419: Training, Discipline, and The Battlefield of Life. With Leif Babin.

How you help people and yourself is to train. Disciplined training will prepare you for almost everything. 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 419 with Kerry Helton and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Kerry. Good evening. And also joining us tonight is Leif Babbitt. Good evening Leif. Good to be here. Right on. Trade at Lieutenant Commander JB is taking command of Trade at from me today 30 September 2010. I would like to thank everyone at Trade at for working so hard to make NSW G1 Trade at deliver the best training in the world. This training has kept many SEALs alive. This training has also directly contributed to the deaths of hundreds of Moog fighters.

• 0:42Jocko Willink?

  Moog fighters that are eager to see our women covered in burkas, our children enslaved, our comrades beheaded, and our way of life destroyed. You now carry the fire. Keep the training hard. Stay focused on our purpose to close with and destroy the enemy. This is our core. This is our religion. Somewhere our enemy is on his knees in a cave in the mountains, cold and hungry, rocking back and forth with an AK-47 in one hand and a tattered copy of the Quran in the other.

• 1:26Jocko Willink?

  He is mumbling a prayer to a god he has twisted into darkness. His AK-47 is clean. He is ready. We are also ready. Our weapons are clean, our tactics solid. We also pray. We pray for toil and chaos and gunfire and violence and blood. We pray for war. Our ritual is preparation. Our ritual is training. Solemn, focused, hard.

• 2:08Jocko Willink?

  We train with intensity and test ourselves mentally and physically. We leave no stone unturned. We tear ourselves apart so we can rebuild ourselves stronger, smarter, tougher.

• 2:24Jocko Willink?

  This is our duty for our nation and for the teams. Hold the torch high and let it burn bright. Let it burn the wretched dying souls of our enemies. Thanks again for your sacrifice and dedication to the teams and our country. Cover and move, simple, prioritize and execute, decentralized command. No fucking slack. Jaco.

• 3:04Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is a note that I wrote to Trade Ed when I was getting ready to retire. And I didn't have a copy of it, but I, I sent it to Leif and he, he had a digital copy. I guess I must've sent it from my work email, which you don't have access to once you retire. And he just sent it to me the other day. And you know, Trade Ed is the group that conducts the advanced tactical leadership training for the SEAL teams. There's one group on the west coast, that's group one, and one group on the east coast, that's group two. And I know that, that note might seem heavy-handed to some of you out there. Some of you understand where it's coming from, some of you might not, but you gotta remember

• 3:48Jocko Willink?

  that was written when we were in the midst of a war. Maybe you could say two wars in two countries. We were fighting a brutal enemy, a savage enemy that tortured, murdered and raped as part of their standard protocol. That's what they did. And we saw that. And additionally, in the SEAL teams and in the military at large, we had lost a lot of friends to this enemy.

• 4:23Jocko Willink?

  And while the message might be hard, I just wanted to make sure I conveyed at the time, the importance of training to everyone at Trade Ed. So that they would understand the importance of their jobs.

• 4:38Jocko Willink?

  And they would take it as seriously as they possibly could. And definitely I heard many times. When guys would come back from deployment, they were so thankful for the training that we put them through. And there's no doubt that they would, it would keep their guys alive. It would prevent blue on blues. It would get guys ready for medical situations, like the training was awesome. And training saves lives. That's what it does. And the importance of training, I actually learned, or I should say I reinforced the importance of training was reinforced to me from a guy by the name of Private First Class PFC,

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  Willie Lump Lump. Remember old Willie Lump Lump? Gonna have to take it to the book, gentlemen. Going a little about face here.

• 5:34Jocko Willink?

  "The fact is, a soldier's response must be automatic and based in a philosophy about killing that simply cannot be taught in a classroom. Kill or be killed. Hands-on training in the control of seasoned, hard-assed NCO can give, can often mean the difference between life and death for a boy on the battlefield. Take the case of Willie Lump Lump, whose tragic story, well-known among my men, went something like this. "After World War II, a boy named Willie Lump Lump enlisted in the army. He went to Fort Benning to take his infantry training, 16 weeks of sweat and tears and lots of punishment to turn him into a hardened soldier.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  Along about the seventh week of training, a sergeant stood up in front of his class and said, 'Gentlemen, I'm Sergeant Slasher, and today I'm going to introduce you to the bayonet. On guard!' With that, the sergeant went into, with that, the sergeant went into the correct stance for holding the bayonet. "On the battlefield," he continued, "you will meet the enemy and there will be times when you will need this bayonet to defeat the enemy, to kill the enemy." Over the next weeks, you'll be receiving a 24-hour block of instruction on the bayonet, and I will be your principal instructor.

• 6:56Jocko Willink?

  Willy Lump Lump went back to the barracks deeply upset. "Man, that was so brutal out there today," he thought. "The war is over. We're living in peace and tranquility, and still the army is teaching us how to use these horrible weapons. Dear Mom," he wrote home. "Today, the sergeant told me he's going to teach me how to use the bayonet to kill enemy soldiers on the battlefield." Willy's mother was shocked. She got right on the phone. "Hello, Congressman Do Good? This is Mrs. Lump Lump, and I want to tell you what's happening down at Fort Benning, Georgia. Here it is, 1949, and they're teaching my baby to kill with a bayonet. It's uncivilized. It's barbaric." The congressman immediately got on the home, got on the horn. "Hello, General Playwright?

• 7:40Jocko Willink?

  General Play it Right at the Pentagon? This is Congressman Do Good. I understand the army is still giving bayonet training." "Yes, we are. Do you think it's a good idea? I don't think it's a very good thing at all. It's even somewhat uncivilized. I mean, really, how many times does a soldier need his bayonet?" "Not very often, sir, it's true. Actually, I was just reviewing the army training program myself, and I was thinking that the bayonet is a pretty obsolete weapon. I agree with you. I'll put out instructions that it's going to stop." The next day, 700 miles away. "Gentlemen, I am Sergeant Slasher. This is your second class on Bayonet Trent."

• 8:20Jocko Willink?

  The sergeant was interrupted by a lieutenant, walking purposely toward him across the training field. "Stand easy, men."

• 8:29Jocko Willink?

  "It's out," the lieutenant whispered. "What?" "It's out," the lieutenant whispered again. The sergeant nodded, his mouth wide open in disbelief. He turned to his class. "Gentlemen, we have to break here. It looks as if bayonet training has been discontinued in the army."

• 8:46Jocko Willink?

  A year later, PFC Lump Lump, the model soldier, deployed to Korea with the 1st Battalion 15th Regiment 3rd Infantry Division. He was standing on a frozen hill and the Chinese were coming at him wave after wave after wave. Willie stood like a rock. Resolutely, he shot the enemy down. Suddenly, he realized he was out of ammunition. He looked at his belt, not a round left. He saw Chinamen rushing toward him. He remembered the first class on bayonet training. He reached down and pulled his bayonet out of his scabbard. Shaking and fumbling, he tried to fit it on the end of his weapon. But by that time, the Chinese soldier was standing over him with a bayonet of his own.

• 9:30Jocko Willink?

  The Secretary of the Army signed his thousandth letter for the day. Dear Mrs. Lump Lump, it is with deep regret, I must inform you that your son, PFC Willie Lump Lump, was killed in Action 27 November 1950.

• 9:45Jocko Willink?

  Heartbroken, Mrs. Lump Lump wrote to some friends of young Willie's in the company. How? Why? Willie wasn't trained, they wrote back. He didn't know how to use his bayonet. Now, Mrs. Lump Lump was not only heartbroken, but outraged. She didn't even bother to call Congressman Do Good. She barged right into his office. Why? She screamed. Why wasn't my son trained for war?

• 10:13Jocko Willink?

  The mythical Willie Lump Lump was my training aide. I used him in every unit I commanded to explain two things to the troops. First, that the training they were about to receive was in their best interests. And second, that the civilian population didn't know diddly squat about the realities of war. Because as much as any other factor, civilian interference was what was leading the post-Korea Army training down the tubes. A few months before my trooper fell out on the beach, there'd been an incident at Paris Island Marine Corps Training Center. A drill sergeant named McKeon

• 10:55Jocko Willink?

  had gotten his 74-man platoon of recruits out of bed for a night march in order, he said, to teach them discipline.

• 11:04Jocko Willink?

  The end result was six dead boots swept down a fast-running creek on the island. McKeon was court martialed and the entire military training system went on trial by the press. Heads rolled on Paris Island as bleeding-heart civilians got on their soapboxes and called for an end essentially to any training that carried with it even the slightest risk of danger. The military overreacted. When Paris Island's commanding general was transferred out of his command, a chill went down the spine of all new-style self-serving commanders I'd met in and since my second tour in Korea, who put their careers above the missions and their men.

• 11:48Jocko Willink?

  But for the grace of God, they thought, and gratefully accepted the new training safety regulations sent down from the top. It was a long, long way down from Blue Devil Day in Gorzia, Italy, then one day each month when all units in the 88th Blue Devil Division were put through the paces. At one of these, I'd be going through bayonet-training drill and managed to vertical butt-stroke my squad leader, who was dancing in front of me, daring me to get him, right in the chops with my M1 rifle. My regimental commander, Colonel Ball, who'd strolled by just as the sergeant fell to the ground in a shower of blood and teeth, hadn't even flinched. "Good work, soldier," he'd said, speaking from experience of three years of the toughest

• 12:31Jocko Willink?

  combat of World War II in Africa, Sicily, and Italy. "Good training." The only way to prepare men for combat is to train them in conditions as close to the real thing as possible. A commanding officer has to be prepared to take his lumps in training. Soldiers cannot be trained in a classroom, then be thrown onto a battlefield and expected to cope. In fighter company, I'd taken my share of wounded in our company in the attack demonstrations, guys hit by shrapnel from a shell landing too close in. But I'd been willing to take that risk because I wanted those people to know what it was like to have a mortar-round slam down in front of them and hear machine-gun slugs snap over their heads.

• 13:14Jocko Willink?

  The average 2% training casualties we had, to my mind, were a small premium for an insurance policy that could cover a whole unit when the real shooting started.

• 13:26Jocko Willink?

  The McKeon case was a terrible tragedy. The sergeant was charged with six counts of involuntary manslaughter, oppression of recruits, and drinking on duty. With the help of powerful testimony from the greatest Marine of them all, Lieutenant General Louis B. Chesty Puller, McKeon was eventually acquitted of the manslaughter and oppression of recruits charges. But the verdict did not calm the fluttering hearts of Colonel Thieson and his ilk. And peacetime Army training continued downhill spiral, the horrible consequences of which would not be seen for another decade.

• 14:09Jocko Willink?

  And of course, that was seen in Vietnam. That's what he's talking about a decade later when soldiers and, and officers weren't trained, not properly trained, and it, and it costs dearly. So, training. That's what we're, uh, that's, that's how we help people. That's how we make people ready to do their job. That's how we prepare them for critical situations. And I, I think a lot of times what, when people think of training, a, a mistake that we make is we think of formal training. We think of training where, uh, okay, we're going to take the next two weeks

• 14:52Jocko Willink?

  or two days or two months and we're going to go through a formal process and we're not going to do any work because we're going to be training. And, and a lot of times that's what people think of when they think of training. And, and obviously I went through a lot of that type of training. Leif, you went through a lot of that type of training because you got a lot of that type of training shoved down your throat at the Naval Academy. I definitely didn't. And there's definitely, there's benefits for it. You get a, you get, you kind of get, I would say a, a foundation from that type of formal training. But to me, the most important type of training that happens is informal training. Training that happens while you're doing your job. I guess the, the common term would be OJT, right? On the job training.

• 15:37Jocko Willink?

  And actually, in the SEAL teams, on the job training was the way everything was trained. When I came in, like for the leadership, there was no leadership. The course that you ran, the junior officer training course, didn't exist. So the officers would just show up to the SEAL team. All they'd done has been through BUDs, like all the other guys. They had, and whatever college they went to, but I, from what I can assess, there's not a, a whole lot of leadership that actually gets absorbed in college. I mean, I, I've never had an officer say to me, oh, I went to this great class and I really, I'm thinking I'm going to do good on this assault because I took this leadership theory class. As, as, well, how much, how much leadership did you get at the academy?

• 16:22Leif Babin?

  We, we took mandatory, uh, you know, you go over to Blue's Hall and take mandatory, uh, leadership, uh, training classes every semester.

• 16:31Leif Babin?

  I, uh, I didn't, I mean, I, I think what I learned a lot from, uh, my time at the Naval Academy was, um, there was a lot of examples of what not to do. You know, there was a lot of, uh, an, an officer or a senior, you know, midshipman who kind of lured it over me or whatever. And I set an example of like, you know what? I want to make sure when I'm a leader that I'm never going to emulate that. There was obviously some great people at the academy and I learned, learned from some, some, some great folks. We had, uh, and there's an orchestrated effort to teach, uh, to teach that. I remember General Krulak coming in as, as the, uh, commander of the Marine Corps and talking about his experience in Vietnam. I mean, there's a number of leaders like that that would come in to talk about their experiences.

• 17:09Leif Babin?

  And I, I think the, the difference though, between when I was going through, uh, the academy, I graduated, I, I went there in 94, graduated in 98, was that there, there just wasn't a real war going on and, and there was a real lack of, I think, actual combat experience. And so I think people trained the best they could and tried to set people up for success. But I think the difference in what your letter is talking about, you know, There and the reason that that was so powerful with me and everybody that read that, which is why I printed it out and and kept it. And the picture of that I sent to you, that that was a hard copy that I printed out. The moment that I got that distributed to me when you you sent it my way and and

• 17:50Leif Babin?

  is that you understand the realities of war and how hard that actually is, which is exactly what that we're talking about. And I think it's super easy for for people to to to lose that that concept of they're thinking, oh, I'm prepared. Oh, I'm ready to go. Oh, I've I've got this figured out until you get thrown into a situation that's overwhelming and totally chaotic and you have no idea what's going on and what the enemy is doing. And I think that's the that's what I love about when you were running training attachment is is it was it was to test people and put them in the worst case scenario that that we could think about so that we could survive that. And it's, you know, as as you instilled in me and everybody that you worked with, that that's the duty of a

• 18:33Leif Babin?

  leader is to make sure that your people are prepared to be able to go out into a realistic scenario that they might encounter and be successful. And of course, on the battlefield, that's, you know, that's that's going out and trying to accomplish your mission and bring all your guys home alive, which is which can be an extremely difficult thing, obviously. So I think it's a it's a good reminder to everybody. And I think that's, you know, going through my time in the academy and my time in the surface fleet, excuse me, before I joined the SEAL teams, I think that's the that's there were a lot of great people that mentored me and passed on some some great lessons learned. But I think really, when we started working together, in in that was my

• 19:16Leif Babin?

  first encounter of it, you had just come back from a whole bunch of combat experience as a platoon commander, and you're talking about lessons that you learned and mistakes that were made and and really analyzing that in great detail and and applying that. And of course, that's exactly what we did when we came back from Ramadi, to take, you know, take over different, you took over training attachment, I took over the junior officer training course to teach the the next generation of SEAL officers going through our training pipeline and to try to set them up for success and and prepare them for these incredibly tough challenges they're going to come up against on the battlefield.

• 19:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I actually I've I've gone and talked at the Naval Academy. I've gone and talked at West Point. I've talked at the Air Force Academy. I've I've so I've been to all them. Am I missing one? I guess the Coast Guard Academy. I haven't been there. Merchant Marine Academy. Merchant Marine Academy. Haven't been there. And I was just out at the Army Navy football game and well, clearly, I mean, those, you know, you go meet all those midshipmen and cadets, they're they're fired up, man. They they want to, they want to learn. They're they're open books. I mean, the amount of them that talk about the podcast, they all listen to the podcast. And but there is a there is a disconnect. And I know that there's leadership classes and, you know, and I know the people that run those leadership classes at both those places.

• 20:32Jocko Willink?

  Or at least I know some of them. And like, they care deeply about training those guys up, which is awesome. And it's appreciated. And they're getting, like I said, they're getting that foundation. But then you've got to at some point, connect the thread between what you learned in the class and what's happening when freaking mayhem breaks out. And if and it takes some time to get to make that connection. And that was cool about like, when I was running trade at they, it wasn't, look, it was hard as hell, but you could, and you saw this when when you went out there with me, especially when you were at Team One in a leadership position,

• 21:14Jocko Willink?

  you could watch the leaders get better. It wasn't like we were just kicking the shit out of them and like, oh, you just suck. No, it was you could watch them learn the techniques, learn the principles, and start to be able to actually lead, no matter what we did to them. And the the another interesting from their viewpoint, a lot of times, it would seem like sometimes that they weren't, they might think that we're just kicking the shit out of them every time. But what they didn't realize until we tell them is like, no, the first operation that you went on, we didn't even do anything. There was no opposing force. All you had to do is go out there and it seemed so crazy. And then the next one, we had one shooter that caused all this chaos and mayhem. The next one, we had two shooters. The next one, we had five.

• 21:59Jocko Willink?

  By the by the last iteration, we had seven or eight guys out there and you guys completely dominated. And there was nothing we could do. There's nothing that the bad guys could do to beat you. To them, a lot of times, it just felt like they were just barely, you know, they're just barely keeping their head above water. But then you'd throw them back into an occasion. We do this, you know, if there was a, if there was a a platoon or a task unit or troop that was sort of starting to maybe get their confidence shook to a point where it's gonna be a problem. We, we would back off a little bit and let them go out there and and, and really knock one out of the park and be like, oh yeah, I got this. And then they'd go, oh. They'd realize that we hadn't done as much to them and they realized that they were getting better. So I, i- it's not that when you're in a leadership position, your

• 22:43Jocko Willink?

  goal is not to just kick the shit out of people and make them fall apart. That's not the goal. In fact, the goal is to do, is to make them like uncomfortable and maybe barely, maybe they just don't get there. Uh, you know, for example, if it's a runtime, right? You want them to just barely pass the run. And actually, sometimes you want them to just barely fail the run. You want them, if they gotta run it in 32 minutes, you want them to get a 3203. So they know like, okay, I gotta run as fast as I can. Next time, you want them to get a a 28, whatever, 20 or 31 52. So, and then what do you do? You tighten the parameters. That's what happened in SEAL training. First phase, you gotta do it in 32 minutes. The four mile timed run. Second phase, you gotta do it in 30 minutes.

• 23:29Jocko Willink?

  Third phase, you gotta do it in 28 minutes. So that's what we would do. We would continually ramp up the pressure. And actually, the way I, the way I explained it to the trade at guys and to the, to the troops too. I'd say we are going to compress the space-time continuum. Because if I get, like, if you're a platoon commander and I give you one problem now, and then 45 minutes later, I give you another problem in a different location on the battlefield, and then 45 minutes after that, I give you one more problem. So you had three problems. And you would address those problems and solve them. It probably wouldn't be that hard for you. You know, you're a new platoon commander. Then the next night, I would compress the time and compress the space. So maybe you'd get

• 24:11Jocko Willink?

  one, and then as that one's getting wrapped up, I'd give you another one. And then as that one's getting wrapped up, I give you another one. And so now you can start to feel it. You can see it's so clear. We'd compress that time-space continuum. And then guess what? By day five, day six of field training exercises, it's seven problems and they're all happening at the same time in the same space. And so what people need to learn how to do is they need to learn to parse those problems out. This is called prioritize and execute, by the way. They need to figure out how to figure out what those problems are, pull them apart and then address them separately and then they'll be able to accomplish that. And the strange thing is, that's a skill and it's a skill that you can learn.

• 24:53Jocko Willink?

  And once you learn that skill, you can get really proficient at it and then seven problems all at the same time, what it feels like, it feels like seven problems. You separate them in your mind in time and space and you're okay. And that's what our goal was. So we got to see this.

• 25:13Jocko Willink?

  And the thing about the, the informal training, so when you and I went through training together, our, our workup, the amount of instruction that you got from the cadre was probably very small. Now, look, did they give you tactical instruction about, hey, Leif, you know, put your sight picture over here or hey, you might want to put this gear over here or hey, when you enter the room, think about this. Like they're definitely, and that's what the cadre was doing. But the vast majority of the training was, was informal training from me, from Tony, from guys that were like, hey, we've been doing this for a long time. Like I had a very lucky situation where I've been doing this for 15 years and you'd been doing it for two. So for me to say, hey,

• 25:58Jocko Willink?

  what were you thinking about in that scenario? And you're like, I was thinking about kicking their ass. I'm like, Leif, I love the fact that you want to kick their ass. But you got 16 guys in the platoon. All 16 of them, if all 16 of them are thinking about kicking their ass and no one's thinking about what you're going to, where you're going to go when you get done kicking their ass.

• 26:15Jocko Willink?

  You'd be like, got it. And it's so obvious. And all you had to do is just take a step back and next thing you know, you're moving forward. So that informal training is what people can do all the time. And it doesn't matter what your business is. If you're a police officer, if you're a firefighter, if you're a salesperson, if you're a construction business, if you're a manufacturing business, it doesn't matter. There is, what you can do is you can utilize what's happening in your business, what's happening in your world to actually train people. And if you do this, it takes a little bit of investment. It's a little bit of investment. So if, if Leif is your, if you're a

• 26:55Jocko Willink?

  project manager on this construction site and you just showing up here, sure, I can say, okay, Leif, here's the timeline that we're going to do. Well, here's the timeline we're going to follow. And you go, okay, thanks, boss. And you just start following the timeline. What did you learn from that? You didn't learn anything. But if I say, hey, Leif, here's the project. Come up with a timeline. And now you actually have to think. And look, what are you, how good are you going to do? You just got out of college or whatever. You've never done it before. You're not going to do great. Maybe you get, if it was a graded test, you'd probably get a 50 or 40 because you know, you saw some of it in, in school and you did that one internship. So you get, maybe you get a 50%, maybe you get a 60%.

• 27:31Jocko Willink?

  But you, but now you do it. And now I sit you down like, hey, concrete, you can't do, you can't double it up like this. And by the way, if you order your wood here, you're not going to have it here in time. Lumber's got to get. And you go, okay, cool. Got it. And you're taking notes. We do, we do another project next time. You do the same thing again. Now you get an 85%. And so in a couple of projects, instead of you just maintaining the level of a get knocking a 40, getting that 40, now you go 70, 90. And, and next thing you know, you're doing it and, and very shortly you'll be doing it better than I can because you're there on the job and I'm now, you know, managing and doing emails instead of doing timelines.

• 28:11Jocko Willink?

  So doing those kinds of things and as a, as a leader in an organization, taking the opportunity to say, hey, go ahead and figure out how you want to, what's the sales pitch you're going to use? What, what are you going to do? Here, pitch me. Well, a little seven minute role play. If we're in the sales industry. So doing that and letting that happen and making those investments is, that is how you build a team. That's how you do it. If you don't do it.

• 28:39Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna end up stuck in your position, whatever it is.

• 28:42Leif Babin?

  I think the biggest resistance to that too is that people think they're good to go. They totally think they're good to go.

• 28:49Leif Babin?

  Just like if you'd asked me as young Lieutenant LaFebvre and Charlie Platoon Commander tasked in a bruiser before we deployed to Ramadi, if, you know, was I ready for some tough urban combat? And I'd be like, totally good to go. You know, are you gonna get in a friendly fire situation? Never happened to us. That happens to losers who don't know how to plan and execute missions. So I think people think they're good to go and oftentimes, and we see that where someone where there's in the construction world or companies we're working with that, you know, that you got these young people coming here and they think they know everything. But one thing you did a good job of was just, you just, you let us brush up against the guardrails of failure and it opened our minds.

• 29:31Leif Babin?

  And, you know, particularly what stands out to me is I remember when we were going, doing our immediate action drills in tasking a bruiser with me and Seth Stone, the Delta Platoon Commander, we're going out into the desert and we're running with our platoons, doing our immediate action drills, which is like a playbook for, like a play you'd run in football, you know, or basketball, when you get shot at, so react to contact drill. And you said, how are you guys doing with your IATs, immediate action drills? How do you guys feel about it? How do you feel about your IATs? And we were like, we're good to go. And you didn't be like, you knuckleheads don't, you think you get it all figured out? You don't have one platoon under your belt. You're not as good as you think. You didn't say any of that. You just said, okay. And so we went out and we ran some immediate action drills and we were not exactly good to go.

• 30:15Leif Babin?

  And we, we got our butts handed to us and we're like, man, this is, we don't know as much as we think we do. I think we came, we both were kind of like talking about it on the way back from the, you know, out of the training range. And so we come back and I remember going up to you like, hey, Jaco, let's talk to those immediate action drills. And so now our minds are open. Now we went, you know, stood around the whiteboard, we're talking about, okay, if you get attacked from this direction, now what do you do? We start just making those calls, role playing the scenarios. And that's that informal training you're talking about, but it's so hard to do that because it's real easy. It would've been super easy for you. You had a ton of experience, you've been in the teams for a long time, you're an enlisted SEAL and, and you just come back from a significant combat appointment, you had a bunch of experience and you could have easily said like,

• 31:01Leif Babin?

  You guys don't know what you're talking about. You know, a couple of new guys, one between wonders. And our minds would have been closed, would have been defensive, but wouldn't have been open to that. So that was always a powerful thing. And that indirect approach that you always took with us. The other thing that stands out to me too is, you know, oftentimes, uh, the training, training standards going through training, our, our SEAL instructor cadre that put us through training, we were going through our workup cycle and tasking a bruiser was outstanding and they pushed us hard and, and they certainly taught us a lot. Uh, and put us in some challenging training scenarios. But I remember several times, whether we were out in, in the desert, going through our land warfare block, or going through our, our close quarters combat, uh, block in, in, in urban, you know, combat training scenario. And them saying, hey, you guys are good to go.

• 31:46Leif Babin?

  You're good to go. And I remember you pulling me and Seth aside and saying, hey, what do you guys think? Do you think we're ready for the worst case scenario?

• 31:55Leif Babin?

  And, and I, I mean, I'm, look, we're tired, guys want a break, you know, we've been training hard. It's, it's, I don't know anybody that did that was like, oh yeah, no, we're going to do it again. Training detachment instructors just said, we're good to go. We can take you back to the camp. And, and, and when you asked me that question, I mean, we kind of looked at each other and like, I don't think so. I think, I think we need to do, let's do a couple more runs. And that, that was always like, let's do, let's do one more run. Let's do two more runs. And we would, we would do extra training just based on the scenario. And I think you, you kept us focused on just like that letter, which is thinking about that strategic, what, what is your enemy doing right now? What is the worst case scenario that you're going to be up against? Who's that hardcore fighter that's training and preparing for you right now?

• 32:39Leif Babin?

  Um, and so I think when we thought about that, it's real easy to lose sight of that. You know, whether you're a police officer thinking, you know, you're, well, what's the worst case scenario? Hey, I, I haven't encountered the worst case scenario yet. So, um, or whether you're, you know, on a construction site, I haven't encountered that worst case scenario. So maybe it won't happen and that complacency starts to creep in. So I think that kept us focused on, hey, are we ready for that? And I think when you're a leader and you're thinking about what is that worst case scenario? Are we actually prepared for that? If you can't answer that question, the affirmative, then that's, you're failing your team. You're failing as a leader. And I think that's, that is really the, the solemn duty of leaders, right? Is to train and, and prepare people

• 33:22Leif Babin?

  uh, for that worst case scenario so they can go out and be successful. And I think those questions to us, when you asked them, I mean, there's, I couldn't be like, yeah, we're good to go. I'm like,

• 33:31Leif Babin?

  Man, because what's the harm in training too hard? Well, you know, and I know you got pushed back sometimes when you were running training detachment. Well, this training, we're training for this crazy scenario all the time. And I remember those discussions, you're like, look, if it's not that hard and you don't lose a bunch of guys on target.

• 33:49Jocko Willink?

  Cool.

• 33:50Leif Babin?

  It's super easy. Wow. Training was way harder than actual combat operations. But if it's the reverse of that situation is horrible, right? We were not prepared and you know what? We got a bunch of guys killed and we weren't able to accomplish our mission because we didn't train hard enough. We didn't, we didn't hold the standard high enough.

• 34:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The, going a little bit, rewind a little bit, talking about this idea. So we're doing these immediate action drills and we have our whole task unit. So there's 35, 40 guys in the task unit. And they're, we're going to go out and we're going to get into a contact, so an enemy engagement, which these targets pop up. And then we start to shoot at these targets. And then we as leaders have to maneuver these, these troops around the battlefield to either break contact and get away from these enemy targets. Or we can assault those enemy targets and take them out.

• 34:54Jocko Willink?

  And so it's at nighttime, you have 40 people with, in a bunch of different locations. They've got machine guns, they've got grenades, they've got rocket launchers. There's a lot of things going on. There's a lot of chaos going on. And it can be really hard to manage and really hard to control. And really hard in some cases to even understand what's happening. So you guys were doing it in your platoons. So before everyone does it together, your platoon is doing it. And then Seth's platoon will do it. So now you only got whatever 16 guys. It's a little bit easier to control because there's only 16 guys. But same thing, live fire, start going nighttime.

• 35:39Jocko Willink?

  People have grenades, you got to clear back blast for rockets. There's a lot of things that are going on. And you guys, you know, I'd asked you prior to going out, like, how are you guys with I-ads? And you guys both were like, oh, we're kind of good to go, you know? Hell, yeah, right? And then you went out and, you know, I was, I was now watching your platoons do it. And I could see that, you know, I could see like, oh, these guys are going to need some help. And actually, when you talked about me being just coming back from a platoon commander tour and done a bunch of real old missions, that's not where I learned how to do that shit. I, well, thank God, was at SEAL Team One. I was an enlisted guy. I did three platoons. I did all those workups, but then I went to training department. I went to the training cell at SEAL Team One.

• 36:23Jocko Willink?

  So I went out and watched people do I-ads. And I went out and really learned what worked and what didn't work and what it looked like from a detached position. So now, when you guys come back and you're like, hey, you know what? Let's go through this stuff. Let's, let's, let's go through this. And so what we did was, and I, like, what, you know, those movies where the person's like, uh, we could use this, and they present it immediately? So you're, you guys are like, oh, I think we need some help. Oh, I happen to have magnets for the magnet board with like the different, you know, squad one, squad two, squad three, squad four. I happen to have these. Let's just break these down when we start to. So we just draw some basic terrain up on the, on the whiteboard and take these magnets, set them up in patrol order.

• 37:07Jocko Willink?

  And it's like, all right, we get contacted from the front. And we had the, the fire team leaders in there as well. All right, what's the call? Boom. And I probably made the call, you know, strong ride or whatever the call was. Where do you go? Where do you go? And people start moving their magnets on the board. Now, what's amazing about this? What's amazing about this is probably for the first time in your life, you saw an immediate action drill from a detached perspective and saw what it looked like from the equivalent of 5,000 feet and saw it like a chessboard. I mean, what does a chessboard look like if you're on the chessboard? You might not even be able to see where the queen is and where the rook is. If you're a pawn that's behind the knight, you can't even see it.

• 37:49Jocko Willink?

  Well, when you're out in the desert and your, your mind is, I'm behind this berm and I'm, there's, I can't see because the, the flash of, of the M60 that's going off right next to me, or there's a flare in the sky that just went out. Now I lost my night. There's all this stuff that's happening. And when you're in it, you can't, it's very difficult to see it. So once you see it, once you're thinking about it from altitude and you're like, oh, Oh, when I'm moving my fire team over here, I need to make sure I make enough dead space so that these other guys can shoot. And you're looking at it from a elevated position. And now you're detached. And what it does is it, it now takes that classroom of, hey, this is an IAT, and this is what you're supposed to do, to when you're in the field, and you're like, wait a second, this didn't look like what it, what it was in the classroom.

• 38:34Jocko Willink?

  But now you're thinking through it. It kind of connects that line between what was going on in the classroom and what's going to go on in the field. And now, when you go out, you understand it so much more clear. And I got this from, there was a Australian SAS guy that was at SEAL Team One when I was there. And he put me through one workup, and then we had another Australian guy, and they had these little, um, they would make these kits, these little kits with a, and I remember it was in a secret box. You know what a secret is?

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Negative.

• 39:06Jocko Willink?

  It's like a breath, like a sore throat thing, little tin box, like Altoids. You know the Altoids thing, right? So these guys would have in their Altoid secret box back in the day. But this guy broke it out. Now, this is when I was a new guy, broke it out. And inside that thing, he had like, a couple pieces of ribbon. He had these little, uh, pieces of wood. One of them was a square, one of them was a circle, one of them was a triangle. And then there was a bunch of little ones that were almost like a direction, like almost like an arrow. And so, what he could do is, right there, oh, we got a brief permission, oh, pull out the secret box, here's a road, that's a piece of ribbon, here's a square, that's a target, here's these little arrows, these are our guys.

• 39:47Jocko Willink?

  And all of a sudden, you could give your squad or your platoon a visual at altitude of what this is going to look like. And it was, it was, for me, the first time I saw that, oh, I, it made such good connections for me. And maybe that's that whole thing of, you know, there's auditory learners, visual learners. Well, I think most people are some kind of combination of the three. What's the other one? Auditory?

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Tactile.

• 40:12Jocko Willink?

  Tactile. So tactile might not come into play too much here, but listening and seeing, those definitely come into play. And if you can give someone both those things, all of a sudden, you're covering a lot of ground in the, in the brain housing group. So we have a much better understanding of what's happening. So. I saw that. And then when I was in training cell as an E5 mafia member, I was in there, I was like, oh, I can, I can watch someone, hey, wait, hold on, let me, let me, let me show you what this is supposed to look like from an elevated position, instead of being like, dude, you, you moved to the wrong spot. Okay, well, they, I told them they moved to the wrong spot, but it's so out of context when you're on the ground, you don't see the big picture. But when someone says, hey, here's

• 40:55Jocko Willink?

  a piece of ribbon, this is the road that you're supposed to be crossing, here's where the enemy was, and they see it, here's where you were, and they see it, here's where the other guy was, and they say, because they didn't know where that other guy was, they didn't know, didn't make sense to them. So, when you can do that, when you can, when you can bridge the gap between what's real and what's classroom, there's like, usually in most cases, there's some kind of intermediate step that you can show someone that will help them to understand what's happening. So, when I think back to, and actually Seth, when we got done with that, he's like, I never knew what was happening. He was, he'd already done a whole platoon. And he goes, I never understood what was happening during IAS. He literally said that.

• 41:36Jocko Willink?

  And he, you know, he's humble to a fault, but he's also, he, he was just like, I never understood what was happening during IAD, and now I get it. It was, it was that much of a, of a game changer for Seth to see that on a whiteboard, think through it, move his piece, other guy move his piece, you move your piece, Seth goes, okay, everyone's moved, it's my turn to move, here's what, yep, that's what you should do. He looked at me and said, I've never understood an IAD before. You know what, I was just, I was just kind of breaking this down in my mind about why that was helpful, because there's no question, you're, you're 100% right, it gives you, from altitude, you can see it. But we actually had a playbook, you know, we had a whole playbook of, of these, like, I think they were in PowerPoint, and so it's like, and so a couple, I think there's two things that I think in my mind,

• 42:19Jocko Willink?

  one is, it was daunting, because there's, there is a playbook of like 100 different things, and so it's, oh, I gotta memorize all this stuff.

• 42:26Leif Babin?

  And so you kind of broke it down of like, look, you're either going to assault or you're going to break contact. You're either retreating if, hey, we encountered, you know, we only have 30 of us and there's 200 enemy fighters, we're going to break contact, we're probably going to pull back, call in an airstrike. Or, hey, we think we can win this, this fight, we're going to assault forward. So then, and that, that broke it down and made it, it simplified it so we could better understand it. We're either, we're going to move right or left. We're going to, we're going to use cover and move. There's going to be a base of, that's laying down fire while another unit's going to maneuver either forward or back. And I think just breaking, just simplifying it all down. So it wasn't this like, oh, if this happens, I have to do this. And memory, it's overwhelming to try to memorize all these different plays. And then secondly,

• 43:10Leif Babin?

  even though that's an overhead view, when you're looking at it on like a PowerPoint presentation, is not, it's not dynamic.

• 43:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you don't have to think about what's happening.

• 43:19Leif Babin?

  And so that's, that's what I think opened my mind too, is we're looking at these magnets is, because now, instead of just, oh, okay, strong right means, these guys are going to go to the right. But we're doing it with, now you're going to, you're drawing up terrain, you're talking about like, okay, if there's a terrain feature between us, do I want to go all the way over there? Well, I can't see these guys and they can't see me. You know, I need to make some adjustments. So you realize that there's flexibility in this as well. Instead of just this, oh, no, I know I have to go to the right, I'm going to maneuver whatever distance, you know, is specified in the, in the, in the PowerPoint presentation. So those two things, I think, one, the simplification of it, so it's not just memorize all these things. It's actually fairly a simple concept. You're going forward, you're going back, you're

• 44:04Leif Babin?

  going right, you're going left. It's all cover move. That's the only tactic as you, as you broke down, you know, for us. And then, and then that it's dynamic and how, how you can take this play and make adjustments for the terrain, make adjustments for the enemy being in two different locations. And, and that just opened up the, our minds, I think, to like, okay, now I can apply this in the real world.

• 44:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. The, the fact that you have to use your brain, because you're right, there was like, there was existing PowerPoints. I don't even know if we made our own. We probably did. I was probably the type of dude that was like, yeah, we're going to make all these things. But there's, so you look through the PowerPoints, but it's like,

• 44:44Jocko Willink?

  When you, when you memorize a phone number, if you look at the phone number and you just type it in over and over and over again, and you just look at it every single time, you won't memorize it. If you don't look at it and you try and remember, that's how you memorize things, right? So when you're looking at the play and you're like, okay, if this happens, I go there. And there's 90 of them. You're not going to be able to remember any of them. And, and so that's huge. And yeah, the simplification of, listen, here's the thing. If you're moving, someone's got to cover you. If you do that, we're going to be okay. Like, that's it. If, if someone is putting down cover fire, the other people can move. If no one's putting down cover fire, you, you can't move. And that means someone's got to get in a position where they can put, put down cover fire.

• 45:26Jocko Willink?

  And, and that's another thing I talked about was like Seth, he thought that, you know, in the pictures, it looks like it's 10 yards back. And he'd be like 10 yards back because that's the standard operating procedure. And I'd be like, bro, can you see anything right now? He's like, well, no, there's a burn there. And I'm like, okay, well, move up the burn so you can see what's going on. And, and telling him, you can go where, you can actually go, look, can you go ahead of the firing line? No, you can't. Can you go into pre-designated dead space where you might get shot by your own guys? No, you can't. But you know, the parameters that you're allowed to maneuver within, then you should maneuver there. And that's good. So the, like you pointed out, the flexibility, and I, I think you guys both probably had a pretty rigid mindset. Not recognizing how much flexibility, especially as a person in a leadership position.

• 46:10Jocko Willink?

  Because look, the 60 gunner, you, you kind of need to know where he's going to be. And he's got tighter parameter. The, the guys that are setting the doors or setting the dead space, they got to have a tighter parameter. But as a leader, man, you can go wherever you got to go to make things happen. And I think that was very liberating for both of you guys. And, and also the attitude of, you know, a lot of times like, hey, shut up and you're not, you shut up and do what you're told to do. That doesn't help. That, that's the opposite of training your leaders. And, you know, we, we had that one event that we were at where I was like, you guys had been trained not to lead. And you and I was, I kind of felt bad saying it and you, you got up to like, no, a hundred percent. When you were in your first platoon, you got trained not to lead.

• 46:53Jocko Willink?

  Hey, stay over there. You'll be told what to do. You take the, the huts report, you stand by to, it was like a lot of don't lead. And what's crazy about this is, you know, I, I, I'd had like offline conversations with like a platoon chief. And they'd be like, well, you're, you're sitting here telling the officers to lead. And I'm like, hey, um, listen to what I'm saying. I'm not just telling the officers to lead. I'm telling the machine gunners to lead. I'm telling the point man, I want everybody to lead. That's what they should be doing. Everybody should be doing this. And, and so don't get into a hissy fit. Because it's like, oh, well, shouldn't the platoon chief have the tactical save what's happening? Hundred percent. Yeah, that's what I'm relying on. That's what I want. I want my platoon chief to handle what's happening. That's, that's what I'm saying. He's a tactical expert. He's making things happen, of course.

• 47:39Jocko Willink?

  Well, why are you telling the officer to lead? Well, what do you want the officer to do? Don't you want to, the officer to figure out where you're going next? Don't you want him to figure out where fires should come in from? Don't you want him to figure out where Casavax should, should land? Or are you going to do all these things yourself? Cause you can't. And we all know you can't. It doesn't matter how good you are. You need help. We need help. So I had a lot of those conversations. And then this is the other thing. And this is true with, with all these opportunities that you have in whatever business you're in.

• 48:08Jocko Willink?

  Is you, you, it's an opportunity to train a team to work together and solve problems. And, and that's what, you know, I was talking to some, a, a unit the other night. And we were talking about training and I said, when you, when you're doing these big training exercises, look, are they going to be, are they going to match the scenario that you're going into? And the answer is, they might. When, when I had Bobby Holland on, we did, we did, uh, I forget what the exact numbers, but we did over a hundred urban, over sniper Overwatch operations in the battle over Mahdi. And, and I was like, Bobby, do you remember how many we did in workup? And he's like, he kind of got the puzzled look on his face. Like it's a trick question. It is a trick question.

• 48:54Jocko Willink?

  The answer is zero. We did zero urban Overwatch training missions in our workup. But what did we do? Luckily we are SEALs, so our careers and our training is meant to train you to look at a problem.

• 49:11Jocko Willink?

  Apply the principles that we have and solve the problem. So we hadn't done urban sniper, kind of offensive sniper overwatches where the intent was to kill bad guys. But what had we done? Well, we'd done rural hide sites to set up and observe targets. Okay, well, that, okay, well, how do you do that? Well, you got to set security. You got to find a good position. We have a good line of sight. You got to have a defensible position. So we just took all those things and just applied them to an urban environment where we're going to set ourselves up not to watch what's happening, but to engage enemy. And so we make these like adjustments to it. And now all of a sudden we're, we're doing an operation that we really hadn't done in training.

• 49:54Jocko Willink?

  But we got it done and we did a lot of them. Same thing when you guys did the PSD mission. That, I mean, did you guys get any pre-deployment PSD? We guys, you guys might've gotten some because it was already a running mission.

• 50:04Leif Babin?

  Yeah, the previous, we, we did in just, just a couple of weeks of it.

• 50:08Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 50:08Leif Babin?

  Right before we left. And they just based on some feedback and we were kind of scrambling to make that happen. But the, the, the guys that took over the mission had nothing. They just jumped right into it.

• 50:18Jocko Willink?

  So here they get hit with this no fail mission guarding the, what, seven, top seven?

• 50:25Leif Babin?

  Five.

• 50:25Jocko Willink?

  Top five government officials in Iraq that are the, most likely the biggest targets in the world, like.

• 50:33Leif Babin?

  Two of them had been assassinated over the previous weeks.

• 50:36Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. These guys had targets on their, on their fronts, their backs, their sides, their heads and everywhere else. And SEALs get tasked with, you need to prevent them from dying. You need to protect them. SEALs hadn't done that mission. Look, did it, like I did it when I was at Team Two. We did like a little, a little training in it. You know, we had some guy, we worked with the Secret Service. They gave us, you know, so guys had some idea. But essentially as a big unit doing that kind of mission sustained, SEALs hadn't done that before, hadn't trained for it. But we're SEALs. We take, we look at the mission. We say, okay, these are the principles that we have. We apply our principles to the mission with an open mind.

• 51:16Jocko Willink?

  And we figure out how to solve it. So that's what we learned how to do. And that's what our training is. And even going back to, to BUDs. And I, I'm guilty of always saying like, oh, you don't learn anything in BUDs. You, you know, it's just a, a suck fest and you just learn how to not quit. But. What you do learn is like mayhem. And how do you get through mayhem? How do you control your emotions? How do you look at these problems? Cause like it's an unsolvable problem. Right? When you, when you're, you, you would know this better than me because I was a freaking E3 in BUDs and I had no responsibilities. You were a class leader in BUDs.

• 51:57Jocko Willink?

  But when you have, you know, nine boat crews of seven guys each. And there's freaking artillery simulators going off, machine guns. It's dark out and there's total mayhem going on and they're getting, they're literally getting told to go in a bunch of different directions. And then they come to you and they're like, Lieutenant Babin, what's the headcount? Like, that's a big problem and you gotta figure it out. And you will learn to adapt and you'll learn how to be like, okay, I've lost control. What I need to do to get back. So our whole existence, and, and again, you know, you want to tie this back to the Navy? Just to the Navy, let's go full Ben Milligan at this point? And go roots of the Navy?

• 52:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, when you're on a ship in whatever, 1873 and you're out patrolling somewhere and all of a sudden your mast breaks, what do you do? There's no help. There's no radio. You can't call anybody. What do you do? You figure shit out. And, and so we become very self-sufficient. We also become, it's in our, it's in our blood and it's in our heritage to look at a problem and figure out how to solve it. And that is an important part of training that when you're raising people up, you want to not just spoon feed them. Going back to the timeline, the, the worst thing to do is, hey, Leif, here's the project. Here's the timeline I want you to follow. I've given you nothing. I've helped you zero in your life.

• 53:23Jocko Willink?

  But to say, hey, Leif, here's the project, come up with a timeline. And we do that in a bunch of little different spaces over time. And eventually you're better than I am. And now I can go up to the next level and start doing the next job. So in order to do that,

• 53:42Jocko Willink?

  you, you really have to, in your organization, make training a part of the culture. The culture of the organization. That's what you have to do. Training and creating leaders has to be inherent in your culture. And cultures, uh,

• 54:00Jocko Willink?

  Culture is a huge, culture is really the essence of an organization, right? If you don't have, if you don't have a good culture, you're not going to have a good organization. It's funny when you were telling my daughter this morning, we were kind of talking about this beforehand and, and you were telling her about, uh, you're like, yeah, when your dad changed our name because we were talking, we're sitting around talking about, uh, culture and leadership with my daughter. That's what happens. And Leif's like, uh, you know, when your dad said, hey, we're, we're not tasking a Bravo anymore. We're tasking a Bruiser. He, and Leif's like, you know, at first we were kind of like, what, what is this all about? And he's like, 24 hours later, we're like, we're Bruiser.

• 54:39Jocko Willink?

  It was all, it was immediate. But, and then she was like, she goes, oh, you did that? And I was like, yeah, I did that. They don't know what the hell's going on. They're like, oh, you were in the Navy? I was like, yeah, I was in the Navy. So when, whenever I think about culture, and this is one of the topics that you were, you were talking about, uh, that you mentioned, you thought it would be good to cover because we, we always get asked about culture. Few components that I think about when I think of culture, um, in order to build a good culture, we talk about them a lot at Echelon Front, but setting a good example, making sure that you explain the history and you propagate the story of the organization.

• 55:20Jocko Willink?

  You have material items like, um, uh, you know, this is patches and that type of thing. Rewarding good behavior. And I don't like to use this word because it's extreme, like penalize bad behavior. That doesn't, but so I usually say mitigate bad, bad behavior.

• 55:43Jocko Willink?

  And then the last one, which I added, I was, I was thinking about this yesterday. Language. Language becomes culture. So I want to go through a couple of these things. Uh, the one I want to start with is from About Face. I just want to read this little chunk from About Face, if you guys don't mind. It's a good book from what I, from what I can tell. If trust troops were proud, and they were, and if trust troops were disciplined, and they most certainly were, then I and our trust troops were the proudest of the proud, the most disciplined of the disciplined. Our platoon sergeant, Steve Prezanka, was the ultimate taskmaster.

• 56:23Jocko Willink?

  He quickly became my mentor and my hero, the one I wanted to be like when I grew up and had a whole bunch of stripes of my own. Guided by his firm hand, the I and R platoon was an outstanding unit, without a doubt, the best in the regiment. "If you learn it right, you'll do it right for the rest of your life," Prezanka would growl as the endless repetition of one thing or another began to take its toll on his charges. "If you learn it wrong, you'll do it wrong, and you'll spend the rest of your life trying to learn how to do it right." Thanks to him, we learned it right first time around. We learned about weapons, our enemies, how to disassemble ours and our enemies, how to disassemble, assemble, and fire them. We spent days training in the woods, learning about camouflage, woodcraft, creeping, scouting, and observing.

• 57:07Jocko Willink?

  We became experts in what Prezanka called snooping and pooping, all under his watchful eye. We had an hour's close order drill every day, using the drills of the 30s. And if Prezanka didn't like the way we did them, he turned back to the old field manual which he read, "Close order drill is the foundation of all discipline." And throw another hour's worth on top of us. Holding a 9.5-pound M1 rifle at right shoulder arms isn't exactly a breeze at any time, and often by that, by the time Sergeant got through to us, our right hands would be locked stiff in the M1 grip position for hours, somehow not getting the word that the weapon wasn't there anymore. The importance of close order drill could not be overestimated.

• 57:47Jocko Willink?

  The discipline instilled was that which would maintain order in a chaotic battlefield. "You're in a life or death situation out there," Prezanka would say. "When you hear an order, you don't respond in 10 seconds or 10 minutes, you respond now." Unless you get, unless you want to get yourself or your buddy blown in half. And don't, and I don't want any of this Simon Says shit either. When I move, move. When I say move, move. When I say stop, stop. When I say knock out that machine gun, you knock out that machine gun. I don't want you to think about it, just do it. Prozenka made out the training schedule. We marched to the tune he played and loved him for

• 58:27Jocko Willink?

  it. He commanded our respect effortlessly, it seemed. He was 22 years old and he'd been through it all. Dude, that's so crazy, right? He'd been through it all. An I R man from basic training onward, he'd been with the 28th Bloody Bucket Division I R in World War II and was captured after a painful cat and mouse game with the Nazis deep behind shattered US lines during the Battle of the Bulge. He was just a total pro. The finest, fairest platoon sergeant who ever came down the track, who knew as much about soldiering as an Alabama Bible bashing preacher knows about the good book. He could double time 10 miles first thing in the morning regardless of what he drunk the night before. Sometimes he'd come roaring into our barracks at 0500,

• 59:12Jocko Willink?

  still loaded to the eyeballs from a wild night, partying, shouting, "Out of those sacks, boys! Let go of your cocks and grab your socks. It's time to go for a run!" And off we'd go.

• 59:26Jocko Willink?

  So...

• 59:31Jocko Willink?

  You know, he starts that off by saying, "He became my mentor and hero, the one I wanted to be when I grew up." So that's what we have. When I talk about setting an example, when you have people, when you want to create a culture inside your organization, you do it by setting the example. And if you're not setting the example, you're... Well, let me rephrase that. Whatever example you set, that is going to influence the culture. That's going to become the culture. What you got?

• 1:00:02Leif Babin?

  Yeah, I was just thinking about, you know, you asked like what I learned at the Naval Academy and earlier and I learned a lot from a lot of great, wonderful people and they taught me how to take care of my people and they taught me about what my role as an officer was and we learned a lot about administrative duties and, you know, how to navigate ships and set up...

• 1:00:23Leif Babin?

  Set up, set up stakes, you know, in foxholes at Quantico to mark your, your, you know, firing positions. But I think the, what's interesting about this, you know, I think the, is pushing the standard high from someone who was at the Battle of the Bulge, you know, who is, who experienced the worst possible combat scenario you could be a part of. And I think realizing that, man, I'm not, I'm not taking care of my people if I don't get them, you know, ready for that. And I, I think that was the thing, you know, just grow, just coming up in the peacetime Naval Academy and the fleet beyond that. And then as I went through training, I, I don't think a single of my BUDS instructors had any kind of combat

• 1:01:07Leif Babin?

  experience when I was going through. I mean, we, I got picked up for, you know, September 2001, and then I went through training in 2002. And they were great people and they, they taught me and, and pushed me. But I think that level of, of recognition of this is hard. And, and if you're not ready for, for this worst case scenario, like you're gonna get killed, you're gonna get captured, all these horrible things are gonna happen, like what the stakes are, why the standards, you know, should be pushed, should be pushed that, that hard. And I think that's, I, I can only imagine that, kind of like you asking us the question of like, are we ready for that worst case scenario? I'm sure that someone like Steve Brzezka was, was asking those questions regularly, you know, to young Hackworth

• 1:01:49Leif Babin?

  and, and his, his peers. Just to, to, to push that of the culture of like, this is what we gotta be ready for. We have to be ready for the worst case scenario. And I, and I think if you don't, if, if you haven't experienced it, then you think you're good to go. You know, it's, it's like the person that, that doesn't train jiu-jitsu and thinks, okay, they're an athlete, you know, maybe they're a vet, they can take care of themselves, you know, they're, they're, they're five and O in the, in the streets or the, the bar fights that they've been in their life. And then they walk- Five and O against my little brother. They walk, they walk in on the jiu-jitsu mats and you realize like, oh, I'm not near as good as I thought I was. That guy was half my size, just choked me out in about

• 1:02:32Leif Babin?

  30 seconds. So I, I think anytime that, that's what training should be is, you know, is, is setting people up for, for, as you said, pushing them. And it's not an immediate thing that, but certainly iterative steps like that. But I think for the folks that know better- Like a Steve Przenka, I mean, that is your job as a leader and obviously he did that in a tremendous way that had a lifelong impact on Hackworth and I'm sure so many others. And there have been many people like that throughout my career, certainly, you know, that took the time to train and mentor me and pass on lessons learned. And I think that's, you know, as I took over, as we came back from Ramadi, was just being humbled every

• 1:03:17Leif Babin?

  day on just, you know, with some really difficult urban combat situations and something that was only a tiny fraction of what I can only imagine of someone like, you know, Przenka saw at the Battle of the Bulge. I mean, every time I read about history and I think I've experienced something in combat, you're like, man, I haven't done anything. I haven't seen anything. You read about how, what others have been through and what they've done. And I just, I think, taking over the junior officer training course, I always was just trying to think, what do I wish someone had taught me before I was in those positions? And trying to pass those lessons on, I know that's exactly what you did at Training Attachment, and not just to the officers, but to the chiefs and to

• 1:03:58Leif Babin?

  the squad leaders and the fire team leaders and the individual shooters that are stepping up. And I think, yeah, that, I mean, that's the duty, that's the duty of every leader, I think is just, and when you say that, you know, building into the culture, that's gotta be the culture of the team. And so it becomes not just leaders holding their people accountable, but other people on the team that realize what the standards are and why we gotta be better. We gotta set the standard, we gotta, we gotta push hard. They, when everybody on the team understands why, then you've got this peer pressure that says, hey, man, your gear's not squared away. What's up with that? You know, that's, that's not what we do here. You better get your stuff ready to go. And I think that's, that

• 1:04:43Leif Babin?

  becomes just powerful at every level of an organization when that's the culture of the team.

• 1:04:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it's important to remember that just like Hackworth was watching Przenka and emulating him, that's what's happening to you when you're in a leadership position. The team is watching you, they're judging you, and if their judgment is positive, they're gonna emulate you. And if their judgment is negative, Well, they're not going to do anything that you want them to do. And so that's why that, that's why your example as a leader. And by the way, that means you're middle manager. That means you're frontline, not in charge of anyone. You, people still. I can tell you so many times where I was like, like when I was in trade at. And I'm out there and I see some freaking new guy.

• 1:05:30Jocko Willink?

  And he's just getting after it like I'm getting inspired by a guy that's just holding the corner with his, with his mark 48, just laying it down. And just like trying to give direction, you're like, dude, this is freaking awesome. So it doesn't matter if you're a frontline guy, doesn't matter. You are still impacting the culture of the organization. And if you think about that, that, you know, that's, that's, that's one of those things that if you think about the impact that you're having to your organization. By the way, this includes your family. By the way, this includes your friends. You know, that friend that's like stepping up and is, and is doing something. And you're like, man, I gotta do this too now. Like, that's what it is. That's you, you, you have culture amongst your friends.

• 1:06:11Jocko Willink?

  And when that culture is like, let's get better, let's do better, let's hold this high standard. That is how we develop cultures in our families, with our friends and in our, in our organizations.

• 1:06:24Leif Babin?

  I was going to say that, that, you know, obviously when I was teaching that, that course. Yeah, we had four weeks of classroom, a week on field training exercise. And I tried to cram as much of that stuff as I could. And obviously the, you were the, you know, the first person to come in and talk to those, the Jaco brief. But I think one of the things I was most proud of is, you know, I think for a lot of guys like me that came out of the naval academy or RTC or OCS that, that weren't a Mustang officer, somebody who was, you know, commissioned prior enlisted.

• 1:06:52Leif Babin?

  I didn't really have that visibility, you know, you don't understand, it's harder to, to realize that you got those eyes on you. You know, from, from the, the folks on your team that are looking at you. And, and that you, you have to live and set that standard. And Bobby Hall was one of the guys I brought in every time to come in and talk to the class. You know, along with a couple of other awesome SEAL enlisted leaders. And I just got to, they got to sit in there and hear, okay, what did you respect? And, and the officers that, that, that you admire and you like working for, what did you not respect? You know, what, what did you? What are some things that people did that that lost respect, you know, and and that are that you had disdain for? And so they got to see that perspective. And and I think it's

• 1:07:36Leif Babin?

  hard to see that. It's it's hard to detach and see how the world views you. Some people do that better than others. It's certainly not in eight, I think in most of us. And and I think that was something that you certainly instilled in me, and and I try to instill in in others as well, when they can see that perspective of, hey, let me tell you what I saw, and some people that I had no respect for would never want to work for again.

• 1:08:00Jocko Willink?

  One of the biggest shortfalls that you can have as a human being and as a leader is not understanding that other people can see what's happening. Like, when you think that you're pulling the wool over somebody's eyes, you you look so dumb. And it's just terrible. It's a it's a lack of self-awareness. And there's actually that when we had Jimmy May on, he was talking about going through BUDS, and they were doing all these psychological surveys. And one of the things they found was, if if the way a guy viewed himself matched the way he was viewed by his team, he had a better chance of making it through. Even

• 1:08:43Jocko Willink?

  if he viewed himself as like, hey, I I'm not sure I belong here, but I'm gonna give it my best shot. And the team thought, well, I don't know if he should really be here. He seems like he's working hard, though. That guy has a better chance of making it than someone that has an attitude of like, I'm I definitely deserve to be here, and I'm gonna make it. And the team thinks, oh, he's probably not gonna make it. Of course, there's anomalies, and it's not 100%. But what that tells me is, you know, when you think of yourself a certain way, and other people see you in a really different way, that's gonna be a problem. And when I'd run in, when we'd have officers that were having issues, it was always that, right? It was always the officer that fought that no one

• 1:09:28Jocko Willink?

  saw him, you know, skip out of the weapons cleaning. Like, he thinks, oh, they think I just have to go work on a brief. They know that he didn't go work on a brief. They know that he just didn't want to get his freaking hands dirty. Or when it's time to pick up brass, and it's like, well, you know, gents, I gotta head back for a meeting. They know that you can get out of that meeting. They they know that 100%. And you think that they don't and it's just absolutely terrible. So you should in your mind, kind of like when I talk about a leadership capital, like you should walk around like, like your bank account's almost empty. You should, you should act as if the intent of what you're doing is printed on your forehead. Right? That's how you should act. You should act like if I'm going to skip picking up the brass.

• 1:10:12Jocko Willink?

  Because I don't, it's going to be hot out there. I should act as if I have, I'm skipping this because I don't want to be hot and freaking walking around the desert for the next day and a half. Cause when I go into, regardless of what I tell Leif, hey Leif, I gotta go back and we've got a meeting, I've got a meeting with the skipper. So you guys go ahead and clean the brass. If I say that, I, I promise you what Leif is reading is the card on my forehead that says, I'm, don't want to work. I don't want to get my hands dirty. So just think about that. You, you should always think that your intent is printed on your forehead. Because it might as well be, it just might as well be. And this is how we're setting the example. So if you think you're setting a good example,

• 1:10:54Jocko Willink?

  but you're really skirting around and you're doing things nefarious things, or you're cutting corners, you're being lazy. I, I promise you, they see it. I, and here's the thing, here's a key point. If you're listening to this right now and you think that, well, Jaco was wrong about this. You're the person I'm talking to. I'm literally talking to you right now. If you're the person that's like, well, I'm really good at like kind of, I can act out, I can act pretty well. The team doesn't know that I just don't, that I'm leaving early. The team doesn't know that I'm skipping this. The team doesn't know that I'm nervous about. All that stuff that you think they don't know, I'm, I'm promising, I promise you, they know. And that's why it's good to have Bobby, when you're teaching the J O's, have Bobby Holland come in there and be like, oh yeah, I had this officer that I work for.

• 1:11:37Jocko Willink?

  And when it's time to clean, clean weapons, he would never be there. He always said he had to go do the, the A R. Like, oh, oh, really? Okay, we got it. You don't have to do that AAR. You don't have to. You can do it later. It's not due. There's no due date on it. You don't want to do this extra work. And by the way, oh, it's extra work? Yeah, you're the officer in charge. You have extra work. You're making more money. You're responsible for all this shit. So for you to do some extra work? Yeah. And I'll tell you what, there's some times where the boys will be like, hey, sir, I know you gotta do this. They'll kick you out of that shit. That happens. Great. If that happens, you can resist and then they'll be like, dude, no.

• 1:12:18Jocko Willink?

  Give me that. I had that happen many times in my career. Hey, we got this. Get out of here. You did that to me a thousand times. Hey, Jaco, go. Get out of here. We got this. That happens to me today at Eshel. That happened to you and me at Eshel Front, uh, a, a, a year ago, whatever. We were trying to help freaking prep for whatever. And Jamie's like,

• 1:12:34Leif Babin?

  We were stuffing bags for the council.

• 1:12:37Jocko Willink?

  Jamie's like, you guys can get out of here. Yeah, cuz, you know, we were more, more because we were just messing things up, but, but.

• 1:12:43Leif Babin?

  You, you set the example though, Jaco, and that's what you're talking, right? As a leader, you gotta set the example for, for the culture. And whether it was going out and pick up brass, I'd never seen anyone do that before. There wasn't even expectation that you'd be there to help pick up brass. But you're there just picking up brass. They're like, oh dang, Jaco's here picking up brass. And then what, what also was crazy is the dives. You, you might think this is weird, but in the SEAL teams, uh, SEALs absolutely hate diving and getting in the water for whatever reason.

• 1:13:14Jocko Willink?

  Many SEALs.

• 1:13:14Leif Babin?

  Some SEALs, yes, many SEALs. And they would, and would try to do everything they can to avoid it to be in wet, you know, cold water. And, uh, we used to joke with Chris Kyle about that. He'd be like, no, we have some sniper training set up. And then the sniper training fell off. It's like, hey, Chris, you gonna join us for the dives? Like, no, no, I've got an eardrum issue. I was like, when did you have this eardrum issue? The first I'm hearing about is like, when I was in SQT, which is, you know, like five years before that, yeah. So I was like, you sure you have an eardrum issue? Like, get yourself ready, we're diving. But you just showed up to the dives and you weren't even, you weren't leading the dives. And if you're on a combat dive, in particular, if you're doing like a pole dive where everyone's just hanging on to like this painter pole underwater. All you're, all you're literally, you're in the dark.

• 1:13:59Leif Babin?

  It's nighttime, you can't see anything. You're literally holding on to a pole and just kicking for two hours or three hours, whatever. And, uh, and that's all, that Jocko would just show up and do it like, and, uh, I'd never even seen that before people. And it was something that just, it, it, it definitely built in the culture of the team. Like, hey, man, we're all in this thing together. Like, we're, we're, we're going to train together, we're going to push the standards together and, uh, I'm here and I'm going to be a part of this thing. And I think it's, we, we started kicking you out. We realized like, hey, man, you know, we know you've got stuff to do, uh, and, and we got this.

• 1:14:33Jocko Willink?

  That, I never thought, I never thought for a millisecond not doing evolutions. Like, that was not a thing to me. I didn't under, uh, to, when you told, I don't know when you first told me like, we, we were, we were kind of like fired up that you were doing the dives. You probably told me that like three years ago and I was like, really? Like, what, what would, uh, what would the task unit commander do? Sit around? You know, like, that just doesn't make sense to me. And again, that's because I had guys like Delta Charlie, that first guy to step up and be like, oh, we got something shitty to do. I'm going first. Let's go. Cool. So setting the example is how you start to spread culture. That's kind of number one.

• 1:15:15Jocko Willink?

  Um, the big piece about making sure that people understand the history. And it was, I, I, I'm not going to read from about face on this. Um, but one of my favorite examples of that, the Marine Corps does this all the time. The Marine Corps, when you go and read their doctrinal material about operations, about squad leaders, about leadership, they just put in there historical things that Marines have done that are awesome. And that's what you get. You get, this is the, it's not, it doesn't say this is how Marines supposed to be. That's the underlying measure, message of everything that the Marine Corps produces is this is the way a Marine should be.

• 1:16:00Jocko Willink?

  And actually, what's interesting, I just remember this, in the squad leader makes a difference.

• 1:16:05Jocko Willink?

  Which is a book that kind of just shows how what they want is decentralized command. What they want is leaders to lead, what they want is subordinate leaders to step up and lead. So they may have a thing called the squad leader makes a difference. And it's just all these stories about squad leaders, but there's, there's a couple of stories in there that are bad. And the squad leader doesn't step up and the squad leader doesn't, and everything falls apart and people die. And so they're showing you historically what you're supposed to be like. In Ramadi, amazing to go into those army battalions, Marine Corps Battalion Headquarters. And they brought their historical documentation with, they bought their battle streamers with them.

• 1:16:47Jocko Willink?

  Like, how awesome is that with the 137, you walk in there, they got articles hanging up from World War II? How, how does that impact you're an 18 year old soldier or you're a 35 year old SEAL like me? And you're like, and they're like, hell yeah, this is, this is awesome. So I, I remember as we were briefing, uh, for before, uh, cop Falcon and launching on that. Uh, that, that, that I remember Colonel Tedesco standing up and saying, this is the most historic thing that, that the 137 bandits have been a part of since the, since the Ardennes Forest. And you know, it just, I think living that history and making sure that everybody's aware of that stuff. It was, I was all fired up too. I'm like, let's do this. Yeah. This is awesome. And you can, and look, you don't have to be a military organization to do this.

• 1:17:30Jocko Willink?

  You have a company, you have a team, you have a sports team, you're a high school sports team. That's why they hang up those banners, right? That's why they hang up the banners in the wrestling room of who won state? Who won masters? Who won C? That's why they do that. They're trying to create that culture inside the organization. That's why they do it in the NBA, the look up at the rafters. That's literally a thing, right? Hang, oh, you're gonna, they're gonna hang your, your number from the rafters. I mean, come on, why are they doing that? Culture, like the Celtics, bro, I mean, you know, the Boston Garden back in the day, right? That place was like, It was, it was culture. It was the culture that propelled and made the Celtics the Celtics.

• 1:18:13Jocko Willink?

  So, and you can do that, whatever organization you're with, and we see that now. You know, you go into a, a good company that cares about its culture, and they're gonna have the article up on the wall that they opened a new building, or they built this, finished this project, or they, whatever, they're gonna, they're gonna talk about their history and what they've done. And that becomes part of the culture, and it drives the culture, and it gives people something to be proud of. So, that's another huge thing that you can do to develop culture inside your organization.

• 1:18:47Jocko Willink?

  Rewarding good behavior that supports the culture, and mitigating behavior that does not support the culture. What does that mean? Well, in the, in the military, we have an award system, and believe us, it is far from perfect,

• 1:19:03Jocko Willink?

  but it does reward people for doing the right things. And you, you only get, if you, if you look at the definition of the, the awards, they are 100% aligned with the culture of the organization. That's what they are. The, even the administrative awards, they're aligned with the, with the culture of the organization. That's what they're there for, is to grab this culture and, and move people in the right direction. And then when people do things that are outside the culture, you gotta give them a little bit of a beat down. I mean, whether that's holding, you ever been to one of those public captain's masks? You ever been to one of those? Oh yeah.

• 1:19:43Jocko Willink?

  Leif, did you ever go to a public captain's mask where somebody screwed up on the ship and they're like, "All hands"? I don't know if I went to an all hands one. I certainly was in some captain's mask. Dude. To observe. I, those all hands captain's masks, when someone really screws up, and they're like, "Yeah, fantail", or what, the air deck. What the hell, why can't I think, what's the name on an LCD, what's the name of the, where the helo land? Flight deck? Flight deck, yeah, flight deck, all hands, freaking 16 hundo. Boom, out, the punishment gets medded out right there. What is that? What are we trying to do? We trying to make the guy look bad, we trying to make him feel bad? No.

• 1:20:24Jocko Willink?

  We're trying to mitigate the impact of negative behavior for our culture of our organization. Now look, do I recommend freaking all hands, you know, dropping the hammer? In some cases. In some cases, yeah. It is, you, if you've got someone that's done something that, that we can't have inside of our culture. Man, you gotta, you gotta kinda make an example out of them. That's the word, right? And a lot of times that has a negative connotation, oh, they're trying to make an example. Like, actually, I am trying to make an example out of you. I don't want anyone else to do this dumb shit that you just did. So everyone's gonna sit here and watch this captain's mask go down, and they're gonna see the punishment that I give you. And I want everyone to understand how jacked up this is. So, there's a reason for that.

• 1:21:09Jocko Willink?

  That's, to me, is, that's the, kinda, a great example of trying to mitigate bad behavior for the culture. And guess what else they do? And this, this I know we've all seen. What, where do you get your awards? Do you get your, or do you get your, your Bronze Star with a V, do you get that in the mail? You shouldn't, cuz that doesn't help our culture. You should get it in front of the command. Everyone should be there, they should all be seeing, oh, this guy did what SEALs are supposed to do. He's being recognized and rewarded for it. That's what it is. And it should mean something. So, those are some things that you can do as a leader.

• 1:21:49Jocko Willink?

  Reward when people, that's why they have, you know, it's literally why they have Employee of the Month at, at Chick-fil-A. Right? It's like, hey, this person did what they're supposed to do. They set a great example, we're gonna award them in front of everybody. And everyone's gonna clap, especially at Chick-fil-A, they're like, oh, we did it. Right? They're fired up. Hey, we got a 16-year-old kid that's treating people with respect, showing up on time, like, they're, they're knocking it out of the park. Good job. Employee of the Month, that's what we're doing. They get a freaking sticker or a tag, right? That's what's happening. When I was at OCS. If you were, uh, on your name tag, you had, like, whatever you were the top in.

• 1:22:33Jocko Willink?

  Was you could be military, academic and physical. If you were in the top of those, so if you were like had the high academic score, you get it says, you know, academics. If you're a high military, you get military. Or was it military professionalism? No, it was like military bearing or something like that. And then physical. And then if you got them all, you had a white name tag. They called it the snowflake. And when you're wrapping that snowflake, you're like, yo, you know what I'm saying? Look, I was in the freaking SEAL teams. I'd been in the SEAL teams for eight years. And I showed up at OCS and got that snowflake, bro. I was kind of fired up.

• 1:23:14Leif Babin?

  Jaco was a snowflake holder?

• 1:23:15Jocko Willink?

  Fired up for that snowflake, boys. Yeah, hell, yeah. So those are some things you can think about.

• 1:23:22Leif Babin?

  Now, I was gonna say that Napoleon's quote about it's it's incredible what a what a man will do and risk his life for a worthless piece of ribbon. And I think just that public that public recognition recognition of effort is is awesome. Anytime that you can do that to show people what the standard looks like. And and I just wanted to say too, you know, when you're talking about mitigating, you know, underperformance, I mean, we wrote in extreme ownership. It's not what you preach, what you tolerate. You you have to hold the standard high. You have to push the standard high for all the reasons we just talked about to prepare people and make sure that they're ready to go take on the real world challenges that they're up against. So they can be successful in what they're trying to do, you know, in business and life, anywhere. But it doesn't have to be drop the hammer on people.

• 1:24:07Leif Babin?

  And I think that's that's oftentimes, I mean, I think about how you, you know, typically did that in tasking a bruiser. And oftentimes it was just kind of asking some questions about like, hey, do you think that helps us out? You know, like, is that, do you think this improves our chances of of getting a chance, you know, going to Iraq? And and so I think there's, we're all trying to, you know, at that time, we're trying to battle the what task is going to get chosen to be able to get sent to fight the war and other people are going to go to the Pacific theater and and train and not, you know, be able to participate in combat operations. So you just related that back to like, okay, here's the standard. And if you don't meet that standard. That's going to affect what, you know, our employment overseas and how we're actually going

• 1:24:51Leif Babin?

  to be utilized and affects everybody, not just you, but every single person on the team. And so I think it just, whether you're asking some earnest questions and letting them come to that, that, that example, or just saying like, hey, we need to, let's redo that. We're going to redo something that needs to be redone until we get to the, the quality that we need to, or we have the standard that's actually achieved. Um, and I think just making sure that you're, you're holding the line on that. And it doesn't have to be like, you screwed up, I'm dropping the hammer. It can simply just be, um, hey, do you think that helps us? And, uh, and, and oftentimes, um, quite a few things that I got myself involved in were not helping us get to where we wanted to go.

• 1:25:32Jocko Willink?

  You know what's interesting though? I, I wanted to address this when we started this thing off, but I, I forgot about it and I didn't have a note. Cause you're talking about, you're, you're throwing it out there like, well, we could have either gone to a place where there was no war going on, or we can go to Iraq where there's a war going on. We all wanted to go to Iraq. That was like the biggest threat I could give, the hardest question I could ask you was like, Leif, do you think that's going to help us get to Iraq? And you'd be like, no, I'll never do it again. Like we, and in that opening thing that I wrote, we pray for war. And look, I understand that people are not going to, that's not going to make sense to people. I, I get it. I get it. But even if that doesn't make sense to you, let me tell you something.

• 1:26:12Jocko Willink?

  Just right now, if that doesn't make sense to you that we have men praying for war right now, if that doesn't make sense to you and you think it's awful, uh, just do me a favor and just close your eyes for a second and just say thank you. Just say thank you. Just say thank you that those people exist because they do. And they are ready to fight. They're ready to sacrifice. They're ready to die for this country. And yeah, do they go a little bit hard in the paint? Might they even go a little bit overboard and pray for war? Yep, they might. But let me tell you, I think I'm thankful that they're there because they're the ones that, who's going to step up if they're not? Who is? What kind of, what kind of, who's going to step up?

• 1:26:56Jocko Willink?

  That's right. There aren't people that are gonna step up. So that's who's going to war. So be thankful for those warriors that are out there holding the line.

• 1:27:09Jocko Willink?

  Next thing, material items. And I, I still haven't, that's not the best name for, for these material items. I haven't thought of a better name for it because it includes all kinds of stuff. That's the best I've come up with is like, uh, you know, patches, obviously that's a big subject in T Bruiser.

• 1:27:25Leif Babin?

  I'm glad that you've come, you've fully come around to the idea that patches are important.

• 1:27:30Jocko Willink?

  Patches, um, uh, T-shirts.

• 1:27:34Leif Babin?

  The old Jaco from, uh, 2006 might have disagreed with that statement.

• 1:27:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and we'll get into that in a second. Um, let me, let me read something real quick from About Face. "When I arrived at Fort Campbell in January 1965, the cluster of World War II barracks shrouded in a cloud of coal smoke. Didn't it all resemble my mental image of the home of the 101st Airborne Division, the Army's premier fighting force? But I didn't have a lot of time to think about. The 101st was definitely the big leagues. To make your mark in such a unit, a second lieutenant had to hit the ground running. And those of us from the class of 64 did just that. We worked hard and we played hard. And we were damn proud to be members of the best team in the US Army. That screaming eagle patch meant a hell of a lot."

• 1:28:21Jocko Willink?

  And that's John D. Howard, platoon leader, 101st Airborne Division, Republic of Vietnam, 1965 to 1966. There you go. That, that patch, what does it mean? You know, um, and if we were to, just when I said, we'll, we'll get into that. Look, to me, well, and I think to you too, our patches were totally out of control. And we were so far, we were so far leaning, SEALs are so far leaning into being unprofessional and not unprofessional. They're so leaning into looking non-military, I had to kind of take more extreme measures to bring us back. So we looked like people that may at least had a chance of being in the military.

• 1:29:04Jocko Willink?

  Cause it's funny, you know, we'll talk about how like, yeah, tasking a Bruiser, they were, you know, all the same uniforms. But compared to the rest of the military, like not even close, you know, uh, everyone has different boots on. I mean, there's just a bunch of different things going on, but yes, I was not as. Open minded as I am now about the about the patches about the stickers. But you know Hackworth ended up giving out patches in a couple of times in his career. That was a big deal to him and you know they have the little what's on the hardcore Ricondo shirts that we have that little arrowhead. That's that's what he gave patches and sewed them on with he had Tiger Force when he was in Vietnam before gave him like what was it?

• 1:29:47Jocko Willink?

  Black berets with some red insignia on it and he talks about it. He let them wear tiger stripe uniforms. Why? He talks about that made them feel good, feel special. You put that thing on. You were talking about the other day, K-Dog. You put on that Def Core shirt. You see that X flag and you're like, hey, it's look, I gotta kind of represent. Can you can you wear a Def Core shirt with an X flag and be in a Dunkin' Donuts? Ain't you shouldn't be. It's a violation. Anybody in the game is going to kind of probably have a chat with you, but they're not in there. So you can kind of get away with it, right? They're not in Dunkin' Donuts.

• 1:30:21Leif Babin?

  But you know.

• 1:30:22Jocko Willink?

  But you know. Yeah. You'll police yourself.

• 1:30:24Leif Babin?

  You'd have been proud of K-Dog when we when he was out for our marketing and media team. The Def Core symbol going up on the whiteboard. Stayed there the whole time representing.

• 1:30:35Jocko Willink?

  It's a thing though, right? It's a thing. When you wear it, you elevate. And look, there is. There is something for us that and we kind of come accustomed to it and maybe forget, but like the trident, like your your trident, when you get your trident and when you wear your trident and when you put your trident on.

• 1:30:58Jocko Willink?

  That's that that you should you should wear that trident and you should be thinking about the price that has been paid for that for that thing to shine the way it does. And when you think about that, man, like you are gonna look squared away. If you can put on if you if you put that trident on your uniform and you think about the price that's been paid to make that thing shine the way it does, you're you're gonna you're gonna polish your boots, you're gonna polish your shoes, you're gonna freaking make sure your shit is squared away. That's the way I feel, you know? And I know that's that's the way it's supposed to feel.

• 1:31:38Jocko Willink?

  And that's what he's talking about here with the 101st Airborne. You put on that you put on that patch, you know, that's that means something.

• 1:31:45Leif Babin?

  I'm giving you a hard time about it, obviously, because you forbid patches, but yeah, obviously, there is plenty of good reason for that. And even I can see that. But what was cool about it is, I mean, the reason you didn't drop the hammer on us, which we wrote about the Academy Leadership is because I think you recognize why we had those patches made. And that was something that just gave us an identity that people wore with pride. And, and that's, that's, I can't, I can't help but imagine that played certainly a significant role in that decision.

• 1:32:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I mean, the fact of the matter is, since I told you couldn't wear patches, everyone freaking spray painted a damn 18 inch Punisher skull on their freaking body armor. So it was like, went from this little subdued thing to like, hey, we're here, Punisher skulls are in the house, let's go. So, yeah. Did you really follow the intent? You followed the letter of the law, but not the intent?

• 1:32:43Leif Babin?

  Dude, we had some kind of a, a senior officer came to visit and we had Punisher skulls on all of the 50 cal like.

• 1:32:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. No, I, I kanked that one.

• 1:32:55Leif Babin?

  Yeah. You, you're like, no, we have to paint over that. It was good. It was on all the vehicles too, on all the sides of the vehicles.

• 1:33:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Leif Babin?

  You overruled that.

• 1:33:02Jocko Willink?

  I had to kink that one because, and the reason I thought was like, didn't make sense for a lot of reasons. But, you know, like, having these clearly identifiable marks to the world seemed like it maybe wasn't the best idea. So, we, we straightened that out. It looked cool for a couple of days, though.

• 1:33:22Leif Babin?

  It did look pretty cool for a couple of days.

• 1:33:24Jocko Willink?

  It looked pretty cool for a couple of days.

• 1:33:25Leif Babin?

  And we did, we definitely complied. It made sense to me. You talked to me about it like, yeah, okay, that makes sense. We'll get rid of it. So obviously, there's a balance to any of this stuff. But there is something, you know, about, about naming, you know, and when you, you had General Mukiyama on, he was talking about how Hackworth, he used words to motivate. And I think, you know, whether it's changing the name from Tasker Bravo to Tasker Bruiser, you know, or, or the Hard Luck Battalion to the Hardcore Recondos, there's something powerful. And then when you're talking about patches, when you're talking about, um, you know, gear, the Def core, you know, symbol like there is, uh, you realize you're representing for that. You can see like Kerry's like, I'm representing for Def core. This is what we gotta think about and,

• 1:34:10Leif Babin?

  and that that is a high standard that we all have to work to achieve, um, the highest possible standard all the time. And I think the more that you do that, I think as a leader, it just, it just builds that into the culture of the team, um, where people take real pride in that. And, it's, it's, it's a pretty special thing. I think when you can look around and look at other folks and, and they, they don't have that patch. You have someone with that patch and, and that's, you know, even the, I know like for Stoner and his guys, um, when they, they get, they, they were given that, you know, that spade, spade patch by the first of 506, um, Task Force Red Kerr, he, you know, one of first airborne guys and, and, uh, they certainly wore that with tremendous pride.

• 1:34:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And just FYI, does this mean if you're in a leadership position, you can make some patch and start giving it to people and it's going to have meaning? Nope. It, it has to have some inherent value and that, that inherent value has to be, is that it has to be earned in some way. So it's like, you know, getting a black belt in jujitsu. If you can go down to a store and buy a black belt, then what does it mean? But when you get a black belt in jujitsu, you, you, you earned it. When, so, so you can't just make things up and just start throwing them around. People gotta earn it. Otherwise it has no meaning. So think about that as well. Um, the other thing, and this is the one that I, I said, I was kind of just added

• 1:35:38Jocko Willink?

  this in my, in my thoughts around culture and developing culture is the language that you use and.

• 1:35:47Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I started throwing down some of these languages that I've used over the years or that I've heard over the years, but you know, you just mentioned hardcore condo. No fucking slack. I started this thing off with like, that was 2010. I wrote that email like, no fucking slack's been a part of my gig for a whole long ass time. And the freaking land warfare guys gave me that shotgun. It says no fucking slack on it. But there you go. That's that language. And even Hackworth talks about in the book. He's like, I, the guys, I knew they would think it was cheesy at first, but I knew over time it would start to sink in. And you're like, oh, okay. So, you know, in Tasking the Bruiser, just BTF. And think about, you know, what does that do to your culture?

• 1:36:30Jocko Willink?

  What's, how does that change the culture of the organization of the team? When you have something that everybody knows what it means. And it, and it means something that's going to help the team. BTF, big tough frogman. Can you say BTF? And be like, well, I'm not sure if, if I want to do this hard work. Nope. Doesn't work. Doesn't work. Doesn't work. Just BTF. So there's that. I was in a platoon where we said right and tight. It was a team too. Everything's right and tight. Like, hey, we need to be right and tight. We were all, we said, we went crazy with this term, but guess what it did?

• 1:37:11Jocko Willink?

  All of a sudden, there was a, there was an underlying driving force that everyone wanted to be right and tight, which is, and the platoon's right and tight. That's the way it was.

• 1:37:24Jocko Willink?

  E- even just the language that you're using, that aren't, isn't necessarily like a slogan or a mantra of any kind, but just the language that you're using, you know, check. No factor. Like, no factor is not really a big slogan, but how does that change the organization? How many times has someone at Echelon Front? There's been some situation going on and someone's like, no factor. Like, we got this. That's very common. So how does that change someone's attitude? And how does that change, if it changed one's person's attitude? And all of a sudden, that organization is all thinking the same way, which is, oh, we've got a problem. No factor. That is a part of the culture.

• 1:38:08Jocko Willink?

  My first platoon, always go out. Always go out. That, and look, this wasn't necessarily the most positive thing because what they meant was go out like, go out partying. I always tried to bend it to be like, always go out on the op. There was no ops going on, so I was just full of shit. But the attitude of like, always go out, it affected me. I'd be like, hey, always go out. That's what we're doing. Okay, cool.

• 1:38:33Leif Babin?

  It took me a long time to realize that I, I didn't have to always go out.

• 1:38:38Leif Babin?

  When it came to partying on the town. I remember I came to that conclusion, uh, living over, uh, you know, here in San Diego back in, back in the day. I'm like, you know what? It's Friday night. I actually don't have to go out tonight.

• 1:38:49Jocko Willink?

  It's not a mandate.

• 1:38:49Leif Babin?

  I'm not gonna do that. Dude, I remember when we started working together in Tasking and Bruiser and one of my good buddies from, uh, SEAL Team Five. I'd, I'd just, I'd been at SEAL Team Five, so I'd, I'd spent two years there, you know, my first combat deployment to Iraq and done their work up. And then I shifted over to SEAL Team Three and I remember him saying, he was, uh, you know, he knew, he knew Seth Stone as well. So we're all hanging out together and he came out and met me, you and Seth out when we were in Tasking and Bruiser. And he was like, all you guys sound the same.

• 1:39:21Leif Babin?

  All you guys sound the same. And, and that's what he was talking about. We were saying no factor. We were saying get after it. We were saying stand by to get some. We were saying like, we, we were all using the same language. Um, that everybody used in Tasking and Bruiser and it was, he was making the comment that, and, and really I think what it was is recognition of the influence that you had on me, you know, and Seth Stone that he, he knew well, you know, both of us well and, and, uh, but everyone is talking like that and everyone has this kind of same attitude. And I think that just, that's a powerful culture when everyone's thinking the same way. Um, we know what we're gonna do and we can make decisions to about what we need to do. Oh, there's a challenge. There's an obstacle that comes up. Cool. No factor. We're gonna figure out a way around that. We're gonna, we're gonna figure

• 1:40:06Leif Babin?

  out a way to get this problem solved so we can accomplish our mission. Oh, it's really hard? Cool, we're gonna BTF. We're gonna BTF. Oh, this is a really dangerous operation? We're taking some risk here. Cool, we're gonna BTF. No one can go into that area. No US force that been in there, um, are you sure you wanna go there? We're gonna BTF. We're gonna BTF in, big mix it up, BTF out, and go get some big chow.

• 1:40:32Jocko Willink?

  Go-go criteria, you know? Everyone else had no-go criteria. Like, if this happens, it's a no-go. If this happens, we had go-go, cuz we're going. That's a good attitude to have. Even you take, you know, in the Marine Corps, close with and destroy the enemy. You hear that? And that's the language that we're using? And believe me, I've adopted that language, as you could hear in that opening thing. Like, that's a powerful thing. Oh, what's our purpose in life? Close with and destroy the enemy. Okay, that's what we're thinking about. Um, so yeah, language that you use is going to impact the culture. And what's interesting, when you look at different groups of people, start paying attention to the language that they're using, and it's gonna indicate to

• 1:41:15Jocko Willink?

  you what their culture's like. So, those are some things that I think really have a big impact on culture. Setting the example, knowing the history and propagating the history, rewards and mitigation for proper and improper behavior that's supporting the, the culture of the organization, material items, the patches, the t-shirts, the banners, all those things. Those, those are absolutely a, a part of the culture. You know what's funny is even, uh, one of our mutual friends, Johnny, he, he's always like, he, he talks about the fact that he could see us and we didn't have helmet covers on, right? So, the army,

• 1:42:00Jocko Willink?

  even our guys with ACUs, we didn't have helmet covers. So, an army guy would have full ACUs and a army ACU helmet cover. Our guys had fully, or some of our guys had full ACUs, no helmet cover. And wherever he'd see it, he'd be like, "Oh yeah, you go tell it was you guys, freaking no, no helmet cover, just out there," and just getting all fired up. And again, it's like, those little things, they start to develop a, a life of their own. So...

• 1:42:28Jocko Willink?

  Good for culture.

• 1:42:29Leif Babin?

  Let me say one more thing about setting the example, and that is, you know, we were talking about this and you said you weren't even thinking about it, you know, when you came out to do, go do a dive or pick up brass. But I think for leaders out there, when there's something hard that's going on, when there's something difficult, when people are having to stay late or work on the weekends, that is an opportu- that's a softball that's getting pitched at you for you to just crack out of the park. When you show up, even though people know you don't have to, you show up, you're there with your team, you're setting the example. That is such a great way to build that culture by setting the example and build leadership capital with your team. Don't miss an opportunity like that. When, uh, when there's something hard going on,

• 1:43:13Leif Babin?

  sure, it's easy to stay in your bed or not come in early or stay late or miss watching your kids soccer game on the weekend or whatever it may be. Uh, but if your people are there working, there's something hard going on, go get in there, go, go set the example. Um, it's such an awesome opportunity, uh, to, uh, to be a part of the, part of the team and, and create that culture. And there's other people gonna do that too. They're gonna emulate that behavior if, if you do it as well.

• 1:43:37Jocko Willink?

  No doubt about it. It, the, kind of the last thing I was thinking about, you'd sent to me sort of some topics and, and I think this is one of the ones that just ties in across the board, ties into training, ties into culture, and this is taking care of your people.

• 1:43:56Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, I know you already mentioned that you learned at the Naval Academy, take care of your people, take care of your people, take care of your people. I learned in Navy boot camp, take care of your people, take care of your people, take care of your people. This is a mantra that gets beat into us, and it can go a little off the rails from time to time. Well, what do I mean by that? What, sometimes you just decide not to take care of your people? No. It's just that sometimes people think taking care of your people is giving them whatever they want. And not pushing them to help them get better. So, uh, you, you look at it, a, a great way to think about it, I was just thinking of a kid, a little kid.

• 1:44:36Jocko Willink?

  Take care of your kid. What does that mean? They want cotton candy? Give them cotton candy. They want ice cream? Give them ice cream. They wanna sit around and play video games? Let them sit around and play video games. We all know that's not gonna help them.

• 1:44:48Jocko Willink?

  Same thing with your, if you're in the military, oh, take care of your people. Let them go home early. You know, let them skip work. Don't check their equipment. Like do the, let them get out of shape. Let them skip PT. Are you taking care of them? Oh yeah, I'm taking care of my people. No, you're not taking care of your people. You're, you're going to get them to a point where they're not capable. And in fact, you're doing worse than that. You're setting them up to get killed in combat. That's what you're doing. Business, same thing. I'm taking care of my people and to cut them loose early. Um, I'm, I'm not going to check their goals on a weekly basis or a daily basis or whatever, monthly basis to, to make sure that they're moving in the right direction. So taking care of your people doesn't mean coddling them. It doesn't mean babying them.

• 1:45:34Jocko Willink?

  It means discipline. That's what it means. It means discipline and it means not imposing discipline on them. But what we want to do is we want to create a culture of discipline inside the organization. So the discipline doesn't come from outside. It comes from inside the person, inside the team. That's where we want it to come from. And can you go too far with that? Yes, you absolutely can. A hundred percent. We want to drive, you know, just having, uh, Danica Patrick on, you talk about driving, right? What are you doing? You're driving, you're driving that thing as fast as you can. What happens if you go too fast? You crash.

• 1:46:16Jocko Willink?

  But if you don't push it hard enough, you don't win. So this is what we have to do as leaders. We got to find that balance. Do we want to push that thing hard enough that we're going to win? But we don't want to blow out the engine. We don't want to hit the wall.

• 1:46:27Jocko Willink?

  And that can happen. That happens. That happens actually too often in military cases where you got the tyrannical leader and they're going to impose that discipline. They're going to burn everyone out. It's terrible.

• 1:46:38Speaker 02

  This reminds me of, so it's actually taking care of your people. And it reminds me of a conversation I was having with JP Denell where he was talking about how you always told the guys the truth. And that's one of those things that, again, on the surface can look like, well, if you're always telling them the truth, you know, can't that be harmful in some scenarios? And what JP said was that there was a situation with your higher up and you and the team. And the higher up was basically, basically telling you, hey, this is a no-go. And you took the truth back to the team. And what I was thinking he was about to say is Jaco came back and said, the boss is bad. So we can't do this and that's what it's going to be.

• 1:47:22Speaker 02

  And the truth you told the team was the actual truth, which was, hey, guys, I've done a bad job at building a relationship with my boss. And because of that, we're in a situation now where we're going to have to do this thing, do it to the best of our abilities and deliver to this boss. So I have a better relationship so that we can keep moving and win. And that was the actual truth of the, that whole situation, right? So it's, it's not just taking care of your people. It's actually doing what's best for your people, actually taking care of them.

• 1:47:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. When the truth doesn't seem like it's gonna work, right? The answer is not lies. The answer is more truth. That's what it is. And the example I use with that is if my wife cooks bad chicken, dry chicken, which we know she used to do, by the way. The solution isn't, hey, your chicken is dry.

• 1:48:22Jocko Willink?

  I don't like it. That's the truth, right? That doesn't seem like it's going to help our scenario.

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  Negative.

• 1:48:28Jocko Willink?

  Right? Big H is going to be mad. Well, so what is the truth? What's more truth? More truth is, oh, your wife.

• 1:48:37Jocko Willink?

  My wife took care of all those kids all day, went out, got the groceries done, got everything ready, put that stuff in the oven. When I got home, it was ready. That's the truth. The truth is, I'm thankful that she did all that stuff. And this thing's not perfect, but I'm thankful. And the truth is, I'm being a jerk by, so you know what? Pass the ketchup. We'll make this chicken good, right? Where's that barbecue sauce at? The truth is, I need some barbecue sauce over here. That's the truth. The truth isn't this dry chicken. The truth is, I need to be a better human being. So that's the same thing as that you're talking about with JP. The solution isn't, hey, guys, the boss is bad. The solution isn't to lie to them. And say, well, you know, guys, uh,

• 1:49:24Jocko Willink?

  the, I don't think we should be doing this anyways, and lie to them. And that's not, that's not the truth either. It's more truth. The truth is, I don't have a good enough relationship with the boss. Or I didn't see the strategic picture, or I wasn't paying attention to what was happening with the enemy. I made this mistake. I put up this op that we want to do, it got denied. It's not, it's not the boss's fault. It's my, it's my fault. That's the truth. So, solution to truth not seeming like it's going to help the situation, the solution is more truth. That'll get you there. And taking care of your people, this is, this has to be part of your culture, but it has to be understood in the right balance. And people in the, people in the SEAL teams have messed that up. People in all military have messed it up.

• 1:50:08Leif Babin?

  I've certainly messed it up. And I think there's, uh, it's a real trap, I think, for young leaders, because they want to be liked. You know, you, you want to, you think, oh, a good relationship is about if my people like me. And I, I see this with business leaders that we work with. I want my people to be happy. And the happier they are, and the more excited they are to come to work, then, you know, the better job they'll do. And it's a trap that leads you down the road if you let people cut corners. Okay, they show up, they show up late, they go home early. His performance standard starts to slip because you don't want to be the person that really, you know, holds the standard high and pushes people hard because that's, you know, it's hard to take constructive criticism. And when you start letting people cut corners, you let things slip, you're actually failing them as a leader.

• 1:50:52Leif Babin?

  And it's, I think the recognition I had to come to was that taking care of my people meant looking out for their long-term good, their overall success, their ultimate success, not just the immediate like, sure, would they like to go home early? Um, on, uh, you know, yeah, I could let them go home early, but then guess what? Then we get behind on the project. Now all of a sudden we're in crunch time so that we, you know, either we're going to fail, which is bad for everybody. Uh, or, uh, or we have to come in, you know, for the last three weeks and work overtime to try to make up for the, for the time in order to get there. Which is not, which is also miserable and terrible for everybody. So I think thinking about what the long-term success, you know, looks like.

• 1:51:35Leif Babin?

  And, uh, back to what we're talking about with training, I mean, just making sure those standards are set high so that people are ready for the worst-case scenario they might encounter. Whether it's on the battlefield with, with an overwhelming number of enemy who are, you know, in greater numbers and maybe they're even, uh, they have greater firepower than we do and attacking our position. Are we ready for that scenario? You know, in the business world, i- is it, uh, are your people ready for, um, if you're in the energy or construction, you know, space, you know, for a major safety incident? Do they understand why they have to follow those procedures? You know, and, and are we ready to handle this worst-case, prevent that from happening? Or, uh, stop it from being catastrophic if this scenario actually develops?

• 1:52:19Leif Babin?

  Um, you know, if, uh, you know, if you're really in any business scenario, you're working on a project and you're trying to meet a timeline and, and stay within budget. Just making sure that, uh, that people understand how, how that's going to benefit them, you know, how what they do is going to connect with the success, the overall mission. And then back down to them, how it's going to benefit them long term when we succeed and we do a good job on this project and we have a client that's super happy about what we're doing, they're going to tell their friends, we're going to get more contracts, there's more opportunity for pay and promotion and all those things. But that only comes from keeping the standards high, not letting the standard slip. It's so hard for me with my kids, like you just said, I mean, when I, I've got young

• 1:53:04Leif Babin?

  kids at home, my youngest is four years old, he's, man, we just came through the Halloween season, he was in there like sneaking candy all the time, like, what's in your mouth, son? Look, he's gone in and grabbed some candy out of the, out of the candy, the candy, you know, basket or whatever that we had for Halloween and just trying to, you know, teach him, look, I know, I know the candy tastes good, but if all you're eating is candy, you're not going to be strong, you know, you're not going to grow the way you need to, your body's addicted to sugar. So I've had to talk to him about why protein's important and he, he refused to eat his sausage

• 1:53:44Leif Babin?

  and eggs for breakfast, was that yesterday, I think yesterday morning and instead snuck out the leftover steak. He's eating the steak, he's like, look at my muscles, dad, yeah, protein. So I, but I think just, just trying to make sure that like they understand like it's not immediate satisfaction, it's not immediate happiness, it's their long-term good. And I think one of the biggest examples of that, whether you're talking about in the military, and these are lessons I tried to pass on, you know, to other leaders or when we're working with law enforcement, you know, our first responders, you know, the idea that like you have a close-knit unit of people and when those people, if, if you're creating the impression like taking care of my people means I've got their back no matter what.

• 1:54:29Leif Babin?

  And that's kind of the way we think about it. And when I talk to leaders, they're like, oh yeah, definitely. I got their back no matter what. If you are setting the, if you're creating the impression with your team that you have their back no matter what, I'm telling you that you are failing them as a leader because you are setting them up for failure. Cause that means you do something bad, you do something illegal, that's immoral and unethical, I'm gonna cover it up for you. I got your back. Instead of, hey, man, I'm not gonna let you do that. Cause I'm, I'm gonna look out for you and your best interests. And if you're following everything that you're supposed to be doing, I got your back, absolutely. But if you stray off the path and you do something that's illegal or immoral unethical that you know you're not supposed to do, I don't have

• 1:55:11Leif Babin?

  your back. And that's, that prevents people from doing that. So I think that's, that's a trap that people fall into as well. I think when you, when you're talking about close knit units that, you know, I'm gonna cover for you no matter what. Instead of, no, man, there's, I'm not covering for you no matter what. I'm looking out for the overall good of the team and the mission and your overall good. And if you're doing some things that you shouldn't be doing, and you start to stray off the path, you know, and, and I'm gonna tell you, I'm, I'm gonna let you know that you shouldn't do that. And, and I'm gonna try to steer you back on the path. And that's what good leadership looks like. It's, it's not just covering for somebody no matter what happens. And I think those are traps that are easy to fall into, particularly for young leaders that, that want,

• 1:55:54Leif Babin?

  you know, their team to like them. And yet what you have to look out for is their long-term good. That's really what taking care of your people means is you're setting them up for the long-term success so that they can ultimately be successful in their business and life and everything they're trying to do.

• 1:56:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I got your back goes in two directions, right? So if I never tell you like, hey, Leif, if you do something that's illegal or moral or unethical and I'm your boss, I'm gonna pay for it. Like you're you're roping me in to get to go down as well. So you're not gonna do that to me, are you? And you, if we have a good relationship, you're like, oh dude, I didn't realize that. No, I don't want. So you look out for me. I look out for you. You take care of me. I'm gonna take care of you. By taking care of you, what I mean is if you're doing the right thing, I got your back 100%. You to take care of me, you're doing the right thing for the right reasons. And if we're got that going on, we're good. And it's it's 100%. We're covering for each other.

• 1:56:50Jocko Willink?

  When you start doing something that you shouldn't be doing, or that's illegal or morally unethical, now we have a problem. You're not covering for me anymore. So this whole thing just fell apart and and that happens and it's terrible. So you're right. Having that understanding is like, here's our standards. This is what we do. This is how we cover for each other. You're gonna be in a good place. The other thing about this is the the discipline, the hard training, the shared suffering, which results in winning. Guess what all those things do? They all build culture. They all strengthen the culture. That that's what the military is, right? The military, oh, how come we have a strong bond in our unit? Because we went through hard training together.

• 1:57:32Jocko Willink?

  How can we have an even stronger bond if we did even harder training? How can we have an even stronger bond? Oh, we went to combat together. How can we have the strongest possible bond? We were in the Battle of the Bulge together and we have a reunion and that's what we do every year for the rest of our lives. So when you do hard things together, that culture solidifies and that's what the discipline is. No one brags. Well, I guess very few people brag that, oh, yeah, oh, our boss just cut us loose this weekend and we just got to do whatever we want. They might brag a little bit, but they won't brag as much as the person that says, oh, yeah, guess what we did? We did this badass hard training. We still went out, but we were, we earned it.

• 1:58:13Jocko Willink?

  That's a totally different brag and that's a totally different culture. So that's what we're looking for. Um, probably a pretty good place to rap. We kind of hit the, you, you, you uh, brought up these subjects to me and I was like, oh, these are all freaking solid. So probably a good place to rap. And

• 1:58:34Leif Babin?

  Let me, let me just say something about that letter, man, because I remember when you, when you sent that email out and when you were leaving the SEAL teams, I remember just thinking it's a, it's a sad day in the Jocko the SEAL teams.

• 1:58:48Leif Babin?

  But what was awesome about that is you, I mean, clearly you're instilling the legacy that you left is hard training, is high standards. Why that's important, reminding people about what's at stake if they're not doing those things and who is training. Your enemies out there, they're thinking about you. They're ready, you know, they're committed, they're willing to die, their weapons are clean. And I just thought that was a powerful note to leave the teams on and to leave your training instructors with. And that was something that got shared widely, you know, throughout the SEAL teams. And it was a sad day, certainly when you were leaving, but the legacy that you left of so many incredible

• 1:59:29Leif Babin?

  leaders in the SEAL teams that continue to pass those lessons on and across the military. And I think that's what's been so powerful about this podcast is taking those lessons from not only our time, but from so many generations of military leaders across different wars and battlefields and experiences and sharing them with so many people so that they can take and learn those lessons and set the standard high and continue to carry the torch forward.

• 1:59:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And just FYI, sir, everybody knows this is what happened to me. The guys that raised me and the teams, they passed on these lessons. I'm just one link in a chain that's strong and it goes, you know, in the SEAL teams, just about 60 years right now, which isn't that long. But guess where those lessons came from? You know, the scouts and raiders. There's a chain and, you know, I'm one link in the chain and that's what makes it strong is that things get passed on and the lessons get taught. And why do they get taught? Because the guys care about each other and they want them to be able to go out and execute the

• 2:00:35Jocko Willink?

  mission. So that's what we're doing. Culture of training, culture of discipline. That's where we're at. Speaking of discipline, we got DEFRESAT coming up.

• 2:00:50Jocko Willink?

  Def reset. How'd your def reset go last year? Late Babin, talk to me about it.

• 2:00:54Leif Babin?

  It didn't go good for me. I came out of the gate super hot, you know, after, you know, just I was working out, you know, over the Christmas holidays, but it wasn't like, it wasn't my normal workouts. I wasn't pushing the standard high. Kind of got off the nutrition plan, you know, pretty good.

• 2:01:10Jocko Willink?

  What's a dessert? What's a dessert at Christmas? What's Christmas dessert?

• 2:01:14Leif Babin?

  Christmas dessert.

• 2:01:15Jocko Willink?

  There's gotta be like a Christmas dessert. Like at, you know, Thanksgiving, you're doing pumpkin pie or something like that. What's, what's Christmas?

• 2:01:21Speaker 02

  I've never had it, but in the songs, there's something about figgy pudding. Is that a thing?

• 2:01:26Jocko Willink?

  I don't know what's up with that.

• 2:01:26Speaker 02

  I don't know, dude.

• 2:01:27Leif Babin?

  Dude, it's cookies, pie. That's usually not what, what for me though, it's just, you know, it's just charcuterie stuff or, you know, just, just, I'm usually not.

• 2:01:39Jocko Willink?

  When did charcuterie become a thing?

• 2:01:41Leif Babin?

  The sweets, the sweets, it's meat, cheese, you know, stuff like that. You put that in front of me and I will eat myself sick.

• 2:01:49Jocko Willink?

  Do you know when charcuterie became a thing?

• 2:01:50Speaker 02

  Well, you got, in America, we called that a party platter.

• 2:01:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:01:55Speaker 02

  And what you got is some little cheese cubes. You got a little meat selection. You got some ham on there, you know.

• 2:02:00Jocko Willink?

  You, you get that at Vons, right?

• 2:02:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:03Jocko Willink?

  Plastic thing. You can see through it, see what's in there, see what's happening?

• 2:02:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, see what's happening. But, but I think that's.

• 2:02:08Jocko Willink?

  People started using the fancy word.

• 2:02:10Speaker 02

  Well, you want to put it on a like wooden plank and you want to, but yeah, charcuterie is a thing.

• 2:02:15Jocko Willink?

  Cause I didn't hear the word charcuterie until like maybe two years ago. And then, uh, my daughters went ham with, you know, they, they go hard in the paint. They're, they're setting it up, taking pictures of it. So. And yeah, so.

• 2:02:30Speaker 02

  So now that, now that's a thing at the Willinghouse.

• 2:02:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, like Thanksgiving, uh, my friend Sharon Robert come over and she brings over, I'm not kidding. She brought over a. Maybe eight foot long charcuterie board. Yeah, eight feet, chocolate almonds, salami, uh, little pieces of bread. So what is this? Like, aren't we gonna have dinner in a little bit? Of course, I, you know, the, like, I'm like you, life, like, salami, cheese, I'm just hammering that. But then the, the chocolate covered almonds are right there too. So we're not getting, we're not, you know, just shit happening with that.

• 2:03:05Leif Babin?

  Cruising by those.

• 2:03:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So anyways, we end up with this whole charcuterie thing, then steak comes. And this is the situation you're at. You're in, you're in Halloween or, uh, Christmas break. You're not, you're kind of straying off the path.

• 2:03:19Leif Babin?

  Comes, then you freaking hammer the steak down too. So now you're like freaking doubly full. But yeah, that was, that was my situation last, last year is, you know, just not, not training for, uh, uh, a couple of weeks there, you know, on Christmas break, we were traveling, spending some time with family. And then coming back, death reset, right? Jan one, I'm coming out of the gate hard. I was training jujitsu every day. I was training CrossFit every day. And, uh, I, I don't think I made it to day five before I was like injured myself. It was like jacked up.

• 2:03:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:50Leif Babin?

  And it was, uh, it wasn't good because what that meant was it set me back where I think it was three or four weeks. I mean, not being able to really train hard. Um, so don't do that. Learn that lesson from me. You gotta start training, like, start training and preparing now for the death reset.

• 2:04:04Jocko Willink?

  I've been trying to tell everyone, start training now, start getting ready for it. Get all the freaking Cheetos out of your house. Get the chocolate chip cookies out of your house. Get the charcuterie chocolate covered almonds. Get them out. Get them out. That's what we're doing. Death reset. We got the, the workouts and fitness coming from Jason Kalipa. Leadership tips from echelon front, discipline directives coming from me. Jocko Fuel gonna be there in the house. Gonna be, and we're actually like, uh, giving away awards for the culture of proper behavior. So you can win a bunch of stuff from Jocko Fuel. You can win mustard, attend to the mustard echelon front. So anyways, that's what we're doing. Uh, things you gotta do, it's all just things on the path. Wake up early.

• 2:04:48Jocko Willink?

  Get, get some exercise in, eat clean fuel, don't eat any trash, hydrate. That's what we're doing. Write down what you're supposed to do. So make a task list for yourself, then prioritize and execute that thing. And then do some, do some writing or reading. And then at the end of the day, do some remembrance. That's what it is. So that's what we're doing. Def reset. If you want to sign up for it, go to the def reset.com and join the party.

• 2:05:16Leif Babin?

  What's also

• 2:05:17Jocko Willink?

  Don't do a late babbin'. Don't do a late babbin' and get hurt four days in.

• 2:05:21Leif Babin?

  What's also about def reset is you know that there are thousands of other people on that same path, right? That are, that's your accountability buddies out there. Uh, you're like, this is not just me. We're all on this path. We're all doing this stuff together, but it definitely starts now. I think there's, you know, and you gotta scale it too. Look, if you're not training hard, you don't want to start out of the gate, super hard like that. But I'm super excited about this year. I think, uh, um, it's been a great program we've run in the past, but I think we've stepped it up this year with Jaco Fuel, Echelon Freud. I think the workouts from Jason Kalipa. We did a workout, uh, with him at the origin camp and, uh, he's a phenomenal coach. Uh, just how he breaks things down, um, and creates programs that, that, you know, are scalable for whether you're a just

• 2:06:04Leif Babin?

  ultra athlete or somebody who's just hasn't been in the gym in a while. Um, I think it's going to be an awesome program and definitely go check that out. It's going to be, gonna be good times.

• 2:06:13Jocko Willink?

  And we were talking about this the other day, trajectory. This is a key word. I need to use it more. I've been using it more, but trajectory, that trajectory is where you're going. And that thing can be pointed up and it can be pointed down and you can, when you have the right trajectory, even when you get pushed back a little bit, you hit some turbulence, you're still going up, you're still going in the right direction. When that trajectory is going down, you're, you're, you're doomed. So what I like about this,

• 2:06:42Jocko Willink?

  we're setting the trajectory for the whole year. We're going to make, because look, in 30 days that you're doing this, you're going to have changes in your life. Like you're going to have physical and mental changes in your life. That's what's going to happen. That's what's going to happen and it's going to set that trajectory up where you're going to be able to keep going. And the year is going to be just, we'll just go ahead and call it epic. So that's what we're doing. The def reset.com, Jaco Fuel.com. Get some hydrate, get some greens, get some mulk.

• 2:07:06Leif Babin?

  God, milk is good.

• 2:07:08Jocko Willink?

  It's so good. I, I gotta put this out again, cause I just gotta make sure everyone understands what we're talking about here. The chocolate milk powder right now, it's, it's, it's America. In America, it's cold right now. If you heat up the milk and you add chocolate milk to it, you have legitimate hundred percent hot chocolate. Now, Leif knows me, I'm a hot chocolate connoisseur. This fool's been buying me freaking, going to Starbucks and buying freaking hot chocolates for me for 20 years. Or whatever, 18 years, cause I don't drink coffee, cause I don't like it. But

• 2:07:44Jocko Willink?

  the hot chocolate, you know, tastes good. Now, you don't have to have a bunch of sugar loaded, uh, hot chocolate from Starbucks. You can get something that's legitimately good for you. You ever seen those things, they show how much sugars in Starbucks?

• 2:07:56Leif Babin?

  Oh, it's crazy.

• 2:07:57Jocko Willink?

  Psycho.

• 2:07:58Leif Babin?

  They show up by like the cup.

• 2:07:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pouring a, pouring a half a cup of sugar right down your gullet.

• 2:08:04Leif Babin?

  My kids love frozen hot chocolates. There's, we got a local, local coffee.

• 2:08:09Jocko Willink?

  Frozen hot chocolates.

• 2:08:10Leif Babin?

  It's a summer moon. It's, it's, it's a, they basically, it's like a milkshake with like whipped cream on it. It's massive sugar.

• 2:08:16Jocko Willink?

  Is it, wait, is it a frozen hot chocolate? So it's a milkshake?

• 2:08:21Leif Babin?

  Yeah. So it's basically, it's basically just like a, like a milkshake without coffee. You know, it's, it's, you get it in a coffee shop.

• 2:08:26Jocko Willink?

  Oh, like a Frappuccino.

• 2:08:28Leif Babin?

  Yeah, our local coffee shop does this, like a Frappuccino with no coffee.

• 2:08:31Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:08:31Leif Babin?

  But, and the kids love them, you know, but massive amount of sugar in it. So I, the other day, I make them, uh, they're like, we want frozen hot chocolates. So they requested this for breakfast and I made it out of chocolate milk and they loved it. And it was, and it was good for them. They got protein. They didn't get a bunch of sugar. It was, it was awesome.

• 2:08:52Speaker 02

  You know who does drink coffee? Leif Babin.

• 2:08:55Leif Babin?

  Yes, I do.

• 2:08:56Speaker 02

  Have you had the new coffee milk?

• 2:08:57Leif Babin?

  Dude, I haven't. Can't wait to try it.

• 2:08:58Jocko Willink?

  I'll go, I'll go home and get you one. When we go home, I'll grab you one. It's, yeah. I don't like coffee, as you know, this stuff tastes good.

• 2:09:05Leif Babin?

  It, it, it tastes good.

• 2:09:06Jocko Willink?

  Jaco, I was with Jaco the other day and, uh, he.

• 2:09:10Speaker 02

  You know, Jaco drinks milk all the time. It's not anything surprising. But I see Jaco take a little hit of this coffee one and then like proceed to slam the rest of it. We were on our little road trip. It was, uh, it was pretty hilarious. Jaco approved on that coffee.

• 2:09:24Leif Babin?

  Did you give him, did you give him a hard time about that? Cause you, you know what he used to tell me, right? When I was like, hey man, I'm gonna grab some coffee. You want something? He'd be like, I don't have any weaknesses. Coffee's a weakness.

• 2:09:34Jocko Willink?

  I consider that a vice.

• 2:09:35Leif Babin?

  Yeah, that's it. I don't have any vices. Coffee's a vice.

• 2:09:39Speaker 02

  Well, the, the new coffee milk negates that.

• 2:09:42Leif Babin?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:42Speaker 02

  A hundred percent good for you. Thirty grams of protein, ninety-five milligrams of caffeine.

• 2:09:46Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna put a hurt on like Starbucks, right? Cause you, why would you do that? Why would you go to Starbucks? And, cause you want a little caffeine thing or caffeine thing? Why would you go there and just pour a little bit of caffeine and a bunch of sugar into your system and just ruin your life?

• 2:10:00Speaker 02

  They can't put protein in my coffee. Starbucks can't do that. They don't have protein.

• 2:10:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's just not happening.

• 2:10:07Speaker 02

  They, they can't put thirty grams of protein in my coffee. They literally can't do it. So now that the milk has thirty grams of protein.

• 2:10:14Jocko Willink?

  Thirty grams of protein. The milk has caffeine in it. Did you know that? The milk, the coffee, sweet cream coffee milk has caffeine. We debated whether we should put caffeine in it or not, cause we're like, oh, I don't know. And then we just like, hey, if people are drinking coffee, they, they're gonna want that. They're gonna want that kick. So, yeah, I'll give you one this afternoon.

• 2:10:33Leif Babin?

  I can't wait to check it out.

• 2:10:34Jocko Willink?

  You can T and E it for the, for the team here. That, that's where we're at. JacoFuel.com. We're making all kinds of good stuff there. Stuff that's truly good for you. Look, we, we have to make the world understand. I'm doing a bad job. There's such a thing, there's one opportunity for you to have an energy drink that's good for you. Go, go to JacoFuel.com and get some go. It's good for you. It's truly good for you. So you can have the benefits of an energy drink without any downside whatsoever.

• 2:11:06Jocko Willink?

  That's it. No downside whatsoever. So, check it out.

• 2:11:10Leif Babin?

  Before Jaco go, I never really paid attention to what was in those energy drinks. You know, pound Red Bulls or Monsters or whatever. And now I look at that stuff. Um, you know, if I'm stopping in the store and they don't, they don't carry, uh, Jaco going, usually I got the stash with me, so I'm good to go. But if you, you pick up and look at what's, what's in this stuff.

• 2:11:30Jocko Willink?

  You can't drink them.

• 2:11:30Leif Babin?

  Horrible.

• 2:11:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you can't drink them. It's just a nightmare. So Jaco Fuel.com, check it out. Also Wawa, also Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, Military Commissaries, Afees, Hannaford, Dash Stores in Maryland, Wake Firm, Shop Right, HEB down in Texas. They do it right down in Tejas at HEB, don't they?

• 2:11:46Leif Babin?

  They represent HEB.

• 2:11:48Jocko Willink?

  Freaking legit. And every, and you know why that is? It's because of you that's listening right now, that's, that lives in Texas and you know you go to HEB. And when you roll in there and you get yourself your, your Jaco Fuel, man, awesome. We appreciate it. Same thing with Meyer up in the Midwest. Same thing. Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, small gyms everywhere. That's what we're doing. We're, we're getting into small gyms. You got a CrossFit gym. You got a jiu-jitsu gym. You got a powerlifting gym. I don't care if you got a global gym. You need to, you need to be giving your consumers and your customers and your clients the best possible thing you can. Email J F Sales at Jaco Fuel dot com. So you can sell the goodness to your people. That's what we're doing. Also OriginUSA.com.

• 2:12:30Jocko Willink?

  You don't have to support communism and slavery. You, you don't have to. You can actually support freedom and America. And you do that by instead of buying something that was made in a sweatshop by a 13 year old girl that's there against her will. You don't have to support that. You can get OriginUSA.com. You can support America. You can help rebuild manufacturing in this country. And what do you need? What do you wear? Well, you wear jeans? We got you covered. T-shirts? We got you covered. Hoodies? We got you covered. Hunt gear? We got you covered. Boots? We got you covered.

• 2:13:06Jocko Willink?

  Workout gear? What? We got you covered. Oh, you need a jiu-jitsu gi? Well, those are only made in Pakistan and China. No, actually they're made right here in the United States of America by OriginUSA.com. We got you covered head to toe.

• 2:13:20Leif Babin?

  So check out originusa.com and get freedom to wrap your body. That's what we're doing. Also.

• 2:13:30Speaker 02

  Jaco Store.

• 2:13:30Leif Babin?

  Yeah, I almost covered for Echo. That's your game. That's your game. What do you got, man?

• 2:13:35Speaker 02

  So Jaco Store, you want to represent on the path, discipline equals freedom.

• 2:13:39Leif Babin?

  You did it again. You're jacking Echo's lines, bro.

• 2:13:42Speaker 02

  I'm getting there. I'm getting there. So what I want to do is lay down the foundation here. Let people know Jaco Store, jacostore.com is where you can get your discipline equals freedom gear. Now, what are these things? We called them material items today on the podcast.

• 2:13:56Leif Babin?

  Yes, we did.

• 2:13:57Speaker 02

  These are, these are.

• 2:13:59Leif Babin?

  See, you can't think of a better word than material items.

• 2:14:02Speaker 02

  It's a hard one. It is. But it is things that you can wear that you represent on the path. And you're not just representing for the world, you're representing for yourself. When I put that on, when I see that X flag, that discipline equals freedom, it changes the way I act a little, you know, it changes the way I carry myself. You're representing, man. This is the path that we're on. And this is where you can get those items. Jaco Store.

• 2:14:29Leif Babin?

  It's pretty awesome when you're like walking to an airport or you're like a public place. You see like the Def Cor flag, you see the shirt and you know, are you on the mats? And you see the get after it rash guard. What's like, I'm repping the shirt locker here today. The shirt locker shirts are awesome because every month a new shirt shows up. You just sign up for this and it gets shipped to you and you don't know what it's going to be, but they're all cool shirts and that's, that's like the next level. So that then somebody sees that shirt like, dude, where'd you get that shirt? Like, oh, shirt locker.

• 2:15:03Speaker 02

  And this is, this is the connection. I just made it in my brain. You're wearing the path is hard t-shirt and the thing about material items is usually they represent something that's achieved through hard work, right? A patch, a metal, a coin, whatever.

• 2:15:19Speaker 02

  The path is hard. That is the thing. When you're repping DEF core, when you're representing discipline equals freedom, the reason I think I'm connected to it like that is because the path is hard. It's hard to be disciplined, man. It's hard to wake up early and get after it. It's hard to do these things. So when you represent with DEF core, you're, you're representing the hard things that we do on the path and that makes it mean something.

• 2:15:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. K Dog's in the game now. Now he be getting texts from four o'clock in the morning from the old man. We got this.

• 2:15:54Jocko Willink?

  Check. So that's where we're at. JacoStore.com. Hey, you're gonna need steak for life, right? You need steak. You want to be strong. You want to take over the world. You want to dominate in your area of operations. You're gonna need steak. PrimalBeef.com, ColoradoCraftBeef.com, delivered protein justice to your door. That's what's happening. They're, they're, I had a, we had the other night, a very expensive steak from a very nationally known high level restaurant. And I'm going to tell you right now, it doesn't, it's not the same. These, this steak that I'm talking about, PrimalBeef.com, ColoradoCraftBeef.com, this is real steak.

• 2:16:39Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna, it's gonna bring your taste buds to, to the next level. So check those out. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also JacoUnderground.com. Also YouTube, subscribe to the YouTube channels. We got, we got Jocko Podcast YouTube. We got Jaco Fuel YouTube. We got Origin USA YouTube. We got Echelon Front YouTube. Get in there. See what's happening behind the scenes.

• 2:17:01Speaker 02

  What's happening?

• 2:17:04Speaker 02

  We're putting a bunch of new content up on Echelon Front YouTube now too. So excited about that.

• 2:17:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. There were chopping up some of the debrief podcasts, which is great. It's great because those are the kind of things you can just take, absorb seven minutes, nine minutes, 12 minutes. Oh, um, in my, you know, doing this part of the workout, sitting on the treadmill. Cool.

• 2:17:26Jocko Willink?

  Learn, get better. So that's what we're doing there. Psychological Warfare, flipsidecanvas.com, Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. That's what's happening. Books, I read a bunch from About Face today. I've read that book a lot. Still on my OG copy, but I, this one doesn't have the foreword that I wrote. So I wrote a foreword to that book, About Face by Colonel David Hackworth. Check that out. Then a bunch of other books. You guys know what they are. Leadership Strategy and Tactics, Final Spin, The Code, The Evaluations of Protocol, Discipline Equals Freedom, Field Manual, Way the Warrior Kid, one, two, three, four, and five. Letters from Uncle Jake, Mikey and the Dragons. And then of course, Extreme Ownership and The Dichotomy of Leadership,

• 2:18:11Jocko Willink?

  written by myself and my brother, Leif Babin, keeping it real. That's it. I used to say that. That was a thing I used to say on the podcast every time.

• 2:18:19Speaker 02

  Spring it back.

• 2:18:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I just brought it back, bro. What are you talking about? And we also have a leadership consultancy, Echelon Front. We solve problems through leadership. We, it's a leadership consultancy. What does that mean? That means that we work with your company for an extended period of time to assess the leadership inside your organization, train the leadership inside your organization, and then follow up to make sure that the leadership inside your organization is winning. We will help you find a way to win. That's what we do. I talked about that earlier today. What we learned how to do is look at problems,

• 2:19:01Jocko Willink?

  apply our principles to the problems, and then win. So we do that through leadership. And we can do that inside your organization. If you want to get engaged with us, go to echelonfront.com. We also have live events that we do. We got the muster, we got FTX, we got council, we got battlefield. All can be found at echelonfront.com. And listen, for you as an individual human being, your company may not hire Echelon Front, your team may not hire Echelon Front, but we have online training. So extremeownership.com. If you go there, we have courses, we have live interactive sessions, and you can learn the lessons of

• 2:19:44Jocko Willink?

  leadership that you can apply to everything that you do. And you might be a frontline person right now, I'm not in charge of anybody. You are influencing other people. You have to lead. What about your family? You're leading your family. What about your friends? I talked about this earlier. You're creating a culture with your friends. Don't you want your friends to be badass?

• 2:20:03Jocko Willink?

  How do you do that? Leadership. Extreme ownership.com. Check that out. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee's Charity Organization. Giving veterans and their families the attention and the help that they need that isn't covered by the US government, by the VA. It's, she's helped so many of our friends. She's helped so many people that we don't know, but we know that she's helped them. We've seen with our own eyes, people's lives be changed, straightened out, reorganized, and it's just been awesome.

• 2:20:49Jocko Willink?

  So if you want to get involved, or you want to donate, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Also, don't forget about Micah Fink. He's got his team with Heroes and Horses.org, taking veterans out into the wilderness. So that they can get better. And Jimmy May has got his organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. Check that out. Helping veterans transition to the civilian sector. If you want to connect with us, we're on the interwebs. Kerry is at Kerry Helton. No underscore, just Kerry Helton. He got that straightened out. And Leif is at Leif Babin. No real Leif Babin anymore. You are the real Leif Babin. Leif Babin.

• 2:21:31Jocko Willink?

  Just at Leif Babin. We got that squared away. Jack Daniel Hill. JTP. JTP came through. Jack Daniel got it done. I don't think that's normal, that you can pull that off. No. But it's pretty cool. And I am at Jocko Willink. Just listen, when you get in there, just watch out for the algorithm. Because the algorithm's no joke. We're acting like it's, we're acting like, oh, that wouldn't get me. You know, Leif was talking about worst case scenarios today. We, oh, and you don't really know what it's like until you're there. Well, guess what? That's what you think about the algorithm. You're like, oh, it won't affect me. I'm kind of a badass. It won't get me. I got discipline. Next thing you know.

• 2:22:11Jocko Willink?

  Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. You swiped away freaking forty-two minutes of your life. Don't let it happen.

• 2:22:23Jocko Willink?

  And, thanks to all of our servicemen and women, who are training right now and preparing right now to fight and conquer the enemies of freedom. We thank you for what you do. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all first responders. Thanks to all of you for training and preparing and being ready when we need your help.

• 2:22:53Jocko Willink?

  And everyone else out there, we got one more bit of guidance from Hack. He said that that discipline and tactical proficiency on the battlefield were direct results of discipline and combat skills instilled on the parade and training grounds.

• 2:23:15Jocko Willink?

  Discipline is not free. Discipline is not a gene that you have. Discipline comes from training. And you have to make it part of the culture that you're in. For you, for your friends, for your family, for your company, for your team.

• 2:23:35Jocko Willink?

  That's what you have to do. And you do that by going out there every day and getting after it. And until next time, this is Leif and Kerry and Jaco. Out.