, I literally said, hey, where there will be no cover ups. If you work for me, there's nothing getting covered up. If you think I'm gonna brush something on the rug, it ain't happening. If you're doing something stupid, it's gonna come out. So don't do anything stupid. You know, our rules of engagement, hey, you better make sure if you if you kill somebody, you better make sure that they are bad. If they're not bad,

• 1:17:50Jocko Willink?

  don't kill them, obviously. And we put those rules out and that's how we executed. That's how we operated. So I really like that idea up and down the chain of command. Come investigate us. Um, next one. Sue asponti. Am I saying that right?

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  Sue asponti, that's right.

• 1:18:07Jocko Willink?

  Sue asponti. See, I wasn't saying it quite right. If I put an E in there. The Rangers have a Latin saying, sue asponti. It means of your own accord. In other words, doing what needs to be done without being told to do so. There is often misguided belief that soldiers only follow orders, but the strength of the American military is that the great soldiers, the truly great leaders do what is right without being told. They do what is right to protect their men and women. They do what is right to uphold the reputation of their unit. They do what is right to bring honor to their country. They do what needs to be done, whether ordered to do so or not. This sense of initiative separates the great leaders from the mediocre ones.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I started off that chapter talking about Ralph Puckett. Ralph Puckett, who received the Medal of Honor for actions, Army Ranger, received the Medal of Honor for Actions in Korea. And then I think also received the Distinguished Service Cross in Vietnam, highly decorated guy. But the story I think that is, that is almost more compelling, as strange as it sounds, because, you know, in the case of Ralph Puckett, the Rangers are moving into this position in Korea, they're taking fire from the North Koreans and the Chinese, and Puckett, in order to draw the enemy's fire, so that the Rangers can direct fire on the enemy, runs across an open field, not once, not twice, not three times, but, but four or five times, so the Rangers can find out where the fire's coming from. And then as

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  soon as they see where the, the North Korean gunners are, then they engage them, right? And, and at some point in time, later on, years later, somebody was asked, "Why the hell didn't Ralph Puckett do that?" And the young Ranger replied, "Well, somebody had to do it." And Lieutenant Puckett knew that he was that somebody. He kind of did it of his own accord. But I tell a much simpler story, because obviously, you know, we're not all going to find ourselves in the Ralph Puckett position, where, you know, our lives are at stake. But, but this idea is, is still important, this idea of suas ponti, of your own accord. And I mentioned that when I was Commodore, we were commemorating a building

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  in Hawaii for Mokie Martin, for one of the great SEALs, Lieutenant Philip L. Mokie Martin. Mokie was born and raised in Hawaii, and in this building, for an SDV building, we were going to name the building in his honor. Well, as we, as we get up to do this, we've got the hangar, the high bay is full, we got, you know, a couple hundred folks are there, you've got dignitaries from, from Hawaii there, and so, and Mokie, as you know, is in a wheelchair. So I get up to give my comments, and we had correctly positioned the microphone for Mokie to give his comments. But we had not positioned it absolutely correctly. So Mokie wheels up to give his remarks, and, and you can't hear him. And I'm, I'm kind

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  of sitting in the back, and, and I'm thinking, "Okay, well, I'm, I'm the senior officer, I'm the dignitary here, it's going to be a little awkward, but I think I need to get up and go reposition the microphone." Sounds like a small thing, except now everybody is kind of, you can tell they're not... So as I start to get up out of my seat, all of a sudden, a young SEAL from formation, breaks formation, comes out, walks past the 200 people, comes right up to Mokie Martin, promptly salutes him, adjusts the microphone, steps back again, salutes him again, does an about face, and returns to formation. And we didn't miss a word of Moki's comments. Small thing, you know, not life or death.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  But it was the importance of the event. This, this was meaningful. And this young SEAL knew something had to be done. So, you know, nobody told him to do it. It was of his own accord. Nobody said, hey, you need to break formation to go fix that mic. No, he just said, hey, you know what? And oh, by the way, not the senior guy. Of course, I was a senior guy. I wasn't even the senior guy in the formation. I think it was young second class petty officer. But he knew something had to be done. So my point to the reader is like, this isn't always about life and death. None of these things are about life and death. Death before dishonor is, you know, that's a saying, but it's about just being honorable. Um, but in this case, uh, suas ponte is if you're a leader and you see something that needs to be done, do it.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  No, you don't always have to ask. If it's the right thing to do, just move out and do it. But as you know, people are like, ah, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't do this. Maybe you go do it. That's what good leaders do.

• 1:22:39Jocko Willink?

  Yes, uh, putting a, putting a SEAL troop through urban combat. And there's total chaos going on. There's paintball flying everywhere. Explosions going off, Humvees are in ditches. It's just total mayhem. And there's, there's this one kid. He's an E5 at the time. I still know he's a freaking awesome guy, but he's an E5. And I've been watching him through land warfare and watching him in CQ. See, I knew he was a squared away guy. And so he's sitting behind this wall, you know, paintball flying over everywhere. And I kind of walk over to him. I go, hey, bro. And he looks up at me and I go, what do you guys think he should do right now? I go, what do you think he should do right now? And he goes, we go get in that building, man. Strong point that building. And I go freaking make it happen. And he looked at me with like big eyes, like, wait a second, I can do that?

• 1:23:24Jocko Willink?

  And I go, do it. And so he goes, hey, everyone, strong point that building right there. And boom, all of a sudden, all these troops start to pass the word and they all strong point that building and they carry on. But it was that idea that this kid, he's an E5. He shouldn't be making big tactical decisions, but that's what the freaking SEALs are for. That's what you're supposed to do. You see what you need to make happen? Make it happen.

• 1:23:46Jocko Willink?

  Who dares win? Who dares wins? We brought this one up. Clearly, an important one. You can say this, in 1991, I was a student at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. For two years, I worked on developing a theory of special operations. I wanted to know why special operations missions succeeded in spite of the fact that they were exceptionally high risk. Was their boldness alone enough to carry the day? Were their commandos so superior to the enemy that they were bound to win in a fight? Was their technology so exceptional that it gave them an overwhelming advantage? As it turned out, those factors were necessary, but certainly not sufficient for success. In each case, who dares wins

• 1:24:29Jocko Willink?

  had to be backed up by who plans and prepares wins. It was only through extensive planning and preparation that the special operations leaders were able to identify the major risk factors and develop options for addressing them. To those on the outside looking in, the risks appeared great. However, to those on the inside, the risks were manageable. Every great leader must exhibit some sense of boldness, because the rank and file don't want to follow a timid soul. Those leaders must be prepared to act when others are weak kneed and fearful of failure. They must embrace the motto, who dares wins. But, no leader

• 1:25:07Jocko Willink?

  should confuse daring and audacity with brashness and impudence. The former is fine, the latter will surely result in failure.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  Well, it goes back to the discussion we just had earlier. You know, when you were, when your platoon was looking at taking, rescuing this hostage, same thing. You know, you look at it and you say, there is a whole lot of risk here, and there's going to be some guys that say, hey, we're gonna go. No, you need to take counsel of your fears, but you also need to kind of plan your way through the hard part. So whether it's breaching the, heavy breach in the gate, whether it's making sure you got the ISR overhead, so you know what paths. And of course, you know, I saw this every, every night in Iraq and Afghanistan, where you were always worried, as you know, about pressure plate mines, about IEDs. But if you put a pred overhead, or a Reaper or something, and you watched it long enough, and you would see them kind of in and out

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  of the buildings, you know, the SEALs and the Rangers on my end, they would map it out, you know, okay, so we know this is a clear path, because we've seen the women and children walking along this path. Oh, by the way, we've never seen anybody walking over here. That may not be a good place to be. But, but this idea is, yeah, who dares once? You have to be audacious. You have to have a little swagger. I always tell leaders, look, you know, like I said, nobody wants to follow somebody that's too timid. Every leader needs to have a little bit of swagger. That's okay. But, you know, hubris and, and being a little bit too cavalier with the lives of your men and women, that's not okay. Have a little swagger, but back it up with hard planning, hard rehearsals, good discipline,

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  all the sorts of things that are really going to make it successful. And then maybe you can swagger a little more after you're successful.

• 1:26:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you mentioned how in the movies, they never show the planning, they never show the guys at the whiteboard, they never show the, you know, four hour discussion about what the best approach to take is. They also don't show the months and months and years and years of standard operating procedure that gets developed. And I know, going back to my first deployment to Iraq, so we're there, and when we first showed up there, there was only one platoon in Iraq. And it was, it was us. So it was awesome. And then my, you know, my command started showing up, and I had a great relationship with my commanding officer, who is also my executive officer of Team Two, so we had a great relationship. I was stoked for him to show up. And we're there for a while now, we're sort of, you know, we're doing a lot, we're working all the time, we're working every night. And at

• 1:27:43Jocko Willink?

  some point, you know, somebody asked him a question. He said, he wanted to know, hey, Jaco, how much time do you need to be able to launch on a target? Because you know, this we'd gotten past when the war started, it was like, oh, we 96 hour planning cycle and that kind of thing. So now we're way past that. But so, you know, he comes down to talk to me and he says, Hey, Jaco, like, you know, we're getting asked to CJ Sotif wants to know, how long do you need before you can launch on the target? And I look at him, I go, 15 minutes, you know, and he kind of like, was a little bit surprised and of course, thought I had, you know, like a little bit, maybe extra swagger. But but and I explained it. And I sat down, I said, Hey, sir, here's the deal. Like, we

• 1:28:25Jocko Willink?

  know what we're gonna do. You point us at a building, it's not a plan. It's a standard operating procedure. This is what we're gonna do. And if you tell me where the target is, you tell me what frequency the conventional forces are that are in that AO and where the friendly forces are located, that's the information I need. You tell me go hit a target, I can, we can leave in 15 minutes. That's how long it takes me to get my battle dress on. And so it takes me 15 minutes and we'll be in those Humvees rolling. But all of that wasn't based on our planning. It was based on the fact that our standard operating procedures were so solid that because we were running ops every night, we know what we're gonna do. So those are included too.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, you know, when I tell people a lot about the bin Laden raid, I said, look, we went through the standard, as you know, our procedures at that command, very, very detailed before any mission. And the night before the mission, I do a four hour debrief. And so as the commander, everybody that's part of the mission is there. And, you know, they all come up to me, I'm sitting in the front row in the hangar and they say, you know, sir, I'm chief petty officer so and so, here's what I'm doing on the, of course, we got the model in front of us. Sir, my job is do this, this, this, and then I quiz him and I check it. So, but, of course, no plan survives first contact, right? So the idea, you know, we had the, you know, first helo was gonna come in, guys were gonna fast drop into the courtyard, second helo was gonna come in, guys were gonna fast drop onto the roof. None of that plays out.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  And of course, we had Plan A, we had Plan B, we had Plan C, but also you talk about the standard operating procedures, team guys knew what to do. Okay, look, now we are not where we thought we were going to be. We're not even in the same compound. We're isolated. Oh, by the way, the second group is outside the building. Well, we didn't plan on being outside, but you know what? We've been outside a lot of compounds in our time, right? Of course, every one of these guys, a lot of combat experience. So, the SOPs then kick in. Okay, I got it. Breacher. Breach this wall. Guys know how they're going to flow in. Everybody knows how they're going to clear the rooms. And the SOPs kind of take over after, you know, Plan A, B, and C. So, yeah, the, but this is what a lot of folks don't understand. But if you're a brand spanking new platoon, you don't have that muscle memory

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  on the SOPs, you know, particularly if you've got new guys in the platoon. But after, like your platoon, like after you've been in combat for a while and every night, it's another building in Ramadi, and it's, you know exactly if you go into the carport, you're going to enter into the kitchen, because every guy in an Iraqi house has got the kitchen off the carport. You know, this is, these are SOPs. But it's when all of a sudden, the target becomes different than what the SOPs have called for, and that was the case in the bin Laden raid. You know, the compound, large, trapezoid, but it was just a little bit different than what we had expected. You know, kind of from the standard compounds. Boy, then you got to plan the heck out of it.

• 1:31:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, the, we got really good as a community in those 20 years of fighting.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  Yes, we did. Yes, we did.

• 1:31:21Jocko Willink?

  Next one. Hope is not a strategy. Never underestimate the power of hope. And again, I'm fast forwarding. Get the book. Get the book. For all the examples, I'm giving some of them, not giving all of them. Never underestimate the power of hope. Hope is what inspires, hope is what encourages, hope is what empowers, and without hope, nothing would be, nothing worthwhile can be accomplished. But hope alone is just wishful thinking. Pair hope with a sound strategy, a detailed plan, and a lot of hard work, and nothing is out of reach. I tell people pretty regularly, without hope, nothing can be accomplished, but hope by itself accomplishes nothing.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, when I was doing, writing my thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School, the one that became Spec Ops, I had a chance to interview some of the, you know, the great leaders of the World War II missions in particular. And, and one of them was the mission to go get the Tirpitz. The Tirpitz was a huge German battleship. It had been slightly damaged and had been sent up into Caffiord, up into Norway, where the, the Brits could not get to it. So for two years, the British decide that they're, they're going to build a plan using X-Craft. So X-Craft were these three-man, small, dry submarines.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  They're going to send six of them from Scotland, across the open sea, to get into the fjord, to make their way up to, up the, long way up the fjord, to put large explosives on the battleship Tirpitz and sink it. So for two years, they rehearsed this. Well, in the planning, the little submarines were being pulled by big submarines. And back in the day, they had two kinds of lines. They had standard manila lines, kind of cotton woven, big housers, big lines. And they had this new thing called nylon, the nylon ropes. Well, as, as they rehearsed this, again, they had a, almost, almost two years to rehearse

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  this, they never did a full dress rehearsal in towing the little minisubs. Because when the minisubs towed behind the big submarine, they would, they would oscillate up and down, and the guys got violently sick in the back of these little minisubs. They could only handle it for about an hour and a half. And they said, you know what, when the time comes, we'll gut it up, and we'll make, it was like a seven or eight hour transit across. They said, we'll just, we'll gut it up. So they never rehearsed that part of it.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  Well, when the mission finally came about, the six big submarines towing the six minisubs, three of them are sunk in loss before they ever get to Norway because the manila lines broke because they didn't test it out to its full extent. All the nylon lines held. And the point of that, and I, as I talked to the guy named Godfrey Place, Lieutenant Godfrey Place, who successfully got his ex-craft up the fjord and actually blew up the USS Tirpitz, damaged it enough that it never sailed again. But in talking to him, he said, you know, if only we had done a full dress rehearsal, if only we had planned that part in it and

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  really done and executed and rehearsed that full part of the plan, we'd have known the manila lines were going to break and we probably would have saved nine guys. And, and he carried that burden even when I interviewed him back in the 90s. I mean, it was like, we had two years and we never did a full dress rehearsal on that. And it is about this, they, again, they hoped, they hoped it would all work. And, but hope wasn't the right strategy. If they had planned and rehearsed it, they would have known that part was going to fail. And you know, you see it all the time. Like I said, I tell leaders all the time, look, it's great to be inspirational. It's really important to be inspirational. It's important to give the men and women that work for you, hope and inspire them. But if that's all you're

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  bringing, it probably isn't going to work. You better be also prepared to pull out the stubby pencil and do the hard planning, build the tactical plan, the strategic plan, figure out how it's all going to work together because that's what's expected of a leader at any level.

• 1:35:37Jocko Willink?

  Hope is definitely not a course of action. That's for sure. Similar, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Again, you, you just mentioned this, but you covered more in depth on the, in the book. You talk about the bin Laden raid. You talk about the multiple contingencies that they had to go through in order to be prepared for those and then to execute them on, execute on them. And you say here, as a leader, always ensure that your organization has put forth the effort to plan for the worst case scenario, even if it seems the least likely to happen because no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Always be ready.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, as you know, this is, everybody always, you know, sometimes you'll look at the worst-case scenario, and I've seen it before, more, again, more outside the military, because military understands, look, you got to plan for the worst-case scenario. But outside the military, sometimes they, they look at it, because it's going to cost them money, to plan for the worst-case scenario. So a lot of times, like, I mean, what's the chance of this happening? So I think in there, I talked about the Exxon Valdez a little bit, the tanker that sunk off, off Alaska. When they, when they did the forensics, and they did the after-action, they did the investigation, there were a lot of people that thought, this could happen, this could happen. Yeah, but you know, the chance of it happening is really, really slim, and in order for us

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  to prepare for it, it's going to require a lot of people, a lot of planning, a lot of money. So it was such a small percentage of chances that I thought it could happen, that they never planned for the worst-case scenario. So, again, this is the nature of it, you got to figure out how far down do you plan? I mean, there's, you know, there's always a worst, worst-case scenario. But, you know, in the military, we know, like I said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. You better have a Plan A and a Plan B, and you better think through the worst-case scenarios, so that you're prepared to make the decisions. What I don't say in there is, on the bin Laden raid, I had a decision matrix that I had the guys make up for me. And I said, every step of the way, if this bad thing's happened, if this bad thing happens, what am I going to do? I don't want to have to be thinking about it, and debating it, you know, right in the

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  middle of the mission. I want to know, and so we had one, so, you know, if the helicopters, you know, cross into Pakistan, and they're detected, do we keep moving, or do we turn around? And the answer was, if they're detected on the border, we turn around. How about a quarter of the way through? We turn around. How about halfway through? We turn around. How about past halfway through? So then there were a couple of branches of that, which was, have the, have the Pakistanis, do they know where we're going? And if the answer was no, then we press on. What happens if we lose a helicopter? Do we keep going? I mean, what happens if we have a mass casualty? Do we? So, all of these scenarios I had so that in the heat of the battle, I didn't go, oh, man, I don't know. What do you think we should do?

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  That's not the time to be thinking through the most, you know, worst-case scenario. You better have figured out what you're gonna do at that point in time. And so, I thought about it, particularly the mass casualty. What happens if one helicopter goes down? What happens if two helicopters go down? And we've, we've got 24 SEALs dead on the ground or injured? Well, I had a backup plan for that, right? We had a whole contingency of guys waiting in Afghanistan to come, pull them out. But, but I wanted to make sure I didn't waffle on any of those decisions. So, when it was warm and cozy, I said, this is the right decision to make if things go south. And I will know what to do in the heat of the battle when bad things happen, because I'll have thought through it ahead of time.

• 1:39:05Jocko Willink?

  This is, uh, when people are climbing Everest or whatever, you know, peak that they're climbing, and they say, hey, if we haven't gotten to this point, or whatever it is, at 10 o'clock in the morning, we're turning around and going back down, no matter where we are. Could be 50 meters away, we're 10 o'clock, we're turning around and going back down. And when people don't follow their, what they've set up, that's when they get killed. You know, it's another thing I used to teach guys was, you know, you're on patrol, you're, you're out in the city, or you're out in the jungle, or you're out in the desert. As a leader, you should be looking, okay, if we get contacted right now, where are we gonna go? Because this is gonna change every 20 yards that you walk. And if you're constantly thinking, oh, there's a good out over there, there's some high ground over there, you're constantly thinking through that. As soon as you do get hit with something, you already thought through it.

• 1:39:46Jocko Willink?

  You, so this is the idea of just having the pre-thought. You've, you've thought through 97% of the information. Sure, there could be some 3% that, well, the helicopter went down, but it went down over here, and it actually landed okay, and so now we've got some people. You could make some little minor adjustments, but the vast majority of your thinking, which is gonna cause all kinds of smoke to come out of your ears, a vast majority of it's already done, and you have a little 3% to make a decision on, and you can do it very quickly.

• 1:40:13Jocko Willink?

  Number 11. Pays to be a winner.

• 1:40:18Jocko Willink?

  Pays to be a winner, and as they say in BUDs, it also sucks to be a loser. You are onboard a ship at this point. I'm gonna read a quick story. At 0800, I heard my name, I think you're on deployment. Yeah, you're on deployment on a ship, you know, with a platoon.

• 1:40:33Jocko Willink?

  At 0800 I'd heard my name broadcast across the ship's intercom. Commander McRaven, report to the bridge. This was not a good sign. I knew that the Commodore, my boss, would be waiting to grill me. As I made my way from the birthing area up three flights of ladders to the bridge, I started to prepare my defense. Yes, SEALs had gotten into trouble. But how did that compare to the 22 Marines who were equally egregious? Entering the bridge, I found Mike Komatos.

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  Komatos, right.

• 1:41:02Jocko Willink?

  Komatos, the Commodore, sitting in his captain's chair. I approached the chair and came to a modified attention. Sir, you called for me? Komatos got down from the chair and I could see the anger in his face. A Vietnam era Hilo pilot, he was tactically brilliant and over the course of the past 18 months, I'd come to deeply respect him for his leadership of the amphibious ready group. To this day, I count Mike Komatos as one of the finest leaders with whom I ever served. Only five foot five, he closed the distance between us and glared up at me just inches from my face. One of your SEALs got into a bar fight last night and beat up a couple of Marines. This is entirely unacceptable.

• 1:41:41Jocko Willink?

  Yes, I completely agree, I started. And then I made a fatal mistake. But sir, I would also note that 22 Marines got in trouble last night.

• 1:41:51Jocko Willink?

  Before I could continue, Komatos moved toe to toe, his face now fully flushed with anger. They're young Marines, Bill. I expect them to get in trouble. And then I was reminded why I was a Navy SEAL. But I hold you and your SEALs to a higher standard. And I expect you, as their leader, to do the same. Are we clear? I hold you and your SEALs to a higher standard. Those words resonated in my head for the rest of my career. While as SEAL, as a SEAL organization, we have occasionally failed to meet those high standards and dealt with the painful, embarrassing aftermath. We have never stopped raising the bar and trying to be the best. And I have always known that as a leader in this community,

• 1:42:33Jocko Willink?

  my job was to ensure the standards of conduct and professionalism were met. Which meant not only establishing the standards, but holding people accountable.

• 1:42:47Jocko Willink?

  Boys getting in trouble.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was, uh, we had pulled into Subic Bay. And it was, it was the deployment that ended up being Desert Shield and Desert Storm. But, you know, we'd been at sea for 30 days, crossing the Pacific on, on the USS Okinawa and the Fort McHenry. And of course, the team guys got in and they got out on liberty and that didn't go so well. But I had found out about that and so I went to the XO to find out who else got in trouble that night, you know? And of course, I find out that, okay, one SEAL got in trouble, but 22 Marines got in trouble. And I thought this was going to be a great defense until, you know, Commodore Quamatus made sure I understood, look, you're a Navy SEAL.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  We hold you to a higher standard and we ought to expect to be held to a higher standard. And as I point out in the book, yeah, you know, we've, we've made it in the press a lot lately for not upholding the standard. But I tell people all the time, I got it. You know, some people don't meet the standard, but the standard of conduct, the standard of professionalism, the standard of duty, honor and country is, I would offer as high as it's ever been. And we expect people to meet that standard. And when they don't, and some of them don't, then you gotta hold them accountable. And every great organization, every great organization, I don't, again, I keep bringing back this point, but it doesn't matter what the organization is.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  Nobody is looking for a mediocre organization. You don't say, hey, where is that mediocre organization? That's what I want to join. I want to go, I want to go be mediocre like those people over there. Everybody wants to be part of a great organization. How do you become a great organization? You set some high standards and you hold people accountable to those standards. Now, you gotta give them the training, you gotta give them the resources, you gotta give them the latitude to do the job, but you set high standards and you hold people accountable. That's how you make a great organization. And so if you're not prepared to set the standards and hold people accountable, then you're never going to have a good organization, a great organization. And after a while... People won't be part of you because you will have had, you will become a mediocre organization. And this idea, you know, it pays to be a winner, as you well know, and I don't know whether

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  it's a term that they still throw out because not having been to BUDS in a while, but you know, it was every instructor would get on your case about, you know, in my case, Mr. Mack, pays to be a winner. And as you know, there was a veiled threat behind that too, which was, you know, if you're not a winner, you're a loser and you're going to pay the price. You're going to have the goon squad, you're going to have circus, whatever comes next. But in my mind, it was all about, look, how do you become a winner? A winner means, say, you're a great organization, you're a great person, you're a great whatever, great leader, and you become a winner by setting high standards and holding people accountable. And that, again, that served me well, but when Quamadas called me up and I tried to

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  defend the fact that, well, we were just as good as the Marines, maybe even a little bit, it was like, no, that's not the point. You're the Navy SEALs. My expectation for Navy SEALs is that you're the best. And if you're going to be the best, this type of behavior is unacceptable. And he was right. He was right.

• 1:46:02Jocko Willink?

  Check. Next one. A shepherd should smell like his sheep. And this one, you tell a great story. You're on a midshipment tour. You're on the USS Lett. And you meet a sailor named Ricky. I tried to find his rank and what his rate was. He must, I think he worked in the boiler room.

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  He was. He was a second-class medico.

• 1:46:26Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Boiler tech. And you say, so you're there, you're young midshipman, you're not even a commissioned officer yet, and you're experiencing what it's like to be in the fleet. Your introduction to him is when you step on his head or his face or something while he's trying to sleep and you're trying to get into your bunk. And I'm going to fast forward a little bit, but you say, knowing I would someday be wearing Ensign bars, Ricky and his other crewmates made sure I understood what they expected from their officers. That dude, Ricky said, referring to a young lieutenant, he shows up every day and spends an hour in the boiler room with me. Now that's a good officer, bro. The XO, he's a hard ass when he wants to be, but he cuts us some slack when he can. He's good too.

• 1:47:10Jocko Willink?

  The skipper rides us hard, but he always makes sure we get the best spot on the pier.

• 1:47:16Jocko Willink?

  The officers they respected the most were the ones who showed up in the boiler room when it gets, when it was 120 degrees, who got greasy and turned wrenches with them, who picked up a broom and helped with the evening sweep down, who brought them water when they were painting the side of the ship, and who thanked them routinely for their efforts. But they also wanted an officer who made the tough decisions, held them accountable, worked hard, and above all, they wanted an officer who valued them for their tough work they did. Finally, they wanted an officer they could be proud of, even if they didn't say it publicly. They wanted someone who was smart, athletic, looked good in their uniform, and didn't embarrass them on liberty by getting too drunk or too rowdy. Three years later, I was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy and headed off to some,

• 1:48:01Jocko Willink?

  to basic underwater demolition SEAL training. The lessons from my time with Ricky were never far from my mind. Share the misery, share the dangers, share the camaraderie, listen to their stories, and you will learn about your sailors, and you will learn what they expect from you.

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  You know, I tell folks, I think this is the single most important lesson I ever learned, even before I got to the teams. So, the Navy, again, in its, in its wisdom back then, in between your freshman and sophomore year, they sent you on what they, you know, euphemistically called the cruise, and as you point out, it was on the USS OLED, it was a fast frigate. And so here you are as a prospective officer, but they want you to understand what it means to be a sailor. So for seven weeks, I'm living with the sailors, you know, cleaning the heads, I'm buffing the floors, I'm doing all the things sailors do, so that you can understand the impact of your decisions as an officer.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Every decision you make as an officer is going to affect that sailor at the deck plate level, and you better understand that relationship. And somebody later on talked to me about professional distance, and the importance of professional distance. And the idea was, look, sometimes as we go through SEAL training, you know, that professional distance, that distance between the decision makers and the rank and file, maybe gets a little too close. But if you ever get to the point where you're sitting in your office drinking coffee while the troops are out, you know, on the battlefield, then that professional distance has gotten way too, way too wide. You need to make sure that that professional distance, whether you're an ensign or a four-star admiral, is such that you understand how the decisions that you're making are affecting

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  the men and women that you're serving. And it can never get too far, but also you gotta be careful about it getting too close because you're gonna have to make the hard, tough decisions. Sometimes decisions that are affecting your friendships, that are affecting guys' families, that may be affecting guys' lives. But sometimes you gotta make that decision, and if you're too close, sometimes that becomes challenging. But this idea that the seven weeks I spent with Ricky and the other sailors on the USS Olet was a time I never forgot because it was just this recognition that it is about the sailors. It's always about the sailors and making sure the sailors can run the ship, run the platoon, whatever the organization is. And it really is this reflection, I think, about servant leadership as well.

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  And you know, when I first came into the military in 1977, there weren't a lot of what we would call servant leaders. It still had, for the Navy, it had this kind of surface warfare mentality, which was, you know, the CO of the ship was the king, whatever the CO said you were gonna do. And, and it was a hard, the young officers were put in crucibles, and if they survived the crucible, then I guess they were gonna be a decent officer. Then the all-volunteer military comes into effect, and there were a lot of guys said, "I don't have to put up with this crap anymore." You know, "I can't be yelled at constantly." And this idea that, look, as a servant leader, your job is to make sure that the team is successful. That, once again, you know, you give the men and women that work for you the tools, do the job, you give them the training to do the job, you give them the latitude to

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  do the job, you hold them accountable when they don't do the job. But if the leadership ever becomes about you, if it's about your promotion, if it's about your ego, if it's about your glory, you're probably not the right person for the job. I mean, this is, I tell folks all the time, we're called the SEAL teams for a reason. Because it's about the team. You can't get the job done unless the team does it. And if a leader, if, if you're not inspiring that team, if you're not managing that team, if you haven't come up with a good plan, if they're not prepared to follow you, then it isn't going to work. So this was a, again, a marvelous lesson early on in my career. And, and the Navy still does it. Those cruises have gotten a lot shorter unfortunately because

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  of money, but best seven weeks, I think I spent learning leadership and it was about learning about the troops.

• 1:51:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's, it's awesome that people ask me, oh, who, who's your mentor? People ask me that. And I would say, well, I have all kinds of mentors. I have mentors that are books. You know, my biggest mentor is Colonel David Hackworth, who I never met, but I just read his books and stole everything from him. You know, that, that's who the mentors are. And here you are, young ins, and you're getting mentored by this, you know, BT2 in the US Navy. How long, I'm thinking of the, the abusive tyrannical authoritarian officer in the fleet, and then you end up with this like cycle of, of, of violence, you know, cycle of abuse. And that's how I got treated. So that's how I'm going to treat the next guy. Did you get to see that sort of, you know, as the volunteer Navy came on board?

• 1:52:43Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you watch that transition?

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  I did. And, you know, the teams were never quite like that because the commanding officers I had in the teams, because again, we'd, we'd all gone to buds together. So there was a little bit of a different leadership mentality from the commanding officers in the teams. But some of those commanding officers had been ship drivers at some point in time. But I spent a lot of time early on, as I mentioned, I was on amphibious ready group, but I spent time on carriers and submarines. And early on in my career, there was a little bit of this, you know, tyrannical sort of commanding officer that that's the way they were trained. You know, they were trained to yell and scream and, and that was the expectation. In the eighties, things began to change a little bit, and a lot of this was the Vietnam officers, and I think of guys like Colin Powell, and I think about Norman Schwarzkopf,

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  the Army guys that had come out of Vietnam, said, hey, look, we've got to change the approach to how we lead. And I don't know when the term servant leadership began to apply, but yeah, I did see this change over time. This recognition that, hey, no, guess what, as a leader, you just don't tell people what to do, and they do it. You've got to, once again, you've got to inspire, you've got to be out there with the men and women, your sailors, your soldiers, your airmen, Marines. The Army understood this, I think, because it was more part of the Army culture than it was the big Navy culture. Because, you know, in Navy, there's officers' country, and there's a, there's a distance between the officers and the sailors, even though, again, don't misunderstand me, there were some fabulous, absolutely fabulous commanding officers and officers on ships and submarines

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  that understood that they had to earn the respect of the sailors. So, don't misunderstand that part. But in general, there was a little bit of a separation. Whereas the Army officers, the Marine officers who were in Vietnam, I mean, they're in the mud with the, with the troops. And so they had, there was a little bit of a different leadership style there. And so as the seventies and the eighties, and then the nineties came along, you saw this, this transition between the hard ass CO to the CO that, yeah, you, you still need to be hard ass, because, oh, by the way, you're driving a ship, but you've got to earn the respect. You don't get the respect just because you're the commanding officer. You've got to earn the respect every day, and you've got to figure out the best way to do that. By the time nine eleven comes along, I think what I saw by that time, and

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  it's why we were, I think, you know, again, I've said before, you know, we are the finest military, I think, in the history of the world. And you think back on all the great militaries, whether you go back to the Roman legions, World War II, World, doesn't make any difference. I don't know of any force that stayed together and fought for 20 years straight. 20 years. I mean, you think about your time, Jaco, think about all the guys you know, particularly these guys that came in right after nine eleven, that signed up after nine eleven, knowing they were going to war, and they stayed for 20 years. And they did 15, 18, I don't know how many deployments, constantly at war, and your, your point about the SOPs, the standard operating procedures. After a while, you could pull any platoon with the guys together who'd been spending time in Iraq and Afghanistan and say, "Okay, we got a target. How many minutes do you need?

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  I need 15 minutes." Why? Because they'd done it so many times before. Most of the Roman legions, of course, were kind of part-time troops. You know, you had some professionals, but they were only professionals for a couple of years. They drew on the farmers a lot of times to make the Roman legions. You think about World War II. Incredible Americans. The war only lasted for four years. A lot of these guys were on the line for maybe, you know, 30 days on, 30 days off, maybe 18 months in Europe or the Pacific. These guys were, you know, 20 years in combat.

• 1:56:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, from 18, 19, 20 years old up until they're 42, 43, 44.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  And so the leadership had to change. Now, you know, not every leader changed. Not every leader got the memo. You know, we still had some kind of hard asses out there that didn't understand we needed to leave. But I was fortunate, again, in my time as a Navy officer, essentially serving in the Army, as you know, in my joint command, I watched these really remarkable general officers. I remember one point in time, a young Army major wrote some scathing critique of the Army leadership and the senior Army leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan. And frankly, I was pretty livid looking at the article. And this was kind of the, as I've said before, the junior officer righteousness, you know? Ah, the generals are sitting up there in their place, they just don't understand, you

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  know, they're up there drinking their coffee and the hard work is being done. Well, let me tell you, every general officer I knew, Army, Marine, and then the Navy flag officers in there, they understood what the troops were going through. They had this tremendous respect for the troops. And the great ones, again, the Petraeus, the Odierno, the McChrystal, the McKeonan, I mean, these guys would get down, you know, and oh, by the way, they were in their 50s. And yet, they would go out with the guys. They would put themselves in harm's way because they respected the troops so much. And that was a certain amount of servant leadership. It was this recognition that, hey, I'm in charge, but you know what? I gotta earn the respect every single day. And the only way you're gonna earn the respect? Do the hard work, share the fear, again, share the discomfort, just like Ricky told

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  me, come into the boiler room, you know, share the hazards, share the discomfort, spend time with the troops, that's how you earn their respect.

• 1:57:55Jocko Willink?

  And part of that is the next section, troop the line. Trooping the line is steeped in army tradition. Historically, generals have ordered their soldiers to muster on the parade field so the officers could inspect the troops, ask questions about their training, and ensure the generals' orders were being relayed to the youngest private in the formation. You've got to talk to your people.

• 1:58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:18Jocko Willink?

  And find out what's going on.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  So I mentioned in there, so when I was over in Afghanistan and Iraq, but I think in this particular example, I'm talking about Afghanistan, and generally I'd stay in the jock until, you know, most of the guys were kind of on their way home or something. And then I would walk around at night, and it was normally, so Afghan time was probably like four or five in the morning Afghan time, but you know, we were on Zulu time, so it was always at 11:30, 12 o'clock. And I would get, you know, every evening, I'd kind of walk around, I'd talk to the soldiers. Now, for your listeners, while our special operations force was on this kind of Camp Alpha, most of the soldiers that were supporting us were, you know, conventional soldiers who frankly didn't have a clue who we were. They were manning the guard towers, or they were, you know, running the laundromats, or they were up on the motor pool, but they didn't know what we were doing day in and day out.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  But at this one particular time, as I tell the story, I'm wandering around, and I remember going into the laundromat, and so we had this, you know, plywood building that the Seabees had built, long, typical laundromat, right, just like you see in the civilian world. I don't know, 20, 30 laundromats in there, and about half of them weren't working. And so I come in about 2 o'clock in the morning, you know, and, you know, the soldiers are bitching about the fact that, you know, damn, laundry's not working. Of course, I come in, they see me, oh, sir, how are you? It's good, I hope everything's going fine. What's going on, you know? Laundromat, laundry machines aren't working. Yeah, interesting. So the next day, I've got my global video teleconference, you know, and you know, so here I am, talking to the entire force, thousands of people on the video teleconference, and they're waiting for, you know, the great admiral to give them some guidance on winning the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 1:59:47Speaker 01

  And so I kind of go down the same, I said, okay, I said, I want all the senior NCOs that are kind of in charge of the, the contoman area of the garrison, go check the laundromats. And, you know, I can see the eyes rolling on the, on the video, like, are you kidding me? The three-star is telling the NCOs to get the laundry machines fixed? But the point was, you find out about things when you troop the line. Maybe it wasn't going to save the war, but it was going to save the morale a little bit of the soldiers that were working for me. So we got the laundromats fixed, we got a bunch of things fixed, and that's important to an organization. When I was the chancellor of the University of Texas system, I built this kind of electronic suggestion box. And I would watch it every day.

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  And the people could add anonymously, you know, this thing's all screwed up or this. And at one point in time, I kept seeing this thread come up. And it was about the paper towels. Paper towels. So we worked in this big office building. And it turns out, somebody said, "Well, these are like Soviet-style paper towels." Rough, you know, I'm like, "So all of a sudden, more and more comments kept coming in about the paper towels." And so I'm thinking to myself, "I am the chancellor of the University of Texas system in charge of 230,000 men and 100,000 employees. I am going to fix the paper towel problem, right?" And so I get ahold of the guy who's essentially my logistic officer. I said, "Look, get new paper towels." And of course, I think it's going to be an easy decision. He's like, "Ah, sir, it's not quite that easy." We buy bulk towels.

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  I said, "So we go find..." I said, "Okay. I don't care if I got to pay for the friggin' paper towels. We're getting new paper towels in." So I finally get the paper towel problem fixed. It was a very interesting dynamic. The rank and file, the employees thought, "You know, here's the chancellor, who I got it. He is solving big problems with the universities, but he also cared enough to get the paper towel problem fixed." Now, you know, as a leader, you don't always have a chance to worry about paper towels. You know, that's what the sergeants do, and that's what the petty officers do. But every once in a while, in a large organization, you find that little problem that seems intractable, that nobody else seems to be able to fix.

• 2:02:00Speaker 01

  I mean, the laundromats have been broken for a long time. You know, and the paper towels had been Soviet-style paper towels for about a year or so. And you fix that problem and the troops then understand, hey, he's listening to us. He cares about the little problems. Wasn't going to save the world, but we got the Soviet paper towels fixed. And interestingly enough, it, the rank and file were very appreciative. Just like the soldiers were appreciative that all of a sudden the laundromats worked, you know? So you can do those sorts of things when you troop the line.

• 2:02:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You, you wrap this one up. You say, get out of your office and talk to employees at the far end of the chain of command. Find an opportunity to solve small, but seemingly intractable problems. Ensure your senior staff know that these little problems can have major effects on morale. Next section. Expect what you inspect. And you've got a story in here about the Sante raid and the commander of that raid. We actually had a guy, a Sante raider on the podcast. Yep. Terry Buckler, um, podcast 329, Terry Buckler, he was brand new in special forces and his first operation was the Sante raid.

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:03:10Jocko Willink?

  And his entire time in Vietnam was 20 minutes as the, one of the Sante raiders. He got off of the helicopter and killed a dude in like 10 steps. I'm like, you have the, the best, uh, shortest time to contact of anyone. I mean, that's just like unbelievable. Yeah. This, he, he just joined right at the end of the Vietnam war and boom, there you go. Sante raid. Uh, but, uh, Colonel Elliot Bud Sindor, who we talked about on that podcast. He was the GFC on the, on the Sante raid. And he ended up in another job. He was running the convoy security for sensitive material. And you've got a quick story in here about that. Sindor had relinquished oversight of the mission to the senior federal agents or agent,

• 2:03:54Jocko Willink?

  a police captain. The agent was now in charge and would oversee the actual movement of the material. This is like a big convoy that's happening. As Sindor observed the final preparations for movement, one thing caught his attention. At no time had the captain conducted a personnel inspection of each guard on the truck. He approached the agent and tactfully said, I'm sorry, Captain, but I noticed you didn't conduct a personnel inspection of your troops. The captain, looking somewhat annoyed, rolled his eyes and said, well, Colonel, we're all professionals here. There's no need for an inspection. Sindor, a man of quiet disposition, but with a penchant for detail, replied pointedly, "Well, Captain, if you were a real professional, you would understand the value of an inspection."

• 2:04:37Jocko Willink?

  The captain paused, remembering the service of the man in front of him, and within minutes, each agent was lined up as the captain went by, man by man, to ensure all their equipment was in place and operational. The captain knew that if anybody understood the value of inspection, it was Bud Sindor.

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and Colonel Sindor told me that story himself. When I was doing the, for my thesis, I did the Sante raid. So I had a chance to interview a lot of the Sante raiders. But, and I've said before, I said, "It was probably the best planned, rehearsed, and run mission of all the missions I looked at in my, in my thesis," even though, obviously, the POWs were not at the camp because the intelligence didn't realize that they'd been moved earlier. But in the planning and preparation, the Green Berets who were running the thing, I mean, they were inspecting guys constantly. Because again, that, as you know, that was

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  kind of an army mentality, from, from being young Rangers or young soldiers, whether it was boot camp or Ranger School, they understood, "Hey, you know, we're going to inspect everything about you." Before the Sante raiders got on the helicopter to get ready to go on the mission, there was a guy there going, "Okay, how much ammunition do you have? How many magazines do you have? Do you got your water? Do you have a radio? Is it on this frequency?" You know, every, every man before boarding the helicopter. So when we were doing the, the planning for the bin Laden raid, I mean, this was constantly in my head. And, and I talked to the ground force commander, and I said, "Look, you know," and of course, I'd known the ground force commander for a long time. I said, "Look, I need you to do this. I need to make sure the mass chief, whoever, inspects every single guy." And of

• 2:06:17Speaker 01

  course, the guys didn't have a problem getting inspected. They understood the value of this inspection. And I can't think how many times, as a young officer, I was getting ready to go on a, a training op or something, and at the last minute, you go, "Oh, shit, you know, I forgot my," whatever it is, you know. And I also always made sure that, before the big missions, if I was in charge, I would tell the guys, "I want you ready at this point," even though we had an hour before we would get on the bird. And I did that for the Bin Laden raid and I did that for a lot of things because invariably when you do the inspection, then all of a sudden, somebody goes, "Oh yeah, forgot to bring that." Okay, well, run back to your hooch, grab it and get it. Because we got time.

• 2:07:00Speaker 01

  If all of a sudden, you plan the mission, "Okay, we are, we are leaving, you know, the garrison at, you know, 2,200." And then all of a sudden, 2,200 comes and guys still aren't quite ready, then you, the fud factor, all of a sudden, it starts to complicate itself, things get harder and harder. But this idea of inspecting, "Yeah, I got it." You know, but if you're gonna go do something really complicated, you've better spend some time inspecting people. And Sidnor really understood this. And the story about this, this police captain, and I love the line, I mean, he's telling me the story over the phone, and he said, "I told him, 'Look, if you're a real professional, you'd understand the value of an inspection.'" And he just said it casually. And I thought, "Oh, that, that's golden." Because that's what real professionals understand.

• 2:07:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I, I, as you're telling this, I'm realizing that such a huge part of me being a decent SEAL was the fact that I had a swim buddy that, you know, I went through BUDs with, and then we did three platoons together, and then we, uh, three platoons together, well, then we worked in training cell together, and then, then I became an officer, we split up, but for, and we lived together the whole time, so we were roommates. But we inspected each other without, without even, without even a word. You're like, we, we were getting ready for a dive, we'd walk over to each other, we knew exactly, we were getting ready for a jump, we knew he was getting ready to go to, to, you know, out on a, on a training op, we would just walk over to each other, we're guaranteed we're gonna inspect each other.

• 2:08:28Jocko Willink?

  I never forgot anything.

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:08:30Jocko Willink?

  At least never made it past him, and ever, you know, never paid, made it past him as a buddy, but, yeah.

• 2:08:35Speaker 01

  But you know, we do that, to your point, you know, you're getting ready to go on a dive, the dive supervisor, or somebody's gonna inspect you, you get on the bird, you know, it's like, check parachutes, you know, everybody, everybody, but for some reason, a lot of times, you're getting ready to go on an op, and if you don't have somebody that says, "I got my lineup, okay, you know, who's got the tie ties, how much ammunition you got, you got water, you got the radios on this freak?" And then all of a sudden, you're like, "Did you put batteries in your radios?" Uh, yeah, yeah, the inspections are helpful.

• 2:08:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, next one. Communicate, communicate, communicate. And this is the story that I opened up with, uh, with, uh, Ensign Rambo McRaven on the, on the attack. Again, what I liked, really liked about that story is you realize how that these, you're learning a lesson in training. That's so valuable. And I think that's one of the reasons that we've been successful is that our training reflects combat. And what, one thing that I remembered about that, when I, when I hear communicate, communicate, communicate, I remember I was, uh, going through STT and when we went through STT, they made you, they made us do every position. So, you know, you might be a radium in this time, you might be point man next time, you'd be an AW gunner this time. And eventually on some

• 2:09:41Jocko Willink?

  long patrol, I ended up as like rear security. And I had no freaking idea where we were. I had no idea how long I'd been walking for. I had no idea where we were going. I, I had no idea how long we were going to take a break for in this perimeter. Just didn't know anything was happening. And I was so absolutely irritated by this, that when I moved into a leadership position, I always said to myself, I'm never gonna let anyone feel like I felt when I was a rear security on a patrol. So, that idea of passing the word and making sure people understand what's going on, this is so critical. And they, you think you're communicating well, you're not, you're not. You sent an email out, right? Oh, I sent everyone an email two weeks ago. No, they got 47 other emails that day. They didn't open that email. You gotta hit them with multiple

• 2:10:26Jocko Willink?

  times and multiple different directions, but.

• 2:10:29Speaker 01

  So, when I took over SOCOM, of course, as a four star, you know, you get your general officer staff and the colonels are on the staff. And, uh, and I would do this. I'd say, okay, guys, uh, here's what I want to do. I want, want the staff to do this, this, this. And, um, so a couple months into the, uh, into my command tour, I called the staff together. I said, uh, are you guys making sure this word gets down to the, you know, we had 3,000 people on the set. Oh, yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I said, tell me, tell me how that happens. And so I pulled some colonel aside. He said, well, sir, you know, right after I come out of this meeting, I go into my office and I call my, uh, my majors in and I tell them what you told me. And then the majors meet with their people and they tell them, okay, okay, good, good, good. Um, so that afternoon,

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  I go troop the line. So I walked around for a couple of hours and I would just go into various departments. I'd show up, you know. Of course, people are like, oh shit, there are four stars here, you know. And walk in, I'd start talking to some, you know, young sergeant or something. I said, um, Sergeant, did you hear this? No, no, sir.

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  Well, interesting. So I kept going around and just about every young trooper I talked to, "Sir, I don't know what you're talking about." "Okay." So I did kind of this informal survey and I found out that 75% of the time, the word I was passing just wasn't getting down.

• 2:11:45Jocko Willink?

  That's the four-star freaking Admiral.

• 2:11:48Speaker 01

  So, and it took me, I mean, I did this over, over a period of a couple of weeks, kind of doing my own little assessment. So finally, a month later, I pulled my staff in again. I said, "Okay, boys and girls, let me tell you what I found out." And so I started going through this. I said, "Let me tell you, this level of, they're not hearing this at all." And of course, they were like, "Well, I don't know how, why they're not hearing it." You know, "I'm passing the word." And to your point, boy, you gotta communicate, communicate, communicate. I mean, up and down the chain of command. And, uh, and I just found that it was kind of the classic kids' thing. You know, you start at one level and before long, the word is either incorrect or it's not getting passed. You have to actively pursue making sure the information gets down to the rear security.

• 2:12:31Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:12:31Speaker 01

  And of course, I, I mentioned in that one, Marshall Lubin, who was, you know, quite the SEAL and, and, and, uh, one of the oldest guys that went through training with me. He's the rear security for this particular one. And he had no clue what the hell I was doing. Rambo McRaven was off on his own, you know?

• 2:12:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, uh, I've, I don't know how many companies I've talked to where I've, you know, talked to the, the C-suite leadership, like, "Oh, do you think everyone knows what's going on there?" "Oh, yeah, of course. We communicate really well." And you go talk to the frontline and they have no idea what's happening. I also often bring up the idea of the one MC on a ship, which is a very powerful tool. And, you know, there's a, a microphone that this commanding officer of the ship can pick up and he can talk to every single person on that ship at one time. And sometimes there's events that happen, there's things that occur that you need to tell people yourself what's going on. You know, if we had a change in the rules of engagement, if we had a, a drastic change in the way we're going to be doing operations, I wouldn't tell the platoon commanders who could then tell their platoon chiefs, who could then tell their LPOs, who could then tell their squad leaders, who could then tell them what's going on, "No. I was gonna get everyone into a room and I was gonna tell them what's going on."

• 2:13:31Jocko Willink?

  So sometimes it's gotta come from the horse's mouth.

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  Well, you talk about the one MC. So because the communications problems, it's so common, because again, you've been down there. I mean, huge facility, 3,000 people. And the word, no matter how hard I tried, wasn't getting down. So I put in essentially a 1MC. I put in a PA system. And when I went to my IT people, I said, okay, look, I want to put a PA system here. And the guy says, sir, you mean like elementary school? I said, whatever it takes, brother. We're going to put in a PA system. Well, it's complicated. I mean, you put in speakers all around this massive building. It was not cheap. But at the end of the day, every morning, I would get on the PA system and say, okay, hey, here's what we're doing today. Here's what's going on. So and so got. And I knew the word would get passed.

• 2:14:17Speaker 01

  Um, and, uh, and that is that simple little thing, having a public address system, having a 1MC, as we call it on the ships, as you know, is absolutely crucial. Everybody on the ship gets the word from the commanding officer.

• 2:14:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go. Uh, next one. When in doubt, overload. And this is something that is in reference to demolitions. And you talk about this in the book. You explain like, hey, if you're going to blow up a obstacle on a beach and you're trying to figure out how much demolitions to put on that obstacle, the answer is too much.

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  Double it.

• 2:14:52Jocko Willink?

  Double it because you want to make sure that thing is gone. It's not costing you, might maybe it costs a taxpayer a little something, but it's not costing you anything extra. So you're going to, when in doubt, you overload that. But the metaphor that you make in here is the amount of work you are going to put in. And you talk about, well, you talk about getting fired.

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:10Jocko Willink?

  You got fired as a lieutenant. Were you lieutenant when you got fired? You tried to push something. We talked about this on the last podcast a little bit. You, you were trying to change some things inside of a command. And they weren't, the commander wasn't ready to change those things. And so you ended up getting fired. And then you also talk about it. You have an opportunity for a mission. There's you're, you're now, you were just taking over special operations, one of the special operations commands. You've got an opportunity for a mission. You, you know, the, the, you take the risk. Doesn't go great. Luckily, no one was killed, but it doesn't go great. It's not a good look for you. You start to hear rumblings about your ability and that's happened both these times.

• 2:15:55Jocko Willink?

  And what you do is you basically double down on how freaking hard you're going to work.

• 2:16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was, I said, early on in my three-star tour. And in order to go into this particular target, which was not in the country we were supposed to be in, I mean, I had to convince everybody. And I spent a couple of months, you know, getting CENTCOM approval, getting the Pentagon and Secretary's approval, and then going to the White House. So I thought this mission was that important. And there were a lot of people said, "Man, you're risking way too much here." And as you point out, boys go across, mission does not go well. Fortunately, none of our guys were killed. We had, I think, a guy winged, but the bad guys we were going after, who we'd hoped to capture, we didn't capture, they get killed in a firefight. And then all of a sudden, you know, I start hearing rumblings, "Well, maybe McRaven's not the right guy for this job."

• 2:16:46Speaker 01

  You know, I was the first Navy guy to lead this command, so there were a lot of doubters out there. And early on in my tour, and I remember, and of course, when things like that happen, when, you know, things don't go well and you put a lot of effort into it, you begin to doubt it yourself. Am I the right guy for this job? And I found over the years, and it wasn't just getting fired, you know, in the course of a long career, you stumble often. And it happened to me when I was in command of SEAL Team Three, it happened to me, you know, when I was at Group One. I mean, there are always times when, as a leader, things don't go well, and the troops sometimes wonder, "I don't know, is this the guy we wanted leading us?"

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  And I always found that the way to overcome that and to re-earn the respect of the troops was to, "Okay, now I'm going to come in earlier than I came in, I'm going to work harder, I'm going to stay later, I'm going to come in on the weekends, I'm going to do whatever it takes to re-earn the trust of the men and women that you're serving." And I found that nothing kind of overcomes those problems quite like hard work. Because, you know, even if they don't like you, and not everybody liked me, they will at some point in time begin to respect you because you're putting in the effort. And so, like I said, this went in doubt overload. Again, I was a frogman when I started, did a lot of underwater demolition, and you laid

• 2:18:09Speaker 01

  it out perfectly, this was just the nature of the problem set. You know, we've got a Japanese scully that ought to take 20 pounds, well, let's put 40 pounds on it, you know? And you're right, the metaphor is about, look, you've got those hard problems, you just double down on the work.

• 2:18:27Jocko Willink?

  I had, uh, speaking of getting fired, I had one of my friends get fired and he ended up, you know, he, there's whatever, whatever the dozens of little issues you have that leads to getting someone fired. My friend got fired and he had to go see, you know, the big boss. And he, he's calling me from overseas. Hey, I gotta go see the boss. What should I tell him? Should I tell him about this? Should I tell him about that? Should I tell him about the other thing? And I said, what you tell him is you're here because you got fired because you didn't do a good job and you want to get better. And that's it.

• 2:19:02Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:19:03Jocko Willink?

  That's it. And that's exactly what he did and ended up, you know, on the right path again. But, um, yeah, that taking ownership of when you do something and you say, yep, I messed that up and I'm going to work hard and get it fixed.

• 2:19:16Speaker 01

  I mean, that's all you can do. And to your point, uh, you can't blame somebody else for your mistake. Uh, it doesn't matter whether there were other people to blame or not. That's not what leaders do. Hey, if you were in charge, you're responsible. Don't, don't deflect, you know, don't deflect the problem. Uh, don't deflect the blame. You raise your hand, you say, I'm responsible. I'm going to get better at it.

• 2:19:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And by the way, that was part of it. Uh, part of it is, hey, hey buddy, you got fired. It's like, you know, there's, there's, this guy might not have a good personality and that other person might not have got along. This might have person might not had the wrong, uh, concept of operations for people to be doing. And guess what? You weren't able to work all through that. So when you tell the boss, that's why you got fired because you messed up. It's not because you're trying to persuade him that, that you're better than you are. You got fired because you messed up.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:20:08Jocko Willink?

  That's what happened. And if you couldn't get along with your boss over there, or you couldn't get along with the people, your peers, and you screwed that up, that is on you.

• 2:20:16Speaker 01

  It's on you.

• 2:20:17Jocko Willink?

  So go and say sorry and take ownership and move on. You got this one. We already discussed this one briefly. The can you stand before the long green table? And you have this quote in here. You got a bunch of quotes in here, but this one I kind of had to read because it's 99% of all failures come from people who have a habit of making excuses. And that's from George Washington Carver, who was a an agricultural scientist born into slavery. Eventually, he became a professor at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, who we covered Booker T. Washington's book on this podcast up from slavery. But 99% of all failures come from people who have a

• 2:20:59Jocko Willink?

  habit of making excuses. I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership that is about not making excuses. And you mentioned this story, but I still wanted to hit it real quick. In October of 1925, the nation was fixated on a court martial trial of an American hero, General Billy Mitchell. Mitchell was a highly decorated pilot who had received the nation's second highest award for valor for his exploits in aerial combat during World War I. But Mitchell was also a fierce advocate for air power, believing that another war was on the horizon and that a unified air force should be built to rival the Army and the Navy. Mitchell was particularly adamant that airplanes carrying heavy bombs could sink a battleship. However, the Navy leadership and the White House had made a case to Congress for additional battleships and defended their position vehemently. To prove their point, the Navy orchestrated

• 2:21:44Jocko Willink?

  several demonstrations of the battleship's survivability, but the exercises were rigged in the Navy's favor and Mitchell exposed the deception. Finally, after insisting on a legitimate test, Mitchell proved beyond a doubt that air power could dominate on sea and on land. Nevertheless, the services fought back hard against the idea of a unified air force. Mitchell was eventually court martialed when he accused the Army and Navy leadership of almost treasonable admission administration of the national defense. That's what Mitchell did. The court martial had a jury of 13 military officers, including a young major general named Douglas MacArthur. Among those who testified on Mitchell's behalf were a who's who of military royalty,

• 2:22:25Jocko Willink?

  including World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker, General Hap Arnold, General Carl Spats. The latter two officers would go on to lead the US Air Force. Over the course of the seven week trial, Mitchell stood before the long green table of assembled officers and made his case. He never wavered from his position that he had a moral, legal, and ethical obligation to raise these issues to the leadership of the Army and the Navy. War was coming, he stated, and a failure to recognize the inevitable and plan for the fight was near treasonous. In spite of all the support he received and his passionate defense, Mitchell was found guilty on all counts. Of the 13-member jury, MacArthur was the only officer who voted to acquit.

• 2:23:07Jocko Willink?

  He said a senior officer should not be silenced for being at variance with his superiors in rank and accepted doctrine. Seven years later, one of Mitchell's early critics, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, became his strongest advocate. By 1942, the skies over Germany were filled with American bombers. And in 1947, by an act of Congress, the United States Air Force was established. History would reflect that Billy Mitchell stood tall in the face of withering criticism and career-ending threats for his unwavering support of air power and his principled stand on aviation mobilization. General Billy Mitchell would forever be known as the father of the Air Force. So this is what you talked about earlier.

• 2:23:46Jocko Willink?

  Interestingly, I didn't know who Billy Mitchell was, except for in the book about face, when Colonel Hackworth is getting interviewed, he throws it out there. He says in one word, you know, he says, I wouldn't want it. No one wants to be a Billy Mitchell. And that's all he said. And I eventually looked up. This was years ago. I looked up to figure out who Billy Mitchell was. And this is a guy that, you know, was ready to stand and do the right thing.

• 2:24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so as you mentioned earlier, my dad was, joined the Army Air Corps in 1941 and then served in World War II, had a 26-year Air Force career. But of course, the Army Air Corps became the Air Force in 1947. And so I grew up with these stories about MacArthur and, you know, Truman firing MacArthur. And my dad always felt that was the right decision to make. MacArthur stepped over the line, didn't support the civilian leadership. But Dad would also tell the story of Billy Mitchell and and his point to me was in spite of all the criticism Mitchell received and Mitchell probably was a little a little too adamant, a little too boisterous, but he's he's so firmly believed in this principle

• 2:24:55Speaker 01

  of air power that he was willing to get court martialed for it. And my dad used to make the point, every once in a while, you're gonna have to stand your ground. And if you think it is that important, stand tall. Yes, you may get eviscerated for it, you may get fired for it, you may get court martialed for it. But if it's the right thing to do in the long run, you know, you'll be not only exonerated as Mitchell was in the long run, but people will recognize that you did the right thing for the right reasons. And again, I was fortunate to grow up with two parents who, you know, I think taught me all the right lessons that they had learned, you know, growing up themselves.

• 2:25:33Jocko Willink?

  I was getting investigated one time, got investigated a bunch of times. But one of the times I got investigated, like I said, part of that's because I was always saying investigate me. One of the times I got investigated, I get I get into, you know, there's a there's a Navy captain. I get called into Warcom on a Thursday night. I get called into Warcom and there's a Navy captain. And it's eight o'clock at night. So this isn't, this is not a good sign.

• 2:26:00Speaker 01

  Normal.

• 2:26:01Jocko Willink?

  And so I go in, yeah, what's going on? And there's Navy captain sitting there and there's an O five, you know, Lieutenant, or sorry, Commander, that's a note taker. This is also, is it a good side? And yet, at the same time, I'm, you know, I'm always ready to stand on on the in front of the long green table. And I sit down, I say, you know, sir, what's going on? And he says, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in court of law. He reads me my rights. And so now I'm thinking, what is going on? And I said, before I respond, can you just tell me what this is about? Like, I have no idea what this is about.

• 2:26:46Jocko Willink?

  And he tells me what it's about. And I said, you know, sir, when I joined, when I got to the SEAL teams, the, the people above me in the chain of command, my platoon chief, my platoon leading petty officer, they'd tell me, hey, if you ever get read your rights, don't say another word and get a lawyer. And I said, and I've actually told guys that because that's good advice. When you get read your rights, you, you, what you should do is get a lawyer. And don't say anything. And I said, but in this case, what you're talking about, I actually can 100% guarantee you I've done nothing wrong. And I'll waive red or white rights. You want me to waive, let me sign and I'll tell you whatever, you know, I'll tell you all about this. I'm, I'm ready to go. Come investigate. And the guy had a really surprised look on his face.

• 2:27:29Jocko Willink?

  And then he started asking me questions and eventually he was like, gosh, well, this is a kind of a crazy scenario. And I said, good, let's, you know, and so it was, you know, it was another time that I got investigated and, and I'm, I'm thankful I was investigated. I'm always thankful to be investigated because then people know what happened. Uh, but that, I can't, I'm glad I don't have to, I never had to walk into situations like that thinking they got me, you know? My, my legitimate mental questions were what could this possibly be about? And not, oh my gosh, they got me. So.

• 2:28:04Speaker 01

  Well, as is the nature of, of the business we're in, I have also been investigated many, many times. And, and there were some very senior officers investigating me. And I did the same thing. I said, look, I'm perfectly comfortable with the decisions I made. And, you know, and I had a, again, interestingly enough, while it was a, an overarching Department of Defense investigation in one case with a three-star Air Force general that was the investigating officer. Uh, it was a Navy captain who was a JAG at the time, who came at me pretty hard. And, uh,

• 2:28:34Jocko Willink?

  Maybe it was the same guy. Was he from SOCOM?

• 2:28:38Speaker 01

  Uh, no, he was not. He was a conventional Navy JAG and, But right up front, I said, "Look, yeah, I'm happy to waive my rights." And he was surprised too, because he thought I was gonna lawyer up. I said, "Look, I am perfectly comfortable with the decisions I made. Were they tough decisions? Were they ugly decisions? Was it...?" All of that's true. This is combat, things aren't always as clean as you'd like. But I've got, you know, no regrets about the decisions I made, so bring it on. And for three weeks, I mean, I was kind of, had the Klieg lights on me and guys were... And at the end of it, it took him about six or seven months to resolve the investigation, and the Three Star finally called me. And I was out in Afghanistan at the time.

• 2:29:21Speaker 01

  And he calls me up, he says, "Hey, we have, uh, we've completed the investigation." And there was this kind of long pause, I'm thinking, "Okay, he's about to tell me I'm going to Leavenworth or something." And he said, "You know, we had a chance to interview everybody, and there were hundreds of people in line." And he said, "It's gonna be all right? You actually came out of this looking pretty good, because you, you know, you did all the right things." I said, "Look, you always try to do the right things, you know? I mean, it's, you don't always do it. I mean, sometimes you make them, you make bad mistakes, because again, we're human. But in this case, as ugly as this particular situation was, I knew I had done the best I could do, and I was happy to, happy to, you know, put it on the record, so to speak. Um, because that's saying, as I mentioned, when I was a young ensign, "Can you stand before the long green table?"

• 2:30:05Speaker 01

  I always asked myself that, and in this, again, I can't go into it on this, on this net, but suffice to say, these were some tough, tough calls. But I felt comfortable in the decisions I was making.

• 2:30:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and the tough calls that you make, you're making them with the information that you have at that time.

• 2:30:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:30:19Jocko Willink?

  Which you don't have the luxury of hindsight. You don't have a crystal ball to know what happened, or what were wrong. You know, and this is also goes back to the idea of covering things up. And what happens if you try and cover things up? I know from life that you can't cover things up. You cannot, and especially in the damn SEAL teams. Look, you know, the kid that, you know, when I was 23 years old, and, you know, whoever got in a fight down in Coronado on a Thursday night, or a Friday night, or a Saturday night, and, "No, we won't tell anybody." Everybody's gonna know. And so now you take that into, into a combat situation, everybody's gonna know. And I, I would always tell, there was a couple Army guys, and I don't remember all the details of the story, but there was a couple Army guys...

• 2:31:01Jocko Willink?

  Early on in the Iraq war, they shot and killed uh somebody and they went and planted an AK-47 on them. And they went to jail and I think they, I want to say they got something like 10 years. There's no reason to plant. If you're looking at a street and someone's doing something, they're, they're digging a hole, they're, they're acting suspicious and you decide that they're a threat, you can kill them. You can't. And, and that's okay. And you can explain, hey, this is what I saw. This is the TTPs that they were, that they were emulating or that they were doing. This is the behavior that I saw. Here's the rules of engagement that I acted within and here's why I shot a person and they didn't have a gun and I know that, but it sure looked like they were planting an ID. Sure looked, they were, looked like they were passing information.

• 2:31:44Jocko Willink?

  It sure looked like they were spotting for someone else and that's why I did this. And every one of those, the, the, the JAG would say, okay, we, we understand what happened. The minute you go out and plant a gun on somebody, just throw everything else out the window. You just, you just committed a war crime and it's going to be bad. And that's exactly what happened to those guys. So the idea of covering something up is, is just, it's not going to work.

• 2:32:10Speaker 01

  It never works. That's right.

• 2:32:12Jocko Willink?

  And then to make sure that you are ready to go stand in front of the long green table and then on top of that, make sure that everyone that works for you knows where you stand on this. Because if you start to give the impression of like, well, you know, as long as you're kind of staying within the rules, it's like, no, we're staying within the rules. This is what's happening. That's what you have to do and you have to make that clear. Otherwise you put yourself in a terrible situation where, you know, uh, what, what is, what'd you say earlier about the West Point? Lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. So once you give the indication that you'll tolerate and somebody does something that they shouldn't have done, and now you're not going to tolerate it after the fact, you've really screwed yourself and you screwed that person.

• 2:32:57Jocko Willink?

  And look, that person might've done something bad that they shouldn't have done and that's on them, but for the fact that you gave them the impression that you were going to be okay with that in any way, you also screwed up really bad. And you're putting yourself in just a terrible situation.

• 2:33:09Speaker 01

  You know, I, I told folks in my time in Iraq and Afghanistan, what I tried to do for the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines that were working for me was to have bright, bright red lines that said, these are the lines you don't cross. You can do anything you need to within those lines. Law of armed conflict comes into play, you know, the rules of engagement come into play, but within this bright red lines, you stay in that lane. And I realized I needed to do that for a number of reasons. One, it was the right thing to do, but also what I didn't want to do was put these guys in a position where, and you know, war can get dark. The guys can go down a very dark, bad path when they start killing the enemy.

• 2:33:54Speaker 01

  If they begin to like that too much, they keep moving down this path and they move outside the bright red lines, and then at the end of the day, they will end up living with that when the war is over. And they'll come back and they'll go, wow, I did some bad things. And I know that now. And in the heat of battle, sometimes you don't think about it, or you put it down deep and you justify it, but when the war is over, you come back, you're gonna have to bear that burden. And so there were times when, I mean, I jacked guys up big time to make sure that the force understood this is unacceptable behavior. And if I find anybody doing this, you're out of here, and oh, by the way, if I need to, I will courts martial you.

• 2:34:33Speaker 01

  And I fortunately didn't have to do that often, but, and I got a lot of pushback from guys going, you don't understand, sir, I mean, the Afghans fight like this, we need, stop. These are the law of armed, this is the law of armed conflict, this is the rules of engagement, you are gonna stay within these lines. And while the guys weren't always happy with it, I hope at the end of the day, when the dust settles and they look back, they go, you know what? I didn't commit any war crimes. I didn't do anything bad because I was forced to stay within this box, even if at the time it didn't seem the right box to be in. I tell leaders sometimes, look, this is what's expected of you. Back to kind of setting the standards. You're right, this is the, we're never gonna cover anything up. You know, we are, we are never gonna have, you know, retribution to guys that come and

• 2:35:18Speaker 01

  speak truth to power. We're gonna do things that are, you know, that are honest and that are within the rules, because if we don't... Back to the, who's trident is it? Ain't your trident. It will reflect poorly on every person that ever wore a trident and every person that ever wore an American flag on their, on their shoulder, too. Don't do it. But it's hard sometimes, you know, the guys are isolated, they're out there on their own. And you gotta, as a leader, you gotta keep them within those bright red lines.

• 2:35:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt about that. And the brighter you make those red lines, the easier it is for them to see them, the more they know what the consequences are if they cross those bright red lines. That's what you need. They should be definitely afraid of stepping over those lines. Otherwise, you're gonna have issues. And they're, and by the way, also, they're gonna test you. They're gonna brush up against them. They're gonna see what happens. Oh, we, and, and they're gonna do that. And that's why they, you need to be really clear about this stuff. So I really like that idea of the bright red lines. It's awesome. The last one of these you, is, is something I just talked about. Always have a swim buddy. Every frogman knows that in the turbulent waters of life, you always need a good swim buddy.

• 2:36:30Jocko Willink?

  And you wrap it up with this. Find a person you can trust implicitly. Be prepared to lean on them in times of great stress. Accept both their support and criticism with equal grace. Be a swim buddy to others. Someone out there needs you.

• 2:36:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, having somebody that's gonna tell you how stupid you are is, is a lot more valuable than someone that's gonna tell you.

• 2:36:53Speaker 01

  How great you are. That's right.

• 2:36:55Jocko Willink?

  And, and especially, I mean, I was only a lieutenant commander. So I was many, many miles below you in the chain. And I would have guys being very, very nice to me, laughing at my jokes, thinking my ideas were great. And I can't even fathom what it was like for you as a four star, to have, to, to, to put the bullshit.

• 2:37:15Speaker 01

  Oh, I was great every day. You don't understand. My jokes were always funny.

• 2:37:19Jocko Willink?

  Just absolutely brilliant tactician, strategist.

• 2:37:22Speaker 01

  Oh, great admiral.

• 2:37:23Jocko Willink?

  And a comic to go. Yeah, so you gotta watch out. That's the swim buddies you want. The swim buddies you want are gonna tell you, you're gonna be able to rely on them, but you're also gonna be able to rely on them to tell you when you're jacked up. I wanna close this out, out the book with a section that you, from the conclusion of the book that you write. You say this. In his book, It Worked For Me, Colin Powell tells the story of an old general, sitting in the officers' club, who is approached by a brand-new Army Second Lieutenant.

• 2:37:52Jocko Willink?

  The general is on his third martini when the young lieutenant gets up the courage to approach the senior officer. The general is very courteous and after some small talk, the lieutenant finally asks the question he's been dying to ask. "How do you make general?" the lieutenant inquires. "Well, son," the general answers, "here's what you do. You work like a dog. You never stop studying. You train your troops hard and take care of them. You are loyal to your commander and to your soldiers. You do the best you can in every mission and you love the army. You are ready to die for the mission and your troops.

• 2:38:36Jocko Willink?

  That's all you have to do." The lieutenant replies, "Wow. And that's how you make general?" "Nah," replies the general, "that's how you make first lieutenant. Just keep repeating it and then let them see what you've got." So, there you have it. That's all it takes.

• 2:39:01Speaker 01

  That's it. But you know, that's, it's a great story that, and I got to be close friends with General Powell, Secretary Powell, before he passed for the last couple of years. And then he would tell that story occasionally and then he had it in one of his books and I thought it was very emblematic of what we know as leaders. As I mentioned earlier on, you know, you gotta bring it every single day. And I don't care whether you're an ensign or a four-star admiral, or whether you're a seaman recruit, or a master chief. You bring it every single day. You gotta work hard. You gotta take care of your troops. You gotta lead from the front. You have to do all these sort of things every single day. Not Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you know, not Tuesdays and Thursdays, but every single

• 2:39:46Speaker 01

  day. And you won't, you won't bring it every day, you know, because we're human, we got bad days. But those days you don't bring it, you ought to be a little sick to your stomach and say, "Shit, I didn't bring it today. I'm gonna have to bring it even more tomorrow." And yeah, it's hard. It's hard every single day. But you've got the honor of leading, you know, great soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, civilians, whatever it is. Remember, it's an honor to be in a leadership position. Um, every day you gotta do that. That's how you make first lieutenant, second lieutenant.

• 2:40:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And as I read that, I was just thinking about you and thinking about what you've done in your career and, and, and how that's, that's literally what you did.

• 2:40:29Jocko Willink?

  You know, and what you just said, I, I, I wrote about in one of my books, uh, it's called Leadership Strategy and Tactics. I wrote about that I, I, you know, pulled my radio man aside when I was platoon commander. I said, Hey, listen, you're the most important guy in this platoon because if we get into a firefight, something happens, you're going to be the guy that's able to call for help.

• 2:40:49Jocko Willink?

  And then I talked to the machine gunner and I said, Listen, you're the most important guy in this platoon. Cause if we get into a gunfight, you're going to be putting down suppressive fire that's going to allow us to maneuver and, and either take out the enemy or get away from the enemy. And then of course I talked to, you know, the corpsman and I said, Hey, Doc, you're the most important guy in this platoon. Because if someone gets wounded, you're going to be the one that's going to save their life. And this goes on. And obviously what I was telling everyone in the platoon that they're the most important person in the platoon. And what made me think of that is, is you're talking about whether you're, you know, a BM two or a, or a semen apprentice, or you're a private first class, or you're a individual contributor at a company. What you're doing inside of an organization, number one, you're a leader. You are a leader, no matter where you are inside of an organization.

• 2:41:35Jocko Willink?

  But also what you do has a huge impact. And the, the more you work and the better you, the more you try to do a good job, the more positive impact you will have on that organization and ultimately the mission. And ultimately all that will come back to you and you'll be able to get promoted. And when you get promoted, guess what you get to do? You get to take care of more people.

• 2:41:58Speaker 01

  More work.

• 2:41:59Jocko Willink?

  Get to take care of more people. And that's what it's about. And, uh, yeah, leadership, the hardest of human endeavors. And that is why it is the most rewarding of human endeavors.

• 2:42:12Jocko Willink?

  I don't know. That gets us up to speed. I think that's the book. Like, like I said, I, I hit the wave tops of some of the book. Books outstanding, uh, Echo Charles.

• 2:42:21Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:42:21Jocko Willink?

  Do you have any questions?

• 2:42:22Speaker 02

  Yes, I do.

• 2:42:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, here we go.

• 2:42:23Speaker 02

  Actually, that last part kind of reminded me of this question that I was wondering, um, how do I become Admiral?

• 2:42:31Speaker 01

  You know, there's a, there's another story at the end of the book. And it's from Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire. And, you know, for your listeners, you know, Gates of Fire, it's a fictional account of the, of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. And of course, talks about, you know, Xerxes the Great, 480 B.C. sweeps across Asia Minor, comes to the, to the borders of Greece, and the 300 Spartans move to Thermopylae, where they're gonna, they're gonna hold the pass. Well, they hold it for three or four days till every one of them is killed but one guy. And, and in reality, the truth of the matter is, the Persians continue on into Greece, but they're frankly, frankly so exhausted from the fight at Thermopylae, eventually

• 2:43:13Speaker 01

  they get beaten and they retreat. But on their way out, as Pressfield tells the story, he's got the single Spartan, and he brings the Spartan to him. And of course, King Leonidas was the king of the Spartans, and he led the fight at Thermopylae. And so, Xerxes brings the Spartan in, and he says to him, he wants to know, "Why did they fight so hard for King Leonidas? What was it about the king that made them prepared to, to sacrifice their lives for him?" And the quote goes something like this, you know, that the, "The king does not abide in his tent while his men bleed and die on the battlefield.

• 2:43:53Speaker 01

  The king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep while his men stand watch upon the wall. The king does not earn the respect of his men through fear or the price of gold. The king earns their love through the sweat on his back and the pain he endures on their behalf. The king is the first to lift the heaviest burden and the last to put it down." And I think, you know, to answer your question, if you want to get to the top, be the guy that picks up the heaviest burden first and puts it down last. Yeah, that's how you make.

• 2:44:34Speaker 01

  The next rank.

• 2:44:36Jocko Willink?

  That's how you make first.

• 2:44:37Speaker 01

  That's how you make first.

• 2:44:39Speaker 02

  So that process in the can like, do you have to be in the Navy to be Admiral? Or like, how does that?

• 2:44:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Coast Guard, I guess it's.

• 2:44:47Speaker 02

  Actually, part of, part of why I said, why, how can I be good? Cause literally I just joined the military and I'm like, hey, one day I want to be like Admiral. You know, is there a specific?

• 2:44:55Speaker 01

  That's a good question. Here's what I tell you. Yeah, it's interesting because, uh, you know, when I joined the SEAL teams back, I went through BUDs in seventy seven and seventy eight. I, I joined the teams. There were no admirals, you know, there were only two Navy captains. So that's like an army colonel, right? Nobody, when I came in, nobody had any expectation of being an Admiral. Nobody had any expectation of being a Navy captain because there were only two of them. One on the East Coast at Group Two and one on the West Coast at Group One. All I wanted to do was be a SEAL platoon commander. And I think the Colin Powell story is pretty important because it is, I mean, I got to underwater demolition team eleven. And this was my task to be the best ensign I could be at UDT eleven.

• 2:45:34Speaker 01

  And then from there I went on and everywhere you went, it's like, I'm just going to do the best job I can right here. I didn't look too far down the road. It was just like, hey, this is my job now, be the best I can be. And after a while, like Colin Powell's story, show them what you got and you know, you'll get promoted. You keep moving. What does concern me about, you know, the, the special operations community today is guys can come in and they can be four star admirals. And they can be four star generals. And I want to make sure that those people that are thinking about that, well, that better not be your thought when you're going to SEAL training or Ranger training. Your thought ought to be, how can I be the best petty officer I can be today? How can I be the best ensign I can be today? How can I be the best sergeant, whatever it has?

• 2:46:19Speaker 01

  Do the best you can where you're at and then show them what you got.

• 2:46:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So as you get promoted up the ranks, you're promoted essentially above others though, right? Like, is, do people like?

• 2:46:29Jocko Willink?

  There's a competition.

• 2:46:30Speaker 02

  Are they compete? Yeah, exactly.

• 2:46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. There is a competition. I, you know, I was fortunate. So when I went through, my peers were all of us, none of us expected to make flag officer. In fact, I don't think most of us expected to make Navy captain. We were all very close friends and we stay close friends today and so there was never this sort of, you know, backstabbing, you know, we all were thankful that we got as far as we did. We were all appreciative when somebody else, you know, made, made flag before we did or when everybody else was successful. It was a great environment to grow up in because, you know, it was, we were friends before we were competitors and that friendship held ground. And today, I remain tremendous friends with, whether

• 2:47:15Speaker 01

  it's Admiral Eric Olson, Admiral Joe McGuire, Admiral Joe Kernan, you know, Ed Winters, Bob Harward, the list goes on and on. They're all flag officers that, you know, we all grew up together. But yes, to answer your question, there's a board, but not only one person comes out. So, you know, when you make Lieutenant Commander, there's, you know, 20, 30 guys make Lieutenant Commander, whatever, but then as the pyramid gets smaller and smaller, next rank, fewer guys make it, next rank, fewer guys make it, next rank. So, when I made Admiral, that year, I was the only SEAL that made one star. And then, we kind of picked up one Admiral every year after that sort of thing.

• 2:47:54Speaker 02

  Gotcha. So, let's say, for example, like E4, we'll say. To become an E5, that's not the case, right? Because everyone can kind of become E5, right? And then, as you go up, then it starts to kind of diminish as far as like...

• 2:48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but even in the enlisted ranks, I mean, it gets small. I mean, to make Chief Petty Officer, so, you know, yeah, from an E3 to an E6, you know, and then all of a sudden, you're going to be a Chief Petty Officer. Well, that's still a pyramid and it gets, it gets smaller and smaller.

• 2:48:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:48:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that being said, there's people that are getting out, there's people that don't want to get promoted, there's people that are just, you know, they're, they're getting out at 20 years, they're getting out, you know, a lot of, a lot of SEALs get out at 20 years. Okay, so they get out, there's, that means a bunch of people, yeah, a bunch of, a bunch of openings you're going to get. But, um...

• 2:48:34Speaker 02

  Do you get a bigger house when you become Admiral?

• 2:48:36Speaker 01

  You do, actually.

• 2:48:37Speaker 02

  Right on.

• 2:48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I know. But, but the interesting thing about it is, it's a bit of a gilded cage because, so the house, the first house I had when I was a one star was out at Fort Bragg, because I was on, on an army base. And, and we, and frankly, it wasn't, I mean, it was just a standard army house, but I was gone all the time, so it really didn't make a difference. But, when I came back as a three star, now, I was actually going to be the senior guy there at Fort Bragg. And so, the base commander calls me, I said, "Sir, we got a big house for you." I said, "No, no, I want the old house I was in." Sir, we got this other big, I said, I understand, I like the old house. Yeah, sir, but that's, that's kind of where the June, I said, okay, brother, maybe you don't understand this. My wife and I want to move back into that old house.

• 2:49:19Speaker 01

  Uh, but yeah, you know, there's, there are perks, but again, as we were talking, the perks really mean nothing. I mean, at the end of the day, the more senior you get, the expectation from yourself ought to be, that means I've got more people to lead. Means you gotta work harder. Um, people from the outside, they see the perks. But you realize pretty quickly that those are just window dressing.

• 2:49:44Jocko Willink?

  Great to see you again.

• 2:49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, good seeing you. Thanks.

• 2:49:46Jocko Willink?

  Sir, any closing thoughts?

• 2:49:48Speaker 01

  Now, you know, Jaco, as always, appreciate you having me on. Uh, you know, as I, I mentioned before, you do a remarkable job, not just of, on the podcast and the books, but of representing the SEAL community. I'm incredibly proud of you. I was talking to Jim Worthington last night, who you remember well, Chief Petty Officer, we were, he didn't know that I was coming today. We got talking about the time when we were setting up Quantum Leap and we had the Blue Force trackers and you guys were on your way up to Miramar or something. He's telling this story and he goes, so Jaco was my radio man, I think at the time or something like this. And, uh, and I got laughing thinking, man, that's, that's been a few years ago, but, uh, but I'll tell you, everywhere you have been, Jaco, you have represented the community with incredible dignity, incredible honor.

• 2:50:31Speaker 01

  You personify every single leadership quality that is in this book and in your book. Um, so let me tell you, it's a, it's an honor to spend a little time with you.

• 2:50:42Jocko Willink?

  Well, sir, I appreciate that. Uh, obviously, uh, you need to do a little bit more research about me.

• 2:50:48Jocko Willink?

  Hey, for me, the honor's all mine and, and I'll tell you, I went to the SEAL Team One 60th anniversary a few months ago. And what struck me was, you know, there's all the old, old guys from SEAL Team One, the Vietnam guys. But when I was a young SEAL, I went to the 30th anniversary. So I went to 30th anniversary, now 30 years later, I'm going to the 60th anniversary. And it's just, it, you know, when you think about the tradition of the SEAL teams, it's not that old. Like every one of those admirals that you just rattled off, I know every single one of them. That's kind of crazy, right?

• 2:51:28Jocko Willink?

  The fact that, you know, I'm sitting here talking to you and we both worked with Double L. Jones. Like, these are, these are crazy things and the community is just so small. And yet, um, has had a big impact. And, and for me, you know, I always say, I try and give back what I can to the teams because the teams gave me everything. So, um, I know you feel the same way. Absolutely. Honored to have you on here. Thanks for, uh, sharing the wisdom of the bullfrog with us all. Thanks for your leadership in the teams, the Navy and special operations. Thanks for your leadership for the country. You made an incredible impact on, on our community.

• 2:52:12Jocko Willink?

  I mean, you think about, we've been around for 60 years. You've been, you were around for 37 of those years and I'm not just trying to make you feel old. Uh, but that, that really is incredible. And, um, we're grateful for your service, for your sacrifice and for your leadership always. Thank you, sir. It was an honor. Thanks, Jaco.

• 2:52:31Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Admiral Bill McRaven has left the building. Just a real honor to have him on here. And, you know, as he was leaving, 37 years he was in. SEAL team's only been around for 60. Yeah. That's, that's most of it. That's, you know, legit. And all those lessons learned, I'm glad he's capturing this information. Solid advice, simple advice. And as the cover of the book says, simple, but not easy. Which is actually in the book, Extreme Ownership. Same thing, just talking about leadership in there. Simple, not easy. Which I actually, in the book Extreme Ownership, a tribute to Dean Lister.

• 2:53:16Jocko Willink?

  I attribute the quote, "Simple, not easy," to Dean Lister.

• 2:53:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:53:20Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's the first person I heard say it.

• 2:53:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:53:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, when you do jujitsu and you get caught in this position, you gotta move this, you gotta move your hips over here. It's very simple. It's not easy.

• 2:53:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:27Jocko Willink?

  But it's simple.

• 2:53:28Speaker 02

  He does say that a lot, too.

• 2:53:29Jocko Willink?

  Yes, and it's, it's often very true, and that's what this book is about, you know, leadership made simple, not easy. It's not that hard. You know what's right.

• 2:53:40Jocko Willink?

  That's the way many worthwhile things are in life. That's what makes them valuable, right? Is that they're simple, they're not easy. If they were easy, as they say, everyone would do it.

• 2:53:51Jocko Willink?

  But like constant, the constant work that it takes to become better mentally and physically. Everybody kinda knows. Like, let's face it, you could go and, you could go on the internet and look up eight million different workout programs that are various levels of complexity, or you could just start lifting weights.

• 2:54:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:10Jocko Willink?

  Doing squats and you'd be getting stronger, just, just like that.

• 2:54:14Speaker 02

  Well, you know, one of the tried and true protocols for lifting is that still even today, this, this was like, I don't even know when it was invented or, or introduced or whatever, is the five by five, just five sets of five.

• 2:54:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 2:54:26Speaker 02

  Simple.

• 2:54:27Jocko Willink?

  Simple.

• 2:54:27Speaker 02

  Not always easy.

• 2:54:28Jocko Willink?

  Not always easy. By the way, the questions you were asking at the end.

• 2:54:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:54:34Jocko Willink?

  They were way out, they were way out of bounds.

• 2:54:37Speaker 02

  What, no, no, no, no, no.

• 2:54:38Jocko Willink?

  Like you asking.

• 2:54:38Speaker 02

  Inbounds, actually.

• 2:54:40Jocko Willink?

  It made me realize how little you know about the military.

• 2:54:43Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 2:54:43Jocko Willink?

  I didn't think, when you asked the admiral, the four-star admiral.

• 2:54:49Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:54:49Jocko Willink?

  The commander, the former commander of all special operations in the United States of America, the most powerful country in the world.

• 2:54:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:54:56Jocko Willink?

  You asked him if, do you have to be in the Navy to be an admiral?

• 2:55:01Speaker 02

  Should I, I might as well just say, do I have to be in the military to be an admiral? That would've been just, that would've been a similar question.

• 2:55:07Jocko Willink?

  Be saying, do you have to do, do you have to do jujitsu to be a black belt in jujitsu?

• 2:55:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:55:11Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of a similar question. So.

• 2:55:14Speaker 02

  Now we know, now we know.

• 2:55:15Jocko Willink?

  Look, you, you know a lot about a lot of different stuff.

• 2:55:19Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:55:19Jocko Willink?

  Even though you, you know, you, there's some things you don't know about, but you know a lot about, a lot of stuff. I didn't realize how much you did not know, especially after you've been listening to this particular podcast for 382 episodes, by the way.

• 2:55:33Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:55:34Jocko Willink?

  And to say, hey, sir, in order to be an admiral, you have to be in the Navy.

• 2:55:40Speaker 02

  Well, hey, look, no, I don't want to split hairs here, but technically, my question was, how do I become an admiral, which could technically be even more ignorant, because Echo, you cannot be an admiral, but that was more of an expression like, hey, if I'm a person who I'm not in the military yet, I'm 18, 19, or whatever, you know, how do I become admiral? In the event of me wanting to become an admiral, and actually, his answer was even better than I expected.

• 2:56:06Jocko Willink?

  His answer was, he took a crap question and turned it into a freaking outstanding answer.

• 2:56:13Speaker 02

  He totally did.

• 2:56:14Jocko Willink?

  Hey, I want to review the tapes on that, because I think if we drill down and capture his expression when you're asking that question, I think he might have thought you were joking. I was almost like, wait, what's Echo, is he trying to be funny? What is going on here? And he took your junk question, no offense.

• 2:56:33Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:56:33Jocko Willink?

  Hey, can we look back and say it was kind of a junk question?

• 2:56:36Speaker 02

  Um, I can't refute that.

• 2:56:38Jocko Willink?

  Okay, he took that and gave an epic answer.

• 2:56:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:56:41Jocko Willink?

  Got to give even a little extra credit for the admiral today.

• 2:56:44Speaker 02

  Oh, big time. And, and the idea too, that even it had a lot to do with, actually, essentially the same thing as becoming a general, right? What he was talking about earlier, where it's like, hey, you just do, you know?

• 2:56:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Be freaking awesome. Work hard. It wasn't just keep showing up, it was like, work hard, make sacrifice, be ready to die. Like, there was a lot of stuff in Colin Powell's answer.

• 2:57:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57:05Jocko Willink?

  And he just went straight to Leonides' answer.

• 2:57:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, he was, and you know, what do you say, something every day, right? Bring it every day.

• 2:57:12Jocko Willink?

  Bring it every day.

• 2:57:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly right. So, and so that kind of, to me, translated 100% over to the whole black belt thing. Well, especially when I asked the question. So, when I'm like, hey, how do I become admiral? The thing is, you don't ask, you don't come into jujitsu, ideally, from an ideal standpoint, you don't say, you know, I'm going to join jujitsu to be a black belt. You don't do that. You just go and learn jujitsu, you get a white belt, you get a, you know, and you essentially approach it the exact same way. That's gonna be the best, hard to argue that that's gonna be the best way to do it. So, it's like that, a big parallel.

• 2:57:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's another parallel is like, in jujitsu, don't worry about getting promoted. Don't ask about getting promoted. How do you get promoted at work? Don't ask about getting promoted. Don't say, hey, when can I get promoted? Just work hard and, and eventually, it'll come your way. And that's the, the basic concept from Colin Powell, and then the basic concept from the admiral as well.

• 2:58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:58:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I want to review the tapes. We'll see if he didn't, if he doesn't give you at least a little bit of a smirk or something, I'd be, I'd be even more impressed.

• 2:58:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:58:14Jocko Willink?

  Even more impressed.

• 2:58:15Speaker 02

  He was. I don't, I can't read his mind, but put it this way, if he thought I was joking, in hindsight, I would not be surprised.

• 2:58:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think I was, even I, I mean, I know you pretty well. And even I was like, wait a second, does he have a follow up? Is there some comedy thing that's about to go down? Is there some deep philosophical path? And it found, turns out, no, no, and no.

• 2:58:42Jocko Willink?

  Alright.

• 2:58:43Speaker 02

  No, but I was for real wondering about that, because you know, like.

• 2:58:47Jocko Willink?

  What did you actually mean by that question?

• 2:58:48Speaker 02

  Okay, so overall.

• 2:58:49Jocko Willink?

  How do I become an?

• 2:58:50Speaker 02

  Okay, so.

• 2:58:51Jocko Willink?

  Do I have to be in the Navy?

• 2:58:52Speaker 02

  If I had a bunch of, if you remember, I kind of like threw that in, like, hey, let me make sure I have this right, almost kind of thing. Now is the whole thing about, do you have to be in the Navy? I figured, but I could be wrong. I don't know. Shoot, I'm not Admiral. I don't know these stuff. But so, no, no, the, what, the whole comprehensive question, in a nutshell, if that even makes sense, was kind of like, you know, like if you want to be mayor, or governor, or judge, or whatever, like you got to do certain things first, then you kind of got to get elected and all this stuff. There's like a, this kind of zigzag process that goes on, you know, where, you know, in certain companies, for example,

• 2:59:32Speaker 02

  you start out in the mailroom, I don't know, it's arbitrary, um, start in the mailroom, then you move up, then you move up, and you just work hard, work hard, work hard, and then you move up, and then you're, I don't know, CEO, whatever, kind of a thing. It's, it's more linear, you know?

• 2:59:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, oh, it's actually pretty linear in the military as well, in, in the Navy. Like, you get commissioned as an officer, then, and you could track the career for like what a pilot does, like, oh, you become a pilot, then you become a whatever, then you become a squadron commander, or a squadron ops, and you become a squadron XO, then you become a squadron commander, then you become, and you go up.

• 3:00:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:00:04Jocko Willink?

  If you're in this, in the Navy for the, for the SEAL teams, you become an assistant platoon commander, a platoon commander, a troop commander, an ops officer, an executive officer, a commanding officer, a major commander, and then an admiral.

• 3:00:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:18Jocko Willink?

  So there is actually a progression that you can make.

• 3:00:20Speaker 02

  Okay, so that's perfect right there. So you don't like, you don't become. This get promoted to this position and then you gotta kind of run for Admiral or people gotta vote for you or nothing like that.

• 3:00:29Jocko Willink?

  No, although although people actually kind of do vote for you because you'll be up on a on a selection board and there might be four people that are up for Admiral and the other admirals are voting on it like, okay, yeah, like, you know, Echo has been just a stellar combat leader and he's been in charge of a, you know, a major command and he's been in, let's pick him. So they are actually essentially do, they do vote on you.

• 3:00:55Speaker 02

  Okay, I got, okay. Yeah, I see. Perfect right there. See us like me, you know, I don't know that kind of stuff. I do now.

• 3:01:02Jocko Willink?

  Now you know.

• 3:01:03Speaker 02

  Another one last expression that I'm gonna bring with me as well is using the expression wire brush as a verb.

• 3:01:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:11Speaker 02

  Like, I'm not gonna wire brush him.

• 3:01:12Jocko Willink?

  I'm not gonna wire brush you. That was good. He came out of the gate with that one, too.

• 3:01:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he used it again, too. I was like, oh, bro, I need to roll that into my everyday vocab.

• 3:01:19Jocko Willink?

  Well, what's interesting is in the Navy, that is a very specific thing, right? Like, you're gonna be, the normal Navy person is gonna have much more chances of literally utilizing a wire brush. And in the SEAL teams, you get a wire brush to clean out your UDT life jacket and keep it all squared away. Use a wire brush on your weapon. Like, you legitimately will use a wire brush.

• 3:01:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:01:47Jocko Willink?

  But I like the fact that it transfers even to a civilian that doesn't even know that you need to be in the Navy to be an Admiral, still understands a wire brush up and down my left side.

• 3:01:56Speaker 02

  We know how that's gonna feel.

• 3:01:57Jocko Willink?

  We know how it's gonna feel.

• 3:01:58Speaker 02

  I got it.

• 3:01:59Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's not gonna be a good feeling. You don't like it. Okay, lots of lessons learned. Speaking of, wire brush doesn't feel good. You know what does feel good?

• 3:02:08Speaker 02

  What?

• 3:02:09Jocko Willink?

  Lifting.

• 3:02:10Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:02:10Jocko Willink?

  Doing jiu-jitsu. Good training. You've been good. You're kind of, kind of getting back in the game over here on your side, Echo Charles.

• 3:02:15Speaker 02

  I would say we are back for sure. You know what it was? One of those conscious things, and actually, you've helped me. Actually, I even told you this, sir, but you helped me a lot where like you'll I used to like, I used to, for lack of a better way of putting it, I'd get reminded that, hey, Echo, you actually do jiu-jitsu. Did you know that? You know, kind of a thing when you'd post pictures or, you know, this kind of stuff or whatever. I'd be like, fricking, it's, oh, it's too late. And the days that I would make it, it'd be like I'd right in the middle of something and it flashes to me. Hey, wait, if I left like in five minutes, I could make the training, you know? That's when I would make it. But now, since it's more in my mind, you're always reminding me. I'm like, oh, yeah. And then you go a few times and you're like, okay, that's part of the schedule now. Yeah, oh, yeah. I even rolled the kids in, brother, going, you know, so it was like,

• 3:02:59Speaker 02

  it was just that one small, teeny tiny thing. Like, it was almost like all I needed was the reminder.

• 3:03:04Jocko Willink?

  Just need that reminder to get back on the mats. Get back on the mats. Now we're back. We need the fuel. Get yourself some Jaco Fuel. Go to Jacofuel.com. Get yourself some pink lemonade, which I'm drinking right now. Pink lemonade, just delicious energy in a can. That's what you need? Get some go. Get some, I just, by the way, as soon as the Admiral left, I pounded a banana milk. RTD, ready to drink.

• 3:03:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's go down real quick too, by the way. My kids now prefer the banana.

• 3:03:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:03:38Speaker 02

  I don't have them at home, but we got them from here.

• 3:03:40Jocko Willink?

  Check it out. You can get this stuff at Wawa, Bottom Right for the energy drink. Why? Because we're getting a little bit, we're taking some abuse from some of the big companies. But you can also get the stuff at Vitamin Shoppe, number one brand at Vitamin Shoppe. Military commissaries. We're working on the exchanges, everybody, from military exchanges. Hanaford, Dash Stores, Wakefern, ShopRite, Circle K in Florida, HEB, Meyer, by the way, crushing, crushing in Meyer, crushing in HEB, everybody that's down in, down in Tejas, everybody that's up in, in the Meyer area of operations. Thank you for going out there and getting after it. Go get this stuff. Jacofuel.com. If you don't have it near you, you can order.

• 3:04:25Jocko Willink?

  Get yourself some Time War as well. This is...

• 3:04:30Jocko Willink?

  This is something I will be taking for the rest of my life. And the reason is because, look, do you feel better? Yes, you do. Did I notice documented improvement in my eyesight? Yes, I did. That's crazy, right? That's crazy. And, and now like I'm noticing it all the time. So I will be taking time more for the rest of my life. So check that out as well. It is got all the vitamins that you need, the minerals that you need and some anti aging, some ocular nutrition in there. It's freaking awesome. So check that out. Jaco Fuel.com. There you go.

• 3:05:05Speaker 02

  Yep, it's true. Also, Origin USA, American made jeans, boots. And when I say American made again, I'm gonna say it again. It's not just assembled in America. Not just put the tag on it at the end in America from like the cotton grown America. The buttons they make that they put on the jeans, America. From the material all the way to the end product. Anyway, it's a big deal though. You know, economically, you don't support slavery and you think that, oh yeah, we don't have that. No, we, we exported the slavery.

• 3:05:40Jocko Willink?

  Yes, we did.

• 3:05:40Speaker 02

  And now it's still going though.

• 3:05:41Jocko Willink?

  Still going. There's slavery right now. There's slavery right now. And if you're wearing something that's made in China, you're supporting slavery right now as we speak. So don't do it. Get something made in America. In America.

• 3:05:53Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 3:05:53Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. Origin USA, get Gee's, get rash guards, get jeans, get boots, get whatever you need. Got training shorts now. I'm wearing them. The, the new training shorts are good to go. All right, there you go.

• 3:06:08Speaker 02

  It's true. Also Jaco.

• 3:06:09Jocko Willink?

  OriginUSA.com.

• 3:06:10Speaker 02

  OriginUSA.com. Also Jaco has a store called Jaco Store. JacoStore.com is where you can get your Discipline Equals Freedom shirts, hoodies, hats.

• 3:06:22Speaker 02

  That lightweight hoodie is coming in real handy right now, springtime.

• 3:06:25Jocko Willink?

  It's that time of year.

• 3:06:26Speaker 02

  It's that in between or weather, same saying, well, in California, I don't know. I don't know if everybody's in different spots, so I don't know. We have heavier weighted hoodies too, so all good. Uh, check that out, there's a, a T-shirt subscription scenario. You get a new shirt every month. The, the, the designs go a little bit outside the red line sometimes.

• 3:06:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 3:06:44Speaker 02

  But appropriately, no, not the red line, sorry, the, um, what do you call it? If you ain't trying, you ain't cheating.

• 3:06:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you're pushing the envelope.

• 3:06:53Speaker 02

  We're thinking outside the box a little bit on that one. Yes, but well within the red lines, yes, you, you, that's a good point because it's true. We don't, we don't, uh, we don't defy the hard set boundaries of the path. We don't, not with these designs. Anyway, people seem to like them. JacoStore.com, check that out if you like.

• 3:07:10Jocko Willink?

  Uh, subscribe to the podcast, uh, subscribe to Jaco Underground, JacoUnderground.com. We're putting out another little podcast talking about things that will help you in life. Curiosity, overcoming little challenges. We're answering a bunch of questions. We answer all the questions that come in. I think we're on question, uh, we're 400, 300, something like that. So we, we answer questions on that. JacoUnderground.com, it costs $8.18 a month. If you can't afford it, it's okay. Email assistance@jacoun underground.com, we'll take care of you. But this is how we protect ourselves from being shut down off of a platform. We don't own this platform. We own JacoUnderground.com, we'll always be on there, putting the word out.

• 3:07:52Jocko Willink?

  So check that out, check out our YouTube, check out Psychological Warfare, check out FlipsideCanvas.com. Check out the books Wisdom of the Bullfrog by Admiral William H. McRaven. You heard us review the, the wave tops of it today. There's all kinds of really awesome stories in there and awesome knowledge. Check out the rest of his books as well. You can find him on our, on our website. Um, check that out for sure. And then of course, I've written a bunch of books. Some of them about leadership, some of them are about laundromats, by the way. Got a book called Final Spin, it's about a laundromat, kinda. I've written a bunch of kids book, kids books, get those kids books.

• 3:08:32Jocko Willink?

  If you know a kid between, under the age of 14, between zero and 14, immediately right now, go and get these books, go to WarriorKid.com and just get all these books for these children. There's literally nothing better you could do for them. Nothing. Go get them these books. Also get Mikey and the Dragons, check out About Face by David Hackworth. You heard me mention it today a couple of times. Extreme Ownership, the economy of leadership. We also have a leadership consultancy called Echelon Front. Go to echelonfront.com if you need help inside your organization. We have an online training academy because leadership training is not inoculation. A leadership book doesn't teach you how to lead in one

• 3:09:11Jocko Willink?

  sitting. You need to actually train it, just like going to the gym. So go to extremeownership.com, learn how to live your life. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families or Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And also, don't forget about Micah Fink, who is up there currently. Latest report, he is wearing a bear skin and he is stalking a giant elk.

• 3:09:49Jocko Willink?

  So, he only has, by the way, a twig that he sharpened up on a rock. But he's up there, heroesandhorses.org. He's taken veterans and helping them find themselves. If you want to connect with us on social media. You can, you can. Echo is at Echo Charles, I am at Jaco Wink. Just be careful, because it's not just us on there. There's a whole algorithm on there, a monster algorithm, that will try and grab you and try and get your time from you, get your attention, take you off the path. Algorithm's just a big baseball bat that's trying to knock you off the path. So watch out for that. And thanks once again to Admiral McRaven for joining us, sharing his lessons learned. And most

• 3:10:34Jocko Willink?

  important, thanks to the Admiral for his selfless 37 years of service and sacrifice to our great nation. And thanks to all the military, men and women out there right now, who tonight, as we speak, are serving and protecting our country from those who seek to destroy it. And also thanks to police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all first responders, thank you for what you do every day to keep us safe here at home. And everyone else out there, let's

• 3:11:14Jocko Willink?

  remember what the Admiral wrote, when he put in words, "The day you no longer believe you have something to prove, the day you no longer believe you must give it your all, the day you think you are entitled to special treatment, the day you think all your hard days are behind you, is the day you are no longer the right leader for the job."

• 3:11:41Jocko Willink?

  And I'll take that one step further. That day, that day when you feel entitled, and you feel special, and you feel like you don't have to give it everything you've got, that is the day you start to die.

• 3:11:59Jocko Willink?

  So don't let that happen. Don't stop fighting. Don't stop striving. Don't stop working.

• 3:12:09Jocko Willink?

  And no matter what, don't stop getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco.