389: Fix Your World. "Super Power in Peril." With Dave McCormick

>Join Jocko UNDERGROUND < https://app.redcircle.com/shows/64a89f88-a245-4098-8d8d-496325ec4f74/exclusive-content After his graduation from West Point, McCormick went to United States Army Airborne School and to Ranger School; he was named the Honor Graduate of Ranger School. He joined the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1987. 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 389 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  An American-led coalition orchestrated by President George H. W. Bush had given Saddam Hussein an ultimatum. Leave Kuwait by January 15th, 1991.

• 0:21Jocko Willink?

  He didn't. And on January 16th, 16th, the world witnessed what the grading greatest fighting force ever created could do.

• 0:33Jocko Willink?

  The invasion went in two phases. First, an air war where the combined might of American and allied militaries rained thousands of tons of ordinance on the Iraqi army. Weeks later, the coalition smashed through Iraq's barricades and military in a two-pronged ground attack. To the right, American-led forces surged Iraq into Iraq near the Kuwait border. Meanwhile, another contingent launched a left hook across the Iraqi desert. My unit joined that assault. At the last minute, we had been attached to a French tank division charged with protecting the left flank. We crossed the border into Iraq early on the morning of February 25th, our Humvees

• 1:16Jocko Willink?

  cutting through the desert with close air support in the distance. When the sun came up, carnage met my eyes. I remember vividly the skeletons of enemy tanks, trucks and artillery that had been hit by precision-guided missiles. The bombing campaign, so precise and watched on TVs around the world, was unprecedented in human history. Pushing farther in, we encountered some resistance from retreating Iraqi Republican Guard forces, but the majority shed their uniforms and blended into the populace or surrendered by the thousands.

• 1:56Jocko Willink?

  My unit was assigned the missions of clearing minefields and destroying Iraqi munitions and military equipment. A platoon from 27th Engineer Battalion, also from Fort Bragg, was attached to my company. Soon after crossing into Iraq, it was assigned the mission of clearing munitions from airfields after coalition bombing had rendered them inoperable. Sadly, when clearing cluster munitions, the bombs went off, killing seven, including their platoon leader, First Lieutenant Terry Plunk, whom I'd gotten to know well. It was a tragic and very personal reminder of the costs of war.

• 2:47Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book called "Super Power in Peril", written by David H. McCormick. David McCormick is a West Point graduate. He's a Ranger School graduate. As you can tell from that excerpt right there, he fought in the First Gulf War. He's been the CEO of companies, including Bridgewater Associates. He served in the Second Bush Administration as the Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, and also as Undersecretary of Commerce for Industry and Security. He's got a wide range

• 3:32Jocko Willink?

  of experiences, and it's a pleasure to have him with us here tonight to hear about his experiences and lessons learned in life. David, thanks for joining us.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Jocko. I appreciate it. Thank you, Echo.

• 3:46Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir. Oh, Echo's getting thanks. Is that how it's gonna be?

• 3:51Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah, starting off with the, with the Gulf War, definitely we'll, we'll get into some of that and what that buildup was like. That was when I, I had just joined the Navy. I was, I joined the Navy in 1990. So I missed the, I missed the first Gulf War. We'll get into that. But, um, before we get into, into the Gulf War, let's talk about, you know, how you grew up and what happened and kind of start at the beginning and, you know, the book is filled with all kinds of cool little anecdotes and stories. Um, you start off in the book, you say this, "I was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, shoot, a few short miles from that evening's rallies," when you were running for political office, "in Westmoreland County and was raised in a small industrial

• 4:34Jocko Willink?

  town named Bloomsburg, 50 miles south of Scranton." And everybody knows where Scranton is now because of the office.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  For sure. And, and Joe Biden said that, uh, he, uh, you know, he, he lived there for like a year, but, uh, he keeps talking about growing up in Scranton.

• 4:49Jocko Willink?

  Are those his roots?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Those are original roots, I guess. Yeah. Before Delaware.

• 4:54Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Bloomsburg was the sort of place where on the Monday after Thanksgiving, the schools would shut down and we would head out of the hills for the first day of deer hunting season. While we lived in town, my family owned a small farm and I grew up working in the summers, trimming Christmas trees and baling hay. On the weekends, I bust tables at the local Maggi, is that right?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  McGee.

• 5:12Jocko Willink?

  McGee.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:14Jocko Willink?

  McGee Hotel on Main Street. I did well enough in school, but I wasn't a great student. I found a home competing on football fields and wrestling mats across northeastern Pennsylvania. So that's a little bit about, about where you're from. Uh, tell us about your, your parents. What was going on with your parents?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. My mom and dad are both teachers. They grew up, uh, in Western Pennsylvania. So my dad grew up in a little town called Marion Center and his, uh, his dad owned a pharmacy, a little drugstore. And he was, my dad, my dad's father, my grandfather was a county, a Democratic county commissioner in Indiana County. And my mom was born in the famous, uh, Punxsutawney, where Punxsutawneyville comes out. And we're like the seventh generation of Pennsylvanians in Western Pennsylvania. And, uh, as I say in the book, you know, one of the great traditions my dad has, is he's doing it next week, is every Memorial Day. He drives out to Western Pennsylvania and he'll go put flowers, he promised his mom when she was passing, on all the graves of the relatives. And so we got graves across Western

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Pennsylvania. So it's a day and a half affair. And then he went into higher education. My mom became a teacher, my dad went into higher ed, and he got a doctorate at University of Pittsburgh, and that was his career.

• 6:28Jocko Willink?

  Was there any military background in your family?

• 6:32Speaker 01

  None. Uncle Charlie, who I don't remember, apparently served in World War I. And we uncovered some boxes recently where we found his draft card or his military ID.

• 6:44Jocko Willink?

  Did you figure out what unit he was with or anything?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  No, I didn't.

• 6:46Jocko Willink?

  Poor Uncle Charlie.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Uncle Charlie, but nobody, which was why West Point for me was such a, you know, out of character. And what happened with that is I got recruited to play football at West Point and to wrestle. And I had no interest in going. And I wanted to go to Penn State and play football, which of course I wasn't good enough to do that, or Lehigh to wrestle.

• 7:07Jocko Willink?

  And you weren't good enough for that?

• 7:09Speaker 01

  I might have been good enough for that, I'm not sure. But my dad said, listen, apply to West Point. You don't have to go, but just apply and see what happens.

• 7:19Jocko Willink?

  And was your dad just looking at this from like a financial perspective?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Huge, huge. So it was $40,000 of savings, more or less. So it was financial, but he also, it was just, he thought the honor of going to one of the academies. And so what happened?

• 7:33Jocko Willink?

  When you were growing up, so you were into sports, you say your grades were okay. Were you not that into school?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  I was okay into school, but not, it wasn't the driving force. And my dad was, you know, this academic guy, and he was the president of this little college in Bloomsburg. And my dad knew nothing about sports, although he was, you know, would attend every, every game. And so

• 7:56Jocko Willink?

  How old were you when you started wrestling?

• 7:58Speaker 01

  I started wrestling young, maybe sixth grade. And then football, a little bit later, football came in more in the high school area.

• 8:04Jocko Willink?

  You can kind of catch up on football, though, right? It's a little harder to catch up on wrestling.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Well, the football, you know, the football thing, the amazing thing about football was I wasn't very good. I was kind of warmed the bench for the first couple of years. And the coach got fired at my high school between my sophomore and junior year. And my sophomore year, I would sit on the bench. And then when we were winning big or losing big, they'd say, hey, go on in. And I'd play, I'd play defense.

• 8:29Jocko Willink?

  So this is your sophomore year?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  My sophomore year. So the new coach comes in and he looks at all the films. And he sees this guy that keeps coming in in the fourth quarter and, you know, has big, makes, makes big tackles. So he calls me over the summer and says, listen, I think you can be the starting linebacker for the football team, but you're going to have to work your butt off. So I worked my butt off. This is like one of the most seminal moments really in my life. I worked my butt off.

• 8:54Jocko Willink?

  So you say you work your butt off like you are in the weight room? You're trying to put on weight?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Weight room, sprints, I mean, every day.

• 9:02Jocko Willink?

  We're just going full Rocky montage?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Rocky montage, baby. I'm going for it. And we have the camp, so two weeks of camp at the end of the summer. At the end of the summer, he makes me co-captain of the team along with another guy.

• 9:17Jocko Willink?

  As a junior?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  As a junior. So this, this inconceivable to me. It seems small, looking back at the time for me, it was huge. And I started to see myself differently after that. And he saw something in me that I, I truly didn't see in myself. And then he was ruthless from that point forward because he, he was taking no quarter. I mean, he had big expectations and we, we turned out to have a great team. And that, that was sort of a changing, a really transition point in my life.

• 9:44Jocko Willink?

  And this is Coach Lynn we're talking about?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Coach Tom Lynn.

• 9:47Jocko Willink?

  From the book. And again, you get the book, I'm going to read some small excerpts from the book. The book's got all kinds of details in there. But you had, you had one experience with Coach Lynn where he kind of chewed you out that definitely seemed to have left a mark.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Oh, man, he took, he took me to the woodshed. So what happened, I started to, you know, in the local paper, I started to get recognized. And, you know, they were talking about blast game and, you know, I started to be impressed. So we have a game, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was in North Schuylkill in the, you know, in the, in the, in the Anthracite region of Pennsylvania. And it was a rainy night. And we just were getting our clocks cleaned in the first half and he came into the locker room and he was, I mean, he was a tough guy, tough love, I would say. And he went around the thing and he swung to each person and he said, you're doing a terrible job. This is awful. You know, you're, you're getting run over and you're not making your blocks. And then he looks at me and he says, and Dave, you're doing such a great job. Those,

• 10:45Speaker 01

  all those nice things they're saying in the paper about you, they really, I mean, you are really a superstar. And he just was, and then he'd go back and be, and so you, you know, it was just singling me out. I think you've been reading the headlines, Dave. You're doing so well. And so it was awful. And, uh, and so the second half, we turned things around and we did better, but he, uh, he, he laid it on me.

• 11:06Jocko Willink?

  And Pennsylvania is, is a Mecca for football and wrestling.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  It really is.

• 11:14Jocko Willink?

  And you were in both of them.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really is. My, my wife is from Texas and, and she's like, what's this wrestling thing? I said, wrestling? I mean, you go to the gym on a Friday night. I mean, it's packed. Everybody's come. This is the biggest sport and it's, uh, you know, you know, you know this from your own experience. There's nowhere to hide. You're out there in the middle, the light's on you and the crowd's going crazy. And now Penn State is the greatest, you know, wrestling college in the country by far, number one for the last 10 years. But it's, it is, and they make quarterbacks and, you know, and, uh, and wrestlers in Pennsylvania.

• 11:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. One of my friends, uh, is, lives in Pennsylvania and he was telling me about the NFL players from Pennsylvania.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's long, long.

• 11:57Jocko Willink?

  Just like crazy number of NFL players.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Long, long list. These little towns, you know, they, uh, they, kids grow up, all they do is play sports and, uh, it defines them.

• 12:07Jocko Willink?

  So you're wrestling since sixth grade. So you, so you must've been a good wrestler. How are you doing? Are you making it to state? Are you winning state? Where are you at?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  I finished fourth in the states my senior year.

• 12:18Jocko Willink?

  Which in Pennsylvania is a big deal.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Pennsylvania was, was good. And then I, I went to West Point.

• 12:22Jocko Willink?

  Wait, now you said though you wanted to play football. Like

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Slow man. I didn't, I didn't have the speed. Didn't have the speed for division one football and wrestling.

• 12:32Jocko Willink?

  But is that you want to play football? Why did you want to play football instead of wrestling?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  I think, I think football, football, I liked the contact. I liked being a linebacker. I would have probably been a defense, maybe a defensive back in college. But I, I liked them. We were good. And, you know, in retrospect, wrestling was probably the better sport. Cause it didn't, I didn't, I didn't come out of it with a major concussion or anything, but, but as it turned out, I rest, I, I could make the team at West Point as a freshman. So I, I rested all four years varsity at West Point and was the captain of the team there.

• 13:07Jocko Willink?

  So going back to

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Co-captain.

• 13:08Jocko Willink?

  Application to West Point.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:10Jocko Willink?

  Your, your dad says, just apply. He's thinking, I'm going to save some money.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:15Jocko Willink?

  He's thinking it's the honorable place to be. Anybody that's been to West Point, I've been to West Point. It's like just an outstanding, you get, you get fired up just being there. And seeing the cadets walking around and it's a beautiful campus. So your dad must've visited at some point and be like, yeah.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. We visited when I was a kid. I remember visiting once. We, my mom had a college classmate that lived nearby. And so we visited early. And I, I didn't have a great experience. And then in a weird story, when I went up for the college recruiting visit for football. We, we stopped at a diner in Newburgh, New York on the way. It was like, we get up at four in the morning and drove up, my, my friend and I. And I, something, something was bad about what, that I ate for breakfast. So throughout the course of the day, getting the pitch, I would go into the bathroom and throw up. So I had terrible memories of my first visit to West Point. And, and then what happened? I got accepted.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  And the whole town kind of just, you know, embraced it. And it was in the newspaper and nobody had gone to an academy for like 20 years. And you know, in that part of Pennsylvania, military, the military is widely admired, even though my family hadn't served. And so all of a sudden it kind of took on a life of its own. It didn't even seem like a choice. I just was gone. And it turned out to be great. I'm glad I did it, but it wasn't something I'd always thought about.

• 14:38Jocko Willink?

  You get into West Point, I think.

• 14:43Jocko Willink?

  This is going to the book here. It says, "On a balmy day in early July 1983, my parents dropped me off at West Point's Meche Stadium." Am I saying that right?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Mikey Stadium.

• 14:54Jocko Willink?

  Mikey Stadium. "A short briefing to parents and their soon-to-be cadets ended abruptly with, parents exit to the right, and new cadets exit to the left. My military career had begun. By the end of the day, after hours of vaccinations, uniform fittings, a buzz cut, and parade practice, the West Point class of 1987 marched across the parade field with the reviewing stands chock full of teary-eyed parents looking down on their transformed, and in some cases, teary-eyed, new cadets. The rising seniors, or first-classmen, firsties, ran the show. They bombarded us with information and barked orders as they herded us around West Point's historic grounds. There's no gentle orientation day at West Point, or

• 15:37Jocko Willink?

  the 60-day beast barracks that follows. They intentionally shocked the system with a time-tested process that takes this cohort of wide-eyed teenagers and begins to break them down to be remolded as leaders and officers. It was all perfectly orchestrated, a test for the older cadets who are responsible, as well as the new plebes in their charge. I'd realize only years later, when it was our turn to welcome the new class, just how much work went into preparation for this century-old tradition." So there's your welcome aboard.

• 16:14Jocko Willink?

  How ready for you, were you for that mentally?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  I don't think I was very ready. Yeah, I wasn't ready for it. You know, I, it ended up, I ended up adjusting and adopting, but I wasn't ready for it because there's no, and you've had your own version of this, there's no debating, there's no reasoning, there's just... Learning to do and responding and surviving. And so it was a shock to it was a shock to my system for sure.

• 16:43Jocko Willink?

  I think the thing that catches catches people when they enter the military and you go through that indoctrination period is just a complete and utter loss of freedom.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:52Jocko Willink?

  Like it is completely gone. Anything that you you can't sneak away to the bathroom for an extra minute and 30 seconds to have some alone time. It's not happening. Every moment is accounted for. You're only doing what you're told to do. And it is a it is a serious shock to the system. Where how long did it take? How long did it take for you to say, all right, I guess I'm just gonna have to deal with this?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  It took a while to just embrace it, you know? And, you know, the saying which people have been saying for decades, you gotta love the suck and just embrace that it's gonna suck. And you just gotta hold your breath and get through it. And and wrestling helped in that regard because, you know, it was an outlet where I'd have two workouts a day. I'd start early in the morning, do all the cadet stuff, have practice at the end of the day. And and I found to my surprise that, you know, I didn't know what to expect, but that I could compete and there was an opportunity. And that became a big focal point for me during my during my whole four years, but particularly that first year.

• 17:56Jocko Willink?

  Did you did you know you weren't gonna play football when you went to?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  I had made the decision that you can only do one sport and I'd made the decision that wrestling was gonna be what I'd what I'd try to do.

• 18:07Jocko Willink?

  And so what are you going to college for? Like, what are you what are you learning? What's your degree gonna be?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Well, this is the remarkable thing is I decided I'm gonna be a mechanical engineer, which turned out to be a terrible decision. Cause I'm not a good engineer, but I got halfway through it. I'm like, I'm gonna muscle my way through this. So it it was miserable. You know, I wasn't I wasn't great at math or economics or math or. Design or any of the mechanical engineering things, but I got through it. And along the way, I figured out that I didn't want to do that, which is always good when you figure out what you're not going to do. And, and, and at the

• 18:41Jocko Willink?

  Take four years to figure out what you're not going to do.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. But it teaches you how to think in a particular way. It's very systematic. And at the end of my senior year, I, in wrestling, I break, I hurt my knee. I have, I tore all my ligaments. I have to get a knee reconstruction. At the time, they have these Gore-Tex implants. So they implant a Gore-Tex ligament in my knee, my senior year after wrestling season.

• 19:07Jocko Willink?

  What ligament?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  ACL.

• 19:10Jocko Willink?

  They put a Gore-Tex ACL in you?

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Gore-Tex ACL.

• 19:12Jocko Willink?

  I had not heard of that.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  This was, this was the, if you remember the time, there was this great football player, Gastonow with the Jets. They did the same for him. So this was an experimental thing. The army was using it and I still have it. I had never had it replaced.

• 19:22Jocko Willink?

  So it worked?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  It worked. I went to Ranger School and jump school. I did 80 jumps on it.

• 19:27Jocko Willink?

  How come people don't do that anymore?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  No, they found much better sources of

• 19:31Jocko Willink?

  Now they use cadaver or they use your own patella?

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, they used to use pig. Now they use your cadaver patella. But, so I, I, I can't go right to the army. So I'm supposed to go to Ranger School and the basic course. I can't do all that. So West Point keeps me for six more months. And I, I can use the GI Bill to go to grad school. So I apply to Columbia and I do two courses at Columbia. And one of the courses is taught by this guy named Roger Hillsman, who's like this epic guy. Fight, fought, he was West Point graduate, fought in World War II in the OSS. He's got this incredible story about rescuing his father from a POW camp in Burma. And he is the professor. He goes on and he works in the Kennedy administration in the State Department. And I'm listening to this guy in front of the class.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  I'm saying, that's what I want to do. Like that life sounds so much more interesting than being a mechanical engineer. And so that was in my head and that, that helped shape a lot of the things that came after.

• 20:31Jocko Willink?

  When, when you're at, at West Point, what, what do you think formulated in your brain? What lessons did you, did you really grab on to from a leadership perspective?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  You know, they, they drill into you these concepts of duty on a country and they, people throw those off quickly, but I think that was it. I think this notion that there's this whole institution, I mean, the, the military, uh, West Point being part of it, that the entire purpose is to have people defend America, that, that the whole thing is selfless, about selflessness. The idea that leadership, which isn't what you think about when you read the books, the leadership isn't about you. It's about service to others. Those were the concepts and it got drilled into your head, both by what people, what you were taught, but also by the example that others, that you'd see in others. So I think it was

• 21:26Speaker 01

  like fundamental. I, I'm so grateful I had a chance to do it. I don't think I had that concept of service to others embedded in me the way it, uh, it came through after four years there.

• 21:37Jocko Willink?

  And so as you get this knee injury and as you realize you don't want to be an engineer, do you decide, hey, I want to be an infantry officer?

• 21:42Speaker 01

  No, I, I, I applied. I was an engineer officer.

• 21:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  So I was an engineer officer in the 82nd. So, uh, you know, there's, which, which I found out when I got there is the same as an infantryman. You just have to carry more shit.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  You have to carry a lot of, a lot of C4, your backpack's bigger.

• 22:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, the engine, what's crazy about the engineers is, uh, you know, during the recent wars, those guys are the guys that were out clearing mines and clearing roadside bombs. And so that's another thing. You think you're going to be out there building bridges and you're not out there. Well, they're built bridges too, but a huge percentage of the job that the engineers have done, like in, in the battle of Ramadi, the engineers, yeah, they went out and built the combat outposts in downtown Ramadi under fire. But then on top of that, in order to get to those combat outposts, they had to clear all those roads. The, the engineers were just, were just awesome. They did an awesome job. Um, so, so it takes you six months to heal up?

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:40Jocko Willink?

  And you're, you, you go take those classes at Columbia, you maybe get a glimpse of some other things that you might like, like to do in the future. Did you ever think about doing special forces? Cause this guy was OSS, which is sort of a-

• 22:51Speaker 01

  I did. Yeah. I thought hard about staying in, you know, I, I went to the 82nd. Um, I went to basic course, went to Ranger School.

• 22:57Jocko Willink?

  How was Ranger School?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Ranger School was

• 23:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, now, before you get to Ranger School, how was Officer Course?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Officer's Course was great, because at that time, it was Fort Belvoir. So it was right next to DC. So imagine you're like, you know, you're stuck in West Point for four and a half years in the middle of nowhere. So I show up there. I'm six months behind all my classmates, but I've got, I mean, it was, you know, an incredible six months of not I'm not focused so much on, on school.

• 23:24Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you what, we had James Webb on the podcast, and, you know, he went from, you know, the basic school, Marine Corps Basic School, Naval Academy, Marine Corps Basic School, the, the Officer Infantry Course for Marine Corps Infantry Officers, had, I think it was 12 days of leave, got on a plane, the plane took him to Vietnam, got on a helicopter, got in a Jeep, got on a patrol, out there in the middle of the jungle, somebody pointed at a ridge and said like, hey, your platoon's up on that ridge. Go take over. He walked up there and said like, hey, I'm here to relieve the officer. And they're like, oh, we don't have an officer.

• 24:05Jocko Willink?

  You know, sergeant's been running it. Staff Sergeant over here has been running it. So you're in charge now, sir. And then that night, they got into a huge troops in contact and he was calling for fire. And I was, I said to him, did you feel like you were prepared? And he said, I was fully prepared.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:19Jocko Willink?

  So this was in, I think, 1968, 1969, but the level of training that, you know, can you imagine at the height of the Vietnam War?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:28Jocko Willink?

  How well the, the lessons were learned were coming back and the

• 24:32Speaker 01

  The feedback loop.

• 24:33Jocko Willink?

  The officers that were just in Vietnam were now teaching you. But now you're going through in 19, what, what year is it? 1988?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  1988, yeah.

• 24:42Jocko Willink?

  So 1988, we, we, I mean, there just hasn't been a lot of combat going on.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  It's all Soviet. Everything is, you know, there's the two big training centers at the time, which I think were probably still around in your time as a national training center out Fort Irwin.

• 24:56Jocko Willink?

  Yep, still there.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Which is tank warfare. But then there was the Joint Readiness Training Center, which was all the Insurgency stuff, which was in Arkansas at Fort Chaffee.

• 25:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  And that we would do, you know, 10 day, 14 day things. And you were fighting against a Soviet armed sort of insurgency. And, and, and that was, everything was through the eyes of Soviet weapons and Soviet tactics. So not really, not in some ways, very prepared, in some ways, not, not very prepared.

• 25:25Jocko Willink?

  What about from a leadership perspective?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  I think, um, I think Ranger School was, was another really important, you know, moment for me in terms of developing as a leader, because you get the school and the West Point experience. And I had done a number of things in preparation. But Ranger School, you know, it's, everybody strips off their rank, as you know, and you're just back to, okay, who's going to be a leader? And everybody has to be a leader at, at, at the moment in time. And you learn to be a good follower as well as a good leader to help your Ranger School classmates. And you see the worst of people when they haven't eaten and they have.

• 25:58Jocko Willink?

  Somebody steals your crackers.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Steals your food and you see the best of people.

• 26:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, somebody gives you crackers when you're hurt.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. So for me, it was, uh, it was a great experience. I, I, I did well. I emerged in that as someone who was a, who was a good leader. Gave me a lot of confidence.

• 26:13Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any challenges in Ranger School? There was anything that was particularly hard for you?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Not really.

• 26:19Jocko Willink?

  What about, you used to cut in weight from wrestling? Did you cut a lot of weight in college for wrestling?

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I lost a lot of weight for wrestling and I lost a lot of weight in Ranger School. I think I lost by almost 20 or 30 pounds in Ranger School. I do remember a moment, you know, you, you realize that, that not that this is anything like, you know, some of the dangers others have faced, but you, you, you, you really realize you have to overcome fear. And I remember being in a, like a helicopter at night, doing a night jump. And it was over a bunch of trees and, you know, it was just, it didn't feel like it was going to go well. I remember thinking, man, I really don't want to do this. But then I thought that the horror and the shame of, of not doing it was far worse than getting killed or maimed. So you roll out, you roll out of it and you say, okay, I'm going to go on.

• 27:00Jocko Willink?

  I was one of my buddies, who's one of the toughest guys ever. Uh, my friend, Tony Fratelli, who was a, a SEAL with me. And then he was one of the platoon chiefs when I was in, when I was a task unit commander. And he's absolutely petrified of heights, like absolutely petrified. And he was on a training exercise in Hong, I think, I want to say Hong Kong. And they had to do a rappel, like a, like a. 50 story or a 30 story rappel out of a building face first, jump off the edge. And he said he was so absolutely terrified. And he's, and then he said, but I would rather have died.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:39Jocko Willink?

  You know, than, than not do it. So that happens, but, but from a leadership perspective, you're going through Ranger School.

• 27:47Jocko Willink?

  And it's a great school because you, you get put in all the different positions. Sometimes you're the patrol leader, sometimes you're a machine gunner.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:54Jocko Willink?

  What did you, what did, what characteristics do you think made a good leader going through Ranger School?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  I think, um, you know, Claire, being able to maintain clarity, clarity on mission despite the haze, despite the hunger, just, you know, like the, the focus on mission, the fact, the fact that you're exhausted, just that recognition that you're, you have to be on point. And the idea that, you know, if you're not the leader, that you have to know everything that's going on because you might be the leader next. And so that, that rigor associated with that, and the, and the getting your, you know, getting your buddies through it. That, that was a big piece, which is nobody succeeds in life or in Ranger School alone. And, uh, you know, you do the rating system at the end of each, each thing where everybody can rate who, who does poorly.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  And, you know, you can do that in a way where everybody makes it, or you can do that way where the, you know, the guy who's a real asshole gets thrown out.

• 28:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  And, uh, and, and you see the assholes get thrown out and the people that, that, that helped their teammates get through it.

• 28:55Jocko Willink?

  That's a cool system that they have called peering.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:58Jocko Willink?

  Peer, peer evals and you can peer someone out. They, they didn't, when I went through SEAL training, we didn't have that. We got rid of a couple of guys that were just bad, but we didn't do it through any official system. It was, I think, you know, the class leader, we all talked to the class leader and the class leader eventually talked to the instructors and they got rid of some guys. But that's a, that's a really good system to have in place where, hey, look, if we, if we, if we all work together, we can all stay here. We can give each other the proper evals at the proper time. But if we just, if someone's not good.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:31Jocko Willink?

  We can get rid of them. What's the, what was the attrition rate? Do you remember what the attrition rate was like?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  I think the, in the, I think the original class, it was like 25% graduated. And then through recycle and everything else, you get another 20%. I think it was like 45, 50% eventually got through. But it was, it was, it was, you know, it was, it was high.

• 29:49Jocko Willink?

  And it's three phases?

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the time, I think they've changed to like 72 days. It was four phases. It was the original phase, which is bending. You do the mountain phase in Delanaika. Then you do the desert phase in Utah, dugway proven ground. Then we did the final phase in Florida. And Florida's where you finish.

• 30:08Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  So.

• 30:10Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with Ranger School now, and then your first job is at the 82nd?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, platoon leader at the 82nd.

• 30:15Jocko Willink?

  Platoon leader. So are you in charge of an engineering platoon?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:18Jocko Willink?

  At the 82nd?

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:20Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and there's no war going on?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 30:24Jocko Willink?

  At this time. This is 19, what, 1987, 1988?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  No, this is 88.

• 30:28Jocko Willink?

  So 1988, it's just preparing for the war, World War III with the Soviets, basically. That's what you're doing, right?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Right. And you're doing the three rotations, where you have one rotation where you're on readiness, where you're not doing much. You're, you know, you're ready to, because you gotta be ready to go up and, you know, be on the, you know, 24 hours, anywhere in the world.

• 30:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  So that, that's one of the three phases. The second phase is your preparation phase, where you're hardcore training. You know, you're out, you're out at dugway, you're out in Joint Readiness Training Center, you're out, you're hardcore, and you're in the field, come back, clean up two days.

• 31:05Jocko Willink?

  How long is that? How long is that phase?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a third of the time. So I don't know if you're, I think it's every-

• 31:10Jocko Willink?

  It was like three months?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Every six weeks. I think every six weeks you rotate through phases. So like hardcore six weeks of training, and you're not, you're never home, you're, you're out in the field. And then there's six weeks of basically cleanup, evaluations, you know, vacation, whatever you're gonna do. Like, that, that's, that's the, the sequence. And so you're, I was a single guy. You know, we're running hard, all over the place. And I loved it. I mean, I loved being up and I felt prepared, just to your point about Jim Webb, I felt prepared to be a platoon leader. I felt prepared to, to learn, and it was, it was great.

• 31:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the peacetime military can be an interesting thing because it's really easy for the peacetime military to get focused on things that aren't about warfighting.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:51Jocko Willink?

  And you can start focusing on other things, whether it's literally shining your boots, which sometimes people get really into shining boots and starching uniforms, or whether it's just, I mean, I guess in today's day and age, you can list all kinds of things that the military might be focused on that have very little to do with warfighting.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Completely. I mean, that's one of the things I talk about in the book, which we can talk about later, but it's the fact that the military today, the army as an example, rolled out under President Biden, its climate change strategy before its warfighting strategy. This is, this is the world we live in. And you're right.

• 32:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I shouldn't be laughing because that's actually very disturbing.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And it's easy to get distracted, but I felt like the 82nd was serious in that sense of mission. And while I was there, we had Panama, which, which my unit didn't, you know, only one brigade deployed, the first brigade, but I was, they put together a second platoon to go to Panama that was going to go support the first brigade. And I, the platoon, the battalion commander picked me to be the platoon leader. So I was like ready. We were loaded. We were on the airplanes, ready to go. And they didn't, they didn't send you. So, so we thought we were going to have a chance to go to Panama. And then eventually Iraq happened with the Gulf War.

• 33:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the airborne divisions are freaking outstanding. I work with both of them. I worked somewhat with the 82nd and I worked a lot with the 101st and they're just freaking outstanding. Like every, they're, they're total professionals all the time in everything that they do. So I can imagine that even, even when the rest of the military is getting distracted, that the airborne units are still staying focused and making things happen as they should be. So you're, you're in this platoon commander and then the first Gulf War starts to spin up. Were you now a company commander at this point?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  I was an XO.

• 33:39Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so a company XO.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  I've become an XO. We go to, we're deployed, like a fourth deployment or something to the Joint Radiance Training Center. And then literally in the middle of the night. We get a radio call, go to this grid. And there was one of these big runways, we're in Arkansas. And they were bringing the C-141s and C-5s to load up all the equipment and go back to Bragg. And this was Saddam Hussein had crossed into Kuwait. And then I think we had 24, 48 hours of cleaning the equipment and getting ready, loading up, loading ammo. And then we flew out again and went to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany to refuel. And then ended up in, we landed in Damam in Saudi Arabia. And so the 82nd was the first unit there.

• 34:23Jocko Willink?

  So you guys actually executed the recall procedures?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 34:27Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking outstanding.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely, the whole thing. And remember, you, I mean, there was no email. There was no texting, there was no cell phones. So you can't tell your mom and dad what's going on in your family. So you're just packing up and leaving. And all of a sudden you start writing letters. And you're in a letter, you know, you're in 12 months of letters. That's how you're communicating with your family.

• 34:51Jocko Willink?

  And you're getting, look, we look back, or at least I do, and I think most people do. They look back at the first Gulf War, kind of shrug your shoulders, oh, 72 hours, blah, blah, blah. But I specifically remember that I was watching CNN and they're saying there's going to be, I forget. They're saying there's going to be 40,000 casualties in the first 48 hours.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:12Jocko Willink?

  And I'm thinking, I was now, I'm in the Navy, I'm waiting to class up in SEAL training. And I'm thinking, oh yeah, this is like, we're going to fight.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  This is the big one.

• 35:21Jocko Willink?

  This is going to be a long war. This is going to be world war, you know, like world war II for us. Did you guys, as you guys were preparing, what was your mindset?

• 35:33Speaker 01

  We definitely thought that it was going to be a very hardcore combat situation where there's going to be a lot of casualties. We all were reading the newspapers and seeing these estimates and, you know, doing the stuff like before. It was all built up to this invasion day. If you remember, there was the air war and then, so we thought the invasion day was when you were going to be like in world war II kind of. Land warfare that we'd all been talking about. So people writing letters like the letter to give to your folks if you don't make it, that kind of thing.

• 36:05Jocko Willink?

  Especially they have also the chemical warfare threats.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  We saw the scuds being shot. I remember seeing the scuds shot over our heads into Israel and us dawning, you know, the chemical equipment on a number of occasions. So we, we thought we were in for a hell of a fight and, and it turned out the whole thing collapsed through a combination of the air war was just so punishing. A combination of the, of the troops recognizing they were being overwhelmed, they're just disciplined and command and control being lost. And then the, you know, the inability to keep the people in the, in the uniforms to the passage you wrote, they just blended in. They just put on civilian clothes and next thing you know, you see them driving by in a pickup truck, you know?

• 36:50Jocko Willink?

  That, that, you know, I was hearing about this the other day, or reading about this the other day. We had this, I forget who said, one of the generals said something along the lines of after that first Gulf War, like, oh, we've, we've gotten over our Vietnam, whatever hangover. I forget the terminology that they used, but you know, Vietnam was this other thing and now we know how to do it right. That, that, you could say that that victory, that expedient victory didn't bode well for us in terms of the way we looked at war to follow on worse.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, wrong lessons maybe. Well, the Powell doctrine, you know, if you remember that, that, the thing that was so unique about that was this incredible buildup, six month buildup. I mean, I don't know, it was 450,000 troops or something like that in totality, all the, the allied coalition. So it was like you had all this time to build up, which, which was a precondition to going in. This was what, what I think Powell and President Bush and so forth were promoting. But then the second thing was that the decision to pull out, which now in retrospect, looks like it was totally obvious and clear, but at the time it wasn't obvious and clear. And I think what happened in the, in this, in the Iraq war after nine 11 was that the first

• 38:09Speaker 01

  lesson of being able to rapidly overcome the forces did happen. Same, same similar kind of thing. Unbelievable speed and unbelievable firepower.

• 38:17Jocko Willink?

  But with less troops.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Less troops.

• 38:20Jocko Willink?

  Because they were like, well, you know, so easy last time. This is like, oh, you know, you, you got into a fight with this guy. So we'll just go, we don't, we don't really need to, we got to fight with another gang. We beat him really easily last time. We don't need to bring all of our guys. We just, we just bring a few.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  But the second thing was to stay with the goal of, you know, helping this transition in Iraqi society. And then you've read all the same books I have, but the fact that the disassembling of the Iraqi military, when that was such a critical part of the stability in the society, in the Baathist party. So doing that with a lot of clarity and very surgically, as opposed to what eventually happened, which was really chaos. And then the, the ability to bring about order was lost as a consequence of, of, of that decision and the way it was handled.

• 39:08Jocko Willink?

  So back to the, the, the invasion day. Are you talking to your troops like, hey, I mean, did you give a like, hey, not all of us are going to make it. Hey, be ready for casualties. You know, I always think back like in my life, I've given those talks to my guys about we're killing the enemy. We're going to take out like those are intense things to, that you're doing. And were you having those talks with the guys? Because you had no idea. You guys are thinking you're going to hit with chemical weapons. You think the Republican guard is going to stay and they're going to fight and it's going to be house to house, tank to tank, whatever the case may be. That was what you guys were thinking. Man, it must've been so weird.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:52Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So I'm, before we get to the weird part of, hey, you just roll in there and they kind of roll over. So you're, you're in that mode.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely in that mode, thinking we're in for a hell of a fight and being prepared for that, both mentally and with every, you know, every bit of preparation that we're doing, trying to figure out the missions, prepare for the missions, mind clearing, explosion, taking up bridges, whatever it's going to be. We're, we're in, we're in it. And we have the complexity of being attached to this French armored division at the last minute, which is, you know, we're trying to figure that out. So absolutely. And then you get across the border and 24 hours in, it's kind of like Planet of the Apes. If you remember the, the movie where you're walking, it's like society. Has sort of civilizations gone and like everything's wreckage and the air war had just done been so devastating.

• 40:38Jocko Willink?

  So you guys rolled into Iraq?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:41Jocko Willink?

  Or did you guys roll into Kuwait? You rolled into Iraq?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we went straight into Iraq from the Tapline Road.

• 40:45Jocko Willink?

  And are you seeing, sir, you seeing like the highway of death, which was in, you must have seen some of the remnants of the highway of death, the vehicles that made it far enough north into Iraq, you're seeing that kind of destruction?

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Right, just on the sides of the roads, just literally, you know, you'd see a tank chassis with a hole right through the engine block where a precision guided missile would have just taken out the tank, you know, it was, it was, it was kind of remarkable. I don't even think I knew we had that capacity, you know, until, until I saw the, the actual destruction that it had brought.

• 41:20Jocko Willink?

  As your troops are going, as you're telling your troops, you're getting ready to go in, you're giving them, hey, that speech, what, what, what's the looks on the faces of the guys as you're rolling in?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  I think we're all scared, you know, all scared, but I'm feeling a deep sense, which I'm sure you do of like, man, I'm, I'm responsible, you know, I want to get these, I want to accomplish a mission, get these guys through this. I'm feeling that anxiety and that fear, but I'm also feeling that sense of that weight of responsibility. And I think we're all scared, but we all, you know, determined that we're going to do our part.

• 41:53Jocko Willink?

  What was the end state of your assignment going into Iraq? So, look, we knew that we weren't going to stay there, we weren't planning to stay there, we weren't pushing to Baghdad, we weren't, we weren't going to stay there. Was your end state to get in, hold this long enough, Kuwait's now secure, and then you were going to leave? Was it something along those lines?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Well, the leaving part was never, was never pre-communicated.

• 42:15Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you guys thought, we're just going in?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Going in and, you know, take control of whatever area we're responsible for. And then in the end, what it turned out to be was there were these huge. Enemy depots of ammunition, um, which when the decision was made to pull out, they wanted to destroy uh all the the munitions. But these were like city blocks of munitions and it was, you know, things that the Iraqis had put together over over decades. So the final mission was to destroy all that stuff on our way out of town. And uh that was that was high adventure because we, you know, we were essentially rigging city blocks with uh, you know, C four and uh, and and, you know, secondary explosions and some of it didn't go off.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  You had to go back in and reset it. It was uh, it was messy, but uh, but but eventually we accomplished it.

• 43:07Jocko Willink?

  How long, how long were you in Iraq for then?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  You know, I'm, I can't give a probably twenty days, twenty five days, something like that.

• 43:19Jocko Willink?

  And you're just blowing up all these?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the the story you tell about that, you know, two things were happening. There was enemy munitions everywhere, but then there was these cluster bombs that we had.

• 43:29Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  And those were covering all the airfields. So to create the airfield so we could use them, we had to clear the cluster bombs off the off the runways. And that's what happened with that platoon. That platoon had actually been attached to me uh, when we deployed. And then when we got over into uh, right before the uh, right before the invasion, it went back to its original battalion and somehow got a different assignment. And then, you know, we we heard a day or two into it that they had uh, lost all those guys on that on that one mission.

• 43:56Jocko Willink?

  Terrible. So yeah, twenty days in or whatever it is, you get the assignment. Okay, you're leaving now. We're leaving now. That's what's happening.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:09Jocko Willink?

  And you guys must have been like high fives.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  We're ready to go. But but you know, you know, the military, going home is not going home. Like you're going back and you know, you're you got another month and a half of like cleaning up your equipment and getting everything. So it was an extended uh withdrawal, but I think the whole thing was a total of August to April, end of April, May.

• 44:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's because you guys were the first one on the ground. So you guys were sitting there forever.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:32Jocko Willink?

  Waiting to do this.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were first in a screening force on the Iraqi, on the Kuwaiti border.

• 44:37Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  So we were up around that beach town, Kafji, and, and, and which if they had come across, there's nothing we could have done because it was basically to create a deterrent by saying, if you, you know, if you cross, you're going to be in a fight with the US government, the US military. And then we moved over into the middle of the country, more above Riyadh, and we, we bounced around a good bit and as more forces came on the ground.

• 44:58Jocko Willink?

  So you wrap up that, you, you finally get back to America. While, while you're in, while you're in, and while you're wrapping up, are you already thinking like, hey, I think I might get out of the army?

• 45:12Speaker 01

  No, I'm thinking I'm staying. So I, I, my plan is to command a company. I haven't done that yet. I get, I get, I've got to go to the advanced course. I get a request, an invitation from West Point to go to grad school and teach. So my plan is to go to Korea, command a company, go to graduate school, go to West Point. And that's the path I'm on. And I'm in, I'm in Missouri at the advanced course and I'm, you know, I'm, I got a good plan and I'm filling out my essays to go to grad school because West Point tells me to apply to grad school and then defer it and you can come back after Korea. So I'm writing the essays and, and the essays are about what do you want to do with your life?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  And none of the essays end with, I want to be a career army officer. You know, none of them end with that. And if I did that, it would have been two years in Korea, two years in grad school, four or five more years in the army. That would have basically said I was going to make a career of it. I was going to do 20 years. And, and so I, I realized I really wasn't, I really wasn't ready to do that. I wanted to do something else.

• 46:17Jocko Willink?

  So you were writing these essays?

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:19Jocko Willink?

  And as you're writing these essays?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:21Jocko Willink?

  You realize, that's interesting. I was taught, when people ask me about how to detach emotionally to make decisions properly, I always say, one of the best things that you can do is write, is write down because it physically detaches you from your thoughts and now you're looking at them on a piece of paper. So that's exactly what happened to you.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  That's exactly what happened. And so I'm sort of stuck because I go to, I go to the commander of the advanced course. I say, listen, I'm going to resign. And, yeah, this was in, in 1991.

• 46:51Jocko Willink?

  You're kind of a war hero.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'm a, I'm a, I'm.

• 46:55Jocko Willink?

  At the time, you're a combat, did you get your combat infantry badge and all that?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, all those, I got a combat patch, 80 second, all that stuff. So, so I say I'm gonna go. My father, at this point, who is in love with West Point and the army, says to me, his first words are, you're gonna lose your pension. And I'm like, you know, you got 15 more years, you already got a pension. I'm like, Dad, it's gonna be alright. So.

• 47:18Jocko Willink?

  15 years is an eternity when you're 25, dude, I don't care.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  So, so I've already sent these graduate school.

• 47:26Jocko Willink?

  It's a mindset, though, by the way. There's a mindset. You know, people that, people that, they're looking at, you know, they think, you know how many people have said to me like, man, if only I would have stayed in, I could have been retired, I could have had that pension. There's, there's definitely people that do 20 years, and at about the four year mark, they think, well, only 16 more years and I'll have that pension.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was my dad. That wasn't me. So, but here I am, I don't have a plan. So I've sent these applications to grad school. And it's November of 1991. I've got like, leave built up until February or March. I've got something like 10,000 bucks of savings because.

• 48:05Jocko Willink?

  Richest guy ever.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Got paid for it. So I buy a $5,000 TWA around the world ticket. And the rule with it, as long as you go in the same direction, you can do as many flights as you can get. So, I, I go through Christmas with my folks and I take off. And I travel around the world. So I go to Greece.

• 48:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you cover it in the book. You're like, I bought an around the world airline ticket from TWA. The ticket which drained about a third of my Gulf War savings let me take as many flights as I wanted, as long as they took me in the same direction circumnavigating the globe. I trekked overland through the Middle East, including Turkey, Syria, and Jordan, spent three weeks in the Holy Land. It was my first time in Jerusalem. I had the opportunity to visit and pray at the Western Wall, one of the great holy sites in the world. From there, I scuba dived off the beautiful reefs of the Sinai Peninsula. Saw the Coptic churches for the first time, a memory that would come flooding back when I met my wife and her devoutly Coptic family. After three months in the Middle East, my travels continued farther east. I spent almost a month exploring the incredible rainforest of Borneo

• 49:12Jocko Willink?

  before making my way north to Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, and eventually China, where I saw a nation on the cusp of modernity. Eight months and about 20 flights later, my adventure ended at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, where my brother was stationed.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  That's it. It was a whirlwind.

• 49:32Jocko Willink?

  So you're a, you link up with your brother. Your brother was in the army at this point.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, my four years behind me. He was West Point, four years behind me.

• 49:39Jocko Willink?

  He wrestle at West Point as well?

• 49:40Speaker 01

  He wrestled. He was first in his class at West Point, which brought my dad to say to me at one point, what, what do you think happened? Were you just not focused? Exactly.

• 49:51Jocko Willink?

  Just a loser.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  So, uh, yeah. So, so he was there.

• 49:55Jocko Willink?

  What number were you in class at?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know, 300?

• 49:59Jocko Willink?

  Not even in the run.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  No, not even, not even.

• 50:02Jocko Willink?

  And your brother was number one?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Number one, yeah. He, he, he's.

• 50:05Jocko Willink?

  How was Thanksgiving dinner with that?

• 50:06Speaker 01

  It was constant. This was, it wasn't until, they used to, my brother and my dad, because there was these stops and starts. My brother and my dad would talk on weekends till I was my mid 30s and, and my dad would start it by saying, what do you think we're gonna do about old Dave?

• 50:22Speaker 01

  He's directionless. This poor guy can't find a direction.

• 50:28Jocko Willink?

  You did end up getting into grad school, you end up going to Princeton?

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:33Jocko Willink?

  What, what's your experience there, going to Princeton?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  You know, it was incre, it was incredible for me because I had that ye, that eight months traveling had kind of gotten the military out of my system in some ways. Like it was a, it was a bridge to something totally new, you know? And I, I was by myself. So I met people on the way. I traveled with people and it was a total adventure. And I was psyched to get into a new environment and learn. And I, I moved in with, plutonically with three women, uh, who I shared a house with. And it was like the college that I had missed.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  I was like a 27 year old guy that was like, oh my God, you know, I've been, I've been in West Point in the Army and this is, so I, I, I loved it and I had a couple of great professors. And I, I wasn't very confident about my academic abilities, you know, I hadn't been a good student and I was surprised I even got into Princeton.

• 51:29Jocko Willink?

  I think your dad was surprised.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  My dad was surprised, we were all surprised. And I had a couple of professors who really took an interest in me. And there was one guy who was an elderly guy, he was a very dignified gentleman named Dick Allman. And he, I had a class with him and he had been, he had been in the Whiz Kids with McNamara in the, in the 60s and he had been on the New York Times editorial board, he was a Democrat. But he just took an interest in me and military people in particular. And I would submit an essay in his class and I would get it back and there'd be these light marks like A, B, C, just look at it. And he'd, he'd at the end of it, and then he'd get done with the alphabet, he'd do double A, double B.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  And when you get to the back, there's typed comments attached to every letter. And the comments were as long as the paper. And this guy was so, I mean, he would just, he was super tight logic and strong intellect. And he just invested the time. And so he helped, he started to help me become a good writer. And he really invested it. And he, you know, a year and a half, two years, and he said, I think you should do a PhD. I'm like, you think I can get through this? He goes, you can do this. And so I applied to the PhD program and eventually did a PhD. And it was because this guy took an interest. And then I had a couple of other professors. And so I ended up doing a PhD while I was there.

• 52:58Jocko Willink?

  In what?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  I did a PhD at the, in essentially international relations.

• 53:03Jocko Willink?

  Did you have some kind of a goal at this juncture?

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Well, I thought I was going to be a professor. You know, I thought back to that professor that I had seen at Columbia and my dad, and I got about halfway through it. Which is another reason my, my, my dad was concerned. I said, I, I'm never gonna be a professor. I'm, you know, this, I'm not cut out for this. I, I wanna do, I wanna do things. So I finished the PhD and I went to visit my brother who went to, had gone to business school at Harvard and I go up and see him.

• 53:30Jocko Willink?

  So wait, this is your army brother?

• 53:31Speaker 01

  My army brother.

• 53:32Jocko Willink?

  So he got out of the army?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  He got out of the army after five years and I go up there and I'm saying, I have no, what am I gonna do? I don't have a, and he said, you know, there's these, all these McKinsey guys here. Then they say that McKinsey's hiring people with PhDs. I'm like, okay, sign me up. I wanna go see McKinsey. And so I go interview with McKinsey and I get an offer and they say, we've got a great offer for you in New York City. And I said, I, I thank you. I'm excited, but I don't wanna go to New York. I wanna go to Pittsburgh. I wanna go to the Pittsburgh office of McKinsey and they said, you're the first person in history-

• 54:06Jocko Willink?

  The waiting list is zero.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  That ever insisted on Pittsburgh. And so that's how-

• 54:10Jocko Willink?

  Why were you so fired up to go to Pittsburgh?

• 54:12Speaker 01

  I wanted to go back to Pennsylvania. Um, I had been born in Pittsburgh, had my, you know, had family roots in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was on this, the cusp of this, you know, real renovation. And so I wanted to be part of that and it turned out to be, be great.

• 54:26Jocko Willink?

  Then, this is, so this is like now 1996 that you graduate, that you get hired at McKinsey?

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:32Jocko Willink?

  And when you go and you're working, like, uh, when you get this job at McKinsey, what do they have you doing? Were you doing typical analyst stuff? What, what'd they have you doing?

• 54:40Speaker 01

  You know, they, all the clients were manufacturing companies. So GM and, you know, automotive or tier one automotive, steel companies, Weert and Steel, Westinghouse. So these were gritty, like operational efficiency-

• 54:55Jocko Willink?

  I say again, what did they want you to do?

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't know anything, right?

• 54:58Jocko Willink?

  PhD and international relations.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  No, they taught, they taught basically everything. So I did supply chain stuff, reduce costs, negotiate new contracts. I mean, I just, I was a, they just stuck me in and I got trained and-

• 55:09Jocko Willink?

  Who trained you?

• 55:10Speaker 01

  You know, there's a bunch of, it's like being in the military, the trainer, the trainers are the next generation people. So there'd been a bunch of army guys that went there. The Pittsburgh office of McKinsey was a little different than the rest of McKinsey. It was sort of gritty, you know, you know, the client base, this was, this had a different feel to it. And there was a number of military guys there that had been part of why I got hired in the first place. And, and that became just a great way to learn business and a great way to make a transition to a business career.

• 55:42Jocko Willink?

  And that's what ends up happening. You spend three years there and then you join up with a company called, called Free Markets.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Free Markets, yeah.

• 55:49Jocko Willink?

  And it sounded like your timing was good, 1999.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was perfect. The timing was awesome. You know, we, we went public that year and, you know, this is the ridiculousness of the moment, but there was a, for a point in time, I think we, when we went public, we had $19 million of revenue or something like that. And we're losing money. And it was valued in an IPO at something like nine billion. And then I so, I became the CEO. I sold the company six years later in 2005. It was 150 million in revenue and profitable. And we sold it for 500 million. So that just shows you that the crazy journey was, we went from, I don't know, 70 people when I joined, I think, to 1,000 people when we sold. And so it was a, it was a crazy.

• 56:33Jocko Willink?

  So where did, what was your job when you started at Free Markets?

• 56:36Speaker 01

  My job was initially working with the, the business was sell, the business was essentially trying to digitize purchasing. And if you looked in the purchasing world, there was all this stuff. You could buy paper and things like that online. But this was direct materials. So the things that go into things you build, castings, forgings, machinings. So we were helping companies take those things, make them in digital drawings, and they do a competitive bid online where you could source the things. So it was really kind of innovative. And we started to help the government do that too. So we helped the United States Postal Service. We helped the Navy. And I initially ran the little national, the, the public sector business.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  And then I ran all the businesses and then I eventually became CEO.

• 57:23Jocko Willink?

  What do you think was your key to doing well, making things happen, getting selected for promotion, getting selected to lead this bigger organization and getting selected to CEO? What do you think was your key component?

• 57:35Speaker 01

  I think, you know, I think some of the basic leadership things from the military, just finding good people, getting alignment, holding high standards. I think those things were, you know, important to be a platoon leader, important to be a successful CEO. I think the thing that ended up being the strength I had through all business was I was always a client facing or customer facing executive. So I would always go help sell the deals. I would be at the front end of, I was always that at Bridgewater. I was that at Free Markets and that was the thing that helped, that we needed at the time to grow. So, you know, there's different kinds of CEOs. There's those that are the product developers or those that are the commercial. I was always more of a commercial, client facing CEO. And that's what, that's what Free Markets needed at the time.

• 58:19Jocko Willink?

  And you said they had $16 million in revenue?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Maybe 19.

• 58:24Jocko Willink?

  20, let's call it 20 and they, and you went public with a valuation of nine billion, you said?

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Billions, many billions. Yeah, I think the nine billion. Yeah, it was the, it was, and you see some of that same, some of those same things have happened, but that was the height of the tech bubble.

• 58:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  And then the bubble burst.

• 58:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, fortunate we had a business that could survive it and, and continue to grow, but it was, it was tough. And I tell the story in this book, which is, which is just, it tells you, this was like creative destruction, witnessed firsthand because there's this huge consolidation and software firms are gobbling up software firms and so forth. And about the time I was CEO of Bridgewater, maybe 2003, four, something like that, maybe or 2002, I do a Kleiner Perkins, which is the big venture capital company. I do a CEO conference and the partner at Kleiner Perkins says, yeah, I wanted to meet these guys. They've got this new company, it's called, it's called Google, it's a weird name, Sergey and Larry. And I'm like, that'll never work.

• 59:22Jocko Willink?

  What a joke.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  That'll never work. And meanwhile, meanwhile, you know, we're, we're, our industry consolidates and they become Google, so.

• 59:33Jocko Willink?

  Where are you on September 11th, 2001?

• 59:37Speaker 01

  I'm in the, we have a tower in Pittsburgh that has our name on top of the building at Free Markets, and we're in a management meeting, and, and right next to it is the, is the caf- sort of cafeteria area, and somebody comes in and says, "There's a plane that just hit the, plane that just hit the, the, the tower." And so, we go in and we're all watching, and we all think it's some sort of accident. And then, the news come, and then we see the second plane, and it was like, "Oh, my God." And it was interesting, because we had, we had an international business, so we had people that week from all over. We had a little business in Australia, we had a business in India, we had a man that ran our India business that was a Sikh, so he wore a turban, and we couldn't get anybody

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  home. So, we have all these people, and these international people that are trying to get home, they can't get home, so we're working over that over the next week or two to try to, but once the, you know, airlines start moving again. And then, this particular man really had a tough time, because he was getting harassed a lot on his, on his way home, because people were trying to make sense of what had happened, and, you know, they, they didn't know yet, they didn't know who was who, or whatever, and it was very, very memorable, because we brought all the senior team to our home, and talked about the company, but also talked about what was going on in the world.

• 1:00:57Jocko Willink?

  And what did that do to Free Markets?

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  You know, it didn't, didn't affect us in any, in any really meaningful way. You know, I had, we'll talk about this, I'm sure, a bit, but I had helped President Bush, when he was governor-run, so I had helped write some of the defense-related speeches when he was the governor, and when he had won the presidency, I had made a conscious decision not to try to serve, but to stay at Free Markets. So, I was kind of doubling down on Free Markets, but I, I stayed really close to what was going on in public policy.

• 1:01:30Jocko Willink?

  How were you connected to Bush?

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  You know, I was connected through some people I knew who were on his team, in the national security team, a guy you may, may know, Rich, Rich Armitage, who was a, sort of a-

• 1:01:41Jocko Willink?

  I don't know him personally, but I know who he is.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  He was a defense, defense guy, who had served in the Navy, I think in Navy Special Ops, and he had been a, a big player in the Reagan administration, and he was helping to chair Governor Bush's defense team. And so I had written my dissertation on reforming defense, reforming the Defense Department. And so I helped write a couple of speeches that the governor eventually gave, one at Citadel, about his vision for reforming the Pentagon. And that's how I got involved. But I didn't go in when he won, but that laid the groundwork to go in later when he won a second term.

• 1:02:15Jocko Willink?

  And then what year do you end up selling, selling Free Markets?

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  We, we sell it in 2004 and closed the deal in 2005.

• 1:02:24Jocko Willink?

  And did you stay on once the deal got closed? Did you stay on?

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  I stayed on, I had a deal, which was a really interesting deal. I had a deal that if I wasn't, I became the president of the combined company. And I, I actually end up in the, in the rare instance where I really liked the CEO that had acquired our company. So we worked really well together. It was really a joint, joint effort. But I had a deal that if I didn't become CEO, I'd leave or get a payout and so forth. So he, I was on the track to become the CEO and I chose to do the government instead. So I went into the Bush administration about a year after the transaction from, I was the president of a REB, I went to become, that was the acquiring company. I went to become the undersecretary in the Commerce Department.

• 1:03:07Jocko Willink?

  And then how, how was, how was that welcome to the, welcome to the Beltway and all that stuff? I mean, you're now, you've been looking at the government from the outside. I mean, I guess you did some, some speech writing and whatnot, but you know, now you're in the mix.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Well, you know.

• 1:03:25Jocko Willink?

  How horrible was that?

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  It was so interesting because the job that I was in is a job that's written about a lot these days because it was the, the job that decided which technology we could export around the world. So all this talk about export controls and tightening up on China, that was the job that I was in. And it was, so it was interesting, but it's thankless in the sense that you never, no one ever is happy because all the business people say, don't restrict us, you're killing us. And all the national security hawks are saying, hey, wait a second, you know, you can't give away. And so you have to have a lot of judgment in trying to figure out the things that make the most sense and you're dealing with your allies who are doing all sorts of selling all sorts of things which you can hurt us business relative them. So it's a thankless

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  business in some way, but it's a job, but it's a very important one. And what became obvious early in that tenure is the challenge with China. And I was responsible for putting in place a rule that was going to restrict certain technologies to China, further restrict, and put China in a different standard than some other countries. And the Chinese went crazy. And President Hu complained to Steve, to President Bush about this directly, about this thing and this essentially this guy in the Commerce Department who's making this rule. And so I, President Bush doesn't even know I exist. He doesn't know this office

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  exists. And I get called to give a briefing to the National Security Council about this, you know, this policy, which they eventually agreed with and we went forward on. And but that was the first insight into the fact that the Chinese were very predatory about technology, about intellectual property. I mean, others were saying this too, but it was, it was much, it was much more obvious even then that they had a strategy for really dominating in the technological space. And we weren't well equipped to deal with it. And that, that, that challenge has become much greater in the last, in the last 15, 20.

• 1:05:29Jocko Willink?

  So did you pick that up when you were in China, when you were traveling through China?

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:05:32Jocko Willink?

  Did you start to see, how'd you pick that up?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Well, I picked it up when, when I got back. So I, I went through China as, as part of that trip we talked about, but I was, you know, I had no money and I had a backpack. So I was just trying to find the next place I was going to stay. But I started to go back in 2005, 2000, I'd done a little, our business had, had had a little exposure, but not much to China. But in 2005, I started to get much more involved as the, as the Undersecretary of Commerce. And this was the hot issue that we started to study. And so it became clear that the intellectual property theft of the Chinese was, you know, over the top. I think there was a Keith Alexander who, who ran the Uh, who ran the NSA some years ago said in testimony, it's the greatest theft in the

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  history of mankind, what China has stolen from the United States in terms of intellectual property. And that's true. That was even clear in 2005, but it's just become much worse.

• 1:06:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And the obvious things that back in the day in that time period was like, oh, is it really obvious that they were stealing our, like, literally like our Disney movies were being whatever, put on DVDs and sold and the music was being stolen. So all those, but the, the much more important thing is the actual technology and that they are, that they continue to try and get from us so that they can utilize for their own, for their own purposes.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Oh, completely. And it's, it's, it's insidious and it's very purposeful. So there's not intellectual property protection. So it's things like you said, DVD and so forth. But they force companies to do their manufacturing onshore in China for this specific purpose of building that indigenous capability, you know, it's, um, and it's, and it's worked.

• 1:07:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So I was about to say like they've succeeded.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  They've succeeded. There was a great, um, not great, but a very depressing, I should say, story in the journal about a month ago, the Wall Street Journal, which had this Australian think tank that did an evaluation of the 44 most important technologies to our economic wellbeing, but also national securities, like artificial intelligence, quantum science, bioscience, satellites. China, according to this Australian think tank, in the lead in 37 of the 44. Right? So China's got a plan. This is the point I make in the book. China's got a plan for, for global dominance, techno authoritarian dominance. We don't have a plan and that's, that's a big part of our, our risk right now.

• 1:07:55Jocko Willink?

  And Americans think like, you could really give Americans the benefit of the doubt and say, oh, they think in a four year cycle. They're probably thinking a two year cycle. A lot of us are thinking in a 24 hour news cycle, maybe a 40 hour news cycle. And the Chinese are thinking in a hundred, 200 year strategic cycle. That's what they're thinking.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and when, you know, when I talk about the motivations of the Chinese and where they're headed, it's not like I'm making this up. You just go read President Xi's speeches. So our interests were diverging with China for, you know, the last 25 years. It, you know, or the bet we made. The thing that we were hoping for, and it was bipartisan, was that if we brought China into the global trading system, that we get reciprocity, we get access to their markets, and this would also help them become a benign entrant. And none of those things have happened.

• 1:08:53Jocko Willink?

  We're 0 for 3.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  We're 0 for 3. So, there's not been reciprocity. They've stolen our technology. They've become dominant in technology. They've become dominant geopolitically, you know, in the last three or four weeks. On the one week, you had Xi visiting Putin in Ukraine, and you had the Foreign Minister of China brokering the deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia. So, these guys are on the march. They've got a plan. President Xi has a very clear path, which he's talked about for more than a decade. And it's a real challenge to America's role in the world, and it's a challenge to, you know, our security and American way of life.

• 1:09:29Jocko Willink?

  So, in 2005, you see this. You see this. The people you're working alongside see this. You start putting these, some of these restrictions in place. Thankfully, you were able to convince other people, in this case, President Bush, that these were the right moves. And really, once someone shines a light on it, it's very clear that these are the right moves. It's very clear that these attempts to, you know, formulate relationships with China, that it's just like an abusive, codependent relationship that you end up in. This isn't going to be helpful. You're inviting people to the party, thinking like, "Hey, if we have them over and have a couple beers with them, they'll probably end up being cool."

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Right. Not so.

• 1:10:08Jocko Willink?

  And it doesn't work that way. They actually steal all your furniture.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  In fairness, I would have said I had skepticism. So, I was skeptical, and I was worried about the Chinese military. But I, to be honest with you, I had no idea. What's happened is so far beyond what even a skeptic would have imagined happening. Because what they've done is they've created real dominance. Their military is truly consequential. Their navy is larger than ours. Their economy is not as big as ours, but gaining. And their technological leadership is high. So, if you sort of would have taken my worst-case scenario, I think we're worse by a long shot. So, unfortunately, we really missed it. And there's a bipartisan consensus now that we need to do something.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  There's not much of a bipartisan consensus on what to do. And so, one of the things I try to do in this book is lay out the what to do.

• 1:11:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, and we'll get into some of that. It's interesting, though, to hear the seeds of your thought pattern on this. You eventually go from that position to being, do I have this right? The George Bush's personal negotiator and representative to the G8?

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is, um, this is a job that's been established over the last couple of minutes. It's the Deputy National Security Advisor for Economics and National Security. And that person also is the negotiator that goes on behalf of the President to negotiate the summit. So, the G20, the G8. And it's an amazing thing because there's weeks of meetings that lead up to these meetings, where you're negotiating the US position on behalf of the President. And then, when the meeting actually happens, there's usually a couple of open issues. And when the meeting actually happens, you're the person that sits with the President. So, if there's, you know, 20 world leaders sitting around the table, each of them have a desk behind them. And, uh, and that's the person that I...

• 1:12:07Jocko Willink?

  You're like whispering in his ear.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  You're whispering in his ear, yeah. So, I have a funny story on this, if you want to hear it, which is when President Bush, when I first got hired for that job, I didn't really know President Bush. And so, I was hired by the Chief of Staff and the National Security Advisor to do this job. And I get hired in August of 2006. And in September is the first summit, which is in Vietnam. And it's of the ASEAN countries. So, it's like, you know, 25 leaders, it's this Chinese, it's Putin, it's this is a big deal. And I'm learning all these issues. It's non-proliferation with Iran, it's, you know, beef exports to Japan. I mean, you name it, all the whole range of issues. And I'm trying to get the US position clear and I'm trying to get to see the president.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  And I keep hearing, president's not available, president's not available, he'll make time. Finally, I hear you're gonna brief the president on the airplane. So I've got these big binders that are full of all the position papers and the US position on these.

• 1:13:05Jocko Willink?

  And how big is your team that's putting all this stuff together?

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  You know, because I'm in the White House, I can co-op the whole government. So I have a team at the State Department and Treasury, everybody's working.

• 1:13:13Jocko Willink?

  Do you have like the Japanese cow export expert? Do you have the whatever? So you got experts for everybody and they're pulling this information, they're briefing you?

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Briefing me, but then, you know, when we get into the game, it's just me. Because I got the binders and I got the... So we get on Air Force One, and I've never been on Air Force One before, I don't know the president. And I get a note that says, president wants to see you up in the front of the plane in the conference room. So I walk up.

• 1:13:37Jocko Willink?

  You're getting pass notes.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  I got my binders, you know, and I walk in, as president, I say, Mr. President, here's the main topics. And he goes, this is not my first rodeo. I don't need any more preparation, I'll be fine. I'm like, oh geez. So I go back to my seat, and we get in Vietnam, the summits in Vietnam. We go through the whole, a couple one-on-one meetings with Putin and various leaders. And then he and I go in the car. And we go to this big conference center where the summit's gonna take place. And we walk into the room, and I've been briefed that there's gonna be all the leaders on their big chairs in a circle with their people, me, the Sherpa, sitting behind them. I walk into the room, there's no Sherpa tables. Like, holy, where am I supposed to be? And all the Sherpas, they say, are gonna be in this back room where you can sit.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  And if your leader wants to talk to you, they can have you called up. So I'm like, oh my God, this guy doesn't...

• 1:14:29Jocko Willink?

  He's doomed.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  He's doomed. Like, he doesn't have the wisdom that I, you know, I'm gonna bring him, I've got the papers. So I go, I go sit down there, and it's like a scoreboard, which has every country. And if your leader calls for you, a light goes on. So I'm sitting there, I'm listening, I got, we got the headset on, everything's getting interpreted in the different languages. And it's like five minutes in, the red button goes on, United States, America. I'm like, oh shit, I can't believe it. He's calling me, what's he wanna know? I got my binders, I mean, I was in North Korea, whatever. I'm walking in, so I walk into the room, they let me through the security. These guys are sitting in circles, it's just the leaders of the world. And I walk along the wall, and I come up behind him, and I lean over to him, I said, Mr. President, you had a question? And he said, I pushed the wrong button.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  So he had meant to be the, push the I wanna talk button.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  And he pushed the IC, call your Sherpa button. So that's, so I took the walk of shame back to the Sherpa room and all the Sherpas are, what do you want, what do you want? Well, he pushed the wrong button. So I teased Bush about that sometimes. He goes, no, no, that was, I, that was just testing the new Sherpa.

• 1:15:34Jocko Willink?

  And how'd he do in the meeting?

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  He did fine. You know, he was right. It wasn't his first rodeo. He did just fine.

• 1:15:40Jocko Willink?

  I noticed, uh, there's, there's videos of Bush when he's running for governor in Texas. And he'd get up there during those debates and he was like, just good to go, very relaxed, very calm, articulate. And then it seemed the longer he was pres, well, when he got, when he became president, it seemed like, I don't know, handlers get into his head and they're saying, don't say this, you better watch out, you better not say this. And it just kind of seemed to make him less fluent.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Jocko Willink?

  When he would speak than he was when he was just running for Texas. And then I, I met him before and I've seen him speak in other events now that now he's not president and it's back to that kind of.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Jocko Willink?

  Same way. So it seems like a lot of his reputation came from the way he presented himself when he was president, kind of in the restrained sort of, you know, a controlled environment where they don't say this, don't say that. And behind the scenes, and I have friends that worked directly for him, and they were like, no, he's totally good to go.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Same.

• 1:16:45Jocko Willink?

  So that's your assessment as well?

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I, I see some of those clips too, like the formal speeches or like the formal press conferences, it just wasn't his thing. I don't know what happened either. But like you see him in the, on the, even just with leaders at these summits or whatever, he, he was, he was fantastic. He was comfortable. He was funny. He was, I mean, he's a hard boss. He was a very demanding boss, but, uh, but he's a very capable guy. And, you know, I don't agree with everything that President Bush did, but I definitely think he was a, a high integrity. Leader and and there was a lot to like.

• 1:17:22Jocko Willink?

  So then what after that you become under secretary of the treasury for international affairs? Am I getting these?

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:28Jocko Willink?

  Right. You kind of a lot of you were moving couldn't keep a job.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  That's my that's couldn't keep a job. So Paulson calls me and says, you know, I'd like to have you be under secretary of treasury. The treasury, the way it's organized, you've got a deputy and then you have three divisions. You have international, domestic and terrorist financing. And so this international division was like the it's the lead financial diplomat for America. It's a it's incredible. You lead the G seven negotiations and all these things. It was a it was a big, big job. And I said to him, listen, Hank, I don't know. I don't really know anything about markets. You know, I took this company. I was at this public company, but I don't really know. So don't worry about it. You know.

• 1:18:06Jocko Willink?

  You were about to say I took this public company from nine billion dollars to 500 million. I don't know if I'm your guy.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Beat that. That's exactly right. So I said, I said, I don't really know that much about about this stuff. He said, you know, the president and you know, all the economic policymakers around the world because you've been doing this Sherpa job. And, you know, you'll you'll be great. You'll learn what you need to learn and I'll teach you what you learn. So I and and everybody who's advising me says, whatever you do, don't do that. You're in the White House. You know, this is going to be a backwater. Nothing's happening for the next two years. Whatever you do, don't go to treasury. So I I ended up going to treasury and I get there in the financial crisis, you know, and it's like. It's like a wild, crazy ride of, you know, almost year and a half, 18 months in the center of that storm. And and with Paulson, which was which was great, great, great honor.

• 1:18:58Jocko Willink?

  What does it look like from the inside as everything's falling apart?

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  It's like standing in the middle of a of an eight lane highway. And you have trucks and cars coming at you like 100 miles an hour. And just when you avoid, you know, a truck running you over like Bear Stearns. You stand up and look around and you have another one coming at you, a Lehman Brothers or AIG. It was that kind of feeling like you're just going from one fire, one crisis to the next. Without and, you know, Paulson might disagree if he heard me say this. I don't think there was a theory, an adequate theory of here's exactly what's going on at the root cause level. And therefore. What's the, what's the whole, what's the movie?

• 1:19:46Jocko Willink?

  Like strategic big solution?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  What's, yeah, there, there's no, I mean, when you're in a fire, you have to put out the fire. But there was, you know, ultimately, I think through lots of iterative, you know, good thinking, we got to an answer that saved the world, in my opinion, at least. Like people who now say, well, we didn't need to do that. I mean, I think we were staring into the abyss. I think we could have gone into a depression. I think the banking system could have collapsed. I think it was that close. And we ended up doing some things that I wish we hadn't done or had to do. But, um, but that's the moment we were in. And, uh, you know, the thing I respected most about Paulson is when something didn't work, he just said, okay, that's not working and try something new. And he'd own it.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Like he wasn't, he wasn't worried about his, you know, he wasn't worried about people blaming him for being wrong. He was trying to solve the problem. He was stepping into the breach and owned it, completely took responsibility. And, you know, that's, that's, that's an admirable quality in a crisis.

• 1:20:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a quality that would be nice if more people had it because I noticed a lot of this during the pandemic. People wouldn't change their minds based on new information.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:55Jocko Willink?

  They were just sticking with whatever information they had. Yeah, we're just, hey, we're going to do this. And okay, we did it. Now it's not working too well. We're going to keep doing it. And you'd be thinking, hey, maybe make some adjustments. It's okay to say, hey, I was wrong. I misjudged this. I didn't think it was going to go this way. Here's a new course that we're going to take. You don't see a lot of that from the government.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Right. And we were in unprecedented, you know, unprecedented waters. I mean, we, we really were in a whole new world. And so we had to break precedent in terms of how to respond to it.

• 1:21:24Jocko Willink?

  What are some of the moves that you had to make that you didn't, that you look back and say, well, I wish we wouldn't have done that or could have done that differently?

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Well, the big, you know, we're living it again. The big thing was the, the capitalizing of the banks, which, you know, ended up to the taxpayer not a cost at all because the banks have paid back beyond that. But anytime you're, the government's standing behind the banks, as we are now, you're creating a bit of a moral hazard. And I think we're in the middle of doing that again with the deposits. And getting that balance right in terms of letting the market, um, discipline bad behavior. Uh, and at the same time, not jeopardizing our, our system. That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to make sure that bad behavior is punished by market forces, but not hurting mom and dad who live in Peoria, just because they had their

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  money in a regional bank.

• 1:22:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so like that legit could have happened with the Silicon Valley Bank.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that Silicon Valley Bank is a good example, because what happened there is that you had terrible, I mean terrible management. There was just a hearing the other day, which you saw the CEO couldn't even defend their behavior in terms of how they held their deposits and the risk they took on. So it was terrible behavior. At the same time, you had terrible oversight by the Federal Reserve. So the regulators were completely failed. The management was completely failed. And by bailing out Silicon Valley Bank and protecting all the deposits, the people you protected were essentially the guy who lived down the street from Silicon Valley Bank that had 10 million, lives in a $10 million

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  house and has $10 million of deposits. And who you didn't help is the creditor, the guy that has the lawn mowing service, that's mowing the lawn outside Silicon Valley Bank, he got hit. And so that's a bit of the dilemma. Now, if you don't intervene and play some role in protecting those deposits Silicon Valley Bank, the risk is that you create a run on the bank.

• 1:23:21Jocko Willink?

  How do we not help the lawnmower guy?

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  Because if you're a creditor, you got you got haircut. So if you were a shareholder, you got wiped out. If you were a creditor, like the Silicon Valley Bank owed you money, you got wiped out, or you got a haircut. If you were a depositor, you got 100% protection of your money. So, but as practical terms, that's what, when you say it like that, you realize who got protected and who didn't get protected. And so that's a problem. That's a problem. And now we're in the middle of this dilemma of how are we going to treat deposits above 250,000 and what are the implications going to be? And so we need, we need some more fundamental reform on that. But you know, this particular crisis started with really bad management and bad oversight.

• 1:24:06Jocko Willink?

  And when you, when you, I always picture these situations happening and it's, you're reinforcing my, my assessment is that there's a few people in a room that are trying to figure out what to do.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Jocko Willink?

  That's basically what's going on.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Jocko Willink?

  And, and the decisions that they make, how much power like did Paulson have to make these decisions? Like when he's, or, or with this Silicon Valley Bank, the people, how many people are making that call?

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Handful. Yeah. In the case of, I mean, I can't speak to Silicon Valley Bank other than by imagining what's happening, but in the case of the financial crisis, you had Paulson, you know, a handful of key advisors working for him in the treasury and a couple of people from the White House that were connected and then he would go make his case to the president and he'd get the president's thumbs up and then, you know, to the extent that it required legislation, he'd go try to make the case on the Hill, which we, you know, we lived through a number of iterations on that. And the one thing I'd say on that, and you know, maybe it's because he wasn't a politician, but, but I think Paulson, to his credit, was solely focused on what the right answer was. Damn the politics and the politics were bad, by the way, they turned out to be terrible.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  And I remember a moment where Paulson had to make changes because the initial thing was they were going to create this good bank, bad bank for the treasury assets. I don't know if you remember that.

• 1:25:27Jocko Willink?

  I don't remember that.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  There was supposed to be this plan and they had to throw the plan out the window and do a new plan. And I remember being with Paulson when he had briefed Bush on the original plan and then he came in a couple of days later and said, we're going to do a new plan. Uh, we're going to, you know, do this capital injections in the banks. And Paulson was like, or Bush was like, geez, you know, like what, we were just doing the other thing and Paulson laid out the logic and, uh, Bush said, just do what's right. You do what the right thing is for America, for the economy. I'll, I'll deal with the politics. You just do what's right. And then in that moment, finding people to just say, let's do what's right because the, the politics are nasty. It's, uh, we're lucky to have them.

• 1:26:10Jocko Willink?

  So you wrap up that job, um, and, and what you leave when Bush leaves?

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I leave when Bush leaves. I, um, you know, the way it works is you submit your resignation for noon on the day that the new president sworn in. So I remember going down and, you know, exiting and going down and watching the swearing in of President Obama and, uh, and I, I was done. And, uh, you know, went to three or four months and not doing much, uh, you know, walking around in sweatpants and not shaving and, uh, finally landed a job at Bridgewater, which was the next chapter.

• 1:26:53Jocko Willink?

  And, and how did you end up at Bridgewater?

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  So Bridgewater, um, I had not known much about Bridgewater. Bridgewater is a very, you know, prominently well-known investment firm, but it wasn't as well-known then as it is now. And I get a call in like October of, uh, 2008 saying, hey, would you, I'm interested in Bridgewater. I said, first of all, we're in the middle of a crisis. I can't, I can't talk about anything until after the, I leave. And, uh, but I hadn't heard of it. So I said, call me back in March or April. And they did. They called me back in, uh, March and I went up and interviewed and the founder of Bridgewater is a guy named Ray Dalio, who's sort of a bigger-than-life, uh, guy. And, uh, I go through this interview process. I called my wife at the time from the call.

• 1:27:37Jocko Willink?

  You interviewed directly with Ray Dalio out of the gate?

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  No, I interviewed with a bunch of people, but Ray's one of them.

• 1:27:41Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  And I call her on the way home and I said, there's no way, there's no way this is gonna work. Like this guy did not like me and I did not like him. This is off to a bad start. So, you know, this is interesting, but not gonna happen.

• 1:27:53Jocko Willink?

  What gave you that impression?

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  He was, um, he was very antiseptic. It was like this, you know, and it was combative. It's a little, you know, why would you do that? It's like, it's sort of the interview process was not, not one of cultivating your, you know, it was a sort of in-your-face. And, uh, and he called me and he said, let's, why don't you come back up and let's continue to explore this. So we did that three or four times.

• 1:28:17Jocko Willink?

  Were they all combative? Did they get nicer?

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  They didn't get much nicer and it all ended with a cell dinner, you know, Ray's idea of a cell dinner where the two of us were having dinner. There's others involved in recruiting me, but that, but he and I had this cell dinner, you know, this, uh, where we sat, uh, across from each other and he said, you know, I think you'd be great. I think this is going to be a good fit for you. And he said, I think there's a 50% chance you'll make it. And, uh, I was like, that's yourself? Like this is you trying to get me to come? And I said, no, I'm just being honest. I think it's, uh, you know, it's not for everybody, but I think this could be a good fit for you.

• 1:28:51Jocko Willink?

  I talked to clients and, uh, when they talk about interviewing people and I, I say, well, you could give them the Willy Wonka and people, I say, what's the Willy Wonka? And if you remember in the movie, the original Willy Wonka movie, what happens at the end is Willy Wonka has the kid and he goes off on him and he says, you stole from me, you violated this thing. And he's yelling at him, this ridiculous, good day, sir. And the kid's sad, Charlie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and the kid's sad because he had stolen that, that, uh, everlasting whatever, the everlasting candy. He had stolen one. And so Willy Wonka yells at him and screams at him, but not about that, about something else. And now the kid's going to leave and before he leaves, he gives him that thing and it was all just

• 1:29:34Jocko Willink?

  a test. So Ray Dalio was giving you the Willy Wonka test.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  He gave you the test.

• 1:29:38Jocko Willink?

  You know, cause if he's treating you bad and you're like, you know, maybe he's looking for you. Can you stand the combat? Can you, you know, who knows? But, uh, that's an inch. I've done that before. We're like, oh, let's see what this person's really like. I'll tell you what the SEAL teams definitely like that. You're going to push people hard to see what they're like. And now you go, okay, this person seems pretty cool. I know, uh, Hackworth like wouldn't, wouldn't smile or make any jokes for four weeks. And when I was in charge of stuff, I made it six weeks, be a little bit.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  No smiles for six weeks?

• 1:30:06Jocko Willink?

  No jokes, no smiles, like.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:30:08Jocko Willink?

  It's all business.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you and Ray would get along well.

• 1:30:14Jocko Willink?

  So you get the final, the great offer comes that you have a 50% survival rate in this job.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  I didn't survive it. So, uh, so the way this thing goes down, I joined.

• 1:30:25Jocko Willink?

  What, what, what did you join as?

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  I joined this, like, he was trying to put together a succession plan. He had, he had a 10 year vision of the succession. So he was trying to hire a number of people who could be successors. And basically came in and joined this management committee to run the place and then over time took on different things. And so, uh, I came in and it went off to a pretty good start and about 18 months in, he said, I'm ready. I want to step out and be the chairman.

• 1:30:51Jocko Willink?

  And he wants you to be CEO.

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  Be CEO with another guy, co-CEO.

• 1:30:54Jocko Willink?

  Co-CEO.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  With a, with a guy who I admire was, it was, it was his protege who had been a big investor.

• 1:30:58Jocko Willink?

  You've been there for 18 months?

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  I've been there for 18 months. So I take this job. And, you know, it's tough because Ray's trying to be chairman, but he sort of has a foot in, foot out.

• 1:31:07Jocko Willink?

  He's had a little time, a little hard time letting go.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  Little time let go, right? And 18 months into it, he fires me. Fires me. I mean, and it is like, and I'm in the Wall Street Journal and, you know, people, and people know I've been fired and I'm debating. I've got young kids. I'm thinking about leaving. I think I'll resign. He doesn't fire me from Bridgewater. He fires me from the job.

• 1:31:27Jocko Willink?

  From the CEO job.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:31:29Jocko Willink?

  Demotion, little ego check.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Big ego check. And I make the decision to stay at least until I figure out what I'm going to do. And I'm thinking of, I'm going to leave.

• 1:31:38Jocko Willink?

  I noticed even right now you're whispering.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:31:41Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to stay as long as I can.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Stay as long as I can, right? And I finally, uh, start to hit my stride. And things start to go well and I'm building the business and I'm, you know, I'm running around the world. I'm the biggest traveler at Bridgewater. Cause I'm getting clients and all that stuff. And so it starts to go great. So I'm, I'm staying and, uh, it goes really.

• 1:32:01Jocko Willink?

  But you're not CEO. This is, you got fired from co-CEO. Your new job is biz dev or.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  President.

• 1:32:06Jocko Willink?

  President.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Jocko Willink?

  And you're, and yeah, I remember in the book, you're saying you had the most miles of anyone at, at Bridgewater.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:32:13Jocko Willink?

  Which is a lot of miles.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  A lot of miles. I was all over the place, Middle East and Singapore and.

• 1:32:18Jocko Willink?

  Are you, are you thinking you have a chance to go back to that CEO position?

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Not really.

• 1:32:22Jocko Willink?

  You're just thinking, I'm going to get what I can out of this, do a good job and I'll look for another opportunity.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Or maybe after a while, maybe not even look. Like after a while, I, you know, maybe being CEO isn't the greatest thing in the world anyway. You know, that kind of thing. And then he comes back. And asked me to be the CEO again. And this time I'm saying, well, listen, I don't think, are you sure you're ready? Cause I don't think you were ready last time. And he says he's ready and we, I write, I write a note to him about what's gonna be, cause he's a bigger than life character. I said, you can't, you gotta let me be CEO. So I wrote a note to him about what would be required. So like, you know, I've gotta have all the rights on decisions around people and compensation. And you know, we agreed on what that would be. And I took the CEO job and it was with, with another person and then eventually just me. And it became great.

• 1:33:10Jocko Willink?

  What year was that?

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  2017, 2016.

• 1:33:16Jocko Willink?

  2016, 2016, 2017. So you become now the co-CEO and then the CEO of Bridgewater. What are you doing on a daily basis when you're in that job?

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  You know, I think you're spending, I'm probably spending 30% of my time with clients because business model is very engaged in consulting, helping them think about not just the Bridgewater investment, but their investments more broadly. I'm spending probably 50% of my time trying to oversee the day-to-day management. Are we making good decisions? Are we managing our cost? You know, are we doing the things we need to do? I probably spend 20% of my time on people, 30% recruiting, you know, assessing. There's a big people piece of it. Even though it's a relatively small firm, it's 1,500 people, but it's, it's a big part of the job is getting the people right.

• 1:34:04Jocko Willink?

  How much of your job is tracking like what's going on from a financial perspective in the world so that you can at least understand the decisions that are getting made with all this money?

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  I'm pretty engaged, but it is a machine of, it's an understanding machine. There's hundreds of people that are doing nothing but understanding and compounding that understanding. And, and so I'm a beneficiary of all that good work. So I need to stay abreast of it, but I'm not, I'm not the investor. I am the person that's overseeing the whole enterprise and making, and trying to make sure the investors are doing a good job of allocating the capital.

• 1:34:42Jocko Willink?

  Is there any way that they stratify like the tactical investments that are happening versus the overall strategic? Do you literally assign people like, okay, you're looking at oil futures, but then someone else is looking broadly at energy? Do they have it stratified where you have tactical operators, operational operators, and then strategic operators? Is there something like that going on? Cause I could see where, you know, the, the person that's looking at oil future, he thinks he really has a good slice of what's going on and he's pushing for certain types of investments. And then meanwhile, somebody looking at more strategic pictures like, oh, solar's taking over, whatever the case may be.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  You know, the, the way Bridgewater invests is really unique. It's, it's characterized as fundamental systematic diversified. What that means is it starts with a bunch of smart people in a room trying to think about, how should the, the economy work? How should this particular market work? What should happen when inflation goes up? What should happen when the Fed pumps a lot of money into the system? How should that affect different markets? Taking that understanding and then building it into an algorithm, an equation that reflects that, and then testing that over and over again. And then when that, when that fundamental understanding is systemized in an equation, then we start to trade it in a certain way based on how much confidence we have. And we do that in a highly diversified way.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  So no single position accounts for that much. So think about it, think about our investment strategy is, is a whole bunch of little P and L's, which are the algorithms that should perform with a certain set of, of outcomes over time. And if the algorithm is performing like we would expect, then we keep it in. If it's not performing like we expect, we pull it out and adjust it. And so every day is about trading based on what those algorithms are saying. It's not based on anybody waking up and saying, hey, I think this. Whatever that thinking is, it has to get built into the machine. And so that allows you to have a whole lot of capacity to scale your investment process. And the people that are working on the investing are studying.

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  Different markets to try to see what they should be systemizing or what they might be missing. So it's like compounding. The whole idea is to compound understanding because the same things in markets happen over and over again. That's the premise.

• 1:37:02Jocko Willink?

  So what, from a leadership perspective, what did you take? Well, let's just go through the co-CEO, fired CEO. What were your big leadership takeaways from those three things?

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  The biggest, the two, two big takeaways, both which were the feedback originally. So while I didn't love being fired, I think there was merit in what, what the feedback was. The first one was, how do you take, and this Bridgewater is like this, but lots of organizations are, this incredibly opinionated, smart inputs you're getting from everywhere? And how do you wrestle those to the ground in a way that you do a good job of making a decision? So how do you put yourself in a frame of mind where you're totally open-minded? You're not arguing, you're listening, you're countering, you're seeing different sides of a perspective, you're taking all these strong voices and synthesizing into the view that you take. And so I learned the ability that I can get into room on any topic, and

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  if I have a bunch of smart people with different opinions, I can get some level of understanding on what I think we should do. Because I don't, I'm not anchored to my own perspective. That's a key, that's a key skill in leadership is some, one few, two people have. They think because of the leader, they have to have the answer.

• 1:38:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, this is definitely, I mean, we just did, did back-to-back podcasts. One of them was, you don't need to have an opinion about everything.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:24Jocko Willink?

  And my growing up in the SEAL teams, recognizing that just about every question has more than one answer. And as soon as you're in that state of mind, it's like, look, I don't care if we use your idea or my idea, or which one makes the most sense. That's, that's what we're going to go with, which one makes the most sense. And, and you know what? The one that you're totally passionate about. If you're totally passionate about it, we can roll with it because it's not going to be that big of a deal, you know, compared to Echo's idea that he's totally passionate about. But we're just not going to do dumb things.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:55Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, so open mind, listening, not going in with a preconceived notion of what you think is correct. That's one lesson.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, but sort of the way we would say is open minded and assertive. So you want to be open minded, but then you want to push and stress test. When you're hearing somebody say something, the way you get to the understanding, you have to be open minded, but you have to stress test what they're saying to really see whether it's anchored. And that ability to get in a room with smart people, stress test, be open minded and assertive to get to resolution on what you think you should do. It's a, it's a, it's a superpower. If you can get it right. The second lesson is, is the lesson of just the need to drive change. So when in doubt, change. When in doubt, it's violence of action. It's when in doubt, move. So if you, you're studying some and you think they're up for the job, but you're not sure

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  and you can't make a decision, make the decision. You know, the, the idea of, of taking decisive action, recognizing that you're going to get some stuff wrong, but that by acting, you're going to learn more and then you can evolve and grow. That, that's an important lesson. That's the, both of those lessons I learned from failing the first time as a CEO. And I'm not saying I was the greatest the second time, but I was a hell of a lot better because of those, of those two lessons.

• 1:40:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I wrote a book called Leadership Strategy and Tactics. And I talk about the iterative decision-making process. I talk about the fact that while I was in the military, I was known as being very decisive, but I kind of cheated all the time because all I would do was look at big problems and make really small decisions really quickly and then adjust my decision based on the feedback loop that I would get.

• 1:40:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Jocko Willink?

  And it sounds like that's what you're talking about.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. The feedback loop's key. And don't be scared to get it wrong a little bit and just act on the feedback loop.

• 1:40:46Jocko Willink?

  How did you, I could, I can only imagine the, the shot to your ego when you get demoted from CEO. What was that process like of saying?

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Hard. Yeah, hard. You know, I, on the surface level, I had had my challenges, but I hadn't really ever failed at anything. So, you know, if you, sort of, people look at me and say, oh, he's gone from one success thing to the next. It's not quite true, but this was a clear not true. You know, this was a clear face plant. And it was hard. And because in Bridgewater world, the hero is the person that, you know, is embracing their challenges and growing and evolving. But in the world world, no, that's a big kick in the head, right? And you're trying to explain to your friends, what happened? It's okay, you know? And it was, it was a shot to my ego. The, the, the turning point on it was just embracing it. Embracing, wait a second,

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  like, you know, I'm at one of the most highest performing companies in the world. I, I fell short. I learned a lot from it. I'm adding a ton of value. I'm getting better. And all of a sudden, it became a superpower, because I could talk to anybody about our culture at Bridgewater and say, wait a second. It's all about evolution. It's all about growing. It's all about embracing your challenges. That's how we get, actually, that's how Olympic athletes become Olympic athletes. So, you know, I'm, I'm the role model on this, or I'm trying to be. And, and it gave me a lot of empathy, understanding what it's like for people to fail. It gave me, it gave me courage, I think, to make more decisive decisions on people that needed to, you know, needed to change jobs. So, I, I thought it was a real gift, but at

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  the time, it didn't feel like it.

• 1:42:30Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, while you're doing, am I right? Did I capture this right in the book that you became a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee with General Mattis?

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:39Jocko Willink?

  During this time as well?

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I came, I became a, so, I'm, I didn't know President Trump at all, but when he was elected, I got a phone call from Mike Pence, who I also didn't know, that said, come interview for Treasury Secretary. So,

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  So this is a funny story. I'm driving down to Bedminster. And I think this is a secret meeting, you know, where I'm going to come in the back and interview with President Trump for Treasury Secretary. And my wife calls me on the phone and says, no, I think, I think people are going to see you. I think it's going to be very public. I said, well, how do you know? She said, I just watched Mitt Romney walk out of Bedminster. There's like 200 cameras there. And I said, I'm not Mitt Romney. I'm going to come in the back. And she said, I don't know. So I drive in, it's like cameras, crazy. And I walk in, I interview with President Trump. And the first thing he says, I've never met him, he is, out of his mouth is, you'd be good on TV. That's the first thing he said when I meet him. And I interview for Treasury Secretary. I don't get the job.

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  But when I walk back out on the front porch, he said, I'm going to give you some good press here. And he says, I'm going to act like we're talking about something very important. So he's, he's, he's saying, so how's it going? What are you doing? You know, he's like, we're not talking about anything. And then, you know, I'm standing there and the cameras and the thing, I'm on the main stage. And my people are calling my mom, dad, what the heck is going on? And, and then I leave and I don't get the job. But I get offered the job of Deputy Defense Secretary, which, which I decline. Given where I am at Bridgewater, what I'm doing. And, and so I get put on the Defense Policy Board. That's the introduction to it. And I, I almost went to be Deputy Defense Secretary, but declined to do that.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  And then President Trump came back later when I was in, later in the administration, asked me whether I want to come and do some other things. And I, I held off on that. But that was my initial introduction to him.

• 1:44:37Jocko Willink?

  But then your wife ends up working for Trump.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  Right. My wife ends up working for him.

• 1:44:41Jocko Willink?

  And how's that happen?

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  Same thing. We didn't, she didn't know anybody. She got a call from Ivanka Trump. Went in and interviewed with, with the President eventually.

• 1:44:50Jocko Willink?

  She did better than you.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  She did better than me. She succeeded. But then she, what happened? She was there for a month or two. And then a friend from the military, H R McMaster, who I had known from my time in the Treasury, became a National Security Advisor, and he asked her to be his deputy. So she was his deputy during her, her year and a half in the White House and, and he, he, he left, she left and he left soon after.

• 1:45:18Jocko Willink?

  That was a kind of a bloodbath in there oftentimes.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  It was a tough, yeah, it was, it was, it was tough. It wasn't, it wasn't a coherent team, which is, you know.

• 1:45:29Jocko Willink?

  Cohesive?

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  Wasn't cohesive team, that's right. Wasn't a cohesive team, but beyond that,

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  it wasn't in, in the world of national security, which, you know, if you think about something where we need to put a, be aligned and put a strong, clear vision forward and a face forward, it was a challenge at times.

• 1:45:46Jocko Willink?

  So she works there for a year and a half?

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  A little more than, yeah, something like that.

• 1:45:51Jocko Willink?

  And when General McMaster leaves?

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  She left a little before General McMaster came back. She was commuting. We had, we had kids still in high school and so she, she, she had always said she was only going to spend a year. She spent a little bit more than a year.

• 1:46:03Jocko Willink?

  And, and so what, what year did she wrap up there?

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  I think she must have wrapped up in 2018.

• 1:46:14Jocko Willink?

  Then, at what point did you decide, so you continue at Bridgewater, you continue with that job as CEO, at what point did you decide you're going to run for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania, which you did?

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 1:46:28Jocko Willink?

  And you failed again.

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for calling that out. I'm going to embrace that. So the second.

• 1:46:34Jocko Willink?

  We're embracing, you know, our challenges.

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. So he, Toomey said he was going to step down, I think, early in the year. And some people had approached me about running and I had thought about it and we decided not to do it. And then, you know, sort of had in the back of my mind, but decided not to do it. And then the Afghanistan thing happened. And that, to me, was such a debacle and such a humiliation, the, the way we left our allies hanging, the people dropping out of the wheel wells, the.

• 1:47:03Jocko Willink?

  To disgrace.

• 1:47:03Speaker 01

  You know, it was just, and I thought to myself, God, I want, I want to get in the ring and try to do something about that. So I decided to, to run. We then had a health scare in our family with my wife and we uh so we said we're not running, you know, that was that's a little divide.

• 1:47:20Jocko Willink?

  Did you leave Bridgewater?

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  I did leave.

• 1:47:22Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna read run?

• 1:47:23Speaker 01

  No, in August I didn't leave. Um, we had this health, literally like what right after we decided and so we went through that with her and she by Thanksgiving looked like we were gonna be okay. So we said, we're gonna run and I told Bridgewater and Bridgewater said, uh, these are people that I've worked with for more than a decade. They said, uh, great, we'll support you 100% but stay through the end of the year so we can get a good succession plan in place, which I did. So I launched the campaign January 13th and the primary was May 17th. So it was a five month crazy, you know, crazy campaign, but but a great experience.

• 1:48:00Jocko Willink?

  And as you're doing that, so you you end up in the this this race is the Republican for the Republican seat and you end up running against uh that guy Mehmet Oz.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:48:12Jocko Willink?

  Who's a guy from from uh, I think he's on Fox News, I believe. Is he on Fox News?

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  No, he he was on, he was a had a huge show Oprah, his initial show business, move into show business was through Oprah. Oprah had him on her show and then he got his own show and it was a huge show. He's extremely, when I was thinking about getting in, everybody said Oz has 100% name ID and my wife would say, well, you have no name ID and everybody thinks McCormick's a spice. So this is gonna be a problem for you. I was like, okay. But he, um, so he was not viewed as a conservative, um, but he decided to jump into the race. He had gone to medical school in Pennsylvania and he was, he knew President Trump quite well and he was close, very close to Sean Hannity and that was, you know, really his base of support.

• 1:49:04Jocko Willink?

  You make this effort and like you said, you're going to go up against someone with a hundred percent name recognition and then you don't have any name recognition other than the fact that like you said, pepper.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:18Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and then Trump kind of, Trump ends up coming on board and, and supporting Oz. And, and you, did you guys know at this time you would be running against this guy Fetterman?

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, we didn't know for sure, but Fetterman was, was really strong in the Democratic primary. And so, I mean, he was, from, from my perspective, we thought he was a pretty good candidate to have because he was so left, so progressive. This was before any of the health issues were evident. He was so progressive that it felt like there'd be a good matchup for a Republican because he seemed too, too liberal for Pennsylvania.

• 1:49:56Jocko Willink?

  So you, you know, and you go into, you go into some really interesting details and ah, interesting is a word. It's just, it's a little bit, it's hard to read, you know, when you read, you start reading about all that's going on, the political situation and just what you're up against and like how these elections are taking place. It's worth reading the book just so you better understand that because I think it gives people a better perspective when these elections are happening of what's going on and what they actually mean. Uh, you're, you're going through that and then, and then Oz wins. Um, and then Oz loses to Fetterman, which, which it seemed kind of, it seemed kind of shocking. Why did that happen?

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  Yes, I, I'm unclear. I think, um, I think there's a couple of things that happened. I think Oz had trouble convincing Pennsylvanians that he was a Pennsylvanian. I think in the end.

• 1:50:52Jocko Willink?

  You're like seven, seventh generation.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  Seventh generation.

• 1:50:55Jocko Willink?

  Right? You're seventh generation Pennsylvania.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  Thank you for repeating that.

• 1:50:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  That's, I'm seven generations.

• 1:50:59Jocko Willink?

  That's impressive. I live in California where there's like very few people that are more than, yeah, everyone's, everyone moved here like three weeks ago. Never mind first generation.

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he, he had that, that was tough. That was tough. And then he, I think Federman ran a really clever campaign, particularly given his health issues, where he didn't get exposed until late in the cycle with the debates. They ran a very successful mail-in ballot campaign where he had 700,000 mail-in ballots before the election day. So he was an elite. And then I think the Dobbs decision really motivated turnout. And I think that that was, that all made it a harder hand for Oz than he expected.

• 1:51:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was very strange to watch unfold. And again, it sort of shows you as a just normal American citizen. It was shocking to me. It was shocking to me to see that happen. And then Trump weighing in for Oz. How did that, does that make people, you know, Trump being such a divisive figure, does that make people come out stronger against the person that Trump supports?

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, when we got into it, we were very clear-eyed. You know, I'd never run for elected office, but my wife and I have been around politics enough to know. So we thought we had to do five things to win. These are, this is a hard, hard thing to get right. We thought we had to appeal to the base, which are largely Trump voters, MAGA voters. That's right where I grew up in Pennsylvania. My military background, we thought would appeal. My policies, I thought President Trump had done a number of good things on policy, would appeal. So, so that was first. We also had to appeal to the more moderate Republicans around Philadelphia. Forty percent of the voters are in the five counties around Philadelphia. So we had to run a campaign that appealed to both conservative elements and more moderate elements. We had to run a campaign that didn't require President

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Trump's endorsement. We didn't believe we needed that to win, but we believed we didn't, you know, have him attacking us. Him attacking us would be a problem, which, which eventually was. But it's a purple state. So you need to run a campaign that can also get independents and conservative Democrats. And then finally, you gotta wake up every morning, look in the mirror and like that person. And say, I believe that this guy is running for the right reasons and staying true to his values. That's what you gotta do to succeed. And, and in the end, I think that path was the path I was on. President Trump, I had heard he was gonna endorse Oz. He knew Oz and all that. I had expected that was a possibility. I hoped it wouldn't happen. So I called him.

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  And I said, I'd like to come down and talk to you. This is probably, I don't know, six weeks out. And I said, I was running, I was winning. I was up in the polls by about eight points. So I went to Mar-a-Lago and President Trump came in and he asked his assistant to come in and run a video that that he had taken. And the video basically had me talking about, I was being asked on Bloomberg about January 6th and the polarization of the country. I just said, as a leader, President Trump shares responsibility for that. And then Biden came up on the screen and saying he wanted to unify the country. And the interviewer said, what do you think of that? And I said, I wish him well. He's our president. I wish him well in unifying the country. So President Trump was upset that I had said those two

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  things. He said, those are very bad, very bad. And then he said to me, you know, Dave, you can't win unless you say the 2020 election was stolen. And I said, Mr. President, I'm not going to say that. And so based on that, he endorsed Oz two days later. And I was still winning.

• 1:54:38Jocko Willink?

  Did Oz say that the 2020 election was stolen?

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  He didn't, he didn't say that exactly. He said, we need to go back and look at it and said a bunch of things. And then what happened was 10 days before the election, they did a rally. I was still up in the polls and President Trump came to town and he laid into me. He took me to the woodshed and they made a commercial out of that. And that ultimately, I think, was, you know, when you lose by 900 votes, there was 1.4 million cast and I lost by 900. So when you lose by 900 votes, there's lots of things you could have done differently, but certainly having President Trump opposed to me didn't, didn't help me any.

• 1:55:14Speaker 02

  Is that Dr. Oz?

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:55:17Jocko Willink?

  That's who it is. Yeah. Yeah. It's Dr. Oz. I think I've seen him on Fox News getting it. That's why I thought.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  He's been interviewed a lot on Fox News. That's probably it. But he didn't have a show there.

• 1:55:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:27Speaker 02

  But he had a show, though, right?

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  He said he was on Oprah, then he had Dr. Oz.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  Right. Big show.

• 1:55:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:32Jocko Willink?

  What do you think of this guy? Because I don't really know him. Echo Charles, give me an assessment.

• 1:55:34Speaker 02

  I don't know him politically.

• 1:55:35Jocko Willink?

  What kind of show was it?

• 1:55:36Speaker 02

  It was like a doctor kind of talk show, you know, like, hey, you got pimples? Here's a way to pop it.

• 1:55:41Jocko Willink?

  For real?

• 1:55:42Speaker 02

  For real. Oh, yeah. Like, hey, you have gastrointestinal scenarios going on? Here's what you can eat. And it's like.

• 1:55:49Jocko Willink?

  So it's like a health show?

• 1:55:50Speaker 02

  Healthy, medical, you know? And then they had another one called like The Doctors.

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  Man, you do a lot of daytime TV.

• 1:55:56Jocko Willink?

  He does a lot of TV, period. That's his, that's because we entered his strong zone right there.

• 1:56:02Speaker 01

  Man.

• 1:56:03Speaker 02

  I have a certain unique level of expertise in many things.

• 1:56:08Jocko Willink?

  And while you, so as you're going through this whole thing, that's when you decide that, that's when you decided you start writing this book, right here?

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  Well, no, I started writing the book a couple of years earlier.

• 1:56:18Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd sold the book to Center Street, based on this idea, the country, you know, you talk, everybody's talking about decline, America's in decline, and there's not a lot to talk about what to do. And I said, like, I'm, I agree, it's in decline, now what, I'd like to write the what-to-do book. And so I started writing it, and I got about, with, with the, this great guy, James Cunningham, who was my colleague, and I got about 60% done. Then I decided to run, so the book kinda went on hold.

• 1:56:46Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:56:47Speaker 01

  And then I finished it after.

• 1:56:48Jocko Willink?

  All right, so, so this book, and again, look, I've read a couple excerpts from the book, and get the book for the, for the stories, but then, really, essentially what you said, this book isn't, you use the stories anecdotally to support what you're talking about, or to give some background, but essentially, this book is, what are we supposed to do? What should we be doing right now?

• 1:57:10Jocko Willink?

  Let's talk through some of that stuff. You know, first of all, let's talk about the fact, is America in decline? You said, yes, you agree. Why are we in decline? What's happening?

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's a moment. We're in economic decline. So what's that mean? We're $31 trillion of debt, we have 40-year high-end inflation.

• 1:57:30Jocko Willink?

  Hey, if I was a, if I was a family guy, and I had a family, I had three kids, well, just make it me, I'm four kids, and I have, what, how much debt do we have?

• 1:57:41Speaker 01

  31 trillion.

• 1:57:41Jocko Willink?

  31 trillion? What's that? If you put that into household terms, how far into debt is, is my family? And I make, let's say I make 50 grand a year?

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  I think it's something like $100,000 per person.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  If you take the population of the United States, divide, divided by 31 trillion.

• 1:58:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, okay, let me, what I, what I want is a, is a, is a comparison, for my family, for my family to be 30 trillion dollars in debt?

• 1:58:12Speaker 01

  Oh, I see.

• 1:58:12Jocko Willink?

  How much debt is, is my family, and I make 50 grand a year?

• 1:58:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so your family is...

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  Your family, you're in debt by, you make fifty thousand a year and you're in debt by over a hundred thousand, a hundred and twenty thousand. Cause our GDP is eighteen trillion or something like that and our debt is thirty two trillion.

• 1:58:35Jocko Willink?

  So if I say, hey, my mortgage, you know, I got a two hundred thousand dollar mortgage, so that doesn't sound that bad.

• 1:58:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got a two hundred thousand dollar mortgage, but you've got an asset, right? So the problem is that you've got this mountain of debt and the servicing of that debt is getting more and more expensive as interest rates goes up. So the government, that's crowding out our capacity to invest in the things that we need to make America great. And on top of that, it's one of the big drivers of inflation. And that the problem that your family has is not only the debt, the problem they has, they have is that inflation hurts us all. But it really hurts working families because your dollars, your fifty thousand dollars is buying less and less than it used to. And so working families and elders on fixed income are who get screwed by inflation.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  And, and that's a big problem. If you have assets, then you know, you're, you're living large right now. That's the big thing I learned on the campaign trail. I saw it up close and personal. The last twenty years have sucked for a big chunk of Americans. If you had assets, you did great. All these people with assets, investors, they think, they think they're geniuses. Every asset went up in the last twenty years, right? But if you were living paycheck to paycheck, which is sixty percent of Americans, ninety percent of Americans don't have any material assets. Real income's been flat and inflation's gone up.

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  Crime's gone up, drug crisis has gone up. It's been a bad twenty years for a big chunk of Americans and that's, those are the people that are most pissed off about the direction of the country.

• 2:00:09Jocko Willink?

  So going back to this metaphor, if I am two hundred thousand dollars in debt, I make fifty thousand dollars a year. But it's not a mortgage because it's not against a house. It's like money that I blew.

• 2:00:20Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. It's like debt. It's like debt you have hanging out there with no asset behind it.

• 2:00:24Jocko Willink?

  And it's on a credit card and the interest rate is high. And it's starting to get to a point where my monthly paycheck no longer covers the interest rate, just the interest rate on the money that I owe.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  That's perfect metaphor.

• 2:00:35Jocko Willink?

  That's where we're at.

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  That's where we're at. And, and so the economic problem's big. But the national security problem is big because we have this emergent challenge with China. We talked about the technology leadership. We talked about their capacity to challenge us on the world stage. But we also have a spiritual crisis because the notion that America is exceptional, the notion that a country conceived with individual freedom is the driver is at risk. You see this in what the history being taught in our schools about America conceived in sin. You see this in our business community where the idea of capitalism and merit is chipping away. You see it in the military where the climate change strategy is coming before the military strategy, where this progressive ideology.

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  So all of these things are leading to 80% of Americans thinking the country is headed in the wrong direction. Two thirds of Americans think that their kids are going to be less well off than they are. 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. That's why we're in decline. And so that's the bad news, and it's bad. The good news is we've been here before. You know, this is the American story. We get to the edge of the cliff, we pull ourselves back. It happened before World War II. It happened in the Civil War. It happened in my lifetime, in the late 70s. We had 16% inflation. We had gas lines around the block. We had odd days and even days. You could only go get gas on the odd day or the even day, right?

• 2:01:58Jocko Willink?

  I remember that too.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  Right? We had Desert One, this disaster where we lost eight service members on the Iranian sands where we tried to rescue our hostages, right? Four years later, I'm at West Point, you're joining the Navy, and we have inflation under control, the economy is on fire. We're in the middle of the Reagan defense buildup. There's optimism, there's hope. It's morning in America. And four years later, Ronald Reagan, with some of the policies we need to do now, but also some new policies for now that we need to do now, not just Reagan policies, but leadership makes a big difference. So this isn't hopeless. Decline is not inevitable, but neither is renewal. It depends on what we do.

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  And that's what, if you're worried about one thing today, I think the thing you should most worry about is if you turn on the TV, if you read the newspaper, there's not a hell of a lot of people saying, talking about what we should do. It's mostly backwards looking, it's mostly grievance looking, there's not a lot of vision forward looking, and that's what I'm trying to do in the book.

• 2:02:59Jocko Willink?

  So, some of the things that you point out in the book is cultivating our nation's talent, which is a reform of education, a focus on education, technology, which you've mentioned somewhat already. You have a quote in the book from The Economist, and it says, "The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data."

• 2:03:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, so there's three pillars that I'm talking about. You know, when you're a CEO, and you know this with your businesses, there's like 100 things you could fix. There's so many things you need to fix, and the challenge is to pick the three things, or four things, and get focused on what's going to make the biggest difference. And these three things that I'm zeroing in on, I think have the best chance of bringing back a renewal in America, but also helping us to confront China. Because the biggest thing we need to do with China, I'll talk about what to do in confronting China, but we need to go to the gym, we need to build our muscle at home. And so, it starts with our people. Our people are our number one asset, and school choice is the path to reforming our school systems. Conservatives have been beating the drum for school choice for decades.

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  Covid was a huge step forward, because you had parents looking over the shoulders of their kids, and seeing the history that's being taught, and seeing the terrible scores and standards that we have in terms of, we're 22nd in the world among industrialized countries. They see the sexualism that's being taught in our schools. So, school choice really has a moment. We're conservative governors, school board elections, there's a real turn, and I'm optimistic. Second thing is something I know you feel strongly about, which is we need skill training. Not every kid needs a four-year education, right? I'm on the campaign trail, I'm going to fracking sites, these great $100,000 a year technical jobs, they're importing kids from Oklahoma. And Texas, because we don't have skilled training programs.

• 2:04:51Speaker 01

  Every manufacturer I've visited in Pennsylvania, their biggest inhibitor to growth, skilled workers. So we need to take the GI Bill, all sorts of benefits, and double down on our capacity to help our young people get skilled training. That's going to give them great middle-class lives and opportunities.

• 2:05:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and quit brainwashing them that the only path they can take out of high school is to go to college.

• 2:05:13Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:05:13Jocko Willink?

  Which is a path for, for not everybody. In fact, I would go so far as to say is, most kids could at least go out and spend four or five years doing a trade, doing something that doesn't take any college whatsoever. And cool, if you want to go to college, good, but you're going to end up in debt. You better figure out that that's what you want to do. Look, you're a great example. You went to a four-year college, got your degree in engineering, something you realized two years into is something you never wanted to do.

• 2:05:41Speaker 01

  And it wasn't very good at.

• 2:05:43Jocko Willink?

  That's a classic example. Luckily, you were in the Army and you ended up with a job in the Army, figured out your path. But a lot of kids are trying to make a decision of what they want to do for the rest of their life when they're 18 years old. They don't know what they want to do. They, they need to go out there and, and get a job, get a trade, get a technical skill, and perhaps that leads to a great life and you can get further education on down the line. So we got the, the choice of schools, which again seems so obvious. And if you've been a parent, I got four kids, like you got four kids, you can look at the schools and, and you can figure out what's going on. And imagine being in a situation where your kid, you don't want your kid to go to that school and you're not allowed to do it. That's crazy.

• 2:06:24Speaker 01

  Well, and the thing that, the thing about school choice that's so ironic is the people it hurts most are minorities and working families because they can't afford another choice, right? They can't afford, that middle-class white people in the suburbs of Philadelphia can afford a choice. African-American kids in downtown Philadelphia can't afford choice. So if you want to create opportunity for all, which is what America's supposed to be about, school choice is the way you do it. You put the money with the kid and, and that's the path to creating competition and quality. So that's a big piece of it. You know, the other thing I talk about, which is really important is is immigration. And the border is a disaster. I went to see it. We've got to stop it. The fentanyl crisis in Pennsylvania, we lost 5,000 people. We got to stop the border.

• 2:07:08Speaker 01

  We've got to get illegal immigration under control. Biden's been a disaster, but we also have to.

• 2:07:12Jocko Willink?

  Have you gone down to see the border here in San Diego?

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  I have. No, no, I've gone to Yuma, I went in Arizona.

• 2:07:16Jocko Willink?

  I mean, you can see the same thing here. We got friends that are border patrol.

• 2:07:20Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 2:07:20Jocko Willink?

  It's, you know, it's, it's, it's actually insane.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:07:24Jocko Willink?

  It's actually insane what's going on. I mean, when you talk to the guys that are on the ground,

• 2:07:30Jocko Willink?

  supposed to be protecting the border, they're border patrol, they have waves of people coming over. When they come over and they get, then they get obtained by the border patrol, border patrol takes them to a hotel.

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:44Jocko Willink?

  Gives them money, a phone, and a report date, six months in the future, and then says, good luck.

• 2:07:52Speaker 01

  See ya.

• 2:07:52Jocko Willink?

  That's what happens. I think they get $1,700 or $1,300 or something like that, all of them.

• 2:07:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:58Jocko Willink?

  And then they never see him again, obviously. That's what's happening. It's happening every single day.

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  Madness.

• 2:08:02Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's, it's crazy to think about.

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the ironic thing is that, I mean, a place like Pennsylvania is a big deal. I mean, Pennsylvania is one of the worst states in the country on fentanyl. That fentanyl crosses the border. The cartels manage it through, you know how small and compact it is. They can come across where in 24 to 48 hours, they can be in the northeast part of the, of the country. My hometown's right on Route 80. And these small communities have this huge influx of fentanyl. Fentanyl is super cheap. It's super compact, so they cut everything with fentanyl. So marijuana, whatever. So all of a sudden, you get people addicted, or worse, dead. And that 5,000 deaths in Pennsylvania, that doesn't even include all the people that are in drug rehab and everything else. So this is like a huge blight.

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  On our society, but so we got to fix that, but but the thing we can't lose is that reforming skilled immigration is also an important part of the future. So we can have legal immigration that works. My wife's a legal immigrant from from Egypt. My wife's a legal immigrant from England, so. Yeah, we we got to do this, right? We we can't. So that that's the that's the talent piece. The the technology piece is, here's the reality, we are competing on a terribly unlevel playing field. So if you want to make microchips, then you got to have way more capital. You got to deregulate in a lot of these technologies. And the Chinese are heavily subsidizing these state owned enterprises. So it's it's a tragedy that we have lost

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  our domestic semiconductor industry. I mean, 90% of the semiconductors that we need are manufactured 90 miles from mainland China, right? China's built 32 chip fabs in the last 10 years, we built zero. So this is this is the result of stupidity. And we're going to have to change that. And the way I describe it in the book, we can't become China, and we can't become the Democrats with this industrial policy that we just are giving money to companies and imposing all sorts of social policies like daycare and diversity inclusion, right? We can't do either. We need to have a unique American innovation policy where we essentially use public policy with tax incentives or capital to draw private sector capital into the areas that are most important for us strategically.

• 2:10:17Speaker 01

  And that's the way to let the private sector forces work. So let me give you an example. If you want to compete in the AI industry, create a fund. Private sector invest $10 billion. The US government invest $10 billion. And that private sector capital is allocated to companies, that capital is allocated to companies based on where they think the highest return is. And the US government takes first loss. So we make the capital a little more attractive and caps its upside at 15%. So you just took a private sector opportunity, and you just juice the return. There's going to be a lot of private sector capital that flows into that, and you're going to keep the benefit of our capitalist constructive destruction that we have in our system. So those are the kinds of things

• 2:11:02Speaker 01

  that I recommend in the book.

• 2:11:04Jocko Willink?

  And then, just broadly speaking, China. Like, I mean, I think, first of all, people don't recog- there's plenty of people that don't recognize what's happening with China. You already went into what China's doing, what they've been doing, and what they're trying to do. It's really obvious to anybody that pays attention to this kind of thing. So what's, what do we, what do we do in broadly speaking for China?

• 2:11:27Speaker 01

  China, China has a plan. We don't have a plan. So for us, I think there's three or four things we need to do. First, we need to strategically decouple. What does that mean? Semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, satellites, 5G. We can't be dependent on China for those things. We need to either have those things at home, or we need to have them in those supply chains in the hands of our closest allies. Second, we can't invest in Chinese companies that are doing things that are in direct support of the PLA or the Communist Party. So, right today, in California, in the Silicon Valley, there are companies that are investing in artificial intelligence companies in China that do business with the Communist Party. We can't do that. We have to stop that.

• 2:12:12Speaker 01

  There needs to be a review process that stops that. We need to hold China accountable for bad behavior. Covid is the best example. So here we go. Three years ago, it was suggested that maybe the virus that, that started in Wuhan might be affiliated with the Wuhan lab that does research on such viruses. That was heresy. The liberal media went crazy on that. Here we are, three years later, the intelligence services say that's, that's a strong possibility. So we got to hold China accountable for those kinds of things by sanctioning them and, and calling it out. We're not even calling it out. And then the fourth thing we need to do is have a smart ally strategy with Australia,

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  Japan, and South Korea to really isolate China in the, in the South Pacific and, and really build alliances that give us added power. Those are the four things we need to do. Now, here's the rub. I'm not saying, and some of my, my colleagues and friends are, that we should cut off all relationships with China. I think we have to coexist with China, economically too. So in York, Pennsylvania, in one day, I walk into a mach- you know, a manufacturing shop, those Chinese, they're, they're They're dumping on steel. We gotta sanction them. We gotta stop globalization. We gotta go after the Chinese. I'm running as a kid. I hear you. I go next door. It's a machine shop

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  that builds racks for Harley Davidson motorcycles. Harley Davidson's based in New York. They build motorcycles. And the guy says, whatever you do, don't mess around with China. That's our biggest market. So that's the reality of manufacturing. So I'm not making the case that we need to stop all trade with China. I am making the case, China's a threat, and we have to make sure the most strategic things are done here at home and hold China accountable.

• 2:14:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, clearly, I'm doing my best over here. We're making, we're making clothing in America, not in China. We got factories in Maine. We got factories in North Carolina. We're gonna build more factories. But that's just one industry and clearly, all industries, and that's a very basic industry. Now, listen, it is an important industry, but the rest of manufacturing needs to be moved back here, clearly. You lay out all these in much more detail in the book, and it, as you said, it's someone that sat down and thought, okay, what do we actually do about all this? So that is the premise of the book. I kinda wanna wrap up here, just reading, to

• 2:14:43Jocko Willink?

  close out the book here, you say, "We are at a pivotal moment in our nation's history. Behind us, we see a grand legacy of victory and failure, ingenuity, and war, decline and renewal, all of which have brought us to this point. Ahead of us lies a great uncharted territory. It is up to us to choose the path, and is up to our leaders to guide the way, uniting us once again around the creed of liberty and opportunity that binds our national fabric."

• 2:15:14Jocko Willink?

  This is the exceptional American story. We get to the edge of the cliff, then pull ourselves back. America can renew itself with a rebirth of liberty, opportunity, and American power, but we all must do our part to fulfill that promise. Americans are a resilient bunch. They know how to take a punch, and no matter how many times they get knocked down, they always get back up. Though times may be tough, they believe in America. They believe we can do better. They believe we can revive our nation and achieve America's promise. Their faith

• 2:15:54Jocko Willink?

  is the rally point I return to when my own fails, and it fills me with an unerring confidence that we can and must meet the moment.

• 2:16:10Jocko Willink?

  So, we certainly have to meet the moment. And, you know, I know you reference Reagan a decent amount in the book, but you know, we are, we are the last hope.

• 2:16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:25Jocko Willink?

  And we have to step up.

• 2:16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:27Jocko Willink?

  No doubt about it.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  Well, there's this great, uh, there's this great quote, uh, from William F. Buckley, who's this great conservative, as you know, and he talks about citizenship. And citizenship is, is a privilege, uh, to be born and to live and to prosper in the greatest country in the history of the world, but it's also a responsibility to do everything we can to preserve it. And so right now, I think we, we're long on privilege and, and short on responsibility. And I think that's what's going to have to change to make, um, what I'm talking about there a reality. And I'm, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful.

• 2:17:03Jocko Willink?

  So what do, what do, what do the citizens need to do?

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  Well, need to vote. Need to vote. Elections have consequences. If you have any doubt about that, go to Pennsylvania. Look at what happened there. I don't think anybody in Pennsylvania is looking at their senator right now and John Fetterman and saying, we are being well represented. And, um, and so they gotta vote. They gotta be active. Right now, what's happening? Is that 15% of people on the right and the left are driving the national conversation. They are driving where we're headed as a country. And 70% of the people in the middle who agree on a lot of stuff are basically not being represented because they're not actively voting. And, you know, unfortunately, and not actively participating, rather, and unfortunately,

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  until we really mobilize ourselves around what we need to be successful, which is solutions that are looking forward, competence. It used to be that public life and public office was based on competence and success. Those were the drivers, right? And we don't see that. So, the last part of the book talks about, you know, you can have all these great ideas, but if you don't have leadership, leadership really matters. And it doesn't, you know, we don't need thousands of leaders. We just need a handful of the right people in the right places. You know that from your career. The right people in the right places at the right time can change the future of everything. And that's what we need. So, it doesn't, we just need to keep pushing.

• 2:18:27Jocko Willink?

  You think you're gonna take another crack at this thing?

• 2:18:31Speaker 01

  Thinking hard about it. You know, last time I was outvoted 7 to 1 and I did it anyway. Six daughters and one wife. So, we're rallying, we're rallying the votes again. We'll see what happens.

• 2:18:45Jocko Willink?

  Where can people find you?

• 2:18:48Speaker 01

  dave mccormick book.com. And I appreciate any engagement on the book. The book is meant to be a real effort to say what we should do. And I think the more we can talk about what we should do, I think the more we're gonna be in the right direction.

• 2:19:04Jocko Willink?

  And then you're on Twitter @davemccormickpa.

• 2:19:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:19:09Jocko Willink?

  Instagram @davemccormickpa. Your davemccormickpa.com as well.

• 2:19:15Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:19:16Jocko Willink?

  So, I don't know. If you decide you're gonna take another crack at it, that's where people can find you.

• 2:19:23Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles.

• 2:19:23Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:19:24Jocko Willink?

  You got any questions?

• 2:19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, a quick one. Going to rewind.

• 2:19:28Jocko Willink?

  Brace yourself.

• 2:19:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:29Jocko Willink?

  This is the intense part right here.

• 2:19:31Speaker 02

  This is actually the thing I kind of always want. Okay, so you referenced playing football two days or camp, football camp, right? Fall camp?

• 2:19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:40Speaker 02

  Is that two days?

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:42Speaker 02

  Okay, so how would you compare and how long is that? One week or two weeks?

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  I think it's two weeks.

• 2:19:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, two. So how would you compare boot camp to that as far as like lack of freedom and just like the constant?

• 2:19:54Speaker 01

  Oh, man, boot camp had no, the boot camp had no freedom and Ranger School had even less freedom, where like you literally have no agency.

• 2:20:03Speaker 02

  So even moment to moment.

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  Now, everything, everything. You got a, you got a drill, drill instructor or a Ranger instructor calling up your you know what?

• 2:20:13Speaker 02

  Because I remember in football camp, same deal, two days, but aside from just resting between workouts and stuff and meeting, it, we had a lack of freedom as well. That's the only reference I have, obviously, I didn't go to boot camp. But so I always wonder, like, how does that compare? So it's like way worse.

• 2:20:28Speaker 01

  Way worse.

• 2:20:30Speaker 01

  Way worse, way worse.

• 2:20:31Jocko Willink?

  That's why it shocks people.

• 2:20:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:20:33Jocko Willink?

  You know, that's why, that's why it shocks. I think the loss of freedom is the biggest shock when you go to boot camp.

• 2:20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I have friends who I played football with who went into the military and stuff and they said it's, they said, it's just like football, just worse.

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  Maybe physically. That might be physically.

• 2:20:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:20:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:49Jocko Willink?

  Is that good?

• 2:20:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:20:50Jocko Willink?

  You're good?

• 2:20:50Speaker 02

  Thank you. Good to meet you right on.

• 2:20:52Jocko Willink?

  Any, David, any, any closing thoughts?

• 2:20:55Speaker 01

  No. Hey, listen, thank you for having me. I'm going downstairs and looking at the merch section.

• 2:21:01Speaker 01

  See what you got.

• 2:21:02Jocko Willink?

  We got plenty of merch, that's for sure. Appreciate you coming on. Appreciate you joining us and sharing your lessons learned and obviously, thanks for your service.

• 2:21:13Jocko Willink?

  Leading troops in combat and protecting and preserving our great nation and thanks for coming on and sharing the battle plan to renew America.

• 2:21:24Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me and thanks for everything you're doing.

• 2:21:28Jocko Willink?

  And with that, David McCormick has left the building. Echo Charles.

• 2:21:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:21:36Jocko Willink?

  Maybe the country's in rough shape. You know, we talked to Mike Glover, you know, we gotta be ready on that perspective.

• 2:21:42Speaker 02

  Be prepared.

• 2:21:44Jocko Willink?

  You know, we gotta do what we can to help the country out. One thing you can do is, you know, when you want to help out the country, when you want to help out the world, when you want to make things better, start with yourself. You know what I'm saying?

• 2:21:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:57Jocko Willink?

  Start with yourself, get your own world in order. That's a good place to start. And it will help the rest of the world as well. So, you know, read, study, exercise, do some jujitsu. This is my recommendation.

• 2:22:13Speaker 02

  Agree.

• 2:22:13Jocko Willink?

  Maybe get yourself some, some workout of the day.

• 2:22:17Speaker 02

  Sure. Hell yeah.

• 2:22:18Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying? The WOD, so there you go. When you do that kind of stuff, you're gonna need to fuel your body and do that. I recommend, I recommend you do that with Jocko Fuel at Jacofuel.com. I recommend you get some protein. I just, in the break, had a protein. I had a protein cookie and I had a protein malt.

• 2:22:38Speaker 02

  You're talking.

• 2:22:39Jocko Willink?

  Seventeen plus thirty. You know what that is?

• 2:22:41Speaker 02

  Sure, forty-seven.

• 2:22:42Jocko Willink?

  Forty-seven grams of protein I just got in, in four minutes.

• 2:22:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably less than that.

• 2:22:47Jocko Willink?

  That's no joke.

• 2:22:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22:49Jocko Willink?

  That's legit.

• 2:22:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:22:50Jocko Willink?

  I'm rebuilding.

• 2:22:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, and if you're okay.

• 2:22:53Jocko Willink?

  As we speak, you're over there, you're, are you catabolic right now?

• 2:22:56Speaker 02

  No, I had a malt shake.

• 2:22:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so what was it, in the game?

• 2:22:59Speaker 02

  GTG, good to go. Yeah, fully. And hey, so, you know, we, we always say, hey, you should, we recommend Jocko Fuel. Right? We say why, but I think it's important to say, I think, I don't know, I could be wrong, but it's important to say, hey, I recommend this fuel and this is why. Okay, cuz hey, look, let's face it, there's a lot of fuel out there, there's supplements, there's this and that or whatever, but along with, let's say, your garden variety supplementation, there's some downside. There's no downside for this one.

• 2:23:26Jocko Willink?

  It's a beautiful thing.

• 2:23:27Speaker 02

  Like, consider the energy drinks, uh, no poison in there, no sugar in there, no, uh, oddball preservatives that your body's gonna reject, by the way. And there's a whole physiological process for that rejection, which is, it's not fun to listen to, but it happens nonetheless, and these other ones, it's true, hundred percent.

• 2:23:43Jocko Willink?

  Very little of what you say is fun to listen to.

• 2:23:46Speaker 02

  Okay, alright man, you're gonna be glad you know this stuff. If you don't, I'm telling you.

• 2:23:51Jocko Willink?

  I'm just saying.

• 2:23:52Speaker 02

  Bro, this is the, this is the clean fuel, Jocko Fuel. So keep that in mind. I think it's important.

• 2:23:57Jocko Willink?

  Alright, so there you go, JacoFuel.com. Get yourself some joint warfare. Get yourself some super krill. Just get yourself some Jocko Fuel. You can get it at JacoFuel.com. You can get it at Vitamin Shoppe. You can get it at Wawa. Go that bottom right. We're getting the squeeze at Wawa. That's okay. We're at GNC.

• 2:24:13Speaker 02

  What do you mean get that bottom right? What is that?

• 2:24:15Jocko Willink?

  That's where in the shelves.

• 2:24:16Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, okay, yes, when you approach the shelf.

• 2:24:18Jocko Willink?

  The big, the big beverage empires bought our space for a lot of money.

• 2:24:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:26Jocko Willink?

  Cause they're just, they're, they're big empires.

• 2:24:28Speaker 02

  I get it.

• 2:24:28Jocko Willink?

  They see a rebel threat and they're like, we gotta eliminate this.

• 2:24:31Speaker 02

  Bro, I'll tell you what that's like. I feel like I told you this maybe off.

• 2:24:34Jocko Willink?

  Star Wars, bro, to be honest with you.

• 2:24:35Speaker 02

  Yes, but you know what they did was they pull, you know, like when you do a Google search, right? You do Google, you have all the sponsored ads in front. Doesn't necessarily it's the most appropriate for you. It's just the ones that they paid for.

• 2:24:47Jocko Willink?

  In this case, it's not appropriate for you. It's actually bad for you.

• 2:24:49Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying.

• 2:24:50Jocko Willink?

  They're, they're paying money to poison you.

• 2:24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, they get in front of your eyeballs when you walk in that, in that aisle.

• 2:24:56Jocko Willink?

  We're not down for that.

• 2:24:57Speaker 02

  So just like I said, look down to the right, just like you have to scroll down to maybe the third or fourth option, the real one, the organic, the real one.

• 2:25:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go. So there you go. Uh, you can get it there. Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, Military Commissaries, Hannaford's Dash Stores in Maryland, Wake Fern Shopper, HEB. You know where in HEB going strong? You know where in Meyer, up in the Midwest, or Harris Teeter. I saw someone tweeted, uh, where we, I went to Harris Tweeter. Out of stock. Always bums me out. But it kind of bums me out, but also makes me fired up because that means a bunch of people in there getting it. Get more, we'll send more. Sorry if it's not in stock. Lifetime Fitness, Shields, just went into Shields. Those are some incredible stores. We're in a bunch of small gyms everywhere. That's growing. That's growing. Jiu Jitsu gyms, CrossFit gyms, people that are getting after it in one of those two ways, they want access to the good stuff.

• 2:25:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:25:47Jocko Willink?

  The Jocko Fuel. If you, if you own one of those gyms, if you own a Jiu Jitsu Academy, or you want a CrossFit gym, you can email, or any kind of gym, or any kind of Jiu Jitsu Academy. You don't need to be a victory. It could be any, any kind of gym, any kind of fitness location. Hey, look, it could be a knitting club.

• 2:26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26:06Jocko Willink?

  You know, if you've got knitters that are like, you need to focus during that last little knot that you're tying.

• 2:26:11Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 2:26:12Jocko Willink?

  Knitting clubs, you're welcome into the game. My youngest daughter went through like a knit phase.

• 2:26:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26:17Jocko Willink?

  Bro, knitting is something I can't do. I don't have the attention span. It's, it's a tedious job, knitting. You've seen the two sticks and they're knitting.

• 2:26:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Fully knitting, crocheting. You know what macrame is?

• 2:26:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, all that stuff.

• 2:26:28Speaker 02

  Bro, I did that.

• 2:26:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I did. I made like one knot and it was like throwing it at the wall and stabbing somebody with the needle thing. That's what I'm doing over my life. Hey, no matter what your little club is, if you've got that, you want that wholesale account, go to J F sales at Jocko Fuel dot com. Get yourself some of that. Thank you for the support. Jocko Fuel, growing, taking over. You know why? You make a good product that's clean and people are down for the cause. You, who here is like, oh, I'd really like to go to the store and get some poison for my body. No one's saying that. Look, they might want the, the, the upside. They might want the upside. They don't want the downside, but if there's not that option, they just get what they get. You don't have to do it anymore. People are down. So, let's keep getting after it. Jocko Fuel dot com. Well, that's what we got.

• 2:27:13Speaker 02

  That's true. Also, Origin USA. Hey, talk about supply chains and all this stuff, stuff that you can do. This is another thing you can do. It's a big deal. And man, I, you know how, and I gotta admit.

• 2:27:23Jocko Willink?

  You didn't think it was a patriotic move to buy a pair of jeans.

• 2:27:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:27Jocko Willink?

  You didn't think, you didn't think you were supporting national security to buy a pair of jeans, or to buy an American, you weren't like, oh, I want to help America with its national security today. I'm gonna go buy a Jiu Jitsu gi from Origin USA. You didn't think that. You didn't think the T-shirt was like, oh, now I'm really gonna help out the United States of America and our national security and my children and my grandchildren.

• 2:27:50Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 2:27:51Jocko Willink?

  I cut you off, go ahead.

• 2:27:52Speaker 02

  No, no, no, that that's actually part of what I was gonna say, like you don't realize, I'm with you. But you don't really realize it, you know? And then it kind of, and it stands to reason that after a while, when you think about it, you're like, wait a second. If I go and buy, even this goes for, for the, the, um, like energy drinks, for example. If I go and buy the poison one, or the one that's just readily available without making the effort to look down into the right to see the clean one. Made in America, by the way. And I keep buying that poison one, now it's off the shelf, now the poison producer just produces more. So, you know, so it's like this cycle, you see what I'm saying? And if you don't do the right, in the, in the, in the, in the case of American made, if you don't do that, we don't get that cycle going. And that's kind of what's been happening.

• 2:28:34Jocko Willink?

  No, it's not happening anymore. We're going the cycle in the other direction there, originusa.com, get your hunt gear. Get your, have you seen the RT, have you got an RTX gear?

• 2:28:43Speaker 02

  Oh, I think you might have got some for me today or tomorrow.

• 2:28:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 2:28:47Speaker 02

  I think so. But no, the answer is no.

• 2:28:49Jocko Willink?

  No, no, if I got a box and it came to my house.

• 2:28:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:55Jocko Willink?

  And they didn't put Echo Charles on some shit?

• 2:28:58Speaker 02

  That's yours.

• 2:28:58Jocko Willink?

  That's mine.

• 2:28:59Speaker 02

  All right, yes, sir. All right, well, we got, so we got some, yes.

• 2:29:02Jocko Willink?

  We definitely have some over on my side of the table. The RTX like training, training gear. Uh, it's been a long time coming. This is probably one of the first things I talked to Pete about. You know, we need a quick dry wicking, anti fungal, like all those things. T-shirt now. It took longer. Why? Cause supply chains were jacked up. Because of what you just said. So they're not jacked up anymore. We got you covered. We got the shorts, we got the, the tops, the, the wicking, quick dry, athletic, training, t-shirts. So all that stuff's coming. So stand by to get some of that. That's at originusa.com.

• 2:29:45Jocko Willink?

  America, 100% not made in China. So there you go. What else?

• 2:29:50Speaker 02

  Also Jocko's store called Jocko Store. This is one where, look, we're all in this path. Maybe together, maybe individually, everything.

• 2:29:58Jocko Willink?

  Get an Origin USA rash guard that is made in America, but it's from Jocko Store. That way you get, maybe you might like those designs better.

• 2:30:08Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 2:30:09Jocko Willink?

  You might. Hey, man, you might. Maybe you like the Origin designs. It's cool. You can go there.

• 2:30:12Speaker 02

  It is cool.

• 2:30:13Jocko Willink?

  But you can also go to Jocko Store and get a more of a Jocko design.

• 2:30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a little bit different of a, how should I say this, like the, um.

• 2:30:20Jocko Willink?

  Vibe?

• 2:30:21Speaker 02

  The vibe, the identity, I guess. Maybe that's not the right one, but either way.

• 2:30:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, either way, you're supporting national security in this nation.

• 2:30:30Speaker 02

  It's true. Yeah. So yeah, if you want to represent, discipline equals freedom. If you want to represent good, it's like, it's almost like a very personal element of your thinking on the path. I would say that's the best way to put it as of right now.

• 2:30:42Jocko Willink?

  It's hard to skip a workout when you're wearing a discipline equals freedom T-shirt.

• 2:30:45Speaker 02

  Very hard.

• 2:30:46Jocko Willink?

  Or rash guard.

• 2:30:47Speaker 02

  Very hard.

• 2:30:47Jocko Willink?

  Can be challenging.

• 2:30:48Speaker 02

  Very challenging.

• 2:30:49Jocko Willink?

  I don't recommend it.

• 2:30:49Speaker 02

  That's true. Also, we have the, um, on there, we have the shirt locker, which is the new, uh, design every month, subscription scenario. A little bit.

• 2:30:57Jocko Willink?

  Most recent one seemed quite popular.

• 2:30:59Speaker 02

  Most recent, yeah. I got, yeah, literally got texts and DMs saying like, hey, man.

• 2:31:06Speaker 02

  Just like, just, uh, a very specific request for that design. Okay. Yeah, people seem to like it. It's called the shirt locker. You know, you click on there. But anyway, yes, on JacoStore.com, if you like something, get some.

• 2:31:19Jocko Willink?

  JacoUnderground.com. Go subscribe to that so you can get the, the additional podcast that we do, which is called Jocko Underground. And we talk about subjects that are adjacent to, yet not the same as this podcast. They're a little bit more focused on life.

• 2:31:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:36Jocko Willink?

  A little bit more focused on pragmatic information to utilize immediately without filter.

• 2:31:42Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah, like where it kind of sorted itself out to be straight up every week, life advice from Jocko.

• 2:31:51Jocko Willink?

  That's definitely what it is. And answering questions, which is life advice.

• 2:31:57Speaker 02

  Exactly right. Very elaborate questions, you know, that, that actually do apply to more people than just the person that asked the question.

• 2:32:02Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. JacoUnderground.com. Hey, look, it costs $8.18 a month. That's how we own that platform and we can never be denied our freedom on that platform because it's ours. If you can't afford it, that's okay. Email assistance at Jocko Underground com. That's what we're doing it for. We got a YouTube thing. Subscribe to that. Subscribe to the Origin USA YouTube. See what's going on at Origin USA. Check out the Jocko Fuel YouTube where they're putting longer pieces of content together for you about what's going on there. Flipside Canvas, check out Dakota Meyer stuff to hang on your wall. You're gonna want that stuff on your wall. Books, of course, we got Superpower in Peril by Dave McCormick. You heard some excerpts from it today. Check that out. And then, of course, I wrote a bunch of

• 2:32:47Jocko Willink?

  books, too. I wrote a bunch of books. Go check this, especially the kids book, to be honest with you. You know, like, you, you can impact a child infinitely by getting them these books. I know that because I've gotten thousands of messages, emails, letters about that impact. So if you know any kids, go right now to WarriorKid.com and just order all the books for these kids that you know, and you'll help them all. We also have Eslam Front, which is a leadership consultancy where we solve problems through leadership. Go to EslamFront.com for

• 2:33:25Jocko Willink?

  that. We have live events. We also have an online training academy at ExtremeOwnership.com where we help leaders from all walks of life in every level of leadership, and we help them solve their problems. There's courses you can take. There's live sessions that you can join. That's what we're doing. ExtremeOwnership.com. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And don't forget about Micah Fink. Micah Fink, who right now is sitting beside a river that he

• 2:34:07Jocko Willink?

  just did a seven-minute cold bath in. Now he's reheating his body on a fire that he started with a stick. That's what's happening right now. So check out HeroesAndHorses.org. Once again, if you want to connect with Dave McCormick, Twitter, Instagram, he's at DaveMcCormickPA. And he's also on the web, DaveMcCormickPA.com. I don't know if he's running again.

• 2:34:33Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, kinda sounded like he was leaning.

• 2:34:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:35Jocko Willink?

  He's a guy that's patriotic. He's a guy that wants to help America. He doesn't have to run. I mean, he's obviously in a position in his life where he can kinda do what he wants. But he loves the country. So, that's the type of person that's stepping up. So, check him out. And then, of course, on the interwebs, Echo and I are also there. Echo's at Echo Charles. And I'm at Jocko Willing. Just watch out when you go on there because the algorithm's gonna try and grab you by your ankle and drag you down into the underworld of wasted time and wasted opportunity.

• 2:35:11Jocko Willink?

  Beyond that, uh, once again, thanks to Dave McCormick for joining us. Thanks for sharing your lessons learned. Thanks for your service to our great nation. And also, thanks to all military personnel out there, right now, who are on the front lines. As we speak, keeping evil at bay. We thank you all for standing the watch.

• 2:35:32Jocko Willink?

  And to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, and all first responders. Thank you for keeping evil at bay here at home.

• 2:35:45Jocko Willink?

  And to everyone else out there, to everyone else out there, the world can be a dark place.

• 2:35:56Jocko Willink?

  And you can read about it, and you can watch it on the news. There's a lot of bad things happening in the world.

• 2:36:03Jocko Willink?

  And you can focus on how bad it is, and you can surrender your mind to that darkness.

• 2:36:12Jocko Willink?

  Or you can decide to do something about it.

• 2:36:16Jocko Willink?

  You can decide to make it better. And listen, maybe you can't change the whole world. Maybe you can't change the whole world, but I guarantee you can change your world.

• 2:36:31Jocko Willink?

  You can square your life away. You can get smarter. You can get stronger. You can get faster, healthier.

• 2:36:41Jocko Willink?

  You can get better. You can help your friends. You can help your family. You can help your neighbors across the street.

• 2:36:51Jocko Willink?

  You can clean up your yard. You can repair that fence. You can replace the light in the garage.

• 2:37:03Jocko Willink?

  You can be better.

• 2:37:06Jocko Willink?

  You can make your world better. And when you do that, you make the whole world better. So, don't complain anymore.

• 2:37:17Jocko Willink?

  Don't surrender to the darkness. Instead, go get to work.

• 2:37:26Jocko Willink?

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