291: Are You Prepared? Stack The Deck In Your Favor. Army Special Forces Soldier, Mike Glover

0:00:00 - Opening 0:06:00 - Mike Glover, Army Infantryman and Special Forces Soldier. 3:29:10 - Final thoughts. 3:34:07 - How to stay on THE PATH. 3:50:31 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 291 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  Your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces, but in less traditional roles. Men risking their lives not as combatants, but as instructors or advisors, or as symbols of our nation's commitments.

• 0:23Jocko Willink?

  The fact that the United States is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required, the service to our country, which is rendered, or the pain of the casualties which are suffered. To cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you, you may hold a position of command with our special forces, forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional, forces which are growing in number and importance and significance, for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age, or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation.

• 1:07Jocko Willink?

  Korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the Second World War.

• 1:12Jocko Willink?

  Men have fought and died in Malaya, Greece, the Philippines, Algeria, and Cuba, and Cyprus, and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese Peninsula.

• 1:26Jocko Willink?

  No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate.

• 1:34Jocko Willink?

  This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin, war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him.

• 1:58Jocko Willink?

  It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we, to what has strangely been called wars of liberation, to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved. A whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore, a new and wholly different kind of military training.

• 2:38Jocko Willink?

  And that right there was an excerpt from a speech by John F. Kennedy to the 1962 graduating class at West Point, the United States Military Academy, and that same year, he also released a message to the US Army. And that message read, "To the United States Army, another military dimension, guerrilla warfare, has necessarily been added to the American profession of arms. The literal translation of guerrilla warfare, a little war, is hardly applicable to this

• 3:21Jocko Willink?

  ancient, but at the same time, modern threat. I note that the Army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle, wars of subversion, covert aggression, and in broad professional terms, special warfare or unconventional warfare. By whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics, communications and logistics to meet this threat. The mission of our armed forces, and especially the Army today, is to master these skills

• 4:01Jocko Willink?

  and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves. Pure military skill is not enough. A full spectrum of military, paramilitary, and civil action must be blended to produce success."

• 4:21Jocko Willink?

  The enemy uses economic and political warfare, propaganda, and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror, by subversion, and by force of arms.

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  To win in this struggle, our officers and men must understand and combine the political, economic, and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission.

• 4:56Jocko Willink?

  The Green Beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom.

• 5:06Jocko Willink?

  I know the United States Army will live up to its reputation for imagination, resourcefulness, and spirit as we meet this challenge. Signed, John F. Kennedy.

• 5:23Jocko Willink?

  So, the Green Berets, the US Army Special Forces, were formed for this new type of warfare. Well, I guess as JFK said, "New in its intensity, but ancient in its origin."

• 5:38Jocko Willink?

  And today, almost 60 years since JFK made these statements.

• 5:43Jocko Willink?

  There's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare. And we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences. He served in the US Army Special Forces, worked as a contractor for some government agencies, and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company, Fieldcraft Survival. His name is Mike Glover. Mike, thanks for coming out, man. Thanks for having me on, it's an honor. Happy to be here. Green Berets. Green Berets. The deal.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Well, kind of a big deal. I don't know if you knew that.

• 6:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, obviously, uh, the SEAL community gets quite a bit of, um, you know, flack because we're like, uh, I guess for lack of a better word, kind of popular right now.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:38Jocko Willink?

  But people seem to forget there was the Green Beret, Green Beret movie way before.

• 6:44Jocko Willink?

  And, and then I was thinking about the actual Delta Force movie the other day, which was way before anybody knew anything about the SEAL teams. So, so anyways, let's get to it, man. Let's go back to the beginning. Let's go back to where, how you grew up, where you're from. What turned you into you?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Ooh, conception in Korea, actually.

• 7:05Jocko Willink?

  Conceived in Korea?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Conceived in Korea. My dad was a Joe, an army kid.

• 7:10Jocko Willink?

  What do you do? What do you do?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  So he had two MOSs. He was a, uh, a ninety-five Bravo, which is a military police officer and a field artillery guy.

• 7:19Jocko Willink?

  What years was he in?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Seventy, late seventies into the mid eighties.

• 7:25Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  His, his stint was.

• 7:26Jocko Willink?

  Was he, did he go to Nam?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  He didn't. He was, he grew, he was in high school during Vietnam and then by the time he got out, the war had been fought.

• 7:35Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was over.

• 7:37Jocko Willink?

  But he got stationed in Korea at some point?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got stationed in Korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age. She was eighteen years old. And then they had me at nineteen.

• 7:48Jocko Willink?

  Wait, how old was he?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Twenty-five, twenty-four and, um, just living his best life, doing the army thing. Uh, we actually moved to California, to Fort Ord, California, where I was born in Monterey. Looks like a zombie apocalypse there now. The, the actual base for Ord, it looks like a sim shoot house.

• 8:09Jocko Willink?

  Did it get shut down?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  It, it did. They, they shut down all the buildings, condemned them, but it's still open. Like you could drive through it publicly, so there's no gates. And, um, stationed in Germany for a period of time with my dad as a young, uh, child. And then, um, parents separated, so got to come to Daytona Beach, Florida, where I was basically raised.

• 8:33Jocko Willink?

  Going with who? Who'd you go with, mom or dad?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  I went with dad. Um, mom didn't speak any English, um, met a guy in Germany, winded up getting back over to the US where, um, I, I spent time between Florida and North Carolina, splitting the difference growing up.

• 8:49Jocko Willink?

  Were you?

• 8:52Jocko Willink?

  Were you looking at the army like good deal? Were you around the army all the time when you're when you were a little bit older?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like it's like us, you know, we we live, you know, these civilian lives now, but there's always this evidence that we served in some capacity. So I saw that evidence as a child. My dad had, you know, the dog tags, the pictures, the military gear. I remember playing with his TA 50, his old military gear, his his mess kit and all of his LBE and all the old stuff that we had, the webbing. And I just kind of knew growing up in that environment that I was going to be in the military. His brother was a career Navy guy. So I was, you know, growing up with Charlie Sheen and Navy SEALs and Chuck Norris and Delta Force and kind of immersed in that

• 9:40Speaker 01

  and decided at a very young age, I mean, man, is is as young as I can remember, that's all I wanted to do was do the military.

• 9:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the same with me. I always say, people like, when did you make that decision? I'm like, I don't know, because I just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:59Jocko Willink?

  That's what I remember. But you were in mostly growing up in Daytona Beach?

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, Daytona Beach and then splitting the difference between North Carolina. My my mom actually settled right outside of Fort Brag, North Carolina, which I would spend a lot of time.

• 10:11Jocko Willink?

  What year were you born?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Eighty.

• 10:14Jocko Willink?

  So you're growing up, so now this is like the nineties.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:18Jocko Willink?

  It's weird. I'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind, I'm thinking I'm talking to like, like, an older person.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:24Jocko Willink?

  And I'm thinking in my mind like, oh, it was the fifties. I don't know why I'm thinking that because

• 10:30Speaker 01

  JFK.

• 10:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I guess because I just read JFK. So I'm thinking, oh, yeah, this is the fifties. And then I started thinking to myself, wait a second. This is like, I was already in the Navy when you were a freaking teenager or whatever. So you're growing up in the nineties.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Nineties. What year did you go in the Navy?

• 10:43Jocko Willink?

  Nineteen ninety.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Ninety. Okay, I was ten.

• 10:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  I was ten. Wow.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Now I feel young all the sudden.

• 10:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. So so what are you doing in Daytona Beach? What's the scene down there?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 10:57Jocko Willink?

  Are you in the water? Are you surfing? Are you listening to music? What are you listening to?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  No, I was, I mean, my dad jokes and says that I was a part fish because I was always in the water. I mean, I remember training. I wanted to be a Navy SEAL when I first started thinking about the military. My uncle was very pro Navy. Obviously, my dad was pro Army. And I remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater UDT challenges like tying knots. You know, there was no Discovery Channel or there was no representation mainstream of what Navy SEALs did. It was UDT was Charlie Sheen in Navy SEALs. So I wanted to do that, but I grew up in the water, outdoor fishing. I grew up on a boat. I mean, I think I was out, we, we probably fish four days a week.

• 11:39Jocko Willink?

  What was your dad's civilian job?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  So he, he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the Department of Corrections for the state of Florida. So he started doing corrections at an early age, right out of the military, which transitioned his retirement benefits, a whole bunch of cool stuff for him. And that's all I remember him doing.

• 11:57Jocko Willink?

  And then are you, uh, is he live, is there another like, did he get remarried or something? Who's taking care of you when he's at work?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, man, if I could reflect on that time period, I think I did a lot of taking care of myself. Um, but I was super independent. I was an only child, so it was just me, you know? So growing up, um, I had a good imagination. It was very responsible as a kid. I don't remember getting in trouble. I wasn't into bars, wasn't into weed, all the typical things that kids are into. I remember like doing con op, like concept of the operation plans and briefs as a 10 year old. I had a toy MP5 and planning ops, getting Gucci'd out and geared up. And then doing these like low vis operations at night. And then even AAR, I didn't even know what an AAR was, an extraction review. I would come back and like, let's talk about it, like weird stuff.

• 12:48Jocko Willink?

  Who's we?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Like all my friends.

• 12:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  I was just that kid. Yeah, I was that kid.

• 12:53Jocko Willink?

  Hey, did you, what about the, the fact that your parents got divorced? Did you, did you have like, uh, animosity towards your dad or towards your mom? Or were you just, did you just kind of, because you know, when, when divorce happens at a young age, sometimes kids can't understand it and it, it makes them, you know, uh, uh, I guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other. Sounds like you were pretty, maybe you kind of, because you can also, when you get older, you go, yeah, you know what? They just, you know, they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along or they weren't quite a good fit. And I get it and we're going to carry on.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was me, man. I just never had a, I never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right. I, I don't know if it was because I was taught not to judge people and even my family and the circumstance I was in. What I looked at, it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to, to go to different places, meet different family members and then have these cool experiences. I mean, I grew up in North Carolina with my cousins, um, running the streets, doing, playing war, uh, shooting BB guns. And then I come back to Florida, then I was hanging out with my dad, fishing outdoors on the beach in the water. And so I, I had a really good childhood.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  I, despite the problem that was separation, uh, which eventually at the age of 12, winded up moving back to my mom's, taking advantage of opportunities there. What was the, what were the opportunities there? So, um, when I went, so my, obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me, you know? And so I'm going back and forth, getting spoiled in, in separate ways. But I remember actually a summer of like, when I was 12 or 13, my mom trying to convince me that, hey, you know, your dad just met a new woman, which he did, which was going to be my stepmom. She had three kids at the time. And then it's an allocation of resources, right?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  When you have three new children in the home, you don't get taken care of like you used to. And so I was like, yeah, maybe I want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation. So I just said, Dad, I'm, I'm just going to live with my mom. And he was, I remember painfully, he was bummed out. I, I don't think I've ever heard my dad, my dad cry or, or saw him cry. And I think he was crying on the phone when I told him that. And it, it created a divide because I was his only baby boy. But, um, he had children to take care of. He had a newborn with, uh, the woman that he was with. And I knew he had this life, he had this vertical he had to concentrate on. So I lived with my mom and then, you know, in North Carolina and, uh, and she wasn't, she wasn't wealthy at all.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  She was an entrepreneur, small business beauty salon. We were struggling. I, I thought it was going to be like, oh, this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time. My dad never buys me stuff. And so I went into that opportunity and realized, hey, I mean, me and my mom are going to have to fend for ourselves. And was she with another guy at this point? She was, she was with my stepdad. She eventually met my stepdad at 15. She had a boyfriend at the time named Alex, who was a good dude that she had met in Germany, had brought her over. But she was trying to find her way. I mean, I don't even think, and this is, this is an honest reflection, I don't think I had shoes until I was like 14. Like I had flip flops. It was like, she didn't have a car till I was 15, because she couldn't

• 16:12Speaker 01

  afford a car. So we didn't have a lot of things that were basics, because she was grinding as an entrepreneur. But that taught me more about life, moving forward, being adaptive, and eventually becoming a military leader. I think a lot of those experiences come from that.

• 16:27Jocko Willink?

  You know, you said, you said, first of all, it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached, able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid. You also said, hey, I was taught not to judge people. Who taught you that?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  I grew up as a Baptist, and I wasn't, like, I'm not a super religious person. I never have been. But I've questioned, I remember crying as a kid, when I was in my bed, trying to think about what the next step was for people. Like, what happens when you die? I remember, actually, I remember this thought, because it stuck with me. I said to myself in my head, I said, wait a minute, if, if God's Jesus's father, then who's God's father? And there was this void in my brain. I'm like, oh my God, I can't figure this out. And I remember being distraught. And so, religion kind of brought that together for me. So I grew up like a Christian, non-denominational, and was taught a lot of values that way. Also, my dad's a military-minded guy. So,

• 17:26Speaker 01

  discipline, integrity, honor, all those things were instilled in me at a young age, too.

• 17:31Jocko Willink?

  And then what, at what point did you, because you were in the water all the time, and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the Navy, and try and go in the SEAL Teams. What made you make the decision to go in the Army instead?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, good question. I've never been asked that, but specifically, I know the exact moment. I was on my, the steps of my grandma's house in Daytona Beach, and my uncle, who was still active Navy, had just come back from being on the water, in the fleet. And I was talking to him about being a Navy SEAL. And he said, listen, I know you're torn between the two. Do you want to be a Green Beret? Do you want to be a Navy SEAL? And for a kid, it's like, it's a choice, but you don't realize the progress that you have to go through. And so I'm like, so what happens if I fail? As in, if I go to selection and go to BUDs, if I fail, what happens? He goes, you're mopping a deck forever. He goes, and then he told me about the whole recruiting thing.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  He actually tried out for BUDs and didn't make it when he was young in the Navy. And he said, hey, there's a whole bunch of guys I served with that didn't make it, that fill all the slots in the Navy that nobody else wants to do. And I'm like, so what happens if I'm in the Army? And then my dad was there to educate me, says, listen, you could be an airborne Ranger, you pass Ranger school, you go to selection, you don't make it, you're still an airborne Ranger, Combat Arms. And I'm like, well, I just want to be in the fight. And I made the decision right there in that moment was like, okay, let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy. When I was 10 years old, I made a bet with my dad that I was going to be a Green Beret.

• 19:07Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Bet him an MP5. Bet him an MP5 SD.

• 19:12Jocko Willink?

  Did he pay up?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  No, I had to buy it myself. I had to buy it myself. He could buy me a Phoenix Arms 22 right now.

• 19:20Jocko Willink?

  The, uh, the fact that, what, what, the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible. When I, I was freaking, you know, what was I, I think I was 18 when I joined, but I might've been 17 on the MEPS program. Anyways, I was young, but I was older than you were at age 10.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:37Jocko Willink?

  And I didn't even figure out that, hey, that, that thing never came into my mind, what if you don't make it?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:44Jocko Willink?

  Which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's an 80% attrition rate in BUDs. And it's totally, uh, it's, it's the worst. I mean, look, here, here's what's the worst. If you join the Navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be on, uh, uh, work on aviation's equipment, that's awesome. The Navy's freaking a great place to get those kinds of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue collar jobs. The Navy's freaking awesome for that. You, you want to, like I said, you want to be a diesel mechanic? Bro, go, go join the Navy. You'll get awesome experience of that. You want to learn about communication systems, technical stuff, the Navy's great.

• 20:21Jocko Willink?

  But the type of person that wants to be a SEAL doesn't want to do those kinds of things at all, at least as far as I can tell. So, but that's what you're gonna end up as. And so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it. It's not, not gonna be fun.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  What's worse too, you train up for that job before you, you used to, right? You used to train up for that job.

• 20:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  So then, what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks.

• 20:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  So when you go into, that's your motivation. I don't want to go back to that thing, that vocational thing.

• 20:51Jocko Willink?

  No, it's, it's cra- and the other thing that's, that's really good about the Army and the Marine Corps is you get all this fundamental, basic infantry, small unit training before you go to special operations training. So in the, in the SEAL teams, you don't have that. You don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental, small unit tactics like you have in the Army and in the Marine Corps.

• 21:14Jocko Willink?

  So, how old are you when you enlist?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Seventeen. Yeah, I joined when I was seventeen.

• 21:19Jocko Willink?

  And go to boot camp? Got what you expected?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went to infantry boot camp, went to Sand Hill, became a eleven Bravo. I actually signed up to be a, an airborne Ranger, an option forty contract, which is known as the, the option to go to Ranger Battalion.

• 21:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so that's, that means you're going to battalion?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was, so I was set to go to battalion. But what I signed up for as an MOS was called eleven X-ray. An eleven X-ray is similar to the eighteen X-ray where the X stands for they fill the gap. They, they decide what they want to make you. So back in the day, it's not like this now, but back in the day, there was four different specialties in the infantry. Eleven Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and Mike. And, or not Mike, not Delta, but Mike and Hotel. So if you were eleven Bravo, infantryman. If you're a Charlie, mortar man. If you're a Mike, heavy wield mechanized vehicles. If you're a Hotel, heavy armor, like riding on Humvees. So basically an infantryman with different skill sets.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Well, when I got there, the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing. So they said, hey, you guys in a group, you're gonna be Bravos.

• 22:29Jocko Willink?

  You mean like literally standing?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Literally where you were standing.

• 22:32Jocko Willink?

  Standing in your class rank or anything like that, just where you're standing.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Where you were lumped together. And so they're like, you lump, you're gonna be a Bravo, you know, and they made the MOSs. Well, they made me an 11 hotel. And so I'm like, okay, so I'm an infantry guy that drives in Humvee, shoots 50 cows and tow missiles. Cool. Let's do this. At the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to AIT where you get your advanced training.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  They they're supposed to have a RIP brief, a Ranger indoctrination program brief. So the RIP instructor comes and I'm like, what's going on here? Like, he's not talking to us. He's talking to the bravos and the Charlies. Like, why isn't he talking to us? Don't even think anything about it because I'm like, I'm E1. I don't even have a rank, right? And so no foot to stand on. So we go through the training and at the end they go, hey, Mike, you're going to Fort Lewis, Washington to an infantry unit. And I'm like, I have a Ranger contract, airborne Ranger contract. So they look at my MOS and go, no, you're a hotel. Ranger Battalion doesn't have hotels. I'm like, what? Like, what do you mean they don't have hotels? Like, you should have told us before you went to AIT. I'm like, I'm a private. I think I tried to say something, but you guys ignored me.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  So luckily for me, my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th Airborne Corps, big division of airborne infantry units. So I call him during my little break and like, this is what happened. So he gets this, you know, long story short, he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and I'm in a room like similar to this. And they're like, I know your uncle. I'm gonna hook you up. Like literally the guy says it to me is E5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard, the third infantry regiment, right? I don't even know what the hell the old guard is. I'm like, okay, what do I gotta do? And a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders. He said, give me your orders. And he looks at it and my MOS says 11 hotel.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  He literally takes a pen and scratches that 11 hotel, writes 11 Bravo, and then signs his initials. Boom. And it instant 11 Bravo. And I'm like, oh, and I'm like, okay, so am I going to battalion? He goes, well, first, we can't do that. We have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal. When we send you the old guard because you could only be 11 Bravo going the old guard, we're going to send you there and then you could put a 4187. Everybody back in the day, even kinda now, says, yeah, 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do. Not true. So I get the old guard, no idea what the old guard is and long story short, they're their ceremonial unit of the US military. They do all the full honor funerals, the state

• 25:10Speaker 01

  dignitary escorts, all the stuff I did not want to do. I had to take advantage of my time. This is pre GWAT.

• 25:18Jocko Willink?

  So we're talking what, like 97?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  97. 97. So I get there and you know, luckily for my circumstance, my uncle is very well known in these units. He, he served as a platoon sergeant, does a storm. He's just a popular character in the infantry in this, in these particular units. And the old guard for infantry guys is like a break. Yeah, you go to Korea, you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old guard to take a break. So I get there, E1, don't know anything and I realize it's not the place that I want to be, but I have to take advantage of my time. So I, I head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success, to be the best version of special forces that I could be. And so that's, that's where that journey began.

• 26:04Jocko Willink?

  Did any, was anyone telling you what to do? Was anyone talking to you about it? Was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that? Were you reading about it?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  So I was, so books are have been a big part of my life since the origins of where I wanted to be in the military. You know, the Marsenko books, the, you know, the, the Marine Sniper, all these books, John Plaster, McVesog, John Stryker's stories, all these stories I was digesting and absorbing. I even stole in basic training, a book called Commandos, that was a paperback book from the drill sergeants' pool table hall while I was doing KP, where I was cleaning crap up. And because I was like, I, I want to digest this. I was like hiding doing that stuff. And so I had an understanding of what it took and, and discipline. But I had no idea because I didn't get any intel.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  As I got into the infantry, I maximized my time. I trained up for Ranger School. I went to Ranger School as an 18-year-old, PFC, a private first class. I went to airborne school.

• 27:08Jocko Willink?

  How hard is it to get a billet to Ranger School as an 18-year-old?

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Almost impossible.

• 27:13Jocko Willink?

  How'd you get it?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  So, there's a, there's tryouts. Most infantry units run what's called pre-Ranger. And, and people think, hey, you raise your hand, you get a slot. That's not true. For battalion, it's a requirement, so they get the majority of the slots. If you're a regular infantry unit, you get slots based on order of merit. So, they have an OML list. And if you earn it, they'll give you a slot, and then you're on the list, and then you just trickle your way to the top. So, I tried out for it. About 30 of us tried out for it, and only three of us got slots. And I was a young PFC.

• 27:45Jocko Willink?

  What's it, what's the tryout based on? Freaking PT tests and weapons assembly or something?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Well, it's harder than Ranger School. So, it's, it's about a week, right? So, in a week, it's like, how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids? To, to see who's most likely to succeed? Because these units have their reputation on the line. If, if the 3rd Infantry Regiment sends five dudes to Ranger School and nobody passes, it, it reflects poorly on, on the regiment. So, when I showed up, um, um, it was a rucksack. It was a, you know, a ruck march, 12 miles in time. It was land navigation. It was a common core task. It was patrolling. The number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness in Ranger School. It's your ability to lead. And so, as a young 18-year-old at the time, um, I'm navigating this problem set.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  It's like, hey, PFC Glover, give a Warno, give a Con Op. And I'm like, oh, like, I have to brief this? So, planning, um, and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in Ranger School. So, I was successful.

• 28:48Jocko Willink?

  And, and you're a PFC, and there's 30 people try out, and you get selected?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  I got selected. Yeah, I was one of, one of three that got selected. We went to Ranger School. I was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling. And in my infantry company, the only people Ranger qualified was me as a PFC and my first sergeant, who was a senior, uh, E8 in the, in the Army. So, it was back then, it was rare. It was rare to have a Ranger tab on your uniform.

• 29:17Jocko Willink?

  How was Ranger School?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Kicking the balls, kicking the balls.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Fear was the, um, the thing that I had to overcome. It was the most difficult thing that I had to overcome. I remember like the night before Ranger School.

• 29:32Jocko Willink?

  Fear, I'm assuming fear of failure.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Fear of failure, absolutely. And, um, you know, you have no perspective. You just have these stories, you know, my squad leader had been to Ranger School before. So he was feeding me information, which almost makes it worse. Like you gotta, you gotta be aware of this and, and you're trying to live with that solution in mind. And you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face. I showed up and I'm super physically fit and I remember getting my, um, I had a low body fat, high physical fitness score. And when I got there, I realized very quickly, it wasn't about that. It was a, that's a, the Ranger assessment part of Ranger School is relatively easy. I mean, it's, we're talking eight minute mile pace, five miles, 40 minutes.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  We're talking about basic pushups, situps and running and pullups and basic stuff. Really quickly, you start deteriorating because you're not eating. Uh, you're averaging about one MRE a day when I went during winter time. And you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep. Those difficulties for a dude, I mean, I went to Ranger School, even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds. All the guys that were meatheads, that were big dudes, suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle. And when you're not getting that, your body starts deteriorating and it's painful.

• 30:52Jocko Willink?

  How much weight did you lose?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  30 pounds, 30 pounds.

• 30:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, uh, that's good times.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:59Jocko Willink?

  And that's another thing, man, I might've taken the gamble. You know, they're like, hey, listen, Jaco, you might end up on a ship somewhere, but if you go to Ranger School, guaranteed you're not eating. I'd have been like, hmm, let me think about that one. I roll the dice.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:15Jocko Willink?

  That's another ballgame. That's the thing about buds. The thing about buds, you're getting fed, man.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:20Jocko Willink?

  And it's all you can eat.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  That's huge.

• 31:22Jocko Willink?

  It's beautiful.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:23Jocko Willink?

  They just want you jacked.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  That's huge.

• 31:26Jocko Willink?

  But the thing is Ranger School, like you said, Ranger School is really the premier leadership school for the army.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  It is, yeah.

• 31:35Jocko Willink?

  You're running operations, you're, um, you're, you're filling a different role basically every operation. Sometimes you're the leader, sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, you know, when I went to Ranger School as a very young kid, um, I didn't know what to expect. And then it's sink or swim. You either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be, look, there's the characteristics of being successful in Ranger School aren't that difficult. But being a clear, concise, decisive leader, um, under stress is super important. And I saw, and, and for, for, you know, comparably to all of my peers, which weren't peers, I'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated IOBC, Infantry Officer Basic Course, Navy SEALs, Green Berets, like, these are guys that I highly respect. So it was a whole plethora, like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And I realized when you took away food, when you took away sleep, when you broke everybody down, we were on this equal plane. And so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult. And so I saw people, uh, sink and I saw people succeed because they swam. Those people that sunk were just, they couldn't make decisions. And then when they got stressed, which they'd never been tested in stress, they couldn't do basic, basic skillsets, right? So Ranger School, they give you the formula and here's the con op, here's the five paragraph op order. Here's how you execute a raid. Just follow that step by step and you'll be successful.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  And I realized how analytic that was. And so I just needed to get through and check the block and get it done. And I saw a lot of people, um, sink that I highly respected because they started falling apart. I mean, I saw guys who were beef. Beefy dudes who were jacked, who were strong, and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food. And when I saw that as a young man, as a young leader, it changed my entire perspective on life. Like, it reprioritized the hierarchy of things that I thought were important. And I'm like, that's not important. Like, eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys. So I came out of that as a very young leader,

• 33:55Speaker 01

  who wasn't even a, I was an informal leader. I wasn't even a designated leader. And that shaped me to become the leader that I would become.

• 34:01Jocko Willink?

  When you say people that would have trouble were people that were having a hard time making a decision, like, what would they be having a hard time making a decision? Like, hey, there's a, where are we gonna put this Overwatch position? Or where are we gonna set up the base element? Like, those kind of decisions?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly. So, in Ranger School, you're gonna set mission, which is based off your con op that you plan. It's a deliberate mission set, contingency-based mission set. You go in the field with that, and then after that, it's all fragos. It's fragmentation orders of, the mission's changing, we're doing this. And mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change. Hey, guys, this just happened, now you have to adapt, what are you gonna do? I have no idea. And it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain. It was a lack of sleep. I mean, I had guys that broke down and, like, just quit. Because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally,

• 34:59Speaker 01

  what's gonna get you through that? And typically, it's grit, it's resolve, it's digging deep. And some of those guys never found that. And even though they were tested and they had an opportunity, they never found it. So when we came out of the field, the greatest thing about Ranger School is you're judged by your peers. You you write down on a piece of paper right at the like the second you come out of the field. You're smoked out of your mind. They put you in a classroom. They sit you down with a piece of paper and they say, write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind. And that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  That's I mean, it's super impactful because it's like, hey, man, adapt, change. Do some self-reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life. That that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward.

• 35:56Jocko Willink?

  And in Ranger School, one of the ways that you get dropped is by getting peered out, right? Where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy X number of times, then the instructor is like, yeah, this guy is not the guy that we want.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  If you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field, you'll immediately get recycled. So a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase. It's potentially going back to the beginning of Ranger School. So now you're talking about when I went to Ranger School, 70 plus days, it was a couple of months. Three different phases when I went Derby, which is in the Fort Benning and Sand Hill. Delanega, which is in the mountains, and then Eglin, which is in the swamps. So if you get recycled, you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning. I mean, I I interviewed a woman, Lisa Jaster, who was one of the first females to go through Ranger School.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  She failed every phase. She got to the last phase and failed. And they said, you failed. So here's your options. You could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these pushups because we get to assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward. If you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now, you're done. But we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning. So she, she was in Ranger School for like a year. Like sustained combat operations and sleep and food deprived for like a year. And I can't imagine, but that was your options. It's either, again, it's either sink or swim. You have an opportunity to succeed and change. The way you look at yourself, which I think is the most impactful, that they give you that opportunity. Or continue to be that guy and then just get shit canned.

• 37:32Jocko Willink?

  When are they helping people out by, let's say you get graded low. Is an instructor gonna come over to you and say like, hey, listen, here's what's going on. You're, you're really indecisive. You need to start thinking through these things. The, the reason I'm asking you this is because like in basic SEAL training. First of all, you're not doing anything really tactical. But second of all, there's no real, hey, bro, here's the mistake that you're making. Whereas the kind of training that I ran, which was, which is like the advanced training, like the, the, the, the training that we do with platoons before they go into deployment, right? I mean, that's all I'm doing is being like, hey, man, you, you can't be, you can't be sitting there. Uh, being indecisive. You need to figure out what, what call you're gonna make. You need to at least give your guys some direction. Like I'm constantly doing that to these guys.

• 38:16Jocko Willink?

  Is that happening at Ranger School or is it more like, yeah, you know what, this guy ain't got it?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, I mean, here, the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it. The, the, your peers know, the students know. There's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war. And one of the things that I think is important about the, the Ranger tab and the experience. Is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tab. Now, um, now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms. But when you saw that tab, you understood that, that guy was capable as a leader in combat. And it told a lot. So a lot of the times, especially with the officers who come out of IOBC, they're brand new 22-year-old, uh, second lieutenants. They'll give them the opportunity.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  And they'll say, hey, these are the fixes. Fix this. If you don't fix it, you're gonna fail. You go to, you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a Ranger tab? Forget about it. Your career field for the, you're just not, you might as well just get out. For for young Joes like PFCs that I was for specialists or even young NCOs not commissioned officers, you have an opportunity. They'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you take that opportunity. You might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols, which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again.

• 39:40Jocko Willink?

  What's the attrition rate at Ranger School?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  It's pretty high. It's about 80%.

• 39:43Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's about 80%.

• 39:47Jocko Willink?

  So you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation. What are you? Are you 19 yet?

• 39:53Speaker 01

  I'm 19.

• 39:53Jocko Willink?

  19. You graduated from that. So what's next?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  So my uncle, when I'm there, was a guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He was there as a guard. He was a platoon sergeant before my time. And when I'm there, I put a 4187 to go to Ranger Battalion. Doesn't get accepted. They're like, no. I have a Ranger tab, which I thought was a prerequisite to get a 4187. They're like, no, we don't we don't need the numbers. And in 98, they didn't need the numbers, 99. And so I talked to my uncle, I'm like, what do you want? What are my options here? Like, I'm ready to be in the fight, which there wasn't a fight. And that's probably the reason why I didn't get a 4187 approved. They're like, he's like, go try out for the tomb. And at the

• 40:42Speaker 01

  time, and still at that unit, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was the most difficult. It's probably the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life, to be honest. Selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was. I went there. The Army's been guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns since the 50s. It's been around since the interment of the World War I Unknown. And it was an honor. It was something that was going to build me and set me up for success, leading into potentially battalion or special forces. And so I took the opportunity. I went and tried out.

• 41:22Jocko Willink?

  How long is the tryout?

• 41:24Speaker 01

  So you typically do a two week tryout. It's called TDY. They just, they TDY you to the tomb. You do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go, you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try. And that's a seven and a nine month process. If you're smart, seven months. If you're not so smart, nine months. So it took me like 10 months. So it took me a long time to get my, earn my tomb identification badge, but the, the, the process is almost a year.

• 41:51Jocko Willink?

  And then what's that job entail? I mean, obviously we know what it looks like from the outside.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:56Jocko Willink?

  Guarding the tomb, but what's it look like from the inside?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  It's a suck fest, man. It's a suck fest. I mean, it's, it's the most difficult thing I've done. But the most honorable responsibility I've been given in the military. So the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the, the 40s. And they guard the tomb 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And that rotation takes place in three release based on height. First being the tallest, second being the mid, mid guys, and third being the shortest, minimum six feet tall. And then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule, day on, day off, day on, day off, day on, and four days off all year round. You know, your schedule for three years in advance. And you typically guard, if you're a guard, you have

• 42:42Speaker 01

  your badge during the summertime, seven walks a day, 30 minute walks with a seven minute guard change. And then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night. At night, we don't do it in ceremony uniform. It's typically class, I think Bs at the time or BDUs, and it's a roving patrol. Your, your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect. And we, we do that, snow, sleet, heat, doesn't matter the weather. It's, it's just being done.

• 43:12Jocko Willink?

  What makes the, uh, what makes it so challenging to get through the, is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your ear here, ear hairs and stuff like that?

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's the attention to detail. Line six of the sitter's creed states, my standard will remain perfection. And so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform, even your life, even your personal life of being squared away. So I, I did that job and, um, you know, painful to be a new guy doing that job. But inspections of your uniform every single day, if not by the hour, they have a culture where you earn a walk. You don't just get a walk. You have to earn that walk. So you have to earn it by understanding knowledge. You have to verbatim memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of Arlington National Cemetery.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Cause you're a representative. You like, you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3,000 people, come inside the quarters, change and go out three minutes later. And communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the US military. So it's a, it's a diplomatic position, not just a, a guard wearing a uniform, walking back and forth. And so I remember the, my first walk was in front of 3,000 people at 12 o'clock noon. CNN, Fox News, cameras were in my face. I remember hearing, standing at port arms, hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon.

• 44:39Jocko Willink?

  Cause you were freaking nervous?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Cause I was nervous. I was standing in front, I mean, I'm looking through aviator glasses that are in my peripheral and see people like inches from me, just staring at me. And every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating, but it's a sharp learning curve. And again, it's a huge opportunity for me.

• 45:00Jocko Willink?

  So the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that, that's 10 months long, are you working during that time? Are you doing any guarding or no?

• 45:08Speaker 01

  You're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you, early morning, late afternoon and everything at night. I even did what's called a vigil. Because I wanted to get the hell away from the guys. I didn't want to get hazed and abused. I did vigils where I would work all day. And so I'm, you know, helping prep the guards uniforms, doing early morning, late afternoon walks. And then at night, I'm taking, when the cemetery closes at 7:00 PM until 7:00 in the morning, standing guard for 12 hours straight, no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys. I was like breaking records of doing, I was like doing 21 vigils back to back.

• 45:47Jocko Willink?

  So what the hell is going on with the guys? That was so bad. Was it just freaking all in your shit all day long?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Well, the, so the, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the, the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the US military besides the astronaut's badge. Cause you know, they're, they're not a dime a dozen. So the Tomb Guard badge is, is very, um, much protected by the Tomb Guard badge protectors. And so they don't want the right guys there, uh, or the wrong guys there. They want the right guys and they, they want to make sure you earn it. And I did. And back then, you know, hazing, um, we come from the military where hazing was normal. I mean, if you weren't hazed, you, you didn't feel like you were loved. Like I got my EIB, my airborne wings, my halo wings punched into my chest, my every rank punched in my collarbone,

• 46:40Speaker 01

  into the bone. Um, and that was just the, the universe we, uh, evolved in. That was very much the case. Everything from running through the cemetery, trying to find, you know, inscriptions of, of specific people, getting smoked to death, low crawling across, you know, face down in the lawn, get, you know, getting smoked. Um, just routine hazing to make sure, hey, this is a, we're, we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here. And it's something I guess is handed down in tradition.

• 47:10Jocko Willink?

  What's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Not, not that big of a deal. I mean, it's pretty, I, I, I just saw a picture of it. I have a, a small four by six picture of it. And, um, the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in O6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning. And typically you've worked the whole night. Take your, you take your badge test, which is a, a series of specific tests, including changing the guard at noon. Reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors, being perfect and a written test, all kinds of stuff. And then you get your badge pinned and you know, I'm badge four, seven, zero out of probably about almost 600 badges today.

• 47:56Jocko Willink?

  Then how long did you have that job for?

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Not long. I did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then.

• 48:02Jocko Willink?

  So for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this shit.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:07Jocko Willink?

  They're like, okay, and this is what you're doing.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  That's your job. That's your job.

• 48:11Jocko Willink?

  And how did you like it?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  So I loved the honor and the duty, but it's not what I wanted to do in the military. And I, I, you know, one thing we had to do is maintain our common core skill sets. So we would come out of the field and those three days down, we'd do med training, we'd do raids, patrolling. We had to maintain all these things. So you get the infantry experience as a part-time position, representing the army in a full-time position. And it's not what I signed up for. I mean, I, I was trying to be the best that I could be. Be all you could be was the motto back then, but it's not what I signed up for. And then nine 11 changed everything for me in that, in that situation.

• 48:53Jocko Willink?

  But how, but where were you stationed when nine 11 went down?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  So I was, so I got out of the army on my first rotation of four years. September 3rd of oh, one was my ETS date, get out of army date. I transitioned into the National Guard because I was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry.

• 49:13Jocko Willink?

  What was your plan? Like?

• 49:15Speaker 01

  At Federal Bureau of Investigation, HRT. I was like, if there's no war, if I can't get into battalion, I'm going to get my college degree and I'm going to go, I'm going to be a sniper in HRT. And that was my, my, my sights were set on that. And when nine 11 happened, it was a week after my ETS.

• 49:32Jocko Willink?

  And how old are you now?

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Twenty-one.

• 49:35Jocko Willink?

  So you're 21 years old. You get out on September 3rd?

• 49:39Speaker 01

  September 3rd is when I left the army.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Okay. Yep. So then what do you do? So September 11th comes, now you're freaking, you gotta be going berserk. I'm freaking out. Like, when September 11th happened, I was in the National Guard, and I knew the nasty guard was gonna get mobilized. And I'm like, I'm not going to war with these dudes. No offense to the National Guard, but I'm like, I'm not going to war with these dudes. I immedi- like, I took, I was at college in the cafeteria in Fayetteville, near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when this happened. I went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff. Cause I'm like, we're going to war, this is it. And immediately, I started making phone calls, and they're like, you ain't doing nothing, man. Nothing's going on with us right now. Standby to standby. And I'm like, I have to make moves.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  So I started reaching out to recruiters and very rapidly got back in the military. And went straight to selection, went straight to green braces. Was it hard to get to go straight to selection? There must have been lines out the door at that point. Impossible. I was a, I was a 20-year-old E5. I mean, I made sergeant at 20 years old. Airborne Ranger qualified with a Tomb Guard badge. And when I showed up to recruiter, he looked at me like I was a 16-year-old kid who wanted to play Army. And I was like, is this not a thing? And at that time, they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve. And I'm like, dude, I just got out last week. And he's like, sorry, man, you gotta start over. And so I'm duck walking, barefoot, with a whole bunch of teenagers, trying to get back in the Army.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Wait, oh, cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process or whatever? Very beginning. I mean, I didn't have to go to basic AIT, I had a Ranger tab, so I didn't have to do any of that stuff. But I had to go back through the Army and processing system called 30th AG from the beginning. I mean, I'm duck walking, and I actually went to the recruiting station, which is called MEPS, is where they process you, in military uniform. And I remember they brought us in the room, and like, everybody stripped down, and guys are looking at me, and I'm battle dress uniform, stripping down, and they're like, what is this dude doing? Like, isn't he a recruiter? Like, what is happening? And I'm, you know, in my boxer briefs, like everybody else, duck walking, doing all my little drills to get back in the Army.

• 51:57Jocko Willink?

  And then you go straight to selection from there?

• 51:58Speaker 01

  So I went through a program, basically an 18 x-ray program. And I had a tryout where special operations preparation course. They evaluate like they did a mini ranger school and said, hey, is this kid? Is there a probability that he's going to be successful? Let's evaluate him in land nav, let's ruck him, let's PT him. And if he's good, we'll give him a slot.

• 52:21Jocko Willink?

  So that's, that's prep you just said?

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Prep. It's the, it's basically the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection. Cause they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail. They're setting you up for success. And so I quickly evaluated and they're like, hey, the student's ready, let's send him now.

• 52:39Jocko Willink?

  How long is that little evaluation?

• 52:43Speaker 01

  A week.

• 52:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not.

• 52:45Jocko Willink?

  Straightforward. And then you go to selection. And selection, this initial selection is only a few weeks long, right?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Um, when I went to selection, it was 21, 22 days. Yeah, a few weeks.

• 52:57Jocko Willink?

  And this is just sort of, um, weeding people out?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:00Jocko Willink?

  And seeing, making sure you want to be there?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, at the time you had to have, and you had to have three years in the army. So you're talking about experience, typically NCOs, not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military. And you show up, it's a week of assessment, land nav, all these gates to make sure that you're good to go. And then it's team week, it's, it's basically a little mini version of hell week. And then they do the long range movement. The long range movement is what gets everybody. It's the land navigation leading into a long range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skillset and then in the wood line alone, execute that skillset to be successful.

• 53:42Jocko Willink?

  And that skillset is just land nav?

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Land nav. Yeah. It's our trigger. It's like you guys is water, we use land. And, um, hey, can you hump for a long period of time, duration, day, night? And keep moving and can you find your points? And, uh, just like the water, there's a lot of people who can't. You know, this is, this is crazy. I mean, it's to me, it's like walking is very primal. And a lot of people fail.

• 54:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And put that rucksack on, it's not quite walking anymore.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. It sucks the life out of you for sure.

• 54:13Jocko Willink?

  What about the first, I've always found like the first 17 minutes with a ruck on them always like, oh yeah, I remember this shit.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving. I, I've always been a good rucker. That's always been my strength. And so I'd never had a hard time with ruck and my feet were hard. My, my back was good. So I didn't have a difficult time with, with selection. But um, what I saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement. And it just broke them down.

• 54:45Jocko Willink?

  What are you doing a day? And those, in that selection where you did what, a week of rucking? What do you, what do you think you're doing a day?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Uh, on average, six, 10 to 10 kilometers per movement, per gate. Um, so you know, it, it depends. Like you, you start that whole entire pro. Here, here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet. And then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20. I think the, the average is a 20 something plus miler. And so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see. It, it's all a test on preparation, by the way. It's, it has nothing to do with the actual assessment. It has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance. And so what they want is the guys who've prepared in advance.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  And so at, at one point, uh, for the long range movement, which is 30, probably 30 plus miles, uh, over a period of 24, 48 hours, you're non-stop moving. And if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down, eat chow and rack out, and you're not timing yourself appropriately, you just fail. And so you have to meet these gates, but it's all, it's all on your own. And that, that jacks up people's minds. When, when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be, what uniform you gotta be in and what time you're moving. That independence and setting off with no destination in mind. Hey, students, I want you to get ready, get your ruck on. We're gonna move until we tell you to stop. That immediately destroys people's mindset out the gate.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Cause they're like, what do you mean? So they go out the gate, they start sprinting and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out. Or they're so insecure with the circumstance, they impose, they self-induced all this stress. And then they quit. And you're like, you're self-selecting because you don't have the, the exact parameters of what you're gonna be doing. That's how war is. I mean, war is, hey, we, we might be flexing all night. We might be flexing all year. Who knows? And that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down.

• 56:47Jocko Willink?

  And they wring out or whatever. What do they do? How do you quit in, in selection?

• 56:51Speaker 01

  So, uh, in selection, um, in periods of time, you go back to your barracks. And, and when I went to selection, it was a piece of plywood, no pillow. And you have a bunk that has no pad, nothing, nothing comfortable. You'll go to, you go to sleep in the morning and you'll wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone. And, and you're like, what? And so what people are doing is getting up, they're leaving, knocking on the hut and this self-selecting, like literally saying, I'm done. I'm, I'm, I'm out. You have to voluntarily withdraw in order, and have a conversation in order to check on a selection.

• 57:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's something I've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically. There's two things that come to mind.

• 57:37Jocko Willink?

  And I've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective, just like my own personal, um, mindset is I'm very aware of time. I'm very aware of time. I can always feel time creeping up on me. I can always feel time like, people think, oh, we'll be able to make it. We can, we can rest a little longer. And I always had that sense that, oh, actually, no, it's not, we're not gonna make it. In fact, we need to leave now if we're gonna make it. Or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan. I say, you know what? We need to start moving forward. We can't spend any more time planning. It's time to go. I always had that sense of, of time and I still do. And it's, it's, it's almost a level of paranoia. It's something that always is in the front of my, um, uh, heads up display, right?

• 58:19Jocko Willink?

  My heads up display is always going, hey, wait, check your time, check your time, check your time. But that reminds me of being out on patrols where they're total dick dragger patrols where you're, you're carrying a shit ton of weight and you're going really far. And you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes. Cause once you sit down, you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter. And just they're they'll sit there, they'll sit there indefinitely. Like, like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their their they've been crushed. For a five, six, seven hour patrol.

• 59:04Jocko Willink?

  They won't get up. Unless you're like, hey, boys, we gotta go. And if you if you don't do that, if somebody doesn't do that, somebody doesn't say, hey, guys, it's time to get up and go. There's no, there will be no movement will will happen. They'll they'll not hit that target. They'll be like, hey, we couldn't make the target. That's what will happen. People accept that, like, yeah, you know what? And and so having that, having that intrinsic will. To say, look at your watch and go, you know what? We we said 10 minute break. It's been nine minutes. Hey, boys, get ready to roll. That's a big deal.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:37Jocko Willink?

  That's a big deal.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think part of the, you know, like you say, discipline is freedom. Part of that freedom is control that you have self control. If you understand what you have to do to be disciplined, to make gates, to meet time hacks. Then you have control, you're offensive, you're thinking proactively. And a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that. It's it's it's it's a real crazy to see that something so simple, a task. So common core can weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed. With a combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not.

• 1:00:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and like you just said, what it really boils down to is when you're tired, when you're sore. And when you don't know how much longer this is going to last. Do you have what it takes to put your ruck back on, stand up and start walking again?

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  That's it, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:29Jocko Willink?

  You wouldn't think it's something that that freaking simple.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  So simple, so primal too.

• 1:00:36Jocko Willink?

  So you get through selection and then you hit the Q course?

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Hit the Q course as an 18 Bravo, Special Forces Weapons guy, going to third Special Forces group.

• 1:00:48Jocko Willink?

  Any, any highlights out of the Q course?

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  No, I think that, you know, in, in the lead in, talking about JFK and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare. I learned that truly from the long duration that I was in the Q course.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  I went to Robin Sage, merely weeks after Robin Sage, after that experience. I was living that training in Afghanistan in a remote firebase. So, Robin Sage, which is an exercise, basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is Rockingham, North Carolina, the, the surrounding area, where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing, this elaborate scenario, was so impactful for me. I mean, it's crazy.

• 1:01:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so just to give a little background on this, so the, the, the mission of the Green Berets of Special Forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces, get them trained up, get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the, from the Special Forces and eventually with no guidance at all. That's the, that's the mission. So, the, you guys do this big exercise, it's sort of, is it like the final exercise that you do?

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much, yeah.

• 1:02:07Jocko Willink?

  And, and it's called Robin Sage and you go out and you have, quote, indigenous forces, which is really just the local populace inside this town. And you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards. Because that's what the, the primary mission of Special Forces is, to go do that.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's by with through, it's foreign internal defense. It's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now. But it's the idea of, you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people, with forces. You just can't go and do deliberate actions only. You know, SR, DA, HR, those things are complementary to a strategic plan. The strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds. So, when I went to Robin Sage, you had West Pointers, like junior West Pointers. We had role players from the military. That are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind. You have to break bread with them. You have to drink tea with them.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  You have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target. And so that's what I really took away from Robin Sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture. And then build that relationship, which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the with portion of it. And find a fix and finish these bad guys together, empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with. That that's super important because the the translation of going into into war was exactly that with the circumstance with Afghanistan at the time.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  And, you know, like I, one of the scenarios I built conduit in a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy. And I'm like, I'm like looking at the other dude, I'm with him like, dude, what's going on? Like, what are we doing right now? Are we just, are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this? And then at the end of that six hours, we heard a noise and I'm like, it's all coming together. We put our M4, we ran in the woods, put our M4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer. And I'm like, this is so awesome. I mean, it's the long, it's a long burn, but it was so awesome as an experience. And then you, you, so you get done with Q, anything else in Q course stands out?

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Not survival school. I mean, survival school got my ass handed to me. I mean, it's the first time that I, um, I mean. How long is the survival school? It's pretty long. I mean, it's probably a few weeks when I went through was like a escape, like a survival block. SIR. Yeah, it's a C or C, the high risk C, C version, which you guys have gone through. And then, you know, you escape, you evade, and then you go into the RTL and just get your ass handed to you. And, and again, you learn very rapidly. That were not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress. And I dealt fine with it. I mean, I grew up fighting. I grew up in martial arts. I grew up doing all these things.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Which set me up for success there to go, hey, man, this is an exercise. Learn from this experience.

• 1:05:21Jocko Willink?

  Wait, what martial arts did you grow up in?

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  Ninjitsu before.

• 1:05:24Jocko Willink?

  Straight up ninjitsu. Who wants some?

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Dude, I, my first instructors were all Green Berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who opened a ninjitsu school. Active and former SF guys. And it was gangster. We were doing stuff like my mom once.

• 1:05:42Jocko Willink?

  Did you have them shoes with the toe cut out?

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:44Jocko Willink?

  Look at you. You're like hell.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Shurikens. I had all the.

• 1:05:47Jocko Willink?

  Freaking throwing stars. Yeah, you were just getting it.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  It was crazy.

• 1:05:50Jocko Willink?

  I was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking, uh, Black Belt Magazine.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  I have the catalog. It was, it was, I had all the red knives, all the, it was crazy. It was a, it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all Green Berets. And so they, like you do, like a lot of guys with our experiences do. Try to impart those experiences and impact on young people. And so they were doing the same with me. So I felt like I was mentored by these Green Berets. Uh, once I went into a class and my mom dropped me off. And for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal. She dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror. And she came back an hour and 10 minutes later and I was still standing in front of the mirror.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  And she was pissed off because she's like, my, I'm paying for my son. Why are you doing? Why are you only having him stand there? It's like, it's an assessment. And I stared at myself for an hour in meditation. I'm like, what the hell? I learned a lot about myself in that hour. It's crazy.

• 1:06:52Jocko Willink?

  All right. So, uh, back to, back to, did you, did, wait, before we go there, did you guys fight each other in ninjitsu school?

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  A lot. It was aggressive. A lot of dudes got hurt. It was just, I think it was a lot. Before

• 1:07:06Jocko Willink?

  What years was this?

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Uh, ninety-three, ninety-four.

• 1:07:10Jocko Willink?

  Well, so UFC was just coming out.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Jocko Willink?

  People were, this is during the revolution.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It was a lot of, I mean, there were jujitsu, I mean, ninjutsu has, uh, in, in its Japanese form, has a lot of traditional, uh, jujitsu type moves on the ground, but it's not ground game.

• 1:07:27Jocko Willink?

  It's like a move.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:28Jocko Willink?

  It's a singular move.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  It's a singular move.

• 1:07:30Jocko Willink?

  That's the problem.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  That is the problem. That's an inherent problem with, with that. And so I, I, I learned a lot about discipline from that experience, but it made me harder. So when I went to survival school, uh, I was just prepped, man. I was good. Uh, and it wasn't a difficult thing, but I saw dudes fall apart. And when I went to survival school, it was the last thing that you did in the Q course. If you failed, you failed everything. You just, you just spent two years of your life training to be a Green Bray, and they let dudes go.

• 1:07:59Jocko Willink?

  How many people failed that?

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  We'd have a couple per class. I mean, it was, it was common to have a couple per class that would self-select and they'd be like, I'm done. And you're like, you just did two years of training.

• 1:08:09Jocko Willink?

  What's making them quit?

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  The stress, man.

• 1:08:11Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's stressful.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, getting a, like, even just a hood, like, people aren't used to taking, if you, if you don't grow up in those martial arts, if you don't grow up in, um, impact sports and not used to making contact, when that hood comes off your head and you get slapped by dudes' hands who are like pickle fingers, McGee, and he slaps your face and, and you can't do anything, that starts breaking you down. And by, you know, day two of that experience, you know, laying naked in your cell, flex cuff in a box, you, a lot of guys self-select. I thought it was, I was into claustrophobia. I like being in small places. I, I hid, I slept, and I was like, this is awesome. Just keep me in this box.

• 1:08:53Jocko Willink?

  Man, I got slapped so hard when I got captured at Sierra School. The, it surprised me.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Jocko Willink?

  Like, it was, I mean, this guy freaking out of nowhere.

• 1:09:04Jocko Willink?

  The hood comes off, I'm standing up against a wall. It's out in the middle of the woods and they have like a wall. And I think it's almost like a Hollywood wall where it, when you get pushed into it, it kind of gives a little bit.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:14Jocko Willink?

  So he pushed me into it once and like, whatever, I must have had some kind of punk ass freaking smirk on my face like whatever. And this dude did not like it at all and he cracked me. I mean, I'm talking as hard as a human being can. I mean, I've been punched in the face. It was like that, but his hand happened to be open. And I, I got the little, uh, got the little flash and I was like, oh damn.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  This is real?

• 1:09:38Jocko Willink?

  I was like, yeah. And, and believe me, that was, that was number one. Cause he followed that one up.

• 1:09:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but I, like you, I, I can't imagine that that would have made me quit. But I guess if someone's not used to, you know, maybe scrapping and whatnot.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  That's it. Yeah, a lot of people quit.

• 1:09:56Jocko Willink?

  Not really for them.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had, well, the interesting thing in the psychology was you're playing, you have to be resistant, right? The whole game is you're resistant. I remember we were building, um, in the sand, a, a sickle that represented the communist, you know, scenario. And we were building a sickle and half of us were sabotaging the sickle. So guys would make it. And I remember I had a guy who I highly respected, he was a platoon sergeant in the infantry, had gone through training with me. I was scooting all the stuff out after they were building it, knocking it over. And he turned around and he walked to me and goes, what are you doing? I'm like, uh, what do you mean what I'm doing? Like dude, I like worked an hour on that. I'm like, wait a minute.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  You realize that we're supposed to be subverting this whole circumstance? Like you're not supposed to actually be making this. And he's like, oh, and he was in the scenario, man.

• 1:10:51Jocko Willink?

  Freaking bridge on the river Kwai.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Oh dude, it was insane. Some of these guys were like the headlights. I mean, it was, they had the deer in the headlights look and they thought for real they were in the back country of Vietnam. I mean, it was, it was crazy. It was crazy to see. But cool, cool experience. Go ahead.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  What kind of claustrophobia stuff did they?

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  A lot of it was, um.

• 1:11:14Jocko Willink?

  This, this guy right here is kind of claustrophobic.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:17Jocko Willink?

  We've been working with him.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Exposure is the way to deal with that, but it's, they had, I mean, it was, it was very,

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  tight secluded spaces where you couldn't sit down on your butt and you couldn't stand up all the way. So you're in an uncomfortable stress position. And then they would close the box on you and turn off the lights. Um, and then they play the music like crying babies, all kinds of different stuff. And a, a lot of people, um, they, they would transfer you into different boxes based on your fear. So if they saw the fear coming out of you, they were exploiting that fear. They're like, oh, this dude in a big box is getting scary. Let's put him in a small box. And so it, it varied from small boxes to big boxes. But it, it, that jacked up a lot of people. I mean, it was, it was significant.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  And then how long do you have to stay in there?

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  So a long time, you, you lose track of time because you're sleep deprived. Here's one story, I, I, thinking I was a smart guy. I, I was like, similar to the, I have to piss right now, but I had to piss really bad. And so I'm like, if I piss in this box, they're going to hook me up. I can't piss in this box. So this is my, I'm thinking logically, I think. And I'm like, this is completely logical.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  Wait, so hook me up is a bad thing?

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Hook, like, like pull me out of the thing and slap, slap my face off my face. And I'm like, look, I'll piss in my boot. And then I'll take it outside and we're in the gravel, I'll dump the piss out. Forgetting about this whole thing called displacement, right? I pee in my boot, I take off my boot, you don't have socks, you're naked, got these bare pajamas on. I fill my boot with piss. And then I'm like, okay, I got it in here, I feel good, it's not all over the thing. And then I put my foot back in the boot.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  And then it goes everywhere and I'm like, and then it immediately occurs to me like, that was a horrible idea. And so I'm standing in piss. And then my foot, my naked foot is covered in piss and I'm like, dude, that did not work out. I had a plan, that was not how I thought I was going to execute, it was horrible, man.

• 1:13:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's funny because as you were thinking about that, or as you were talking about that, and then when you asked that question, Echo, you know, there's some, look, I don't know if this is some, um, you know, just straight up Sam Harris meditation type scenario, but you get your brain where you just aren't there anymore. You're just like, cool, you want to put me in the box? Cool. And you're sitting there and you're thinking about freaking whatever. Kentucky Fried Chicken and lemonade and what, and you're just in a totally different world. And you don't know if it's been an hour or five hours. And you're getting slapped. It's like, cool, whatever. Like whatever they're gonna do to you, you, you just sort of, and it's the same thing when we were talking earlier about humping a ruck. It's like, okay, look, there's just, I'm not,

• 1:14:05Jocko Willink?

  the pain is there, but it's like somewhere else. Like it's almost like you're watching it happen and you kind of can be like, eh, whatever. Hey, keep going.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely. You're, you're, you're sedated, man. You're just going with the flow. It's, it's similarly to, I, I think about when you accept at some point when you're in water, that you're just gonna pass out and you accept that. You're like, I'm okay with that. That bridge in that gap and just accepting it is the, the first part of being successful in that environment. And then you, like you create your new happy place where you're like, man, as long as I'm in my head and I have this space that I'm comfortable with, I'm good. You could do whatever you want. There's nothing you could do to me.

• 1:14:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, if you are present in the shit that you're going through.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Jocko Willink?

  That's gotta suck. I can't even, I can barely even relate to it because I, I think eventually you just get good at being like, okay, cool, whatever. That's what we're doing. Cool. Whatever. I can't, it's gotta, that's what, that's, you know what, that, when I start thinking about what makes someone quit, it's because they're present in that shit that's going down. They're actually in it. And now they're in it, they're looking at the future going, it's just more shit in the future. So, oh, this is horrible and forget it. I'm gonna wring out.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's that fear response. It's the contemplation of impending doom. You're just thinking about the next thing that's coming and then your whole life is all these little small progresses of like doomsday, doomsday, doomsday. It's like, dude, I'm, I'm on the beach drinking a pina colada, eating a piece of chicken. I'm, I'm, I'm living my best life in my head and I'm good.

• 1:15:37Jocko Willink?

  You must have learned some of that, the tomb situation, because that stuff doesn't sound fun to me. I would rather go through SER school 20 times right now than do uniform inspections.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  I would rather do that as well. I would take, the tomb taught me about self-awareness and being present within my own mind and developing this relationship with the conscious voice that's in my head, but also like this passive observer, this person who's kind of observing the narration of the voice in my head and sitting back and like measuring all these inputs. Because when you're standing still for 21 seconds at a time before you take 21 steps, repeating it times an hour for a long walk during the winter hours, times four to six walks a day, you have to get real good at being comfortable with yourself.

• 1:16:30Jocko Willink?

  Is there a facing movement in there?

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  There is. So it's, um, face Washington DC, 21 seconds, face down the mat, 21 seconds, walk 21 steps and repeat for the entire duration.

• 1:16:41Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and it's one hour?

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  One hour and seven minutes with the walk and the guard change.

• 1:16:46Jocko Willink?

  How often would you be in total autopilot where you'd get done and be like, whoa, that was?

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Constantly.

• 1:16:54Jocko Willink?

  Jack.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Constantly. You, you know, that, that it's referred to as the flow state?

• 1:16:58Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  You're completely in a flow state because you're, what I like about, you're talking about time. Time has always been an important metric. In fact, we should probably look at it more closely because that relationship with time, I think, sets and establishes these gates and disciplines for your whole life, the structure of your life, right? When I was a tomb guard, um, one thing that you had to train to do is count 21 seconds exactly and then turn and face for 21 seconds and get this rhythm and cadence down. But when you got into that flow state, it was unconscious. So now I'm just on autopilot and I'm in a meditative state. There's times that I came off, um,

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  The mad after an hour walk and feeling like the best I've ever felt like super calm, super relaxed, super focused and like I was doing meditation in my own headspace. That translated throughout all of the uncomfortable, even experiences and gunfights and everything else I did in my life, created a structure in my head for being comfortable in my own head i- in physical stress in my environment.

• 1:18:09Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes when I do jujitsu, I don't really know what happened for the last hour. Yeah, like I'm just like, what, how did you get that? And I'm like, I don't remember getting anything. And I remember early on in my, uh, in my SEAL career, like entering a room and shooting some targets and then, and then all of a sudden be like, wait a second, is my weapon, I put my weapon on safe, there, I put my weapon on safe and not wanting to draw any attention to myself because I don't want anyone to see that. I don't have my weapon, my weapon was on safe. And I did it without, and then, you know, did it absolutely without thinking about it. And that was pretty early, you know, and eventually you're just like doing this like a freaking robot that's just executing.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that high level, I mean, it's theta and alpha and these, these wavelengths of like this neurological consciousness. When you're in that alpha state and you're taking that, that information, similar to like, uh, when you're in a shower, on a drive and all these thoughts come to you, this creativity comes to you. Those things happen in that flow state because you're streaming information and that's when you're most, I, I think when you're at your best, right? It's when you're flowing in CQB and everything comes together and you're like, what just happened? Like we, we were just objective secure in 17 seconds. How did that happen? I, I barely remember anything, but I was so conscious because you're in that alpha state of flow. It's, it's, it's an amazing state to be in. And I think

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  very rare for people to find these days with the distractions they have.

• 1:19:31Jocko Willink?

  You wrap up the Q course. The last thing you do is Robin Sage, working with, you know, um, role playing in Digi. And then you said you're almost immediately in Afghanistan.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Right out the gate, um, deploy with third special forces group on a mountain team. And then, uh, do nine months in Afghanistan, a remote firebase, just right off the gate, right off the gate, uh, during Operation Red Wing. My company was involved in Red Wings.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  When I got to a team, it was the traditional Green Beret mission. We're going to put you in a remote firebase on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. As an 18 Bravo, I had 150 Afghan soldiers that weren't even soldiers. This is before Afghan National Army was even stood up and solidified, especially in our region of Nuristan province. And we trained, assisted and advised these guys, made them Afghan Special Forces guys and started conducting operations in Nuristan.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  What kind of operations were you conducting? Movement to contact. We did SR, Special Reconnaissance. We did DA, a lot of training and a lot of getting attacked. I mean, we got attacked every other day in the remote location that we're in. We're the furthest northern firebase beyond J Bad, beyond Assadabad, in a firebase called Nuray, right on the border, surrounded by the Hindu Kush. I mean, we were at the bottom of that bowl. So rockets and direct attacks almost every other day. And so we did a lot of direct, you know, react to contact, immediate action drills, and a lot of patrols.

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  I mean, we drove up and down one MSR that went to Parikalt and, you know, eventually ended up in Shetral, Pakistan, and conducted a whole bunch of air ops and ground ops in that area.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  Was this like a traditional ODA team of 10 or 12 guys? 12 guys with a small contingent of civil affairs for a period of time, one combat controller and a firebase two hours from air in J Bad. So as remote as you can get. I mean, we were self-sustained. I learned a lot, even fast forwarding with how I teach survival and sustaining oneself and what we call just homestead as we teach it, about how you have to take care of yourself because you don't have the opportunity in those remote circumstances to depend on any kind of assets. I mean, a snowstorm in that area would shut us down for a week at a time

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  where we get no air support, no air support, no CAS, no resupply, no medevac platforms. So we were solely dependent on the men and their skill sets that they have based on their experiences.

• 1:22:27Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking sketchy.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  It was the Wild West, the greatest time I had in SF, to be honest. We did have a flagpole. We had simple five W's for a con op submissions. It was, it was a good time.

• 1:22:39Jocko Willink?

  And did you realize that while you were doing it?

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  I did. I had the introspect. I mean, when I remember when I showed up and um we landed at 10,000 plus feet of elevation and I was pissing mellow yellow. I mean, I was like, dude, this is insane. And I look, I remember standing in the middle of my fire base. Uh, we were along Konar River. Um, very small base. I mean, I could throw a football and hit every gate. Um, I remember looking around going, well, this is my home for almost a year. Get comfortable with this because this is how it's going to be. And immediately transforming and using those cultural tactics and building relationships, but getting comfortable with time because I didn't know when we were going to get out. I didn't know if we were going to survive. Uh, we've lost a lot of guys that rotation, Operation Red Wing had happened.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  So there's a whole bunch of circumstances that happened during that trip where I'm like, dude, this might be it. I mean, this, this is pretty hot circumstance. Are you going to get out of this? Stop thinking about that. Uh, it's like the character in Band of Brothers that the officer who said, you know, who's basically is walking dead. Just accept the fact that you're going to get killed. I had those kinds of moments going, this is it, man. We're focused on the mission. And it changed a lot of how I, what I assumed at war and practice and how it executed in real life. A lot of it was theory and concepts and didn't necessarily translate.

• 1:24:03Jocko Willink?

  What was the delta between the two?

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  The biggest thing was my relationship um in the ODA was teaching tactics and creating a base defense plan. And so the doctrine told me to do specific things that didn't work in our environment. So you had a base defense plan, for example, where I would exercise my guys and say, hey, I want you to hit the walls, hit the roof, be prepared for that direct attack. Well, that's the dumbest tactic when you're receiving 107 millimeter rockets that have a kill radius of 100 yards. And so you put dudes on the roof, which I did myself on the first uh, direct attack. Got on the roof with a 240 machine gun and I'm like, dude, what am I? And I'm getting, and we, a 107 screamed over me, my 18 Charlie, my engineer, and impacted a fuel blivet behind us and exploded. And I'm like, what am I doing? And also,

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  In practice, you could immediate action to death, what it's like to react to contact with small arms. But how do you react to contact when it's a 107 millimeter rocket? When it's an 81 millimeter mortar? All of the things that you prepare for change rapidly when that kind of ordinance and munitions and firepower come to bear completely changes everything. So I'm like, oh, this isn't like running through the wood line in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This is a little bit different. And so that changed my perspective on a doctrinal conventional answer and solution versus being creative and coming up with new ways and tactics as you evolve at the speed of war.

• 1:25:35Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys have any counter battery or anything like that?

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  None.

• 1:25:42Jocko Willink?

  Did you have mortars?

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  I had 120 millimeter mortars. I mean nightly that I would go out and we'd be dropping on point of origin sites, on Poo sites. But that's all we had. The biggest weapon systems we had were munitions and caches that we found and caches that we found where we took them and turned them around on bad guys. We built a Mark 21 107 millimeter pod. We get one rocket from the bad guy, the sit rep would read, you know, ODA 366 responds with 57 107 millimeter rockets. 106 millimeter recoilless rifles, we had mounted to ATVs. We had RPGs that we carried with us in backpacks and we were using Chinese made 120s to respond and react to contact.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  So it was truly, I think, a significant Green Beret firebase mission.

• 1:26:31Jocko Willink?

  You ever seen the movie Heat before?

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Jocko Willink?

  This makes me think about, this is the second time I've thought about it in recent times, but you know, like the cop is telling, the cop is saying, hey,

• 1:26:51Jocko Willink?

  You can make mistakes, or no, I can make mistakes. Doesn't matter if I catch you or not. Like, I'm gonna go home at night.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:56Jocko Willink?

  You make one mistake, and it's game over.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:59Jocko Willink?

  And, and that's what I think of, you know, the enemy in that situation. They don't have to take very big risks at all. They can lob shit at you from wherever. And they just have to get lucky one time.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 1:27:11Jocko Willink?

  To get a guy.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:12Jocko Willink?

  And you've gotta be vigilant all the time. And you gotta keep your guard up all the time. And even if you keep your guard up all the time, you're still just exposed, just by the nature of the fact that you're in a valley surrounded by indirect fire or direct fire in terms of rockets.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Our strategy in that firebase

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  was a testbed for creativity. We built a mosque. Like, I physically built a mosque with my hands. My ODA, brick by brick, helped build a mosque. Why? Because we wanted to build rapport with having a place of worship inside of our firebase for Afghans. But it also deterred indirect fire, because no terrorist wanted to be responsible for dropping a mosque in the middle of an American firebase. Like, we had to think outside the box. And we truly were set up almost for failure in that circumstance. But every firebase had to hold its territory. Before VSO, where village stabilisation operations, where you're setting up in the actual village.

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  The idea of firebases derived from, obviously, from Vietnam era, from John Schrecker Meyer era of, hey, let's go out, set out these bases, and establish a presence. And so, we were present, and the bad guys knew about it. And it was a sharper learning curve, a steep learning curve, to say the least.

• 1:28:33Jocko Willink?

  Where are you getting food from?

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Typically, initially, we were flying it in, until we started getting creative. We built a bread house, where we were making footbread, Afghan footbread in the middle of our firebase. Then we started procuring goats, and sheep, and then slaughtering them, and then eating them, and then rice. And we were getting supplies from Pakistan, because it was right across the border. And bringing it in to make actually good meals, versus the mermite chow that was garbage. It was disgusting.

• 1:29:07Jocko Willink?

  Did you, uh, did you take any casualties from all those attacks?

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we've had, we had wounded in action, we had killed in action in our company. We, you know, during the mid-range, um, which was, we just had the anniversary of Operation Red Wings, uh, which was the 28th of June.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  We got hit up for that mission task with that. Camp Vance, which was in Bagram, kind of assembled the quick reaction force that eventually went out and lost one of the birds, the MH47s that were shot down. So we did QRF for that, um, did some big operations in what, Cotea Valley near Barracau, and, uh, took casualties. We lost an MH47 during that trip, um, pretty expensive bird. But it was, I mean, it was overall is a good trip. I mean, our, our firebases were successful in disrupting the enemy. But we just started over, man. The, the detriment to warfare is this vicious cycle.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  And when you take a playbook and you plan the playbook, but you don't put in the same continuity pieces to establish a long-term relationship, you just start the vicious cycle all over again. Every detachment commander, every team sergeant wants their mark in history on that battleground. And it doesn't do well long-term in, in warfare, which is obviously where the, the point we're at today. I mean, pulling out of Afghanistan.

• 1:30:37Jocko Willink?

  What'd you do during Red Wing? You were on the recovery op?

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  So, uh, two of my companies in Assadabad and J-Bad, um, south of us, got tasked to actually do the, uh, rescue of Marcus Luttrell. So, uh, a good buddy of mine, Kent, was the ground force commander for that. Two ODAs and then the Rangers went in, uh, with some, uh, intermittent special operations guys. We got told because of our proximity to the actual site, crash site, uh, to hold fast. They sent Chinooks to us to be the QRF for the other group. And then the rest of our company, all the other ODAs did the body recovery with, uh, battalion. So there was a, the whole company was involved in some way, but I sat on an airfield for the entire operation, not doing much.

• 1:31:27Jocko Willink?

  So your leadership lessons on that deployment were, you know, you gotta think, you can't follow the doctrine all the time.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Look, Green Berets are known to be unconventional and irregular warfare experts and thinking outside the box, this idea of, hey, you're not stealing, you're acquiring these creative tasks to bear that benefit you on the ground is what I learned about. I actually learned that, you know, being in a remote firebase in Afghanistan with minimal to no resources at all, you had to come up with solutions. So I learned about establishing problem sets, coming up with creative solutions, and the path to execution for those, which is a formula that I used in, you know, A-Combat rotations later.

• 1:32:22Jocko Willink?

  And you're running a company of 150 Afghans?

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah, I ran, so I was the, when I went, I was the only Bravo. Typically, you run a junior and a senior. I would have been the junior because I was a young staff sergeant. My senior had surgery, so he couldn't show up until later on in the deployment. My team sergeant came to me like on the first day and he said, hey, there's a formation outside with your guys. I'm like, my guys? Like, yeah, you got 150 Afghans out there, you're the commander. And I'm like, what? Am I roger that? I go outside, I'm like, guys, let's, uh, let me give you an in-brief. Let's, we're gonna do assessments, I give them the plan. And I have to build rapport with these dudes. These dudes are looking at me like I'm a child, and I was. I mean, I was a 25-year-old child. So they challenged me immediately.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  One of the guys says to me, um, Mike, uh, they want to know if you're a good shooter. And I said, well, what does that assessment look like? They go, well, what they like to do, and I'm like, okay, so this has been done before. What they like to do is take a piece of bubble gum wrapper and they delaminate it and they put a one-inch square at 25 yards on the target. And they said whoever gets closer. Whoever's closer wins, but then you earn our respect. I'm like, did you guys watch a movie, man? Is this like, is this a thing? Cause I don't, I don't remember seeing this anywhere. And like, it's, it's part of their tradition. Okay, cool. So we get in the prone and I said,

• 1:33:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so it's rifle, not pistol?

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  It's rifle, AK-47. So, but no red dot, iron sights, and I don't even know the point of aim or impact on this gun. There's no dope on the gun.

• 1:33:56Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's a random AK?

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  Random AK. So I said, so I say to the guy, I said, um,

• 1:34:01Jocko Willink?

  This is the same weapon that you shoot at the circus, at the little red star.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Notching the star out at the county fair. So he, he sits down and he's a well-respected Neuristanian. These guys look like me. I mean, I, I look like I belong in that tribe and they're all Chinese influenced. And so they always got the, the Asian eyes. And so rapport initially right off the bat is like accepted, but I have to prove myself. So this guy gets down in the prone and he takes a shot and we go up and inspect it and he's like an inch off of the pasty. So I'm thinking in my head, he's holding it and he's shooting it, but he's a little bit high. And at 25 yards, flash to bang, not much change at muzzle velocity at 25 yards. So I'm thinking, let me just aim at the base of this thing.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  So I put my, I lollipop this one inch pasty and I break a shot and it goes through the, the piece. And I try to contain my excitement because I'm like, yeah, and I want to, I want to be like, yeah, what's up? But I knew as part of the, this whole story, this journey. So I go up there and they, they bust out and they're like, yeah, my God. And they're so excited. And from that moment, it's like I was their commander and we had this relationship where I trained them every single day. I broke bread with them every single day. And it was a beautiful thing, man. I, I felt like I had a company worth of valuable human beings who had laid down their life. And, and when I found out later, and this is, this is in

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  hindsight, looking back and talking to different guys, when I left, I had those Afghan commandos. I handed them over to another ODA. When third group came back in, they rotated in and there was a guy by the name of, uh, uh, Rob, uh, Rob, I can't remember, Rob something. I can't remember his name. It's horrible. I can't remember his name. And he rotated in with them as the 18 Bravo. So when he gets in that position, He starts grooming these guys and they're telling stories of that circumstance. So as this evolves later in the war, I find out that one of the guys that we had from third group that was killed posthumously in a gunfight running uphill with a machine gun,

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  gets killed, earns the Medal of Honor and dies fighting side by side with these same guys. In fact, some of those guys that I trained were killed in that action where a third group guy won the medal, earned the Medal of Honor, sacrificed his life, but those Afghans died on that same hilltop running uphill against an enemy machine gun nested position. And I'm like, dude, I mean, you know, you look for all the, the light and darkness and I'm like, man, that, that means the world to me that maybe I had an impact on these men that stood side by side and, and fought uphill and that, that truly meant

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  a lot. And so those guys, you earn their respect, you operate with them, but when I left him, it was, it felt like the end of the world. And, you know, you talk to guys like John Striker Meyer, that's a common theme. It's something that we're not very good at. In fact, we're pretty horrible at.

• 1:37:10Jocko Willink?

  And now, of course, you must be kind of sick to your stomach seeing that we're pulling out and those guys will either be rounded up and killed or they'll join the Taliban because that's what they gotta do to stay alive.

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  More likely, all the intel has been leaked already. They already know who they are and they're, they have their target deck built. And right now, I mean, if you look at all the different places, especially the remote places of Afghanistan, which is very tribal, very geographically, regionally, they're already taken over. I mean, they'll have the estimates from the experts is in the next six months, Bagram and Kandahar will fall to the Taliban, if not sooner, because there was a formal agreement, a diplomatic agreement. That means they're supposed to take over in some capacity anyway, but what that means to the rest of the men that we fought off all over the country, all these guys will be rolled up and more likely executed, which is a, it's a, it's a damn shame.

• 1:38:06Jocko Willink?

  Yes, I'm hearing some reports that the Taliban would go to, you know, some of these villages or whatever and send a note into the police chief and say, hey, man, um, yep, it's over. You can get on board or we're going to kill you and kill your family. And the police chief or whatever, the local Afghan leaders like, Roger that, you know, I'm on board. And that's that.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, those guys, just like in Iraq, just like I've experienced in Yemen and Pakistan, in Africa, um, it's a vicious cycle that doesn't stop and we don't learn those lessons. But I don't know the answer. I don't know the solution. I mean, making them citizens and bringing them up, taking the fighting force that's the most capable human beings there and doing that. I don't know what the answer is, but it's a, it's a horrible thing that I know is transpiring likely right now.

• 1:39:00Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with that deployment?

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  Yep, get done with Afghanistan, immediately come back and go to Sephardic, which is our version of advanced CQB, Haas's rescue, to be aligned with the DA company, you know, the, when I work with the, the SEALs in oh six, oh seven, all the, the latter rotations, it was mostly with a company called the Commander and Extremist Force, which has now been renamed the Crisis Response Force, which has been re-coined, a deep underground, um, unit, uh, for, uh, tunnels and stuff. So get part of that unit, which our focus is DA, SR, uh, HR, and get through Sephardic, no problems, and get immediately reassigned to the Commander's

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  and Extremist Force, which is hopping on a plane, uh, the next month to go down range.

• 1:39:52Jocko Willink?

  How, how long were you home for?

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  Four months, home for four months.

• 1:39:57Jocko Willink?

  And how long was that deployment to Afghanistan?

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  Nine months total. Yeah. So nine months, get back, do Sephardic for two months, and then got about a month and a half before we burn out for Iraq, for Baghdad.

• 1:40:10Jocko Willink?

  Have you like gotten married or anything at this point?

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I actually got, I actually got married right before this rotation. Um, and in a courthouse, my grandmother passed away at that same time period, didn't get a lot of time to, to have any kind of anything with the family, and then we were turning and burning for Iraq.

• 1:40:31Jocko Willink?

  Four months home and now what's this deployment? So this is now your first deployment to Iraq?

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  First deployment to Iraq, yeah. Going down range and CT is the...

• 1:40:42Jocko Willink?

  And this is oh six?

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  Oh six, yeah.

• 1:40:45Jocko Willink?

  And so you ended up working in Baghdad?

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  In Baghdad, yeah. Baghdad International Airport, yeah. We were at Camp, uh, not Camp, man, it's Area Four.

• 1:40:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we staged the Area Four, had a couple of mission sets, you know, working with Iraqi counterterrorism forces, working with task force as a unilateral force, and then working with the ERU, which is the Emergency Response Unit, the equivalent of the FBI HRT that prosecutes targets in Iraq.

• 1:41:14Jocko Willink?

  Iraqi, that's an Iraqi unit, just for everybody to know. So the ICTF is an Iraqi unit, they are an Iraqi unit, the ERU, was it ERU?

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, ERU.

• 1:41:24Jocko Willink?

  The ERU is an Iraqi unit, and then occasionally giving support to some American units that are out there doing hits.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Almost acting like the Mike Force until, you know, the Mike Force Strike Unit, until we get there and we start doing joint operations with NAFSOF and then the CIF. So it's, it's like a couple of guys from my CIF company, which was B23, the Third Group CIF, working hand in hand with six or seven guys from a civil platoon. And we would go out, and at the time, we weren't, they weren't doing operations with Americans because a company, a contracted company was training them, but they weren't advising them, but they weren't doing counterterrorism operations. So we actually took over and started doing the first counterterrorism operations with them, side by side,

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  using our assets to bear, but doing the true CT for an internal defense mission.

• 1:42:16Jocko Willink?

  So you're rolling out hitting targets?

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  Hitting targets, yeah, every night.

• 1:42:19Jocko Willink?

  Is basically what this was about.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Smashing targets every night. I mean, our PDSS, our Pre-Deployment Site Survey, we got in a gunfight and killed dudes in our PDSS. So we were like, it's gonna be a hot year. And that was a year you were there as well.

• 1:42:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was over in Ramadi, you guys were down in Baghdad, and you were working alongside some of the guys I was with,

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:42:37Jocko Willink?

  Uh, well, that I knew over there.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  Just basically nightly ops. Reverse cycle nightly ops. We had a cycle of, you know, red, amber, green. You're training dudes. Um, even if you're training dudes, you're probably gunning on trucks or acting as a machine gunner on halfs, on helicopter assaults. But every single night we were prosecuting targets, sometimes two, three targets a night, depending on what was going on. So we had a target deck. Everybody else in Task Force had a target deck. And at the time, which was, um, in transition for the big surge, we were prosecuting at the time, um, Shia-based targets. And so, um, Muqtal Sotir and his network of shitheads we were going after, uh, every night.

• 1:43:27Speaker 01

  Were you working mostly in and around Baghdad or all over the country? Pretty much all over the country. I mean, we halved with Navy assets flying us out the sixties. Um, we were using Pavlo or the 53, um, or we were using Task Force one sixtieth. So little birds, sixties, depending on what was going on. It was all over, all over. And what was your specific job on this deployment? So I was, I was an assaulter. I mean, in the SIF, I was an assaulter. I was a breacher. I actually was deployed with, um, at the time Jeremy Wise. Uh, Jeremy Wise was a young, uh, East Coast-based SEAL team member, uh, who wound up getting killed with the CIA as a global response staff officer.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Uh, he posthumously was awarded the CIA Star. Um, and we were both breachers together. Um, so we, every night we did, did breaches. We, um, did unilateral pieces of our op. So a couple of Americans like me and another SIF guy and like three or five SEALs would go out and do our piece. We'd hit one building and then the Iraqis we were with would hit another building. So unilateral assaulters is basically what we were. This is radically different deployment than what you did in Afghanistan. I mean, like not even the same freaking ballpark. Insane. Completely different. I try to use some of the, you know, the similarities where we were training them in the backend. But these guys.

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  If you saw them operating when they're a kid, you would think they're Americans, like competent assaulters, snipers, Americans.

• 1:44:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and they had all American gear and weapons, cuz I was telling you, I went over on PDSS and cuz we were gonna go. Actually, if that would have happened, I would have been co-located with you and we would have been running the same op. We would already know each other. We'd be bros.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, we rolled together.

• 1:45:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we'd have rolled out, but we ended up not going there. We ended up going to Ramadi and said, but yeah, the ICTF and the ERU had like American issued weapons. They had night vision, had everything.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 1:45:20Jocko Willink?

  They had everything.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, they had everything.

• 1:45:22Jocko Willink?

  And they were well-trained.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  Well-trained.

• 1:45:23Jocko Willink?

  They had to be the best-trained and most reliable Iraqi soldiers by a landslide.

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, the combination of the Iraqi Counterterrorism Force, which we pulled out of Iraq and Jordan and isolated and trained. And the ERU that turned into the Emergency Response Battalion were the highest paid, trained, experienced units that eventually took ISIS. These same guys, like I lost probably half my fighting force that I worked with over the years against the fight against ISIS in 2014. When we pulled our guys out and those dudes went to war. I mean, they went to Mosul, they went to Baghdad, they went to Kurdistan. They were fighting in Erbil. They were probably with close air support, meaning the JTAC piece, were the sole reasons that ISIS doesn't exist in Iraq today.

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  So it's a, it was a long road ahead of them. We were just in the beginning stages of it.

• 1:46:19Jocko Willink?

  What did you prefer for the deployment? What did you like doing better?

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  Man, that's a tough question. So different, so different, right? But in the things that I enjoyed, like overlanding across Afghanistan in the Wild West with not a lot of oversight and just winging it. And learning a lot of lessons in that versus that deliberate like land on the X, fast rope on top of the building and kill bad guys. I enjoy both. I mean, if I could have, if I could overland to an objective and fast rope on top of it, that whole culmination, it'd be perfect, man. I love both of them.

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  And then how long was this deployment to Baghdad? Six months. Yeah, so we were doing six month rotations. Did you, did you guys take any casualties on that deployment? We did. We took every deployment that we wanted to take and we wound up losing a team guy. So we were working with joint task force, which included tier one units and the Rangers and us and the Navy. You guys were taking casualties. There was EFPs that were affecting guys, gunfights. We took a casualty, one of my guys in my troop was killed that rotation, Tong Nguyen was killed. And then we had a ton of Purple Hearts dudes getting in gunfights. It was, it was an active year.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  Was, was Tong the first guy that you lost that was in your actual element? Yeah, and that was on my team in my troop, first, first dude.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  Didn't know him great. I mean, I knew him, I was a new guy there. But one of the most respected members of that unit. I mean, he was the guy on the PDSS with his long gun who wound up killing like three bad dudes on a PDSS. I mean, who goes TDY and kills a few dudes, comes back after, you know, getting intel, like you got some intel on target, you know, he, he was that kind of guy. Vietnamese descent too, so me and him were the only Asians in that group and he took, he took,

• 1:48:23Speaker 01

  he, he took his job serious and when he saw me coming to the company, he took me under his wing and, and he tried to take care of me. Experienced a salter, belonged to C11, which is the first group, SIF, and did a whole bunch of operations in the Philippines, all over Southeast Asia. And just a highly respected dude. I mean, just a great guy. And when, and how deep in deployment was that? Man, right out the gate. I mean, it was only a couple of months in. We still had four months of that rotation. And then at the end of our rotation was the surge. So we got super hot, super active. Probably some of the closest experiences to death I had in that, in that rotation for, for me personally. From gunfights, from IEDs?

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  No, gunfights. I mean, I was on a rooftop in Sodder City once in a sniper overwatch position for hostage rescue, got pinned down to the roof. I had a big army sniper team that was with me. That, that one and a half hour gunfight. Small arms, RPGs, mortar rounds, all in the same gunfight, all on our position. I'll never forget, I was like, you know, laying on the roof, trying to keep my head flat and staying in the fight. Because we had a retreat option, we could have went down into the building, into the third story that we were on. And I looked over and my buddy Chris, because there's only two of us with a big army sniper unit, was laying underneath the satellite dish.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  And we're three stories high, so we're above most of the city. But they're still second and third story buildings inside Sona City. And he's getting the satellite dish disintegrated over his ass, a couple of feet over his butt. And I'm like, oh, these guys are close, they have us dialed in. And then I looked up in the sky, because something caught my attention, I looked up and there was RPGs air bursting above us. And I'm like, this is not good. So we, we, we basically started waylaying bad guys that were squirting into the objective, like trying to infill on containment, and then we're breaking contact out of the objective. And all black, mighty militia dudes, black pajama kind of guys.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  And a lot of it was command and control, because we had CAS, I had control, I had comms with a close air support F-16 that was above us. And we were trying to relay and report all the information, but we were having comms problems. So what lulled that fight, you know, in the long story of it,

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  what lulled that fight was an F-16, because I marked a VS-17 panel in the middle of that roof, came out of its rotation, its orbit, and over 500 feet above our building, did a pass and popped flares. I thought he was going to do a gun run and kill us all, because we've lost comms. So I popped that VS-17 and I looked up and he started banking in, and I'm like, I yelled at my commo guy and I'm like, do we have any comms? And he came down and ran the perimeter road, which I think was, um, used to call it home base. Where at the base of the leg of solder city from home base to third base. He ran that entire road at 500 feet, turned his wings, you could almost see his, his face.

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  And pop flares and it lulled the gunfight enough for us to get out, break contact into Bradley's and break contact. Yeah, we, we killed, I mean, total during that op, over a hundred dudes. And got us shut down for like a month out of solder city. Came a big, I mean, tanks were, tanks were destroying buildings five feet in front of them. Because they were, I mean, they were just getting smashed with RPGs and everything else. Pretty, pretty gnarly gunfight.

• 1:52:02Jocko Willink?

  And that was the, that was the end of your deployment in oh six?

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  Uh, about mid-rotation, that was, that was about mid-rotation.

• 1:52:11Jocko Willink?

  Good times.

• 1:52:15Jocko Willink?

  Then you come back.

• 1:52:18Jocko Willink?

  Do another workup?

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  Uh, instant workup, getting ready for a new deployment and then, uh, we go down range. Oh, seven's a different beast. The, the height of al Qaeda. On the tail end of that rotation, the surge begins, the Sunni strategy. They start the sons of Iraq, they start empowering Sunnis. You know, there's a war going on between the Sunnis and Shias and typically it's like, you know, big solder city versus everybody else in the country. And now the Sunnis are getting supported by the US. So we're going to war with Iran-backed Shias. And we get into that rotation. And our task force does a couple of things.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  They have a mission set where they go, hey, you guys are going to go and do bilateral operations, working with indigenous guys like ICTF, like ERU, like we, like we talked about. But there's another component to our mission set where we work with JSOC, a joint task force. So we were under a joint task force, conducting counterterrorism operations, hunting HVTs on a deck. For JSOC as part of one of their action arms. That whole entire rotation and it was, it was epic. It was one of my best rotations.

• 1:53:36Jocko Willink?

  So this is now oh seven, you're back over there?

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  Oh, seven Iraq, yeah.

• 1:53:39Jocko Willink?

  In Baghdad again?

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, we're at Fernandez, MSS Fernandez, uh, named after a unit guy who was killed.

• 1:53:45Jocko Willink?

  And you're doing, and you're doing one hit, you're working with the indige one night and then two nights later, you get a package from JSOC and you're going out and hit that target.

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  So we divided our troops.

• 1:53:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  So my troops just doing unilateral ops.

• 1:54:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  We're just killing bad guys. Landing on the X every night, just killing dudes. Yeah, it was great. Yeah. It was, that was.

• 1:54:08Jocko Willink?

  How, how big is your unit that you're working with?

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  Twenty, so our troop is about twenty plus guys. And at the time, I'm a sniper now, so I'd moved over to the sniper section. So I'm a sniper team supporting to assault teams for hits every single night. So my job specifically was containment. So setting, establishing containment, a lot of building climbing, that rotation. Um, a lot of Overwatch, killing squatters, running out of buildings, uh, killing bad guys, trying to get to the fight. And it was like the gloves are off. I mean, the strategy that we got passed down and rules of engagement were, um, kill them all. I mean, that's what, that's what we were doing. And so it was a, it was epic rotation.

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  We had a lot of HVTs, a lot of foreign fighters, a lot of gunfights, um, a lot of casualties on, on our side and, uh, a lot of dead bad guys.

• 1:55:03Jocko Willink?

  Were you guys mostly taking vehicles or were you doing helicopters all the time?

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  Most of it was halfs, was helicopter assaults with little birds and, uh, and MH60s. So all Blackhawks and little birds. Every, I think pretty much every night it was that. I don't remember too many ground assaults, a couple here and there in strikers. Um, if we had to go into Sotter City, we took, uh, tanks that would lead the way into Sotter City, suck up all the EFPs. We called them Team Rock, they would get blown up for us. Even to the point.

• 1:55:32Jocko Willink?

  God bless them.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, even to the point where these guys would get blown up, they'd pull over the side of the road and we'd just bypass. They were just the breach point. And, uh, they, they were the hammer we were going through and hitting our surgical targets. And it was a great rotation, man. We, we lost a guy, one of our, uh, team guys, uh, Justin Monchki was killed, stepped on a pressure plate IED. We had about, uh, in my company, we had about fifteen Purple Hearts. So a lot of dudes injured, shot, blown up. And a lot, we killed a lot of bad guys. I mean, it was a good trip for killing bad guys.

• 1:56:05Jocko Willink?

  How are these, um, your, what, what's your position of as far as leadership inside the company here?

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  So I'm a, I'm a two IC. So I'm right behind my cell leader, um, as a new sniper. So I do what my cell leader at the time, Jason tells me to do. And most of my role is because I was pretty lean and a good climber. Me and a couple of the other guys were in the climbing team. And so if we had a containment set, we hit a building, we use ladders or even building climb, traverse ladders, um, from building to building and set containment from a high position. We called high team to be able to contain the objective from top down. While the assaulters hit a deliberate target set. So traditional countdowns, five, four, three, two. Breach goes off at two and then, and we hit the target.

• 1:56:56Jocko Willink?

  And you're doing it an op a night, basically?

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  Sometimes, yeah, sometimes a couple.

• 1:57:00Jocko Willink?

  More than that.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, a lot of this, this time period was, um, taking advantage of SSC. There was emphasis on sensitive site exploitation, doing a lot of post-analysis on the objective. A lot of tactical interrogation to lend itself to taking advantage of the opportunity on a target and flexing to other targets to take down networks. So it was super aggressive. You know, the combination of two, two SAS Ranger Battalion, uh, CAG, us and, and DEF, uh, five action arms under task four 16. And this is Stanley McChrystal's big project, right? His, his, um, his big, uh, machine of war. What, what it, what it was, was one of the most significant, I think, most significant

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  strategies in the war, especially of attrition of taking out bad guys.

• 1:57:53Jocko Willink?

  As you're, you talked about you're losing some guys now. How's, how's your, um, how are you guys handling that? So the reason I ask this question is because somebody's gonna be listening to this in 10 years or 17 years or 23 years and we're gonna be in a situation where there hasn't been any casualties in a long time and all of a sudden someone's going out and doing what, doing what soldiers do and they're gonna take casualties and I know when I, when I took my first casualties and had lost my first guys, there was no one that was telling me like, "Hey, here's what you gotta think about." Not just from a, look, we get the protocol of, "Hey, here's the, here's the book that we're gonna follow, here's the calls we gotta make."

• 1:58:37Jocko Willink?

  But now you got a bunch of guys that just lost one of their best friends and what are you gonna do about that? How did you guys go about it?

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  Great question. A lot of responses that are, um, doctrinal would have guys stand down, have a moments, if not days of mourning, a process. I remember when we lost Tong in 06, our immediate strategy at the tactical level, so you're talking cell leaders and troops sergeant majors, said, "Listen, we're not waiting. We're hitting targets tonight." And we got aggressive and we went out and in 06 and 07, we had a vindication, vindication board.

• 1:59:31Speaker 01

  This vindication board was filled with team guys that we lost and there was dozens of them on one side. And when you killed a bad guy, because you took that call sign patch and then, you know, if it was Tony Yost, who was a third group team sergeant that was killed, you would carry TY on your left shoulder, under your call sign patch. And if you killed a bad guy and you were successful on your mission, you'd come back and you put it on the vindicated side. And we had all the pictures of the guys that were killed on that and every night, we'd fill that board and cycle them back and forth because, um... We understood that getting killed was a part of the job comparatively.

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  And you know this, you're very schooled in this history of warfare, including the Vietnam War, where thousands, 60 plus thousand Americans were killed, sometimes hundreds in certain battles were killed, entire MACV SOG teams taken off the planet. They accepted that risk. So when we lost guys in our community, there was no mourning. There wasn't time no more. We get back on helicopters. I remember something that really stands out to me from the 07 trip. We lost 22 SAS guys. They were killed on target and there was two or three of them that were killed. The task force commander had us come outside and the 22 SAS commander briefed five different task units.

• 2:00:58Speaker 01

  And he spoke to warfare and he spoke to the importance of understanding the fight we're in, how this works, and getting back in the fight. It was a 10 minute spill. And we're all sitting there in kit with guns in our specific units. And at the end of the speech, he gives a hand and arm signal and all the little birds and all the 60s spin up and we load five different task forces up in little birds and M860s and fly away and smash bad guys. That whole experience was what the task force was. Depending on what unit you were, you might have that experience. But if you're in task force, that was the experience every night. We accepted that risk, we lost guys, and then we got back in the fight because we had

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  no time no more. It wasn't a time for mourning.

• 2:01:47Jocko Willink?

  That's um, same strategy I had.

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:52Jocko Willink?

  Got to get your shit back on, get your gear back on, go back out and do what you're supposed to do.

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:58Jocko Willink?

  And do what your boys would want you to do.

• 2:02:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 2:02:05Jocko Willink?

  Any good leadership lessons or any leadership lessons from that deployment that stand out?

• 2:02:10Speaker 01

  The biggest one is, I'll say his name now because he's retired. He was the commander that we worked under. His name was Tom DiTamaso. He was a platoon leader in Black Hawk Down as a young Ranger. At the time was a CAG commander. And he was our commander. When we got to that country, we had gotten used to the way that we did business. Breaching, blowing every door, shooting bad guys in the face. And he briefed us and he said, "Man, we're going to start this new tactic this year. And it's called callouts." And we laughed. We joked. It was comical to us. We even, we even drew cartoons about how comical this whole tactic was.

• 2:02:53Speaker 01

  So, let me get this straight. You want us to go to a building, land little birds, offset, surreptitiously approach and then knock, essentially knock and call them out? Yes, that's, that's what we want you to do. So the whole time we're like, this is ridiculous. This is insane. Until we hit a foreign safe house that had Libyan foreign fighters. And in the war in Iraq, positions two and four out of the top four guys killed on the battlefield that were killing Americans, formidable foes, were from Libya, two and four. Number one was Saudi Arabia. Number two was Libya. Out of these foreign fighters, they were training in the Green Mountains of Libya. They had gear that was comparable to ours.

• 2:03:38Speaker 01

  A solo boots, sun toe watches, chest rigs, suicide vest, proper guns with red dot optics. And all the tactics to bear. We hit a foreign safe house, offset, on infill, which was about a 4K, 2 to 4K offset, which is offsetting away from the objective so you don't get compromised. We get compromised by a early warning position. Our little bird attack helicopter kills six dudes right off the bat on infill. Birds get straight, the bird I'm in, the 60 I'm in, feet hanging off the 60, takes incoming rounds in between us and the chalk in front of us.

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  We land, we make movement, we think there's a couple foreign fighters, there's 13. And they're all suicide invested out. You know, long story short, I have a dog saved my life, a CAG dog by the name of Vinnie, bit a suicide bomber 15 meters in front of me. Sacrificed his life for mine. We get into the house, we kill everybody. We establish SSC after objective secure and realize they have PKM machine guns barricaded in sandbag positions, a threshold deep away from the reach point. If we'd have breached that, like every target set we breached prior, we would all die. We would have got the first assault element would have been zipped up, they would have

• 2:05:03Speaker 01

  broke contact out of the back and we've been fighting for our lives. We were fighting for our lives in containment. We had offset containment, called them out and we were in a hand to hand range.

• 2:05:13Jocko Willink?

  So you did end up doing containment and doing a call out on them?

• 2:05:15Speaker 01

  We did, yeah. We did, we did exactly what he trained us to do. And even in that, I mean, I threw six hand grenades on the other side of a berm in direct engagement and contact with the enemy. I mean, the hand grenades I was throwing with my teammate were landing in bad guys' laps on the other side of the berm. These dudes were ready to get it on. We decimated the target with 105s from a Spectre gunship. We recovered Vinnie's body and then we dropped a JDAM on it on exfil in daylight. And we got back, you know, Vinnie was covered in an American flag, the whole task force there was there to salute us.

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  And we're, you know, we got blood on our shoes, some dudes are injured and we're like, this makes sense. And I realized.

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  From that experience, don't be in a rush to die. So many guys want to get on the X and they want to do this thing called kicking indoors and shoot back guys in the face, but they don't understand the tactics and techniques procedures evolve every single day at the speed of war. And it was the realization where I had the coolest guy, because he's the coolest commander, the coolest unit, telling us something that didn't seem cool. And then that realization coming home and going, damn, okay, now we gotta change tactics. We gotta think outside the box. We can't get, uh, we can't conform to convention and to routine and think it's going to be the right solution every single time because times change. And that was a huge impact on my career moving forward.

• 2:06:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I went through a similar transition in oh, three, oh, four, where we were breaching every door and we ended up hurting some, some people, you know, and sometimes not the right people. And we started getting some pressure, like, hey, you can't just keep doing this. And so, well, if you're not going to explosively breach, then that leaves you mechanically breaching. If you're mechanically breaching, well, now you're sitting there with the hooly swinging at a door and now you're really exposed. So why not just take a step back and say, hey, get the turp on the horn and, and tell these guys to come out. And now we kind of know what we're dealing with. And, and yeah, as you can imagine, um, the pushback I got was, was, you know, pretty

• 2:07:35Jocko Willink?

  strong from, from the guys because they're thinking we're giving up this tactical advantage. We should explosively breach every time. And, and I was getting pressure from my boss. And what I realized is if it makes sense to explosively breach, awesome, we will do it. And I told my boss, if it makes sense for us to explosively breach, we're going to do it. And if we don't need to, we won't. And if we call out as appropriate, we'll call it as appropriate. So right there's three courses of action, which for the first few months I was there, there was one course of action. And how long does it take the enemy to figure that out? And, and like you're saying, by what was this now, this is oh, seven, of course they'd figured out, oh, we can put a barricaded, sandbagged position, two rooms deep, you know, on the main breach point and we'll have a field day.

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it was their, their MO. I mean, look. Guys often think about warfare and they think the opposing side is are these shadows and these entities and these paper targets. These are creative human beings who aren't conformed to convention. They don't have doctrinal time hacks and requirements that they have to abide by. They wake up, they use their imagination and sometimes that imagination trumps the fighting force conventional tactic that you bring to bear. And you gotta adapt, you gotta be malleable.

• 2:08:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, even the idea of what we ended up calling combat clearance, and I don't know if you guys called it combat clearance, but like, hey, we're gonna open the door and we're gonna look inside. Like, hey, I'm not, why would I run in there?

• 2:09:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:06Jocko Willink?

  And are there times we gotta run in there? Absolutely. We're getting shot at in the hallway, I'm gonna get into this room, we're getting shot at in the street, we're gonna bust this door and we're gonna get in this building, that's what's gonna happen. But if we're safe in the street and it's secure and we open this door or we breach this door, what are we running in for there? What are we running in? Why, why would we do that? So again, that was another thing that was contrary to everything that, not everything I had learned, but to the bulk of what I had learned, which is, hey, speed, violence of action. Like, we're gonna get, when that door opens, we're going in. And I get it, there's plenty of times where that's the appropriate behavior. Absolutely. There's also times where that's not the appropriate behavior.

• 2:09:44Jocko Willink?

  And it's difficult to overcome what you always, I always feel like what you, what the first thing you learned is what you kind of, you prefer, right? Whatever you learn first, whatever methodology you learn when you're a new guy, you think that's the way it is. And it can be hard to overcome that barrier and there's a bias, there's, there's an actual bias around that. I forget what the name of the bias, but there's a cognitive bias around whatever, oh, anchoring. So whatever you learn first, whatever piece of information you get first, that's kind of what you anchor to.

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:10Jocko Willink?

  So it can be difficult to overcome and say, hey, wait a second, does this really make sense? And believe me, I mean, I, I met that stiff resistance with a lot of guys along the way. And, and what I tried not to do was be like, you don't know, or this doesn't, I'd be like, okay, well, let's talk through it. You know, and actually, I'll tell you what, let's break out some simunition and let's give it a shot. Why don't you show me how it works out when you go rushing into this room? When you don't know what's in there and there's no reason to rush in there. Look, if you're getting shot out in the hallway, I get it. But if you're not, man, what are we doing?

• 2:10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Don't be in a rush to die.

• 2:10:48Jocko Willink?

  So that was a freaking savage deployment then.

• 2:10:51Speaker 01

  It was. It was epic.

• 2:10:53Jocko Willink?

  And once again, what's, you, you knew it at the time. I mean, every time, every night you're loading up birds going, you're, this is as good as it's ever gonna get.

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I had multiple conversations with guys in the team room and the kit room, getting loaded out, like, it doesn't get any better than this, guys. Remember every single moment of this, because you'll never get this again.

• 2:11:14Jocko Willink?

  How old were you?

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  Twenty-six, seven, yeah.

• 2:11:18Jocko Willink?

  But that's your, so that's your third deployment, though. So you knew it.

• 2:11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, yeah.

• 2:11:22Jocko Willink?

  And you got to relish in it?

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  I was comfortable in war. That was, that was, I was getting, I was fixing mistakes I was making and honing this craft. And I was getting pretty good at it. And, you know, there was opportunities inside of my unit to do whatever I wanted to do. And I took all those opportunities. And it, it was, it was a great playing field for creativity. And we, we did a lot of cool stuff, man. It was, it was amazing. It was a, that task force, Crystal's task force, was awesome. Colonel or Sergeant Major, Command Sergeant Major Nacy

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  was the unit Sergeant Major at the time. And I remember we had a team patch in a brief. And our team patch had some skulls on it. And it was like one of those, you know, badass, like Punisher Skull Deals, right? And I'm thinking, Sergeant Major Nacy's gonna see this and he's gonna be pissed. So during a brief, we're doing a brief right before we load helicopters, and he looks at it, and I see him side-eye one of the patches. And the patch says, "Kill them all" on the patch. And he kind of side-eyes it. And I'm like, "Oh, shit." And I go to my cellmate, I'm like, "Jason, dude, he's side-eyeing that patch. We're screwed."

• 2:12:46Speaker 01

  And this is the unit Sergeant Major. And so he, he comes over and he says, "Hey, whose, whose patches are these?" And Jason steps forward, and he pulls them in the hall. He's like, "Come with me." And he goes, um, let me see that patch and he pulls it off his shoulder and I see this go down in the hallway. I'm like, oh dude, this dude is like, Jason's going home. Like, we're not doing this op. And he hands him the patch and Sarmajer reaches inside of his pocket and pulls out a handful of JSOC coins. That's a, um, uh, task force and has all the numbers. It's a skull. On the backside, it says, uh, uh, something like operating at the speed of war. And he hands him the coins. He goes, this is the coolest patch I've ever seen.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  And he slaps it on his arm and he walks out. I'm like, that did not go the way I thought it was gonna go. I was like, we're in the right place. This is, this is where it's at right now.

• 2:13:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, um, this is where, this is where you lose people. I mean, mentally lose people because if you're not, if you, if you, if you don't know what we're talking about,

• 2:14:00Jocko Willink?

  if this sounds like, uh, hyper aggressive or crazy or whatever, the, the, what you're forgetting is that the whole object of war is to kill the bad guys. That's the, that's what we're doing. That's the purpose. I remember I heard a, a story. They were, you know, I read some news story and it was, I think it was a marine unit. And they were talking about the fact that this marine unit had, um, like a scoreboard on the wall of number of bad guys killed. And each one of them was like a K bar, like a little K bar was drawn up there. And the tone of this article was, you know, just, just disturbed by this. Can you believe that this was U S Marine Corps unit? And I think it's Marine Corps unit.

• 2:14:44Jocko Willink?

  Had these, you know, was keeping score of the number of enemy that they killed and proudly displayed a K bar knife.

• 2:14:51Jocko Willink?

  And I was just thinking, man, what do you think we're doing over there?

• 2:14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:56Jocko Willink?

  What do you think we're doing over there? Now, where you gotta be careful is, is, well, for one thing, you gotta be careful because you gotta, you gotta protect your guys. And if you get them in that mindset, they can go too far with it, of course. You've also gotta be careful because you're not building good relations with civilians or reporters or the public.

• 2:15:19Jocko Willink?

  At least part of the public, because part of the public goes, what are you doing? What do you mean, kill them all? So it's a, it's a touchy thing. It's a touchy subject. And yet, the, the entire purpose of a military unit is to kill the bad guys. And, and I said this the other day somewhere and people were like freaking out about it. And, and I'm like, well, no, I mean, I understand you've got supply people, but what are those supply people supplying? They're supplying bullets so that the frontline guys, what about the people that are, you know, collecting intelligence? Well, they're collecting intelligence so the frontline guys can go kill people, like everyone, that's what we're here for. That's what we're here for. There's no other thing. And, and sure, are there humanitarian missions? Yes. Are we gonna try and win hearts and minds? Yes.

• 2:16:01Jocko Willink?

  All those things, all those things are secondary to the fact that a milita, the milita, the military is to kill bad guys. Are they here to protect and defend? Yes, absolutely. How do they protect and defend? Kill bad guys.

• 2:16:13Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:16:17Jocko Willink?

  So you wrap up that deployment?

• 2:16:19Speaker 01

  Wrap up that deployment and then, um, start doing advanced training. I mean, I, I have a lot of catching up to do, so.

• 2:16:26Jocko Willink?

  Because you've done four back-to-back-to-back deployments?

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, and, and every break, every month or every day of break is get, get more honed. You know, like you need to get more trained. I think that year, in between those rotations, I went to sniper school, I went to free fall school, I went to JTAC school.

• 2:16:49Speaker 01

  All to, again, become an asset, more of an asset on my team. So I went to special forces sniper's course.

• 2:16:56Jocko Willink?

  How long is the special forces sniper school?

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  A couple of months. It's pretty long. I think it's two and a half months. A little bit of technical, a lot of tactical, a lot of long gun. But it's evolved over time. Rangers go to that same school, CAG snipers go to that same school, and special forces CAG snipers go to that school as well. Great experience, learned a lot. I think out of those, out of that break, what I learned most was the difficulty of close air support. I was one of the few guys that got picked up and tasked to go to the school and I'm like, I'm going to SOTAC with SOTAC, Special Operations Terminal Air Control School. I'm like, dude, I don't want to go to SOTAC. They're like, look, if

• 2:17:37Speaker 01

  you're a sniper and you're doing sniper operations, you want to keep the team small, somebody has to have that skill set. So you can drop bombs. I'm like, well, that makes sense. All right. Does that mean I'm tethered to a radio? Likely. But it means you'll kill more bad guys. I'm all about that. So they sent me to, one of the most difficult schools I've been to is SOTAC, by the way. How long is that school? A few weeks, I think three weeks. It's a couple of weeks of ground and then an air week where you call live fire and all different aircrafts and platforms. Only school I've almost failed. Really? I was blade running. What was hard about it? The technical aspects of speaking big military language, like lat long. I mean,

• 2:18:19Speaker 01

  I could speak MGRS and Braille, like I'm good at MGRS. But then they said lat long and I'm like, what the hell is lat long? So, so the Air Force controllers that I went to, they're like, you don't know what lat long? I'm like, dude, I've never even heard the term. Like, what's lat long? Like, I have to learn this? Like, it's all that long? Because you have to communicate to the aviators and they speak lat long. I'm like, oh no. And so I was, you know, doing the homework late at night. I was a senior E7, I was a class leader and I was blade running. I almost failed that course. So, I was this close. And I think the Air Force dudes there, they didn't want to see me pass. They were a little stoked. They're like, oh, this senior SF guy, this dude's on, he's blade running. Damn savages, bro.

• 2:19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, they wanted to see me fail out. I passed though, and I got my air, close air support certification. And then rotated back into O8, another war.

• 2:19:13Speaker 01

  And what are you doing this last, this last time in 08? So 08, I was a troop advisor for the ICTF. The Iraqi counterterrorism force was born and bred by the CIF companies, A15 and B23. Fifth Group CIF and Third Group CIF pulled these guys into Jordan, isolated them, trained them, and then infiltrated back into the country, smashing bad guys. And the ICTF, the young operators of the ICTF, they don't get bricks. They don't get a red cycle, right? They, they stay in warfare and they, through the culmination of years of war, got the most experience and were some of the most experienced operators I've ever served with.

• 2:19:58Speaker 01

  So I advised a whole troop and at the time we were downsizing American forces. So me, a Navy EOD guy, a commo guy, maybe a commo guy, and then a troop full of ICTF spanking targets. What time in 2008 were you there? The entire, the entire summer, so probably March, April timeframe until, you know, six months into it, almost to Christmas. And this is smashing targets? All, all, we were calling them true bilateral operations, right? And we're trying to work ourselves out of a job. A lot of guys were bummed out by it. Things were getting political in 08. I was signing shooter statements if I was admitting that I was killing bad guys, which we start, stopped doing.

• 2:20:43Speaker 01

  I mean, we stopped admitting we were killing bad guys because at that time, if you killed a guy, you've already shooter statement and it went to the DOJ in Iraq. I actually remember one time I came back from an op and my commander, my company commander comes to me, goes, "Hey, Mike, you're good to go back out on ops." I was like, "I just got back from an op." "Sir, what are you talking about?" "Oh, you're being investigated for that last shooting you had." I'm like, What? What do you mean investigated? Like, well, yeah, they had to do a trial process and they took it to trial. They did the shooter statement with witnesses and everything else. And then you're good. I'm like, what? I went to my team sergeant, I'm like, dude, what is going on? They're, we're going on trial and, and through paperwork?

• 2:21:28Speaker 01

  And then we're shut down from operations? He's like, yeah, just, it's part of the climate. I'm like, uh. And it's, it's, it's one of the first times in, in, in leading, cause I was leading a troop, uh, entire troop of ICTF. That I started getting affected by the political climate. All the other times I've been insulated by cell leaders, team sergeants, good leadership, who knew that they just keep all that shit away from the guys and let them do their job. And it's the first time it started trickling down. And I'm like, oh, oh, wow.

• 2:22:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about that when you were talking about your oh seven deployment. I mean, your, your focus was 100% on your job.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:22:10Jocko Willink?

  And so the people above you in the chain of command, and that's a, that was a superlative, supportive chain of command as well.

• 2:22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:19Jocko Willink?

  And so you weren't dealing with any of this other crap. Now all of a sudden you show up in oh eight and you find out you're under investigation.

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  Super political. Yeah. Super political.

• 2:22:30Jocko Willink?

  So did you, uh, you, you just kept doing ops, backed off a little bit? Did you back off a little bit or did you?

• 2:22:36Speaker 01

  So the ops weren't as aggressive? Like I remember telling my new guys, cause I was a cell leader at the time and a troop advisor. I remember telling my new SIF guys, bro, it's about to be on. Get your stuff ready. Bring the thumper, plenty of 40 mic, we're about to kill some bad guys. And go, and we went to Solder City and it was crickets. And I'm like, this isn't normal. I was like, dude, it's gonna happen. We're gonna get ambushed, EFPs, nothing. And I'm like, what is go-? We got back. I'm like, no, dude, that, that was probably just random. We're, we're gonna get back into it and we're gonna go kill, and they, then we get, went out again. And I'm like, there's nothing hap-? What is going on? And because of the- At the times, the Sunnis and the Shias were doing a ceasefire.

• 2:23:21Speaker 01

  And anytime they killed Americans, they would pay for it politically. They started pulling back and just isolating, building their infrastructure and their castles. And not being aggressive, but all the things that we were hitting were dry holes. We got in a few gunfights, killed a few dudes. But it was not what I expected it to be. And it was the transition of what became, I think, the transition out of that fight.

• 2:23:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know. And one of my buddies took over my task unit and went into Sotter City with snipers in, I want to say it was June of 08. And they killed all kinds of bad guys. And they did about four to six weeks of operations there and the freaking, the sheiks there kind of were like, alright, we're good. We're good. We don't need any more of this. And they made that truce and stuff. And you know, the way I looked at it was like, they'd been doing operations for so long, like the Mahdi Army and stuff out of Sotter City. And they would take so few casualties. I mean, they'd go out, set off in the FP and kill an American or two or what, you know, go lob.

• 2:24:33Jocko Willink?

  And like I said, they don't really have to, they don't have to win every time. Like, it doesn't matter. They're gonna go back and they'll attack again tomorrow night or the next night. And, but then once they started taking some massive casualties, they were like, I think we've had enough for this.

• 2:24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was pretty mad. I remember that time period. So I was a sniper at the time. So in between my troop being up, I did stay behind sniper operations. And we actually took, from what I understand, we took one of the missions that you guys had. You guys were doing daylight. Overwatch for the guys who were building the T barriers around Solder City.

• 2:25:10Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:25:10Speaker 01

  And you guys killed a whole bunch of people. When we came in, they switched it to night ops. And we couldn't kill anybody. Like I sat on a rooftop for like days and weeks going, where the hell are the bad guys? And guys were joking like the Navy killed them all. Like where are they? They're like, they're not coming out. They all gave up. There, if, once you did reverse ops, that tactic worked because they were getting smoked in daylight. And so, and I think Chris Kyle at one point had that op. And so I remember, we remember hearing about his name and some of the guys and like, oh dude, they have a high body count. We were so excited and we infilled day one. It was like crickets and I'm like, what is? And they had a, they had a drone. I remember seeing a drone overhead and they were low flying this drone during the building of this wall.

• 2:25:55Speaker 01

  And the completion of it. I'm like, no wonder there's no bad, like all the bad guys hear this drone on purpose. Uh, as a tactic that we applied, but they're all keeping their head down and we couldn't kill any of them. And I was like, oh, this sucks. But the stay behind stuff was fun.

• 2:26:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, that, that was a, a big kind of, when I, when I was in Ramadi, it's the same thing. Like the bad guys were, they knew not to come out at night. Now, ninety, whatever, probably ninety-seven percent of the bad guys that got killed by my task in it were in the daytime.

• 2:26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:24Jocko Willink?

  The other three percent were at night because they knew if they came out at night, it was a bad deal for them.

• 2:26:28Speaker 01

  Free fire.

• 2:26:29Jocko Willink?

  So they came out in the day and it's the same thing that those guys did in Solder City.

• 2:26:37Jocko Willink?

  That's another, so it's another deployment, another six months?

• 2:26:40Speaker 01

  Six months, yeah.

• 2:26:42Jocko Willink?

  And going out, hitting targets, but it's definitely more mellow on this deployment.

• 2:26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was more of a, a leadership role in troop advising the sergeant major because I was acting as the ground force commander for every op. So I, I started learning. A lot about processes, you know, like before I was just in a nug assaultor. I was called a ghost assaultor, just there doing my little narrow piece of the pie. Now I had to step back and get the big picture. I had to control air assets. I had to flex to different targets. I had to strategize on the fly with my troops sergeant major deploying his troops. And we had a whole bunch of incidents like where, you know, me and the EOD guy, the Navy EOD guy, are hitting targets by ourself because they're hitting a building. We get intel. I don't have enough time to flex that whole troop. We have to do it.

• 2:27:31Speaker 01

  So we go inside of houses by ourself and it was fun, man. We had a blast. It was like, it was cool because we had the leash off. And even though it wasn't as active, I mean, we were doing, I remember we had intel from a soccer field that they had a couple of handsets that correlated to the soccer field. And I was like, all right, we gotta get the soccer field. So I said, hey, guys, we're going to move to the soccer field. So we started walking. I'm like, I need you guys to move out and they wouldn't move out. I grabbed the EOD guy. We sprinted to the soccer field. As we ran around the block, we were in ambient streetlight. The group of guys were meeting and they were in the middle of soccer field, the middle of the night, like two in the morning. They see us and we're sprinting across an open field, trying to shoot like 10 dudes who move

• 2:28:14Speaker 01

  in 10 different directions and we miss everybody. And, and when we get back, the, uh, everybody in the jock and the talk is laughing because they're like, dude, that was the best shit we've ever seen. Cause we saw you guys break contact from the main element and you're like, screw it. And you start sprinting, but they all went 10 different directions. So we couldn't track any of them and we're running and shooting and we're standing there in the field like, damn it, that was our opportunity. It was good times, man.

• 2:28:41Speaker 01

  Wrap up that deployment, then what's next? So I, I, I get back and I go to CAG and I'm in CAG in a, a techno reconnaissance role. And I go back to Iraq and to Balad and I only I I run because of my reconnaissance background is how I got recruited in. I run a joint interagency task force of interagency organizations with JSOC to do reconnaissance over the entire country of Iraq. I was I was undercover as a lieutenant colonel. So I was an OIC, young OIC. Nobody believed it. But put in that position to see to and control all the things that were going on for reconnaissance

• 2:29:25Speaker 01

  assets in the country. Now in Balad at that time period, because everything was downsizing, including the base of Balad.

• 2:29:33Jocko Willink?

  What year is this now?

• 2:29:34Speaker 01

  Oh, nine.

• 2:29:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So stuff's really slowing down.

• 2:29:37Speaker 01

  Really slowing down. In fact, the reason they brought me in is because reconnaissance is obviously another way we get involved without involving packs on the ground, people on the ground. So we still had to have eyes on, but we had to use technical means of reconnaissance and that just depend on dudes and hide sites. In fact, during that time period, there was a restriction of one or two Americans per target and you had to stay in containment. So if you're moving to a bad guy place, you leave behind the Americans. They'd stay on containment with the vehicles. Indigenous force would hit the objective, come back, and then you'd roll out. And so at that time, working in the joint interagency, I didn't feel like I was missing out on much. I felt like I had a broader role to fill

• 2:30:22Speaker 01

  in that in that capacity.

• 2:30:24Jocko Willink?

  And then and you're just overseeing all this reconnaissance elements? That's what you're saying?

• 2:30:28Speaker 01

  All of it. And I had daily VTCs with SEAL Team Command, NAVSOF, mostly, which was the main effort, by the way. There wasn't a lot of SF guys in the country at that time. So I had daily VTCs with the Navy and supported their operations and technical reconnaissance means, tagging, tracking, locating, all the all the sexy stuff for technical recon for the entire country.

• 2:30:54Jocko Willink?

  And that was based on the fact that you had sniper experience?

• 2:30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got recruited.

• 2:30:59Jocko Willink?

  Recon experience or whatever.

• 2:31:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got recruited. I went to selection all successful and then my background, my entire life, my background in special operations was mapped for that, that field of expertise. And the transition, coming back from 08 to 09, I went to JSOC's Technical Reconnaissance Course, which was like six months, a pretty intense course, and learned a whole new world of, of operations that I didn't even know existed. I know a little bit, but when I went to that course, I was like, whoa, now this is, this is some cool shit. So I, I did that for Task Force for JSOC for my 09 rotation.

• 2:31:36Jocko Willink?

  And then what happened after that?

• 2:31:38Speaker 01

  Got back and then got with another squadron. And at that time, we hadn't been in Iraq since we killed Zarqawi. The task force hasn't been in Iraq really since, I mean intermittently. We, we owned Iraq, but Afghanistan, we completely gave up. So our eye wasn't on the ball in Afghanistan because we were too busy in Iraq. And then all of a sudden, we had a change of heart. Look, Al Qaeda was on the run. We didn't even know this thing called ISIS existed. And we decided to do a surge as an organization to Afghanistan. And I was on the first thing smoking.

• 2:32:18Speaker 01

  So my first real good deployment with that organization, with a special missions unit was in Afghanistan. And when we got there, the Rangers on the battlespace, Colonel Carrillo was in charge and we were the redheaded stepchildren. And I was like, what? How is an SMU the stepchildren? Like when I got there, I was taking showers with bottles of water in an open field. And I'm like, this is the premier CT unit on the planet? And I'm doing this? And they're like, dude, we have, we're building everything from scratch. So we set up shop there and started targeting bad guys. And it, the first two months was prep and then the second two months was killing bad guys.

• 2:33:03Speaker 01

  And we did a lot of it. That, that, that second 60 days of that four month rotation. We I saw more bad guys killed in a two month period than anything that I experienced before and it was because of the assets that we brought to bear. Good rotation though.

• 2:33:18Jocko Willink?

  And you were you were still overseeing recce at this point?

• 2:33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was I was that squadron's reconnaissance in CO, which just specialized in recon. So everything from OPs to technical recce to inter-agency, like even controlling aircraft for for ISR. And it was an active trip. I mean, we lost a dog. We had guys shot. We had guys blown up. A lot of active operations during that period of time. It was it was amazing to see the talent and you can't really get an idea or understanding of that talent and capability when you when you focus on individuals. But when you see it come together

• 2:34:01Speaker 01

  in a single combat operation where everybody's so efficient and effective, you really see the benefit of the selection process, the training process, and the support mechanisms that make that unit the the most elite unit in the world.

• 2:34:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, you hear like the sports analogies of like, well, you know, it's like a professional sports team, but these are like the the champions, right? These are the NFL freaking Super Bowl winners that, you know, that you see the Super Bowl guy that like, whatever, gets his right arm massaged so that he can whatever. And he and this other guy's doing speed drills with the first four meters of his sprint and he's going to work with a specialist that's going to get him even a little bit, you know, one millisecond faster. And then they're getting their helmets dialed in so that they can have comms in there. And they got this, they got all like, this 100% pure focus for every individual to be as good as they possibly can.

• 2:35:02Jocko Willink?

  And then you put that team together and every one of those individuals is 100% focused on being as good as they possibly can with all the support they could possibly want. And this is what you end up with. Just, just freaking the best.

• 2:35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the big leagues for sure. And I, what I realized in that unit, even being a very competent shooter, respected member of Special Forces and being a PT stud at the time, that there was men above me and beyond me that I'd never catch up with, that were just so talented. And I was like, it was humbling. And I'm like, well, I'm not the most elite dude. I thought I was. I, I woke up and went, dude, I'm crushing it. And then I see the talent pool over there and realized, there's this thing, this machine. And like you said before, these guys aren't trained to be diplomats, to be fit experts. They're trained to kill bad guys. And they're the best at it. I mean, the Navy version

• 2:35:57Speaker 01

  and the Army version, they're the best at it in the world. And it was a humbling and honorable experience of being part of that.

• 2:36:06Jocko Willink?

  So what came after that?

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  So at a very young age, actually at the age of 29, I made E8.

• 2:36:13Jocko Willink?

  How's your wife handling all this, by the way?

• 2:36:16Speaker 01

  She's good. She's a champ at the time. I don't, she's not married to me now. So it didn't last. But she's handling it well, man. I mean, I mean, look, she, her, her perspective was if I was happy doing what I loved, that was my moment in time. And she would support me.

• 2:36:33Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any kids?

• 2:36:34Speaker 01

  No kids. No kids. None. So it was easy for us, right? She was busy getting her nursing degree. Phenomenal woman. Just, just handling business and grinding. And then when I came back, she was my support and make sure, made sure, because she knew I was coming back. And in that unit especially, those, those boys don't have any downtime. It doesn't exist. Even when you're down, you're not down. You're up on a, a call cycle for being able to quick respond. Or you're in a down cycle and you're training. You're always gone. I was gone more than any part of my career in that organization. So.

• 2:37:15Speaker 01

  When I made the E8 list, I made it on the black side. There's a blacklist. And the blacklist is just, it's not advertised. And I was the, just to give, I don't know the exact numbers, but for that year, it was something like 160 guys were promoted. I was 159.7 on the blacklist, because the blacklist, like you're like a intermittent number that's not advertised. I was the last guy on the black side, which includes the Navy, that was promoted to E8, which means I was the last guy to get picked up, and I was 29 years old, as an E8. As an E8. Yeah. And so, I, I, you know, it was mainly because of the combat experience I had.

• 2:37:57Speaker 01

  And then in E7 school, which is for us is called A-NOCH, I won the Leadership Award. And so those two things set me up to get promoted that fast. But I wasn't prepared in my operational career to go, "You're an E8? What's next?" So if I stayed in that unit, then I would have just been what I was, you know? In that unit, you're not, it's called blue chips. You don't get blue chips because you have experience. You could be a 20-year special operations guy. When you show up to that unit, day one, you earn your blue chips one day at a time. And so me starting, I was starting, starting from zero.

• 2:38:36Speaker 01

  Leaving the unit and going anywhere I could have gone, I'm a team sergeant. I'm a god in the special operations, right? And it's the job that you want, because you're controlling and operating with your ODA, with your detachment. I had no, look, I wanted to go back, but I was like, if I go back, they'll put me on a regular ODA. And not meaning that in a derogatory way, but just not a SIF company, not a specialized company. Randomly, a gentleman by the name of Command Sergeant Major Bob Erby, who's a legend in Special Forces Command, communicates to me that he heard I made E8, and he heard about my experience, and he wanted to recruit me to stand up a new CRIF,

• 2:39:20Speaker 01

  a new commander's response force, for the continent of Africa. We didn't have one, because we were so busy fighting in the Middle East, we didn't have one. JSOC approved that and long story short, I stood up a CIF as a plank holder from scratch. We went into a company in 10th group, me and another guy from the unit, stood it up from scratch, had full power to train anything we wanted to with our guys, reconnaissance guys, and build this unit from zero. As we built the unit, we got vetted and validated and then Benghazi kicked off, which by our benefit, winded up being in Africa. So. So did you deploy immediately?

• 2:40:03Speaker 01

  I deployed immediately. I was the first team to deploy for that unit to Benghazi, to Libya. This is after the September 12th attacks? Yeah, yeah, September 11th and 12th attacks in 12th in 2012. During our train up, we literally get tasked to go to Libya, we start developing intel, and then Benghazi kicks off. And when that happened, I was actually in a special missions unit compound doing cross KLE briefs with Libya. And then this thing happens. And then a few weeks later, I'm in Tripoli Libya, going, building out a counterterrorism force going after Abu Ghattal, the guy responsible for it. Did you run, we didn't run any of those ops though, did we?

• 2:40:47Speaker 01

  So, one, we didn't do anything about it, right? It was a big, 13 hours in Benghazi is kind of reflective of that understanding. But we had the opportunity to kill Abu Ghattal in about 60 to 90 days. There were other USASOC elements with us and they positively identified that dude in a short period of time. I was there in the meeting when we proposed it to the country team, which included the ambassador, Shar J, Alexander Pope, who was appointed, and he denied it. He said, "The political climate won't allow us to do this." The representative from USASOC, senior E8, stood up and almost detonated.

• 2:41:30Speaker 01

  I mean, he detonated in a very attackful way. But that was the climate we were dealing with. It was, it was so politically charged, they wouldn't allow us to do anything. For six months, I was in that country, fighting to kill bad guys, to do our job as the commander's response force, but also representing USASOC. And they wouldn't let us do anything. It was horrible. It was, it was the worst political military experience that I, that I've faced.

• 2:42:00Speaker 01

  So what'd you do when you got home from that? That had to leave a bad taste in your mouth. Well, it did.

• 2:42:06Speaker 01

  Three weeks after I got back, I was out of the army. I dropped my paperwork as a senior E8. With how many years in? At the time, sixteen. Sixteen years. When I was downrange, I got recruited by the CIA. And I was going to take a job called paramilitary operations officer, which is a, you can go on US or CIA.gov and apply for it. Did you get a little job description there? Yeah, yeah. Mike Spann was one of the first casualties of the global war on terror in September 11th. And he was actually a paramilitary operations officer. I wanted to be Mike Spann. I had, I had just finished my college degree, which took me fifteen years to accomplish, which is a prerequisite for government service and federal, federal government.

• 2:42:46Speaker 01

  And I decided at that point, I wanted to step aside and work for this agency because I saw the good things they were doing. At the time, after I got back, it out-processed very rapidly, where people were like, my troop and my, my, the main element wasn't even home yet. And I was already out-processed. My independence was July 4th of that year of 2013. And immediately started contracting, went straight back to Libya. I was in Libya on terminal leave, back in Libya as a civilian. And then started contracting with the agency for the la, for the next two and a half years. While at the same time, in a reserve component, special operations.

• 2:43:32Speaker 01

  And where I was a team sergeant in Texas. Then made sergeant major in Texas. And so I was contracting, deploying with inter-agency, coming home and then. Deploying again? Deploying again, yeah. Put on my uniform, jump on a plane. I mean, one time I came back from Yemen, a week later, I was back in Niger Africa with a sergeant major uniform on, doing a counterterrorism staff operation or staff exercise that turned into an operation. Came back, put on my civilians and then went back to Yemen. So I was just in a, a cycle of it.

• 2:44:08Jocko Willink?

  Give us a little bit of a brief on what you're doing as a, what your job was as a contractor.

• 2:44:13Speaker 01

  So honestly, um, it's nothing sexy. Uh, I was babysitting case officers. I mean, my job was to protect them overseas. I was outside of the, what people would normally refer to as industrial contractor. So I actually worked directly for the agency. And, and babysat case officers and protected them. Um, when you're a case officer and you come out of school, uh, you got a 500 pound head, lots of experience in training, but it's all concepts. When they go overseas, we only have enough time to repair the biggest and brightest minds on the planet to do what they do.

• 2:44:53Speaker 01

  And so we, we are the, um, the shield that protects these guys to do their job. And at the time that I applied, you had a minimum experience of six years in special operations and you had to shoot your ass off. And I, when I showed up for this job, I vetted, it's a shooting call. You shoot and you meet the standard or you leave. My class, we had probably 10, 10 dudes that are senior level dudes, operators in the most elite units. Half of them probably went home because of the shooting calls. You're competing for a six figure job also. So the pressure is high. And the shooting standards are the, the hardest shooting standards I've seen. Apparently in federal government, cause you're a federal law enforcement instructor after you get through this experience.

• 2:45:38Speaker 01

  It's the toughest federal law enforcement call. That's informal. It's not actually doctrine.

• 2:45:45Speaker 01

  And when I went down range with that organization, I was confident that even me and my riding partner typically were SEALs. That with our little Glock 17P shooters in the waistband, that we could do some work. Enough to fight back to our vehicle or back to the machine gun in our vehicle and do some work. But it also taught me about, uh,

• 2:46:11Speaker 01

  What these inter-agencies and these brave men and women do every day, which is they put it on the line. Like, you don't have a QRF Ranger Battalion element in MH47s prepared to come rescue your ass. It's just you. And I'm like, dude, you guys do this? Like, yeah, we've been doing this since the beginning. Like, what? Just driving around randomly, doing your thing and like, that's all? Like, what's the nearest task force? Oh, they're about three hours away. Okay, so we're out on our own. That changed everything for me. I mean, that changed everything I thought in, that I potentially knew about singleton operations and low-vis operations. We think low-vis, our guys thought low-vis was like putting

• 2:46:54Speaker 01

  a shemag on, you know, and hiding their chest carrier or plate carrier underneath their dress, their man dress. It's a new game. It was crazy.

• 2:47:04Jocko Willink?

  So you do that for two and a half years?

• 2:47:06Speaker 01

  Two and a half years, yeah.

• 2:47:08Jocko Willink?

  And did you, so you originally wanted to actually be in the CIA, not a contractor? You did, were you continuing to try and pursue the job of actually being a member?

• 2:47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanted to be a staffer. I wanted to be a blue badger. I wanted to be a full-time employee. And I had a change of heart when I was in Yemen. Yemen was super political. The Houthis, the political climate, all these things that were transpiring was doing what I didn't think was possible in that interagency, which was debilitating their ability to do their job. And I saw great guys that were on operational side, on the operational side, that were getting stagnated. And I couldn't believe it. I actually, I remember thinking to myself on one rotation, like, this doesn't happen to these guys. There's no way. These dudes, there's no way these guys are getting, there's gotta be something going on. Cloak and dagger.

• 2:48:08Speaker 01

  And it wasn't because the oversight of how the interagency, the IC works in the intelligence community with well over 17 agencies now, there's so much director, uh, directorate, national level oversight and micromanagement that can't do their jobs. And so I had, my whole thing with getting on the military was if I can't kill bad guys, I don't belong here. So I left because I went to an organization which I thought were still killing bad guys. And they, they still were in some capacity, but where I was in the situation I was in, they weren't. And I went, dude, I have to make, I have to have a change of heart here. I have to figure something out because the war for me is over. There's no more killing.

• 2:48:51Speaker 01

  I mean, eventually ISIS popped their heads up and there was a whole new cycle of killing that I missed, which I, I, I wish I was part of, but I had to make a decision to get out. And then that was it? That was it. I was in Pakistan and I made that decision. I, I brainstormed. Um, my, my riding partner, who was a SEAL, his brother was a DevGru guy that was killed on a raid, trying to rescue a hostage in Africa. And, um, he's one of my best friends. And I said, hey, man, I want to start a business. He's like, well, let's brainstorm. And we had course of action development, man. We sat down after work and mapped out some plans and, and sat

• 2:49:34Speaker 01

  at many conversations over dinner, trying to figure out like what I could do. And, um, you know, with our background and expertise, the obvious route is a tactical something, right? But I didn't want to do that, man. I, I, I saw these dudes who were getting out and they were dealing with all the backlash of coming out and saying, hey, I'm this guy. Cause at the time I didn't have any social media. And I'm like, dude, I don't, I don't want to be a tactical kind of guy. I want to do something kind of different and I wrote down survival and you know primitive survival was what most people would think about when they think about survival. But I said, what if there's this niche in developing like this modern survival take on preparedness

• 2:50:18Speaker 01

  of training citizens, not just military and law enforcement, but citizens to be better prepared in their culture.

• 2:50:24Jocko Willink?

  What year is this?

• 2:50:25Speaker 01

  This is 2015.

• 2:50:27Jocko Willink?

  Damn, so you were ahead of the curve.

• 2:50:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. This is 15 and I'm like, there's something here. And I wrote a mission statement. I did a con op. I wrote a whole five paragraph op order on the whole business plan and resigned from my position with interagency, came home, talked to my command sergeant major as a sergeant major. It was an op sergeant major at the time and said, hey, man, I'm thinking about doing this. And he goes, dude, like you haven't like, there's nothing going on. It's like we're about to activate the entire unit and you'll be a staff sergeant major sitting in a talk for a year in Afghanistan. There's nothing going on. Do what you want to do. I said, how hard is it for me to resign? He goes, I'll, I will type the paperwork. That's

• 2:51:12Speaker 01

  how easy it is. And then I'll just send it to you and you sign it. For, for your position and your rank, you don't have to do anything but technically resign and you'll go into IRR status, inactive, ready, reserve, and that's it. And I remember I did that. And the next day I was like, holy crap. Like I just cut the biggest umbilical cord known to man in the history of man. And now I'm out here flapping and I have to make, make shit happen.

• 2:51:40Jocko Willink?

  And are you still married at this point?

• 2:51:41Speaker 01

  I'm not. I'm, I'm, I'm three years removed or two years removed from a divorce and.

• 2:51:47Jocko Willink?

  But you're not, you don't have to take care of anyone but yourself.

• 2:51:52Speaker 01

  It's just me.

• 2:51:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So it's kind of like a little bit of big umbilical cord, but I mean, let's face it, you're going to be able to.

• 2:52:00Jocko Willink?

  You know, give me a ground pad.

• 2:52:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm winging it, man. I'm, I'm, I think I probably was living in, on a, a ground, like a pad. Like I, I was probably on an air mattress inside of a, a abandoned place. But I, I was smart with my money because they call it the thousand air club because you, you're making a thousand a day and you're bankrolling. Most guys go home, blow it on Harleys and trucks and come back and start the vicious cycle again. Um, but I took that money, I think it was 25K and invested it and started my business.

• 2:52:31Jocko Willink?

  What was the first move?

• 2:52:33Speaker 01

  The first move was education. I had no idea.

• 2:52:36Jocko Willink?

  Educating yourself?

• 2:52:36Speaker 01

  Educating myself. I, I had no idea about marketing, about, um, like I have a degree in homeland security. What's that going to translate to? Not much in, in my new field of expertise. So I took my business plan, started doing, um, trying to build fidelity on the correlation between a, a concept and then the execution of that concept, trying to use historical data. And there was none. There was no good case studies or examples of businesses in that genre that weren't very narrow in their field. Primitive survival. Yeah, sure. You could find a hundred business plans. They all suck and they're not doing very well. But what is this cultural thing of like this genre of called preparedness? Where mindset, self-awareness, uh, technical training, um, you know,

• 2:53:21Speaker 01

  all the things that we did in our culture and purpose in special operations. Uh, how does that translate to citizens? And how do you scale verticals in business? That, that was intense for me. Uh, it's something I still learn today, you know? Five years later with 40 plus employees, I'm like, dude, I'm still learning. I'm trying to figure this shit out.

• 2:53:40Jocko Willink?

  What was the first move that you made then in terms of like, what's the first gig that you did?

• 2:53:45Speaker 01

  So the first gig was, uh, tactical training because I could make a revenue stream. So I'm like, wait, I figured out like a 12 to 24 people, $500 a slot, pistol carbine. Let's make some revenue. Then I built the website. Then I started marketing. Social media for me was brand new and I think at the time was new for people to see special operations guys doing it. I know at the time, there was only a handful of us doing that and people were like, oh, and they gravitated towards us. Uh, I remember Tim Kennedy, I was his boss. Uh, Tim Kennedy was a, is an MMA fighter. Successful entrepreneur. I was his boss at the time and I'm like, dude, how are you doing this? He plugged me on his social media. I got 10,000 followers and I'm like, this is how it

• 2:54:28Speaker 01

  works. This network building, that's how easy it was. And so I started building it. I designed a survival kit. As a contractor, I went to the luxury of doing the interagency direct contract position. I can go to any training I want to. And they sent me to a whole bunch of high-speed schools, including a survival school, where they had high-speed contractors who developed this like Ziploc bag theory. There's this guy right now who works for me, Kevin Estella. He's in the field right now, day two, doing a 72-hour Ziploc bag challenge on Phil Kraus Survival on our Instagram. And we're updating it. And the idea is, if you're in a foreign country that's semi-permissive, non-permissive, the worst-case scenario for

• 2:55:11Speaker 01

  you is it loses its sovereignty, a coup happens, and now you're on your own. The first star in the 50s that was applied to the CIA board was a guy who escaped and evaded from China and got killed in Tibet by a random security guy, shot in the chest with one round with like a .32 British pistol revolver. That's a thing. And there's dangers of it. So the idea is like a Ziploc bag is the things that you can carry on your person, your physical body. So I took that and I literally in the course went, everything you guys put in this bag, how did you guys come up with it? Well, we did R and D, like the best things that we could put in the bag, and you're going to live out of it for 72 hours, which happens

• 2:55:54Speaker 01

  to be appropriate amount of time to escape, evade, and then carry the appropriate amount of stuffs in reconnaissance, like not overbearing. And I said, I'm going to take everything in these bags, and I'm going to turn it into a survival kit and sell it. And he's like, dude, you should do that. I'm like, hell yeah, I'm doing it. And so our first survival kit, I sold like a thousand on day one of that kit. And I was like, there's something here. There's a product thing here. There's a training thing here. There's these revenue streams that I'm seeing. And we built it from very small, diversified, and built up all the verticals, one by one.

• 2:56:33Jocko Willink?

  So you sell a thousand of these survival kits almost instantly?

• 2:56:37Speaker 01

  Instantly.

• 2:56:38Jocko Willink?

  So now, so now your theory is correct. There's demand.

• 2:56:41Speaker 01

  There is demand. I'm creating a new demand signal, but there's demand.

• 2:56:47Speaker 01

  That that starts off.

• 2:56:49Jocko Willink?

  What year is that?

• 2:56:51Speaker 01

  Six, the very beginning of 16, the very beginning of 16. So five years ago.

• 2:56:57Jocko Willink?

  You get the word out, you sell a thousand of these kits. And so then what's the next move? Now you know there's a market, you start developing shit. What's next?

• 2:57:05Speaker 01

  Well, I think part of it was I have to develop a culture here. Like there's a, there's this thing that exists that I'm trying to redefine. Um, most people who think, or have seen us on the surface even, think that we're a primitive survival company because survival was synonymous with, with primitive survival, like rubbing sticks together in the woods. And so I'm not a big fan of that. I'm not an expert at that. There's guys that are talented at that. I hire those guys now, but that's not me. I'm the guy who understands that, you know, 20 operators can go out and deliberately hit the worst case scenario and come out on top. And so in my hypothesis, like, why is that happening? Why, why do, why do intentionally men put themselves in harms way to kill the bad guy?

• 2:57:50Speaker 01

  And why statistically do they come out on top? And so if you start looking out and laying out all the reasons why, it's not because of one widget, one school, it's because the culture they're immersed in. It's, they all got selected together. They trained together. They pay attention to all the details. They can do contingency based planning. They have service support. They do course of action development. They rehearse. They pay attention to their equipment and everything they do. And ultimately they're conscious to their culture, their world. They're, they're here right now, paying attention to what they are doing. And when I look at citizens and everything that's happening in our world that we never learned the lesson from, we're completely complacent

• 2:58:35Speaker 01

  in freedom as a benefit of freedom. Because we're comfortable in routine. And that happens to be our MO as Americans, which is beneficial, right? That you live in sovereign societies, you get all the luxuries and freedoms of all the men who go out to war and do this thing. But what is it to the detriment? Well, it's the, if you look at statistics. And this is what I did. This was, this was the greatest start point is doing this research. I started realizing there's no understanding of what this even means. There's one guy that I found, there's a couple of guys, but one guy significantly by the name of John Leach, who did a study on survival psychology. He asked the question, why do people live? And why do people die specifically in catastrophes?

• 2:59:17Speaker 01

  He has this theory, um, based on this case study analysis of mostly natural disasters, some of them manmade, that there's a breakdown of about 10, 80, 10. 10% of the population happens to be making the right decision. And they survive. 80% probably broken in half, 50, 50. Make sometimes the right decision, sometimes the wrong. And then 10% are the bottom of the barrel. They're, they're like the guy who runs.

• 2:59:44Jocko Willink?

  This is, this is in a survival situation of some kind?

• 2:59:47Speaker 01

  This is a catastrophe, a disaster. So all of the things coming together, typically associated with, um, compressed timeline, high intensity stress. So the bottom 10% is the bottom of the barrel. And children happen to be in that bottom 10%. And so the, the, the question is, why are some people at the top 10? And why are people at the bottom 10? And how do we get the people who are at the bottom, even children, into the top 10? And that was the premise of my business in answering that question. We need to figure out why people die. Um, what is their background and experience? What mistakes they made? And how can we put them in a bracket, in a 10% bracket to make sure they survive?

• 3:00:32Speaker 01

  That, that was the, the question that had to be answered.

• 3:00:35Jocko Willink?

  That's where, that's where it started. And then you started looking at, okay. What did you find? What did you find as far as a curriculum that you put together? That moves people from the bottom 10, we're getting killed, to the top 10?

• 3:00:49Speaker 01

  The most impactful thing that I've found, which I see a lot of correlation in what you're, whether it's discovery or just dissemination of your books and all the information that you're doing, is self-awareness breeds situational awareness, right? So there's this lack of awareness. There's really a lack of understanding. The analogy I like to use is, I have a Land Cruiser. I'm a big fan of Land Cruisers. So I take my Land Cruiser, which is a 94 Land Cruiser, which is FCG80 if you're a Land Cruiser nerd. Head gasket problems are notorious for these things. They overheat, their head gasket blows, and then it's catastrophic. So the question is, when you're driving down the road and you see smoke, how do you address smoke?

• 3:01:34Speaker 01

  Most people see smoke and they go, "Oh crap, smoke. Let me pull over," right? "I'll call AAA." So they have a dependence on something else, an institution, an insurance company, whatever it may be. And so they don't source, sole source the solution. Another course of action is you keep driving because you don't understand what's happening, so you just push through. And you think that pushing through, hey, because it's only 10 minutes away from home, is the answer. So you saw the smoke, you didn't have a answer. There's a void, a darkness in the back of your head. So you just do something random. It's randomized behavior. You drive, you get home, and before you get home, when you get down to your street,

• 3:02:15Speaker 01

  your car catastrophically implodes. You hear a pop, you hear noise, it starts to buck. You pull it over the side of the road, you lift the hood, and you realize you have a blown engine, right? That analogy is representative of people's brains and the understanding of the brain. So a lot of things that happened to us in our lives, mostly affected by stressors, which happens to be a catastrophe, by the way. A stressor is just either low-grade or high-grade catastrophe.

• 3:02:48Speaker 01

  We take in stress, we start filling these things, and then we don't know how to control it, we don't know how to diagnose it, we don't understand mechanical processes, and then so we ignore it until it becomes catastrophic. So now you're in the vehicle accident, and your only role is to do certain technical things to help the person who's burning alive, but you don't know how to do it. Why? Because you don't understand how to break glass. You don't understand the fortitude that's required to push past the pain and break the glass. Or maybe if you understood technically that you could just crack off this wire antenna and slap it, that you could shatter the glass. Or if you even had more forethought, maybe you carry a tool, like a breaching axe, a Winkler, a breaching axe, and you smash the window.

• 3:03:33Speaker 01

  But then you let that person burn to the ground. Hopefully, it's not a family member. Hopefully, it's not you. But this happens. And this little thing happens to everybody in some kind of circumstance. And what I tell people is, if it hasn't happened, it's bound to happen. The difference between us and our experiences and civilians is that we've seen the detriment of not following these basic processes and the understanding of what take places when you don't understand them. So what I want to do is lend these processes an understanding so people can self-diagnose, be aware of what's happening sympathetically, parasympathetically, and then give them more awareness. So when they see smoke, they go, "Oh, that's not smoke at all.

• 3:04:18Speaker 01

  That's water vapor. That's coming from our radiator. Oh, I'm gonna pull over. I'm gonna let the car idle and sit. I'm gonna let it cool down. Oh, I carry gloves and a rag in the back of my car. I'm gonna pop the radiator cap. Oh, I realize, because I looked in the reservoir, there's nothing in the reservoir. I carry coolant because I have a 94 and it eats coolant. I get coolant, put it back in it, top it off, sit it, let it idle. Everything seems fine, and I'm on my way, and I just survived." That whole thing is not done in a very tactful and intelligible way, and I think we need to change that. So it requires processes. It requires progressive learning. It requires a lot of different paths that haven't been created, which is the business challenge. Because it's easy to articulate it,

• 3:05:03Speaker 01

  to do a podcast, to do a book, all those things. But to create a progressive path for civilians who are disinterested in the first place, it's the best, in my opinion, business problem to have. Because it lends itself to a new challenge, which I'm all about.

• 3:05:18Jocko Willink?

  So what do the courses look like? How do, let's say you just sold me and I'm like, hell yeah, I'm in the game. Freaking Jaco, the whatever insurance salesman and you just sold me. What do I do?

• 3:05:32Speaker 01

  There's three progressive paths to this. The first path is Phil Kraus Survival, philkrausrevival.com. It's the website. It's physical training. It's like physical things that you can do. It's gunfighter pistol, gunfighter carbine. It's first aid, tactical combat casualty care.

• 3:05:48Jocko Willink?

  This is via a website?

• 3:05:49Speaker 01

  Via a website.

• 3:05:49Jocko Willink?

  So you're, for instance, on, on, on a video explaining to me how to put a tourniquet on my kid?

• 3:05:57Speaker 01

  This component is you physically come to our training.

• 3:06:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so there's a difference. So you said website, but then you said physical.

• 3:06:03Speaker 01

  So you go on the website, you get, you sign up for the training, right? And then the, the in-person physical training is one component of it. Uh, that training includes equipment, augmentation and equipment. Look, we're not the, we don't own the monopoly on medical gear, but I'll, I will sell you the best medical gear that's made. Uh, North American Rescue, the same CAT seven tourniquets or CAT tourniquets that we use. We've seen them save lives. So we sell tourniquets, survival kits, all the augmentation for enabling people to be better prepared. That's Phil Kraus Survival. The second component is progressive learning. You have to be able to learn progressively at a start point and understand the path. I realized that deficiency years into this whole thing. Cause people go, oh, I trained gunfighter pistol, what's next?

• 3:06:48Speaker 01

  And I'm like, uh, gunfighter pistol two? And they're like, well, outside of that, what's next? Like, well, I need a holistic path to this. So we hired a girl, um, her name's Amber, stay at home mom, uh, nurse, somebody who understands LMS systems. We actually teamed up with Osmoor, which is a learning management based system. The same thing we did with online learning through your masters for my bachelors where we take. An online learning approach to get people involved, including families. So you can go online, you could sell up, you could sign up on a we the prepared.com and sign up for an LMS component that includes like, stop the bleed. So you take a class where you receive a tourniquet, you apply that tourniquet,

• 3:07:33Speaker 01

  and you have an interactive experience virtually. It's online learning, but it's for the preparedness minded. It's for people who, you know, who don't have the time or money to fly from North Carolina to Utah to take a physical class in person. So there's a progressive learning path that touches all the fields that we break down and what's called pillars of preparedness, which I can go over. Of how we, how we disseminate this information so people can understand it. The last component to that is what I've realized that preparedness is, is it's this thing that brings people together, that's not super toxic. Like everybody can get, if you're a liberal in San Francisco or a conservative in rural Montana,

• 3:08:15Speaker 01

  you can get on board that you need this idea of preparedness to make you better prepared for the worst case scenario, generally speaking. So when I have classes in person or online, I see this community building built based off of this one thing that's not segregating people, or that doesn't have toxic underlying things about it, right? It's not fringe. So we started American Contingency, which is a community, community-based program where if we educate people to be better prepared, what's next? What happens when you get around people that you like? Cause you're, you're thinking about the same considerations. Like I want to take care of my family, I want to protect myself. How can you interoperate?

• 3:08:58Speaker 01

  Well, there's, like, there's a, there's a bigger picture, right? The breakdown of the family unit, breakdown of communities. When we, me and you grew up, we knew our neighbors. We knew our, our neighbors, friends and family. Now, if you see your neighbor and he's checking his mail, you're like, you're like, "Who's that guy? Like, why is he looking at me?" Like, that's your neighbor, man. Like, what are you doing? Like, for the first time in history, you could be in an apartment complex with thousands of people in a vertical and not know one person and be disinterested in knowing anybody. But what do you do when you have to band together because a hurricane just destroyed the infrastructure of your town? Well, American Continency, we actually have a members.americancontinency.com that allows people to group and network.

• 3:09:43Speaker 01

  We have hundreds of groups that are inter-operating now, that are like-minded, that train together, that work together, that build assets and their capabilities together, and then to break bread together, which is building relationships. So, in every tier, and this just happened, which, you know, look, I think the most impactful thing that you've done in your career and your, in your life, is what you're showing in, and what you do and your actions outside of the military, right? It's, it's somebody, for me, as a young entrepreneur, I look at you and go, "These are the right things." Writing a book and publication that, that exposes your ideology and your thinking to

• 3:10:28Speaker 01

  impact young people who don't have anything to lean on in purpose is the most impactful thing that a human being could do, especially from our backgrounds. So, I said, "I'm gonna do Pillars of Preparedness, teach this thing, let me get a book deal. Nobody wants to touch me." For years, they thought I was fringe. I mean, I've been called everything from right-wing extremist, which is bizarre because I'm half-Asian, to, you know, neo-Nazi, to all this weird stuff, because I'm, I'm talking about this idea of being prepared. Just two weeks ago, I signed a book deal with a major publisher that vetted me for

• 3:11:09Speaker 01

  two years, which means they just paid attention, about writing a book on preparedness. And I'm like, That's big, that's huge for me. One, to be able to impact somebody via the written word, which I grew up with, is impactful. But two, a publisher that published Michelle Obama and also Jordan Peterson, on both sides of the spectrum, is taking a chance on me. And I am allowed, I'm humbled by the opportunity, allowed to have the opportunity to pass this word and mainstream to people who might be thinking about this but don't know how to contextualize it, is a sign to me that this is making sense to people. Like, it's a hard genre because it's so, it's spread so thin.

• 3:11:53Speaker 01

  But the time and the place that we live in our society right now where people's cellphones, their virtual realities are more important and significant than their actual reality, at the detriment to their physical and mental health and wellness. It needs, we need to be bringing this to bear in conversations to get people involved in something outside of their cellphone. So, it's my mission, but it's become something so different than I thought it was going to become as far as scaling a business vertical.

• 3:12:27Jocko Willink?

  Let me tell you what I think.

• 3:12:30Jocko Willink?

  This is what I think is very cool. And, and I was wondering if you would get there, just from what you've seen so far, to what my perspective is. And what my perspective is, is you're sort of like, what, everything you just said to me is the tip of the iceberg, actually. It's just the tip of the iceberg, and I'll tell you what I mean by that. If you look at, for me, jujitsu. Jujitsu for me was a huge component of my life. Not because I learned how to fight, not because I got in good physical condition, but because I learned a new way of thinking. And I started to understand the world from a different perspective. And I started to see correlations between jujitsu, combat, tactics, leadership,

• 3:13:15Jocko Willink?

  interacting with other human beings, the way I approach problems, the way I thought. Jujitsu became a way of thinking, and it's actually, I can't say it's, jujitsu is that way of thinking, because it's everything combined. It turns and translates into this sort of just the way of thinking for me. Well, when I start thinking about being prepared, about handling situations, about reacting to emergency situations, about handling contingencies, all those things you can learn, you can learn for the specific, for the specific genre of actually applying to a survival situation,

• 3:14:00Jocko Willink?

  just like you can learn an arm lock for actually applying to a grappling situation. But guess what? You can take that mindset and you can apply to everything that you do. So you can take what you're teaching about thinking through a problem, about foresight, about preparing for a certain scenario and the contingencies around that. You can actually apply that, not just to how you're going to handle a fire or an earthquake or a civil unrest, but how are you going to handle a business situation that you're in? How are you going to handle an interaction with someone in your own family? It's not a hostile interaction, but it's an interaction that you need to think through. So the way that you're talking about preparedness,

• 3:14:44Jocko Willink?

  and I've told this to people before, they're like, well, you know, how good do you have to get at jiu-jitsu? Like, I mean, at a certain point, you're a blue belt, you're 225 pounds, Jaco. You're okay, you can handle yourself in a self-defense situation. Yeah, absolutely, I can. What about shooting? Well, what are the chances, Jaco, that you're going to get into a gunfight? You're 49 years old, you know, you've got a wife and kids, you live in a nice area. What are the chances you're getting in a gunfight? Why do you need to be training? Why do you need to, why should I be training? People ask me, why should I work with a firearm? Well, let me tell you why. Because, yeah, you have this narrow chance that, for whatever reason, somebody enters your house,

• 3:15:26Jocko Willink?

  or you're in a situation, somebody tries to steal your car, hurts you, or whatever, where you've got to use your firearm. The chances of that, let's face it, they're tiny. But guess what you get? Guess what you get from practicing an art like shooting? You learn how to control your breathing. You learn how to detach. You learn how to refocus after you throw a shot. And, and still take the next clean shot without worrying about what just happened. You learn how to calm, you, you calm yourself down. You learn how to associate or disassociate from problems that are happening right in front of you. So there's applications to the art of shooting a weapon that you can apply to everything you could do.

• 3:16:08Jocko Willink?

  There's applications for what you learn in jujitsu that apply to everything you do. There's applications to, if I went to one of your courses. And you taught me how to, what, what I should put together for a go bag for a car. Here's what you should think through. Cool. I can promise you, I'm going to use that. I'm going to put a go bag in my car. I'm going to put together a good one. But guess what else I'm going to do? I'm going to think about a contingency for my business. And what we can do as a business to prepare for a certain contingency. What do I need to prepare? What do I need to think through as a leader? To, to be ready? So you're talking about a narrow, when you talk about this mindset of preparedness. You're talking about a pretty narrow thing. How am I going to survive a situation?

• 3:16:53Jocko Willink?

  To me, it's applicable to everything that a human being does. And, and why does a special operations guy? When there's a, a, you know, an earthquake or a flood or a car accident? Part of it, part of the reason that they survive is, hey? They know what to do. They know how to break a windshield. They know what to do in that specific technique. They technically know what to do. But part of it is, number one, they've been under pressure before. And number two, they know how to think through the problem that they're facing. So what you're teaching isn't only applicable to survival. It's actually applicable to everything.

• 3:17:34Jocko Willink?

  And that to me is, it should broaden your audience to everybody. And I like the fact that you said, you know, there's a certain alignment with what you're doing. The alignment is, you know, we run one of this with businesses sometimes. If you go higher up enough. The, the alignment ladder in a business. You know, you might want to do something one way. I want to do something a different way. Ultimately, I say, hey, listen, do we want to take care of our clients? Yes. Do we want to make some money? Yes, we do. Do we want to take care of the people on our team? Yes, we do. So we're going to be aligned there. Like, there's no one, you're not going to, if you and I are in business together, you're not going to say, well, actually, I don't want to make any money. Or actually, no, I want to screw over our clients. Or actually, no, I don't want to take care of our team.

• 3:18:19Jocko Willink?

  No, you're not going to say that. And if you did say that, we're not working together. But 99% of the time, you go to any business, they, you can go to a point where you're aligned, where you and I are thinking the same. Hey, listen, we want to take care of our clients, we want to take care of our team, we want to make some money. We can agree with that. What you just said, I don't care where you're from. I don't care where you're from. You take, what did you say, a liberal in San Francisco? Or a freaking redneck in Montana? And you pull them into a room and say, do you want to be able to take care of your family? What are they going to say? They're going to say, yes. Do you want to be able to handle yourself in a pressure situation? They're going to say, yes. Do you want to be able to take care of yourself? They're going to say, yes. So there's an alignment that's inherent in what you're teaching.

• 3:19:04Jocko Willink?

  That absolutely will bring people together, but it'll make them better, not just because they're able to survive. It'll, it'll teach them a way of thinking that will progress them in every aspect of their life. And that's why I think it's even more powerful than what you're saying. Because I could take some company executives and send them to one of your courses. And, and yes, it's a cool benefit that they're going to learn about survival. Just like I run a program where we take our guy, we take civilians. We teach them how to do a room clearance, we teach them how to move between buildings, right? This is a, this is a, this is a 45-minute session, right? How to clear a room and how to move from building to building in a group. That's what we teach them.

• 3:19:48Jocko Willink?

  Then we say, okay, here's your mission. And we start giving them missions. Now, what do they learn about clearing buildings? Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter at all. But what do they learn about leadership? What do they learn about thinking under pressure? What do they learn about how to get people to move in the right direction? What do they learn about being able to detach and take a step back? And not get caught up in the firefight we use, we use later attack, not get caught up in their laser gun and, and freaking out about that. So we take people and put them through this tactical training, not so that they can become great tacticians. But so that they can lead better. So what you're doing, hey, listen, it's great. You put people through some training that they learn survival skills. But to me,

• 3:20:31Jocko Willink?

  And even even higher up of the hierarchy of of benefits is that they learn a way of thinking that's going to benefit them in every aspect of their life. I think that's badass.

• 3:20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it. The the lessons learned that we found is exactly that, that most often people aren't exposed. They they they have limited exposure. So when they have the opportunity to do something like, you know, a five day experience, like we have, you know, we do corporate training, we do, um, we've done it. I've consulted for Oracle and some other companies. It's not about, like you said, the technical experience. The bottom line is they're not going to learn enough reps to build that technical expertise, unless that's on their own. But the life lessons they learn and taking it back and processing stress, like you said, is so important and valuable. I think what's happening with

• 3:21:21Speaker 01

  this introduction of technology in our lives is it's limiting our ability to be exposed. So, um, one of the vices that I give for people who are like, how do I change my mindset? You know, a lot of people say mindset, mindset, mindset. What the hell does that mean? In in our field of expertise, it has to do with resilience, your ability to bounce back, your ability once suppressed to bounce back and to be stronger, to thrive instead of just survive and get by. So when we expose people to new challenges, it doesn't have to be extreme. You could just, I mean, we have extreme versions of this. We do SERE School. We have a civilian SERE School, which is fun to run. But those guys will come back from that experience,

• 3:22:03Speaker 01

  from a five day SERE experience, survival, escape, resist, evade. And they'll go, this is the most impactful thing I've ever done in my life. And I'm like, really? And like, okay, let me reflect on my impactful experiences. Oh, yeah, Ranger School. When I was in Ranger School, and I'm exposed, and I'm I'm vulnerable. It's impactful because it's something different and we understand this obviously about even single-celled organisms. If you're exposed to trauma, that is the first stage in growth because no growth takes place without exposure to trauma. And so whatever that form factor is, getting pummeled on the mats in jujitsu, you are learning as you go. You're breaking

• 3:22:46Speaker 01

  to build. And so what's fascinating about this whole movement that I think is preparedness is that it's positive. There's not a lot of negative things that take place in preparing people to be prepared for that worst-case scenario. You see a lot of positive impacts on community, with law enforcement, with relationships, with people's understanding. And for me, getting all this collective of information and making sense of it and being able to clearly disseminate that is the biggest challenge. But it's the funnest thing about the business. I mean, the LMS, for example, of creating this idea that you could learn

• 3:23:28Speaker 01

  online and you could learn about these lifesaving things. The naysayers came out and said, why would you teach somebody how to apply a tourniquet online? Like, don't you think that's kind of like a, it's high in liability and it's neglectful? I'm like, dude, you could build a rocket ship inside of your garage off a YouTube video. So I think I could teach somebody how to stop the bleed with a technical tourniquet applied to their body to help them survive. And so I'm fascinated by it. It's my passion, obviously, but I think you're right. I think especially when it comes to leadership, there's a breakdown in our societies with guys not willing to get off the bench and do anything for themselves. I was doing

• 3:24:08Speaker 01

  a podcast with Pete Blaber. He was a former CAG commander, wrote The Mission, The Man and Me, and just wrote part two of that, which is The Common Sense Way. And one of the things he talks about is this idea of collaboration. And when you collaborate with somebody, when you have communication and you have reciprocation, then you you create the environment of us willing to learn from each other. But you also give people the confidence to stand up in their own communities and do something about it. I don't care if it's not their community. Like, yeah, you want to run for city council, that's great. You don't, and you just want to stand up and get off your ass for your family, or even for yourself.

• 3:24:48Speaker 01

  You're fat, you're sloppy, you're lazy, and you can make a change inside yourself because you've you come to that realization. That's good. And for me, there's no revenue generated there. It could be a podcast, it could be one-way dissemination. That impact is priceless. It's worth everything in the world.

• 3:25:08Jocko Willink?

  So what are people going to do if they want to get in the game with you? So they go to they go to fieldcraftsurvival.com?

• 3:25:17Speaker 01

  That's it. I mean, fieldcraft survival. Look, we're all over the map on fieldcraft survival. We got a podcast, we got the website. We could port you to the we the prepared.com, which is the LMS or or members dot American contingency dot com. The start point is start like in this experience, listening to the long-form versions for free from YouTube, from podcasts, and start developing an understanding of what you want. And then, you know, it's it's it's all over the map on like on Instagram, fieldcraft survival. My personal is mike dot a dot Glover. But every day I'm living this. One thing I haven't detracted from is consistency. I might be making wrong business decisions. I mean, I might be jacked up in many ways.

• 3:26:01Speaker 01

  But one thing I could never be criticized for is consistency. So I wake up every single day with this on my mind. And in the last six years that I started this venture, I don't think I've had one day off. And that's okay, because that my grind is this purpose. And, you know, selfishly, I don't know if this is a tactic, maybe it's done when we're unaware of it. But I've built a thing around me that felt and feels like the team life that I had, the culture that I came from. And I get the feeling in it in here and in your gym and this and the people that I've met. And in a similar experience, I'm doing the same thing on my end in a parallel, but also synergistic universe.

• 3:26:45Jocko Willink?

  Is there any mistakes that you made from a business perspective that were close to catastrophic? Have you screwed up anything really bad or they all just kind of little learn as you go?

• 3:26:54Speaker 01

  Kind of learn as you go. I think early on, I almost made a mistake early on where I was told in the diversification of all the things I was doing was too much. And I get that. If you looked at me even today, I mean, there's a lot of things we got going on. But at the time, all the verticals were spread so thin that nothing was gaining traction. And so I was told, find one vertical, one thing, one kit, one training session, and double down on that. Create one little tiny vertical scale that you can make revenue from, and then diversify. And I said, no, I can't do that. I said, because this whole thing that's preparedness is very diversified in the first place. I can't teach mindset without teaching physical training.

• 3:27:38Speaker 01

  I can't teach physical training without an understanding of a mobility platform into your life. So we have to do everything at once. And so doing that was challenging because it almost broke me. I mean, literally, it broke me. Like, I lived in my business with my girlfriend for four months, and we literally lived in a warehouse for four months and showered. It didn't even have a shower. It had a pump shower that we camped with. That was our living circumstance. But you make those sacrifices in business, and then all of a sudden, everything scaled at once. And then you're like, oh, okay, so this is the place to be now. So now it's about tactics and, you know, developing the right flow, supply chain issues, all these things that everybody's dealing with in business. It's a train wreck,

• 3:28:24Speaker 01

  but I wouldn't trade it for the world.

• 3:28:25Jocko Willink?

  And where are you based out of?

• 3:28:26Speaker 01

  So right now, we're in Heber City, Utah. Headquarters is there. We're standing up. Kevin Owens, a former Sniper teammate of mine, who's unilaterally running Phil Craft NC. He's standing that up. And then Raul Martinez, my training director, has 20 subcontractors that teach all over the US. He's standing up in... In Arizona, near Phoenix, North Anthem, Arizona, which is north of Phoenix. So, we're standing up these small little verticals. Evan Hayfer, who's a buddy of mine, owns Black Rifle Coffee, has given me the opportunity to sell in a display about the size of this table, Phil Craft Survival swag and gear that we sell for equipment. And that will be in every Black Rifle Coffee.

• 3:29:11Speaker 01

  It's in two right now, it'll be in four next week, be in, hopefully in a thousand, when he's competing with Starbucks. But, yeah, we're all over the map, man.

• 3:29:19Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking awesome. Well, hey, man, I think we've been going for, I don't know, we get four hours yet? I don't know, three and a half, something like that? I don't want to, I don't want to take up too much more of your time, and I know you got a little, little plane to catch. Echo, Echo Charles, you got anything?

• 3:29:37Speaker 02

  I do not. Thanks for coming. Good to meet you.

• 3:29:39Speaker 01

  Man, nice meeting you too, man.

• 3:29:40Jocko Willink?

  No questions from Echo Charles?

• 3:29:42Speaker 02

  Not today. We covered it all.

• 3:29:45Jocko Willink?

  You, you, one podcast, we were talking about living off the land.

• 3:29:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:29:50Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, I was a, I was a radio man in my enlisted days, so I was always traveling light and, you know, carry like no food, just water, batteries in the radio. And, and then we were talking about whatever was, we were talking about the Civil War and how those guys were just, they would live off the land, right? And Echo chimed in the fact that, you know, he had also, he could also live off the land.

• 3:30:16Speaker 02

  That exact, okay, alright.

• 3:30:18Jocko Willink?

  He was saying, you know, if he's going to LA for a couple of days,

• 3:30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:30:21Jocko Willink?

  doesn't need to pack a lot.

• 3:30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:30:23Jocko Willink?

  Cause worst case scenario, live off the land. You didn't bring a toothbrush, brush? Cool, roll into Walmart.

• 3:30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:30:29Jocko Willink?

  Roll into Walgreens, you get a toothbrush. Wow, that's what I'm talking about.

• 3:30:33Speaker 01

  Urban survival.

• 3:30:33Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking urban survival, man. So I'm surprised you didn't ask about like what the best, you know, store was to get toothbrushes at.

• 3:30:40Speaker 01

  CVS, man, you're CVS, man, they're pretty consistent.

• 3:30:43Speaker 02

  Whatever, Brett, conceptually, it was the same thing. See what I'm saying? Instead of packing a big bag or whatever, like we live off the land.

• 3:30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, urban sprawl. That's an urban sprawl, that's urban land. It's the same thing.

• 3:30:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:30:57Speaker 01

  It's an ecosystem, it's an ecosystem.

• 3:30:58Speaker 02

  Let the environment provide.

• 3:31:00Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 3:31:00Speaker 02

  Right?

• 3:31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:31:01Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 3:31:02Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Sounds good. Mike, any closing thoughts?

• 3:31:06Speaker 01

  No, I just want to just take a second and just say thank you for the opportunity. I will, we'll say, just like I say on a lot of podcasts with guys of your caliber and your background, that you're doing something that I wish a lot of guys with our background would do, which is get off the bench and take a stand and commit to this burden of responsibility. What you're doing is growing a business, but what you're also doing is impacting young people's lives and every walk of life to do something with their lives. That's purpose, that's different than anything else that's a structure and business plan. This is an impact on culture. I think from, you know, as far back as we could record, every major battle that's been

• 3:31:51Speaker 01

  fought, those men came from war and affected popular culture. Whether it was cutting, you know, P51 Mustangs, making hot rods, chopping Harleys, having an extreme impact, there is a burden of responsibility of men like you and me that need to step up and accept that reality. The John Plasters, the John Stryker Meyers of the world are the ones who affected my life and me stepping up and doing something about it. I'm not talking about just military service, I'm talking about doing something impactful for your life. And this, the books, the business, that's the vertical in revenue.

• 3:32:29Speaker 01

  That's what scales the hierarchy and grows, but the impact, it transcends across society. And without you, without your abilities to stay in it and stay committed, we wouldn't, we wouldn't be affecting popular culture like we are. And I think you're leading the way in that way. I'm humbled to have been on this podcast and to have the opportunity to speak to your audience, but I just want to let you know that personally. It's a big deal and you're doing it. You did it in military service. To me, we come from similar lines. That's not the greatest impact, the greatest impact is what you're doing right now. So I appreciate it.

• 3:33:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, thanks, I appreciate it. I'm not sure of all that you've made me out to be, but um. When I look at what you did in the past and freaking just talking about your deployments, I mean, not even, there's not even any words to describe. And, and I know that you sit there and think in the back of your head of like, you know, guys that did 12 more deployments compared to your whatever, five or six. And I think that's the feeling we all have all the time. And you even said it today. There's, you found out, I found out, there's, there's someone, and not just someone, but there's a bunch of people way better than we are at that job. And God bless them for going out there and getting after it.

• 3:33:47Jocko Willink?

  And, and that being said, what you did to hold the line, what you did to carry the torch, appreciate it. And then back at you once again, what you're doing right now. You know, I, I think what you're doing right now is gonna have a huge impact and is having huge impact, getting people's mindsets straight.

• 3:34:07Jocko Willink?

  In a time when mindsets are all over the map. Seeing you do that, that's impressive. And I hope you keep doing it, brother. Thanks, brother. Will do. Right on.

• 3:34:22Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Mike Glover has left the building. Appreciate Mike coming on.

• 3:34:31Jocko Willink?

  Freaking great story.

• 3:34:35Jocko Willink?

  A lot of incredible stuff. And what he's doing right now is awesome.

• 3:34:40Jocko Willink?

  Talking about preparedness, talking about being ready.

• 3:34:46Jocko Willink?

  Seems like we should start fundamentally, there's one area we can start to be ready.

• 3:34:50Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:34:51Jocko Willink?

  Today. Echo Charles, what do you think?

• 3:34:53Speaker 02

  There's always ways to be ready, be more ready.

• 3:34:59Speaker 02

  I think that self-evaluation part was kinda critical. I mean, it wasn't surprising, like, oh, you know, like, but it was a good, like, kinda reminder. It's like, that is like one of those answers that lies like right be below the surface. You already know is there, but it's not always revealed. Self-reflect, evaluate where are we, you know?

• 3:35:19Jocko Willink?

  You would think that's obvious, but it's not.

• 3:35:21Speaker 02

  It's not obvious.

• 3:35:21Jocko Willink?

  A lot of people go through life without evaluation, evaluating where they're at, where they can improve, what they can do better.

• 3:35:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true. And I'd say this before where it's in a way, depends on how you look at it. It's a good problem to have. It means a lot of our problems are solved. You know, if you're not worried about this or that happening, that just means that. It's not happening very often, you know, kind of a thing, which is a good thing. Solved problems tends to be a good thing, tends to.

• 3:35:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:35:51Speaker 02

  Anyway, so we gotta be careful about that kind of stuff. We do want to keep ourselves ready, strong, healthy.

• 3:36:00Speaker 02

  You won't have to exercise strength every single day, aside from in the gym. See what I'm saying? Like you, doing 20 rep squats. Right? Like the results, the reason you do that. That reason is not going to be demonstrated, displayed, put into play every single day in real life. It's not gonna. I guess maybe conceptually it might, but no, it won't. But there's a bigger purpose here, see what I'm saying? It's to stay ready, realistically, as ready as you possibly can. And all these different elements. So while we're on this path of readiness, capability, health,

• 3:36:44Speaker 02

  mental and physical, we might need some supplementation. Good news is Jaco has supplementation called Jaco Fuel. So let's start with Discipline Go, RTD cans. It is the new, it's the new era of energy drinks.

• 3:37:01Jocko Willink?

  Actual energy drinks.

• 3:37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, Mike Glover said something real simple, but real true. He's like, I like it. I like that it's healthy. You don't have to worry about poisoning yourself anymore. So I'm paraphrasing that last part, but it's true though. And it, you know, I said before too, where yeah, sometimes I'm gonna drink two of those in a row, sometimes three.

• 3:37:23Jocko Willink?

  I did drink two of them just now.

• 3:37:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:37:26Jocko Willink?

  In a row.

• 3:37:26Speaker 02

  So you don't have to, there's no backend price anymore. It's like, oh wait, I'm actually technically.

• 3:37:31Jocko Willink?

  I'm not worried about becoming a type 2 diabetic this afternoon.

• 3:37:36Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 3:37:36Jocko Willink?

  I didn't just drink 72 grams of sugar or whatever.

• 3:37:39Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 3:37:40Jocko Willink?

  No, I had monk fruit, which is technically good for you.

• 3:37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a good point. You made this off air, by the way. Where you're like, yeah, you know, there's five calories and some the new ones is 15 calories because it comes from food. That's right. The sweetener comes from food, not some chemical that shouldn't be in your body. They can't provide any kind of calories.

• 3:38:00Jocko Willink?

  Between five and 10 calories per can. Why is that? Like you just said, because it's not chemicals. You know, it has zero calories, a chemical. That's what has zero calories. What has some calories? Monk fruit has some calories. Five.

• 3:38:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's one of those deals, man. Like I said, the new era of energy drinks. You can drink some energy drinks. There's your energy drink right there on the path 100% too. It's not like, it's like, well, you know, put something in there to preserve it.

• 3:38:30Jocko Willink?

  Partial, it's not partial path. 100% on the path.

• 3:38:32Speaker 02

  100% no deviation. So yes, you can get these. There's new flavors out, by the way. You're gonna have to check them out yourself. Very impactful, exciting flavors as far as flavors go. Anyway, you can get them at Wawa if you're in the area that you have Wawa and get them at Vitamin Chop.

• 3:38:51Jocko Willink?

  By the way, talking about flavors, uh, what I find interesting is some families of beverages, they kind of all taste the same. They might have a different label on it or a different name. This stuff tastes legitimately different. Like you might have one and be like, this is the best thing I've ever tasted. You might have another one, not like it. Try a different one. Because there's definitely more variation in flavor with these flavors than there is with a normal company, a normal drink who's just like, look, they know what the flavor profile is to get people addicted. So they put a bunch of sugar in there, name it something and cool, they're moving forward.

• 3:39:33Jocko Willink?

  We're not doing that. We're giving you legit flavor profiles with different tastes.

• 3:39:38Speaker 02

  It's a good point.

• 3:39:39Jocko Willink?

  Keep your mind open.

• 3:39:40Speaker 02

  Also, you can get them at originusa.com. Also, as far as supplementation goes, we have stuff for your joints, super krill oils and joint warfare, also for immunity, vitamin D3 and Cold War. Also, if you need additional protein, if you want additional protein.

• 3:39:59Jocko Willink?

  Or if you want dessert.

• 3:40:02Speaker 02

  And or you want dessert boom I had one last night not to go too deep into it uh the peanut butter one peanut butter chocolate that a total win and it's not like I was like hmm let me just choose the I just grabbed any one and it happened to be that so I'm like cool I I went kinda hard though I don't recommend this all the time I put some chocolate chips in there on accident put too many not that not way too many but too many and then banana

• 3:40:30Jocko Willink?

  this kinda disqualifies everything you're saying

• 3:40:32Speaker 02

  little bit huh

• 3:40:33Jocko Willink?

  you can't just add chocolate chips and be like oh it tasted really good you added chocolate chips bro

• 3:40:39Speaker 02

  but it was like almost too sweet I think because of the additional chocolate chips

• 3:40:46Jocko Willink?

  yeah

• 3:40:47Speaker 02

  I pounded the whole thing don't get it wrong it was still very very good you know what you do you you know those uh the dark chocolate chunks you can buy dark chocolate like you know whatever percentage put that in there that would have been perfect even if I accidentally put too much that milkshake anyway there's other flavors as well so don't you know don't slack on that either way whatever flavor you like milk additional protein another clean deal it's not like some sugar filled deal

• 3:41:16Jocko Willink?

  it is once you put freaking chocolate chips in it

• 3:41:18Speaker 02

  you know it's gonna depend on the level of uh

• 3:41:23Jocko Willink?

  freaking turn into Pete Roberts with the freaking sugar cubes under your tongue

• 3:41:27Speaker 02

  it was just one of those things you know it happens sometimes

• 3:41:30Jocko Willink?

  I don't put chocolate chips in there it tastes freaking delicious

• 3:41:33Speaker 02

  yeah totally does

• 3:41:34Jocko Willink?

  so there you go get some milk get some get what you need

• 3:41:39Speaker 02

  yep

• 3:41:39Jocko Willink?

  chocolatefuel.com and and by the way this is important

• 3:41:46Jocko Willink?

  it's important

• 3:41:46Speaker 02

  oh just this is important I thought you were gonna say something that is important

• 3:41:49Jocko Willink?

  important is if you wanna get you if you wanna get free shipping get a subscription if you subscribe you get free shipping um we know we're competing with some large maybe even the largest of organizations in the world that are shipping stuff for free no big deal we're shipping for free too subscribe boom we got you

• 3:42:09Speaker 02

  yep it's true um also I mentioned originusa.com

• 3:42:13Speaker 02

  This is where you can get American made denim, American made jujitsu gees, rash guards. So basically apparel for work, apparel for jujitsu, and then everywhere in between.

• 3:42:27Jocko Willink?

  Basically apparel for life, for everything.

• 3:42:30Speaker 02

  For the whole gig. The whole gig, yep, 100%. OriginUSA.com, again, all made in America, from the ingredients or materials, not ingredients. The materials all the way to the end product, boom, all made in America. So you're supporting yourself, but you're supporting America as well.

• 3:42:50Speaker 02

  Also, Jaco's store. Win-win, big time.

• 3:42:52Jocko Willink?

  Big time.

• 3:42:53Speaker 02

  Also, Jaco's store called Jaco Store. So you go to JacoStore.com and this is where you can get rash guards, t-shirts, trucker hats, right, the flex fit hats, hoodies, all this good, cool stuff, representing the path. Discipline equals freedom, good.

• 3:43:10Speaker 02

  When things are going bad, there's always some good that comes from it. Iconic video, words from a man right here. Unless you want to represent that, that's where you can get the shirts on Jaco's store. So.

• 3:43:22Jocko Willink?

  Is it the video that's iconic or is it the words?

• 3:43:25Speaker 02

  I don't know. I didn't evaluate it, it kind of seems like both, I guess, technically, but.

• 3:43:29Jocko Willink?

  You're saying you made an iconic video is what I'm hearing.

• 3:43:33Speaker 02

  Either way.

• 3:43:34Jocko Willink?

  Good job.

• 3:43:34Speaker 02

  Either way, we have a subscription situation as well for shirts. Design's a little bit different.

• 3:43:40Jocko Willink?

  Iconic designs that you're making?

• 3:43:41Speaker 02

  Well, you know, it's, that's a subject for debate, I think, but people do seem to like them. You know, you want a cool new shirt every month, high quality, by the way. Boom, you can subscribe for that, to that, it's called the Shirt Locker. You can get it on Jaco's store. Also, subscribe to this podcast if you haven't already. Leave a review if you're in the mood. That's kind of cool.

• 3:44:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's cool. Also, we have Jaco Unraveling, which I do with my, my brother, Daryl Cooper, DC.

• 3:44:13Jocko Willink?

  Grounded Podcast, Warrior Kid Podcast, you can also join the underground, JacoUnderground.com. We have alternative podcasts, we're going into some pretty cool subjects on there. Look, we made that in the event that there's problems in the, in the podcast realm. And people start trying to block or erase or put, inject advertise, all this stuff that they could do. If that gets out of hand, which it could, we will make adjustments and we'll be on JacoUnderground.com. If you want to support that, you can sign up, you can subscribe, it's eight dollars and 18 cents a month. Then you can listen to all these alternative additional podcasts that we're making.

• 3:44:54Jocko Willink?

  And we're going to do other cool stuff that we haven't really even started yet, but we got cool ideas.

• 3:45:02Jocko Willink?

  That will come out. We have a YouTube channel, subscribe to that if you want to see the videos that I am the assistant director of. And the videos that sometimes I, I am in them, which is kind of cool that I do the dual role. I both assistant direct and I.

• 3:45:17Speaker 02

  And you're the talent.

• 3:45:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, both.

• 3:45:21Speaker 02

  Either way, yeah, it is true. We do have a YouTube channel.

• 3:45:24Jocko Willink?

  Does it make you mad when you're, when you're directing a video? And then I give a little suggestion and it kind of makes a big difference. Cause you always seem a little bit frustrated by that. You always seem like a little bit frustrated. And you kind of, you kind of, the good thing I'll say, you're humble enough to be like, you do the shot, whatever the adjustment is. But then I feel like it, it, I feel like you have a hard, I think those nights you don't sleep as good as you do. If you come in and you got the shots.

• 3:45:56Speaker 02

  Well, a wise man once told me, and when I say once, I mean plenty of times. That as a leader, I need to always, my goal should be to do your team member's idea, not your own idea.

• 3:46:10Jocko Willink?

  So from a leadership perspective, you do a good job of going like, yeah, hey, good, that sounds like a good shot. We'll do that shot. I like it a lot. That's good.

• 3:46:18Speaker 02

  Even if it's an 80% solution.

• 3:46:20Jocko Willink?

  Even if it's, even if, even if the shot's an 80% solution. What I'm asking you, so from a leadership, I'm giving you an, you know, an A minus, you know? But what I'm saying is. When you go home at night and the little demons start to knock at the door and you wonder, you wonder why the assistant director had to come up with that shot.

• 3:46:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:46:41Jocko Willink?

  Had to, had to say, hey, let me give you a little, little help.

• 3:46:45Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:46:47Speaker 02

  Like, like I said.

• 3:46:48Jocko Willink?

  Do you, do you?

• 3:46:49Speaker 02

  It makes me happy that, you know, we were able, we were able to collectively come up with a viable idea.

• 3:46:55Jocko Willink?

  You want, you want to know why you got the A minus?

• 3:46:57Speaker 02

  Why?

• 3:46:57Jocko Willink?

  Cause I can see it in your face. I can see it in your face. I can see the frustration when you don't come up with the shot. When it's, when it's, when you have to take advice from the A D. When you have to take advice from the A D. Yep. That's when I realized he's a little frustrated. I can see it in your, in your face. I can see it in your eyes. I can kind of feel it too.

• 3:47:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, well.

• 3:47:18Jocko Willink?

  I'll give you credit. It's still an A.

• 3:47:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:47:20Jocko Willink?

  Because you still do your best to get the good shot. I haven't had you sabotage a shot yet and said, yeah, you know, it actually doesn't work. But I can see that it's frustrating.

• 3:47:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you keep talking to me, talking to me with that in condescending tone. I'm about to go C plus on you pretty soon.

• 3:47:37Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 3:47:37Speaker 02

  Either way. Anyway. Psychological Warfare. If you don't know what that is, it's an album with tracks, Jaco talking to you through your ears. But why and how to get past moments of weakness? Even if he imposed those weaknesses on you himself. As the case may or may not be sometimes.

• 3:47:58Jocko Willink?

  Check. Hey, Dakota Myers got a company called Flipside Canvas, flipsidecanvas.com. You can get cool stuff to hang on your wall. I got a bunch of books. I got a new book coming out. It's called Final Spin. It's a.

• 3:48:12Jocko Willink?

  We're not sure what to call it. It does tell a story. Parts of it are not written normal. It's a strange story. There's some interesting characters in there.

• 3:48:23Speaker 02

  Literature or something?

• 3:48:25Jocko Willink?

  Maybe literature, maybe poetry, maybe a transcript. We're not sure what it's called. It's a new form of writing. If you want to check it out.

• 3:48:37Jocko Willink?

  It's called Final Spin. Pre-order it so that the publisher knows to print a bunch of copies. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, the code, the evaluation, the protocol, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, Way of the Warrior Kid, one, two, and three, and four. Then we have Mikey and the Dragons, we got About Face by Hackworth, we got Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership that I wrote with my brother Leif Bab and who I also have a leadership consulting problem, a leadership consulting company where we solve problems through leadership. Go to EchelonFront.com for details on that. We have Extreme Ownership Academy, ExtremeOwnership.com where we have virtual learning and live

• 3:49:20Jocko Willink?

  virtual learning. Leadership is not an inoculation, you get a shot and now you know it. No, you gotta go to the gym every day, the leadership gym. Come and get it. Next live event is the muster in Phoenix, August 17th and 18th, and then Las Vegas, October 28th and 29th. We've sold all these out. Go to ExtremeOwnership.com, click on events, get registered. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got a charity organization, and if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org.

• 3:50:05Jocko Willink?

  And if you want, if you want more of my colorless chroniclings, or you need more of Echo's inane interjections, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook, Echoes@EchoCharles, I am at @JockoWink, Mike Glover, Mike Glover's on Twitter, MikeAGlover1 on Instagram, Mike.A.Glover. And then, of course, he's got Fieldcraft Survival and FieldcraftSurvival.com. Check his stuff out, lots of great information.

• 3:50:42Jocko Willink?

  And, well, thanks to Mike once again for coming on, for sharing your experiences and knowledge, Mike, it's awesome. Even more thanks for your service, for taking the fight to the enemy, which you most certainly did worldwide, freaking outstanding, thank you. And to all our military personnel that are right now out there taking the fight to the enemy.

• 3:51:07Jocko Willink?

  Thank you for what you're doing every day to preserve our way of life. And the same goes to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. Thank you for preserving our safety here at home.

• 3:51:26Jocko Willink?

  And everyone else out there, let me ask you a question.

• 3:51:31Jocko Willink?

  Are you ready? Are you ready for contingencies? Are you ready to maneuver if you have to? Are you ready to save your friends, your family, yourself? Are you ready?

• 3:51:46Jocko Willink?

  Well, you should be.

• 3:51:49Jocko Willink?

  We all should be. So get your mic glover on.

• 3:51:54Jocko Willink?

  Train, plan, prepare by going out there every day and getting after it.

• 3:52:04Jocko Willink?

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