The Debrief w/ Jocko and Dave Berke #17: Calculating How Often You Should Argue With The People Around You

How often is acceptable to push back on ideas you don't quite agree with up the chain. 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 the Jocko Debrief Podcast, episode 17 with Dave Berke and me, Jocko Willink. Dave, talk to us about the debrief really quick. What is it we're doing here?

• 0:12Dave Berke?

  We are debriefing, actually debriefing interactions we have with clients that we work with at Echelon Front, interacting with folks that join us on the EF Online Brigade and the EF Online Live Q&A Sessions that we do. And we take, we take issues that our clients are dealing with that are often similar to many other issues, and we kind of combine them into a debrief. So partially, I can tell you what's going on that I'm working on, and also so we can share the lessons of the challenges that not only are our clients facing, they're the same problems everybody's facing. So we are actually debriefing what's going on. So you know what's going on in my world, and then everybody listening gets a little sense of the challenges people are dealing with, and hopefully how to solve them a little bit better.

• 0:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we probably had 700,000 of these conversations before one of us said, you know what? It might be a good idea to record this so we can actually tell other people and they can share these lessons learned. So that's what we've been doing. And with that, let's debrief. What do you got?

• 1:15Dave Berke?

  When you're calculating how often you should argue with the people around you, a good place to start is, is never. That's a good place to start. Start with almost never, and then go from there.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  But what if I'm right?

• 1:35Dave Berke?

  Yes. What if you're right? And that's, a little question came up was this situation. And what's cool about this one, actually, is this-

• 1:41Jocko Willink?

  Is this from a client, or is this from EF Online?

• 1:43Dave Berke?

  This is from a client, client we've been working with for a while. This client's awesome. I didn't mention this, but the cool part about this is that you don't know who you are, because we take pieces of this. It's not the same company, the same person. It's, it's a, it's several versions put together. So you can't attribute this. We don't obviously share what our, what our actual clients are, are doing, certainly by name or by specifics. But it's a representation of a challenge that might be happening among several different clients. We kind of piece that together. But in this situation, it's with a client we've been working with on the, on what we call the LDAP program, the Leadership Development Alignment. That's where we partner with a company, work closely with them, and help them build their leadership program inside their own companies.

• 2:26Dave Berke?

  And that's awesome because we get to get to know them and work with them closely and get a good sense of some of the leadership challenges. And this conversation actually was about someone who's working with with his boss and he and the boss have an awesome relationship. This isn't like some big friction laden situation where this person's boss has a whole bunch of bad ideas and I'm pushing back. It was a question of, hey, you know, I was in a conversation with my boss and she had a thought and you know, I pushed back and this person I was talking to was really just kind of conversationally asking me, hey, hey, what, how often should I, do you think I should be doing that?

• 3:03Jocko Willink?

  So the question was from Fred. So Fred's got this boss and he's pushed back against her and now he's kind of hitting you up saying, hey, how often should I be pushing back against my boss? Well, first of all, give me some details on what he means by pushing back because I need some clarification because you know, I want, if you're in my platoon, I want you pushing back on me all the time. I mean, could, could you get a little crazy with it? Sure, you could. You could just become a contrarian, which is, I guess, being a contrarian is fine. Being an extreme contrarian is annoying. It's just annoying.

• 3:40Dave Berke?

  It is. That's right. And so this situation was Fred's boss, Mary, had a suggestion for how they should roll out a particular process they're going to do with their company. Fred was a little lukewarm on it and in the sort of the executive meeting suggested, hey, I don't, I don't think we should do that. I think we should do this. This was not a big blow up. This was not a boardroom, you know, scream session. This was Mary in charge, had an idea. Fred didn't like the idea and pushed back. And the question was also to me like, hey, how often do you do that? And that's kind of where that little joke came from. And my answer was, how often do I do it? I said,

• 4:21Dave Berke?

  Almost never. I almost never push back. Now, we should dig into this a little bit because like you said, there that this isn't like, don't ever push back against your boss. So, a couple of things.

• 4:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because so the way that could immediately be interpreted with no further traffic would just be, oh, so Dave's a pushover. Got it.

• 4:38Dave Berke?

  He's a yes man.

• 4:39Jocko Willink?

  Hey, but Dave, I got a deal. Why don't you just take your platoon and go charge that machine gun nest? You got it? You're like, yep, got it.

• 4:44Dave Berke?

  That's right.

• 4:45Jocko Willink?

  Everyone gets killed because you don't push back.

• 4:47Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Jocko Willink?

  So you know what? I really like you, Dave, because you don't push back.

• 4:50Dave Berke?

  You always say yes. Yeah. So there is absolutely some context to this, and that's, this debrief is actually about the conversation we had about clarifying what that meant. So,

• 5:02Dave Berke?

  they have a good relationship. They can speak pretty candidly, and he wasn't worrying too much about like, undermining that relationship. And so when I said, never, here's some of the things I I captured for this debrief is, first of all, am I, am I saying never? No, not it's not never. The answer is not never. There are times you absolutely have to push back. What I said was, I almost never do that. So when somebody says something like, in this case, my boss, let's say you, we're in a, we're in a team meeting. You offer, hey, this is what we're gonna do. This is what I think we should do. You got your plan, and you tell me your plan. The first question I ask myself is, what's the risk? What's the damage? What the, what's the problem that could happen with your plan? So I think about, hey, we do it this way. If we do it this way, what's gonna happen?

• 5:46Dave Berke?

  And if the answer is, there's nothing wrong with that plan. There's no risk. There's no real problem, then I'm not gonna push back. And we talked a little bit of scenario too. Hey, you and I want to go get some dinner later. You're gonna break out your phone and you're gonna use um, Google Maps, and I'm gonna use Waze. Waze says we're gonna here in seven minutes. Yours says we're gonna get there in eight minutes.

• 6:07Dave Berke?

  Hey, Dave, I wanna, I wanna use Google Maps. Let's go. Am I gonna be like, eh, I don't think Google Maps such a good idea, Jocko. I think we should use Waze. Now, could I do that? Sure, I could. And you'd be like, eh, cool, whatever, no factor. Willing to do it my way. And doing that once, is that a problem? No. Then if I do it twice, is that a problem? Probably not. But if every single time, over time, even with I got a good relationship with you, if you've got a suggestion, and all I like to do is go, actually, you know what we should do?

• 6:35Jocko Willink?

  I can shave a minute off that time.

• 6:36Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I can save us 12 seconds. And part of the reason why, if I look and go, well, if we use Jocko's map plan, what's gonna happen? We're gonna get to the destination. We're gonna get some dinner. Now, here's the thing, though.

• 6:51Dave Berke?

  Mine says, we're gonna get there 30 seconds faster. And over time, those 30 seconds are gonna add up. By the end of next month, it's gonna be five minutes of efficiency that I've gained. But here's the thing. Here's what I don't know. I don't know that halfway through my route, that the car in front of me isn't gonna run into me, or have an accident, or I'm gonna... There are so many things I don't know. That is, do I really wanna be pushing back against things that really don't matter? So, part of the calculation initially is, hey, listen, if the outcome gets you to where you wanna be, if what you are going to accomplish is the same, and there might be a small difference in there, do I wanna have a reputation of someone who's always pushing back? Or someone's like, hey, cool, I'm on board, let's go make that happen?

• 7:31Jocko Willink?

  And let me ask you another question, and this stems into you getting rear-ended, or T-boned, or whatever. This is, I think I talked about this on E F online.

• 7:42Jocko Willink?

  I don't wanna be a person who is committing to the unknown. This is a bad idea. And yet, we see people expend massive amounts of leadership capital to make a commitment to the unknown. This was a classic all-day-long planning SEAL operations. "I think we should come in from the west." Why do you think that? "Well, because there's a good position where the enemy could be set up." Okay, that makes sense. What if their enemy's not set up there?

• 8:15Jocko Willink?

  "Why... So, they're... And I say, "Well, I think we should just come in from the south, 'cause it's the safest route to get there, and then we can make a decision when we get there." "No, we should come in from the west, we should come in from the west." Committing, and arguing, and giving up leadership capital on the unknown. Why would you ever commit to the unknown? Why would you ever invest leadership capital to the unknown? You shouldn't do that. That's a bad move to make. Not only is it a bad move to make...

• 8:43Jocko Willink?

  It's making this, it's bad enough for me to commit to a plan where I actually have a general idea of what to expect. Because even when I have a general idea, that's not a guarantee.

• 8:52Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Jocko Willink?

  So, avoid committing to the unknown. "Hey, I think our five-year plan should be this." Really? You want to argue with me about what's gonna happen in five years?

• 9:03Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Jocko Willink?

  That's what you want to argue with me about? Okay, got it. I have never argued with anyone in my life over what's gonna happen in five years, not for one second. And yet, I have sat in business meetings where people are arguing about what's gonna happen in five years.

• 9:16Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And we see that. And what happens to me in terms of my influence is if every time I don't like what's gonna happen at year four of the plan, I push back. What's gonna happen over time is actually over time, you're gonna stop listening to me as much.

• 9:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you become the boy that cries wolf.

• 9:33Dave Berke?

  I'm the one who's always...

• 9:34Jocko Willink?

  The boy that... You become the boy that makes random suggestions all the time.

• 9:38Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 9:39Jocko Willink?

  And I don't like them.

• 9:40Dave Berke?

  And we marginalize that person, that person loses influence, and when I do push back, when I need to, my, my words carry less weight. And I don't want that.

• 9:52Dave Berke?

  Here's the other side of that.

• 9:55Dave Berke?

  The truth of the matter is, is that I actually push back all the time. But the way I push back, if you want to think of that, or the technique that I use to push back against your plan, isn't to question your plan, isn't to question what you want to do, isn't to say that I don't like your idea, I think my idea is better. The way I push back against your plan is I actually ask you questions about all the things that you are doing that I wouldn't do and go, "Oh, hey, you know what? Interesting, when you were talking about this thing over here, I was actually gonna do something else. Hey, can I, can you help me better understand why that thing is a good idea?" And so, the way I push back isn't telling you that you're wrong, it's to go, "Oh, hey, Jocko, can I ask you about this?" And so, my question gets you to

• 10:40Dave Berke?

  explain it to me. And...

• 10:44Dave Berke?

  The other side of that conversation, when I say when I push back, I push back all the time, but I don't push back by pushing back. I actually push back by asking questions. And the little piece that I think is critical about that, and I guess I should be careful with this phrase, because I say it all the time, is we talk about this all the time, is when I'm asking that question, it's not just a little trick to get you to go, oh, you didn't think about this, did you, Jock? I'm gonna ask the question and go, yeah, what about this? I actually want to know what you were thinking. Now, listen, sometimes I'm gonna be right, and sometimes you're gonna be right. You're not gonna be right every time, or I'm not gonna be right every time, but when I ask you that question, I really want to know. And if the way I push back to you isn't by arguing all the time,

• 11:27Dave Berke?

  but if by asking questions, and I have a reputation of asking really good questions, every time I ask a question, go, oh, you know what? You know what, dude? I don't know if I really thought that through. And then, you know what we can do? We might be able to make a little adjustment to the plan. I might be able to lead you to adjust your plan. Or you might come back and go, hey, you know what I was thinking about? Was this, this, and this? I'm like, I had no idea about any of those things. You're over here making moves. You're the CEO. I don't even realize what's going on. Hey, that's good information, boss. Thanks. I'm on board with your plan. So, do I push back? I said I never push back, but the truth of the matter is, is that's not true. But the way that I do it, isn't from a place to say, hey, I gotta, I'm right, and I gotta maneuver against my boss, and let my boss know that his plan isn't such a good plan. And it's not just my boss. It's

• 12:12Dave Berke?

  my peers. It's my subordinates. It's my counterparts. It's my clients. It's everybody I interact with. When they are doing things or thinking things that don't make sense to me, if they're not what I would do, I push back all the time. And the way I do this, go, hey, man, I always think I should think of someone else here. Hey, walk me through this. Let me better understand this. Oh, man, that's, that's solid. Or, hey, if we do that, will that affect this other project? Will that put us, put us a little bit behind timeline over here? Because I'm, I'm allocating a bunch of resources to this. Does that can affect that? And you go, oh, I didn't think about that. Now, we're having a conversation, and we sort through that, and the plan might change because I guess I am pushing back.

• 12:50Jocko Willink?

  The, the word that I use when I talk about asking these questions is ask earnest questions. Earnest questions that you really want to know the answer of. And the other, um, thing I've been saying a lot lately is these weapons that we have, these tools that we have, whether that tool is the truth is one that comes up a lot, right? I want to tell Dave the truth. The first thing I need to do is aim that weapon of truth at myself. Here's another thing. I'm not questioning, Dave comes to me with a plan. I'm not questioning Dave's plan.

• 13:25Jocko Willink?

  I'm actually going to aim that question at myself and say, hey, Dave,

• 13:31Jocko Willink?

  I don't think I really understand your plan. I don't think I understand it properly. Can you help me understand it better? That's what I'm trying to do. And you said that 14 different ways, like, like, hey, hey, Jocko, I'm not sure. You say you want to come in over here. Can you explain to me? I'm not sure I understand why you want to do it. That's what we're doing. We are truly asking questions and we're questioning our own understanding of the plan, which is a much more productive way to, to push back. Good. I like it, man. Check. What do you got next? This was a question from an online session,

• 14:17Jocko Willink?

  from a client that had joined us during EF Online. So sometimes, well, not sometimes, a lot, actually, clients that we work with directly, when our, our two teams, Echelon Front and, and their companies work together, a lot of them also join EF Online. So the individual leaders inside those teams that work with are part of EF Online. And this is a question that actually came from them and it was a question about, it's a question about resiliency. And the question went something very close to this. I'm not going to get it exactly, but it's close. It's what she had noticed was,

• 14:48Dave Berke?

  And this stemmed from somewhat recently, you know, there were some folks working and you know, we had some really tough weather not too long ago. And there were some folks that were kind of working outdoors and literally the physical conditions were just harder than they had been. It had been colder and windier and just some tough situations. And she'd asked a question recently, "Hey, it appears that some people on my team are just more resilient than others." And the question kind of stemmed around, is this just a, is this a natural thing, this idea of resiliency? And how can I cultivate it if they just don't seem to have it? Because some people just show me that in tough times, they can get through it. And other people in tough times show me that they can't. So that was kind

• 15:30Dave Berke?

  of the, the question. And it was, it was how do I create resiliency in support when I kind of don't think I can because it's a natural tendency? And I thought this was a good one, too, because I actually remember hearing you talk about, and I think it might've been at one of the very first musters is where I heard this conversation is you talked about, you had a scenario where at the end of the seven month deployment in Ramadi, what if your team had been asked to extend? Hey, we're gonna, we're, we're getting ready, we're packed up, we're gonna go home tomorrow and we get the call, we're staying. We're gonna do this for another seven months. And the reason I, I liked that story is it reminded me of the team, I was in a very similar situation. I had a team of Marines that had been through a rough, rough seven months. And had we been

• 16:13Dave Berke?

  asked to extend on the last day, I had guys on my team that absolutely would have said, "No factor, I'm all in." They wouldn't have batted an eyelash, they'd been right back in it. And I genuinely had guys on my team that I do not think could have done that. They could not have done that. And I thought about, and the answer you gave was connected back to something we talk about all the time was the idea of ownership. It was the idea of, of their connection to what was going on. And this idea of being resilient or being able to endure difficult things is, are some people more naturally resilient than others? I think that's possible. I think there's a, there's a possibility whether it's through...

• 16:55Dave Berke?

  Your genetics are through where you grew up or the environment that you're in. Can some people in their adult life have some more natural resiliency than others? Yes, I think that's true. But where people find a way to get, to be resilient, or where your folks during difficult times resilient, you made the connection to the people that had the most control, the people that are the most involved, the people that had the most connection to the plan, the people that were in the biggest leadership positions, the people that felt most connected, the people that had the most ownership of what was going on, had the most capacity to continue to endure the most difficult situations. And the farther away you were from understanding the plan, knowing why you're doing what you're doing, having control over that plan, being able to influence that plan, knowing how that plan was going to affect you,

• 17:40Dave Berke?

  the farther away you were from that, the less, and in this case, I would summarize it by, the less resilient you were, or you could be. And you connected it to a situation that resonated with me, which was, what would my Marines have? My Marines had the same training, they had the same gear, they all were actually about the same age. They all were pretty similar in where they came from, what they're like. These weren't, these were Marines. And yet I had Marines on my team that could have done seven more months, and I had guys on my team that couldn't have done seven more days. And the difference between them in a lot of those cases was how close they were to what they were doing. And if I kept them in the dark and kept them away from what was going on, and didn't help them understand it and let them lead and let them take ownership of it,

• 18:25Dave Berke?

  they were less likely to have that. So can you build resiliency in your team? Yes. And one of the best ways you can build resiliency in your team is by giving the individual on your team more control, more influence, more, and I won't ever forget to say the word, more ownership.

• 18:49Dave Berke?

  And that was a tool to let them move past the idea, is there some have more than others? Yeah, that's probably true. And I'm not, it's not a guarantee, like all of a sudden, this person's going to have unlimited resiliency to get through any difficult situation. But if you want to build that on your team, if she wanted to build that on her team, could she do that? Yes, you can. And here's a way to do that.

• 19:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Jocko Willink?

  So. That's good stuff. Good stuff. Solid stuff over there.

• 19:26Jocko Willink?

  What's interesting about this is, what do you think? Okay, so you've got background, you've got kind of personal experiences that individuals have had. You've got their genetic makeup as a human being. So you've got these things that certainly have some level of impact on their resiliency.

• 19:50Jocko Willink?

  I would say that there's a factor that is probably 12 to 17 times more important than any of those.

• 20:04Jocko Willink?

  Leadership.

• 20:08Jocko Willink?

  I'm reading a book right now that's going to be on the podcast soon. Guy's a battalion commander in Vietnam. And

• 20:18Jocko Willink?

  they are running a kind of a score, a scorecard for all these different battalions, for the three battalions in this brigade.

• 20:27Jocko Willink?

  And they're monitoring a number of, number of missions done, number of enemy killed, number of casualties. And then it gets into number of AWOL, number of court martial, retention rate.

• 20:44Jocko Willink?

  So what is, what is, what does, what does it mean? What's AWOL? Well, like, why do you go AWOL? Well, it's because you're not resilient to this. Why do you, why would you be in Vietnam and re-enlist in the freaking army? If you're not resilient, you have to have a level of resiliency to do that. And so this guy, who is a real leader, has the highest score in every category, including re-enlistment rate, including lowest AWOL.

• 21:14Jocko Willink?

  Why is that? Is it because he had different humans? No, it's not because he had different humans. Why were they able to conduct more operations? Which are stressful. Why were they able to be? Why were they so resilient? That they were able to conduct more operations than everybody else? Is it because? He got kids that were all, you know, wrestlers? And worked on whatever? No. It's because of leadership. And part of that is what you're saying. Absolutely. Part of that, actually, a vast, a vast part of that. Is as a leader? He's the leader that's giving ownership. He's the leader that's saying, hey, here's the mission. How do you guys want to execute it?

• 21:56Jocko Willink?

  That is, that comes from leadership. Again. Here's another, a couple other small things that you as a leader have, have some control over. The next one I would say, I think that the psychological literature would support this statement. Be on offense. How can we take my team? Which is on the defensive because there's bad weather? And we're, we're, we, we don't want to go out. How do we? How do we reverse that? How do I say? You know what? We got bad weather coming. We know it's coming. We're going to go on the attack. We're going to actually take a day off from work. Or we're going to stand down these troops.

• 22:41Jocko Willink?

  You guys go get some extra rest. That way, when this weather hits, we're ready to rock and roll. We're going on the offense. Just think about that right there. What does that do to the resiliency of the troops? All of a sudden, we're going on the attack. What it feels like? To be on the defense is a horrible thing. When you're sitting there, waiting for morgars to hit your position? You've heard them come out of the tube and you're waiting for them to hit. It's the, it's, I believe it's the worst feeling that I've ever felt.

• 23:12Jocko Willink?

  I've read soldiers in World War I and World War II, describe that as the worst feeling that they've ever felt. We are in a foxhole. We are suffering from heavy artillery. And we have no control. We are on complete defense. That is the worst feeling in the world. So what can we do as a leader? To go on the offense? Because that very move? Will help the resiliency of your troops? It will. A hundred percent. And then lastly, and this is a little bit of a hand in hand type thing. But what can we do to have some fun?

• 23:54Jocko Willink?

  What can I do to have some fun? What about when the weather hits? And it's sleeting and snowing and I'm the commander. And you know what I do? I go out and I service that client in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. And I video it and send it to everybody. Hey, little chilly out there today, gents. Might want to bundle up. Right? What can I do to bring fun to my organization? Because fun builds resiliency. Smiles build resiliency. And this isn't just, I'm telling you this.

• 24:35Jocko Willink?

  They have psychological experiments where you're tasked to do something and you're they, the instructions are smile and do this task.

• 24:46Jocko Willink?

  And people that do the task with a smile are more resilient. People that do it with a frown, sometimes they do it more accurately. It focuses the mind in that way, but who's going to be able to do it for longer? Who's going to be able to suffer? Look, going through basic SEAL training?

• 25:02Jocko Willink?

  Which is, which sucks?

• 25:07Jocko Willink?

  I promise you, when you go hit the surf and it's 55 degrees and you smile, I guarantee it's easy. It's, it's actually, the water is warmer when you smile. The water is warmer when you, when you're running to the surf and you look at your buddy and you make fun of the instructor that you just sent to the surf and you crack a good joke about it, the water is warming up.

• 25:32Jocko Willink?

  And that's what we as leaders need to do.

• 25:37Jocko Willink?

  You took some notes over there. What up?

• 25:39Dave Berke?

  I literally wrote down what you said.

• 25:42Dave Berke?

  And, and what it gives me is it, it, and that's amazingly, that's actually part of what my debriefing with you has been about as we go through this is it gives me more little tools, little ways to explain it in a way that eventually will resonate with the people that I'm working with too. Because sometimes you, the more ways that I can explain or describe, the better I am, the more likely we're going to get to an outcome that they can go, oh, I can do that. Yeah, I can do that. And it's, and I, I literally am writing that down and I will add that because a version of this question gets asked all the time. Some version of this may not be exactly the same. It might not be because it is, you know, a once in a decade, you know, weather situation.

• 26:24Dave Berke?

  But teams facing adversity all the time. So this is just more, more for me.

• 26:31Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Um, I guess with that, maybe it's, uh, is it my turn?

• 26:35Dave Berke?

  Indeed.

• 26:36Jocko Willink?

  So I'm gonna have to backtrack just a little bit to a little bit of EF Online to,

• 26:43Jocko Willink?

  to get to a new, uh, discovery angle. I'm not sure. So

• 26:49Jocko Willink?

  I'm a fan of chess and really I'm, that's a strong word. Probably not a fan of chess. I'm, I'm definitely not good at it. I've never practiced it very much, but I understand sort of the complexities of it and therefore I'm a fan of it. And part of the reason I'm a fan of it is because it's very similar to jujitsu. It's very similar to leadership. It's very similar that you're maneuvering. You have moves. There's things that you have to do. And I, and I talked about this on EF Online a few weeks ago. I went kind of on this little tangent about Gary, Gary Kasparov, and he's the world chess champion for 20 years and he's a legendary guy. And he was saying that he could not beat the current champion. This guy, this, this kid, and I think the kid is 30 something years old, but this kid named Magnus Carlsen, and he gave a couple of reasons. Kasparov

• 27:34Jocko Willink?

  gave a couple of reasons that I found interesting. One of them that was, one of them was because he was too old. And that one really hit me as a strange thing because you'd think chess is just a game with your mind. So why does age have anything to do with it? Well, it turns out that it's actually, there's some physical component to chess. And when you're, when you're playing chess, you're burning three times the normal calories and your heart rate goes up and you're breathing, your blood pressure. So if those things are, if you're not healthy, it's going to be a disadvantage. The other thing is the, the old mind is slowing down. Your, your mind is going to slow down. It's, it's not a precise science and everyone's different, but cognitive decline

• 28:18Jocko Willink?

  is a thing that happens. And some say it happens as early as twenties and thirties. Some say it's as late as your seventies. Some say it's, the, the average that I, as I researched this was like in the fifties. You know, in your fifties, you're going to start to deal with some level of cognitive, cognitive decline. And Kasparov is 57 years old. And I was thinking, you know, here's this guy that is a champion chess player, you know, using his mind at the highest level his whole life. And just like an Olympic athlete that uses their body their whole life, they, that Olympic athlete knows when they're starting to decline. They know they can't hit that PR anymore. They know they're a little bit slower. And you can just imagine Kasparov, you know, seeing a move and

• 29:03Jocko Willink?

  going, I missed that. I never would have missed that before. So, so age was one of the reasons that Kasparov gave is why he would lose to the younger Magnus Carlsen. And the other reason he gave was the fact that Magnus has the benefit of knowing all of Kasparov's moves. And if you know anything about chess, they take entire games and they put them in books. Like this is every single move and you can actually study those moves and you have those move and, and

• 29:31Jocko Willink?

  so Magnus, not only does he know those moves, but then he's able to build upon them.

• 29:37Jocko Willink?

  And it might have taken Gary Kasparov, you know, freaking being put in a particular situation a thousand times before he figures out a way out of that situation. And Magnus opened a book and figured that out in 20 minutes and said, oh, okay, now now I know what to do there. And then he got to build on it. He got to use that brain power that he would have wasted trying to figure out that position. Now he already knows how to do that. So now he can use his brain power to go do something else. And so, so basically Magnus got a head start. Which again, this was weird for me to compute because you'd think, hey, I'm 57, I've been playing chess for whatever, 53 years, I'm going to be better at you than you. But Magnus gets a head start. He gets instant knowledge. It's like the Matrix where they, is that what it's called? Yeah, the Matrix. You plug in, here's jujitsu.

• 30:22Jocko Willink?

  And now you can just learn from there. So he kind of got that advantage. And the reason that I talked about all this on EF Online was because my point that I was trying to make was there's leadership moves that you can learn, just like, just like Magnus Carlsen got to look at these old moves and look at these books and study them, you could learn those moves and then you, then you have them and you can build on them. And I was trying to say on EF Online, hey, you can pick up books and, and you can learn leadership moves there. You can, you can look at leadership strategy and tactics and the dichotomy of leadership and extreme ownership and you can get books from there, but also you can get them from about face and military books and, and you can learn from mentors and you can learn from classes and you can learn from the movies. If you start looking at everything through a leadership lens, you can learn a ton.

• 31:04Jocko Willink?

  I mean, from a leadership perspective, how many freaking lessons can you get from the mini-series Band of Brothers? You, you, that's, you could pretty much be like, okay, yeah, I might have 80% solution for, if we went through and dissected that movie and just took leadership lesson, leadership, we'd, we'd, insane amount of information. So we need to do that. We need to pay attention to leadership moves that other people make so that we can learn from them. And then I also talked about the fact that chess is a finite game with limits and rules and there's 64 squares on the board and each piece is limited in the way it can move. And so because it's finite, because it's a finite thing, computers can actually beat us. It took them a while, but now that they've got better, better computing power, a computer

• 31:49Jocko Willink?

  can just run the numbers and beat you. But, but leadership and life is not finite and there's an infinite number of moves and an infinite number of variables and an infinite number of inconsistencies that we actually have to think and figure out.

• 32:07Jocko Willink?

  Going to the last one of these that we did, we actually have to be able to move our brains to find solutions.

• 32:15Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. I'm sorry I had to backtrack back to EF Online.

• 32:20Jocko Willink?

  But there's more lessons.

• 32:24Jocko Willink?

  And it's weird because we talk about this idea of detaching all the time.

• 32:32Jocko Willink?

  Taking a step back. Detaching from your emotions, detaching from the firefight, detaching from the meeting so that you can see what's actually happening there. And

• 32:45Jocko Willink?

  Listen, if you're watching chess. If you're sitting there watching two people play chess. You're actually seeing the same thing as the players. Right? I mean, you, if, if someone was sitting here, if you and I were playing chess and someone was watching us. We would all see the same thing. We are all literally looking at the same board, the perspective. You can kind of take that idea of perspective and throw it away because we all see the same thing. We're all seeing the board. And look, you can look at it from over there, over there. It's still the same board with the same pieces in the same place.

• 33:22Jocko Willink?

  So you can see everything.

• 33:27Jocko Willink?

  But players still make mistakes, even though they're detached from that thing, they still make mistakes. Magnus Carlsen, and if you know anything about the guy, he's a, he's a

• 33:42Jocko Willink?

  beyond genius in this game. And he's, he makes mistakes. He made a mistake in 2016, game eight of the world championships. He blew a move, just blew it. And everybody saw it.

• 33:58Jocko Willink?

  Everybody saw it and he didn't see it.

• 34:03Jocko Willink?

  And as soon as he did it, guess what? It hit him in the face and he realized he had blown it. And why did that happen? So he didn't detach until he made the move. So he failed to detach, to truly detach from that, from the emotion, from the pressure, from the habit, from the instinct, from the intuition, from the God-given talent that he has. He didn't detach from all those things.

• 34:30Jocko Willink?

  So even when you're detached, like he's physically detached from that board, even when he's physically detached from that board, he's still not detached. There's still things that he's hanging on to.

• 34:45Jocko Willink?

  Still hanging on to that emotion, still hanging on to that pressure, still hanging on to that habit, still hanging on to that instinct and the intuition. Still hanging on to those things and missing what's right in front of him.

• 35:02Jocko Willink?

  Still missing what's right in front of him. So we have to be careful.

• 35:10Jocko Willink?

  We have to be careful because detaching is...

• 35:13Jocko Willink?

  It's harder than we think.

• 35:18Jocko Willink?

  It's not easy to do. And by the way, this is still not... This is still not why I'm talking about chess today. It's still not there yet. And I know this is a big buildup. This is a big buildup to my point, which is ironic when you hear the point that I'm about to make. It's going to be very ironic when you hear the point that I'm about to make. I saw a quote the other day about chess. It's an ancient Chinese proverb. And what the quote says...

• 35:45Jocko Willink?

  What the quote says is, "A person of high principles is one who can watch an entire game of chess

• 35:57Jocko Willink?

  without making a comment."

• 36:05Jocko Willink?

  And I thought to myself, there it is.

• 36:12Jocko Willink?

  If you think about that, if you think about how inclined we all are to chime in.

• 36:22Jocko Willink?

  And think about how inclined I am to tell Magnus Carlsen that he's not detached enough. That's what he's doing. I'm sitting there saying, hey, that guy's not detached enough. That's me telling the greatest chess player of all time, hey, you might want to figure out how to detach. I gotta chime in on that.

• 36:41Jocko Willink?

  We all think we know what's happening.

• 36:45Jocko Willink?

  We think we're smarter. We think we have a better perspective. We think we see the solution. We think that the players in the game actually want our opinion.

• 36:58Jocko Willink?

  And so we talk.

• 37:03Jocko Willink?

  When we're watching, we aren't even in the game, we talk. What is wrong with us?

• 37:10Jocko Willink?

  What kind of inborn tendencies do we have that makes us feel the need to speak?

• 37:22Jocko Willink?

  I see it all the time. I do it all the time. We know, we know that the more we speak, the less people listen. We know that, and yet we can't hold it back.

• 37:34Jocko Willink?

  We can't hold it back. We can't keep our mouths shut. And the problem is when we speak, we don't listen. When we speak, we don't detach. When we speak, we don't learn.

• 37:49Jocko Willink?

  Look, am I saying don't talk? No, obviously. We have to communicate. This is what we do. That's what leadership is. Leadership is actually communication. But just put yourself in check a little bit more. Observe what is happening.

• 38:07Jocko Willink?

  Watch the team come up with a plan. Listen during the meeting instead of talking.

• 38:18Jocko Willink?

  Because that person, that person of high principle, who we are all striving to be, that person can watch a whole game of chess without making a comment.

• 38:36Jocko Willink?

  Let's strive for those principles.

• 38:43Jocko Willink?

  And I think that's a good place to stop. Dave, anything?

• 38:47Jocko Willink?

  I suppose it's a brutal setup to talk about not talking and then ask if you've got anything to add. You got nothing?

• 38:53Dave Berke?

  I got nothing.

• 38:54Jocko Willink?

  Come on, let me lure you into this trap. What do you got? Go.

• 38:59Dave Berke?

  No, I literally got nothing. That, that, that lesson, had I learned that lesson earlier in life, it would have paid off. I rarely regret not saying something. I often regret or have regretted the things that I've said.

• 39:15Jocko Willink?

  Ratio.

• 39:17Dave Berke?

  Dude, high.

• 39:19Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you what, you know what sucks about that? This is what's painful. It,

• 39:27Jocko Willink?

  you know, the, the old adage, it's better to regret something you have said than something you haven't, or it's better to regret something you have done than something you haven't done? Meaning, hey, I'd rather, you know, when I get old and I'm on my deathbed, I'd rather say, you know, I, I did go out that night and, and, and, you know, party in that whatever city and you're not going to grow up and say, oh, I wish I never would have partied, or I never would have wished I never would have done whatever. That's an old adage and, and people apply that adage to talking.

• 39:55Jocko Willink?

  Is like, I'd, I'd rather, and I will say, sometimes when I haven't spoken and I should have, it's, it's a very heavy feeling, but I will say it's not as heavy as, man, I wish I would have kept my damn mouth shut.

• 40:08Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Dave Berke?

  That I agree with completely.

• 40:13Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. All right. We are at 40 minutes. We always try and keep this for half an hour. It's a little bit difficult, especially when some people, myself, can't keep his mouth shut. So, good place to stop. If you want to dig deeper in all these aspects of leadership, join Dave, me, and the rest of the Echelon Front Team, efonline.com, where we solve problems through leadership. And if you want leadership guidance inside your organization.

• 40:39Jocko Willink?

  You can check out our leadership consultancy at echelonfront.com. I've also written a bunch of books on the subject of leadership, Extreme Ownership, The Dichotomy of Leadership, and Leadership Strategy and Tactics. My other podcasts are Jocko Podcast, Jocko Unraveling with Daryl Cooper, Grounded, and The Warrior Kid Podcast, which has some new episodes, and also have Jocko Underground, which is a tangential podcast where we talk about subjects that are a little bit different. And it's also something that we're giving as a bonus. If you subscribe to something called Jocko Underground, jacoundground.com,

• 41:24Jocko Willink?

  just a little contingency plan in case everything went sideways and we needed a place to host our podcasts, then that's what we're gonna do. Hopefully we won't have to. But you can check out jacoundground.com for that. And if you want to support any of these podcasts, including this one, you can get some gear from jacostore.com or from originusa.com. And I think that's all we've got. Thanks for listening to the debrief. Now go lead. And this is Dave and Jocko. Out.