445: Pursue Opportunity Over Passion, and Bring Your Passion to The Opportunity. With Ryan Bates.

Ryan Bates, former US Navy SEAL talks Military career, business, and seizing the opportunities in this life for massive success. 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 445 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. I heard a quote fairly early in my Navy career and the gist of the quote was that SEALs succeed because of leadership or in spite of their leadership. And when I was young, it was a little hard for me to understand that because it's definitely a contradictory statement, right? That you can either succeed because of leadership you have, or you succeed in spite of the leadership that you have.

• 0:34Jocko Willink?

  But as I grew up and as I got older, it became more and more clear what that meant. By the time I was getting towards the end of my career and I was running trade at, which is the West Coast SEAL, which ran the training for the West Coast SEAL teams, it became very clear to me what that meant. Because you see in the teams, we have some great leaders and we have some not so great leaders. And in the teams, we've got some great guys, we've got some not so great guys. But what I realized in trade at was, and this is after I was in trade at and I was now teaching and watching and observing platoon after platoon, after platoon, after platoon, go through training.

• 1:14Jocko Willink?

  What I realized was in a platoon, you needed like a couple of good leaders. If you needed, if you had a couple of good leaders, then the platoon was going to be all right. The one exception to that is if you had a real arrogant loser in there, he could ruin all the, every other good leader. If you have one, and especially if it's a senior guy, that could be a serious problem. But so, so you need at least a couple of good leaders. One, one you can get away with, two, you're going to be solid. And chances are, one of those good leaders would be in a leadership position in the platoon. It could be the platoon chief, it could be the platoon commander, it could be the LPO, it could be one of the junior officers. So if you have one of those guys and they're pretty good, maybe two of them are pretty

• 1:58Jocko Willink?

  good, platoon's going to do well. But if you, if one of those guys wasn't maybe the best leader, or if those guys weren't around for whatever reason, which there's a bunch of reasons why they couldn't be around. One of them wasn't trade at, if they were good leaders, we would kill them, like mock kill them, a good leader, we'd be like, okay, you're dead. You just got shot, you're dead. And we would do that on purpose to see who was going to step up and see who was going to make things happen. And, and by the way, the reason we did that is because that can really happen on the battlefield. So you need to be prepared when your leadership goes down. Somebody has got to be able to step up. And that someone's going to be one of the boys, right?

• 2:39Jocko Willink?

  One of the boys, one of the E5 mafia, one of the guys with a platoon or two or three or four platoons of experience under their belt. The kind of guys that have the, the humility, the humility, that they don't feel like they need to step up and run and everything all the time. Cause then you get contradicting word going out, it comes a problem. But guys that are humble, but at the same time, when it's time is needed, they can step up and they can run. They can basically run everything. And that's what they mean by the teams succeeding either because of leadership or in spite of leadership. It's because of the E5 mafia, the boys that are going to step up and make things happen,

• 3:23Jocko Willink?

  regardless of what is going on. And I got one of those boys with me here tonight. His name is Ryan Bates. He's a, a former SEAL. He's an entrepreneur, he's a business owner, he's a, he's a security and arms expert. He's a husband, he's a dad.

• 3:41Jocko Willink?

  And he's one of the boys who got it done because he's a frog man. And he's here with us tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned. Ryan Bates, man.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  What's up, buddy?

• 3:52Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for coming down, man. It's freaking great to see you after, well, it's been a while. But it's awesome to see you again. Let's start at the beginning because I, I think you have a, you have a background that really led. That really had an impact on the rest of your life. So you're you're raised in Washington?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Washington state, yep.

• 4:08Jocko Willink?

  You were born in?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Uh, Pasco, Washington, uh, kinda eastern Washington, like the opposite corner of Seattle.

• 4:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you're in the sticks.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  In the sticks, all farmland.

• 4:16Jocko Willink?

  All farmland. And what did your parents do?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Um, dad, truck driver, had some alfalfa fields. Um, mom, just a, you know, kinda worked a little bit, but more mostly like 4H, FFA, grew up breaking horses. My grandpa was one of the top poniers of um, race horses on the east or west coast. So grew up with horses a lot, just old farm boy.

• 4:37Jocko Willink?

  So you were breaking horses?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yep. I used to.

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  Like, starting at what age?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Uh, I was watching it my whole life. My grandpa, when you get a, when you get a filly or a colt and they buy them at auction, you have to bring them in, break them, then you gotta start conditioning them for, uh, for the jockeys to take over, pretty much. And my grandpa was pretty much that all the way through. So he spent a lot, spent a lot of time with him doing that kinda thing. And yeah, just old cowboy baits, cowboy baits back in the day, pretty much, you know?

• 5:05Jocko Willink?

  And you, you, were you legitimately like in the sticks? There's no city around or anything like that?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  No, it's, it's kinda a little bigger now, but no, it's, it's literally farm fields as far as you can see. So a lot of, uh, wrestling is pretty much the heat of everything, all those little smart, small farm towns around. So a lot of that and, um, just buck and hay.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  And, and that was your, that was your sport growing up wrestling? Starting at what age?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Uh, probably five, six years old. So.

• 5:30Jocko Willink?

  Did you have brothers and sisters?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yep, two brothers and we just.

• 5:33Jocko Willink?

  What, what number were you?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  First.

• 5:35Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Oldest, yeah.

• 5:36Jocko Willink?

  So you're, you were breaking ponies and breaking your?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Breaking my brothers, yeah. My brothers started getting tough after a while too, and they'd team up on me like, damn it.

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  Does, were they wrestling too?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, we all, we all started wrestling.

• 5:48Jocko Willink?

  Did your dad wrestle?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, he wrestled too.

• 5:50Jocko Willink?

  So it's just you're wrestling?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, wrestling, yeah. That's what, that's what you do. And that's kinda what you do in that town, really, is wrestling. A lot of those small farm towns, they don't have the budget to have huge football fields and stuff like that, but they can get a wrestling mat. So, so it's pretty much it, you know, and we'd, we'd go nine months out of the year from, uh, doing collegiate to freestyle and then usually doing, uh, intensive training camps through the summertime, like Jay Robinson and.

• 6:12Jocko Willink?

  Did you do J Rob?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yep, yeah. Yeah, the smaller one, the two week one, but yeah, it's gnarly.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  Did you get the T-shirt?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Yep, yeah.

• 6:19Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, the.

• 6:20Jocko Willink?

  You know what shut down? Do you know J. Rob shut down?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Did it really?

• 6:23Jocko Willink?

  Yep, it shut down during or right during COVID or just after COVID, they shut it down.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Really?

• 6:28Jocko Willink?

  Which is a bummer because my kid went to J. Rob. It was freaking transformational, just a great thing. We should start another one of those.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's another good one, Cobra Camp out of Portland. That was really good, too. It was also about two, two and a half week course, but you know, they're gnarly.

• 6:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Sixteen hours a day.

• 6:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  I mean, I always look back, even when I went to Buzz, I was like, ah, it's not as bad as the camps, dude.

• 6:50Jocko Willink?

  My kid was going through it and he was, you get, so Echo Charles, you, the whole goal of J. Rob is you're trying to get this T-shirt that says, I did it.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:59Jocko Willink?

  Right? And if you miss a certain number of practices, if you get a certain number of demerits, blah, blah, blah, you don't get the shirt. And the final thing you have to do to get the shirt is do a 12 mile run. So I'm talking to my kid, I think my kid was a, saw, uh, just out of his freshman year. So he's like, whatever, 14 or something like that. And I knew he hurt his ankle before he went out there and his ankle was jacked up while he was out there. You know, every day he'd be telling, oh, my, my ankle's jacked up. And so then he's got to do this, the last day, you got to do this 12 mile run. And I said, hey, you know, what, what's the deal with your ankle on this run? And he goes, I'm going to go to the athletic trainer and tell him to tape it up so it can't move and I'm doing this run. I was like, cool. Sure enough, he did it, got the shirt.

• 7:45Jocko Willink?

  So you're doing that, you're, did, did you, so you obviously wrestled in high school. How'd you do wrestling in high school?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Pretty good. Um, never went to state, but always kind of a contender in there. Just, I started taking it less and less serious as I got into high school. I don't know.

• 7:58Jocko Willink?

  Well, what was distracting you?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  I don't know. I just, uh, I don't know. It was such a big part of our, uh, um, our life, you know, and I started getting burned out. My senior year, I, uh, I actually was undefeated. I actually beat the guys at one state, but I'd skipped too much school, kind of a bad student too. So I know it's, it's, it's shitty because my dad always tells stories about how good I could have been, but never really did it. You know, I found out later in life as I got more, I know, I know, my brothers are more, uh, More serious about it than I was.

• 8:28Jocko Willink?

  Did they go to state?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, my brother did, yeah.

• 8:30Jocko Willink?

  Either of them wrestle in college?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  No, no, all of us were kind of burnt out. My dad used to put it on the hard. I mean, we would used to, we used to do these round robins where one person would be on the swim bike. We'd take the belt off the dryer. One would jump rope, swim bike, and then sit inside the dryer. We'd do that kind of stuff all the time, like hardcore, that kind of stuff. And then, but yeah, as high school went on.

• 8:50Jocko Willink?

  Sit inside the dryer?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't get in a sauna, you know, you have to take the belt off and close the door, it gets a little sauna, you know?

• 8:57Jocko Willink?

  God, that's freaking outstanding.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  But, but, uh, yeah, I just, um, I was good, um, alternate one year, but then, uh, as I was tiny, I was like 103.

• 9:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Or sorry, 108, my freshman year, 129, 135, 141. So I didn't really, I starved myself so much. My 141 year, I was undefeated the whole year. Um, uh, one district, seeded first in regionals. And then, uh, I had too many skips and I couldn't go to state, but the guys that beat one state that year, I beat twice that in that year.

• 9:27Jocko Willink?

  Come on, man.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  I know, I know, I know.

• 9:30Jocko Willink?

  Well, the good lesson here is, is you can't push your kids too hard.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:34Jocko Willink?

  And if you get, if you push your kids really hard, they get burnt out, it, it doesn't matter, you know? You gotta love the game, you gotta be doing it for, of your own accord.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:42Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't mean you can't push them a little bit.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:44Jocko Willink?

  But at a certain point, if you don't give them a little bit of, a little bit of their own decision making, dude.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it gets, gets hardcore.

• 9:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's terrible. And you were just not interested in school?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  No, I was, you know, I don't know why, you know, because like after I got in the bill, I, when I got in the bill, I like girls, you know? That kind of stuff, but I never drank or anything in high school. I just, uh, I chased girls a lot.

• 10:08Jocko Willink?

  Did you have a car?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Uh, I did have a car.

• 10:10Jocko Willink?

  What kind of car did you have?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Um, I had a, uh, I had a 69 Land Cruiser. And then I had a, I had a truck, just a Ford truck too, so, but, um, but yeah, I had that. And you know what happened? I'm gonna tell you. This is my sophomore year, um, I was walking back and I was kind of getting good at wrestling and I started stepping up more. Um, this, uh, this guy, like the, the senior guy that, uh, was the cool football player, like quarterback and everything. He, uh, he like. I had a girlfriend at the time. She's my first everything. Well, she ended up cheating on me with this guy. I'm coming back from the thing. I got my backpack on and my dad always said, if you're ever getting in a fight, use your wrestling. And he said, hey, Bates, you know, your girl was good. This guy was a big dude, probably like 200 pounds and I just dropped my bag.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Came up and he's like pop, pop, pop, pop in the face. I took him, locked up belly to belly and took him for a ride. Landed on his face, knocked him out and then uh, fucked him up pretty bad. And then after that, all the girls liked him here.

• 11:10Jocko Willink?

  You were better when you were, you were better when you were a monk.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Oh man, but uh, but yeah, that was, that was it. And then um, I was so burnt out. As soon as I graduated high school. Um, I had a 76 van, a lot like the van you were talking about. Stripped it out, put a, put a futon in it and just took off. I worked at Mount Hood as a lift operator.

• 11:31Jocko Willink?

  Did you ski your snowboard or something?

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Snowboard and ski both of them. But you get free lift pass if you do that. And so living out of the van, then we go to Vail.

• 11:37Jocko Willink?

  So this was your plan? Like you, you didn't have a plan when you graduated?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  No plan, zero plan, zero plan. Just wanted to fricking take off. I always told my mom, I just wanted a life full of stories, you know?

• 11:46Jocko Willink?

  Doing pretty good, bro.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know what's funny is everything I'd done in my life, I've never had this long-term goal of being any of it. And like a smart man, when I was younger, told me take opportunity over passion, bring your passion to the opportunity, right? So um, all these things that came in my life was kind of just a flow. So did that for a couple of years or sorry, about a year. And then my mom gets on the phone. She wanted me to go to college. She wanted me to wrestle and that kind of stuff. And she's like, son, are you just gonna be this weed smoking loser your whole life? I was like, well, mom was gonna think about it for a while. And she's like, God, I'm so disappointed in you. And I was like, fuck. So.

• 12:20Jocko Willink?

  That stings.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I went down, I was in Vail at the time and drove down to the recruiter there in Colorado. And I was like, I want to be in the army. Like, well, this is the Navy. I was like, I'll be in the Navy. He's like, what do you want to do? Knew nothing about it, right? And at the, he was a, he was a rescue.

• 12:36Jocko Willink?

  You knew not, like you didn't have a clue.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Nobody was in the military in my life. Nobody, I was never around it.

• 12:41Jocko Willink?

  Did you watch any movies where you're like, that looks cool or no?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, somebody, one of my buddies said that they're going in the military and I was like, I was like, ah, that sounds like a good thing. And you know, I'm like, I was thinking, I thought like, well, you know, it's going to get me into something, you know, who knows? So I drove down, like we're in the, we're in the Navy. He's like, um, he's like, what do you want to be? I was like, I don't really, I haven't thought that far. What's cool stuff? He's like, well, I was a rescue swimmer, helicopter rescue swimmer. I was a good swimmer, are you a good swimmer? And I was like, yeah, I'm a great swimmer.

• 13:08Jocko Willink?

  How were you a good swimmer?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  I was a swim team. Oh, sorry. I was also swim, swim team. So wrestling is swim team, probably the two best sports to be.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  So he, uh, so he was, uh, he was like, well, do you want to be a rescue swimmer? I was like, shoot, yeah, you know, and this is before September 11th and all that stuff. And I was able to get in pretty damn quick, like pretty much a couple of months later, left on my birthday. Come back and I'm going in the military. She's like, you sign up? She's like, I was like, yeah. She's like, oh my God. I was like, you told me to do something.

• 13:38Jocko Willink?

  Wait, she's mad?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, she was mad. She wanted me to go to college, you know, like most boomers, they want you to go to college, you know?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Uh, so I showed up, um, and the military is good for me, you know, it's, it, uh, you know, I was competitive, I was always in good shape. Pretty much crushed, uh, rescue swimmer, set, set a bunch of records there, set the old course record in rescue swimmer school too, or air crew school. And then, uh,

• 14:01Jocko Willink?

  They have an obstacle course there?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, in, uh, in Pensacola. It's smaller. It's not like the buzz ones.

• 14:07Jocko Willink?

  That, that, how hard is that program? Like, how many people don't make it through rescue swimmer?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  It was a lot. It was like, uh, we probably showed up with maybe 50, 60 people and probably only 22 made it.

• 14:16Jocko Willink?

  No kidding.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a pretty regular, it's a lot of swimming.

• 14:19Jocko Willink?

  I thought you had to be in the Navy first before you could go to rescue swimmer's school. Is that wrong?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  No, it was a pipeline. You can go right into it. So you have to go, you go through boot camp, then air crew, then RSS. And then you go to, um, your A school and then to the fleet after.

• 14:35Jocko Willink?

  What were you thinking like day three of, uh, of boot camp?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  I thought it was fucking weak.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  I don't know. I just was like, you know, I was, they made me the athletic petty officer because I can run. At that time I was pretty lean, so I can run a five minute mile right around there. So I was just crushing and they, I don't know. I thought it was, I thought it wasn't that hard.

• 14:56Jocko Willink?

  You're like, hey, as long as you're not stuffing me into a dryer.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  You know how wrestling, cutting weight and fricking wrestling is this, it just sets you up for success in life. You know what Dan Gable said, once, once you've wrestled, everything in life is easy, you know? So, um, yeah, I didn't think it was that hard and even, um, RSS and I didn't think it was that hard. You know, I actually liked it. I liked the competitive competitiveness of it, you know? And so did that, went, got to my squadron.

• 15:21Jocko Willink?

  Had you heard about the teams yet?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Not really. It, that's, that's another thing I wish, I remember them having a dive motivator in 99, but it wasn't like it is now, you know, I, I just didn't know what it was. I know I saw some SWCC guys there, but I didn't really put two and two together. I was just kind of doing my thing and, um, it wasn't till I first deployed.

• 15:40Jocko Willink?

  So wait, so where'd you get stationed?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  San Diego here.

• 15:43Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's pretty cool.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  HSL 45, yeah. So the, uh, we did our first deployment and, um, we were off the coast. And that's when they, they were taking down the smugglers coming out of Iraq. You know, they'd go through the hat, I think the hat and diamond head. When they come off the coastal waters, we'd bring, seals would come in and drop on and.

• 16:00Jocko Willink?

  What, what ship were you on?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Ingraham, USS Ingraham.

• 16:04Jocko Willink?

  What year was this?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Uh, it's be 2001, 2000, 2000.

• 16:08Jocko Willink?

  I was over there in, in 2000, I was in 1999, 2000, I was there, I was in the Gulf.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  So it had been 2000 because we were, we were out there when September 11th happened. So it was right, right in that time. I was at the tail end of our deployment and, uh, we were dropping off seals and they were taken down. I just remember watching them, our, our flaring stuff like, fuck, this job is way cooler than mine. You know, and they were on the boat, the two guys, there was a sniper and another guy on the boat with me the whole time for like a month on the Ingraham. And I was like, how do you do this? So like, I always get an in test. So I did my in test in Bahrain, right there. And I got my packet together and, uh, pretty much I got back. The detailer wouldn't let me go until I had two deployments for some reason, because they put so much time in. So I had to immediately jump on another deployment back to back. And then I went to Bud's when I came back from that.

• 16:54Jocko Willink?

  What was your second deployment?

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Uh, same place.

• 16:57Jocko Willink?

  Different ship?

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Uh, different, nope, same ship.

• 16:59Jocko Willink?

  Same ship.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Same ship, same squadron, went to the same ship and, uh, this is right when the war was kicking off. And right when it started, right when it started, I was at the tail end and then came back and went to Bud's right after that.

• 17:12Jocko Willink?

  And did you feel like you needed to train for Bud's? Did you train for Bud's?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  No, not really.

• 17:17Jocko Willink?

  You were just like, I'm freaking, I'm a stud.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  That's what I thought. I'm not joking. I don't know why. Like, I mean, you can talk to some of my, I don't know, Bud's, I, I crushed it, man. Like, um, I was always a good swimmer. Especially once you put the fins on.

• 17:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. If you're on swim team, swimming's no factor. If you're a cross country runner, running's no factor. If you're a gymnast, then the freaking O course is no factor. Usually if you're a wrestler, probably the O course is no factor too, because you have upper body strength. But it's weird. So you had no weaknesses?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  None, dude. And if you talk to other guys that are in Buzz with me, I just won everything, dude. I won fucking everything. And I got rolled. I got, I got pneumonia and hell week and I got a roll. I got rolled for it, but so I did do a couple or a couple first phases. But I just, I crushed everything. And, uh, I don't know, I, you know, Bud's, people don't understand. They're like, ah, just get to Buzz is good. But Bud sets your reputation from day one, you know? So some people try to be the gray man. I was like, fuck that. Win everything. Win everything, you know?

• 18:14Jocko Willink?

  Plus, it's, it's easier if you win everything.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:17Jocko Willink?

  If you're not, if you're not winning everything, or if you're losing things, it's going to be a lot harder for you.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yep. A hundred percent.

• 18:24Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I guess you could, if you're in the middle of the pack, you won't get noticed very much. And maybe that's an, an attitude to have. I mean, I tried to win. I couldn't win anything. I was freaking slow. Slow swimmer, slow runner. So I was pretty much not good.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Except the log PTs. Just pick the log up by himself.

• 18:39Jocko Willink?

  I was good at not stopping. Like, I was good at not giving up. You know, I was good at, like in hell week, I, that was like so fun for me. Cause I was like, oh wait, there's no, like I just have to keep going. Cool. I can keep going all freak, let's go all week. I'll keep going. Uh, but no factor, huh?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  No, I just, uh, I crushed pretty good. I set the O course record at the time, I think four forty-four, which is, uh, I think it was four fifty-eight before then.

• 19:02Jocko Willink?

  The O course is different now.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  It's different now.

• 19:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, they have a big net underneath the slide for life.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  What?

• 19:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Pussy shit. What are you talking about?

• 19:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's a big net. So there's, I saw it. I was like, yeah, it's a big net. It's basically a big net. So if you fall, you're going to hit a big net.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 19:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's it. And they have a low rope. So they have like one rope from the third story and one rope from the first story. So you could just pull yourself across, which I guess apparently is hard too, because you don't have the downward gravity.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  The top one's the fastest one. Yeah.

• 19:33Jocko Willink?

  But there's a net there. So there's that. And then you remember the little logs that you would, the little stumps that you had to jump across?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:41Jocko Willink?

  Those are now not there. It's like a, it's like tires you step through. So you don't.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Oh, so you don't hurt your ankle?

• 19:47Jocko Willink?

  Bite ass like.

• 19:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, do it wet and sandy. Oh, yeah, that's fun.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  I think when, you know, when I got to run the, when you, you were an admiral's aide for a little bit.

• 19:57Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  And everybody knew I broke the record or something like that. And I had to run it for you.

• 20:01Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the first time I ever met you. You don't remember that, but yeah, that's when I first met you.

• 20:05Jocko Willink?

  That was you, huh?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you were, I had to run the O course for you guys to show.

• 20:09Jocko Willink?

  Show the admiral?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  How, what studs we had.

• 20:11Jocko Willink?

  What studs we had. That's freaking.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was good, man. But I remember, I was like, damn, that guy's big, dude. That fuck looks, look like the admiral's aide frigging security.

• 20:24Jocko Willink?

  I got that a lot.

• 20:27Jocko Willink?

  So, so then what? You go on SQT?

• 20:30Speaker 01

  SQT. And then Crush, I was with guys like Mike Affink, Van Wilson.

• 20:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really? Michael was in your class?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, Michael was in my class. Yeah, he was, he was funny. He, he was a tough guy, right?

• 20:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  And at that time I was rolling a bunch. I always rolled as soon as I got into that and like.

• 20:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. So what year did you start rolling?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  I started rolling in 1990. I mean, I wrestle up there, but as soon as I got to San Diego, I immediately met Steve Bruno. He fought in UFC a couple of times, but he's a rescue swimmer with me. He was getting ready for a pro fight and he was more a stand up guy. And he's like, oh, I heard you're a good wrestler, Ryan. I gotta, I need somebody to train with. So I went into the lion's den and it was Tony Glendo, Vernon White, a bunch of the guys and.

• 21:14Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  And they're like, they're like, oh, you heard you're good wrestler. All right. They just made me do takedown after takedown after takedown and like freaking all these different guys rotating out and me just wrestle. I was like, okay, I could train with him. So for six months, I just kind of helped Steve get ready for his fight. And that was my first introduction to jujitsu.

• 21:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  I loved it. I was hooked.

• 21:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The Lions Den back then, first of all, they were like one of the premier schools at the time. But they also had an old school mentality where you were going to get basically abused when you showed up there if you were like a new guy. And we would, we would train with those guys occasionally, uh, but we would more compete against them. I know Dean did a couple of competitions and I know at least a couple of competitions. He went against Vernon White a couple of times or at least one time that I remember. But those guys had a, they, they were great, you know, they, they, they had a great thing going.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:08Jocko Willink?

  Um, you know, at the time, Ken Shamrock, he was probably a little bit done with his fighting career at that time.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  WWF like at that time.

• 22:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but you know, I mean, Ken Shamrock freaking was one of the premier guys back in the day. And yeah, so you, you rolled into the Lions Den.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably like the, as a new guy coming in, you know, that's probably not the one you want to start with. But, uh, I got thrown into the fire quick. I liked, you know, like I did a couple of jujitsu tournaments not too long after that. And I, I just, you know, went in advance and I ended up doing pretty good just by my wrestling, you know?

• 22:43Jocko Willink?

  Once you learn to avoid a couple of submissions and you just get takedowns and not get submitted, there you go. You just won two to zero or four to zero or whatever.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, just take down, quick take down and then hold them off for a little bit, you know, so it was good. But yeah, right into there. And then, uh, I kept rolling there. Actually, after they kind of closed down. I went on deployment, they kind of closed down. Then I, the next one was city boxing with, uh, with Dean Lister. And, um, I got, that's, you know, uh, Chris Ruiz, do you know his?

• 23:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  That's what I got. I talked Chris into starting jujitsu.

• 23:14Jocko Willink?

  You talked him into starting jujitsu?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, uh,

• 23:16Jocko Willink?

  I mean, like, you know, I've, I trained with Chris so much over the years until he moved, like he was freaking, he's a badass.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a ship guy, but he was, uh, he always worked out a lot. He was really flexible.

• 23:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  And we were sitting at our apartment in downtown and he was partying and stuff like that. I was like, dude, just do jujitsu with me, man. He's like, what? It's right up here at City Boxing, man. You'd be good at it. Now fast forward, look at him now.

• 23:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. His nickname was Soap Fish. Morongo gave him that nickname. He says, holding on to you is like, it's like, it's like fish covered in soap. So his nickname was Soapfish.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:50Jocko Willink?

  Chris Ruiz. What, were you on the ship with him?

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was on the, he was on the Ingerham. Well, he was on my buddy's ship.

• 23:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  But then he made friends with him and he came back and he was hanging out with rescue swimmers and stuff and he was a cool dude, you know?

• 24:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  And, uh, and I got him into rock climbing too. He started doing that and he got really good at that. And then, uh, and I talked to him in jujitsu and fricking, obviously that caught on. So.

• 24:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So this is what, 99?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  It's to be like 2000, 2000, 2001.

• 24:15Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. I would mean, then I was in, that's where I was training at the time too, like all the time. Uh, but I was mostly training in the daytime because I was going to college at this time. So Dean and I were training like at lunchtime, we trained for two or in the morning, we trained for two, three hours in the, in, or at lunchtime. So we, that was my schedule at that time.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:34Jocko Willink?

  Uh, but we were training all, I was, I was training like two to four hours a day.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Two to four, yeah.

• 24:39Jocko Willink?

  For those years from like 2000 to 2003.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because remember then Brandon Vera came in there.

• 24:45Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  For a while too.

• 24:46Jocko Willink?

  I trained with Brandon all the time too.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:47Jocko Willink?

  He was a freaking animal.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was. That's, I would come in at night. He was mostly there at night. It was Brandon Vera and stuff. But yeah, he was an animal dude.

• 24:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  He's a good mentality.

• 24:55Jocko Willink?

  So fun, so fun to train with. He, we would do drills where we just like lift each other up like body lock and lift.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:02Jocko Willink?

  And just like switch hands, body lock, lift, switch hands, body lock and lift. He had all kinds of crazy stuff. Cause, cause he trained at the Olympic Training Center for a while. He's a freaking animal.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  He's an animal.

• 25:10Jocko Willink?

  And a great dude.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Oh dude, he's the nicest guy, dude. Yeah. Super nice guy. Always happy. You know?

• 25:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Dude. Sick. So you're doing all that and you're getting ready for BUDS. One thing I was kind of tell people, people will talk about like, oh, you know, I've trained jujitsu and they're going to BUDS and I tell them like, listen, six months out from BUDS, stop doing that. But you didn't care.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  I didn't care. That's what I did for my training pretty much. I was like, who likes running? I don't like fucking running, dude.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Oh, I need to run every day. I'm like, dude, I'm not running, man. I'm a good runner, but I don't like it. Does anybody like running?

• 25:43Jocko Willink?

  There are some people that like running that much. So you're doing all that and then you get through BUDG, go to SQT. SQT is all good. You wanted, did you want to be a west coast to the west coast teams?

• 25:54Speaker 01

  I didn't care. Um, the, uh, my best friend in BUDG is Van Wilson. He is an officer. He's a freaking stud. He wanted me to go east coast, so I think he filled me out east coast. I just ended up getting west coast. You know, so he, uh, he was a freaking, he was, he was the honor man of our class. He was a stud. He actually, right after we got our, um, our trident, I had just drove across country, visiting people, stuff like that. He's like, I'm going to drive across country and, uh, and, um, proposed to my girl. And he freaking ended up hitting his head on the, and catching his will and dying on that thing. So, but, uh, that sucked. You know, he was, he was a good dude, but yeah, I graduated with him, uh, Tim Fox.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Mike Afink, a bunch of, a bunch of good studs in there. Mike is a good one because, uh, we were in SQT.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  I can mic it. He's, he's a tough guy.

• 26:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  But we butted heads a little bit. I was more a jujitsu guy. I was a tough guy too. It was like two alphas being in the same thing. And he would be like, I don't give a fuck about your jujitsu dude. I'll freaking smash you.

• 26:54Jocko Willink?

  Cause he was a boxer.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was a boxer. He's, you know, you know, Mike ain't know him, but we ended up tussling back and forth a couple of times. We actually became really good friends after that, you know? It's good. I was like, ah, I was like two alphas being like, all right, all right.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  But, uh, but yeah, then went to, uh, to team one, uh, did deployment. My first deployment was the Philippines. Uh, it was good, good.

• 27:17Jocko Willink?

  What was your, what was your job?

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Uh, breacher. I was, I, I, the, uh, usually they don't, they don't let you go to breacher school as a new guy, but, uh, they liked me. So, uh, uh, it was tough dude. So I went to breacher school and, um, was a breacher that first deployment, even though you don't use it at all.

• 27:32Jocko Willink?

  Were you an A dub?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. Yeah. He does.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Whatever's heavy. And, and how was, how was work up? Uh, work up was good. I was with a super, um, seasoned guys like Andrew Buckley, um, uh, Bo Nackable. Like I was pretty much the, me and, uh, and this guy, Jason Fair, the only two new guys. I'll tell you a freaking gnarly story as a new guy. Okay. I don't know if this can be good, but I have to cut at the end. All right. All right. So you know. Just try not to say anybody's names.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Actually before that, what's the A dub?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Automatic weapons. Machine gunner. A machine gunner. Yeah. Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  So when I was a new guy, we got, um, you know how we used to have to put a bunch of, um, gas tanks on the bottom of, uh, the, uh, ribs or whatever, and drive it all the way out to San Clemente and back. He's out of the thing. So as a new guy, I'm on the front of the boat. I fling off the front as we're going out there and I land my butt on a gas can. Right? I know. It rips my asshole. Right. Have to do the full training for a couple of days and that kind of stuff. Come back and, uh, I'm nervous because you know, when you're a new guy, you're getting your, your nickname. You know, they're talking about all these cool nicknames that might have, you know, that kind of stuff. And I'm like, fucking just worried that my nickname's going to be fucking sphincter or something like that, you know? So I get, get in there, the other new guy with me, I'm like, hey, but I need you to check this out, dude.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  And he's like, and I was showing, and he's like, oh my God, dude, you gotta go to the doctor now. I was like, no fucking way. I'm going to the doctor, dude. I'm just for freaking two months. I just ate, uh, uh, freaking medicine and Ex-Lax until that shit healed.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Fast forward fricking, you know, 20 years later, I meet my wife. She's, uh, you know, we're messing around. She's like, what the fuck is wrong with your ass?

• 29:24Speaker 01

  So anyways, yeah, that was my new guy experience. Nobody found out. My nickname was not that. It was, ended up being whiskey steamroller, which is way better.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  I could have ruined my whole life after that, you know?

• 29:36Jocko Willink?

  And how'd you get treated as a new guy? Cause you had a little bit of experience from the fleet. You were like, you know, physically had good physical prowess and shit like that.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, you know, at that time, you remember jujitsu was kind of just really starting to get into the teams now. And the people were watching it more and more. And at this time, I was pretty, pretty damn good. At least better than the average person. And got hazed a little bit, took it. And then, um, kind of in their rock and roll private terror later found out that I was good at jujitsu. And, uh, it's like, you think you tap out the platoon and I was like, yeah, if you wanted a time, yeah, let's do it. So I think we had the jujitsu gym at that time, like team five, remember it was like the little like kind of training area. And, uh, for a couple of hours, they just kind of rotate out. I ended up spending most of them. And then after that, I never got hazed anymore, you know? That's, that's key. And you, uh, Bud's guys going out there, make sure you're a good fighter before you go to Bud's, you know? At least have that in your arsenal, you know?

• 30:29Jocko Willink?

  It really is like, I mean, a SEAL platoon is sort of, it's a, it's a gang, right? It's a gang and that stuff definitely is for real, like that pecking order. And yeah, if you can fight, I mean, that's what our job is to be able to fight. So if you're good at it, people are going to be thankful that you're a good fighter and you can actually train the other guys. And I was the same way, cause I was into jujitsu real early. And so it's the same thing. I mean, that's kind of, uh, blown out of proportion kind of story of like Jaco submitted his whole platoon. It's like, dude, I knew jujitsu and they didn't. That's, that's all the same thing with you. It's not like you're a better human being, but if you know jujitsu and other people don't know it, bro, they're screwed. Like it ain't going to work out good for them.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Well, we're like a pride of lions. We're all kind of biting each other and that kind of stuff. And you're, you're the better biter, dude. Everybody's like, all right, let's go back.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  No, you're, I mean, it's a warrior mentality, you know? You gotta have that warrior thing. So you should be, shouldn't be just a good gunfighter, be all around good fighter, you know?

• 31:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And at the same time, like if you're a person that's like a bully, they, they will gang up on you and they will take you down and you will pay the man. So it's like, it's just like the, the chimpanzee thing, right? Like even the strongest in the tribe of, they call the tribe of chimpanzees? I don't know what they're called. In a pack of chimpanzee, whatever. If one of is like super dominant, strong and can kick the other one's asses, but he's an asshole. Two or three of them will gang up and take him down.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:56Jocko Willink?

  And kill him so that the other ones, so then they'll have someone that's a better leader, basically.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:01Jocko Willink?

  So it's the same thing in the platoon. Like if you're just an asshole and you can kick people's asses and you walk around, like you'll, you'll get, you'll get taken down off that pedestal.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  More of them than you.

• 32:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. They'll use gang fu.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, gang fu.

• 32:15Jocko Willink?

  So this is now what, 2006? You're going on your first deployment?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2005, I think.

• 32:19Jocko Willink?

  2005?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Somewhere in there, yeah.

• 32:21Jocko Willink?

  And, and you go overseas to the Philippines. The war is going on. How did you feel about that?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  I was wanting to be there. You know, it sucked because, uh, you know, when, uh, we first got in our different task units or whatever, um, a lot of our new guys got pushed to another platoon, which is going to Iraq, but all my older guys liked me. That guy squared away. Let's keep him. I'm like, no, don't keep me.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  To Iraq, but, uh, I, it was good. Like, um, you know, we went to Basalon Island and, uh, we were actually in a pretty bad area. I actually got, no joke, me, uh, Christian Zook, um, Frayer, we got shot in a helicopter. We were coming out of Isabelle and we were loitering MBLT six and we were in Evergreen with Dyna Core or something like that. And we were told like, hey, it's kind of a bad area. And right then we got lit up, freaking rounds coming all through the thing. I was like, shit, this is the most action we can get on this whole deployment. Now we had to do a little emergency landing. I think one of the SF guys with this got some frag in his leg. Probably got a Purple Heart, you know, who knows?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Just shit up. And then, uh, but yeah, other than that, this is kind of cool though, because after that, they pushed me up to Manila and, uh,

• 33:31Jocko Willink?

  To do what? Like as a liaison or something like that?

• 33:33Speaker 01

  To train their nav sock, like whatever their Navy SEALs are. Well, they never wanted to train, right? They want it once a week. So I'm living in this fucking five star or the Avast or something like that, really nice hotel. Just not with nothing to do all day. So I, I cruise around and I was looking for a, a jujitsu gym or fighting gym. And I find a boxing gym and I'm training there. And then, uh, uh, some guys, uh, showed up, uh, Alvin Aguilar, he's a, he's Talagama in the Philippines. So we're really close now. He started showing up and they had a fighting syndicate there called URCC. And he was getting a guy, Marco, ready for a fight and he's a bigger dude. And I was just kind of training the boxing gym and I see they're doing MMA and stuff. I was like, hey, um,

• 34:15Speaker 01

  if you guys need a training partner, like kind of come in there like fucking white boy and like not saying anything and like, uh, And then later on, they kept coming back and I kept asking, kept asking and they're like, ah, come in. So I sparred with this guy and just tuned him up, you know, like my boxing's okay, but I'm, I'm a good, uh, clinch fighter, you know, I can, I can do well. And after that, um, we freaking bonded. I started going to, uh, Sukot where they lived, uh, every day. And for like three, three and a half months, I just trained. I won the Filipino nationals.

• 34:45Jocko Willink?

  In what jujitsu?

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Only white boy in it, right? They're like, you have to live in the Philippines for, for two years, but the Talagama, the Philippine Talagama, they call it a fraternity, but it's, um, it's like a mafia type of a little bit, but they, he just goes in, he's like, no, he's lived two years. So he's good. So I got to enter and, uh, yeah, I freaking, and there was two, two different kind of, uh, fight groups where, um, his was DEF-TAC and the other guys, I forget, but they were also a different fraternity, which their fraternity is like, I wasn't been shot up by AK and shit, like they're gnarly kind of guys. And so I went in there and I represented DEF-TAC and just crushed the other, other teams and all that stuff. So it was good. I trained pretty much the whole time there. I never did gi really. So, uh, that's when I started first learning gi.

• 35:29Jocko Willink?

  Oh, they, that was a gi tournament?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  It was, yeah, it was a gi tournament. Yeah. It was gi. So the, um, so that was the first time I started doing that, but, um, he gave me my first blue belt and, um, yeah, he was, it was a good time. He owned all the, the local like air force. I don't know if you know Philippines deal or no, Air Force One and, and Starship.

• 35:46Jocko Willink?

  The bars.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're good bars there.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. It was, it was good. And actually, um,

• 35:53Jocko Willink?

  So you were like king of Manila.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Ask, if you ever talked to Bo Nakavon and it goes, they, they came up from Tawi Tawi to come and visit. I'm like in the club with all these people here. I'm like, hey, let them in, let them in. Come on guys. Like fucking V shirt out, spiked up hair. Something like, what? Are you even on deployment?

• 36:11Jocko Willink?

  Are you even in the military?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  But it was it was a good deployment for that, you know, so.

• 36:17Jocko Willink?

  You made the best of it.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:19Jocko Willink?

  What was that saying you said like you brought your brought your passion to the opportunity?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Opportunity over passion, bring your passion to the opportunity.

• 36:24Jocko Willink?

  So that's exactly what you did.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 36:27Jocko Willink?

  In Manila. So you get home from that deployment. And then it's time for your second platoon.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Second platoon and I was actually with Task Unit Three that was supposed to go to Iraq. And Dan, you know, Dan Luna is.

• 36:43Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Okay, so Dan Luna, I call him the Godfather. He's awesome. He was. They were obviously going to Afghanistan, a lot more action at that time in Afghanistan. He was kind of just cherry picking from different, different platoons. And I was one of those cherry picker. He made just the most, I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of pipe hitting little groups guys out there, but. Me, him, Brandon Cruz, Andrew Arribito, Brad Kavner. It was just a group of us that were that were fricking ready to ready to get in, you know.

• 37:15Jocko Willink?

  Was Dan your platoon? Who was he? LPO? The chief? He was the chief of that platoon.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  And you know, I always say this with with wars, right? You can have, it's all your leadership, right? If you, you could be in the most badass combat zone, but if you don't have the right leader to work with the army and to get the right missions. You get pushed to the side.

• 37:35Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  You gotta be political, you know, so and Luna was that.

• 37:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  He just, he, he got us into the mix into the gunfights all the time. And if I, if it wasn't for that platoon, I probably would have stayed in teams longer, but that platoon was just, it's a good one, man. It was a good one, dude.

• 37:51Jocko Willink?

  It's not supposed to work that way. You're supposed to be like, that was awesome. I'm gonna do it again. You're not supposed to say.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Well, everything was shutting down after that, you know, like Iraq was shut down. I was talking to my guys at Dev and they're like, ah, we're kind of operating less. And I wanted to get into some contracting after that. I got in contract after that, but, but no, it was a, it was a good platoon. We got to do crazy stuff like I, we'll go ahead.

• 38:15Jocko Willink?

  So what I was gonna say, so this is when I was running trade at. And this, this scenario unfolded and this is, this is how I, you know, look, I put like a lot of guys through training.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:26Jocko Willink?

  And obviously if someone's a real turd, you kind of remember them because you got to do paperwork on them and get them shit canned. And then you got a bunch of studs that are just doing good stuff, but, but then there's some guys that are like, they stand out, right? You're like, oh, this dude's a freaking pipe hitter. And when I was. I probably, I don't know if I put you through land warfare, but I remember seeing you. I remember seeing you. I'll be like, this dude's freaking, this dude's getting after you. You're freaking charging. You're making shit happen. I was like, yeah, this dude's a freaking pipe hitter. And then you, you, your platoon, your task unit was going through urban combat training out in Louisville, Kentucky. And there, you know, we would just unleash total mayhem on you guys. It would be freaking chaos and ammunition and paintball everywhere.

• 39:10Jocko Willink?

  And we'd kill your leaders and, you know, kidnap some of your guys. Just freaking total chaos to make, make guys step up, see who's going to step up. And so there's one scenario, I, I actually tell this story from like a leadership perspective. Is I'm sitting there and your platoon, I don't know, we probably killed your platoon, probably killed Dan Luna, like he's probably, you know, in the back of a Humvee dead or some shit.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. This is a, we were with Effy. I hadn't transferred to Luna's thing. I'm still getting cherry picked at this time.

• 39:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But we were, I remember we were locked down in the courtyard or something like that. Everything was down. There's gunfire everywhere.

• 39:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So we had, that's what we had. The situation where it's just total chaos and no one's making any decisions. And someone's got to make a call. Someone's got to step up. And I, I remembered you from like just being a, a freaking pipe hitter. So I walk over, you're, you're like a younger guy, right? To me, I mean, I was probably like 38 or something like at that time, you were a younger dude. But I walk over and you're like looking at me, you're like crouched down behind this wall. And I was like, hey, bro. What do, what do you think you guys should be doing right now? And you're like, you look around, you're like, we should get in that fucking building right now. And I was like, fucking make it happen. And the look on your face, it was like I flipped a switch as a, as a human. Where you realized, bro, I know what to do. I'm a freaking frog man. I can make this shit happen. And you're like, all right, everyone.

• 40:28Jocko Willink?

  Get to that building right now. We're going to strong point it. And sure enough, everyone did it. Yeah. And I was like, hell yeah. That's what I'm talking. That was one of those moments in my, in my learning voyage. Where I was like, yeah, dude, if a, if someone. Can step up as a leader, doesn't matter who they are in the platoon. And I knew this from when I was a young guy. That's the shit I was doing when I was a young guy. And it's a real testament to what that that kind of quote that I started off this off with is like, if you have good guys in the platoon, the platoon is going to win. They're going to figure out a way to win. And that was that moment. That's, that's why I remembered you. Like from that moment on, I was like, yeah, that dude's a freaking stud. And, and that was just a badass thing. And then I ended up, you know, I then I found out you trained jiu jitsu, you know?

• 41:13Jocko Willink?

  Which was like, once I found out you trained jiu jitsu.

• 41:16Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent. Let's make this guy freaking master chief of the Navy as far as.

• 41:22Jocko Willink?

  Uh, but yeah, that's what you need and, and platoons have that. And like I said, the only time

• 41:28Jocko Willink?

  a platoon really fails, occasionally it's because they just don't have one person like that. Occasionally that happens. It doesn't happen very often. But what, what can happen is you can have some leaders in there, some studs in there, but you have one really bad leader that, you know, like in that situation, you could had a leader that said, hey Bates, shut the fuck up. You know, you're not in charge. Like that can happen.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:50Jocko Willink?

  And you watched it happen. Maybe it's the platoon chief, maybe it's the OIC. Hey, you just keep staying in your lane, right? Stay in your pay grade. Like that shit actually happens. It doesn't happen very often.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:59Jocko Willink?

  But if you have a guy that's a little bit insecure or whatever, and they'll be like, Bates, you need to stay in your lane. And it bothers them.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:06Jocko Willink?

  And that's when you have actual platoon failures where we have to recycle them, or maybe we got a shit can. The platoon chief, but it happens pretty, because usually a platoon chief or an OIC is like, dude, they're freaking stoked that they got a stud. Like Bates is out there making shit happen. And they're like, cool. Hey, good job. Thank you. You know, which is how it should be.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:23Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's what we want. You want decentralized command. You want people to step up and lead. So that left a huge impression on me, you know, and there was always, there was always a guy in the task unit like that. There was always like a, a Ryan Bates in there. You know, JP Danelle was like that when he was in my tasking. JP was that guy. I was like, oh, and there was, there was a few of them, but JP I'd be like, hey JP, and he'd be like, freaking ready to go, you know, like ready to slay and make shit happen. He could do it. And there's always, you know, usually there's two, three guys, two, three pipe hitting, E fours, E fives, E sixes that they're, they're going to make shit happen. They're going to win. They're going to find a way to win. And that's what makes it awesome.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Also too, like I always think like, uh, for leadership. People that get too micromanage, right? And they kill the vibe of the guy that's trying to do it, right? I always think, and I was, you know, Dan Luna taught me this. He's like, let your boys work. You know, if they, maybe they don't get from A to B the way you want them to, but they get from A to B and they make it happen. Let your boys work. If you start taking away the power, they're not going to fricking work, you know? So, yeah, I always, yeah, there is leaders out there that don't let you do that micromanaging too much. They want it their way, anal, but no, let your guys get after it, you know? Because we're a bunch of alphas, right? We're a bunch of alphas. We all want to get it, you know? So like, if you let them, let us think about, we're all, we're all pretty smart, you know? Let's get to work, let them work, you know? And then that gives them powers, the platoon, and then they just fucking take off like our whole wrecking crew, you know?

• 43:44Jocko Willink?

  And that's, that's the unstoppable shit. That's a freaking great seal platoon.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:48Jocko Willink?

  That's what it boils down to. Uh, but yeah, I wish I had like a helmet cam or something. Cause dude, I can remember the look on your face. It was like, oh shit. It was like, I can do this. Like, like I can do this. It was kind of like, I can do this. Oh, I could do this. And you fricking made it happen.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Well, you know, at that time, that platoon I was with, we kind of had a micromanager, right? And, you know, it was, and at that time, when you, when you said that, you know? You know, most of the guys in the teams looked up to you because they already came back from Iraq and you had those stories and stuff like that. And when you come up and be like, hey, get to work. I'm like, fuck yes.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Like you, I had the permission now to fucking make things happen, you know?

• 44:31Jocko Willink?

  The debrief, Jaco told me I could do it.

• 44:38Jocko Willink?

  And that was, so, so then after that, you got, they put together like a, like a handpicked team to go to Afghanistan?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, because obviously Iraq was kind of closing down. They're doing more police action there. And Afghanistan's really kicking off, 2009, 2010. And, uh, so they, so Dan Luna got kind of, I don't know, the opportunity to cherry pick out of the other platoons and, and make a, make a wrecking crew. And he did, man. We, uh, we went there. I mean, he was a great leader. Like he was one of the better leaders I've had.

• 45:07Jocko Willink?

  I was, I was a team one with him like long, long time ago. When I, yeah, so.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, yeah, he, uh, I don't know. I, just the fact like what I told you, he was political or he knew how to talk to. People in a, you know, respectful, smart way to make the, get us more work. And at the same time, he was out there with us, doing the work with us. So he was, uh, and, um, and he was all about like, hey, just make it happen. Don't, don't let's not get all crazy about shit. Let's just fucking crush everyone. And that's pretty much what it was. So we had crazy ideas out there. We were like, we were in FOB Anaconda and this would be coming into FOB Anaconda. We, we're in a Chinook on the way into like maybe 500 yards out. We get RPG that shoots past us, right?

• 45:50Speaker 01

  I think it's them shooting off the flares and I'm like, talk to the gun. I'm like, what is that? And they're like, it's RPG. I'm like, get me out of this fucking helicopter. Yeah. So that's just coming into it. And, um, at that time, the base was getting attacked like every other day. And we'd be, if we'd go 200 yards off the base, we're in a firefight. And it was just eight of us, eight of us. Uh, so ROIC was a new guy, but a pipe hitter. But he was, he was one of those guys just let, I wouldn't say he was like, he like was manipulated by, by freaking Luna, but he would listen to Luna as a leadership, you know?

• 46:24Jocko Willink?

  Well, Luna's an experienced guy.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:26Jocko Willink?

  And that OIC, who I know who it is, is like a guy that's smart enough to be humble enough to be like, okay.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:31Jocko Willink?

  It sounds like a good plan, you know?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  So we had him as an OIC or we had, uh, good guys in OIC. And then we had, uh, just a little wreck crew. We went up there and, and, uh, we did crazy stuff like, uh, like I, I saw a bunch of horses there and they were just halter broke. They're crappy. So for like almost a month and a half, I just broke them out there. My grandpa sent me out.

• 46:49Jocko Willink?

  What's halter broke?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  You can't ride them really, you know, so they can lean them around, but you, it's harder. They're not really rain broke.

• 46:56Jocko Willink?

  So you can only use them for like carrying stuff.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Carrying stuff. And if they, if you can ride them, they, they don't listen to their reins at all. They're really green, you know?

• 47:03Jocko Willink?

  So how long is this? You get on the ground and you see freaking horses? Who had the horses?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Just the people around.

• 47:09Jocko Willink?

  The Afghan people?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a couple raunchy ones on base. There was like, uh, on a little fob that just, they were just, uh, just really shitty horses. I got some pictures. Pretty cool. But, um, um, Dan, at the time we're high altitude, so we weren't getting the air support a lot. So sometimes we were patrolling in like 10, 15 kilometers a night with like a hundred pounds on our back, you know? And it was fricking sucky. So I was like, hey dude, I think I could break some of these horses and get them set up and we can do off horseback. And he was like, do it. Alright, so my grandpa sent me out my, my thing, had him build a post and around, get around crowd going.

• 47:42Jocko Willink?

  So what did your grandfather send you?

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Um, sent me like a rope so I can rope them and then uh, different horses, different uh, like pack saddles and stuff like that and they had some saddles there, but they're real shitty and uh, just, just stuff where I can, you know, work and start working them and like, you know, it's been a while since I did it, but I was like, I was dude, they're tiny horses, like thirteen hand horses are tiny and uh, Brandon Cruz is out there with me. He's like, I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but I'll help you. And uh, so we just started getting to it, getting the horses reined. The hardest part is once they're pretty ridable is to train in the seals to ride them. They wouldn't listen. Just guys like hawk him in the face. Listen to me. Poor Beato, right? Beato's a pretty athletic guy and he's an a- alpha, like the worst.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  I gave him the worst horse. I was like, I joke around, I was like, hey, get on this horse. The frigging horse takes off. Just sprint around, tries to clip him on a conex box, almost takes him off, runs straight into the frigging wall. Beato has to do a split over the top and land in the dirt, almost kills him, right? Seriously, almost kills him. But uh, but the uh, but yeah, we ended up-

• 48:43Jocko Willink?

  Was Beato a horse rider prior to this?

• 48:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 48:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  None of the team guys were.

• 48:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  That was, it was terrible. It was terrible. But yeah, the uh, but we ended up getting going and we did pretty, I think like, I don't know, probably thirty, forty missions off horseback. But mostly what we were doing, I did, we did one with riding in. Uh, but again, the seals just weren't good riders. So it was just, it didn't work out, you know? So we ended up using them most as just pack animals, putting all of our weight, taking off our plates, moving fast at the night, you know, and then taking down a compound, bringing the horses in, fighting it out with the Taliban, and then putting all the weight and going out at night again. And so that's really what we did for that whole mission set for those uh, four months. It was awesome. It was uh-

• 49:25Jocko Willink?

  Did you have, did you have, were you working with Afghans? Did you have Afghan like partner force?

• 49:31Speaker 01

  No. Oh, Hazarians, but they never came with us.

• 49:33Jocko Willink?

  So it was just you guys?

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yes. We didn't have any like, uh, how you'd have to take a couple with you. No, so just imagine that.

• 49:42Jocko Willink?

  Dude, yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  There was a good, it was a good time and it was, it was all guys that were.

• 49:47Jocko Willink?

  So were you sending, was, was the OIC like sending up for mission approval like yo, we're transport will be horses.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 49:57Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking epic, man.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, they got me awarded Army, Army Achievement Medal with a B for it and stuff. So I got, I got awarded for it. They, but yeah, they liked it.

• 50:05Jocko Willink?

  And what were the missions? What were you guys, like what was the mission that you would be doing?

• 50:08Speaker 01

  So.

• 50:09Jocko Willink?

  Like you're going into a compound, who's selecting the compound? What are you looking for?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Intel in the area, they would say Taliban, Taliban safe havens. Like maybe they use caches there or they house them when they come through. So we would get that intel from the people in town because most of the people in Afghanistan, they don't like the Taliban, like a gang, you know? So, and it was a very heavily Hazarian, which the posh to the Taliban really persecuted the, the Hazarian. So they, they helped out a lot too. And plus the Taliban at the time were, they're making IEDs with kids toys on them and little kids are getting blown up left and right. So, so the town was really kind of on our side and they would give us the people that in the area that we used to house them. We'd go in there, take down the thing, turn

• 50:53Speaker 01

  in and find the caches. And then honestly, like I'll show you the videos, like I'd just get on the loudspeaker and I'd say Taliban like a shoozy Yankee, saying like you fight like girls, come fight us. And they would come out and fight. And it's weird too, because sun would rise, they'd fight for us, they'd fight all day. We would, I was a sniper during that too. So I'd snipe at them. We'd have guys that flank them and then they'd stop for, from 12 to 1 to do prayer. And then come the two o'clock, here's the fight go again. And before it comes down, the sun comes down, they're out. So it was, it was good. Nobody, nobody, we did have one, CNNS, he got his legs blown off in the very first of that, you know, Dan Kenoson?

• 51:31Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was our deployment on that deployment. So, but other than that, everybody else, nobody, that happened literally in the first like week.

• 51:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was his, that was his first.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was turnover ops, turnover ops. Yeah. The, but that happened in the first.

• 51:44Jocko Willink?

  Turnover ops was always a little sketchy.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're always a little sketchy. It's always right when the guys are leaving. Yeah. But, but yeah, that, that whole deployment, nobody got hurt after that. You know, some people got shot in their plates, but everybody came home safely other than, and even, you know, CNNS came back, he just lost his legs, you know? But, but yeah, it was a good deployment.

• 52:03Jocko Willink?

  And what was your op tempo like? Like how often were you going out?

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Every other day, every two days. It was a lot. It was good.

• 52:10Jocko Willink?

  And and thirty or forty of those was on was bringing them horses with you. How many horses would you take?

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Maybe three or four and put our weight on them. You know, we would we would go out with um with mortars a lot. We'd Beato was like a frickin idiot savant with that frickin mortar. Cause it's handheld. You know how you're doing the little handheld. He'd just be like, I'm like, the fuck? He was good with that mortar, man. Um, and then I put my sniper rifle, a bunch of stuff. We would take out a bunch of law rockets. Uh, we had a good story. The the DA was on on one and they were burning hash on the compound and I was on the roof. It was kind of blowing in on me.

• 52:47Jocko Willink?

  Getting ready to pop positive.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, man, it's just boom. We started getting hit, right? And everybody jumps off. It's me, me and a couple of the guys up there and uh my new guy throws a grenade out and he's a little bit whatever feeling a little lightheaded. I was like, are they that close? Like, nah, man, I just want to throw a grenade.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  People are throwing up law rockets. I'm shooting. I'm like, I have no idea where that went.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  I look at Brendan Cruz, he's sitting with me and he's on the ALGL, the whole thing that breaks down. He takes two rounds right in the screen. He's like, I was like, get down. He's like, oh shit.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  That was that was one of our deployments on it. But yeah, we used to take DEA if they found um different stuff they burned it on. But if you're sitting there for a long time.

• 53:34Jocko Willink?

  And you guys that use no vehicles at all?

• 53:37Speaker 01

  No, not really. We would uh.

• 53:40Jocko Willink?

  Kind of nice.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Very rarely. Like it's it's really sketchy there because if you're in bad air, there's really only one. It's not like you're in a city where you can take different routes. Like a couple of times I was in a vehicle, I'm like, we're getting blown up. It's gonna happen, dude. We had those weird things with the tires in front of it that's supposed to roll. I don't know what that that's gonna do though.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  But uh, but no, mostly everything was, oh, we did have side by sides. I think we're the first platoon to use those side by sides out there. And we broke them all by the end. They're all for trash, but uh, but mostly just patrolling, patrolling. Helos a lot of times, but high altitude, you always need those Chinooks. So uh, um, if we couldn't get the air, you'd just be patrolling in most of the time. So, but it was, if you, like, everything I would think, you know, and it'd be eight of us. We're cruising some horses and I'm pointing, I'm way up there. I just like cruising. You know, you had to use those AC 130s overhead. I felt like a lion pride is cruising through like the, the valleys, ready to get after it, you know? It was, it was a good deployment, man.

• 54:44Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys do like immediate action drills with the horses? Did you talk about how it was gonna go down?

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, we talked about it. We got in a like, an IAD coming back and we, it was shitty because we were coming through a freshly plowed, um, like, uh, farm or something. So we're stepping in like knee high. And the horse is bounding back with us. We're getting shot, we're shooting, moving back, boom, boom, boom, boom, getting back to the compound. It was probably a good like 500 yards where I and I are doing those immediate action drills all the way back. I'm like moving through this just plowed fricking field and the horses stayed with us the whole time, dude.

• 55:24Jocko Willink?

  Without you holding on to them? They just knew that you were?

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. At the end, they were kind of like, uh, I spent so much time with them. I had this one named Whiskey. He was a little stud dude. Yeah. They actually tried to get where I could take him back with me. They were trying to put in paperwork. I was like, where am I gonna put him at? I live in PB.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  I mean, I'll roll around PB with my, my horse, you know? But uh, he was, um, he was honestly like a little every day because they were just running loose in our compound kind of thing. And so every day you'd just wake up and I'd be like, Whiskey, come over there, eat an apple out of my hand. So at the end I would patrol and I wouldn't even have a lead rope. He would just fall on my, my back hip, you know? So it was cool, man. It was, it was, uh, I, you know, I've heard a lot of stories about horse stuff, but it was, it was a cool horse experience.

• 56:10Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  I felt like it was the wild west, you know? A hundred percent.

• 56:14Jocko Willink?

  How long was it when you started working with the platoon before you, um, working with the horses and then working with the platoon before you got, before you took them out on an op?

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Um, we, we brought them out on halters pretty soon, pretty quick, but the, the horse ride is probably like a month into it.

• 56:29Jocko Willink?

  And now it's kind of a shit show.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  So Brad Cavan, right?

• 56:34Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  I love him to death, but he's aggro, he gets aggro. I gave him like one of the worst horses. He couldn't rein him. He just went where he wanted.

• 56:40Jocko Willink?

  You're just being a dick handing out the freaking shitty horses.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because, because Brad Cavan used to get super aggro. I guess pissed and I was like, here, take this one, Brad. He's like, he's trying to ride. He's like, where are you gonna fuck it go horse? Slapping him in the face, like hitting him, like, God damn.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  It was, uh, we visited a school that, um, it was more kind of like, it wasn't for a real hardcore op. It was, uh, in the area, this, um, this Azarian school got burnt down, a bunch of the teachers killed, uh, because the Taliban was in the area. They didn't want any kind of schools going on. And at the, at the end, we pushed all the Taliban out, but they were able to start their school again. So it was us. We rode in to meet them is what we did. So we all came in a horseback. Dude, Beto came in with just a loincloth. And, and a fricking chest rig, painted himself, painted his face half black with a mohawk, right? The kids are just like, what the hell is this dude? No joke, boots with a loincloth. That's it, you know?

• 57:38Speaker 01

  So we, we rolled in like that and, um, visited the kids, like let them thank us and then we cruised back to the thing, but it was good. Like, you know, probably six mile ride, five mile ride, you know?

• 57:48Jocko Willink?

  So. Yeah, dude, those, there's pictures of Beto in that, in that get up.

• 57:55Jocko Willink?

  That shit never would have flowed if I was there, not a million years. I love Beto. I think it's freaking awesome. I'm so glad he did it, but it shit wouldn't have happened on my watch, bro. Zero percent chance.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  That wasn't on an op that we were actually freaking operating on though. So the kids probably thought they're, they didn't know what to think.

• 58:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. Dude, those pictures of Beto like that. They're the most epic freaking pictures. And I'm like, yeah, I, I love those pictures so much. And there's just, just, I'm being honest. There was a zero percent chance this motherfucker would have been doing that shit if I was there, like zero. And he probably would have, he would have known that, like anyone who was around me, they'd know, yeah, shit, shit ain't fly with a fucking chaco.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we kind of had like free rein at that time. So we're just being cowboys and stuff.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  I went, I went more like jeans into like a freaking jungle top. I thought that was cool.

• 58:42Jocko Willink?

  You guys all looked, you guys all freaking got the seal fashion qual on that one.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  It looked like the Backstreet Boys from Afghanistan.

• 58:50Jocko Willink?

  It's so funny. Like that's the kind of shit, yo, I was always like, hey, look, you know, we gotta be professional and all this shit. Like that's, I mean, I stopped my guys from wearing patches. You know what I mean? And they had to do it behind my back. But, uh, yeah.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  But you were also close to the flagpole too. You had to be like that, right?

• 59:06Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah. And Ramada, you definitely, we were, yes, a hundred percent.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:10Jocko Willink?

  But, but even, um, my previous deployment, like we were kind of, we were, we were in Baghdad, but my guys weren't gonna see anyone from the senior leadership. But I was still like, hey dude, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta be professional. That was just, you know.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  That's how you get the more ops, you know?

• 59:26Jocko Willink?

  That's how you get the more ops. And, and look, you guys were freaking in the middle of nowhere, you know, and.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Horseback.

• 59:34Jocko Willink?

  Fucking horseback, like some shit. And you can kind of, I guess, you know, I can, I can imagine if those pictures would have made it up to the, up to the, uh, leadership that have been like, well, listen, you know, we were out there, we, you know, this is important to blend in with the local population, who the Comanches?

• 59:51Speaker 01

  With the Mohawk?

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Oh, man. But yeah, that was. Yeah, that was a, that was a good one. And then, uh.

• 59:59Jocko Willink?

  There's like that picture of Chuck Keating too, where he's got like his sleeves cut off his shirt. He's got a big fat cigar in his mouth.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Jocko Willink?

  And I'm like, I love that picture.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Jocko Willink?

  I can, I have to be honest, like if I was around, that shit never would have happened. Like it wouldn't have happened.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Square your shit away.

• 1:00:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I would just square your shit away. But I'm glad that there was enough leeway to get some really cool pictures.

• 1:00:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, dude, freaking. Is that why Beedle calls half face blades, half face blades? Is that why?

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Kind of off that. Yeah. Yeah. From that, uh, little there I know.

• 1:00:31Jocko Willink?

  Is there some other like, how did he, where did that come from? I'm gonna have to have Beto on to talk.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you gotta have, you gotta have Beto on.

• 1:00:37Jocko Willink?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, you know, he's really artistic.

• 1:00:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Call him autistic artistic.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  He freaking, he just comes up with cool shit all the time. Even when we were out there, he's a really good cook, amazing cook. Like, like Michelin star cook. He would like, just cook us food all the time out there. I'm like, hey, man, cook us up some gourmet, maybe like truffle salt, fricking eggs and that kind of stuff. Yeah. I don't know, he's just really creative. He's a creative guy, man. Cause remember, he almost, he also built that BNS Brewery too. He's.

• 1:01:05Jocko Willink?

  What's BNS Brewery?

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Ah, he had a brewery, he fell off, fell out with business partners and stuff, but he designed that whole brewery that's in Santee.

• 1:01:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  The, but how it looks inside, that's all him.

• 1:01:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's, he's artistic for sure.

• 1:01:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but.

• 1:01:17Jocko Willink?

  Well, clearly, I mean, you look at his knives and his hatchets and everything, those things are freaking amazing.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's, he's good at whatever he does, man. He's a, he was a, he was definitely, he was definitely a guy that was not a follower.

• 1:01:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Even in the teens.

• 1:01:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, it's like one of those things where you have to have a level of creativity. If you're gonna be really good. So I, we covered this book on this podcast, it's called.

• 1:01:44Jocko Willink?

  The Psychology of Military Incompetence.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:47Jocko Willink?

  And the whole book is about, basically, there's, there's people that are attracted to the military. And the reason they're attracted to it is because they see like this good order and discipline that they want to be a part of and that they kind of want to be in charge of. Right? So they see like, oh, if I put on this uniform, people are gonna have to salute me, they're gonna have to listen to me, they're gonna have to call me sir. And they really kind of get off on that. And those kind of people can do really well in the military. In peacetime. And in garrison situations, because it's like, hey, we all need to be wearing this thing, and you be at this time and follow these directions and all that. And they do really good. When things are peaceful.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:02:21Jocko Willink?

  But when war breaks out, they kind of lose their minds, because all of a sudden, like, wait a second, the enemy didn't do what I thought they were gonna do. And the enemy wasn't supposed to do that. And they kind of fall apart and their guys do things that they didn't expect. And so they kind of fall apart. So you want to have that good combination. And, and that's what you want in a platoon. In a platoon, you want like, a couple of guys that are like, yo, dude, we need to follow the rules. And a couple of guys that need to be like, yo, we need to like, bend, bend the rules a little bit and make this happen. And you want to have that good combination. And then, of course, you want to have somebody that's overall in charge. It's like, all right, we can bend these and that's going a little far. So put a, put a freaking pair of pants on, Beto.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  Just crown him a little bit.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  All right, let's, let's rein the Comanche in here.

• 1:03:01Jocko Willink?

  And that, but, but you end up with guys like in a situation like that, like you. Clearly there's no doctrine for, okay, we're in this area of operations, we're going to start breaking horses and utilizing them for our transport. That's not a, that's not a thing. You're probably the first, well, you, you know, you're definitely not many SEALs.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Jocko Willink?

  Have gotten on horseback and gone, I know there's a bunch of SF guys that did it, um, too, like early in the war.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25Jocko Willink?

  But it's just not a normal thing and you thought outside the box and for lack of a better word, but you, you have a creative sense like, oh, we can make this happen. And then that's, that ends up with a really positive result.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:03:36Jocko Willink?

  And so those are the kind of things you want in the SEAL teams, you want, and in the military in general, you want to have people that are like, okay, cool. I can see what we're doing. I get it. I understand the constraints, but hey, we could probably do this too. That's what you want.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. I think that's, it's bred in us even from, uh, buds, you know, we're all, we're all kind of equals, right? I think that's why I like the teams. Everybody says that their force is the best. What I like about the teams is everybody gets a seat at the table.

• 1:03:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  You know, if you're squared away, um, you know, a straight shooter and you're freaking pipe hitter, you know, you get, even if you're on your second platoon, maybe even on your first, but you got a good idea and people respect it. You get a, you get a seat at the tail and get to talk, you know? Um, I think that's what makes us a great force is everybody, everybody has their ideas and, and then yeah, probably one guy just be like, it's a great, a little bit too much.

• 1:04:20Jocko Willink?

  A little bit too much.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Let's pull it back a little.

• 1:04:23Jocko Willink?

  And you do attract guys, like e- even me, as much as I'm like a pretty lean towards like the Marine Corps type discipline type thing. That's kind of where I lean, but still I joined the teams because I saw motherfuckers wearing jeans and boonie hats and NOM and I was like, that's what I want to do. And then I got in the teams and especially as I moved up, I started entering the mindset of like, oh, we got to form good relationships with these people. We got to be professional. Like that's definitely where I ended up. It's not where I started.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  No, because you used to be enlisted, right?

• 1:04:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was enlisted for my first eight years when I was at team one and yeah, it was awesome. But even then, you know, so I got very lucky and had a very weird career in that I did, I did one deployment to Guam. This is in the nineties. There's nothing going on, but I did a deployment to Guam. That was cool, whatever. But then I did two ARG deployments, which meant back in the day meant you rode a ship.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:05:12Jocko Willink?

  And so I was riding a ship. I'm working, you're working with, there's whatever, there's 16 or 18, we, we got plussed up a little bit. So we had 18 SEALs. And then. Whatever, three thousand Marines or whatever that freaking group is. So we're a really small part and we're working with the Marines all the time. And so I got very integrated and I was a comms guy. Yeah. So I got very integrated with the Marine Corps and how they operated and what it was like going to their briefs. Going with my OIC. Who was taking me to these briefs so I could come up with a comms plan. But now I'm sitting there like in a big brief with the Marines. With the, with a Colonel or Lieutenant Colonels from the battalion. And I'm like, oh, so I got.

• 1:05:53Jocko Willink?

  Introduced to conventional forces and even just the big Navy. Cause bro. Yeah, I know. Yep. Like you, you at least had a little bit of experience with the big Navy. You take someone like Beto. I mean, this motherfucker, he doesn't know what the hell is going. He's like, what? Cam's mass right away. Yeah, like what's captains? We didn't even know what the captain is. They're like, bro, I don't know what you're talking about. So I would have been like that, but luckily I did those couple art platoons where I'm integrated with the big Navy. Yep. Going to big briefs with captains and Commodores and Colonels. And you're like, okay, I understand. So I kind of learned. What it took to build good relationships with the conventional forces. And that really paid dues for me. Cause when, when I was a platoon commander and a task unit commander, that's what I had to do. More, more so.

• 1:06:38Jocko Willink?

  Platoon commander. It was pretty early in the Iraq war. We were kind of, my task unit commander kind of ran a bunch of stuff and it was very. I mean, I was basically like an assault force commander for the whole time. Like all it's all I do is go. Take down buildings and whatever. But when I was a troop commander, now it was like total integration with the army and the Marine Corps. And it was, hey. First and foremost, you gotta be professional, make those things happen. But inside the platoon, like, you know, my guys were saying, hey, here's some things we could do. Here's some insertion methods. Here's some. Ways we could set things up that were not. That were unconventional thinking. And so it ended up being a great combination of that. And, and like you said, that's what you need in a platoon. That's what you need in the SEAL teams. You're going to end up with some guys that are a little bit.

• 1:07:21Jocko Willink?

  Far in one direction. You're going to end up with some guys a little far in the other direction. And what you should end up with. What you should end up with is a nice, happy medium. Yeah. Where dudes are like, all right, we're. We've, we land in a place that makes sense. Yeah. You know, which is what we want. Yeah.

• 1:07:40Jocko Willink?

  You know, I always feel that way. Like when, when guys get in trouble, you know, I'd be like, damn, I wish I was that guy's boss because if I was their boss, I would not shit would not gonna happen.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  You wouldn't let it get to that point.

• 1:07:50Jocko Willink?

  Hey, man, you, you can't wear that. And look, I'm picking on Beto. I get it. But you know, guys get in trouble.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Beto's gonna listen to this podcast like, fuck you, Choco.

• 1:07:58Jocko Willink?

  Guys get in trouble all the time. Guys get in trouble in teams, right?

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:08:01Jocko Willink?

  And I'm always like, dude, if I was there, this dude would not have been doing that dumb shit. Like, I would be like, hey, bro, you can't do that. Like JP Donnell tells a great story. When I met him for the first time, he's like in his second platoon, we're, we're at an island. And I'm like, bro, what'd you do to your, you know, what'd you, what happened to your hand? And he's like, I fell down. And I was like, hey, bro, I've been in the teams for 15 years. Who did you hit? And he's like, I've got a fight. And I was like, listen, man, I want you to go on deployment with me so you can kill bad guys. Do you want to do that? Or do you want to get in bar fights? He's like, I want to go kill bad guys. I was like, cool. Don't get any more bar fights. Like that right there. That's all it takes.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:08:35Jocko Willink?

  I'm not saying JP didn't get any more bar fights.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Jocko Willink?

  Cause he did.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  But at least it was less. JP's such a nice guy too, man. When he gets down, he's a warrior, dude.

• 1:08:43Jocko Willink?

  So it was like, okay, when you, when you, and I always had guys like that. You're always gonna have to be pulling the reins on guys. Most guys, well, I shouldn't say most guys, in a platoon, whatever, 18 guys, you got three or four guys, you gotta pull the reins on them. You got three or four guys, you gotta push them. You know, there's three or four guys that are like, I'll sit here in the tent and play video games.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Jocko Willink?

  Those guys are in the teams.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:04Jocko Willink?

  And so some guys you be pushing, some guys you be pulling back and, and that's all good. That's what makes the, the good platoon happen.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Jocko Willink?

  And if you don't have that, then people do things that they shouldn't be doing. You also, you also have to have

• 1:09:19Jocko Willink?

  the freaking wherewithal.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:09:20Jocko Willink?

  To look at a guy and be like, hey, dude, you can't do that. And they go, you fucking pussy. It's like, no, no, no. I actually don't want you to get in trouble.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Jocko Willink?

  I actually want us to continue to do our job. I actually want you to, you know, be able to progress with your career. I don't want you to go to Captain's mask. All those things?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Jocko Willink?

  Like, I'm not, I'm not a pussy. I actually just want you to do good.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Jocko Willink?

  And I never had a guy that was like, oh, that doesn't make any sense. It's like, hey, bro, I get it. I see where you're coming from. And probably that's because I wasn't an E-Dog.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you had the experience. You saw, I think the best, some of the best officers are guys that were E-Dogs prior. Worked with them and then because they know what they're thinking like, like a guy's coming, you could speak to them in a better, better manner, you know?

• 1:09:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I never forgot where I came from. You know, I, I was never like, I can't believe you got in a fight. I was like, hey JP, I know you got in a fight. I get it.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  I used to hear those old stories that cause I had when we turned over in Philippines with Gud.

• 1:10:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  And Gud said you guys used to battle back in the day.

• 1:10:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  It's about the war of the giants or guess it all.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Oh, man, he's a he's a big boy, too.

• 1:10:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he's a freaking stud. I mean, what a freaking stud. So that's what we're doing. So you.

• 1:10:27Jocko Willink?

  You do this deployment.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:10:28Jocko Willink?

  And I mean, during deployment, you guys were you guys were engaged the whole time. You're doing good missions the whole time?

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Pretty much the whole time, like right towards the end, even. I think even as they were doing turnover ops, um, some of the guys in different places are still get shot in the plates and fricking it was from the start when seeing us when we got there all the way to the end, it was it was go time and I mean, I'm honestly like, uh, I know everybody says they've had good deployments and you know, I I talked to a lot of guys that were on your deployments to like Jason Hogan and stuff like that. But man, it was a good one for us.

• 1:10:58Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  I loved it, you know?

• 1:11:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, one one tenth of what you said.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06Jocko Willink?

  It's like, that's a great deployment.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Jocko Willink?

  You know, but then when you do a hundred percent of that stuff, it's like, hell, yeah.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Get after, yeah.

• 1:11:11Jocko Willink?

  That's that's that's what you came in for.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, who wants to be a peacetime seal, you know? Nobody.

• 1:11:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, I was a peacetime seal for a long time.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then you weren't, though.

• 1:11:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  I'm sure from the day one, you wanted to get after it.

• 1:11:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, of course. It's so weird because we the whole mentality in the nineties was we thought we would get to do one, like if we were lucky, you'd get to do one mission. You'd like something would happen and you'd get to do a mission.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Jocko Willink?

  And then that would be it. It'd be like, yo, we did a mission. And yeah, when September 11th, even after September 11th, I was like, I hope I get to do a mission.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:48Jocko Willink?

  And the officer detail was like, Jaco, this war is going to last a long, long time. And I was kind of like, I didn't believe him.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Jocko Willink?

  I didn't believe him. Now, he was probably more right than he thought he was because two decades of fighting.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Crazy.

• 1:11:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's freaking crazy.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Dude.

• 1:12:02Jocko Willink?

  Crazy stuff. So as you as you're getting ready to get done with that deployment, first of all, did you turn over the horses? Did you try and explain that to the next guys?

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  It was a it was a, uh, now it's his fifth group that came in. And they didn't want anything to do with it. And honestly, too, because, uh, You know, horses, horses feet, if you don't have right shoes on their feet and their toenails grow, if you don't have, take care of that and you're walking rocky, they'll start splitting and turn lame. And honestly, pretty much every single one of the horses at the end were lame, you know, they're all because all their nails are splitting because I didn't.

• 1:12:34Jocko Willink?

  Couldn't get the whatever horseshoes for them?

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  I didn't go, I need all the, um, I mean, I never, I never horseshoot, I mean, I usually had people that do it. So like, uh, you know, you have to clip the nails and you have to clean them out. I didn't have any of that gear, you know, you could try to do your best.

• 1:12:48Jocko Willink?

  Your grandfather didn't send it to you with a YouTube video of like, here's how you do the shit?

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  Dude, their hooves are so tiny too. And like, I could, I could probably do it, but like trying to get the, the right shoes for them out there. And I mean, they were tiny horses. I'll show you pictures. They are tiny ass horses and, uh, we, they really didn't, um, start going lame till like the last couple of weeks. But I could see him, all their, all their toes are splitting. So we kind of handed off a bunch of lame horses to the next guys, but they didn't want any of it, dude. They're like, what? Nah, dude. Honestly, the SF guys didn't even want to leave base that much. A couple of them got fricking smoked in the first little bit that they got there. And so they're just like, nah. And we're like, all right, we'll get it. So yeah, the next guys that came in, they didn't want anything to do with it. And so who knows? I, but I almost got to bring that horse back.

• 1:13:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, uh, uh, our officer, our officers, uh, R O I C liked it and he like ran it up the chain. They're like, yeah, we can work on it. But I was like, dude, I'm, where am I going to keep it? It would have been cool PB though, right?

• 1:13:44Jocko Willink?

  Whiskey.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  Right up my horse. Probably got, got it some chicks that way, you know?

• 1:13:50Jocko Willink?

  So as you're coming home from that deployment, are you, are you thinking about getting out?

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  So that's kind of where it is, right? Screen, like me, screen or get out is what I kind of thought at the time. Um, remember, I never had this huge life, um, kind of dream to be a SEAL or do anything. I really just wanted adventures and do stuff. And so like, I had some adventures. So I was kind of that point at 12 years in by this point, right? So obviously if I do another one, obviously screening go that route, staying for the 20. And then that stuff was kicking off in, um, uh, the piracy stuff was kicking off with Tom Rath or Tom's company, Trident Group. It's 2011 and, um, I think Beto screened and so did, uh, so did Cruz.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  And I was like, guys, I'm getting out, man. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go and you know, it's, they all talk to you a couple of times. I'll be, you should be like, hey, man, this is me. Got a lot of experience. Let's give it back to the thing, you know? I think I came and did the jujitsu for you for a little bit and uh, and that and I was just like, you know, I understand, but I don't, I just want to do other stuff, you know, I want to do cool stuff. So, get out and um, me, Lee, why am I on terminal leave? Go do my first uh, do an anti piracy, right? Did you ever talk to any guys that did it or no?

• 1:15:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, but not in any kind of like in-depth stuff.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  It was a good time. I'm gonna tell you this. So, first one I get on. Flying to Malta, you know, have some beers, you know, I'm single during this time. At this time, I sell everything in America. You know, I'm just living in a backpack. I'm going rogue. You know, I'm gonna travel and use this because you're gonna change your home of record every, every ship. And you work for that ship, but then you're off contract. Just you contracting that ship and you go. So I'm, I'm like, well, I'm just gonna live in Europe. You know, flying to Rome, fly from Rome, go out to Lisbon or whatever, you know? And so I come in there, I get into Malta and at this time, there's like three old seals. I mean, they're old as dirt from like the sixties or so. I don't know. They're not even from the like peacetime seals, but just fat. One of them's called gut, right? We uh,

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  we get in, we fly into Malta, we buy our weapons from an arms dealer there. We bring it on to the ship and then we go through Suez Canal and we start going down the Red Sea. Um, once we get to the Gulf of Aden, we get attacked by one small boat, right? So uh, it's coming up and misses the angle and it's come behind us. And they shoot at us and I'm like, I shoot back, but the other guys don't shoot. I'm like, are we not supposed to shoot? What's going on? They're like, oh, yeah, yeah, we, we should shoot. I'm like, okay, these guys have never been in a firefight before in my life, right? Um, end up getting one of the guys on the boat. He uh, our Navy ship picked him up. I got him in the hip and he passed away on that. And then literally,

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Five days later, biggest privacy, private piracy attack ever. One of the guys released on YouTube. It's pretty, pretty frigging.

• 1:16:38Jocko Willink?

  I watched it yesterday.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  You watched it, right? Okay. The guy, I got nervous when that happened. The guy Pat got fired from it, right? Because he didn't, he let them get in too close, that kind of stuff. So we get in like freaking, that actually goes on for a long time, that whole thing. But they come all the way into the ship. We put the, so that what was hap- I was on the bridge when it happened. There's like a boat, it's off the quadrant. There's a boat just sitting in the shipping lanes. And I was like, talking to the Indian, it was all Indian crew. I was like, what's that? And they're like, oh, I don't know, maybe nothing. I was like, why were the big boat just sitting in the middle of the ocean, right in the shipping lane? Sure enough, as soon as the boat came over the horizon, they released two small boys on us. And over the water, it takes a long time. You know, it's like, it doesn't happen all, there's like 15 minutes to watch it just drilling in.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  So we put the crew in the.

• 1:17:25Jocko Willink?

  So they had, they had like a squared away system. They got a boat to launch mini boats from and stuff?

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, mothership, that was an old fishing vessel and they had, you know, whatever 20 foot skips on it. Lower down, there's about eight to nine guys per skip.

• 1:17:38Jocko Willink?

  And you're watching all this happen?

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm just watching. I was like, well, this is awesome. I'm gonna get my, my, make my little loophole. I get already, it's literally like shooting fish in a barrel. It's.

• 1:17:47Jocko Willink?

  What were you shooting?

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Uh, ARs, ARs, you either buy ARs or AKs.

• 1:17:51Jocko Willink?

  Did you have yours like all dialed in?

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  No, you can't. You buy them from arms though, to get on the ship and you can't really side them in.

• 1:17:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  But really, it doesn't really matter on the water anyways. If you look at it, you would miss a lot, but you gotta walk the rounds in. Because it's hard to tell the distances, you know, 100 yards looks at like 50 yards on there, you know, so. Um, they come in, we put the cit- guys in the citadel. One guy stays.

• 1:18:14Jocko Willink?

  Citadel?

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Like at the bottom of the ship where they can't get shot. So there's like 20 crew. You put all them on the bottom of the ship. And, um.

• 1:18:20Jocko Willink?

  And who's, who's driving the ship?

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  Uh, the captain stays up.

• 1:18:24Jocko Willink?

  So he stays up?

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Some of them, sometimes they don't. It's just us trying to figure out how to drive the boat.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  It's not good.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  It's such a wild west. It's crazy, you know, so they they go down, they come in, Pat, he didn't, he didn't wait, like he let them get, if you if you listen to me on my version, I'm like, yeah, they're getting pretty close. Do you want us to start a warning shots? No time for warning shots. They're already coming and shooting at us and.

• 1:18:48Jocko Willink?

  So they start shooting at you?

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we give them warning shots and they immediately start shooting back.

• 1:18:53Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  And they're shooting everywhere. They don't know where, I mean, it's a big ship. They're shooting everywhere. They don't know where they're getting shot at. They freaking, they hit the boat and then we're over the top. Just that whole boat just gets way and then they get behind. There's a little kind of shooting and we kind of waste them all back there. And then another boat comes in. I was like, Jesus, this is the best firefight ever. Because it's not like we're in a.

• 1:19:14Jocko Willink?

  It's like you're shooting ducks in a barrel, except for you're shooting pirates in a freaking little boat.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're behind, like, we build sandbags, you're fortified, you know, they don't know where you're at. They're shooting everywhere. You're just like, like, oh, man. So anyways, that whole thing goes down. Funniest part is the Indian crew comes up, right? And he's like, so thankful. He's like, oh, he's like, thank you, Ryan. Thank you, Ryan. I am so, so appreciative. Let me offer you my daughter for marriage. No, no, no, no. Let me see a picture.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  Let me see a picture, buddy. No, but the, but that really didn't happen. Then we we get off, we get off in Sri Lanka and then we're off. You get paid like forty, fifty grand. And so I immediately call every friend that I that's on the fence about staying or getting, I'm like, listen, me guys, we fly into Malta, we get a jump on the ship, we just shoot with no dangers, we get a jump off of fifty grand and then you get a party for a week. And he's like, I'm getting out. So like eight guys got out at the same time. And I did that for like three years. I didn't really come back to America. Just, just freaking did that with all my buddies and we did, I did twenty eight ships in three years. Freaking good time. I got a hundred and seventy four stamps.

• 1:20:35Jocko Willink?

  Passport stamps?

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, all through different areas.

• 1:20:37Jocko Willink?

  How often did you get engaged? Or did you engage?

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Only four, four times. That big one and then three smaller ones. Um, we were on the wish way where we got stuck in the bottom of Deb and they were kind of fishing in, but not getting close enough. So a lot of warning shots, but other than that, um, that was the biggest one. So everybody else come on, we're all like, fuck, I thought you were going to get in some firefight.

• 1:20:58Jocko Willink?

  And the rest of the time, were you just like sleepy lift on, did you, did you stand watch even?

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I would set up my guys because after that they made me a lead so I could make my own team. And so I set up my guys, like two teams, get 12 hours a day. So three on, three off, three on, you know, so they take 12 hours and then you're off 12 hours. So always a guy on the bridge and, um, and then the other two guys have the other 12 hours. So yeah, you have all you do. I mean, the best shape I was in my life, you know, fricking lifting steel. I felt like I was in a Rocky movie. Cause you're using chains and shit and we're all covered in rust, shirts off, you know? It was, it was good. Yeah. But, uh,

• 1:21:34Jocko Willink?

  And you say you did, you did this for three years and it was 28 ships, you said?

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  28 ships.

• 1:21:40Jocko Willink?

  So how long is the ship ride?

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  They could be anywhere from two weeks to a month and a half. It just depends, you know? And then I'd usually take seven, 10 days off, you know, flying to Rome, spend 10 days there, sight see, hang out and then be like, ah, hung over one day, be like, hey, you got another ship going on? And like, yeah, we got a ship out of Sri Lanka. I was like, I'll take it. So, uh, and then I, by this point, I found a bunch of single guys that were kind of the same situation as me. So we just traveled together. Get off a ship. All of us have like, you know, a hundred and eighty grand combined with no, no kind of ties to America.

• 1:22:14Jocko Willink?

  No bills.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  No bills, dude.

• 1:22:16Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  It's a good time, dude. It's a good time.

• 1:22:19Jocko Willink?

  I'm sure you invested that money very wisely.

• 1:22:25Speaker 01

  Oh man, yes, I did.

• 1:22:27Jocko Willink?

  Man, did you, um, when you, when you got out of the Navy, was this like kind of no factor, huh?

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  Like you weren't like, No, because I was still getting into stuff and then after that first thing, I was able to pull off a lot of my buddies. So it was like almost being in the teams again, but no officer in charge of you anymore.

• 1:22:46Jocko Willink?

  And more money.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  And more money, yeah dude. So it was, it wasn't, uh, it isn't like I just all of a sudden left the teams, you know, eight of us all got out within the, a month of each other and we all ran those boats for three years. So it was, it was fun, but then yeah, no rules, bunch of money, able to party was, I know, everybody, I know, it was a good time.

• 1:23:09Jocko Willink?

  So then, so then what was next? Is this when you started doing security?

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  No, so what happened is I came back to America and I had a little security company that we set up on the side. I never worked them, but I was able to set it up and we got the monster contract and I came back and ended up doing security. My wife is an announcer. So ended up doing, doing the security really professional afterward. She asked me out and then, uh, and she's a 12, so I was like, well, this life's over with. So she, she's really the one that tamed me, you know? I was like, I was like,

• 1:23:46Jocko Willink?

  What year was that?

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  Uh, 2013.

• 1:23:48Jocko Willink?

  2013, yeah. She just put freaking full lock on you.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, she's built like a good mayor dude, so I couldn't, I couldn't, uh, I, I knew if I was gone all the time, you can't hammer, you can't keep that down if not, so. So I, uh, I was like, ah, you know, I'm thinking about kind of finding work here. Do you want me to do that? She's like, yes, please. So that's when I jumped on and was on the wind detail after that. Um, it was offered to, you know, Chance Hughes is, yeah, so Chance was offered it. He passed and offered to me and I took it. So perfect timing.

• 1:24:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  You know, so it was, uh,

• 1:24:24Jocko Willink?

  And then what did that consist of?

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's, uh, it's hard because he's obviously doesn't have eyesight. So you're more security, um, slice slash like kind of everything. And, uh, you get up, you know, hour before he does get ready and you're going to bed an hour after he does. So for, you know, two weeks out of the month. I mean, you're sleeping five hours a night and it's, uh, and he himself is a, uh, is a very high capacity uh, genius. So you have to be on his point, you know? So if you're, if you're not well spoken, if you're not on point, if you're not, uh, you know, kind of at his brain level or somewhere close, he's like, beat it. So it was, um,

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  It was a, it was definitely, you know, the teams, you come through the teams, you learn how to be a warrior, right? And then you get out of the teams, it's almost like starting new, right? Learning about business, real estate, learning how to progress your empire, all the different ways to do it, you know? It's, um, it's like all the time that people went to college and were starting in normal life, we skipped that. And now we're, you know, mid 30s trying to figure it out now, right? And so it was, uh, it was good detail, him, um, and I was in a position where I, I like to ask questions. Like I, I don't think there's anything I can't do, I really don't. I, there might be people smarter than me, but I'll, I'll work them, you know? Uh, and I'll ask questions constantly, you know? And so, once I got on that detail, I was with him, you know, all the time.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  And so I was like, all right, how do I, how do I use this, use this detail to progress my life? And what I'm doing with, uh, my new hot girl I just got.

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  So I would work for those two weeks and, um,

• 1:26:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's another thing, cause you knew you couldn't be traveling all the time. You also didn't get, you need some bank, boy.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Jocko Willink?

  It's a bank. To keep the hot ones, dude, you can't be a slouch, dude. You know, behind every successful man is a hot girl that pushes them.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  So, so, uh, so yeah, the, um, you know, I'd come back from that thing and obviously, you know, I'm living at the win. You know, you're living inside the win casino, room 560, everything's free for you. Getting paid really good money, plus you're eating at every five star place there. I mean, it's, it was fucking awesome, you know? And, and plus you're protecting him.

• 1:26:42Jocko Willink?

  Do you live, do you live there even on your off weeks?

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  No, two weeks, another guy's coming in, switch out with him, you go back to your house afterwards, you know? And, uh, because, because of his eyesight and stuff, you're with him all day long. And it's everything you're learning, like you're seeing, even if 30% bleeds off and you're learning about business every day, like high level.

• 1:27:02Jocko Willink?

  And you're sitting in meetings with him when he's doing the big negotiation for whatever deal he's working on, you're sitting right there.

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, because yeah, you have to, everything, everything you're with him, you're answering his phone, you're, you're bringing it to him, you're hearing everything going on. And so like, you're just learning and, uh, um, and so I was like, okay, I'm going to build a bar. Because he's in hospitality, you have the, um, his whole empire that you're with, you're meeting with their, um, COOs, their general managers, you're talking to all these people, becoming friends with them, so.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  I came back and I literally just took a hundred and twenty five grand to start building a bar. I didn't even, I wait, I saw my two, two weeks. Monkey see monkey do. Yeah, two weeks off, so I moved my off time to Spokane, Washington. Never lived there before, never knew anybody. What, what made you move there? Uh, it's close to my hometown. Got it, got it. My hometown's small and kinda shitty, so I moved to the bigger city right there.

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  And I was there for like two. Where's your wife from? Uh, Temecula, Cali girl. Yeah, yeah. It's the IE hotties, they call them.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  But, but there was no pull for her to move like down there? Well, at the time she was, uh, she's worked, she's an announcer for Supercross. So she's on the weekends going to do those, so she can live, leave, live anywhere kinda thing. So we both can, are just traveling. We, she works every weekend announcing. Uh, she did the X game, she did a bunch of stuff like that too, or in all the off roads for the Baja's, but those on the weekends. So she would do those and come back so she can live anywhere. So she moved up there with me and, uh, it was. Were you married yet? No, no, she, uh, I actually got her to give me some money for investment too.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  I was like, I'll get, for eighty grand, I'll give you two percent.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  So, so I literally just, uh, came in there for a couple of weeks, kinda looked where, you know, I'm, I'm asking questions about this all the time with everybody there and I found, found a good area and pretty much got a building. It looked like it was an eighteen eighties building, pretty much condemned. And I was like, alright, I'm gonna build a bar there. Did you buy the building? No, just rented out the space. Looking back now that I know of real estate, I would have bought the damn building, you know, but. Steve wouldn't, you know, let you know what was up. Yeah, I know, damn it. Cause I could have go bought that building for like six hundred eighty K and it's fucking worth a lot more. So anyways, just started building out a bar, a little eleven hundred square foot. Did it for a hundred and twenty five grand. Barely, uh, had enough to buy the liquor to start it out. But what I did,

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  I'd ask him questions. What he would say is like, look, I was like, how do I find good people? How do I get known? He's like, poach. Go to all the restaurants around, meet the people, talk to the, talk to the industry people, look, find the cool people and then poach them. And that's what I did. So every day I would have a beer at a different bar, eat dinner at a different, different place. And I would just start talking to people. I'm like, I'm a Navy SEAL, I'm building the, ex Navy SEAL, I'm building a, uh, bar down the road. And I actually got the, the newspaper there to do store around me and I just started doing it that way. And by the, it took me three months to build it out. And as soon as I built it out, I won over the industry and I talked in some of the big, like the better known bartenders in there that started working for me. And so it became successful overnight.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  I think I built it from one twenty-five and I did about four hun- I did about eight hundred and ninety in gross and four hundred and some thousand in profit the first year. And, um, and then the next one happened. And so I'm going there, working with when doing this, but the next one, and that didn't have a kitchen. So the next one I had to build was a globe bar and kitchen. And I had

• 1:30:30Jocko Willink?

  Why'd you call it globe?

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  It's a globe building. So it was like called the globe hotel back in eighteen ninety is one of the first buildings there. And when I dig into this stuff, probably asbestos everywhere. I'm probably gonna die when I'm like seventy. But

• 1:30:44Jocko Willink?

  And the first one was called the blind buck?

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  The blind buck.

• 1:30:47Jocko Willink?

  Well, where'd that name come from?

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  I don't know. Like, you know, those speakeasies are, I don't know. I was just coming up with cool sayings.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  I was looking, because like a lot of those, it was more of like a speakeasy, kind of like old school looking bar. So is, uh,

• 1:31:02Jocko Willink?

  I remember seeing, I don't know why, maybe you've sent me pictures of it or something.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, I've got

• 1:31:06Jocko Willink?

  It was a cool looking bar.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's cool. It was all from scratch, too. Like we built, I talked to my buddy and that was a contractor down in Pasco where I was from to come up on the weekends to help me. Dude, in the beginning, I was no joke hiring like bums off the street to help me hang drywall and shit. Bare bones, you know?

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  And, uh, yeah, then the next one. So still going, working my two weeks, coming back, running the bar. Uh, the next one, you know, Jason Hogan?

• 1:31:29Jocko Willink?

  Yep, hell yeah. He's in my task unit.

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Yep. So, um, I talked, Jason, I was looking for work. I talked him in to come and help me build the second bar. And, um, you know, no, like any part of it, just like come and hang out with me. I think he got in trouble somewhere and he's trying to get his life in order. So he's living on my couch and helped me build the second one.

• 1:31:48Jocko Willink?

  He's a freaking stud too, dude.

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  Stud. Well, you heard what happened to him there.

• 1:31:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  I'll get to that.

• 1:31:53Jocko Willink?

  I, yeah, I remember when it happened and we freaking, you know, try to help it out, help out his scenario.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the, uh, but yeah.

• 1:31:59Jocko Willink?

  Weird scenario, too.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll tell you. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. The, uh, so we built out the second bar. I had to build a kitchen. So I gotta learn how to build a kitchen. Built the kitchen, somehow put it together. And if, listen to me, if you can make a successful bar and restaurant, every other business in life is easy because dealing with sixty employees, people taking from things from raw to cooking them, trying to keep people from stealing alcohol and money, it's fucking, it's hard dude. Sixty people, how big was this place? Uh, this is about, the first one was eleven hundred square foot, the next one's four thousand, but with a kitchen, so I had a full kitchen, everything.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  They did good, uh, the, uh, I did hire, so get it going, they're both popular, the highest grossing bars in East of Washington. And just really from, from when guiding me, giving me ideas and then asking questions. Um, so like, that gave me the confidence in business and doing that kind of stuff, but we get them open. So Hogan, team guys, man. So I'm like, hey, be my GM, like, six months into it, I'm like, ran through all my waitresses and stuff.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  I was like, buddy, I gotta bust you down, man, I'm sorry, man, I, I can't have you. Like, you got, you got these feuds of girls all fighting over you. Fraternization, buddy, you should not learn anything in the teams. So, so yeah, I, I, I put him ahead of my security and yeah, what happened on that, it was a big weekend. Uh, he broke up a fight, the guy took a swing at him. He shot in, took him to the ground, but when he shot in, he put his head into the concrete and broke all five vertebrae in his neck. Yeah, so, that's stuff because he's a stud. He's a stud. He's a frigging physical beast. Beast. And, um, he's never been the same after that, you know, that, he went paralyzed from the neck down. Took him like, uh, you know, three or four months, he started getting feeling, he's, I seen him a couple

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  times since then, he walks with a limp now, but I feel bad about that, man, I just frigging, it's freak accident, you know, but, uh, but yeah, anyways, yeah. He was like, um, just explosive power. Explosive power. Squats like almost six hundred pounds, like gnarly stuff, like, uh, he runs a four forty, like just a beast of a person, you know? That's why all the girls liked him.

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  Oh, man, yeah, but anyways, you know, team guys, I don't, I wouldn't hire teen guys to run bars. That's not a good mix. That is not a good mix, man. We're too cool, man, it's just, especially in those small towns. Uh, frigging, everybody's pregnant afterwards, you know?

• 1:34:33Jocko Willink?

  So you're doing that and those businesses now you're still working for win.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Jocko Willink?

  You're doing this every two weeks, two weeks on, two weeks off.

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:34:39Jocko Willink?

  And that's what you're doing. And how long do you keep this process up for?

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Just keep doing it because the bars, once now I'm married to my wife and we start a family. And bar life is not for family life because whoever counts the money first wins in the bar. So I always had to be there four o'clock in the morning, count the money, or my wife had to. And then even her too, when she was nine months pregnant, we couldn't get the, it's a B story. We couldn't get the bartenders to do their cleaning duties, right? My wife is within weeks of popping. She's like, all right, everybody come in, pays them their hourly wage, has them sit around our fricking huge bar. Serves them all beers. She's like, now you're going to watch me clean this whole bar for six hours, nine months pregnant. And so she fricking on her hands and knees, pulling the hair out of the drains.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  And made everybody in that bar watch her for fricking, you know, almost eight hours probably while paying them, while serving beer the whole time. Made them watch and to keep, they call her the hammer.

• 1:35:37Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  She was probably more like you.

• 1:35:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:41Jocko Willink?

  I remember meeting her. And I was meeting you. Well, I knew you, but I remember meeting her.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:48Jocko Willink?

  Is it Cavs?

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Cavs.

• 1:35:49Jocko Willink?

  Memorial.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, you know what you're doing, right? This is, this is, this is why my wife's a fan of you, right? Everybody's, you know, trying to drink their sorrows away, drinking beers. Jaco comes in with a pitcher of water. Just drinking water, walking around the bar, right? Walks packs this little eight year old kid. He's drinking a Coca Cola, you know, probably just trying to have a good time. He goes, you know, kid, that's 41 grams of high fructose corn syrup. It's going to stunt your growth. You're not going to be nothing in life.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  That's my wife's first introduction to Jaco is.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  She's like, wow, he seems motivated. He is.

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  You'd be a great bar owner, dude. Everybody would be listening.

• 1:36:38Jocko Willink?

  Drinking water, drinking water, serving water. Freaking $4 a cup of water.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  Here, son, drink this water. Flush that sugar out of your system.

• 1:36:47Jocko Willink?

  Didn't you get in some tussle with like her, with your wife's ex boyfriend at some point? Who's like a Bellator fighter or some shit? What would happen with that?

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  Okay, this is a good story here. Okay, so. So we sold the bars, right? And we had this kind of limbo. I was still working for a win. She's like, I want to move back to California to my hometown. I was like, I don't want to meet your old boyfriends. It's a small town. It's Canyon Lake. I'm like, I don't want to fucking meet old boyfriends and stuff, you know?

• 1:37:09Jocko Willink?

  You literally thought of that?

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:37:11Jocko Willink?

  Like, I don't want to meet your old boyfriends?

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's-

• 1:37:13Jocko Willink?

  That's part of your brain?

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  It's a tiny little fricking community. It's called Canyon Lake. It is literally, they live in a lake and they all still live there. She's got like five boyfriends in that area. And they all still hang out. I see pictures and I'm like, dude, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to meet fucking, she's like, sweetie, they're gone. You'll never see a boyfriend. I'm like, alright, because I don't want to fucking, I don't want to talk to old guys that have been with you, you know, that kind of stuff. And she's like, you won't, sweetie. It's gonna be fine. I'm like, alright. We go there. And it is fine. And then I was like, I was looking for a place to train. So I was going to Jan Henderson's gym.

• 1:37:45Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  And trained there for a month. And they're like, hey, man, you're pretty good. Will you come train with our, our fighters? You know, like, we have a guy getting ready for a Bellator fight. He's a Bellator fighter. And I was like, yeah, shoot, man. He's like, your size. He needs better grappling anyways. He's a striker. I'm like, alright. So I come in and so my wife mentioned me before. She's like, oh, my first boyfriend's a big MMA guy. But I didn't really know anything more than that. So we come in, start pummeling, getting warmed up, going through some drills. And he goes, this guy goes, hey, man, I feel like I know you. I was like, I don't know. I trained a long time ago down in San Diego, but never really up here. He's like, oh, okay. Pummeling more. He's like, oh dude,

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  is your wife Diana Dolgan? I was like, yeah. I was like, fuck. This is the guy. This is the guy that de-burgeonedized my wife.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  My wife's 10 years younger, right? So this guy's younger than me.

• 1:38:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  You know, I'm, I'm 40 now or something like that. I'm like, getting ready. They're like, oh, I'm going live half an hour. Guys, train hard, no. I'm like, one more time, old buddy. One more fucking time.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Pull everything you got. Oh, man, for like thirty minutes. I just fucking crushed this guy. I freaking, I was, I might have been, might, must have been wrestling for fucking ADCC right now. Just going all for it all, dude.

• 1:39:00Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  And afterwards, like, I get in the car and he's like, fuck, man, he crushed me. And I was like, yeah, man, good training. Like, drive away, like, fucking, uh, so what I don't know, he's got a big following social media, so he, he tags, he's like, oh, Dinah Dogan's husband just fucking crushed me for thirty minutes, right? So Dinah gets a notification on her stuff and she-

• 1:39:20Jocko Willink?

  Wait, she following him?

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  No, she's not following him.

• 1:39:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's because she tagged him.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, tagged, yeah, tagged.

• 1:39:25Jocko Willink?

  We about to get to some-

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like-

• 1:39:26Jocko Willink?

  Michael Charles wanted to hear this drama, dude.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  Going back to mekula, boys.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  Uh, so she gets a notification that, uh, he says something and then, so I walk in the door and she's like, so how was jujitsu today? And I'm like, oh, you know, don't you? She's like, yes. I'm like, I did crush. She's like, yes, thank you. Like, yeah, but that was my, that was my one drawn way. And like, now we're packing up or we're leaving this fucking town.

• 1:39:52Jocko Willink?

  Before that guy gets any better.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  My one time old buddy, because he's ten years younger than me, you know, once you start pushing forty, everything moves a little bit slower, you know?

• 1:40:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you gotta, you, you have, you do have that wisdom.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:04Jocko Willink?

  You know what I mean? You have that wisdom. You can do some little things, some little, like, you can notice something, like, oh, I can see this guy has a little issue with this position. You can, like, focus on that. Like, you can, you can outsmart some of these youngsters.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  I noticed his takedown defense sucked.

• 1:40:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  Yes. Rinder, in the middle of taking him down, right to rear naked.

• 1:40:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, dude. Yeah, no, I mean, I trained with you. You freaking, a beast. Yeah, it was awesome.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  My takedown, my, my stand up takedowns are good.

• 1:40:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, no, your wrestling is freaking solid. And your base on top is freaking solid.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:36Jocko Willink?

  And you're a strong bastard.

• 1:40:37Speaker 01

  Well, you, you have these weird persuasion moves where you fucking, you did this one thing where you dug your elbow into my fucking, my, you know what I'm talking about? I was like, fuck, dude, what are you doing? He's like, oh, man, does that hurt? I'm like, yeah, it hurts.

• 1:40:50Jocko Willink?

  That's see that's more of that mental but does that hurt? Does that hurt you? Oh, I didn't know that would hurt you.

• 1:40:55Speaker 02

  He rolls persuasion.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  You think he's gonna be super like, ah, but he's not. He's like a gentle giant and then he just finds a little area and then just fucking pulls it in you.

• 1:41:03Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say gentle, but yeah, yeah, I guess.

• 1:41:05Jocko Willink?

  Well, I can be a little bit more hostile if, you know, sometimes depending on the, you know, a quote unquote opponent. Sometimes hostilities do come out.

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  Sometimes.

• 1:41:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, my boy Ryan over here, he's always cool.

• 1:41:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. He's a very smiley, nice, cheerful guy.

• 1:41:20Jocko Willink?

  Like other people.

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  Bruh, whatever.

• 1:41:22Jocko Willink?

  Echo sometimes comes into the gym and like, you can see on his face, like, on his face, he's like, today's the day. You know what I mean? He walks in with that today's the day type attitude. Not every time. Not every time. Sometimes you don't want to be there.

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true.

• 1:41:36Jocko Willink?

  But sometimes today's the day in your mind. And I could usually sort that out in about three to six minutes. I'll have that attitude sorted the fuck out.

• 1:41:46Jocko Willink?

  And I'll be a real asshole.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  Or he comes in all happy. He's like, yeah, I'm doing good.

• 1:41:50Jocko Willink?

  Comes in like, like, like mean, like, you know, today's the day. Like, I've been thinking about this thing and he watched a YouTube video about something. And he's got this little, this little tension in his brain.

• 1:42:00Speaker 02

  We call it focus.

• 1:42:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, focus. He'll have that focused look and I'm like, oh, is that, is that how it's gonna be?

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  Watch Marcelo Garcia, the arm drag. He's like, yeah, I'm gonna fucking arm drag this shit.

• 1:42:11Jocko Willink?

  Some little thing like that, he'll try and I'll be like, shit, the gym's getting shut down.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  You gotta throw him off. You gotta, gotta come in all happy, joyful, like, hey, man, go to, and then take it to him at the end.

• 1:42:20Speaker 02

  Doki doki. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:22Jocko Willink?

  That'd be a good try.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  We're gonna keep exploring. I'll tell you that.

• 1:42:25Jocko Willink?

  Try something. So what was the whole deal with like War Machine and how like, what? Kind of talk through that. Like, cause I know you guys, and, and look, I try, I mean, we were, we in San Diego, everyone that's training, for the most part, we're all chill and like we would cross train with each other. I'd go to undisputed. We'd like, when I say I, we would go to undisputed. You guys would come to victory. Like, there was definitely, and plus we had been at City Boxing. We had been at undisputed. Like, these were all, we're all friends.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  Small, tight family here.

• 1:42:55Jocko Willink?

  So I knew, I mean, obviously I knew you, but I knew John as well. So what was, do what went down with that dude?

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  Okay. So obviously.

• 1:43:05Jocko Willink?

  How'd you meet him? How'd you meet him?

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  We'd been at the Lions a long time ago, stayed friends contact and then. Once I started training with Undisputed in 2003, maybe.

• 1:43:16Speaker 01

  We just came more and more tight and he was just now doing that Ultimate Fighting Challenge. So I was main training buddy. We're pretty much the same size at the time and and we wrestle a lot alike. So I trained with him all the time. Became really good close friends, started living together as roommates.

• 1:43:30Jocko Willink?

  Now, now. Were you, were you like, he seems like kind of a typical guy that's like, oh, he likes to go party, come get in some fights. Were you ever like, hmm, there might be a little bit. Might be a little bit more.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's.

• 1:43:46Jocko Willink?

  Not good.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  It got.

• 1:43:50Jocko Willink?

  By the way, we're about to talk, the guy that we're talking about is a guy named John, how do you say his last name?

• 1:43:52Speaker 01

  John Copenhever.

• 1:43:53Jocko Willink?

  Copenhever, who legally changed his name to War Machine. He was an MMA fighter. He fought in the Ultimate Fighter. And he eventually.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  Bellator too.

• 1:44:03Jocko Willink?

  Bellator, but he eventually almost killed.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  Christie Mack.

• 1:44:07Jocko Willink?

  Christie Mack, who is his girlfriend, then wife, right?

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  No, they never got married.

• 1:44:12Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's his girlfriend, live in girlfriend. They were together for a while and he beat her almost to death and beat some other guy.

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:44:21Jocko Willink?

  Almost to death as well. And he's in prison, I think for the rest of his life.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  Thirty-six years.

• 1:44:24Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So that's who we're talking about. So from your perspective, you're, you're hanging out with this guy. He likes to train. We like, I like to train. You like to train. He likes to party. You like to party. We like to party. Okay. So these are all kind of normal things. Was there any indication that this dude might not have it all there?

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  In the beginning, no. Is this more, he always had respect for the teams. You know, he went to the Citadel. He, to be an officer.

• 1:44:46Jocko Willink?

  Did he graduate?

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  No, his junior years, he had a kind of a drug addict mom. His dad died when he was 12 in his arms. He got his pension. The mom ended up spending all the money and he lost his tuition at the Citadel. So I think he made it up to his junior year. Then obviously he linked up with Shamrock and he started fighting.

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  Obviously, I met him during that time. We kind of fell apart. I was going, you know, more military stuff and they would link back up.

• 1:45:11Jocko Willink?

  Wait, you met him which time?

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  In Lyons Den.

• 1:45:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so this is you're in, you're in the rescue swimmer ship.

• 1:45:17Speaker 01

  Rescue.

• 1:45:18Jocko Willink?

  Like nineteen ninety nine.

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  Yes, way back then. That's when I first met him. Obviously, and I was always searching new places to train, I always kept in contact. He's like, come to Barry Sheed's place. So I'm training, I'm getting ready for my UFC fights. And I was like, fuck yeah. So when I just rekindle him back again and start, I'd just pretty much the main training partner.

• 1:45:35Jocko Willink?

  So now it's like two thousand and are you, are you still in the?

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  I'm in the teams now. I'm in the teams now. I just got it. I'm probably a new guy at the time. And obviously, we started doing, but yes, as he started getting, I don't know. He wasn't that bad until he, he got in a, he got in an argument with the matchmaker of the UFC. I don't know that is, and they kicked him out of the UFC. He didn't know what he was gonna do. And then he started getting into porn. Once he started getting into porn, that's when he really started getting off track. I don't know. I'd go visit him in LA and I'm just like, what the?

• 1:46:05Jocko Willink?

  Like, he started making porn, right?

• 1:46:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:46:08Jocko Willink?

  He was in the movies.

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  He was in porn, porn star for a bit, yeah. And so he was, you know, I'd always visit him up in LA. He's like, oh, this shit's great, man. I'm getting all these bitches. I was like, dude, come on, get back into this. And I was trying to always kind of pull him back. But he didn't, he was always a little bit more rowdy.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  And then he started kind of calming down. We got in that fight. Because of that fight, he went to jail for a year.

• 1:46:31Jocko Willink?

  You say that fight?

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  Sorry, the fight where? The fight at Thrusters. It was a pretty big fight. Yeah. Yeah, we freaking, a helicopter was looking for us. It was fucking nuts. I don't.

• 1:46:40Jocko Willink?

  I remember seeing the security cam footage.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:46:44Jocko Willink?

  And I remember thinking to myself, yo, like, I knew you guys were friends. And I see the security cam footage and I'm like, yo, that's Ryan Bates right there. He just knocked a guy out or like, and, and I remember thinking that, okay, well, let's, let's hope this, you know, doesn't go anywhere as far as the teams go. Cause I didn't want you to get in trouble or any of that stuff. But, but you didn't get rolled up that night.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  I didn't, you know, I just got back from Afghanistan. The process, they didn't want to do anything with me. And honestly, the guy was coming up to fight me. You know, I was just doing that. War Machine only got in trouble. Because he wasn't, he was in violation of his probation for a prior, something prior and he wasn't supposed to be in a bar. So he went to jail for a year because violation of probation.

• 1:47:26Jocko Willink?

  So are you talking to him when he's in jail for a year?

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:28Jocko Willink?

  How did that impact?

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  Well, he had another, he had another porn star. Girl, um, uh, what's her name? It is Jeanette, uh, Madison, something Madison or whatever porn girl and he married her. And, um.

• 1:47:42Jocko Willink?

  She was while he's in prison or before he goes to prison?

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  Before he goes to prison, what happened is, is he was trying to, uh, she got in trouble for doing porn illegally and got sent home. Well, he brought her to.

• 1:47:54Jocko Willink?

  Where's home?

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  Uh, Hungary.

• 1:47:56Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  He tried to.

• 1:47:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, wait, did some team guy trying to get her?

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna tell you that.

• 1:47:59Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Uh, he. Some dumb shit. All right, let's go.

• 1:48:04Speaker 01

  He got her into Tijuana and another still team buddy, close buddy of mine, uh, uses girl's passport with war, brought her a pack. She got popped. He got popped for a warrant. He got in trouble for illegal alien smuggling. See, if you were our officer, you wouldn't have gotten.

• 1:48:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I would have been like, dude, you can't do this.

• 1:48:24Jocko Willink?

  I'm serious about that. Like a little sanity check, little sanity check to be like, hey, this is not a good idea. Wait, did so the, did the team guy get in trouble?

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, he got in trouble. Yeah, he got, uh, he got in trouble. He was a good team guy, so they didn't kick him out. They busted him down. You know, and that kind of stuff, but he stayed in. Well, she got sent to a immigration jail. Somehow a war machine worked with the IRS because the thing that she was doing, the guy she was doing porn with was in violation of IRS stuff. Sometime he worked deal with the IRS for her to be an informant through the IRS for this porn guy. So he got her out. Then married her and got her into America. Then he went to jail for a year for that fight. So then me and the team guy, we had to take care of this porn star wife of his that couldn't work.

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  And so he's living at that team guy's house with his wife, family. I had to freaking give her money for like a year. So we take care of her. She gets out. He has to, he got a prior fight in Vegas, went to jail for another year. We had to take care of her for another year. And and then he got out.

• 1:49:28Jocko Willink?

  Friendship dues are strong.

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:30Jocko Willink?

  These are a lot of friendship.

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  I make I make better choices now with my friends as they get older, you know, when you're younger, you just want the fucking tough guys and that kind of stuff. As you get older, you want to surround yourself by like minded, smart people, you know? So anyways, we get him out, that kind of stuff.

• 1:49:44Jocko Willink?

  Or you couldn't talk any sense into him.

• 1:49:46Speaker 01

  I was, I was like, I was like, buddy, listen to me, you know, like, I'm in the teams and that kind of stuff. I like this. You gotta pull your shit together, right? Well, he does. He starts getting back into it.

• 1:49:55Jocko Willink?

  Um, back into fighting.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Yes, back in fighting. That's when he starts fighting with Bellator again. He starts getting the stuff. He obviously stops porn stuff, but he did a thing with Christie Mack at the time, so they started dating.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  I get out by this point, I'm doing anti piracy. I start working in Vegas and that kind of stuff, so I'm hanging out with them all the time.

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  You know, I had to help him with a lot of like, um, uh, legal stuff, money wise. So he's like, hey, I'm gonna start this company. You don't have to put any money. Let me just do something for you. So we started doing it together, right? Does good with it. He's crushing it. Just says I do alpha male shit. For some reason that worked out. Anyways, he's winning in Bellator. Everything's good and good, doing good. I was like, hey, man, you know, maybe start dating like a nice girl, you know? He was always good with the like girls that have low self esteem. I don't know why hot girls a little self esteem. I was like, let's try to get you with another one, but he was in love with her.

• 1:50:53Jocko Willink?

  He was, he's in love with this girl, Christie Mack.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he, uh.

• 1:50:57Jocko Willink?

  Did you meet her?

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  Oh, plenty of times.

• 1:51:00Jocko Willink?

  And what's she like?

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  She was kind of monotone, like cruel. I don't know, like, not like a crazy wild girl, you know, just kind of like, but he, I don't know, he was. It just wasn't good mind space for him. Like if if you put him with the, he's like fuel. If you put him with more fire, he just burns up, you know? And by this time, we've been friends for fucking, you know, twenty something years or yeah, probably, uh, maybe not twenty, but like fifteen years at this point, you know? And so I'm trying to get him better. Well, he wants to marry her, so he. He has all of our T-shirts and stuff at his place. Got eighty grand worth of T-shirts. And he's kind of doing it fulfilling out of his, out of his place. Well, he drives up there to Vegas to propose to her and catches her in bed with another guy.

• 1:51:45Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know, whatever the real I T V guy is, he beats the shit out of him almost fucking to a pulp. He leaves and then he stays back with her and uh. Wait, the, the other guy leaves after? After war beats the shit out of him. He leaves and then that's when he turned his, his attention to Chrissy Mack. And obviously like, you know, we know all that turned out and you know, um, she's pretty bad and he calls me right after it happened and I was like, buddy. So, so while he's on the run? Like right after it happens. Oh, so he like beats the shit out of her. He almost kills her. Yeah. And he calls me like at three in the morning and I was like, I was like, buddy, you gotta turn yourself in, man. I, I can't do anything for you.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  Fucking you fucking idiot, you know? And I don't, I don't hear from him again after that. And uh, so then I noticed that he, he drains the bank account. There's no money in the bank account. We got all these bills we have to pay. And um, but because it's hit the fricking, uh, it's all over the news, like it's prime time news. Remember that? Oh, yeah. Dog, the bounty hunters looking for him, all that stuff. We start getting fricking, we start getting uh, T-shirt orders like fucking crazy. Like crazy. This is a sick and twisted world. Sick and twisted. And so I'm stressed out because I can't close down the account because he drained it before he went on the run. I don't know what to do. I'm like, fuck, you know? My wife's like, hey, sweetie, we're getting orders in like crazy over Shopify. I was like, fuck, I don't have the T-shirts that are at his house. She's like, I was like, well, they are yours, right? I'm like, yeah, I was.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  I talked to a lawyer. They're like, hey, if they're your company, yes, you can go get them. And so we cruise up and we load up my truck with all of these fricking eighty grand worth of like wholesale T-shirts, right? I'm loading the last box and uh, my, or my girlfriend at the time, my wife now. Did you have to break into the place? Um, we had a key. We had a key to get it. So it's no factor? No factor, yeah. The um, and then all of a sudden my wife's like, are those on marks? I was like, yeah, they're on marks. She's like, what should we do? I'm like, nothing. We're not doing anything wrong. And so I started driving away with the stuff. I get taken down by marshals. I'm not talking like, you know, police force guys. I'm talking kitted up, shaved heads, big beards. Like, I look like I'm getting rolled up by fricking your platoon.

• 1:53:51Speaker 01

  Like get on the ground, get on the ground. I'm like, oh shit. So I get out there and they're, they're kind of tussling me around and stuff and they pull me into a van and interrogate me for a little bit and I'm just, I plead the fifth. I'm like, I'm not saying anything, you know? And, uh, and so my wife's down in the car behind me or my girlfriend and they're talking to him and, um, and I keep beginning saying that and then they come in, they're like, oh, you're fucked dude. Your girlfriend spilled the beans on everything. I'm like, what?

• 1:54:18Speaker 01

  The guy, the detective just started being like a fucking asshole to me like you piece of shit, but the guy, there's a, um, a federal marshal in the front that was ex a Marsoc guy.

• 1:54:27Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  He actually, he's like, hey, calm, calm down dude. He's a fucking good dude. He's a warfighter. Just let's not get too hard. And they let me go and that was it.

• 1:54:34Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  And we sold the T-shirts, made our money back and then he went to prison.

• 1:54:38Jocko Willink?

  You ever hear from him again?

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I started calling this a bunch. Um, maybe like a year ago, like a lot. He's just, he's a lot, man. It sucks because he could have done so much good stuff. Like he's a very smart, intellectually smart guy. He just, uh, just too much, you know? But yeah, he's a, he's in thirty six years without, uh, without parole. It's crazy, right?

• 1:55:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  He was a good fighter too, man.

• 1:55:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:04Speaker 01

  He was a good fighter. Just I wish he would have not been so fucking outlawish, you know? But, uh, you know, I, I like it because it's, I like that I went through that path about finding friends because now I'm very particular about the people I keep, especially now having a family and your business. Like if you're not, if you're not adding or, or I'm working off or like we're combining things or you're, you're doing, you're not at my level or above. I don't got time, man. You gotta freaking, you gotta put in the work, you know? So, uh, I'll never be caught in that situation again with, with that, but.

• 1:55:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's weird too because,

• 1:55:40Jocko Willink?

  you know, I, quite frankly, I never saw any side of that from him. So when he was around me, he was like, super humble, super respectful, like just a totally different person.

• 1:55:54Jocko Willink?

  And it makes you, you know, you wonder, I mean, clearly the dude had some serious issues, but he seemed like he was trying to prove something. He would always be trying to prove something. And yeah, I didn't, I didn't get to see that, you know, I just had this super humble guy that would be calling me sir and stuff like that. Like, you know, team guys don't call me sir. They call me Jocko. Like, here's this dude, he's calling me sir, you know, it's like. And again, it, it, it always makes me think if that individual human being who ended up doing this horrible stuff that's going to put him in prison for the rest of his life. If he would have had some kind of like mentorship or leadership, even like me personally, if I'd have been like, hey dude,

• 1:56:36Jocko Willink?

  what are you doing? Like, let's go over here, let's get your shit squared away. Hey, it's not impressive to act like that. In fact, we don't think it's cool. It's cooler if you do something, you know, if someone can, can get into a person like that's life. And I've definitely had people come and talk to me, you know, now that people that have listened, like, I was on the wrong path. I was getting in trouble. I was doing drugs. And they totally turned their life around. So it definitely is worth it when you interact with people. There's always a possibility you can really help them. And there's all, and all that being said, there's some people you can't help. There's some people that they're going to do things and it doesn't matter what you invest in them and how much you mentor them and talk to them, they're going to ruin their lives. It happens.

• 1:57:17Speaker 01

  Well, with him, when I was not deployed, like all of his worst decisions happened when I was deployed. Right? When I was around him every day, we'd train, hang out, you know, like, you know, I'm, I'm not doing drugs. Like, I might go out. I wasn't a big, huge drinker either. So like, I'd go out for a couple of drinks, but we're training all the time. So all of his bad decisions that he made is when I wasn't around. When he was around me, he's the same with me too. Like, he was never like a hothead to me. He was a crime, what's going on on this train? Like, he was, he's very level-headed, like you're saying. He was only like that when he was, when he's up in LA hanging out with porn stars, doing drugs, that kind of stuff. It sucks. If he did, like honestly, he would have been a great team guy with the right mentorship, you know? That's why he likes us so much because we're, whereas like I'd take him to the O course, like he wishes he could have been done that.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  But then he got neck tats and all that stuff. You can't do that with neck tats, no. But, but no, he had potential. He had potential. It makes you sad. Because he was, he was close. We were close and um, and honestly, he's, he expanded like we were very well matched up. You know, you got that one training partner we were tight with. That was, that was him and him and me. So I missed that. I can't find that anymore that much, you know? Especially the same age, but.

• 1:58:22Jocko Willink?

  We just had a guy on the podcast the other day. Um, his name is Brian Wood. He's a, a British soldier and just like the ultimate professionalism. Uh, he won the Military Cross or was awarded the Military Cross. He, he literally led like a bayonet charge in Iraq. Uh, but he made this statement. He was like, he said, I believe everyone is two decisions away from ruining their lives. And he says, I like trying to work my life where he can influence people or help people if they've made one or two of those bad decisions, right? And I, I was really thinking about that a lot is like, everyone's in that situation like, oh, you drink, you get a DUI.

• 1:59:06Jocko Willink?

  And like, that's the like, oh, like you might, you can recover from that, but if you drink, you get a DUI and then you like resist the cops or you, you know, there's one more bad decision that you make, you freaking trashed your life, you know? And I always try and tell that to young people, you know, like you do, you can make a mistake and you can make a bunch of little mistakes, but you can make one bad mistake and you've really screwed up and then another one and you're done.

• 1:59:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:59:31Jocko Willink?

  So definitely a good learning lesson there. Um, from him. It's, it's, it is, it's sad to see. It's, I mean, obviously it's terrible what he did to that dude. And then to Christie Mac, Christie Mac, Christie Mac, you know, terrible. I mean, he almost killed her. She, I remember seeing her posting stuff and it was, it was just a freaking nightmare.

• 1:59:51Speaker 01

  It's like, like just fucking walk away. Like I wish, I wish he would have called me before he went and did that shit. Like he's like, fuck, I'm freaking out. I'm like, hey dude, stop, fucking walk away. Now you got the opportunity to get a new girlfriend. Good. I'm serious dude. I got the, I mean, like truly though, that stuff, uh, that little saying is like, good. Now you have the opportunity to get a fucking more badass girlfriend. You don't want that trash anyways, you know, if that's true, what's happening, you know? But I also, I don't, I think it was just that, that whole mentality and where he was at, it wasn't good. And I think, I think drugs were a little bit involved too. Like he was doing stuff for Adderall or something like that. And I don't know. Yeah, for all your kids out there, keep narrowing straight. Hundred percent. Yeah, waste of talent. Waste of talent.

• 2:00:35Jocko Willink?

  And then your wife starts up, when did she start up Salty Honey dot C O?

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  As soon as I started impregnating her and ruined her career.

• 2:00:45Jocko Willink?

  Ah, okay.

• 2:00:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:46Jocko Willink?

  Cause she's a model and all this other stuff.

• 2:00:48Speaker 01

  Well, she's an announcer. She gotta, you gotta fricking, you know, you gotta travel a lot. So as soon as we started having kids, she can't travel every weekend and doing that kind of stuff. So she's like, you ruined my career. I'm sorry. Don't be so hot, dude.

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  You know, so yeah, once we started having kids, she's like, I gotta do something, you know, she has good following and so, and she was helping me with those bars. So she learned business. She's 10 years younger than me, right? So, but she's a,

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  she's got a crazy story. She got thrown in jail, like kids jail when she's like 14 years old, you know, those, those hardcore camps.

• 2:01:20Jocko Willink?

  What?

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  She's a bad kid and her dad chained her up and dropped her to the middle of the Nevada desert.

• 2:01:25Jocko Willink?

  How bad of a freaking kid?

• 2:01:27Speaker 01

  I mean, she was running away from home, like, you know, hooding around and that kind of stuff at 14. So her dad chained her up, threw her in the car, drove her, you know where Vegas is in Prump?

• 2:01:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Another two hours out there, hills have eyes kind of shit. And they dropped her at this kid's.

• 2:01:43Jocko Willink?

  Like reprogramming camp or something?

• 2:01:44Speaker 01

  Yes. And it's gnarly. I've went out there and looked at it. I'm telling you, it's, it's 200, 300 miles from anything in the middle of the desert, just this little building. And for a year and a half or whatever, I was supposed to be there for, I think, three years altogether. They dropped her and dropped her off and like, they can't look up from the ground, you know, they can't, it's gnarly. It's like worse than probably jail. And, and they, they can't, they can only see their kid once a year, right?

• 2:02:09Jocko Willink?

  What?

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  And if they don't earn enough.

• 2:02:10Jocko Willink?

  Is this shit legal? This sounds like psych.

• 2:02:13Speaker 01

  I don't think it is. I think Paris Hilton's talking about it. So it's like, shut it down or whatever that kind of stuff. But she said it was good for her. But yeah, the, yeah, it's gnarly. Like their parents can only visit them one time a year if they earn enough merits. To do it, right? Well, the, she didn't earn enough in the beginning. So they didn't see her for like a year and a half and they wrote her a letter in code saying, if you graduate high school, you can get out. So she took all of her time and graduated like three years of high school in six months. And so she was out by the time she was 16 on her way.

• 2:02:42Jocko Willink?

  Does this place have a name?

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  I don't know what the name it is. Yeah, it does. But I don't know what the name is out.

• 2:02:47Jocko Willink?

  And you're and she appreciates that she went to this thing?

• 2:02:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of her own little buds. She came out like all frickin', she's honest, doesn't lie. She doesn't fricking really drink or do anything. She's like straight edge. I'll get her to party once in a while, you know, but like it's, you know, we're a pretty healthy family. She's a very regimented girl. So, so when she started learning about business and

• 2:03:09Jocko Willink?

  No wonder she liked when I was like, you got forty one grams of fuck those cars.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  That's right. Wait, listen to me. I was eating a couple of eggs in the beginning of our relationship in the morning. Quarter to eight. She's like, those are rookie numbers, dude. Fucking get about six, seven eggs in there. Put some egg whites. Come on, protein up. I'm like, okay, Jesus. We should see it. All we do is eat steak in our house.

• 2:03:28Jocko Willink?

  So what's, what'd she do when she got out of this freaking home for delinquent children?

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  Well, she like, she was sixteen. She had her GED by that point and she asked her dad for, for money and she's like, he's like, get a job. And so from then on, she just on her route, you know, started doing modeling, started trained for the Olympia, won top three in the Olympia three years in a row, which is fricking gnarly, you know, um, just like overachiever all the way through. So she, uh, she's doing that. Then obviously I marry her, put her into more business and, um, ran the bars. Really, she was the hammer. She was like, you know, me, I have a drink with the guys, relax a little bit, that kind of stuff. She was like, what time you're out? Let's go drink on the job, fired. Like that kind of stuff, like gnarly hardcore, you know, which is good. I'm more the happy guy.

• 2:04:15Jocko Willink?

  You got that balance that we were talking about from a seal to you. You got you, you're over here going wild and she's over here running.

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  Yes, like I'm more relationships. Everybody's like, all right. I'm like, come on in. I'm the happy guy. She's the, she's the fricking. She's a really hardcore, even with my kids, man. My kids are like, daddy hugs and kisses. She's like, he's like, are you crying?

• 2:04:35Speaker 01

  So anyways, yeah, she

• 2:04:36Jocko Willink?

  You're a check.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 2:04:40Jocko Willink?

  What made you decide to sell the restaurants? Just because it was the

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  Family.

• 2:04:43Jocko Willink?

  The family like

• 2:04:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:44Jocko Willink?

  Kids can't be at a bar at four o'clock in the morning.

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  No, and you're just like, you know.

• 2:04:48Jocko Willink?

  Did you do all right when you sold them?

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. We crushed them. Came up like five times.

• 2:04:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, nice.

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I gave some money for a lot of things that we're doing now, you know.

• 2:04:56Jocko Willink?

  Sweet.

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  Rolled those into a bunch of fourplexes. Um, we got into real estate a lot after that. After I sold those bars, when it was like, what do you want to do now? I was like, teach me real estate. So I got to talk with cool people like Dom Brand, who owns Irvine Group, you know, Irvine. Got to meet with him a lot, La Frax, who owns pretty much all of, um, you know, uh, New York. You know, you got to get to mingle and talk to those people. Real estate, even at a small level, it's the same equation. You know, how you leverage, um, different, different products you can use for that kind of stuff. And I always liked the, the real estate more because if you look at the best families, the real estate families, the wealthy guys, it's not as cool, but they have the best families.

• 2:05:37Speaker 01

  You know, they get passed down from generation and they just build empires. So after that, we went that route. With our money. Uh, but then at the same time, my wife needed a job, so she started doing Salty Honey. Started with 12,000 bucks. Just that, that's it. And it'll do a little over three this year. And she does that all herself, no guidance.

• 2:05:58Jocko Willink?

  Dude, I'm bringing her on the podcast to find out about this freaking school, dude. I want to know what the hell is going on in this thing.

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  She'd be a good podcast.

• 2:06:04Jocko Willink?

  I also want to know what she was doing when she was 12, 13, 14 to get in enough trouble. I can't imagine taking my daughter, putting, or any, I have three daughters, taking one of my daughters, wrapping her in chains and freaking dropping her off somewhere.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  And her dad too, she's, is like you.

• 2:06:19Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  A big fricking dude that's serious. Like it's, it's like you wrapping your daughter, like your dad, daughter's being a thing. It's, he is a gnarly, strong person. Like, I'm not joking. Six, two, six, three, two, 50, two, 60, arms like this, just enormous Viking looking dude, you know, so. Yeah, he was like, I guess they, they didn't have, he's like, all right, he wanted, he had to pay like 80 grand a year for her to go there. Yeah, back in like the, I wonder, early 2000s.

• 2:06:42Jocko Willink?

  What did he do for a living?

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  Contractor.

• 2:06:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I keep pulling.

• 2:06:46Jocko Willink?

  Dude, she must've been off the rez.

• 2:06:48Speaker 01

  She was. Off the rez.

• 2:06:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  Dealing drugs, doing crazy shit.

• 2:06:52Jocko Willink?

  What?

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little, little hoodlum.

• 2:06:54Jocko Willink?

  That's so weird because I, I only know the new.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. I even it's hard for me to see it. It's hard for me to see it. Like, you know, she's the kind of girl, if you give her a couple beers, she's like, oh, my God, I'm so tired. I'm going to bed. And you know, like that kind of stuff. I don't see it either, but I guess she was bad, though. So. But yeah, she uh she jumped in that and now it crushes that. And you know, I help her with that. And it's honestly why we got into um. Yeah, but yeah, anyway, she she crushed it with that and still crushing it. It's grown it.

• 2:07:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So then you end up starting canoeclubusa.com.

• 2:07:26Speaker 01

  So is. Great name.

• 2:07:29Jocko Willink?

  The great.

• 2:07:32Jocko Willink?

  Great name. So canoe club USA, what made what what brought that about?

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  Kobe, nobody can get ammo. And I knew how to get it, had the money to buy it. And I was seeing people buy it for thirty, forty cents, sell for a dollar. I was like, shit. I started with honestly, I just started with a couple pals in my garage. That's how I was doing in the beginning. And um. The guns and ammo world is an awesome world. It's very Wild West, good old boy crew. Like, it's hard to come up in it and it's like. You gotta be an honest person, pay fast, don't try to screw anything over because it's a small community.

• 2:08:09Jocko Willink?

  And everyone will hear about it.

• 2:08:10Speaker 01

  Everybody will. You'll be uh cut off in a second, you know, like. Just because of doing good business, paying on time, saying what you're doing, you know, a lot of times you're giving money upfront and hoping it comes to you. You know, so you gotta freaking know the right people to talk to. And we do, we've gotten caught in a scam for one point two million. Um, we got it back, but it was a scam. There's a lot of them out there.

• 2:08:31Jocko Willink?

  What was the scam?

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  During COVID, there's a company called uh Urban Arms out of Utah. Just let you know, don't ever do business with anything in Utah. It's like one of the uh scam capitals of the world.

• 2:08:42Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, Ponzi schemes and stuff like that.

• 2:08:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  But what he was doing, he was uh taking a bunch of payments from a bunch of different seller or buyers, taking that, putting it into um cryptocurrency.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  And then be like, oh, sorry, your thing didn't go through and then give them their money back and try to make money off cryptocurrency. Well, crypto went crash and he didn't have the money to go back. But I have like, um, cause of all the people that I met in, in Vegas, like David Chesnoff, like we know the governor, everything like when really connected me with the right people there. David Chesnoff is this gnarly lawyer, like you ever watched the jinx? He like, you know, he, if you look him up, he's gnarly. He's one of my best friends. So he, uh, he just put his name on a letterhead and their lawyers like paid these people immediately. So we're the only people out of the eight that got our money back. Yeah. But, but anyways, yeah, ammo world is, is very sketchy, but if you do it right, you know, like, um, you know, now I, I work with,

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  you know, a hundred million dollar companies like guns.com. They, you know, they're worth like 300 million. They buy from me because they can't have people to import. Um, because they, it's on their insurance. So when I import, I get to sell it directly to these people. So, relationships, handshake deals, stay true to your word and, um, and yeah, you get with those big companies. And, uh, obviously canoe club is kind of the retail side, the small, but behind the scenes, our wholesale is what we're crushing with. Um, uh, Brent from Orion, all these different distributors are, you know, a hundred million dollar companies all import and they'll buy it from me right away, you know? Guns.com is probably the best one. They, they do a good job. They, they crush, they crush the market as far as, uh, used guns and that kind of stuff. So I work with them a lot, but.

• 2:10:20Jocko Willink?

  And you're also, what, what's the Gordian, Gordian?

• 2:10:24Speaker 01

  Gordian imports.

• 2:10:25Jocko Willink?

  And that's, that's weapons, right?

• 2:10:27Speaker 01

  That's anything that so like, that's like right now, we're working on a mark 19 deal. Um, but I started that with Adam, you know, Adam Fritz's.

• 2:10:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  He's a, he's a team seven guy. He, uh, you know, went, went that more secret route for a while and worked in Eastern Bloc a lot. So, and then he's kind of retired, semi-retired. I'm like, you're the perfect person to help do international arms deals. So that's how I started with, with him. But yeah, they do the, uh, that's how we import. And then that's how I'm doing the, um, because I had one deal where I went to Poland, Ukraine, to sell 16,000 VM rockets to NATO. And I realized it's not like the movies. It's not like War Dog and stuff. You have to be clear by the DTC, have a broker's license to do it legally. So I didn't get to take any money from that. So after that I,

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  I teamed up with Fritz and, um, and now we do that on the side too, but all, it all works in together, you know? It all works together.

• 2:11:24Jocko Willink?

  And then on top of all that, you're doing the real estate stuff.

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  Every bit of money that we get and we make, we put into real estate. It's tax free. No depreciation. So, and the thing is too, how, you know, if you, if you put in real estate, it's generational wealth. You put it into your trust that they can never sell and cash out. You know, they have to rotate it into another, another investment. You know, they can live off then stuff, but they can never cash out. So that's, that's why I learned from all the billionaires.

• 2:11:52Jocko Willink?

  Good lesson learned. And then you ended up doing this freaking TV show. How did that, we just had Dean Stott on for the second time. But how, how did that come about?

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  Old mean Dean dude, very serious man.

• 2:12:05Speaker 01

  The, you know what, Brandon Cruz got offered a deal and I was middle of doing ammo. And they saw me on some video with him and they asked me to come out last minute. I wouldn't pursue it or anything, like literally a couple of days before the, the, um, the actual, uh, audition of it. Yeah, try out. I had to go to do a go ruck challenge and whatever. And I did it and they picked me. And I wasn't going to even do it. My wife's like, do it. And I was like, God, I'm going to be one of those Hollywood seals now, dude.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  They made fun of him so bad now.

• 2:12:39Jocko Willink?

  So you go, you try out and then what do they say? Like, we want you in this show? Yeah. How long is the filming for that shit?

• 2:12:44Speaker 01

  Dude, it was long. It was like a year and a half.

• 2:12:46Jocko Willink?

  God.

• 2:12:47Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:12:47Jocko Willink?

  Did they pay you all right?

• 2:12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, they paid okay. It's like, I mean, could be more. It's only 90 days of filming, but it's just spread out over a long time. Yeah, but, uh, I, truly I wasn't going to do it at first, but then once I started doing it, it's actually kind of fun.

• 2:13:01Jocko Willink?

  Kind of fun, yeah.

• 2:13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's like you use all the gear. You don't have to do the cleanup.

• 2:13:05Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's sweet.

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, everybody cleans your rifles for you. It's kind of, I'm kind of a big deal now, Joe.

• 2:13:12Jocko Willink?

  But you got rolled up, right? You got arrested.

• 2:13:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

• 2:13:18Jocko Willink?

  So, so briefly on that one. In Kuala Lumpur.

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:22Jocko Willink?

  Which is not a great place to get arrested.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  No, and so we went in, we're training with the triple or the G G K is what they're called. On the way out.

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  They I had didn't have the right paperwork for your military gear and then that that country, even if you have an expended shell, seven years in prison, six cadence expended casing. If you have a light that attaches to a gun, seven years in prison, six cadence. That's the maximum sentence. So just don't go to don't go to Malaysia. I don't know. Um, they, uh, Netflix came back. They got me, got me Laura, got me all strangled up.

• 2:13:58Jocko Willink?

  Wait, so you get, you're going through the airport. Is it to leave or to arrive?

• 2:14:02Speaker 01

  To leave.

• 2:14:02Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  I already worked there the whole time.

• 2:14:04Jocko Willink?

  So you're getting ready to leave.

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:14:05Jocko Willink?

  You're going through what like customs to leave?

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they find it and they're like.

• 2:14:09Jocko Willink?

  They find a magazine, one magazine, three mags.

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, empty mags. Um, they, uh, they pull them out and they're like, oh, they're kind of confused. I don't know what they're saying. I'm like, well, just take the mags. It's like, no, no, no. And I didn't take it serious at first. I'm like, what do you mean? No, no, no. Or what's going on, you know? And, uh, and then that turned into a bigger thing.

• 2:14:29Jocko Willink?

  This is freaking locked up abroad about to go back.

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  Dude, I started getting nervous, like maybe 24 hours into it.

• 2:14:35Jocko Willink?

  So they, so they bring you to jail?

• 2:14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Luckily,

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  like in the jail cell is not, it's like a 20 by 20 is freaking shitty shitty kind of. The guy's been in there for like seven years and I'm getting mug shots.

• 2:14:48Jocko Willink?

  Just gen pop like you're in with a bunch of other random.

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  I was like, I was like, shit, I'm gonna have to beat the shit out of all these guys.

• 2:14:56Jocko Willink?

  I'm the new boss of town.

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  Um, no, but the G G K bailed me out right away Netflix and stuff. So I was on house arrest. But the thing I was nervous is like there's, there's gonna be four to six months for your trial. And I can't leave. And I'm like, fuck, my wife starts getting on social media and reaching out. Everybody's reaching out. I got freaking different congressmen, like Morgan Luttrell helped me out a bunch too. Like I got like freaking. Like extraction teams being set up. I'm like, guys, not gonna get to that.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  Let's be careful here. But it ended up the, the people that actually helped me in the end were the G G K, the guys I worked with. They, uh, in Netflix too, but the, uh, the G G K was there for me the whole time. Like this guy, Pong Young, he's a, he's a stud dude. He was, um, next, uh, he was like in trouble a lot when he was a younger kid and joined the military. He's kind of the rougher bunch, but now he's ahead of their counterterrorism unit. Um, when I first showed up, I gave him a half face blades knife that because he's a big dude, he had, uh, you know, Beatles company DEFCONs. Have you ever seen those? He had DEFCONs on. I was like, damn, half face blades like, oh, too expensive. I was like, here's a knife. Thank God I made friends with them because he's a guy built me out of it. Um, but they took good care of me. I was just in trouble under the civil side, not the monarch.

• 2:16:12Speaker 01

  The monarch is everything's under G G K. So in the end, the, uh, the, um, the magazines were classified as props. So, uh, so the, uh, I was able to get out. It's funny too, because, uh, that David Chestnoff, that lawyer, my buddy, honestly, he's awesome guy. And, uh, he was like, he's like, I mean, they immediately rushed me to the airport, fly me to Tokyo. And I land, he's like, are you in Tokyo? You're out of there? Okay. I'm gonna go to sleep now because he stayed up for 10 days trying to get me out. Yeah. But, uh, but it worked out. It was, uh, definitely, uh, might negotiate the contract to be a little more next time, you know?

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  How was the rest of that film in that ship? It was good, man. And the, uh, you know, I miss it. I miss, you know, I don't get to be a team guy anymore. You know, you don't get to do, shoot and move and do that stuff. And everything moves a little bit slower and not as quiet, but, uh,

• 2:17:05Speaker 01

  it was good, dude. The, uh, I think the toughest guys, I think physically tough are the Swedes. We did this ice hole, right? It's fucking negative 30 Arctic Circle, right? Jump in this ice hole and you come out and fricking, I'm, I'm fucking freezing. Like, how long did you stay in the water for? Uh, maybe a minute or so, enough to, enough to wear them fucking, definitely in the verge of hypothermia. We come out, I gotta immediately strip down naked. It's not like we go to a warming hut. We have to re-warm by running through the snow and shit. We, we get, we get out and they immediately get naked, right? I'm trying to put on my socks and the Swedes are naked too. I'm like, do you guys not have fucking shrinkage? He's like, what the shrinkage? Where your balls go beside you? Are you just hanging like that all naked, walking around still swinging big, dude? I'm like, no, we're Swedes, no shrinkage. I'm like, god damn it, boys.

• 2:17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Swedes, the Swedes are tough dude, but uh, but yeah, I got to see all these special force I'd never heard of before, you know, it's like, uh, um, like the anti cartel unit in Mexico and

• 2:18:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that I was surprised that you guys were down there doing that.

• 2:18:05Speaker 01

  Well, it makes me nervous. Now the cartel knows I because they had to cover their faces the whole time, but I know.

• 2:18:09Jocko Willink?

  But you're the right there.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  I'm not going to Mexico anymore.

• 2:18:15Speaker 01

  But it was good. It was, it was good. Uh, rolling with Dean. Dean's a good dude. He's, he's a, he's more the serious guy joke around a little more. He's like, why are you joking all the time? My buddies, this is how I was in the war.

• 2:18:26Jocko Willink?

  Cause this shit's fun.

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, but it was a good time though.

• 2:18:30Jocko Willink?

  Have you heard anything of what's gonna happen with that show?

• 2:18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's looking good. It got 10 million views in the first week. Um, so I'm probably will do it again. If it comes up, we'll see. It's cool. Like, uh, you know, I've never been in this position to get like sponsors or anything before, like I know Veski is like, I always love their guns. They're badass and Lorraine is like, I got you dude. I'm like, fuck yeah. I'm cool enough to get sponsors now, dude. And my wife, my, her whole life, she's got sponsors all the time, you know, because all the stuff she did, I was like, now, look, what do you need, babe? What do you need?

• 2:19:01Jocko Willink?

  You need some Neveski, I got you.

• 2:19:03Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Yeah. So Neveski is probably my main sponsor. I love those guys. So hooking up with them now.

• 2:19:08Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah. Uh, does that, does that get us up to speed? Does that get us to present day? What else you got?

• 2:19:14Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I think that's pretty much it. I'm gonna probably get my wife pregnant again pretty soon.

• 2:19:18Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 2:19:18Speaker 01

  Start, start a freaking franchise, you know, of kids.

• 2:19:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you need at least a fire team, dude.

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude.

• 2:19:23Jocko Willink?

  At least a fire.

• 2:19:24Speaker 01

  Are you having more kids?

• 2:19:26Jocko Willink?

  Well, no. I mean, uh,

• 2:19:29Speaker 01

  What do you have? You have two or three?

• 2:19:30Jocko Willink?

  Four.

• 2:19:31Speaker 01

  Four kids?

• 2:19:32Jocko Willink?

  Four kids. Yep.

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  Oh, shit.

• 2:19:33Jocko Willink?

  Four kids. Fire team.

• 2:19:34Speaker 01

  Fire team. So I gotta have four then?

• 2:19:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, at least. You should have seven. I mean, honestly, like. You, it seems like a lot or whatever, but have as many kids as you can.

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:45Jocko Willink?

  Like have as many kids as you can, because the ones that you have, they're gonna, they're gonna grow up and leave.

• 2:19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:49Jocko Willink?

  You'll be mad.

• 2:19:50Speaker 01

  Nobody will remember your name if you don't have kids.

• 2:19:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You, you gotta have as many kids as you can and just like, the, the, the older ones will leave and then you'll have more.

• 2:19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:59Jocko Willink?

  Like more.

• 2:20:00Speaker 01

  Do you ever think that like, you know, obviously being in the teams, we were selfish our whole life, that kind of stuff. Once you have kids, like you turn less selfish, right? I feel like everything that I've learned in life, my duty is to somehow pass on at least some of it to them.

• 2:20:13Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 2:20:14Speaker 01

  Bring them up in the way, you know, that's, that's probably my more passion now is, uh, you know, everything I do, this TV show, all that stuff. Really everything is to create wealth and empire that my kids can learn from and crush it further than what I, I, I took it to here and then they take it to there kind of thing, you know?

• 2:20:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I mean, it definitely was different for me because I had kids while I was in the teams. And as I've said many times before, the teams was my priority, even when I had a wife and kids. And you have to have it that way.

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:40Jocko Willink?

  You know, I mean, my wife would look at it, I'm, I hope from a strategic perspective back then and be like, well, at some point, this old bastard is going to have to retire from the teams and then he'll be like, be able to focus on the family. And that was true.

• 2:20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:54Jocko Willink?

  You know, once I retired, it was like, okay, now I can go to every wrestling tournament, every freaking dance recital, every gymnastics thing that the girls or kids were doing. So yeah, at a certain point, it's like, I get to do this. But I will tell you, like, once the kids are gone out of the house, which I have one left in the house and it's like, it sucks.

• 2:21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because you have all the nights, it's like, damn, what do I do now?

• 2:21:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Because you don't, like, you don't have, like, at, there's a certain age where like, those are your friends.

• 2:21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:24Jocko Willink?

  You know, your, your kids are your friends.

• 2:21:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:21:26Jocko Willink?

  And especially for me, like when I got out of the teams and like a couple of years later, my son was sort of old enough to be my little team guy friend, you know? Where it's like, oh, we're going surfing, we're going to jiu jitsu, we're gonna go, like, it was just that. And so he became sort of like my team guy buddy that were, you know, you're gonna go dawn patrol. I used to go dawn patrol surfing with my team guy friends. Well, they're, you know, I'm out of the teams now, I'm going with him. Oh, I'm going to go and ju- jiu jitsu for five hours on a Saturday and a Sunday. It's like, well, no, I'm doing it with him. So you have this little relationship, you know, with your son where, and I did that somewhat with my girls, but it's different.

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's different.

• 2:22:03Jocko Willink?

  Like they don't, they're not always going to be into what you're into.

• 2:22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:06Jocko Willink?

  And, but then when, when they're gone, it's like, hmm.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. What do you do now?

• 2:22:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well now what are we supposed to do?

• 2:22:12Speaker 01

  You're gonna tell your wife, get in the gym dude, we're starting to roll.

• 2:22:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we can let's go. No, that's, yeah, so have more.

• 2:22:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, we're at that point. I'm gonna, I'm, we're, I mean, again, my wife's too hot not to, to bang him out. Our, our kid's too studly dude. They're all, they're all ripped when they come out. They get six packs as soon as they come out of the womb dude.

• 2:22:30Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking nuts.

• 2:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude. It's dude, you know, it's, it's like, you know, and when you're breeding, this is bad to say, but you're breeding horses, it's all about the mare, not the, not the stud. You know, so that's, that, that's the key to having gnarly offspring is have a stud wife.

• 2:22:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. I would say like, my wife is definitely like a, she's a beast.

• 2:22:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:50Jocko Willink?

  She's a freaking badass Viking chick.

• 2:22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:53Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, I definitely stepped it up. You did too.

• 2:22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude. Our kids are gonna take over the world dude.

• 2:23:01Jocko Willink?

  Right, old man. Awesome. Echo Charles. Yes. Well, before that, where, where can people find you? So you're, you're at frogman5326.

• 2:23:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, 5326 underscore.

• 2:23:12Jocko Willink?

  Underscore.

• 2:23:13Speaker 01

  And then, uh, Canoe Club USA, obviously our company, if you want ammo.

• 2:23:18Jocko Willink?

  Or cool t-shirts.

• 2:23:19Speaker 01

  Or cool t-shirts.

• 2:23:20Jocko Willink?

  Or cool hats. Do you have hats on there?

• 2:23:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, of course. So I should bring some, damn it. Yeah, all sense of.

• 2:23:25Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you didn't bring any? No, delete all this.

• 2:23:30Jocko Willink?

  And that's you and Beto doing that, right?

• 2:23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Beto and Johnny, Johnny LeBlanc too.

• 2:23:33Jocko Willink?

  Okay, right. Hell, yeah.

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  You know Johnny?

• 2:23:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's freaking, dude, that kid's a stud too.

• 2:23:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, right, old man.

• 2:23:38Speaker 01

  He runs a, he runs a chat, he's CEO of Chatterbait.

• 2:23:41Jocko Willink?

  What's Chatterbait?

• 2:23:43Speaker 01

  You know what it is.

• 2:23:44Speaker 02

  No, no, I don't know what that is, man. I don't know.

• 2:23:46Speaker 01

  Oh, you have to ask about that. He's, he runs a, it's like almost a three billion dollar company. He runs it all.

• 2:23:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, can you give me a hint as to what it is?

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  It's, it's the biggest porn company in the world.

• 2:23:56Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, he runs it all. He's the backside. He develops. Like, he doesn't actually do that, but it's like.

• 2:24:01Jocko Willink?

  He's not in the movies. He's not in front of the camera.

• 2:24:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, he runs that whole company. He freaking, uh, it started like right in the beginning of, uh, of when they first, um, were, he was like the third coder to come on. Because I brought him on those piracy trips with him and he started being a coder. I'm like, what are you gonna be a coder for?

• 2:24:17Jocko Willink?

  Dork.

• 2:24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, fast forward. Now's the, now's the chief of staff for the whole company, dude.

• 2:24:21Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's crushed it. But him, uh, him, Beto and me are, are Canoe Club.

• 2:24:25Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 2:24:25Speaker 01

  And then we'll have, we have some other stuff coming up. And then also, yeah, watch, watch the show on Netflix.

• 2:24:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:30Speaker 01

  Toughest Forces on Earth.

• 2:24:31Jocko Willink?

  The toughest forces on earth. I've watched a few episodes. It's definitely entertaining. I get a kick out of it because you're on it, you know? And it's cool. I know Dean too, which is cool, but I, you know, I know you a lot better than I know him. And you're having, you seem to be having more fun than Dean is having, right?

• 2:24:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dean's like more serious.

• 2:24:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:49Speaker 01

  I kinda, I give a shit all the time, you know?

• 2:24:52Jocko Willink?

  How was it? How much is it like edited down to where you're like, dude, why'd they cut that out? Or why'd they kiss, cut, cut that out?

• 2:24:59Speaker 01

  Pretty much it's, it's pretty, uh, thing. I mean, all TV is a little bit of a lie, you know, but, but pretty much what you're seeing is what you get. They don't, they didn't really have any input. They didn't say they just like go. And I was like, just go. All right. You know, and this, so I just kinda had fun with it. I mean, what do you do in that situation? I mean, I don't have this attribute to be a frigging TV star. It just came in front of me. So, you know, opportunity, brought the passion, the opportunity and fricking out after that, you know? So I was kinda had fun. You get to travel all over the world and like, dude, listen to me, when you're even in between, like you're staying in nice hotels. When you're out there, sometimes you're fricking like when we were in the suite and we were fricking living without food and shit.

• 2:25:36Jocko Willink?

  And you were chilly.

• 2:25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:38Jocko Willink?

  And you got shrinkage.

• 2:25:39Speaker 01

  My fuck dude. I was like, I gotta tote a toilet at home now and a fucking steam room, dude.

• 2:25:44Speaker 01

  Too old for this shit.

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  Oh man. Like hunkling through the jungle, like, I know it's been a while since we did that, but like, you know, doing 10 kilometers through the jungle with a 50 pound pack. I'm like, fuck man. I mean, it gets me, it gets me sharp again though. Sharpen the sword again, you know? So. But yeah, but no, yeah, well you're doing it. You're doing it with them. What's crazy is that the jungles were crazy. Those guys getting a lot of firefights. Uh, fighting those cartel down in Colombia.

• 2:26:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Again, that was wild that you're down there doing that stuff and fighting the cartel.

• 2:26:13Speaker 01

  Like they were opping why we were doing this stuff. It's funny. You show up and they're like, hey, what do you want? And I was like, I don't know. Here's a frag grenade. I'm like catching a frag grenade. I'm like, whoa, this fuck. Uh, I didn't give a shit there, you know? So, but, uh, yeah. If we do another one, I think I asked to go to Africa more.

• 2:26:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 2:26:28Speaker 01

  I want to do the Rhodesian shit.

• 2:26:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Plus you hunt too. So you get down there and slay some stuff.

• 2:26:33Speaker 01

  Oh, that's, yeah, that's the thing. Buddy, I've, I was never into hunting. I was in when a little kid, but when you're, um, getting to, um, Teams, you kind of forget about it. And over the last couple of years, obviously beetle hunts like every other day.

• 2:26:47Jocko Willink?

  Did he ever kill an elk with a spear? Like, he was all fired up telling me he was gonna, he's like, I'm gonna get an elk with a spear. He was gonna hide in like a mud wall like Rambo. And he was like, all fired up.

• 2:26:58Speaker 01

  No, I didn't.

• 2:26:58Jocko Willink?

  I was with John Dudley and I shot an elk and it was, you know, it was wounded and bedded down. We're waiting for it to die. And I'm like, I'm like Dudley. Like, I can, I can go kill this deer. Like, I will kill, I will sneak up on it. He's like, dude, shut up. And I'm like, no, I, I'm like, dude, let me get up there. Like, let me put a knife, I'll put, I'll put a knife on the end of this stick. And I'll get it. And he's like, dude, you're an idiot. And I'm like, okay, but can I go?

• 2:27:24Speaker 01

  You just figure four to ten and got it old school.

• 2:27:27Speaker 01

  You know what's funny is, uh, so I just got into bow hunting last year, which honestly, I love it. Yeah. I mean, I shoot.

• 2:27:32Jocko Willink?

  So freaking badass. Like, you have to. It's hard. It's hard. It's freaking hard. Like, I've, I've been at, I've been at elk camp with some of the literal best hunters in the world.

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:46Jocko Willink?

  Guys like John Dudley, guys like Cam Haynes, like in with the best guy. And like, it is, there's no, there's no one in that camp that will say, I guarantee this is gonna work for me. Not one single person will say that. No. Not somebody that's been hunting for 30 years publicly, all this other stuff.

• 2:28:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:28:01Jocko Willink?

  And they will sit there and drill targets at 110 yards all day long. Not one of those dudes will be like, oh, I got this. No one.

• 2:28:07Speaker 01

  No way. No way. Well, and said, and you're trying to range, trying to do everything at once, but call at the same time. Do you know what Terry Howen is?

• 2:28:16Jocko Willink?

  Yes, I, I know his name, but I don't know.

• 2:28:18Speaker 01

  Oh, dude. Awesome guy. When I first met him, you know, he was even a team guy, you know, I was like, oh, I'm a Navy SEAL. So I was like, oh, were you in the military? He's like, I was in the Navy. I was like, oh, where are you at? I was like, ah, 17 years, you know, and I'm like, ah, I'm an idiot. So I go, so he's turned into my good hunting buddy. We went, so last year's the first time I hunted with a bow. They told me there, this thing, OEF4, it's, uh, Ryan Bates. Organization, it's, uh, you should do that with us, dude. We get, uh, We get donated tags to us so we can hunt all those units in Arizona. Sweet. They're frigging gnarly. Oh, yeah. Four hundred plus bowls or something, you know, and they, uh, because when people draw and they can't do the hunt, they don't want to lose their points. They get to donate it to us and then we get to hunt and they keep their points. Damn.

• 2:29:01Speaker 01

  So, uh, so I go out there with Terry, right? And learn how to, they told me to get it. I had got a bow tag. So I got a bow literally one week before that. I'm trying to learn how to shoot. Not good. Not good, no. So I get out there fricking, we stocking like a mile and a half. I fricking pull back on a elk shoot, hit a branch, miss it. And they're all like, this is the last time you're probably, you're not going to get another shot. I'm like, God dang it, man. I'm just pissed off, right? Next day, I'm, I can only do a cow call, call one in, bedded down. Terry's like, I'm coming to you right now. We're gonna, we're gonna get this guy. Okay. All right. Comes in, as soon as he comes in, steps up, starts moving. We're moving on it, stocking in, um, get close, frigging shoot, hit another branch, miss it. Damn. I freak out at this point. I'm like, fuck, he takes off. I'd start sprinting over the mountain, down the mountain, take another shot, miss him.

• 2:29:46Speaker 01

  I'm sprinting for about two and a half miles. Terry's trying to catch up to me the whole time, calling me on the radio, being like, calm down.

• 2:29:54Speaker 01

  He'll come back to us, but I don't hear. I'm just sprinting, take another shot, waste four arrows at this thing, right? He finally catches up and he's like, bro, were you even a fucking sniper?

• 2:30:05Speaker 01

  Dude, what did I get myself into? You're just running through the forest after an elk? You know, I'm like, I almost got him. Just calm the fuck down, dude. So, so he, uh, it was like, so I learned a lot on that one. And at the end I did. Did you get one? Yeah, I got one. Yeah. Double long shot, seventy yards. It was good. That's a good shot. Yeah. Well, he was teaching me like, in the beginning, I was missing everything and he like sat with me every day and like. Well, if you had your bow for one week, yeah, that's not good. So like during that two weeks I was hunting, he, uh, he taught me. Now, now I'm good to go. What does he do for a living? Just hunts, hunts and he does, uh, teaches sniper school, but, um, he's sponsored by a couple people. He's retired. You know, he did, I think he did seventeen years of Darnick, North Darnick. And so now he's just hunts a lot, but, uh, Hell, yeah.

• 2:30:46Speaker 01

  He's a cool chill guy. Never, but until you take off running, like, we ran out of water and he's like, damn, bro. Hunting with you fucking sucks.

• 2:30:58Speaker 01

  But yeah, I love Bohun, man. That's the best.

• 2:31:01Jocko Willink?

  Do you have a range? Can you shoot at your house?

• 2:31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I set up 120 yard at my house.

• 2:31:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, sweet.

• 2:31:07Speaker 01

  I got a big, long, couple acre lot. So I got that. And then there's a couple of live courses by us, too.

• 2:31:12Jocko Willink?

  Sweet.

• 2:31:13Speaker 01

  Where you can walk around.

• 2:31:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:31:14Speaker 01

  Vegas is cool, man.

• 2:31:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's weird. You know who Alex Honnold is?

• 2:31:18Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:31:19Jocko Willink?

  He's like the rock climber that climbed El Cap amongst a billion other things. But he's like the best rock climber in the world.

• 2:31:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:31:26Jocko Willink?

  I guess, can I say that? There's probably someone that's like, well, actually, he's not technical, but whatever.

• 2:31:30Speaker 01

  He's a good rock climber.

• 2:31:31Jocko Willink?

  Freaking badass. He climbed El Capitan in Yosemite.

• 2:31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:36Jocko Willink?

  With no ropes. Like, the dude's freaking gnarly.

• 2:31:38Speaker 01

  Is he the guy with the Netflix scene, too? Doesn't he have a show?

• 2:31:40Jocko Willink?

  Yes, he does. I think it's on Netflix.

• 2:31:42Speaker 01

  Or is it HBO or some that?

• 2:31:46Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, but he made the movie called Free Solo.

• 2:31:48Speaker 01

  Yes, I know what you're talking about. I watched it. That's nuts.

• 2:31:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so he came on, but he he lives in Vegas. And everyone's like, why the hell would you move to Vegas? And he says you can, he said 20 minutes drive from Vegas, and you're at a trailhead. 20 minutes later, you're at a place where you can just die alone because no one will ever find you because you're that remote.

• 2:32:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:32:06Jocko Willink?

  So Vegas has a lot of uncovered gems once you get out of the strip.

• 2:32:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, we live towards, we live on Lake Meter, like maybe 10 minutes from Lake Mead, but then we have a river house down on the, because remember dumping down to Lake Mead is the Colorado River and then goes down to Lake Havasu and stuff. So we have a river house on the river there. So during the summer times, we're on the river with a dock. And then we cruise down to Lake Havasu and there's like, you know, little restaurants and stuff along the way. And then when you're winter time, you're you're in the in Vegas. And Vegas is good because it's the best food in the world. So like date night is always.

• 2:32:40Jocko Willink?

  Plus, you can fly direct to a lot of different places because a lot of places fly direct to Vegas.

• 2:32:44Speaker 01

  Because the casinos subsidize the airport to get cheaper flights and more directs into it to get people quicker to Vegas. To Vegas, man.

• 2:32:51Jocko Willink?

  Let's go.

• 2:32:53Speaker 01

  And honestly, I call my crew like the Vegas Illuminati. They're freaking badass like. Like all the people I met through the wind, it's like the people that run that town. So if you ever come, let me take you out to the best restaurants and stuff, dude. It's awesome.

• 2:33:06Jocko Willink?

  I, well, I used to go to Vegas a lot for UFC when I was cornering a bunch of people, but I still go occasionally.

• 2:33:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, dude. Honestly, we love it. You know, it's good. And like, you know, even, even the governor, Joe Lombardo, all those guys are all part of a little crew there. And it's good, good, good town. It's still got like a cool underbelly. You know, they got the, got the crew, you know, got my homie, Jave Chestnut. You'll never get in trouble again.

• 2:33:32Speaker 01

  Listen, maybe look him up. He's like literally the best lawyer, best lawyer in the world if he comes up top seven. So,

• 2:33:37Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 2:33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you see, we can go and have a good time. You'll never get in trouble.

• 2:33:41Jocko Willink?

  Freaking bonus program. Got you out of the KL freaking detention center. So that's good. All right, Echo Charles, what do you got for questions?

• 2:33:49Speaker 02

  It seems kind of random, but back when you were protecting the, the ships, right? Against the pirates. And you said that it's hard to gauge distance on the water.

• 2:34:00Speaker 02

  Why is that?

• 2:34:01Speaker 01

  Well, everything always looks closer than it is on the water, you know? So you can't like, you know, if you're on land, you can kind of tell between football fields, right? But when you're on the water, you can't really tell that. It's hard. It's hard to tell that stuff. But what's different about the water than is but land is when you shoot into the water, you get immediate feedback. So instead of trying to shoot and not know where your rounds are going, it's better to shoot short and then walk your rounds into the person. You know, that way, and then say if you're shooting at the person, but you keep missing, you're not knowing where he's missing. But if you shoot before, it's kind of like using the A dub to like walking around or an automatic or a machine gun.

• 2:34:39Speaker 01

  But yeah, if you're over the water, it's easy to shoot into the water and then walk them in.

• 2:34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Is it, it's, I mean, as far as gauging the distance and the difficulty or whatever, is it, does it have to do with the water like moving as opposed to like land? You know how like,

• 2:34:52Speaker 01

  No, but you gotta, you gotta think too. You got like, you got your ship that's going 12 knots. This ship is going 20 knots. So you have all this change of distance over water. So to try to make a point shot on a rocking boat to, to a person in another boat, it's, it's pretty, pretty impossible. You know, so, so if you're coming, you better be to shoot close and then walk them in past the, past the boat, you know? You should jump on one of those ships. They're fun, dude.

• 2:35:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds fun.

• 2:35:19Speaker 01

  Put a whole hunting trip out there. It's good to go.

• 2:35:22Speaker 02

  Sometimes I like to go technical. See what I'm saying? But yeah, all my other questions have been answered. Thank you.

• 2:35:31Jocko Willink?

  You got it done?

• 2:35:32Speaker 02

  Good to meet you.

• 2:35:33Jocko Willink?

  Ryan, any, any closing thoughts, bro?

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  Um, no, everybody listen, just keep crushing life. Don't be a pussy.

• 2:35:41Jocko Willink?

  I like it, man. I think your wife says that on a pretty regular basis, too.

• 2:35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had to get it tattooed on my wrist because she says it so much.

• 2:35:49Jocko Willink?

  Right on, man. Well, thanks for joining us, bro. Um, thanks for sharing your insight, your lessons learned. Most important, thanks for your service to the country and to the teams and thanks for being a badass frogman, man. Appreciate it.

• 2:36:02Speaker 01

  You too, buddy. Thank you for having me on. It's an honor, buddy.

• 2:36:06Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Ryan Bates has left the building.

• 2:36:13Jocko Willink?

  Did you, you know, when we were talking about War Machine?

• 2:36:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:18Jocko Willink?

  You remember that whole timeframe, right?

• 2:36:20Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 2:36:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's strange, isn't it?

• 2:36:23Speaker 02

  Oh, timeframe, yes, in real life, yeah.

• 2:36:25Jocko Willink?

  Like both, both when War Machine was kind of around?

• 2:36:30Jocko Willink?

  And then in the post?

• 2:36:31Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, fully. So War Machine, actually, I knew, not as good as him, but I knew War Machine, my first, like, you know, eras in your training. So when I first started, um, War Machine was one of the main guys that I would be training with. It was like War Machine, Matt Tyrell was down there every once in a while.

• 2:36:52Speaker 02

  Just old school guys, Dean, no, it was Brandt, remember Brandt? And then, uh, yeah, some other guys. But yeah, he was there. That's how I met him. And I remember thinking, oh, War Machine is kind of a dope nickname. Then, yeah, later on he changed it. But he was always, he was always like, actually cool. Like, he didn't seem crazy or, or nothing like that to me. He's normal.

• 2:37:13Jocko Willink?

  Would you say even though he seemed normal? Did you see a little tinge of like crazy eyes?

• 2:37:19Speaker 02

  Nope, not at all, only, only online, this was back in the MySpace and Facebook days. And only through that, that I was like, hmm, these rants are kinda like fueled by some other side that I haven't seen in him in real life. And I'm gonna like hard training too, you know, like some people when you, when you train hard, you see little tinges of temper or this and that, but nothing, nothing. All normal, like freaking good training, you know? Um, and then I actually ended up doing his website later on, in maybe two thousand and seven ish. War Machine MMA dot com. So, you know, I've, so I had dealings with him, so like all normal, but I would see the stories, you know, like in the news and then like, you know, that thrust just fight, I remember that too.

• 2:38:02Speaker 02

  And he did a rant on, online about that, like freaking, oh, they just wrongly accused me and, and I kind of for whatever, cause I knew him in real life. I was like, fuck, I gotta believe him. Like, that's how, that's how normal he was in real life with the, in my experience, which was, yeah, weird, I mean, amen. It is what it is.

• 2:38:23Jocko Willink?

  It's another little part of Ryan Bates's, like, what'd he say when he was younger? He's like, I wanna make stories or I wanna have good stories to tell or something like this?

• 2:38:30Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:38:31Jocko Willink?

  He got some good stories.

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:32Jocko Willink?

  Real horseback, like breaking horses over in Afghanistan.

• 2:38:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:38:37Jocko Willink?

  And just making it happen.

• 2:38:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, he and I mentioned this to you before, probably many occasions where I'm starting now to really come to realize, even though I felt like I knew this, I really come to realize that. So Ryan Bates seems like the guy who always is taking some kinda action, like doing it rather than talking about it or reading about it all the time and not doing it. He's already, he's taking steps already physically making it happen. Oh, yeah. And yeah, I guess so. That's how it turns out, right? You got all these stories. And it's weird because he's talking about all this stuff and I'm like, bro, I was around for all of that. Like me personally, I'm popping in and out of those stories. Like, hey, I was part of that.

• 2:39:18Speaker 02

  Just a little bit and I didn't, I didn't know him back in the day or whatever, but I was kind of part of those. So that's, that's kind of weird.

• 2:39:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You think about, he spent three years going on these pirate, anti-pirating ships. And then just being in Europe with a hundred grand in his pocket.

• 2:39:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:36Jocko Willink?

  You know, like what, what kind of stories did he make that? Probably the kind you can't be talking about right now.

• 2:39:42Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:39:43Jocko Willink?

  But, uh, dude, I was just, I, I remember when he, when he got out, I was kind of, I was like, I retired. And then, you know, you see that he was getting out or I'd hear that he got out or whatever. I was kind of bummed out. You know, cause you feel like that's a, you know, kind of a guy that's going to carry the, carry the torch.

• 2:40:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:02Jocko Willink?

  The torch of getting after it, the little, the, the frogman torch of making things happen.

• 2:40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:07Jocko Willink?

  You know, but.

• 2:40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's interesting that he's the guy that you were talking about this whole time.

• 2:40:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you've heard me tell that story before.

• 2:40:13Speaker 02

  Plenty of times. In fact, that, that affects me. Cause I'm always been, not to go too deep about myself or nothing, but. I'm like that guy who's like, hey, like there, there, it, it's a weird subconscious almost thing, like in the back of my mind. It's like, hey, if I do this, like I'm going to violate some rule. Like I'm not in any position to like make anything happen. There's a few things I'm responsible for and the rest is kind of like, hey, I'm waiting to be told what to do, kind of a thing. And then to be like, no, no, no. If you can actually take action on pretty much everything. In one way or another, you can take action on it to make things happen or whatever. And it's like, huh, that was like, that story always was a good, like really legitimate, real world reminder of that.

• 2:40:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it was, like I said, I wish I had a little camera and helmet cam. Cause you could see the look in his eyes changed. Like, oh, I can, and JP tells a similar story. When I'm like, put JP on your helmet.

• 2:41:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:07Jocko Willink?

  Why? Cause I want to be able to see you so I can have you make stuff happen. It's like, dude, that's so. Awesome. And they were in similar situations because that was JP's second platoon. You know, so you, you, you kind of know what, you kind of look around if you're, if you're cognizant, if you're aware, if you have good situational awareness, you're like, I think I know what you could do right now.

• 2:41:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:25Jocko Willink?

  But, but the weird thing is last platoon, you were a new guy.

• 2:41:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:29Jocko Willink?

  So no one has told you, bro, you, you're cleared hot.

• 2:41:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:33Jocko Willink?

  To make shit happen.

• 2:41:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:34Jocko Willink?

  So let's go.

• 2:41:34Speaker 02

  Well, I felt that.

• 2:41:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:37Speaker 02

  Like when he says like, yeah, like you're, and it's not like you're cleared hot to be the boss now.

• 2:41:42Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:41:42Speaker 02

  It's not that, but it's like, bro, if you, if you, if it's kind of clear, like that something should be done and you know what that is, bro, you can make it happen.

• 2:41:49Jocko Willink?

  And that's a key component. And I mentioned that when I was, uh, opening, that the dude, you have to be humble. Because otherwise, if you just think you should be in charge of everything all the time, then you're just, it doesn't work. Cause now you're stepping on people's toes and you don't think that boss made a bad call and you go, like, that's a problem. But when you're humble and you're like, oh, wait a second, just like you said, there's a little leadership vacuum right now and I need to help out. And I'm going to do it. That is a powerful thing.

• 2:42:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:42:18Jocko Willink?

  So that's what, that's when you have a good platoon. Get some pipe hitters in there.

• 2:42:25Speaker 02

  I understand.

• 2:42:25Jocko Willink?

  Things happen. All right. Um, and you can see that, that he went out in the world that made stuff happen.

• 2:42:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:42:33Jocko Willink?

  I mean, he's kicking ass.

• 2:42:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:42:34Jocko Willink?

  Good to see. So the action part, definitely important. All right. Speaking of action, we're working out.

• 2:42:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:42:41Jocko Willink?

  We're getting stronger.

• 2:42:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:42:42Jocko Willink?

  We need fuel.

• 2:42:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:42:43Jocko Willink?

  Recommend? Any recommendations?

• 2:42:45Speaker 02

  Uh, I think Jaco Fuel. I think, you know.

• 2:42:47Jocko Willink?

  I agree with you. I agree with you. Hey, check out JacoFuel.com. We've got all the supplementation that you need. We got everything, protein. We've got energy drinks. We've got this hydration system right now. Hydrate that I'm drinking. I'm drinking the fruit punch. The fruit punch is very, it tastes very sweet. Very sweet, like rewardingly sweet, like Kool-Aid as a child, like fruit punch.

• 2:43:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:43:11Jocko Willink?

  Rewardingly sweet.

• 2:43:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:13Jocko Willink?

  Cause you know, you get some kind of dopamine activities going on when you drink something sugary.

• 2:43:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:18Jocko Willink?

  You get that from this.

• 2:43:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:19Jocko Willink?

  Even though there's no sugar in it. It's healthy. So check all this stuff out jockofuel.com. Also, you can get this stuff. We're, we're in a lot of stores around the country now. We're in Wawa, we're in Vitamin Shop GNC, Military Commissaries, AFE's, Hannaford Dash Stores, Wake Fern, Shop Right, HEB, Meyer, Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields. That's where we're at. And we're also in a bunch of little gyms, a bunch of little jiu-jitsu gyms around the country. A bunch of CrossFit gyms around the country, a bunch of just gyms. If you want to get Jaco Fuel in your gym, your academy, email [email protected]. That's what we're doing.

• 2:44:01Speaker 02

  The Hydrate, the new Hydrate, is that in stores yet? Or is there like a delay?

• 2:44:07Jocko Willink?

  No, it's, it's landing in stores right now, but there is a little bit of a delay.

• 2:44:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:12Jocko Willink?

  As it goes out from the warehouses and gets into the stores, but most of the stores, what's cool is you, you, you bring your product in. Like, let's say a product's selling our product, right? They're selling more. You bring them and they, they want to try them to see if they want to put them in the store. Everyone said yes, like, get them in. Cause as soon as you try these things, you're like, there's no way this is good for you. Oh, this is good for you?

• 2:44:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, straight up. Yeah.

• 2:44:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:37Speaker 02

  Fifteen calories, but drink as many as you like. Don't care what program you're on.

• 2:44:42Jocko Willink?

  Don't care what program.

• 2:44:42Speaker 02

  The, um, yeah, yeah. Cause our friends from Arizona was asking like, oh, wait, can we go buy these now at the store or whatever? I was like, I don't know. Don't know.

• 2:44:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. So we're there. You should be there. I mean, it's hitting stores.

• 2:44:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:55Jocko Willink?

  And by the time you hear this, it's probably in stores. So that's what we're doing. Jaco Fuel.com. Check it out. Also, we make gis, we make jeans, we make shirts, we make hoodies, and we make them all right here in America. OriginUSA.com. Check it out. If you need jiu-jitsu gear, if you need hunt gear, if you need a pair of blue jeans, because you're gonna go out to the store, you're gonna go out to dinner.

• 2:45:19Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:45:20Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna go out, work on your, on your ranch. You're gonna go swing your hammer. Whatever you're doing, we got you covered. OriginUSA.com. This is a big deal. Cause it's all made in the USA, which is very important.

• 2:45:36Speaker 02

  It is.

• 2:45:36Jocko Willink?

  Very important.

• 2:45:40Speaker 02

  Yep, it's true. Also.

• 2:45:43Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:45:43Speaker 02

  Unless we want to talk more about the origin, because

• 2:45:45Jocko Willink?

  Made in USA, that's what you need to know.

• 2:45:46Speaker 02

  But everything is made in the USA. That's the thing. So it's one thing to be like assembled in the USA. And actually, I'll even go, look, the, the, the cotton is, is made in the USA.

• 2:45:56Jocko Willink?

  How about the, the

• 2:45:58Speaker 02

  Cotton's grown in the USA, USA. But even if you go before that, the idea was born in the USA.

• 2:46:03Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:46:03Speaker 02

  Everything. So 100% from idea to freaking, you know, final product.

• 2:46:09Jocko Willink?

  Dirt to shirt.

• 2:46:09Speaker 02

  Dirt to shirt.

• 2:46:10Jocko Willink?

  We're doing it all. OriginUSA.com, check it out. Save America.

• 2:46:13Speaker 02

  It's true. Also, we have the Origin Jiu Jitsu Camp. Sold out, sorry.

• 2:46:16Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:46:17Speaker 02

  But next year, next year.

• 2:46:18Jocko Willink?

  It is sold out, but we do have the law enforcement one. There's still some slots available. So if you're a military, law enforcement, first responder, check that out as well. All of it at OriginUSA.com. Get some.

• 2:46:27Speaker 02

  It's true. Also, Jaco has a store called Jaco Store. So you go to JacoStore.com. And this, you arrive here, this is where you can get your Discipline Equals Freedom stuff. Shirts and hoodies. There's a lot of cool stuff on there. Also, good. Good. We talked about that a little bit today.

• 2:46:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, we talked about it more offline.

• 2:46:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, offline.

• 2:46:45Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 2:46:45Jocko Willink?

  We stopped recording. Apparently, Ryan's wife is fired up for the good.

• 2:46:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:52Jocko Willink?

  Attitude.

• 2:46:52Speaker 02

  It's true, bro. It's very useful. Very, very useful tool and weapon in this life.

• 2:46:57Jocko Willink?

  I'm definitely got, I got curious about this camp that she went to.

• 2:47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:01Jocko Willink?

  Can you imagine you're taking your daughter and tying her up and dropping her off at a camp somewhere?

• 2:47:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:08Jocko Willink?

  She must have been getting wild, bro.

• 2:47:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:10Jocko Willink?

  There must have been some mayhem going on. I mean, what would your daughter have to do to where you tie her up and drop her off not to be seen for a year?

• 2:47:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think.

• 2:47:19Jocko Willink?

  Some chaos.

• 2:47:20Speaker 02

  He meant, yeah, he mentioned, like, she was dealing, right? And so, yeah, that makes sense. Like, if my daughter was dealing, and I, I felt like, hey, she's not responding to my, my rehabilitation tactics. Yeah, man. I dig it. And I knew about some camp that purported to rehabilitate young troubled youth, you know?

• 2:47:37Jocko Willink?

  Off she goes.

• 2:47:38Speaker 02

  There she goes.

• 2:47:38Jocko Willink?

  God, it would be heartbreaking, wouldn't it?

• 2:47:40Speaker 02

  Very much so, yes, sir. Yeah.

• 2:47:41Jocko Willink?

  Heartbreaking.

• 2:47:42Speaker 02

  But hey, if it worked, it worked, you know?

• 2:47:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and apparently, like, he called her after to figure out, like, what the name of the place was.

• 2:47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:50Jocko Willink?

  But, you know, she, he said it was what she needed. And you know what's cool is like the military, so what's what the military often provides that for young men and women. This is what they needed. Structure, discipline, direction, those are all really good things.

• 2:48:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wonder what their pro, cause it got shut down or whatever, right? Or maybe moved or re-done.

• 2:48:09Jocko Willink?

  Something about Paris Hilton, maybe Paris Hilton went to this thing.

• 2:48:12Speaker 02

  That kind of rings a bell though. I feel like I knew something about it. I don't know, but if I, I do wonder what the programming is.

• 2:48:20Jocko Willink?

  We will take Eddie Bravo's advice and we'll look into it.

• 2:48:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we'll look into it. But you know, like there's all these pro, there's all these programs, like you know, uh, Scared Street, remember that one, right? And that's a specific program with a specific like approach, right? They can bring you to the prison and all the stuff. And you know, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, you know, I wonder what the programming is there, cause it's a whole camp. You can't talk to them. It's like, you could tell obviously it's rigid.

• 2:48:43Jocko Willink?

  What do you say, like she wasn't allowed to look up, like you had to look down? Like there's some, yeah.

• 2:48:48Speaker 02

  It's rigid, but I wonder though, what's the, cause there has to be some philosophy. It's not just like, hey, let's wing it. You know, there has to be like, hey, we're going for this, so we can do this. Like I see, like I wonder, like if, because military seems like, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna kind of break you down and then build you back up. Cause the, the really, at the end of the day, what, and from what I know of the people that go into the military, especially if they're even halfway looking for that, for that structure, you know? People go in for different reasons, I know. But a lot of times when the people that I know anyway, that, that are like, hey, I want to go for structure, or the parents recommended for structure, oh, they get the structure because they do provide that empowerment part of it. Sure, it's hard and you know, they do all this stuff, but at the end of the day, they're empowered. And you know, I wonder like what empowerment,

• 2:49:34Speaker 02

  programming they have.

• 2:49:35Jocko Willink?

  And another huge part of it is like, you're going against your will.

• 2:49:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:40Jocko Willink?

  So as a human, we don't like to be doing things against our will. So when our dad ties us up and puts us into a school where it's completely against our will, they have, must have had, have had some serious psychological understanding to get through. Like bro, if somebody did that to me, I would never comply to anything that they're telling me to do. I mean, unless it was like, okay, I, after a month, I'm like, oh, I'll never get out of here.

• 2:50:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:05Jocko Willink?

  You know, I had a friend that was in the brig, you know what the brig is?

• 2:50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:50:09Jocko Willink?

  It's like the, uh, military jail. And I actually met this guy when I was in boot camp. And he had been in before, oh no, it was after bootcamp. So he had been in before. And he told the story that when he got, he got kicked out the first time and he'd gone to the brig. And he was in there for like a month of just not listening. Fuck you guys. You know, I'm not doing your shit. And finally, one day, like he, the guy's like, hey, you need to make your bed. He's like, making my bed. He goes, looks like this day won't count either. And then walked away. He was, the next day, the guy comes back. He said, what did you mean by that? He's like, well, if you don't do what we're telling you to do, that day doesn't count. And you owe whatever you owe, four months or something.

• 2:50:54Speaker 02

  Oh damn.

• 2:50:55Jocko Willink?

  So you have to do what they say. Otherwise this day does doesn't count.

• 2:50:59Speaker 02

  We're just gonna keep it going.

• 2:50:59Jocko Willink?

  So you know what? This dude made his bed, got on board with the program because he needed to get out of there. So I could understand complying because you know, that's the only way to escape, but then I'd get out and I'd freaking be pissed. I wouldn't want to do it.

• 2:51:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's why I figure there has to be some kind of mentor shit, something, something, something in there to say like, hey, this is beneficial.

• 2:51:20Jocko Willink?

  You know, too, man, you get broken like a horse gets broken. You know what I mean? Where you're like, oh, I have to kind of get on board with the program. And if you get on board with the program and then you re, maybe there's that moment where you go, oh, I can see where this is going to help me. You see what I'm saying? So that that's kind of a, I very seldom talk about imposed discipline. But sometimes, very rarely, I hate to even say this, very rarely, you've got to impose discipline on someone for long enough for them to go, oh, I can see that I'm going to win now.

• 2:51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:50Jocko Willink?

  You know, this happens with sports. This happens with coaches. Like you gotta do the hill sprints. No one wants to do them. We gotta do them. And then they start winning and then everyone realizes the benefit, right? Or you gotta do the homework, right? Oh, you gotta do the homework. I don't want to do my homework. Okay. Well, I'm going to make you do your homework. And then a while you get an A and then you, your opportunities open up. So you can, you can impose discipline on people sometimes because you have to, because it's, it's the only way that you can show them that the discipline will bring you freedom. You can't tell it to them because it just doesn't work.

• 2:52:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:18Jocko Willink?

  You can't explain it to them. It doesn't work. They've got to, they gotta do it. So occasionally, so maybe it was a situation like that where she was anti, anti, anti, anti, but she's doing it because you have no choice. And then eventually she goes, oh, I see how this is going to benefit my whole life.

• 2:52:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yet it is, you can, under certain circumstances, you can see how that could be where, you know, someone who's super rebellious or whatever, and they're like, no, no, no, they insist stubborn. I insist on not listening. I insist on not doing it right. I insist on it. And that one moment of like, bruh, this me rebelling is, I'm kinda tired of it. So let me, okay, I'll listen just for the sake of, I don't want that beef just today though. Just cause I'm, and then they do it right, then they, it's almost like it opens their eyes to this whole new world where it's like, wait a second, all these benefits from, come from just doing it correctly. Oh shit, I might do this again. And then it slowly gets good to them. And then that's just how afterwards, you know? Makes sense. So yeah, good.

• 2:53:14Jocko Willink?

  Yep, good.

• 2:53:14Speaker 02

  If you wanna represent, good. You can. Anyway, like I said, jocko store.com, that's where it is. Uh, also the short locker, new design every month, subscription scenario. So good. And people seem to like it. Um, that is also on jocko store. So if you click on the top where it says, uh, short locker, you can kinda see some of the designs, see what you're in for, you know? So yeah, man, if you like something, get something.

• 2:53:38Jocko Willink?

  Check. Also, speaking of getting something, you probably wanna get some steak. So check out coloradocraftbeef.com and primalbeef.com, two awesome companies selling you the best steak you're gonna eat. That's just how it is. And you can put it on your stove, your pan, three minutes, one side, three minutes, the other side, two minutes, the other side, two minutes, the other side, you're good. You're good.

• 2:54:02Speaker 02

  Depends on the temperature.

• 2:54:03Jocko Willink?

  There you go. But that's 10 minutes. You got a steak, like a good, really good steak, right? And you're eating it. You know what I mean?

• 2:54:09Speaker 02

  Yes, you are.

• 2:54:09Jocko Willink?

  That's one thing with, you know, you know, well, you know me, you, do you know that fact that I, like, if it, if it's, if it, I'm required to put in effort to make dinner? Ham sandwiches. You know what I'm saying? Like two, like that's what, I'm just not, I'm not doing the whole life babbin', four hours, you know, like yesterday, we had to marinate it, make the marinade, like all that stuff that he's, I'm, I'm, I'm super stoked when he's doing it.

• 2:54:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:34Jocko Willink?

  But I'm not doing it. John Dudley, dude, this dude's prepping meat freaking three days in advance.

• 2:54:39Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, that's real.

• 2:54:41Jocko Willink?

  And I'm always like, yo, I'll bring ham.

• 2:54:45Jocko Willink?

  And some mayonnaise, we'll make some sammys if I'm in charge.

• 2:54:48Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:54:49Jocko Willink?

  But if you are going to, you only need 10 minutes and you make yourself a freaking tasty steak. Which is gonna be the best thing you're gonna have.

• 2:54:59Speaker 02

  What do you put on your steak?

• 2:55:01Jocko Willink?

  Salt and pepper.

• 2:55:02Speaker 02

  The same, yeah, regular.

• 2:55:03Jocko Willink?

  Salt and pepper. That's all you need. That's all you need with these steaks, 100%. So, check it out, coloradocraftbeef.com or primalbeef.com and get yourself some steak. There you go. Also subscribe to the podcast, also jockronunderground.com, also YouTube channels, also Psychological Warfare, Flipside Canvas, Dakota Meyer putting cool stuff to hang on your wall. I've written a bunch of books about leadership. You can check them out if you want to. I've written a bunch of kids books, which some people find surprising, even though I have four kids. Some people think, "Oh, what are you doing writing kids books?" "You're a military guy." "Well, I'm a military guy. I had four kids." So, yeah. Had to write books for them. So they could actually learn something about life. So check it out. Way of the Warrior Kid, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Also, Mikey and the Dragons, check those out.

• 2:55:47Jocko Willink?

  Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Every problem that you have is a leadership problem. And the way you fix that problem is through leadership. So check out echelonfront.com for details. We do consulting, we have live events, we have all kinds of things happening. If you want to check that out, that's where you do it. Also, we have an online training program for life. For life. I could tell you it's a leadership program, but it's not just a leadership program. It is a square your entire life away program. Go to extremeownership.com, check that out, take some of those classes, join some of those live sessions. That's what we're doing there. If you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee.

• 2:56:32Jocko Willink?

  She's got an amazing charity organization, helping our service members.

• 2:56:37Jocko Willink?

  Get better. And she does a bunch of other things. But giving them the medical treatment that they need, that the government doesn't provide, that is one of the premier ways that she has helped a bunch of my personal friends save their lives. So if you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Also, we got Heroes and Horses.org. You heard Micah Fink get mentioned a few times today. He's a tough guy. Micah Fink, tough guy. Ryan Bates, tough guy. Two tough guys together. You know what you gotta do? Fight. Get the respect. Now we're bros.

• 2:57:15Jocko Willink?

  But Micah has now opened up his charity organization up in Montana, and they take veterans out into the wilderness. So they can reattach to reality.

• 2:57:30Jocko Willink?

  And reattach to the earth. And reattach to their lives. So check that out, Heroes and Horses.org. And also Jimmy May has his organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. Getting guys from the teams into the civilian sector. Helping civilian companies win. So check that out as well. And if you want to connect with Ryan Bates, he's on the gram, @Frogman5326 underscore. Also, if you need ammo, or cool t-shirts and hats, go to CanoeClubUSA.com. For us, I'm at Jaco.com. I'm also on social media, I'm at Jaco Willink. Echo is on there, @EchoCharles.

• 2:58:14Jocko Willink?

  Just be careful, because you can ruin your whole life. Or waste your whole life, getting caught up in the algorithm, which you don't want. Thanks again to my brother, Ryan Bates. Freaking kick ass dude. Kick ass husband. Kick ass dad. Kick ass frogman. Proud to call you brother. And thanks to everyone out there who has served, or is serving in our armed forces around the world. Thank you for protecting our freedom and our way of life. And the same goes to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for protecting us here on the home front. And to everyone else out there.

• 2:58:57Jocko Willink?

  Just listen, just remember. No one's gonna do it for you. No one's gonna give it to you. You're not gonna be gifted the things that you want. No one's gonna take the action that you need to take. And no one's gonna do the work that you need to do. No one. But you. So get up. Get out there. And get after it.

• 2:59:23Jocko Willink?

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