337: When You Think You've "Made it", You Can Still Do More. W/ SEAL Officer, Mike Hayes

Mike Hayes. Navy SEAL Officer and lessons from combat. 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 337 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  We had planned to take down an insurgent cell known to be located in three or four buildings in a village overrun with Sunni extremists. I was one of the four SEALs on the outskirts, making sure the area was clear before establishing the command and control position. Suddenly, through my grainy green night vision goggles, I saw a family. A mom, a dad, a 10-year-old kid, and a baby, sleeping outside a shack on a two-foot-high platform. This wasn't entirely unusual, given the middle of the night heat in Iraq, families often slept outside.

• 0:49Jocko Willink?

  But something about this situation felt off to me. I saw the father start to reach for something. Instinct told me this was bad. I spoke firmly and clearly to the guy behind me, calling his name, Joel, Joel, Joel, so he would know that I was about to make a move and could cover me. And I held the Iraqi man in my crosshairs, ready to shoot him at any moment as I rushed as fast as I could toward him before he could grab what did turn out to be a weapon.

• 1:23Jocko Willink?

  He was reaching for an AK rifle, just as I put my foot on his arm so he wouldn't be able to point the weapon at me or any of my teammates.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  Then I quickly put my muzzle on his chest and subdued him and enlisted Joel's help to properly detain him with flex cuffs.

• 1:41Jocko Willink?

  I could have shot him at any time, but as I first approached him, I didn't know for sure that he was armed, and my instant and instinctive calculation made me confident that I would be fast enough to get him before he could take a shot at me or anyone else if he did have a weapon.

• 2:00Jocko Willink?

  It turned out that the AK was fully loaded and he had three magazines. And after we got him cuffed, his family under our control, and our target secured, we realized through our interrogation process that he was in fact the number two most-wanted enemy in western Iraq at the time.

• 2:23Jocko Willink?

  So that right there is an excerpt from a book, a book called Never Enough, which was written by Mike Hayes, who is a retired SEAL officer, who served 20 years in the teams, which included tours at Team Four, Team Eight, Team 10, and also a tour as the commanding officer of SEAL Team Two. And in his career, he deployed to South America, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He also served in the White House as part of the National Security Counselor Council under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

• 3:03Jocko Willink?

  And I actually did serve with him for a short time in Germany, when he was the operations officer, and we are lucky enough to have him here with us tonight to discuss some of his experiences and lessons learned. Mike, thanks for joining us, man.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Jaco, great to see you, brother. Great to be here.

• 3:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we haven't, we haven't hung out much since we were playing Combat Water Polo in Germany, which was circa 1998. And you were stationed at Unit Two. Were you the Ops Officer?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  I was the Assistant Ops Officer, but close enough.

• 3:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you were the Assistant, oh, that's right, COXO Ops. You were the Assistant Ops Officer. So that, you know what that made me, right? As an Ensign, I was like the Assistant Assistant Ops Officer. So we'd have these games, these water polo games. Did you actually play water polo?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  I didn't play in college, but Man Alive Combat Water Polo with you was one of my best memories.

• 4:07Jocko Willink?

  I obviously sucked at water polo, but I was good at Jiu-Jitsu even, even then. And I used to more, for me, it was more just water Jiu-Jitsu, especially against the guys that actually could play water polo. And there were some guys, there was a couple of guys that played water polo in college. I don't know if you remember that.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:25Jocko Willink?

  There was a couple of guys that really needed to get taken out of the game, or at least mitigated as much as possible.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, for, for people listening, the rules, there's just really one rule. If you let go of the ball, you're supposed to let go of the person. So, you know, it was intense and I always did my best to be on your team.

• 4:46Jocko Willink?

  All right, on good times. All right, let's uh, let's, let's get right into it. Let's talk about you and let's talk about where, where you grew up. Where, so where'd you grow up? You're a New Englander, right?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well dad was in the Navy, so bounced around a good bit, but from ninth grade on Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

• 5:02Jocko Willink?

  What, what did your dad do in the Navy?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  He was a combination submariner out of college and then supply officer. So kind of a joint career there.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  And how long did he do?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  He did 20 years, 23 years or something like that.

• 5:14Jocko Willink?

  And so you were all over the place?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  I was until, until ninth grade.

• 5:19Jocko Willink?

  Where? Where were you up until ninth grade?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  I lived in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Guam, you know, just a couple of places around the, around the US and, and then just was really happy to settle down in, in ninth grade onward and call the biggest little state of Rhode Island home.

• 5:35Jocko Willink?

  How long were you in Guam for? What grades?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Seventh and eighth grade.

• 5:38Jocko Willink?

  Was that pretty, then, what year was this now?

• 5:41Speaker 01

  That was 83 to 85.

• 5:43Jocko Willink?

  So Guam was remote in 83, 85, 84.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  We'd get the Super Bowl mailed to us like four weeks after it happened, you know?

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  Cause I went to Guam in 1992, 93, when they finally, when they started sending seals there on deployment. And it was, I mean, you were not really connected. I mean, there's no internet or anything. So everything took a while to show up there.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  It was a, it was a, a very educational part of my growing up. You know, there's the simplicity. It was awesome, but at the same time, you know, you definitely give up some of the, the amenities of modern life.

• 6:23Jocko Willink?

  Did you go to school out in town or did you go to school on base?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Went to a, a private Catholic high school, actually junior high school, high school.

• 6:30Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, seventh and eighth grade.

• 6:32Jocko Willink?

  So you didn't get like the crap beat out of you by the Lokes?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I did. Of course I did.

• 6:41Jocko Willink?

  I got a friend that was at SDV in Hawaii, but he grew up in Hawaii. And he was actually at Team Three as well, but he said it was so, it was rough, man. Growing up, he was a Howley kid in Hawaii. He said it was rough, man. Echo Charles, commentary. Yes, sir. Rough? Rough for the Howley kids? I can't be, it depends. It really depends, for sure. Well, this particular guy, who's a great guy. Where I think he might have been claiming a lot of it had to do with him being Howley. I think it may have also had to do with his mouth, which was rather large. That is typically the case, yeah, for sure. Oh, classic. So, you know, you, you mentioned that your dad was in the Navy, but you, you have a section in here about your grandfather as well.

• 7:25Jocko Willink?

  And I'm just going to go to the book here and read this because it's a pretty awesome piece of history. You say, "My grandfather graduated from the Naval Academy in 1940 and was nursing a hangover in a bungalow on the Pearl Harbor Naval Base the morning of December 7th, 1941, when the Japanese began bombing. He was with seven others at the time, and when he heard the first wave of something going on, he knew he needed to get in his Jeep and go toward the harbor back to his ship. None of the others would go with him. They all believed they were safer where they were. He told me the scariest part was heading toward the ship, driving past a marine guarding the gate at 45 miles an hour without stopping, worrying the guard would shoot him.

• 8:08Jocko Willink?

  My grandfather made it to his ship and manned his battle station. He was onboard that ship for the third wave of attacks and tended to many of the wounded that day. In the wake of the bombing, he realized that he didn't want to spend his career on the ground or at sea. When he'd tell me this story, he would point up at the sky and say he wanted to be up there. He put in a transfer to become a pilot, and after flight school, as a World War II raged across the Pacific, he ended up stationed in the Aleutian Islands doing long-range bombing missions from the outermost islands and helping to attack strategic sites in northern Japan. He took over as the commanding officer of his 35-plane bombing squadron at age 26,

• 8:52Jocko Willink?

  after his own commanding officer was shot down. And he later served as a test pilot for the Navy's first helicopters and the commanding officer of the Navy's first helicopter squadron during the Korean War." He ended his career as a professor of naval science at Holy Cross and commanding officer of the school's ROTC training unit. He taught me about causes greater than self, what it means to serve, and how to keep pushing yourself to get better. No offense, bro, but if anyone should have written a book, it sounds like it would be the granddad, huh?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  I agree. Larger than life, he's a real, like, absolute hero. You know, it's, I was blessed to be able to grow up around a person that didn't say, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" He would always say, "Who do you want to be?" And, you know, there are a few of us on the, in the nation and on the planet that know what it's like to set your personal desire aside and assume risk for the nation. I grew up with the stories of my grandfather who did that quite regularly, and it was always inspirational, and I'm really thankful it unquestionably made an indelible mark on who I am.

• 10:03Jocko Willink?

  So he was the commander of the ROTC unit at Holy Cross? That's, that's, that's awesome to think you had a guy that was, that did all that. Did he fight in the Korean War when he was a helicopter pilot?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  So he was actually here at North Island, California, and as the, as HU-1 was the unit name, and I just remember it because I can still see a lot of his plaques that he had on his walls, which are almost memorized in my brain, but, but in Korea, what the Navy would do is put a couple helicopters out on some of the frigates and the ships, and then use that to go fly search and rescue. And so he, like, like, like those of us who are in leadership positions in combat, he didn't have to get into the cockpit and go fly. But every time he went to visit the troops and there was something that happened, he said, told the young JG to step aside and he was going to fly this one. And I'll never forget one great story that he told from Korea about, you know, being

• 11:00Speaker 01

  shot at quite heavily going in to rescue a pilot, and just very calmly looking at his copilot, and after this copilot was freaking out a bit and saying, "Sir, they're shooting at us, they're shooting at us, they're shooting at us," and, and of course, I'm sure my grandfather just, ice in his veins, just said, "Son, we're at war, that's their prerogative."

• 11:21Jocko Willink?

  I was on a, I was on a, uh, going on an operation. It was my first deployment to Iraq and we're driving in a convoy and we're heading south of Baghdad and it was a long transit. We had, we were going down to Natchez, as a matter of fact. So it was a long haul, few hours, maybe even like four or five hours. But we get ambushed and a couple RPGs, some, some small arms fire and the RPGs missed us. One of them went over and I'm in vehicle two and it was a long convoy. We had some, a vehicle, another type of vehicle in the middle. So we probably had six vehicles. So the, the, and you know, we're driving blacked out and it's at night and we, so we get, so my vehicle, we make it, no, nothing happens to us at all. And then

• 12:03Jocko Willink?

  we see, I, the first thing I saw was I was looking kind of outboard and I just see an explosion, which the first thing that I saw, well, I saw a couple of tracers, but then I saw an explosion, which was an RPG that went high and then another one went low. And we just, you know, kept driving. I think, I think, uh, you know, push through was the typical call or whatever. And, and then my platoon chief, who's a freaking great guy, that he was in vehicle six. So he's the one that got to like watch the RPGs near miss and all this stuff. And he comes up on the radio and he goes, he's like, hey, sir, you, we just got ambushed back here. We took some RPG fires and some, and some, and some, and some freaking small arms.

• 12:44Jocko Willink?

  And I came up on the radio and I went, Roger. And he got a big kick out of that. Uh, maybe I should have been more understanding at the time, but, uh, yeah, I gotta, I gotta try and stay calm.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Sometimes empathy works and sometimes it doesn't, right?

• 13:00Jocko Willink?

  So you're, uh, so you're growing up, you, so you do your high school years in Rhode Island. What, uh, what, what, what sports were you doing? Did you play sports?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Did, you know, soccer, basketball, baseball, you know, was very, um, you know, average at all three in a town that was, or in a state that wasn't exactly competitive either. So.

• 13:18Jocko Willink?

  That's that's a harsh statement about poor old Rhode Island. And so you're just a decent athlete. I mean, how tall are you?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Six, four.

• 13:27Jocko Willink?

  And you didn't play. Were you good at basketball?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  I was, you know, I was decent, but in college, all my friends were on the varsity team. And I was like, man, I can't hold a candle to these guys.

• 13:36Jocko Willink?

  And what about grades? Were you studying hard?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I was, I was a good student in high school.

• 13:41Jocko Willink?

  Were you, uh, what kind of music were you listening to?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh, wow. That's a great question. So mid eighties was like, you know, Rush, a little Quiet Riot, maybe, uh, uh, what else would that have been? You know, that that that pretty much dates it.

• 13:54Jocko Willink?

  Dude, Quiet Riot, damn. Uh, was that Come On, Feel the Noise? Am I, or is that Twisted Sister? Man, I'm messing up my hair metal bands. And then since your, since your grandfather worked at Holy Cross, you went to Holy Cross. Was that pre, preordained or how'd that happen?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  My family has a long history with Holy Cross. My great grandfather is in the Varsity Hall of Fame, class of nineteen ten. And, uh, and so, you know, my, my grandfather, there's a lot of relatives who've been there. So no one ever pushed the Navy or Holy Cross or anything on me. It was more of just a, hey, son, here's what's out there. There's this thing called a four-year ROTC scholarship and, uh, you know, I just love for you to be familiar with it. And, um, you know, I'll, I'll never forget my, my grandfather and dad put me in the car like summer uh, of junior year in high school and driving me up to, to Holy Cross and and actually meeting the major who was in charge of the unit at the time. And, uh, that was a guy who to this day is a great friend of mine, Joe Dunford, later became the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. So,

• 14:59Speaker 01

  uh, you know, Holy Cross has, is a, is a storied institution with a lot of history and I was, it was a no brainer for me.

• 15:07Jocko Willink?

  Then, uh, you show up there and you're instantly, you're, you, you take an ROTC scholarship out of the gate?

• 15:13Speaker 01

  I did.

• 15:13Jocko Willink?

  So that means they're paying for college?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 15:16Jocko Willink?

  That's a pretty good deal.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the time, I was just thinking to myself, as the oldest of four, this is a great chance to not burn any cash and save money for my younger three siblings to be able to go to college. You know, it's, it, I thought I'd do four years as some sort of a supply officer and get out, or, you know, be, have great leadership experience for four years. And then you recall, we invaded Panama in eighty-nine, there was a guy named John Connors, who was killed on the Patia runway. John was a Worcester Polytech graduate, but Holy Cross ROTC. So my first exposure to the SEAL teams was the memorial service in the chapel at Holy Cross, where the SEAL community came together and remembered John Connors. And that left a real mark on me, but freshman year, dude, I was six-four and, I don't know, about a hundred and five pounds.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  I'm, I don't know, but I was, there was no way at that age, I even thought about myself being capable of going through SEAL training. But then later on, as the years progressed, and I, I went from one push-ups to one and a half, or something like that, you know, then, uh, then, uh, I, I went to mini-buds and then became.

• 16:16Jocko Willink?

  Was, was that your first sort of knowledge of the SEAL teams?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:20Jocko Willink?

  Was, was when Panama happened?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:22Jocko Willink?

  Cause Panama definitely influenced me as well, because I thought to myself, wait, there's a war, there's a war going on. As far as I was concerned, there's a war going on, and I was thinking to myself, how is this happening and I'm not there? And how do I get there ASAP? And that's why I joined the Navy.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Well, you know, for me, it was not what went through my head at, at that time. For me, it was more of like a, be come familiar with it and set it aside for a couple of years. And, you know, in ROTC, you spend a week in the summer with the pilots, a week with the, you know, the submariners and the surface guys. And you try to figure out what do you want to be when you grow up? And, you know, I had a great aviation cruise, I flew in an A6 off of the USS Saratoga. And I, and it was right after Top Gun came out, so there's like ninety-two-ish or something. And I was like, you know, partying like a rock star and thought, I'm gonna go be a pilot, this is freaking awesome. Then I went to three weeks of mini-buds and became perversely attracted with that challenge.

• 17:15Jocko Willink?

  Is, uh, so Holy Cross, have you ever been to Notre Dame before?

• 17:20Speaker 01

  I have, yeah.

• 17:21Jocko Willink?

  So Notre Dame, I've been there a few times and it, you know, like, the. Females aren't allowed in the male dorms and you have or if they are, they gotta be out there by 10 o'clock at night. Like it's pretty strict from a college aged person perspective. Is Holy Cross like that as well?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  It's not as strict. The, uh, there were, you know, at this point, maybe I'm going to guess roughly 10 or 15 Jesuit priests on as, as professors when I was in college. It's less now, but, uh, you know, there were some that would, would go out and enjoy a glass of wine or more for, uh, but, but they disappear around 10 o'clock at night and, and, uh, but it was, it was a, it was a, there was a great relationship between, you know, the, the student body and the faculty.

• 18:02Jocko Willink?

  So now you're saying that you did summer cruises and for those people that don't know, this is when you're going to college, you're in ROTC, the Navy will take young college kids and send them out to get a little taste of the different parts of the Navy. So did you do a ship one? Just a straight up shipboard one?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  I did for a day, you know, and I was like, this ain't me, you know? So, uh,

• 18:24Jocko Willink?

  That's all it took on that one?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  That wasn't hard.

• 18:27Jocko Willink?

  Well, did you, were you, did you actually go like onto a ship somewhere that was on deployment? Or what was that?

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I think what we did was got helicoptered from Norfolk over to some frigate for 36 hours or something. It was, thank God it wasn't longer.

• 18:40Jocko Willink?

  And then what, and then what year was that after your freshman year?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  92, 91 ish, 92 ish. Yeah.

• 18:45Jocko Willink?

  Then when did you do the pilot thing? What year was that?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  That was between junior and senior year.

• 18:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So in between your junior year, junior year and your senior year, you get the full on, um, Top Gun experience?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  I, I did. And then the full on BUDs experience after that.

• 19:00Jocko Willink?

  So that was in the same summer?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Same summer. That was an optional three week thing. And I thought, you know, in order to really figure out, do I want to be a pilot or do I want to be a SEAL? I've got to go do this mini BUDs thing. And they took 32 kids out of college for that program.

• 19:13Jocko Willink?

  What, what year was the mini BUDs?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  It was the summer of 92.

• 19:18Jocko Willink?

  So you show up to Mini BUDS and what are they doing? This is three weeks long.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  It was a legit, they legit three week, one week of each of the three phases of training. And you know, when you're going through it, you're like, how does this compare with the real thing? It was after going through the real thing, I look back and say, we got a legit full treatment for each of the three weeks.

• 19:37Jocko Willink?

  And I think nowadays they use that sort of, it's called something else now. I think it's called SEAL Officer Assessment and Selection. And it's, it's something like Mini BUDS, but it's sort of the selection and how they're going to figure out who gets to go. Was it like that for, for you guys?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  It definitely was. We came out with like grades out of the 32, you know, like not grades as an academic, but like just an all around score of how you did. And, and you know, I, I remember having a pretty high number and thought, I think I'll be probably, this will stand me pretty well if I applied to, to, to circle back and go to BUDS and history has it, I did. And they took 16 guys out of ROTC my year, 16 guys out of the academy. So there were 32 officers taken into the program. And as you know, I don't know the number, but maybe 15 of those made it through ultimately or something like that.

• 20:24Jocko Willink?

  Was there any quid, quitters in Mini BUDS?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, there were. Yeah, there were. It was fun. It's just like, okay, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, you know?

• 20:33Jocko Willink?

  And, and so this is now 1993 that you graduate from Holy Cross and you get your, um, you get selected. I mean, the selection process for officers now is totally insane. I mean, it's insane back then, but with all the hype around SEALs and all that, it's just ridiculous. But still taking 16 from ROTC and 16 from the Naval Academy, that's slim pickings.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  It, it was tough and the hard thing as a rising senior and needing to make a life decision was that I knew that if I applied for BUDS, I would not get my number two choice of pilot because you know, once you work through and they take the washouts who they don't pick for SEAL training, all the pilot slots are gone. So it was a little bit of a gamble. Well, it was a lot of a gamble, but like anything in life, go for what you want.

• 21:21Jocko Willink?

  And then you would have been on that ship that you didn't like very much.

• 21:26Jocko Willink?

  And then you show up and what Bud's class were you?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  192.

• 21:29Jocko Willink?

  192. So you show up for Bud's class 192. How prepared were you, you think?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  I was very prepared. I wasn't the, far from the most gifted physical athlete, you know, I had friends that did, you know, showed up and did 50 pull-ups and I'd, you know, struggle with my, you know, eight and a quarter, you know, or something like that. But, you know, 6'4", 230 at the time. I, like, I ran real fast, could swim like a fish. The O course was no trouble. For me, pull-ups were my downfall. But, you know, I, I came in feeling pretty strong.

• 21:59Jocko Willink?

  Was there any, uh, was there anything that really challenged you?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  For me, it really was the pull-ups. It, uh, but never to the point where I wasn't, I joke around about the eight and a quarter, but I, I just, you know, I just, I just knew I was gonna, I was there for a reason, you know? If something's worth doing, it's worth overdoing and I prepared as well as I could. And, and I just took it really seriously when I went through and kind of limited my, my drinking when I was going through Bud's. At age 21, everybody's drinking like a fish. I was pretty serious about recovery and, and just knew I needed every advantage I could possibly help myself with.

• 22:34Jocko Willink?

  When I went through Bud's, I didn't leave the barracks, really.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:37Jocko Willink?

  Like, I was a total nerd. I would sharpen my knife and polish my boots like all weekend long. And I didn't even think about the recovery aspect. I think that's a new thing, like the idea of recovery. I don't know. I didn't really have that. I didn't really think of that.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  You didn't have guys walking around with those big jug, the gallon jugs of water?

• 22:55Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Like, that, that was the thing in our, our time. Just pump the fluids after the, after the day and for the weekend.

• 23:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I didn't really have too much of that. Now, I've always thought that if you were, if you couldn't do pull-ups, you were gonna have a problem with the O course. And it seems like you had problems with pull-ups, but you still didn't have a problem with the O course.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Dude, I'm, I'm, I've honestly, I flew through the, I was always top five in the O course.

• 23:18Jocko Willink?

  And you sucked at pull-ups? That's really bizarre.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's just a different type of strength pulling just a little bit laterally sometimes. You know, it's just that dead overhead up and down for pull ups is a little different than like rope climb where you're at that a little bit of an angle.

• 23:33Jocko Willink?

  How were you good at rope climbs too?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I was really good.

• 23:37Jocko Willink?

  That's you must just have some weird genetic anomaly where pull ups are hard. Cause that's crazy, right? To be able to do the O course in a in a top five position and be suck at pull ups? That seems crazy.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I can't explain it. I could just tell you what I experienced.

• 23:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, the cool thing about sucking at pull ups is you probably won't fail BUDs because you suck at pull ups, right? You can fail, you can get dropped from BUDs for running, you can get dropped from BUDs from swimming, you can get dropped from BUDs for the O course. But for pull ups, you might get, you know, teased basically uh by the instructors during a PT, but

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 24:12Jocko Willink?

  You're not going to get dropped.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's it's very true. It's very true.

• 24:18Jocko Willink?

  How many um? How many people quit? Or how many did you start with and how many people quit?

• 24:23Speaker 01

  We started with 120 and 19 graduated.

• 24:27Jocko Willink?

  Started with 120 and 19 graduated.

• 24:31Jocko Willink?

  Were you? Did anybody quit that you were like, dang, how's that?

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Oh, hell, yeah, you know, you you got guys that look like you who walk in on on day one and you're like, man, what am I doing here? But, uh, you know, guys just drop like flies and and um, you know, my you remember in the beginning, they they assign swim buddies. You just throw people in the pool and go swim, you know, a mile or half a mile. I can't remember what it was, but it was just swim as fast as you can. And with 120 guys in the pool, you're crawling all over each other and just doing and and then they just pair up, you know, number one and number two or swim pair one, number three and number four, swim pair two and so on. So myself and Chris Cassidy were swim pair one. And so Chris and I, like lifelong friends from, you know, day one of BUDs and and the two of us just um

• 25:15Speaker 01

  were always had this fun, healthy sense of talking trash at each other and uh and uh, you know, he ended up as the honor man for the class. And I I years later went back to BUDs and I I told him that I pulled all the records and recalculated the math. And at this point, he was an astronaut, of course, you know, and and I said, hey, I just got some bad news for you. I'm having your name taken off the plaque and my name's going up.

• 25:39Jocko Willink?

  So, so, but nothing really challenged you, made it through one shot?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  One shot, honestly.

• 25:43Jocko Willink?

  No major injuries or anything like that?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Dude, I, it was like that or nothing. So I, I really can honestly say I never thought about quitting and I never, it was hard, just like the rest of us, but just powered straight through.

• 25:52Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Um, so then you get assigned to, so it's now 1994, is it 94?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  94, yeah.

• 25:58Jocko Willink?

  And you get to, assigned to Team Four. Did you speak, did you speak Spanish prior to that?

• 26:03Speaker 01

  I was, um, almost a double major in Spanish. So good, good in the books, but never real, at that point in life, not a lot of practical Spanish.

• 26:11Jocko Willink?

  Cause that was when we were coming up. If you spoke Spanish, you were going to Team Four.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:16Jocko Willink?

  It's pretty much guaranteed.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:19Jocko Willink?

  So being a new guy at the team, and I have a good new guy story from your book here. And, uh, we'll go to the book. It says, "Another story again from my time as a brand new SEAL. The Navy needed four of us to test out some new equipment. I was voluntold to take part in the exercises. They took us in a boat, two or three miles offshore, dropped us in the water and told us to swim to the beach, stay for a few minutes and then swim back to the boat together. It turned out that conditions were unexpectedly harsh, 40 knot winds, nearly eight foot high waves, and the four of us immediately lost each other, unable to see more than a few feet in front of us."

• 26:59Jocko Willink?

  Man, that's scary in its own right. "I swam for what felt like hours before I finally got to the beach. And once I was there, I could not see my teammates. I waited and waited, but there was simply no sign of them. I figured maybe I had missed them. Maybe it had gotten slowed down by the waves. Maybe they'd already made their way back. So I got back in the water and tried to return to the boat, even though I couldn't see it. In my mind, I had to complete the assigned mission at all costs. Just keep going. This is what a SEAL has to do." I couldn't find my way back to the boat because of the harsh conditions. I was using my Silver Ranger compass to do my best to swim a straight line of bearing to the planned link up point.

• 27:39Jocko Willink?

  But it didn't work. I realized I must have drifted much more than I expected. I couldn't see back to the beach either. For a few hours, I was basically lost at sea, worrying the other three more experienced seals would think I was a total screw up. I had broken a fin strap and at one point I was startled, okay scared, when I was moved about 10 feet in the water, bumped hard by a massive sea mammal. I imagined that no one would ever find my body and everyone in the seals would think I must not have been a good swimmer. Despite entering Bud's training with one of the fastest swim times in the history of the program and along with my swim buddy, Chris Cassidy, coming seconds away from the fastest ever two mile swim in Bud's.

• 28:23Jocko Willink?

  Finally, the boat found me and picked me up and I was quickly exonerated for being stupid enough to make the swim back out to sea. My three teammates had ended up down the beach from where the current had taken me, just a bit too far away from me to see them. And they stayed on the beach until the boat came for them, knowing conditions were too miserable to even attempt to head back. I'd put myself at risk for a training exercise because I confused doing the hard thing with doing the right thing. My decision was far too risky to make sense, even as a confident and capable swimmer. There's so many little lessons in that one right there, that little story. And by the way, so your book is filled with a bunch of lessons and obviously I'm just reading excerpts from it.

• 29:08Jocko Willink?

  And, and this, this chapter was choosing the hard path and doing the hard thing. And of course, everything's a dichotomy and you can do things where you go too hard. But, uh, man, I can't even imagine you with your Silver Ranger, which is, for those of you that don't know, it's a little compass that you use to navigate on the land and you, you probably had it with you for like E and E or some whatever. And you actually pulled this thing out. You're trying to swim a bearing, which is literally impossible to do. Like this is totally ridiculous. And what I, what I love about this, and this is so true. The main thing you're worried about, you're lost at sea for hours, you're getting pushed around by sea animals. The main thing you're worried about is looking like a loser.

• 29:52Jocko Willink?

  And being a bad team guy.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. You know, I still vividly remember being, you know, pushed this, you know, eight or 10 feet or so in the water and just thinking, okay, this is going to be the end. But the worst thing is people are just going to think I was a terrible swimmer and it's just not what you want. It's not the look you want. I was like, no, I'm a good swimmer. Please don't think that, you know? So yeah, there's a million lessons in there. You know, it's, you know this well, when you, when you write a book, if you, if you, if you're the president of your own fan club, by definition, you don't have a book, you know? And, and so sharing these things where we, uh, you know, didn't make good decisions or, or in retrospect, were, were actually stupid. I think that's where the learning is, and that's what I tried to do in the book.

• 30:33Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you, you as a new guy, meaning this is the universal you, me, you, all of us as new guys, man, you do some dumb, dumb things. And this is a classic example of like, this is all the other guys that were experienced were like, hey, we're not swimming back out. Are you kidding me? We'll all die. And you, of course, hey, that's what the mission is. We're going to go and do it.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Well, a little bit of two, it's an interesting thing. I'd be interested in your perspective on this, but you know, growing up in the teams before nine 11, it was mission, mission, mission at all costs. Post nine 11, our community got much better at saying, you know what? There's new information. Let's incorporate new information. Know what's going on. Let's think about risk. Is the risk worth the reward and constantly reassessing that risk? You know, it's, it's, uh, it became okay to turn around on a mission in Iraq or Afghanistan and say, hey, you know what? The risk profile just changed massively. We'll, we'll come back another night for the, this group of terrorists. There's, this, this risk is not worth assuming and let's not do the mission. And, and when I was growing up and when you were growing up, we'd be excoriated for not doing the mission. Later on, we were held up as smart.

• 31:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, well, there was, there was a big difference, you know, when we were coming up before the war started, we were literally training for the big mesh singular, like, hey, you're going to do this one mission. We didn't know what it was, but that's what we were training for. And yeah, there was no way. It didn't even seem like a feasible idea that you would. Turn around on a mission or not complete the mission and then yeah, obviously as the war kicked off and once we started to get combat experience for our generation, it was like, oh, this doesn't make any sense. Oh, the risk is too high. Oh, the enemy has what? Well, we're not going to get them then. And yeah, uh, that's something that we had to learn just as our forefathers had to learn. And it's unfortunately, one of those lessons that it, it's almost like

• 32:25Jocko Willink?

  we, well, we had to relearn it, you know? Uh, I wrote about this in Leadership Strategy and Tactics. We used to set up this training scenario in, in Mount or South or whatever you want to call it, the urban training where the guys would be clearing like down a building, down a hallway and there'd be, we'd have a barricaded shooter at the end of the hallway and everybody that ended the hallway would get riddled with paintball and get put down. And you'd see, unfortunately, just about every leader would fall victim to this. Two more guys go, they get mowed down. Two more guys go, they get mowed down. Two more guys go, they get mowed down. And, and then, you know, finally after, you know, three quarters of the task unit is laying dead in the hallway, we'd say, hey, man, take a step back and think about what's happening. What are you doing? It doesn't make any sense. And, and they would have, that's

• 33:10Jocko Willink?

  what they have to do is they'd have to learn to detach and take a step back and go, oh, this is obviously bad and I shouldn't continue to do this. So yeah, that's definitely a lesson that we learned and that we had then to pass on to the next generation of SEALs to, to make sure they understand that quitting is an option. And you know, you don't quit from a strategic perspective, but with whatever tactic I'm using right now is going to cost us lives or get, get people killed or doesn't make any sense. I got no problem saying, oh, I was wrong. This is a bad move. We're not doing it anymore.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Totally agree. And it's, a lot of people ask me, how does your business career, now that I've been retired for 10 years and help, uh, run the operations for VMware, a really large software company, you know, the, the applicability is the exact same. It's, hey, we have a certain amount of, you know, capital to invest. Do we invest it in, in place A or place B or C? And, and, and wait a minute, you know what? We're getting feedback from the market that, that our original choice wasn't quite right. Are you going to keep trying to invest your way through and throw, throw bad money after, good money after bad, a bad path? No, you're going to make a decision. Sunk costs are sunk. Let's go try something different and, um, and quickly dynamically assess. And so the parallels between business and the SEALs are. And the military writ large are really, really perfect.

• 34:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I often end up talking to companies and that's the exact example I'll use is, "Hey, we tried this marketing campaign. It's not, we're not getting the ROI we expected. Let's put more money into it." Okay, and they still don't get the ROI we expected. Okay, well, let's put even more money. It's the same thing as sending guys down a hallway to get shot up. Awesome. So you, so you get to Team Four. That's kind of an example of Team Four. What else was going on at Team Four when you got there? Do you get, do you get put right into a platoon?

• 35:00Speaker 01

  I was relatively quick, maybe six months or so of kind of like schools and individual time, but yeah.

• 35:06Jocko Willink?

  Did you go to, so you went through STT at the team or was it?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  At the team.

• 35:09Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so, so your team is running STT. Was that a good course of instruction?

• 35:15Speaker 01

  It was, it was good. You don't know what you don't know at that age and that, that, that time in life, you know, but uh, look, everything was learning at that point. Learning what to do, sometimes learning what not to do. Uh, you know, we, we, um, but, but immediate exposure to what was going on. I remember in demolition training, being at Fort AP Hill, one range over from us, there were four Marines that were in a demolition accident and basically vaporized. And it was terrible. And, and so.

• 35:44Jocko Willink?

  What was the accident?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  There was something called a Meekleak charge. It was like a line charge and these, it went low order and they, you know, collected all the C4 and put it in a pile and then went to burn it, but forgot that there was this little thing called a booster in the C4. And so when they, when, because you can burn C4 as everybody, as you know, but not everybody necessarily does. And, and that caused it to go high order. And, uh, and so, you know, right, right away, we're exposed to, you know, real situations. And so lots of, uh, like, like you know, a lot of the, the biggest learning comes from the hardest situations.

• 36:18Jocko Willink?

  What uh, what schools did you go to as a new guy officer?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's funny, one of my greatest friends in life, Warren Nickerson, was the operations chief. And as a brand new Ensign, I remember walking in and saying, alright Chief Nick, the only question I have is do I go to Freefall and then Sniper? Or Sniper then Freefall? And he's like, shut up new guy, you got some dog and ponies for you. And so, you know, so I was, you know, hitting the road, doing, you know, the dog and pony shows and all kinds of stuff. But I, you know, I, I went to, you know, at the time, it wasn't like you could get right into Freefall School. So it took me three or four years to be able to get there. And so I, I don't even, my schools were so unremarkable at that time that I don't even remember what they were.

• 36:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know, as a new guy, I got sent to like, uh, well, I was very lucky that I got sent to the comm, comm school on the east coast, which was awesome. But other than that, it was like demo driver school and just other.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Here's how you chain up the trailer to the vehicle and stuff like that.

• 37:07Jocko Willink?

  Just complete new guy schools. It was freaking horrible. And then you get put into platoon, Assistant Platoon Commander?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yup, Assistant Platoon Commander.

• 37:14Jocko Willink?

  And uh, how's your workup? You, you doing a six month, uh, you know, you're doing a six month deployment. At this time, Team Four deploys to South America.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, deployment was to Panama. And then from there, just a lot of what J-sets, joint combined exchanges for training where we, we bounced around and, you know, we trained, you know, El Salvador, you know, Chile, Peru. Just the, the local operational forces that were similar to ours. And um, and it was just a, a big, you know, a, a big bunch of fun. It's, there just wasn't, it wasn't, there was no real, real stuff going on, but uh, lots of learning.

• 37:51Jocko Willink?

  How was, how was your, you know, what, what did you feel like as a, as a new guy officer? If you were talking to yourself when you were younger, you're talking to a young, uh, Ensign or Lieutenant JG that's rolling into a platoon right now. What, what would your, what would your advice be?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Look, I think one of the, the things that, that young officers always wrestle with is how to walk the line between. Being a leader when a leader is needed to step forward, but at the same time really have the humility that a lot of other people know a lot of things that you don't know. And to me, that's what makes the team special is when you think about how you make decisions and who makes decisions. We just grow up with that just built into who we are. And that's really, you know, the thing you test is, when do I step forward and say, alright guys, shut up, lock it on, we're going this direction? And when do you kind of step back? Like you espouse in a lot of your work is, leading from the rear is okay.

• 38:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. No one ever expects the SEAL leader to say, hey, lead from the rear, right?

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:54Jocko Willink?

  Are there times you gotta lead from the front? Yes, absolutely. If you're doing something that's dangerous, or something that's horrible, or something that's even monotonous, sometimes you gotta step up and say, alright, I got this. But yeah, if I have the opportunity and someone on my platoon or my team wants to step up and lead, no problem, go for it. I like to say, I like to try and lead with minimum force required, right?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think there are a couple of great points here. First of all, I always say the L in SEAL stands for lazy, right? And like, we find the easiest path to go achieve the goal, because that gives you more time, effort, and energy for the next problem, or lets you rest and recover for the next problem. But, you know, it's, like, in business, we're always thinking about succession planning. And the only way you're gonna get your second line ready to be the first line is if the first line can take a step back and let the second line be the first line. So the only thing you need to do if you're in the leadership position, and what I try to do now, I think it's one thing I do decently, is to step back and let other people make the decisions, and only weigh in if and when needed. Most importantly, it's the process. Does the process to make decisions make sense?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Is it, thinking about, like, the SEALs are a meritocracy, as you know, is, who cares where the idea comes from? You get all the ideas on the table, you find the best idea, and the best idea wins. And that's the way you're gonna go do the mission. And that's exactly the way we need to operate and often do operate in business.

• 40:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and of course, this doesn't mean you let the second string, you know, run off the cliff, but you can let them bump into the guardrails and get a little dinged up and they're gonna learn from that, put some Bondo on there and they'll be alright. But a lot of times, people are paranoid, they don't wanna take any risk at all and think that, oh, you're gonna make a mistake. It's like, hey, yeah, they're gonna make mistakes and that's how they're gonna learn.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Dude, it comes down to comfort in your role, right? I mean, it's, if, I describe careers in three phases. The first phase is getting really good at something, whatever it is, doctor, lawyer, SEAL, whatever. The second phase is trying to show the world you're really damn good at what you've chosen. And that third phase, which many people don't get to, is being so confident that you are good, that you no longer need to prove it to anybody, and that's what lets you step back. I think when I see in the business world, the people, the leaders who don't step back, what I see is oftentimes a lack of, a lack of confidence that, that, that makes the person feel like if they're not in front of the room making the decision, then, then they're not seen as the one in charge.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  And so it's really, I think, a failure of leadership when you can't step back.

• 41:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I had, one of the things I used to teach the J O's was you have nothing to prove, but everything to prove. And the nothing to prove part is, hey, I don't care how we build this pallet. I don't care, you know, I don't care who goes on this operation, I don't care what route we take in. Like, there's a bunch of little decisions that are gonna get made that if your platoon makes them, it's perfectly fine and you don't need to prove, well, my way of getting to the target would be a little bit more efficient than yours, or my way of building-

• 41:51Speaker 01

  We might not get our feet wet.

• 41:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, just like all these little things where sometimes that insecure junior leader feels like they need to prove to everyone that they're in charge, and you don't, you have nothing to prove. You're actually in charge, you're de facto in charge, and that's fine, you don't need to prove it. What you do need to prove is that you're gonna listen, that you're gonna, that you're gonna pay attention, that you're gonna make the right decisions at the right time, that when it is time to weigh in, you're gonna do something smart, not something rash, so, yeah, all good things to think about.

• 42:23Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of not being rash.

• 42:27Jocko Willink?

  Here's a little scenario you talk about in the book. My platoon was once training at the Altamaha, am I saying that? Altama?

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, Altamaha.

• 42:36Jocko Willink?

  Altamaha River in Georgia. And we had an enthusiastic SEAL named Max. We were carrying kayaks with a good amount of gear inside, trying to find the most convenient way to transport guns, paddles, and sensitive reconnaissance equipment that had to stay dry as we waded through the shallow water. Suddenly, Max very calmly stopped and said to me, "Mr. Hayes, there's a gator on my leg."

• 43:00Jocko Willink?

  His calm demeanor in the face of such an alarming statement caused me to doubt him, until he lifted his leg out of the water and I saw a three to four foot baby alligator had indeed latched around his knee. Max, to his extreme credit, did not overreact. He stayed calm, certainly calmer than I would have been, and took deep breaths until the alligator decided to open his mouth and let go. Max was unharmed, other than four bite mark tooth scars. Many of our enemies are not as cooperative as that baby alligator ended up being, which is why our reactions to situations are so important. The smartest SEAL isn't the one with the greatest raw intelligence. It's the one who has the best

• 43:41Jocko Willink?

  and quickest reaction to the problem. The SEAL who can quickly assess and decide the best course of action is the one I want on my team, not the SEAL who gets emotional and lets his feelings or his fears get in the way of pure rationality. I said in Chapter One that I would take someone with hunger over someone with greater ability every time. I'd also take someone who reacts well over someone with greater raw intelligence. You want both, intelligence and control, but in the stressful moments, control matters a lot. I would love to find people who are smart enough to predict the future, but I haven't come across many of them. So I need people who react well, no matter what the

• 44:26Jocko Willink?

  future turns out to hold. No matter the context, the importance of having good, controlled reactions to surprising situations can never be overstated.

• 44:39Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. Freaking gator chomps on your leg.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, you know, the saying you don't have to outswim your buddy. You just have to, excuse me, you don't have to outswim the shark. You just have to outswim your buddy. So, you know, it's like, should I go on a dry land and get away from this guy? Uh, yeah, I remember that situation very well, but in all sincerity, it is the expression calm breeds calm. Excitement breeds excitement. You've been shot at and rocketed enough to know that anytime you're not calm, you are just using emotion that could be used to solve the problem.

• 45:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Jocko Willink?

  Do you think that the, that buds weeds out some of that?

• 45:18Speaker 01

  It's a good question. I think to some degree, but not perfectly.

• 45:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's definitely not perfect because I know you and I both have seen plenty of team guys go freaking like this guy. Max is a great example of like the calm, cool, collected seal that you want in your platoon, either in charge of your platoon or one of your machine gunners in your platoon. Having a guy like that is awesome. Having somebody that's just loses their mind is absolutely horrible.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  I think that's one of those traits that you can learn though. I'm sure you're asked a similar question that I am frequently, which is, uh, talk to me about what's innate leadership. What are you born with and what can you train through time? I think that calm is a thing that you can learn and, and train through time. Would you agree?

• 45:59Jocko Willink?

  A hundred percent. And, you know, I, I got really lucky in that the last tour that I did was run and trade it out on the west coast. And so I got to run this freaking leadership laboratory, which was, I, I honestly think it might have been the greatest leadership laboratory that's ever existed in the world. That's what I think. Uh, just to be able to put these guys in these stressful situations with so much on the line. And look, it wasn't life or death. No. So I guess combat is an even better leadership laboratory, except for in combat, you can't take a guy and put him through iteration after iteration after iteration because he's dead if he's bad. So you can't really, it's not a laboratory. It's a real world test. Is combat a better real world test than, than going through training?

• 46:42Jocko Willink?

  Yes, it is. But the training that we had was really crazy good. It was realistic. It was hard. And you would see guys develop these traits. You would watch guys. You'd see them and, and you'd put them in a situation and they'd lose their mind or they'd start getting, getting panicked or they'd start freaking out about something and you'd see everything would fall apart, their platoon would fall apart. And then maybe, you know, the next time you say, you know, you say you debrief them. Hey, listen, man, when you start yelling and screaming on the radio, no one's listening to you anymore. It's not getting through to anybody. They can't make sense of what you're saying. You need to calm down. You need to think about what you're gonna say, simple, clear and concise language. So you brief them on that. And then the next time, maybe they start getting excited, you go, hey, man, hey,

• 47:25Jocko Willink?

  Fred, come here, take a wrap off, think about what you're gonna say. What are you gonna tell your platoon to do? I'm gonna tell them to get, oh, no, hold on. What are you gonna tell them to do? I'm gonna tell them to get, hold on. What are you telling them to do? I'm gonna tell them to move to building 34. Okay, now come up on the radio and just say that. Or just yell it, just, just put the word out. And then you'd see the guy do it. And you could see that they would learn. So, yes, you can absolutely learn this stuff. As long as you're humble enough to, uh, as long as you're humble enough to take criticism and, and, and assess yourself. So there was a bunch of things that, that you can improve at. Look, there's some things that you can't improve at. Right? There's some genetic things that you have that you can't improve. There's another thing I wrote about leadership strategy and tactics. I had a guy coming through. He's a task unit commander.

• 48:11Jocko Willink?

  Super smart guy, good tactician, the voice of a mouse, right? So when it came time to put out word, you know, like to tell everyone what was going on, he just didn't have, he couldn't project his voice at all. And so I'm talking to him like, hey, man, listen, you gotta start, you gotta start putting the word out. And in my mind, I'm thinking, you know, maybe this is just, maybe I'm just super biased towards being loud because I have a loud voice. Maybe I'm just biased. And so I'm watching him and I can see he's trying to put out word. No one can hear him. It's a problem. So I say, hey, man, if you don't start upping your volume, people can't hear you. I don't even know if you can do this job, which is a real like horrible thing to tell someone.

• 48:55Jocko Willink?

  This guy's a task unit commander. He's been in the teams for 12 or 15 years or something. This is a senior guy. And now I'm telling him, hey, you can't do this. And then the next iteration, I'm watching him and he's got to make the call and he grabs like big mouth Bill. Did his platoon or one of the platoons is like, hey, Bill, tell everyone to get to building thirty-four now. And Bill's like, ah, broken. And I was like, oh, cool. Problem solved. So you gotta, you've got some things that you can't get better at. You know, some people aren't articulate, talking in front of a crowd. Okay, cool. Hey, Echo, you're good in front of a crowd. You put the word out to the troops. Or some people can't simplify a problem. So it's like, hey, Mike, I'm having a hard time getting through this. Can you simplify this thing so everyone can understand it?

• 49:36Jocko Willink?

  So there's some things that you're going to naturally not going to be great at. Put your leadership team together where you've got some people that are good at that. And then be humble enough to say, you know what, Mike's a lot better at simplifying things than I am. And Echo's a lot more articulate than I am. So I'm gonna have Mike figure out the problem and I'm gonna have Echo talk about it and we're gonna be good to go. I'm gonna sit back and, and just try and get these guys what they need. So there are things that you can not get better at. Or you can, you can usually improve them a little bit, but you might not become an expert at them. But there's, there's definitely some things that you can absolutely improve on. And being calm and being able to detach and take a step back is most certainly, most certainly one of them. So that was your assistant platoon commander. Was it anything else? What was, you, you

• 50:19Jocko Willink?

  got one story on that deployment about kind of getting held. Was this when you got held up at gunpoint?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:25Jocko Willink?

  Talk us through that.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  So nineteen ninety-six, we, we were with squad in, in Peru, squads, eight SEALs. So it's myself and, and seven guys. And, you know, we were just training the Peruvian SEALs, nothing crazy. And the, I will say that in those days, the leader of the shining path, Sendero Luminoso, which was a terrorist organization, was in jail about a mile or less than a mile from the Peruvian SEALs compound. So we were likely, you know, watched or people knew that there was somebody in country helping the Peruvian SEALs. But myself, myself and my LPO stayed back in Lima for just a day while the rest of the guys flew forward to Iquitos, Peru, which was deep in the jungles of the Amazon. And

• 51:09Speaker 01

  And we were just literally out to dinner one night, driving back from dinner unarmed, and two cop cars pinned us in really, really quickly, jumped out with three or four guys armed rifles and basically opened the door, held me at gunpoint, threatened me with execution, and they drove us around and basically interrogated us, asked us a bunch of questions that nobody ever really wants to answer, you know, how you want to be tortured, how you want to be executed, how do you want to die, you know, and a lot of worse things than that. I had a point where I could have jumped out of the car, that my LPO, Ken Needham, was in the back of this SUV, I was in the middle seats, and I could have jumped out when the

• 51:50Speaker 01

  car was going 40 or so, saved myself, and I very, very vividly remember, I can never, ever jump out of this car because I couldn't live with myself if I bailed on Ken and I lived and they killed him. Just not who I wanted. Back to my grandfather, who do you want to be? So, you know, we learned never bail on your swim buddy, and I was fortunate after that incident because I could answer really, really truthfully, knowing that in a life and death situation, that I would not bail on my swim buddy. So, it was a lot of learning at a young age.

• 52:21Jocko Willink?

  How'd you get out of that scenario?

• 52:23Speaker 01

  You know, I did what I would have wanted victims to do if I were in the other role. Don't look at the victims, so we can't identify, or excuse me, don't look at the assailants so that we can't identify them, and the threat goes down, and just be compliant in answer to our previous part of the conversation around calm. I was so uber calm, you would never think that I was even 1% remotely worried about the situation I was in. In Spanish, I was like, hey, we're economists, we're desk workers, we work at the embassy, and, you know, we were just out to dinner. These things happen all the time. If we get it, you guys need the car, take the car. We have insurance, go take it. It's all you. And just really totally mellow answer these questions, and I think these guys just figured out these

• 53:08Speaker 01

  guys aren't a threat. These guys, these guys can't possibly be SEALs. So, they drove us around, and after the interrogation of about an hour, they brought us out of the car at gunpoint, and I was like, okay, this is the point where they either pull the trigger or they don't. Myself and Ken just kept walking because I remember very vividly thinking, hey, a 10-foot shot is harder than a zero-foot shot.

• 53:26Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  You know, maybe they'll miss an organ. And so I just quickly put space between me and the guy who had a gun. And at the point, he just, I wasn't looking backwards, so I can't tell you what he was doing. I was just ready to be shot. And, um, and, um, they, they never pulled the trigger.

• 53:41Jocko Willink?

  That doesn't sound like a very nice last day in the, in the city of there.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  I have not been back to Lima.

• 53:50Jocko Willink?

  And so that's what you did on that deployment. You travel around, this is pre 9/11, you're traveling around, you're training other forces. Um, and, and then what happens after that? After that tour, is that, that's when you go to Germany?

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Went to a DLI for learning German for nine months, uh, then ended up, uh, you know, just going over to Germany.

• 54:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you went to DLI first, huh?

• 54:12Speaker 01

  I did, yeah, yeah.

• 54:13Jocko Willink?

  So you speak three languages then?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Well, depends how you count. No, I, I'm, I'm still working on English.

• 54:21Jocko Willink?

  So you go to DLI and then you come over to Germany. This is where I meet you.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  97, 98?

• 54:28Jocko Willink?

  98. Cause I went, I basically got done with OCS. I showed up at SEAL Team Two and immediately went over there.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:34Jocko Willink?

  Um, and it was the Master Chief there who was one of my platoon chiefs. And apparently the conversation went, uh, the, the commander over there or, or the ops officer said, hey, we need like a, we need someone to come and help out with, with ops. And they were sending, they're sending this ensign. And they're saying, oh, these guys are sending us Team Two, sending us a damn ensign. Like, what good is this guy gonna do? And then, then the Master Chief sees my name and goes, wait a second, I know this guy. So you say that name again, Ensign Willink, we want this guy over here. And so, uh, sure enough, I showed up and we played water polo.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know what, what we did beside that. If in all truth, uh, we probably filled out some forms and almost like in the, almost the pre-computer days. You know, so I don't know what in the world we possibly, we weren't deleting email in those days.

• 55:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'll tell you a funny story. We went to, we did some big joint exercise and the, the skipper, at the time, he's like, all right, Jaco, you're gonna go forward and we're gonna, you're gonna run the, the tactical operations center. And like- You know, these days, when we think of a tactical operations center, you know, we're talking plasma TVs and satellite links and internet. You're talking, you know, like a Star Trek looking scenario. I shit you not, we went on this mission and I fit this quote tactical operations center into one single rucksack. I had like a

• 56:03Jocko Willink?

  I had a bunch of maps. I had some like, I thought I was squared away because I had, you know, like some overlays for the maps. And then how much the world changed between that time. So this is 1998. Well, I, I literally had the tactical operation. I mean, this isn't a big exercise, a big giant joint exercise that was taking place all over Europe. And I had a little, you know, we had a little, the, the SEALs there had a little role in this exercise, but it was a big exercise. A lot of stuff going on and I literally had the entire tactical operations center set in, in my rucksack.

• 56:36Jocko Willink?

  That's uh, that's scary. That's some good times right there. So then how, how long were you, how, how long did you spend in Germany for?

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Two years and, and that was the, the Bosnia Kosovo days. And so there was some good learning there too. And, and I felt like I would be a better platoon commander if I went overseas at a, at a, in a role like that for two years. And honestly, those two years really set me up to be in my, in my opinion, a much better platoon commander when I got to SEAL Team Eight in 99.

• 57:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and just kind of had some epic leadership over there too. The unit that you were at, um, I mean, those leaders are just incredible leadership over there.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Incredible. Really, really strong. Rick Smethers.

• 57:16Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, yeah, just great guys that

• 57:21Jocko Willink?

  awesome times. Um, any major, so, so when you say, oh, there's, there's lessons that I learned or there's things that I got from that deployment. I mean, is it just learning what it's like from the other side when you're on deployment?

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, um, taking a look at a SEAL platoon and saying, what is the effective employment of a SEAL platoon? When you're in the platoon, you're a little bit I don't want to say biased, you have a narrow view. You know, and so, understanding the difference between what success and, you know, and I wouldn't say failure, but like, some average performance is, was really important to me, because, you know,

• 58:00Speaker 01

  hearing, having the opportunity at a, at a young age, at a junior seniority, to see the senior leadership say, "Hey, that was really awesome," or "What the hell are those guys doing?" Just those statements themselves carried value.

• 58:13Jocko Willink?

  I was in training cell at SEAL Team 1, so I was like an E5. And I went on my first trip, where I was kind of like the trip lead, and it was to Florida, to Herbert Field, Florida. And we put a platoon out in the field for recon and whatever, and like, they, they flew down there, went right in the field. They might have even jumped into the field, but anyways, they go down there, they go right to the field. And of course, I was there on Advan, getting the target set up and all this stuff. And then, they get done with the operation, and we pull them out of the field, and now they've got, whatever it is, three days in Fort Walden Beach, Florida. And I'm like, it was the first time that I saw a platoon from the outside, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is gonna be a problem."

• 58:58Jocko Willink?

  Like, there's no way these guys are gonna get through three days of liberty here. We, this is gonna be crazy. And I, I remember that was the first time I was not in a platoon, because when you're in a platoon, you don't, you're just like, "Oh, we can go out now? Cool." "Oh, we're done with our op? Cool." "We're gonna go out and do whatever we want, in wherever we are." And that was like, the first time I saw it from the outside, and it was a good learning lesson for me.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, like we often say now, it's, "You don't know what you don't know." And so, how do you take things from that unknown, unknown quadrant and make them known? Like, whether it's the SEALs or in business, all of the risk and all of the opportunity is in that unknown, unknown quadrant. So how do you get into that and identify it and pull it back out? So, we didn't realize it in those days, but that's what we were doing.

• 59:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a...

• 59:47Jocko Willink?

  If you, that's another lesson, another, I should say a reiteration of the lesson of to take a step back and see something because when you're in that platoon, you don't, you don't, and you'd been on deployment before. You knew what it was like to go on deployment, but you were in a platoon. And so you don't quite know the perspective of not being in the platoon and not understanding what that looks like from the outside and not understanding what it looks like when there's some kind of an incident and how much that disrupts everyone and how much it hurts our reputation as SEALs. You know, that's something, you know, when you're in a SEAL platoon, someone gets in trouble. You're like, oh, Fred got in trouble. You don't think about it from, you know, what does the fleet think of that? What does that army commander that's there think of those things? You just don't, well,

• 1:00:32Jocko Willink?

  at least I didn't. I had, you know, I was young, dumb and, and, uh, well, just young and dumb, I guess.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  You don't need to finish that.

• 1:00:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, so you wrap up there. You wrap up there. And then where do you go?

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  SEAL teammate took over as a platoon commander and, um, did work up and then deployed down to Kosovo.

• 1:00:51Jocko Willink?

  So what, what year is it now?

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  So 99, I moved back to Virginia Beach and take over as a platoon commander.

• 1:00:58Jocko Willink?

  And, um, when you get there, how, how are you, how are you feeling? How are you feeling you're getting your platoon?

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Dude, so great. It's like finally like, I'm ready. You know, it's, it's been a year of like, put me in coach. And then you're finally in and it's just off to the races and just, you know, you remember the feeling well, I'm sure. It's, it's, um, it's everything. It's cracked up to be in more.

• 1:01:19Jocko Willink?

  And so you said you, this is that teammate?

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Jocko Willink?

  And so now you guys are basically fighting to try and get to go back to UCOM?

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:01:28Jocko Willink?

  And go to Kosovo, Bosnia, whatever's happening in that theater because that's the only show in town.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  That's the only show in town, but we, we made it back and, and, you know, we, we did a deployment there where we were doing, you know, small four or six man special reconnaissance missions. And, you know, we'd go out on three or four day ops and then we'd stand QRF for three or four days while another, a sister, part of the unit would go out and then, um, and then we'd have three or four days off. So we were actually in quite a, a regular predictable cycle while we were overseas.

• 1:02:03Jocko Willink?

  You talk a little bit about one of these operations here in the book.

• 1:02:07Jocko Willink?

  Here we go. "I was in Kosovo in 1999 in the middle of winter, leading a small surveillance team in the mountains, just a few hundred meters from the Serbian border. Freezing cold temperatures, the darkness of night, howling winds, and both Kosovar Serbian and Albanian armies somewhere in that same snowy terrain, weapons ready, looking for an enemy to fight. As we suffered through the elements, the sun soon to rise, we knew we needed to find a place to rest and hide for the daylight hours. From our vantage point halfway up the side of a mountain, struggling to maintain our balance on the steeply sloping ground, we could see a natural line of drift below. Railroad tracks, a 10-foot wide patch of flat ground, a path that could, that would have called out to anyone as the comfortable

• 1:02:52Jocko Willink?

  place we should naturally set up camp. Of course, we wanted to move down there. I remember a young guy on our team incredulous that we could even be out in this kind of weather. Humans can't survive in this, he said. It's miserable." The temptation to head down toward the easier path and the more comfortable site was real. But if it was calling out to us, we knew it would be calling out to anyone who happened to be coming that way. Going down there would make us more visible, more vulnerable, and more likely to run into trouble. So we set up camp a couple hundred years, meters up the steeply angled slope, and sure enough, within an hour and just a short time before

• 1:03:32Jocko Willink?

  sunrise, what looked like the entire Albanian army marched straight down that natural line of drift. Had we been camped there, they would have found us for sure. Doing the uncomfortable, exhausting thing, the hard thing, saved us that day." So those are the type of operations you were doing.

• 1:03:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're a great reader, by the way.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:57Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you guys do winter warfare in your workup?

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  We did.

• 1:04:02Jocko Willink?

  And this was after, I guess, teammate or sorry, team two had sort of given up the, the, the, the, the lock they had on winter warfare?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  They, they did. And you know, it was all of, you know, four or six weeks or something like that in the Colorado. What are they 13,000 or 14,000? Foot peaks. And so we, we did, you know, slept in snow caves and attempted to get good at telemark, but certainly get good at, at snow shoeing and we did all the winter workup and, and it really paid off because those operations in Kosovo were sometimes really miserable from a weather perspective and, and, and then on that particular passage you just read, I mean, I just very vividly remember thinking like, if we would have given in and done the easy thing there, we, we probably would not have survived. We at a minimum would have been captured and, and interrogated.

• 1:04:49Jocko Willink?

  The, so you, you did a full six month deployment down in that AO?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:54Jocko Willink?

  And you're doing pretty much three days on in the field, three days on QRF and then three days off?

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Yes. It's forward stage of QRF and sleep in a Humvee for three days or, you know, just be, be at the ready to go help whoever is in the field, maybe, you know, 10 or so kilometers or whatever it might be from the, from the main element.

• 1:05:11Jocko Willink?

  Anyone ever get contacted?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  We did on one operation. It actually was, the, the quick story is that we observed an arms transfer. Recall, we were enforcing the Dayton peace accords and, and, and we saw Russian forces handing weapons to Serbians, which is not the Dayton peace accords. And this is early, early in the day of no light, you know, no light cameras and near real time satcom sending it back. So we, we got pictures and documented the whole thing.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  And then we weren't set up to do any sort of offensive operations. You know, we had a whatever 80-pound packs for three days and you know, as many ham sandwiches as you could stuff in your backpack. But the, the, um, there was a nearby Army Special Forces house that, that could get out, get out and get underway. We called them in. They went and looked through the, the, the building where the transfer had happened. And I, I mean, I just assumed that that meant we would be, our mission would be over. You know, the age-old saying, if you assume, if, if you think you've been compromised, assume you have. And if you have, expel. And this was a leadership thing I got put against. The Army major at the time, who was in charge of the, the SOC C, the Special Operations Command and Control Element,

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  said, Charlie Mike, continue mission. And I was, I remember over computer, kind of getting in a little bit of an argument with him and saying, hey, here's what we do in the SEALs. This means we're over. Ultimately, he talked about it with a couple of us, the, the six of us that were in the field, said, hey, boys, what, what do we think here? This is, we have time to talk this through. And, and everybody said, you know what? It's, let's, let's, let's just continue mission. Let's not make this an issue. We don't feel that threatened.

• 1:06:54Jocko Willink?

  So, so let me just catch everyone up here. So you're in the field, you see this weapons transfer and you're, you do this, you, you tell the story in the book with, with great detail and it's an awesome story. But you're, you're in the field, you're doing a reconnaissance, you see this weapons transfer take place, and it's illegal and it shouldn't be happening, and you actually get photographs of it. And you push those up over SACCOM, which this is not like the movies. This is, this is a legit effort to get that done and very cool that you guys were able to pull that off. You get photographs of this weapons transfer taking place, and then you send that up the chain of command. And what the chain of command does is pushes a special forces group out to go inspect the area, which clearly anyone with...

• 1:07:39Jocko Willink?

  Any sort of tactical sense is gonna go, "Oh, we just did a weapons transfer and now the US military's there. There's someone watching." And so your thought is, "Okay, once the Green Berets go and inspect that site, we need to get the hell out of here." Well, you get told by the chain of command, "No, you're not leaving. You're gonna stay eyes on." And this is where you have the discussion, "Hold on a second. What do you mean, stay here?" And so that's where you're at. So what's the decision?

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  So we stayed. And then not a few hours later, we were being actively hunted by, we counted 19 armed individuals looking through this tree line and trying to figure out where we were. And we were set up with two OPs, observation posts, and then one CP, command post. So two, six people in the field, two, two, and two. I was in the command post with my radioman, and I did not have eyes on. I was back a bit. And then there's, in one of the command, in one of the observation posts, Chad Wilkinson, who, rest in peace, hero. You had Sarah Wilkinson, another amazing American hero on

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  your show recently, just one of my lifelong friends, and basically radioed back to me and said, "Hey, boss, we gotta make a decision here. We're, there's somebody coming down the tree line, and we either need to take him out or fall back." And I just said, "Listen, Chad, here's the deal. If you take him out, just know that we're gonna have, you already know this, we'll have 18 other people hunting us even more actively. But do whatever you think is right, and I'm behind you." And he ultimately, with one other guy that he was with, pulled back, took eyes off, didn't shoot. And to this day, I think that was one of the greatest decisions ever, because the six of us got back together and then we just worked our way out of a really tricky

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  problem. I remember two or three times, having my weapon in hand, coming off safe, finger on the trigger with like an Albanian insurgent, if you will, walking feet from me and saying, "Okay, please don't let me have to shoot this guy, because it'll be a bad day."

• 1:09:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  And we made it out. We ultimately made it out.

• 1:09:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and this is like I said, and it's hard for people to really, it might be hard for people to comprehend this. This is pre nine eleven. So you're out there doing real operations before the war kicks off and getting yourself into leadership situations and learning a lot and really being pretty, being pretty lucky in that situation for sure.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Big time.

• 1:10:13Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with that deployment and then what do you do next?

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Well, I screened to go to SEAL Team Six. And as you know, they take only a handful of officers every year. And I screened positive. I needed to come back from deployment just a couple of weeks early to go to what they call Green Team. And my commanding officer said, Mike, you can't come home early. You can apply again next year. And I just remember being so disappointed. And and I came home and I was like, you know what? Forget this. I'm I just don't see a future in the SEALs for me after this. And and that's right around that was literally the time when we started deploying again as two platoons going overseas. And they said, Mike, I got a different job for you. Stay here at SEAL Team Eight. Be in charge of two SEAL platoons. And I had a hard decision to make because I just wanted to go to Development Group and and be the best of the best. And in those days, like, that's where you went

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  if you really wanted to, you know, be in the mix. The regular teams weren't in the mix nearly as much. And I just ultimately, you know, like, many times in life, don't don't overreact and stay calm and think about what's the best thing. And and to this day, I'm I look back at that decision as Mike, as incredibly fortuitous, because my life wouldn't have panned out the way it did. And so, you know, nine eleven happened, and all of us in the teams had way more work than we ever would have wanted. And so, life works out. You don't always think it does in the moment when you get really frustrated with a decision that's not breaking your way. But when you zoom out over time, things usually work out.

• 1:11:44Jocko Willink?

  Where were you when September 11th happened?

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  I was on the pull-up bars at SEAL Team Eight. So a handful of us just doing a command PT and just really just never forget the moment.

• 1:11:58Jocko Willink?

  So at this point, were you a task unit commander?

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was in charge of two SEAL platoons and we were in our workup. We weren't close to being deployed overseas, but like everything, we were scrambling. And I actually remember there were questions like, who knows how to operate Stinger missiles? This is when there were planes in the sky. Nobody knew what was going on and we were getting ready to go, you know, arm, basically protect the ships and just homeland defense, if you will, if that's what it took. So we ended up not doing any of that, but just watching on TV, just like everybody else. But as you know, that infamous day really changed all of our future.

• 1:12:35Jocko Willink?

  And then where'd you go on deployment? So now, did you take that task unit on deployment?

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  We did. And we went over to Germany in the European Command and we were really ready to go and didn't get put into the mix early on. So again, a little bit disappointing. And I said to myself, what in the world? I'm sitting here as a task unit commander, ready to serve the nation, and we have forces at the ready, but we're in the wrong theater. And there was talk about, every day, there was talk about pulling us from Europe over to UCOM, over to CENTCOM to help out. It didn't happen. And again, I said, all right, you know what? If this is the way that things are going to break, I applied for the Paul Mill Fellowship, the Political Military Fellowship. No SEAL had ever been picked for two years

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  of fully funded grad school. And I said, all right, I'm at the stage of life where I need to think about other things. And I thought, let me just put my name in the hat here. And I was the lucky squirrel that was picked and I got two years of fully funded grad school and then went to grad school in Cambridge, Mass. for two years, from 03 to 05. So the whole early phase of the war, I was largely an observer.

• 1:13:45Jocko Willink?

  When you, there's a, I get, I asked often about this, especially from young SEAL leaders right now, because, you know, every SEAL joins the, well, you hope that every SEAL joins the teams because they want to go to war and then there's no wars going on. How was it? So you're in a task unit, you've got a fully capable task unit, September 11th has happened. When is this deployment to UCOM?

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:14:11Jocko Willink?

  Is it like 2001?

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  So that would have been, yeah, oh, one. It was oh, one. Yeah.

• 1:14:16Jocko Willink?

  So you go on deployment oh, one, oh, two, and you've got a bunch of hungry

• 1:14:22Jocko Willink?

  frogmen and they're sitting around in Europe.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 1:14:26Jocko Willink?

  What's the, uh, what, what did you do to try and keep your, your forces focused on the mission at hand?

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  Pull ups.

• 1:14:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a rough one.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a rough one. It sure was.

• 1:14:38Jocko Willink?

  I've had, I've told many, uh, young SEALs that I was in the SEAL teams for 13 years before I ever shot my weapon at the enemy. And you don't know, and all you can do is keep going, keep doing workups and keep going on deployment.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Keep training.

• 1:14:50Jocko Willink?

  That's the best thing you can do is keep doing workups, keep going on deployment, keep trying to get better. And they're, the, the nation's gonna call at some point.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Totally agree.

• 1:14:59Jocko Willink?

  Um, so you, are you thinking maybe once you get done with that deployment, it sounds like you're also the new young frogman that's pretty pissed off and not going to war. Uh, so you apply to go to school, you go up, you get, are you thinking you're gonna get out after that?

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  Well, no, you, you, you incur a three-year obligation. So at that point I had, I don't know, 12 or so years in, but I was like, I, I wanted to finish 20 years with a master's degree. And so, you know, the Kennedy School government was a, a really good path, you know, I, being the first SEAL uh, for this program, I thought, great, I applied at Harvard Business School and then the, the detailer was like, wait, that's a little too far off the reservation. You can do a master's in public policy, uh, at the Kennedy School and I applied there and, and, and got in. So that was, um, and that, that took me from oh, three to oh, five. And then, as you know, a date burned in every SEAL's head is June 28th, 2005. I had orders to SEAL Team 10. All the guys on the other helicopter were all teammates from SEAL Team 8.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  And, uh, and I went overseas right away and took over for, for Eric Christiansen, God rest him, and, uh, and, and basically took over for the guys who were in, who weren't shot down on June 28th, 2005.

• 1:16:03Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man. So.

• 1:16:09Jocko Willink?

  So that, so, so that shot, that, that shit happened, I don't know a better way to say it. And you are the guy that goes then to Team Ten and you go on deployment and you take over for Christiansen.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Yep. I'd already been a task unit commander and I was like so privileged to be able to do it again. I, you know, I felt like my calling was to help all the guys who were, um, who lived through that, who really had a hard, a really hard day.

• 1:16:39Jocko Willink?

  You write in the book about some of the, some of the things that you implemented to try and help guys out from a, I guess, a psychological and spiritual perspective. Talk us a little, talk us through that a little bit. Not only, um, what you did, but also what made you, what gave you the awareness? You know, this is pretty early on in the war and you seem to be, you seem to somehow be instinctively or intuitively know that guys are going to need some help.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, look, I, I like to say in life, I just have varying levels of ignorance on everything and some things I'm a little less ignorant on, but this was definitely one of them. I, in talking to the guys, I realized that this isn't a problem we're going to solve alone. Kind of to your voice example for the squeaky voice guy earlier, you know, and so know what you're good at, know what you're not good at and know how to bring in teammates that, that are better at things than you. And, and, and so we, I asked to have a psychologist and a chaplain come out and took everybody in the platoon aside and I said, listen, I've had one-on-one conversations with every single one of you. You are all struggling with things in different, different things and in different ways. I will never talk about any of our conversations with anybody else. It's not, it's not for public knowledge.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  But, but here's the deal. Um, I, I want every single one of you to spend at least five minutes with the chaplain and five minutes with the psych. It's, it was very countercultural at the time, at the time, you know, all we did and I was grow up showing either strength or perceived strength. And, and this was kind of like weakness. It could be perceived as weakness, clearly not, but, um, but in those days could be perceived as weakness. And, you know, we, we had the, you know, the guys who would, you know, beat their chests and say, no effing way am I talking to the chaplain and blah, blah, blah. And I was just like, okay, the way to get through this is make everybody do it and there'll be no stigma for who did and who didn't talk and, and, um, And there wasn't a single person who didn't talk less than several hours to each of the psych

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  in the chaplain. We had to extend them there for a couple of weeks and, and really, I think, set the foundation for a couple of things. Number one is for each of those guys in their own lives of, as they dealt with, you know, the post-traumatic stress of, of doing the body recoveries from the down helicopter and, and putting their buddies in bags and bringing them home, uh, which, which clearly isn't easy. And just the extreme loss of, of teammates and such. It was the first real mass casualty that the SEALs had in, uh, in the modern era. And so I, I just felt like it was a no-brainer to me to, to bring in, to bring in help. And then I ultimately, as I returned from that deployment, made a real push to get a psychologist on the staff and to begin the era of, of really saying, asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.

• 1:19:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you definitely get some credit for some foresight there because, um, yeah, that's that, that culture that we have in SEAL teams of like, just suck it up, um, just deal with it. And that's just the way it's gonna be, um, for you to sort of see beyond that. That's definitely, um, that's an admirable move right there.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Well, we're just here to help each other.

• 1:19:51Jocko Willink?

  So you guys get done with that deployment and come home and, and now, what do you do now? Now are you the ops officer at Team 10 or the XO?

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  So this is the era where the ops officer at a team became an O4. So I'd already been an ops officer as an O3. I became the ops officer as an O4. So this is why my career has been, was awesome. I just spent SEAL teams my whole life. I never did a boat unit tour. I never did an STV tour. I just was in this perfect storm of always SEAL team, SEAL team, SEAL team. So now I'm an ops officer again. I already know how to do the job pretty decently. Uh, we, uh, and that's really, you know, O5, all the way through late O7, which included a six-month deployment as, as the deputy commander for Sodof West and Anbar, which you know very well. I was, I think, one, I was like a couple of months after you is when I got there. And, um, and so just with, you know, some augmentations,

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  I, uh, got to get out to theater a couple of times during the workup for a month. We were really aggressively augmenting guys forward as you, you recall, so.

• 1:20:55Jocko Willink?

  So you guys roll out to Iraq in what 2007 you take your the team is going on deployment?

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was um spring of oh seven.

• 1:21:05Jocko Willink?

  And this is this is when Jason Redmond's out with you guys.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, Redmond's.

• 1:21:08Jocko Willink?

  This is when he got he got wounded and the other guys with him got wounded. Um, what was that deployment like from your perspective?

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Dude, that's where all my I it was uh night after night of stopping bad thing people from doing bad things to good people, you know, we were literally like vampire hours, one cycle of darkness operations, you know, as soon as the the the sun goes down, think about, you know, you vary your operation, do you leave the FOB at 10:30 PM or 11:45 PM, you know, it's like and and you remember these days really well, but just one cycle of darkness, you get back before sunrise. Uh, you know, you you lay down around six in the morning and you get back up at 10 AM and you rinse and repeat. It was a really high op tempo and in Sodaf West, we had about, I want to say about 15 or maybe 18 kind of outstations throughout the the Anbar province.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  And so there was always something going on somewhere. And I'll say I was I was really fortunate. It was team 10 and team seven came together. We we um so the CEO of team seven was the CEO of the the of Anbar and I was the deputy commander.

• 1:22:12Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  And, uh, you know, really privileged, just a quick aside, I one of my one of my favorite and most memorable memorable BUDS instructors, Mark Crampton, just beat the hell out of us and and and used to do berm sprints and and just would get out there and lead from the front. And I was just always so impressed with this man back in 93 when I went through training. On this deployment in 2007, Mark's the command master chief for SEAL Team Seven. And one of my some of my greatest days where Mark and I strap hanging and going out on operations and literally the two of us, you know, two guys who didn't have to go on the operations, going out every third night. And it was just super meaningful for me. And that's why, you know, as I I visited Coronado yesterday.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  So one of the, the way I started my workout was going to the very berm where, where Mark used to make us do those berm sprints. And I just had some quiet time all by myself and just, you know, spoke in my head to Mark and, and, uh, you know, just paid a huge tribute to him just yesterday and made myself super effing miserable and, um, and, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's, this is, this is the weight that we all carry, you know? So for those who don't, Mark, Mark died by suicide about three weeks ago, just before Easter this, a couple of weeks ago.

• 1:23:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, a guy that, I never saw him without a smile on his face in my whole career. Never saw him without a smile on his face with a great attitude, looking to help everybody. Just, uh, just, uh, just pure positivity and, um, just shocking.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  I, I don't know how to explain it.

• 1:23:46Jocko Willink?

  Were you guys, um, were you guys working with Iraqis? Was every element out there working with Iraqis?

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  We were, but you know as well as I do, it wa- a lot of it was window dressing. You know, hey guys, we gotta start building these guys up. We gotta take, you know, s- six or 12 Iraqis with us on the mission. And it was early in the days of actually, you know, really committing to trying to build the Iraqi army.

• 1:24:09Jocko Willink?

  We tried, we tried to, uh, build the Iraqi army and we would take them out. And it was definitely the, one of the biggest challenges was trying to work with the Iraqi army, especially at that time. And that's why it was very, it was very rewarding when they pushed into Mosul later in 2000, you know, 17, 18, 19. And the Iraqis did a lot of the fighting and they made incredible sacrifices, which, you know, at the time, when, when I was there in 2006, you, you wouldn't anticipate them.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  Stepping up.

• 1:24:41Jocko Willink?

  Many of them stepping up at all. You know, there's, if there was a few brave Iraqi soldiers for sure, but a lot of them, you would think, oh, they're, they're not going to be able to ever do this for themselves.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, for us, I mean, so I got sprint that deployment started, I think it was March of 07, and I recall the peak of the insurgency by using the metric of attacks on Americans, which we know is a flawed metric when you have more Americans or more attacks on Americans. But the, um, but the, uh, there were, the way to, to kind of quantify it is my first 30 days in theater in Fallujah, we lost 35 Marines from the greater Fallujah area. And, um, and so it was just night after night, we didn't, we, we were in the real early innings of, of being able to actually confidently take a lot of Iraqis out on operations and let them take the risk for their own nation.

• 1:25:30Jocko Willink?

  What'd you bring back from that deployment for lessons learned?

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a great question. I think the, the main thing is sustained operations, the importance of, um, of efficiency and making sure that, that, um, that you don't have SEALs or special forces, um, doing things that don't take SEALs to do. You know, when I grew up, there was a little bit of an attitude in, in coming out of BUDs that's like, I'm a SEAL, you're not. You know, there's, there's the SEALs and there's the non-Seals at the team. And I think the, you, you, I know you live this way also, the faster you learn that an integrated team is what it needs, what it takes to be successful, the faster your trajectory's to success. These are things that weren't learned quite as quickly in the early days, but in that deployment, all of the younger guys that, that were able to hand off, you know, the

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  Iraqis, the, the insurgents that they took off a target, hand them to somebody else to interrogate them. And, you know, there's a lot of people that can ask questions and interrogate, you don't have to be a SEAL to have that skill, or intelligence analysts, or whatever the case may be. And so I think we got really good at saying, what's the part of the job that just takes a SEAL to do? What's that comparative advantage? And then how do you hire people for everything else?

• 1:26:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Even I, I tell this to leaders all the time, do, you should be doing things that only you can do. And if someone else can do it and you're in a leadership position, let someone else do it. And if there's no one else can do it, cool, then that's an indication that maybe you should start training someone to do that other thing that you only at this time can do. Because as long as you're the only person that can do a job, guess what, you're going to be doing that job.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Jocko Willink?

  And that's, that should be your goal, not to be doing the same thing forever. And if you're doing that job, that means you're looking down and in, instead of being able to look up and out, and see what the next horizon's going to be, see what the next market's going to be, see where we can maneuver to, those are all things we need to look at.

• 1:27:25Jocko Willink?

  You get done with that deployment, and this is, is this when you went to the White House?

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I finished three years, basically, of running pretty hard as the XO. So, so the, the Ops Officer and then fleeted up as the XO at SEAL Team 10.

• 1:27:37Jocko Willink?

  Did you deploy again with SEAL Team 10 as the XO?

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  I did.

• 1:27:41Jocko Willink?

  And then where'd you go on that?

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry, that was the Iraq deployment.

• 1:27:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  That was, that was deployment. So, um, so I did two deployments, one as like the right out of grad school.

• 1:27:49Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  And then the XO SEAL Team Iraq deployment. The, um, so come back, and for, for everybody listening, we're really good about succession planning in the SEALs. You know, you, once you're in the seat, a seat for two or three years, you're, you're thinking how, you have to get out of your seat and make room for the next guy. And we do these diversity tours. I was fortunate, my first diversity tour was, you know, graduate school for two years in Cambridge, Mass. And it was time for me to get out of my chair as the XO of SEAL Team 10. And I applied for the White House Fellowship. It's a non-military program. It is a great leadership, public service program. I threw, you know, I say threw my name in the hat, it's quite an extensive application process. And ultimately was picked, there

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  are thousands of applicants, the, the nation picks 14 to be White House Fellows every year. And I got placed as the Director for Defense Policy and Strategy for Bush. So literally report to the National Security Advisor, who reports to the President. Like day seven, I'm running my first meetings in the White House Situation Room. It was a lot of steep learning, walking around pretending like you know how to, your way around Washington DC. You know, I'm like, you know, dumb team guy, all of a sudden thrown in the policy world, but.

• 1:29:00Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you, you got, speaking of getting this job and the selection process, you've got a, a cool thing in here that, that talks about that a little bit. Going back to the book, my interviewer sat me down and asked a bunch of questions, a bunch of introductory questions, then stared at me with intensity and said, Mike, what do you know about the START Treaty?

• 1:29:19Jocko Willink?

  I took a breath, looked at him and said with deadpan seriousness, I know how to spell it. Honestly, I didn't know anything about our nation's nuclear treaties, not a bit. But what I did know, and I told him this too, was how to get the right people into a room and how to run the decision-making process. I knew how to figure out what motivated people, how to get them to generate ideas, how to cooperate, and ultimately, how to leave the room with the best possible outcome. I wasn't afraid to admit that I didn't know a thing about nuclear policy. And I think that's what got me the job. Being humble enough to admit that, being humble enough to admit what you don't know, but still

• 1:30:00Jocko Willink?

  confident enough to explain where you can add value is a balance that's often hard to strike. But you need to recognize that it's a strength, not a weakness, to know what's beyond your knowledge or understanding at any point in time, instead of pretending otherwise. I walk into any room and always assume the people in it are smarter than I am, faster than I am, and more agile than I am. That way, I can never be wrong. I never assume I have the idea. I have an idea. Maybe it's the best one, or maybe it's not. But honestly, it shouldn't even matter, because our job in any room is to find the best answer for the problem we're working on, no matter whose answer it is. We have to listen to

• 1:30:41Jocko Willink?

  each other, and really hear each other, and the best way to do that is to walk into the room knowing there's no doubt that everyone in there has something useful to say. So, that's how you ended up with that job. Not by being the smartest guy about nuclear treaties, but by saying, hey, look, I don't know everything about that, but I can help make a decision.

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  It's exactly what you talk about in Extreme Ownership. It's the exact same way we've grown up in the SEALs, and just espousing that, for sure.

• 1:31:13Jocko Willink?

  So you're working at the White House? So what's this job? What's the first job that you get? When you get there as a White House fellow? What's the first job?

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  Well, the White House Fellowship is, has kind of like three legs of the stool. As an active White House Fellow, you're, you know, you're wearing a suit to work every day. It's not a, it's not a uniform job. And so the program has, places you in a full-time job throughout the year. And, and some people opt into a job that's a little bit more, uh, a little bit more fellow-y, meaning you don't have really that many obligations. You're there to learn, you just get to observe. And I'm like, you know, I want to really get in the mix, you know? So I had opportunities at Department of Commerce, and I had opportunities at National Security Council. And so I thought, you know, do I go deeper in something I know? National security? Do I go to Commerce and learn something new? And ultimately, you can't pass up the, the, uh, the role where you're going to be in the West Wing

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  and be a, just in the mix with the nation's hardest problems. And so that, um, so, so with that, the fellows also get together though, a couple of times a week, and you listen to, you know, Cabinet Secretaries, the Vice President, the President, and is, and so on, and just ask them questions and you learn. It's all off the record and 14 fellows plus the President, or 14 fellows plus the Vice President. And it's just a tremendous program. But you're really, i- i- if you pick a job that, that is a real, a job with real responsibilities, i- it's a hard year.

• 1:32:40Jocko Willink?

  When you see the news now, and I mean, I guess it's just like seeing like a movie about, like a military movie, how you and I will watch a military movie and it's like, oh, that would never happen. Oh, that's, oh. How is it for you now? You look, you look at what's happening in the White House and you know all these inner workings of what's going on behind the scenes? What is it? What, give us a little glimpse of what it's like going on behind the scenes.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I, I think the real thing that is not sexy is process. But process is what accelerates outcomes. And so when you think about it, there's 17 acres of the White House, but, but there are bajillions of different decisions that need to be made. And so not everybody can bring their decision to the top of the House. And so at my Level, I ran a certain meeting in the White House Situation Room. And it's it's simple. It's a binary outcome. You know, with it's either we agree, in which case national policy is made. Or if not, then we we suss out what is what are the different stakeholders think? What does Department of State or Department of Defense or Energy or the intel community think? And and why can't we compromise?

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  And so by definition, only the harder issues are bubbling up to then a deputy's committee meeting where the number two runs it. Again, binary outcome at a deputy's committee meeting. They either agree and make policy or not. And then it becomes a principals committee meeting where you have the National Security Advisor chairing it. And you've got the SECDEF, the SEC State, all of the the number ones of all the departments and agencies around the table. Again, binary outcome, agree or not. If agree, great, policy made. If not, that's going to the president. And so by definition, you've created a system where you get volume and flow. And but only but only the hardest things are making it to the top. Sometimes that runs well. Sometimes that doesn't run well.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  And so as I sit back, you know, I I think about, you know, how are things working? Are they working like they can or should? As soon as decisions get made outside of that process, you you you you actually diminish the probability of the best possible decision getting made. Because you know as well as I do, i- if not everybody's at the table and you make a decision, you've kind of alienated a bunch of stakeholders and you don't get everybody rowing in the same direction. So that's kind of the lens that I look at at Washington DC. And, you know, I think sometimes we're way more broken than we we should be. But other times, I think, you know, it's it's you see in the smartest minds solve some of the really hardest problems. We have we have a lot to be proud of and we have a lot to work on in this in this nation.

• 1:35:12Jocko Willink?

  So what which meeting is it that you would run? You said, like, out of all these meetings, which one were you? Which level of meetings would you run?

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  So, every administration changes the name a little bit, just because they need to, you know, put their own stamp on what it's called. But a Policy Coordinating Committee was what it was called in the Bush administration, as an example. A PCC, I think it was, if I might even be wrong on that. But a three-letter acronym that was, you know, something that changes. But the point is, I'd be at the head of the table, and you'd have, basically, assistant secretary-level people, or, you know, roughly two, three-star-ish generals from the Department of Defense, you know, just whoever the stakeholder was for the particular issue. Some people from undersecretary of Defense in the policy shop, sitting there. And, look, I'm not trying to glorify myself or be the president of the fan club. I'm a guy who ran the process.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  But the thing is, that's the role. If you can run the process really well, then it makes the nation run well, you know? And, you know, I've been often asked, a little bit of a segue here, but, you know, hey, as we got out of Afghanistan, what went wrong? The thing that went wrong was policy process broke down. Who are we bringing home? We didn't have an answer to that question. And so, that caused a lot of chaos, and a lot of people rushed to an airport, hoping to get onto a flight. You know, so, anyways, that's just one example of how policy, the engine in the machine, should work.

• 1:36:38Jocko Willink?

  How many hours a day are you working in that job?

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  Oh, that was long hours. That was, you know, I'd get in at, you know, I always get my workout in in the morning. I honestly got there, you know, 7:30, 8 o'clock, something like that. But it was home at 10 o'clock on a lot of nights. And then, a lot of times, you know, paying attention to the BlackBerry, I'll date myself, '07, '08, '09 timeframe. And, in fact, I remember very well, one night at 3:00 in the morning, the BlackBerry just buzzing nonstop, which usually didn't wake me up, but it did this night. And that's where that guy, Captain Richard Phillips, got taken hij- was hijacked on the Maersk, Alabama. And then, I called a friend of mine, Chris Domensik, who was at Team Six, and said,

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  "Hey, man, a million layers between you and me, but you gotta go start looking at this right now." And, you know, hours later, I'm in my suit, in the basement of the Pentagon, and the NMCC, the National Military Command Center, and just trying to work the problem. And ultimately, ran that whole thing from the National Security Council. And one of the cooler things was... You know, running these meetings and, you know, President Obama would walk in and there's only about, only about four, five, six of us kind of running this, this, um, this uh, situation. And when the whole thing was done, President Obama wrote a really nice note on White House station or stationary, "Mike, great job on the Somalia situation. You made a family very happy at Easter."

• 1:38:03Jocko Willink?

  Barack.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  Check. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

• 1:38:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you have a little, uh, little section here that I thought was pretty cool. Talking about that, as this is going down, you get these, you get these texts or whatever, the, the BlackBerries buzzing. You say, "I called the Pentagon and a one-star admiral who was on duty told me that his guidance was not to prepare any options to deal with the situation. I responded with something I said only twice in my two years in my position at the National Security Council. Quote, 'Sir, please take this as direction from the White House,' end quote. I told him that the Department of Defense needed to prepare military options to rescue the crew and keep the pirate captors from selling Captain Phillips to Al-Shabaab or another terrorist organization. The only question, I said to the admiral,

• 1:38:50Jocko Willink?

  is how fast can you have options back to the National Security Council? By the afternoon, my biggest worry had become real. The pirates had left the ship, putting the crew, putting the crew out of danger, but they had taken Captain Phillips with them and were holding him hostage on a lifeboat heading towards shore. Fortunately, by that point, the Department of Defense had done what it does best and was giving the National Security Council and the President real options to address a really hard problem." My friend, my friend Scott, commander of the entire task force being deployed for the mission, and Chris, a leader of the tactical response itself, arrived on scene halfway around the globe in a matter of hours after the mission was launched. They averted a crisis on Easter Sunday as they shot three pirates with three rounds in the dark of

• 1:39:33Jocko Willink?

  night while both their ship and the pirate's lifeboat rocked up and down on the swells of the open ocean. Scott, Chris, and their snipers were the true heroes of that day.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  It's no different than the third phase of BUDS. Do you remember when we were thinking, we're told, "Think about what can go wrong on your mission." "Think forward. What are all the things that can happen?" So it's not like I was anybody special in the White House. I was just doing what I grew up with in the SEAL teams. It's the same thing you or any other SEAL leader would have done, which is, "Hey, this could actually go bad. And here's how it can go bad, and we're going to prepare for the worst case, not the best case."

• 1:40:08Jocko Willink?

  Have you been to the UDT SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida?

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  Not lately, but I have.

• 1:40:12Jocko Willink?

  They have the Lifeboat there. I don't know if you know that.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  I've seen pictures of it, but yeah.

• 1:40:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's pretty awesome. A pretty awesome group doing pretty awesome stuff there. So that's this White House Fellow position, and that's an interesting going from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. What'd you notice about those two leaders?

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  First of all, great governors of people and great leaders in different ways. You know, the press has a certain view and a certain lens on things, and having been on the inside, it's really obvious statement, but just don't believe everything you see or read. So that was another great set of lessons that what came out of that two years in Washington DC for me. The White House Fellowship was supposed to only be a year, but after that Captain Phillips thing, President Obama said, "Hey, can you stay my whole administration?" So I stayed a second year and continued in my role. But, you know, really at the end

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  of the day, it was about seeing an administration in year seven and a half is a lot different than an administration in minute one. And so people can think about, "Oh, the right and the left." For sure, there's of course policy differences, not as many in national security. Ironically, once you get briefed up and you're really like in the TSSCI, Top Secret Sensitive Department of Information, of like what's happening in the world. Politics actually causes the opinions to narrow a good bit because there's only so many solutions to the national security problems. But the thing I would say is, setting aside right and left issues, it's really an energy. You're seeing the third or fourth person in the role at year seven and a half of an

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  administration, and you're seeing somebody else on minute one who's got incredible energy and are just happy to be, they're happy to be there. They might not know where the light switches are for the first few weeks, but that's the beauty of the permanent staff that kind of works as part of the institution in DC.

• 1:42:17Jocko Willink?

  And I've always felt, you know, people will complain that nothing ever changes. Well, there's some positivity to things being hard to change in our government. Would you say that's an accurate assessment?

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  Agree 100%.

• 1:42:31Jocko Willink?

  Like, I don't want the government to be at the whim of whoever's in charge to just whip it one way or the other.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  No. I think our nation's forefathers made it easy to kind of bump down the highway, but not to get off the road.

• 1:42:44Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. All right. So you wrap that up, and while you're there, is this when you figure out that you're going to go to SEAL Team Two as the CO?

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  It is. And, you know, I was handling Afghanistan policy as well, and Scott Moore was the detailer, the Scott that you just referred to in the previous passage. And he said, "Hey, Mike, you're going to take over SEAL Team Two. Can you get yourself out of the White House? Like, we can't pull you out. Like, you're the only one who's going to have to..." You know, and of course, after two years, I was, dude, I was ready for my next challenge. And ultimately got permission to leave. And I said, "I've got a great opportunity." And I knew I'd be deploying back to Afghanistan because, as you well know, the Naval Special Warfare Community doesn't frequently get real estate to own. And so, we had southeastern Afghanistan, and it was a great opportunity to not just

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  take a SEAL team overseas, but to integrate a bunch of, you know, Green Berets, a bunch of, you know, infantry from the Army, and just every single aspect of what the nation's Department of Defense really is.

• 1:43:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What a huge, what a huge step for the community. You know, I was talking to Admiral Richards, and those guys that had this sort of vision that we should be deploying in that, in that... Even with the idea that we should be deploying like that, like as a team CO deploying overseas, like that was, those guys came up with this idea and, and thankfully they came up with it before September 11th. They kind of, it wasn't there yet. I mean, what was, remember Vision 2000 and all that? Like that was them trying to formulate this idea. But yeah, this is an example of how well that actually worked, the opportunities that were there.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  So, so awesome. And so exciting as a commander of a SEAL team to be able to bring your whole team overseas to one, to one effort and to make a meaningful impact.

• 1:44:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I mean, for, just so everybody knows, for, pretty much for the entire history of the SEAL teams, it was going to be onesies and twosies, a platoon going here, maybe a couple of platoons going there. And that was what they did in Vietnam. It was like one or two platoons at a time deploying. The SEAL team commander was back in Coronado or back in Virginia Beach and they were just kind of watching. And then to have this idea that actually a SEAL team, the whole team should be able to deploy. And then the team should be able to take on other assets and utilize those assets. I mean, it's, we got to be very thankful for those senior leaders that came up with that plan, for sure.

• 1:45:14Speaker 01

  Totally agree.

• 1:45:15Jocko Willink?

  And I would say that you were, you were definitely a benefactor of those things.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  Couldn't be, couldn't be more accurate. So, so appreciative.

• 1:45:24Jocko Willink?

  So you show up at a team, what was your, what was your attitude coming back to the team?

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  Oh, fired up, man. To, to like get out of the White House and, uh, wearing a suit every day for two years. I was ready for some sand and, and surf zone.

• 1:45:36Jocko Willink?

  You show up and the workup, anything particular that you guys focused on during the workup?

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Well, you know, we knew, of course, knowing, it's a real benefit to also know you're really preparing for Afghanistan and you, you get to not prepare for a bunch of different things. And, and so we minimized, I hate to say this, but we minimized diving. We had to make hard decisions. Like, we're not going to be diving in Afghanistan. Let's not go spend three weeks diving. It just doesn't make sense. And, um, and yes, it kind of moved us away from our roots a little bit, but that was, that was. That's what commanders do is you make the those types of decisions and so for me I was really moved when I went overseas I went to Afghanistan to spend a couple of weeks out in theater early on in command and you know I was there when we lost three SEALs in a helicopter crash out in Zabul province and of course terrible terrible incident you

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  know being there really left a serious mark on me I mean of course you know I'd been exposed to everything already in my career but when you really feel that you feel that you are the owner of the risk of the whole team it's a different feeling it there's a I used to think when I was second in charge of a SEAL team that it wouldn't really be that different to be overall in charge I couldn't have been more wrong so when I when a senior leadership team from from SEAL Team Two did our advanced reconnaissance if you will we came home on a medevac where I'll never forget there was a young man who was blown up in an IED who was really just being flown to Germany just so he could pass away

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  in Germany next to his wife he was in a coma and and I'll never forget like a you know six or eight hour flight just spending it next to this whole guy just with my hand on him talking to him and just some army trooper who I don't even don't even know his name but like when you're really around that it I got back to the States and I I already worked hard but I worked like it really stepped up the like this is real like I will bring all my guys home and and we'll do everything we can.

• 1:47:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah so those we experienced that going getting to Ramadi like as soon as we get there there's there's soldiers and Marines getting killed just about every day and and we would go to those services whenever we could but it was out of the gate we were hitting two three services in a row and it's a wake up call to everybody to to the recognition of what's going on out in that battlefield every single day which which you know you could hear it going on you could see it going on you could see vehicles you could see guys getting CASA vacked out we were giving blood when we could whenever we could give blood like just that heavy reality of going into these scenarios.

• 1:48:30Jocko Willink?

  You guys, you guys finish your work up, you go on that, that pre-deployment and now you've got your platoon, your, your team over there, your whole team, never mind just the platoon. Now you've got the whole team and it's not just your team, it's you've got SF guys, you've got, you've got an entire like force here. It sounds like from the book, you, you had a little bit of a rough relationship with the, with the conventional commander that was there.

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  Initially with the one who was right next to me in Taran Kaut, this guy just didn't want to get out and, and put his force at risk to go do great things. And you know as well as I do, you just, you just don't respect people that don't want to do their job.

• 1:49:09Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, that being said, um, you're, you're determined and you're going to go make things happen. You've got some, you've got your, you've got your platoons, your teams, your forces still out there, still getting after it. Um, but you've got to know when it's time to not get after it. Got to know when it's time to push back. You've got a thing here that's a really good lesson and it's a really good lesson and you do this in the book, you counter it to the time when, when the major told you in Kosovo, was it Kosovo, to stay out in the field. And you go, you know what, we're just going to stay out in the field like he told us, you know, well, well, that, that seems like the right

• 1:49:53Jocko Willink?

  call right now. This is a little bit different here. Um, going to the book, "To ensure civilian casualties were as limited as possible and that the innocent Afghan civilians wouldn't turn against our forces, the military set up a policy called Boots on the Ground Battle Damage Assessment. This meant that after every bomb we dropped, we were, we were required to physically go to the site to confirm that no civilians had been killed. The theory, a smart theory, was that knowing we would have to acknowledge civilian casualties would make it less likely that there would be any civilian casualties. A talented team of Army Green Berets within my command had intelligence at one point that there were approximately

• 1:50:37Jocko Willink?

  10 Taliban members gathered together at three in the morning in an area no civilian would ever go and certainly not at that time. The team used surveillance techniques to view the site and we knew as a certainty that there were no civilians there." They asked me for permission to drop a bomb from an unmanned aircraft and following the decision-making process I had put in place, I granted it. They went ahead and eight of the Taliban fighters were killed. An army colonel from the commanding general's staff in Afghanistan called and asked my watch officer for our BDA report. And my watch officer explained that we didn't have one, that it was simply too much risk for

• 1:51:20Jocko Willink?

  not a good enough reason. The road to the site was too dangerous to travel and we knew there were no civilians present and to ask anyone on my team to go down this isolated path in the middle of the night was an unnecessary risk to their lives and one it made no sense to take. I got on the phone with the colonel and we went back and forth. This is the policy. But the policy in this case makes no sense. To achieve an already known outcome, I will not take unnecessary risk that my men will die. There are consequences in the military for not following the orders of a superior. Truth is, the lack of organizational flexibility is a huge problem for the military. On the ground, we were living a never agile enough

• 1:52:04Jocko Willink?

  kind of life, but in terms of the larger hierarchy, the structure had its weaknesses. I could have been fired and sent home from the deployment as an insubordinate. But in that moment, I couldn't, I couldn't just blindly follow the policy. I had to act consistently with my values and make a judgment and subsequent decision that I was going to be able to live with if the worst happened. The colonel said that since I wouldn't comply, he was going to report my non-compliance to his boss, the commanding general in Afghanistan, and that he would ask his peer in charge of our Afghan partner force to order his men to unilaterally inspect the site instead. I urged him not to do that, but that decision

• 1:52:49Jocko Willink?

  was out of my hands. Twelve Afghan soldiers drove down that isolated road in three vehicles to make their assessment of the bomb site.

• 1:52:59Jocko Willink?

  The first two trucks hit an IED and three of the eight people in those two vehicles were killed with others seriously wounded. Soon after, I flew by helicopter to the outstation where the Green Beret team was stationed, sat with them and told them how incredibly proud I was of their amazing bravery, the remarkable work they did night after dangerous night. It was one of the more emotional moments in my life. As we started our meeting, silence fell over the room and one of the guys on the team opened by looking me square in the eyes and quietly but resolutely thanking me. He knew that the easier decision would have been caving to the pressure from above and deviating from my beliefs and we all knew that would have meant some of the men in this room would have died.

• 1:53:43Jocko Willink?

  The Green Beret had no idea that his words made my throat almost close as I choked up and how hard I had to fight off tears. I was simply overwhelmed by the real life impact, by the reality of the situation, the overwhelming magnitude of these kind of decisions made under the pressure of intense nightly combat take a toll on people that's difficult to understand for those who haven't experienced it. Now, with the benefit of several years of hindsight and the time to fully reflect on those past events, I have an even greater belief in the importance of process, your own process and a values-based decision-making. Process can, no exaggeration, save people's lives.

• 1:54:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. A point I like to bring up in situations like this is if you're in a leadership position and someone below you in the chain of command is refusing to do something or pushing back that hard, you should probably listen to them. And this is a situation, I mean, as I was reading this, as soon as I saw, you know, it go to, "Oh, he's gonna order someone else to do it," I just was, I already knew the outcome.

• 1:55:06Jocko Willink?

  Because I know you're not pushing back for no reason, you're pushing back for good reason. It might be hard for people to understand the kind of pressure that you're under to kind of concede and just go with what you're being told to do.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  There's times in life you gotta just put it on the table and say be ready for the outcome. Be ready to be fired. You always hear pick your battles. This was unquestionably one of them. And this is why you are in command. And this is why, everything that you've trained to do at this point in life is for that, is for a moment like that. It's to have confidence in yourself that you're, that you're right. And to not take that unnecessary risk. I still get, you know, emotional as you were reading it. I haven't, you know, you know, I sit back and I can very tactically feel, sitting in that room, in the silence and me looking at all these guys and, and really knowing that, that me having the backbone

• 1:56:06Speaker 01

  saved, you know, several of their lives and not, not being able to look at which guy wasn't there or which guy, you know, it would have been. But it's just the weight of combat gets really hard over time. And, um, and there's certain moments like that where you just say to yourself, this shit is real.

• 1:56:26Jocko Willink?

  How long was this deployment?

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  That was 10 months.

• 1:56:30Jocko Willink?

  That's a long deployment for SEALs.

• 1:56:31Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:56:32Jocko Willink?

  What was, there was, was, were we correcting a deployment cycle or something like that? Was it one of those things? What happened?

• 1:56:37Speaker 01

  We were just trying to stretch our forces more, get more out of the forces we had. So lengthen it out a bit. And, um, and then you could put more people on the battlefield and, and that it was not more complicated than that.

• 1:56:49Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes NSWs had to kind of make adjustments and extend someone and cut someone else short. Uh, but it wasn't that, huh? We were just trying to?

• 1:56:57Speaker 01

  No, it was, it was aligned with the, uh, you know, there were aligned with the command leadership structure for the Joint Special Joint Special Operations Task Force throughout Afghanistan. There were, you know, five different regions, if you will. So I was southeast, but there was also, you know, obviously south and west and da, da, da. And, and that was the cycle that the, that the special operations community was on. And so if the SEALs wanted to, you know, play the game and have the, the battle space, you just had to acquiesce and do the 10 months. You can't get off cycle with the rest of the, rest of the force. But yeah, decisions like that very, um, frequently and, and literally life and death.

• 1:57:37Jocko Willink?

  What was your kind of battle rhythm, your, your personal battle rhythm during that deployment? Like, what, what time are you going to sleep? What time are you waking up? Is there any rhythm?

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  Jaco, I had no rhythm. You know, I had a red light in my ceiling that was, anytime there was, it was a tick, troops in contact. You know, my, my bedroom was about a 30 yard sprint down this like, you know, plywood palace kind of hallway to get to the, the, the, um, the operation center, the, the antithesis of the, the talking rucksack that you talked about at the beginning. You know, we, we had the, we had the plasma TVs and the terrain mapping and unmanned aerial vehicle feeds and everything. And, and you know, you, you would just get the, the, the calls that, you know, you, you'd hear the, the crazy machine gun fire coming in over the, over the satellite radio and you'd hear one of your, your key leaders whose voices you know immediately, even though they're not saying their name on the, on the, on the satcom radio. And they're just calmly saying what they need.

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  It's, it's a, I need a 500 pound JDAM dropped like yesterday on this particular location. And, and, uh, and I was the one to make the decisions on when we dropped bombs and when we didn't and what operations we went on and what we didn't. And so because I had, I don't know, it was roughly 25 different outstations throughout the southeast and sometimes literally, I think that, uh, five, six, seven different elements in a tick at a time, I was, I was just, I was just on.

• 1:58:58Jocko Willink?

  Did you, were you the approval for air?

• 1:59:01Speaker 01

  I was the approval for air. Yep.

• 1:59:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you're busy.

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I mean, we, I don't know, I don't think I've ever said this number publicly, but it's, it's not, you know, a secret, but we had, uh, over 1,100 air to ground drops over 10 months. And I'm proud to say we didn't harm anybody we shouldn't harm. There were times that we, that we said, no, it wasn't a lot, but, um, but, but you know, the, mostly the leadership in the field knew when not to ask for something. But occasionally there were times it came up when I said no, and I just wasn't comfortable with something and. So the other thing that's interesting when you ask about the battle rhythm though is that it was also important to me to go out on some of the operations with the guys. And I didn't go out quite as frequently as I did in Iraq, but I still got out maybe once a week or something like that. And I didn't do that in the beginning of the deployment

• 1:59:47Speaker 01

  because I wanted the staff to kind of see the judgment, the decision-making, etc. But I had an incredible XO, Rocky Russell, who I had supreme confidence in. So I'd go out on an operation and be with the Afghan commandos in a SEAL platoon for, I don't know, a day, day and a half, two days at times. And that's a tough decision also because as soon as you swing and go on one operation with one unit, dude, you don't know what's happening with the other 24. So that takes an element of like confidence and trust. But of course, as you know, it makes you a better leader because it helps you understand and maintain perspective. And frankly, just to share the same risk as the guys, you know. And as a, whatever, I'm 51 now, as a 41-ish year old SEAL Team commander, you know, that

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  deployment, we got shot at and rocketed and I cut one of my guy's legs off on that deployment.

• 2:00:39Jocko Willink?

  What happened there?

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  There was somebody in an IED who was blown up and we had a mass casualty situation. And so, you know, it was, we had, you know, doctors, but they were busy and, you know, I was kind of under, it wasn't like I did it on my own. The doctor kind of said, hey, okay, do this, do this, do this, and cut this and, you know, go. And because it was a, it was an all hands on deck kind of thing in the, in our, in our, in our headquarters at the, it was kind of like the MASH unit, if you will, you know?

• 2:01:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you had, you had casualties come into your location?

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  Yup.

• 2:01:16Jocko Willink?

  And it was a mass casualty?

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, yeah.

• 2:01:19Jocko Willink?

  And so you were there freaking scrubbed up, getting it, getting it on?

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  I don't even think we scrubbed it. I mean, we, you know, we did, I don't remember perfectly, but I just remember we didn't, I met this guy at the helicopter who had three tourniquets on and one of them was, had come loose and he had arterial bleeding coming from the middle of his leg that was missing. And I had to, you know, reach in and hold pressure on arterial bleeder and take him from the helicopter and get him all the way into the, get him all the way into the medical unit. And there was another guy who was, I mean, blown up beyond recognition, but I mean, I knew who it was, of course. But I mean, it was just, it was really, really bad. And And then it was just, there were only a handful of SEALs in the headquarters at the moment and, you know, the tick was gone and so that was taken care of and so it was

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  just all hands on deck and dealing with the medical situation and that was one night, but there were several nights where we had overwhelming number of people who were shot up or blown up that we were taking care of.

• 2:02:23Jocko Willink?

  But somehow, from your SEAL team, from SEAL Team 2, you guys made it through that deployment without losing anyone?

• 2:02:29Speaker 01

  No one was killed in action, yeah.

• 2:02:35Jocko Willink?

  Any other thing to wrap up on that deployment?

• 2:02:39Speaker 01

  I think it's really, the main, it really is the inexplicable pace and dedication that our entire Department of Defense has is really remarkable. You know, you just get humbled every day to see how hard people work in the austere conditions and, you know, both SEALs and Green Berets and non-Seals and non-Green Berets out in these hinterlands, literally just not showering for months on end, only eating the food that helicopters drop into them and just really putting country and others before self. I just was constantly

• 2:03:22Speaker 01

  humbled to be part of an organization with such great Americans.

• 2:03:32Jocko Willink?

  So, you get home from that deployment and I'm gonna go to the book here. I'd been home from Afghanistan for just a few weeks when I found out that my replacement as commander of the Special Operations Task Force, who had taken over my team, when my team finished its deployment, had decided to take his own life, shooting himself with his pistol in his room in the bed I had slept in for the previous 10 months.

• 2:04:06Jocko Willink?

  I was shocked and devastated. He and I were good friends, former roommates, Bud's classmates 20 years earlier. We had come up the ranks together. Before we each got married and started our families, we shared a house in Virginia Beach for three years. We were inseparable in those days. We had bonded over our mutual frustration at the pull-up bar during Bud's training. One Saturday morning, after we'd both failed the day before to come anywhere close to matching the 15 to 20 pull-ups our fellow trainees were able to do, we decided to go find a pull-up bar to practice on, far away from the Bud's compound where no one would stumble upon us. Despite a full night's sleep, we were still struggling.

• 2:04:49Jocko Willink?

  As we fought, as we each fought through our fourth pull-up, I can still see his face and hear the chuckle in his voice as he turned to me and said, "World's finest, right here." He was loyal, genuine, a man who could find humor in absolutely anything. Another time in training, we were so cold on a boat ride back to the compound after an icy swim, that we found ourselves fighting over where to place one rubber fin that was shielding very small parts of us from the 40 knot winds. There we were, two grown adults, SEAL trainees, fighting over a tiny rubber fin to help make us a tiny bit warmer and we, and just a little drop less miserable.

• 2:05:32Jocko Willink?

  We stopped for a moment and realized what we were fighting over, and we both just broke out in hysterical laughter. It seemed like we were always laughing, back then. When I was deployed, he would check in on my family, and when he was deployed, I would check in on his. I would say that I trusted him with my life, except that it was so much more than that. As SEALs, we have no choice but to trust everyone on our team with our life, every minute of every day on the battlefield. But when you bond with someone, it's not so much about trusting them with your life, it's about wanting them to be there in the trenches with you, feeling better because you know they're right alongside you. He was so much more than a fellow SEAL.

• 2:06:14Jocko Willink?

  He was a friend, a teammate, a brother, a shining example of the bravery a human being can exhibit.

• 2:06:33Jocko Willink?

  Man.

• 2:06:38Jocko Willink?

  Um, you know.

• 2:06:42Jocko Willink?

  You, you, you talk about, um, the pressure and the pace and the, and the battle rhythm or lack of rhythm and the lives at stake.

• 2:06:58Jocko Willink?

  And it's, it's, it's hard to describe what that feels like.

• 2:07:06Jocko Willink?

  And it's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to describe what it feels like, I guess is all I can say. Um, but man, this was, this was just a travesty and a shock.

• 2:07:20Jocko Willink?

  To have the, the commander on the ground.

• 2:07:24Jocko Willink?

  Who had just taken your place, someone you grew up with in the team, somebody I was at team two with, I mean, just freaking good, good mug.

• 2:07:39Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's so hard to understand.

• 2:07:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, this one hurt.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  They all hurt.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  Some of them hit closer to home than others, you know, as, as I know you've experienced too. And, you know, this is, this is the thing I was talking about and, and not describing well enough before, but it's the, um, it's the weight that people carry. It's the, it's the, um, not, not always knowing the weight that people carry. And, um, yeah, this, that was a tough one for me.

• 2:08:16Jocko Willink?

  You, you, you talk a little bit in the book.

• 2:08:20Jocko Willink?

  You know, I mean, obviously we all have the, we all go through the, you know, what could I have done differently? Maybe I could have said this or seen that or done this or done that.

• 2:08:31Jocko Willink?

  Is there anything as you look back? Is there any pattern? Did you have any indication? I mean, you did a turnover. You know, I was looking, um, I was looking at, there's a, there's an article in the New York Times about this and there's a, there's a, there's a situation that you describe in the book where I guess the local Afghans had gifted you some kind of a, you know, ceremonial head garment of some kind. And he was with you and they kind of ceremonially gave him as well, the same thing. And, and it's, it's, it's, I don't know if you've seen this, I'm sure you have, but there's, so you write about that in the book and there's a picture in, in the New York Times of, of you in that, there's the picture of when that happened. And for me, it was very tough to look at because I read it and I kind of imagined it.

• 2:09:16Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, then, then I, then I go on the New York Times, I'm reading this article and I think, oh, there's the picture. There's exactly what Mike was talking about.

• 2:09:25Jocko Willink?

  Is there anything that you look at and that you think we need to do a better job of looking out, out for?

• 2:09:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, let's start that with me, right? I think that, you know, we've grown up saying, look, we can always go blame the world at everything, but we, guys like you and me grow up starting with ourselves and say, what could I have done better? And so when I look back at, at this particular situation, I recall very vividly on a Friday afternoon, two o'clock in the afternoon or so at a team, picking up the red line and trying to, to dial him and just check on him and see how he's doing. And there was a new policy where you needed a four-digit PIN or something like that. And I was like, oh, the comms guys have already gone home. I'm not going to bug them on a Friday afternoon and make them make my phone work. I'll just call, call overseas on Monday. Well, that Saturday is when, when he took his own life.

• 2:10:16Speaker 01

  And I, I sometimes look back and say, you know, did I, did I, did I do enough? And I, I certainly wrestle with that. And, um, and it leads me to a lesson that I talk about, which is not seeing intrusive as a bad thing. You know, it's, it's a good thing to be intrusive in people's lives and to ask the question of like, hey, really, have you, how are you really doing? Have you ever considered harm to self? Is a hard question to ask. And it's a little bit embarrassing sometimes to ask it, but I'll take 99 embarrassings for the one yes. I missed that here and I won't miss that again and since then, since that happened,

• 2:10:55Speaker 01

  I've had plenty of yeses where I've been able to step in and help. I certainly wish I could have helped more in the past.

• 2:11:06Jocko Willink?

  When you guys were doing a turnover, the turnover, I mean, just so everyone understands, this is like...

• 2:11:12Speaker 01

  It's the commander of the team.

• 2:11:13Jocko Willink?

  It's the commander of the team, but also the turnover, this is, for lack of a better word, this is like the most intimate intellectual exchange you're gonna have with another human being in your life. Hey, I've been on the ground, I've been fighting these troops, we've been at war, I'm gonna give you everything I can to help you do the job. I mean, this is as close as you're gonna intellectually transfer information between two people. And then, plus, on top of that, you guys are brothers from buds. And, I mean, as you're doing this, is it, is there any, there's nothing, there's no...

• 2:11:51Speaker 01

  You know, Jaco, I've never said this publicly, the, there's just one shred of little thing when I play back in my mind, you know, we didn't lose any Americans and in my last, you know, session with the leadership, I celebrated that. But the incoming team was also there. And, and my friend, you know, pulled me aside afterwards and said, hey, that was, you know, really rough for us to set the bar to expect that we're not gonna lose anybody. And, um, and it turns out that, that the leader from the East Coast SEAL Teams had also pulled my friend aside and said, hey, listen, just do the same thing Mike did, just bring everybody home. And, and he had lost four guys in his first month.

• 2:12:32Speaker 01

  And so I think that pressure of losing people, um, and, and, you know, it's, it's, it just, it didn't, it didn't add up. So I, I don't say that's the cause, but it's certainly unquestionably a contributor.

• 2:12:48Jocko Willink?

  Man, yeah, it's um, I actually remember turning over with the guys that took over for us in Ramadi and I told them, well, because I had lost guys and I'm like, it was a, I remember thinking to myself, am I gonna say this? Yes, I am. You guys are gonna take casualties. Like you, there's a hundred percent chance you're gonna take casualties. There's a hundred percent certainty that you're gonna take casualties. And, I mean, I've talked to guys since then that were in that group, in that task unit that relieved us and they were like, that was the wake up call for them, was, holy shit. Like, we got our, we got the SEAL Team commander of the task unit telling us we aren't a hundred percent certain gonna

• 2:13:28Jocko Willink?

  take casualties. Um, yeah.

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  But all you can do is look at wake up calls as fuel for improvement in the future. Yeah. Right? And that's how we, I know both of us live our lives this way now, is we do carry inexplicable weight and it's, we're just here to make everybody else's lives better and, and what do we, how do we make the, the families who have borne the cost lighter and better and how do we help the nation better, learning from the things that we've learned?

• 2:13:59Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you know, one of the really heartbreaking things in the book that you write about was you're, you're going to, I guess, were you part of the CAECO team?

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  No, I was home, um, you know, on post-deployment leave, but, but in, in Virginia Beach. And so, being such a family friend, we were, we were, of course, you know, we were one of some of the few in the house.

• 2:14:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you're talking about on your way to let, you know, his wife and his family know what had happened. You, you, you called a child psychologist and you, you asked, you said, do we tell his daughter now the truth of what happened or do we wait until she's older so she can better understand it? And the psychologist says, you have no choice but to tell the truth now.

• 2:14:44Speaker 01

  Tough stuff. I mean, I'll never forget being in the house with my wife and daughter. And I mean, this merits a super quick story. It's, you know, when I was overseas, of course, their family was checking on my wife and daughter. And one of the things before I came home was that my daughter made a deployment box that had 10 months' worth of note cards written out to her friend, my friend's daughter. And they said things like, "When you miss your dad, go into his closet, take out a shirt of his, put it on and pretend it's a hug." You know, notes like that to say, "Here's how you're going to get through the deployment." And so then, you know, just a month later or so, me being

• 2:15:26Speaker 01

  there and seeing the deployment box that she had told me about, which neither my wife nor I gave her the direction to go do that. That was her entirely on her own. And sometimes, you know, the kids and the wives and the spouses never get enough credit for as strong as they are. But being in that room, and I'll still never forget her screams, you know, "He said he'd come home." And then, more importantly, like, my daughter being there and consoling her friend who had just lost her dad. It's, these are, these are weighty things, man. Makes you grow up fast.

• 2:16:02Jocko Willink?

  How much longer after that did you decide you were gonna, you were gonna retire?

• 2:16:08Speaker 01

  I was really close at that point. I was weighing it pros and cons in my head. That's not what influenced me in any way. I, I made, I actually frankly can't recall if it was, how soon after that I made the decision, but, you know, it ultimately was about continuing to make a difference. And I was, I was at year 20, and after being commanding officer of a team, I just felt like there's so much more to do in life. And while it's awesome to be a SEAL, and I'd already been privileged to run meetings in the Situation Room, and like, what am I gonna do, like, another six years and return to attend the meetings that I've already run? You know, so I was like, let me just pivot and go spend a chapter of my life in the, in the private sector, which I'm 10 years

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  into now, and have been really fortunate, and learned a ton, and... And at some point in my life, I'll return in some capacity to serve this nation. And I'm not sure what form or fashion that will take. I really have no idea. I just know that when you're open to service, it will find you. And the ways we serve now are genuinely doing things like writing books and trying to make a difference for Gold Star communities and just continuing to elevate the conversation.

• 2:17:19Jocko Willink?

  How was your transition when you retired? I know people ask me that question a lot, and I always give the advice of like, hey, when you get out, you need a new mission because you've been on mission, super hyper focused on this one thing for your whole life, for everything from how to freaking put your web gear together in the most efficient way so your magazines are in the right place, for an offhand draw, like all those little things that we were focused on for 20 years. And then you go up through the ranks where now you're focused on how can my platoon do this better? How can my tasking do this better? For you, it's how can I do this better for my team? How can I better support them? And then one day, in one day, you clean out your locker and you're a civilian. And I always tell guys, hey, man, you got to find a new mission. And it sounds like you got

• 2:18:04Jocko Willink?

  on mission pretty quick when you got out. Did you already have that, did you already have jobs set up when you retired?

• 2:18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. I was, again, I've been very fortunate because I had exposure that few people are privileged to have, whether it was the White House Fellows Program or two years of a pretty reputable graduate school. And so, you know, I didn't know what I would do when I made the decision to retire, but I had a lot of conversations to try to go find that thing. I had great mentors and ultimately, you know, had offers at Goldman Sachs and at JP Morgan and at Bridgewater, the hedge fund where I ultimately went. A good, really good friend of mine, Dave McCormick, who actually just ran for Senate in Pennsylvania, was in the Bush administration, the Treasury while I was at the National Security Council.

• 2:18:54Speaker 01

  But Dave is a good, really good human and really good friend. Just asked him for some advice and, and, um, and he, he ultimately created another option that I wasn't trying to create and I jumped into, to Bridgewater with him and, and a couple of other really great leaders and learned a ton there. And that was my first chapter. So, look, it, it's really, it can, when you look in the rearview mirror with transition, you can say, oh, it must've been really easy. No way, man. It's super freaking hard. Like, because we're all planners. You know, in the teams, we're, we're not like, we're not letting life just happen to us. We're planning life. And this is an element of time when you're like, it takes patience to, for the plan to come together. It's not like you can plan

• 2:19:36Speaker 01

  harder and create things to happen in 12 hours. And, and, and man, I'm bad at a lot of things, but patience is definitely one of my weak, weak spots.

• 2:19:45Jocko Willink?

  You have this, uh, this section, which I think kind of wraps up, um, some, some of your transition here. You say this, "I hear the question all the time, how did you manage to move from the military to the government to the private sector when those arenas, arenas are so different from each other?" My answer is to premise the challenge, uh, or challenge the premise of this question. Of course, there are different, different details, different specifics, but the truth is, in my experience, all high stakes organizations and all high stakes decisions are pretty much the same. The concrete knowledge you need is the easy part. Anyone can learn that. But the details don't matter if you don't have the right process. And if you do have the right process, you can go anywhere. It's why strong leaders

• 2:20:28Jocko Willink?

  are able to jump from one industry to another, one organization to another. So that's what you did. Applied your, your decision-making process, your, your lessons learned from the military, you applied them to the, the government sector, I guess, uh, and then to the, to the civilian sector. Um, so you did Bridgewater for a few years and then you ended up. Actually entering the another business, right? With with cognizant?

• 2:20:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:20:57Jocko Willink?

  And then what was that experience like?

• 2:20:58Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, Bridgewater is a phenomenal place. Four years, it is, it is a crucible of of talent. That is all trying to be more talented and do great things in in markets and in ultimately how to manage the company so that they can outperform in markets. And the mission is very simply to figure out what's going on in the world and how to how to capitalize on that for for their own investors, you know, police retirements and teacher retirements and, you know, sovereign wealth funds and things like that. So.

• 2:21:29Jocko Willink?

  I like the mission of figure out what's going on in the world, right?

• 2:21:32Speaker 01

  It's a large statement. Yeah, it was so.

• 2:21:35Jocko Willink?

  That they do quite well over there at Bridgewater.

• 2:21:37Speaker 01

  Very well. And and and so, but but after, you know, four years or so, three and a half, four years, I was ready to pivot and a really good friend of mine started a company called Cognizant. He spun them out of Dunn and Bradstreet 25, at the time, 25 years ago and or 25 years prior. And then they had an activist investor take a billion six position in the stock and start agitating and and I just called him and said, hey, man, here's what you need to be thinking about, just this, this and this and that, the other thing. And and he said, Mike, just come help me, come help me run the company. And I was like, I'd never been at a large public company. And I was like, oh, let me bet on myself. This is risky. I'm not sure I'm going to be great at this, but I'm going to go figure it out. And it it's what you just read in the book. And and honestly, I think it I did very well there. And and I've continued to, you know, pivot.

• 2:22:21Speaker 01

  And I'm now running global operations and transformation and and security and real estate, etc. For for VMware, it's a large software company and with with very public news right now about a potential acquisition or an acquisition. Again, very public knowledge. And VMware is an awesome organization in so many different ways. And and just bringing the same exact, you know, skill set, if you will. To VMware, but with some of the knowledge that you've that I've learned along the way of the 10 years. So it's a combination of specific knowledge, but also, you know, the the management skill of seeing forests and trees, but definitely both.

• 2:23:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we've been my company, Echelon Front's been working with VMware. We've worked with VMware a decent amount. But the fun thing is for me, the first time I worked with them was telling them, hey, I used to carry VMware stuff in the field and hook it up to my satellite radio and make comms. And they were all pretty stoked. And they got a good veteran community there.

• 2:23:22Speaker 01

  Really strong.

• 2:23:22Jocko Willink?

  At VMware. So awesome company.

• 2:23:25Speaker 01

  Well, it, you know, and I forgot to mention the, I know that the team thought incredibly highly of your and Echelon Front's leadership and instruction and motivation and inspiration. Everything that you are that you espouse has made a huge positive impact on people. And whenever that that finished up, I think it was about a week ago, or something like one of them was the most recent was about a week ago. I got multiple emails saying, hey, this guy's awesome. Everything from like, people who know that we know each other and others like, hey, you ever heard of this Willink guy? Like, yeah, yeah, I heard of him.

• 2:23:58Jocko Willink?

  Right. Also, you got that going on in the civilian sector, that that chief digital transformation officer. And at the me in the meantime, you know, you mentioned giving back. And you are giving back. And one of the things that that you're doing, which is incredible, is this book that we've been reading through today, this book, which is called Never Enough. You've taken all the profits from this book, all the profits from this book. And you are very specifically giving the profits to Gold Star families and very specifically in order to pay off their mortgages. And this is, you know, homeownership is not only the American dream, but it's also.

• 2:24:44Jocko Willink?

  The American nightmare, when you've got a mortgage to pay, or when you don't have a place to live, or if that comes under pressure, there's just, there's just, you know, your home is your castle. And so this idea, and I'm not sure quite how you came, you probably came to the conclusion the way I just spoke through, which is, listen, if there's anything we could give a Gold Star family, the best thing we can give them in terms of security and peace of mind is to say, hey, you can, you don't have to worry about where you're going to live forever. And so that's what you're doing with this. And, you know, it's funny, I was asking you, well, like, is there a website we can put out or anything? You're like, nope, it's not, it's, it's, you're, you're, you don't even want to spend money on a website.

• 2:25:24Jocko Willink?

  You're like, a hundred percent, it all goes to buying these houses for Gold Star families. And I personally know some of the people that you've done this for. Again, I can't imagine a better gift to give a Gold Star family than the absolute peace of mind of, here's a place for you to live and security for the rest of your life. How did you get to that? How'd you get to that goal?

• 2:25:48Speaker 01

  Well, it's, thanks for sharing that. I really appreciate that because that is really, you know, multiple goals with never enough. One is to elevate the conversation, but a very, very tangible one is to literally pay off mortgages like you described. And just from seeing firsthand the situations where, you know, the, the government doesn't really cover nearly as much as, as you would expect in, in a situation where there's somebody killed in action or who dies by suicide. And I just felt like there's a gap in the community. There's plenty of fishing trips and, and, and mental health outlook, like all very, very good things. But the most fundamental thing is for these families not to feel the pressure of needing to move from the communities that have hugged them for the previous one or 15 years of their lives.

• 2:26:34Speaker 01

  And if you could you imagine being a Gold Star Widow all of a sudden, not that any of none of them make that choice, nobody wants that title, and and being pressured to leave your community, like it's unfathomable to me. And so I just really was fired up that that we don't do more. And so at this point, we've very, very confidentially paid off six mortgages, and I'm on a drive to do more and ultimately alleviate this burden for for really every one of these families that has experienced this. And I wish we could wave a magic wand and do all of them all at once. But look, it's it's it's it's really what derives me in one of the ways that that I try to not I mean, that I am giving back.

• 2:27:17Jocko Willink?

  And if people want to help that cause, it's real simple. Go and buy this book. That's that's how you help this cause. Hey, look, will you get awesome lessons? Cool. We get some cool stories? Yes, you will. But you will you'll be able to help out these Gold Star families. So freaking outstanding. You're also you're also involved with the National Medal of Honor Museum. So so tell me what's going on with that.

• 2:27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, great. We I'm on the board of a museum that the nation hasn't built. So about four years ago, I got asked to give somebody some advice. There was something that was a small local effort in South Carolina. Long story short, they this person asked me to join the board. I said, you know, like, all of us are we're too busy, don't have time, excuse, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And and then, for personal reasons, after sharing a story back and forth, I said, Okay, you've got me. I'll join the board on one condition. We get to fire everybody who's on the board, and we're going to make this thing go national. So we've raised at this point $165 million. We've got about 60 million more to go. We took us three years, but we worked through concept to city selection.

• 2:28:23Speaker 01

  New York City offered us Governor's Island, and Washington DC offered us a spot in the mall. We ultimately did a bake off between those, plus Denver and Arlington, Texas. We chose Arlington, Texas. We're building the museum right next to AT&T Stadium. We've got an incredible board. We've got all of the ex-presidents, with the exception of President Trump. Mostly from a timing perspective, you know, we're, we're, we have great momentum. This is irreversible at this point. Of course, not surprisingly, the CEO of the museum is my swim buddy that we've talked about, Chris Cassidy. He's a phenomenal American, you know, SEAL astronaut, and now CEO of this museum. And what we're really doing with this is we're on a mission to inspire America.

• 2:29:06Speaker 01

  We will, we will take the lessons that the Medal of Honor recipients have, that they espouse, the character, the values, et cetera, and talk about that to make the nation greater. And the vision is for, you know, some young kid to see the Britz Lebinsky and what he did, and to learn about his character and values, or, you know, strike Britz's name and replace it with any recipient and say, "How do I, you know, I'm seeing this little third, third grade situation develop. I see a girl being bullied on the schoolyard. How do I step in and go make this situation right?" That is what we, we want to stop that, or school shootings, or, or having the bravery, the courage to step in during a school shooting

• 2:29:48Speaker 01

  and, and stop the shooting from happening, or just to make the, make our nation stronger and better. And the, the premise is really to inspire America. We will open in about a year and a half. We haven't completely determined our opening date, but this will be one of the nation's, if not the, I should say, the, the premier museum for the nation that will tell the stories of the roughly 3,500 recipients and 64 living recipients. Many of them, many of whom you personally know, and, and just get their stories out there.

• 2:30:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's just awesome. I mean, just the idea of giving people examples to read about and to be introduced to, that they can try and follow in their footsteps, at least be inspired by. And yeah, that's just, that's just phenomenal. A while ago, maybe a couple of years, I guess it was maybe a year and a half, two years ago, you you like, hey, you shot me a text, hey, you know, we're looking for a CEO of this of this of the Medal of Honor Museum thing. If you know anybody, let me know. And I was like, I rack in my brain a little bit. I definitely couldn't give you, I couldn't have given you a candidate as good as Chris Cassidy. So that's, that's, that's an awesome guy to, to, to take the, to

• 2:31:01Jocko Willink?

  take the lead on that. And so did they, did they start construction already?

• 2:31:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:31:07Jocko Willink?

  Was that when you, were you doing the groundbreaking ceremony when we were both

• 2:31:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:31:10Jocko Willink?

  cross paths? We missed each other in the hotel by whatever, an hour or something?

• 2:31:14Speaker 01

  March 25th is Congressional Medal of Honor Day. And that's the day we broke ground. We had President Bush, we had just, we, we had a lot like 17 or 18 of the living recipients there. And yes, that's when we, we came like minutes from linking up with each other.

• 2:31:30Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's awesome. Um, does that bring us up to date on your life right now?

• 2:31:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, life is busy. I can't sit still, just like you can't. It's all about giving back. And, and I really do appreciate for everybody out there, this pushing never enough. I, I promise you, it's, it won't disappoint. It's, it's not been extreme ownership, and therefore you can buy it a lot cheaper on Amazon. So, but really do, do appreciate that great support.

• 2:32:02Jocko Willink?

  And if people, people want to find you, you have a website, which is thisismikehays.com. You have Instagram, which is this is dot Mike Hayes. You have Twitter, which is this is Mike Hayes, and Facebook, the real Mike Hayes.

• 2:32:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I don't know about you, social media was foreign to me about a year ago. But you know, it's like, like, the discomfort leaning into discomfort is, it's, it's part of the new, the new us.

• 2:32:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's it's definitely a very strange thing to go from zero social media and also being anti-social media, which we were absolutely had to be. Were you kidding me? Um, but yeah, uh, it was, I guess it was a combination. It was, it was Leif Babin's wife Jenna, who was like, you, you gotta get on social media. I'm like, no. I think Leif, Leif imitates me now, you know, where I'm like, no, we don't need it, not doing it. And then Jamie, who, who, who's the CEO of one of my companies is like, you should really do this? I'm like, I don't think we need to. And then Tim Ferriss, who said, dude, you better get on Twitter. Oh, you're an idiot. I was like, all right.

• 2:33:11Speaker 01

  All right, time to go.

• 2:33:12Jocko Willink?

  A bunch of people that are telling me to do this.

• 2:33:13Speaker 01

  Well, what's real, I have to say, you know, what's really funny is of course I, I follow you. And when you show the four, zero, four thirty wakeups, I keep saying to myself, I'm going to get the exact same watch and set it for one minute earlier than you and take my picture and just show that my, my, I'm a minute earlier than you every single morning. But, uh, I just haven't had the energy to actually pull that off.

• 2:33:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's, there's been some campaigns on that. I know Andy Zump for a while was, he, I I forget if he was waking up earlier or, or he was doing something, something like that. There's also a whole host of people that, that, you know, show their, their, their watch at ten forty-two in front of a box of donuts and saying, you know, just got after it. Um,

• 2:33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:48Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, so that's where people can find you. Echo, you got any questions?

• 2:33:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, real quick, the, you know, the fellowship program or your job at the White House? How often do you see the president?

• 2:33:59Speaker 01

  It depends on what role you're in. The fellows get together a couple of times during the year with the president and, and have these candid off the record conversations. Um, and then if you're in a role like I was at the National Security Council, sometimes it was three times in a week and then it'd be a month without seeing the president. So a little bit varied depending on what was going on in the world.

• 2:34:21Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 2:34:22Jocko Willink?

  That's your question?

• 2:34:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:34:24Jocko Willink?

  That was an easy one, man. Throwing softballs.

• 2:34:26Speaker 01

  Looking for the high and inside fastball from Echo Charles.

• 2:34:29Jocko Willink?

  Charles is just over there cruising.

• 2:34:31Speaker 01

  Feeling sorry for me, taking it easy for me.

• 2:34:33Speaker 02

  That's what I was wondering.

• 2:34:35Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Uh, Mike, any closing thoughts?

• 2:34:38Speaker 01

  Nah, just extreme appreciation. I think that's maybe the next, uh, extreme appreciation besides, uh, extreme ownership. But, uh, just so appreciate you and, and, and all of our, our community and the, the, the nation for helping elevate the conversation and just recognizing that, you know, while we were in the service, we're ultimately all here to serve each other and it takes different forms and fashions. And I just encourage people to get off the sideline and serve in whatever way makes the most sense to, to everybody listening and just great appreciation for being here, Jaco. It's, it's a real, um, special day for me to be able to be, it's shocking when we go from, you know, water polo and killing each other, or you killing me in the pool. And then, uh, and, and this many years later, seeing where we both are in life. It's, uh, it's fun.

• 2:35:21Jocko Willink?

  Kind of crazy, man. Well, uh, speaking of service, thanks for your service to the country, um, to the nation, to the teams for what you've, for what you've done in your past and, uh, for what you're doing today. Not only the civilian sector, but more important for what you're doing, uh, today to take care of the families of our fallen teammates. So thanks for coming out, man. Sorry it took us a while to get this together, but appreciate it, man.

• 2:35:47Speaker 01

  All good, brother. It's my pleasure. Thank you, Jaco. Thank you, Echo Charles.

• 2:35:52Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Mike Hayes has left the building. Echo Charles?

• 2:35:57Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:35:59Jocko Willink?

  Key takeaways? What do you got?

• 2:36:00Speaker 02

  The one key takeaway is kind of a reminder, something that I guess, yeah, yeah, I guess you talked about this, but anyway, he said on a few occasions, process can save lives. The process.

• 2:36:14Speaker 02

  Because and it's one of those things where I'm personally, I think I fall victim to this a lot of the time where I kinda, I'm not used to having,

• 2:36:23Speaker 02

  for lack of a better term.

• 2:36:26Speaker 02

  Where like, you know, I don't have any many, I guess I do have some processes in place, but sometimes I can't put it this way, I can get distracted from the process.

• 2:36:35Jocko Willink?

  Process on when to take joint warfare, dude.

• 2:36:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not saying I have all the processes for all things, for sure, but I get distracted from the process kinda easy, even though I know that if I stick to the process, the chances of success go way up exponentially. And I think that's kinda like, and I think about myself and I think how generally speaking, this can be the case where if you allow that to happen, like whether it be because of stress, because of, you know, just whatever kind of distraction or whatever, that's, that's how it works. Where if you just stick to the process, you can keep yourself out of a lot of trouble, even in like hectic kinda situations.

• 2:37:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yep, and the dichotomy is, sometimes you gotta get outside the process.

• 2:37:19Speaker 02

  Gotta be flexible.

• 2:37:19Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's, people literally say, think outside the box.

• 2:37:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:24Jocko Willink?

  So you gotta know when to, when to stick to the process and when to,

• 2:37:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:29Jocko Willink?

  make an adjustment.

• 2:37:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the process can be somewhat flexible, but the process is the process for a reason.

• 2:37:35Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:37:35Speaker 02

  It's like, okay, so think of it in terms of like jujitsu, for example, like when things start to get, you know, let's say I'm rolling with you.

• 2:37:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:37:42Speaker 02

  And, you know, you start turning up the heat on me all of a sudden, for whatever reason that's going on in your head. I can't get all panicky and start going off natural, like instinct, I gotta stick to the technique.

• 2:37:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:55Speaker 02

  See what I'm saying? Sure, I can turn on my urgency, but I stick to the process, which is the technique.

• 2:38:00Jocko Willink?

  It's a good idea.

• 2:38:01Speaker 02

  Stick to what you've learned, like that kind of stuff, that's a version of the process.

• 2:38:04Jocko Willink?

  Yep, but there's also a situation where you might have to do something that's against the process. Look at Jeffy Glover. Jeffy Glover will do some wild things.

• 2:38:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they're not it. Well, then again, I can't read Jeff's mind.

• 2:38:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:18Speaker 02

  But I will say this, the stuff, the creative stuff that he does is all within the realm of jujitsu that he's either learned or experimenting with.

• 2:38:27Jocko Willink?

  No, because nowhere in jujitsu does it say like, oh, turn your back. Nowhere. And it doesn't say that anywhere.

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  Well, that's his.

• 2:38:33Jocko Willink?

  He might say it now.

• 2:38:34Speaker 02

  I would say this, and I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, but this is what I'm.

• 2:38:38Jocko Willink?

  What about Pete the Greek going for risks all the time?

• 2:38:40Speaker 02

  Okay, so that's still, that's still jujitsu though, is what I'm saying. So think about this.

• 2:38:44Jocko Willink?

  No one was telling him like, hey, focus on the wrist.

• 2:38:46Speaker 02

  I'm, put it this way, they're not.

• 2:38:48Jocko Willink?

  Focus on wrist locks.

• 2:38:49Speaker 02

  They don't do that.

• 2:38:50Jocko Willink?

  No one said that to him.

• 2:38:50Speaker 02

  They don't do that because they get distracted or taken out of their game. They do that voluntarily as part of the game.

• 2:38:57Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:38:58Speaker 02

  See what I'm saying?

• 2:38:58Jocko Willink?

  Outside the process, though, is all I'm saying.

• 2:39:00Speaker 02

  Maybe that is within their process. Maybe their process is just more flexible.

• 2:39:04Jocko Willink?

  No, there's no process in jujitsu. Seven years ago, that said, hey, turn your back on the person's, on the person. There's no, no one that said that.

• 2:39:14Speaker 02

  Do you predict?

• 2:39:15Jocko Willink?

  Jeffy Glover just did it.

• 2:39:16Speaker 02

  I know you can't read Jeff's mind, or Pete the Greek, or anyone for that matter, but would you say yes or no? Would you say that turning his back, done out of creativity, do you think that's part of his process?

• 2:39:29Jocko Willink?

  I didn't say it wasn't part of his process. I said part of the process.

• 2:39:34Speaker 02

  Alright, so.

• 2:39:35Jocko Willink?

  Cause you said trust the process. And what I'm saying is.

• 2:39:39Speaker 02

  Okay, your process then, how about that?

• 2:39:40Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:39:41Speaker 02

  Trust your process. Hey, if there's a process in place, I'm saying, if there's a process in place, go ahead, uh, trust it.

• 2:39:47Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:39:48Speaker 02

  To a significant degree.

• 2:39:49Jocko Willink?

  To a significant, okay.

• 2:39:50Speaker 02

  And what I'm, what I'm, what I mean, what I mean in jujitsu, what I'm saying, don't get distracted, meaning don't go on, like, if you start going all crazy hard, is it beneficial for me to involuntarily go all crazy hard back?

• 2:40:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, now you throw all kind of qualifiers on there, like involuntarily and stuff like this, right?

• 2:40:09Speaker 02

  You're making, you're making me get all specific over here with the and his and all this other stuff, so I'm trying, I'm doing the best I can over here.

• 2:40:18Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Ah, no, point taken.

• 2:40:20Speaker 02

  Now, right on now, okay.

• 2:40:22Jocko Willink?

  I'm trying to, I'm trying to trust the process myself. You trying to make a point? I'm trying not to ridicule it too hard. Yes, there is process. That's why we have standard operating procedures, right? And you gotta stay within those standard operating procedures, to your point. A lot of the times.

• 2:40:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:39Jocko Willink?

  But you can't get stuck in them.

• 2:40:40Speaker 02

  So what complacency, distraction, panic, these are all things that can make you deviate from the process.

• 2:40:46Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:40:46Speaker 02

  And then which kind of goes along to my secondary thing takeaway, which is how, and you guys, well, you say this a lot all the time too. It's like staying calm and really making it a point to stay calm, which kind of can be rolled into the process. Right? Not only is it part of the process, potentially it helps you stick to the process.

• 2:41:06Jocko Willink?

  All right. So we're sticking to the process. Speaking of sticking to the process, get yourself a subscription to it. Joint Warfare, let's say, super cruel.

• 2:41:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. So the process is we're, we're main, and here's the thing too, this is important. Follow me. So in life, life process, no matter if you're, no matter what your job, career, whatever. You have certain things in life that if you do stick to, don't get distracted, complacent or panic about. These things are going to benefit you in life, uh, not only exponentially indefinitely. Working out, reading and getting smarter, keeping an open mind.

• 2:41:39Jocko Willink?

  Doing jujitsu.

• 2:41:40Speaker 02

  Doing jujitsu is part of that game for sure. So when you work out, get yourself some supplements to help you.

• 2:41:49Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:41:50Speaker 02

  Working outside easy all the time.

• 2:41:51Jocko Willink?

  Not only can you help you work out, it can help you keep working out. Cause let's face it, you can get jammed up.

• 2:41:58Speaker 02

  Yes, you can. So the process is work out, eat good, take relevant supplements. And I do say relevant because that's, that's something, it's not nothing. Some people take irrelevant supplements in my opinion. So take relevant supplements. You stick to that process. Now you're on the right track.

• 2:42:13Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Jacofuel.com. Get yourself some of those relevant supplements.

• 2:42:17Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 2:42:17Jocko Willink?

  Not, what'd you call the other supplements?

• 2:42:18Speaker 02

  Irrelevant.

• 2:42:19Jocko Willink?

  Not irrelevant supplements. You didn't vary too much on your vocab there. You just went relevant, irrelevant, which is fine. You know, we talk about effective, ineffective. You're doing the same thing. It's cool. Authorized. You're staying with the process.

• 2:42:31Jocko Willink?

  Jacofuel.com you can check it out at Wawa you can get the drinks by the way this is probably worth saying right now we got all new flavors coming out not only new flavors but the old flavors which let's face it some people didn't like that much we did them all and I'll tell you what they're all amazing now and I don't say that lightly this isn't like you won't find me in the past saying oh try this it tastes try our try Jaco discipline go drink it tastes amazing you wouldn't hear me say that before because it wouldn't be true it tastes good and maybe to me some of them taste pretty amazing but I wasn't throwing out that blank blanket statement blanket

• 2:43:15Jocko Willink?

  statement right now the new drinks taste amazing and that's a bold statement but I'm making it reformulated so check those out they're kind of hitting the stores right now so as the as the old drinks run out the new drinks are coming in so

• 2:43:34Speaker 02

  is there a way to tell which one is the OG

• 2:43:36Jocko Willink?

  you will be in like a month but we we have to use up the old cans so the old cans right now starting maybe like this week the old cans have the new heat in them

• 2:43:51Speaker 02

  but how do we know on the can you don't know

• 2:43:53Jocko Willink?

  you'll know when you taste it when you taste and you're like damn Jaco wasn't lying about that this tastes amazing that's what you're gonna get so check out those check it out at Wawa check out the vitamin shop vitamin shops got all this stuff too and so there you go get some of that you probably saw me down at the do you see me at the factory

• 2:44:09Speaker 02

  I saw the video

• 2:44:10Jocko Willink?

  video okay then you saw me at the factory originusa.com making stuff in America the highest quality the best gear it's what you need pair of jeans you need a pair of jeans

• 2:44:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:44:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay, where are you gonna get them?

• 2:44:24Speaker 02

  Origin.

• 2:44:25Jocko Willink?

  Are you gonna get them from someplace that utilizes slave labor?

• 2:44:28Speaker 02

  I would prefer not to, yes.

• 2:44:30Jocko Willink?

  How about you don't?

• 2:44:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:31Jocko Willink?

  Don't do that.

• 2:44:32Speaker 02

  I don't have to anymore, yeah, that's true, that's correct.

• 2:44:34Jocko Willink?

  OriginUSA.com, get yourself a gi.

• 2:44:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:37Jocko Willink?

  You can wear a gi that feels good. That's a weird thing, right? It's weird, cuz can a gi have a feeling?

• 2:44:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah, yes sir.

• 2:44:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, isn't it nice when it feels good?

• 2:44:47Speaker 02

  Yes, and you can focus on the jujitsu part of the experience.

• 2:44:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, not on the discomfort of your gi.

• 2:44:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, the third man in the, in the match.

• 2:44:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's you against your opponent and against your shitty old gi.

• 2:44:59Speaker 02

  Kinda against the gi, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:01Jocko Willink?

  Now it's you and your gi against your opponent. Your opponent has to wear this old crappy gi that's already bothering him.

• 2:45:09Speaker 02

  Brutal.

• 2:45:09Jocko Willink?

  No, you don't have to do that. You can have the gi on your side.

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 2:45:12Jocko Willink?

  Get the gi on your side. That's my message. Go to OriginUSA.com for some of that.

• 2:45:17Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 2:45:17Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:45:18Speaker 02

  Also, when you're on the path, you wanna represent, go to JacoStore.com, is where you can get your t-shirts, hoodies, light and heavy, by the way, not super heavy, but we'll say regular hoodies and then your lightweight hoodies. Come on, bro. The more and more people that acquire these lightweight hoodies, the more and more good feedback I get from them. There is such thing as light hoodie environments and weather.

• 2:45:41Jocko Willink?

  Concur, a little bit.

• 2:45:42Speaker 02

  Also, we have a little thing called the Shirt Locker. Okay, recently, we've been getting heavy positive feedback from the Shirt Locker design. So what it is, is if you don't know, which most people do, but if you don't, new shirt, new shirt design, every month, subscription automatically comes to you. Uh, very creative, I guess, for lack of a better term, but yes, very good, positive feedback in that one. So check that one out at JacoStore.

• 2:46:06Jocko Willink?

  If you want, if you want, if you wanna get a cool shirt to wear, that not many people are gonna have. Cuz you know, you know, sometimes like, uh, someone, a girl goes out to a party, and there's another girl there, and they're wearing the same dress.

• 2:46:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:46:21Jocko Willink?

  And it's drama, man.

• 2:46:22Speaker 02

  It's drama.

• 2:46:22Jocko Willink?

  Or as my daughters would call it, you know what that is? It's tea.

• 2:46:25Speaker 02

  What do you, a tea?

• 2:46:26Jocko Willink?

  Tea, no, it's tea.

• 2:46:27Speaker 02

  It's just tea?

• 2:46:28Jocko Willink?

  It's tea, is a meme of like someone drinking tea, and it's sort of like drama. So you can say that's tea. See, you're not caught up.

• 2:46:37Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:46:37Jocko Willink?

  No, no, you don't. You're not hip like me.

• 2:46:39Speaker 02

  I don't see the correlation between tea and drama.

• 2:46:42Jocko Willink?

  It comes from a meme where someone's drinking tea.

• 2:46:46Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:46:46Jocko Willink?

  And it's a dramatic. Yes, Kermit the Frog is drinking tea and it represents drama.

• 2:46:52Speaker 02

  Okay, so.

• 2:46:52Jocko Willink?

  I'm pretty sure.

• 2:46:53Speaker 02

  The meme, I don't know. I think you might be right, but maybe the re-

• 2:46:58Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:46:58Speaker 02

  Kermit the Frog is drinking tea and he said it all, the meme will always say something, something, something, but that's none of my business.

• 2:47:05Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:47:06Speaker 02

  And he's drinking.

• 2:47:07Jocko Willink?

  Drinking tea. So, so you will get, uh, let's say, uh, what, what group is this? Millennial? No, it's lower than millennial. What's?

• 2:47:13Speaker 02

  Not lower, but what's, what's younger than millennial? I, I think it's Z.

• 2:47:18Jocko Willink?

  So Gen Z.

• 2:47:19Speaker 02

  I think.

• 2:47:19Jocko Willink?

  Well, they'll say, oh, and they won't say, tell me the gossip. They'll say, tell me the tea. Do you not know this?

• 2:47:26Speaker 02

  I, this is news to me. Yes.

• 2:47:27Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:47:28Speaker 02

  Oh, so no, I did not know that. That's good. That's new. That's good. Cool. Oh, so yeah.

• 2:47:34Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Yeah. If you want the tea, get a good T-shirt.

• 2:47:37Speaker 02

  No, right. You were saying, you were saying when girls show up to the party and somebody's wearing the same outfit, that's some tea for your.

• 2:47:44Jocko Willink?

  There's drama, right? So when you get, when you're part of the shirt locker, no one's showing up with the same, same T-shirt as you.

• 2:47:49Speaker 02

  Well, actually technically.

• 2:47:50Jocko Willink?

  If they do, you're kind of like, duh, you're kind of down.

• 2:47:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, no tea. Well, here's the thing.

• 2:47:55Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of cool.

• 2:47:57Speaker 02

  The tea scenario with the girls.

• 2:47:59Jocko Willink?

  Over the small country when you do that. You show up with the same shirt locker T-shirt and you're like, what? Let's go. Let's take over this nation.

• 2:48:05Speaker 02

  Start planning.

• 2:48:06Jocko Willink?

  Plotting.

• 2:48:06Speaker 02

  No, that, so technically the, uh, the female drama, when there's the same outfit in the same location is opposite with males. It's opposite.

• 2:48:17Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:48:17Speaker 02

  That's like the thing.

• 2:48:18Jocko Willink?

  This is why you and Carrie, when you show up and you're wearing the same T-shirt, you're like, ah, fist bump. Yes.

• 2:48:22Speaker 02

  Rowing out. Yeah, you will bro out like.

• 2:48:25Jocko Willink?

  You and Dave Burke. Good deal, Dave.

• 2:48:26Speaker 02

  Same deal.

• 2:48:26Jocko Willink?

  Show up with the same T-shirt.

• 2:48:28Speaker 02

  What I'm telling you, like, if you went to the, okay, if you went, look, you're wearing this, you know, no matter what you're wearing, you go somewhere and someone else is wearing the same thing. You don't feel like, oh, you're wearing that. You kind of feel, it's a positive feeling is what I'm saying. See what I'm saying?

• 2:48:41Jocko Willink?

  Check out you sociological expert over there.

• 2:48:44Speaker 02

  Either way.

• 2:48:44Jocko Willink?

  The word.

• 2:48:45Speaker 02

  Shirt locker shirts, Jocko Store stuff, no exception. You're gonna feel, you're gonna feel the camaraderie is what you're gonna feel.

• 2:48:52Jocko Willink?

  Now, speaking of subscribe, subscribe to the podcast. Don't forget about jocko underground.com. Appreciate the support over there. Don't forget about the YouTube channel. If you want to see some, some, just really sort of award winning assistant directing happening, you can come and check out some of my A D activities.

• 2:49:10Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 2:49:11Jocko Willink?

  It's incredible.

• 2:49:12Speaker 02

  Actually, there's some new stuff on there on YouTube, like the top gun review, like some kind of one off videos.

• 2:49:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:18Speaker 02

  Pretty solid. The top gun on the, I put some underground clips on there too, for the people, just so they can get a little taste of what's going on down there.

• 2:49:26Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes the things are important.

• 2:49:28Speaker 02

  They are.

• 2:49:28Jocko Willink?

  That they need to know about. So, so check that out. Psychological Warfare on MP3 platforms. Flipside Canvas Dakota Meyer, speaking of Medal of Honor recipients, Dakota Meyer is Medal of Honor recipient. He's badass. He's funny as hell. I have conversations sometimes with Dakota where we're laughing so hard neither one of us can talk. This is rare. Uh, and he also has a company called flipsidecanvas.com where he puts cool stuff to hang on your wall. So if you want something cool to hang on your wall, cool, you might as well get it from Dakota Meyer. Books. Hey, first of all, Never Enough by Mike Hayes. Check that book out. Listen, all the profits for that book, all the profits go to Gold Star families.

• 2:50:09Jocko Willink?

  So just get the book and are there lessons learned? Yes. Are there cool stories? Yes. Will you help out Gold Star families? Yes, you will. So check out that book. Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay. Check out that book. If you want to know what was going on in Iraq and Syria. Uh, then I got a bunch of books that I've written. You can check those out as well. I have a leadership consultancy called Echelon Front where we teach leadership. Two companies and leadership is how you solve problems inside of organizations. So if you need to help there, go to echelonfront.com. We got, we got the muster coming up. There's like a couple more seats left. I don't even know if I should say anything because it might be sold out by now.

• 2:50:54Jocko Willink?

  If you want to come to the muster, go to echelonfront.com. The next one is June 15th through the 17th, Denver, Colorado. I know it's late, but if you want to come, come and check it out. We also have an online training academy. If you want to learn how to lead, you don't necessarily have to leave your office, your house. You can learn to lead online. You cannot just learn to lead others because that's not what it's all about. Some of it's about that. Some of it's about how to lead yourself, how to make good decisions for you, how to be on the path. So check out extremeownership.com for that.

• 2:51:29Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to help some service members,

• 2:51:32Jocko Willink?

  active and retired, you want to help them get medical treatments that they might need, that the government doesn't pay for, for whatever reason, and there's a bunch of reasons why they might not pay for it. Check out America's Mighty Warriors.org. That's Mama Lee's organization, Mark Lee's mom. Check that out. Also, remember HeroesAndHorses.org. Micah Fink up there in the wilderness, taking people out on horses and letting them relearn how to live. So check that out. And once again, don't forget about Never Enough, and helping out Gold Star families not have to worry about a mortgage, or a place, or a house, or a home, or a castle. Because that's what Mike's giving them. So that's awesome.

• 2:52:17Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to find Mike Hayes on social media, this, he's at, ThisIsMikeHayes. You can find him on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Also Echo's on there. I'm on there. Echo's at EchoCharles. I'm at Jocko Willink. Hey, and when you get there, just, just watch out. Because you know the algorithm's sneaking up on you. Thanks once again to Mike Hayes for joining us and for your service and sacrifice for our great nation. Appreciate you coming by and thanks to the rest of our selfless military members out there right now on the front lines, protecting us and protecting our way of life. We kind of take it for granted. It's real easy to take it for granted. It's real easy.

• 2:53:02Jocko Willink?

  But we're not taking it for granted here. Also, thanks to our service, the service of our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all the first responders that are out there doing the same thing, sacrificing to protect us here at home.

• 2:53:23Jocko Willink?

  Thank you. And everyone else.

• 2:53:27Jocko Willink?

  You know, I know.

• 2:53:32Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes you've been on the grind for a while, right? The grind, you've been working, you've been staying focused, you've been holding the line.

• 2:53:41Jocko Willink?

  And at some point, maybe you feel like you're there. Like you got there, like you made it.

• 2:53:50Jocko Willink?

  But that's a good time when you feel like that. That's a good time to remember that that's not enough. It's never enough. We can all do a little more.

• 2:54:03Jocko Willink?

  Work a little harder, be a little bit better.

• 2:54:08Jocko Willink?

  So reload and recharge and go out there every day. And get after it.

• 2:54:17Jocko Willink?

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