387: You Don't Inherit Self Confidence and Discipline. You Must Choose. With General Michael Ferriter.

Michael Ferriter is a retired United States Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army Lieutenant General https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieutenant_General_(United_States). He served as commanding general of the United States Army Installation Management Command https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Installation_Management_Command/U. S. Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Installation Management from 2011 until 2014. During his career he has participated in Operation Restore Hope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Restore_Hope in Somalia, and served three tours of duty in Iraq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War. On June 19, 2018, he was named president and CEO of the National Veterans Memorial and Museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Veterans_Memorial_and_Museum 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 387 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Combatives, the art of hand-to-hand combat, bridges the gap between physical training and tactics. The products of a good physical training plan, strength, endurance, and flexibility must be directed toward the mission, and soldiers must be prepared to use different levels of force in an environment where the intensity of a conflict changes quickly. Many military operations such as peacekeeping missions or noncombatant evacuation may restrict the use of lethal force.

• 0:39Jocko Willink?

  Combatives training prepares the soldier to use the appropriate amount of force for any situation. Combatives training includes arduous physical training that is mentally demanding and carries over to other military pursuits. This training produces soldiers who understand controlled aggression and remain focused while under duress, possess the skills requisite to the mission at all levels in the spectrum of force, have the attributes that make up the warrior ethos, personal courage, self-confidence, self-discipline, and esprit de corps.

• 1:22Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is a quote from the US Army's Technical Circular TC 3-TAC 25.150 Combatives. And the Army has made huge advancements in the past several decades in their combatives capability and ability. They incorporated elements of grappling and striking and weapons into a comprehensive system that has become a solid foundation for soldiers that are in any military occupation.

• 1:56Jocko Willink?

  But as the manual states, combatives doesn't only help soldiers with hand-to-hand combat. It helps with improving all their attributes as soldiers and as human beings. And it's an honor to have one of those soldiers with us here tonight, who has led at all levels as an officer, who not only trains in combatives, but helped establish the combatives program in the Army. His name is General Michael Farader. He's a retired Army General. He served in Somalia, he served in Iraq. He's a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And he's here to share his experiences and lessons learned with us.

• 2:40Jocko Willink?

  General, thank you for joining us.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  It's my pleasure. Good to see you.

• 2:44Jocko Willink?

  I always have a good time diving into the history of combatives in the Army and the Marine Corps. Even the SEAL Teams has a little history of combatives. We have an old, I have an old, uh, field manual from years and years ago. And it's pretty neat to see and there's been some, some vast improvements in combatives over the years. I'm sure we'll get into that. But, uh, I always like to start at the beginning. Let's start, let's talk about where you came from and what made you you.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Well, I came, uh, grew up in an Army family. My dad, uh, joined the Army during World War II, at the beginning of World War II. He's a private. He went to Officer Candidate School. And, uh, served in the Pacific. He was put in for Medal of Honor. They received the Distinguished Service Cross.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  And as he raised my brothers and sisters, he always told us, you gotta take care of the men. You gotta take care of your troops. And then things will work out for you. And so, also being an officer candidate, we had to roll our socks and put them in the drawer and smiles facing up and answer the phone. You know, Colonel Farader's quarters, Mikey speaking, this line is unsecure, you know, back in the 60s.

• 3:56Jocko Willink?

  So, so how long did your dad stay in for?

• 3:58Speaker 01

  27 years. Retired as a Colonel. Yeah.

• 4:01Jocko Willink?

  And were you just old school, moving all the time, growing up?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we moved, uh, I'm, I lived in 18 houses by the time I was 18 years old. And then raised a family and probably moved them just as many times. And this, we just came out of month of the military child and there's a lot of truth to the resiliency and flexibility and adaptability of military kids and their ability to start over, you know, my mom used to throw us out in the yard, say, go explore, find out who lives in this neighborhood, see where the other kids are.

• 4:39Jocko Willink?

  So your dad was put in for the Medal of Honor and ends up getting the Distinguished Service Cross. What did you, growing up, what did that mean to you? What did you know about what happened? You know, did you, did you, do you have the citation hanging on the wall? Did you hear the story from him, from his buddies? Or what was that like? That's pretty amazing.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, you know, that generation, you know, my dad had, I think, a Silver Star, a couple of Bronze Stars, a couple of Purple Hearts, and they were in the garage on the wall. They didn't have an I love me room like, like my generation, right? So, but I went back to Guadalcanal with him when I came out of Ranger Company Command in 1989. And we walked his battlefields and we went and dug out canoes with, with islanders and we walked up on, you know, we saw where Chusti Puller and then Marines went and Red Beach and then inland and then all the way up to, almost to New Caledonia. It was amazing.

• 5:37Jocko Willink?

  So your dad did like the full Pacific campaign?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  He did, yep.

• 5:43Jocko Willink?

  I mean, talk about casting a shadow. You must have always felt, I mean, to this day, I mean, how do you ever feel like, you know, when your dad's that guy? That's amazing.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Well, you don't want to disappoint them. You could take a whooping, but if you get the D word, you know, I'm disappointed, then that, that just kills you. So, he was a great athlete. He played. Before the NBA, he played professional basketball and he played up to AAA baseball. He came out of World War II, went back to play baseball and he'd lost a lot of steps and a lot of speed and so he went back in the army and then continued on.

• 6:23Jocko Willink?

  And then did he go to Korea as well?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  He did not fight in Korea. He went probably in fifty-three or fifty-four, fifty-eight, about fifty-eight.

• 6:34Jocko Willink?

  I was always interested in that part of Dick Winters' book where Dick Winters, you know, fought World War II, the entire European campaign. They recall him for Korea. He gets to, I think it was San Francisco, they're about to get on the boat and they said, "Hey, anyone that was, that fought in World War II, you don't have to go." And he goes, "Cool, I'm out." He had enough combat, he was done. And he said, "I'm going to go back to my farm in Pennsylvania."

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 7:01Jocko Willink?

  And so you're growing up, you're going to different schools all the time. What schools were, oh, sorry, what sports were you playing?

• 7:09Speaker 01

  I played baseball and basketball.

• 7:11Jocko Willink?

  Were you any good?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  I was pretty good.

• 7:12Jocko Willink?

  Were you disappointing your dad the whole time?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  No, no, I did not. You know, going back to that military child, different kids, you know, could get after it better than others. My older brother didn't like it and he didn't play sports and, you know, he would get the D-word more than me. But we moved to Germany and we lived in Hattelberg and then Berlin. So, you know, a lot of my deeper thoughts about where American strength and power and the investment in our young men and women, you know, when we had a footprint in Berlin, the Russians did not, you know. And so now in the Middle East, when

• 7:59Speaker 01

  we get sent over there, there's some validity to when we're there, then the Persians are not. And so, pretty, you know, there were a couple incidents when everyone mounted up on the Berlin Wall, you know, machine guns and tanks up. And so that kind of gives you, as a twelve, thirteen, fourteen-year-old, a good taste of, it is a real world out here. And so, you know, if you're going to do something, do something that makes a difference and be ready when it's time.

• 8:26Jocko Willink?

  So how old were you when you decided you were probably going to go into the army?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  It was pretty funny because here I'm in San Diego and We retired, my dad retired and we went up to Lake Tahoe for a couple of years and then so my high school and then my last year was down in Monterey and at the in Pebble Beach at the school. And so I I applied to West Point and did not get in and applied to ROTC and back then if you got an ROTC scholarship, every school that has ROTC writes you. So I I felt like, you know, Tom Brady, everyone wanted me. And so I said to my dad, hey dad, University of California, Santa Barbara, I can play baseball down there. There's all kinds of, you know, good looking girls down there.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  And he said, hey, I want you to take a look at this school in Charleston, South Carolina. I said Charleston? Yeah, it's a military school. I said, dad, I got shoulder length there and I'm playing baseball. He said, you need to take a look at this. And so I said, nah, I'm gonna go to UCSB. And he said, take a look at it again. And so didn't want to disappoint him, right? And so and I said, you know, I loved it. In fact, when I was in Berlin, back then in Vietnam, if you were a great athlete, you you were playing on the commanding generals football, full pad football, above the rim basketball and and fast pitch baseball. And so I would talk to these eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old guys and say, shit, really? You don't ever put a uniform on except for sports? And I said, dad, I want to join the army.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  I want to do that. So that was kind of in the back of my head, knowing that that really wouldn't be that way, though a lot of people who've known me for the thirty-five years that I served think that that's probably what I did anyways. A lot of time in the gym and a lot of time on the playing fields. But so I said, okay, I'll go to this military school for one year if I, you know, if it works out, fine.

• 10:19Jocko Willink?

  So what year, what year was it that you graduated high school?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Seventy-five.

• 10:23Jocko Willink?

  Seventy-five. So you had long hair and your dad was okay with that?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  He was not.

• 10:31Jocko Willink?

  What kind of music were you listening to? Just like the typical 70s rock?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably Beach Boys and Eagles and, and, uh, uh, Doobie Brothers.

• 10:41Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh. And, and he convinces you to give one year shot at the Citadel?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:47Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any, when you went there, you know, a lot of times, young men are impressed by the whole, the uniforms and the discipline and they get a little bit excited about that thing? Did you have any of that or were you just doing it to, to gratify the old man?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  You know, there's a lot of physical, uh, challenge there too. So I enjoyed, you know, you know, the running and obstacle courses and, and, uh, working out and then some elite, you know, drill teams or other kind of teams trying out for those things. Um, but what, what's funny is, um, two years later, my brother goes to University of California, Santa Barbara.

• 11:25Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  With the little brother. So, but, uh, um, the president of the Citadel was a guy named Signius. Lieutenant General retired and he had been the commanding general in Berlin. So they, they had me booked. You know, six years earlier that I was going to end up going to that school.

• 11:41Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it, it worked out pretty good.

• 11:44Jocko Willink?

  So you show up there, they shave your head, the whole nine yards.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. At the end of the first day, I'm rubbing a shaved head thing and dad one, Mike zero. Let's see, let's see where this goes from here.

• 11:55Jocko Willink?

  Were you, uh, you know, I was talking to people about the Shaka boot camp and it's, well, did you get that little shock of saying, what the hell am I doing here?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Not really.

• 12:04Jocko Willink?

  You were down, you were ready.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:06Jocko Willink?

  And then, then you, you go, what are you studying when you're in, at the Citadel?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  I studied business and, and, uh, you know, mostly the management, leadership management side of it. It interested me, the accounting. I didn't like that.

• 12:20Jocko Willink?

  Not so much. And what about sports? Were you playing any sports?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Ended up, um, trying out for the baseball team and got a call back. And that was the first day we were allowed to go downtown Charleston. So, you know, the young women were like five for every cadet. And so I

• 12:38Jocko Willink?

  So I had this workout for the baseball career.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it became a huge intramural player. So they had sports all, you know, all year round. So I got to, you know, still get the bug and.

• 12:49Jocko Willink?

  And you had a good experience overall at the Citadel, though?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, real good.

• 12:53Jocko Willink?

  Then, uh, what year did you get commissioned?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Seventy nine.

• 12:57Jocko Willink?

  And did you, so when you're getting commissioned in nineteen seventy nine? What this is Jimmy Carter's president? The what's, what's the outlook on the military as you're going in? Low funding, probably recruiting trouble. I guess recruiting that might not have been too bad because the economy was bad.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Um, post Vietnam, um, all the good NCOs and good officers, many, many had left service. They, they've seen what combat is, like you said about winners. And, uh, a lot, so in the first couple of years, most of the NCOs that I had were, uh, alcoholics and so all volunteer force just started. And, um, so the, and the, um, I ended up at a mechanized infantry in Fort Riley, Kansas. And the army back then had tiered readiness. And so, you know, ninety six days, get on a train, go to Germany.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  But if you're in the eighty second, so you were level four. So you're unfunded. Um, we had a rifle company with three platoons authorized, but only men for two platoons. So it was, it's pretty bad until President Reagan came in and, and really, uh,

• 14:18Speaker 01

  you know, resourced us. A couple of big things happened in those first six years.

• 14:23Jocko Willink?

  When you, when you got commissioned, you go straight to, uh, did you go to the infantry officers? Basic course? Is that what, is that what the pipeline was?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  It was, yeah.

• 14:30Jocko Willink?

  And how long was that school?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Uh, fourteen weeks.

• 14:33Jocko Willink?

  Are you feeling like you got a good education in that? I mean, I had, uh, I had James Webb on here, who was in the Marine Corps Navy Cross recipient. And he was, went to the basic school, went to the Marine Corps Infantry School, Infantry Leader School.

• 14:53Jocko Willink?

  Got on a, had 12 days of leave, got on a plane, went to Vietnam, went out, they walked him out into the middle field, pointed up a ridge line and said, there's your platoon. He walked up there. He said, who am I relieving? A sergeant said, I've been the platoon commander for the last, whatever it was. Our other platoon commander got wounded or killed. You're in charge. And that night, they got in a big gunfight and he was calling in air support. And I said, were you ready for that? And he, he said, yes. So they, at that time, you know, in the middle of Vietnam war, they, the Marine Corps was squared away at getting those guys ready. You know, I've often looked at some of the training that I went through in the nineties, and thankfully, we didn't get thrown into war because we wouldn't have been ready for it.

• 15:36Jocko Willink?

  How did you feel that, that course prepared you?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Then, I think we would all say, it prepared us to do a squad leader's job. Not command a platoon in combat.

• 15:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  And, and that was going to be taught, um, when you got to your first unit. And if you had a squared away captain, you know, O3, then it was taught. And if you didn't, um, your sergeants would probably bring you along. If, if you're smart enough as an officer to listen, then that's what happened to me. My, my captain was, was horrible.

• 16:12Jocko Willink?

  You, you show up, your captain's horrible, so now it's on the NCOs that are going to get you trained up?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  We just kind of said, hey, we're in this one together. Let's, you know, let's get me, get me trained. I'll bring leadership and energy, you know, but.

• 16:25Jocko Willink?

  What does bad leadership look for, look like for a captain, just for informational, educational purposes? When you say your captain was a bad leader, what was up with him?

• 16:35Speaker 01

  So I always tell everyone, Jaco, that, you know, you enter the service with your faith and your friends and your family and your integrity. And you should leave the service when someone tries to take that from you. And so my first captain, um, was a liar and a cheater and, um, he would steal things and, uh, he, he gave me the, he said, hey, take this truck to Topeka. And trade everything that's in the back of the truck to the guy and he's going to give you some stuff and put it in a truck and bring it back on Sunday. I said, I'm not going. And he said, your career is going to end right here. I said, I'm ready for that. I'm ready for that. You know, there's nothing you can do. There's nowhere I'm going to

• 17:19Speaker 01

  end up that doing this for you is going to, you know, make it right. So he said, get out, get out of here. He called in another lieutenant and that guy took the truck.

• 17:30Jocko Willink?

  And it was Chuck's fullest own goods or something?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You know, he would, he would end up getting excess. He'd trade internally to get stuff. And then, you know, he stole a trailer. It was parked in the field and he sent his supply guy, hey, go hook that up to our supply truck, bring it back. Because he could trade that for someone who needed a trailer who had lost one. He's just a scumbag.

• 17:59Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so your first, what makes you decide you're going to stay in? I guess, I guess you had the family tradition. So there was no getting out.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Well, you know, my mom was really strong, elegant woman from Boston. And, and she would say, hey, if you don't like something, then, you know, get to the top and change it. And, you know, either, and then my father would probably add to that, if you walk out, who do you think is going to take care of those soldiers? So, you know, he would, he would have supported me leaving at the end of the first four years. My high school best friend at about year 16 said, you've served 16 years for four years of college? You're a fool. I said, no, John, I stayed in because I like it.

• 18:43Jocko Willink?

  So, so that's your first job out there in Fort Riley, Kansas. Sounds like you're learning some lessons of at least how not to act. Where do you go from there?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Well, as you said, I went from the basic course. To Fort Riley. They didn't allow my class to go to Ranger School. So here I am, a lieutenant with no Ranger tab, and every, you know, payday breakfast, some general says, if you're an infantry guy and you don't got a Ranger tab, then you're, you're not worth it. So I lived four years and, you know, the sort of a theme is wanted to go to West Point, didn't get in, went to second string, the Citadel, which none of my classmates would agree with that, but, but it, you know, when you're 18, you're like, oh, gosh, yeah, damn it. And then go to basic course, you know, your dad is a paratrooper and, and a distinguished

• 19:40Speaker 01

  soldier. It's like, okay, I get my Ranger tab and then get ready to go to combat. No, no Ranger tab. So, so I came back to, uh, in 1983, went to, and I'd been offered a bunch of company commands as a lieutenant, you know, stay here, it's a captain's job, but you, you got what it takes. And I had to tell the battalion commander, I gotta move on. It's a big army. You know, I got, I got some things I gotta fulfill. So I went back and about eight captains and again, the same number, 200 lieutenants and, and young sergeants started Ranger School after the captain's career course and only one graduated. And, uh, cause it's too easy for them to, to say, hey, I've already, I've

• 20:22Speaker 01

  been out there. I've already led. I got good reports, you know, I can get, I can get what I need.

• 20:27Jocko Willink?

  Were you a captain yet when you went through Ranger School then?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  I was, yeah.

• 20:29Jocko Willink?

  So you went through Ranger School as a captain. What year was that? Like 1983 now we're talking, 1984, something like that?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  October 83 to, uh, to January or December.

• 20:40Jocko Willink?

  Like, did you prepare for Ranger School? Like nowadays, people when they're going to some kind of selection, they, they go through a pretty, they, if they're smart, they'll go through a pretty hardcore training regiment to get ready. Did you prepare, train and prepare for Ranger School?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  I did. And, and, uh, I'd be, you know, Columbus, Georgia, you know, August and July, August, June, carrying an 80 pound rucksack sweating like, you know, and I was probably a whopping, you know, one 38 pounder, one 42, you know? And, uh, but other guys are on the golf course and they're laughing and joking and, you know, and holding a beer up and they see me and my big black dog walking and then laying half, you know, I'd shoot an azimuth, I'd say.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  You know, hey Kelly, go out there, go, go, go, go, go, sit. And then I'd walk to him and then send him a hand. Sit and all that, but then night land navigation, you know, all the things, not time, all the things that were going to come up, you know, you spend the time, you know.

• 21:41Jocko Willink?

  And you, so you were ready for it. What were the numbers that you just threw out there? You had how many people start this?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Let's say probably two twenty eight.

• 21:49Jocko Willink?

  Two hundred and twenty eight, and these were captains?

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Eight, only eight were captains. So only eight captains had the courage to try it again or try it. Uh huh. Because they already were comfortable, you know, complacency is a killer.

• 22:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  And, and so in this case, we started and, and only I, only I graduated. A guy named Danny Green was recycled. He later graduated and all the others quit along the way. And then of the two hundred and twenty, uh, young officers, lieutenants and young sergeants, probably about forty eight made it. So we probably had a graduation around fifty, starting two twenty eight.

• 22:30Jocko Willink?

  What was, what was the hardest part or the biggest challenge for you in Ranger School? Oh. I mean, if you're a hundred and thirty eight pounds, I'm surprised you even lived through that.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Well, you know, everyone was one thirty eight at the end. So I didn't have, I lost probably about four pounds and I saw big men lose, you know, lots. Uh, part of it was, you know, I'd, I'd been deployed with the unit from Fort Riley around the country and overseas and, and I had done a lot of training. Um, we ran a basic in A I T, advanced individual training. The army had an idea, send them to the unit and you train them up. So when I was going to Ranger School, I kept thinking, they gotta have a safety net around here. We're, we're going down this river. It's going pretty fast. So, you know, they gotta have a first aid tent around here, you know, for hypothermia. So I was all, I'd already been a support platoon leader in a battalion, you know, logistics officer. So I was just kind of.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  And my Ranger buddy was Ed Ruiz, he was a Staff Sergeant from 82nd Airborne and he thought he was gonna die. He's like, "We're gonna die."

• 23:37Speaker 01

  You know, to me, I thought it was like, you know, Disney World. If you're taller than Mickey, you can get on this ride here. And so, "Man, I'm gonna get five extra jumps. This is great." And I literally would, you know, he would eat everything they gave him. They'd give you two meals for a day or three meals for two days. And I ended up just, my ruck was getting heavy with the C rations. So my ruck was getting heavy with extra chow. And then, you know, when he'd start whimpering, I'd go, "Here, go take this. Here's spaghetti. Here's, you know, all that." So, you know, everyone has a day or two that are bad days in Ranger School. And if you have your Ranger buddies, then they carry you through. And likewise, you do it for

• 24:18Speaker 01

  them. So, you know, to me, it was a leadership, you know, opportunity. And just put one foot in front of the other.

• 24:28Jocko Willink?

  What was the most significant leadership lesson you took away from Ranger School?

• 24:35Speaker 01

  You know, I think if you're not building teams, they're falling apart. That's a life lesson. And so, you're constantly trying to make the team stronger. You're going around and probably learned it because I thought that's probably the right way to do it. And then when you see it come together and you see that we can get through this together kind of thing, then you know. And I served with a lot of, those enlisted guys all went to the Ranger battalions. So then when I started serving in the Rangers, there's all my Ranger buddies who are now NCOs that know Captain Ferriter's. You know, he's legit.

• 25:13Jocko Willink?

  When you get done with that, what's your next duty station?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  I went up to Alaska and took it in Fairbanks, north of the Arctic Circle. Ended up taking command of the parachute infantry company, Charlie Airborne. And we had 50 guys at every union. So from 1985, 50 guys still get together.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  In Fairbanks, Alaska, and the Arctic, the yook they call it, it makes men. You know, they all come in skinny little legs and buck teeth and big ears and no neck. And after they carry their rucksack through the winter on snowshoes, they're tight. They're tight grouping, they're studs.

• 25:54Jocko Willink?

  They end up with a thick neck, big legs and smaller ears.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right, exactly.

• 26:00Jocko Willink?

  It's all moving in the right directions. So now you're a company commander, you said at that point?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  I am.

• 26:05Jocko Willink?

  And what was your, you know, what was your premise, you know, from a leadership perspective? When you took company command? How did you, what was your first sit down with the troops? What did you tell them? What was your kind of your principles of leadership?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Somewhere along that time, I coined the idea, you know, or the motto, you know, we win together. And so it's pretty simple, but it's we and it's together. And it's about outcomes. And they all wore a maroon gray, you know, fancy hat. And they thought they were invincible. And I told them, you guys, you know, we don't live fire. No one in the army does, but I don't really care about that. I care about us. So first it was, you know, applied marksmanship, basic marksmanship, then applied marksmanship. And I would challenge the NCOs. And the reason I think we're still together is, okay, let's, let's figure it out. There are great shots in this world and everyone in this company needs to do that. And we will walk everywhere.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  So we'll parachute in and we'll walk to the front gate. There's no buses coming to the drop zone. All right, we're going to be hard, you know, not, not full of ourselves, but you know. And so then we challenged my best friend's company to a wrestling match. And so we got the NCO club is all kitted up. And when the first paratrooper got pinned by a non-airborne guy, they couldn't believe it. It's like, wait a minute, we're supermen, we're airborne. So, okay, so now the hype and the reality, let's work on this here. So we got to maneuver live fire level and. And they're just great. So the whole thing is, I think in life, if you treat everyone like

• 27:48Speaker 01

  they're really wicked smart, then, you know, there were guys at the Citadel that would walk around like, you know, dumb privates, and then you'd see them on a basketball floor, and they were natural leaders. And those kind of observations taught me, you have no idea the fierceness in a platoon or a company, and you have no idea the talent that's around you unless you let it come out. And so that was, that's the way that I do it, done it my whole life. So then, I get a call from Department of the Army. Hey, you've been up there for three and a half years. We got something for you. And I said, what do you mean? They said, we got, we got a recruiting job down in San Jose. It's real close to your

• 28:32Speaker 01

  home. Or recruiting or reserve duty. And I said, the phone lines up here in Alaska are not that good. And I hung up. So I called down to Second Ranger Battalion, and I talked to a friend of mine named Bernie Champeau. I didn't know him at the time, but he became a long friend. And I said, hey, I'm coming out of company command, and I'd like to come compete, try to try out for a Ranger. You're supposed to be the best of the best. And he said, man, you should have called a year ago. You know, we're booked way out. And I said, look, I'm, I'll fly down there. I'll give it a try, whatever you want. He said,

• 29:14Speaker 01

  I can't help you. Then a guy quit. And so he had my name right there. So, you know, what is it, Wayne Gretzky says, you miss every, you miss every shot you never take. And so he calls up, says, hey, Mike, this is Bernie. If you can be down here. And it's like, I'm standing next to him. Here I am. So, so that worked out really well.

• 29:39Jocko Willink?

  Did you have to go through some kind of selection to be an officer in the Ranger Regiment?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. We called it ROTE back then, Ranger Orientation Program. Now, now they use

• 29:49Jocko Willink?

  RASP?

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, now they use RASP.

• 29:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Selection program.

• 29:52Jocko Willink?

  And how long was this selection program?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Probably three weeks.

• 29:56Jocko Willink?

  And you were ready for that thing, even though you hadn't been preparing? You'd been preparing just by being an infantry company commander up in Alaska, humping a rock and doing what you're doing?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:05Jocko Willink?

  And wrestling against the legs?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Exactly. And again, I'm the basketball player and the, and the baseball player, not, not a grappler yet. So that's what's really unique about it. So yeah, so it, you know, combat water survival test, which is, you know, simple. I grew up water skiing and playing around. And then shoot and then 12 mile foot march, five mile run in 35 minutes. And so you, the idea was one, it was an orientation program because they wanted you to know how to tie your gear down, where it goes, what, see all the weapons that you're going to see when

• 30:50Speaker 01

  you get there. And then, and then, but also to know that if you take that, the day you arrive, they go on a 20 mile foot march, you can do it. And first, it's just an investment and good, good, you know, people management. You don't want to waste time bringing someone in and then have them flop out because they're just not fit.

• 31:10Jocko Willink?

  So you get assigned then, you, you, you get assigned to the Ranger Regiment?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  I do.

• 31:17Jocko Willink?

  As far as I can tell, and you know, I, I was in the Navy, obviously, and I worked with the Marines a lot. I worked with the Army on deployment. I worked with the Marines on deployment. But, and you know, I work with special oper, or special forces. I work with Marsoc. I've worked with kind of a bunch of different units. I've worked with Rangers before. I was, lived next Rangers. But, but the, from what I could tell on the outside, looking in, it seems like Ranger Regiment is kind of the, the most Spartan of the units out there in terms of the day-to-day life of being a Ranger. And I've also been told

• 32:02Jocko Willink?

  this by, by friends that were in, in Rangers, at Ranger Battalion. The life that you lead there is like, you're a Ranger, that's it, nothing else. And what we're going to do is be in the field and we're going to train. And there's a lot of young kids there. It's a very young group, you know, because you can go right out of high school, the training, you didn't have to go to Ranger School, go to Ranger Battalion.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:26Jocko Willink?

  You can just go through that two or three week thing and boom, you're now at a Ranger, in a Ranger Battalion. What was, tell me a little bit about the day to day life of being in a Ranger Battalion.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, it's, so the day to day life started on Sunday where you got a high and tight haircut every Sunday. And so, you know, you either had a flat top or you had, it looks like a divot from a golf course landed on top of your head. And it's, and then, so everybody starts right there. Everybody carried a Ranger coin. If you didn't have your coin, you get smoked, you know? Or you buy beer for somebody.

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  And getting smoked is, you're actually like doing pushups and PT like you're in bootcamp.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:12Jocko Willink?

  So that kind of thing doesn't happen in, it doesn't happen in the SEAL teams, that's for sure. Like no one's going to make you do pushups when you're in the SEAL teams, though. You might, if you do something really stupid, you might get slapped around, you might get actual duty assignments. But you're not, you're not walking around, there's no, there's no feeling of bootcamp whatsoever when you're at a SEAL team.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:35Jocko Willink?

  Ranger regiment is not like that. You, there definitely is a bootcamp.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  You don't, yeah, you don't want, you know, so I end up commanding a company, being a battalion S3, being the regimental S3, commanding a Ranger Battalion, so.

• 33:48Jocko Willink?

  You've seen it at every level.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and except for the regimental commander.

• 33:52Jocko Willink?

  Jack.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  You know, but, but there's, there's a rites of passage, you know? Every officer who serves in the Ranger Regiment has already done the job. So I commanded the parachute company, I come back and command a Ranger company. I commanded a parachute battalion in the 82nd, came back and commanded.

• 34:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh, got it. That's smart.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Battalion S3 in the 9th Infantry Division, and then Battalion S3 for 3rd Ranger Battalion.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  In the platoon, there are echelons. I joke about, you know, you just love it when a new private comes in because he gets the green scrub pad and you get the buffer, right? And so you're no longer sticking your hand in the toilet cleaning it, right? But until the Ranger gets to Ranger school, he's a lesser. Now, they'll fight, you know, in a bar together, they'll take care of them. They'll fight in combat together. But there's, you know, I have gone to Ranger school, I'm a Corporal E4, or I'm a Sergeant E5, and you have not. And you're specialists that came from Korea, and we are the same E4, you're not the same. So it starts there in terms of Spartan life.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  The, you know, the officers are supposed to eat last, you know, make sure the troops, the Rangers got their chow, that kind of thing. But everyone has to meet that standard. And so if a guy falls out of a run, falls out of a foot march, then the Army gave summary release authority to the Ranger Battalion. And so you get dropped. And then you're sent down to Legland, or sent down to 9th Infantry Division, or 24th Infantry Division, back in those days. And so you had to stay on it, and you had to learn to play hurt. And so you're jumping and walking through the night and falling in things.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  And, you know, if you got hurt, and the wounded wildebeest kind of syndrome, you know, the lions see the one that's limping and, you know, they'll go after the NCOs, or someone will go after someone that's can't keep up. And so, so it's a good, it's a good tough life.

• 36:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so you get, you get a haircut on Sunday, you get a high and tight on Sunday night, what do you, Monday morning, aren't you going in the field all the time? Don't they spend a ton of time in the field?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they'll go, so first, first of all, there's no, other than combat prep, there's no picking up trash. That's what the divisions, you know, on the same post, will do a rotation of stocking the shelves in the commissary, being the gate guards and all that. Rangers don't, don't do that. And so instead, it's...

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Probably in the rifle company, probably Tuesday morning out, Thursday evening back or through the two weeks, a Thursday back, weapons clean and then that late into that night, weapons clean in the next day, hang your boots to dry somewhere and then get a haircut.

• 36:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and most guys don't spend more than one tour at Ranger Battalion, is that accurate or inaccurate?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the, I was at, where was I? I think I was at either Bragg or Benning and there was a guy who looked like he was made of, you know, leather and freaking muscle. He looked like he might have been 45 or 50 years old, he's in the, he's in the commissary and he's wearing like his Ranger panties and like a Ranger t-shirt and I'm like, this guy is 100% Ranger, you know, he's, and, and I've always, I've always heard that most guys, they do like maybe, maybe four years hitch there, maybe they'll do one more, but then they move on because of the lifestyle is just so Spartan.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  The, the senior, senior NCOs will stay and, and a lot of guys will go from private to platoon sergeant, the same platoon, you know.

• 38:05Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and then, and then some, some leave. If someone messes up, then like I said, they'll, they'll get dropped from roles, a release for standards, RFS, and you can tell them, hey, you can come back, you know, six months, you can come back to this unit and never do. Once they get to the soft life, they're not coming back. So, but, but it's very close and tight because you know, you've got this, this kind of caste system, but it's also, it's a brotherhood like none other.

• 38:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, salute to the Rangers. Every time I work with a Ranger, you know what you're going to get, you're going to get 100% professional soldier that's ready to do the job anytime, anywhere. Outstanding. What was, from a leadership perspective, what did you take away from the Rangers as a leader?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  So it probably came out of there with what I would call my command philosophy, which is funny because my son Patty commanded the same Ranger company that I did. And the only time in history that a father-son command the same Ranger company. And he wrote me and said, many years later, so in 2006, he wrote, "Hey Dad, I've written my command philosophy. It's six pages. Would you read it? And tell me what you think?" I said, "No, I won't read it. No one else will either." I was going to read six pages. I said, "Well, what's yours?" I said, "It's easy. I've had it since Bravo Company 275. One is do your best, do what's right, improve daily, build teams,

• 39:44Speaker 01

  take care of a little guy or show that you care and never quit." And so I kind of came out of there with, if you're not doing that, then you're probably falling behind. And as an older guy, as an older officer or as a general, you know, I would tell everyone, "Do your best" means don't try to be the best. Because the team suffers when you try to advantage yourself. You know this. And then do what's right, be true to your wife and leave everyone else's alone. And they all look at that and I said, "This is not a religious thing, man." This is, you're going to ask them to go up that hill? You're going to ask them to leave the airplane in combat? They trust you. And too many senior officers and senior NCOs, you know, they cheat on their wives. They think it's no big deal.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  And now the troop goes, "You guys are fake, you know? If he lies to her, then he can lie to anybody, right?" And then the rest is about the building of the team. And when I was in Alaska, this guy, finance officer, I pulled him through the cage in the finance building. Because this private from Charlie Airborne got an O-Pay due. So I'd hear him in the first Air Force office saying,

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Jones, it's no pay due. All right, send him over to finance next morning.

• 41:03Jocko Willink?

  No pay due means he's not going to get any money?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:06Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  And so, um, the next day I hear Jones's voice, first sergeant, and I, you know, student sergeant's talking in there, so I'm listening. Well, he didn't have enough copies when he went over there for finance. I kicked him back, so now he's got four copies. Okay. So then, next day I hear his voice. He signed the copies in blue ink. And at that point, I said, "That's enough." So I said, "First sergeant," I said, "Sir," I said, "No. This, this guy's wife thinks he's an idiot because he's working for free." So I go into finance and the captain there, um, was my next door neighbor. His name's Art. I said, "Hey, Art, my, my private's no pay due. He's been in here, this is the fourth day in a row."

• 41:50Speaker 01

  And he said, "Oh, gosh, we can fix that. What's, what was the problem?" "Well, you didn't have enough copies." "Yeah, you gotta have four copies." "You got a copy machine right there, Art, number two." He signed it in blue. "Yeah, we, we got a hundred percent, you know, no deficiencies noted in our inspection." At that point, I grabbed him and said, "I'm gonna kick your butt in front of all of your troops right here, or, or you're gonna pay this kid right now." That, you know, that, that word gets through that the boss is gonna stand up for us. And I think, uh, that's what we, we're supposed to do. So that's what I really learned in those first two company commands.

• 42:24Jocko Willink?

  When you were at Ranger Battalion, are you going on deployment anywhere? Or do you just, were you just staying in Fort Lewis?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we traveled the world.

• 42:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, back then, we had jungle, uh, training in Fort Sherman, Panama. So every year you'd go there. Um, you'd go up into the Arctic, Fairbanks, or, or Fort Richardson, or Norway, or something like that. And then, um, we, we, you do a long in-flight rig, parachute rig, and then parachuting into Germany and, and move for three, three days and nights, and then attack bad, bad tolls. There's a, was an army airfield there. Um, went up to Boise, Idaho, jumped in the desert. We, we would go, we'd go quite a bit.

• 43:05Jocko Willink?

  So you'd just go on big training operations and, and get back?

• 43:11Jocko Willink?

  Square your gear away, get ready, go do it again.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Go to the field and then, then once every eight weeks, you take two weeks stand down and then twice a year, you take two weeks of block leave. The whole unit shuts and goes.

• 43:25Jocko Willink?

  Square it away. Rangers don't play around. So what'd you get, what'd you do when you got done with, with, with this tour at the Rangers?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  I had to go next door and be in the motorized infantry and then Desert Shield, Desert Storm kicked off and then I went to Commander General Staff College and then when I was in Commander General Staff College in 91, 92, the regimental commander came to interview and we had about 20 Ranger company, former company commanders in the, in the course and the word out was these guys, this guy, this guy and this guy were going back to the regiment as majors and, and so I thought, well, they've already picked, but I stopped by to see the Colonel and General Buckner and what's

• 44:17Speaker 01

  the regimental commander. He said, oh God, glad to see you. I heard you were gonna go to 101st, but I got a spot for you. I said, shit. I said, I'm here, sir. Let's go.

• 44:27Jocko Willink?

  When the Gulf War went down, where were you? Were you in the Command and General Staff College?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:34Jocko Willink?

  How pissed off were you during that time?

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Me and, and you know, whatever it was, 600, you know, pissed off captain, promotables or majors. Yeah. People tried to call back, tried to go back to their unit and you know, back in those days, war lasted, you know, a weekend.

• 44:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that one did last, what, 72 hours or 96 hours or something like that?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Grenada was that way. Just cause was that.

• 44:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, Grenada too. Did you go to, did you go to Grenada?

• 45:03Speaker 01

  No, I was in Ranger School during Grenada.

• 45:05Jocko Willink?

  And then what about Panama?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  I gave up the Ranger Company and six months later Panama.

• 45:12Jocko Willink?

  Man.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, one of the things that I would say to you and for this podcast is there's, there's a lot of times that you don't get what you think is supposed to happen in life, you know, and, and like the Lord is your assignment officer, you know, and, and I, you know, I should have been is not, that's not a good way of looking at life, you know, it's, you know, look through the windshield and not the rearview mirror and make something of what's in front of you is kind of what I would tell people. So, didn't get West Point, went, got the sitter, didn't get Ranger School, got the weapons platoon, didn't get a rifle platoon. So, when I went to Ranger School, I was like a blank disc or, you know, somebody teach me how to, how to maneuver because I, I've been shooting mortars, you know, then

• 45:57Speaker 01

  got up to Alaska, got the airborne company, got Bravo Company in, in the Rangers, and then didn't get to go. But in each case, you, you gotta, you know, go with purpose, do your best, do a try, take care of somebody, and things will start to work out.

• 46:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, in those days, it was just a roll of the dice whether you were going to get to go to war or not.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  And, and in those days, you might be in a unit where you know you are not going to go. And so, you still had to motivate the troops or some of them didn't want to be motivated. There are those days we invented something called urinalysis. They didn't have it prior to 83. And so, you, you know, had drug use and stuff like that. And, and suddenly now you, you know who is and then you could punish them and or correct them and all that. So, the army changed a lot in, in from 79 to, you know, 94.

• 46:56Jocko Willink?

  So, after college, and what did you learn there? I mean, what, what were you learning? What was your main, main takeaways that you got out of going to the two years of command and general staff?

• 47:07Speaker 01

  It's one year and.

• 47:08Jocko Willink?

  Okay, one year.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and. Someone told me that the next 10 to 15 years of service will be with this group. So knowing that there are people who are not infantry and they're squared away, they're smart, you know, and up until then who've kind of been sequestered into all male infantry units. And one thing, I never left an infantry battalion until I made Colonel, and that's pretty rare. And so I was always finding a way, you know, to get back and, uh, and different kind of tree, maybe, and then back to the Rangers and then 82nd Airborne and then back to the Rangers, so.

• 47:49Jocko Willink?

  So then that's what happens. You get, they had a slot for you back at the, at the regiment?

• 47:54Speaker 01

  And yeah, first, first at regiment and, uh, then General Grange or Colonel Grange made me the battalion or the regimental S5, which could be Civil Military Affairs, but actually it was, I want you to create the Ranger Monument at Fort Benning. I want you to create the James Deets prints. I want you to create the pavers and all that stuff. And so, um, he, he, he went to go worldwide because we'd, we'd been left out of Desert Shield, Desert Storm, except for one Ranger company, uh, from First Ranger.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Schwarzkopf didn't, didn't like the Rangers and he'd been at Fort Stewart and so he probably felt that they were prima donnas. And, and so for whatever, whatever reason, the Rangers didn't get a lot of action. And so General Grange, then Colonel Grange's view was, I'm going to go to each of the combatant commands and, and then arrange for an exercise that will be used. And then he came, he would come back and he, he asked the communication officer, there's these kind of radios, Delta Force has these kind of radios, you know, and he'd come back, said, what's the word on radios? And the guy go, I can't, I didn't make any progress. And then go to this guy, you know, this kind of supply stuff, we need this, this kind of rapid deployable parachute thrown out from a helicopter, no action.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Then he came to me and, and I said, here's the print, you know, this, this print is that the, here's the sketch and met with these guys from Florida and that, and, uh, So in sixty-nine days at the regimental level, I was then sent down to third battalion where everyone wants to be in a battalion. So it's the shortest, I think I was hailed and farewelled at the same social event.

• 49:43Jocko Willink?

  And so now you get into the battalion and what are you doing, ops there?

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have a extra field grade in the range battalions who does the special ops, liaison and coordination. So for one, and you're really schooling yourself on what the other S3, what the S3 is going to do and you're probably the error parent. So I was the LNO and after a year, I moved into the S3 job and then my battalion commander and another range battalion commander were killed in a helicopter crash in the Great Salt Lake on October twenty-ninth, nineteen ninety-two.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  So then Danny McKnight came and took over third range battalion and he led third into Mogadishu with Bravo Company and they worked with the Jordan Special Operation Task Force there. He was not half the man of Colonel Caneley and I think it had a lot to do with a lot of problems in the street there. And, you know, when you think about the lieutenant colonel, they're still pretty young, but when you're a captain and a major, you expect a lot from them. And if he's a ranger commander, you expect a lot.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  So I was asked to be the chief of staff of the Army's aide-de-camp.

• 51:11Jocko Willink?

  So where were you when, did you deploy to Somalia then?

• 51:17Speaker 01

  I did, but I deployed after the big fight.

• 51:18Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  So I brought Alpha Company and A Squadron forward from Delta Force and we had trained, we were going to be the replacement and October third had the big fight and we arrived October fourth at about six at night.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  We did patrols, got Mike Durant back, and then, um, and then the president, President Clinton struck a deal with I D. And we thought, we just lost six of our buddies. Gordon Shugart lost, you know, Sergeant Cleveland, who was a pretty good friend. I did a lot of missions with Task Force One Sixty, and he was dragged through the streets. And then you see, you know, it just given up. So, I'm very proud of the Rangers. I think Ranger Scotty Miller, who retired as a four-star, was the captain on the ground for the Delta Force, and a

• 52:19Speaker 01

  great friend and a great, great, great officer, person. I think any other unit in the Army that day would have been killed to the man. And what Bravo Company and elements of, right, Task Force Ranger did was amazing, remarkable, and courageous beyond description.

• 52:39Jocko Willink?

  What was the, when you, so you land on four October?

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:44Jocko Willink?

  What was the atmosphere when you get there?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was really, really eerie, sullen. We got mortared that night, and we, one guy killed, and, uh, um, Dr. Marsh, Task Force Doctor, wounded badly. Griz Martin was killed. He had been a Second Range Battalion guy, and then did the long walk and joined, uh, the guys at Bragg. But it was eerie. There was sort of this rationalization that had occurred that, you know, the Ranger standard didn't have to be followed because we're hanging out with these cool guys. And I, and I felt, we sent my Colonel there, ill-equipped, to

• 53:28Speaker 01

  command because he didn't have his staff. And so I, I think, I felt when I got there that I assumed that role of leadership began to get the Ranger standard back up to speed. And, I mean, they hadn't even sandbagged, you know, the place they were living in. And they were just kind of playing volleyball and hanging out and then going on missions and stuff, so. And then, and then, you know, they lost, we lost some, we lost six guys. And it means a lot to all these guys and to me.

• 54:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was obviously just just horrible. I mean, I was I was in the SEAL teams at that time and we were all just well, I didn't have we had Durant on on the podcast and it was so so surreal to be sitting across talking to him when you know, like I said, I was in the SEAL teams and we're watching, you know, seeing the videos of him and watching him get dragged through the streets and watching the the videos that got posted or that were on the news. And, you know, you just think this guy, well, you want to do everything you can to help him. And obviously, I'm like in I was in San Diego, you know, I mean, we're not going to get to do anything to help him out. But yeah, what a what a what a tough fight.

• 54:47Jocko Willink?

  And a tough situation. And um so when when you get done with that, what's your what's your next job after that?

• 54:57Speaker 01

  When I became the Regimental Operations Officer, we planned Haiti and I got ready to go into Haiti. And then I think General Powell and a few others went down there and brokered a peace. So we were rigged on the airplane. Clamshell. We are three hours from jumping into combat. Clamshell.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  And then actually, um, that night, my mom passed away. So she had cancer and so an Air Force

• 55:31Speaker 01

  tactical air control guy drove me from Savannah to Fort Bedding where I met my my wife and Margaret. Linked up with Margie and then she put me on a plane out to Monterey to settle my the estate. So the whole time period was from Kenele Dine. Mogadishu.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Haiti, my mom passing, and then one month later I take battalion command at Fort Bragg. And it probably was kinda numb for about six months. Someone told me once, you know, you got that smile back, you got that sparkle back. I didn't know it was gone.

• 56:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you must have been quite focused when you showed up. Where'd you do your first battalion command?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  It was Fort Bragg and Second Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry.

• 56:22Jocko Willink?

  With the 82nd?

• 56:24Speaker 01

  With the 82nd. First Brigade Commander was John Abazade, really great officer. And the second one is the famous Dave Petraeus. So, General Petraeus and I would race each other. And so the other battalion commanders, when Colonel Petraeus would come out in the morning to look around, we'd all be stretching and they'd run and hide behind the bushes or their barracks. And so, he would say, "White Devil Six, let's go for a run." I'd say, "All right, sir." So then, we'd go two miles out and then come back. And at the beginning of the fourth mile, we'd race.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  And so, I think he's probably got me by about three. But I'd say, "Hey, sir, if you wanna play one-on-one basketball first, you know, you wanna wrestle? You wanna do anything else?" But, so we had a lot of fun. When he would come to Iraq later, I would tell my aide, "We're gonna get a call tomorrow night at 2300 to meet with General Petraeus at 04." He's like, "Sir."

• 57:33Speaker 01

  You know, so we learned to take a day off before the race the next day. Cause he would try to sneak in there and know you probably smoked yourself the day before.

• 57:45Jocko Willink?

  So when you're doing the battalion command now at the 82nd, are you guys doing a workup cycle where you're training and then you're moving to a higher state of readiness? Is that, was that what you do in the army? I'm in the Navy, so our cycle was always, and it's the same with the ships, and then Marine Corps falls into this too. They do kind of what the Navy does, which is get ready to go on deployment and then you board ships and you go on deployment. And the SEAL teams, you get ready to go on deployment. Sometimes we board ships, sometimes we just fly to another place and we stay on deployment for six months. That's sort of the, that's sort of the methodology of the Navy and methodology of the Marine Corps too. When you're at 82nd and there's no war going on, what do you do?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have three cycles. Division Ready Force One, Two and Three. If you're in Two, that's the intensive training cycle. And if you're good at it, then before you enter Two, you've, you've done your basic marksmanship of all weapons. So now you can go straight into collective training. And then at the conclusion of that eight week cycle of really field time, then you become Ready Force One and all your vehicles are rigged up to be paratropped, all your ammo's ready to go.

• 58:58Jocko Willink?

  So you're basically on standby at that point?

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then if you're on Three, you can take your block leave or you're picking up trash and you know, stashing some shells into commissary and stuff.

• 59:12Jocko Willink?

  You legit do that? Soldiers legit do that? Stock shelves in the commissary?

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 59:17Jocko Willink?

  I did not know that. I don't think anyone in the Navy stocked shelves in the, in the commissary in the Navy. I don't think so.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:24Jocko Willink?

  I could be wrong.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:26Jocko Willink?

  But at least in the SEAL teams, we didn't. I don't know.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you try, you know, when you're a new officer, first time in 82nd and you try to tell a sergeant major, my guys shouldn't be stocking shelves. That dog doesn't hunt very long in the 82nd.

• 59:39Jocko Willink?

  What'd you take away from General Abizaid and Colonel Petraeus at that time?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Well, um, so attributes were, uh, they're very focused.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  One intensely focused, General Petraeus, the other focused and very cordial, very friendly.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  One, very good listener, one, a pretty good listener. And so I, what I've seen is-

• 1:00:07Jocko Willink?

  Who was the very good listener? Who was the pretty good listener?

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  General Abizaid was, was a very good listener. He's just curious as heck.

• 1:00:13Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  And General Petraeus was prone to, um, I think he, if he knew what he wanted, then he didn't need to listen as, you know.

• 1:00:22Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  You, you just had to be a little smoother at bringing up, you know, sir would be helpful and useful if maybe, you know, those kind of discussions. I have a great relationship with both of them.

• 1:00:33Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Really great, but they're, they're little different leaders.

• 1:00:37Jocko Willink?

  When, um, as a, as a battalion commander, what'd you take away as a leader? Did you make any big mistakes? Did you have any huge lessons learned as a battalion commander?

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  I, I, so the first was understanding really, you know, um,

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  who, who did you need to own their heart? What level did you need to own their heart to know that the unit would do anything for you? So at a company level, you, you know, all 180 guys, 160 or whatever, you know? And if you get the E4 Mafia kind of with you, um, then you, the companies can do anything. And, and the, uh, at the Staff Sergeant and Sergeant E5, right in the middle of that was where the Battalion Commander. So, so how do you get that? Well, you gotta run PT with them, you know? You gotta roll with them, you know? You, you gotta, um, be on that foot march when, when they step off for the Expert Infantry Badge.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  You, you know, not only do you step off, but you, you beat everybody on a 12 mile foot march. So they know, they know he, he, he can do it. You stand up to the Brigade Commander when they, you know, somebody's ragging on your guys, you go, sir. It's not your job. You run a brigade, I'll run a battalion, and I got this. So you gotta earn their trust. So I think I learned that when you can do that, then you can do anything.

• 1:02:13Jocko Willink?

  Then what was the, so you just were telling me that you do, in Rangers, you already did the job somewhere else. So now did you go, is this when you did battalion commander at Rangers after that?

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went down to Fort Benning from Bragg at that time and took third range battalion.

• 1:02:31Jocko Willink?

  And this is what, 1996, 1997 timeframe?

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's 96 to 98.

• 1:02:38Jocko Willink?

  And this is where you get your introduction to jiu-jitsu, am I correct?

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:02:43Jocko Willink?

  And what was that introduction like?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  It happened this way, what it was like, it was awesome, but it happened this way. Then Colonel McChrystal, Stan McChrystal,

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  asked me, hey, what do you, what do you think about bringing these guys, Hoist Gracie and Horion Gracie?

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  And in training year sergeants, this idea of hand-to-hand or combative.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  And I said, well, sir, what's that gonna cost me? And he said, it's $40,000 for two weeks. Well, we didn't even have night scopes on all of our machine guns in 96. I said, sir, I'd rather take the money and put it into scopes, you know? And he said, okay, good, good. You're gonna do it. I just wanna know how you felt about it. So I said, all right. So then, within a week or two, I walk into the Ranger Dying Facility and there's these two guys sitting at the table.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Somebody introduces them to me and, you know, I'm looking at Hoist this close, I'm thinking, I wonder what do you do if I slapped them right now?

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  I didn't slap them.

• 1:03:52Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, I actually do know what do you do.

• 1:03:56Jocko Willink?

  Now, we all know that.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  But they introduced.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Ground fighting in the form of Gracie Jiu Jitsu and I asked him, you know, why are you winning? And he said, you know, my, you know, our father took the Japanese style of fighting and, and put the Brazilian side on it and, and we can win and we will win. So I, our recurring theme is to trust and, and super backup your, your non-commission officers. And so we set, set up the training and then we pure fleet it. And right as I started to understand it, then the army sent me to Boston. So, um, went up there, went

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  into Kenny Florian's place once or twice. And, um, and I trained with his brother Keith about two months ago. It was a pretty good, pretty awesome time. But, uh, so third range battalion is where combatants was introduced. I went to the Fletcher School of Loan Diplomacy in Tufts University. As, you know, I was joking, say that's a senior national defense fellow. So let's show a little respect around here with the title. But then when I came back, there's another one of those example. Um, there's a lot to talk about third range battalion and learns and live fires and, and guys getting killed and, and, and hurt in training.

• 1:05:22Jocko Willink?

  Uh, is that during live fire evolutions, uh, guys getting killed?

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  At a demo range, we had someone put pee for plenty, you know, just trying to, let's get rid of it all. They do a dirt clod of clay in the air, size of a piano or something, and landed on, on guys that were behind the mer. Yeah. And, uh, but you know, you, you learn when you're doing these things that it's dangerous. And if you do what's right, go back to that one, you're going to be okay. If you're with the right people, you're going to be okay. But when you do something wrong.

• 1:05:59Jocko Willink?

  What did the investigation on that look like? I mean, what was the, if you, if you're talking to a young soldier right now, a young ranger right now, what, what would they take away from that?

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  There was negligence and, and you know, the master breacher was found, was court martialed and departed the army.

• 1:06:18Jocko Willink?

  And what was he, what was his thought process?

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Just.

• 1:06:22Jocko Willink?

  Bigger boom?

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  Not, not trying to be show offy, but more like, look, if we continue to do this, we're going to be here till ten at night. So then let's put it all in the hole and just get out of here.

• 1:06:33Jocko Willink?

  No kidding? How much explosives?

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  You know, I, let me make the one correction. I was, that happened when I was the S3 and, and I was in Mogadishu when it happened. So, um, so I got investigated for having signed off on the, the range request and then deployed. And so then the OIC and the NCIC were the ones that were found responsible.

• 1:07:02Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:04Jocko Willink?

  And then what other, what other major takeaways did you have from battalion command at Ranger Regiment? You guys, you talked about live fire.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Jocko Willink?

  What was, uh, how much live fire would you guys do? Live fire maneuver?

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Well, we, we did a lot. We did, we did, uh, company live fires. So, so in that train up for the Rangers to take the mission in a similar way as in the 82nd, we, we would always do a joint readiness exercise, which meant we had, uh, helicopter assets from the 160th and from Air Force Special Ops and you had gunships and, uh, and then, you know, sometimes it would be, there's a, there's a, uh, there's a special forces location in Copal, Peru. So we rebuilt it to, um, to seize it back should, uh, was it Shining

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Path or whatever, if they had taken it, then, then we would live fire, take it back. So it's always built around some kind of ongoing.

• 1:08:10Jocko Willink?

  Actual objective out there?

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And then again, you, you want Ranger platoons to, um, be, be the best platoon size element that can overwatch, support by fire, breach, assault, consolidate, you know, can, uh, breach any, any kind of fence door, whatever. And so you, you string a lot of the blocking and tackling and then you put it into a, a concept and, um, Which is interesting because a lot in the 20 year war, which we call this one we're just finishing up, we're still working on. A lot of our officers are sort of like latch, you know, latch key kids, they, everything's

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  been given to them, they haven't had to conceptualize, visualize, conceptualize, put it together, and understand angles and, you know, moving force, stable force. So I think we learned a lot about that. Also, in range battalion command, now you, one, you have to know things about three levels up. When you're a company commander, you gotta sort of know what the battalion commander thinks. As soon as you get to battalion, then suddenly it's JSOC and all the assets, it's, you know, combatant command, or their CIF forces, counter terrorist

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  forces, host nation, and partner nations. So there's a lot of that. I think the biggest thing is just how smart the ranger officers and the senior NCOs are. That's when you realize, oh my goodness, you know. I had four company commanders, one of whom is Eric Corella, now a four star. They were all West Point classmates, and they're great guys. And they were, but they're so smart, and they would vote as a block, so they'd come walking into the office, I go, here we go, all right. But if I needed to do anything, I would say to Jeff Martindale, is Eric doing okay? He seems kind of droopy these days.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  And a minute later, Eric be at my door, sir, I'm good to go. So I think, you know, you learn that, that they're not as experienced, but they're, you find out that, wow, these guys are really smart. And the senior NCOs, you know, probably all NCOs, but you get to see it at the senior level, you know, really smart.

• 1:10:39Jocko Willink?

  You know, from a training perspective in the, I grew up in the nineties in the SEAL teams and we did live fire everything. I mean, we did live fire everything. In fact, that was pretty much the only way we trained was live fire. We did live fire IADS, we did live fire IADS at night, we did live fire CQC all the time. That's, that's what we did. Blanks kinda wasn't even a thing. And I would, you know, hear about the army, hear about the Marine Corps and they'd be talking about using blanks. We, I mean, I would personally, my own ego would be like, well, you know, it's so lame that they're doing blanks. And we just did live fire, everything, everything, everything was live fire. Didn't even think about it. It wasn't even a question what we were doing. We were doing live fire.

• 1:11:18Jocko Willink?

  But in the two thousands, we started actually using both simunition and we had a better form of miles gear. That was very high speed and very, very realistic. And we started using that and all of a sudden it made us so much better. Both those things made us so much better. And we do less live fire than we used to, but we're a lot better because now we go against, we go against an enemy that's maneuvering and shooting back at us and killing us. And we're having down men and all that stuff. And then when I ran training, I, I was really focused on that force on force training. Did you guys see that? Did you see that kind of transition as well?

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  We did, and especially going back and forth from big army to, to the Rangers, you would see. And the, the advent of the combat training centers, joint readiness, national training center. And the CMTC over in Germany, now you had a world-class OPFOR. And that, that's what took the army out of the doldrums of, of post Vietnam. Just suddenly everyone's getting their ass kicked.

• 1:12:21Jocko Willink?

  You gotta fight, you gotta know what you're doing.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so then it's like, and then you have world-class observer controllers that are saying, you know, you're the 14th iteration of, that I've seen, you're not that good.

• 1:12:33Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  You know, and they would not publicly, but off the side and it's, it's, you know, some of the same rank is saying, you know, your planning's not that good, your communication's not that good, your actions on a director aren't that good. So, you know, here's your take home packet or you get better. And then you got a mission in two days. You know, you didn't, you didn't rehearse anything, get you guys out of rehearsal.

• 1:12:54Jocko Willink?

  When did they stand up that NTC?

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  In.

• 1:13:03Jocko Willink?

  Was it in the 2000s? Was it?

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, it was, it was, uh, eighty, eighty.

• 1:13:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay. So they've had it for a while.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. The army brought in the Combat Training Center, the Blackhawk, the M1 tank and the Bradley, all, all within a five-year span.

• 1:13:18Jocko Willink?

  That's a big transition.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:21Jocko Willink?

  All right, so you get done with, uh, school, you're up there, and then you come, where do you go back when you, when you get done with that? Where do you go?

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, um, you know, God had decided that I was a Ranger with a capital R, so I should probably command the 75th Ranger Regiment. Didn't happen. So they sent me to the 11th Infantry, which is the school brigade. And, you know, talk about humility, um, you know, having to suck it up and like, oh my God, you know? Command a Ranger Company, Parachute Company, Parachute Battalion, Ranger Battalion, Ops.

• 1:13:58Jocko Willink?

  And then a Training Regiment.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  And then Training. And so I had Officer Candidate School, Infantry Officer Basic Course, Jump School, the Captain's Advanced Course or Career Course, and then a Battalion of Dogs and Cats and.

• 1:14:12Jocko Willink?

  Now, if you're, we had a little issue with this in the SEAL, we used to have an issue with this in the SEAL Teams where no one wanted to go to training. And especially the advanced training, what we now call Training Detachment, but it used to be called Training Cell, where you're actually training the platoons that are going to go work. And, uh, you learn so much there, number one, but number two, it's real, it seems real obvious that you would want to take your best guys and put them where they're training the other guys, as opposed to taking the turds and putting them in charge of training. So did you, were you able to make that mind shift after you got assigned to the training and realize you're going to have an impact on a bunch of people that are coming through training, including the Basic Infantry Officers Course?

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, right away. And, and, uh, Probably in July of ninety-nine, I was, you know, moping around and my wife would normally say, "Okay, moping time's over. Let's, you know, what are we gonna do with this?" And so the entire generation that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan started underneath me, started the captains. I wouldn't allow the captains to stay more than eleven months in any job, so they had to go back to their divisions. Otherwise, they were gonna be dead in the water. They wouldn't make major. And so all these guys that learned how to train, had first sergeants, were running training companies. All, they were in the first wave of captains

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  and many of them are two and three-star generals now and all that. So, big impact. And then also, I got called up to a four-stars office, trade-off commanding general's office, and he said that, "Okay, you got the lieutenant course? They're too soft. The lieutenants are a bunch of wimps. You know, all they do is PowerPoint. They, you know, "Once you do a quick study, come back here in three weeks and tell me how you're gonna change the training for all the officers in the army." So, um, so we found out, we did analysis real quick and found out that of the sixteen basic branches, only four qualified with the basic, with a rifle. Out of how many? Out of sixteen branches.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Ooh. I think it was artillery, infantry. Engineers? Engineers and armor. And everyone else might, might fire a weapon, might, might not. Wow. So this is before nine-eleven. So I designed the course with a couple of the sergeants and a couple of officers. And, and we did the same, same thing we did in the Rangers. It's like, "Okay, Monday, you're going to the field, you know, and then you're gonna shoot every week that you're in the basic course." We purified that and then the cultures of the other branches, about three years after I left, you know, went to their generals of quartermaster, generals of finance or whatever, and got, got away.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  But I also saw the opportunity to insert combatives into every course. And I had to fight, you know, the big organization. They're like, you can't, you can't do combatives. You don't have, the, the manual says you should have a fair bay knife and, you know, fight like the Brits did in World War II. So we rewrote that TC that you talked about. And the credit goes to Matt Larson and Troy Thomas. Troy's just retired as Lieutenant Colonel. Matt, long friend and Black Belt under Chakaray. They did, they did the hard work. I did the review and all that. And, and then they said, you, you can't do it because you don't have

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  any master trainers. So we created a master training course. You can't do it because you don't have a facility. I traded two pallets of MREs for the book warehouse. And this guy was a deer hunter who was the, the post ops guy, military post. And I said, hey, Colonel Jordan, I'll give you, what, what can I, what do I have to give you to get the book warehouse? He says, well, a bunch of MREs would be helpful because I'm out on the. So in OCS, when they finished their last training exercise, they'd just throw MREs into the basement. It's a big room. So we bundled them up, traded. And then we went to two different high schools and got the first wrestling mat. We pieced it together. So, you know, again, the lesson

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  learned is reject rejection. And if you know it's right. And then even several of the course directors didn't want their lieutenants, captains, or, or officer candidates rolling around on the mats. And so we.

• 1:18:47Jocko Willink?

  Who says that? What kind of, what kind of human being, what kind of soldier says, hey, I don't want my, my troops to learn combatives? That seems insane to me.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  It was. It was. And so you just play through them. And the captains would sneak down there. And, and again, all of them ended up being combat commanders as captains and majors and battalion commanders in combat. And they all, they all got it. And, and our NCOs got it right away. It's at the staff sergeant level, they got it right away. And those were all command sergeant majors and, you know, division and sergeant major at the army level.

• 1:19:24Jocko Willink?

  And what years, this, this is like around 2000 that all this is happening?

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:29Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take you to get that manual? The first combatives?

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  I think we published it, we published it by, I took over July of 99, probably by July of 2000.

• 1:19:40Jocko Willink?

  Then where are you at when September 11th happens?

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  I was standing outside Admiral Natter's office at Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. And we were about to go to up to Iceland to do, we had an airbase up there that we were responsible for. And we were just, he was just gonna go do a European tour of something sort. So I was in to brief him on the trip and boom, we see the first plane on his TV. Boom, the next, and I'd been assigned there four weeks, maybe. Came out of Brigade Command, again, supposed to go to Pentagon, supposed to go to Joint Staff, ended up in Norfolk.

• 1:20:22Jocko Willink?

  What's the mission of Joint Forces Command?

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  It was the idea of Secretary Rumsfeld that we needed an honest broker to select, to use the Navy's global force present, posture presence, to use the idea of the M U rotation,

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  division rotations, brigades, aviation. He sort of saw that we were.

• 1:20:50Jocko Willink?

  We needed some broad coordination between all the services and the whole supply chain and all that.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  It was a big time disruptive innovation. Nobody liked Joint Forces Command, nobody. And so, you know, it's like you go down.

• 1:21:03Jocko Willink?

  Everyone wants to just stay in their silo?

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  They do, yeah.

• 1:21:05Jocko Willink?

  Where we're happy, no one bothers us?

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  We called Norfolk the colonies. We'd go up to the Pentagon and say, we're going back down to the colonies, you know. But, so I was there and then, and I'm sitting there thinking, I'm gonna miss another damn war. I cannot believe this. How can I be in the Army all this time and everyone's deploying? And then I'm the deputy J3 preparing the deployment order for every unit in the military. And I'm thinking, oh shit.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  So I'm there until 2004. So from 9/11 to 2004, watching everyone go to war. And then someone said, you know, you'll make general if you can get your boots dirty. And, you know, everything's good except for you. So then General Honore and General Vines, J.R. Vines, pulled me out of there, sent me to be the assistant division commander.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  And I had, in Iraq, I had all the MPs, all the aviation, all Psyops, Civil Affairs, and Armies Hoff. And so I went everywhere. On the road, the street that I didn't drive on.

• 1:22:18Jocko Willink?

  What year was that?

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  2005.

• 1:22:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay. And what was your, explain what your job was?

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  They had these separate brigades that would rotate in, and there wasn't a division headquarters on top of them, a two-star, and there wasn't a one-star. And so they were kind of just running their own thing.

• 1:22:39Jocko Willink?

  What, each brigade combat team was?

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  They were aviation brigades and military police brigades.

• 1:22:45Jocko Willink?

  Got it, got it, got it. Okay.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  And so I became the sugar daddy for them.

• 1:22:50Jocko Willink?

  And how long was that first deployment over there?

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  That was just under six months, wasn't that long?

• 1:22:55Jocko Willink?

  And then what was your, what was your, what was your viewpoint of the war? Look, you watched the thing happen. You're kind of detached the first three years of the war. Actually, first four years of the war, you're seeing the direction that it's going.

• 1:23:11Jocko Willink?

  You know, actually, I was just talking about it on this podcast yesterday with a guy who was with me in the Battle of Ramadi, Leif, and I was saying, we're not winning. We're losing this war. This was now in 2006. A lot of people weren't saying that. You know, a lot of people were like, oh, yeah, we're winning. You know, well, my battalion did this many missions. That must mean we're winning. And my brigade did this many missions. That must mean we're winning. And we caught this many bad guys. That must mean we're winning. And so we're winning. And that was, there was a lot of that going on. Were you seeing that when you headed over there? Did it look any different when you got on the ground? Were you starting to question whether we were winning or not?

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd agree with you. I think, first of all,

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  You saw a lot of transactional, you know, leadership. In other words, we've got this units in, we own this piece of ground, and we're out of here on July 4th. We know that. And so you saw good, hard work, you know. The surge, the next time I went was at the tail end of the surge, and I went three times. And so I would have, people would ask me a question like you just said, and I would say, "Well, when I play golf with my friend Chuck, and I hit the ball over the hill and there's water down there, I'll say, 'Chuck, do you think I went in the water?'" And he goes, "Sir, too close to call." And I felt that way about Iraq the whole time. When someone say, "How's that gonna end up?"

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  And I'd go, "It's too close to call." I think that the Kurds and the Iraqis could screw up anything. And, you know, I hope that doesn't get me in trouble. But culturally, they, they can't take the win, you know. And I think it's the Arab culture that, you know, they grew all the way back to, to, you know, coming out of the Far East are these camels and everything, and they, they have to trade. And they say, "Hey, can we have, I'm the sheik, can I have six camels and all those rugs?" And the guy goes, "No, no, no, no, no." But the sheik was powerful. He'd go back to his village and say, "I asked them, they heard what I wanted, you know. We gave them water, they gave me one rug," and all that.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  So they're traders, they do trading. They also have multiple wives, and the wives promote their child. And the one who becomes, you know, when you say Abu Masch, that's, that's the father of Masch. So that, that tells the tribe, Masch, or, you know, Abu Zaid, or Abizaid. So Abu Zaid is, is the father of Zaid. And so they, so they-

• 1:25:54Jocko Willink?

  There's maneuvering always.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so-

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  They, you know, they know that a new brigade's coming in, new brigade commander, and they can get another suburban when that guy shows up.

• 1:26:05Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  And all that, so they, I think, I think that's the problem. You know, my, my third job there, third tour, I, I ran the advising and training. So we, my team trained all the national police, the police, the army, navy, those small.

• 1:26:24Jocko Willink?

  What year was this?

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  Two thousand and ten.

• 1:26:28Jocko Willink?

  What'd you do on the second deployment?

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  I was DCG for operations, Deputy Commander General for operations at the, for the three-star headquarters under General Lloyd Austin. I, I ran the army special ops. We, we had a CJ SOTF that you know all about over there.

• 1:26:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  But within the corps' area of operations, it, it was, uh, the CJ SOTF really was Arabian Peninsula.

• 1:26:55Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  And then inside Iraq itself was, uh, would be brigade commander or joint special operation task force. And I, General Austin gave them to me. He said, "You, you speak their language."

• 1:27:09Jocko Willink?

  And what year was this?

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Two thousand, it was fifteen months, it was a long tour. Two thousand eight, two thousand nine.

• 1:27:15Jocko Willink?

  So the surge was two thousand eight, right?

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Uh, six, I think. Six or seven.

• 1:27:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, maybe seven, I guess. Cause it didn't, I was in, my, my last deployment over there was two thousand six. The surge wasn't happening yet.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:27:28Jocko Willink?

  Um, I'm just trying to figure out when, when, uh, you know, what was going on when you were there. So you were, you had oversight of the CJ SOTF in Iraq during that tour?

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  The brigade commander, everyone's got a thousand fathers, you know, you can call them back to brag, but brigade commander direct reported to me. I approved the nightly missions. Um, if, you know, we went into whatever it was, Hillier, Hill, whatever it was.

• 1:27:54Jocko Willink?

  Hala.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was, uh, Prime Minister Maliki's hometown. We shot up, uh, his nephew or something. We shot at, at our SF guys first and they shot and killed them. And so then, so I'd meet.

• 1:28:07Jocko Willink?

  You're the guy.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  General Austin with the photos and with the tape, show it, then I'd go to the Prime Minister and show him, um, here's what happened, you know, da-da-da, we'd like to pay the family, or we're not paying the family. They shot at our guys first and he's dead.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  Did a lot of EFP hunting as the makers or the deliverers coming out of Iran. And then we had Iraqi special forces version of they would live in this camp, take all the uniform off, go home once a month and then come back and nobody knew who they were. But we went into Sotter City. I went in with them a couple of times and then I ran big,

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  high level psychological operations and influencing operations.

• 1:29:12Jocko Willink?

  Now, 2008, when that surge happened, it sounds like you were there. You started to, you know, this was something I was tracking on, you know, with General Petraeus and no more drive-by counter insurgency. We had to get out and this is what we did in Ramadi, Battle of Ramadi. We went into the city, you know, and we is the 11 AD who's going into the city and setting up combat outpost and whatnot. You got to see that take place throughout the whole country. And then did you start to think, maybe we can actually, for lack of a better word, win?

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  I think you feel that way. First of all, commanders are optimists and it's a good thing to be. It's a bad thing to not be a realist, but you can be optimistic. And so and then you'd see the gains being made. And for my role at that time, you know, I'd roll into a battle space, see one of those lieutenant colonels that might have been a captain underneath me previously during those days, see how much they've grown up, see feel the cohesion of their organization, see what traps they were running against the Al Qaeda or whoever.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  So I think you still gotta characterize it as optimistic, but also knowing that at some point, we can't sustain, you know, 80,000 men and women here, or we can't sustain this budget, or we can't, if they can't take it over from us, then it's not gonna work.

• 1:30:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was a big thing I had to tell my guys, we had to start working with Iraqi troops, and of course, all my guys were like, "You kidding me? These guys are terrible, they're not trained, they're not trustworthy, they don't have any equipment." But what I had to tell them was, "Hey, if we don't get these guys trained up, where they can actually go out and control the level of violence in their city, then we're gonna be here forever, our sons are gonna be here, that's what it's gonna be." And that's a losing, that's a losing proposition. And the guys understood that, and moved forward, and certainly, we were absolutely successful in Ramadi, and that was based on what General McMaster did up in Tal Afar, and then General McFarland went and relieved him, and then since it had been pacified, they took General

• 1:31:32Jocko Willink?

  McFarland and sent him down to Ramadi, who relieved General Gronski, who went home with his troops, and that's what they did, they implemented that, that strategy inside the city of Ramadi, go in, set up combat outpost in the neighborhoods, start to get to know the local populace and all that. So we, and we left, and when we left, within months after we left, Ramadi was like a completely different place, there was, the level of violence was, almost went down to nothing. You know, you had Sheikh Satar Bazir was out there, they were forming up there, we had, there was like 30 police, 30 Iraqi police that were pretty much collecting a paycheck and not doing anything when we showed up in Ramadi, now there was 2,000 of these guys.

• 1:32:14Jocko Willink?

  So there was a massive transition, and it did look hopeful, from, from our perspective back here, looking at the transition that had happened in Ramadi, we started seeing it in other cities, and you were there for that, what did that, what did that look like on the ground for you?

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, the other big task I had was to convert the sons of Iraq. So, what we, what we had was 104,000 Sunni men, that Sean McFarland started.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  Getting the SAWA or the Awakening going. And so the thought was, hey, if we can get them on every street corner, then we can get out of there. I ended up having to brief Malaki about every other week on a Wednesday and showing him. We went around to every province. There was an Iraqi Special Forces two-star, General Muth there, who was sort of their their god, you know, their warrior god. So he and I would go, we'd brief the sheikhs, we'd brief the US Brigade Commander or the Coalition Brigade Commander, the police. We'd get them paid $300 a month.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  And then after six months, then the Iraqis would, during that time, the Iraqis would learn to pay them. And then after that, the Iraqis, money would pay them. And so we converted it all. And then about a year after I left, the Shia started killing the Sunnis. And then that drove them into the arms of ISIS and that drove, you know, that surge again.

• 1:33:54Jocko Willink?

  Is there anything that we could have done different in that transitional period? You know, we ran into all those problems. We had the Shia army coming into Ramadi. The, obviously Ramadi is filled with a bunch of Sunni. We had the Sunni police, like I said, there wasn't very many of them, but there was definitely some antagonistic relationships there. But we did see a unification of the Shia army and the Sunni populace against Al Qaeda. Like, we absolutely saw that. They, neither one of those people, neither one of those groups wanted Al Qaeda insurgents inside the city. And so there was a brief time of unity. But it seems like where we dropped the ball is not nurturing that relationship to continue to be positive.

• 1:34:39Jocko Willink?

  Maybe it's impossible, I don't know. But do you think there's anything we could have done better?

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  I think understanding them better is the first step. In other words, because of that brother thing, so it's me against my brother, and then it's me and my brother against another family, and then it's our tribe against another tribe, and then it's all the way up to the Muslims against the world. And so.

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  There are a culture of self-interest and so you have to, there's no, the loyalty is very low. And so when you say, "We're gonna leave and now you got this," there's gotta be something in it for him. And if you, so what can we do better, it's fine, that's whatever that was.

• 1:35:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I was rooting for Walmarts. I thought if there was more Walmarts and you could employ people and they could have a place to go get a job and they would have a place to go and get burgers and get, you know, Cheetos. We'd made some progress, you know, but when we left, we just expected things to work themselves out. And what you end up with is a rift. There's no Walmart to go and work together at. That's what I'm saying. Like you want to give them something, give them some kind of commerce, give them some kind of positive. Cause it takes generations to get rid of, and look, maybe they never get rid of those things, but eventually you're living right next to each other. Eventually you say, "You know what?

• 1:36:09Jocko Willink?

  This is a little bit easier if we, if we all are doing, if we're all working together instead of working against each other." But we just, I don't think we recognize the depth of the rift between the Sunnis and the Shia, which is, which is completely pathetic not to recognize that. It's pathetic not to understand that. I mean, to say that, to say that we didn't understand it, everybody knew it. I mean, look, I knew that at my levels. My platoon commanders knew it. My, my senior NCOs were like, "Oh yeah, we've got Sunnis, we've got Shias, we've got to make sure they get along." So, we on the ground knew it. But boy, we didn't end up at a higher level figuring out a solution to that stuff.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  No, no we didn't. And, you know, creating, you know, within the parliament and then within the provincial, you know, get equal representation and...

• 1:37:03Jocko Willink?

  You could even say, I mean, Maliki, so when we got to Ramadi, we thought, we actually had the op plan. We were gonna do La Fallujah style, just complete smash of Ramadi. We're gonna go in there, massive kinetics and kill all the bad guys and, and get rid of them. Maliki said, you know, Maliki's a Shia. And he said, "If we do that, if I, if I send my Shia army into..."

• 1:37:28Jocko Willink?

  Ramadi was filled as soon as it's gonna look like, you know, it's gonna look like extermination. It's gonna look like genocide. Can't do that until we took a different approach. So Maliki understood that. He knew that he couldn't do that. Yeah, we, we just didn't. It's like we, it's like we just dropped that ball, you know, we're heading towards the end zone. We just dropped the freaking ball.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you think about the, you know, 50 or 60 years apiece in occupied Germany,

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  in Korea, in Japan, and, and because we remained the presence there like I said, learning that as a kid in Berlin. And I think when we went back behind the wall of the embassy, then, you know, we were telling, first we moved our, our footprint out to Al Assad.

• 1:38:21Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. Middle of nowhere.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so now, you know, there's like, there's some Americans here, but they're not, you know, they don't got to get in the game anymore.

• 1:38:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it's amazing what the American presence brings to peace. I mean, it really does. You know, when we left, I don't think there's a one single military person when we left in 2010, 2011 that thought, oh, this is gonna go, this is, this is gonna work smooth now. I don't think there's anybody that thought that. And I don't think it would have taken a huge American presence to keep things, you know, it's like the, the, the school teacher in a room, right? The school teacher's in the room, the kids are pretty much doing what they're supposed to do. That school teacher leaves the room, it's mayhem. It's mayhem. That's, that's what happens. And it's not like the school teacher has equal force to whatever 25 high school students.

• 1:39:14Jocko Willink?

  They can't, they could easily overpower that high school teacher, but the presence, the understanding of consequences, even the understanding that you're being observed, like all those things make a difference. And when we, when we just walked away, everybody, I mean, I was sick. Everyone was saying, this is, there's, this is gonna be, this is gonna be a disaster. And sure enough, it was.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we asked for 14,000 troops and, and.

• 1:39:40Jocko Willink?

  Was like a permanent presence on the ground?

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that would have been enough to.

• 1:39:43Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  You know, to have a Mosul presence and a, you know, up by Spiker and then in Baghdad and out in the belts. It would have been, it would have been enough. Cause now. The schoolteacher size has the sheikhs and Iraqi generals to hold them accountable and to continue to ride around with them and all of that. And, but that was denied and it went from 4014 to 4 to 3 to 2 to over the horizon Kuwait.

• 1:40:12Jocko Willink?

  And we, and we just saw how it played out in Afghanistan as well. And we also got to see how it played out to have, what was it? 3,000 troops on the ground that were in Afghanistan for 18 months and there was really low levels of violence and you, you just were gonna let that wound heal. You gotta let these, let these wounds heal over and let these relationships start to form and it might, like you said, take a generation or two generations, 50, 60 years. And in the meantime, okay. It's great, it's good, it's good, it's good training for our guys to be over there and working with these, understanding these different cultures. And, and just this, this lack of any kind of presence. And then there was the, um, you know, people were calling Afghanistan like this forever war.

• 1:40:55Jocko Willink?

  It hadn't been a war, it hadn't been a war for the last 18 months before we pulled out. It had been a, a peacekeeping observation of what was happening and maintaining some presence that, that we could continue down the path that we were on. And now, I mean, it's just been a, a complete disaster.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And, you know, whenever I hear on the news where someone says, you know, the troops are tired of this, whoever's saying that isn't a troop, you know? And tired of picking up trash in Fort Riley and when you're, you know, division ready three or not having sufficient bullets to, to, to do live fires, that's when troops get tired.

• 1:41:39Jocko Willink?

  And troops get tired. Look, you put them into strenuous combat where they're losing their friends, yeah, you're gonna get tired. But when you say, hey, you're gonna go, your friends and your brothers and sisters in, in arms have gone and sacrificed so much and we're gonna go, but we've gotten to a place, we can maintain this, that's what you're gonna go and do. You're doing something positive and productive in the world. Troops say, Roger that, I got it. Let's go. Yeah, you're right. There's no, there's no fatigue for troops that are going on, going on deployment anyways. Let's go do something that counts. So we definitely dropped the ball on that. And this is what you saw in your last deployment. So your last deployment was in what year?

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  It was, uh...

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  All of 2011.

• 1:42:22Jocko Willink?

  So you were there for the shutdown?

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was asked to stand up the Office of Security Cooperation, which we have, we have around the world, different, different names, Mil Groups, Office of Security Cooperation, Office of Defense Cooperation. So this was called Security. And I worked for Ambassador Jeffers and General Austin at the same time. And knowing that my replacement, who was going to be Bobby Castlin, General Castlin, that he would be working for the ambassador out of the embassy. And so we downsized to 10 locations, where we would have mostly contractors,

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  who would maintain the helicopters, maintain the M1 tanks that we gave them, maintain the MRAPs, and teach them the maintenance. And so that, that was, General Austin was the four star, I was the three star.

• 1:43:22Jocko Willink?

  And this was your second time working for General Austin?

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  It was.

• 1:43:24Jocko Willink?

  And how was your relationship with General Austin?

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  It was great, yeah.

• 1:43:28Jocko Willink?

  And, and his attitude about all this, was he, did he have the right focus? Did you feel like comfortable with all the decisions he was making?

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  I did, yeah. And he's, he's a really, really great leader. I don't know what's going on in his current job. And I haven't spoken to him in a couple of years, but, you know, fight for the troop, take care of the troops, you know, go after someone when they're bad, bad guys. He doesn't, he's going to let loose the dogs of war. He's a very thoughtful, big thinker in that regard. Understood, you know, his role was setting conditions and being out here, and then being in the street where the troops can see him. And then letting his

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  layers of two stars and brigade commanders or squadron commanders do their part, so.

• 1:44:22Jocko Willink?

  And then, so, so are you there when the actual pullout happens, when we're finally done?

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  No, I left November 2nd, and I think they went out two months later, something like that.

• 1:44:35Jocko Willink?

  Am I accurate when I say that people, that everyone that was in the military looked at it and, and thought it was going to be a disaster? Did you think that too, or did you have hope?

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  When we're resourced, I had hope and going down to 2,000 not not having a presence, then that would be hopeless.

• 1:44:56Jocko Willink?

  And in your circles, you know, with General Austin, is there pushback going back up the chain of command or people saying, hey, you know, Mr. President, this is what look, we got a bunch of people that are saying this isn't going to work out well. Is that what's happening?

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  It is, yeah.

• 1:45:13Jocko Willink?

  And and do you think it's political pressure on President Obama that makes him say, yeah, you know what, we're we're we're out?

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  I think, you know, Israeli officer taught me once, the first rule of the regime is to remain the regime. And the second rule of the regime is to remain the regime. And so, yeah, I think the polling or anything else, the news cycles, they're playing that more than the national strategic and defense.

• 1:45:50Jocko Willink?

  Which is strange because Obama's an articulate guy that I think could do a good job of selling what's the selling snow to an Eskimo. He seems like that type of guy that could say, hey, here's the situation. We thought we're going to be able to leave. Looks like that that's not going to be the best plan. Here's our here's our adjustment. Does that make sense?

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  I think so. I think so. I, you know, I think politics drove it. Why they did, I don't know. You know, why he would choose this that way versus another, I don't know.

• 1:46:24Jocko Willink?

  And and it's just a complete create a complete vacuum over there.

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  Again, I go back to 1968, Berlin, you know, if we had if we pulled out of Berlin, leaving a German force there, the Russians would have gone that day and taken it.

• 1:46:44Jocko Willink?

  There's a book, I haven't covered it on the podcast yet, it's called The Donkeys. And it's written by a guy, uh, that kind of observed, he wasn't in World War I, but he, he observed what the generals did in, and the mil- and the military and government leadership in World War I. And he, he wrote this book, he wrote it a long time ago, but it, it's called The Donkeys. And it comes from that quote that everyone's heard, usually they say lions led by lambs or something along that. That's what they would say about the British, or that some German said that about the British. The actual quote was lions led by donkeys. That's what the Germans said about the Brits.

• 1:47:26Jocko Willink?

  And this guy wrote this book just talking about what, what, you know, what terrible leadership it was. And I don't know, I'm thinking of, uh, I think of a lot of these leaders that we have nowadays as being donkeys. Especially when you see these collective decisions where it's like everybody knows, everybody can see. Same thing with Afghanistan. There's not one military person that thought that was gonna go well. Not, none, none. And yet, the, the leadership is executing on these terrible plans.

• 1:47:58Jocko Willink?

  Ah, okay. So you get done with that. Um, and I think what we, I think we skipped when you were, when you were at the, um, what, 18th Airborne Corps?

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  We skipped, uh, what, as a two-star, um, commanding Ford Benning.

• 1:48:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yeah, got it.

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  Again, that, so Benning as lieutenant, Benning as a captain in the careers course, Benning as a major in third range battalion, Benning as a battalion commander, lieutenant colonel, Benning as a brigade commander, and then back for two stars. Um, so we would tell the housing office, we're coming back. So you better take care of these families. You better, you better square these people away, um, these young soldiers and their families.

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  So another transformation job, you know, I had a lot of them in each of these that we've talked about transforming the sons of Iraq to be neighborhood watch instead of al Qaeda. Transforming the way soldiers fight hand to hand.

• 1:49:01Jocko Willink?

  That that story about transforming the sons of Iraq before they were sons of Iraq, they were called something else and I can't think of it right now. But it started out in Al-Qa'im.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:15Jocko Willink?

  And and they had the Marines had said, hey, these locals are telling us what's going on. Desert protector, that's what they called them. And they formed this program called Desert Protector. And so the first meeting that we had, my information operations officer had with Sheikh Satar Bazir, he said, we want to be desert protectors. And so I got that information and I kind of started, I tried to figure out what the desert protectors were. Desert protectors had been shut down because Maliki didn't want a bunch of Sunni tribal rebels running around that were armed by Americans. So I had to tell Sheikh Bazir, hey, it's not desert protectors anymore. It's now called Iraqi police and we can get you trained.

• 1:50:00Jocko Willink?

  And then he was like, that sounds good. And then the 11 AD came in and Colonel Dean and Sean McFarlane, they took over and ran with it and it was great. But the way those things happen was, and then after that came the sons of Iraq. That's when they, we, actually, my, my guy came back with the document that they had created, like the first one. And he showed it to me and I was like, what is he, we had the translator go through it. And it was pretty neat to see that stuff unfold like that.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was. And, you know, a common theme on all of this is kind of the sparkle in the eye of a young soldier or Marine or SEAL, you know, that they realize, you know, we're doing something now. This is pretty squared away. At Fort Benning. General Dempsey told me, um, I want you, he was the trade off commander. I want you to bring the armor school from Fort Knox, Kentucky to Fort Benning and change the infantry center into the maneuver center of excellence. They're walking the streets together anyways, tankers and you know artillery, everyone's, everyone's doing it. So trying to bring the infantry and the armor and the cavalry together is the Shia and the Sunni and the Kurds.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  I was trained in many ways, but and then always having the old shake. So all the retired generals I had go to and I'd say, you know, retired four star armor guy, look, I didn't make this stuff up. We're, we're bringing the armor school. You need to be, you know, an ambassador for a good idea.

• 1:51:36Jocko Willink?

  By the way, doesn't everyone agree that it's better when we all work together?

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:51:40Jocko Willink?

  Well, doesn't, is there anyone that thinks we're, we're, we're going to go and, you know, branch off and become our own country? No, we're going to work together as United States of America. This is what makes sense. We all have supported each other on the battlefield. Wouldn't it be better if we actually trained that way? But then rice bowls, those silos.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And, uh, the, the platform of the tank, um, is really important to the armor guys. And so they will always maneuver jobs and positions where they can protect the budget line for that. I'll, I'll get a call on that one, but that's all right.

• 1:52:17Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm a huge supporter of tanks myself. I actually love tanks and I love tankers and God bless them.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  You know, we fight as a team, you know, we deploy as a team. When you need help, you shift assets and they show up and you love them, you know, stack, stack the planes, you know, to the moon over the head of a SEAL platoon or a Ranger platoon and that's all good, you know? But that, but that, that took a lot of leadership, um, two years to, to, uh, pull, actually about 14 months of command. And then I went back to Iraq as the three star. And then I, then I came out of there and took command of all the army bases around the world. So I ran 75 cities in 17 time zones with 123,000 employees.

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  Delivering about 300 services every single day from child development centers to, at that point, 70 golf courses, which I thought I should inspect myself. But also then I realized, hey, guess what? I have every gym. Maybe we'll have mats in most of those gyms.

• 1:53:21Jocko Willink?

  That's a good spot. Yeah. Before we jump into the gyms and the jujitsu and the mats and the gyms of the however many gyms you own now that you are in this position. Before we hit record today, and since we were talking about donkeys, you mentioned that your father-in-law actually worked with Colonel David Hackworth in Vietnam.

• 1:53:50Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:53:50Jocko Willink?

  Give me some stories. Come on. What was the situation?

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  So that they were, it was probably 1967-ish. Let's just say that. And so my father-in-law then was Lieutenant Colonel Promotable John Hemphill, Class 51, West Point. And David Hackworth was, I'm pretty sure, a brigade commander. He might have, I'm pretty sure. Anyways, there were orders that came out of the 101st Division Headquarters telling Colonel Hackworth to do this or that, or the word came out late, or helicopters didn't show up, for whatever reason. He, Colonel Hackworth stormed up into Division Headquarters, a bunch of tents in the jungle,

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  and started telling everyone that they'd really screwed up and they were a bunch of jerks and unprofessional. And so my father-in-law stepped in between Colonel Hackworth and his people and said, let's take this outside and talk it through. Colonel Hackworth allegedly or reportedly said, no, you know, I'm not going anywhere. And so then they, they got it on right there and started to fight in the tent and rolled out into the darkness and, and, but they remained great friends until my father-in-law passed away about two years ago, but they, they were fond of each other. They knew that each was a warrior and that, you know, you're going to have disagreements, get it on and then get over it.

• 1:55:21Jocko Willink?

  Now, when I was kind of becoming a disciple, I guess, there's such a thing, but kind of when I started really getting interested in Hackworth and I was reading his books and reading them again and starting to see a lot of good leadership in there. He was absolutely, he was absolutely hated in the entire Navy because he had done a report, he had done some reporting on the Chief of Naval Operations at the time Admiral Borda, who was a beloved guy, who was a prior enlisted guy that had come up through the ranks to become the Chief of Naval Operations. And Colonel Hackworth had done a report on him that he was wearing some unauthorized and unearned awards on his uniform and Admiral Borda killed himself.

• 1:56:06Jocko Willink?

  So he wasn't popular there. He wasn't popular in the Navy at all. The Army, I pretty much got mostly the same thing from the Army that, you know, Hackworth, Hackworth was just bad. Now, recently I've talked to, I actually went out to West Point and when I went, when I was at West Point, they, I would, I, I asked the question, hey, how does everybody view Hackworth now? And they pretty much say, I mean, a paraphrase is Hackworth was right. What, did you, did you, like you, you, did you know about Hackworth from your, from your dad or anything like that?

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  Just, just a little, just especially when About Face first came out and General Hemphill handed me the book, told me to read it and, and then told the story. So, but he was.

• 1:56:53Jocko Willink?

  What, what did your father-in-law think of the book?

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  Um, well, he thought it was good enough to give it to me.

• 1:56:59Jocko Willink?

  Okay, that's a good point. It's interesting because you know, you read the book and as you read the book, you can go, and I actually had these thoughts and I thought, you know, what was he, I mean, you know, you write a book about yourself, of course, you're going to put yourself in the good light. You're going to make yourself look good. You're going to pull the quotes that make you look good. You're going to tell the story that makes you look good. And I had a guy named General Jim Mukuyama on the podcast, who was one of Hackworth's company commanders in Vietnam, and I was really excited. I'm like, now I'm going to get the, I'm going to get the real story on what Hackworth was really like, what they really thought of him, what was he like for a commander? And you know, so I asked, uh, General, uh, General Mukuyama, and he, he couldn't have given Hackworth any higher praise. I mean, he absolutely just loved Hackworth.

• 1:57:43Jocko Willink?

  And he told me that everybody in the army knew who he was. He said, when he checked in at Fort Lewis, when, when Hackworth checked in, uh, Mukuyama was working like the, the, the desk, the admin desk, the personnel desk, or he was an aide or something. He was, but he was the kind of the young lieutenant checking him in. And I said, did you know who he was? And he said, everybody knew who he was. Mr. Infantry. Everybody knew him. Everybody knew his reputation. So I thought that, that was very reassuring to me. So this is now more reassuring that, uh, getting word via your father-in-law that Hackworth was the real deal.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  Both of them, um, you know, back in, in those days, that body count was, was the measure of success or effectiveness. And so both Hackworth and, and, uh, Margie's dad, later General Hemphill, um, turned people in who, who doctored the books. And, uh, so they, Margie's dad was, was the first West Point guy of his class to make O6. And he was the last West Point guy of his class to make one star. And all the generals that that he reported had falsified the number of Vietnamese being

• 1:59:01Speaker 01

  killed during South Vietnamese or Viet Cong, you know, he he rendered a report that is not true. And it went all the way back to to the Pentagon. And all those guys that were three and four, five years ahead of him that sat the promotion boards, cut them out. And when the last one retired, the next day, he he made or the next board he made. So I think that's, you know, that that's the lesson of leadership is, is can you stand strong when others won't? And can you stand strong when it's personally and professionally not in your interest? And and do the right thing? And and we need, we need a lot of

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  that. We need more of that. And we need to celebrate it when we see it.

• 1:59:49Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember, because it's 1989, when when this book came out, do you remember when it came out? Was it a big deal in the Army? Were people passing it around? Were people saying it was a bunch of crap?

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  There were, there were, yeah, there were lovers and haters. Eighty nine, I was in Second Range Battalion, out at Fort Lewis. My father in law had retired in eighty five out at Fort Lewis. And so, like it or not, every Sunday, we were over at their house, you know, for Sunday afternoon dinner. And and I became, I loved my father in law and I liked him. But it would be, you know, come over, have a beer, we're gonna watch football. Absolutely.

• 2:00:30Jocko Willink?

  Mandatory fun.

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  But when but when the book came out, that's why it's so easy for him to say, read this now. And that there were some that, you know, another thing for our generation, we sort of Looked at if the person wasn't charismatic in a big way, we didn't want to hear about back in Vietnam. So in many camps, the book that describes a warrior leading in time of combat was probably a little bit overcast or overshadowed by the context of it was Vietnam.

• 2:01:07Jocko Willink?

  So. Well, what gave you guys that that opinion was like, hey, Vietnam, we know all about Vietnam. Was it, hey, Vietnam was your, it was a different, different situation that doesn't convey to what we have to deal with now?

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  A little bit of, little bit of that that doesn't convey, doesn't match up. But the other was the, the context of arriving in your first units and your captain screwed up and your sergeants have two or three DUIs and, you know, they're, they're the carryovers. And then they start telling you, you know, you have to be squared away like we are. And you're looking, thinking, you know, young and full of life and going, I'm, I'm not sure I agree that you're squared away, you know? And so, so then when we're in the basic course or the camps course and some say, well, back in Nam, you're like, oh, please.

• 2:01:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I kind of look at you now.

• 2:01:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, you know, the, in time, they sunset and, you know, the, the new non-commission officer, the more professional, on purpose, using those words literal, a plan to make them professional came in. We, we called the, you know, the sergeants in Vietnam shake and bake.

• 2:02:15Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  Right? And so nowadays, people don't know what shake and bake is, but back in those days, it was a pouch of, of breadcrumbs and you put the chicken in it and you shake it up and then you bake it and you have Kentucky Fried Chicken. Well, they made sergeants shake and bake, in other words, after about a month or two in the combat zone, they put, pinned rank on them and said, you're now an NCO. And many of them, they didn't have basic NCO course, advanced NCO course, you know, primary leader development course, they didn't have that non-commission officer school like we do today, like we did in the nineties and, and two thousands. So, so anyways, point is when, when.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  When his book came out, probably half the people were like, you know, I'm not sure of the lessons of Vietnam are going to be relative to me are pertinent, when in fact, you know, leadership is transcendent.

• 2:03:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and the other thing is, it seemed like, like I came in in nineteen ninety, nineteen ninety. It didn't seem like we were gonna have another big, long, prolonged war. You know, like there was, we all thought we'd do one mission, you know, do one big mission and that would be that, the big mish. There was no, and then, and then the first Gulf War was over in seventy-two hours. Okay, well, that's what war is now. You, maybe we'll fight for, you know, maybe we'll do one big mission in a seventy-two hour war, but that's what war is gonna be like from now on. It wasn't gonna be this ten-year thing like Vietnam where you got all this experience and you're gonna be out doing all these operations night after night after night. And boy, were we wrong about that.

• 2:03:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:56Jocko Willink?

  So, all right, so I just wanted to get some, get your perspective on Hackworth. I appreciate that. Now, you were just saying you took over all the bases in the world? That's right?

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  The army bases, yeah.

• 2:04:09Jocko Willink?

  All the army bases in the world, which means you're in charge of the golf courses. I'm not a golfer, but it means you're in charge of the gyms and inside gyms, you can put mats. Now, at this point, I think, uh, two thousand twelve, I saw an article that you got your brown belt from Jacare, not the Jacare that you know from UFC out there, everybody. The old school Jacare, who's a, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt from the previous generation. An old school, I went there and trained in his school when I went from officer candidate school in Pensacola, Florida. And I was going to SEAL Team Two at Virginia Beach and I stopped in, in Atlanta and trained for seven days. Just went and trained every day, all day. That was in two, that was in nineteen ninety-eight.

• 2:04:55Jocko Willink?

  So, you're a brown belt at this time. You've been, you kept training Jiu-Jitsu, which is awesome. And, and now you have the opportunity to start putting some combatives, training areas in all these different gyms. So, how was that?

• 2:05:09Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  Like anything else, it took, you know, one, two, three cups of tea. So, go to the location, meet with the two-star general. And you know where you have your guys. So you already know Sergeant so-and-so there, Major so-and-so's there. And so you go to the general and say, "Resources are tight in the Army, they always are, but I can square you away." And so, we can build a world-class facility here, which gym would you want to put it in? So rather than saying, "I own the gym and have the truck show up in the middle of the night with mats." For the program to stay alive, that general needed, and his Sergeant Major needed to want it. And for the most part, they did.

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  And so, we went to Fort Drum, then to Fort Campbell, then to Fort Lewis. And some of them now have huge training facilities that they spawned off of the original gym idea. And so, the strategy was, take away any excuses for people not training their people. And, "Oh, you know, we always got basketball in our murals. You'll be okay. You'll have enough, you have 12 gyms at Fort Pratt. You're gonna be okay." And then, "Oh, people get hurt." No, more people get hurt playing racquetball in Army facilities than training jiu-jitsu or combatants.

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  And then mostly, you know, I just don't want a generation to be asked by their grandson, you know, "Did you ever get in a fight, Dad?" Granddad, and he's, "No, but I can put a PowerPoint presentation together like you've never seen." You know, it's not the warrior ethos. And you said it early, if there was a place where the eternal flame of warrior ethos should burn, it should be Fort Benning, in front of the main building there. And as Fort Benning and the infantry goes, so goes the Army. And as the warriors of each service goes, so goes their warrior ethos. So, you know, no one likes change but a baby with a wet diaper, right?

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  And so, when you show up and tell the guy who's in charge of all the gyms, who works for you, that "We're gonna do this," and he says, "No, sir." You know, that's mission money, not morale money. And you tell them, you know, do you think taking that stance is worth your job? Because one of my guys had just unencumbered their future. And I said, this program is going to happen, so let's all be for something that's going to happen. And that's what Stammer Crystal told me. We're gonna do this. So be for it big time, because you'll love your life much more than if you drag your heels. So that guy, three years later, was two thumbs up. And he had been a wrestler. So he was a Department of the Army civilian. He'd been a wrestler. He was just reading, you know, he wasn't doing what's right.

• 2:08:06Speaker 01

  He was doing it right. And I said, let's do what's right instead. Change the manual. I had to do it to get there. If your MWR manual says the gyms are solely for the use of, you know, after hour, you know, basketball, volleyball, and intramurals, change it. And for use by, you know, soldiers and training, go for it.

• 2:08:29Jocko Willink?

  Too easy.

• 2:08:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:08:32Jocko Willink?

  And it really is impressive, the Army Combatives. They have the Combatives tournaments, which are pretty awesome. Is that just coming from Matt Larson? Did they come up with that idea?

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:45Jocko Willink?

  And Troy?

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I have a picture on my wall in the museum of about 28 people. We're all in the Army green woodland BDU's. Matt's in the picture. Troy's in the picture. Our young Colonel Farrar is in the picture. That was the first Army Combatives tournament. And then, and I kind of just closed my eyes as you started talking, because just last week was the 20th. And I got too busy and I couldn't go down there. They invited me and all that. Matt is the father of Army Combatives and I'm the godfather.

• 2:09:26Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna guess grandfather, but maybe that would have been a bit much for you.

• 2:09:29Speaker 01

  Well, no, I take that too. Grandfathers have unconditional love for their grandkids. But when someone messes with the program, then I'll show up again and just go close the door with whoever it is and say, you know, If I say to you, you want to shoot, you want to go shoot a sniper rifle, you want to go shoot a Barrett? Oh yeah. You want to drop a mortar round? Oh yeah. You know, you want to shoot the machine gun? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You know, pull a lanyard on an artillery piece? Yeah. You want to go down to the mats? Oh, well, my back is, you know, and I told, I tell the senior officials, just don't say no. You don't have to, you know, if you're not into it, that's fine. I think you should be into it.

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  I think you should try it enough, you know, do jujitsu or any other martial art enough that you understand what it is. And if that doesn't move you, then, then don't be moved. That's fine. But, but don't make it, you wouldn't make it that decision on anything else as a leader. But on this one, there's so much ego and uh,

• 2:10:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah.

• 2:10:28Speaker 01

  Or lack of humility.

• 2:10:29Jocko Willink?

  I came up with a protocol for how long you need to train jujitsu for? Cause I get asked this question a lot by, by people that don't really like it. For whatever reason, it's sweaty, it's, ah, their ego is getting crushed. And I said to you, my protocol now, I tell people is you train jujitsu until you tap someone out. And then if you say, if you don't, if you get that feeling of tapping someone out and you don't say, yes, it's pretty cool, then maybe jujitsu isn't for you. But you at least need to train that, that long.

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  I like it. Yeah.

• 2:11:00Jocko Willink?

  So then you, 2014, you actually get promoted to black belt once again from Jaco Ray.

• 2:11:05Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 2:11:07Jocko Willink?

  When you were training, when you were overseas, when you were on deployment, were you training? Did you guys, did you have enough guys to train with?

• 2:11:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:11:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You always found people to train.

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thinking that, um, or, or understanding that I started training as a full colonel. So I really started.

• 2:11:25Jocko Willink?

  How old were you when you started training?

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  Probably forty-three, forty-four.

• 2:11:32Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:11:34Speaker 01

  So I, I, we, we took eighteenth airborne corps into Iraq in two thousand and eight.

• 2:11:42Speaker 01

  January 2008, we stayed till June of roughly June of 2009, 15 months ish. The second plane had the mats.

• 2:11:54Speaker 01

  And I brought, I just sent a picture to Henner, I'm sorry, to Hiron and Guy Valente in Miami, the Valente brothers, and I brought them over and they gave seminars at 28 different operating bases. Yeah, and so over there, yes, when deployed, keep doing it. We built a gym next to the embassy and Union 3, across the street from the embassy. And part of it was probably something like 70 feet by 70 feet of mat.

• 2:12:33Jocko Willink?

  Beautiful.

• 2:12:33Speaker 01

  And then someone, you know, went to the IG and said that, you know, I misused the gym. I built it for my personal, you know, and it's like, look, we built it for everybody and we want everybody training. You know, you would want a squad leader, or a young NCO with a team of four or five, to come in there three times a week and go through situations. Okay, we're in a room, they grab you, now what, now what, now what? So, so yeah, so I continued to train and then was graduated to black belt by Jacare and Matt.

• 2:13:05Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:07Jocko Willink?

  Is Matt, did Matt get his black belt from Jacare?

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  He did.

• 2:13:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:12Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 2:13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:14Jocko Willink?

  And now 2014, this is, was that, was that your last tour?

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  It was, yeah, I retired in June of 2014.

• 2:13:23Jocko Willink?

  And then what'd you do once you retired?

• 2:13:28Speaker 01

  So I went up to Fort Lewis, took Margie back to the hometown where her mom and dad and her, four of her sisters were, and I told her, when you're sick and tired of your four sisters, we'll go somewhere else. So we were there about two years and she looked over and said, I'm ready. And then Dan was deploying to uh.

• 2:13:46Jocko Willink?

  And how many kids do you have?

• 2:13:47Speaker 01

  Four, yeah, two boys and two girls, Megan, age forty two, Dan, age forty, Patty, thirty eight, and uh, Mary Wendy, about thirty five.

• 2:13:56Jocko Willink?

  How old are you?

• 2:13:57Speaker 01

  Sixty six.

• 2:13:58Jocko Willink?

  Nice. And you still train?

• 2:14:00Speaker 01

  I do.

• 2:14:01Jocko Willink?

  That's outstanding. Echo has spoken.

• 2:14:04Speaker 01

  I'm getting better, man. I'm getting better all the time. You get on a mat, you know.

• 2:14:08Jocko Willink?

  Do you do, what do you do for workout besides jujitsu? Do you lift weights every day? Do you calisthenics every day? Do you do nothing at all except jujitsu?

• 2:14:16Speaker 01

  No, I I'll get about ten workouts in a week and uh, I stopped running. I'm about to restart, but in uh, when covid hit, we got locked down into Monterey and and uh, it wasn't too bad.

• 2:14:30Jocko Willink?

  Good place to be locked down.

• 2:14:31Speaker 01

  My uh, three of my grandkids were there and we started just getting a cup of coffee and walking them. And so we would walk, you know, eight miles, walk out into the valley and back.

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  But then I'll I'll do weights, do the Peloton bike.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  I'm now sort of in the build the quads, working the quads and then lower legs quite a bit. And then golf, I'll I'll play golf.

• 2:14:57Speaker 01

  About, and I and I'm I'm in this, you know, skills and drills, I'm not into score and you're never gonna get me pissed off on a golf course. With all the stuff that we've seen in our life, it's like, look, it's just, you know, it's mechanical. You you can't hustle, you can't try harder, you can't motivate yourself, you gotta strike the ball.

• 2:15:16Speaker 01

  But uh, so that's what I do, yeah.

• 2:15:18Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then currently, you've got the National Veterans Memorial and Museum. And and tell us how that came about.

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when when I retired, I started the Farida Group and we we decided that we would help transitioning veterans, help find employment and and all. And like I said, in our store now at the museum, every, you know, something like forty eight different companies.

• 2:15:47Speaker 01

  All veteran owned or have their merchandise and product. We have books in there. We should take yours as well. We have a um.

• 2:15:57Speaker 01

  And then, then when we bring an exhibit in there. So anyways, so I set out in 2014 to help. I also started hands-on inspired leadership, which really is using jujitsu as a metaphor for life to close the distance, establish the dominant position and finish. And then giving that to high schoolers, did all the medics and nurses at the hospital at Fort Lewis, did the freshman class at the Citadel three years in a row. And basically, you're telling young girls, it's like women empowered, you know, your body is your body. You can say, stop right there, take two steps back. You can tell alcohol, stop right there, get

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  back. We can defeat suicide. We can defeat depression. We can defeat clock. And so I'm still on that mission. Right now, I'm working with the Columbus Police Department to set up a whole hands-on inspired leadership with them because they do have jujitsu instructors, but that's the sport side or the, or the I love it side. But how do you decompress someone? You know, I've got a picture of a ball. My executive assistant puts the rubber band on the next one, on the next one. And so it's about the size of a baseball. And I took a picture of it and I said to someone, that's what PTSD is. That's what PTS is right

• 2:17:18Speaker 01

  there. And you gotta take that apart one by one by one until the tension's gone. But you can best do that through healthy activities, through sports, through jujitsu, through the connection that comes in the gym when all those guys that we just walked by, you can just feel it, right? So, so then I started helping companies. If you tell someone that you ran all the army bases around the world, you had a $12 billion a year budget, you took it down to nine, that you have more than 200 parachute jumps and four combat tours, they say, you know, thanks for your service, you know. But you tell them that those bases,

• 2:17:58Speaker 01

  you were dispersing the checks, then people say, oh, now you're a consultant. So, so Mike Ferriter helps companies connect wherever they need to be connected. So into the military or

• 2:18:14Speaker 01

  Army Air Force Exchange Service. We do that. And we do it for the right reason. We do it because there's someone out there making goodness happen. And we want your grandkids to say, "Granddad, whoever thought of helping you out to get that product?" And Big Lots is another friend of ours. Pretty big. West Point graduate is their CEO, Bruce Thorne, and he wants to help veterans too. So then, so I got this call first. First, I went to, three things happened. Senator Isaacson, and I said, "I will fix the VA. I just fixed the biggest part of the Army."

• 2:18:56Speaker 01

  And so I interviewed with the President's team, eight lawyers. And the Wall Street Journal announced that I was a finalist to be the Secretary of the VA. And the next day, President Trump went in and said to the Secretary, "Well, just keep it. You're doing great." And the team. So then, I interviewed to be the President and CEO of the Wounded Warrior Project. And my good friend, Mike Lennington, got the job. He's done a fantastic job. So then, I got a call to come and interview to be the President of the Citadel, which is, when you figure out how I ended up at the Citadel, that's kind of comical to think about that.

• 2:19:37Speaker 01

  And then, my classmate and friend, Marine, retired four-star, Glenn Walters, got that. So I turned to Margaret, I said, "Man, I'm not too good at getting jobs for three." And she said, "You know, we know we're unencumbered. We're free to do whatever we want." And then I got a call from a lady in Corn Ferry in Atlanta. And her secretary said, "Can you take a call on Friday with Jane?" And I said, "Of course." And so then, I said, "Hey, wait a minute. Your phone number, your prefix is 706. Are you in Atlanta?" "Yeah." I said, "Well, I'm gonna be in Atlanta on Friday. Can I just see her face to face?" And she said, "If that's breaking the rules, no problem."

• 2:20:21Speaker 01

  But, "Yeah, come on." So I went in, I interviewed with this headhunter, and we hit it off pretty good. And when I was leaving, she said, "Who else are you gonna see in Atlanta today?" I said, "No one."

• 2:20:34Speaker 01

  Came up here to see you. Say, have you ever hired anyone on the phone? No. So, so then they took me to Columbus, Ohio, living in Columbus, Georgia, and interviewed me. And they said, what do you think of this National Veterans Memorial Museum? Or national VMM.org for, for the listeners? And it is, John Glenn was the Senator, the astronaut, the fighter pilot, the test pilot. And he would look down on the old vets and then he would call the Titans of Industry in Columbus, Ohio. And say, that, that is not upfitting. It's not good for, for our vets. It's an old raggedy looking thing. So they knocked it down and they built this beautiful facility. And when they walked me in.

• 2:21:18Jocko Willink?

  What year was that built?

• 2:21:19Speaker 01

  Uh, 2017, 2016.

• 2:21:21Jocko Willink?

  Again, it looks like it's brand new.

• 2:21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:23Jocko Willink?

  It's beautiful.

• 2:21:24Speaker 01

  So I'm the founding CEO and president of it. They said, what do you think? You know, General Ferrer? And I, and I said, it's insufficient to our need. And they said, oh, my God, we put $62 million in there. What'd we forget? I said, you, you forgot that there's veterans in San Diego. There's veterans in Tampa. There's veterans in Fort Lewis, in Iowa. And they're not coming to Ohio. So we're gonna need, so they, they said, so, so what, what's that? You know, smarty pants, what are you gonna do? So, well, we'll have virtual tours. And we'll have a veteran or store. And we'll bring product in and help veterans that are small business owners. I said, we'll go to Ohio State University.

• 2:22:07Speaker 01

  And we'll have a leader certification course for veterans. And so when, when you get asked that question as a veteran, you don't have any continuing education. What have you been doing tonight? And the answer is, yeah, patrols and Ramadi. That's what I was doing, you know? And so we've run four semesters of leader certification. They get six hours of master's credit. Um, you can take it from right here. Right? Um, and so we're growing that program. I, I, this is like off the cuff. This, you know, and, you know, it's nice meeting you. Anything you want to say? And then, and I told them, um, that we would probably have a wellness and resilience program with things like jujitsu and, and yoga, which we have. And we've had for two years.

• 2:22:52Speaker 01

  Um, and I told them that, uh, we'd have young inner city youth, especially as youth ambassadors. And we run summer camps, um, on them. There's a big giant field right there in Sanibel. And when we run the summer camp, the coach will be a policeman, another first responder, and a veteran. And these kids that are throwing water bottles at cops and vilifying cops and all this, they'll get to know that these are men and women of character that give a shit about people and are leaders. So, the National Veterans Memorial Museum, one of our mottos is more than a museum. And I'm an Army Ranger, more than a history guy.

• 2:23:36Speaker 01

  And we can build teams and then we don't need to own anything. We started an employment service now. We call it Veteran Concierge, so we connect big companies and little companies to veterans. We have an IT solution that called Opline. And it'll, you just fill out a checklist, went to boot camp, went to BUDS, went to here, deployed here, cut this college, did this, have a driver's license, you know, I'm a sniper. And then it'll say, you're fully qualified, and here's the kicker, you're fully qualified for these 14 jobs in these seven companies in these different parts of the nation.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  And so when a veteran's going through that now, instead of going all the way through the employment thing and then they say, you're just not a perfect fit, and he's got to start over, start over. So, we're in our pilot year, probably best way to say it. And all of those were the original vision of what we could do and much, much more. So, we're getting after it.

• 2:24:43Jocko Willink?

  And you got your bride away from her four sisters?

• 2:24:48Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:24:49Jocko Willink?

  The bonus program.

• 2:24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the other thing that's interesting in that regard is we bought a house in Ohio, in Columbus, Ohio, and that is the first house that I've ever purchased.

• 2:25:00Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 2:25:00Speaker 01

  Because I've always been on Army bases or whatever. So, life is good.

• 2:25:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, does that get us up to speed? Is that pretty much where we're at, this gets us to today?

• 2:25:13Speaker 01

  It does.

• 2:25:14Jocko Willink?

  And where can people find you?

• 2:25:18Speaker 01

  They can find me at nationalvmm.org or mfariter at nationalvmm.org or Mike at the Ferriter Group.

• 2:25:31Jocko Willink?

  Okay, and you've got the faritergroup.com I'm assuming as well? And then you're on social media?

• 2:25:37Speaker 01

  I am, I'm on LinkedIn and Facebook, Instagram, and then the social media of our museum is Eye Watering, it's just fantastic.

• 2:25:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay, what's the, what's the social media of the, that's the one I don't have, I have, I have you on Instagram at Mike Ferriter, on Twitter, Mike underscore Ferriter, and I have Facebook at Michael Ferriter, what's the, what's the social media of the National VMM?

• 2:26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would go to nationalvmm.org, which would give you the landing page.

• 2:26:11Jocko Willink?

  And just scroll down?

• 2:26:12Speaker 01

  And then just hit it, yeah.

• 2:26:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay, awesome. And what do you, what do you guys post on there that, on the social media side?

• 2:26:17Speaker 01

  Our podcasts are on, on our Facebook.

• 2:26:20Jocko Willink?

  Okay, awesome.

• 2:26:21Speaker 01

  And then, one of the, one of the things in that same discussion interview, I said, you know, we'll do these podcasts and, and in essence, we'll have a virtual museum hall. So whether it's short stories, or whether it's a, you know, 30 minute to 50 minute, you'll be, you can be able to query and say, I'm interested, you know, in Vietnam era guys, I'm interested in, in war, who I'm interested in, lessons learned in leadership. And so, so it's like, we have 35,000 square feet of museum, we've got about nearly 4,000

• 2:27:00Speaker 01

  square feet of mats, just saying, and then, but, but we can have 350,000 square feet of virtual museum hall.

• 2:27:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you can.

• 2:27:11Speaker 01

  And we'll never run, you know,

• 2:27:13Speaker 01

  What did I hear? 386?

• 2:27:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is podcast number 386.

• 2:27:17Speaker 01

  See, I mean, you got, you got your, your own, you know, virtual museum storytelling opportunity here. People can go and they can hear, hear about Hackworth directly.

• 2:27:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, it's awesome. Echo Charles, any questions?

• 2:27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. What are the rules for that combatives tournament? Cause I mean, how do they differ from like, you know, your general jujitsu tournament rules?

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the beginning.

• 2:27:50Speaker 01

  So I think there are three levels now. One is, one is it's straight combatives. They're, they're wearing the army battle dress uniform or fatigues. Level two, as you advance, then kicking and striking the torso. And then in the finals, kicking and striking and just like.

• 2:28:10Speaker 02

  MMA scenario. So the first level is essentially like general jujitsu rules. You got points for, you know, passing guard side and all that kind of stuff. And then.

• 2:28:19Speaker 01

  Only if you don't tap them.

• 2:28:21Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, of course, of course. And then you go essentially to like a pancreasian scenario, right? No, no head straight and then to MMA. Okay, right on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's legit right there.

• 2:28:32Speaker 01

  They just had, like I said, they just had the, the tournament and I didn't get to go, but all of the beginners, all, all of the founders were there. They're all older men, beers and bellies.

• 2:28:42Jocko Willink?

  Do they, do they escalate through all the bases and have like an all army combatives tournament? That thing needs to be televised. I think Jaco Fuel needs to sponsor that.

• 2:28:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'd be, I see them. Everyone, you can catch everyone.

• 2:28:55Jocko Willink?

  Wait, where do you, where do you see them? On YouTube or something?

• 2:28:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, on YouTube or something.

• 2:28:57Jocko Willink?

  But they're not on like a big channel.

• 2:28:59Speaker 02

  It's not like the event show. It's like a clip, like someone recorded it or something like that.

• 2:29:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:04Speaker 01

  They were ready this year. If, if we had this four months ago, if you and I were sitting here four months ago, you would have been, you would have been a sponsor.

• 2:29:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, next year we'll be doing it. And yeah, Tim Kennedy, who's a friend of mine and how would you like to be like an army dude and you show up and you, Tim, you have to fight Tim Kennedy?

• 2:29:24Jocko Willink?

  An actual UFC dude. You're like, hold on a minute, man.

• 2:29:28Speaker 01

  I think we've got our blue belt the same day.

• 2:29:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you and Tim?

• 2:29:31Speaker 01

  From Hoist, yeah.

• 2:29:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, right on.

• 2:29:33Speaker 01

  And Tim was at Ford Brag and with the special forces guys and I would go in there once in a while and so if I'm holding you like this, then what?

• 2:29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that works. Okay.

• 2:29:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome. Now, anything else, Echo Charles?

• 2:29:54Speaker 01

  No, that's it. Thank you. Great to meet you. My pleasure.

• 2:29:57Jocko Willink?

  General, any, any closing thoughts?

• 2:30:00Speaker 01

  Well, I, I just appreciate the chance to be here. I'm, I'm really humbled to, to be sitting with you. I hope that, that any message that I send out there to someone can help somebody. Secondly, so there's a guy in Columbus, Ohio named Zach. He said, if I had let Zach sit there, he would let me have food and beer at his dad's restaurant for the rest of my life. But.

• 2:30:26Jocko Willink?

  You should have brought him down. Made that happen.

• 2:30:29Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 2:30:30Jocko Willink?

  Well, send him out to visit sometime. Does he train jujitsu?

• 2:30:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:30:33Jocko Willink?

  Okay, we'll send him out to visit and he can train some jujitsu and we'll make it happen. Then that way you can eat for free.

• 2:30:38Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 2:30:39Jocko Willink?

  Gotta take care of the general.

• 2:30:40Speaker 01

  To, to the rest of the audience, there's a friend out there that needs to hear from you. So give a call, send a text, check on your battle buddy, your shipmate, your fellow team member, check on somebody because you don't know if that's the one that's going to make a difference. Sometimes they just come in and they'll start working out again and all that. Other times they say, I had a gun right here in front of me. So we can all make a difference in that stuff. And then if I could get you to sign something for

• 2:31:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. No problem.

• 2:31:10Speaker 01

  Then that'd be great. But really honored to meet you for the person and people that you guys are and the difference that you make for a lot of people.

• 2:31:20Jocko Willink?

  Well, uh, obviously, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for sharing your experiences and your lesson learned over your career of 35 years. And, um, more important, thanks for your service in those 35 years in Somalia, in Iraq, countless other places around the world, uh, Static Line, jumping into God knows where to do God knows what. Uh, and thank you for what you are continuing to do today to preserve and memorialize our veterans and our history. Uh, it is much appreciated. Thank you, sir.

• 2:31:55Speaker 02

  All right. Sounds good. Thank you.

• 2:31:58Jocko Willink?

  And with that, General Mike Ferriter has left the building.

• 2:32:04Jocko Willink?

  And we just walked out. He was definitely excited about the jujitsu mats.

• 2:32:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:11Jocko Willink?

  He's definitely into jujitsu and jujitsu, helping in all aspects of life. If you're not training jujitsu, go train jujitsu. I think it's pretty straightforward. I think it's pretty straightforward. It's a good way to add value. And that's not a popular, that's not something I like to say.

• 2:32:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:34Jocko Willink?

  Cause you know why? Because in the military, that turns into a thing like, oh, we're really gonna add value here. So it's a corporate buzzword, right? And it's in the military is a corporate, in the military is a buzzword. Add value or value added, either one of those two. We could go either direction. But jujitsu is, is going to add value to every part of your life. Now, I would say unfortunately, or fortunately, it is secondary to what you claimed on one of our early podcast, earliest podcasts, that physical exercise is across the board gonna help out every aspect of your life.

• 2:33:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:33:14Jocko Willink?

  I would prioritize that as number one. From physical activities, I would put jujitsu as number two. That's where I'm putting it.

• 2:33:22Speaker 02

  I agree. Yeah. So, and it was interesting that, uh, recently, I forget what.

• 2:33:30Speaker 02

  I even forget what you said, but it was along the lines, oh, you said something along the lines of I was talking about lifting weights. We were talking about lifting weights, how that that'll help every aspect of your life, right? Exercise, whatever, we'll just say lifting weights. And then you were like, well, even though you don't use it all the time, because it's not like every day you're gonna be like, you know, um, powerlifting, something, something along those lines, you said. And I remember thinking later on, I was like, wait a second, that's because that's not really the the benefits of the the weightlifting. Benefits, benefits of the weightlifting is, let's say you're like, strong, like notably strong in all lifts and all things or whatever. It does translate to everyday stuff.

• 2:34:12Speaker 02

  Like if you're changing, you ever change one of those water bottles, those five gallon water bottles in the cooler? It's way easier when you're strong. See what I'm saying? So there's tons of little things that you can do day to day.

• 2:34:23Jocko Willink?

  I thought what you were gonna say, I thought you were gonna say something that was meaningful.

• 2:34:26Speaker 02

  That is meaningful, that is meaningful, it is impactful.

• 2:34:29Jocko Willink?

  Something to people, I thought you were gonna say like, hey, when you lift every day, it creates discipline in your life. It makes you overcome a challenge every day, it makes you mentally tired, so you just go down there. I think you're gonna talk about five gallon water bottles.

• 2:34:38Speaker 02

  But it's true, that's it's all real, it's all part of it. That's what I'm saying, that's how beneficial it is, because we can go deep like you, or just go not so deep like me, and everywhere in between. And boom, the lifting is gonna, you know, it's gonna add value.

• 2:34:49Jocko Willink?

  So jujitsu, it's gonna help you with your confidence. I mean, look, the physical things help you get more flexible, you're gonna get good cardio, you're gonna get good grip strength, strength in general. You're gonna get the proprioception is gonna be improved. So there's a bunch of physical things that you're gonna get, but man, the mental aspect, the release of aggression, the confidence built. Like you want a kid, you got a kid that lacks confidence, put him in jujitsu.

• 2:35:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:14Jocko Willink?

  Put him in jujitsu. You, you have a 22 year old that lacks confidence, get him into jujitsu.

• 2:35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:22Jocko Willink?

  You've got a 38 year old that lacks confidence, get him into jujitsu. So it's gonna be beneficial in so many different, and and yes, you know what else that gives you? Gives you discipline, gives you the power to overcome, gives you the power to fight through things, gives you a sense of community, introduces you to new people. There's all kinds of beneficial things when it comes to jujitsu. Is it secondary to, to?

• 2:35:45Jocko Willink?

  Health and fitness, strength training, cardiovascular training, mobility training. It's secondary to those things. It's also complementary.

• 2:35:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:54Jocko Willink?

  Like there's some people, wait, do you lift and do jujitsu on the same day?

• 2:35:58Speaker 02

  Every once in a while, yeah.

• 2:35:59Jocko Willink?

  Is that, but it's not, it's not planned?

• 2:36:01Speaker 02

  It's none.

• 2:36:02Jocko Willink?

  If you, if you set up your perfect schedule, would you do both things on the same day?

• 2:36:06Speaker 02

  One day, yeah.

• 2:36:07Jocko Willink?

  One day a week?

• 2:36:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. One day a week would have two days, yes. But only one day a week.

• 2:36:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:36:12Speaker 02

  They're essentially jujitsu and fitness. We'll talk about a workout or whatever would overlap on one day.

• 2:36:17Jocko Willink?

  Okay, only one day. But they are complementary. You can do that. You can do jujitsu one day, lift or workout the next day. Jujitsu the next day, workout the next day. You could do that, or you could do, like I do, I do jujitsu and workout. The, the same day, all the time. I do that. Well, let me put it this way. Every time I train jujitsu, I lifted that day. So we're, we're batting a hundred percent.

• 2:36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, man.

• 2:36:42Jocko Willink?

  And you know, some days I went for a run as well. Some days I went for a surf as well. In fact, most days I went for a run as well. So we got into controversy about this, remember? On, on, uh, on more plates, more dates.

• 2:36:55Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, the steroid.

• 2:36:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's one of the things that, that he said, which I, was my fault because I said, yeah, I'll work out three or four times a day. To me, that was like, oh, lift, jujitsu, run, surf. This isn't me going in and doing, you know, super squats.

• 2:37:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:37:16Jocko Willink?

  And so he took that as, oh, if this guy's lifting four, three to four times a day, he's, he's doing steroids. So my fault for not clarifying that. But I do do that. I do that as often as I can. As a matter of fact. Now, am I tired when I get done that? Dude, I was tired. We got home from training on Sunday. This Sunday, I was training. You, you, you weren't there actually.

• 2:37:39Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 2:37:40Jocko Willink?

  You, and you weren't there on Saturday either.

• 2:37:42Speaker 02

  No, no, no. I never, I never go on Saturday. I don't think I've ever been there Saturday.

• 2:37:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So I go on Saturday all the time.

• 2:37:47Speaker 02

  Right off.

• 2:37:48Jocko Willink?

  Man, I was, I was tired on Saturday. No, no, sorry, on Sunday. That's the good training. You get it out, man. You get, you leave nothing on the mat. That's good training.

• 2:38:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:01Jocko Willink?

  Feeling good about that, but it doesn't inhibit me. I might feel a little bit tight, but I'll still surf. I'll still go for whatever. You'll still go for run. I'll still do other stuff. I won't let it stop me.

• 2:38:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:12Jocko Willink?

  Is what I'm saying. Hard training is not going to stop me from doing more training. I might not be the, the best run I've ever done.

• 2:38:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:18Jocko Willink?

  But I'm going to get it. Get some.

• 2:38:20Speaker 02

  Get some.

• 2:38:21Jocko Willink?

  If you know what I'm saying. So. Let's do jujitsu. That's my, that's my recommendation. Workout, do jujitsu. I mean, look at the, look at the general here. Sixty six years old, right?

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:38:32Jocko Willink?

  He's still training.

• 2:38:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Started at forty three, he said.

• 2:38:35Jocko Willink?

  Forty three.

• 2:38:36Speaker 02

  So that's one of those men, forty three, that was like a couple of years ago for me, just starting and has a black belt, by the way.

• 2:38:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:43Speaker 02

  So it's like, you know, those things, cause come on, let's face it. That's a common question where it's like, hey, I'm forty. Shit, I'm, is it too late for me to start? Cause a lot of times you see these tournaments and these guy, you know, you see Gordon Ryan, you know, excelling in jujitsu and all these other guys where you look at them, you're like, bro, I'm forty right now. That's not me. No, that's somebody else, you know, kind of thing, but it's right. It's not necessarily like that, you know? Even actually as a competitor, you can still start at forty.

• 2:39:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Cause you can do the masters.

• 2:39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, the divisions.

• 2:39:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they got weight, uh, weight and age divisions. And belt divisions. Across the board. So let's go train some jujitsu. Train jujitsu. Guess what? Gonna need some fuel. You know what you're gonna need joint warfare? Need joint warfare a hundred percent.

• 2:39:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's gonna help.

• 2:39:26Jocko Willink?

  The, go get some joint warfare from jockofuel.com. Get some, get some drinks. Get yourself some, oh man. I went to, I went to on the discipline glow. Get yourself some discipline glow. Get yourself some milk. Your post-training milk. Maybe that's why you can just keep getting after it. You got that milk hitter.

• 2:39:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:39:44Jocko Willink?

  Get that protein going. That's all good for you. Uh, you know, we got hydration coming.

• 2:39:49Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:39:50Jocko Willink?

  I'm drinking one right now. It's right over here.

• 2:39:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:52Jocko Willink?

  It's freaking awesome.

• 2:39:54Speaker 02

  Electrolyte beverage.

• 2:39:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's so good.

• 2:39:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:58Jocko Willink?

  So good. Uh, you know, once again, natural, that's, that's what we're doing. We're making it literally good for you. So we got that coming online. Um, if you want this stuff, check out jockofuel.com or go to Wawa, go to vitamin shop, go to the military commissaries. And I just got word today from Joe Moss. You know Joe Moss?

• 2:40:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:17Jocko Willink?

  I got word from Joe Moss, we're pending going into the military exchanges. So those of you in the military, you know what I'm talking about? We're in Hanaford, we're in Dash Doris, we're in Wakeford, ShopRite, HEB. Down in Tejas. By the way, if you're in Texas, your, your support is appreciated of the cause. Cause at HEB, HEB is like, is these, this is our front lines. So when you're out there in HEB, we appreciate your support on the front lines of the battle. We're in Meyer, we're in Harris Teeter, just rolled into Harris Teeter. So you got a Harris Teeter by you, check that out. Lifetime Fitness, big gems. You been to Lifetime Fitness before?

• 2:40:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:40:57Jocko Willink?

  They're big. Um, go. They got, they got the drinks. They got the supplements. So go check that out, jockoffield.com. Make yourself better.

• 2:41:06Speaker 02

  Also, Origin USA, American made. They started with the gis. You know, we're doing jujitsu gay. When you start jujitsu, if you haven't already, you're gonna need a gi. You want to make sure it's American made. Probably the best quality gi, no matter who made it.

• 2:41:22Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Yep. You know, okay, you, you just mentioned American made. I'm starting to get more and more fired up because I see other companies out there. And what pisses me off is not that the other companies are out there. That doesn't make me mad. It doesn't make me mad that they're out there. It makes me mad when they, they're, they, they are sending a virtuous message about themselves, about their company and how they're doing good. And they're actually lying. They're actually lying about this. They're not doing good. They're, they're, they're, they have slave labor, for one thing. Instantly, if you have slave labor, you're done. You're not doing anything good. You can't say anything virtuous. Hey, if you want to go and you want to make your stuff in China and you want to sell it

• 2:42:05Jocko Willink?

  here, you want to keep your mouth shut and make money. Okay. You're bad, but I have beef with you, but it's a contained beef. When you start telling people about how virtuous you are, when you literally have slave labor and you're dumping chemicals into the, into the water and you're pouring chemicals into the air, that's what you're doing. And then you're talking to the American people as if you're virtuous. You're a liar. You're scum.

• 2:42:37Jocko Willink?

  So, don't be a part of that. Don't be a part of that. Get American made. Get American made. I don't care who it is. Look, look, Origins American made. Good. You can get that. You need that. Cool. But whatever you're getting, get yourself something that's American made. And especially, this is especially true with clothing. Especially true with clothing, because those are sweatshops over there. So, go to originusa.com. We're taking care of the workers. We're taking care of the environment, and we're taking care of you, because we're giving you the best damn jeans, the best gi, the best hoodie, the best t-shirt. We're giving you the best.

• 2:43:17Jocko Willink?

  And you don't have to have the karma of slavery and ecological disaster on your soul. It's freaking terrible. Originusa.com. Go get it.

• 2:43:32Speaker 02

  Get it. Yeah, those jeans are extra legit.

• 2:43:37Jocko Willink?

  Black jeans available right now.

• 2:43:39Speaker 02

  Yep. Delta 68. So, total, what are the, what are the different models of the jeans? I know the Delta 68, the many washes, of course. Then there's the

• 2:43:47Jocko Willink?

  And then there's the factory.

• 2:43:48Speaker 02

  Factory. Yeah. And that's more of like the thicker one, right? Not as stretchy, still a little bit stretchy.

• 2:43:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's definitely stretchy.

• 2:43:54Speaker 02

  But more heavy.

• 2:43:56Jocko Willink?

  Yes, it's just thicker. Like, if you're in, if you're in Minnesota, you might want those factory jeans. Wintertime. If you're in Montana, wintertime, you want those factory jeans. Even though, I'll be honest with you, I wear the Delta jeans. I wear Delta 68's year round. But my legs, do your legs ever get cold?

• 2:44:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:44:16Jocko Willink?

  I'm surprised your legs don't get a little chilly, being that they're kind of skinny.

• 2:44:23Speaker 02

  They have the capability to get cold. Yes, thank you for asking.

• 2:44:29Speaker 02

  Generally speaking, we're pretty warm over here. Generally speaking. Thank you, Jocko, for asking. But yeah, the Delta 68, oh yeah, all year, all year, all day. That's my, um, what do you call my, my formal wear.

• 2:44:43Jocko Willink?

  Check. Yep, me too. All right.

• 2:44:45Speaker 02

  Also, Jocko's store called Jocko's Store. If you want to represent on the path, this win equals freedom, because it does, by the way. The idea of good, right, good, something, if you're faced with something bad, there's some good to come from it. You want to represent, I'm telling you, shirts, hats, hoodies, whatever you need, jocko store.com. Also, we have a, it's called the short locker, subscription scenario, get a new shirt every month, different designs, creative, we'll say.

• 2:45:11Jocko Willink?

  Did you see Leif and Dave on the airplane together?

• 2:45:13Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:45:13Jocko Willink?

  They, that, Dave wrote, planned or not? What do you think?

• 2:45:19Speaker 02

  I don't think it was planned.

• 2:45:20Jocko Willink?

  I don't think it was planned either.

• 2:45:21Speaker 02

  Because I can't really see them like calling each other, I'll be like, hey, I'm gonna wear the freaking again shirt, you know? So yeah, not planned. That's a good shirt though. So, and I understand that kind of coincidence, and that's not even that much of coincidence, because it's like, hey, if you're gonna choose one, I could see why someone would choose that one. You got two people doing it. So I get it, man. That was the January shirt for 2022.

• 2:45:43Jocko Willink?

  Again.

• 2:45:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:45:45Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:45:46Speaker 02

  So you understand the layer behind that, right?

• 2:45:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:45:49Speaker 02

  You know, new year, new me, no? We're gonna do the same good stuff we've been doing again. And actually, I got it from you.

• 2:45:55Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah.

• 2:45:58Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:45:59Jocko Willink?

  No, that's because sometimes I like wake up in the morning and I'm posting.

• 2:46:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:05Jocko Willink?

  And guess what I'm doing? Everything that I did yesterday, again. I'm getting up early, again. Going to workout, again. That's what's happening, again.

• 2:46:14Speaker 02

  Swear I got it.

• 2:46:15Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. Get yourself some of that, jocko store.com. Go to, subscribe to this podcast, subscribe to the Jaco Underground, subscribe to YouTube page, the Origin USA YouTube page, the Jaco Fuel YouTube page, the Echelon Front YouTube page. Go check those things out. We got some information on there for you. Check out flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, badass. He, yeah, he's badass. He's a Marine. He's just a guy that can make things happen, and he makes things for your wall, too, that you can hang on your wall. Flipsidecanvas.com. Check that out. We got a bunch of books, written a bunch of books. You know what they are. If you don't have them, go get them. If you get, and listen, the most critical of these, look, you're, you're 38 years old, or you're 42 years

• 2:46:59Jocko Willink?

  old, and you want to get, you want to get leadership strategy and tactics and become better yourself, cool. But more important, actually, if you know a kid, any kid in your neighborhood, the kid across the street, he seems to be freaking constantly like sitting out in the yard, not doing anything, maybe he's digging the holes for no reason, you know, hucking rocks at things, no direction, get that kid the Way of the Warrior Kid books. Get them all five. Just literally get them and bring them over to that kid. Oh, it's a girl. No, it doesn't matter. Girl, boy, doesn't matter. So many girls read Way of the Warrior Kid. Doesn't matter. No factor. And then you know what? Go to Home Depot and spend $12 on a piece

• 2:47:44Jocko Willink?

  of pipe and hang it from a tree in their yard so they can start doing pull-ups. And then just watch their entire life get better. Change the trajectory of their life. Way of the Warrior Kid. Go get it. Also, we got Mike and the Dragons. So that's what you need for kids. We talked about Hackworth today. I wrote the foreword to the re-release of David Hackworth's book about Facebook. Pick that thing up. It's an 800-page leadership lesson. It wasn't written for a leadership lesson. It was just written about a dude's life. But when you read it from a leadership perspective, you're gonna see what's in there. Power. So check that one out. Also, we have Echelon Front, which is a leadership consultancy

• 2:48:25Jocko Willink?

  where we solve problems through leadership. We have echelonfront.com. That's where you get those leadership solutions. We have live events. We have online events. The online academy is called, is at extremeownership.com. It's called the academy. Extreme Ownership Academy. Go to extremeownership.com if you want to learn the magic. The magic. We talk about jujitsu like it's magic. Guess what else is magic? Knowing how to communicate with other people. Knowing how to interact with other people. That's magic.

• 2:49:00Jocko Willink?

  So learn it. You don't know it, just like you don't know, if you don't, if you know jujitsu, cool. You know what a power it is. If you don't know what jujitsu is and you've ever rolled with somebody, you realize that you get destroyed.

• 2:49:12Jocko Willink?

  I'm telling you right now, this is, that is one aspect of life, is being able to fight. There's another aspect of life. It's called being able to interact with other people and it's magic if you know how to do it. And if you don't know what I'm talking about right now,

• 2:49:27Jocko Willink?

  if you don't understand what I'm saying right now, you should go to extremeownership.com right now and you should check out one of the free classes and see, go, oh, that makes sense. And then you go try it and it works.

• 2:49:41Jocko Willink?

  So check that out. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mamali. She's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And also don't forget about Micah Fink, who is, I guess, last report is wearing a bear skin and he is scaling a 14,000 foot mountain in the Rockies with no water. And he's helping other veterans do that kind of stuff. Heroesandhorses.org. Someday I'm going to go out there. When I'm older, I'm going to do, do that, whatever

• 2:50:24Jocko Willink?

  it is, 45 day program. Learn how to ride a horse, go out in the mountains, sit in cold water, eat, you know, bear or whatever they're eating. You know how to ride a horse now? No. A little bit? No, no, not at all. I've ridden a horse up at, we have a thing called the Council at Echelon Front and it's up at an off-site location where we have horses. So they put me on what's called a trail horse. Do you know what a trail horse is? A trail horse is just a old horse that just walks on. It doesn't, it knows exactly what to do. Yeah, yeah. It's like, uh, I'm trying to think if another situation like this. It's just a horse that's gonna kind of be compliant and it knows just to walk on the trail. Yeah.

• 2:51:09Jocko Willink?

  It's called a trail horse. Okay. It's not, you're not really riding, you're not riding a horse. You're on the horse and it's walking, but you.

• 2:51:16Speaker 02

  You're hitching a ride.

• 2:51:17Jocko Willink?

  You're kinda, you're kinda just there.

• 2:51:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:51:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's well tamed. Um, but yeah, I, I, so I don't know how to ride a horse, no. I've been on a horse, but I don't know how to ride one very well. At all. Like, I know if you pull the rein this way, you pull the rein that way. I know how to stop it in an emergency.

• 2:51:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:51:35Jocko Willink?

  But, right now, I would just be, I'm pathetic.

• 2:51:39Speaker 02

  I'm with you.

• 2:51:39Jocko Willink?

  Now, Iris, you know Iris Gardner?

• 2:51:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 2:51:42Jocko Willink?

  She was, she's like, uh, she was a horse wrangler. My wife, too. My wife's, uh, grew up on horses. So she'll just jump on a horse and jump over stuff and run, gallop, and do all this other stuff. You know, she's like a cowgirl.

• 2:51:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:57Jocko Willink?

  In a sense.

• 2:51:57Speaker 02

  I understand.

• 2:51:58Jocko Willink?

  Her and Iris.

• 2:51:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's from England, so is that a cowgirl?

• 2:52:02Jocko Willink?

  Hmm, I don't know what they-

• 2:52:04Speaker 02

  Can you be a cowgirl from England? English, British cowgirl?

• 2:52:07Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, we have to, we have to check with, uh, check with my wife.

• 2:52:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:52:11Jocko Willink?

  I don't think so, though. I think cowboys are Amer- I think they might be American. No, but there's cowboys in like, South America, too. There's like, cowboys in Mexico, there's cowboys in like, down in South America.

• 2:52:21Speaker 02

  Well, in Hawaii, a cowboy is called-

• 2:52:23Jocko Willink?

  I think there's also in, like, in New Zealand and stuff.

• 2:52:25Speaker 02

  Oh, bro.

• 2:52:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:27Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 2:52:27Jocko Willink?

  So anybody that's basically a rancher.

• 2:52:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I guess so. In Hawaii, they call them panuelos.

• 2:52:34Jocko Willink?

  Are they wearing cowboy hats?

• 2:52:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:52:36Jocko Willink?

  See, there you go.

• 2:52:36Speaker 02

  And cowboy boots.

• 2:52:38Jocko Willink?

  And cowboy boots.

• 2:52:38Speaker 02

  And they know how to lasso and do the, the whole gig.

• 2:52:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, in fact, they have like, shows and stuff, too. It's pretty cool.

• 2:52:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's impressive. It's pretty cool. Like I said, at some point, when I have time, I'm gonna go get with Micah Fink and I'm gonna learn all this stuff. Micah Fink did it?

• 2:52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:52:52Jocko Willink?

  He's like, grew, he grew up in what, New York, Long Island or something?

• 2:52:56Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:52:56Jocko Willink?

  Micah Fink, and then he's just like, no, I'm actually gonna be a cowboy.

• 2:52:59Speaker 02

  In the wilderness.

• 2:53:00Jocko Willink?

  In the wilderness. And he straight up is. So, good on you. There you go. Um, if you wanna connect with us, first of all, with, uh, General Farter, you can go to thefartergroup.com. You can go to nationalvmm.org.

• 2:53:18Jocko Willink?

  And then there you can find the the social media for the National Veterans Memorial and Museum. You can also find him on Mike Ferriter on Instagram, Mike underscore Ferriter on Twitter, and Michael Ferriter on Facebook. And Echo and I are also on the social media. Reluctantly, kind of, little bit.

• 2:53:39Speaker 02

  We're there.

• 2:53:40Jocko Willink?

  We're there. Look, we're not trying to waste your brain cells. We're trying to connect. Maybe you got a question, maybe you want to, maybe you want to see what's happening. You can go on there. I'm just saying that there's an algorithm on there. And, and I hate to tell you this, there's a decent chance the algorithm is stronger than you are. There's a decent chance that the algorithm is stronger than you are. Don't let it be. It's not, it's not because it's more physically powerful. It's because you're allowing it to be stronger than you. And I'm just saying, don't, don't allow the algor- algorithm to be stronger than your willpower. It's a bad move. And it will make the rest of your life worse. It will make the rest of your life worse. So don't let that happen.

• 2:54:21Jocko Willink?

  And thanks again to General Mike Ferriter. Thank you for your service. Thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for the lessons that you passed on to us today. Thank you for spreading the word of Jiu-Jitsu and starting combatives in, in the Army. It's awesome. One man, lot of impact. And also, thanks to the rest of our warriors out there in the military, who are making sacrifices right now, so that we can remain free. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. Thank you for what you do every day and the sacrifices that you make every day, so that we can be safe here and to everyone else out there.

• 2:55:04Jocko Willink?

  Let's think about, let's think about those attributes that a warrior is supposed to have from the Army Combatives Manual. Here's something to think about, personal courage, self-confidence, self-discipline. What's interesting about those attributes is they're not inherited. They're not passed down in your genes. You don't get personal courage from your mom and dad. You don't get self-confidence from your genetic gene pool. And you damn sure don't get self-discipline in your bloodstream.

• 2:55:48Jocko Willink?

  These are choices that you make. You choose to be courageous. You choose to have confidence.

• 2:55:57Jocko Willink?

  And most important, you choose, you make the choice to be disciplined, to have self-discipline.

• 2:56:09Jocko Willink?

  So make the right choice

• 2:56:12Jocko Willink?

  by getting up every day and getting after it.

• 2:56:18Jocko Willink?

  And I think that's all we've got for tonight. So until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.