333: Excuses and Rationalizations are Not Valid... And We Know That. W/ Dan Cnossen

0:00:00 - Opening 0:04:59 - Dan Cnossen 3:22:00 - How to stay on THE PATH. 3:38:23 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 333 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  The rumors started in the morning.

• 0:15Jocko Willink?

  Some guys in Afghanistan got hit.

• 0:19Jocko Willink?

  There's some wounded guys and you don't know who it is at first. You don't know what team.

• 0:29Jocko Willink?

  East Coast, West Coast, you're just wondering.

• 0:36Jocko Willink?

  Pretty soon we, we know it's West Coast guys.

• 0:40Jocko Willink?

  And you know, the transition is happening. So you got two teams over there at the time. Team one and team seven.

• 0:51Jocko Willink?

  And now you know you got wounded guys and then you're thinking of,

• 0:56Jocko Willink?

  who, who do I know? And, and at this point, I kind of know everybody. Because I've been putting all these platoons through training for the last couple of years. So I know I'm gonna recognize names when they come through.

• 1:13Jocko Willink?

  And then you're waiting.

• 1:17Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then we hear it's one guy. It's only one guy. And that's, that's good, you know? Good. It's only one guy. How bad is he?

• 1:28Jocko Willink?

  And it doesn't sound good.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  And you, you're hearing reports is a massive IED.

• 1:37Jocko Willink?

  How bad?

• 1:39Jocko Willink?

  Real bad. How bad is real bad?

• 1:44Jocko Willink?

  Real bad.

• 1:50Jocko Willink?

  And then you start to ask that horrible question to yourself. Is he gonna make it?

• 2:00Jocko Willink?

  And then you start getting reports back. They don't know if he's gonna make it. And that's not a good sign because team guys are usually positive thinkers who we think we can survive anything.

• 2:14Jocko Willink?

  So when you hear a team guy say he doesn't know if someone's gonna make it, it doesn't usually bode well.

• 2:26Jocko Willink?

  And there's a

• 2:29Jocko Willink?

  weird, strange silence around. Everyone's kind of waiting to hear.

• 2:38Jocko Willink?

  And quite frankly, everyone's waiting to hear a name.

• 2:43Jocko Willink?

  And waiting to hear the outcome. And wondering if we're gonna lose a brother.

• 2:52Jocko Willink?

  Finally, I get an actual call.

• 2:55Jocko Willink?

  An actual call, the distant voice from one of my buddies over in Afghanistan. And I get the firsthand report of what's going on. And yeah, confirmed massive, massive IED.

• 3:12Jocko Willink?

  I get the name, Dan Conawson. He's one of the platoon commanders that I just put through work up. Great guy, humble, tough, locked on.

• 3:26Jocko Willink?

  And

• 3:29Jocko Willink?

  I asked that question, you know, is he gonna make it?

• 3:35Jocko Willink?

  And the response is,

• 3:39Jocko Willink?

  you know, something along the lines of he lost both legs and he's got massive trauma to his lower abdomen.

• 3:47Jocko Willink?

  Looks like they have him stabilized. The guys did a great job. And this is like a stall tactic, not answering my question, is he gonna make it?

• 3:58Jocko Willink?

  And the answer comes again, um, I don't know.

• 4:06Jocko Willink?

  And you sit with that for a while because there's only one thing that's going to give you the answer and that's time. Only time will tell. And in this particular case, we were blessed because Dan Cannesson did make it. He survived a massive IED that would have killed probably anyone. But somehow he was able to survive and we can talk about that because we're lucky enough

• 4:45Jocko Willink?

  tonight to have the honor of having Dan with us here to share some of his experiences and his lessons learned from his life and from his time in the SEAL teams. Dan, thanks for, thanks for coming by, man. Thanks for joining us.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Thanks, Jaco. Thanks for having me here.

• 5:06Jocko Willink?

  That was, you know, one of those weird days at the teams where I remember this when you got blown up and that, you know, this would happen, you know, guys would get wounded. You'd hear those rumors when you got into work, someone saw message traffic or someone talked to one of their friends and it would just get, you would have so little information. And then as the time, as the day goes on, you sort of, the picture becomes more and more clear and I really remember that well. You know, just because I was in trade at, I'd already lost guys and, and was not looking forward to going to a funeral. So I'm freaking glad you're here, man.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  I'm glad you didn't have to go to that funeral.

• 5:54Jocko Willink?

  Let's start at the beginning, man. Let's start at where you came from and, and how you grew up and all that. Let's get to it.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Sure. I'm born and raised in Kansas, fifth generation family farm. From 1874, I grew up roaming around outside. I had a BB gun. I got in a little bit of trouble with the BB gun, shooting some targets I shouldn't have been aiming at. But really, I think, growing up on a farm in Kansas, I developed a deep-seated love of just being outside. I think this comes into play later in my story.

• 6:28Jocko Willink?

  Were you, uh, was your family a farming family? Is that what you did, they did for a living?

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yes, my, it's on my maternal side of the family. My mom's father, his, his, so my grandfather, his grandfather, came out, this is Homestead Act, 1870s.

• 6:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  If you farm the land, you get to keep it after a certain amount of time. And they built a limestone home, a limestone barn, still stands today. That's where I was born and raised. I was a kid, I didn't think anything of it, just where I grew up, but now I realize how special that was. 240 acres. And my grandfather had three daughters, one of whom was my mother, and so the farming didn't get passed down. And I did not grow up as a farmer, but I certainly took advantage of the tractor rides.

• 7:15Jocko Willink?

  And then, what was your, was your grandparents in the military at all?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  My dad's father was US Army, World War II. And I don't know, he is no longer alive. I don't know the extent of action that he saw, but he was in the European theater in the later part of the war.

• 7:32Jocko Willink?

  And what about your dad?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  My father served in the Marine Corps. He, in 1965, enlisted. He didn't get drafted. He chose to enlist, and then he chose to enlist in the Marine Corps. He did three tours, and the third, and my father is no longer alive as well, to talk about some of the specifics. And as a kid, when I grew up, he didn't talk about the specifics, but generally speaking, he gave me a glimpse of life into the Marine Corps, into the military, and actually, I wanted to be a Marine in high school. My dad, at the end of his third tour, did one of these small teams where you're working with locals, kind of going village to village, four-man teams.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  That's the last thing he did, and he exited the Marine Corps in 1968 and was, was done.

• 8:24Jocko Willink?

  And he didn't, he didn't share much with you about that when he

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Not about combat. When I was a kid, I remember in our family room, we had some old storage items and I was combing through this. This is while he was still alive and I saw citations, Navy Commendation Medal, bronze, not, I'm sorry, Purple Heart. And

• 8:47Speaker 01

  he, he was under mortar fire at one point and rendered lifesaving aid to a teammate, to another Marine. And so he was commended for that. But yeah, I don't have specifics. I also found some old letters that he had written home that were pretty interesting. Just to, you know, it's a glimpse into my father when he was 23, 24 years old, writing home from Vietnam.

• 9:10Jocko Willink?

  What was he saying in the letters? You should have brought them. We could have read them.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  I think there was some mention of R and R and

• 9:17Speaker 01

  probably don't need to go into the specifics.

• 9:19Jocko Willink?

  I guess it depends who he was writing home to.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:23Jocko Willink?

  And what did he do when he got out of the Marine Corps in 1968?

• 9:26Speaker 01

  So he, he ended up going to business school in Cornell. He did have a degree from Iowa State. He's from Iowa. And so he had a college degree enlisted in the Marine Corps. 1968 gets out. He would have been 25 at that point, went to Cornell. And my mother-

• 9:42Jocko Willink?

  So he enlisted in the Marine Corps even though he had a college degree?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:46Jocko Willink?

  Do you, are you tracking any, any like decision-making process on that? Was he just fired up for the Marine Corps?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  I think it was a little bit of rebellion against his father. And his father had said, if you're going to go in the military, do not go in the Marine Corps. Go in any service, not that one.

• 10:06Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, if his dad served in World War II, he might've had that impression that, hey, you don't want to be at the Marines. You're going to be in the, you know, storming beaches over in the Pacific. You want to have a more plush job? Like storming the beaches in the, in the, in the European theater? I don't know. Interesting. So you think he rebel, a little bit of rebellion?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Rebellion, I think. And I think he probably-

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Wanted to be part of something special and I think that is something I've seen growing up on a farm in Kansas. I think you have work ethic, but you also want to be part of something special. You like to be part of a team and it's a continuation of that going in the military.

• 10:44Jocko Willink?

  So he gets done with business school and then how do you meet your mom and end up in out there in Kansas on the 240 acres of 40 acres of beauty?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, my, my mother ended up in New York City. She was a secretary and in the office, there was a woman who introduced somehow and I, I need to talk to my mother about the specifics of how they got introduced, but on the first date she didn't like my father as well, as well as would indicate, given the fact that later they got married, but went out on another date, I guess. And, and they eventually moved to New Orleans. They went into the Peace Corps, were in Brazil for two years in the 1970s and then they came back, settled on the farm. At this point, my grandfather had, was retiring.

• 11:25Jocko Willink?

  So you, hold on, we gotta slow your roll a little bit. You can't just roll out Marine Corps, NOM, three tours, Peace Corps. That's kind of, that's a freaking dynamic you don't normally see.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think in addition to growing up with stories of the Marine Corps, I grew up with stories of life in Brazil and this is in the 1970s in the Amazon region. So it's very remote, primitive living. My mother was teaching Brazilian kids with special needs, teaching them Portuguese and my dad was somewhere in the realm of teaching business and skills to local community people.

• 12:06Jocko Willink?

  And how long were they down there for?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Two years, two year tour.

• 12:09Jocko Willink?

  And that's in the seventies?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Late seventies, yeah.

• 12:12Jocko Willink?

  What, did your dad like start going a little bit hippie? Was, is that the scenario?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Perhaps, but when I was, my only living memory of him was not as a hippie, but I think there may have been a stage there in 1970s post Vietnam. It can happen.

• 12:26Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh. Interesting. He's gonna be pissed if he just heard me say, he's like, what a freaking hippie. I was helping out the locals. Alright, so then they get married and at what point do they move back to Kansas?

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Around the time the Peace Corps tour ended and I think my grandfather was retiring, moving to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. This beautiful property, the home was there. I think my parents wanted to start a family. What better place? The land was being farmed by an associate of my father's, a grandfather's. And so they, they settled and I think shortly thereafter had me in 1980.

• 13:03Jocko Willink?

  You were born in 1980?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  1980.

• 13:06Jocko Willink?

  Check. And then what's growing up like? You're out there on the farm, you're getting in trouble for shooting shit with your BB gun and stuff?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had a section of woods we called the northeast corner with a creek running through it. And I would go and just play there, try to get lost.

• 13:21Jocko Willink?

  What'd you have for brothers and sisters?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  I have a younger sister. She's seven years my younger.

• 13:25Jocko Willink?

  Seven years your younger?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  She is a nurse and when we get later into my story, I mean, she quit her job to move down to DC to take care of me.

• 13:34Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  I owe her a lot.

• 13:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So she's seven years your junior though, so you were kinda like an only child for a while.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  For a little while. I learned how to play by myself. I didn't have close neighbor. And we have neighbors, but not necessarily with kids of my age. I learned how to entertain myself. And a lot of this was, was being outside. I, I did like to read as a kid, but in the daytime, I'm, I'm outside playing. We had some dogs, some cats, some pigeons that were in the barn that I was aiming at. You know, going on tractor rides, learning how to drive tractors, playing sports. That was my childhood.

• 14:13Jocko Willink?

  What sports were you playing?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Started baseball, soccer, gravitated towards soccer. Turns out I'm not that great at team ball sports. However, the lessons that you can learn from team ball sports really come into play later. And so I'm very thankful that even though my calling as an athlete was not as a, a team ball sport player, nor was it in combatives. I tried, I tried wrestling in middle school. It was just awful. And then I had this idea of doing boxing. So it was my sophomore year in high school. I went to the local Topeka Golden Gloves gym. And said, you know, I want to take some lessons. And so I remember my dad would drive me there and back. And eventually I started just driving myself and I would go and train in the local boxing gym.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  That resulted at one point in going to a competition in Kansas City. And Kansas City's a big deal when you're from a farm in Kansas. Went to this tournament in Kansas City and I remember there were hundreds of people in the audience. It's kind of in a more underdeveloped area of Kansas City, if you will. And I remember seeing my opponent's older brother was just laying waste to someone on a previous round. And so I think I was just so nervous. I get in the ring and it was three rounds, very amateur. In the first round, he just laid into me and I had the standing eight count against me.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  The second round was fairly even and the third round I actually gave him the standing eight count. But it wasn't enough because I just got whooped that first round. So I lost the fight.

• 15:54Jocko Willink?

  So you lost the fight.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  My dad was there watching and afterwards we went and had some, had a meal, had dinner. And I just remember him kind of saying, it's okay. You did a good job. And that was my, that was my one and only competitive boxing match.

• 16:09Jocko Willink?

  The thing you've got to remember, Dan, is like wrestling, like if you go quote, try wrestling, you're gonna get your ass kicked. Like there's, it's not, people think wrestling and boxing, they think it's like a primal thing that you're just going to be able to do. But man, there's all kinds of skills involved in that stuff.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  This is, I started to think that if all you know is winning. That's just not realistic.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  I've spent a lot more time in the not winning realm than the winning realm. And I can tell you that when you're not winning, it forces you to adapt. It forces you to look at what you're doing. How can you be doing things better? Forces you to grow, challenges you. And I think there's a, if sport is just about character development, which I really think that's what it ultimately is about. Then there's a lot to be learned from not winning. And it's, you need to seek out people who can beat you in order to get better.

• 17:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So what, did you play sports all through high school?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  I did soccer.

• 17:10Jocko Willink?

  What'd you end up excelling at, any of them?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  I was a, I was a varsity soccer player defender because I didn't have good ball skills. Even as a freshman, I didn't always start. I was more of a bench rider, but I did earn a varsity letter as a freshman. And it started starting as a sophomore and then was a, was a varsity player all four years. My last semester as a senior spring, I knew I was going to the Naval Academy. And we can get into the, you know, the reasons of why I wanted to go there, but I, I knew I was going. And so I decided to join the track team, distance running. I thought, I gotta show up to the academy ready to go, ready to bust out a 1.5 mile run. Track had a two mile event, a one mile event. So I signed up and it, it turns out in soccer, I was really good at running, but not so much kicking the ball or passing it.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  As a defender, I'd just try to kick the ball to one of my teammates who could actually do something with it. But in track, I was pretty good for one season track athlete. I ended up running a sub five minute mile, had a, I don't know, a 10:32 mile. And so I thought endurance sports could, could have been my thing. I just wasn't exposed to it earlier. I certainly wasn't exposed to cross country skiing as a kid from a farm in Kansas.

• 18:18Jocko Willink?

  So you, you, so you end up going to the Naval Academy? How'd you get interested in going to the Naval Academy?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want to say that my father pushed me in that direction in no way whatsoever. I found, he wrote me a letter when I did get into the Naval Academy and he said that his childhood dream was to go to the Naval Academy, but he didn't have the grades and didn't even apply.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  But I didn't, I didn't choose to go to the military in the sense of it feeling like a decision. It just felt like this is what I'm supposed to do. It really did. I wanted to be a Marine.

• 18:50Jocko Willink?

  Did you apply to West Point too?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  I did. That was my, West Point was my backup plan. I got, I got into the best one, the Naval Academy. So I, I just wanted to combine military service with continuing my education and I felt like as an officer, I would have leadership responsibilities and this would be, I had read books, you know, Vietnam still fascinates me and probably a large part of this is due to my father having been in the Vietnam War. I would read anything I could get my hands on about special operations in Vietnam, infantry platoons, Marine Corps. I was very, very much keen on infantry, small unit tactics. I ended up signing up for the

• 19:32Speaker 01

  local US Naval Sea Cadets Program. There was a Naval Reserve Unit in Topeka, Kansas. We 'd drive there and it was kind of modeled after reserves. One weekend a month, you show up and you, you drill. The summers between your academic years of high school, you get Navy training. It starts with boot camp in Great Lakes. So I went to Great Lakes, the summer before my junior year of high school for two weeks.

• 19:57Jocko Willink?

  How old were you?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  I was fifteen, fifteen, sixteen. Yeah, two weeks. Not, not an actual boot camp, but it's very much, you're in Great Lakes, you're wearing dungarees, you're marching around, you're getting yelled at. I'm just in high school. I don't, don't remember ever signing a waiver. But they had this training called SEAL training. I had to do one other training before that. So after that summer of going to Great Lakes for boot camp, I went to amphibious school in Virginia. And again, I'm fifteen or sixteen. Cause I had to knock out one, one of these before I could be eligible for SEAL training. Now, in order to go to this SEAL camp, which is going to be the following year that I would be eligible, the summer before my senior year. I had to take the Bud's physical fitness test, 500 yard side stroke and pushups, pullups,

• 20:43Speaker 01

  situps and 1.5 mile run. So I started training for it and I was horrible, horrible at swimming, just horrible. But I somehow got under the 12 minute time or whatever the cutoff, barely. And so they, they put me out to Virginia Beach, Little Creek for this two week camp and it starts

• 20:59Jocko Willink?

  with a What year is this?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  This would have been 97, 1997. So this is actually run by active duty team guys, putting these high school kids through this washed down version of hell week. We had a hell night. It started off and I remember that was a continuous, it was a 24 hour thing. Started sometime in the day and sometime the next day. Go through the night, running with boats on your head. And I remember at one point, running with a boat on my head. I was on the left side of the boat and an active duty Navy SEAL is just yelling at me because I was

• 21:37Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember who it was buddy?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't. I remember there was a Chief Blackburn and he, and this, the particular individual in this story is not Chief Blackburn. I was slacking off and he just laid into me about how I wasn't being a good teammate and I'll never forget that. It just cut right into me and I came back. We, after that, we got to shoot MP5s. We got to do the water obstacle course in Virginia Beach. It's just as a high school kid. I mean, this is amazing. But, uh, truth be told, I didn't have perfect eyesight and I just was horrible in the water. So when I did get into the Naval Academy, my preference was for the Marine Corps.

• 22:19Jocko Willink?

  So, all that hoo ya SEAL stuff didn't get you like totally brainwashed? I was brainwashed just sitting over here listening to you tell that. If I would have been 15, it would have been a done deal.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  It, it was, but I just didn't think

• 22:34Jocko Willink?

  How bad was your eyesight?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  I had a chance. It was, it needed to be correct. It wasn't, it wasn't within 2040. It wasn't, certainly wasn't 2020. At this point, I didn't know about corrective surgery. I didn't, that wasn't even a thing. I, at the Naval Academy, I thought

• 22:49Speaker 01

  I can go in the Marine Corps Infantry, be a platoon leader, a company commander. And so that's what I was leaning towards. I mean, absolutely, though. When I went to the Naval Academy, the SEAL program was extremely intriguing to me. I just didn't think I would be eligible. Why would you set yourself up just to be disappointed?

• 23:06Jocko Willink?

  Check. So, anything else from high school before you roll out? How hard was it to get like all the congressional recommendation and all that stuff?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  You know, I don't think it's that hard when you're applying to the Naval Academy from Kansas. Now, it may be different now, but if I was applying in Virginia, or California, or Texas, Maryland, Virginia, the geographically proximate states, they're very competitive. But I had good grades. You know, one thing I should say is, by the time I was a freshman in high school, I was fortunate enough to have this goal of the Naval Academy inside me. I don't know how it got there, but it was there. And so it then becomes a matter of, well, what do I need to do to get into this place? It's going to be really hard. Okay, you gotta have good grades. Check. I'll study and get good grades. You gotta demonstrate some athletic talent. Okay, well, I'm already doing that.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  That's just, that was easy for me. Leadership, okay, well, I'll try to be a sports team captain. I'll try to run for student government. I'll do the Sea Cadets. And that's kind of how I structured it. And so I think as my story unfolds, you'll see, I tend to be a fairly goal-oriented person, but this is something I think is very, it's very important, but not to force the goals. But when I have these goals naturally, I feel like I can just be ignited because this is driving me forward. And that's what was happening as early as my freshman year. And that's why I think I'm very fortunate. Because if you make this decision, you want to go to a service academy in your senior year of high school, it's too late. You gotta start the process in

• 24:41Speaker 01

  your junior year. You do have to get a nomination from either senator in your state or from your congressional representative. And they're in coordination, they're in communication with the academies and I think the academies kind of lean them towards the candidates that they are already identifying.

• 24:58Jocko Willink?

  And you have no, where'd you hear about the Naval Academy for the first time? You don't remember?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Had to have been in a book. I mean, I would just, I remember watching movies like Predator.

• 25:11Jocko Willink?

  How come Echo didn't end up at the Naval Academy? He was watching Predator a lot more than you were.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, probably was reading some books on a platoon leader in the Marine Corps in Vietnam or something, Naval Academy. I think, I think how it actually happened was at one point I wanted to be a pilot, but then, you know, the eyesight thing, it's just, it's not happening. But to be a pilot, I mean, you start getting aware of the service academy because to be a pilot, you have to go to a commissioning source.

• 25:39Jocko Willink?

  So when you show up at the Naval Academy for like plebe summer, you must be pretty used to this kind of crap. You've already been to boot camp, you've had a bunch of team guys in Virginia Beach who are freaking crushing you.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  It really was not that big of a deal and plebe summer is this six-week indoctrination. It is not boot camp, but it is a service academy equivalent of boot camp. Your class of about 1,200 incoming freshman report in the middle of the summer, July, for about a six-week indoctrination into the military that occurs and ends before the academic year. And on the note of the Sea Cadets, I will say that at the end of my plebe year, freshman year at the Naval Academy, I was invited back to be the class leader. And I did do that and that was just an awesome leadership opportunity. I could be the class leader.

• 26:36Jocko Willink?

  Class leader of what?

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Of the incoming Sea Cadet class of high school students. So as a, as a, now done with my plebe year at the Naval Academy, I'm the class OIC of this group of high school kids coming from all over the place, running through the same thing I had been through two years before at this point because the other summer was plebe summer.

• 27:02Jocko Willink?

  And how did you like the Naval Academy?

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Well, it was.

• 27:08Jocko Willink?

  It's like a love hate relationship, right?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, there's this saying, I H T F P, I hate this place. But you know, in high school, I had friends, but I didn't have what I would call deep connections with the people that I was going to high school with. And I definitely had friends, but when I was in the Naval Academy for the first time, I'm finding people that I really see eye to eye with. I mean, really quite bonded in this way of looking at the world the same way, like just common interest, common personality, this kind of thing, but to a person. And we found each other, weren't in the same companies.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  They all wanted to be selected for SEAL training, all of them. What's that telling me? A couple of these individuals were recruited swimmers, all American high school swimmers. Now they're varsity swimmers as freshmen at the Naval Academy.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  One, actually two were really good boxers and I found that out the hard way, trying to spar with them a little bit in the ring. And then, you know, there was me, a farm kid from Kansas, and you know, I just was not comfortable in the water. The, the, the truth of it is, in Plebe Summer, I excelled physically in anything that was on land, but anytime we had to do something in the water, and this is maybe two times a week, you have to demonstrate to the Navy that you can float, that you can take off your cammies, camouflage uniform when you're floating and tie them and inflate them to help you float. You have to demonstrate that in the event that you fall off a ship, that you're not a total liability, that you can swim from one side of the pool to the other.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  This is what you're doing in Plebe Summer. And on those particular days, we're marching, it's hot out, I would have knots of anxiety in my stomach, palpable.

• 29:07Jocko Willink?

  Were you scared of failing or were you scared of drowning?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  I was scared of the water. I just didn't have a lot of exposure. Now granted, I'd gone to this SEAL, Sea Cadet SEAL thing, but there wasn't, there was a little bit in the water and that stuff petrified me. So, I mean, you know, and it, given what I ended up doing, one could call into question my career decision-making skills, given that this reality, when I went to the Naval Academy, I was just very, very scared of the water. But by the end of this first year, I had met my circle of friends. They all wanted to, pretty much to a person, wanted to be selected for SEAL training and so.

• 29:41Jocko Willink?

  Are these guys all in your same class?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Same class. So we're, we're plebes, freshmen.

• 29:46Jocko Willink?

  And they're just down for the SEALs?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:49Jocko Willink?

  And how long did it take for you to start thinking that in that direction as well?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  I would say by the end of my first year there, I no longer wanted to be a Marine and I wanted to be selected for a SEAL program, but I knew that I needed to get in the water and start training, get better.

• 30:03Jocko Willink?

  What about your eyesight? Had you now learned that you could get corrective surgery?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  That year's class, 1999, was able to get PRK. So that was a game changer for me. And then it's like, okay, well.

• 30:16Jocko Willink?

  So you weren't the class of 1999?

• 30:19Speaker 01

  No, I was class of 2002. So that in, in the.

• 30:21Jocko Willink?

  So you watched the guys that were going to graduate in 1999 or that had graduated in 1999?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Yes. And they were, who were going to BUDs. And for those listening, there are, at the time, 16 billets from the Naval Academy graduating class to go to BUDs SEAL training. And those class, those billets are split over multiple classes, but 16 graduate and get to go to BUDs. And that service selection happens around January of your senior year. So as a freshman in January, seeing who gets picked, and I had just heard that, that some of these individuals had PRK to correct their vision. So that, that they may have had that done a year before or something, but, but that, this is, this is a game changer for me. I just need to get better in the water because I was awful.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  In addition to being scared of the water, borderline scared, just could not swim.

• 31:17Jocko Willink?

  So, so do you start spending extra time in the pool? Does someone grab you and coach you and mentor you? Like, how do you start getting through this?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Well, I had a good buddy who became a team guy and we just started training together. And, uh, yeah, I would figure it out myself. You know, we work on John proofing. We'd work on swimming underwater, 25 meters, something like that. Working on the stroke, working. I also had this goal of trying to make the triathlon team because that year, the senior class, out of those 16 billets going to BUDS, I want to say five came from the triathlon team. So, well, that's a team that could be good to make. It's not a varsity sport. So therefore, you know, you don't have to be recruited. It's a club sport. Let's get in the water and start training. And I was always a very good runner and good at cycling. So I thought, I'll train for triathlon. And along with my friend, we started training.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  We would just go on these adventures, running, running or cycling with our fins strapped to a backpack out to Bay Ridge or into the Chesapeake and just then go fin swim in cold water, come back, get on the bike or run back to the academy. Just doing fun adventures like that. And it just started pushing my limits.

• 32:27Jocko Willink?

  What were you majoring? What'd you major in?

• 32:29Speaker 01

  I chose to major in English. The service academies are geared towards science and engineering. And I am, they said, plebe year chemistry is a good identifier of whether you will do well in engineering and science, if you want to major. And they call it group one. And then group three is more the humanities. First semester chemistry, no problem. It was a repeat in my high school. But second semester chemistry was new stuff. It just was over my head. And so I thought, I had a very influential English teacher in high school, Mr. Schultz. And in addition to my parents really exposing me to reading and in just, I love, I still love to read. I read a lot.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  This teacher really inspired me to want to be an English major. If you, if this is what you like to do, do it. And there's benefit from this, I thought. You're gonna, you learn about people, you learn about situations. You develop an ability to empathize or hopefully with other people. And communication skills as well. This is all very important in the military.

• 33:34Jocko Willink?

  So you decide that you're going to study English while you're at the Naval Academy?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 33:38Jocko Willink?

  And are they, like, what part of English are you studying? Like, I mean, that just seems kind of strange.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  It's English Lit, it just was called English there. But it really is, it's not, I mean, I think they had some writing classes, or creative writing, this kind of thing. But really, it's the study of literature. And my favorite class was a class on Hemingway. And as a kid, I had read Hemingway and I, I read A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls. And these are books very much about war and the wartime experience.

• 34:10Jocko Willink?

  So as you're going through, at what point are you starting to compete? And you're starting to look at, hey, how am I actually going to get selected? Cause you know, you say there's 16 billets and that is, it's as competitive as it gets to get one of those 16 billets. What do you think you did that was able to make you stand out and actually get selected?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  I remember plebe year, we were in an auditorium. I think this is during plebe summer, when the whole class, 1,200 people is assembled. And they're saying, who wants to be an aviator? 600 hands go up. Who wants to be on a ship?

• 34:42Jocko Willink?

  600 out of roughly 1,200.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  1,200, you know, I'm estimating, who wants to be on a ship? And you know, a few hundred, who wants to be a Navy SEAL? And like 200, 150 hands go up, easy. But by the time it comes around to the junior year, we really got to start making things happen. I feel like there were maybe 60 or 70 in my class that were kind of very much gunning for this. You have to do a screener weekend in order to get ready for Mini BUDS. Mini BUDS is a three week program prior to your senior academic year. So you'd go there to Coronado.

• 35:15Jocko Willink?

  Did you go to Mini BUDS?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  I did, I had to do the screener weekend in the fall of my junior year. And in that, you're ranked based on a PFT, Physical Fitness Test. You go through about two days of just hazing essentially from the seniors, the upper class, who have gone to Mini BUDS as if that really qualifies them to do this. But, and then from that, if you survive.

• 35:37Jocko Willink?

  Most badass, most badass has dropped, they've been to Mini BUDS.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Well, at the time, you know, you're revering, they've been to mini BUDs and some of them are gonna go to BUDs. If you get through all this, then you can go to mini BUDs and then ostensibly you're ranked out of that. And then it goes into your senior year, you do another fitness test that gets ranked. You do a peer evaluation, who do you want to go to BUDs with, who do you not want to go to BUDs with?

• 36:02Jocko Willink?

  So you got selected to go to mini BUDs?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  I did, yep.

• 36:05Jocko Willink?

  And how was mini BUDs?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought I did well.

• 36:10Jocko Willink?

  It's three weeks long?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is my first time going to Coronado, California, and I fell in love with the place. Being from Kansas, this is awesome. We had the weekends off. I think we did a hell night, similar to the Sea Cadet thing I did, except now it's in Coronado as opposed to Little Creek, Virginia. And then it was just exposure, you know, in high school I'd been shooting MP, they let us shoot MP5s. And I don't think we even got to do anything that cool in mini BUDs. I think some of it was just going out to La Posta and doing some land navigation in the heat. But it was just a really good time with my buddies from the Naval Academy. And then after that, I got to go to Navy Dive School because I had done a screener for that.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  And that's in Panama City, Florida. And I think that really was helpful for me, given my insecurities in the water to go to dive school.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Five weeks in Panama City, Florida, learning how to dive twin 80s.

• 37:03Jocko Willink?

  How long was it? Five weeks?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  It was five weeks. So that summer before my senior, it was just, for me, it was just the best summer. Mini BUDs for three weeks, dive school for five weeks, come back senior year with a dive bubble. Not that's, I mean, just in the school, like, that's kind of a big deal to have a dive bubble.

• 37:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you were kind of a badass there.

• 37:26Jocko Willink?

  And you get done with all that, and now this is like September 2001, right? This is like September 11th, 2001 is gonna go down right before or as you start your senior year.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember September, I'll never forget that day. I had a late morning class and I went out for a run that morning and.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Outside of the campus, outside of the yard. And as a senior, you're allowed to do that. I came back to the gate and they wouldn't let me in. I didn't have my ID. You don't need to run with an ID. Why are they asking for my ID? And then I came to find out what had happened. I went back to the dorm where we all live. I changed into my uniform, went to class and you're seeing, seeing the replays. I didn't see it live, but things totally, totally changed. I mean, that day, the academy was on lockdown. We didn't know what was happening. We'd heard the Pentagon had been attacked. Of course, the towers in New York.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  And for me, this really drove home this reality. If I get selected for SEAL training, and I'm not going to know until January, I'm going to be directly involved in the nation's response to this. This is for real. It's now we're, we're at war. And there's a decision that anybody wanting to go to BUDS has to make its decision of, what are you going to put as your second choice? And the theory amongst the majority of my friends, in fact, I think all of them was, well, if you want to demonstrate that you want to be a SEAL, you need to put ships as number two, because it's the best way to laterally transfer.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  You're going to have to go to Newport, Rhode Island for surface war for officer school. You'll do a tour in the fleet and then you can put in your package and you can come to BUDS two years later. For me, I was thinking about this long and hard. Cause you're trying to game, you, you want to get one of those billets, but you don't know if you will. It's very competitive. At this point, there's probably 45 guys that are up for this.

• 39:33Jocko Willink?

  And these guys are like varsity wrestlers, varsity swimmers.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, water polo.

• 39:38Jocko Willink?

  Polo badasses.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:40Jocko Willink?

  Destroying the PST. They got a 4.0 GPA. It's like just studs.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So for me, I,

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Thought about this and I put the Marine Corps as number two. You have to go into an interview board and this happens in the fall and this board was happening after nine eleven and it's comprised of senior SEAL officers, mid, middle range SEAL officers, a couple lieutenants at the academy at the time and then some senior enlisted SEALs. So this is intimidating. It's a panel of maybe eight to 10 team guy officers and enlisted that, you know, you just, you don't see a lot of tridents at the academy. So when you do, it's just intimidating.

• 40:24Jocko Willink?

  Dude, I, when I went to boot camp, there was one SEAL there and like, I saw him years later, like probably two, two or three years later. He, he had gotten out and was going, coming back in. And so he was at boot camp, like going, going through some basic like wickets to get reinstated in the Navy and he had a trident and you know, I was like, oh my God, it's a freaking real SEAL. And when I met him years later, totally, totally good dude, but if you would have asked me, what was the height and approximate weight of this guy that you saw that was a SEAL in boot camp? I would have said, oh, he was probably, let's call it probably six, five, two sixty. Cause

• 41:06Jocko Willink?

  that's what he, in my mind, that's what he was. And I met him in real life and he was like, like five eleven, you know, one ninety, you know, and that, that's legit. Like I legitimately thought that he was like that badass. And I was young, I mean, but still that, uh, when you're that, when you're young and you see that, that freaking chicken for the first time, you're like, oh damn. So you're going to this board with eight of these dudes?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of, and the highest ranking officer is an O six, a SEAL captain. And I don't know anything about the ins and outs of the SEAL teams, but this is intimidating and everything, everything seems to, you know, depend upon my performance right here, right now in front of these people. And so I just remember standing outside the room that the guy in front of me's in there, you know, he comes out and, and I'm like, wow, was it, you know, he's like, like shaking his head, like it's tough. So I go in there and,

• 42:01Speaker 01

  You know, they, they asked me, I think they were leading me down. So why are you an English major? Do you write, do you, do you like poetry? Do you write poems? And I'm trying to say, well, sir, this is about, it's about learning of other people and understanding situations and developing communication skills. And I think that'll serve me really well in, in the community if I'm, if I have the honor of being selected. Then they, they said, your second choice, you're not putting down surface warfare. What's going on with that? And I said, well, we're at war. I'd rather be in the Marine Corps if I can't go to BUDS. I'd rather lead an infantry platoon.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  At the time, I didn't know, I, I think, looking back, that's probably the right answer. And I really did. I don't know if the Marines would have taken me. The rumor also was, you put them as second, they're not gonna, they're not gonna take you.

• 42:54Jocko Willink?

  I've heard that, that's like a real catch 22 for guys at the academy. Because they want to go in the SEAL teams, but there's so few billets. But if you put Marine Corps as number two, the Marines are like, are you kidding me? Your Marine Corps should be number one later. So that's a bummer. But that, I've heard that as well.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and truth be told, I think, I'm not going to game this. I'm just gonna rank my choices. And, and honestly, there's a lot of things I'd rather do than be on a ship. And so I'm either gonna make it or not into the, into BUDS and maybe the Marines will take me, maybe they won't. But I remember exiting the interview thinking, I have no idea how that went. It probably, it felt like it was forever, but it was probably half an hour.

• 43:32Jocko Willink?

  And dude, you know, nothing. I'm just sitting here like laughing. You know, nothing about anything.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  I know they were, in, in retrospect, they probably knew the people they wanted. And maybe a couple were on the fence. I don't know where I stacked in there, but they probably were just screwing with me. They probably laugh after, after you leave, they're probably

• 43:51Jocko Willink?

  Did you meet any of these guys later in the teams?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 43:54Jocko Willink?

  Did they debrief you at all? Did they even remember you?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  The company officer at the academy was there and, you know, he's, he's still in and, you know, we've, I have not asked him specifically about that, but they, I, I was, I was ranked fine. I found out afterwards.

• 44:09Jocko Willink?

  So you were ranked fine, you find out in January, that's when you find out what, where you're going?

• 44:16Speaker 01

  That is, yes. There's a day called service selection day. You're gonna go into your company officer's room. Every company, there are 30 companies at the academy, the whole, every company is comprised of all four years. And that company has a company officer from either the active duty Navy or Marine Corps, and then a company senior enlisted from the Navy or Marine Corps. So you go into the company officer's office and he's, or she is gonna tell you what you've been assigned. And this is your fate. You don't get to, this is what you're doing.

• 44:49Jocko Willink?

  That's not a debate.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  No. You don't get to say, well, this or that. And if you're assigned to a ship, later that night, you get to choose, and it's somewhat of a lottery system. I think it actually depends on class rank. You can choose what ship you want to go on. But you don't get to contest the fact that you were assigned surface warfare. So I go in there and he's printing off a certificate that's gonna tell me my fate. And his back is to me, I just remember, it's just, my heart is pounding.

• 45:19Jocko Willink?

  What did you think your chances were?

• 45:22Speaker 01

  At the time, I thought about 50/50.

• 45:24Jocko Willink?

  50/50, Chuck.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  So I go in there and the first thing he said was, "Don't worry, you're fine." What does that mean? You got what you wanted.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  So I remember just feeling absolute relief. And then about maybe five minutes later, it was like, "I'm going to Bud's." Whoa. And now I'm already starting to feel this apprehension, cuz hell week. Second phase, water. I gotta get ready.

• 45:59Jocko Willink?

  How many of your buddies didn't get picked up? Like of your good buddies?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  One of my-

• 46:05Jocko Willink?

  And how was that whole freaking relationship thing? Cuz you know there's like two guys that were like faster than you, and there was another guy that was smarter than you, and another guy that was like a better wrestler, and you're just going, "Jeez."

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. By and large, most of my best friends got a bullet, but one of my best friends did not. And one of my other buddies who did, the guy that I was going on the adventures with, we came up to his room later that day. And he started crying in front of us. I won't forget that either. We all wanted this so bad, but I think it was it was more than necessarily the job. It was this is what your buddies are doing. You want to be with your teammates. It's so, yeah, it's a challenge and you're intrigued by that, but it's about teamwork. And he was crying and man, I felt bad for him. And you know, going on to Bud's, wanting to stay in touch with him, not knowing how to navigate,

• 47:01Speaker 01

  how much do I tell about what I'm doing? Or do I try to protect his feelings and not really, you know, ah, it's, it's, you know, this or that or whatever. But I am proud to say that later on, when I went to a team, another friend of mine, we spoke to the commanding officer and who apparently had good rapport with the detailer. And we said, there's this guy, it's the individual who did not get the billet that year. And he was able to lateral transfer and he is the commanding officer of

• 47:35Jocko Willink?

  Of a team.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  A team. Right now.

• 47:38Jocko Willink?

  That's

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Which is awesome.

• 47:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, for me, when I was in, when I was tasked with a bruiser, Stoner and Leif, both those guys didn't get picked up out of the academy. And they both had to go to the fleet and do the whole lat transfer thing. And, you know, it's all just, man, like you said, it's your fate is in the hands of all these different things. And you can push it. And that's a great story, you know, it's a great story when guys actually stick with it and go to the fleet and do that lateral transfer thing. That's, that's a game I'm glad I didn't have to play.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, in many ways, you were smart. But I will say, I remember there was in the plebe year, the individual who did not get the, who is now doing quite well in the teams.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Who you know. He, in freshman year, we were talking about, what are you going to decide for your major? You know, you don't have to declare until the springtime. I was like, I'm going to do English. And he goes, I think, I'm thinking computer science. And so he, he chose computer science and his grades were not the best. And so it's, for me, this was, English was such a good choice.

• 48:46Jocko Willink?

  Clutch, clutch.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  I could, I, I happen to be someone who likes to read and I can maybe not always read all of the book, but still write a decent paper, focus on my math and science and engineering classes to try to get at least a B in those classes, to try to have good grades because they are evaluating everything and part of that is your grades.

• 49:06Jocko Willink?

  So September 11th goes down, you get picked up, you're in your final prep. You must have been feeling decent about the water now that you passed Navy dive school.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm much more confident in the water. I felt like I had improved a lot. And I knew that anything on land, I'm going to be just given the perspective of, of being borderline afraid of the water, that I could use this to my advantage. I've overcome a fear. I'm used to being afraid of the water. There's actually a strength in that, learning how to overcome something. What I did was I walked up to the water's edge just about every day there at the academy for four years and literally immersed myself in this environment that I am uncomfortable in.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  And come to find later, I had a distinct apprehension of jumping out of airplanes as well. And so SEAL stands for sea, air and land. Sea and air were not my thing. But the processes of overcoming this fear of the water. Serve, I think have served me quite well. And so there's this, I think, inner strength that can come from approaching situations that make you uncomfortable. You get through this. You take it one small step at a time. Work on something. There's always something you can work on. Do one thing today. Do another thing tomorrow. Over time, this will accumulate and grow.

• 50:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I've thought about that too. Like, you're jumping out of airplanes, you're fast roping, you're rappelling, you're diving, you're diving at night, all these things that are a little bit sketchy if you're not comfortable with them. And, and look, the first time you jump out of an airplane, even if like for me, I thought it was going to be fun, but it's still a little bit sketchy. First time I fast roped, like, hey, this seems like it's going to be fun, but it's still a little bit sketchy. First time you rappel off the tower, seems like it's going to be fun, but it's still a little bit sketchy. Well, you're building up sort of the mental protocol to be in a fearful situation and just like proceed anyways, which I think is really good for the first time you're going into combat. Like, oh, okay. Yeah, I know those little butterflies, no factor, I'm going to push through them. That's probably a, probably a pretty good reason just to do

• 51:26Jocko Willink?

  those things in the first place. Of course, you, it sounds like you did it more than I did.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the first step here is acknowledging what's going on. You know, I, okay, this is the situation. I'm uncomfortable in the water. Okay.

• 51:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Check. Let's, let's come up with a plan of action now. But yeah, going into BUDS, I remember I graduated May 24, 2002 from the Naval Academy and my report date at Naval Special Warfare Training Command, BUDS, is late June 2002. So I had about a month off. We got to choose of the 16 of us who were going to go to BUDS with and in what order. And it was split over three classes. And I was in the group that was going to go first. And so we weren't going to have the stories from, and I thought this, this is actually probably good. I was happy with the first, first off the deck because we're not going to see Naval Academy classmates who are further along.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Who maybe can give some wisdom, but they're also through various stages and I just, I'd rather just be the first one to go. And so that worked out well.

• 52:33Jocko Willink?

  There's a definite, like the Naval Academy guys usually do well at BUDs and if they quit, they're just like hated by everyone because they took a billet, they took one of those 16 billets and everyone just can't believe that you got this opportunity and freaking blew it. Like, I mean, the enlisted guys, like, I didn't care. I mean, when I was an enlisted guy going through, I didn't care if somebody quit, for whatever reason. I was like, whatever. But Naval Academy guys, they take that shit real personal.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  There's some pressure, but I also think that can be an advantage. I went out to Coronado, we, the six, so there's actually, it was gonna be six, five and five in those three groups. So I'm gonna be going with six, five other classmates from the Naval Academy. We were packed into an apartment in Imperial Beach, three bedrooms, two to a room, like $200 per person a month for rent. And there was no way I could come back to that apartment having quit. No way. How could I, how could I do that? So you're putting yourself in a situation-

• 53:34Jocko Willink?

  Did any of your 16 quit?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  One. Not in, not in my group.

• 53:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  But you're putting yourself in a situation where external factors, you know, peer relationships, this kind of thing can actually, although it could be conceived or construed as adding pressure, I think it actually made me, you know, at these kind of, you're at your breaking point, point moments, this was maybe just a subliminal nudge in the direction of do not, do not succumb, do not quit, push through, let's go.

• 54:07Jocko Willink?

  I was like so detached from people quitting. I didn't even understand what was happening. Like, people were just quitting. I was like, I was saying this the other day, like, they didn't seem like human to me. Like, they didn't seem like a human, like, oh, this guy, I didn't, I didn't picture a person with like hopes and dreams and that can't believe they just did that and they, they joined the Navy and now they're quitting like, oh gosh, what, I was just like, oh, this person's just a non-human thing that just like is moving on and they're not part of our, what we're doing. And so I wasn't even, I can't even name, I can only name one guy that quit. And he was my boat crew leader. And he was my boat crew leader in Hell Week, but that's the only, everyone else was just like, gone. I just never even thought about him, never even, and I never had thoughts like, oh, I-

• 54:51Jocko Willink?

  You know, this guy's my friend. So I never thought like that. I was like, oh, we're just good. I'm just doing this. Oh, what do you want us to climb those rocks? You want us to jump in the water, whatever. Like, like, I was, like you said, oh, maybe you mentioned real quick. I said, well, you know, I didn't have to go through all that stuff. The Navy got me like, yeah, maybe you're smarter. And I was like, no, in my mind, I was like, no, I was dumb. I was just like, oh, I'm going in the Navy. I want to be a SEAL. They tell me to do something, I'm gonna do it. Like, that was my attitude. So, so, and it might have been beneficial. It seems like it was beneficial. But it also disconnected me from even really any recognition of

• 55:28Jocko Willink?

  how hard SEAL training is because to me, I was like, there was just two groups of people, me and my buddies and everyone else. And we didn't know them. And they just went away. And then we were all going to the teams. And it was like, oh, yeah, we're going to the teams. So it was almost like this weird, like, now, when I hear some of the statistics and you know more about it, and, and you know that guys that are went to the Naval Academy and guys that were, you know, uh, freaking Division One swimmers and Division One wrestlers and Division One football players, and they all quit. And like, I just didn't even, I just thought there were a bunch of guys that just didn't want to be here. And I do. So that was that. Kind of crazy.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember someone giving me advice, or I collected along the way, three pieces of advice. Number one, in hell week, eat like it's your job. Don't ever let a eat, no matter how tired you are, eat, eat, eat. Second was, give 70% effort 100% of the time. Try not to have to ever give 100%, but a good 70% effort 100% of the time, sustainable. And then, third was, don't get close to anybody. Because you don't know if they're gonna quit. I'm wondering if, when your boat crew leader quit, if that affected you. I hear, I hear when an off, it sounds like it didn't, but I, you hear stories about when an officer quits, three or four people go with that person.

• 56:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I forget what, get my buddy Giff, who I went through Hell Week, we, he was on here the other day and we were talking about it. He, he just said, like, he was laughing. He's like, you just looked at him like, all right, whatever. And we just like carried on. I was like, yeah, no factor. I was too like, I was too crazy, I guess. I was too just weird, I guess, or crazy or something. Uh, did you have any challenges during BUDs? Like when you got to pool comp? How was that? Did you have any challenges with the, with the five and a half nautical mile swim or anything like that?

• 57:21Speaker 01

  You know, I think what I saw in BUDs with my class was no matter how gifted a person was, there was probably going to be something at some point that was going to challenge them. And one of the, one of my classmates, this individual from the Naval Academy who I had known for four years at this point was just a, just a stud in BUDs. And there was one day at the very end, for whatever reason, the, the obstacle course rope with the, the, the low wall, the one you have, the high wall, you ascend the rope and then kind of roll over. The rope was wet and he just had a really hard time. I hope, I hope I'm not, if he's listening, I hope he's, I'm not bringing up some bad memories.

• 57:58Jocko Willink?

  BTS.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  For me, you know, I actually did quite well in pool week. I, maybe having gone to dive school really helped me.

• 58:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, dive school had to have helped you.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Had to have helped me. And I, I remember in dive school, the first, just feeling really uncomfortable, breathing underwater. It just was weird, you know? But by the time second phase, dive phase of BUDs comes around, that was normal, that, the, the double hose regulator was new because we, we were using a single hose in dive school. But yeah, you know, and in the-

• 58:26Jocko Willink?

  Aqua lung aqua master.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I, it was just, there was one evolution though, and it's, it's life-saving. I forget if that was pre or post Hell Week. I want to say it was pre Hell Week, but-

• 58:38Jocko Willink?

  I think it's pre.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  We had some large instructors who had weight belts on and

• 58:46Speaker 01

  they bring it and I failed the first time.

• 58:49Jocko Willink?

  Did your world come crashing down?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, it was just, he was just taking me under and, and the, the second time I failed and it was like, the third time it's, I'm thinking, you know, I'm sitting in the, like that wall, that line of shame, yeah. Where you failed and now you, you have to, this is your chance. You know, I'm thinking like, is this it?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  So I, I just really tried to focus on the procedure and trying to do it. And number one, like what I was failing was the fact that this instructor was underwater. So like number one thing is keep this person's head above the water. I don't care if I'm drinking water, if I'm underwater the whole time. His head needs to be above the water the entire time. And I get to the wall and it was a pass. I was just like.

• 59:35Jocko Willink?

  We'll take it. Yeah, and I, I hope I didn't come across like Bud's was easy for me. Cause I, I mean, I failed to run, I failed to swim. Uh, I failed pool comp. And actually, here's the funny thing. For life saving, I got so ready for life saving, I was going, I was like hostile. I was like, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna fight some dudes. And it was like that back then. I don't know if it was like that when you went through it. It sounds like it was. It was a fight, like you're gonna fight this person. And so I was super amped up for that. I went out, got first in line. And in pool comp, I failed pool comp on Friday. And, and over the weekend, me and my buddy, who's now an active duty master chief, we, he failed too. And we spent, I don't know how we did this. I don't know how this was legal.

• 1:00:20Jocko Willink?

  I don't know if it was legal. We spent the weekend in the dip tank with, with charged twin innies. I don't know how we got them. And we just freaking pool comped each other in four, three, four feet of water. Like we're standing outside the dip tank. I'm in the dip tank, he's standing there just ripping my face. And we did that for the whole weekend. The whole weekend we did that. I got on, on Monday morning, I went in there. The instructor came down and this instructor ended up being an admiral. But he came down and as soon as I saw him coming out, I ripped off my own face mask and spit out my mouthpiece like, can't bring it dude. And he, sure enough, he was like, dude, this guy's obviously very confident. And he, you know, he messed me up, but then he was just like, you know, pass.

• 1:01:02Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, I kinda would go a little bit extra on some of these things. But, but I don't want to make it sound like, uh, it was easy for me. Cause like I said, in fact. I failed to run, I failed to swim. Not only that, I can promise you, I never won a run. I never won a swim. I never won an O course. I was like in the middle of everything. And that was about, that was about all I had too. Like when I failed to run, it was because I didn't, I tried to pace myself a little bit and failed. So my only way to pass a run was to run as hard as I possibly could the entire time.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:01:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Not, not 70%, a hundred percent. No, it was a hundred percent, a hundred percent. That's how I had to do it to pass a run, to pass a swim, to pass everything. Uh, so your only big challenge though was life saving.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Life saving, but there was a moment in the beginning stages of Hell Week where, and I can tell the story. I was at,

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  um, a decision point at my, I, I would say my breaking point. And a lot of this was because of frustration.

• 1:02:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh dude, they're gonna get you somehow.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Frustration with physical pain can be a really potent combination. And Hell Week, you know, starts on a, on a Sunday. You know, it's going to end Friday. You're gonna not sleep once until sometime on Wednesday. All these thoughts are kind of going through my head. 70% of my class, 80% are gonna quit. Not gonna make it. Am I gonna be one of the ones who gets through all these, looking around, you're in an isolation room, waiting for this thing to start. Just all these thoughts going through your head.

• 1:02:36Jocko Willink?

  You know what I was thinking at that time? Just like, oh, wait, wait, when's this gonna start? I want pizza.

• 1:02:44Jocko Willink?

  So you're having all these advanced thoughts, dude. I'm having like just nothing. I'm like a freaking idiot.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  And I'm thinking all this stuff and, uh, you know, don't, who knows who's gonna quit? Don't get close to anybody. And we break out and it's just chaos and form up the longest mile. You go all the way down with the boats on your head to that bottom end of the silver strand racing. You're tired. It's, it's not, it's not comfortable by any means, but, uh, you know, at this point, it's like we're in, I'm in this. I mean, you're, you're in it, you're in it. And so all that anxiety and buildup and apprehension has kind of dissipated because I'm just in this now. But we're forming up for the second race. This part of the longest mile with the logs, logs are, you know, the sectioned telephone poles. And my team steps up to a government pickup trucks, receiving our log.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  And this thing was just insanely heavy. I don't know what was going on with it. It wasn't old misery. I don't know what was going on. It felt like it was waterlogged.

• 1:03:45Jocko Willink?

  Yep, it probably could have been waterlogged.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  And maybe the instructors knew, maybe they didn't. I don't know.

• 1:03:50Jocko Willink?

  They knew.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  And I just remember we had a, one of the guys in the boat, and I guarantee you every single person under that log remembers this log. It was just so heavy. I mean, and you know what a log is supposed to weigh. You've done this stuff before and immediately groaned. And there was a guy on the boat team, he'd been through, I think, three days of hell week before, and you know, two years before, gone to the fleet, come back and immediately was saying, this log is a career ender.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  This is not good. So we received the brief, you know, log carry north, bust them, go. It races on and just all the teams in the class were just out of sight. You couldn't hear, see the second to last place team even. This is bad.

• 1:04:40Jocko Willink?

  This way, so you guys are so far.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  So far back. Can't even see the second to last place team. I mean, like the whole class is just gone and we are all by ourselves at the last place. So of course the instructors descended upon us like a pack of wolves, you know, with their megaphones and hurry up, step it out, move it out, let's go. And then there was this instructor in my face and this person had a unique ability to really get under my nerves. And he's telling me he's going to kick me out of the program. We need to step it out. I'm at the far left end of the log.

• 1:05:15Jocko Willink?

  Are you the boat crew leader?

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Yes, far left end of the log. Where the weight tends to collect and the person to my right, it just 10, 15, 20 minutes into this. I have no conception of time, but we're into this race now, we're in last place and it seemed like his arms, there just wasn't much. So you can feel the increase of the weight and I'm at the far left end of the log. So it felt like I was carrying two people's worth of weight on the far left end of this log that was so heavy. I mean, it felt, it literally felt like my arms were going to just rip my, rip out of the shoulder sockets. My biceps were totally on fire. I mean, every step was just horrendous.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  And I started just succumbing to self doubt, frustration, thinking long-term thought like,

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  how am I gonna, this is, I'm just a few hours into hell week. How am I gonna make it like to Friday? Friday seems impossibly far away and this log is destroying my body. This is not good. It's not good. I worked years to get to this point and yeah, things are just unraveling fast. This is not a good start to hell week. We're only a few hours in, middle of the night. And there was this moment where I remember looking up into the skies. We're struggling to advance this log forward through the soft sand in last place and just thinking, I can't, I can't do this. It's just too much. And I was frustrated because these instructors and they don't, you know, I just wanted to scream that this isn't fair. This, this is not, this log is not the right kind of weight.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  It's not a fair race, but I couldn't say that. And they didn't know or let on to their knowledge that this log was too heavy. So at this critical point where I just out of frustration, I was just about to walk away. I remember I just had this idea of like playing this game and it's all in my mind. But I could quit, but first, you know, take a few more steps. I take those steps, but then. Okay, just keep playing this game, okay? Take a few more steps. Okay, I've done that. Let's just keep playing this game. And so I just got in that rhythm and then I started yelling some encouragement to the team. And let's go, let's go, let's go. And they probably wanted me to shut up.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  But this game, I learned a lesson. Like, okay, you gotta, when you have these situations that push you to your limit, you may have long-term goals. You know, I wanted to be a Navy SEAL and all that, but it seemed like really far away. And as I, you know, think about this and unpack this experience, what I have learned is that a way to get your mind away from these long-term thoughts that can only be discouraging is to just focus on mechanics and procedure and process. Support the log with my arms. Advance it with my team one step at a time. That's all I need to be thinking about, right? You know, and you learn that. I learned that in that night, right then and there in that raid. Yeah, of course, we finished last place and we got hammered.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  But, because, you know, it pays to be a winner and they want to drive home this lesson that losing in combat has severe consequences. You need to find ways to win. There was no way in hell we were gonna win under this log. But that punishment occurred. The log was away. We were just, I don't know, doing air squats or bear crawl, whatever it was. It was better than being under that log. And I knew that, I just got through that. There was nothing, nothing this week that can be that bad. And nothing was that bad. And I remember laying in the surf zone, surf torture sessions. All I would need to do was just think, man, this is rest. At least I'm not under that log. My whole perspective had changed. I got through it. I learned that lesson, you know, just focus on one step at a time and advancing it.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  And one, one, but this, I think every person who gets through Hell Week at some form, whether they process this consciously or not, but you have to break down long-term massive challenges into increments. Things that you can do right now that add up over time to get through a very difficult situation. That lesson was very... Valuable for me.

• 1:09:28Jocko Willink?

  No, that's a, that's a good one. And like I said, from my perspective, it was just like, mm, I never even was thinking that far in advance. I was like, what? Carry this log? Cool. Got it. You know, I was too, uh, too much of a knuckle dragger to, to process these kind of, uh, these kind of big picture strategic thoughts about my life.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, maybe I'm prone to overthinking and so there is something to be said for just, just doing it and not think, you know, just do what you gotta do.

• 1:10:01Jocko Willink?

  You know, I remember thinking when I was in hell week, I was like, oh, it's gonna feel so good to, to go to sleep. Like it, it was almost like my anticipation, I was like, oh, it's gonna feel so cool to stay awake for so long. Cause imagine how good it's gonna feel to fall asleep when in a week, that's gonna be so cool. It's gonna feel so good to just like lay down. And I was kind of excited about the prospect of having stayed awake for so long, but then I got to go to sleep. The only way you can get to, to get that much pleasure in sleeping is to stay awake for that long. Otherwise it's just kind of a pain to go to sleep. It's like a waste of time. It feels like it's like uh, bad. Um, so thankfully you made it through. How many people started in your buds class? Do you remember?

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Oh, we had, when we classed up, I believe it was 196. That number sticks in my mind. It seems like a pretty

• 1:10:49Jocko Willink?

  And what class were you?

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Class 242. So June of 2002, we classed up. Hell week was late August, 2002, summer hell week. So the surf torture sessions weren't that bad. They just leave you in longer, but again, it's just rest.

• 1:11:04Jocko Willink?

  They adjust, yeah.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  And, uh, I believe we graduated 26 original, but we had rollbacks along the way.

• 1:11:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh,

• 1:11:14Jocko Willink?

  you get done. So that's, those were your major challenges, a little bit of life saving.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Two big challenges. Yeah.

• 1:11:20Jocko Willink?

  You get done and you get assigned to a team. What team you end up going to?

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  West coast team, team one.

• 1:11:27Jocko Willink?

  So you end up going to team one? Did you want to go to the west coast?

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I chose that. I had.

• 1:11:32Jocko Willink?

  You had that Coronado on your mind.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, being from Kansas, I've been east coast at the Naval Academy and you know, I, the thing is, when you get to a team. Nobody cares that you went through Hell Week.

• 1:11:45Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Nobody cares. Nobody cares that you have a Trident. These things I've been working for, for years, they no longer matter.

• 1:11:52Jocko Willink?

  Did you get your Trident after SQT?

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:55Jocko Willink?

  So?

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  So September 2003, I reported that West Coast team in October 2003 as a new guy.

• 1:12:03Jocko Willink?

  So you show up and you get put right into a platoon?

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  No. The policy at that team at that time was, and, and they were, the detailing was a little off in the sense that they were just a few months away and ended up doing a surge deployment. So to Iraq, the team had to do a surge deployment to Iraq. I think, I kind of forget the particulars, but maybe more platoons were needed.

• 1:12:30Jocko Willink?

  Was this in oh four?

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:32Jocko Willink?

  And you were Team One?

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:33Jocko Willink?

  And you went on deployment?

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:36Jocko Willink?

  In?

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Less than four months after arriving.

• 1:12:38Jocko Willink?

  You went on deployment in the, what, what time of year?

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  January oh four, I believe there was some kind of a surge happening within the community. And so I got to that team. They were already well through their workup. And so the policy, there were several of us junior officers who were just kind of floating around. And the policy was not to put the third officer in a platoon at that team at that time.

• 1:13:03Jocko Willink?

  So did you go on deployment?

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. I deployed to the Pacific.

• 1:13:06Jocko Willink?

  Okay. I was at Team Seven and Team One relieved us. That's why, so I, if you would have gone to Iraq, you would have high-fived with me in Iraq as I was getting ready to head home.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  I was not in that group. I was, I was bummed. You know, when you think at the Naval Academy that you've now been selected to go to BUDs, 9/11 just happened. This is for real. We're going to war. You go through BUDs, Hell Week, etc., land warfare, everything, SQT, you get to a team, you're deploying to war. I did not realize that some platoons deploy to non-combat environments, even when there is combat going on. And that was a surprise to me.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Not exactly what I expected, but I'm a new guy and so you just, you go where you're told. And, and a lot of people may not realize this, but platoons don't often get to control where they deploy, or even the commanding officer of the team doesn't get to control that.

• 1:14:07Jocko Willink?

  There's a, there's a strong element of chance in all this stuff. And you have, that's why the best thing you can do is get to a team, do a good job, do the best you can, keep going on deployment and hopefully get in the right place at the right time. The better you do, the better reputation you have, the better chance you will have. But it's still only a chance. So, did you do a full six months in the Pacific?

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  It was nine months.

• 1:14:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Nine months in the Pacific staged at Guam, doing a lot of exercises with various countries. I mean, you got to, we got to do some cool training, which for me was actually new training, especially in terms of urban combat and movement through houses and amongst structures. So that was something I hadn't been exposed to because I hadn't done the workup. So getting to do that with a platoon with sim munition and this kind of thing was, was really good training, I thought.

• 1:15:07Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with that deployment, now you get put as an assistant platoon commander?

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:15:13Jocko Willink?

  And you're still at Team One?

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is now 2004, going to be deploying 2005, assistant platoon commander, same team.

• 1:15:20Jocko Willink?

  And how's this?

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Yep, it, assistant platoon commander, I'm still a new guy. You know, you're in this position as a junior officer in my situation, not being prior enlisted like you were, that you're, in terms of not only age, but experience in the teams, you're just outranked, even though maybe technically on the uniform, there's a rank. So.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  It's a difficult position to navigate sometimes. I think you want to go into this with some humility, with asking questions. I found that junior officers in the team sometimes, and I, I think I can put myself in this category, try to cover up some of their insecurities, not knowing things, not having the experience by acting as if they do know.

• 1:16:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, which is a big mistake.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  That's in, yeah, in retrospect, you can, you can see, you know that people can see through this, but at the time, you don't necessarily realize that. And so, maybe you're reluctant to ask advice or ask someone's opinion, but I actually learned that this is a wonderful opportunity to show someone that you value their opinion. You ask, hey, in the, in the locker room, where the cages are, how are you setting up your kit? Just pick their brain. And I mean, this is a, I think this is a good, a good thing for anybody in any organization when you're new is ask the people who know what's going on, what do you recommend? And this, this creates a sense of buy-in. I think the, the fact that you value their opinion,

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  that's, that's useful. So I tried, I tried to approach it from a position of humility, but as an assistant platoon commander, your primary responsibilities are to learn tactics, learn small unit leadership, and then do administrative functions for the platoon and support the platoon commander.

• 1:17:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I mean, even though I was a prior enlisted guy, I mean, I still would ask the team, like the, the guys, hey, what do you, how do you think we should do this? What do you think we should do? Where should we insert? What do you think about this platform over here? I would always do that, even if, even when I was the more experienced and sometimes even the most experienced. And I learned that from one of my platoon commanders, who was a prior enlisted guy, who had more experience than any of us, who asked us, hey, what do you think? How do you think we should do this? And that's, you know, I got to just steal his leadership techniques for when I be, for when I was put in charge. But I always give that advice, you know, if you, there's no sense in acting like you know what you're doing, because everybody, not only do they see through it, but they don't

• 1:17:56Jocko Willink?

  expect you to know everything. They're like, hey, you've been here for three months, bro. We don't expect you to know how to run this drill or how to plan for this mission. It's okay. We, we do, and we can all work together to figure this out. Any standout memories from that workup, getting ready to deploy?

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  You know, my memories are of the people and in particular two who are no longer here. And that's just something that I'll always take away from that platoon.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  One, one was killed in the extortion helicopter crash and another on an operation a few years ago. So that's, that's tough. I, you know, I really just, I think about those guys a lot. I, I would say one of my leadership failures in this phase was along the lines of being in that position of you're younger, you don't have as much experience, you're falling into wanting to be one of the, one of the guys, one of the, you know, buddies.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  And, and, and I would say, you know, this is probably something that everybody deals with in, in the junior officer ranks of the teams. You want to be liked, you want to be buddies, you know, going out and this kind of thing with the guys. And I, you know, I did that and, and I don't have any regrets, but I think for me, one of the hardest, I think hardest positions I could have put myself was to be able to make a decision that's, that may be right, but not popular. Now, I wasn't the platoon commander, but as an A O I C, it's pretty easy to get into that situation of like, okay, you're supposed to support the platoon commander, but yet you are buddies with the guys.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  It can be sort of like in or between a rock and a hard place kind of a situation. I think that was a leadership takeaway that I had from that, that platoon. And we ended up deploying to the Pacific again. This was more directly located in one specific A O. And it was doing foreign internal defense with host nation forces. And we were dispersed kind of in a satellite model. And it was a long deployment. There's definitely some leadership challenges. Guys in the platoon, they want to go to Iraq, they want to go to Afghanistan at this point. But we're, we're on this deployment to the, to the Pacific theater. And, and so, yeah, there, there's some leadership challenges for sure in that environment.

• 1:20:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for a while. The SEAL teams was rotating like so you do half your deployment in the Pacific and then go into Iraq or Afghanistan for another three months, but eventually people said that's not a good move either and it really isn't. I mean, it really, it just doesn't make.

• 1:20:50Jocko Willink?

  It's like the fair fairy comes up with those kinds of ideas because it's more fair to get and you know, you, you feel, you feel it, you know, you're like, well, this guy, these guys want to go get in the fight. So that seems like the fair thing to do, but unfortunately, it's the fair fairy doesn't always have the best ideas, even though it seems fair, it's not smart.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and the argument is, well, you know, okay, six months is too long to be in combat. So we can relief in place and the people who really want to go to, you know, but then you're bringing in people that don't have AO expertise. And it's just, yeah, I agree. I, so at this point now, I've done two deployments as a junior officer. I have not been to Iraq or Afghanistan and people who I'd gone through buds with at this point have started deploying to Iraq or OEF in Afghanistan and they're going on combat operations, you know, the stuff that we trained to do. We trained to do all of it, but the, what really pushes

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  your training and, and the ultimate test of your training applied overseas is what you could be doing in Iraq, given the state of things at that time was what you could be doing in Iraq or Afghanistan. And so, yeah, I've, I was feeling, oh, to be honest, a bit frustrated because as a junior officer, you're going to get your AIC deployment, your OIC deployment in platoons. And if you're either in a platoon or you're not. And I've, when I first showed up at the team and I'm not in a platoon, that sucks. It sucks. You're in a platoon or you're not, and you're going to get two platoons.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  And then maybe a task unit commander tour, but okay, certainly not as quite as operational. So yeah, I got one more to go. And yeah, I was, I was a little bit frustrated to be honest. And then now, and I don't, I don't want to come across as bitter. I'm just trying to be honest about how I felt at the time.

• 1:22:54Jocko Willink?

  Well, what kind of human beings try and go through all this shit to go to the SEAL teams? Guys that want to go to war. So when you do it a nine month deployment with no war and then you now you go on a six month deployment, no war, and you know, you've got limited opportunities in the rest of your career, it's going to be, I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to type of person that's like, oh, I was happy I wasn't going to war. Like that's not the kind of guy you would want in the SEAL teams.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Right. I talked to firefighters and I talked to them and see, not that you're necessarily, necessarily wanting there to be fire, people's lives to be at risk, but given that there is one, you want to be the one who responds. And if you're not around people that feel that way,

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  that's, that's a problem. And I was proud to be around a group of people that by and large want to go respond to that fire, so to speak, in the teams.

• 1:23:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I think they eventually got to a point where like, hey, if a guy had just gone to Iraq or Afghanistan and maybe he'd gone twice in a row and now they put him in a platoon where he's not going to go. And it was a little, it did get more fair as time went on, but this was only what this was 2005. So it was like, you know, it's a tough one.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I come back from that deployment in 2006 and then I did a little bit of an overseas augmentation in Afghanistan and I did get to go there, got to see some of the, the countries, some of the area of operations. I came back from that and then I did what's called a disassociated tour. So you're not in a platoon. And again, in my estimation you're either in a platoon or you're not and if you're one of the people who's not it's a distinct feeling there's nothing like being in a platoon it's one of the best I mean I would do that job for 20 years if I could

• 1:24:47Speaker 01

  but so I'm a disassociated tour but supporting platoons at the team on a deployment that

• 1:24:54Jocko Willink?

  so you did another deployment

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  another deployment we

• 1:24:56Jocko Willink?

  but at least you so you've been to Afghanistan and now you come back you're doing a disassociated tour of some job where you're supporting the teams were you doing some kind of like recon element type thing

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  generally speaking yeah intelligence collection and this kind of thing so work it was definitely a leadership you know I'm I'm a officer in charge

• 1:25:16Jocko Willink?

  right and you're in charge of operational stuff that's gonna help

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  yeah absolutely

• 1:25:21Jocko Willink?

  where did you deploy to

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  to Iraq

• 1:25:23Jocko Willink?

  okay yeah so that's also nice

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  yeah and I got to see the area I did get to go out on some operations but again I'm not in the platoon

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  so it was it was it's just you can chalk it up to experience but again I I just can't help but think okay I I don't have combat experience and you know this combat experience is the mark of respect in the teams now I'm that deployment goes to 2008 I've been in five years with a trident six years into my career and I don't have combat experience and it's not my fault but this is something I felt like I had been training for and I just felt insecure about it

• 1:26:12Jocko Willink?

  where were you when you were in Iraq where'd you go

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  we were in the the western provinces there yeah so near where you were in in Ramadi and and we had various I think it was more like an outstation model at this point

• 1:26:24Jocko Willink?

  did you at least go like on some ops

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  oh yeah yeah yeah yeah but no shots fired I mean I don't consider that combat not that not that I mean some good operation there may no there may not be shots fired it's just I didn't have and I wasn't in a leadership position tactically so

• 1:26:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you come back from that deployment.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:26:45Jocko Willink?

  So now you're one, two, three, three deployments deep.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  Yep, in an augmentation and I am.

• 1:26:52Jocko Willink?

  How long was that augment to Afghanistan?

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Two months, yeah. And I, and I got to do, I got to go to an outstation there and that was, that was great. But I'm now past my service requirement. I could get out. You know, yet after graduating from the Naval Academy, you do five years, you can punch. Like, that would just seem like so weak to me. Yeah, I honestly, I didn't even think about that.

• 1:27:14Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  To be honest, but as I look back, I'm like, wow, yeah, I could have, after that deployment, I could have just gotten out. And then, you know, things would have been different.

• 1:27:21Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. Well, it's really hard, uh, like you, like, like we're talking about, it's really hard to look at your career and be like, okay, I'm just gonna get out now, when you know you've got friends that are fighting, you know that you have more to offer. So you're not getting out.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  No, and the one, the one job that I have to do is platoon commander. If, in my opinion, if you don't do that, that's for me, where I was in my mind, I don't do that job. I'm failing myself and everything that I've been through. That's the one critical tour that I'm gonna do.

• 1:27:56Jocko Willink?

  Right. And so you go back to team one to do that?

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:59Jocko Willink?

  So you get back to team one, now you're a platoon commander.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  Correct. And this is now, and I had been an officer in charge of the, the previous element. But for me, this was a very special assignment and I really was excited just to be a platoon leader in a SEAL platoon. Just felt like seven, eight, nine years of effort. It's like coming down to this, this two-year assignment.

• 1:28:26Jocko Willink?

  And you actually have some decent experience for being a platoon commander. I mean, you've done multiple deployments overseas.

• 1:28:35Jocko Willink?

  You're doing alright. This isn't like a guy that like sometimes you get a lateral transfer that has like what they did. Sometimes they do no deployments. Sometimes the lateral transfer is really senior and they just get put into an OIC position. They have no experience. So you've been in the teams the whole time and you know, you've done multiple deployments. So you're feeling, you must have been feeling pretty good about being a platoon commander.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I volunteered, I'm the person who's gonna volunteer, I volunteered to go do the augmentation. I didn't need to do that. And that was after a deployment. You know, I, pretty quickly after, I wanted to go out. I wanted to get the experience. Would you go through an 18-month platoon workup cycle and your deployment is where your deployment is and you only, you know, so six years may seem like a long time, but it's actually not a lot of different assignments. It's only three assignments really within that time.

• 1:29:26Jocko Willink?

  And what's going on with your family this whole time? Like you've been gone or what's, what's happening with the, with the family?

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  So at this point, it's just my mom and sister. My sister now is, she's in college in Kansas. My mother remarried after my father died in 1999. I was at the Naval Academy. And

• 1:29:47Jocko Willink?

  Also, we, how do we, we skipped over that. What, what happened to your dad when you were at the Naval Academy?

• 1:29:52Speaker 01

  Well, he was out on a bike ride one day and was hit by a car. And this just happened out of the blue. I had been training for the triathlon team and I think he had kind of taken up cycling. But it was one of these mornings at the Naval Academy, I was just getting ready to go to class and I remember one of the upperclassmen came by and I was, I'm a sophomore at this point and it's pretty, I had just been home in Kansas because over the summer. And he said, the company officer wants you, wants to see you. What did I do? You know, there's probably, I'm sure there was something I had done in the recent memory that would lead me to believe like, oh man, I got caught.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  So I go in there and he told me the news and it just was like the floor dropped out from under me. We had a, a, the company senior enlisted was a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant and he was, he knew, he had met my father because at the end of PLEEP summer, you, the parents get to come and see how things were, you know, you graduated PLEEP summer and so they talked about the Marine Corps and, and this gunny was awesome and he, he, he was very supportive. I got, this happened on a Thursday and the Naval Academy and all of its generosity told me, you can go home on emergency leave, you need to be back Thursday,

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  the following week, one week. That still pisses me off. But I went home in the funeral and then came back and was in class a week later. And, uh, yeah, that's, uh, so my mom ended up remarrying. I ended up being overseas when that happened. My sister is in nursing school and at Kansas and I'm single, ready to deploy and, uh, ready to be a platoon commander in 2008.

• 1:31:48Jocko Willink?

  So you're, you're in a platoon and going through workup. This is probably when I met you for the first time, when you were going through workup.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Yes. You were training detachment OIC.

• 1:31:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We have good times.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, I first of all, want to thank you for the training, specifically land warfare. You know, I didn't get to stay on that deployment very long, but I'm of the firm opinion that training should be very difficult. And I think you really stepped it up. And so that probably saved lives.

• 1:32:21Jocko Willink?

  Jason Gardner, who was, was the, I guess he was the senior enlisted guy when you guys were out there when you got hit, but he, he, he talks, he's talked to me about it and like how everything went down and definitely, you know, his whole deployment, he has multiple stories where.

• 1:32:41Jocko Willink?

  You know, there was maneuver elements that they were able to act on and able to stop and blue on blues that could have easily happened that they didn't happen because they'd been through training that was really hard. So, yeah, it was definitely, uh, my goal was to make the training hard so that guys were ready for combat. Um, and you know, it was, it was awesome to see. It was awesome for me to be able to watch guys develop and get really good and understand what their job was. It was a really steep learning curve, but it was also like a learning curve that was steep, but also had like really nice steps on it where you'd, you know, this training operation, you'd learn this thing and then they'd figure this other

• 1:33:23Jocko Willink?

  thing out and then they'd do this other thing. We'd put them in a different scenario and, and then you've got them in mount and they're learning, you know, other steps. So by the time guys were getting done, they were really, really competent leaders and it was awesome to see.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  I remember you, you broke things down in a way that made sense and it's simplicity. I remember one time you were, I think, I don't know if we were one-on-one, but it was a very close conversation and you were just saying, listen, either you're online or you're in an L. I just, I think it was one-on-one. And it just, the way you said it just really hit home. Yeah, okay. And then I filed it away and that, that was a very valuable lesson for me. And it's a simple, it's, it's pretty simple, but sometimes, you know, in the chaos, you just, you just get overwhelmed and so, and then, and then just to prioritize and execute, that's a really important rule that, uh, you know, there could be, I, I can see

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  situations in training environments or in combat where you're getting overwhelmed by either too much going on or you're, you're actually overwhelmed because there's, there's actually no seemingly viable course of action. I think those are two different situations, but in the, the other, the one where there's just so much going on, okay, you know, prioritize and execute and, and pick the most important thing or either delegate it or act upon it yourself. With the other situation, uh, yeah, there's, it just doesn't seem like there's any viable course of action. What can we even do to make this situation better? Just realize there's always something you can do. Oh, you're never out of the fight, even if. You're gonna continue doing what you're currently doing?

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  That's an active choice, not a passive choice. And there's a difference there.

• 1:35:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, there's a big difference. As you're going through that workup, how was like the relationships with your with your platoon chief? With your LPO, did you guys have a good, solid, you know, platoon from your perspective?

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did. And I think, I think that's why our platoon task unit was selected to go to Afghanistan. Because I think we did well. And when I say that platoons and task units don't always get to choose where they deploy, but there is a little bit of a selection process going on within the team. And so I think I took it as a compliment that we're gonna go on this deployment to Afghanistan. And, and the West Coast teams had not been deployed to that AO for a while. So it was, it was gonna be new. And we're gonna be going to Iraq this time. And so we knew that the team, the platoons that we would be replacing were getting into it. My platoon chief was experienced. We had a prior enlisted assistant officer in charge who was really, really great.

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  And, you know, one of the things I wanted to approach this position with in my mind was this leadership position was if through the workup, I can ask the opinion of the enlisted members of the platoon and really show that I value their advice, that that is gonna create a sense of empowerment and buy-in, but also that their value is, their opinion is valued in that can create an atmosphere of innovation. Because what you, you don't want to train fire team leaders to just be responsive to doing what they're told. You want them to have initiative.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  And so in order to do that, you know, this is a, hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? Just in the day to day. And, and I, I hope that that, you know, the ultimate barometer here is, is the opinion of the people in the platoon. But, you know, and the other, the other thing is when you're going through a platoon workup, you're, you're trying to train yourself and you're trying to train. Everybody in their various job, but you also have to be training people to be able to step up. And that is one of the things going through a training evolution. You have training detachment instructors evaluating you on your own leadership and tactical decisions. But you need to be able to step aside and say, okay, hey, you got this one.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  Let's go. It's, and it's, it's tough because you're, oh, are people to think I'm just ducking it out because I don't want to make a bad call. But you do need to have the ability to do one job above you. And I think those two things were what I worked on. And I think especially the second one, you know, giving assistant platoon commander the opportunity to take my position. That that in hindsight was the right call.

• 1:37:51Jocko Willink?

  For sure. Yeah. And we would, we would do that too. You know, if we had a, a platoon commander or a platoon chief that was really running everything, they'd be the first person we put down in a training scenario. Just to let's see what's going to happen now, now that we pulled this guy out.

• 1:38:07Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with this workup and, and now it's time to go on deployment. And like you said, you had been selected to go to Afghanistan. And you end up going on the PDSS, right? The pre-deployment site survey.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  You know, we didn't go months in advance. So there was, as I recall, there was going out a few months early. And then there was going out three weeks or so before your platoon. For whatever reason, I, we didn't go a few months or I don't know why. But the plan was for some of the key leaders in the task unit to go early, three weeks or so early. And that's standard procedure. I remember thinking, you know, this is, this is just, is what you do. This is a very important deployment for me, given, and I remember thinking, uh, you know, if I was only going to get one, if you can only have one really good deployment. Well, this is the one I would choose. So it just kind of felt like things are lining up.

• 1:39:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and going into that deployment, like I said, it was Jason Gardner and his task unit, uh, task unit Trident, and they had, you know, Jason describes that as the most kinetic of his deployments and he'd done a lot of deployments. And so those guys were, and you know, I was tracking those guys. I remember I said, uh, I would sign my emails back and forth when they would tell me what they were doing. I would sign my emails to them, uh, you know, Jaco, spiritual advisor to task unit Trident. They got a kick out of that, him and the task unit commander and stuff. Uh, but you know, we were tracking, they were doing a lot of really kinetic operations and yeah, definitely for the guys on the west coast getting ready to go there at that time, that's a, a good place to be going

• 1:39:57Jocko Willink?

  because you know, Iraq had settled down a lot at this point, you know, kinda after the, the, the, uh, debt defender group going into solder city, you know, Iraq had definitely settled down. So you guys were going to the, you know, the best show in town.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I felt we were ready. Land warfare in the desert of California is pretty similar to the terrain and the geography of, uh, southern Afghanistan. And we had a hard land warfare training block. We dialed in our training specifically over the, uh, you know, post-workup phase where you can kind of, you know, we're going to deploy and we're doing a lot of, uh, operations in training that we're going to mimic, we're mimicking what we felt. We're reading in the after-action reports. We knew these guys were getting into, and we knew specifically how they were going on operations. So we could tailor the training for that. And we had done all that. So we were, we were ready. We were ready to go.

• 1:40:58Jocko Willink?

  So you show up on the ground, how long are you on the ground for before? And when you hit the ground, are they like, hey, we got one in the hopper right now? We're going to rock and roll?

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So some operations are time-sensitive. This is one that was not. It was shelved and I think they wanted to, you know, and rightly so, they wanted to expose us to a, not only the execution of the operation, but the planning process, the relevant players, sit in on the briefing and all of this is very valuable. Who we're going to talk to, the air crew and, and all of that. So yeah, they had one ready for us for the leadership element that had gone early. And keeping in mind, most of the platoon and task unit is still back in San Diego at this point.

• 1:41:41Jocko Willink?

  So as soon as you show up on the ground, are they like, all right, here's, here's what we got in the books. We're gonna, how, how, how long was it before you, from the time you got on the ground? Do they hand you like, hey, come, let's give you a brief, a general brief of what's happening. Let us give you a concept of operations? Of what we're about to go do?

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is where my memory gets a little fuzzy. I think just given what ended up happening. I, I feel like I was on the ground, well, certainly no more than 48 hours.

• 1:42:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:08Jocko Willink?

  So you show up, you're getting a brief. How many guys from your task unit are there?

• 1:42:16Jocko Willink?

  It's like three or four?

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  I'd say six to eight.

• 1:42:20Jocko Willink?

  Six to eight?

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:21Jocko Willink?

  And you guys all have, you get assigned probably jobs with, you know, the different sections or the different squads?

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was assigned to the platoon leader from one of the two platoons in country who you know from your task unit.

• 1:42:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  Yep. And so we just go through, I, I remember they were planning, but in the final stages. And then I remember sitting on the brief. I remember going to the plywood huts, kitting up.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  I remember going to the flight line, taking the trucks to the flight line.

• 1:42:55Jocko Willink?

  And are you thinking this time, hey, you have a good understanding of the operation, you know what we're gonna do, you're gonna get a good feel for it?

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, and don't let my, my absence of memory right now and the details of where it happened affect the impression that I, I just think given what happened and, and I don't remember where this happened. I don't remember the, I remember the generalities of the operation, of course, but I, I, the details escape me.

• 1:43:22Jocko Willink?

  What do you remember?

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  I remember being in Canada. I remember going for a run. I remember going for a lift. I remember eating. I remember sitting in the briefing. I remember going to the plywood hut. I remember sleeping one night. I remember.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  Going to the fire pits before we launched for a chaplain-led ceremony, a ritual. You know, this is, this is, I think, evident of combat. You can, it's like you have bits and pieces of memory, facts, and they can get assembled in different ways. And certainly when I talk about the operation and what happened, in order to get the complete picture, you'd have to talk to other people. My impression is my own impression, and I fully acknowledge that my memory may be distorted, but there are absolutely parts of this that I completely remember.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  And what is interesting to me, though, is that some of this pre-operational occurrences that they, I just don't really remember a lot of it. I don't, I don't know. I, I don't know why.

• 1:44:38Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember being on the helos going in?

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  Yes, I remember sitting on the helo. You know, it's, it's loud and you're on night vision goggles. No one's really talking. You could hear the pilot chatter if you want to be on that frequency and it seems probably about a 45-minute flight. I mean, the general operation was to conduct a target assault, a compound, a drug, a bizarre. I think at this time, we were getting into the counter narcotics. You know, this is a funding source for Taliban. This is in heavily controlled Taliban territory. There's bad dudes in this place. It's Taliban-controlled village, and there's going to be an assault. I'm not in the assault force element, but I'm going to be in the blocking force.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  And so I'd be shadowing the element that was pre, pre-assault, detached from the main assault force. We would, you know, after disembarking the helicopters, we'd full patrol under cover of quiet and darkness, middle of the night.

• 1:45:34Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember that?

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:45:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and just going over the plan, you know, it was just to secure the top of a hill in the element that I was in.

• 1:45:44Jocko Willink?

  So you're gonna provide kind of like an overwatch support element for as an assault is going down?

• 1:45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And all this is gonna happen, the assault was gonna happen either right before or right at first light to have a little bit more visual clarity. I think that that's really what they wanted to do.

• 1:46:02Jocko Willink?

  So you remember the helos coming in?

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember going to the flight line. I remember sitting on the helicopter. I remember getting off the helicopter. You know, they're departing. You wait for, you know, it's quiet again. You start foot patrolling. It's kind of, you know, offset. So going through, I remember walking, everyone's, you know, night vision goggles. So it's, I'm sure the technology's improved a lot, but back then it's green and black. And I remember, you know, the villages there look like they're from medieval times, just with the mud brick. Seeing that, it's very quiet. We're just moving. And then, you know, the element that I was a part of detached from the main assault force to proceed to the, to that hill that overlooked the target compound. We were gonna, we needed to clear and hold that hilltop.

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  And there was, from satellite imagery, we knew there was an old fort up there from back when the Russians were in Afghanistan. So we needed to clear and hold that structure, but it was very crumbled at this point and own the high ground. And once we had done that, we could set up a commanding overwatch position with, you know, heavy weapons and this kind of thing. So foot patrolling, we had detached from the main assault force element, foot patrolling to that hill. It's gonna be about a 15, 20 minute hike to get to the top of the hills of fairly, it was not a mountain, but it was a large hill. Going single file, working their way up and being led, we had a Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician up there.

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  And he was sweeping the ground like, you know, as standard, but it was recognized that there's a strong possibility of improvised explosive devices will have EOD up front and have everybody else covering behind.

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  And as we're working our way up,

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  I remember I was shadowing with the platoon commander. And then we kind of had got our way up to the top. And I just started moving forward. And I've thought about this a lot. I certainly, you know, and I'll, I'll talk about it later, but you know, you can armchair quarterback everything and I'm just detaching from who I was shadowing because it didn't seem, at this point, I'm not being value added by just standing there. And so I was going to take part. And moving forward, I was going step by step. All of a sudden, the next thing I know, I'm on the ground. I want to say there was a flash of light. I didn't hear anything.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  I was on the ground. I didn't know what had happened.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  Now, this is where the experiences of combat can be different from one person to another. And if I were to get a complete picture, you'd have to talk to everybody that was up there. All I remember is waking up, coming to. I don't know how long I was out. I've talked to people on that operation who are down below. They said a massive mushroom cloud went off. And that for a long time, nobody was responding on the radio. And that they thought perhaps everybody up there was dead. All I remember is coming to. I was disoriented. It occurred to me, I must have stepped on a pressure plate. I remember that.

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  The pressure plate below the ground, the bomb goes off. I didn't know what the bomb was, but it turns out, I'm told, two 105 millimeter artillery shells wired together. The second one didn't go off. The first one went off low order. So, I mean, this can destroy everybody up there, armored vehicle. But the second one didn't explode and yeah, low order. But I'm laying there and I just remember thinking, I need my teammates. It didn't occur to me that they were dead, but I didn't know if they were alive. I just knew I needed them. And I remember reaching up for my push to talk.

• 1:50:09Speaker 01

  I remember, I gotta get man down out over the radio. And I reached up for where it should be, but it's not there. I was thinking, this is not good. And nothing on my kit, my kit is, nothing's where it's supposed to be. Only my arms seemed to work. I can't see anything. I think my helmet had been blasted off, night vision gone with it. Can't move. Only my arms are working. And I'm laying there. For a second, I just felt utterly helpless because I couldn't do anything. You want to, you want to be doing something. I tried to find my push to talk. It's not there. In my memory, the next thing that happened, though, my teammates are on me. None of them had been injured. Bell's rung, yes.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  But nobody incapacitated. We could not afford to have one other person incapacitated up there. Remote position, elevated, I mean, just not a good situation to even have one person down, but two? Really not. I mean, just, if not impossible to deal with. We had a medic up there, of course. Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal is trying to just protect us at this point, digging for other, or sweeping and digging for other, finding additional IEDs, I'm told, up there. There were several. In fact, we had been walking on them. None had gone off until I found one. But the medic, fortunately, you know, responded, wasn't injured, responded as he was trained to do.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Everybody responded as they were trained to do, selflessly, quickly, to try to save my life. And I remember him putting on a tourniquet. You know, we practice putting these on in training. But you don't ever really crank it down like you do when you need to, to say, actually save someone's life and to actually cut off blood flow, staunch blood flow. It's painful. Just cranking that thing down. I wasn't in pain from the blast. I was in shock, but I do remember the tourniquet getting cranked down. But that wasn't enough, so we applied another one, and then another one,

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  and another one, and another one. I'm told it was six total, just cranking each one of them down to try to stop the blood flow to my lower body.

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  And then I'm told that there was just this scramble going on unbeknownst to me. This is happening all external to my own inner world right now. But to get the helicopters that initially dropped us off, who, which according to the plan, we're going to go back to Kandahar airfield of 45 minute flight away. Touchdown, refuel, unload an army special forces team and some Afghan commando troops bringing these soldiers back to be a blocking force for when that target assault would commence. So the plan was already to bring the helicopters back, but this is now a major contingency that has to be responded to. And time and fuel and everything is going to be of the essence.

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  Now, I'm only hearing this after the fact again, but it's going to be a race against the clock to try to get me out of there. Because time is of the essence. And so the guys up above, you know, they hadn't cleared the hilltop. So there's no way you can, can land or hover a helicopter up there. I mean, it's, it's just too dangerous. So they gotta get me down off this hill that we had taken, you know, it's 20 minutes plus to climb. When we were good, not to mention now dragging someone. I, I seem to remember them carrying me and tripping and falling. And I'm falling from a few feet in the air and it just, in addition to being just damaging to my body, it just was slow.

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  They needed to go to the, the down man drag, shoulder straps of my kit, dragging me. And so this is where their, their grit comes into play and their fitness and their desire to save my life. And why I'm eternally grateful to my teammates, because they were having to drag me down a steep, dark, rocky hilltop, switching off dragging. And it's fatiguing to do that, maybe one or two are going at a time and they're rotating out. The medic is attending to me and I remember that just, I was probably in and out of consciousness, but I don't recall that. I just recall this just happening in, in real time and with no interruptions. This, and people have asked, did you think you were going to die or anything?

• 1:54:40Speaker 01

  No, I didn't. I just didn't. There was no space in my mind, no capacity to think those thoughts. Because I was consumed, inundated by the pain.

• 1:54:54Speaker 01

  Getting dragged over, it was sharp, craggy rocks. This, I talk about the pain of six tourniquets getting applied, or any

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  physical pain of like, doing a marathon, or running a hell week race with a log or something, it's just, it doesn't compare to that. This was excruciating. And it was all I could do just to try to stay awake. And stay awake, and stay awake, and stay awake. And I think that was my desire to live. That if I could stay awake, that that is my

• 1:55:33Speaker 01

  struggle to live and to not succumb. And so that was what I was focused on. And whether my brain was saying that or not, that's what was happening. I wasn't thinking thoughts of you need to stay awake in order to live. It just was, stay awake. And I think at this point, it's getting very close to the helicopters. And their fuel, time, fuel calculation, bingo fuel, all of this, you know, there, if they hit bingo fuel, they're gone.

• 1:56:04Speaker 01

  With or without me. And I'm told that I got loaded onto the helicopter. Really, really close to the bingo fuel mark. So, I mean,

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  there was a lot that had to line up for that to happen and for me to get on that helicopter. I shook Nick's hand. I remember that. I absolutely remember that. He got off the back.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  They were going to continue with the operation. The tail ramp goes up. And then I remember there was a light in my face and then it was out. I don't remember anything after that.

• 1:56:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, you know, working with Jason now, he's talked me through this, this scenario a bunch of times. That being said, I don't want to try and, you know, give his whole side of the story. But I mean, just a couple of key points. If you think, you know, a femoral bleed can kill you in a minute and a half, two minutes. And you had two of them wide open. And the guys were able to get in there and put enough tourniquets on to stop that and keep you alive. Like that right there, the, the, how quickly they must have been done that is. Just a testament to the training and their determination to keep you alive. I know that there was, uh, Jason talks about one of the SEALs that got on his hands and knees with the EOD guy,

• 1:57:24Jocko Willink?

  with their bayonets to start probing for IEDs because they realized that the IEDs that were up there weren't magnetic. So the, the sweeper wasn't finding them. So these two guys are on their hands and knees probing for a path to get you guys out of there. And then, you know, the, the OIC is getting all this stuff coordinated. Um, and yet Jason usually, when he talks about this, he'll mention the fact that, and, and actually Leif and I wrote about this same OIC, when he was Leif's AOIC, like calls me, calls me on the radio in a situation. He's like, hey, this is what we've got right now. We got downed guys. We got an Iraqi killed. Like he's talking in a calm, cool, collected voice. And that's exactly what Jason said. This massive explosion happened.

• 1:58:07Jocko Willink?

  And Jason gives him a second and then finally he wants to know what's going on. He says, hey, what was that? And that OIC calm, cool and collected said, uh, we've got a, that was a big, that was an IED. We've got a badly wounded guy. We're working through it at this time. And then like Jason just let him work. But, um, yeah, the, all the things that fell into place. Um, from your own mentality to like stay awake to the medics and other guys getting tourniquets on to guys on their hands and knees. With literally with their bayonets to, to try and find a way out of there. And then the guy's buddy carrying you and dragging you down.

• 1:58:45Jocko Willink?

  I mean, it's a, it's, it's a miracle that you're sitting here. Um, and the wounds were horrific. Uh, you know, it wasn't, it didn't stop at your legs, right? This blast like tore into your guts and everything else. And, uh, just, just absolutely horrendous. And that's why, you know, some of the initial reports that we got back on the strand was, you know, is he going to make it? I don't know. And like I said in the beginning, when you hear a team guy say, I don't know, that's a, that's a bad sign. So the, yeah, the, the platoons in the task unit, they really did what they were supposed to do. They did what they were trained to do.

• 1:59:27Jocko Willink?

  They did what they planned to do, you know, and it's a testament to our training and the determination of our guys and how much they care about each other and what they'll do to, to try and, you know, save their, save their friends.

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, for any of them listening, I really just appreciate it. I don't even know what to say. But you know, when you think, when I hear this, anytime I hear an external account, such as what you're talking about, Jason saying happened, it's just, it's just a reminder to me how lucky I'm to be alive. And I'll take life like this, missing two legs, any day, over dying up on that hill, any day. So the pilots as well, thank you, doctors, medical professionals, I mean, every step along the way, people responded professionally,

• 2:00:23Speaker 01

  bravely. I remember before deployment, we're reading the after action reports and the task unit in country at the time, which we were going to be replacing, we're doing the turnover up with, they had in a situation where an Afghan soldier stepped on an IED as well, two legs gone. And as bad as it may sound to say, that was practice and practice in real life saving in the field. And I'm told that person later died of infection. They were able to keep him alive in the field, later died of infection in an Afghan hospital. Because infection is a serious risk, and that is another thing that I'm very thankful

• 2:01:07Speaker 01

  for, getting dragged down that hill to not, I mean, through ages and ages worth of goat shit and dust, to not have massive infections is a miracle. And yeah, for many, many reasons, I'm very, very grateful for the fact that I'm here and that I have what I have.

• 2:01:30Jocko Willink?

  When did you wake up?

• 2:01:35Speaker 01

  I woke up about 10 days later, give or take a day. And I'm in what appears to be a hospital room. With my mother's face about two feet away. And I can tell you. When you go to bed at night and you wake up in the morning, you have a general sense of the progression of time. Relative to say, taking a nap this afternoon, when you wake up. When you are in a medically induced coma for about 10 days. You wake up and you don't have any sense of time progressing.

• 2:02:14Speaker 01

  My last memories were being dragged of a helicopter into a helicopter at night, being on foot patrol, being the top of this mountain, you know. Now I wake up and I'm just all of a sudden in a, in a hospital with my mom's face right there. I had no, like, how the hell did I get here? What the hell happened is what I'm thinking. What the hell happened?

• 2:02:33Jocko Willink?

  And so, could you talk immediately? Did you look at your mom? What was that? What was that awakening like?

• 2:02:42Speaker 01

  The, really, one of the first things I said to her, she had been summoned from the basement of the hospital, Bethesda Naval Hospital. My mother and sister had been told what had happened. And in those 10 days had come to DC. So they were there. My sister was up above near the ICU. She calls down to our mom. Drinking coffee. So she comes up and kicks up in the gown. I just remember seeing her right there. And pretty quickly. I commented on the coffee breath that was hitting me.

• 2:03:14Speaker 01

  I'm not a coffee drinker and her, she was so close to me that coffee breath was just blasting me. I'm not a fan of coffee breath either. But I remember, no one was saying anything specific and.

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  My mind was off. I was on some heavy painkillers and my lower body was covered in blankets. I just, I wasn't looking down that way. Maybe I knew, but no one had said anything and I didn't know for a fact. And I do remember asking a medical professional to the right of my bed, whether my, are my legs gone? And that, I remember that person replying, just, yeah. And that's, that's tough to hear. It's tough to hear out of the blue. It's really tough to process and to think about. You do have no idea at that point? Or did you, you said you had a like a suspicion? I had, I feel like I, I feel like when I was in the medically induced coma, that

• 2:04:13Speaker 01

  maybe people's conversations around me were sinking in, but I, I didn't know for a fact. And, and to be then told in a state, you know, I'm not completely lucid at this point, but like I can comprehend what that means and what that means for the future. And that, that is not the entirety of what's going on. Your legs are amputated above the knees. Your pelvis is shattered. You have a external fixator, contraption sticking out of you. Don't know how long that's going to be in. You have a couple of bags attached to you, one of which is a colostomy bag. And I didn't know what that was, but once someone explained it to me, I'm thinking, okay, that's something people don't want to have normally. A bladder too, coming out

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  of my bladder. My fingers are in casts. And I had a burning fever and this, I had a NG tube up my nose, down my throat, into my stomach. I was going through surgery Monday, Wednesday, Friday. There was one week I remember, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, surgery. And these are surgeries that are at a minimum of seven hours, sometimes 10, 12, there's 14 hour surgeries. I mean, I was clocking 20, 30 something hours a week of surgery time, easy, week after week after week. And so my intestines weren't working. And actually with all that I had going on, this NG tube up my nose, down my throat, to try to decompress my stomach

• 2:05:40Speaker 01

  because the intestines weren't working, was the bane of my existence because it was, I wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything because my stomach wasn't functioning. So I was fed and hydrated by IV. So you can imagine how dry your throat gets. You cannot drink a single sip of water. I was allowed to take some ice chips, but in order to talk to anybody, I had to chew gum to generate the saliva to do so. And I had a lot of people coming in the room wanting to talk. I mean, on the day that I woke up, I'm told there were over 70 people in the visiting room, creating a stressful environment for my mother. I wanted to rip that NG tube out, but I knew they'd put the thing back in and I'd be awake when they put it in.

• 2:06:20Speaker 01

  And I was awake at one point when they did put it in, not because I ripped it out, but it is not fun to have that thing inserted. And then, yeah, this fever, this inexplicable fever, we thought it was infection, but it wasn't infection. But I just had this burning fever, but the worst part about that was that this fever combined with a bad mental reaction that I was having to the painkillers. I wasn't on the right kind of painkiller that worked with my mind. And so you can imagine a bad fever, a bad reaction to the painkillers.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  Nightmares, delirium, all centered around Afghanistan, my last memories. I remember one, and these are, these are as real as I'm talking to you right now, these nightmares, delirium. I mean, just, it was, I'm in this, just like we're talking right now. There's no ability to look from an outside perspective and say, okay, this isn't real. You're going to get through this, you're going to wake up, you're in it. My platoon calling me a coward for being not on the deployment with them. And this kind of thing, being on a foot patrol, getting dismembered by some kind of rack machine. I mean, just, just awful stuff.

• 2:07:41Speaker 01

  And so this is really the ground zero low point for me.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  Waking up in an ICU room, finding out this is going on and then, and then just struggling.

• 2:07:52Jocko Willink?

  How long is this sort of bottom time last for?

• 2:07:57Speaker 01

  I was in the ICU for three weeks, right off the bat. I ended up going back there again, but three weeks not eating, not drinking, NG tube, and week after week of surgery. So it was a good 20 plus days of just really just hell. I mean, the, there was a service member in the ICU room next to me, he was a helicopter, probably had been shot through the head. I'd heard about him, managed to land the helicopter and at one point he died while I was in the ICU. Only two visitors could come at a time. You're hooked up to every contraption on earth, monitoring your body, your, your, your body signals. They can't ever make the room dark.

• 2:08:40Speaker 01

  You're close to the nurse's station. You can't sleep. Every hour they're checking you. So I wasn't sleeping. I remember if you took away surgery time, that it was an astonishingly long time that I had last slept. And then when I could fall asleep, it, it would just be the, it would be delirium, nightmares. At, at one point, my sister tells me that at about five or six in the morning, an ICU nurse who sees a lot, I mean, this is combat ICU room in a hospital, calls her crying, saying that you're, you need to get in here and talk, try to help your brother. He's just breaking down. I, I don't, I don't know which one of those nightmares

• 2:09:25Speaker 01

  that I've described this was, but there was, there was just like a, a total bottom point. I was on Dilaudid, which is a very powerful opiate. They did shift me over to morphine and that was, that was much better for, not just pain management, but also for my psyche and everything.

• 2:09:43Jocko Willink?

  Then do you, do you start like making a turning point and they wrap up some of the surgeries? And is it like a slow crawl out of the pit?

• 2:09:55Speaker 01

  It is. In addition to dealing with some of the factors of disconnection from the platoon, and that was also going through my mind, there was, there was progress and then there'd be setbacks. They'd say it's okay, it's three steps forward, two steps back. You're just gonna have to get used to this. And like, well, if there's three steps forward, there are probably like 33 steps back in the beginning. Cause it's just, it seemed like that there would be setbacks. And you know, I alluded to the fact that I couldn't eat or drink for a few weeks. At one point, I'm gonna do the swallow test. This is a big, a big step here. If you, if I can eat some chocolate pudding and swallow it okay, I've passed and then I can maybe actually take some food and not have to be fed by IV.

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  So I took the chocolate pudding and I mean, it tasted really good. I hadn't had any food in weeks. And I remember just a couple of minutes later, it all just comes back out and fail. So back on the NG tube, you know, IV. I had a routine surgery on my hand. My right hand was damaged and there needed to be a plate put in. I had a tendon that was damaged and so a very routine surgery and I'm, I was actually out of the ICU at this point. I wake up from the surgery and I'm back in the ICU. What happened? Why am I here again? And I got the Admiral of the hospital on down, coming through,

• 2:11:17Speaker 01

  apologizing. Something bad happened in this surgery. What was it? Well, I apparently had a normal amount of potassium in my system and the resident anesthesiologist, this is, these are training hospitals, so they're always training new military doctors. The resident anesthesiologist.

• 2:11:35Speaker 01

  Either messed up or just didn't take note of the amount of potassium in my system and gave, administered a anesthetic that releases potassium. So my system in the middle of this very routine surgery flooded with potassium. And my heart stopped. I, I'm told by the surgeon who responded brilliantly.

• 2:11:56Speaker 01

  That she had to put the chest paddles on me and shock me back, shock my heart back into function. And so I wake up from, I basically died and had to be resuscitated in a routine surgery after going through all of this. Weeks later. It's, I mean, to me, that's unacceptable, but this, you know, you may think you're over the hill, but you're not. Anytime you go into surgery, it's a, it's a risk.

• 2:12:23Jocko Willink?

  Like, it seems hard to, and like a lot of things had to fall off the line to get you to survive coming off the battlefield. But it's like, just the beginning.

• 2:12:33Speaker 01

  Just the beginning, I mean, you know, I'm, in addition to realizing all the medical complications that I have. You're thinking, what is my life going to look like? How, how am I going to do basic things? I'm, am I going to be in a wheelchair? Am I even going to get out of this hospital? Am I going to get through surgery? Will I get to walk again? How am I going to shower? Can I drive a car? Dating girls, what's that going to be like?

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  This was my first combat deployment. This was the first operation within the deployment. My platoon wasn't even on the ground yet. And so it just felt like, you know, why me? I would tell myself, well, okay. Let's just say if someone had to, up on that hill had to stop, like, you should want it to be you. You should say, I'm the one who can handle this. I survived. I can make a good life. Do I really feel that? I'm just saying that. I want to believe that it should have been me if it had to happen to someone. Do I really believe that? How, you know, this job felt like my calling is every, the only thing I ever wanted to do, really, in my career.

• 2:13:47Speaker 01

  And it just seemed like it was gone. My identity was very much wrapped up in being a team guy. Yeah, okay, you can still stay in the teams, but guess what? I had a senior ranking officer come at one point and visit and I was trying to do physical therapy and really was focused on my physical therapy, not talking to this individual so much, certainly not talking about career plans and was kind of saying, well, you know, you can stay in the teams. We can send you to acquisition school. And I'm just like, this, that's just not, you know. So, okay, you're not going to do this job the way in which you'd been doing it, even if you can stay in the community. But as I said, you're either in a platoon or you're out of a platoon and I'm going to be out of a platoon.

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  People say, yeah, but you know, as an officer, you progress through it. You're going to be, even if this didn't happen, you'd be, you know, you'd be administrated, you'd be doing some staff tours and yeah, okay, this happened on the first operation within the deployment. It's, you don't get it. It's just, it's not the same. And but most importantly, it was just, I'm not going to be on this deployment with my teammates. If this had to have happened to me, let it happen at the very end of the deployment is what I was thinking. But to be disconnected like that is, is tough. It's, and so in addition to a physical component, I think there was absolutely a mental challenge that I was also dealing with.

• 2:15:09Jocko Willink?

  What was the first, like, what was the first positive step or the positive light that you saw?

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  I remember one day, and this is very basic, but they were saying, okay, we're going to work on getting you up out of bed. I had this shattered pelvis. It was surgically fixed with two screws. I had this external fixator that is a contraption. The stayed in place for about 100 days. They took it out surgically at one point. But that meant that I could not-

• 2:15:38Jocko Willink?

  You had an external fixator on your pelvis-

• 2:15:41Speaker 01

  Drilled, drilled into the-

• 2:15:42Jocko Willink?

  Over 100 days?

• 2:15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, drilled into the, it's two crossbars extending out. You can't, I, I happen to be a stomach and side sleeper and you know, in addition to everything else going, a part of the reason with the sleep, maybe it's just that I couldn't turn, so I'm stuck on my back. And when this thing gets taken out surgically, they're like, okay, you're ready to get, we need to get you out of, your back off of the bed because you're developing bed sores and this kind of thing. But it's not going to be easy to balance. Sitting up, it's not a big deal. I set up, like two, one person on either side of me, sit me up out of the hospital bed. And they let go and it was just fall back.

• 2:16:22Jocko Willink?

  Is this because your abs were, or you just didn't know how to do it?

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  I think my, the system of balance in the flu, I don't know if we have fluids that kind of dictate our balance. That just was gone after being bedridden for a hundred days. I mean, definitely I had atrophied in strength, but I think just the whole system of balance was out of whack.

• 2:16:42Jocko Willink?

  So this is still not light? I'm asking for some.

• 2:16:45Speaker 01

  But, but, but after a few efforts, I was able to hold it. And it was like, it was like doing like a plank or something, you know, where you're just, you're shaking and you're folding and you're concentrating. But I was able to hold it for a little bit of time and I felt, okay, I'm out of bed. Okay, that's awesome. At some point, this means I'm going to be able to transfer into a wheelchair now. And then when I get in this wheelchair, I'm going to be doing laps around this hospital. I'm going to do as much as.

• 2:17:12Jocko Willink?

  So you were fired up immediately?

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  To get out, to get, to get outside. I mean, that, that was actually one of the other challenges. When I became an inpatient, it just didn't make sense to me. Why can't I just get into a courtyard? Just to get outside, if it's a sunny day, like that would be awesome. I love being outside. I'm an outdoors.

• 2:17:31Jocko Willink?

  Was there a reason for it? Is it infections? What is it?

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  Well, I, the cynical interpretation is that when you're in ICU, forget about it. But when you're in the inpatient status, there's a nurse who's balancing now four patients total. ICU, it's one on one. You have undevoted attention from your nurse, but now you're getting juggled with a few other patients. And so I had a lot of, I still had some apparatus attached to the bed. And all of that would, it would take a team of people, not to mention the on, on duty nurse who then. Might not be able to attend to the other patients. So there was a logistic aspect to this that I think was challenging. At the end of the day, you know, I felt this means so much to me.

• 2:18:15Speaker 01

  Can't you just do that? I just want to get out. I just want to get outside. And there was one, they're going to make it happen finally. And this was after a while, I think longer than it should have been. But, you know, I, I don't want to be too reprimanding of them. They got out into the courtyard. It was a sunny day. It was kind of like the sun had come through and it just was a very powerful moment for me. Just to be outside. My mom and sister were with me. And, okay, I got outside. That's, that's a step. Eventually, you get into the wheelchair. And eventually, I was able to start doing laps around the hospital, pushing myself. I don't want people to push me, but to be able to just cover ground on my own is, I think, a

• 2:19:00Speaker 01

  basic human need that needs to be fulfilled. And when you're getting pushed in a wheelchair or on a bed by someone else, it's not the same thing. So it's about me getting in a wheelchair and be able to move.

• 2:19:19Jocko Willink?

  So then, when, when did you start making, what was the next big step that you took? Like, you're now in a wheelchair, you're able to get yourself around.

• 2:19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the next step was, there's going to be a day pass coming up. Okay, a day pass means, not the whole day, but a couple hours, I'm going to get to go out of this hospital with my mother and sister out to dinner. I'll be in a wheelchair. And it'll be about two hours and you come back. So I'm in anticipation of this, laying there in bed and thinking, wow, I'm going to leave this hospital. What's that going to be like? That's awesome. Oh, wait, people are going to look at me. I don't look right. I don't look normal. I look different. I'm used to being anonymous.

• 2:20:09Speaker 01

  Nothing, you know, don't stand out really. It's an average guy. Now I look different, radically different. What are, are people gonna stare at me? What's, what's this gonna be like? And I was just thinking, you know, I'm gonna have to get used to, this is my future reality. Whether I'm in a wheelchair or whether I'm on prosthetic legs, you'd look different. And if you do not get used to this somehow, and eventually, you're gonna be bitter for the rest of your life. So I started thinking, along these lines of, you know, body image and stuff. Whenever I get these prosthetics, and I don't have them yet, whenever that is, I don't know when it's gonna be. I'm gonna boost them up a little bit, so I'm a little taller.

• 2:20:53Speaker 01

  I was 5'9" and I was thinking 6' would be pretty good. If people are gonna look at me, I might as well be taller. But I remember getting on that day pass, you know, I'm sure-

• 2:21:02Jocko Willink?

  How long had it been from like, from you showed up there until now, you're getting your first day pass?

• 2:21:09Speaker 01

  I, I would say two solid months. Two months, which in the grand, you know, at the time, it seemed like a long time in the grand scheme of things. Things were moving fairly rapidly. I had the bags still, I'm about to be discharged from Bethesda, about to be an outpatient. First, I gotta go to Walter Reed, that's where I'm gonna do the physical therapy. I gotta be an inpatient there for a few days, just to get in their system. Did the day pass. My mother and sister were being taken care of by Special Operations Command. They had a program to provide housing, apartment out in town for the family of service members. And also for the service members, for me, whenever I am allowed to be out of this hospital.

• 2:21:52Speaker 01

  This is a privilege, you know, really a luxury that Army and Marine Corps soldiers, non-so-com, didn't have. It's, you know, at the time, I didn't know any of this, but yeah, this, this was very fortunate that my mother and sister had an apartment out in town, that apartment that I would be able to go to. So the next thing in this, this is just to get, get that, that discharge, to become an outpatient. And then after that, it's, you're starting physical therapy, you're gonna learn how to walk again. Okay, Roger that.

• 2:22:28Jocko Willink?

  So now you started learning to walk?

• 2:22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this was-

• 2:22:31Jocko Willink?

  And you're an outpatient, so now you're living out in town?

• 2:22:33Speaker 01

  Living with my sister. Our mother had gone back to Kansas to resume work and, you know, she felt like things were in a good place, but she had been let go, not let go, allowed to go to the East Coast, covered, long as you need, but, you know, I'm living with my sister. My sister was a nurse in New York City, quit her job to come down and take care of me. And when I was an inpatient, other people were taking care of me, but there absolutely was a phase where I was ready to be out of the hospital, but I was no means ready to take care of myself and live out in town, no way. And I'm a single guy. And so the fact that my sister did that is just so, so awesome. And she would drive me to the hospital every day for my physical therapy. And it's, now it's, okay, you're

• 2:23:16Speaker 01

  gonna get fitted for prosthetics, you're gonna do physical therapy every day. Okay, that's working out. I'm gonna be working out every day. And this is a new sport. It's kind of how I thought about it. You're gonna learn how to walk on these prosthetics. First, you're gonna have short ones, they don't bend. Then you're gonna have bending ones, because I don't have knees, so the prosthetics are gonna be my knee joint. And it's gonna be tough, but it's, you got as much time as you need. And every, Monday through Friday, every day, you get two hours of physical therapy. And then I have a lot of other appointments with the various departments that I fell under, plastic surgery, orthopedic surgery, et cetera. So that, it was just hospital days. Ended up being in the hospital four to six hours, just about every day, as an outpatient, coming in, driving there with

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  my sister, coming back at the end of the day.

• 2:24:03Jocko Willink?

  And then, how long was it before you were up on your, kind of like, normal, full-size prosthetics?

• 2:24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd say that was, so my, my goal was, okay, my platoon is coming back in March. If I could be on the knee prosthetics, the ones that bend, even if I have crutches or canes-

• 2:24:24Speaker 01

  That's okay, but just to be there on the flight, like not in a wheelchair. If I can get up on the prosthetic. So first you have to go through the short legs. That was late January, I want to say. All of February, I started eventually learning how to walk on the knees. And because they bend under you, it's really difficult. And keeping in mind that I'd atrophied a lot, you need a lot of hip strength and core strength. Even now, this walking a long distance, because they're heavy, it's fatiguing. So you can imagine when you're really, really at this low point is very difficult. I would just be so tired at the end of the day. I had, I remember thinking at the time, you've got two hours of physical therapy. That's what's automatically provided. The physical therapists are working with other service members. And they don't have time to be with you for four hours or five hours.

• 2:25:09Speaker 01

  But I was thinking, okay, if I do twice the amount of physical therapy per day, I'll get out of here in half the time. The math doesn't work like that. But I also got to say, when I got to Walter Reed, physical therapy, I was surrounded by dozens of injured service members. And some of these people were missing three limbs, four limbs. Four limbs, three limbs? I remember one day, looking at the therapy mat next to me. It's pretty, pretty easy to look around and you can see a quadruple amputee, or in this case, a triple amputee. I don't know what was going on in his head, but he was working hard. Right then and there to make his life better.

• 2:25:54Speaker 01

  And so, once I got in that environment, it becomes competitive. And it also provides a sense of perspective. I'm not saying that perspective just let me, okay, I feel better about myself because others have it worse. But it did allow me to

• 2:26:14Speaker 01

  really highlight the unique circumstances, the conditions that I should be thankful for. Just realize, okay, I've got arms that work, I've got a brain that works, I can see, I can hear, I can talk. I'm not badly burnt, I'm not blinded, I'm alive. And we know people who

• 2:26:35Speaker 01

  Are not here that, I mean, their families would get anything for them to be in this situation. Just be missing two legs, but to be alive. I know that. And so I'm gonna be thankful for what I have, not focus on what I'm missing. That, that is really what that environment taught me.

• 2:26:56Jocko Willink?

  At what point did you start saying to yourself, you're gonna start doing, you know, like wild shit again?

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I, I, I really liked, I was really like hiking and running, trail running, just get down in the woods. I, I actually did a couple extreme hike, actually in hindsight, stupid hiking excursions, like either before or after deployment, because that's when you get the most amount of time. These like pre or post-deployment leave excursions. But my point was, I, I just like being outside and I like being active. And so I was definitely thinking, I wanna run. And that's a good, a good goal to have because in order to run, you need to be able to walk. So that kept me motivated and, and I started, I got a hand cycle. And I'm in DC riding the hand cycle. It's not a, not a great one, but I at least was able to start getting outside

• 2:27:47Speaker 01

  and just do it by myself on a bike trail near the apartment where my sister and I were living.

• 2:27:53Jocko Willink?

  Were you, were you able to meet the platoon when they came home?

• 2:27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:56Jocko Willink?

  So what was that like?

• 2:27:58Speaker 01

  So the generosity of someone affiliated with the Hotel del Coronado, put a room up for my sister and I to go out to San Diego Coronado, stay at the Hotel del Oceanfront. Well, I got the oceanfront room. She had the other one that didn't face the ocean. But, uh, uh, and then the, the, there, the platoon redeployment bird kept getting delayed. So like this, it was supposed to be like a couple of days. It ended up being like a two week stay at the Hotel del waiting. And I was at North Island on the flight line when they got off. I think I may have had one cane.

• 2:28:35Speaker 01

  But that was, that was, for me at least, a very proud moment to just be, at least be standing. And I don't know if any of them knew when they got off the bird that I was gonna be there. I don't know what they were told, but, you know, I shook everybody's hand and then, and then the festivities commenced.

• 2:28:55Jocko Willink?

  So, back to the hand cycle, you're starting to think about being able to do that, you're starting to push yourself.

• 2:29:03Jocko Willink?

  What was it like? Didn't you end up doing the New York City Marathon at some point?

• 2:29:08Speaker 01

  Oh, I did, I did. This was on a hand cycle. And part of it was like hand cycle and then run the last stretch. I think I hand cycled 16 miles, ran 10. And just getting out there like that and getting a sense of my athleticism, regaining a sense of my physicality was huge. To realize that I can still be an athlete. There's this whole world of adaptive sports, just about anything that you want to do or had done, you can do. Maybe in a different, maybe it's gonna take your upper body to do it. Or maybe you're gonna be doing it in prosthetics, but that you can be an athlete. And then I had heard about this thing called the Paralympics. And then that was very, very intriguing to me as well.

• 2:29:49Jocko Willink?

  What did you heard about it?

• 2:29:51Speaker 01

  Oh, I heard it's basically the Olympics for people with physical disabilities. And it's not the Special Olympics, it's different. It's under the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee. It is, it's competitive, it's difficult. You'll get world-class coaching. You can represent the country overseas. It is a direct representation of the United States overseas. And you can be part of a team. There's all these different sports out there, there's summer, there's winter, it's just like the Olympics.

• 2:30:22Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any inkling of what you would be trying to do in there?

• 2:30:27Speaker 01

  I was thinking something along the lines of running or cycling. I actually, there was a recruiter, a liaison at Walter Reed. The clear place to find athletes for the Paralympic program is Walter Reed. You got a young, motivated soldiers, Marines, troops that are looking to get, you know.

• 2:30:47Jocko Willink?

  Looking to get after it.

• 2:30:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you know, and so.

• 2:30:51Jocko Willink?

  They had Rob Jones in there, right?

• 2:30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I was injured before Rob and Rob is.

• 2:30:56Jocko Willink?

  Maybe a year before or something like that?

• 2:30:57Speaker 01

  Something like that, yeah. So, this is just, you know, this, this environment fed off each other, you know, Rob.

• 2:31:04Speaker 01

  Was just so fired up to get back after it and there's some people not maybe maybe being an athlete wasn't their thing. Some people want to get into a career. Some people were struggling. Some like Rob were just just just doing all sorts of impressive stuff. And I think you hear you hear about someone before you know that was a double amputee above the knee. They did this and that. Wow, this is possible. And then and then it create there's a competitive environment. Rob, he was a little bit after saw me running and and then he's like, you know, I'm gonna run, but I'm gonna run faster than Dan, you know,

• 2:31:47Speaker 01

  this kind of thing. And so it was it just was a good environment. It makes me think if I had gone through this in a vacuum in a bubble, would the outcome have been the same? Perhaps. I think it helped, though, to have that sense of perspective and to see what other people are dealing with. And in some cases, really struggling with. But military medicine can keep people alive these days in ways just not possible. And so you're seeing, I mean, it was not uncommon to see triple amputees, quadruple amputees. And

• 2:32:32Speaker 01

  I think there was a bond in that environment that transcended your service, your rank, what you did in your service, that is different than the bond I had in the teams, but it is it was very special. Yeah.

• 2:32:48Jocko Willink?

  So the recruiters come from the Paralympics and they come scoping out at Walter Reed looking for some motivated troops who want to get some. And one of these guys introduced himself to you or something?

• 2:32:59Speaker 01

  One of the yeah, one of the recruiters, she asked, do I want to go to San Diego for a sports camp? Yeah, that sounds awesome. Trip to San Diego. And I go out there. Not really expecting anything, but really it's a trip to San Diego. I'll get to do some adaptive sports. Sounds good. And the coach, two coaches from the Paralympic Nordic ski team, that's cross-country skiing and biathlon approached me and, "Hey, you ever thought about doing biathlon?" I thought that was running and swimming. It's cross-country skiing with target shooting. That sounds pretty cool. Well, hey, you know, they had like a indoor ski erg there and like a little laser shooting station. Okay, this isn't on snow, but do you want to come to snow in a few months?

• 2:33:41Speaker 01

  It's August right now, November, late November, West Yellowstone, Montana camp. Okay, I'm there. Now I still had a colostomy bag. I wasn't done with surgery. The one major surgery I still had remaining was to take away the colostomy bag. And

• 2:33:58Speaker 01

  this sounds awesome. I go out to West Yellowstone. I don't know how to dress as an amputee with my stumps. I don't know how to, I don't know the clothing. I don't have all that. I'm in this thing called a sit ski, which now, I mean, now at a higher level, it's all carbon fiber. It's custom fit to me. It's lightweight, strong. But back then it was like a lawn chair on two skis and it was not, not an athletic device. But and then, okay, cross-country skiing, all you got is two poles. You gotta use your, your upper body, your arms, your core, your back, and you don't get to use your lower body. You're strapped into this thing. How are you going to stop? How are you going to turn? Okay, we're figuring this out. My future teammates are just racing by me. It's like, wow, they're fast.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  I don't know if I could ever get to that level, but at a minimum, just being outside, West Yellowstone, Montana is one of my favorite places to cross-country ski. It's near Big Sky. It's just pine trees. You're in this, you feel like you're in the woods. Yeah, the trails are machine groomed. But once you're out, it's quiet. There was days we were just getting, it was a good snowy, this is late November. It's not always consistent, but that year, fortunate for me, because if it would have been a dry year and canceled, who knows? But it was dumping snow, which isn't always good for cross-country skiing when you're trying to power through with your poles, but more than anything, I just had this connection with nature. That was so important. I'd been running on the prosthetics. I wasn't trail running, I wasn't. Running, you know, out in the woods.

• 2:35:29Speaker 01

  I was hand cycling a little bit in DC. The cars honk at you. It's not a feeling of nature. So this was, this was just different and I really just wanted to keep doing it.

• 2:35:39Jocko Willink?

  And so then what, what happens? What's the course? Cause is that, that ends up being what your first competitive sport is. Is that right?

• 2:35:47Speaker 01

  It's all I've done in the Paralympics and I, for me, it started because I just wanted to be in the woods. And then it was like, okay, you could actually start doing this full, full-time training and, and get better. And just see where you can go. Maybe you'll make a Paralympic team, get to go to the Paralympic Winter Games. I'm still on active duty. I'm still in the hospital. I still have this surgery. I got through the surgery, big recovery. They cut open my core again to take, to reconnect my intestinal system.

• 2:36:16Speaker 01

  I still, I still have orders at Walter Reed. I gotta get out of the Navy. I had a conversation with the head SEAL admiral. He was like, well, we'll support you if you want to do this. Three years training, trained for the Sochi Paralympics. Assign you to Fort Carson, Colorado, 10th Special Forces Group. I'll be training up in Winter Park. I had met a coach up there in Winter Park and they, they got snow. They got a training area. So I took, I took orders. I mean, that, again, I'm very grateful to the NSW community for doing that. It, for me, I, I just, I could have gotten out, but there was something special about still being in and still training for this sport, to go represent the country.

• 2:36:57Speaker 01

  And so the way I saw it, I have orders to move out to Colorado and to train. I'm going to train and train and train. I probably trained a little bit too much and maybe overtrained in that desire to kind of work through my injury and to show that I've overcome it.

• 2:37:18Jocko Willink?

  And so that was for the, for the Sochi. So how did that end up going?

• 2:37:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I showed up there, a newer athlete. I'd been doing the sport for three years, living and training in Colorado. And now that I look back on that time.

• 2:37:32Speaker 01

  I'm just wondering, why did someone who lost their legs and within two years move out to Colorado, didn't know anybody, I knew that local coach, just go train in a sport that like 98% of my training was by myself, hours, in the offseason cross-country skiers, roller ski, I had this mountain board apparatus, so I'm on the dirt roads out there and, and just training and training and training and probably working through some things, but it just felt good to be an athlete, I could train for this sport, be part of a team, follow a training plan, see progress, set long-term goals, work towards those long-term goals, put the skill, put the skills and the training to the test overseas, represent the United

• 2:38:15Speaker 01

  States if I can make a Paralympic team. This seemed like a logical thing to do for me coming out of my time in the teams and in the service, so, but I'm still in the service and I'm representing, you know, the Navy and all of that, I put a little bit of pressure on myself, I showed up at the, I did make the team for Sochi, and we know now in retrospect that Russians were doing, uh, performance enhancing drugs, that's not necessarily verifiable, but I mean, I think plenty of people have come out and said that that was happening and maybe don't have the sample, but there was, there was very tough competition, cross-country skiing is a tough sport, the distances range from 15, 18 kilometer races down to sprints, but...

• 2:39:00Speaker 01

  How, what, what did you do? I, I did six races at the Sochi Games, and that's, that's pretty standard, so the longest, so it would have been six races in cross-country, three, 15 kilometer, 10 kilometer, and then 800 meter sprint, and then in biathlon, 15 kilometer, 12.5 kilometer, 7.5 kilometer, these six races happened in like eight days, it's, it's intense, you don't get a lot of recovery, and I was kind of in the, the 10th, 12th place area, 14th, uh, the fields aren't as deep as in the Olympics, but they're still very competitive, and I, I made the sprint final that one, and got sixth place in the, six out of six on the sprint final, but made

• 2:39:42Speaker 01

  it to the final. I exited Sochi, to be honest, a little bit disappointed because I think I had put too much pressure on myself.

• 2:39:50Jocko Willink?

  And you think you overtrained too?

• 2:39:51Speaker 01

  I think so. I was living at very high altitude in Winter Park, Colorado, Fraser, Colorado, living at around 8,700 feet. It's, altitude has pros and cons. A lot of people think it's a, it's just a win-win. You're up at high altitude, training for an endurance sport, but you do develop the red blood cells that improved efficiency in your, your transportation system internally, but you cannot train to the extent that you can at sea level. And so your neuromuscular system is not performing at the.

• 2:40:24Jocko Willink?

  So what's it best to do? Both?

• 2:40:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:27Jocko Willink?

  Like high altitude and?

• 2:40:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, the model is live high, train low. If, if you have unlimited funds, you would be at sea level, or in this case where there's snow, but lower altitude and you would lit, you would pressure your house to be at like 10,000 feet. Assuming, assuming you can recover, you step out the door. Yeah. Yeah. And then when you, you know, and you spend a lot of time in your house and you go out and then you're now you're, you're at sea level. So it just, you have the red blood cells from the altitude inside and then now you're training fast and hard at a higher tempo, a higher intensity than you can at altitude.

• 2:40:59Jocko Willink?

  So you, you make it to the Olympics, you come in sixth, 12th, 10th, whatever, and you're all kind of pissed at yourself because you didn't do something.

• 2:41:07Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, as I look back, I mean, what, what was I expecting? I was new. I mean, you want to just be given this. Yeah. And like, it's like, there's not as much reward if it was easy, but the other thing is I think I put too much focus on the end result.

• 2:41:23Speaker 01

  That there's actually a different focus. The focus should just be on the process, training, execution of the training plan, modifying as necessary, making adjustments at the end of every season based on what went well and what could have gone better. And that if I can make some changes to equipment.

• 2:41:44Speaker 01

  Make some changes where I'm living. I moved to New England. And so I'd be at a lower altitude. And that if I can execute the process of of training and preparation that. And then, of course, on race day, go it dig deep. Go as hard as I can in a smart way that at that point. You got to be happy with what happens at that point. So I ended up. Training for the next cycle and these are four year cycles.

• 2:42:13Jocko Willink?

  And you moved to New England, go to school, right?

• 2:42:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I to use my GI bill and. I I just I had some friends from the teams who had gone to the Kennedy School of Government and wanted to go there. It was a one year program. I was very much still training. Little skeptical of whether I could get in that. The training hours that I needed. I didn't know how demanding the academic program was going to be, but I found that with. Discipline and time management. Go to bed early, wake up in my training zone, seven AM to nine AM, go to class at ten, rest of the day. And then recover and I often in Colorado prior to in the train up for the 2014 games.

• 2:42:52Speaker 01

  Through boredom and through just a desire to to be training and thinking this is like a Bud's.

• 2:42:57Jocko Willink?

  More is better.

• 2:42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, more is better. If you train twice as hard, you're going to get twice as fast. It doesn't. It doesn't really work that way in in.

• 2:43:04Jocko Willink?

  Damn it.

• 2:43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you. There's days you training has to be hard.

• 2:43:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:10Speaker 01

  But then you have to give you. You obviously know that.

• 2:43:13Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm actually obviously may not know this. I'm like the worst.

• 2:43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43:17Jocko Willink?

  Echo is in full support of like heavy rest.

• 2:43:22Speaker 01

  Make sure you're recovered. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:24Jocko Willink?

  So you're training. So when you when you're going to school, you're training basically two hours a day.

• 2:43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And whereas in Colorado, I've been training like three to four at high altitude, not giving myself the recovery.

• 2:43:36Jocko Willink?

  And then you start getting dialed in. You got a good coach out there that's helping you get dialed in on all this?

• 2:43:40Speaker 01

  Well, a physiologist and it was a remote coaching. But yeah, I mean, looking like uploading workouts, getting feedback. And and then in the winter, I was exploring, okay, the because the it was 20. The first year I skied, I did not ski with the team. The next year I needed to ski with the team internationally to be able to qualify for the games in 2018. And I was working out, okay, like I can train up in Vermont. There's a really good center at Craftsbury, Vermont for Nordic skiing and there's a coach who will help me with biathlon. I can drive there. If I take, you know, compressed classes to be like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I can drive up there Thursday afternoon, train Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. And then there's a ski shack in Boston. I can't do biathlon there, but it's

• 2:44:24Jocko Willink?

  There's a what? A ski shack?

• 2:44:25Speaker 01

  Sorry, a ski track.

• 2:44:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, uh, they make snow from the Charles River and it's about a, like 15 minute drive. So I can do a workout there. And I'm like, I, I think this is possible. So I, I think I can be a student and train.

• 2:44:41Jocko Willink?

  And how hard was school? Was, were they pushing you hard?

• 2:44:45Speaker 01

  It was difficult if you did all the work and if you did all the reading and I mean, I don't know many people that can actually do all the reading. I was also training as a full-time athlete.

• 2:44:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You got it done is what I'm hearing.

• 2:44:56Speaker 01

  I got it done and I got good grades. I, I think, I think they're not in the business of, of trying to separate people out. You know, you're there.

• 2:45:05Jocko Willink?

  Didn't you go to, didn't you go to divinity school as well? So what was that all about?

• 2:45:09Speaker 01

  I had gone to the Kennedy School and I really liked being in class and learning from people and seeing new ideas. You don't have to agree with them, but it's, I'd gone to a military school for college. I just thought this is, this is a good opportunity. And I met some students from the divinity school and they said, it's not, it's not what it sounds like. You can go into the ministry if you're inclined, but there's this other program. It's just an academic study of religion or questions that religion is trying to answer. And so I thought, well, I'll apply. And I was accepted. I studied ethics there and I got to take some classes through electives. This is a very, a wonderful program in the sense that it was broad and I can kind of just take whatever interested

• 2:45:53Speaker 01

  me. I took some classes on Buddhism and I'm not a Buddhist, but there was something in my exposure to that way of thinking that really resonated in the athlete in me. This idea that, you know, life is suffering and I can identify with that. Even when you are happy, you're suffering because

• 2:46:16Speaker 01

  You know that that happiness is not permanent and that there's a way to that this suffering comes ultimately from our desire and craving for happiness, that there's a way to end this suffering and that is through a process, but the process can involve mindfulness and meditation. And so I was exposed to that. And I think when I was in the teams, I would have scoffed at this. But I was thinking, now I'm of the point where I am trying to get every 10th of a percent of performance that I can. And if this was the difference between getting fourth place and getting third,

• 2:47:00Speaker 01

  and I didn't do it, well, I just at least wanted, I tried everything that could help me be a better human, a better athlete. And in biathlon, the reality is you're skiing hard and you have to come into the range and you have to place five shots precisely with other athletes next to you, shooting, an announcer saying something, a crowd, your heart beating, maybe numb fingers from the cold pressure, knowing you need to hit the shots. That if you can cultivate an ability to be aware of your mind and be aware more quickly when your mind has drifted away from the task right in front of you, that that could be a competitive advantage.

• 2:47:45Speaker 01

  Not to mention cultivating this ability to just focus and to focus on your breath or to have the ability to, through breathing, re-center yourself. I think that this is actually something that I could have benefited from highly when I was in the teams. The ability to be aware of where your mind is. It's almost like you're developing an outside view of your mind and you can see when it's gone away. And so I started developing this kind of practice just through some classes I took. And that kind of exposure was exactly why I did the Divinity School program.

• 2:48:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I've been running into a lot of that stuff. You know, I In the book Leadership Strategy and Tactics, I talk about how my very first platoon, I was, we were doing gas oil platforms and I basically, we were online, no one's making a call and I kind of stepped back and looked around and, and made a call and got praised for it, you know, I was kind of expecting as a new guy to get told shut up, but, but it was like the initial idea in my head of taking a step back and detaching and being in a position mentally where you're looking around and you're not in the problem, but you're outside the problem. And that was really beneficial to me. And then, you know, I've come to find out, uh, like, for instance, when you take a step back and you,

• 2:49:06Jocko Willink?

  well, when you're, when your field of vision opens up more broadly, it relaxes you. That's why when you go to the ocean and you look at the sunset, you feel relaxed. That's why when you stand on a mountaintop and you look out over, you know, vast span of land, you feel more relaxed. Those things, those are physiological things that happen because as a, as an animal, if there's a movement in the jungle, like a tiger, you need to focus on that and it amps up your heart rate and it gets you ready to fight, puts adrenaline in your system. Yet the opposite of that is when you, when you open up your field of vision, it becomes, it relaxes you. So kind of unintentionally for me, as a young SEAL, I figured out, hey, if I take a step back and look around, I'm more relaxed.

• 2:49:49Jocko Willink?

  It was more of a byproduct. It wasn't I was doing it to relax. And then the other thing that I figured out was like, anytime you'd hear someone panicking on the radio screaming, you're like, I want to do it. I need people over here and whatever. And so you'd make fun of that guy. We'd make fun of those people. And so I would always, when I was going to key up my radio, I'd take a breath. And it turns out that when you take a breath, that also calms you down. So I kind of stumbled into these things and other things throughout my career that now when I either learn about the physiological, the physiological things that happen in our body, that also people use things like meditation to drive these same physiological things. I kind of like got lucky and stumbled upon them. And just,

• 2:50:34Jocko Willink?

  you know, now I'm sort of starting to put two and two together now as I get older and learn more about the world. You know, these physiological things that I sort of stumbled upon, people go out and seek. And figure out, and you know, same thing with like jujitsu. If you lose your temper during jujitsu, you're gonna lose. Like if you start getting mad, you're gonna lose. So I realized, oh, how do I, how do I keep that in check? Oh, you know, same thing. Take a breath. Don't let, don't get caught up in the moment. And I got very, very lucky to kind of stumble on these things in my, in my career. So that by the time I was, you know, you know, I was a platoon commander and a tasking commander. I was like, oh, yeah, take a step back, look around, make sure you don't get caught up in the problem. Um, interesting stuff.

• 2:51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think this is an opportunity for me, it would be 10, 12 minutes a day. And I just get in a quiet space, close my eyes and try to follow my breath. And I can use this as an opportunity to visualize a race, how I want the race to go, but also some things that might go wrong during the race and how I want to react. Miss a shot. Sometimes the next shot is

• 2:51:43Jocko Willink?

  Do you get another shot?

• 2:51:44Speaker 01

  You, you take five shots on five targets.

• 2:51:46Jocko Willink?

  And you only get five shots?

• 2:51:48Speaker 01

  Five shots.

• 2:51:48Jocko Willink?

  If you miss?

• 2:51:49Speaker 01

  If you miss, it's a penalty lap or a one minute penalty, depending on the length of the race. And you do either two or four stages. So that's either a 10 shot total race or a 20 shot total race. And I've noticed in the past that if I have a miss, the next shot is almost like an anger shot or a frustration shot instead of, so you, as an example, this could be an opportunity to visualize missing a shot. This doesn't mean I'm, it's gonna predispose me to miss that shot. It just means I can work on having the response to a miss in the event that that happens. And the kind of response I want to have, which is, is just the next shot. It's one shot at a time. Just take the next shot. But it's also a chance to track my breathing,

• 2:52:33Speaker 01

  which is, you know, very critical in shooting, the timing of your breath with the trigger squeeze and sight alignment. So what you notice is that your brain just goes all over the place.

• 2:52:45Speaker 01

  When you're trying to focus in a calm room, you are only doing that. You don't need to eat right now, you don't need to drink, you don't need to sleep, you don't need to talk to anybody or socialize, you're just tracking your breath. And I can't even do it. My mind's going all over the place, but guess what happens during a race? My mind's going all over the place. So the quicker that I can notice when my mind has wandered and bring it back to the breath. This is just a simple exercise to just notice when your mind has wandered and bring it back to the task at hand. This, for a tactical leader, anyone in a tactical environment or an athletic environment, I think this is, this is golden stuff. And it just takes a little bit of discipline, doing it every day,

• 2:53:30Speaker 01

  and just working on this ability to notice your mind, just notice where it's going. It's not a problem that it's drifted, it's gonna drift. It's just working on noticing that it's drifted a little bit quicker and then bring it back.

• 2:53:43Jocko Willink?

  So you work the breath, you work the, the skills, you're at the right altitude, you're training, you're going to school, you rolled into the 2018 Paralympic Games. And you're ready to rock and roll.

• 2:53:59Speaker 01

  I think so. In retrospect, I was, I was very much ready to rock and roll. I, I-

• 2:54:03Jocko Willink?

  Where were those games?

• 2:54:04Speaker 01

  They were in Pyeongchang, South Korea. And I would be going as a full-time graduate student, but what that meant was that, just lucky for me, it lined up with spring break and I was gonna skip a week of class. So I'd be gone for two weeks total, but only missed one week of class. My spring break was competing in Korea. I didn't have any sense of pressure or expectation. My competitors aren't in graduate school. I don't, you know, no one expects me to do anything. I'm not one of the people that the media pre-picks to do well. I didn't have good results. I qualified, whatever. But I'd been training, going up to Vermont. I was ready to go, showed up. The plan was to do six races in that about eight-day span, three biathlon, three cross-country.

• 2:54:47Speaker 01

  The first race was the morning after the opening ceremony, didn't go to the opening ceremony. Wanted to be rested. The first race is a sprint biathlon, which is a tough race because you don't have time to take that couple breath extra to hit the, you know, you gotta, because it's such a short ski race, it's a 7.5 kilometer ski race, you gotta go hard and you gotta shoot fast, you gotta hit your shots. It was a windy day. And not to mention, of all the races to put first, I think that's like the hardest one because you're amped up. And in biathlon, I have a different optimal mental state than I do in cross country and cross country. I am, I want to be just ready to go.

• 2:55:29Jocko Willink?

  It's like psycho, right?

• 2:55:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I am going to

• 2:55:31Jocko Willink?

  There's no holding back.

• 2:55:32Speaker 01

  bury myself on this race. And in biathlon, if you have that attitude, in Sochi, the first race off the bat was the sprint biathlon and like, I came in way too hot and missed three shots. I'm like, way too hot. But that was a learning point. And in Sochi, I also learned, do not look at the big screen that has the real time race results. I'd ski by it and look at it, see where I what, don't do that. Don't listen to the announcer. It comes in one ear, out the other. Like, I had learned a lot of lessons that I was gonna rigidly try to apply. And just take one race at the time. Don't think about the next race. If a race goes bad, or if even five minutes ago, something bad happened. In this race, it's gone. The only thing you can do is affect right now. I can't affect five

• 2:56:17Speaker 01

  minutes ago. If I do things properly now, the future will be the way I want it to be, but I can't be, it does no good to think about the future. All I can do is act right here and right now. What's right in front of me. If it's a hill, I'm gonna attack the hill. I'm not gonna be thinking about what's gonna happen in three minutes when I hit the shooting range. So that was kind of my mindset. This was informed by some of the classes I had taken and just, I was gonna apply this and just see how it goes. You know, the first race, Skied the first lap. We had good skis. It was a hilly course. It was a good advantage for me. Windy day. Went through. First shot hit. Second hit. Third shot hit. Fourth shot hit. Fifth shot hit. Get out and go. Bypass the penalty loop. Alright, good start.

• 2:57:02Speaker 01

  Skied the second lap. It's about seven minutes per lap. Coming to the range. Alright. I'm a shooter now. Let's go. Glasses up. Get to the mat, lay down. Take the rifle. Check out the wind. It was windy, kind of gusting and swirling. And first shot hit, second shot hit, third shot hit, fourth shot hit. And then I started like, oh my god, I gotta hit this shot. And my rhythm was off. And I'm like, okay, take a couple breaths.

• 2:57:31Speaker 01

  And then I lined up the sights and squeezed off the round and I jerked the trigger and it was a miss. I got, I got up just mad like, ah. So I skied into the penalty loop, skied it, and then I exited the penalty loop. And pretty quickly, there's a coach there yelling like, hey, everybody, everybody's missed. Like, all the key players have missed. It's, okay, clean slate, let's go. Either way, you go either way. But But it's nice to know. Nice to know. Everybody's like, the top guys. So I went as hard as I could on that last lap. And I, I remember coming into the finish line. You don't, because it's individual starts, it's not head to head. It's like a time trial. You don't know, you have a general idea. I knew that, okay, I'm in contention. But you don't know to the second where you are. It's, you just have to find ways to push yourself.

• 2:58:16Speaker 01

  Knowing that every second counts. And that last stretch, going as hard as I could, I crossed the line. And I had told myself, I'm not looking up at that screen to see the race results. I'm not doing it. Not doing it during the race and I'm not doing it after. And so I crossed the line. I didn't know how I finished. And I just go out and I'm like eating a recovery bar. And someone just taken, a few minutes later, taken off the timing chip. And they said, ah, an American won. Who was it? I don't know. It's got a kind of a weird last name. And my two other teammates in the race had pretty easy to pronounce names. So maybe that was me. It, it was, it was seven seconds separation between first and second. Belarusian athlete got second place. And that, that was unexpected. Gold medal.

• 2:59:01Speaker 01

  Gold medal. Out of the gate. Out of the gate. Good way to start the game.

• 2:59:08Jocko Willink?

  And then you kept rocking through the, through the games.

• 2:59:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was tough races. The next day's race, I was going one race at a time and the next race was a very difficult, the 15 kilometer cross-country race. Actually, on the first lap, had a great first lap and was right where you would want to be. On the second lap, I didn't take into account, it was warm, the sun was kind of degrading the tracks. I had done the first lap on this critical fast, sweeping downhill left turn in the track, which kind of guides you around. You can be in the track or out of the track, but I had been in the track in a tuck, low aerodynamic. The second lap, low aerodynamic, same thing. I didn't take into account the tracks had degraded, other skiers had gone through, they had created some exit channels, so I was in that tuck

• 2:59:53Speaker 01

  and just, like, all splayed out, totally wiped out. And I got up and I had blood on my, I was racing in a t-shirt, it was so warm. This is the Winter Games, but none of my equipment was broken. I started skiing and really was just thinking, it's not about quitting or any of that. I've proven I can do, it's about being a smart athlete. I got four races to go. This one is two laps, it's a five lap race, 15 kilometers, 35 or so more minutes. Does it really make sense to go hard and get like eighth place, ninth place? I can try to work my way back into this, but you know, it's, this race is gonna make me tired.

• 3:00:32Speaker 01

  I got four more to go. Maybe it's actually better to sit it out, or to, to, you know, exit the course and just be done. It's a do not finish, did not finish course. But I was kind of skiing at like three quarters effort. I had lost all this momentum that would have carried me up and over the next hill. I'm like, you know, digging that, digging myself out of that hole, I just don't know if it makes sense. A coach was yelling, "You're still in it, go, go, go." So I just kind of responded to the coach like an athlete and started going. And I'm like, well, let's just see what, you know, it's the Games, I've trained years for it. Let's just go, see what happens. I got 35 minutes to work my way back into it. I got time. It's looking at it a different way. Instead of like, does it make sense to go

• 3:01:17Speaker 01

  hard for 35 minutes? It's, well, I got 35 minutes. Let's go. So I kinda, I was, I was seeing my progress improve. You'd get lap splits, but again, you're just pushing yourself. My lap splits after every lap were getting a little bit better. And then on the last lap, it was, it was kind of like, five of us are kinda in it. They don't exactly know where, you gotta go. And so I just, I went really hard and I crossed the line and I ended up getting second. But for me, I'm actually more proud of this race than the gold medal race because I think that in sports, it's, it's all about character development. The sport in the race itself, the medal, none of that really matters. What matters is what it, the person that it's making you. And you actually learn more from setbacks

• 3:01:59Speaker 01

  and okay, I got second place. Whatever place I got that day, it was about taking a fall despite all my training. In the lead up, sometimes you make mistakes or sometimes just things happen, right? It's about getting up.

• 3:02:19Speaker 01

  And, and I had doubt. Doubt kinda was working its way into my mind. That's probably natural. But working through that doubt by doing what I trained to do, which is to push hard and go hard to the finish line. And so for me, this race is more meaningful in an internal way. Of course, the previous day's race, I got to see the flag go up. That was very special too. But the cross country race the next day was, was more meaningful in, in that sense.

• 3:02:49Jocko Willink?

  And you end up with one gold, four silvers and one bronze.

• 3:02:54Speaker 01

  Yes. I, I had a, I just was in that really sweet spot of physical peak, mental peak, all lining up in a four year cycle, really like a seven year cycle. Cause I've been doing this, trying to train since 2011, 2012, moving out to Colorado. So timing that, and I was 37 years old. I felt like it's the blend, the blend of time in the sport, seven plus years plus.

• 3:03:27Speaker 01

  Not being over 40 like I am now, which helps with recovery and everything. That it was just, everything was lining up and the course, no doubt, played into my strengths with hill climbing.

• 3:03:38Jocko Willink?

  And you end up getting the, uh, the best male athlete of the games. Is that right?

• 3:03:43Speaker 01

  That's right. I, I, I think-

• 3:03:46Jocko Willink?

  That's kinda like stud scenario, right?

• 3:03:49Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think you're supposed to say this, well, it's not about medals or awards. Of course, I'm proud of it and that I performed like that. That I think it was a fair and clean field. And that I got to represent the United States overseas. And for me, this was

• 3:04:15Speaker 01

  just a time that I could, you know, all of this work, most of it was unseen. Yeah, you get on a, on a podium ceremony or get voted the best male athlete. But nobody saw the hard work I was doing in Colorado. Back in the day, on those dirt roads, and I'm by myself in the summer. And that's actually what I'm most proud of. And what is most meaningful for me was, was that. It wasn't the end result of winning or getting second or whatever the race result was. It was putting in the work and

• 3:04:52Speaker 01

  pushing myself and growing and reconnecting with nature and all of it. But really, it was about the work and the training.

• 3:05:01Jocko Willink?

  So where are we at now? So that was, that was 2018?

• 3:05:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2018 unexpectedly, I, I did unexpectedly well. And then that opened up some opportunities that I didn't see coming or expect. But, you know, I had, after my injury, I stayed, I didn't talk about, I didn't talk about it. I have, I've read about General Ulysses S. Grant, serving in the Civil War and refusing to cash in on his service.

• 3:05:33Speaker 01

  Not to write a memoir at the in the very end of his life he did because his wife was dying and he he was

• 3:05:39Jocko Willink?

  Broke.

• 3:05:39Speaker 01

  Broke. He had been swindled and so he decided to write a memoir. I I just I didn't feel comfortable talking about my injury. I didn't even have anybody asking me to talk about my injury. So it's pretty easy not to have to talk about it. So when I was out there just training, I was just doing the work, doing the work, doing the work. And now all of a sudden it's like, oh, I have these opportunities to like uh monetize or what, you know, just I can actually create opportunities to give talks and this kind of thing. And that came my way. And I had to do some soul searching. Is this is this right for me for me? In where I'm at and what I want to do. And I thought if I

• 3:06:22Speaker 01

  try it, it's a challenge because there's a couple of things going on. If I'm going to be honest with myself. One, I'm not comfortable publicly speaking. Let's just be honest about it. I'm not comfortable. It's like getting in the water or trying to jump out of an airplane. It's in that realm. That really and it and then the other thing is I just don't know. I mean, in the teams, we're getting told, you know, you be a quiet professional, just put in the hard work, don't seek glory, this kind of thing. So that was all going on. Okay, I'll try. I'll just at least try to develop a narrative and and see how it goes. And I worked on that a lot. And then I started giving some talks and that came about because I got some medals.

• 3:07:06Speaker 01

  And did had those results. Those opportunities didn't exist, even though I'm the same person with essentially the same background in 2014.

• 3:07:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, check.

• 3:07:16Speaker 01

  That's just how things work in this world.

• 3:07:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I mean, from my perspective, obviously, uh, I I look at it as not so much you taking the opportunity to monetize what you've been through. But to me, it's more important to go out there and share what you've been through because it can legitimately help out a lot of people. And um, you know, I had one of our admirals one time tell me. You know, we were having a talk. I had a book coming out and, you know, he said something along the lines of

• 3:07:48Jocko Willink?

  You know, I was like, well, you know, this is, this is not really the quiet professional for me to be doing this. And he said something along the lines of, hey, we need to be quiet professionals, but that doesn't mean silent professionals. And there's stories that should be told. And as far as I, my opinion is you have a story that should absolutely be told. And I mean, when you're talking, and we probably could do a nine hour podcast if we went back and got like medical records. When you're talking about all the things that you were going through from the time you woke up in the hospital. Like I'm a baby, like I, I'm hearing the things that I'm like mad if you know, oh, uh, you know, like the, the floor's cold. When I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I'm like, oh, this is, you know what I mean?

• 3:08:30Jocko Willink?

  Like, or like I'll, I'll get like a sprained ankle and I'll have to wear an ankle brace and I'll be like, I'm so mad about it, you know? I'm sitting here just thinking, man, the perspective that you have. And, and then you took it even one step further, like you're sitting there with, with a guy that's a triple amputee and he's over there getting after it, trying to make his life better. So, man, I think to, to the contrary of what you're kind of saying about like, oh, trying to monetize this and the silent professionals. Like, hey, man, this is things are going to help people, a lot of people that are in a tough spot. And, and also, you know, team guys that are going to go through tough situations and,

• 3:09:11Jocko Willink?

  and, and just other veterans that just are human beings, man, life is hard. And, and for someone like you that's been through the hardest of situation and still be able to get up and every day, keep getting after it, man, that's like, that's you, I would actually tell you if you're not sharing this story. I think that's actually kind of wrong, bro, to be honest with you.

• 3:09:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that is the side of the fence I'm on right now is that it actually could be selfish of me to not tell my story to, to, for some valorized concept of, you know,

• 3:09:49Speaker 01

  Whatever, not, not cashing in, but really this, the opportunity presented itself because of some success that I didn't have four years prior, but now there's some opportunities to talk. My friend from the teams started this company O2X that is doing awesome work and there, I don't have any holdups of going and giving classes to firefighters and other public service professionals as part of the O2X team, teaching principles of resilience or mental toughness, grit, whatever you want to call it, but also working on goal setting because I, in my own life, setting goals as an athlete, setting goals after my injury, setting goals at the Naval Academy, that all really helped me. And it doesn't mean

• 3:10:34Speaker 01

  you have to have goals, but if you have a powerful long-term goal, that can be a very, a very potent force to help you get through difficult situations, but sometimes those long-term goals can be discouraging in the moment of intensity. And so you're teaching, you know, setting middle-term, as an athlete, year to year, I set performance goals based on various different categories of performance that do not entirely include physical training. It's a lot of nutrition, sleep, mental skills and this kind of thing, tactical, technical. And so also teaching them that in the moment of a tactical situation when chaos is just

• 3:11:16Speaker 01

  everywhere, that you can set micro-goals, just to be aware of that, that, that this idea of you're never out of the fight, there's always something you can do, one more step forward, something that can contribute positively, that this is very powerful. And also what you taught me, I teach them as well, prioritize and execute. What's the most important thing that you need to be focusing on right now? Either act on it yourself or delegate it. And then what's the next most important thing? With improvement in experience and training, you can more quickly identify what is the most important thing to work on. But yeah, just passing on those lessons learned to tactical athletes as part of O2X.

• 3:11:57Speaker 01

  That's just a no brainer. I love being part of the team to do that.

• 3:12:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome. So are you training for 2022 now?

• 3:12:04Speaker 01

  Well, I competed recently in the 2022 Beijing Winter Games and I came back with one gold medal as part of a team relay. And it again was a six race individual format with the very last day being a team event. And the first race off the bat was that same biathlon. And so now I'm going in with, okay, I've had four years since 2018. I knew that going in, there would be, there would be a little bit more attention directed. To whatever extent that would be, it would be more than before 2018, which was nothing. So that there's going to be maybe some more people wanting to do an interview or some media outlets or some maybe sponsorship opportunities, this kind of thing.

• 3:12:49Speaker 01

  And with that, I started to feel, okay, somebody sponsors you, they want you to get a medal.

• 3:12:58Speaker 01

  They want you to perform. This is a different situation. So going into 2014, brand new, didn't know anything. Going into 2018, more experienced, but with no expectations, either externally or internally. Now, external expectations probably, even though no one's going to say that, but really some internal expectations because I'm perceiving those external expectations. As a different, a different, different, just every, each one of the games I've been to is different in that sense. But of course, training, just focus on what you can do, execute the training plan, working through, getting, you know, positive communication with the coaches, work adjusting the training plan. Covid happened. That didn't interrupt my personal training so much, but it interrupted the competitive scene somewhat.

• 3:13:43Speaker 01

  And then this season, just doing a lot of altitude exposure training, actually in Bozeman, Montana with the team, focusing on biathlon support at the range we have there. And showed up that first biathlon was.

• 3:14:00Speaker 01

  Again, as usual, I'm just really amped up on that one because it's the first race and just you've been training and the course in China was not as advantageous for my strengths as an athlete as it was in 2018, but it was gonna be a grind, really slow snow, totally dehydrated snow.

• 3:14:16Jocko Willink?

  It was weird to watch.

• 3:14:17Speaker 01

  Weird snow.

• 3:14:18Jocko Willink?

  Like there was dirt on the sides and stuff.

• 3:14:20Speaker 01

  Really windy place, just in like blowing, so they groomed the course overnight or whenever they did it and then you show up in the morning, but the wind was picking up outlying snow and blowing it into the, and that was just the slowest stuff ever. So this is gonna be some challenges, it's gonna be grind. In that first race, we were competing against Chinese athletes I hadn't seen, hadn't seen them, the competitive circuit and, and keeping in mind, I'm a sit skier, there is, I would say, a lot less technique in cross-country sit skiing than there is in cross-country standing skiing, because we're only maneuvering our poles. So there is, I think, an ability to rapidly develop athletes in my sport, sitting, as compared to in the standing discipline. But that first race, I'm very proud of it.

• 3:15:05Speaker 01

  I came in, hit five shots, came in again for the second and final shooting stage, hit five shots, it was windy, skied hard, absolutely went as hard as I could on the last lap because I was just off of third place. The last split I got was on the last lap, just having hit all 10 shots, you're five seconds off third place. That is a motiv- like motivating, I, okay, I, I just was about, and we're at altitudes, I crossed the line and I hadn't done a lot of racing at 5,500 feet like we were, trained at it, but at a Games race at that altitude, when you're going absolutely as hard as you can, it's painful. And I finished that race

• 3:15:49Speaker 01

  in fourth place, but I can tell you that that was perhaps, in my own estimation, the best race I've ever had. It doesn't matter what place it was. Of course, getting on the podium is nice, but it's about the execution of your own race. You do not control who else is out there. The second race, the next day was 18 kilometers. Again, one of the better races I felt like I've ever executed in terms of pacing. Sixth place. And then races number three and four didn't go so well. I sat one out, was named to the relay team. Our relay team consisted of four legs. I was the third leg. And at this point, my mentality is just take what I was given and try to gain a couple of seconds or something, pass it off to the anchor leg. And we unexpectedly got first place.

• 3:16:33Speaker 01

  We beat some more favored teams. And so I ended up getting to come home with a gold medal. I can tell you that that was a more special experience than an individual medal.

• 3:16:47Jocko Willink?

  Part of the team?

• 3:16:48Speaker 01

  To be part of a team. And I think I felt it. No, I know I felt it during the race. The difference of an individual race versus a race where someone passed it off to you and you're going to pass it off to someone else and you don't want to let them down.

• 3:17:03Jocko Willink?

  They're counting on you.

• 3:17:04Speaker 01

  And they're counting on you. And that's a difference. And so for an individual sport to have that team element is just awesome.

• 3:17:12Jocko Willink?

  Man, right on. I guess that brings us up to kind of where we're at today. Is there anything else? Echo, you got any questions? Probably a good place to wrap it up. I mean.

• 3:17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17:23Jocko Willink?

  Echo, you got any questions?

• 3:17:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were talking before we started recording about jiu-jitsu and you were asking pretty kind of hardcore about the tournament scenario, how it's laid out. Is that to indicate that you are considering doing jiu-jitsu?

• 3:17:38Speaker 01

  Well, I was asking Jaco, is this possible? You know, is there adaptive jiu-jitsu, adaptive martial arts?

• 3:17:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, actually, let me rephrase that. There is no, like you would compete with other dudes and there is no, I've never seen, I've never seen like, oh, you know, here's a bunch of guys without legs that are going to do jiu-jitsu. It's no, you'll compete against other dudes because jiu-jitsu itself is adaptive. And so you would figure out moves that work for you that.

• 3:18:11Jocko Willink?

  You'd figure out how to do it. And there's like, there's competitive wrestlers, there's wrestlers that have fought in the NCAAs that have one leg, no leg, no legs, and they just adapt their body to figure out how to win. And so, yeah, there's, the sport itself is adaptive, but there would be no like, other special rules. I mean, you go to jiu-jitsu competition, there'd be people that are blind. They do have one rule, like in wrestling, the, if it's a blind wrestler, they have to, you have to maintain contact with them. But that's the only rule.

• 3:18:41Speaker 02

  That's wrestling, too.

• 3:18:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I don't even know if that's jiu-jitsu or not.

• 3:18:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:18:45Jocko Willink?

  But, um, we, we have friends, I mean, I have a friend that's paralyzed, you know, uh, pretty much chest down. He does jiu-jitsu.

• 3:18:53Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 3:18:53Jocko Willink?

  Um, and there's definitely, like I said, there's people with one legs, uh, I mean, one of the, one of the greatest jiu-jitsu players of, of all time, Jean-Jacques Machado, he only has, uh, a few fingers on one of his hands. And in jiu-jitsu, grips are really important. We got another friend named Jeff Real. Jeff Real has one hand and he competes all the time and he just competes. There's no, there's no special category other than get some.

• 3:19:15Speaker 02

  Yep, that's true.

• 3:19:16Speaker 01

  I'm here for a few days, so maybe I could come and take a class. One, one of the things I learned, and I guess the ultimate thing I've learned as an athlete in a Paralympic sport for 10 years, and the thing I was telling myself most recently in Beijing was, it's not about results, it's not about how you feel today. It doesn't, no one cares where you came from, no one cares how old you are, no one cares what you look like, no one cares how much money you got, how many degrees you have. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is what you can do right here and right now. That's all that matters. And ultimately, your opponent is yourself. The voice inside you that's saying.

• 3:20:04Speaker 01

  I don't know if I can do this, the voice inside you that's saying, don't go that hard, it's painful. That voice, that's, that's actually what you're competing against. And I think in martial arts, it's probably perhaps even more true than in cross-country skiing.

• 3:20:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, when we had Rob Jones out, we did a, we did some mat work with him.

• 3:20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:20:21Jocko Willink?

  See if you give him that little jujitsu bug.

• 3:20:24Speaker 02

  Remember Kyle Maynard? You know that?

• 3:20:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:26Speaker 02

  No arms, no legs.

• 3:20:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:27Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 3:20:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:20:29Jocko Willink?

  And he would train.

• 3:20:30Speaker 02

  And he, I trained with him before. He, that was a long time. He might be, even be a black belt by now.

• 3:20:36Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 3:20:37Speaker 02

  School. Yep. No arms.

• 3:20:38Jocko Willink?

  So yeah, man, jiu-jitsu's for everybody.

• 3:20:40Speaker 01

  For everybody.

• 3:20:42Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you, A, you know, we're going, we're over three hours right now. Anything, anything else that we didn't cover? Anything else you want to hit on?

• 3:20:48Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:20:48Jocko Willink?

  Any final closing thoughts?

• 3:20:50Speaker 01

  Covered my life thoroughly. I've unpacked my life and brought up a lot of memories. So I, I appreciate you providing this platform and for asking me to be part of your podcast. It's an honor.

• 3:21:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, I don't know why it's taken so long. Hey, if people want to find you, it's danconason.com, right?

• 3:21:08Speaker 01

  Yes, I do have a website.

• 3:21:09Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's where people can find you if they want to, you can go speak, you can go and help them out. Um, they can find you on there.

• 3:21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:21:16Jocko Willink?

  You don't have any social media, do you?

• 3:21:18Speaker 01

  No, I got on LinkedIn.

• 3:21:20Jocko Willink?

  That's not social media, Holmes.

• 3:21:22Speaker 01

  Begrudgingly, but I'm not, I'm not a social, that's, that's one line that I'm not ready to cross right now.

• 3:21:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, right on. Uh, you got the website though, and if people want to contact you, they can find you through there, which is awesome.

• 3:21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:21:35Jocko Willink?

  Cool.

• 3:21:35Speaker 01

  Thanks, Jaco.

• 3:21:36Jocko Willink?

  Cool, man. Thanks for coming on. Um, thanks for sharing your lessons learned for sure. Uh, and, and, you know, more important, thanks for what you did for the country. Thanks for what you did for the teams. Thanks for what you've done since representing America. Uh, that's awesome. And, and really it's just, it's always an incredible example for me, just knowing that you're out there. And no matter what's happening, no matter what you've done, no matter what you've been through, I know for a fact, you're still getting up and you're getting after it. And I appreciate being able to follow that example, man. Thank you.

• 3:22:10Speaker 01

  Thanks, Jaco.

• 3:22:13Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Dan Knausen has left the building. Echo Charles.

• 3:22:19Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:22:20Jocko Willink?

  What was your assessment?

• 3:22:22Speaker 02

  Okay, so the first thing, what I didn't even realize until a few minutes in is when Jason Gardner makes his speech, one of his many, about training works, and he tells the story, he was talking about this guy, right?

• 3:22:35Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 3:22:36Speaker 02

  That was him. That's crazy. Cause to me, that's one of the better speeches, especially from Jason Gardner like that, that's a, that's a, that's what I look forward to, you know, cause the way he says it and like the lesson.

• 3:22:46Jocko Willink?

  At the muster, Jason talks about the effectiveness of training and sure enough, and I didn't want to go through all the details and misspeak anything, but some of those details that I did cover for sure. But I'll tell you what, man, and I kinda talked about it, but like, the amount, like waking up after being in a coma for 10 days, and then having just the insane medical issues, just insane medical issues. No legs, freaking abdomen blown apart, colostomy bag, the thing going down your throat, not even allowed to drink one sip of water. You know, like I get complaint, I have a sore, like here's, here's my complaint.

• 3:23:30Jocko Willink?

  Like, you know, you're doing jujitsu and you, and you cut your mouth.

• 3:23:34Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:23:35Jocko Willink?

  Like you cut, you bite your tongue, you get ripped, you get catch the teeth, and then you can't like eat an acidic food for like a week.

• 3:23:41Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 3:23:42Jocko Willink?

  Like, and I'm complaining about this, right?

• 3:23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:23:46Jocko Willink?

  And, and Dan's over there for, for a hundred days or whatever with a freaking tube down his throat, and he's not allowed to have one sip of water. So, this is another one of those situations where you just think, man, so, so nothing to complain about. There's so nothing to complain about, and Dan just has a freaking awesome attitude.

• 3:24:10Speaker 02

  When he said that about when he woke up and did, you know, like no time, no passage of time, like that's the truth. So, I got a concussion, like a bad one, the kind where you have amnesia for a long time. Like, so basically, it's like a super, super duper, duper, duper mild version of that experience. So.

• 3:24:27Jocko Willink?

  So you've basically been through the same thing.

• 3:24:29Speaker 02

  Yes, I can relate. So I, I, it was the NFL football game. I hit this guy and then got knocked out. But the knockout, like where my body was limp only lasted for like, it was like a flash knockout. So they helped me up and I was all like weary, but everyone on the, on my team saw me and knew I was like.

• 3:24:47Jocko Willink?

  Out.

• 3:24:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:24:47Jocko Willink?

  Out of it.

• 3:24:48Speaker 02

  So they pushed, they put me to the sideline. Apparently the, I don't remember any of this part. So, but when I came to, I was just standing there in the sideline. And it was weird because just like how he said is, but I had amnesia too, though. That's, that was a weird thing. I didn't remember and I don't even know where I was, like the kind of where I'm just all standing here, you know? So, but it's so curt, like especially as a little teenager, right? It's high school time. It's so scary because you don't, it's like you don't know what's going on at all. And nothing is like making sense or whatever. So man, I just kind of broke down and started crying. And my brother's like, and my brother's on the same team, obviously. He's like, kind of worried and stuff. He's calling the trainer or whatever, the doctor.

• 3:25:29Speaker 02

  And they're asking me all these questions and I'm like, I don't, I don't know anything. And it's weird and it's really freaky. Now that you're in the hospital, man, but man, I was feeling him. I was like, that is crazy, man. That's a crazy experience.

• 3:25:43Jocko Willink?

  The, the, the level of discomfort is like unimaginable, right? Again, you know, for me, I get a cut in my mouth and I'm like, I can't eat ketchup for a week or whatever. You know, it's gonna sting, right? And he's just, you know, lost his legs, got the freaking tube down his nose. Having heinous, real nightmares that he thinks are real.

• 3:26:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:26:11Jocko Willink?

  Like this is crazy. So, and then for him, I mean, can you, is there a nicer guy out there? You know, just as nice as they, totally nice guy, um, humble, like just freaking incredible. So.

• 3:26:26Speaker 02

  He did say something and, and he only said it real quick to him and just continued to move on, but it was, it, it told a lot of the story on his little, on his mindset. When he said, oh, when he started, uh, I think when he started sitting up, right?

• 3:26:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:41Speaker 02

  And when, then when he was considering, you know, before he went into rehab, he said, okay, this is like my new sport, right? I said, oh, I see what you did there. And that's huge. That's a huge deal. Where you don't look at it as like, oh my gosh, I'm starting from like, I was at 10 and now I have to go all the way back to one. It's no, it's not that. It's like a new sport. It's like a new challenge that you can start from your, almost like in a way, your original starting spot because you're new to this sport.

• 3:27:08Jocko Willink?

  Just a new, it's a new sport.

• 3:27:09Speaker 02

  New thing. Yeah. And then boom, you kind of gamify it in that way where it's like, oh shoot, now I can sit up. Okay. Now I can take some stuff. Okay. I can use this. And it's like this, this sport.

• 3:27:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:19Speaker 02

  And it makes sense too, cause look at him. Paralympics, no big deal.

• 3:27:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:24Speaker 02

  Winning.

• 3:27:25Jocko Willink?

  That being said, you can gamify that stuff, but at the end of the day, you can't get out of the game. And, and that's why you have to have that, that like just incredible mindset um to look at it. And you know, we, when we had Jim Searlsley on and you know, he had, he had lost both legs and one arm in Vietnam. And, and that, that talk that he had with us after the podcast, when he was talking about Lewis Puller Jr. And he said that Lewis Puller Jr. Never accepted a hundred percent what had happened to him. And, and he's like, and I did.

• 3:28:03Jocko Willink?

  And you, you could hear Dan talking about that today. You know, there's, you know, he said there was, there were, there was times, he's talking past tense. Like there was times where he would be like, oh, why did this happen to me? Oh, do I really think it was the, you know, he said, this happened to me because I could take it. And then he said, I questioned myself. Did I real, do I really think that? And he was doing it in the past tense. So he got to a point where he's like, okay, this is me. This is my life. And what am I going to do? I'm going to go freaking kick ass. I'm going to become an awesome athlete. I'm going to win a bunch of freaking Olympic medals. I mean, it's just, it's just awesome, awesome example um as a human. So anyways, honored to have him on here, Dan. Thanks for coming on, brother. And um.

• 3:28:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, if you want to help out, if you want to support, if you want to support yourself,

• 3:28:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:28:54Jocko Willink?

  You can do it.

• 3:28:55Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 3:28:55Jocko Willink?

  By, by getting good fuel in your system.

• 3:28:57Speaker 02

  Yep. Improving your situation, whatever that may be.

• 3:29:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:29:02Speaker 02

  Physical is a big one and mental, by the way. So we have what? Discipline, go, energy drink. I've been drinking, I've been utilizing these all week.

• 3:29:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:29:09Speaker 02

  And it's only the second day.

• 3:29:10Jocko Willink?

  Highly productive week so far.

• 3:29:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so far. We got a big one, you know? I don't say, I don't run around saying I'm so busy all the time. I don't say I'm not busy, but I will say this week I'm a little bit busy.

• 3:29:21Jocko Willink?

  A little bit busy. Good, good. I mean, he's got a lot of stuff done.

• 3:29:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:29:25Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Jaco Fuel dot com. Get, get some Molk. That's a big one.

• 3:29:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:29:30Jocko Willink?

  It's such a good little, it's almost like a trick.

• 3:29:33Speaker 02

  It is like a trick.

• 3:29:34Jocko Willink?

  It's like a trick that you can have something that tastes delicious and is good for you.

• 3:29:38Speaker 02

  You know?

• 3:29:38Jocko Willink?

  And it's providing you the protein that you need to get stronger.

• 3:29:41Speaker 02

  You know the expression, uh, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is?

• 3:29:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:45Speaker 02

  This one is not.

• 3:29:45Jocko Willink?

  It's that.

• 3:29:46Speaker 02

  It's not too good to be true.

• 3:29:47Jocko Willink?

  It's actually too good and true. It's good and true.

• 3:29:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I said it before, I'll say it again, that man, it's not, especially if you're on the path, you're lifting. Lifting is a big one, but if you're, if you're really working out and you're trying to get that additional protein, it's hard to get the required, recommended amount of protein.

• 3:30:03Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 3:30:04Speaker 02

  It's harder than you think.

• 3:30:07Speaker 02

  So add to that one. It's easy now.

• 3:30:08Jocko Willink?

  Not if you got that trick.

• 3:30:09Speaker 02

  Easy now.

• 3:30:10Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Jaco Fuel dot com. You can also get the drinks at Wawa. You can, uh, check out the vitamin shop. They've got everything in there too. So appreciate that. Go get it.

• 3:30:21Speaker 02

  Yep. Also as far as supporting yourself, this podcast and America, if you're gonna get, get some jeans if you haven't already, go to OriginUSA.com is where you can get your American made jeans.

• 3:30:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's real simple, you know? Oh, like, oh, it's cool. It's American made. And then you, oh, yeah. And actually you're, you're helping defeat communism.

• 3:30:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:30:43Jocko Willink?

  And tyrannical leaders in the world.

• 3:30:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:30:45Jocko Willink?

  So you want a new pair of jeans? Great. Get them from OriginUSA.com. That's, that's a positive move. If you want to help stomp out tyrannical leadership in the world that's enslaving a bunch of people, you can also go to OriginUSA.com. Uh, you can get jujitsu stuff. Sounded like Dan was jujitsu curious. He was kind of jujitsu curious.

• 3:31:06Speaker 02

  He was really.

• 3:31:07Jocko Willink?

  Real. I was out.

• 3:31:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.

• 3:31:10Jocko Willink?

  Right as I was coming in.

• 3:31:11Speaker 02

  He made it a point and he was, he was, he was a really interested to know how, how do the tournaments, how the tournament set up? Like, do you have this? You have that? And you're right, like, right, we didn't, you came in and we had to kind of record, but I didn't realize that. Yeah, they don't have, they don't have, uh, like an adaptive division.

• 3:31:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Jiu Jitsu is adaptive.

• 3:31:29Speaker 02

  You just go.

• 3:31:30Jocko Willink?

  You adapt.

• 3:31:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:31:31Jocko Willink?

  You figure it out. And by the way, like, what's your weight class? Cause Dan probably, if he had legs, would probably be one seventy? So he's gonna be in some, with some one hundred and twenty eight pounders. I have no idea what his actual weight is, but he's definitely gonna be, for his size and strength, upper body's gonna be a force to be reckoned with.

• 3:31:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and but there, and there are, do, do I want to say a lot? Or there, there's not a lot, but it's not a rarity to be like, to, to see a guy with one leg, no legs, competing in jujitsu and winning. So there are like very definitive adaptive techniques that go in and are very effective in there.

• 3:32:10Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah. To train that jujitsu.

• 3:32:13Speaker 02

  Train that.

• 3:32:14Jocko Willink?

  The jujitsu's for everybody. That's the, that's the bottom line. The jujitsu's for everybody.

• 3:32:18Speaker 02

  Where is it? Where'd you get that from?

• 3:32:19Jocko Willink?

  I just said it today.

• 3:32:20Speaker 02

  No, but you said it right there with a little bit of an accent.

• 3:32:22Jocko Willink?

  No, you know why? Because everybody, you could separate it into two words and you have a little pun, right? Everybody.

• 3:32:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:32:30Jocko Willink?

  And everybody.

• 3:32:31Speaker 02

  Back in the day, Kay, remember Stuart Cooper? Stuart Cooper Films? Yeah. So he did a video with Hobson Mora. And that, that's what it was called, Jujitsu, Jujitsu's for Everybody. And that's how he sounded, kind of like. I thought it was from that video. That was good. That was my favorite Stuart Cooper video.

• 3:32:45Jocko Willink?

  Brazilian Portuguese accent comes out, you know, from my youth.

• 3:32:49Speaker 02

  It's true. Also, Jaco Store, you want to represent why you're on the path, Discipline Equals Freedom shirts, and hats and hoodies, some good stuff to say good, and also some creative designs. If you want a new one every month as a subscription.

• 3:33:02Jocko Willink?

  What was the last shirt, Locker's shirt that came out?

• 3:33:05Speaker 02

  The last one, uh.

• 3:33:06Jocko Willink?

  Do you even know?

• 3:33:07Speaker 02

  Everybody must, no, no, no, there's one.

• 3:33:09Jocko Willink?

  Everybody must get stoned.

• 3:33:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's not the most recent one.

• 3:33:11Jocko Willink?

  Controversial one.

• 3:33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:33:13Jocko Willink?

  What's the, what's the most recent one?

• 3:33:15Speaker 02

  It's called Good High Level Problems.

• 3:33:19Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 3:33:20Speaker 02

  You know what it's good road in like, what do you call like a script?

• 3:33:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:25Speaker 02

  Real elegant script. Yeah. With the logos, you gotta.

• 3:33:29Jocko Willink?

  Why does it say high level problems?

• 3:33:31Speaker 02

  Because like, you know, you know, you know, what do you call the aristocrats, right? That's how it looks. I don't know.

• 3:33:39Speaker 02

  I'm just saying now here, you want to know the layers? Okay.

• 3:33:44Speaker 02

  So I, I always say, we always kind of talk about how like people now, or it's been said that people now, they're complaining about like dumb stuff, right? Everyone's offended or all this.

• 3:33:56Jocko Willink?

  First world problems.

• 3:33:57Speaker 02

  First world problems. Yeah. That's like, the thing is sure, it can be viewed as bad, especially when you compare it to real problems, quote unquote, real problems. But it's only natural to have these problems. And if they're problems, they still need to be solved. Most of them can be solved with attitude, of course, rather than, you know, killing a bunch of enemies.

• 3:34:17Jocko Willink?

  First world problem. Good.

• 3:34:18Speaker 02

  It's essentially, no, no, no, it means first world problems need to be solved just like any other problem. No matter how easy or hard, but they still exist.

• 3:34:28Jocko Willink?

  But you still have to have the same attitude.

• 3:34:30Speaker 02

  You gotta have that good attitude, the same good attitude.

• 3:34:33Jocko Willink?

  It's just a higher level good.

• 3:34:36Speaker 02

  Quote unquote, higher level. Yes.

• 3:34:37Jocko Willink?

  All right. So there you go. Shirt locker. Get some of that. Subscribe to the podcast. Jaco Underground dot com. We've been rolling out some Jaco Underground. Pretty interesting topics coming out there, talking about various things on earth and answering a lot of questions. Jaco Underground dot com. If you want to help us with our own little platform that we've got going, just in case we get banned, just in case we get censored.

• 3:35:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:35:04Jocko Willink?

  What else? Banned, censored, removed.

• 3:35:06Speaker 02

  Banned and censored, canceled, whatever, you know? I mean, I, I don't think, well, then again, I don't know nowadays. Cause remember YouTube, you could say pretty much whatever.

• 3:35:19Speaker 02

  As far as like actual words, like you know how they're swearing on YouTube, right? That was never a thing. And then there's certain like words that they like make it a point to like bleep out so their channel doesn't get canceled. Like there's people I listen to and they like cut out the words.

• 3:35:34Jocko Willink?

  I've heard that, but the words that you're talking about are words like COVID. Have you ever heard podcasts like that where they're saying the word COVID and they edit it out?

• 3:35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, or like half the word, it's weird. So that just makes me kind of weird and not, it doesn't make me nervous, but it makes me think like, wait a second, why are they doing that? Because they might've got canceled or demonetized or what?

• 3:35:57Jocko Willink?

  That's why we have jockounderground.com. Cause we can't control these other platforms, but we, we, meaning all of us, we all control jockounderground.com. So if you want to support that, check it out. Check out YouTube, by the way. Hopefully we, you can watch this episode, even though I just said COVID with no frame of reference whatsoever. I just said the word.

• 3:36:16Speaker 02

  Twice now.

• 3:36:17Jocko Willink?

  Three times, I think. So hopefully you can see us on there. Subscribe to it. Check out the Origin USA. Channel as well. If you want to know what's happening there. Psychological warfare. Don't forget about Ty Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. It's flipsidecanvas.com. I've written a bunch of books. Check them out. We got Eshlam Front Leadership Consulting. Inside of Eshlam Front, we have the Extreme Ownership Academy. And this is guidance on life. Guidance on life, how to interact with other human beings, which is what you're doing. That's what we all do. We have to do it, whether it's just the person that you live with, mom, dad, brother,

• 3:36:59Jocko Willink?

  sister, husband, wife, whether it's your landlady across the hallway, you gotta build a relationship with her so you don't get evicted. So if you want to help. Learn to build relationships, help have a better life. Go to extremeownership.com. For the academy, if you want to help service members, active and retired, their families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. It's Americas Mighty Warriors.org. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, and don't forget about heroesandhorses.com. Micah Fink, getting people out into the wilderness, for sure. Echo and I, we're both on Twitter. We're on the Gram, we're on the Facebook.

• 3:37:44Jocko Willink?

  But listen, come, fair warning, better watch out for that algorithm, because it's looking to grab you right by the throat and pull you back in. Actually, it doesn't grab you by the throat. It grabs you by like, by like, a gentle, kind of like, handhold, and it kind of lures you in there. It's not aggressive.

• 3:38:01Speaker 02

  By the, uh, uh, what's the, amygdala?

• 3:38:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, grabs you by the, by the

• 3:38:06Speaker 02

  Gray matter.

• 3:38:07Jocko Willink?

  By the gray matter, just eases you into the algorithm. Next thing you know, you look up, and you just wasted 17 minutes of your life, looking at a bunch of stupid things. So watch out for that. Thanks once again to Dan Conawson for coming on, and thanks, Dan, for everything you've done. Everything you've done for America, for the teams, and the way you represent America in the Olympics. Awesome. And, like I said, it's, it's awesome for, for me to think that no matter what, no matter what's going on in your world, you're out there getting after it. That is an example for all of us to follow. And thanks to all the servicemen and women

• 3:38:49Jocko Willink?

  who have paid the price of freedom in blood. We are only here because of your sacrifice, and we thank you for it. And thanks to all the work done by our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders out there. You also sacrifice so that we can be safe, and we are grateful for what you do. And to everyone else out there, whatever.

• 3:39:22Jocko Willink?

  Whatever excuse you have, whatever justification you make up in your head, whatever rationalization you allow to go on in your mind, just stop it. Just stop it. The excuses and the justifications and the rationalizations are not valid and we know that.

• 3:39:44Jocko Willink?

  We know that because of guys like Dan Kanasan who face incredible challenges. But he doesn't make excuses, he takes action. He overcomes, he drives on. So let's all of us be more like Dan and go out there every day.

• 3:40:06Jocko Willink?

  And get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco.