560: Leadership Is A Skill. Train It. With Jamie Cochran.

>Join Jocko Underground Full Episodes< https://app.redcircle.com/shows/64a89f88-a245-4098-8d8d-496325ec4f74/exclusive-content Jamie Cochran breaks down real-world leadership lessons from Echelon Front clients and organizations. They discuss overcoming resistance, merging cultures, developing leaders, taking ownership without doing everything yourself, and why leadership is a skill that must be continuously practiced. 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 560 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko and Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:04Jocko Willink?

  Also joining us tonight is Jamie Cochran. Jamie is the Chief Operating Officer at Echelon Front, which is our Leadership Consultancy. She's a military spouse, or at least she was a military spouse. She was married to a SEAL officer that worked with Leif and that I put through training. And she has been with us since 2014. She rose up through the ranks and we discussed her background and how she ended up where she is now on the podcast a few years ago, which is episode 388. So if you want to get the entire backstory on Jamie Cochran, check out episode 388. And she's an integral part of everything that happens at Echelon Front. She oversees everything as the COO and she also runs an event called the Assembly,

• 0:47Jocko Willink?

  which is a leadership event specifically for women. And we'll talk about how that came to fruition. But she does everything else at Echelon Front. And today we were recently, we were talking about some case studies with some of our clients from Echelon Front and the lessons that we've learned from that. And as we were talking through them, I thought it would be good to share some of these lessons with everybody. And then we actually discussed a couple more things that it would be interesting to discuss here and have everyone learn these lessons, because many of these lessons, as we often find, are universal lessons that are helpful in any business, in any industry, with any team, including your family, and of course, in life as well. So Jamie, welcome back.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  It's been three years.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  It's nice to be back on a podcast where I don't have to spend the majority of the podcast, or hopefully any at all, talking about myself. So excited to talk about leadership principles versus the last.

• 1:43Jocko Willink?

  You don't want to talk about your days in college singing?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  Did you spend, how many, are you on any albums that we could get right now?

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Um, I supported in doing like vocal demos for several songs that are out.

• 1:58Jocko Willink?

  Can we find out what any of them are?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I think, I think I have Ironclad NDAs from back then, because you're not really allowed to share what songs. I'll tell you off camera. How's that?

• 2:09Jocko Willink?

  Jason Wilson, you know who came on? And he was a rapper in Detroit, like back in the day. And I went and found his music.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  It's pretty legit.

• 2:19Jocko Willink?

  You know, but that's the way it is. So it's still out there.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll find an old demo CD and send you my, my own demo CD at some point.

• 2:26Jocko Willink?

  Were they covers? Oh, there's some you wrote?

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, songs I wrote and, and we did some covers as well.

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  What kind of music was it?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Uh, it's kind of all over, some bluesy. I had a, I was in a band, we had a stand-up.

• 2:38Jocko Willink?

  What was the name of the band?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Ace. It was just my name, Jase, Jase Smith. I was Smith back then. Yeah.

• 2:45Jocko Willink?

  Jase, it's cool to name a band after yourself, but Smith is pretty.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  It was me. And then I had some friends in college that joined me and played with me.

• 2:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So we, I had bands back in the day too. And my brother Elgin had the reel to reels that we had, because we went in the studio and made an album.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  It's a better name.

• 3:11Jocko Willink?

  The album, well, the band was, we had a bunch of different names. The, the name that seems to have survived through the most amount of time is Bronson's Children, after Charles Bronson, because we had all kinds of different names. We, we were one called Time. And mind you, this is when I'm 15 years old. Our band was at one time called Rage of Discipline.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, 15 and you were already chanting the discipline mantra?

• 3:34Jocko Willink?

  Ridiculous. But, so he has the reel to reels. And he brought them to like a forensic person to see if they could get the tracks off of them. And they, apparently it's too brittle or something like that. So I don't know. It would be awesome to get, we had some real bangers on there of songs.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  What was the, what do you call them? The media? It was like a tape?

• 3:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a tape. It's a reel to reel, like an eight. I, I want to say it was an eight-track studio that we were in. He, he sent me a picture of the receipt, you know, had like the little, I think it cost us, you know, $80 for eight hours of, of studio time. But there was a song on there that I wish we could get back. It was, and I wrote it, it was called Myself Strong. And I, I still remember some of the lyrics. We'll get back to it at some point. I could probably try.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  This is still at 15?

• 4:24Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Okay, you've had this running theme since a young, young kid.

• 4:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's what's kind of funny about the whole thing is there hasn't been a whole lot of mental progression.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  I saw one of the videos, Elgin James, that's all.

• 4:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Of you guys like going hard in the garage or something, and then your dad comes in and scolds you guys.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Jocko, 15 years old.

• 4:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, those are some good times. All right, so we were talking about some case studies. And what's interesting is, you know, this is kind of like when, when Dave Burke and I do the debrief podcasts, like changing the names and the industries a little bit, just so we can talk openly about, we, we work with so many companies that it's hard to figure out, it'll be hard for people to figure out who this is, but the lessons are always the same. And so first one we'll talk about, um, there was a, there was a construction company and the CEO came to a muster and recognized like the principles that we teach and, you know, started bringing us in on multiple levels, doing all kinds of work with them,

• 5:31Jocko Willink?

  doing keynotes, doing workshops, uh, doing other types of consultings, FTXs, the whole nine yards, and had exponential growth over the next several years and went from, you know, uh, probably a regional, I would say a regional, a regional player into a nationwide massive, massive company with like thousands percent revenue growth and thousands of employees and hired. So pretty cool, um, pretty awesome, pretty awesome to see. But this is a common question. So one of the things that we dealt with a little bit early on with that was you, there

• 6:09Jocko Willink?

  was like someone in the C-suite that wasn't on board with, you know, the whole Echelon Front, the whole extreme ownership, the whole, you know, these militaristic, and we'll talk about this, I have a note to talk about this, these militaristic leadership principles, like how does this relate to our industry at all? And this, this happens in just about every company that we work with, right? There's going to be some people that are just not on board, like, hey? And we'll talk about some of those reasons, because there's a, there's a whole plethora of reasons that you, that some, that an individual may not quote be on board with the idea of extreme ownership.

• 6:48Jocko Willink?

  But getting them on board and doing a direct assault to attack them for not being on board is not the recommended move. What do you think?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  No, not at all. Yeah, this particular, I, I think a lot of companies we work with, a lot of clients ask this question, because you're always going to have a naysayer. I don't think we've worked with any company that a hundred percent of their employees are on board, especially from day one. It takes a lot of time. Usually we're like, we're, we're happy if we get 10% of people in that room to say, yes, I can take more ownership in my life. And what we tell them is what you have to do is surround them. So you have to build up this culture of ownership so strong that the people that are unwilling to take ownership sort of start to weed themselves out. They sort of feel like they're not connected to the group, they're outside, they're the outsider, because the more they push against it, the more the people around them are compensating by taking more and more ownership. And those problems are starting to get solved with or without them.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  And I think this is the case in this particular organization. One, it wasn't just one, multiple people in the organization were excited about these principles and the one that continued to push back just sort of started to get ostracized from the group a little bit.

• 7:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that is, and again, if you go and attack people, they're, they're not going to be, they're not going to change their mind because you attacked them. That, that's just not the way the world works. And I say this all the time about like, um, the person, the talking head personalities, the either extreme conservative or extreme liberal, uh, type of talking head personalities, like how many people has that extreme conservative person converted to conservatism? The answer is probably zero. And how many people has this left-wing, talking head, super crazy liberal person converted to that? The answer is probably zero. Now, they, each group has their own big giant audiences, but all those audiences always already think the way that they think, or they at least lean in that direction and

• 8:40Jocko Willink?

  they go, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. So you just get a bunch of cheerleaders, but you don't actually change anybody's mind. So, and, and by the way, each of those groups, what they do as their strategy is attack the other ones. So this being idea that you're just going to attack people and then they're going to go, oh, wow, you know, if you came to me and said, hey, Jocko, this is a stupid plan. I don't go, oh, thank you so much for pointing me out, pointing that out to me. No, I say, well, I'd like to see you come up with a better plan. And all of a sudden we have problems. So the idea in, in military terms is, you know, it's like bypassing, you might bypass an area of terrain that's too hard to take, or it's too well defended. And what you ultimately do is you envelop it, which means you surround it.

• 9:22Jocko Willink?

  And then once it's surrounded, well, now they're kind of cut off, like you said, you're kind of isolated and those people either surrender and they go, you know what? Okay, I see it. Or they, they leave, right? They leave the company, they self-select out, which I would say that's usually, well, if that happens, it's going to be a good thing, because that person is too egotistical and too stuck in their ways and they're not going to be progressive in their mindset. So it's going to be a problem. So surrounding people, and listen, that doesn't mean you can't have conversations with them. Because by the way, one of the easiest conversations to have with someone is, well, oh, oh, Jamie, you, you don't like extreme ownership? Cool. What do you, what do you think we should do? Blame each other? Like point fingers at each other? Is that what we should be doing? It's like, no, no, no, that's not what we should be doing at all.

• 10:07Jocko Willink?

  What we should be doing is, oh, well, I mean, it's to me, it's just like, I'm going to take responsibility if something goes wrong. I'm going to try and get my, get my team to do their best to fix it. Does that sound bad? No one thinks that, just like no one thinks cover and move is bad. No one thinks simplifying things is bad. No one thinks prioritize and execute is bad. No one thinks decentralized command is bad, unless you're a tyrant. But so having those conversations is okay, but also just beating the door down with someone is generally speaking, not the smartest approach when interacting with other people.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the resistance oftentimes when I think about the people that resist extreme ownership and the people we've met that just have this wall up of nope, this isn't for me, doesn't come from a place of understanding what exactly we teach. It comes from whatever it is they've made up in their mind of this military combat type of principles. And then what they start to see around them is people actually applying the principles. And if you take away the language and you know, the image of Jocko and the extreme ownership vernacular, all of a sudden you get just people that are saying, hey, I'm going to prioritize building relationships. I'm going to simplify plans and communicate more effectively. I'm going to be detached from my emotions and my ego. So I can make good decisions. I'm going to

• 11:22Speaker 02

  empower my people to lead. And without all of the language we use, people can, for the most part, you have the one offs, but for the most part, they start to see this as this is an opportunity for me to solve a problem and I should probably just get on board. I think we, we just have to sometimes separate the image they have in their mind of what extreme ownership is for them to see it in action and start to see the people around them. And maybe they self select, maybe they self select out, maybe they actually see that as, okay, I see now a path for me to apply these principles a little more effectively.

• 11:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, and we have this in the notes to talk later about, but yeah, the, the Jocko caricature, which is well deserved. It's well deserved. The Jocko caricature is well deserved. But it's also not, not very realistic. It's partially realistic, but it's not, it's a very, it's one side of the story. And same thing with the stereotypical military leadership. Well deserved reputation, but not the real, not the real actual what military leadership should be. So, okay, that's the first kind of resistance card.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  I was going to say, in the case of this case study, though, that individual started to change their perspective when they saw that as they were growing. So this, this particular company was growing at a rapid pace through acquisitions and mergers. And what typically happens in those instances is that you acquire a business and people freak out and you have people leaving constantly. You have a culture shift. You're trying to get people on boarded to new processes and it just creates a lot of chaos for the company that's now being acquired. And this company decided that they wanted to build their culture around ownership. So part of that acquisition was we're going to show them right out the gate, we're here to invest in them. And they would do a field training exercise typically within the first one to three months. So those individuals that are now feeling a little nervous about

• 13:08Speaker 02

  joining this bigger company, they're going and doing this awesome team building experience, this leadership exercise and getting a chance to see these principles in action. They feel more connected to the parent company. They, for most of these companies, which are mom and pop organizations, they haven't been invested in in that way ever. So they're feeling this sense of, man, this company is really taking time to invest in me and my leadership. And so the individual that was really resistant towards this, what he saw was the transition in these acquisitions and mergers were going so much smoother than any other company he'd been a part of before. So the resistance he had started to break down as he started to see the impact of people saying, okay, I'm ready to take ownership and this is helping us with this really difficult transition. And this was our, that was their business

• 13:50Speaker 02

  model. And so he sort of turned the tide and got on board as he started to see it in practice.

• 13:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the idea of merging cultures, which is something that happens anytime with so many businesses out there that are doing acquisitions or merging companies, and you're going to have cultures that come together and those cultures are not going to be equal, they're not going to be the same exact thing when you get together. Like it's just, it's just not going to happen. And the, you know, we, I obviously dealt with this a lot in the military, not only the culture of, hey, the SEAL teams versus the big Navy, the SEAL teams versus the Army, the SEAL teams versus the Marine Corps. And then on top of that, you go to a host nation, it's the SEAL teams and the Iraqis, it's the SEAL teams and the Singaporeans, it's the SEAL teams and the Thai Navy SEALs, it's the SEAL teams and the Egyptians. Like you're working with all these different people with all these different cultures. And so you have to learn like, okay, so what do you do there? What do you

• 14:40Jocko Willink?

  do? And one of the most important things, pieces of advice that I give is of course, goes back to having an open mind. And when you start working with other people that have different cultures than yours, instead of saying, hey, this is the culture now, I, I'm going to dictate the culture to you, that, that's not going to work out. You're going to get that resistance that I talked about when you attack somebody. If I attack your culture, you are, you are going to get defensive. That's the way it is. But if I ask you questions about your culture and why you do things a certain way, and there's going to be parts of your culture that I have to say, oh, you know what? I like that. I like the way that you do that more than the way it is in our culture and our company. Oh, you do this, you have, you know, Fridays where you, you have pizza parties. To me, that seems a little

• 15:22Jocko Willink?

  bit efficient. Oh, but you've tracked over the past three years that you get people that stay a lot later in the evening because they all had a good time at lunch and they get more productive. Okay, cool. That makes sense to me. So, so bringing in parts of different cultures is what creates a stronger culture in the long run. But a lot of times people just think, oh, we're buying, I'm, I'm buying your company, Jamie. Here's your new culture. I'm going to tell you right now, that does not go over well. It just proves out of the gate that I don't have an open mind. I'm not listening to, I don't care about you. Right? I don't, if I, I'm not allowing you to influence me at all. So those are two components of a relationship. I'm not listening to you. That's the third component of a relationship and I'm not treating you with your respect. So right out of the gate, I've failed on four

• 16:04Jocko Willink?

  out of the five elements of building a relationship by not going, hey, Jamie, I noticed that you guys come in casual on Fridays. What's that all about? Or I noticed that you guys always wear, you know, suits when you go to present. What's that all, whatever the thing is. Instead of me just, just decreeing that it's wrong. And I say, oh, why you do it that way? Oh, let me listen to you. Hey, you know what? That kind of makes sense. We should, maybe we should absorb some of that, too. We don't have to necessarily wear suits, but maybe we could, we, we just figure things out. And then all of a sudden, those, instead of rejecting the relationship, all of a sudden I'm building and I'm at least moving in the right direction. So good stuff to think about. Um, this, uh, going to case study number two, we had a company that was, or not a company, but like a public service. This is

• 16:47Jocko Willink?

  a, this person working for the public and let's say Waterworks, we'll say that Waterworks. And this, the director in this company had, or in this, in this organization, had listened to the podcast, read the books, brought us in, we did the train to trainer program. When we did the trainer trainer program, all of a sudden things got more efficient. They increased their delivery of service. They cut their delivery time, like everything got better.

• 17:20Jocko Willink?

  And eventually they ran a train the trainer program with us. And so now they have people inside their organization that teach what we teach and they don't need us anymore. We still do some check-ins with them to make sure that everything's going well. We still give them some, some materials to utilize when they teach. Their promotional exams now include, you know, extreme ownership principles, which is pretty awesome. So it can have a change, even in like the public realm inside of companies. But one of the biggest problems that we work with, when we work with companies that are, that are part of, you know, public services, is it costs money. And how do we overcome the, the costs? And one of the things

• 18:00Jocko Willink?

  here that we'll, we'll talk about is that, you know, you've got to run your budget through like strict, you know, public budget scrutiny. And it's hard. Sometimes people, it's very difficult when people have a tight budget to invest in their people because it's very hard to quantify. Right? It's very hard to quantify. We, we should just get new, what are we talking about? Waterworks? We should just get new pipes and new pumps. And that makes sense, right? Everyone goes, hey, new pipes and new pumps. We should just do that. It's very hard to quantify leadership. Leadership, people have a hard time understanding how impactful it is. Of course, we don't have a hard time because we've seen it over and

• 18:42Jocko Willink?

  over again. But what are some of the ways to overcome the high cost of what we do in for a leader?

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Well, I think the point you're making is really valid because I have had this conversation countless times with clients who are coming to me and asking, what is the return on investment for leadership development? And that answer is very hard to quantify. It's very hard to explain, except for the dozens and dozens, probably hundreds at this point of clients that we have seen the uptick in what matters to them, the measures, the, the metrics that matter to them increase as a result of investing in their people and delivering on leadership development for their people. So we know, we know the measurements exist and we can see it.

• 19:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I say this all the time, you know, this happened for the first time, I don't know, probably 10 years ago, when a client was asking me, what's the ROI on this going to be? And I, I said, well, what, what metrics do you measure? And they said, oh, you know, cost to produce, you know, whatever this and that. And I said, cool, all those things will get better. And they were kind of looking at me because I didn't have a spreadsheet and I wasn't, you know, uh, gonna, gonna look at their, their cogs of what they're, no, I wasn't going to look at any of that. I'm telling you, if whatever it is that you are measuring success by inside your organization, it will improve when your leadership gets better. That's the way it works. That's why we say all the problems, all problems are leadership problems. Because whether it's your upside down on your P and L, that's a leadership problem. Sure, you can blame accounting and you can blame, there's all kinds of things you can blame, but it's a leadership problem because a good leader's

• 20:09Jocko Willink?

  going to say, hold on a second, what are we spending money? How we, what are we bringing in? That's what a good leader is going to do. If it's, if you have trouble with turnover, right? You've got, you're losing people, you've got churn of people leaving your organization. You could say, oh, that's an HR problem. That's a leadership problem. And sure, HR is part of leadership, but it is a leadership problem. And that is, leadership is what will get that problem solved. If you have safety issues, you could say, well, you know, we got, we got the wrong kind of equipment. The fact that you have the wrong kind of equipment is a leadership problem. So all problems are leadership problems. So if you want to improve in any metric, then what you need to do is improve your leadership. So that's why, and what people think is, people think, well, you know, Jamie, if I promote you to a leadership position, now you know how to lead. No, that's not true. It's not true

• 20:53Jocko Willink?

  in the military. It's not, it's not true anywhere. That's why McDonald's sends their managers to hamburger university for six months to learn how to manage and lead in that store. McDonald's making burgers and fries. They have leadership training.

• 21:10Jocko Willink?

  And yet you think in whatever your organization you're in that, oh, well, we can just promote someone. And since that person was a good plumber, or since that person was a good salesman, or since that person was a good technician on the job site, they're ready to lead now. Nope. It's being a plumber is radically different from being a leader. And so when you put a plumber that's never been in charge of anyone before, in charge of people, and you don't give them the skills, it's the same thing as putting them on a job to install a toilet and they don't know what they're doing. You wouldn't do that. You'd have shit everywhere. It's just the same thing when you put them in a leadership position. If you don't give them the training, you're gonna have shit everywhere. It's not gonna be good.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you and I know that. The problem is so many companies do not prioritize leadership development. When times get tough and budgets are tight, it's the first thing to go off the P and L. And it sucks for their people because I have talked to dozens of clients who were in that exact position. I was the best at my job. I got promoted. I wasn't ready and I screwed it up. And think about all the time and wasted money and effort that went into that effort as opposed to investing in your people before you put them in a position to lead. So it's very difficult for us to explain to clients the value of leadership development. And there's few clients out there who understand that and are actively seeking ways to invest. So to your earlier question of how do you manage this when you do have tight budgets or things are going through a very specific budget process to get approval?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Oftentimes, I remember early at my time at Echelon Front, I used to say this to clients, like, hey, this isn't a great sales pitch, but we're okay if you don't sign up for the six-month, 12-month program. Let's start with one thing. Let's start with a virtual session if that's all you can afford. Let's start with an onsite workshop. That's brilliant if we could do a half day or a full day with your team. And if you can't afford those, let me give you a slew of free resources and things available to you to help you start implementing this within your organization. And the reason why I would always start with one thing as opposed to trying to get people to sign up for this big package deal is because I knew that if we could do one thing with them, they would create enough buy-in and they could see enough of that potential ROI to say, okay, maybe we can actually lead up the chain and try to get some

• 23:15Speaker 02

  more funding here. Or let's, let's build this out step by step as opposed to trying to do it all at once. That's been really effective with a lot of clients of, hey, you don't have the budget now. Let's build in enough excitement around this and buy-in that your leadership is going to say, okay, what's going on over here? Let's, let's dedicate a little more funding to this. And that's worked in almost every case.

• 23:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. That's, there's so many kind of low-cost ways that you can start this process inside your organization. I mean, you could probably, probably the cheapest would, would be to go to the library and get a copy of Extreme Ownership, right? And, and there you go. You can start that off. You can-

• 23:52Speaker 02

  The cheapest is your podcast.

• 23:54Jocko Willink?

  Podcast is free. That's a great way to start it too. And, and, and that's, and then once you start getting a little bit of traction, things pick up and then other people see the effectiveness of it. And you know, even with this particular case of this public service company, it's like, oh yeah, when they start seeing their costs go down and the service increase, they go, oh, okay. Where did this come from? Oh, it came from training our leaders. And that kind of ties into the third case study here, where there was a manufacturer, and I think they were making auto parts. And this particular individual had, had left a career as a, you know, working in an auto manufacturing shop. And he started his own,

• 24:38Jocko Willink?

  started his own little shop. And he had read EO, and then he attended the muster, and he started to build relationships with bigger manufacturers. And he built very critical relationships with suppliers, started bringing his team to the FTX, got more contracts. And he, you know, then had the material to make the contracts happen because he had, he had built relationships with the material suppliers, and then brought, you know, NEF to train a whole staff of 200 people. And, and now they are really doing well. But that goes back to the same thing is we, we work with a lot of companies that they don't have a big budget. You know, they're trying to grow. And when you're trying to grow a company, you're not

• 25:20Jocko Willink?

  sitting on a bunch of money. It's just not the way it works. You're going to reinvest that money back into the company. And again, okay, how much of that, it would be ideal if you could invest, invest a bunch of it back into leadership. But sometimes like, no, no, we gotta make payroll. Oh, no, we gotta buy the material for the next job. That's a reality of life. But luckily, we do have things like the books, the podcasts, the academy, the online training academy. Like, that's not an expensive investment at all for your team. And yet, it is so effective in teaching these principles. And then people have something that they can tie back to on a weekly basis. You're getting together. You're making sure

• 25:59Jocko Willink?

  that you're, you're staying on the path. Because everyone, everyone resorts back to their instincts after a short period of time. And it takes some serious time and effort to change your instincts, which I think we're going to talk about as well, changing your instincts to where you actually start to think and let the logical extreme ownership part of your brain run things instead of your emotion and your logic, run things, which we were actually talking about before we hit record, is we've all got that voice in our head of our ego and our emotions that is ready just to ruin everything and think it's right while doing it. And you can't

• 26:40Jocko Willink?

  let that voice out. If you want to let it out, you can, you can go into a, a soundproof booth somewhere, and you can go and yell and scream about how dumb everyone else is, and how smart you are, and how you deserve to be in control. You can do that. You can go in that little thing.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  They have raid rooms. You could go in there, just make all the excuses you want, rage out, and then, and then leave and do the actual right thing.

• 27:04Jocko Willink?

  And then go out and run the filter so that you're not saying dumb stuff. And you're not attacking people. And you're actually building relationships. So the, those are good ways when you start out to, with a company, to utilize these principles and at a very low cost.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, Echelon Front does a lot of emphasis on value. So we really try to put enough out there in the world for, for the clients and the individuals who can't afford us, or who don't have the budget to bring us in, or for individuals who maybe don't have support with their leadership. How do I learn these principles? And one of the most common things we hear from our clients is, hey, we don't want this to be a flavor of the week. And oftentimes, we're coming in after they've had other companies who have become the flavor of the week. And so we try to connect this back to, what are your values? Sometimes clients say, hey, here's our five values. We'll map those to our principles. Let's make sure that this is ingrained in your culture. We'll change some of the ways we talk about it to fit your values. So when we leave here, you can actually sustain it. And that's whether it's through

• 28:04Speaker 02

  training with us, or the academy, or the implementation program, which is one of our fastest growing options because it's scalable, it's cost-effective. And it, it's essentially like a book club that you can go and do with your people, and you can sustain that for 12 months, and then start back over with dichotomy of leadership. And now you've got another year of training. I think Need to Lead is coming out in a, in a month. So now you've got three years of training that with or without Echelon Front there every day and helping, you've got access to the content to ensure it's not flavor of the week, and your people are constantly getting an opportunity to apply these principles effectively.

• 28:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I've done plenty of events over the years where either the, the company, like I remember, this probably happened for the first time, probably like six or seven years ago, this construction company, they'd been doing this big project, and they were way off. And they brought in a new leader, and the new leader was like a Extreme Ownership type guy. And of course, they were way over time and way over budget. He had no money to do anything, but he like, out of his own pocket, bought books for like the 12 senior people. And they turned that thing around. They got it back on timeline. They were still a little bit late, but they recovered millions of dollars worth of lost time, and then finished

• 29:16Jocko Willink?

  the project. And I actually went out there and spoke as the project was completed. Like, I spoke in this brand new facility, you know, $500 million place. And I spoke, and, and I was kind of congratulating them because they had done it. And this happens a lot too at Echelon Front where, you know, I'll come in maybe halfway through a project, or at the completion, sometimes I do the beginning. But, but my point being, just like in the Warrior Kid books, at the end of the Warrior Kid books, Uncle Jake leaves. And, you know, Mark is like, hey, but who's gonna help me? And Uncle Jake says, you, you know what you gotta do? You, you, you got this. And so when people pick up the mantle of Extreme Ownership, they really

• 29:58Jocko Willink?

  can carry it. Now again, you have to be careful. And we have plenty of examples where someone doesn't pick up the mantle of Extreme Ownership, they pick up the hammer of Extreme Ownership, or the shotgun of Extreme Ownership, or the bazooka of Extreme Ownership, or the flamethrower of Extreme Ownership. And what they do with that is they just kill everyone around them. They just aim it at everybody and shoot them in the face with Extreme Ownership. You need to take ownership. You need to take ownership. It's like Oprah Winfrey. You need, you get a car, you get a car. No, it's like, you need to take ownership, you need to take ownership. And you, and that does not work. It does not work.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  I think it's important, though, as we talk about these case studies, to realize that this wasn't Echelon Front necessarily going in and making the changes in these organizations. We're providing the leadership development, the principles to do it, but it took leaders in that organization to, as you just said, pick up the mantle, to actually say, okay, we're gonna go apply it. It doesn't work if they don't actually do the work. So as much as we talk about, well, we, we went in here and the, the client succeeded, so much of that success is, in fact, nearly all of it, outside of us just coming onsite and saying, here's some things we've learned, and we want to teach them to you, was the client saying, all right, we're gonna take this and run with it. We're gonna do this effectively.

• 31:09Jocko Willink?

  For sure. Yeah, that, that, that guy had no money to spend on Echelon Front. And he just, he just got it done with, with probably a dozen books that he bought, or whatever the case may be. Yeah, absolutely.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  I think we also helped him out on the price because he was very clear. This was out of his own pocket. I think we hooked him up.

• 31:26Jocko Willink?

  So you're right. And, and to think that, you know, you're going to be able to hire Echelon Front, and we're going to become your leaders. No, that's not what we're doing. We're gonna come and teach people how to lead. That's, that's what we do. And we're good at it. And when people learn how to lead, they're gonna be able to pick up that mantle, they're gonna be able to run with it, they're gonna be able to learn to build relationships, cover and move, you know, keep things simple, prioritize, etc. They're gonna learn all that stuff. But those are skills. They really truly are skills to to have the naivete to think that to think that someone is born with the leadership skills that are going to make them effective on leading a team of five, 10, 1,000, 10,000 people. It's so wrong. It's so wrong.

• 32:11Jocko Willink?

  And you just got to rate realize that just like you wouldn't put a plumber on a job without teaching him how to solder pipe, you wouldn't take a leader and put him in a position where they've got to prioritize and execute, where they've got to establish the mission and and and have decentralized command and that's train their supportive leaders. You can't. How? How can you expect that? You cannot expect that. So please don't.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  I'm doing some interviews for a project we're working on called the frontline leader make it makes a difference. And it's been awesome because there's so many running themes. And one particular story was actually in the first case study, we talked about that construction company. The individual that I'm interviewing told his story. And what's really cool is a cool story of him taking ownership, but also him having enough humility, because essentially he was that guy. He was good at his job. He got promoted. He got promoted to a pretty big leadership role, big responsibility. And he bombed it. It was bad. His people were unhappy. He was too emotional. He didn't know what he was doing. And he essentially was demoted, told he was gonna get demoted. They were gonna put someone else in this role. And he chose in that moment because he had learned about

• 33:20Speaker 02

  these principles and realized that he needed to take ownership of this problem, that he was gonna have enough humility to take the demotion and to work his way back up. And the next time around, he invested in applying these principles and really getting good at the leading component, keeping his ego in check, delegating to people, building relationships, that when the opportunity came back around to step into that leadership role, he was ready. And now he's killing it in this leadership position. And it's awesome to see people kind of go through the exposure of extreme ownership and get to the other side where they can see the actual outcome of what happens when you take ownership.

• 33:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, it's a, it's just a, it's a cruel world. And it's a cruel world because what happens to people when they get promoted into those positions, and they they haven't been trained on what to do, what they're gonna do is they're gonna behave based on their natural instincts that they have. And what I say it's a cruel world is that your natural instincts of what you think you should be doing as a leader, most of the time are wrong. Most of the time they're wrong. And that's a problem. It's very similar to to jujitsu in that way in that in jujitsu, you're fighting instincts oftentimes are wrong. They're not always wrong, but oftentimes

• 34:40Jocko Willink?

  they're wrong. And if you rely on what your instincts are, they're not gonna help you. They're they're actually gonna hurt you. And it's the same thing with leadership. Your instincts are going to be wrong. And they're gonna cause more problems. And that's such a great example, because I'm sure if we broke that down, and we said, okay, what were the behaviors that you really rocked on your first go round, you know, oh, yeah, you're damn right, I'm in charge. Hey, this is the way we're doing it. Hey, listen to me. I came up with a plan. I told you to be and like, you can see this. And you think that's what you're supposed to know, when you watch TV and a leader walks in the room and starts yelling and screaming, okay, that's the way it's supposed to be. You see the the mob boss or the military leader or the the industrialist that's out there

• 35:25Jocko Willink?

  cracking heads on the on the floor. And you're like, hell, yeah. And it's like, no, those are drama. Those are dramatic things. And they're not true. And I even have this discussion when it comes to like, military leadership, and people say, we know, back in the day, it wasn't like this. You know, we tell someone to do something, they do it. It's like, oh, did you see? Go watch Band of Brothers and see how that worked out. See, why did they? Why did they shoot tyrannical leaders so often in the Vietnam War that they have a name for it? Right? We're gonna frag our officer because we don't like him. Well, did they not like him because he listened to them? Did he not like them because he treated them with respect? Did he not like them because he came up with because he allowed them to influence how they were gonna do things? No, no, that's not why they

• 36:10Jocko Willink?

  that's not why they literally would kill their officer. They'd kill their officer because he didn't listen to him, didn't treat him with respect, didn't allow them to influence him at all. And and they cannot stand that. And yet, what's the instinct? The instinct is, hey, I'm in charge now. This is what we're doing. And it's just wrong. So you gotta be careful of that.

• 36:33Jocko Willink?

  This last one of these case studies, this is a healthcare scenario. And in this particular situation, pretty big healthcare organization, bad relationships between the the headquarters and the union. One manager started using EF. It started to spread throughout the company. The whole company eventually adopted it, doing outstanding. But original, one of the original points of contact was, well, the original person that that kind of ran with it, inside the company was was again, picked up that not the not the mantle of extreme ownership, but the hammer of

• 37:13Jocko Willink?

  extreme ownership and started smashing everyone with it. And their COO was just not on board, was not on board, didn't, you know, coming from a healthcare background, very empathetic woman, like, wait a second, who is this guy with a shaved head in here talking about, you know, battle and war? This is not what we're doing. And so early on, we had to, again, interact in a way to allow their COO to say, oh, wait a second, there's more to this than than I'm seeing right now. And you played a pivotal role in kind of conversing through that.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Well, the the original point of contact had great intent. He read the books. He was a fan. And you can imagine, he's wearing Jocko shirt locker, he's drinking go, he's got the discipline equals freedom flag in his office. He is a champion of the cause. And yet, he was, he was too extreme. He was going hard on the ownership. He was going hard on discipline. And people sort of were put off by that, to say the least, and including his other partners in his C suite of saying, hey, I don't really know if this military thing is for us, but we know that we want to invest in our people. They had a particular group of individuals. Their company wide employee engagement surveys were super, super low. And so they were looking to take a group of 300 people

• 38:34Speaker 02

  and put them through a program to see if that would help increase in their employee engagement efforts. And so they reached out to Echelon Front because of this gentleman's recommendation. And because of their resistance, they said, okay, you know what, we're gonna bring in another company as well. And we're gonna essentially do two full day workshops, one with each company, and then we'll let our people help us decide. And I think that was probably leadership's way of just hoping that they would bring in this other company and the people would choose that other company. And so we got on the conversation with her and talked through the challenges that she was having with this content and this military style. And if you remember, we, it was you, me and Dave went out and actually did a workshop with them. And the other company did their workshop. And the end result was that people said, hey, we want ownership. And I think

• 39:18Speaker 02

  what we were able to show them in that initial workshop is, we can scale this back as much as you want. We have clients where we take out all of our military photos, we change some of the vernacular. If there is a resistance to what we teach because of the military aspect, cool, we can scale that back. And we did that for this organization. And so what they got was all of the same principles, all of the same language we use, but with a little bit of a softer touch so that they could see the value of these things work for us in healthcare. And I think the end result was that she not only got on board, she was a massive champion of the cause. And the end result of the 12 month program was that those 300 people, because they were invested in, they now had these leadership skills, their engagement in the organization increased significantly. And they were happier in the organization. They felt like the organization

• 40:01Speaker 02

  cared about them. They probably felt generally more in control over their outcome. And that shift was significant from the original survey to the end result of those 300 that went through this program.

• 40:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the the point that you bring up, this is something that we always have to kind of contend with is, well, number one, okay, the the caricature of me, which is, again, I am 100% to blame for the caricature of me. I look the way I look. I, you know, what gets, what gets clipped, right? What gets clipped is when I give some freaking terse answer to some question, and someone says, you know, I'm having trouble getting up in the morning. What should I do? And I say, get up. And then that's a clip. And like, oh, that must be this guy's personality or, you know, whatever. There's a million of those little things out there.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  You did. You did not help us out at Echelon Front early on, because one of your first major public appearances of you doing a speech was your TED Talk.

• 40:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  And I remember, I had to manage with clients all the time, like, don't watch the TED Talk. That's if that's the only clip you see, you are so intense. And it really didn't show like, your funny side, your humor side, that the, the real Jocko. And so I used to have to combat that all the time by sending other clips of like, don't watch TED Talk, because you're gonna get a different idea of what Jocko's gonna do on stage.

• 41:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, the TED Talk is hard, you know, and even I watch it now. And what year was that? Maybe like 2016?

• 41:29Speaker 02

  16, yeah.

• 41:29Jocko Willink?

  17, like somewhere?

• 41:30Speaker 02

  It was great.

• 41:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  But it's not not even close to a keynote you would give as part of an initial kickoff with a client, not even close. It's it's so less, much less intense. You have a lot more fun on stage with the audience. It's just different.

• 41:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that's, you know, 13 minutes talking about war and combat and a very, very intense situation, a very intense lesson. It's like, yep, it's not. And the other thing is, is like, it's not like I was backstage, like, hyping myself up, like, you're gonna be intense. Now, like, no, that's, I'm talking about that kind of stuff. And that is very serious. And that's the way I am when I talk about that. And then, but yeah, of course, there's all kinds of, I mean, leadership is comical. It's got a bunch of funny things that happen. It's, it's lighthearted, it's heavy, it's all those different things. And so, so for people to kind of get through that, and I mean, I still have people, you know, talk to me and they say, wait, so you're married?

• 42:31Jocko Willink?

  And I'm like, yeah, I've been married for 30 years, you know, or like, I can't believe you have kids. I had someone say that to me the other night.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  And you're so close with your kids, which is crazy, and your wife.

• 42:40Jocko Willink?

  I know. Like, I can't believe you have kids. I'm like, yeah, I mean, they they think I was just, just sitting like the movie Soldier. Have you seen that movie, Echo Charles?

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:49Jocko Willink?

  That's a classic. They think I'm sitting on the edge of my rack, my bed, with my weapons staged, waiting for the next call to war. That's what they think. Oh, yeah, because Carrie sends that all the time. Carrie said, whenever I'm like, hey, who, hey, who can do this? And Carrie just sends the picture of the soldier sitting there waiting for orders. Yeah. So so getting through that character. And again, I don't, I don't help it very much because of the way I look. And some of my answers, when I get asked stuff, and You know, I've always said if I'm the more annoyed I am, the more the more, the better answers you're going to get from me.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  The more, the more honest?

• 43:31Jocko Willink?

  No, no, the more clippable answers you'll get from me is if I'm annoyed of telling you this thing. Cause otherwise I'm like, well, you know, Jamie, that's a good point. But after like, I'm annoyed, I'm like, no, Jamie, that's dumb. That doesn't make sense, you know? And that's kind of what gets clipped. There was this one where it was a while ago. And this interviewer was asking me, he's like, no, no, but what really like, what, what is it? What really, you know, when you get up in the morning, like what's, can you talk to me? I was like, I'll get up and get, I get up, go to bed or get up, brush my teeth, go work out. And they're like, yeah, but I mean, what's that? And then I kind of, I started mocking him a little bit. And I was like, well, you know, the first thing I do is I ground myself and I, and I went through this thing and I just said, no, I just freaking get up. And they like clipped that. And it was, you know, one of those things where, oh, that's his personality, right?

• 44:16Jocko Willink?

  He's just this, um, you know, knuckle dragger. So I know that you had to contend with that a lot during the early days.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  We still are.

• 44:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I know, I know.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  You did it. We did a live session just like two weeks ago and somebody had asked you a question on that call and said, hey, we have, we have a naysayer. And you gave him some honest answers and you were like, hey, is he a naysayer because of the principles or does he just not like me? Well, it turns out last week I talked to this client because they're looking to bring us in for the implementation. He's like, well, I dug into it and Jocko was right. He just doesn't like Jocko. And I thought, man, if only he could decouple the image of Jocko from what we teach. I know on the other side of that, he'd see the value in, in obviously the principles.

• 44:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's a real thing too. You know, I'm going to absolutely rub some people the wrong way. They don't like the way I carry myself. They don't like the way I look. They don't like, you know, my background. I was in the military for 20 years. Some people just don't like that. You know, I, I'm a physical person, you know, I'm kind of into fighting and lifting and some people don't like that. I'm into working out. Some people don't like that. So there's all these reasons where I, you could say, oh, I don't, I don't like this guy. And that's, you know, that's a bummer. Um, because like you pointed out, I am not the principles, right? I am not, these principles have been around for a very long time. We know, we might've articulated them in a way that people could understand them, but that's not, they're not me.

• 45:43Jocko Willink?

  I follow the principles. The principles don't follow me. And so I think that's important to keep in mind. And you know, the other thing is from the, the military aspect, one of the, one of the effective things

• 45:56Jocko Willink?

  is the military stories are very consequential. And therefore they take something that in business may not seem very consequential. And people go, oh, okay. So for instance, if you run sales and I run operations and you and I aren't, don't have a good relationship and we're not working well together. And you've sold a bunch of stuff and you didn't place the orders with me in time. And now, you know, I don't get them delivered to you. Like, okay, we maybe our client, we have to make some calls to the client. We have to explain, we're going to be a little bit late. But, but you know, we get through it. We still get paid. You still get your commission. I still, you know, do my next orders. It's okay, right? We're, we're all going to live. So maybe we don't really take a hardcore lesson from that.

• 46:39Jocko Willink?

  Whereas if in combat, you, you said you were going to take the high ground and cover me as I moved, and then you didn't take the high ground, you didn't do your part of the job. And I now move and I get killed. The consequences are so high and it makes the story of, of the, it makes the principle very clear for people to understand. Same with decentralized command, same with keeping things simple, same with taking ownership, all these things. When they're put in a context of military, they become very consequential and this, the lessons are very easy. They're not very, they're easier to grasp as opposed to, oh, you know, we, we, I was micromanaging my decisions a little bit for a few months as the CEO of this company, and it caused us to lag a little bit on our orders.

• 47:22Jocko Willink?

  And now we're going to be a little bit below our projections for EBITDA this quarter. Like no one freaks out about that, right? Everyone goes, oh, okay. But so maybe we don't worry that much about decentralized command. And I keep kind of making too many decisions myself. And now we look up in a year and we've, you know, we've lost more money, but still we're in business. People will hit the panic button eventually, you know, if we can, if we paint a picture of some company that goes completely upside down because of their, their problems. Cool. That, that will translate into something people understand, but the consequences of the military examples are very, very clear. And therefore it oftentimes makes the principles easier to understand because the consequences are so high.

• 48:03Jocko Willink?

  That being said, we have all kinds of stories and anecdotes of where these principles were not applied in a myriad of different environments. And the outcome is the same. If you don't follow these principles, you, you're not going to be successful. I don't care if you're running a, a girl's Girl Scout troop, or you're running a giant, you know, trillion dollar corporation. If you don't follow these principles, it's going to, it's going to catch up with you. So that's one of the reasons why the military, I mean, I think that's why Extreme Ownership sold well. And people understand the lessons from it because it's very obvious. If you don't follow these principles, here's this terrible outcome that you can get.

• 48:44Jocko Willink?

  And if you do follow the principles, here's the positive outcome you can get. It just doesn't, it's not as obvious and not as clear with normal examples.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  That's why I love teaching that. I didn't serve in combat. I can't tell these stories in the same way that you guys do, but I always talk about them. And I give people the background of where they came from when I'm on site, working with a client, because the value is understanding if they work in this really harsh environment. And yes, maybe people's lives aren't at stake, but people's livelihoods are in businesses. But if it works in this harsh environment, then let me tell you a story after explaining the combat situation of how I used it with my 16 year old. And you can see the connection. If it works here and here, now you can draw the connection to it works in every other scenario you can imagine. So I think it's really valuable when we can show the combat situation, the background or history of where they came from.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  And then give a ton of experience, examples of business and home examples where people go, okay, I see now the impact of this. And maybe it's not life or death in combat, but it is absolutely critical to the success of the mission as the team or in our family lives with our own relationships with our kids and our spouse.

• 49:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's so weird how when you're detached from the situation like we are at Echelon Front, you know, when we go work with a company, we roll in there for the first time. And over the coming months, we're, we're detached from it. We're not in it. We're detached from it. And it's so obvious. And when we grab someone from that organization and pull them out and we go, hey, look at this. And they go, oh my gosh. You know, like, I can't believe we're doing that. I can't believe we haven't fixed that. I can't believe we have that going on inside of our team. Like it's, it's crazy. How much that ability to detach and pull someone out and say, hey, just come over here with me for a minute and look at what's going on.

• 50:31Jocko Willink?

  I used to do this, you know, training SEAL platoons, you'd, there'd be total chaos and mayhem and grab, grab one of the leaders and say, hey, come with me for a minute. Just come over here and stand on this berm with me and just tell me what you see. And it's, they'd be up there going, oh my gosh, this is a disaster. I'd go, yeah. That's, see how clear it is? Clearly it is a disaster from standing up here on this berm 10 feet away from your platoon that's getting annihilated with paintball right now? Yeah. And what do you see what the solution is? Yeah. We just need to go over there. Yeah, that's cool. Go make it happen. The same thing happens inside when we go and work with a company. It's like, hey, wait, come over here. You know what? I, I share, I, I, I recorded the last meeting that you had. I want, I'm going to, I'm going to let you listen to it right now. It's like, oh my God, I sound like that.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  My favorite thing is we have an exercise called the ball game and you, you and Leif adopted this from something you saw on, online at one point 14 years ago. But the ball game is one of my favorite exercises because it puts people in a little bit of time and attention. There's, you know, there's a timeline where we're getting people's times to go through this activity. The rules are kind of vague. And so everyone's competing. They're all excited. And there's this, you know, non-detached perspective in the room. And what happens is that the end of that, that ball game, the silly little game, the first question you ask, and without giving too much away is, hey, how did you guys do it? Applying the principles we just talked about this morning, the first one being cover and move. And without fail, everyone goes, yeah, yeah, we work together as a team. And you can see it across the room. They're all giving themselves a pat on the back.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  They implemented cover and move effectively. And all you have to say, okay, here's a few things that I heard. And you just look at your notebook and you read out loud, they're cheating. This isn't fair. Uh, and, and all these different things where you realize what they did well was work with their team. You know, their little department, their little group, and yet they didn't actually do the one thing we teach in cover and move, which is break down silos and actually work together. And that's noted because on the leaderboard at the bottom row, which is where everyone should have completed that task, four or five of the groups didn't finish. And immediately they get to see the connection between this silly thing we talked about in combat. And now we played a fun little game, but the reality is you're doing this in your day to day. You're actually not breaking down silos and working across

• 52:44Speaker 02

  with other teams and, and other, other units.

• 52:47Jocko Willink?

  Cause everyone's instincts kick in.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:49Jocko Willink?

  It's such a revealer of instincts. You know, there's so many things out there that just reveal what your instincts are. There's a thing you do that we do with shooting where you basically, you put a dummy round in, in your magazine or someone does it for you. So that at some point, one, you're shooting, all of a sudden a dummy round, your, your, your gun doesn't fire. And it's interesting. You're just trying to figure out what they're, what mistakes they're making on their trigger squeeze and on their holding their pistol and whatnot. But you can see it's like, oh, it gets revealed what they're doing. And that's kind of what some of these, some of these, um, scenarios that we run and we go, oh, yeah, look at what you're doing. And it's so hard when you get, when you see it, when somebody plays it back for you.

• 53:33Jocko Willink?

  We, we do this leadership lab as well, where we kind of set up a, a, a business and we set up scenarios to run the business through. And again, We should, if you ran a survey, hey, who thinks they're gonna raise their voice today at other people in this room? Everyone would be like, oh, no, of course not. And then you you hit record.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  Everyone.

• 53:53Jocko Willink?

  Everyone's like yelling, panicking, barking orders. It's it's it's amazing. It's it's it's crazy. Same thing with the FTX. The FTX, you know, you've got someone that's read Extreme Ownership a thousand times. They have, I'll sign a copy of Extreme Ownership. It has, it's worn ragged. And the first thing, you know, you send them out on a mission, the first they're completely like micromanaging to a level that seems almost incomprehensible. And you record it. You're recording them. And you're like, hey, don't move past that door. Hold right there. Come back four more inches. And you're like, bro, that's what you you just did that for your entire 25 man element, didn't move without you telling them to move and didn't stop without you telling them to stop. You think that might be indicative to how this organization is run? It's so revealing. It's scary.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  I was at an FTX just a couple of weeks ago, and a fire team leader is telling one of his people, hey, you've got to get out of that position. The enemy is coming down that road. You're exposed. And the guy doesn't listen. And he yells it again. The guy doesn't listen. And then he says, and I pull out my pen and I write it down. He says, okay, fine. It's on you if you get shot.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  It's like, we just did a brief on Extreme Ownership, and you're letting your teammate just be out there exposed in a bad position. Instead of thinking, I'm not communicating effectively. I'm not ensuring he understands the real risk here. I'm not going over and saying, hey, we've got to get you out of here. This is not good for the team. And his instinct showed up in that moment of, hey, it's on you. It's on you if you get shot.

• 55:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I had to go beyond just writing down quotes when I was when I was running Trade App, because they they didn't understand how crazy they sounded. And that's when I started bringing a voice recorder out with me. Originally, I made the voice recorder just so I could repeat what they're saying, or, you know, make notes to myself. But eventually, I would just hit record. And you'd hear these guys going completely losing their minds, just yelling and screaming.

• 55:43Jocko Willink?

  And and because prior to me recording it, their perspective would be, dude, I wasn't yelling. Look, I had to raise my voice. Like, they truly did not believe that they sounded the way they sounded, they acted the way that they acted. They truly did not believe it. It did not make sense to them. You know, I'd say, hey, bro, you kind of lost your mind in that last building. And they'd say, what do you mean? I'd say, well, you were yelling and screaming. You were barking at everybody. You weren't even making sense with what you were saying, by the way. And they'd say, dude, I just had, I just had to like, of course, I had to get loud. But I everyone knew what I was talking about. And I couldn't convince them. Or they would think, oh, Jock was just like, he is, he's exaggerating.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  What would happen when you'd show them?

• 56:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, eventually, I would, yeah, eventually, I said, I gotta, I gotta just hit record. And then I'd say, hey, dude, you were getting crazy in that building. And they'd be like, no, I didn't. And I'd be like, okay. And I'd press play. And yeah, they'd be, they'd be, they'd, it'd be a moment of awareness, you know, it'd be a moment of awareness where they go, oh, my gosh, I'm not who I think I am. And I'm not doing the things that I think I'm doing, which is a very bizarre thing. You know, I was writing a book recently, and I was, I was talking about this, this thing that happened to me with, with, when a guy, a friend of mine, Grizz, was in my platoon with me, he got killed. And, and I

• 57:12Jocko Willink?

  was, how old was I? I was maybe like 22 or something like that. And he was a good friend of mine. And I'm, I was very personally, you know, emotive about the whole thing. And we know, we went to the services and I was kind of, again, I was, I wasn't like outwardly just being an asshole. But I certainly had the, the image in my mind that he was kind of my friend, more than anybody else's friend, right? And one of my, my actual, like, best friend, he, he told me, he said, you're not the only one that lost Grizz. And that was

• 57:57Jocko Willink?

  the, that was like him hitting record or hitting play on something that he recorded. Because I realized he was 100% right. He was absolutely right. I was like, oh, my gosh. And the way I'm acting, I didn't even know it. I didn't, you know, didn't just didn't think about it. I'm just an idiot. And so, a lot of times, I think it's a similar situation where so often, we're not aware of the way that we are behaving. And this is why I, I always try and keep a nice low level of paranoia in my head, that the way I'm acting is, is everyone's looking at the way I'm acting through negative viewpoint. They're not looking at me going, oh, Jocko has the best intent. Like, I don't think that about anybody. No

• 58:40Jocko Willink?

  one's looking at me going, oh, Jocko really means well with what he's about to say to me. And I, he, you know, I can just, oh, Jamie's 100% just knows that I'm just, this is in her best interest. So I'm just gonna give it to her straight. I, I, I'm too paranoid to say, you know what? That's not the best approach to take right now. Now, look, quite frankly, with you, I have a, I have a very, I mean, you know, I give you feedback, very straight feedback, pretty regularly when you need it. You don't need it a lot, obviously. But like, at the muster, like, you'll speak at the muster, and you'll say, oh, you'll come off stage and like, what do you got? And I'll be like, hey, this was a little long. This was cool. And I'd index on this right here, because it was powerful. And you'll go, awesome.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  But that took time. You didn't do that in my first, if you had done that on my first brief, oh, my gosh, I would have just melted.

• 59:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, also, public speaking is, is also different. It's, it's critical, because public speaking, if I get someone focused on something, it derails them. So if I was like, Jamie, you know, you, you, you, you did a lot of pauses that were a little bit long. Like, you would, it would screw, you know, it would just mess things up. And that's the same with, you know, if Echo's going out to, you know, for a football game, and I'm like, dude, don't drop that ball. You know, like, that's not, that's not what he needs to hear. Yeah, that's not what he needs to hear. He's a receiver. He needs to hear, like, hey, go out there and crush it. You know, that's what he needs to hear. And same thing with, like, if you come to me and you're like, hey, gunny advice before I go on stage, I'm gonna tell you, dude, yeah, I got some advice. Be yourself, because you kick ass

• 1:00:07Jocko Willink?

  and you're ready to rock this thing. And you'd be like, hell, yeah. If I told you, listen, you need to be careful. Screw everything up. And there's a lot of things that

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Two minutes before you go on stage.

• 1:00:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's not, that's not the best way to run things. And that's true with public speak. It's true with anyone that's going into a pressure environment. Don't put additional pressure on people when they're going into a pressure environment, whether they're going to do a presentation, whether they're going out into a competition. I mean, when I'm talking to people before they go out to compete in fighting or in jiu jitsu, I'm not like, hey, you better be careful of this. No, no, no, it's too late for that. Too late for better be, you know, better be careful of that. No.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  They've either trained for it or not.

• 1:00:43Jocko Willink?

  They're trained for it or not. And it's like, go, hey, go out there, have fun, kick ass. That's what you're gonna hear from me. And I mean it. Because having some weird other element in your brain is not additive, it's destructive for what you're trying to do. You got to go out there and do your best. You've already been trained. You already know what you're gonna say. You already know what moves you're gonna try and do. You already, they're already part of you. So trying to give someone some weird corrective things before they perform is not smart.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  I do feel like, though, there is a, a third layer. So you give the great feedback, hey, just go out there, do your best, be yourself. And then you get to the point of the relationship, you're like, hey, here's a couple of things you can think of after the session. And then he gets to the point, and I think you and I both share in this, where you do say, hey, don't screw it up. Just to mess with us at that point. Once you have enough faith, then it turns back into the, hey, don't screw it up out there. Don't drop the ball. Then it becomes the, the, the fun part.

• 1:01:37Jocko Willink?

  That's when I know that you're not gonna screw it up. You know what I mean?

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  When you have enough faith, yeah.

• 1:01:41Jocko Willink?

  But the, but going back to the feedback thing is like, you've got to clearly be,

• 1:01:48Jocko Willink?

  you've got to give feedback. But a lot of times, the feedback that you give, you got to be cautious, because people will overindex on things. People will grab a hold of something. People will take offense to it. And man, I've got, that's why I'm saying, I'm always slightly paranoid, a small, low level of paranoia, that what I'm saying is not landing the way I think it's landing. And I think that's a very pragmatic way to go through life, is that the words that are coming out of my mouth are not landing exactly the way I think they're landing. And they're probably, my low level of paranoia is they're landing in a worse way than than what I think I'm saying. And man, I've, I've screwed that up.

• 1:02:28Jocko Willink?

  Um, I'll give you one example, you might slap me. But my wife was in the hospital with our first kid, like, she was giving birth to our first kid. And I said something like, um, hey, if you don't show the pain in your face, you'll feel it less. This was like, not a good call. And I, I truly did mean it. Like, I was thinking, you know, when you're going, when you're in the teams and you've got something sucks, like, you don't show it, you just kind of suck it up, and it sucks less.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  Poor Helen.

• 1:02:56Jocko Willink?

  Boy, she was like, she looked at me, and I was like, okay, bad, you know, yeah, no, I, I, I meant that in a totally different way than you heard it.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  My husband's phrase is, tell me two more times. So if you're frustrated, or you're hurt, or a kid comes home, and he's like, oh, I hurt my shoulder. He always says, okay, tell me two more times. You get two more times. So he tried that when, when I was also giving birth, and it also didn't go very well. So.

• 1:03:22Jocko Willink?

  Total idiots over here. Then one time, I was telling my oldest daughter, she was probably like, 17 or something like that. And I said something along the lines of, you know, um, I forget what she did. She did something, something, you know, dumb or whatever. And I said something along the lines of like, you know, it's my fault for not raising you. And, and she was like, yo, she just shut me down. She's like, you're not like a failure as a dad, because I did this. I quit trying to say that kind of stuff, you idiot. I was like, okay, fair enough. So what you say is very often going to land, not the way that you mean it. And also, the way you behave is not going to land the way you, you mean

• 1:04:04Jocko Willink?

  it. And to assume that it is going to be perceived in a negative way, gives you the best possible outcome. Because that means you index in the other direction. Like, okay, I need to be more positive about this, or I need to say this in a softer way, so that it, so it doesn't get taken the wrong way. That's gonna give you the most positive outcome. Assuming that, hey, what I say, you know, Jay, I'm, I'm, I'm the boss around here. Of course, Jamie's gonna, she's gonna love to hear some critique point from me. Like, that is the worst attitude to have, because, no filter, I'll just tell you one thing, that kind of sucked today, Jamie. Like, that. You know, that could, again, you and me know each other and I was like, were you, were you okay today?

• 1:04:44Jocko Willink?

  And look, if you were to bomb something, I, I wouldn't be like, yo, you bombed today. What was wrong? Like, I wouldn't say that. Um, but to frame it in a way that, hey, what I'm saying is probably going to be perceived more negative than I think is a very positive way to go through interacting with other humans.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  You taught me this early on at my time at Echelon Frank, cause you introduced to me this idea of leadership capital and that we have a bank and every interaction is a withdrawal or a deposit. And you said very early on, and it's now something I think all of our instructors teach, you should always assume that when you're interacting with someone, you are at a bigger deficit than you think you are. You're always in the red. And if I interact with you thinking I'm in the red and our leadership capital, I need this interaction to be a deposit. I'm more inclined to engage with you in a way that actually enables us to deposit some money in that bank as opposed to assuming you and I have all the cash flow in the world and I'm coming in there not realizing that I'm at a deficit and I'm continuing to take from the bank. It just further puts friction in our relationship and it's not a good end result.

• 1:05:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and here's another little thing that people get caught on. So, you know, I had feedback for you, Jamie, and my feedback was that, um, hey, the way you briefed today sucked, right? Wouldn't, hey, isn't it just better to just give her that direct feedback because then she knows that it sucked and now you can move forward? And I, I understand that. And, and that's why, you know, that's why we talk about the direct approach versus the indirect approach, because the direct approach, which I just used, what does that do to our relationship? What does it do to the next time you have to go out there and present and you've got this, this bear in the back of your head that you sucked last time? None of it is good. Whereas if I said, hey, Jamie, I noticed a couple of things were different about your brief today. I just want to figure out where, why you did them.

• 1:06:32Jocko Willink?

  And maybe you say, you know what, but you know, my, my kid was sick and like I, I was honestly distracted and, and I go, oh, that sucks. Hey, all right, cool. You know, like, do you need a thing? Do, can we help out? Do you need a day off? Whatever. Like, that's a totally different outcome than, Jamie, your brief today sucked. So, and I think people think, well, the direct way is the best way to get there. It's like, no, it's actually not. It truly is not the best way to get there. And listen, can you develop a relationship with people where you can be very direct with your feedback? You can get there. You can. I see it very rarely. I mean, to this day, my wife of almost

• 1:07:13Jocko Willink?

  30 years, if she cooks something that is not like, that's not my favorite, and she says, oh, how do you like the whatever? And I go, huh, not really my cup of tea.

• 1:07:27Jocko Willink?

  Bro, that's direct feedback. My wife, you know, like, like I said, my wife and I, we have four kids. We've been married for a long time. She's, she's my, my, my soulmate, the whole nine yards.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  She doesn't want to hear that.

• 1:07:37Jocko Willink?

  She doesn't want to hear that. It's not gonna, it's not, it's not gonna, not helpful. Now, what I, I've got a little bit of a system, but now this system has been uncovered. The system is, she'll say like, oh, do you want me to cook that stuff I made the other night? And I used to be like, oh, no, no, I'm not really in the mood for that. Now she realizes that's because I didn't like it. Because, you know, once I had to suffer through it, right? Cause I'm definitely not saying, oh, sounds, oh, that's good. Thank you. But how's that with my wife? Who wants me to have a good meal, right? She loves when I'm like, oh, this is so good. I was telling Echo,

• 1:08:17Jocko Willink?

  she makes this, she's, she's got this thing she's making right now. And it's like, it's protein pasta of some kind with this, um, it's like, it's like some kind of a Caesar salad-ish kind of something, sauce, and then big chunks of fresh mozzarella in it. And it, so what, she's making me these, like mixing bowls filled with it. And I use a salad fork, like a big one to, I like it when my, I push my fork in there and it doesn't even hit bottom. And then I'm just shoveling it in my mouth. But you, when she made that for the first time, I was like, what is, this is, this is awesome.

• 1:08:59Jocko Willink?

  That's great. She wants, she loves that. So this is a woman that wants, you know, to, to, to deliver the goods, right? And even she is not just down for like, no, it's not really, hey, it's not really that, that's all right. Hey, direct feedback. No, no, no, not good.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  I think that the direct feedback from our closest relationships is even harder.

• 1:09:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. Cause it lands harder.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  It lands so much harder. If you gave me direct feedback, that would, that would hurt my soul because I care so much about your opinion of me. Um, just given our long-term relationship. Same with my husband. He does, I don't want to hear his negative feedback. Are you kidding me? Not at all. That's way worse than someone I don't care about who has an opinion about me. And I go, yeah, okay, whatever. I can move on from that.

• 1:09:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So it's just important to be aware of that stuff, the, the direct versus indirect. And all day long, all day long, I'll have people that on paper will explain to me how the direct feedback is better. And I'm sure there's thousands of people listening to this right now that are like, well, you know, if you, if you really got to give them the direct, and listen, that's why you can escalate, right? There is an escalation here. And, and over time, if you have somebody that continually does something and you've discussed it with them and you've brought it up and you've asked her those questions and they're still doing something that is not that they shouldn't be doing, yes, you can escalate your directness to eventually where you say, hey, you cannot do this anymore. This is unacceptable behavior. You cannot do that. You can do that. You can do that with your kids.

• 1:10:29Jocko Willink?

  You can do that with your spouse. You can do that with your family. You can do that with your employees. You can do that with your boss. You can go up and down the chain of command. You can escalate, escalate directness. And how do you, how's it work up the chain of command? Well, if I keep coming to you going, hey, Jamie, I need this by tomorrow. And you're like, okay. And you like, and then the next time, hey, I need this by tomorrow. And you go, hey, just so you know, like, when you tell me you need this by tomorrow, I gotta put these other things aside. Is that what you want right now? Well, yeah, I need it. Okay. And then the next time I go, hey, I need this by tomorrow. And you go, hey, just so you know, last time I couldn't deliver this, the other thing, and I also missed this. So is this really what you want? And I go, oh, well, yeah, I do. And like, I need this by tomorrow. And then eventually you go, hey, just so you know, here's, this is not

• 1:11:11Jocko Willink?

  acceptable behavior. Like, you cannot ask me to do this. It puts every, we, we have all these other things going on and I'm casting all aside because you're not giving me this task early enough. So if you need this stuff done, you need to ask me with this much time. So that's direct feedback up the chain of command. And, but it starts with, with a gentle escalation. Cause believe me, if I was like, hey, Jamie, I need this by tomorrow. And you're like, oh, okay. I got a couple of things, but I can move them. And I'd go, okay, cool. And I, even with that, I'd be like, oh, that wasn't a good move. That was, that was not cool leadership, you know? Now, if I had to do it again, I said, hey, Jamie, I need this by tomorrow. And you were like, okay, just so you know, here's the secondary impacts. I'd be like, she's only telling me the secondary impacts because I suck, right?

• 1:11:52Jocko Willink?

  So you can escalate up, down and across the chain of command, your directness. And, and usually you don't have to. Usually you don't have to. Most cases, people get the hint up, down and across the chain of command. When I bark, when I tell you I need something by tomorrow and you go, as soon as you did that, I'm like, oh, okay. This is not good.

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. But that takes a lot of self-awareness. How many leaders do we know are completely missing out on the signals from their team and not seeing the way that people react to something they're doing? They're missing out on those signals left and right. And then because Jocko said you can escalate to directness, they go from A to B like that.

• 1:12:28Jocko Willink?

  No, from A to F.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  A to F. Yeah. A to Z. And meanwhile, they're missing all the iterative steps of what escalating directness actually looks like.

• 1:12:36Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  People, people tell you how they feel about things. If you just pay attention to how they react to you, you can get a good sense as to what is our leadership capital like? And does, do I have this person's respect?

• 1:12:47Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely. And going back to the, uh, point of people saying, well, listen, why don't you just go from A to F? Why not? And the reason is because of all the collateral damage that it causes to the relationship, to the, to the, um, confidence of the person, to their relationship, not just with you, but with the organization as a whole. So that's why you don't go from A to F, from, hey, I need this done today. Like, hey, you better do this or I'm going to fire you. Like, those are, those are not, those are not good ways to operate. And that the, the collateral damage that is caused is way worse than the time that it takes to escalate the directness.

• 1:13:29Jocko Willink?

  So when you run the numbers on the whole situation as a leader, when you run those numbers, it seems like what you get with the direct, with the, the direct approach is the short-term gratification and a short-term payoff. Like, you're damn right, Jamie. Uh, yeah, Jamie screwed this up. You need to fix it. And so she goes and fixes it. You see, see how that wasn't hard, Echo? I just told her what the freaking problem was. Meanwhile, Jamie's literally putting her resume into another company because she hates me, right? That, that's what you get. So you get a short-term gratification by the direct approach. The law, the, the indirect approach is a strategic move. It builds strategic relationships and it's a strategic win, whereas direct is a short-term win in air quotes, but

• 1:14:12Jocko Willink?

  it's a long-term loser. So please pay attention to that.

• 1:14:18Jocko Willink?

  In talking about some of this stuff before we did this, you were, you were, you were talking about the stages of extreme ownership that you experienced and that now you've seen many people experience. It's kind of like the, uh, the acceptance, the stages of grief, right? And I forget what they are off the top of my head, but there is a similar correlation between the, the stages of grief, which is like denial, anger, sadness, something else, and then acceptance.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  Acceptance, yeah.

• 1:14:49Jocko Willink?

  And I forget what number four is, but this is, this can be a similar kind of trajectory

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:55Jocko Willink?

  of, of when people learn about extreme ownership and how their mind processes it over time to go from like, this is a cool idea to like, oh, a deep sense of understanding. What's it look like?

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  I think the first stage that I see with either clients that I'm talking to that are looking to higher echelon front, or when we go in and do sessions is an initial excitement around extreme ownership. They're excited about the principles they hear about and they're like, yes, we need this. But in almost every case, the excitement is aimed towards other people. So it's the point of contact or the leadership talking to me before the session and saying, hey, my people need to take ownership. We need you guys to come in. We're excited about this because they need to take ownership. And then you know what happens? We get on site and during the break or during the lunch, the people are coming up to us and saying, oh, man, if only my boss, if only our leadership would take ownership, this whole thing would be different. So there's this initial excitement around the principle,

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  but it's almost always placed on their opinion that someone else needs to be taking ownership. I think that's the first stage, at least what I've seen.

• 1:16:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, uh, the, the weapon of extreme ownership is meant to be aimed at yourself, not at everyone around you. It's a very powerful weapon. It's a very powerful weapon and it'll hurt when you use it on yourself and it's supposed to, but it'll hurt everyone else worse when you use it on them and they will not be happy about it.

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  Well, it's hard to see right out the gate how this applies to you. That's uncomfortable. That's your ego sort of protecting yourself. So the easier thing to swallow is to say, okay, extreme ownership is awesome. We love this concept. This is great. And if I could just get Joe to take ownership, everything would change. And so we actually, we, we fail ownership by just assigning it to other people. And I think that's where the initial stage is, yes, this excitement sense, but then it's immediately on the people around us and not necessarily looking internally for how can we start to take ownership in our own lives?

• 1:16:49Jocko Willink?

  And then that rolls into what? Resistance?

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  Resistance, yeah. Uh, and sometimes people jump right to this. You get the immediate people in the room that are like, hold on, you don't know about, and I'll use your name, Fred. You don't know about Fred over here and you don't understand what we're dealing with. And if I look at these situations, this is, I think where most of the barriers come into play that we teach a lot, which is, I can't see a real path for how I can take ownership of this. This wasn't my fault. I'm the victim. It's a whole lot easier to sit in the place of making an excuse than it is to say, man, this is my fault. And so I think people sometimes in that sense resist it, maybe because it's military, maybe because it's you, the character of Jocko they don't like. Or maybe it's because they really just don't see how them taking ownership in their life is going to

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  prove anything because they're really still worried about the other people around them and them not doing it. So I think it's a sense of resistance of saying, no, I don't think this actually works.

• 1:17:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And the idea that, well, it's not really my fault. Like, like, like it's not really my fault. And that's a, that, that might be one of the biggest ones is even when people are like, yeah, it's my fault, but it, but you can hear them kind of say like, well, it's not really my fault. Like the way they're acting is, it's not really my fault. And actually, probably about, it's probably been eight years now, but one of our instructors at Echelon Front went to an event and brought it up on one of our cadre calls and was like, yo, I gotta ask this question. This woman was the CEO of this company. They have 2,500 employees and she was talking about some outstation like

• 1:18:26Jocko Willink?

  person that's on the front lines. And she's like, when this person does something stupid, how can that possibly be my fault? And our instructor at the time was pretty new and this was before we had a really good, the, the squared away kind of educational program and the tests and everything that we put our instructors through. He, he, he was caught. You know, he didn't, it didn't make, he didn't give a great answer. And you know, the fact of the matter is that is, it is your fault. And when you have a company and there's, whether there's 2,500 employees or 20,000 employees or, or 200,000 employees, when someone does something bad or stupid or inappropriate, it is your fault.

• 1:19:10Jocko Willink?

  And that means you have to behave in a way that you say, okay, how did this happen? Why did this happen? What's wrong with our training process? What's wrong with our screening process? What's wrong with our promotional process? What leader, what training have we not given the leaders? That's going to help them prevent their frontline personnel from doing this. This is, this is what happens in the military. This is what happens in any big business that you've got someone on the front lines that does something stupid. If the boss says, well, you know, it's not on me. Well, that's just, hey, that's on the front lines. That's not, that's not me. Okay. Well, then what did you change or what did you implement? How have you tried to prevent it? And I'm not saying that you're going to be able to prevent people from doing things that they shouldn't be doing on the front lines. But if your attitude is, that's not my responsibility. Oh, I guarantee you it's not going to get better. It's going to get worse.

• 1:19:55Jocko Willink?

  And while I can't guarantee you that it will never happen again, if you take ownership, I can guarantee you that the percentage of that happening, negative things happening will absolutely go down when you say, okay, here's, here's some things that we can implement. Here's some things that we can change. So the, the, you know, the, when, when I would have young SEAL leaders and someone in a, in a fire team or in a squad, you know, you'd have a machine gunner that would shoot where he wasn't supposed to be shooting. And of course the machine gunner is getting written up for a safety violation and so is the fire team leader and so is the squad leader and so is the platoon leader. And the platoon leader is going, hey, wait a second, that guy, he was, he was 140 yards away from me on a ridge line.

• 1:20:41Jocko Willink?

  I wasn't even close to him when he took that shot. Okay. Well, why didn't he understand what his fields of fire were supposed to be? Why didn't he understand where the other friendly elements were? Why, why does your squad leader not inform those people, you know, that machine gunner? Why did the fire team leader, why wasn't he watching him and as he set up his machine gun? Like everyone, everyone made a mistake. And so we have to, that guy needs to say, oh yeah, okay, I'm platoon leader. Hey, fields of fire, this is important. Here's what we gotta look out for. And by the way, there's a million other things. That's why we have decentralized command. People need to understand not just what they're doing, but why they're doing it. Because if you're a machine gunner and you go, oh, I'm over in this position because I'm supposed to prevent any enemy approaching

• 1:21:24Jocko Willink?

  from this position or from, from the position where we just came from. Okay, that's my job. And I also, part of my job is also de-conflict with friendly forces. Okay. So those are the two things. It was one thing, but now I'm also supposed to know I'm supposed to de-conflict with friendly forces. Okay. So where are my friendlies? At least even that's in my head, I can shoot in the right field of fire. Whereas if I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing, I cannot make good decisions. So the idea that resistance that like, well, I'm not, I can't be responsible for everything. You are, actually are responsible for everything. You, you truly are. And that kind of ties into preemptive ownership, right? If I know that I'm sending Jamie some, you know, new person into the field to go, I, okay, what can I do to make sure that she at least has some guidelines and some boundaries in place where she's not going to

• 1:22:09Jocko Willink?

  do something that's catastrophic? Okay. So here's what we're going to do. Put these things in place. That's what we have to do. Cause when you are in charge, you actually are responsible for everything. Everything.

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  That's, that's the resistance though, because by accepting the ownership piece, you're accepting them the responsibility to fix it. And so a lot of people push that away because they say, man, I don't want to screw this up. Or what we hear a lot in this kind of stage, if we're talking about it in this way and resistance is I can't own everything. I can't possibly ever be everywhere all at once and I can't take ownership of all of these things. There's too many things on my plate. And so again, it's the barriers that we face in taking ownership and the resistance comes from, I can't possibly do everything you're asking me to do. It's too much responsibility. And instead, what people don't realize is that we're talking about taking ownership of the outcome. Doesn't mean we necessarily have to do it all as a leader.

• 1:23:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, you better not be doing it all. You better be implementing decentralized command because otherwise

• 1:23:08Speaker 02

  Cover and move. Simple. All those principles. Yeah.

• 1:23:11Jocko Willink?

  Um, and so then people start looking at like, okay, what's, what's their first attempt when they start trying to take ownership? What is that, what's that looking like?

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  I think, I think if you are willing to start taking ownership, you get a couple of little wins. Where you start to see in this conversation, I took ownership and that person's defenses came down and it allowed me to have a more open conversation. Or you take ownership with something with your kids and you have a better interaction than you would have otherwise. Or you take ownership of something and you feel a little bit of that excitement or that, uh, sense of, okay, wow, that, I felt a little more control. I can see now a path for taking ownership. And I, I love when people get to this phase because they really start to see the potential outcome. They don't get there right away because we get those little wins and then people backslide. Uh, because those barriers are strong and the various things that keep us from taking ownership constantly are things we have to overcome.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  But the initial wins are where people's eyes start to open and they go, okay, I'm starting to see now how I can control the outcome and I can dictate the situation more than just letting this excuse be the reason why we're not winning, why we're not accomplishing what we should be accomplishing.

• 1:24:17Jocko Willink?

  I am thoroughly convinced that we can take, we have ownership over so much more than people think. Like so much more than people think. We really narrow down what we can control and are into the tiniest thing that we possibly can. Like, oh, I, that's not my fault. That's not my thing. I can't do that. I can't help there. That, that's what our ego does. That's the instinct is, that's not on me. That's, that's not mine. I can't help it. I can't help it if Jamie, you know, missed her plane flight. That's not on me. Oh, really? Well, you're the one that set up the, the event so that Jamie had to go from this event on this day to this event that night. And now you're surprised that she missed her flight and now she's not going to make it. You're really surprised about that. Like, that's what we're doing.

• 1:24:58Jocko Willink?

  You see what I'm saying? Where, oh, actually, if I say, wait a second, Jamie works for me and I put her on back to back events the same day with a, oh, it's only an hour and a half flight from Vegas to San Francisco. It shouldn't be that big of a deal. Oh, no, no, no. We've all been to the airport before. What are the chances?

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  Dealt with it last night.

• 1:25:13Jocko Willink?

  Exactly. So, so to think that, oh, you know, I, this is not on me. Not just the people doing dumb things, but the world doing dumb things, right? How often does the world do dumb things to you? It, the world does some dumb stuff to us. And if, if you just say, well, throw up your hands, well, there's nothing I can do about it. That's the world. That's the world in action. If you don't have that attitude, if you have the attitude of like, oh, wait a second, the world? Is gonna do what I set it up to do. And the things that are immovable, I'm gonna maneuver around them effectively. And I'm gonna put myself in positions where I will not be negatively impacted by what the world is doing.

• 1:25:54Jocko Willink?

  It's the same thing I see in any type of, let's say adversarial relationship. And people put their outcome based on what the other person does. This is a bad move. This is a bad move. So if you and I are arguing about something and I say, and I decide, you know what? I'm gonna call her bluff. Go ahead and do it the way you want to do it, Jamie. The minute I do that, I've now given you the power to do whatever you're gonna do. And maybe there's a 99% chance that you're gonna be logical and rational. And you're gonna see the way that I'm doing, the way that I want you to do to superior.

• 1:26:40Jocko Willink?

  There's also 1% chance that you're gonna do this crazy thing. And guess what you're gonna do? You're gonna do the crazy thing. That's the way, that's the way the world works. So I will never, as, not never, but as seldom as possible, do I put the outcome of a situation into the hands of someone else, where it relies on them and what they do, rather than what I am going to do and what I am responsible for. So if we have to be in a certain place by a certain time, I know what I'm gonna do. I know that I'm gonna be there. And if you're, like, I can't rely on you being there, hey, I'm gonna be there. Jamie may show up, right? And I'm gonna be there, I'm gonna start, and Jamie may show up.

• 1:27:24Jocko Willink?

  She's got a tight timeline, it's okay, but listen, talking to a client, hey, I'm gonna, you know, this, this, I'm gonna be doing the presentation. Jamie may be here as well. She's gonna, right, there you go, no problem. It's covered. If I say, well, you know, we'll start when Jamie gets here. But Jamie's on a tight flight and she's got, you know, she checked a bag, which is a mortal sin at Echelon Front, if you check a bag. So if she checked a bag and now she's gotta do baggage claim and the whole thing and that thing got lost, like, no, don't do that. What outcomes can you control and base your plan around outcomes that you can control? And you're gonna meet a much better situation.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that what you described is the challenge people face is because they underestimate their sphere of control or their ability to influence the situation. So they give up all their control because it's someone else's or something else's problem. I was working with a client recently and we were going through our problem solving framework. And one part of that framework where we start is for them to identify the problem. And everyone loves identifying the problem. They love the part, which is really just coming up with all the reasons why this problem exists, which is usually someone else or something else. In this particular client, the problem was the executive leadership team. They're changing priorities, the goalposts are constantly moving, there's friction, there's change fatigue. Their team is feeling it. And in this situation, they're hyped up around the problem, which is their leadership

• 1:28:43Speaker 02

  and the situation that's happening at the, at the higher level. And so then we flip to the next side of the, of the framework, which is, okay, what are you gonna do about it? How do you take ownership of this problem? And it was crickets. Everyone's thinking like, I don't, I don't have any control over this. We just described that, that's leadership. And one person raised their hand and they said, man, it was really fun on the other side. And I said, yeah, right? Now we have to get to the harder part, which is to actually pull the thread on how can you solve this problem? It, within your sphere of control. And I think that was the piece that they had to understand, is that can you solve for the leadership and the challenges at the top? Maybe not, and probably certainly not, you know, tomorrow. But what do you actually have control over? And it was one gentleman who realized this connection and said, you know what?

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  I realize now, my team has a bad attitude because I am not filtering the frustrations I have from leadership. I am, if anything, spreading it down to them. So he realized that within his sphere of, sphere of control, the ownership he could take wasn't necessarily what leadership was giving him to work with. It was how he created the buffer between leadership and his people and put them on the path to have a better attitude and help them manage the change fatigue that they were feeling. And all it took for, was for him to really continue to pull the thread to realize that the end of that line is, is you. It's anchored back to you. And I think when people first start the attempts of taking ownership, they start to see more clearly, okay, all right, I can't solve for this whole thing, but I can solve within here. And here's what I can take ownership of.

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  And they start to ask that question, how can I take ownership of this? What in this problem can I actually step in within my sphere of control to take ownership of? And that gives us so much more control as a leader than just making excuses and casting the blame onto other people.

• 1:30:25Jocko Willink?

  And then eventually, once that starts happening, then people start saying, wait a second,

• 1:30:32Jocko Willink?

  what about everyone else? And then you get like the, the extreme ownership dip, where they're starting to look around going, why am I the one that has to own this?

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  Or you're the only one. I think that's, for most people, they dip because they feel like they're the only one. They, they got a couple wins, they understand the value of ownership, they're starting to see it more clearly. And then they show up with their team and they take ownership and their team goes, yeah, cool. Or their spouse says, yeah, you're right, that is your fault. Or your kids, who take forever to get them on the other side of ownership, let you have that ownership. And that starts to feel lonely. You're like, I'm out here on an island, no one else is taking ownership. What's the point? What's the point of doing these things when no one else has got my back in this? And so we dip because it, it starts to wear on us if we're the only one out there doing it.

• 1:31:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's kind of interesting that you win, right? You use the principles, you win. It's, it's like when kids wrestle and you practice, you train, you start to win. And then if you keep practicing and keep training, you'll keep winning. And if you don't, but guess what? The training and the practice is freaking hard. And cutting weight, it's freaking hard. And so some kids are like, eh, you know what? I'm not doing this anymore.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  Or you go out into a match and you get, you know, yeah, one time and you go, what's the point? I've been training so hard, I've been having all these successes and I went out there this one time and this guy kicked my butt, like, and then you, what, you just stop training? I think that's what happens though with ownership, is people say, you know what? This doesn't, this was great in theory, but it doesn't work in practice.

• 1:32:07Jocko Willink?

  You know, the question that I get a lot is, you know, what if, what if, you know, I take ownership? And I say, you know what, Jamie, this is, this is my fault that, that I scheduled these flights too close together. And then Jamie says, yeah, it is your fault. Well, then what am I supposed to do? People honestly ask that question, as if it was a get out of jail free card. As if, as if when I take ownership, the problem goes away. It's like, no, the problem doesn't go away, it's still a problem. And so when, when someone points their finger, when you say, yeah, this was my fault, and they point your finger at you and they say, yeah, it's your fault, you don't go, no, actually, no, I was taking ownership so I could avoid this. No, no, no, you say, I know, that's what I just said. It's my fault. Here's the things I'm gonna change. We're gonna make a new, you know, protocol at Echelon Front.

• 1:32:49Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna put a minimum amount of time for distance between events. And that way, no one will get caught like this again. So that's what I'm doing to change it. As opposed to like, well, no, I was just kind of saying it was my fault so that you would take ownership. Cause isn't it kinda your fault, Jamie? And you're the one that booked your flights. Isn't that kinda your fault? Like, no.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  You, that's what you want when you take ownership. There's a little piece of you that's like, all right, I'm gonna take ownership, everyone, cause I heard this was good and I saw the win last time. But you, you all have to be in this boat with me, right? Like, we all want people to take their part of ownership. And oftentimes that leads us, you always say your intent has a smell. If I'm taking ownership, but deep down, I know that you've also got some ownership in this, it's not gonna land in the right way. When I take ownership of a problem, when you really take ownership, it doesn't matter what the other person is or is not willing to take ownership of, because I'm still gonna now solve this problem within my sphere of control.

• 1:33:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep. People get through the dip, they power through, and then they start to form the habit, the extreme ownership habit.

• 1:33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it starts with the mindset, that first question, when you start to see the wins before the dip of how can I take ownership? And then if we just persist, it's the discipline you talk about. If we just consistently look through the world, through that lens of ownership, we start to see that we actually have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. And when we do that, we start to ask ourselves a question constantly. How do I take ownership of this? This doesn't feel like my fault, but somewhere ownership exists. And as we do that over time, it becomes our behavior and it becomes our habit. And I think over time, it actually become your instinct. I think I've been at Echelon Front long enough that I know, I know, even when I trip up and I say something,

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  the immediate reaction I feel of like, oh, man, that's dang it, that wasn't ownership. You feel it because that's your instinct now. And I also know the power in getting to the other side of when it is your instinct. I don't look at problems the way, same way I used to. I don't look at them with, my flight last night was a total disaster. I didn't have any sense last night of feeling overwhelmed and frustrated because I now have this instinct of ownership, which is, okay, cool, that sucked. What am I gonna do to solve for it? Let's, let's move on from this and let's start moving in the direction of getting this taken care of.

• 1:35:01Jocko Willink?

  I remember when you first had this idea of asking, we put it on a slide at the muster.

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Jocko Willink?

  How can I take ownership of this?

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  No, I said, how can I make this my fault?

• 1:35:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right. How can I make this my fault? Which either, either one of those, to me, I read it as, oh, so, and I, you know, you and I talked about this, you, and I said, listen, that means you really don't think it's your fault and you're trying to make it your fault, which is not really taking ownership, you're just pretending to take ownership. And the way, and then after I thought it for a while, I was like, oh, this is like training wheels, right? It's like, here's a situation that's going on, some kind of failure, some kind of a problem. And you gotta, it's a training wheel to go, hold on a second, I don't wanna just blame Jamie, how can this be my fault? Okay, and then it made a lot of sense to me. That's a great way to get it, to form the habit of taking ownership is by, when something goes wrong,

• 1:35:54Jocko Willink?

  instead of just going, I can't believe Jamie does, I can't believe Echo dropped the ball. Instead going, hold on a second, how is this my fault? And the, the minute you start doing that, you, you start going, okay, I can see the things that I could change and the things that I could do better. And man, it, there is such a small percentage of things in the world that when you really start pulling the thread and asking that question, that you don't find yourself going, man, I should have done this. Two weeks ago, I said this, or I did this, or I didn't do that, and now we're here. And that's on me. And sure, there's a bunch of other people that I could rely on to have filled some gaps, but that's not what we're talking about. I don't control them. I control me.

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

  I remember that conversation because that was in my first barrier slide and the barrier was it's not my fault, which I think is the biggest barrier people face. They try to take ownership and like, but this really wasn't my fault. I wasn't there. I wasn't a part of this project, this problem. And I had put on the slide, how can, ask yourself this question, how can I make this my fault? And you gave me that initial feedback of, hey, that's kind of insinuating that it's not really your fault. And behind that might have that insincerity that doesn't lead to a good outcome. And then I think it was like, two days later, you called me back because you thought about it and you thought, you know what, I changed my mind. Because I do think as people start in the path of ownership, you do start to have to force yourself by saying, okay, I don't think this is my fault. How can I make this my

• 1:37:19Speaker 02

  fault in this situation? And maybe I, maybe I can't ever get to what I should have or couldn't or could have done in that situation. But what I can at least get to in making this my fault is what I'm going to do next to solve it, which sometimes is where we have to anchor our ownership. Maybe we can't understand what happened to us. It's that victim mentality, bad things happen, but I can at least take ownership of what I do next and how I respond. That's when you get that instinct of ownership of saying, man, this thing happened to me. I wasn't there. This doesn't feel like my fault. And even in that really difficult situation, I can still understand where ownership lies and how I can take it effectively in this, in this situation.

• 1:37:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the idea of feeling bad or not good when you blame other people. I, I always think about throwing up in my mouth. I know that's gnarly, but like, when you, that's when I'm like, well, you know, actually, Jamie, this is on you. Like, I, I feel like I just threw up in my mouth because it feels so disgusting to say that kind of stuff, to blame other people, to blame other, it's just terrible. And yeah, it's, that's where you should get to. You should get to where you're, if you start pointing that finger at someone else, oh, no, actually, it's on me. You gotta swallow that puke back down.

• 1:38:39Jocko Willink?

  Don't let it out because it's, it's freaking nasty. Um, and then how are we, how are you teaching ownership? Like now you've got the kind of got it, you've got the habit. What are you doing to teach it?

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  I think once you establish this instinct for ownership, then you need to understand your responsibility to model that behavior for the people around you. And certainly with your teams and your peers and your boss and the people that you work with. But where I see this play out the most is at home with my family and especially three teenagers in how can I model this behavior? Because I, what I want more than anything is for the people around me and certainly the ones I care about the most to understand the outcome of what ownership gives them, the gift of ownership that they can take ownership of their life and not spend so much time that I think I did when I was younger, making excuses, which prevented me from actually achieving what I wanted to achieve. So I think it's

• 1:39:34Speaker 02

  modeling the behavior. And then it's those earnest questions and helping people reveal to themselves, like you said before, I can't show up with my kids and say, hey, you gotta take ownership of this, but to reveal for themselves that, oh, there's actually a path here in which I can take ownership to solve this.

• 1:39:50Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you what, right now, like if I, in my house, make any kind of blame on anybody, it is unbearable. It is my kids. Oh, they, I mean, it, you don't do it. Do not do it in my house. Do not do it in my house. Do not say like, well, you know, you, you said you were gonna, nope, nope, nope. You will get, oh, you'll get, you'll get dunked on for the next 20 minutes.

• 1:40:19Speaker 02

  I've had a few of those.

• 1:40:20Jocko Willink?

  It, it's rough. You don't want to, you don't want to let that happen in the house. And it's important to know as well, that there are, there are slugs in the world. There are people that do, that are not going to take ownership. There are people that when, you know, when Jamie, you and I are working on a project together and we're peers and you know, you, we have to do A, B, C, and D, E, and F, and you're gonna do D and F, and I, and I'm kind of done with my A, B, and C, and I go, hey, do you want me to do D for you? And you're like, yeah, yeah, go ahead, take ownership of it. And I go, cool, yeah, no problem. Here's support, cover, move. And then, you know, I do that. And then a little while later, you're like, hey, do you need to help with E too? Because it seems like you're like, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, take it. Here's, here's E, do that.

• 1:41:05Jocko Willink?

  And then, you know, you're like, a little while later, I say, do you, do you need help with F2? And you're like, oh, yeah, go ahead and do F2. And there are people like that in the world. Most people, their egos won't allow that. Most people, you might allow me to take D. As soon as I ask for E, you're like, no, no, no, I got it. Matter of fact, give me D back. Most people, they wanna, they wanted, they want that work. Are there slugs in the world that don't want to do it? Yes, there are. Here's the thing. If you let that play out, we look up in three months and Echo, our boss, comes over and says, you know, hey, how's it going? And I go, yeah, I just need to, I need one more person on my team. And you say, you know, why do you need another person on your team? And I say, well, it's because we do A, B, C, and we do D, E, and F. And she goes, and Echo says, well, why are you doing D and F? Isn't that Jamie's world? Well, no, here's

• 1:41:47Jocko Willink?

  the, you know, here's what I've been doing. Here's the extra man hours it's taken me. And I'm not sure what she's got going on, but I need another person. Eventually, everyone realizes Jamie's not doing anything. And so if you've got people that aren't going to carry any weight, take the stuff off their plate, eventually they'll go away. That's the way it'll happen. Generally speaking, people will let, maybe let you take one or two things off their plate, and then they, they want them back. That's the way the ego works. That's the way the mind works. Everyone realizes that that's, you know, you have to create value inside of an organization if you want to stay there. So when you start taking things that they are supposed to be doing away from them, generally speaking, the, the slug will relinquish it all eventually, and they won't be there anymore. So that

• 1:42:30Jocko Willink?

  is another way that the idea of extreme ownership creates a culture where people that don't believe in it, won't be there for a long time. They, they will get weeded out. And that's an example of like either peer or subordinate, that's going to get weeded out eventually because they won't have a job anymore. They just keep giving stuff up. So, and by the way, when you are taking stuff off their plate, you increase your value. So now you have more value to the organization and now you can bring more people on and you'll get promoted to a new position and you'll be running more stuff. So it is good for you as an individual as well as helping the team. It's a win-win across the board. Um, what's the deal with reflective ownership?

• 1:43:11Speaker 02

  I started thinking about this a couple of years ago because you guys use the term preemptive ownership early at my time at Echelon Front. So there's the preemptive ownership, which means, hey, I, we're about to go do something together. There's things that I can do as your leader or your teammate to preemptively take ownership, meaning I'm putting contingency plans in place, or I'm making sure that I'm double checking certain aspects of the mission so that we can be successful. There's ways for me to preemptively, even if it's just telling my team, hey, what we're gonna go do is difficult and it may not succeed. And if that's the case, here's what I'm gonna do afterwards. You can preemptively sort of show your team you have their back. That's a way of implementing preemptive ownership. And then there's the ownership in the moment, which we should be doing

• 1:43:52Speaker 02

  every day. And a thing that I've been talking with people, different leaders with in the last probably five years is the idea of reflective ownership, meaning when you really have this instinct for ownership, there's power in being able to look at past mistakes that you've made through now this understanding of ownership, this lens of ownership, reflectively in saying, yeah, I see now how I contributed to that. I see now what I could have done differently to set myself up for success. I see now the lack of ownership there, or that making an excuse in this instance was not the right call. And the power in that isn't to dwell in those instances, it's to be able to say, okay, I made that mistake. I can see more clearly now what I did to contribute to that problem, which sets me up for success when

• 1:44:37Speaker 02

  those things come again. I'm going to be more capable of taking ownership when those same issues arise. So I think that there's power for people to take reflective ownership over the things that bring them second guessing, or maybe even shame or guilt, and to look at that through the reflective lens and ownership and say, okay, here's what I would do differently knowing what I know now.

• 1:44:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the idea of remember, don't dwell, you know, that we talk about when we talk about losing people. And obviously, we want to remember them, but we don't dwell in the past. And it's a very similar thing, you know, remember, and what lessons do you learn from it? Because it, the, the excuse of, well, I was 20, or well, I was 22, or well, I was 23. Like, those are, that's an excuse that you're making. And, but we all, we both know, we were not smart. You know, we, you were doing, I was doing dumb stuff

• 1:45:35Jocko Willink?

  when I was 17, 16, 15, 20, 23. Like, I was doing dumb stuff. And so to say, you know, well, this is what I did. And this is what I learned from it. And that, so the, the idea that, oh, well, I was young and therefore whatever I did is excusable. It's like, no, no, no, that was me. Have I learned? Yes, I've learned. Have I matured? Yes, I've matured. Do I try and pass on what I learned from doing dumb stuff to other people? Absolutely. Is it an excuse? Nope, it's not an excuse. It's, it's the reality of the situation. And to your point, do I sit around all day and, and, and,

• 1:46:17Jocko Willink?

  Drag myself under the ground for dumb stuff that I did when I was younger? Nope, I've learned from them. Like, okay, and I'll do my best to pass on those lessons. But I think that's a very important thing to remember.

• 1:46:33Jocko Willink?

  Cause people, things happen, right? Things happen and people do dumb stuff. I do dumb stuff, you've done dumb stuff, Echo Charles for sure is doing some dumb stuff. Right? And, and do we grow up? Do we mature? Yeah, that's, that's part of it. And do you want to dwell on the fact that you made mistakes? When you were younger? Or, and by the way, you can make a mistake two weeks ago and you can beat yourself up about that mistake. You know, um, that happens all the time. Sometimes you gotta make a decision on something and you made the wrong decision. And what information did you have at the time? You, you took action on what the information that you had in the time? It turned out to be not a bad outcome.

• 1:47:15Jocko Willink?

  And again, to sit there and dwell on that forever, and I can't believe I messed that up, is not a good program. They already happened. You have to learn from it and then you have to move on. That's what we, that's what you have to do with life. Do not get bogged down. Don't let extreme ownership become this anchor dragging you to the bottom of the ocean. That's not what it's meant to do. It's meant to be an educate, this reflective ownership, in my opinion is like, oh, this is, extreme ownership is, is the instructions that I'm getting from the past that are now teaching me how to move forward. Cause again, there's all kinds of things. And we talk about PTSD, a lot of PTSD is what I did or what I did not do in combat.

• 1:47:59Jocko Willink?

  Or in, in whatever situation, what I did or what I did not do. And extreme ownership and reflective ownership would be, oh, here's the situation I was in. Here's the decision that I made. I understand why I made it. It wasn't a good decision and here's what I learned from it and here's why I'm better now. That's a reflective ownership of that as opposed to, I did this, I did this thing. It was the bad move. I can't believe I did that. I should have done better. I should have known better. Like just heaping that on yourself and letting that anchor drag you down as opposed to, okay, from a lens of extreme ownership, here's what I did. Here's why I did it. Here's the lessons that I've learned and here's how I'm going to move forward.

• 1:48:44Jocko Willink?

  And that's what we really do have to do.

• 1:48:47Speaker 02

  I agree because I think so many mistakes we've made when we were younger, we double down on the excuse the older we get. We think about it again. I think part of that is because inside we know we should have done something differently. And so we then, for those of us that dwell on the past or think about those mistakes that we've made, we double down on the excuse we made at the time. So there's power and I would say, you know, not that we're super touchy feely here at Echelon Front, but it's healing. It's healing to actually look at mistakes you've made and say, hey, I can recognize now my ownership in this situation. And I'm better equipped to the next time I come around these same problems to, take ownership in an effective manner and actually solve this problem. I don't have to make that excuse anymore. You can alleviate the weight of some of those mistakes you've made and the shame and guilt that comes with them,

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  by just looking through that lens of ownership and saying, okay, I made an excuse. I did X, Y, and Z. Here's what I would do differently now with the knowledge that I have.

• 1:49:39Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Yep. Use that as a lens to use, use this idea of reflective ownership as like a lens to the past to learn from. Not a anchor from the past to drag you there where you have to live forever. It's not supposed to be like that. And then eventually you get to this point where you, you are liberated. Liberated by extreme ownership and it no longer feels like this massive weight.

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  I think similar to what you teach around discipline. If I think about the discipline that I enact in my life for my physical health or my mental health or things of that nature, ownership can become this instinct. And if you continue with the discipline to implement it effectively every day in your life, you get to the other side, which is absolute feeling of control over the outcome and a higher sense of confidence. You get to a place of understanding how to solve problems. The, the friction you feel with other people or the friction you feel about just challenges in general, can be replaced with a sense of calm and ownership that I, I can solve this problem.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  I have the tools to, to solve this problem and take ownership.

• 1:50:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is very liberating eventually. Eventually. Cause for a while, again, the financial problems I have, the relationship problems I have, the job problems I have, the, the progression problems I have, the physical problems that I have, there's a lot of problems to have and have them all on your shoulders. But when we take ownership, all of a sudden it's our decisions that shape the, the outcomes of all those things. And again, are there going to be things in your world that you have no control over? Yes, there are. So what are the things you can control?

• 1:51:32Jocko Willink?

  Do not put your, do not put your future, do not put your, your, your present into the hands of other people or of other situations or of other outcomes. What outcomes can you control? And that, those are the ones you need to focus on. And the ones that you can't control, you have to maneuver around them. You can't beat your head up against them. You have to, you know, I talk about, um, at the muster, I talk about human terrain and reading the human terrain. And there are some pieces of terrain when you're out in the field, actual earth terrain, a big mountain, you can't move it. A stream, you can't move it. A river, you can't move it. You have to maneuver around them. And there is human terrain. That's the same thing.

• 1:52:16Jocko Willink?

  Like there are people that they're, they're, I'm not, we're not going to be able to change them. And they're not going to be any different and I have to maneuver around them. That's the way it's going to be. And then in life in general, there are going to be partial portions of life that you cannot change. They are what they are. And if you rely on how that unchangeable thing, you rely on that thing changing somehow, it's not going to happen. It is going to be what it is and you have to maneuver around it and you have to, if you can, incorporate it. Incorporate it into the whole thing. That's what we're doing. Okay, that's the way this is. Okay, I'm in with it. That's the way, that's how we're going forward. Just like when you have somebody with a, some characteristic that's really hard to deal with. Incorporate it into the program. Make it part of the program. That's what we're doing.

• 1:52:59Jocko Willink?

  Okay, I got Echo Charles, we're going to use, we're going to utilize that thing. We're going to make it work. People get, people waste a lot of energy on things that they have no control over. And man, it, it's just a waste of energy. And, and not only that, it's futile. It really is, it's futile. And to waste your energy on futile things is, it, it's just going to bring you down. That's the way it works. So identifying, and you know, sometimes it might take a little time to realize, like, oh, you know what? I can't, I don't think I'm going to be able to change this. I'm not going to cast, I'm not going to, you know, throw it away, but you know what? I think it's going to be really hard to change this situation. Okay, so you know what? I'm going to deal with it. I'm going to deal with it. This is what, this is my new normal.

• 1:53:43Jocko Willink?

  This is what normal is, this is okay. You see, sometimes people get hit with some kind of a traumatic, um, disease or they get with a, you know, look at, look at Travis Mills, you know? Lost arms and legs. Like, okay, that's his new normal. I did, he's crushing worldwide. He's just getting after it.

• 1:54:03Speaker 02

  And he's such an example of ownership because look at what he's done with his life as a result of that.

• 1:54:07Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. And he couldn't change it. And you know, that's one of the things he talks about, you know? He's like, okay, this is where I am. It took him, it took him a little bit of time. But this, okay, this is where I am. This is what I got. Here's, I'm moving forward. So there are going to be things in your life that, yep, you, you wish you could change. You can wish all day. You can spend the rest of your time wishing and wondering what could have done, what could have been, but it's not. And so don't waste that time with that. Get on with what you got. Start moving. Take ownership of what you got. Don't worry about the things you can't control. They're not, they're really no factor. Ultimately, they're no factor. You've got to contend with them, but you can't let them drive the way you're, what the outcomes are going to be. So pay attention to that.

• 1:54:48Jocko Willink?

  So many cool examples of people that have shared those kinds of outcomes, um, just.

• 1:54:55Jocko Willink?

  Just the people that we have personally met over the years that have done everything from grow their business into billion dollar businesses to overcoming addiction, to getting healthy, to repairing their damaged relationships, to getting promoted, to just, just everything. And it does, it all comes back to, you know, all right, I'm going to start taking ownership of what's going on.

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  We call those stories of impacted Echelon Front and we share a lot of those to remind our team of what we're doing here.

• 1:55:28Jocko Willink?

  Internally, we share a lot of them.

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, what we're doing here at Echelon Front. And again, like we said earlier with the case studies, this is individuals, people come up to you all the time and they say, hey, you changed my life. And what do you always tell people?

• 1:55:42Jocko Willink?

  I didn't change it, you did.

• 1:55:43Speaker 02

  You changed your life. And I think the example here is yes, the principles are here, but these are individuals and people who said, I'm going to change my life. I am going to take ownership of these things that I am currently making excuses for. And the examples, I couldn't even count the number of times people have emailed and said to what you described, I overcame this addiction, I lost a ton of weight, I repaired this relationship with my wife. You know, I was on the brink of divorce and we came back and were healthier than ever. Whatever it is, people, when they start taking ownership, they see a path of gaining the control to actually achieve what they want in their life. It is so empowering. I know for myself, I've been around you guys for 12 years now.

• 1:56:24Speaker 02

  I read that first manuscript and it was a lot of stuff that I knew about leadership, but the end result of 12 years of trying to create this instinct, and I'm not perfect at it for sure, is I am a better human being as a result of these principles. I'm a better mom, a better friend, a better spouse, a better boss, a better teammate. I am a better individual as a result of these principles. And what I always tell people is if you just get on the path of ownership, the end result is that your life will be better. Every aspect of your life will be better. And it doesn't mean easier. You look at someone like Travis Mills or Rob Jones, not easier, but better because you're in control of the outcome.

• 1:57:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I got asked a while ago, like, what's, what's the first like move? You know, what's like the white belt first move that you're going to learn when it comes to these principles? And, you know, I said, oh, it's looking around at the world, looking around at everything that's going wrong in your world and realizing that it's because of you. There's one common denominator in all these freaking disasters that are going on in your world, Echo Charles, there's one common denominator.

• 1:57:25Speaker 02

  We have the decal. It's actually our council. If you come to our council, you get a plaque that's a mirror and etched on the mirror, it says, problem identified. And then we decided Jen on our team got decals that you could put on your mirror. So if you're trying to take that first step and you're struggling, just put that decal on your mirror. And every time you wake up in the morning, you look in the mirror and it just says, problem identified. You go, yep, all right, we're going to start the day off right. I'm at fault and because I'm at fault, I can actually control what I do next.

• 1:57:53Jocko Willink?

  Check. Um, we have the muster coming up in Denver, October 14th through the 16th. And the muster is one of those things that, you know, like a little bit of a gamble. Well, maybe even a lot of bit of a gamble in the beginning because we had sort of grown to a point where we were priced out of some small businesses. And we had a bunch of people saying, hey, can you come work with our company? And they just didn't have the budget for it. And we kind of talked about it and decided, let's do something where pretty much open to the public and anyone can come and it's a lower price point. So the first one we did, what year was that? 2016?

• 1:58:30Speaker 02

  2016.

• 1:58:30Jocko Willink?

  2016.

• 1:58:31Speaker 02

  This will be 10 years this October of musters.

• 1:58:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, sweet. 10 year anniversary.

• 1:58:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:58:37Jocko Willink?

  We, so we decided to do it. Luckily you had experience in event planning and you're also just going to take ownership and figure things out, which you did. And so we, we did it in San Diego. We sold it out. It was freaking awesome.

• 1:58:53Speaker 02

  365 people.

• 1:58:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:55Speaker 02

  Our first one.

• 1:58:56Jocko Willink?

  And I do.

• 1:58:57Speaker 02

  Which felt like a win because we had no idea. I didn't know if 50 people would buy a ticket.

• 1:59:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, none of us did. And we ran the numbers and it was like, okay, well, worst case scenario, we're going to lose some, like, I think when we ran all the numbers that we were going to lose like 80 grand or something like that. And I was like, well, you know, okay, that sucks, but upside, if we do it, we'll be able to, we'll be able to make some money. We'll be able to get the word out to a bunch of these small, uh, smaller businesses.

• 1:59:20Speaker 02

  But back then, that was a lot.

• 1:59:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  That like the pressure was real.

• 1:59:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. The pressure was definitely real. The pressure was definitely real. Um, but anyways, we sold that out and then we've sold out all these things since. But the next one is in Denver. You, the first muster was, um, behind the scenes was chaos. It was chaos. Like we, you know, we just didn't know what we're doing.

• 1:59:46Speaker 02

  I think we got like an hour of sleep a night. It was wild.

• 1:59:49Jocko Willink?

  Ton of moving parts and of course, even from the very first muster, people were like, this is the most smoothest thing we've ever seen. And I was like, bro, I'm glad you thought that because.

• 2:00:00Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, I didn't have like.

• 2:00:02Jocko Willink?

  Three days.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  I didn't have a way to like, uh, take cash for the merchandise. It was like, it was a nightmare. It was just like money stuffed in, in like a notebook.

• 2:00:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:10Speaker 02

  It was very, it, it was organized to the attendee, but behind the scenes, it was a lot of problem solving and innovating. The first shirts we ordered, the laws of combat were in the wrong order and we had to get them reprinted in like a 24 hour span so we could sell them on site. Take that times a hundred.

• 2:00:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, times a hundred. That was the first muster. It got better for the second muster, better the third, fourth, fifth. And now it's front of stage is front of scene has all always been super squared away, but now the back of the house is awesome too, very smooth. But it's just such an impactful event and we have people come from all over the world. So that's coming up. Now, at one point, and I mentioned this when I was talking about you in the beginning of the assembly, at one point you came to me and you wanted to do, started with a women's breakout. Is that right? At the muster? You wanted to go women's only?

• 2:01:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had an intern at the time who kind of said, hey, 10% of our attendees at muster were women at the time. That has changed significantly, but at the time, we just weren't getting a lot of women to come to this event because I think just it didn't feel like a welcoming place, I think for people.

• 2:01:17Jocko Willink?

  My presence.

• 2:01:18Speaker 02

  Back to the caricature of Jocko. Uh, and so I had said caricature.

• 2:01:23Jocko Willink?

  Not the actual character. You're like the character of Jocko.

• 2:01:27Speaker 02

  Caricature. Um, I had said, hey, what if we did like a women's breakout? And your response to me at the time was, hey, this, the principles are the same.

• 2:01:38Jocko Willink?

  And this was like, this was like during the muster.

• 2:01:40Speaker 02

  It was during.

• 2:01:41Jocko Willink?

  You were like asking me in between a break, you were like, hey, we're thinking of like, maybe next month we can do a women's breakout. And I was like, well, the principles are the same.

• 2:01:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:48Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't sound like a great idea.

• 2:01:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I remember going back that night and kind of being like, I, I rarely have disagreed with you in our relationship, but in our, that night I was like, he just doesn't understand. He doesn't understand how different it is for me as a woman versus like my male counterparts. Um, and there's, there may be true to that, but the reality was the next day I was listening to the same content you has had been put out at every other muster. And it hit me that what you were saying was it doesn't matter the circumstances or your experience being different, the same principles we teach apply. And I realized that you were right in that instance. And it was probably another year later before the idea came to fruition of, okay, we understand it's the same, but there is still a barrier to entry.

• 2:02:31Speaker 02

  There is a barrier to entry. And I think you started thinking about it based on jujitsu, correct?

• 2:02:36Jocko Willink?

  Yep. A hundred percent. No. Um, we have at Victory America, we have women's jujitsu class, but they don't teach different techniques. They teach jujitsu and, but there's a barrier to entry because jujitsu means you're going to be in close, close contact with a bunch of dudes. And a lot of women are like, hmm, that doesn't seem like fun, especially when you start first start jujitsu. It's like, well, that doesn't seem like a, I don't like the looks of that at all. I don't want to do that. Well, jujitsu is still awesome. And so we have a women's class. Okay. And most, a lot of women do end up migrating into training with the, with the dudes as well. Some of them do, some of them don't. But the barrier was there and it was real. And I realized, oh yeah, that's, that's the same thing here.

• 2:03:20Jocko Willink?

  You know, you've got me, the Neanderthal as the, what's the, uh, the face of the, yeah, the face of the event. Like what is this big Neanderthal going to teach me about jujitsu or about, about leadership? But to going back to what, what I said to you originally is like, no, the principles are the same. And the principles are the same and it doesn't matter if you're male, female, old, young, black, white, um, experienced, inexperienced. It, it doesn't matter where you are, the principles are the same. Now.

• 2:03:58Jocko Willink?

  Are there trends that certain groups of people will have to utilize certain principles more than others? Yes. For instance, if you have engineers, engineers are a group of people that will have to focus on certain parts of the principles and leaning against their personal instincts. Salespeople are going to have other parts of the principles that they have to lean into or lean away from because their instinct is different. And it's the same thing in jujitsu. You know, you have, there are, there are absolutely women at Victory MMA that are bigger and stronger than some of the men at Victory MMA. That's,

• 2:04:41Jocko Willink?

  those are just the facts of the case. And so those women that are bigger and stronger than some of the guys are going to utilize some of the moves that are generally used by some of the bigger guys. And so, but the principles are the same. The jujitsu is the same and the leadership is the same. So eventually, I, did you start with the, doing the phone, uh, doing the, the online, the women, the webinars? That's where you started? Cause once I, once I realized that I was being stupid and that there, there was a barrier and that this is a good way to overcome it, then it was like, okay, yeah, let's do this.

• 2:05:14Speaker 02

  We did that for like a year and a half, I want to say. We had just started doing live free sessions every month. And we're like, let's see who shows up. And that audience grew and grew and grew. I think we would have anywhere from a hundred to 300 people that would join live, but we had six, seven, then eight, then nine thousand people in the community that were asking for more content, that were watching the video after the live session. So eventually we had enough of a data point to say, I think we have enough people to maybe do a live event.

• 2:05:43Jocko Willink?

  And so what number is the, the next one's going to be in January, January 5th through the 7th. This will be the fourth assembly.

• 2:05:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:49Jocko Willink?

  It's in Palm Springs. So that'll be awesome. And you know, what do we, and we're, we have in 2027, what do we have? Two musters in 2027?

• 2:06:00Speaker 02

  Two musters. So we'll have the women's assembly in January, kind of a kickoff to the year. I, my, my pitch to women is, hey, for a lot of women, particularly mothers, they've spent the holiday getting everything ready for everyone else. And then all their kids go back to school and this is your chance to start off your year and do something for yourself. So come to the women's assembly and then, um, and then we have in March DC, a muster. And then in October, we have a Dallas muster.

• 2:06:28Jocko Willink?

  Sweet. Um, and then of course we have stuff going on all the time. FTX, we have Battlefield, we have Council, we have Roll Call. We got a bunch of stuff going on. We have the Extreme Ownership Academy. We have the Lead Win Podcast. Are you on every Lead Win Podcast?

• 2:06:43Speaker 02

  I'm on most. I think that there's been like one or two episodes where I left for a flight and they, they, they floundered through.

• 2:06:52Jocko Willink?

  They had to flounder through it without you.

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  I was told that when I left, there was about 25 minutes of just nonsense. They're, they didn't have anyone wrangling them in. It was, it was Sean and Leif. They went on off on a tangent.

• 2:07:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. I'm sure that was, uh, I'm sure that got, had to get edited out between these two guys.

• 2:07:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. But it's fun. We've had a bunch of the Echelon Front instructors on for a season. So we'll do, you know, eight or 10 seas, eight or 10 episodes with another instructor. So you get a third voice besides just mine and Leif in those conversations.

• 2:07:21Jocko Willink?

  I've been on it.

• 2:07:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

• 2:07:23Jocko Willink?

  They were the best episodes I've heard.

• 2:07:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Hands down. Everyone said that your episodes were the best. But it's, it's a, it's a good compliment to your long form podcast. Cause ours are 20, 30 minutes and you can, short, short form.

• 2:07:37Jocko Willink?

  You don't have to get dragged through the freaking history of whatever battle that I'm going off about for.

• 2:07:42Speaker 02

  They're, they're less intense for sure.

• 2:07:44Jocko Willink?

  Suffering everything else. No, it's awesome. Um, so that's it. Plenty of options that we have at Echelon Front to, to, for you, for you to learn about leadership and get on board. Um, so plenty of ways to activate your brain. Sometimes you also got to activate your, uh, physicality from time to time.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  I have a question.

• 2:08:05Jocko Willink?

  You go send it.

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  Jamie, can we remind a little bit to the Flynn Cochran two more times?

• 2:08:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:08:11Speaker 01

  Can you explain that a little bit to more robustly?

• 2:08:14Speaker 02

  Yes. So if you are hurting, so you hurt your ankle in a football game and you come home and you tell my husband, dad, I hurt my ankle. He will receive that with some empathy and then remind you, you have two more times to complain about said injury.

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  Like you're cleared to complain about two more times, but no more after that. We're done.

• 2:08:36Speaker 02

  Two more times, you will continue to receive some empathy, even though even, it's kind of a lie. Cause even the, the very next time he's like, okay, one more time. It's just his way of reminding you like, cool. Let's, we don't complain. Let's just suck it up.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  Let's not, uh, harp on it kind of a thing. Yeah.

• 2:08:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Suck it up.

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's good. I like those little techniques, you know? So like if, um, for example, like if one of my kids will do something or run into a situation that's very small and they're complaining about it, like, oh my gosh, I can't believe whatever. And then so I asked like, hey, are you, are you going to be okay? If it's super small, you know? And they don't like it, but they understand. See what I'm saying? So it makes them not complain about these small things over time.

• 2:09:15Speaker 02

  It's the same level of sarcasm. It is the same level. It's like, hey, tell me two more times. It's, it's very insincere, but their outcome is, I think, if you ask my kids like, hey, what's our mantra as a family? They'd probably say two more times. But what you get is hopefully kids who just don't complain and make a bunch of excuses all the time about random stuff. They're just like, yeah, okay. Two more times and then I'm going to get over this.

• 2:09:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's what it felt like. And that's what it seemed like too. But I want to make sure I don't want to misuse it, you know?

• 2:09:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Family mantra. Two more times.

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  It's a good one. Cause yeah, over time they kind of get what you're doing, you know? Where it's like, oh yeah. Like it's not like they, you're, they're saying, hey, don't complain. It's kind of like, okay, complaining, cool, but chill, you know, kind of a thing. And overall.

• 2:09:56Speaker 02

  They say it to each other now.

• 2:09:58Speaker 01

  Oh, perfect. That's when you know it's working.

• 2:10:00Speaker 02

  Or to me, or to their dad, you know, that we, we get, we get it back now quite a bit as well.

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  My kids say it back to me too. Am I going to be okay? Like if I just say like, oh, the, the air conditioning is running too long. They'll be like, oh yeah. Are you going to be okay? But it's like, okay, good. I'm glad, I'm glad you picked it up.

• 2:10:17Jocko Willink?

  Like, like I was saying, when the kids come back at you with this stuff.

• 2:10:20Speaker 01

  So you know, bruh.

• 2:10:21Jocko Willink?

  Stand by.

• 2:10:22Speaker 02

  You know what though? Isn't that, doesn't that mean you're doing something right? Right? You're getting it back. And even though you're like, ah damn it. Like, okay. But you're getting it back and you're thinking, all right, we did something right.

• 2:10:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, hell yeah. I, I'll be, I would give them like, do you, do you, do you want me to take you to the hospital? Should we get you to the emergency room? Just straight up, you know? Cause I'm, come on.

• 2:10:44Speaker 02

  That was like our, our parents who were like, well, we should just cut it off, you know? My finger hurts dad. We should just cut it off, you know?

• 2:10:50Jocko Willink?

  I used to do something with my youngest daughter and I would like walk up and like touch her head as if it was like soft. And I'd be like, oh, how long were you, how long were you watching TV for? Cause and she would look horrified. She would look so scared that her brain was getting soft. So.

• 2:11:12Jocko Willink?

  Check. Uh, physicality, being in shape, working out. Tell me about your first in nutrition journey.

• 2:11:20Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. A couple of years ago, I worked with First Nutrition. They're awesome. Anne and Jonathan have a very rigid, like you talk about discipline. It is a discipline program. It is not for the faint of heart. And I say that because you should know what you're getting into, but their program works. I am significantly healthier as a result of them working with me and understanding even, and I understood nutrition and macros and some of that. But the way that they, the way that they run their program is, it is, it is the forced discipline of you're going to track this, you're going to run this. And if you do these things, and what it does is it reveals all these little things that you just weren't counting on, uh, because you're forced to track your calories and to track your protein

• 2:12:03Speaker 02

  in an effective way. So you're learning very quickly. Like, oh man, I never really counted that. And you start to see how they add up. Like peanut butter. I used to think peanut butter was such a great source of protein. And then you run through First Nutrition. You're like, this is a terrible source of protein.

• 2:12:17Jocko Willink?

  And it's just a big, uh, jar of sugar.

• 2:12:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Sugar and, and fat. And there's, there's aspects of that that might be good for helping, you know, athletes, but not for me at 40, when I was going through the work with them. Um, so they were awesome to help me get on my own health journey.

• 2:12:31Jocko Willink?

  Um, my wife, big H, uh, she did it too. And she, she was like, it, the thing that, the thing that I realized about it is it's like what you're talking about, that kind of audit period. People learn so much about what they're putting into their bodies that it becomes a habit. And then they're like, oh, okay, cool. And they, it's like seeing the world in a different way, you know? And my wife is in awesome shape and she's always been very athletic and in very good shape. But talk about A-game, you know? That girl's got her A-game together. And so anyways, shout out to, uh, for, uh, First in Nutrition.

• 2:13:13Jocko Willink?

  Cause I noticed a big impact with you. Just like you're, you're looking healthier and more like energetic. And I was like, oh, okay. Squared away. And boom, there you go. And you know, they, they're kind of a, a real presence at the muster. They always bring a bunch of people to muster because there's a huge overlap in like extreme ownership and taking ownership of what you're doing in your life and taking ownership of what, you know, how you're fueling yourself. And so just, just awesome stuff. Um, but that physicality part, and we have to work out, we have to get after it. I know you posted some of your family joyous Saturdays and Sundays.

• 2:13:53Speaker 02

  Sandbag Sunday.

• 2:13:54Jocko Willink?

  You guys go hard. What's the, what's the tradition with Sandbag Sunday?

• 2:13:57Speaker 02

  Sandbag Sunday, my husband started just because my boys are wrestlers and why not have a theme for Sunday where you throw some sandbags around. But they, my boys, so we have like a little group, uh, it's called the Penguin Circle Barbell Club. That's the street.

• 2:14:11Jocko Willink?

  Penguin Circle?

• 2:14:11Speaker 02

  It's the street we live on. And, um, and so it's my husband, my boys, and then a couple of neighbors and they'll bring some friends periodically, but it's every morning at our home gym around six o'clock. They all gather, get their workout in. Saturdays, they go to Mount Trashmore. It's, it's a, it's become a family thing. I used to separate myself from that and go do my own thing.

• 2:14:29Jocko Willink?

  But now you're in it.

• 2:14:30Speaker 02

  But lately I've been in it and it's fun. Cause you just roll, wake up and roll out to your home gym and it's, uh, yeah, there's some good accountability there.

• 2:14:36Jocko Willink?

  And you sent me a picture of your fridge that you have, which is racked and stacked with Jocko Fuel.

• 2:14:42Speaker 02

  It is. You, it's cases and cases and cases of Jocko Fuel. And you'd think like, dude, you're good. You're good for months. We go through it so fast, partly because it's an open door. So anyone who comes to the barbell club can help themselves. Uh, but it, it's amazing how fast we go through it. The only thing I'm waiting now is a decal. I need to get like a get after it or a Jocko Fuel decal for the fridge. Cause it lights up and it's.

• 2:15:07Jocko Willink?

  We can make that happen pretty easily around these parts. Uh, so if you're working out, if you're getting after, if you're throwing sandbags around y'all, we recommend you get some fuel. We recommend Jocko Fuel protein. I just had the pumpkin spice. Did I have the pumpkin spice?

• 2:15:20Speaker 02

  That's my new guilty trope.

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  God, that was good. Actually I just got informed by my wife.

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  Big H.

• 2:15:27Jocko Willink?

  Big H, yeah. She said-

• 2:15:29Speaker 02

  Does she like that nickname?

• 2:15:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, of course, Big H. She, um, it's funny because people, people, people like refer to her as Big H. And even people that probably don't even know what her name is, you know, but there's like Big H. Um, she just informed me this morning, she was like, I, I just, I'm gonna get some more pumpkin spice. And I said, oh, cool, cuz it's a, it's, it's a, just like a seasonal thing. And she was like, she looked at me with anger.

• 2:15:57Speaker 02

  We ordered five cases just to have enough because I love it.

• 2:16:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so I don't know.

• 2:16:03Speaker 02

  And I knew it was going away.

• 2:16:03Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna talk to the team and see if we can't maybe prolong or maybe even make permanent. Although we tried that before with the powder and it was like, kind of, it kind of faded. The demand signal faded, so we'll see.

• 2:16:18Speaker 02

  Well, I think they're following the trend with the national coffee chain where every fall it's like the pumpkin spice latte comes back. So I think maybe sticking with the seasonal creates the hype cuz then you're just waiting for it when the fall comes. You're waiting for the drop.

• 2:16:31Jocko Willink?

  Just extend the season a little bit cuz it is good. I think, I think we leaned into the spice a little bit. Like, I think it's a little bit, we get a little bit of that spice.

• 2:16:40Speaker 02

  I put it in my coffee, so I prefer that.

• 2:16:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what Big H does too. Alright, so Jocko Fuel, check it out, check out the energy. What are you drinking over there?

• 2:16:48Speaker 02

  Orange, always.

• 2:16:50Jocko Willink?

  That's your go-to.

• 2:16:51Speaker 02

  I drink other flavors, but orange is my go-to.

• 2:16:53Jocko Willink?

  Orange is your go-to. Uh, we got everything that you need. We got supplements. We sell it all over the place. We sell, if we, if they don't have it in the store down the street from wherever you are right now, just tell them you want Jocko Fuel.

• 2:17:04Speaker 02

  You know where I just saw it for the first time in a long time?

• 2:17:07Jocko Willink?

  Where?

• 2:17:07Speaker 02

  Wawa.

• 2:17:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, we're in Wawa.

• 2:17:09Speaker 02

  Back in Wawa.

• 2:17:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, Wawa is, and it's, it's doing awesome in Wawa. So Wawa, we, we got so many awesome partners out there that are selling Jocko Fuel. So check it out, Jocko Fuel, or you can get it from jacofuel.com and make sure you get enough to feed your entire neighborhood when they get done throwing sandbags. Also, Origin USA, we're making clothes here in America, which is a really big deal. It may not seem like a big deal. I was at an event and there was a bunch of patriotic people at the event. And I was like, oh, this is cool. A bunch of patriotic people. It was around September 11th, you know, and you're kind of like, everyone's feeling very patriotic. And I'm sorry for being this way, but I start like looking at everyone's clothing.

• 2:17:54Jocko Willink?

  And I'm like, dude, I, I didn't say anything, of course, I filtered it out, but super patriotic people are wearing literal Chinese-made jeans. Chinese-made sneakers, Chinese-made boots. It, it's, it's terrible. And the, i- if you want to be patriotic, if you wanna support America, then buy stuff that's American-made. Support the communities, support the, the people that are in the factories making this stuff. And the people that are making the materials for this stuff. This is, this is absolutely so important at this juncture in the world. We are adversaries, economic adversaries with people like China.

• 2:18:35Jocko Willink?

  And every time you buy a pair of jeans or shoes that are made in China, you are helping them enslave people. That's what you're doing. So we make the best product. We make it all American-made. It fits great, it wears great, it's high quality, it looks cool. It's Origin USA. So go to originusa.com and get yourself some. That's what we're doing.

• 2:18:59Speaker 02

  Amanda just sent me some of those women's jeans.

• 2:19:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:02Speaker 02

  So good.

• 2:19:03Jocko Willink?

  You love them?

• 2:19:03Speaker 02

  So good. It's, it's, it was about time.

• 2:19:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, you know, Amanda, obviously as the COO of Origin, she definitely had the priority of wanting to make women's jeans at a minimum. But even for, for Amanda, who's, you know, the COO, you know the pressure being the COO. She told me, she's like, we're, we're not making them till we are squared away on men's jeans. And like, okay, until we get to where, and we finally got there. And by the way, it's not just being squared away, I mean, all the products that we make, right? It's just a whole nother, it's a whole nother game, right? When you start making clothes for women, so we're slowly entering that game.

• 2:19:45Speaker 02

  I was feeling left out cuz all the men in my house wear Origin jeans and Shirt Locker shirts. It's, that, that's the only thing that exists outside of like school spirit.

• 2:19:53Jocko Willink?

  Dude, your, your family represents.

• 2:19:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:19:56Jocko Willink?

  Your dad represents.

• 2:19:57Speaker 02

  My dad is in the game. He wears the Jocko shirts every day without fail. But the Origin, I was feeling left out because there wasn't as many women's products, but the jeans, I, it's highly recommend.

• 2:20:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so Origin USA, get some American-made. They are a hundred percent, a hundred percent communist-free. Get some.

• 2:20:16Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah. Speaking of Shirt Locker, thank you, by the way, for representing so hard and it even inspires me. You know, help run the store, so that's saying a lot. Um, Shirt Locker is, uh, an option we offer on jacostore.com. If, for the people who don't know, so you go jacostore.com, so you can shop your Discipline Equals Freedom, good, all that stuff. Um, got some hoodies on there, some hats on there. Christmas is coming, by the way, Jamie Cochran.

• 2:20:41Jocko Willink?

  You make a special, you make a special, uh, shirt?

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  No, maybe, I don't know.

• 2:20:46Jocko Willink?

  What about the December Shirt Locker shirt?

• 2:20:48Speaker 01

  December Shirt Locker shirt is not in production as of right now cuz we're on October.

• 2:20:53Jocko Willink?

  I have an idea for that, so let's get offline and discuss.

• 2:20:56Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, not right now.

• 2:20:57Jocko Willink?

  Not right now.

• 2:20:57Speaker 01

  Oh, surprise, okay.

• 2:20:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:59Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, right on.

• 2:21:00Speaker 02

  That's how my dad's Shirt Locker started off, was a Christmas present. I got him the Shirt Locker for a year and now we're just, I think, three years in and he just, yeah, shirt after shirt after shirt.

• 2:21:09Speaker 01

  That's how I'm feeling.

• 2:21:10Jocko Willink?

  Locked in.

• 2:21:11Speaker 01

  So good. Uh, you, you'll be happy with October one, though. It's, um, it's good, it's a good shirt, it's another good shirt.

• 2:21:18Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:21:19Speaker 01

  Right? Um, but it's like the opposite of the high-level problem, you know, high-level problems, the opposite. It's called, uh, Hard Times.

• 2:21:26Jocko Willink?

  Oh, dang.

• 2:21:28Speaker 01

  Good, Hard Times.

• 2:21:28Jocko Willink?

  You know the layers on that, right?

• 2:21:29Speaker 01

  Layers.

• 2:21:30Jocko Willink?

  Song by the Cro-Mags right there, Hard Times.

• 2:21:32Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't know. There you go, incidental layers. Yeah, yeah, right on. Yeah, good, came out good. It's in production, this October shirt, uh, October 1st. So you can go on jacostore.com, click on it, you can see kind of what it, like a little teaser, what it looks like. That's just a heads up. Um, otherwise, yeah, just get your regular Discipline Equals Freedom, maybe some other options with a good shirt. Available on there, some socks on there.

• 2:21:53Jocko Willink?

  By the way, I don't have any socks.

• 2:21:55Speaker 01

  So, oh, you want some socks? Do you want me to give you socks?

• 2:21:57Jocko Willink?

  Me, you know.

• 2:21:59Speaker 01

  Some people have socks, they just go, they just buy the socks.

• 2:22:01Jocko Willink?

  Okay, okay, cool, noted.

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, other people have socks, that's what I'm saying.

• 2:22:06Jocko Willink?

  Actually, my wife asked me the day, why, why?

• 2:22:08Speaker 01

  Big H?

• 2:22:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:08Speaker 01

  Is that who you're talking about?

• 2:22:09Jocko Willink?

  You know the deal. She was asking me, like, she was like going through our finances. She does all the financing stuff and she goes, why is there an order on here for jacostore.com? And I go, well, that's the only way I can get stuff from that.

• 2:22:21Speaker 01

  Represent, uh, represent, right, you're the man. Thanks for, hey, we thank you for your support, see what I'm saying? So, yeah, thank you for that. Um, oh, yeah, there's like polos on there too. And actually, if you get a polo, we'll offer you like a little half off with the socks, like a combo situation. See, I learned that, you know?

• 2:22:37Jocko Willink?

  Matching.

• 2:22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so when you go to work, you can represent in more than just one way.

• 2:22:40Jocko Willink?

  Head to toe.

• 2:22:41Speaker 01

  Head to toe, see what I'm saying?

• 2:22:43Jocko Willink?

  Unless you're me, then you're just kind of like-

• 2:22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're kind of struggling for sure, but, you know, we're gonna do the best we can. But yes, solonjacostore.com, you know, you like something, get something. But yes, I wanted to announce, it doesn't seem like it, but Christmas is coming up. Like, end of September, right? That's when we're starting to think about Christmas?

• 2:23:01Jocko Willink?

  I think, I think it's after, after Thanksgiving, right? Which is like literally-

• 2:23:06Speaker 02

  I highly doubt your wife is thinking about Christmas after Thanksgiving.

• 2:23:12Jocko Willink?

  You mean, she thinks of it before then?

• 2:23:14Speaker 01

  Before, right?

• 2:23:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:23:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:16Speaker 02

  It's, it feels a little early, it feels a little early to me now, but by like, by Halloween, yeah, I'm starting to think about Christmas. Two months away, I got three kids.

• 2:23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so we're getting ready to get ready. Boom.

• 2:23:28Jocko Willink?

  So keep these in mind. You know what I'm getting ready for? Thanksgiving? Way the Warrior Kid movie.

• 2:23:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, me too.

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  I've been ready, to be honest with you.

• 2:23:36Jocko Willink?

  Global, global, uh, release. I've seen the trailer, you seen the trailer?

• 2:23:40Speaker 01

  I've seen the trailer, man.

• 2:23:41Jocko Willink?

  I show you the trailer?

• 2:23:42Speaker 01

  Total approval, a hundred percent.

• 2:23:43Jocko Willink?

  I'll show you the trailer, yes.

• 2:23:45Speaker 02

  I, I got to see a little piece of it, of the actual film.

• 2:23:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. How'd you, what's your assessment?

• 2:23:50Speaker 02

  It's so good. Uh, remember, I have like, I have the original Warrior Kids. I have the OG Warrior Kids. I think the kids, the, the age group that read this book first before it came out. So my kids are fired up. They've been Warrior Kids since day one and now they're like little, they, they've, all the lessons we teach them were found in Warrior Kids. So as a family, we're stoked for this.

• 2:24:10Jocko Willink?

  It's so cool. I meet kids like that, like I'll go to wrestling tournaments and there'll be some kid that read the Warrior Kid book when he was six or seven or eight. And now he's like a senior in high school and is like a badass and is gonna go, you know, gonna go in the Marine Corps, gonna go into the Army or gonna go into one of the military academies. And their parents will just be like, they're literally all doing this, like, I'm like, oh, do you wrestle? Nope. You did jiu-jitsu? Nope, nope. The kid, he read the books. It's, it's amazing, like, it's so cool. So getting it on this new medium with, you know, which is a easily consumable medium of watching it is gonna be crazy. I'm super freaking stoked.

• 2:24:51Speaker 02

  The last muster, we had, I think, eighteen team members bring family. So we gotta see like this generation of Warrior Kids. And these kids are, there's something special about them. And these are all of our team members and their kids, so they're all the kids that grew up with Warrior Kid, grew up around Extreme Ownership. It's, it's amazing. I can't wait for even more people to get exposure to that.

• 2:25:13Jocko Willink?

  November 25th, streaming live on Apple TV. That's where, that's when you're gonna be able to watch it. Global release. Um, we got some books, Warrior Kid books, obviously, we got, then I've written some books about leadership and whatnot. And then Dave Burke, Need Lead, Rob Jones, Put Your Legs On. Also, we just talked about Echelon Front, echelonfront.com, if you wanna check out any of that, go and check out all of that. And then if you wanna help service members, active and retired, you wanna help their families, wanna help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mom Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization. If you wanna donate or you wanna get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also, check out HeroesAndHorses.org and Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org.

• 2:25:54Jocko Willink?

  If you wanna connect with us, for Jamie, she's on Instagram and LinkedIn. She's at Jamie Lynn Cochran. Are you on Twitter?

• 2:26:03Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:26:03Jocko Willink?

  Twitter X? Are you on Twitter X? Echo Charles?

• 2:26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have an account, you know, my activity is very, yeah, very low.

• 2:26:13Jocko Willink?

  And you're on Facebook, I'm assuming, but that's like not really-

• 2:26:17Speaker 02

  It's just linked to my, it gets whatever I put on Instagram.

• 2:26:19Jocko Willink?

  Got it. But your, your, your LinkedIn is a little bit more active.

• 2:26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:24Jocko Willink?

  I would say. You got some good stuff going on there, so you can find us there. And then, you know, for me, you can check out jacco.com and then on social media, um, I'm at Jocko Willink and that goes Echo Charles. Just, I'd rather, I'd prefer you don't go there. I prefer you just don't look at social media cuz it's not healthy for you. So try not to go there. If you have to go there, you might as well check out me, but don't, don't, if you don't have to, don't. If you, if you really want to, check out Echo Charles.

• 2:26:52Jocko Willink?

  He, he'll inspire you not to, not to be on social media anymore.

• 2:26:55Speaker 01

  Sometimes.

• 2:26:56Jocko Willink?

  And Jamie, anything else? Any closing thoughts?

• 2:26:59Speaker 02

  Don't make excuses. The path of ownership is what leads you to solving the problems in your life. So learn how to create that instinct and I promise you, your life will be better for it.

• 2:27:09Jocko Willink?

  You agree. Right on. Well, thanks for coming up. Thanks for joining us again. To all the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines currently deployed around the world in harm's way. Thank you all for protecting us and our way of life. To our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all other first responders. Thanks for what you all do to keep us safe here on the home front. And everyone else out there, you're in a leadership position. And whether that's your family, whether that's at work, whether that's in your community, you are leading people. And you're not just leading the people below you in the chain of command. You're leading your peers. You're leading your family.

• 2:27:52Jocko Willink?

  You're leading your boss. And like I was saying earlier, imagine you were in a band and you had to play guitar. And you didn't know how to play guitar. That's not something you'd naturally know how to do. Just like if you were, had to go and do plumbing in a building and you didn't know how to do plumbing, you wouldn't just naturally know how to do it. You have to learn it. And leadership is the same exact thing. It is a skill that we have to learn. And it's a skill that you have to continue to practice. And the better you are at leading, the better every aspect of your life will be. So, think about it, read about it, invest in it, so that you can make

• 2:28:34Jocko Willink?

  your life and the life of everyone around you, better. So go lead. And that's all we've got for tonight. And until next time, this is Jamie, and Echo, and Jocko, out.