114: How to Lead and Win with Leif Babin.

This is Jocko, podcast number 114 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

Good evening.

And tonight we have a guest on the podcast for the fourth time, the fourth appearance, which is no surprise, really, because this is a guy that I went to war with, started a business with, wrote a book with. I actually watched him get married and have kids and buy houses and go from a.

Let'S say, a wild single man going to live a Friday night like it was his last night ever.

To a guy with a diaper in one hand and a bag of cheddar bunnies in the other hands trying to tame his son, who at 1 years old was like a hard headed, borderline psychotic version of himself.

And I also saw this guy in much harsher environments and in some of the most challenging situations. I saw him bear the incredibly heavy weight of leading men in combat.

And also the crushing weight of losing some of those men.

I still see that weight on his shoulders.

And I see it in his eyes.

And I wish I could take some of it away.

But I can't.

And.

As we learn.

In the SEAL teams, we don't complain.

We shoulder our share of the weight.

We shoulder our share of the burden, and we drive on.

And I've.

Seen him stand up when I needed him to stand up.

When.

What I was asking for was more than I could have asked or should have expected from anyone.

And I watched him time and time and time again.

Move out.

Move out into the darkness.

Toward the unknown, toward the violence, toward the enemy whose mission was.

To maim or to kill him.

And his men.

But he went and he went every time, and he went without fail.

And his name is Leif Babin. And if you want a more thorough background of Leif, you can listen to the other times that he's been on this podcast. He was on number 11, number 34, number 65. You should listen to those first. Before you listen to this one, you can also read the book that we wrote. It's called Extreme Ownership. It's about our experiences in combat and the leadership lessons we learned there. But for now, here we are once again. And Leif, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me on.

And we had a couple different options on what we were going to do this time around and tweeted out, you know, if anybody has any questions. And we got a lot of questions, so I know I can answer questions. We'll just say in a really, in a very in depth manner from time to time.

Sure.

And we got a lot of questions. So I, I, you know, we, we just took down a bunch of the questions and I'll read through some of them and we'll try and burn through a bunch of these questions that we got from everybody.

Let's get some.

Ready to get some. Like I said, Leif is always ready to get some, which is a good thing.

Stand by to get some.

Stand by to get some.

For, for people that know, don't know what that means. And we often put that out on social media and I don't think people recognize what that actually means to us. Like, we, we knew we would say this all the time in combat or in training scenarios. When you knew that, I mean, it was about to go down, bullets were going to be flying around, explosives are going to be going off and you hear someone very clearly over the radio, just a real calm voice come up and be like, stand by to get some.

Yeah, so we get a chuckle out of that every time.

Always get a chuckle out of that one. Yeah, that's, that's a, it's a true statement though, right? You know, you're going to get some.

But when you can say it in that manner, you know, when you should be like, you know, stand by, I got some. And people are like, stand by to get some.

It's pretty awesome.

I was on my first deployment and we were driving, driving south from Baghdad and, and we got ambushed and we were in like a, like a five or six vehicle convoy and the ambush hit the tail end. I was, I was in the number two vehicle as normal for, you know, the, for platoon commander at the time. I'm in the number two vehicle. The tail end of the ambush gets ambushed or tail end, the convoy gets ambushed. And, but I mean it's very clear, it's RPGs are going over the convoy and explosions and machine gun fire. And it's really obvious we're getting ambushed and what, we're on a highway and we're moving fast. So we, you know, it's, you know, I was like, push through. You know, I mean, like we didn't stop at all, didn't even hesitate. And then we continue down the road and I asked for the, you know, like up count from the rams, like up count. And so it was, you know, I hear like, vehicle six is up, vehicle five is up and vehicle four is up and it gets to the front and I'm like, roger, we're up, keep rolling. And then another, maybe another minute goes by and my platoon chief, great guy, he's in the back Vehicle rear, you know, in the rear vehicles. That's how you break. You know, break it up. So if something happens, he's in control, and. And he comes up in the radio and. And he's like. He's like, hey, sir, just want to let you know we got ambushed back here. Did you know that? And I go like this, Roger.

We got back, we had a good laugh about that one. But it was pretty good times. So.

Awesome.

Yeah. All right, getting to some questions. This is a question that actually came. Very similar question I had when it. When I had Tony on. And most of these questions come. I said, these questions are for Leif coming on the podcast. So most of them are directed at you. And I'll. I'll chime in or whatever if I feel the need, but you like that. So here we go. First one, Leif, how often did you disagree with Jocko's commands and how many times did you actually let him know? Also, how did you handle either situation?

So there you go.

I disagree with Jocko every minute of every day. Listen, we actually. We had a. It's a great question. And look, Jocko and I are different people. We have different views of the world. We have.

There were. There were times when, you know, his job was. Your job was strategic, and you're looking at the bigger strategic picture. My job was tactical. I'm looking at the tactical picture. Sometimes you can make a tactical decision that could impact their strategic mission. And ever. It was very rare, though, that we ever had any kind of disagreement on those things. I think, you know, there were. There were a number of times when.

What I always liked about Jocko, and I think people look at you and think, oh, he's this big, intimidating guy. And I remember our commanding officer, actually, we were talking to him, and of course he loved our task unit. And he was like, yeah, you guys in Bruiser. He's like. He was talking to me and Delta platoon commander and said, you guys, you gotta do what Jocko says or he'll choke you out. And we were kind of laughing about that because we were. We were training jiu jitsu every morning. Like, man, I've been choked out by hundreds of times. It's not even a threat anymore. But it was. It was never. We never did what you said because it was fear, intimidation, or, like, we have to do what he says because he's in charge. What I always loved about you and your leadership was that I knew that I could push back on stuff and you were going to listen to me, and it was it was interesting for me to see that as, you know, we built a relationship. I could come in and be like, hey, I think we ought to do this. And very rarely would you. You would never say, like, no, do it this way, because it's my way. But even very, very rarely would you, would you say, sometimes you might be like, well, we want to go in this direction. Here's why we want to do this. But most of the time you would actually just say, hey, we'll talk me through that. Okay, how's that going to work? And you would give me the opportunity and others in the platoon the opportunity to come up with a plan and kind of analyze it and look at it and, and give it, give it a shot. And so that's, that's what I always loved about, about that. I mean, a couple disagreements that, that came up, you know, for, for me, something that we talk about all the time. You know, with our business echelon front, when we're talking, talking to companies and leadership teams going through the workup cycle, you know, we always talk about people want to hire folks and just kind of let them, let them run. And, and you know, people won't say, hey, give them, give them the opportunity to go out and succeed. And, and a lot of bosses want to kind of, you know, we'll just, hey, I'm really busy. Hire someone with experience, put them, put them in, in position. You kept really, really tight reins on us. And initially that was super frustrating to me. I mean, I, I remember being in our mount training military operations, urban terrain training for folks that don't know what that means, where we're, we're in the mock cinder block city, and we've talked about that on the podcast and talked about that often here for other folks at other podcasts. But that was. I wanted to plan these things. I'm the platoon commander and I want to be in charge. I remember you saying, hey, we should do this or let's plan it. And I, I remember wanting to kind of push back against that and, and oftentimes.

But I recognize, like, as we're going along, you're actually training me and, and giving me the, the giving me opportunity. You've done a whole bunch of these operations that I hadn't done any of those operations previously. So you were, you were teaching me and mentoring me and, and, and once we got to the battlefield, you just unleashed us to, to get after it. And a couple times I, I do remember some pushback where you came up and gave me some direction and you Know where you said, hey, why don't you try this or do that? And one of those times in particular was when I was, you know, when I was trying to get. Get. I remember a number of times, one of them out in our desert training facility out at what we call land warfare. And I'm trying to get the platoon.

To pull back to a position, and we're trying to. Trying to patrol out. And you gave me. You told me to actually stop trying to put a bunch of detailed information out of the radio, like, use verbal commands, do it this way. And immediately my ego getting the way I was in it. It was frustrating because the team wasn't doing what I want them to do.

That's like step number one in the frustration. My team isn't doing what I want them to do.

So automatically my meter's kind of starting to get pegged in the rat. No one's listening to me. So when Jocko comes up to give me some direction of like, hey, you ought to do this, My immediate pushback is like, no, no, I'm not gonna do that. You know, I didn't say that, but I just. I was like. I kind of bristled a little bit. I remember kind of bristling that. And I was like, okay, let me think about it. What do we. You know, he hasn't told me wrong before. And I was like, let me give that a shot. It's like, okay, I'll do that. Use verbal commands. Get everybody moving. And you do that over and over and over again throughout multiple training scenarios and then on the battlefield as well, where that's what built up trust. So when. When you did tell me to do something, I was like, I'm gonna give it a shot. And. And it worked. Yeah, it worked.

Expand on that a little bit. Verbal command thing. And so you get guys that. There's a bunch of people. You know, you got. You got a platoon. We'll just take this case. You got a platoon of 16 guys. They're in various terrain features. One guy's in a little. In a little ravine. One guy's up on a little knoll. Another guy's behind a shrub. So they. There's a little bit of dispersion with your troops, and you want to get them to do something. You want to get them to fall back, or you want them to get them to muster where you are, and maybe the shooting stopped or whatever. But you. You want to control all these people at the same time. And so what you think is, hey, I'll just get on the radio and I'll tell everyone, hey, everyone, I'm back. About a hundred meters back, there's a little piece of terrain sticking out. There's a rock by it. I'm behind that rock. And if you guys start peeling back here to the northwest at about 090 degrees, that's where you're flying me. Okay, so now what does that come across like on a transmission For a guy that's shooting a machine gun, he hears like, come back. That's what he hears. He doesn't hear anything. And, and so, and you've given this long complex direction and what you really need is, hey, everyone, fall back here. Now that's what, that's what they need to hear. And so then you do it and you realize that now we have a thing in the SEAL teams where you pass the command. And so when you hear a loud verbal command, everyone passes it. Now everyone heard it and now everyone comes back to your position. But this is the essence of, in the book, extreme ownership. This is really the essence of simple. Like it's simple clear communications. And that's one of those things that once you learn it, you're like, yeah, if I, if my people, if my team isn't doing what I want them to do, not that they don't want to, they don't even know what do you want to do because you're giving it in such a complex way. I gave that counsel hundreds of times once I was running the training on the west coast, I gave that council 100 times, like, hey man, just tell everyone a simple command right now to get him to do something. So that holds true. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you another situation where you, you kind of disagreed with me. And we were working with a company, I'm not going to mention the company's name. We were working with a company and there was a scene, like a mid level, but a somewhat senior leader. And you didn't like him. And the reason you didn't like him because he wasn't really that confident. He had messed some things up and his whole, his division was suffering a little bit. And you were, you were kind of like, hey Jocko, we should talk about getting this guy fired.

Well, it wasn't that he was, it just wasn't that he was competent. His division was suffering like they were like, hey, what's the, this guy is dragging us down. This is a major issue. And, and, and I was, we were getting massive negative feedback that was impacting the team, particularly from a guy who was supposed to be.

The knowledgeable guy that was able to. To groom and mentor the, the junior leaders, you know, underneath him. And you know, I thought, man.

Why should they keep this guy? This is, he's actually dragging the team down. And you said, well, strategically, it, if they get, you know, if they get rid of this guy, it's going to, it's going to actually have some impact, the strategic mission they're trying to do.

Yep.

The senior leaders were going to, you know, maybe question what was going on there. If you remove a key leader from.

So strategically, at that point in the company, that individual who was, you know, again, we'll just say incompetent and also unliked, he had really, really good political and relationship connections with the, we'll say a parent company, but the people that controlled the funding. And so we could get rid of this guy. But all of a sudden, all these people that were funding this company, there was going to be problems. And I was like, hey, if we get rid of that guy, we're going to cut a lot of relationship cords. So let's try and find a way to mitigate as much we can. And we disagreed upon it, but basically, you know, you fundamentally got the other leader in that division to figure out how to work with the guy and got him trained up, and then that guy took enough control that they mitigated the non performer kind of out of the picture and it worked out well.

I think the lesson there is that, you know, like I mentioned earlier, you can win the tactical battle and lose the strategic war and you certainly don't want to do that. I think you got to recognize that when you're, whether it's terminating someone or making decisions, I think that's where we had, you know, you had that strategic picture in mind and I was focused a little more on the tactical side. So you got to, you, you got to keep. You can make the right tactical call and can have some real strategic consequences, you know, that cascade and cause you a lot more problems. I think, though, that the. My true answer to this question on our most fundamental disagreement came on patches. And that was. Jocko was understood as seals that we needed to be squared away. We wanted to be Stormtroopers in T bruiser. That's what we wanted to. We wanted to all look the same. We wanted to have, you know, squared away haircuts, squared away uniforms, everybody in the same. And that's hard for seals because seals often want to just kind of wear a, you know, mix and match of uniforms and kind of Whatever gear they.

Want to look cool.

Straight up, long hair, beards, all those things you recognize, we needed to, we need to do that. And, and guys can get out of control where they have all these patches made that are, you know, that are like, look at these cool guy, I got patches all over me. And, and, and, and that's. Seals are some of the best, you know, the biggest offenders of that. So jocko was like, no patches.

Yeah. And just to expand on this a little bit more, but the, strategically, from the army, from the Marine Corps. The army and the Marine Corps, when they look at someone that's not in a square squared away uniform, they think to, they think to themselves, hey, if this guy can't even wear a squared away uniform, how can he operate out in the battlefield? And that's what they think. And good for them because it's a true statement. If you've got someone that can't mind some details and look squared away, then how can I expect them to do their job? Well, now in the SEAL teams and really in all soft communities, there's some absolute laxity when it comes to uniform requirements. That's why you see pictures of guys doing this, you know, dressing out a uniform and mixing and matching uniforms. It's, it's the way it is. And you know what? My, in my, in my deepest knowledge, I know that you can have, and this is a classic military quote, is, you know, an inspection ready platoon has never passed combat, and a combat ready platoon has never passed inspection. It's, it's a commonly known thing that I understand and I get. And, but especially we're new in the battle space. We're just showing up here. We got, you know, Marines and army soldiers and senior leadership that we're gonna be working for. And I say, okay, we're gonna make a good, this is the base of fundamentally, we're gonna make a good first impression. We're gonna look squared away, which means we're gonna, you know, have squared away haircuts, we're gonna blouse our boots, and we're gonna wear a normal looking uniform, which means we don't have crazy looking patches that, that make us look different. Right? Because it's, that's the thing that you're saying. The thing you're saying is, look at me. That's what you're saying, look at me, I'm cool. That's what a patch is. It's, hey, look at me, I'm special. And, and obviously I don't like that attitude. And so here we go back to the patches.

So we, I mean, when you told me we were on board with everything on the same page, and we saw eye to eye on so many things that certainly me and the Del Plateau commander with you, absolutely. And. But that was. I don't know why, but for one reason I. We got together and I was like. We designed our own patches. We're like.

When you say we, you mean you and the Delta.

Me and the Delta platoon commander. We. Me and the Delta platoon commander said we're going to design some batches for tasking a bruiser. And I don't know. I don't know why. If we just had an idea that this was going to be a historic unit, this was going to be something we wanted to be a part of, but we felt like we needed tasking in packs and I felt like you secretly wanted us to have them even though you told us not to do it. So, so I was like. We designed these patches. One of them, I. I use the Lord Humongous from the Road Warrior for one. And the other one we had. We had a big cow skull. And, and it was. So we had these two patches. We went out, we had them made. So we, I secretly had them shift. I secretly had them distributed to, to both platoons and we keep them in our shoulder patch pocket. And we'd be. So we'd be in a convoy ready to roll out. Jocko would come out, see everybody off, shake hands with everybody, and we'd be launched on the operation and we'd come up over the radio. My leading pedops would come over the radio and be like, patches on everyone. Pull the badges out, slap the badges on. And then we. Although we got busted when there was an embedded reporter with. There was an embedded reporter with one of the units we were working with and there were some photos of patches. So we, we got busted. Although you didn't. You didn't come down on me hard like that. You just.

Well, hey, I, I just. Because you mentioned that we had this conversation on text the other day and I'm, I'm actually, I just pulled up my phone to read this text back and forth. We were just talking about.

You were basically saying, hey, you know, you. Let's not forget you didn't want us to wear patches. And, and, and then, and then I wrote back to you. Hey, don't forget that while I was out outwardly disapproving inside, I was smiling, knowing that a little rebelliousness isn't important, is important for leaders to possess and that esprit de Corps trumps compliance and uniformity. Oh, that's an actual text conversation we were having. That's kind of jacked up, isn't it? But my point is, like, you. You know, obviously it meant something to you, and it was bringing the team together. It's like when you go through boot camp and the drill instructors will let you get away with something because they know it's unifying the team. And that's what it was for me. It's like, okay, and also, how much leadership capital am I going to expend? Because even though I just made it sound like it was a big deal at the. That. And. And also we had earned a good reputation. We. It wasn't a first impression anymore. It was like the impression had been made and the impression was solid. And so now it's like, oh, yeah, these guys are. These guys. Oh, yeah, they're actually a unit identifying patch. So we actually.

And we gave that patch to the brigade commander and we departed, which was awesome.

And.

And I'm very proud to say that there's not a whole lot up on the wall in the Jocko gym, but in the garage there.

But.

But there is a tu bruiser patch.

There is indeed.

Lord Humongous represents.

There's a seven echo from my. From my Echo platoon at team seven. And there's a SEAL Team One patch. I mean, a sticker. That's my. That's my wall of glory.

Stapled to the wall. Awesome. All right, next question. See, that's one question. We're 20 minutes deep. You gotta like that. All right, next question.

Can you discuss the evolution of Echelon Front? Was the company ready for the explosive popularity of extreme ownership? What kinds of challenges have you.

We face all kinds of challenges and the same challenges that. That any business faces, certainly. And, you know, for. For us, it's been learned to the fire hose. It's been. It's been an awesome experience. I mean, I think just like any. Just like our combat experience, we would adapt to the battlefield. We learned, we educated ourselves about things that we didn't know about. And, And. And we've grown. I mean, I don't think anyone could. I don't know if we could have predicted just how, you know, widely disseminated the book would be or. Or, you know, the popularity of things that we're talking about. We knew they were powerful. It reason we wrote the book is there was a massive demand signal for it. And, And I think, you know, as we work with companies now through. Through our company, Echelon Front, I mean, there's just, we're able to go and, and deliver some impact to these teams in a way that other people aren't able to do, because most of the, the folks in that space are. It's a feel good thing you're out there to talk about, hey, you guys, you're great, and let's harness your inner potential and all this kind of stuff. And, and I laugh when people call us motivational speakers because I say, look, motivational speakers tell you how good you are, and we're here to tell you how much you suck. You got to get better if you want to win. So that's what we do. And I think it's the same way, that brutally honest assessment of yourself, your team, the same thing that makes SEAL unit successful on the battlefield and other military units is the same thing that we're doing now with our company. Certainly all the challenges of bookkeeping and, and you know, the billing processes and paying taxes and I mean, just the, you know, regulatory environment, those things that make it hard for any business launching. But just like on the battlefield where we could either bitch about the paperwork or we could figure out a way to most efficiently get it done so that we could actually go accomplish the mission which you instilled in us. Like, hey, I can complain about it all day, or I could figure out a way to get this done and make it happen because that's what it requires to do and that's what we've done with our business. And it's been awesome. And frankly, what I love is working with leaders. And so many of the folks that contact us, that want to work with us, they. They're already doing well and they want to do even better. And it's just so much fun to work with folks who want to just constantly grow and learn, and we grow and learn all the time from them.

Yeah, yeah, I think you hit it all.

Next question. In battle, having the high ground is crucial. How do you see this principle applied to the business world? And I've answered this question before with the statement, take the high ground or the high ground will take you. So business world, okay, well, tactically, what do you think? Why do you need the high ground?

Well, I think that's the real question, right? Why is the high ground important? And obviously, you know, out of thousands of years of military history, the, the high grounds, always important. By the way, I did have a, I did have a training instructor a few years ago, my, my SEAL team days who we had. He said, look at your high speed altimeter watch and, and, and you get, get down behind something. So he was basically telling us like if that thing's going up, you're wrong, that should, things should be going down. He was, he was telling us to take the low ground, which was, was, which was kind of laughable. So out, out doing thousands of years of military history, always take the low ground. No, don't do that. You want to take the high ground. The reason is because tactically if you're on the high ground, you, you have got a better shooting position. You can shoot down on people who can't hide very well because you, you, you're above them. Which is why it was awesome for us to be in buildings and if we could get a three or four story building in this, you know, in the city of Ramonti, the urban environment, it was awesome. But it's no different in the business environment. And what you have to do is just identify the key terrain. What is the key to the high ground is key terrain. So that doesn't, it doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, you're going to go climb to the mountaintop because that's where you want to be. But, but if that ridgeline that's on the high ground gives you, you know, tackle advantage on the battlefield, that's, it's the same thing in a business world. If you're, if you're a retailer, you know, where's that key terrain? Where's the intersection that's. That you want to be, that's going to give your business the, the best, you know, the best chance to, to succeed. If you're, you know, any space. I mean, there's, there's key terrain that you can identify where you want to be a part of. If it's, if you're a private equity company, you're trying to get, break into some new, you know, some, some new technology or a new, new, new particular industry? That, that's, that's key terrain. You need to be focused on that and identifying that is critical why it's important and, and everyone's going to be going to be vying for that. And you want to be aggressive, you want to maneuver because if you get there first, you're going to be a lot better position. It's, it's flank or be flanked. We always say, you know, you're maneuvering on the enemy, they're going to maneuver on you. So what you don't want to do is wait for somebody else to get in a better position and then you actually have to fight your way out of that, it's, it's not good. Like in Jiu jitsu, you don't want to wait till someone's going to mount you. That's not a good place to be or take your back, right? You want to try to prevent that before you can get there. And, and if you can do that to them first and in a much better position. And I think it's no different in the business world.

I had a, was working with a company the other day and basically what they were saying was that their competitor was lying about them. To, to as they're trying to close accounts, their, their competitor would go in the field and say, oh yeah, this, this, the company are, this, this company. They don't do it right and they don't have these accounts and they're, they're going out of business and everything's bad. So there's, there's their competitors were out there lying about them. And you know, the sales leader said, you know, I don't, I don't want to stoop to their level, you know, and start throwing lies out there about them or making accusations. I think that's, you know, I said, well, no, you don't want to take the low ground. You want to take the high ground. And he said, well, yeah, but at the same time, what were we supposed to do? And I said, well, you actually have the most powerful weapon in this fight. The weapon that you have is the truth. You have the, you have the truth, but you're not getting the truth out there. I said, what do you do when you do close an account? What do you do? How do you publicize it? He's the coolest. We really don't. And I said, well, do you, do you do a press release when you close a big account? No, we don't do that. Do you advertise it anyway? No, we don't do that. I said, so the most powerful weapon you have is the truth and you're not utilizing that weapon. You need to have a propaganda arm at this company that's going to go out there and explain that all the wins and what the truth really is and that will be more powerful and then you can maintain the high ground. And by the way, when those other companies are out there like lying about you and then people find out, it makes them look even worse. So they, they've broken their trust with, with the potential client. So yeah, always take the high ground, always take that ground. It might not win you the short term battle in business. Right. You know, you see, you See, companies, you know, like, I can sell you this thing right now. I can, I can paint, repaint this thing, put a fresh coat of paint on it and sell it to you. That's not the high ground, right? That's the low ground, because it's gonna, it's gonna fail you because what's underneath the hood is crap. So that might win me, you know, that one sale. But what's gonna happen in the long road? Taking the low ground, you're gonna, you're gonna put on Yelp that you got a crappy deal. And I did, you know, I repainted something and sold it to you, and it wasn't worth it. And now that reputation is gonna spread, and it's not gonna help you if you take the high ground. Hey, here's what's going on with this vehicle or whatever, Whatever you're selling, take the high ground.

The cool thing about that is, is we, we see so many leaders and some of the most successful people, we do that, recognize how important that is to build relationships. And they're, they're willing to, to lose a sale or lose a. You know, to send someone to a competitor just to. Just to make sure that person gets exactly what they need. And they're building a relationship. So that means more business gets sent to them as a result.

It's what you started talking about. It's a strategic, strategic win as opposed to a tactical wind. And that. And that's what you've got to be focused on. And that's really, as a leader, that's what you got to be looking at. You got to be looking at your front line people and making sure that they. They're not just out there trying to win every little tactical battle, but they're going backwards strategically. So keep that in mind. That's why you have to detach. That's why you have to stay out of the weeds. And when you get in the weeds, you got to step back out of them, because otherwise you lose track of that and you're gonna end up in the low ground before you even recognize it. All right, next question.

How do you control rumors and gossip within an organization?

That's pretty easy. You just, you just talked about being, you know, getting out there with the truth, and you're propaganda, armed outside your company. It's no different inside your company. You've got to make sure that people.

It's interesting that when you work, we work with leaders, sometimes you see people that are like, well, I don't want to share this with my people. You know, because I don't know what they might think. Like, they're. They're thinking something that may be totally not true. They're not just sitting there not thinking anything because you're not sharing it with them. They're coming up to their own conclusions, which may be completely false or opposite. But like we say in the Navy all the time, you know, perception is reality that becomes reality. So you've got to. You gotta. You can defeat the gossip and rumors by actually just sharing the truth. Be open with people and being first out there with the message so people get and understand it. And even when horrible, horrible, bad things go wrong, extreme ownership, right? If. If you take ownership for that and say, hey, listen, this happened, here's what we're doing to fix it. Here's what we're doing to turn things around. It's gonna. People, people are not going to lose respect for you in the organization. They're actually going to gain respect for you as a result. Something we talk about all the time. So don't be afraid to do that again. Just get the message out there and, and be transparent and talk to folks.

If you don't tell people what's going on, they're going to make up their own ideas of what's going on. And the thing that. I have to.

I have to. We have to. We have to take this just a little bit further, right? Just a little bit further. Because we talk about transparency, right? And that word gets thrown around all the time. And.

Of the idea that you're just gonna. The idea that you're just gonna tell everyone exactly what's going on, and that sounds great, and it's like, hey, I'm a fully transparent leader and I'm gonna tell everyone what's going on. But there's times where you actually don't want to do that. There's times where you have to maneuver and you have to be tactful, and some of the things that you might tell someone actually is not the right thing to do. Now, I'm not saying we're gonna be dishonest with our people. I'm not saying that. And I'm saying that transparency is a great thing. But I mean, just on a personal level, if Leif's working for me and he's not doing. He's doing something horrible, is the best way to go about that. Fully full transparency is, hey, Leif, you're doing horrible at this. Is that the best way to do.

It in front of the entire team?

In front of the team, Right. Is that is, that it's full transparency, right? Hey, I'm fully transparent. Okay, everyone, welcome to the meeting today. By the way, I just wanted to point out that left misses numbers again and he's a loser. That might be what I'm thinking. That's fully transparent. Hey guys, just be. And you love this too, right? Just being transparent. Leif's a loser. He missed his numbers again. And you know what? I'm actually thinking about firing him just in case anyone was wondering.

So that's, that's probably gonna wait to close the business Friday.

Did I do a good job? Right? So, so let's not get carried away, right? You know, what is the smart way? The smart way is to maneuver. The smart way is to say, okay, Leif's not doing what he, what he wants, what he should be doing. If I go and accuse him of failing, what's his reaction going to be? How's it, so what do I do instead? Instead I go, I want to take ownership of it. And so instead I say, hey, Leif, you know, hey, come, come to my office. I want to talk to you about a couple things. So he comes to my office, so I'm not in a public place and now it's hey, Leif. Hey man, I noticed that you, you know, you missed your numbers. And I'm thinking that maybe I'm not giving you the kind of support that you need to get where you need to be. Is there anything else that you need from me so that you can win again inside? Sure. I'm thinking, Leif, you pathetic loser, you.

Missed your numbers again.

Right, but I'm not going to do that. So the full transparency thing, I get it and it makes sense, but we do have to consider the tertiary and the secondary and tertiary effects of the things that we say, especially as a leader. What you say is a lot of impact as a leader. And sometimes I see leaders, they make a little off the cuff remark about something, you know, oh, that won't matter. Oh, oh, okay, so it doesn't matter. So, so this little thing, you know, hey, hey, boss. We wanted to get this, this task done by this date. Is it still important? Ah, it doesn't matter. Oh, okay, so it doesn't matter. So what I was working on for last month and a half, doesn't matter. Okay, cool, great. I was fully transparent. So just be careful, use tact, use your brain.

Yeah, that's, that's 100% correct, I think. You know, what I was trying to explain in the first situation is, I mean, I was having a conversation with a leader that we work with who was, you know, telling me that there was a key leader in his team that didn't want to share with any of his key leaders that they, you know, they're the. He didn't want to share with the key leaders that they were. They were having. Having some issues, having some dire straits, wonder, you know, getting to a point where they're wondering, hey, I don't know if we're going to make payroll, you know, a few months from now if we don't turn these things around. But I don't want to share that with them because I don't want them to panic. And when I laugh when I heard that, I was like, what kind of panic are they going to have when they find out.

Yeah.

That they can't make payroll, but no one told them about it and they thought everything was great. So the panic is going to be 100 times worse.

Yeah.

And that's. That's the kind of transparency I'm talking about, where you're like, listen, you need to go and have a direct conversation and say, guys, here's where we're at.

Yeah.

And that should be something to help get them in gear to be like, listen, we have got to. We got to hit these numbers. We've got to get things going again. We got to turn performance around, or this is where we're going to be next quarter if we don't do that. And I think those. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about where you're not keeping the secrets is not helping you out.

Because, by the way, everyone knows the numbers, right? So they know. They already probably know you're in dire straits, and they're thinking, well, I better find a backup job, and they're going to leave. And now you're in even worse. Straight. So, yeah, absolutely. You don't need to hide information from. From the team.

All right, you know what? We actually have, like, a few questions on the Muster that people asked. One of them was. One of them was, why should I come to the Muster? What do you think?

Why should you come to the Muster?

By the way, the Muster, in case you don't know, the Muster is a leadership.

Event. Is it seminar?

Gathering.

Gathering. Oh, okay. I like it.

Leaders.

So the Muster is a leadership gathering where we get together and we talk about leadership, and we have them twice a. Well, this one we're having twice a year. But anyways, why should someone come to the Muster? What do you think?

What I love about the Muster is.

What you have to understand. Like we talk to hundreds of, we've, we've actually worked with, we talked to thousands of leaders over the last six years that we've had this company, Echelon Front, worked with hundreds of companies in about every industry you could imagine. Imagine. And we speak at a lot of leadership conferences. We speak at them all the time. And there is nothing like the Muster. There just isn't anything out there like the mustard. Nothing even comes close. And the reason I love it, I mean I, I, I, I just get super excited to be there and be a part of that stuff. And I even use words like magical to describe it on previous podcasts, which I took some heavies for. Took a lot of heavies for out there.

It was pretty magical. I guess.

There were, there were some pretty good, like Disney, Disney memes. Yeah, Disney memes going there. That was pretty good. But the, the reason the mustard is so amazing is it's just different from anything else that we do. And I think, when I think about what really makes the mustard different, it's the, the people that are there, it's the content that we're talking about, it's the impact that it has and you know, so who comes to the mustard? The reason that's so awesome is that there are leaders from all over the place and these leaders are hell bent on dominating their universe. I mean these are people that are there, they're in the game and they're from every type of business, every type of industry. I mean we have entrepreneurs, we have senior executives from major companies, we have mid level managers, we have frontline leaders and we have people who really aren't even in a leadership position, maybe with no direct reports, but are aspiring to be that way and grow and learn. We get police and firefighters and other law enforcement officers, members of the military. I mean they're serving out there on our front lines of the home front and abroad. And these are the most committed people I've ever met.

You know, it's, it's, it's one way to quantify this. Or when, when we're at the muster, the like the hotel staff will, will come up and they'll be like, oh my God, this is crazy. Because for instance, the doors to open, to actually get in the morning of the muster, they open at 8 o', clock, right? Or I guess 7, 715 or 7 45. Because it starts at 8, 7 45, the doors open up. And most, I mean like you said, we go to these conferences all the time. Everyone's listening, been to some kind of conference and it's, you know, people are meandering around and they're coming in late. They don't really care. At the muster, it's like the doors open at 7:45, everyone's out in the hallway. And we're out in the hallway hanging out with everyone at, you know, 7 o'. Clock. And that's after we do a 4:45 PT in the morning. We do. Because we do a little get some. And that's another thing. Like the hotel people, we're clearing it with the hotel. We're just letting them know, like, hey, there's gonna be a large gathering of people in front of the hotel in the morning. And they're like, well, what time? And we're like, oh, 4:45. And they say, well, like, how many people? We're like, well, there's 450 people here. So there's gonna be about 450 people here. And sure enough, there it is. And that's what the whole muster is like. Oh, we say, hey, we're gonna restart in 10 minutes. And everyone goes out and they come back in in 10 minutes. Everyone's seated, ready to rock and roll. So that's, that's the, and that's. It's funny to hear that from an outside perspective. Cause we're in it. But the hotel people always make comments about, they say, hey, we've, we never, you know, Kyle, say, hey, I've been, I've been running conferences here for 22 years. I've never seen a group of people like this. So that, that to me shows you what kind of people show up at.

The muster when the, and when the doors open. It just bum rush in there. Everyone wants to be in that front row, you know, be there, engage. They can. So, and not just so they can, you know, so they can actually ask questions, so they can actually engage with us. And that's what I love about those folks. I mean, they just, they're, they're not there to feel good about themselves, right? They're there to take a hard look in the mirror and, and learn and grow and get better. And, and, and so they, they can better and be, be more effective leaders so they can lead and win in their teams whatever they happen to be doing now.

So you just kind of talked about the, the other question was who comes to the mustard? It's really every different type of leader. The, another question that we got about the muster is what do we talk about at the muster.

For what that's the other piece that I really like about. It is content, right?

It's.

It's content that, that we talk about. And of course, I love telling war stories, as you all know know from listening to this podcast. We like talking about war stories. We like talking about our time in the teams. And even when you just, you put that photo up there of, you know, of us and Ramadi from back in the day and, you know, just. It just brings back great memories. I mean, those will always be some of the absolute best times of my life. Certainly some of the worst times of my life as well, but. But mostly some of the absolute best times of my life. And so we get to talk about that, but not just in a way that's. That's a, That's a cool story, but it has impact. And I think taking the, taking the combat leadership lessons that we talk about from extreme ownership and applying them directly to, you know, to people's lives and what they do and how to overcome their challenges, that's what it's about. It's. It's super engaging. And for us, you know, for me. And this isn't a. The standard leadership conference where there's like 40 different speakers and the, the main folks kind of get up there and spend a few hours. I mean, we're. We're there the whole time, and we're there to engage with leaders. It's me, it's Jocko, it's Dave Burke, it's JP Danelle from our Echelon front team. We're there. We're the guys on stage. And even during the breaks, we're talking to leaders that are coming up and asking questions. We're engaging with them. No green room in Q and A. There isn't a green room. There isn't someplace we're hiding behind the curtain.

There isn't somewhere in the back where Leif is getting cucumbers put on his eyes.

Take a load off, sir. Sipping, sipping my jack of white tea.

Look. And that's, you know, these, these folks are there to get their questions answered and to ask hard questions.

The thing that you really. We really get granular on a lot. And that's, that's what it is. You're taking like you understand the principles. It's like, it's like learning a jiu jitsu move from one person, and they teach you a fundamental, basic move, and you're like, okay, I understand that. And then compared to, okay, now you're gonna get a private lesson. Like, that's like in a class, right? You, hey, this is the arm lock. Then you get a private lesson with someone that goes in and adapts the technique to your body style, to the opponents that you're facing, the adjustments that you need to make. That's the kind of granularity we get because the more you see these different angles and the other great thing is because with all these different people that you got there, and we do group exercises where now you're sitting down and we purposely don't want people to sit with industries that they already work with. So in one group, you'll get a CEO, you'll get a firefighter, you'll get a startup business owner, you'll get a mid level manager, and you'll get some, you know, regular corporate evp. And they'll all be sitting at the same table and we'll give them a problem, we'll give them a task, and they'll come up with a solution, and they'll relate it to how it affects their lives and their business. And when you see stuff from different angles like that, and you're all applying, we're all speaking the same language because everyone there's obviously read the book. Everyone understands the, everyone understands fundamentally what the principles are. But now we're getting to see how they impact people's businesses and lives and leadership roles from all these different perspectives. And it just makes you that much better. That's why during these exercises, like, I'll say, okay, I'm gonna float around to these different tables and listen, but the first table I'll get to, I'll be like, oh man, these guys are, I'm sitting there learning because you got, like I said, you got a firefighter that's explaining to a CEO what you do in a situation where your team has decided that they're not gonna follow this procedure anymore and they have good reason why they don't want to. Like, it's one thing when you're, when your team doesn't follow the procedure and you say, hey, you got to follow this procedure and you. And they say, well, why? And you say, you explain it to them and they go, oh, okay, that makes sense. But what about when you tell them to follow the procedure and they have a reason that actually makes sense, then what are you going to do? Well, that's what you learn at the muster. That's where you make the progress. So that's good. One last question that we got about the muster is what kind of impact do you see from people that have been to the muster?

The impact is obvious in that the number of people who are there that are talking about how they just got promoted, you know, or they, they just got put in this, in this position of greater responsibility and, and authority on their teams, are they been recognized for their exceptional performance, are the folks who've come, who've come back from that and we hear about it on social media or reach out to us via email or come back to a muster to talk about that, from what they, you know, what had happened to them previously, the number of leaders who come and, and see what we're doing and bring their team, you know, that's what's pretty awesome too. I mean that to me, when a, when a, when a CEO from a company comes, checks out what we're doing and brings 25 of his team members back to be a part of that because he recognizes the impact that that can have to his team and will have. And it's, it's just, it's awesome to see that. I mean, these are the most, again, the most committed people you could ever be around. And they just, they leave there with the knowledge to directly apply things to solve problems. And they learn from us, they learn from each other, just as you said. And part of that too, I think, is a recognition that these kinds of problems that I'm having are not unique to me. They're not unique to the market that I'm in, they're not unique to my industry, but they're leadership problems and they apply everywhere. And I'm trying to get a diverse group of people to focus their efforts to and mutually support one another, accomplish a mission just like everybody else in, in every other industry in the business world as a first responder, the military, doesn't matter. It's the same thing. And these same techniques apply everywhere. And it's just, that's why it's awesome. I love the muster and I can't wait, I can't wait to meet those folks. And that's why so many people come back again and again and again. And it's just an awesome event. It's the best thing that we're a part of. And frankly, if you don't want to have that good look in the mirror that hard look in the mirror at yourself and have answer some tough questions about where you can do better. You probably shouldn't come because it's not for you. It's, it's for people who are, are eager to destroy their competition and dominate the universe. And that starts with looking at themselves and taking ownership and solving problems so they can Win.

Yeah, it's. It's interesting because if you think about it, I was talking about this yesterday, like, every problem that you have in an organization is going to be solved by leadership. That's it. That's it. That's what it's going to get solved by. Every problem that is in an organization is going to be solved by leadership. I don't care if it's because you're missing numbers. I don't care if you got bad process. I don't care if you got wrong people in the wrong positions. All those problems are all about leadership. Because if you got a bad process, there's a leader that's allowing that process to be in place. If you've got bad people, then there's a leader that's not either training those people or getting rid of those people. And if you're P and L is upside down, there's a leader that is not paying attention to the numbers. So all these problems are gonna be leadership problems. So if you want to improve your business, well, then what you need to do is improve your leadership. Now, I will say this as well. I just gotta make like a little caveat here. Cause you just talked about the value of it. If you're out there in the world and you can't afford to come to the muster, which I understand, the mustard is expensive. It costs us a lot to put together. I had somebody hit me up like, hey, it sounds like you care, but more about making money. I was like, no, no, we definitely want to make money. That's what, that's what we are a business and we need to make money and we need to pay our team. And so, yeah, we are. We are going to make money. And the muster is expensive. It costs a lot of money. If you can't afford to come to the muster, don't come to the muster. If you can't, don't go out and borrow money to come to the muster. No, you're not. You know, don't skip a mortgage payment so you can come to the muster. That's not a good idea. What you do is you implement some financial discipline, you start saving money, you put it together and you can come to the next muster. By the way, if you can't afford to muster, you can get a book called Extreme ownership. It costs 1697 on Amazon. That's fine. We. This podcast is free. There's 400 something hours of us talking about this kind of thing. So you can do that. Like I said, if you can come to the muster, that's when you're going to get basically a private jiu jitsu lesson. You're gonna learn really granular things. You're gonna get the interaction face to face. You're gonna get to ask the specific questions about your world, and you're gonna interact with people that are on the same path as you. That's awesome. If you can come, come, we'll see you at the muster.

That. No green room thing. And we've talked about that before, but that's a big deal. That's a bigger deal than it might seem. Because you know how, like, how you say, like, okay, you have a Q and a part, or, you know, like, you have. You have a specific question, like, hey, that was cool what you just said. But what about the. You know, like, some people have questions. So during the break, when most times, like at these conventions or whatever, they got the, you know, the people, they'll. They'll say they're. What they have to say, and then they'll go and they'll disappear. Straight up. Disappear.

Cucumbers on their eyes.

Yeah, whatever. Grapes, whatever. And. But here it's like, people like, hey, that question that I had, now I can go run and go. Go grab Leif or Jocko, whatever, and ask it, like, personally.

Yeah, it's what we have when during the break, Leif and I were on stage. Yeah, the break. We say, okay, take a break. Come back in 12 minutes. We step down off the stage, and we stand right there, and people just come and ask us more questions, and we continue talking. And sometimes somebody asks such a good question, we're like, bring it back. And we'll get back on stage and say, hey, someone just asked this question. Here's the question. It's a great question. It's a problem. Yeah. The whole time. The whole time. Time.

Yeah. Even the kind in the. And this would happen to me a lot. For some reason, they think I know. Well, I guess I kind of know a little bit.

They come and asking you the leadership.

Question, like, in the hallway. Like in the hallway.

You know, the best thing to do in that situation is you want to just kind of cruise a little bit.

Yeah. Yeah, that's. I was going to say that's one of the. The other primaries to come to Mustard is Echo Charles is going to be there one of these days. We're going to get you on stage for a keynote presentation.

Sure.

And it's going to be awesome.

Yeah.

You're gonna be right. Right in your comfort zone, getting flanked.

All right, moving on. Those are the three questions about the muster, but they got asked. So here.

Knowing what you know about war and the teams, if you could go back in time, what would you have done differently?

Man, I wish I could go back in time. Dave Burke and I were doing an event.

Early this week, and he was, he. He said, you know, I'm glad I'm not in Ramadi. I know Leif probably wishes he wasn't robotic 100%. I would go there right now. Yeah, let's go and look.

It's.

What I would do differently is the recognition that we were super aggressive. We took a lot of risk.

What I would do differently is I would actually be even more aggressive. I would be a hundred times more aggressive. I would be putting up, you know, a concept operations brief for your. For your approval to send up the chain to swim across the river and hit targets and, and, and, you know, put in some cyber overwatches and just completely ruin the bad guys program going on in south central Miami. When they had complete freedom movement before, they had any expectation that we could be there before anybody could get to us. And I think they would never see it coming, which means that we would have more impact and it would actually be safer for us because they wouldn't be expecting it. So they would probably hammer us. But we, we recognize that we could get away with a lot more, you know, than we could. And looking back on it, I just. When you, when you come into an area and they're like, hey, don't go in there. You're all going to get killed. You. You want to be cautious. You want to. You don't want to just jump into things. You want to mitigate risk. You can control, certainly. But we recognize we could get away with a lot more than we thought we could, and more often than not, bring. Bring guys home. And of course, that's the one thing I would change, obviously, if I could change. If I would trade places with Mark Lee and Ryan Jobe in my platoon in a second, I'd trade places with Mike Monsour and Del Platoon in a second, and I don't wish I could do that, and I can't. But that is the. That is what I would change, but I certainly would. If we could go back there again, we would be even more aggressive and we'd have even more impact.

There's a term that, that they used to say in the teams. I don't know if you ever heard it. You probably did. When we'd be doing special reconnaissance training and guys would say, trust your camouflage. Did you ever hear that expression, you may not have?

I don't. I don't believe so.

So what it was, was when you got good at putting your camouflage together, you could really get aggressive in getting up and observing a target, because if you trust your cam, if you've done a good job with your cami, paint your ghillie suit and, and putting yourself together well, the enemy's not going to be able to see you. But it's really weird to be, you know, 40 meters from a target that you're looking at and there's a guy walking around and you feel completely naked. Like they can see, but they can't see you at all. They can't see you at all. And so it takes some. It takes some time to learn to trust your camouflage. And I think, you know, Obviously, hindsight is 20 20, and, and when you look back at your body, like, you look back and you think to yourself, we could have done this and we could have done that. We could have gotten closer to that target. We could have done more things because our hindsight's 20 20. And also we learned over time to trust our camouflage. And the longer we were there, the more aggressive, you know, operations took place. But, yeah, that's hindsight's 20 20, isn't it?

That it is.

Okay.

Advice on restarting your life after the military.

I think you just got to figure out what you want to do. Yeah, you got to figure out what.

I have a new mantra that I tell people now. It's. It's find your next mission, and that's what you got to do. And I got, I got really lucky because we got right into this and, and you. You the same thing. Like, we, we went right into a new mission. And so any time to kind of wander around and look around and figure out which direction to go. And by the way, when you're wandering around and looking around to find out which direction to go, you're going to get pulled in a direction, and that direction is probably going to be the path of least resistance. It's not going to be a good path. We certainly know it's not going to be the path. So when you come out, when you get out of the military, man, have a mission, figure out what your next mission is going to be.

But I would disagree with you there and that it wasn't that we got lucky right in that. In that if you think about what we're doing now, this is what we like to do, and this is what we.

We.

We brought lessons back from Marty that we, we translated and gave to the next generation of seals and saw the impact that was happening. I mean, when you, when you came back from Marty, you could have had any job that you wanted to. And you said, I want to go run training detachment because I want to make sure that the, the, the next seals that are coming through this training and going forward to places like Iraq, Afghanistan are ready. You chose to do that. And I was running a training program that that's. I would, I didn't want to be anywhere else in that. It was awesome. And I recognize how powerful that was and the kind of reward it brought to me to see these young officers go out there that I put through training and succeed on incredibly difficult, dangerous battlefields in different areas that I'd been to. So, you know, we took that and recognized like, this is something that is useful, it has impact, and that we can do for others. So I think that's. It was absolutely not the path of least resistance. And I got, you know, we had job offer offers that people thought. People thought I was completely crazy. A buddy of mine was like, come work for me. We'll pay, you know, this huge salary that was, you know, triple what my Navy salary was. And I said, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to start my own business. I mean, he looked at me like I was nuts.

Yeah, we were talking about yesterday because we weren't making a lot of money at the beginning of Echelon front, now, were we? Yeah, we were. We. We. We had to put it together. We were writing checks and paying for things and traveling on our own dime to, to go and talk to companies and.

For free.

For free.

For almost nothing. Yeah, And I think that's. And that's really. It is finding your mission. Like, this is what I can do and this is. This is what I like to do. And, And I'm gonna figure out a way to do something that is useful. It impacts people. And I think that's. That's real key is finding the next. For sure.

Next question. I like this question. This question made me think that whoever wrote this question has a good feel for like, kind of the whole thing here. So the question was, is this question to Leif. What's Jocko's most impactful strategy on you when he says Leif gets real fired up.

Definitely someone who's been listening to a lot of podcasts, or maybe he's coming to the mustard or heard us speak or talk before. Because Jocko talks about angry ladies, angry life, angry life. I can get angry.

That's like, hothead, right? Basically be a little bit of a hothead.

I can definitely be a hothead.

You can be a lot of. Bit of a hot end. Sometimes I can't.

And usually, I mean, I, I, I'd like to think that it takes me, I don't immediately spin up on things, but once I get spun up, I get really spun up. And I don't know if you disagree with.

No, no, I agree. No, I was gonna ask you if how's having two kids, for sure. That teaches you some temper control.

Big time. Big time. And particularly when, you know, when there's timelines that you're trying to meet and we're trying to run a business, they don't. They just do.

The timeline is now. I want some crayons now.

And what I've loved is I love spending time with my son and my daughter, and they're awesome kids. And particularly my son, now, he's three. He's old enough to come kind of.

You know, he, he's in the game.

Yeah, we'll go, we'll go somewhere and do something fun or we're hanging out, and it doesn't matter if that's five minutes long or five hours long. Like, when it's time to leave, it's level 19 meltdown every time. Right. And he's. I, I'm waiting for the time. He's like, dad, thank you for the time. This is really fun. Doesn't happen. So, so yeah, that, that actually instills in you some patience. Some patience. But it's the. We always talk about red flags, and that's something that I learned from you and that I know you were looking at for me to see, like, oh, some red flags are going off. Red flags are those things that, as you talked about often, you recognize in yourself like, okay, I'm getting spun up right now. I need to take a step back here and throttle back. I need to throttle back here because I'm getting spun up. So with kids, I got to look at it as, you know what? This is good because I know that something, it's in my nature that I can get spun up. So with kids, I gotta relish that opportunity to say, this is a training opportunity for me to be outside my comfort zone, to say, you know what? I feel myself getting spun up. I'm gonna practice detaching and spinning down and not not reacting in a way that I might otherwise would have. And I think it's a great, it's a great tool. There really, for. For me, I think what the. When Jocko would sense that in me, and we've talked about a number of times when that's happened here on the podcast that, That I was getting spun up. You know, we talked about, you know, previous. In previous podcast about cancel the op and some of these things where I, you know, I just, I would. I would get fired and get angry. And, and you. What most people would have done in that situation, what I probably would have done to a subordinate leader is get. Is. Is get spun up as well.

And like, you yell at me now, I'm going to yell at you, but a little bit louder.

Exactly. And we're going to ramp up and it becomes like the battle of wills. And how you hand. You handled that exceptionally well with me was generally you would. You would never get spun up. You would just be very calm in your response and you would ask questions, or in some cases, you would just start chuckling like, like laughing about it. Like, hey, man, you get spun. And not. Not in a way that was condescending or like, look at you, you idiot. Yeah, it was in a way of.

Like, you don't want to laugh at people when they're getting mad.

It was in a way of like, hey, man, take it easy. Yeah, just take it easy. And then you start laughing about it. And it was. And then it just. That was something that was. Would you ask questions in a way that were, hey, well, why. Why do you think this or those things. That was powerful as well to me. That wasn't. It wasn't like, hey, why are you doing this? Or why won't you listen to me? And it was. That always allowed me to kind of take a step back and recognize, okay? So I think you got to make sure you see a red flag in somebody else. They're getting spun up and they're really emotional. You need to be unemotional, and you need to. You need to check your ego to do an end around. I'd never see anybody do that before. You did that exceptionally well against me. And, And I learned a lot from that because I recognized, like, I got to do that better. And it never. It just doesn't benefit you from getting spun up and angry.

And I'll tell you one thing that's another little thing that I noticed that I do for sure is if someone comes at me and they're super mad about something, I can't just be 100% calm, because if. If you come in the room and.

You go, chocolate this crap, the we're.

Getting told to do this thing over here, this is total crap. We shouldn't be told to do this. And if I go, life, just calm down. It's not that big of a deal. Like right there, I've already taken. Right, because you're, like, going, what are you talking about? It's not big.

I tried that with my wife Jenna. At times it doesn't work very well. The opposite.

What you have to do is you have to be. You have to show some. We'll call it a diminished reflection of the emotion that they're showing. You want to. You want to take a little off of it, but, you know. Oh, my. Leif, are you serious? They're telling us to do that? Oh, man, that's. That's. That's crap. All right, let's. Let's find out what's going on. So now, instead of being against you, now all of a sudden, I'm on your side. I've calmed down a little bit. I've brought you down a little bit. But you at least recognize that I'm on your side. Because if I just. If I just say, leif, calm down. Getting mad is not going to help. Like, you're going to get even madder. Or if I say you need to think about what they're saying, no, no, I need to join your side first. Once I'm on your side, now we can talk and we can move through the problem effectively. So you might want to just show a little diminished reflection of the per. You know, if someone's really sad about something, okay, you know, you can't just be like, hey, it's not that big of a deal. Like, you know, I got. I got kids, right? I got. I got teenage girls, and, you know, they get sad about stuff. And I can't just. You know, I've tried it before. Like, don't worry about that. It will mean nothing. In three years, I've done that. By the time you graduate high school, you won't even think about that anymore. Stop.

How does that work?

It doesn't work.

Good.

Because you realize that that's the whole world to them. So, you know, instead you got to say, ah, man, I can't believe that happened. You know, that's. That's. That's sad, you know? But the good thing is, here's some good points about it maybe. You know what I mean? So just don't be completely emotionless, because then the person can't relate to you, and if they can't relate to you, you're not gonna be Able to talk about it. If you can't talk about it, you're not gonna make any progress on the subject.

Be careful of that one. All right, Wanna hear more HDH in Vegas? Do we talk about the HDH hands on one of the other podcasts?

Yeah, we talk about it.

So $100 hand in Vegas.

Listen to podcast 11 if you want to hear about Mark Lee. Some of our shenanigans in Vegas we did have.

There were a couple good stories of Vegas. We, you know, we. That was a crazy boondoggle trip. But one of them that I did remember well was we had this giant convoy of Humvees and we were coming up to a major intersection just off the Vegas Strip.

A red light because we were driving, just so everyone knows we're driving. We drove the, the humvees to a range to do work up in that area. Is it an Air Force range?

Nellis. Nellis Air Force Base.

So it's a Nellis range where they do training up there. And we had taken the Humvees from one base on civilian roads to another base and we'd spent the day training there and now it was time to come back to base. So we're back on civilian roads again in a, in a convoy of Humvees. What, five trucks probably so five Humvees. And we had done a drill where we had the we. I was always big on, you train how you fight, right? So that means if we're driving Humvees, guess what we're doing? We're mounting weapons. We're going to, we're going to be ready to get after it if we have to. Not that we'll have to get after it in Vegas, but we're going to, we're going to test things because if you're not used to swinging that gun around up in the, up in the turret, then you're not used to it. So you got to practice. So we were basically in, in full kind of kit.

I think we actually had the whole task in us. I think we had like eight or ten Humvees. It was a big, big convoy. But yeah, so we come up to, we're coming up to a red light. The red light starts to turn yellow and the lead, the lead navigator, you know, this is a major intersection, you know, two four lane roads that are coming up, coming up to. He gives the command, blow through. Which means that we're just, if you get, you're in an ambush and people are shooting at you and you're just going to keep rolling and he Says blow through. So we literally have the entire convoy behind him like running this red light at a major intersection. Yeah, I was like, we're going to be standing tall in front of the Admiral.

You don't want to do that because.

In, in like in Iraq you wouldn't stop at a red light or you wouldn't stop at a stop sign. You, you know, you obviously the lead vehicle would check close enough and then you, you're traveling really tight. You make sure there's no cars coming, but yeah, you're just going to blow through. You're not going to stop. And so that, yeah, the call came out to blow through. So what's going to get in trouble for that?

Which it would have been a fight. Well, luckily we had some heads up drivers that stopped at the, at the, their green light and, and saw us coming or maybe they were intimidated by guys with 50 cal machine guns in the turret. But definitely, you know, that's one of those things where it's hard for guys to turn it off sometimes. And when you're, when you're doing tactical driving on the range as if you were in a combat scenario and now all of a sudden you're on the street.

Yeah, see that again, this is hard. I should have been said, okay, guys, we're going back on civilian roads, stand down. You know what I mean? I should have said that. But I didn't say that because I'm dumb.

And I, well, we, we, we made the assumption, which turned out to be false, that people would automatically know that. And they did. Yeah, so, so we had to tighten that up. But that was just one lesson learned from our Vegas trick. That was shenanigans. Yeah, it was good times.

I'm surprised I didn't get in more trouble for that. One of the, one of your guys, we were in a, he was a designated driver. We're in a navy van and we go from one place we knew someone and we were out in town and we went from there to downtown to go to, you know, the bars. Right. In Vegas. We're pulling into a parking garage and you know, they have that metal pipe that says, you know, 6 foot 2 inch clearance or whatever the clearance was. It was a very low parking garage. So he's got this big navy van. We come in and we, we kind of hit that. And I'm, I'm sitting in the back. And you know what, this is a classic example of a decentralized command. I'm not going to step on the toes. The guy's the designated Driver. I wasn't drinking. I probably had a few drinks or whatever, but I wasn't. Definitely wasn't intoxicated and. But I see. Oh, like, I look out and I see we kind of hit that thing. And so we go around the corner, and then we start to actually enter the parking garage. And as we go underneath the first concrete beam, the.

The.

It's. You can hear it. It scrapes against the ceiling, but it scrapes hard. And the vehicle comes to a stop. And what does the driver do again? This is the designated driver. What does he do? He starts pressing down the gas. He's just gonna power through this.

I'm in the back.

I go, dude. I'm like, dude, what are you doing? Stop. What, are you gonna rip the roof off of the vehicle? Like, back out of here and leave? He's like, well, I thought I could have made it.

Oh, man. One, one good team guy shenanigans that we were talking about was me, you, and the Delta commander, Delta platoon commander rolling. Rolling up to Santa Barbara. I think you actually came up to me and said, tenacious D. Are you.

Going to see Tenacious D? Yeah.

So for those of you who may not know, Jocko is a huge Tenacious D fan. The D. The D. I think that's. That's how it came out. You're like, the D. They're in Santa Barbara. Let's go.

Road trip.

Road trip. Road gig. Road gig. So we jumped in. Yeah. Of all the things that you gave me, you gave me a copy of About Face by David Hackworth when we were working together. To you, Bruiser, at the end of our tour together. And you gave me the set to the DVDs to Tenacious D and the Delta.

There you go. That's the dichotomy of leadership right there. Hackworth, About Face, the Tenacious D. Yeah.

So we found out Tenacious D was having a concert up in Santa Barbara. You know, we're all stationed here in San Diego. And we jumped in Jocko's Dodge Grand 1997. Dodge Grand Caravan 1997.

A lot of people just called it the pimp wagon because it was hard to keep the ladies off when you're rolling in. The window was taped shut on the driver's side. It's riggers. Taped shut. You weren't getting in there. No, that thing was shut because the little electrical thing broke.

So we're cheap bastards. So we're not going to spend the night up there. I think we actually had work to do maybe the next day. So we Jumped. We jump in the van. I think you drove up there. We rock out to Tenacious D concert in Santa Barbara. We, we bought Jocko a T shirt.

Still got it.

The Sasquatch is real. The Sasquatch, he is real. And I remember driving back at about, it was about 3 o' clock in the morning. We were like passing through Camp Penald and as kind of where our ranges are there as on the way back down we just acapello singing to every Tenacious D song that we, we knew by heart.

We're going to make a new band. It's going to be called Acapello D.

That was a good time.

Yeah, yeah, that was pretty fun. All right. Tenacious D.

What are your daily non negotiable habits?

Leif BABBIN My daily non negotiable habits usually I want to sleep in about 10:30, 10:30am style. Just eat some donuts. Listen, I mean I, at the end of the day this one equals freedom. It's a mantra that I learned from you and that it's just absolutely true. And if you gotta, you gotta get up in the morning and work out. There's some days, frankly I can't do that because life gets in the way whether I'm, if I'm traveling or my, my kid wakes up early and I know, you know, I've been out of town and my, my wife wants to get a workout in before the day starts so I'll take the kids so she can do that and we can, we can rotate out, you know, so, so I can't tell you that always happens. But you got to get up early, you, you got to work out and, and you have to, you have to prioritize and execute and, and having that checklist that you put together the night before about what you want to do and what's important is, is absolutely critical. Otherwise you lose it. And you know, for me and Jocko and for all of us at our team on Echelon front like it's when we get away from the things that we talk about to people. We're human beings like everybody else and we can get pulled in different directions. When we get away from those things, it doesn't work. Things start to fall apart. You lose, you lose track of where the priorities are. If I can't regularly detach, that's something I have to really focus on. To do is to regularly detach if I'm grinding on something for two, two or three or four hours at a time. Sometimes it's easy to miss other Things that are. That are coming up, and I got to make sure I pull away from things. Kind of. Kind of think about the prior, prioritize, nice qps, figure out, you know, if I need to reprioritize, and, and so I don't get target fixated on one thing and, and keep going. But I think for me, you know, what I want to do is I try to make time to spend time with my family as much as I can as well. And obviously, there's a. There's a. There's a lot of work to do. There always is. And, and it's, you know, those things, the, the When. When. When I could stay consistent on getting up early in the morning, getting a workout in, you know, stay focused on a list that I have from the night before that I'm falling through. All the things that you talk about that's.

I'm.

I'm performing better than I ever do.

That's how you win. It works.

At the end of the day, there's what works and there's what doesn't work.

Yeah, that's how you win. Check. Tell us about a time you were annoyed with Jocko or his intensity.

Annoyed with Jocko or his intensity.

You know what? We. We got along pretty damn well together. And, And I think there's not. There's not really any time that comes to mind that I was annoyed by you. Except for maybe, you know, what. What we mentioned earlier, right? When the times when initially we were working together and you're looking over my shoulder, shoulder and, and telling me to do like we should do this way. Let's, let's. Let's plan it like that. That. I definitely got annoyed from that time. I felt like I want to run my. You know, everyone's trying to tell me what to do here, and Jocko's looking over my shoulder.

I want to run.

Run my team. Just. Just as I explained earlier and, And I, I didn't realize until later, like, what you were doing. Like, hey, you're. You're passing. You're passing on a lot of great information. And I see that all the time, actually, with people, because if I could have detached from that situation, I would have recognized, like, hey, I'm a new platoon commander. I've never been a platoon commander. Jocko was just a platoon commander. He had a highly successful platoon commander tour. He had a historic deployment where he did a whole bunch of operations, and he's got a ton of lessons learned, so what an amazing opportunity to learn everything from him. But that's not the way you approach it. Right. It's like ego, my ego. And I see that all the time. There was a, there was a leader, a leader I was dealing with where I was talking to a member of the board for this particular leader who was constantly bucking against the, you know, this guy's. And it was, it's amazing to me though, to see like, hey, the, the CEO of this company who's pushing back in September of the board, like, he should be so thankful that the member of the board has, who's got massive amounts of experience, extraordinary success is, is there to mentor and train him, and yet he doesn't want to listen to that guy. I want to do it myself. You're always over my shoulder instead of being like, hey man, open up the legal pad. Let's take some notes here. I want, I want to pick your brain for everything. I want to, you know, it's. And, and I think just recognize if you're feeling that way and you're frustrated with, with somebody who's looking over your shoulder, then, then you need to take advantage of the situation to learn from them and certainly build up trust. The way to get out of that situation is to build up trust to show that you, you're learning, you're growing, and, and that you don't need someone to look over your shoulder every second. And usually that comes even after we got forward and you just unleashed us on the battlefield. I, I would always come to you and be like, hey, Jocko, what do you think about this? We're going to do this situation. I wasn't looking to you to tell me what to do, but I was running things by you. And, and we do that all the time now. That's not front.

Absolutely.

I, I call Jocko up and say, hey, here's what's going on. I'm working with this leader. You do the same. I mean, we talk about these things all the time.

Well, and that's actually that. What's, what's interesting about that is that in the last six months, that idea has really become formalized in the tank, which is where we take the companies that we're working with and we, whoever's working specifically with us with a specific company on the ground is coming back to the tank. All the Echelon front team and we, we get on the call or the Skype or the conference room and we go through all the issues that all these different companies are having and that's where we solve the problems is in the tank. So that way we get everyone's input. And not only do we give the best solution to the client, we also all learn from it so that we have that solution in our head so we all get stronger and better. So that's. That's one of the evolutions in national on front. That's pretty awesome to see is what started off as just like how we would run tu Bruiser, which is, hey, we're bounce ideas off each other and hey, I don't know how to solve this problem to you, or hey, hey, I don't know how to do this operation to you, or this is what I think. What do you think? Which is the way a team should work together. And now what we do is we get to do that for other companies, use the same brain power, use the same methodology. And it's awesome to do. And it's awesome to see.

It is awesome. The tank.

Yeah, Getting in the tank.

All right, Leif. For those of you that don't know, Leif was a ship driver for how many years before? So Naval Academy. Didn't get picked up for SEAL teams Right. Out. Didn't get picked up for buds right out of the Naval Academy. So. So he had to go to a ship. Here's a question about. Not about that specifically, but, Leif, what are your thoughts on a ship's captain being relieved of command and what to do if you are involved? And he would like to know from the ship's captain's perspective, that is being relieved because of the mistakes of your crew or if you're in the crew and the captain's getting. Getting relieved even though you made the mistakes. What do you. What are your perspectives on that?

That.

Well, look, I just to. To give people some background on that. I know I've talked about my background on podcast 11, but. But it was. I never wanted to be a ship driver. I wanted to be a seal. That's why I went to the Naval Academy. I got thrust in that position. Looking back on it, it was. It was an amazing opportunity for me as a young man to have to be in those leadership positions. And I, I enjoyed my time on the show.

How much does a warship cost to build?

Billions. A billion.

A couple billion dollars.

Crazy.

So you're, You're, You're. Sometimes you're the guy, right? You're a lieutenant JG on the bridge of a $2 billion ship, and you're in charge of all.

Yeah. When you're. When you're the officer of the deck, you're the guy in charge. The captain's asleep Right in his cabin and he's got a full faith and trust in you and you're running the ship.

And so there's the question right there. Sometimes the captain's a ship asleep in the cabin and he runs and the crew runs the ship aground, the captain gets fired. What do you think about that?

That is the Navy way. It's, it's always been that way. And I think it's 100% correct because there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. And I think that if you have, even if the captain wasn't in direct responsibility, it's his job to train that team. It's his job to mentor that team. And if he's got questions about whether or not somebody is, has the capability to do that job, then, then they shouldn't be in that position. It's up, it's, it's up, it's up to the, the captain. Now the captain can't be everywhere at once. So it's decentralized command. He has to rely on his leaders. But it's.

It'S definitely, I think ultimately the, the, the captain is responsible and that's, that's really what extreme ownership's about.

I had a client asked me a question yesterday. Have you ever sent anyone to do something that they weren't ready to do?

And I thought about it for a minute and the first thought was well, of course the second thought was no. The real answer is it's a gray area, right? Did I ever send somebody to do something that they weren't 100%? If I put this quantification on 100% ready for it?

All the time.

All the time, how often did I send somebody to do something that they weren't capable of doing? The answer is zero. In other words, if you weren't capable of doing this, and I didn't trust, trust that you could make it happen, I wasn't going to let you do it. That'd be irresponsible for me as a leader to let a subordinate go and do something that they're not ready to do. That's it. Period. Or they're not 100% ready to do or they're, no, not 100%, but they're not capable of doing. But I mean, when we first got to Ramadi, in your mind you probably weren't 100% ready to go out there and execute.

Particularly because we've been training for a mission with just seals, you know, for roll up assaults or direct action raids, you know, at night time. And all of a sudden we're shifting to daytime counterinsurgency operations, working with Iraqi soldiers. Completely different mission.

Yeah.

Broken up in all these different units. We hadn't trained, we hadn't trained like.

That in a violent war zone, by the way. But I, you know, I had trust that you were completely competent and capable of doing that. And if I didn't think that, and I didn't think you were competent or I didn't think you were capable, then I, I, I would be a bad leader if I said, yeah, go ahead and go do that. And then I answered the question further to this client. I said there was two people from Task Unit Bruiser that didn't go on deployment with us because they weren't capable of doing that job. So, yes, you, as a leader, you're responsible. And I was thinking about this. There's been times where Navy ships have run aground and the captain wasn't even on board. He had flown to somewhere to go do a meeting. Somewhere, the ship runs aground. Guess what? Still getting fired because you left someone in charge, that you left that team. You didn't train them well enough, and you can make all the excuses you want. I wasn't there. Yeah, well, guess what? You're still getting fired because you were responsible for that team.

So I think part of that, too, is the understanding, you know what? No bad teams, only bad leaders. With the chapter two we wrote, you know, extreme ownership is about, though, the part of that is, I have seen some people that misinterpret that right to say, well, I got a bad leader, so the team's not good. That's not an excuse.

Oh.

So when we're talking about leadership, we're talking about leaders at every level of the organization. So, so, you know, if you're, if you're, if you're a department head on that ship or a division officer or division chief, and you say, oh, I got a bad, I got a bad commanding officer. It's all the commanding officers fault. Our ship doesn't, doesn't perform the way it should. Whatever your team is, that's not an excuse. You got to do your utmost to get your team ready, to train others around you and lead that team as more as you possibly can. You don't have to be the senior guy in charge. And often some of the best units we worked with and we're part of. The senior guy may not, he may not have been the guy driving the operations, but he allowed his leaders to go out and execute and make it happen. So leadership, we're talking, we're talking leaders at every level of the organization. It's not an excuse to put the blame on the boss. You got to step up. You got to lead and own your team. Solve problems, get better, learn from mistakes, and make it happen.

What does it mean when a ship runs aground?

I mean, literally hits dirt. Oh, that's what it means.

Well, in this case, we're talking ship collisions. So running aground is one thing. The.

You know, and there's an argument. There is an argument to be said, like, because some of our greatest leaders, like Admiral Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, who was the hero of the Pacific War, was. I've quoted him, you know, on this. On this podcast previously, he was the commander in chief of all US Forces in the Pacific. So he was. He was the person responsible for the entire war effort against the Japanese in World War II. And that victory, a massive effort, obviously, and an extraordinary turnaround from disaster to victory. He actually ran a ship of ground as a junior officer. So there's an argument to be made that there is no the flag. Flawless performance. It doesn't exist. And people make mistakes. You can learn from it. You know, as far as ships running around, you know, that. That's one thing I think, you know, you can make a careful evaluation. What we're talking about here is specifically said ship collisions.

Oh, yeah.

And, you know, those. Those should not happen. That just. That should not happen. I understand how easily that can happen because it. There's a. These are huge machines that go very fast, and you're out on the ocean with other. Other ships that are moving around, and there's a whole lot of dangerous.

And it takes some of those big ships, takes miles to stop them. Like, even if you see and you go, okay, hit all full brakes right now. It doesn't matter. You're still gonna hit.

Absolutely.

You know, you're gonna get hit for like 10 minutes. Yep. You know, it's. You can't stop it. Just brace for impact.

Yeah, but. But if you've got. You got the right team in place, they know what they're doing. You know, there's all kinds of safe safeguards in place, and if that team's properly trained, like, that should not happen. It should not. It's. It's like, you should be able to. The airplane should land safely. All the horrible things that could go wrong when you're flying in an airplane and landing in a crazy airport like JFK or, you know, or lax, you're flying.

Yeah, that's a doozy, too.

Yeah. So those kind of Things that are crazy. So. But there's a lot of things that go wrong. But if it's done properly and safeguards are in place, you're gonna. You're gonna be fine. So. So. So. But there's. Again, it doesn't mean that, you know, we expect flawless performance, that no one's ever going to make mistakes. I think if. If a mistake isn't that bad, it should be forgiven, but there isn't. There just isn't an excuse of like, well, it wasn't me. Somebody else on my team did it. That's the opposite of extreme ownership. It doesn't work.

Doesn't work. Check next. I. This is for life. Well, I guess, yeah. Yes, it is for life. I heard you say it is important to think. I heard Jocko say this, too. How do you think. Meaning, how do you talk to yourself? Do you ask yourself questions? Do you think by talking to others? What do you believe is the most valuable method for becoming a clear thinker and communicator?

That's a deep question.

I actually think it's pretty easy to answer.

It is easy to answer.

I think I can answer it. One word.

Go.

Detach.

That's. That's. That's how I think. Okay. You can't. You got to step out. You got to step back mentally. You got to step back, look at what's going on and think, and that's where you can think about it. That's where you can figure out what's going on. If you can do that, you're there. If you can't do it, you don't even know you're not doing it. That's the problem when you're not detached. You don't even know you're not detached. You're in the storm, and you don't even know it. That's out for.

That's exactly right. But I think, you know, for people that maybe don't fully understand what that means.

Means.

Right. This idea of the task, which you've obviously talked a lot about on here and which is such a key thing for decision making, it's the. I think the key thing there is to make sure that you're not clouded by, you know, this emotional attachment to plans which we often talk about with our leaders in the SEAL team. So I'm emotionally invested in a plan that I came up with. I spent hours or days or weeks or months, you know, involved in, and I want that to succeed, of course, but. But is that, you know, I got to have that realistic assessment, and that's what the detachment really requires is that you pull yourself not just physically away, you know, out of the weeds or to say, okay, let me think about this in the strategic picture. But you really. You take away that emotional investment that you have to, maybe even whether it's a plan, sometimes it's a team member as well. And if you have, you know, someone that you just have a close relationship with that you, you know, whether they're a relative of yours or you had a long standing relationship with and that maybe you've gotten too close to them and you can't see that, you know, they become more important than the mission and they're dragging the rest of the team down. You're not making the call, either tighten them up or let them go, if that's the right case. So I think what that really requires is you got to emotionally pull back. It's a mental thing to really have a brutally honest assessment of the situation that's independent from any kind of previous bias that you might have had.

That's interesting there, because even if, you know, like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna detach.

Oh, it's not that easy.

Yeah, like, you can't just go through the motions. You can't be like, hey, I'm gonna detach. I'm detached right now. Meanwhile, you're just, like I said, clouded by the emotional part that you're like kind of one foot in emotionally, so you're technically not detached. So it doesn't work.

You know what else is a good way to think is to listen. You listen to what people are saying. I've been thinking about Hal Moore, how he said, if you listen, you know twice as much, you know everything that you know, and you know everything that the other guy knows. That's a great. That's a great thing. But if you're sitting in a. In a conversation, I mean, from a business perspective, if you're in a meeting and. And there's a conversation going on, if you're in the conversation, you're talking, you're adding your piece, well, then you're. You're not detached. You're in it. But if you sit back and you listen and you hear what's going on, you can assemble, you know, thoughts better. So.

All right, next, when can we expect any books to come out by either of you? And what are they going to be, like, Extreme Ownership or Way of the Warrior Kid? So I also had a book out called Discipline Equals Freedom. It's a field manual, by the way.

Sure.

You familiar with field manual Echo you claim to be familiar with field manuals.

My favorite kind of manual. Yeah.

Okay.

Way The Warrior Kid 2 is coming out in April. It's called Mark's Mission and we are in the process of writing Leif Babin. Tell me about that.

Yes, we are. We're getting after a second book right now. It's a follow on book to extreme ownership and I'm super excited about it. It's, it's to be in the same format. We talk about combat, combat lessons learned on the battlefield or in training and then a principle and then its application the business world in the same, in the same format as extreme ownership. And, and what it really is is it's to answer all of the questions and difficulties that people have from applying the principles. We get these common questions all the time of like okay, I'm having this issue. Okay, you said take ownership here. But, but what does that really mean? And, or how do I ply cover moved? You know to my team these. It's gonna dive much deeper into that and it's, it's gonna be also gonna be coming out fall of 2018.

How do you feel about writing a sequel?

It's, it's not a sequel. It's gonna be a standalone book on its own. It's gonna be good. Okay.

I, I, I think it's nerve wracking because you know what, have you ever seen the movie Jaws?

Yes, yes.

That's one of my favorite movies. Have you ever seen the movie Jaws?

Yes.

We got issues with Jaws too. We got issues.

Yeah.

And this is what I think. So I think again I'll call it luck. Maybe not, but I call it luck. Luckily for us this book has sold really well that if we would have written a sequel a year after this book came out, it would have been Jaws too, to be honest with you. But luckily during, because now it's been two years since this came out. So we've had and by the way a follow up year. If we were to release the book, if the publishers going release another book, release another book. We'll pay you more money. That's what they do. They want you to release another book. Now we got some hype from this book. We'll get another one out there. And Leif and I were like well no, not right now. Just stop and we'll let Time write another book. Well I did write another book, but they're not the same. Right. We don't, we want, we don't want to make Jaws too. So we let Time go and guess what? We're doing all the time that we, that we had passed. Right. We weren't sitting around. No. We were working with more companies, we were working with more military units. We were working with police. We were working firefighters. We were having the muster. We were learning more and more lessons, and we were getting feedback from this book and saying, okay, I see some threads, and it's. First, it was one little thread, and it was another little thread, and now all of a sudden, all those threads come together and you get something. You get a fabric, and that's what we waited for, is let's get something that is a woven fabric that's gonna be strong like Kevlar. So the next book that we got coming out.

I disagree with you that it's a standalone book. I don't think it's a standalone book. Are you gonna retract your statement? I'm gonna give you a chance. You should.

I do track my statement because.

Because it is. I mean, the new book.

I thought you were setting me up for a. An ambush there.

No.

No, it's. It, it. I'm sure you could read the new book on your. On its own, but you shouldn't. You should read Extreme Ownership first. And then you read the new book, and when you read the new book, it's gonna. Again, all those threads are gonna weave together and, and. And.

They'Re going to be the perfect. It's going to be. They're going to complement each other amazing in amazing way.

I think that's in that. In that method or in. From that perspective. Absolutely. I think absolutely. It is. It is a sequel in that respect. It will be written in a way that you can read it as a standalone book for sure. It will certainly reference the things that we talked about in Extreme Ownership and the foundational principles upon what that's written. I think there are a few exceptions under your Jaws analogy, A lot, actually. I mean, I could think that Indiana Jones, the Temple of Doom.

Yeah. Terminator.

Yeah. Terminator 2. Judgment Day.

But it does have a lot to do with how you said, hey, let's wait a little bit.

Yeah, that's true.

You can't just start unless the whole story that you.

That's the difference. Because if you just. Oh, we had a hit movie. Make another one. Right? Jaws two. Yeah, that's a good title. Jaws was a hit. Let's make another one. We'll call it Jaws 2. Yeah.

If they would have waited, like terminated, they waited what, eight years or so? Then it's like, okay, a lot of things are updated A lot of new stuff they figured out just like how you were saying that. Boom. Terminator 2. Just as good.

Aliens.

Aliens.

First movie.

Was that pretty quick afterwards, the second movie.

Aliens crushed the first movie, really.

So I. To be totally honest, it's a gamble though. No, I actually, I don't know because I'm. I'm halfway. A little bit more than halfway done with my writing part. Right before we start editing each other, I think. I think we might have an. A sequel that's better. I don't know. I have a suspicion that the sequel is better. Possibly better.

I think so too. It's been. It's super fun to write, you know, as we're doing it. And I think as you said, our knowledge is so much more now. I mean, we, Our knowledge of the business world was. Was. Yeah, we'd been working for a couple, you know, two or three years in the business world at that point, but. But now we've got double. More than double that. And the reach and expansion of what we've been doing since the release of Extreme ownership is. It's 100x what we were doing previously. So that's just given us. It's been a massive education and our knowledge of how to apply these things across the spectrum. Yeah. Is incredibly.

So much deeper than it was previously. And I'm excited about it.

Yeah, it's going to be good. Next question is how long does it take to prepare for a muster? And when we read this question earlier, I thought it was the person asking how long it would take this individual, me or whoever, a person out in the world to get ready to go to the muster.

Oh, yeah.

And the answer to that is it doesn't take you any time. You just. I mean, you should read Extreme Ownership for sure, but there's no like big physical. There's physical things that you do with the muster, but they're scaled that anybody can do them. So it's really. You don't need to do any major preparation other than put your ego in check.

I think the biggest preparation you need is. Is to look at yourself in the mirror and. And write down the. Where you're weakest and where you need to work. I mean, that's what we want to talk. I don't care where you're doing great. We're not there to pat you on the back. We want to care like where you can get better and everyone can get better. Certainly you can prove all the time. And I think that's what you need to do. I thought this question was about how we prep for the muster. What you see, it's always about. It's always about which is substantial.

Always about life.

All about me all the time.

Yeah, it's. It's. It is a ton of work to prepare for the muster, but which is.

It's fun. Yeah, it's fun. It's. It's great. We enjoy it.

Random question. In your experience, have you had or do you see high injury rates in Jiu Jitsu? Want to start rolling again, but don't want to disrupt progress on the barbell?

Oh, yeah, sure. What was that banter?

It's possible I am being a weak suck. Although not probable risk assessment. What do you think? Can you get injured in Jiu Jitsu? Yes.

Yeah. Just like you get injured, you get injured playing basketball. Actually, you'll get injured playing basketball quicker than Jiu Jitsu.

That's very important.

As far as injured goes.

As far as injured goes. Yeah, I will. The key part about this question for me is you want to keep making progress on the barbell, right?

Yes.

You want to keep getting stronger. That's cool. I want you to be stronger. But if you're super strong, you don't know how to fight, I got nothing for you.

Yeah. That's a deeper thing, too. And keep this in mind, though. And this goes for any physical activity. Like, if your goal physically is this thing, and then you start going hard in another direction, it could very well take away from.

Oh, it's a takeaway. You're not going to reach your maximum potential as a weightlifter. Yeah. If you're doing Jiu Jitsu for sure.

Or swimming.

Or swimming. Or any marathon.

Marathons or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. You gotta find the balance. But I mean, what's the most important. What's a more important skill to have? Be able to snatch big weight or be able to defend yourself in a street fight.

Yeah.

Hey, the snatching big weight's gonna help you defend yourself.

Yeah. Big, too.

We appreciate that. We're fans.

Yeah.

But prioritize.

Yeah.

Now, what's interesting is on a daily basis, I always work out, but I don't always do Jiu Jitsu. Because you can't. You need. You need someone to train with. You know what I mean? Like, you need someone to do Jiu Jitsu with. You can't do Jiu Jitsu by yourself. Yeah. So sometimes you don't have anyone to train with.

Look, I think from my perspective as a white belt, it's. It's. I've trained enough.

You got to be getting Close to that blue belch.

Well, I. I got a lot more work to do. Certainly that's not up to him, you guys.

Yeah, that's true.

You guys have inspired me. I'm training. Training hard. Got a. Got a great place. I'm training down in Texas now. John Jacques Machado. Awesome. Awesome.

Todd White, right?

Yeah, Todd White.

Todd White's awesome guy.

Yeah.

And it's the type of people that train in there. I mean, it's. It's. And that's. That's what I like about. That's that. That's, you know, same thing in the place I trained in New York. It's just that, to me, has. I think if you're constantly getting injured all the time, like, you're not training with the right people and you're not training in the. In the right manner. Something that I learned years ago when I was on the boxing team, the Naval Academy. Me and my buddies, you know, who were kind of scrubs, we didn't travel with the team. We just beat the piss out of each other every. Every day. And no one could breathe out of their nose. And everyone had black eyes. And you watch the guy who was. The guys who were really skilled, they sparked, but they were working on form. They were, you know, they weren't just knocking each other's heads off every punch, every time, you know, every single day. And I think that's. That's. That's where you have to. It's great to train hard, but I think you need to train smart, and I think you. You need to. The biggest thing I'm guessing this person is probably hasn't trained that much so that they. They spin up. Dave Burke and I were just rolling, you know, here at Victory last night, and I was. I was. I was telling. Telling Dave, you know, Dave, he's made some progress. He's been training out in Virginia. I was like, cool, man. You're doing good. But he's. He gets so amped up that he can't detach. So. So he can't detach because he's. He's gets so amped up, and it's. It's. I realize I used to just be in the. I've trained enough now. I still might be the white belchy, but I've trained enough now to know that. That I've got. I've got to throttle that back because it's. You get so focused, right? I'm gonna focus on my one little white belt Americana. I'm trying to get, you know, or arm bar versus Versus, like, no, detach and think four or five.

Getting nuts, dude.

Yeah, he gets nuts.

So did you train with him?

Yeah, we did. Like, yeah.

Okay, so he. It was funny because we're rolling around. I mean, it's. It's. And at one point I'm. I'm like, laughing him because he's literally like, you know, that kind of breather, like Dave in his.

Like, you know, when you breathe, when you hear somebody breathing hard like that, typically, it's like when you're. They're right in your ear, so it's. It sounds way more intense.

What about the time?

It could have been also because I had a little.

Little.

Little elbow pressure.

What about the time period when you're in, like, kind of starting jiu jitsu and Dave Burke might be in this situation right now? It's. It's the very early in jiu jitsu, where in your mind you think, like, you know what?

Like, I'll be able to. I. I think I'll be able to.

Get, like, Jocko, right?

Sure.

Like, I'll be like. Like, hey, man, if I. I think they learn some little move and they're like, oh, if I think throw this at Jocko at the right time, I throw this at this black belt the right time, I'll be able to get him.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

You have that in your brain. Oh, yeah, for sure. I had that with Dean one time.

I mean, but what. What when you're amped up to that level, though, you know, and. Yeah, when you're thinking that, like, no one can tap me or. And I don't think Dave is in that. In that mode. He's learned enough maybe to be. Be beyond that. But it's.

It's.

When you're that amped up, your chances of. Of getting injured are way worse, just more significant. And it's. It's why, you know, if you see a brand new white belt coming, I'd much rather roll with brown belts and purple belts, even though I know they're gonna, you know, they're gonna get the best of me. I. I have a much less chance of getting injured than just the death match with some white belt who's, you know, who doesn't even know you know, anything.

And, And.

And you. So I think you got to be smart about who you train with. And that's what I love about, you know, John Machado. Awesome. With Todd White. His guys, they're. They're. They're. They're super. You know, they're Very knowledgeable. They pass on stuff, but they're humble. Just, just like, just like folks here at Victory. I mean, it's. And I think when you're training with the right people, they're like, oh, cool. You got, you got me in an arm bar, you got me a kimura. That choke was great. Show me how to do that. And it's, it's a. But it's a humble learning environment where, you know, you're not there to injure people, you're not there to get hurt. And I think it's sure you're going to get tweaks and bumps and bruises, but I think there's, you know, if you're training smartly and training to learn, then the chance of getting injured, the probability is, is much less.

My boy, Todd White. Todd White, he's like old school jiu jitsu guy. He, Me and him were on the circuit back in the day. The competition back in the day. He was an old LA Jean Jacques guy. Yeah. And, and he, by the way, he listens to the podcast, by the way.

Yeah, la.

That's all the payments were fully. Yeah, they were back in the day. All right.

Addition to that, the jiu jitsu, what even, like, I wouldn't want to paint the picture that, like, all white belts are gonna increase your chance of injury. It's a, it's kind of a specific type of person to roll with that will increase your chance of injury. And that's like a guy who's strong may or may not have like this ego where you can't tap me and I'm gonna try to kill you every single time for sure. And he, he has like an element of like, legitimate strength and athleticism on top of it now. So you got to put all those together. Like, you go into a typical gym, all you take all the white belts, you may not even have a guy like that.

That's true.

The probability of a guy being like that is pretty low.

I'm not saying it's zero. I disagree.

There might be higher probability.

Not pretty low.

Depends on what, you know.

What changes that, though? In my opinion, what changes is the, Is the black belt instructor like someone is like, oh, you want to get tough with that guy over there? Well, let me. I'm going to impose some humility on you. It's called regulation.

It happens.

Yeah. Which is yet another factor that kind of contributes to the overall safety of it. So, and I'm not saying low, like they're rare, nothing like that. But I'm saying if you Take just, I don't know, some random class.

A new white belt, spazzy, strong, may or may not be young, with like a huge ego that maybe one guy may. You won't get a class full of those, you know, so your day to day rolling is. Is pretty safe. You know what I mean?

Yeah. You do need to pick your training partners carefully. Yeah, for sure.

But to this guy, though, here's. I mean, look, Echo and I go way back. I think I probably knew Echo even before. Before you did Jock in our Surface Warfare D. Our good, good friend Cake Nuts, who's a mutual friend and others that we've. We worked with. In fact, Echo was. You were. He was a bouncer downtown before I.

Everyone knows because he talks about he.

Had to put up with all our shenanigans and back trouble. But I remember coming in here and training at Victory and Echo was a blue belt and showing me and Cake Nuts like some moves and. And because I kind of had this mentality of the guy who asked this question of like, you know, you might get injured. And I was focused on other things. And I trained here all the time and a lot of times I'd be here to work out and I do stand up and I would never, I never trained jiu jitsu like I should have. Never stuck with it consistently. Didn't have the discipline to do that. For whatever reason, I get pulled in different directions and, you know, here we are, you know, 10 or 12 years later and Echoes of brown belts. He knocking on the door of getting his black belt, and I'm still, still a white belt.

What door is he knocking on?

I'm not knocking.

I didn't hear no door getting knocked on.

That's not.

I don't think about silence out there.

So don't be that guy. I think I would make the time to train, get some.

Yeah, for sure. All right. Losing a teammate, both military and civil civilian world happens. How do you assist and promote healing and growth within a team that has lost a pivotal member? What do you do when the emotional toll leaves your guys unfocused and is creating unacceptable risks?

Yeah, you know, I've talked about this, this before, and I think obviously this can happen. This part of life is death and people are going to die. And you, obviously, we're all going to deal. They're all going to face it at some time in a work environment. How do you deal with it? One of the things that I always say is get back to work. Right. Yes, you're gonna mourn. Yes, you're gonna have your memorial services, and then you got to get back to work. And I think if you let people, if you give them too much time off, if you let them sit around, they're gonna get unfocused, they're gonna start thinking about, you know, they're going to start thinking about things that are not good to think about. Because we want to, yes, we want to mourn. We want to do the. We want to remember, but at the same time, and I say this all the time, we don't want to dwell. You don't want to dwell in the past. You want to remember, but don't dwell. So I say get back to work. Going back to what we talked about earlier, Find out what your next mission is going to be. You have more of a reason to achieve your mission because you lost someone that. You lost someone that can't. That can no longer carry on with their mission. So for them, carry on with your mission. Go forward. Don't dwell in the past. Anybody that you lost that you cared about, what would they want you to do? Would they want you to sit around and sulk and look at the ground? No, they'd want you to get your gear, get your mindset straight, and get back after it. So that's what I recommend.

I think that's. That's exactly right. And I think getting to work, the reason that's important is, is, yeah, if these people, if that person died, you know, and for the guys that we lost, like, if we just. If we just gave up and walked away, that means they died in vain for nothing. And, and we're not going to do that. We're gonna. We're gonna double a triple, quadruple down on that mission to make sure that we win, that their sacrifices weren't. Weren't in vain. And I think that's helping the team understand what you're accomplishing and why they're doing what they're doing is incredibly important. And we wrote about that in Extreme Ownership and talk about it all the time. That understanding why and briefing the team and helping them understand why is critical. But, yeah, focus on accomplishing that mission is, Is what you got to do. I think the other thing too is you do everything you can to take care of that person and their family, take care of their family and help them out. And, you know, that's an obligation that never goes away, that you're always going to have, and that's extremely important. And something that's. That's helped me through, you know, those difficult losses is by serving others. And look, trying to look out for others. And I got to do that even more than I do.

You know, Another thing that can help out in those dark times is a little bit of jiu Jitsu, to be quite frank with you. Next question is about Jiu Jitsu again. My BJJ coach knows it all. The problem is he's a know it all. Condescending, insulting, derogatory comments to students while class is in session. Option A, stay. Option B, go to a school down the road with less experienced but much more mature minded teacher. What would Jocko do? What would Leif do? What would Echo do?

I would probably move.

Okay.

Fair enough. It's straightforward.

Depends how much, maybe not that straight. Depends how much less experience though.

Yeah, okay, but, but purple belt, brown.

Belt, if I'm just beginning, white belt, whatever. Yeah, move.

Okay. Leif Babbitt.

Yeah.

Look, as a white belt myself, like, I, I learned from. There's amazing purple belts and brown belts out there, you know, I've learned a ton, you know, from you, Echo. You always show me stuff. And you, you have a great knack for teaching, which is good. You know, people, some people just don't have that as much. And I think, yeah, I think that's a. If you're at the white belt level, that's, that's great. So I think that's.

Jocko apparently disagrees.

I know, bro.

That goes. A very good teacher, that is.

Echoes.

You can see his, you can see him swell up a little bit when he gets that.

He gets that. He loves that. Loves it.

Look at him.

Hey, Leif said it.

Yeah, he's like impartial.

Listen, that's because I've been, You have taught me things. I imagine you haven't taught Jocko things in that way. But. And even if he would, yeah, you should, you should go for that. Maybe we should do that right now. Kumite.

But look, I, Yeah, I think you can learn from a lot of different.

People and real down.

One thing you just can't make sure is you can't make it. You make sure it's your ego getting in the way. And when someone's really coaching you saying, hey, you need to do this, you need to get better, and you just don't like the manner in which they're, they're doing it, public or whatever, you might need to put your ego in check and just say, okay, I don't know everything. Of course you don't. Let's learn. If it's over the top, then yeah, absolutely. You should go where you can learn best. And the quality of the people around you that you're rolling with, as we talked about earlier, I mean, that. That to me is everything. And, and that's what I love about Jiu Jitsu is just the, you know, such a diverse group of people. When you get at a great gym that you're training at and just folks are working together and learning together and, you know, they get the best of you, and then they're. They're willing to show you about how they did that or some things you should think about.

Keep it a secret, old school. My opinion on that is I. Well, just. Yeah, I agree with you guys. But at the same time, I'll say this. One of the things you got to learn to do in life is you got to learn that you're not going to get along with everyone. And not everyone's personality is going to mesh with yours. That doesn't mean you throw away the baby with the bathwater.

Sure.

You see what I'm saying? So there might be a guy that. He's not a good teacher. He treats people like crap, but he's got really good information and he's. You're learning a lot. And you. So I'm going to take as much knowledge as I can from that person. I'm not just going to walk away because I don't like his attitude. You know what? You're going to have people that you work for that have bad attitudes, and you're going to have people that work for you that have bad attitudes. You're going to have to learn to deal with it. You're going to have to learn how to get as much out of them as you can out of everybody as a leader, everybody that you got. There's people that aren't going to be good at this, but they're good at that. Okay, well, let's. Let's capitalize on what they're good at. So this guy, very knowledgeable, kind of a jerk. Let's capitalize on the fact that he's very knowledgeable. Put your ego in check, show up there, take the knowledge from him.

Yeah.

And then in years to come, you pay him back. Pay him a visit.

Yeah, I've. I dig it. Sure. And I think. But overall, big picture. But yeah, if. Yes. If you're getting the knowledge you're.

You emphasize in your life, cruising. No, no, I emphasize in my life, getting after it. So therefore, Therefore you're at that, you're like, oh, this guy doesn't cruise hard enough.

Right. Right. We might be coming.

I want to get.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I dig it. And. But I think at the end of the day, if how you said the guy. Yeah. He's not saying cool stuff or he's saying stuff that's not cool or whatever, but you're still getting the information, then okay. You know, and also, just like with Jordan Peterson, like, it pays off in life to have thick skin, like you're gonna be successful. Like, that's one of the ingredients for. For success. They dig it. So if you're getting the information, for sure. But a lot of times with the know it all situation, which is the words he used, I've been in that situation, like, a few times where it's like, I see what you're doing there. And being the guy who's kind of had some experience, I'm thinking, like, I don't. The circumstances that you're talking about, that's not going to work. And I know that just from experience or whatever, but this guy's a know it all and no, no, I know you don't know kind of attitude or whatever. And if that's the way the whole teaching experiences and learning, quote, unquote, learning experiences, I think. I think more benefits would be gathered elsewhere.

Yeah. It's interesting when Leif, when you're talking about. Yeah, you use your kid as a test for yourself to calm down and get more mature and detach and all that.

That's good advice.

I'm basically doing that all the time. Like, when I meet someone that rubs me the wrong way, I always look at that like, okay, cool, I'm gonna form a relationship with this person, become their best friend, and see if I can get through this and make it happen.

Yeah.

So that's maybe what I do with that jujitsu trickle while, by the way, I'm taking all this knowledge from him so I can formulate it into goodness again.

If you're getting the knowledge. Yeah, good, man, good. But as a white belt, it's like, come on, bro, you get it. You want to get the best teaching, learning, overall jiu jitsu experience possible. That's where you know, like, as a new beginner white belt or whatever, I'm gonna come in and then just get insulted by a know it all or whatever. Like, I don't know even know if I like jiu Jitsu now.

Yeah.

Kind of thing. And you run that risk.

Not good for business, that's for sure.

Yeah. So, of course. Hey, you're Jocko. I get it, man. Life gets It. But we're not all jocko. When someone says like, or is a know it all, and I'm supposed to trust this person to teach me Jiu jitsu because, you know, for all the great reasons we take Jiu Jitsu and I'm trusting this person, and they're gonna be like, how this guy explained. I don't know, man. I don't know. Big question mark there.

You go down the street and train.

I would rather get 99% of the knowledge from a good purple belt than 5% of the knowledge of a know it all guy.

Okay, there's, there's, there's a clean argument for that. Next question. This is from Vijay Nirmal Kumar. He's been, he's been on in the game for a long time. Yeah, got a lot of, A lot of list. You know, we got a lot of listeners in India.

Yeah. Actually, I talk to Vijay from time to time time online, check.

So he says, you must have had good days and awful ones in the field. How did you manage to stay focused despite the ups and downs? How did you win over the darkness? Also, what was your workout like when you guys were engaged in the field and probably tired? Two questions there.

I think how you manage the ups and downs is, is.

You got to stay focused on what the goal is, you know, and I think we talk about that. How the recognition, you know, when we came back from that deployment and you put that slide together about the Battle of Vermont, they kind of captured on this map, you know, the, the, the areas that we'd taken back. And even though I planned and led those operations.

You know, so many of those operations, I've been intimately involved in the planning and leading those ops and, and writing, you know, post operational summaries and all the reports that we, we had and was involved in some of the battalion and brigade level meetings, you know, for that, that whole strategic plan, I didn't really have a fully grasp just. I didn't put it all together in that way. And when you, when I saw that slide that you put together that showed, you know, the, the red enemy held areas of Ramadi and all of a sudden blue circles going in the US Bases that were put in that we were off and the lead element on the ground for it put it all together for me in a way that I had not seen before. And I recognize I had to do a better job with my guys of doing that too. And I think that's something that for every leader, that's where that detachment comes in to be Able to think, okay, help me understand what this is all about through the dark times, through the rough times, so I can focus on what the strategic goal is and so I can help the team understand that as well. And I think that's, that's something that, you know, if you step back from the details, kind of think about it so that you can understand it and then impart that team, that to your team so they get an understanding. It enables them to slog through when it's, when it's really difficult and it's, it's dangerous or they've got some real challenges ahead, but they can stay focused on that, that, that goal.

You also got to remember what it feels like to do the right thing for me, like I know what it feels like to not do the right thing and I don't like that feeling later. Right? It feels good right now to not do the right thing because you're like, oh, cool bag of Cheetos and I'm going to get some. Right. You know what, that feels good right there. You know what it feels like later. You know, you went off the path and that's not good. So I, I just always think, okay, well I'm going to suck it up now. Take the, take the problem now. Take the hard path now because I know later it's going to pay off. I'm going to feel better in the long run.

Pain out, pay later.

Pay now or pay later.

That stuck with me when you said it. It was good.

Yeah, Yeah.

I like when you pay now and pay later.

Sometimes you do that sometimes.

Pay the man now and then pay the man later and, and then hey.

Asked about workouts too while we're in the field and, and this is a good one because, you know, like firefighters, right? Firefighters are on duty for 24 hours. So that means they're going to get a workout in at some, Sometimes they do more than that, but they're doing 24 hours on, on duty where they're at the station waiting for a call. Are you going to do.

Let'S say one of the workouts from Disc Freedom Field Manual? Are you going to do the three sets of 20 rep squats with 20 minute rest in between?

I think they call those widowmakers.

Are you going to do that if you, if you're, if, if within like 15 minutes you might be called on to carry a kid down a ladder, don't do that workout then because you won't be ready. And that's kind of the attitude in Ramadi.

It was like, yeah, we we trained hard, certainly. And you know, we talked about that on, on podcast 65, the things they carried and, and how we had to be. We had to train hard, but you had to always hold a little back because you never knew when you're going to get the call. And you certainly after a big blowout squat workout like that, I mean, you, you weren't going to be able to run through the streets and run upstairs and drag your 215 pound buddy with 60 pounds of gear on, you know, for 50 yards across the open street while shooting with the other hand. So I mean, those are the kind of things where you got to be ready for, for that and you could, you had to leave a little reserve in the tank just in case because we got often we're like, oh, we don't have an option. Oh, we do have an optin. I get ready.

Yes, you do. Right on. Yeah, so leave a little in the tank. That's a good way of putting it. Okay, here's a good one. Next question. This is for both of you. Did either of you ever get into serious trouble as a teen before joining the military, or were you always exceptionally disciplined from a young age?

That's Rafe Babbitt. Exceptionally disciplined from a young age.

The reason I'm laughing if my, if my parents are listening to this and they're probably laughing hysterically right now.

So as, as are mine, this is.

Yeah, I got in all kinds of trouble, all kinds of trouble all the time. I was a total wild man.

Did you shoot your brother with an arrow in the leg or something?

No, he stabbed himself. Okay. He stabbed him. So we used to shoot each other with BB guns all the time. That was. And we threw spears at each other.

Oh yeah.

You know, in high school I drove around with an old beat up pickup truck and I heard it from my, my uncle who had inherited from my grandfather and smash road signs and just knucklehead stuff and, and yeah, I was a good complete idiot and, but you know, in the military helped square me away certainly. And it was, I'm lucky that I didn't do something that caused me to have, you know, lifelong injury or death or, or damage, you know, I think.

Or do something that you get in a bunch of trouble for, for sure.

That would have changed the trajectory, prevented me from going to the naval camp, prevented me from going to the military and, and, and would have, that would have redirected my, my whole life. So I, I think, you know, if you're in that stage and you're a wild Teen, you need to think clearly about the long term consequences because you definitely can pay the man now and pay later in that situation. For sure.

One of the things that we do as young boys, I'm speaking from a boy perspective because I'm not a girl. And when I was growing up and with the way I look back on it now, a lot of the stuff that we did, dumb stuff that we did as teenagers was we were testing each other and we were trying to prove ourselves. Like, I'm tough. Watch me do this. Like, it's almost, it's almost like if you go instinctually as a tribe member, you're proving that you're willing to sacrifice. You're willing to take risk and sacrifice. That's what you're proving to your peers. Like, I'm gonna. Like what you just said, pickup truck. I'm gonna drive down the road and I'm gonna, I'm gonna run over this sign. Well, okay, it's funny, but you're also proving to your friends that you don't really care and you'll take risk and you'll do things for the tribe. That's kind of what you're proving. So I think again, I don't want to sound like going back to the same broken record, but if you want to get your kid or if you're a kid and you want to prove yourself, guess what you can do? You can go take Jiu jitsu. You can learn how to fight for real. You can learn how to defend yourself. You can learn how to take care of your tribe, take care of yourself, take care of your family. You can do. You can learn how to beat up other people, which is an important thing. I wish I would have known it. When you know Jiu jitsu, you have less of a chance of getting into a fight because the way you act is different. You don't act like a jackass because you realize that you might get stabbed. And so you act respectful to people and people can tell that and you're respectful back to you. So, yeah, it's just another thing I think helps out a lot with kids because I think boys are always trying to prove themselves to each other and to themselves that you're tough and that you're brave. I'm trying to prove that all. You know, how many. Let's just, let's just survey. How many times did you jump off the roof of, you know, buildings?

A lot.

Yeah, it's like, why are you doing that?

We actually used to go, when I was, we'd go fishing on the oil rigs off the coast, go deep sea fishing. You might run 40 or 50 miles off and you're not supposed to get on the rigs. There's all these signs and stuff, but we totally get up on the rig and just jump off 60ft off the top of the rig, which was awesome. It hurts a little bit, but it was good times.

But we do things to prove that we're tough. I did a lot of dumb things when I was a kid, and most of them were to prove to. To myself and to my friends that I was tough and that I was committed and that I would take risks, which are all. That was crazier than that, which are all positive qualities, right, that you want. Like when we're in the teams, what kind of guy, what kind of teammate do you want? You want a guy that's aggressive, you want a guy that will take risks if he needs to. You want a guy that's committed, that's what you want. So in these little weird tribes that we have as teenagers, that's what we have. And what are you going to do to prove, let's go get in a fight with somebody, let's go beat someone up. You know, there's all those dumb things that you do. So be smart, be smart. Neither one of us were model children, to say, to say the least. All right, Leif, next one. Leif, first off, thanks for picking up the spear. I'm interested to hear more about the mujahideen in remarks. How did they stack up against US Forces? Was it like an NFL team playing against a high school team, or did they have tactics, training and discipline equal to our own?

Well, first of all, I appreciate the thanks, but it was an honor for me to carry the spear. And as we said, we'd go back there in a heartbeat. Certainly. This is a great question. It's a great question. I think it really gets to the heart of what we talk about all the time, is the greatest quality, quality in a leader, and that is humility. And when you look at the Mujahideen, or the Muj, as we call them, right, the enemy fighters who control Ramadi, there were several thousand of them by. By US Intelligence reports estimates one who controlled two thirds of the geographic area of the city. When we first arrived in the spring of 2006 with tasking and Bruiser, when Jocko and I were there and, you know, we were showing up, our. Our seals are some of the best shooters in the world. They're some of the best combat troops in the World. We have highly screened group of guys who've been through all the SEAL training pipeline that's a year and a half long probably at a minimum. And, and then we've worked together for almost a year as a SEAL platoon. We've got guys with extraordinary physical fitness. We go to these awesome shooting schools, we train together, we have, we have the best budget and gear, you know, that, that all the giant special operations, you know, budget can buy, the best training and equipment. And so when we get over there, we're, we're ready to go. And, and pound for pound, if you take, you know, a SEAL operator from Charlotte platoon versus one of the Moos fighters that we're going up against, that SEAL operator can do hundreds of push ups. He can do hundreds of pull ups.

That's NFL versus grade school.

Exactly. And that, you know, the Moos fighter, he has virtually no training, he probably can't do 10 push ups. He has none of the gear and awesome gear that we have. And so it's pound for pound. It's not even comparable. And yet to think about this from the reality perspective, right in Charlie platoon we had 16 seals and five of those guys were brand new straight out of training, never been to combat before, never deployed to Iraq. Five of us, and we're going up against the enemy that has had three years at that time, three straight years of non stop real world combat experience. And so the, the experience level is not even comparable when we're going up against these guys. They know the city, they, I mean, and they're able to use our weaknesses against us, whereas we got to carry all the heavyweight and you know, the body armor and the helmets and, and we're not acclimatized to 115 or 120 degree high during the, during the day, in the heat of the summertime. They are, and they live there and they don't have to carry water on them and they don't have to carry body armor and helmets and they, they, they, they can just throw a backpack with seven RPG rockets and a rocket tube and roll out with their flip flops and knock off Adidas tracksuit, which is what they generally wore. And, and you know, or their belt fed, you know, Russian machine guns that they use. They weren't near as good as the ones we had, but they were, they were deadly and they could use them and they could shoot and, and so you could never, ever, ever take those guys for granted. And, and I think that's the, if they would always be looking to probe weaknesses and they weren't there to fight us head to head. They would try to take advantage of our weaknesses. They were very good at analyzing a situation, looking at a weakness and taking advantage of that weakness and probing for them. And, and if you ever took them for granted, I mean, they were, they were gonna, they, you were setting yourself, they might hit you hard anyway and you might get lose guys, even if you were prepared, but if you weren't prepared and you started taking for them for granted, you started getting complacent and, and not respecting them as an enemy, then, then you were gonna fail.

And they kind of, I mean, for lack of a better word, they cheat too. That's the thing, right? You guys have rules of engagement, all this stuff, and they just straight up.

And what's. I would say even more important, that is they don't have value for human life. They don't value their own lives. They're literally suicide bombers. And so they could lose five. They want to die. They want to achieve martyrdom in many cases. And so them dying is not a huge impact. And then obviously for Americans and American soldiers and our friends, it's, it's, it's epic and, and crushing loss of life every single time. And so that is the, the biggest difference is that we have to, it's like being in, it's like, you know, he says, this is what he says. He says it's his NFL versus high school team, right? Well, the, the, the. If the NFL should destroy that team, right, completely destroy it. But if the high school team scores a single point, they kick a field goal, they get lucky and kick a field goal, that's, that's a win. And that's, that's, that's, that's crushing. And that's kind of what it's like. They're not going to win. They're not going to win the game. But even when they put a score on the board, man, it's crushing.

And one thing that, you know, as I think about it too, that what was unique about that Tasking and Bruiser deployment to Ramadi in 2006 was, you know, I deployed three times to Iraq, had quite a, you know, jocko made multiple deployments to Iraq. We, a lot of, you know, we had a handful guys have been there multiple times. The guys that went later Afghanistan and, and, and elsewhere around the world and saw significant combat operations. But what was unique about that was we were, we were going on foot. Do you want to drive? Because you're gonna get blown up with these, you know, horrific IEDs. Are gonna destroy your vehicles. So we park our vehicles. We had to carry everything on our backs and walk into deep, deep into enemy territory in places where we knew that it was very unlikely that tanks could even get to us to help us out in some cases. And if they did, if they were going to try to come in, they might very well get blown up and kill. So what was interesting about that is, you know, we might have eight or 10 or you know, seals sometimes. It may be it was 20 seals, but, but that's a fairly small group. You know, we had some Iraqi soldiers with us, but we didn't count them when it came to, they didn't count when it came to, hey, who going to actually be able to defend this position. But I had to have the expectation that, that we might very well have 50, 60 enemy fighters surrounding our position, attack us and they could easily overrun us. And what was unique about that to point was we didn't have dedicated air support. We didn't have a dedicated quick reaction force that was going to come out and help us that only was supporting us. Unlike, you know, some other SEAL combat operations that, that have happened elsewhere. And it was or on other deployments that I was on and we were on our own, we had to plan for that. And you had to recognize that they would absolutely bring it and they would try to kill you, overrun your position, to kill everybody, capture someone. And that was a real possibility that we had to recognize could happen at any time and we had to be ready for it.

Well, just to statement of fact on top of what you're saying, the, the enemy did, the enemy did overrun friendly positions multiple times while we're there and kill dozens of people. And some of those, you know, some of those heavily fortified ECPs would get completely overrun, attacked, overrun vehicle borne ID. So yeah, it wasn't like this could happen. This is actually happening. While we were there, friendly positions got overrun by the enemy. And so yeah, it was not just it could happen, but it is happening. And it's a, it's a, it could happen to us tonight, tomorrow night.

Whenever they were good, they used cover move. I mean they laid down fire support each other. They, they put together plans again.

They had combined, they had combined arms. You know, they'd come in with the, the machine gun fire and then the RPG fire and the mortar fire and then all of a sudden there'd be a VB id. That's, that's what they do.

And there were different levels within there as well. I mean sometimes you get shot at and it was kind of a spray and pray someone dumping an AK in your direction. And then other times you'd have multiple belt fed machine guns hitting you that were, you know, coming through a little, you know, three or three by four foot window from 100 yards away and they're coming inches over your head and you're looking at each other like man, these guys know what they're doing. They, they. So you could tell when you know the, the guys who've been there for a while maybe come from elsewhere, they brought it and you could never take that for granted.

And also luckily for us, even though we might not had a dedicated qrf, we had the best damn QRF in the world which was absolutely the, the 11 AD. And they were awesome and never failed to come and, and save the asses of tu.

They brave those roads over and over and over and over again. Jumping in their tanks, taking such tremendous risk or driving in Humvees down these horribly dangerous roads. We didn't want to drive to come help us out. And they did that all the time. They were, they were awesome. And we couldn't done any of our operations without, without them.

Next question.

And this is actually a good question. It's, it's how did the Naval Academy prepare you to lead? And actually a lot, a lot of listeners at the Naval Academy and a lot of listeners at West Point, I hear from them and actually I got sent that show you the helmet I got sent somebody sent me a hand painted Navy football helmet. It's pretty awesome with a warship on it. Yeah, I'll show it to you this afternoon. Awesome. Thanks for sending me that by the way. It's awesome. So like, like I said, a lot of listeners we've had Brian Stan on, you know, he talked about his experiences there and a lot of leadership he got from the Naval Academy was actually from playing football. When you listen to him, he's playing football at the Naval Academy which was, was a challenge for him. But he learned a lot of leadership lessons there. How did the Naval Academy prepare you to lead?

Well, first of all, I love my spirits of the Naval Academy and for me that was all about the people that I served with and the folks that I met and the things that we went through together. I got in a lot of trouble Naval Academy. I struggled with my grades, something we talked about previously. I had a big conduct record because I still did some of those knucklehead teenage things and rebelled against, against authority. But frankly, you know, look, there's great people there, you know, there's great people on the staff. I've got a very close friend, there's a battalion officer now. And it's awesome to have good people there that are passing lessons on to, you know, to those young midshipmen as they graduate. And for every academy or RTC unit, you know, for that matter, I saw, you know, because you have such a wide swath of officers from all different, you know, from all different.

You know.

Navy, Marine Corps, I mean every, every kind of different branch of, within those services as well. And, and also you have a, a, a midshipman leadership hierarchy. So you've got someone who, because they made good grades or had a good con or ever got, got promoted into this kind of make believe.

You see that right there?

Yeah.

Little bit of, little bit of, you know, little bit of anger about that one right there.

Just cuz they got good grades or.

They didn't have a good godhead, they were thin. God duck record. Listen, they're gonna be in charge of me.

Listen, there, there are some resentful.

This is a new life. I just met a new life, resentful life.

I'm actually not at all resentful. I, I could tell you I had some, I had some good friends who were in those positions and it was great for them, you know, good, good for them. It's, it's kind of, it's just, it's funny looking back now because it's completely meaningless, right?

When you're, do you have a regimental commander there?

Yeah.

Is that guy in charge of all the students?

Yeah, there's, there's, you know, there's regiment.

Brigade, you know, battalion at ocs, they have it too. When I was at ocs, I was the man, I was called.

You were the regimental regime. So, so no wonder he's a little sensitive this, He's a little sensitive.

Coming in hot. Oh, they also called the five bars because he's the only person with five bars on your little uniform.

Did they, did they call you Captain big time?

No, they called me all presidente. I was a president of my class too. I had a good time at ocs.

So, so now, now we see the same sensitivity there. Yeah, listen, I, you know, great.

Maybe you should have studied harder. Like I meet some kids now or I hear from, I get, I get correspondence from people at the Naval Academy and like I can see that they're in the game. I can see that they're like, oh, this is going on. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna like, you know what I'm Saying like, you think you could have been, you could have had that?

No question about it now would it have mattered at the time? I, I don't know. You know, failure, as we say, is often the, the best teacher. Look, I, I made, I made great grades in high school and did well on my SATs and ACTs without, with almost no study. I got super.

I didn't have the discipline that was in place once I got to the naval cabin, that structure, it was difficult for me. It was very hard for me as I went into a system engineering program and those sort of things. So I struggle with that. So that could have helped me if somebody had. If I had learned discipline equals freedom at a young age and recognized the power in that, I'd be way more ahead, you know, in life.

Wouldn't we all?

For sure.

What about playing the game?

Yep.

And playing the game as well, right. That I'm in a buck authority of like, you know what? Actually it's going to be a lot worse for you if you just, you know, even from a just personal perspective, not only worse for you, but for your squad or for your, you know, these folks that you care about. If you just build a better relationship with the folks above you instead of being the, the, you know, hard headed, argumentative guy, for sure it would have been way better for me.

I, I don't know when I figured that out. I mean, it was definitely, it was definitely in my enlisted time, I started figuring out that, oh, I'm working for a guy and I can either make my life, I can either tell him he sucks and then my life is gonna suck, or I can figure out how to work with him and that's gonna make my life better. And by the way, it's not just gonna make my life better, it's gonna make us do a better job as a team. So it's interesting when you pick up on that in life. And obviously if I would have been going to the Naval Academy at 18, you know, I was a knucklehead, I would have been in the same boat of like, oh, I'm going to stick it to the man. Right. I mean, I'm still listening to Tenacious D at age whatever, and we're still sticking it to the man.

Well, I'll tell you, the people that I really like, like my upperclassmen, I really like, we have some that are, you know, still serving the SEAL teams and, and are great guys that help influence me. And, and I expected when I showed up there, I wanted to be a seal. Yeah, I Wanted to go to war. That's what I wanted to do. And it was very hard for me to recognize that, like, not everybody wanted to do that or was exactly like me or was. So it was, you know, some people were a little more academic or wanted to be on the intelligence side or wanted to be, you know, they wanted to drive a ship or they wanted to be on a submarine or that, you know, they, those things that, you know, fly a plane. I mean, Top Gun had come out, but, you know, we had a whole bunch of people that wanted to be, you know, pilots that had gone to school. So it was, it was interesting. People were a lot different than I expected. And, and some folks didn't quite have the, the warlike mentality that, that I expected everyone might have, you know, going into that environment. But there's no question that if I had done a better job of, you know, you caught playing, playing the game, just seeing that, you know, detaching and.

Seeing like, hey, listen, thinking strategically. Yeah, thinking strategically if we want to. See if we want to. Don't want to say play the game because that sounds too, too easy.

I want to build a relationship devious.

That it's too devious.

I didn't recognize that it was not in my benefit or the benefit of the people around me to, to create antagonistic relationships and that. So rather than deescalate those situations, I rebelled against them and pushed against them, and it was a struggle for me and it took me a long time to figure that out. That being said, though, there's. The naval cab is no different than anywhere else. There was great leaders there who mentor people and trained people and represented folks well that were both officers on the staff and enlisted on the staff, as well as midshipmen. But I think what was a lesson for me and looking back on it now, that I recognize it's great to identify who you don't want to be. And if someone does something that's looking out for themselves or throws people under the bus or, you know, those, those leaders that you start losing respect for, it's great to actually identify that. And that's a good lesson to learn to say, okay, good, I want to make sure I don't be that. That way. But what, what I have learned is that I can't be. We talk to leaders about this all the time. And I get people like, what do you do? You know, when your boss is. Just isn't a good leader? You're like, guess what? The SEAL teams is one of the most highly screened organizations in the world. What's, what's the percentage of senior leaders that I work for that I had respect for, that I'd go and work for again? You know, that's maybe, maybe 20%, maybe 20% of the people I work for during my time. And guess that's about average as you talk to people. You know, it's about average in the business world. It's certainly at the Naval cab, any of those places. So if you're expecting that there's most of the, of the world out there is not going to be a good leader, they're not going to be a good leader, and that doesn't matter. And that shouldn't affect your performance. You should be able to do, you know, something that I learned from you, which has probably been the most helpful thing that you ever taught me, was that I should try to have the same relationship with, with every boss, you know, whether I had deep respect and admiration for them or whether I despised them and thought they were, you know, egomaniac who, you know, or a coward who, you know, couldn't mitigate risk. So. And that it's in my benefit and my team's benefit to build that relationship with, with my team. And that was, that was a lesson that I, I had not learned then. So, yeah, those negative, those negative lesson learned were, were good for me. And also I would have had less negative lessons learned if I'd have figured this out earlier.

Yeah, same. And really we got time for like one more question, but it's almost the same vein, so I think it's a good question to ask. It says, Leif, at what point did you become enlightened to extreme ownership? And how did you respond to the philosophy? Kind of same vein of what you were just talking about.

Exactly. I mean, I clearly didn't have that fully at the Naval Academy, but I started to understand through the kind of school of hard knocks and falling on my face and getting a bunch of trouble and realizing, hey, it doesn't benefit me to rebel against authority or not do what I'm told or be seen as, you know, as someone who's, you know, doesn't respect the rules or whatever. And, and.

I think I started to learn that a little more in the service fleet because I, my goal, I went out circle. It was crushing to me to not be selected out of the Naval Academy and to go into the SEAL program. So as I went out to the, and served on a couple different surface ships, I recognized like the, what is the pathway for me to, to the SEAL teams. My Lifelong dream.

That's all I want to do.

And it was be the best freaking service warfare officer.

Now you got to. Just so everyone knows, now you got to earn a recommendation to go and do this. So if you're not the best fleet officer you could possibly be, someone's gonna go, why would you. Why would you send you the SEAL teams? And you're not even doing a good job here. No.

So you got to earn a reputation. You also have to. And a recommendation for sure.

You.

So you have to build that trust with your bosses, and you have to get qualified. So they've got to trust you, and you have to achieve that qualification. You're not even eligible until you've achieved your warfare qualification.

So in. When you. When you report about aboard a ship, you have to do certain qualifications that say, okay, yes, you are now a surface warfare officer. A qualified surface warfare officer. There's a bunch of boxes you got.

To check, and those boxes, you got to learn all kinds of information about all the hundreds of different systems.

And until you get that, you're not even gonna get. You're not getting a recommendation. Until you get that, you're not even eligible.

You're not even eligible.

So you had to just. You had to get something.

I had to embrace it. And that. And that helped me. And I still had frictions, certainly, and. And. But I started recognizing, like, what works and what doesn't. And. But it wasn't really until tasking bruiser. That's where you really quantified that for me. And, and, you know, as. As we were going through, I was in my second platoon, so I'd already been through a previous platoon. And, And. And I. I didn't even realize, like, as in that second. The second platoon, as we were working and tasking a bruiser with Charlie platoon, I was like, man, we're good. We're performing well. And when we started having, you know, a few months into the workup cycle, we'd have, you know, training instructors be like, you guys are the best task unit we've ever seen come through here. And it was interesting to me because I was like, well, I. I don't really. I mean, we have some amazing guys in this task unit, but I had amazing guys in my last task unit, too. We had very talented. So it's not really the talent factor that broke us out, you know, And. And I. I didn't even realize. It certainly wasn't that we didn't make mistakes, because we made all kinds of mistakes. Mistakes in tasking a bruiser and, you know, disastrous training operations. We had to come back and revamp our training process and, and make sure that we dialed in standard operating procedures just what training is supposed to be.

Exactly.

And Right.

Exactly. That's the difference, really.

Yeah. And that was it. It was, it was this idea that we now call extreme ownership, which is we're going to take ownership of this and instead of being like, hey, we're going to push back against people that are telling us we need to be better or we're going to maybe even deny that we're as bad as we, we are, we're going to take a brutally honest assessment of ourselves. And that, that's one thing that really stands out to me as I think about it. Do you remember our, our debriefs? The, the training instructors, they're usually have a super lengthy and critical debriefs. We would debrief ourselves after a run because they let the, they let the platoons and the task units go first. And so often it was the only time I ever saw it throughout my, you know, my nine years in the SEAL teams that, that, that most of the time we would get done debriefing ourselves and the training instructors did not have, they had either nothing to say or maybe just a couple sentences and that was it.

Yeah, because we'd rip ourselves to shreds.

Because we were, that was such a brutally honest assessment of. And sometimes they'd be like, hey, I actually thought you guys did pretty good. Shut up. Yeah, we're working. And that's actually. You told, you told them, right?

Yeah.

They say the worst thing. You don't ever tell my guys that, that they're, they're doing, you know, they're, they're amazing. That's the best run they've ever seen because that, that, that allows us to not get better, to not grow, to get complacent. So we always did that. And I think that's, I, I was starting to, I, I recognized just how powerful that was to our performance. So again, we were never flawless. We always made, we made mistakes, but we learned from those mistakes. We got better, we grew all the time and we were able to run circles around everybody else as a result and, and deliver some exceptional performance on the battlefield field with that attitude. And that's, you know, that, that mindset and attitude is, is the game changer. That's why we call the book extreme ownership. And it's what we impart to people as we, we see in the business world. And it, there's, at the end of the day, there's what works, and there's what doesn't work. But that tasking at bruiser and working with you and recognizing what that is and how powerful that is, that's. That's made all the difference.

It's crazy to see. And I'd see this all the time, that. Well, you just think about what you're saying. When the. When the training cadre, for instance, tells you, hey, it took you guys a long time to get a headcount, meaning you're on the target, and you want to leave the target, before you leave the target, you've got to know that you've got all your people, so you want to get a headcount. So the training cadre says, hey, it took you guys a long time to get a headcount. Now, you can do one of two things here. You can say, okay, that's criticism. How could we get a faster head count? Hey, guys, anyone ever done this a different way? Yeah. Hey, I've used this process in the past. It works really good. Okay, let's try that. Oh, that worked better. And we do this one little thing. It can be even a little bit faster. Okay, let's rehearse it. Let's actually try and rehearse it. Okay. Boom. Now we're getting really good. So we take that, and all of a sudden, the next time we go out, we do a little bit better, and then we modify it a little bit more, and all of a sudden, we can get a head count in 15 seconds instead of four minutes, which is. There's a huge difference when you're trying to leave a target. So that's one attitude to have that's like, we're gonna take ownership of the problems. But I would see this all the time, which is, hey, guys, your. Your headcount was a little slow. And guys, go. Wasn't that bad. Wasn't that bad. It only took us four minutes. Four minutes is not that big of a deal.

Like. Or like, that guy's saying that right now, But I'd like to see him get a headcount faster than that. And we did it as fast as we could do it. Everyone counted as fast as we could, and we made it through the first time. That took us three minutes. And they're going to say, that's not good enough. Hey, don't worry about that. And so. So you're going to stay on that.

Pattern, and you never get better, and.

You'Re never going to get better, and it's because you're not Looking. You're not accepting criticism from the outside.

And it's like, when we see that with leaders now, I start laughing about it. Dave and I were just working with a team, and we had this. It comes up all the time. And it's funny when you see people pushing back against some. Some real constructive criticism. And my question is always like, okay, instead of just, you know, that battle of egos there, I look at that and say, okay, what you're telling. Just. Just let me understand. You're telling me that you. You are at absolute optimal performance. You can never improve in any way. Is that what you're saying? And obviously, then they recognize, like, of course not. So. So that kind of opens the door of, yeah, you can improve and you should approve. And if you're not, what you taught me is not only should you improve, I think the big lesson that I learned from you and that we now, you know, teach here with Echelon Front is, is that if. Not only should you improve, but if you're not trying to do better, if you're not doing everything you can to have the most efficient and effective headcount that you can and improve in every aspect of your game all the time, that you're actually failing as a leader and you're failing your team. And I think that's a very fundamental difference of looking at it.

Yeah.

That it's not just, no, I should be doing that, but, no, if I'm not doing that, I'm a failure as a leader and I'm failing my team. Yeah.

And all this is weird. You know, talking about this headcount thing, It's. It's a great example. I'm surprised I haven't talked about it very much because it's a. It's a really big deal. Like, for instance, when you leave a target, you can't leave until you know that you have all your guys. So you got to get a headcount. There's multiple different ways to get a headcount, and the easiest way is you use decentralized command. And every little team leader counts their three or four guys, and they go, yep, one's up, two's up, three's up, and they report in up one level. And by the time I would need a headcount, I'd look at Leif and the Delta Plume commander, and I'd be like, hey, are we up? And it would take them 10 seconds to be like, we're up the way. The worst way to do it, which I would also see, would be, you would Literally count from the lowest guy, there's 36 guys in the troop. And someone would say, hey, head count. And the back guy would go 36, 35. And they, you'd have assigned numbers. 35, 34, 33, 32.

Hey, who's 31?

Who's 31?

Oh, over here.

Wait, you're 31? No, I'm 32. Did you count? And so it takes three minutes, four minutes. And, and yet it's like, well, that, that's a very sensible way on paper to do it because you know you're gonna have all your people, but in reality it doesn't work. And that's that one. And so this is that one little thing, right? It's one little thing, one little improvement you can make. But that's not the only improvement you can make. You can improve every little thing that you do, and every little thing that you do as a team, everything that you do as an individual human being, you can make it just a little bit better. And the minute that you're sitting back and you're going, you know what? I'm not going to make this change anymore. I've reached my pinnacle of performance in this category. The minute that you do that, it's not just one category that you're slacking off on, it's all of them. And I was telling you guys the other day, I'm like, you know when you see me post a picture in the morning that saying that I'm getting up, but I'm not getting up at 4:30. If that says 4:35, that means I got up at 4:30 and I got out of bed and I went in and, and, and I took a picture of my watch and I post it. When I'm posting it at 4:08, that means I woke up and I was like, I gotta get busy. It's like, it's not, it's not alarm clock, I've got to get, I gotta go do, I gotta go make these things happen. I gotta look and see where I can improve my method for getting a headcount. How can I make it that much faster? That one little thing. And when you look at your array of what's going on in your business and it's also in your life too, what can you do a little bit better? You attack those problems. You accept the criticism when it comes at you, which is so hard for everyone to do, myself included, you accept the criticism, you listen to it, and then you modify and you make these little iterative changes. And at the end, instead of being a decent task unit or instead of being a decent person or instead of running a decent team, you can be the best. And that's only happens if you take ownership of what's going on in your world.

With that.

Echo, Charles.

Yes.

Speaking of taking ownership, trying to get better.

Yes.

Maybe you could help us out with that a little bit. I don't know.

Yeah, it's possible. That's interesting though, like where. When you put it into perspective, right. The extreme ownership. Because you know how you say the biggest or one of the, the biggest, best qualities of a leader is humility.

Humility. Yeah. You see the tie in right now, right?

More so even.

Yes.

Because you figure, okay, so you have.

A little bit of a stripe, another.

Stripe on the, on the leadership. White belch.

There you go.

So you get a team of people, all different personalities, whatever, egos, different varying levels. Right. So for little, there's going to be all these little problems. No one's perfect, no one's optimal. Right. That's kind of the goal. Even if it's unattainable perfection. Right. That's kind of the goal. Optimal. Then you have a team with however many mistakes they make and then as they train, perform all this stuff, all the little mistakes, mistakes get pointed out. And it's almost like this self, self correcting organism.

We hope it is.

Like, that's why. Yes, you hope it is. So like if you compare it to like a machine learning situation, it does that because it doesn't have an ego, it doesn't take things personal. It's kind of like, let me just solve all the little problems. And then that's why they can what, grow at exponential rates. Right.

The thing that's awesome about that though is that you get, I think what you're talking about is building the culture. Right. So you get, if you, the leaders doing that and you get the team doing that once, once people recognize like, hey, look how much better we are at headcounts now. Even if I resisted that, then you start getting junior leadership who's new, you know, frontline troops, new guys who, you know, they come up with an idea, hey, here's a way we can do this a little better.

They're solving problems that you don't even see.

Yeah, it's a solid.

I was saying that the other day. You know, I was, I was in a training situation the other day and I saw things go bad for this group. It was a military group and, and things were going bad. They were, they, they all dropped the ball. They all Kind of didn't drop the ball, but there was slack there. There was slack. And I was thinking to myself, I wouldn't see a young new guy machine gunner not get in a good position. I would never see that with my eyes because the guy that was immediately senior to him would. Would straighten him out. There would be no slack right there. There'd be no slack. He'd get straightened out. So by the time I show up and I look around and everyone's doing amazingly well, everything's the way it should be. It's not quite optimal, but it's damn close. And why is that? It's because what you just said, Leif. It's because every leader, every individual leader and every person is adjusting and making things. Making adjustments that I'm not even seeing. And why are they doing that? Number one, because they're all humble enough to look that they need to change things. And number two, everyone in the group has their ego in check. So when someone says, hey, shift your field of fire a little bit to the west. The guy doesn't say, why?

Yeah.

No, he goes, I wonder why? Oh, I see. Because he's got another guy over there that's covering that field for. I got it. Got it, boss. That's. That's what. That's it. Now we have, like. Like a machine that's just improving all the time.

Yeah.

Which is what we're going for. And if you lack humility in any. In any one of those levels, you're. You're gonna slow down that machine's progress.

Stop that process fully. Yeah. So it's weird when you look at it from the big picture, you know, and you see, like. Just like how you're saying when you kind of mentally compared your current team with, you know, teams in the past, like, oh, there was talented guys on the other side, on the other teams that I was on, too. But you kind of understand and recognize that one factor is that everyone's kind of humble and is always constantly like, what can I do better right here with my, you know, situation in my own little world here? But everyone's doing that. So it's like this. If you. If you kind of collectively consider this group, they're just boom, boom, boom, self.

Self, and I'll take it one step forward, just. Just one step further. Just so everyone can think about how to implement this in your world. The way you implement it isn't by saying, guys, the headcount was slow. You need to fix it. It's not by saying, hey, the approach to the Target was too loud. You need to be quiet. That's not how you fix the problem. You say, hey guys.

Our headcount is taking too long. I need to come up with a better way to do it. I need to. I need to. I need to figure this out or hey guys, we were too noisy going to the target. I need to make sure that you have the gear that you need. And I need to make sure we all understand how important it is to be quiet. Going to the target. I think I was too loud, right? I think I was too loud. Now everyone says, damn Jocko's. Like he's blaming himself for being too loud. But I'm the one that was back there. My drop, my canteen, it made a bunch of noise in the rocks. That was my fault. I'm gonna tighten myself up. Yeah, as opposed to blaming everyone. And we talk about this all the time. The minute you're blaming everyone, everyone's just, you know, they're looking for excuse. They're blaming you. You don't understand how hard it is to carry that canteen quietly. And I was thirsty because I've been carrying the machine gun and I need to get water right there. I was gonna get dehydrated. They're just making excuses.

And the machine can't self correct.

The machine can't sell.

Can't do. It just stays in the one inefficient, ineffective place mode. Speaking of machines, machines need oil. Not necessarily krill oil, but we need krill oil.

B plus.

If you. If you didn't know already, Jocko has supplements. Good news.

I just took my Jocko krill oil this morning. Good stuff.

Me too. Good. Always. Every day. Don't forget. Can't slack on that. Thanks for bringing me some krill oil in New York too, by the way.

Yeah, that. You still owe me a bottle for that.

Yeah, no problem. I know a guy, his name is Jocko. And the krill oil is called Jocko Super Krill and Joint Warfare, by the way, which is another joint supplement. You know, maintain the physical capabilities of your body. I said don't forget to take it. And don't run out. By the way, I ran out before, but if you're running out, there is a subscription option.

By request.

By request, yeah. You get it? What, every month?

You can get it every month. Every two weeks. This. This was cool though, because the indicator was.

When people order krill oil, Joint warfare, guess what they do? They order more. Yeah, and then they order more. And so then the requests were. Can we just put it on Subscription. So there.

I mean I don't. I just take three of them. Three of each. Boom. But I had never read like how much should I be take? Cuz it's a little bit more like strong. Right? Like this more.

I. I'll tell you what I take. I take three of each in the morning and I take three, three of each at night.

So you're. Yeah, full on. That's good and that's fine. But what is the recommended.

You're also talking to the guy that you know orders the 40oz steak too.

More is better.

Yeah.

After.

I would say, I would say depending on your weight, but I'd say like two and two. Take two of each in the morning, two of each at night. And also you can for a day.

Okay.

Yeah. You can also do this. You can also, you know, see where you're at. Right. Like you know what it feels like when you haven't been taking. You're like, yeah. So then up the dose. That's what I did. And I've been real, real confident with where I'm at.

Yeah. I mean two, three and three for me. Not twice. One, one time. Three and three. Boom. Morning.

I gotta get on subscription though. That's good. I like that option because I run out and, and then, and then it takes, you know, days.

Yeah, that's what sucks. It takes like three days, right? Three days. You're like, how might. Oh, I haven't been taking it. And then you got to get back on it and it takes another couple days.

Swack. Get the subscription if you're into it.

Where can you get that anyways?

Like that. Well, there's more stuff. What? Yeah, yeah. If you want to go get it right now. Originmain.com. that's where you get it. Also@originmain.com also Jocko supplement. It's called discipline. It's a pre mission Cognitive enhancers. Micro dose of caffeine if you're into it. Just like Jocko white tea.

The bottle just sampled. So.

Yeah. See tasty. Which is. I mean. Yeah. I mean. Right again. I know I said it before but it doesn't seem like you're all like focused on taste because you're not focused on looks.

No, seem not at all.

Yeah. But you like to taste. Yeah, yeah.

Here.

And make sure stuff tastes good apparently. But it is good stuff. I take that one every day too.

When do you take it?

Morning now.

Pre pre day life.

Free day life. You know why? The way I see it is like there's no caffeine or there's not like huge amounts of caffeine. So it's like. Okay, if I'm going to microdose.

Yeah. I rip that off from Tim Ferriss microdose. They talk about microdosing LSD and microdosing psycho drugs and whatever.

Sounds cool.

That's not really my thing. But I'll take a little microdose of caffeine. 15 milligrams.

Sure.

But give you a little glimpse into the spirit world.

I don't think you to do it. Well, the LSD might. Yes, for sure.

Yeah.

Yes.

Come and get some of that sometime.

I just figured the like the cognitive enhance enhancing nutrients. I figured that's like a thing. That's not like a drug, right. That's nutrients. So that's. You take it every day. So your brain is just generally more capable. It's just what I figured.

I don't know why he's answering all these good questions. They got the discipline. Maybe the nerve neurons are firing.

I've been on it.

That's why I got those stripes. 19% increase in performance.

Thanks, bro. And the rash guards do that by the way. Also. Anyway, get them@originmain.com also@originmain.com is where you get your ghee. Straight out.

You have origin gi?

I do have an origin GI and they're awesome. I get comments on it all the time. They're great geese. They're super lightweight, but they're super strong. And. And yeah, definitely my favorite ghee. I'm. I'm looking to get another one.

Mine too. And made in America. By the way, Brian emailed me yesterday.

You might think that's the best thing about origin geese, that it just made in America. But then it's not because you get the GI and you realize that. Yeah, it's awesome.

Yeah. Because if it was made in America and then you're like cli.

The other night I was rolling in.

The deaf G.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The interesting thing we obviously we know I'm not a fashion guy, right? Well, I mean clearly I'm not a fashion.

Yeah, we know that.

We could leave can tell you want to see your stories? You can tell stories about my fashion escapades.

1987 tapered jeans, Danner combat boots.

Hey, that's how I roll. But when you put on the def gi, everyone says something. Why is that? It's just because it looks. Because it's not flashy. It just says discipline equals freedom. And then it says get out on the back. Every time I walk by people when I'd walk by, then I'd hear him going, get after it. Like, yeah, yeah.

And you know what? Pete is like that, though. He has, like, an element of fashion in his stuff.

No, I know. I got to put him in check on that. Him and I have been going back and forth a little bit, like, hey, you got to put that in check. You want to. Because he made some.

He made some spats.

Oh, yes.

Which is an approved term now.

Yes. Leaf compression pants.

Compression pants. Tights is what super column. Spandex. But anyways, he made some of that work.

Is that, like, jeggings?

No, that's way too far. They're jeans, but they're like. It's. I know this because my daughter has some, and it says, like, what is it?

Teenage girls, you don't know what jeggings are?

Come on.

They're like leggings slash jeans.

Well, yeah, Pete has more fashion sense because he's got that whole design thing going on. Yeah, like, he's a designer.

Yeah, yeah. He's a creator.

I know you're listening, Pete. You know, you're all designing stuff up there. Me, I'm like, make it black.

Yeah, yeah.

What can we add to it? More black.

And what kind of shape do you want in the waistliner? I don't know about that kind of stuff, but Pete's like, oh, don't worry. I got it.

Yeah. And that's why until he designed the multicolored spats, well, that's just like.

Just taking in a beginner.

I can't even. I can't even. I'm not even. I have to put myself in check here, because I realize that that is beyond my domain of competency right there. That is way beyond my domain of competency. So if you want to get those spats, go for it. But to Pete's credit, guess what they have now.

Black.

Black spats.

There you go.

If you need them, you can get them.

Boom. But even his. Even the other GI's, though, people. Before I got the deaf one, people would be like, oh, that's a nice.

Well, what's really, really interesting is when you see the weave.

Yeah.

The weave is what makes it gorilla. Yeah. But there's, like, this little pattern in the weave, and actually, the first one of the first ones I actually held was years. Life. Because you've. You've had that origin ghee for a long time.

Yeah.

Because you asked me a long time ago, before I was even with origin. You're like, hey, what kind of geese? I said, get a damn origin Geese.

Awesome company. You were telling me about it and.

You know, you went and got one.

I went and bought one. It's good.

And I was like, God damn, this thing is nice. But yeah, there's a pattern. All right, cool. Yeah, we get it. Sorry, what?

I'm just saying, even though you don't care about the fashion, pet will sneak it in there just for like perfect amount of fashion. I gotta watch out for Pete Subtle fashion. It's good. Keep it up, Pete. I think also some rash guards there, all made in America and some other stuff. Check it out. If you like something, get something. Originmain.com is the website also on it.com/chocolate K on it. This is where I get my kettlebells. Kettlebells?

Yeah, kettlebells.

Yeah. So I got the whole set. Primal bells, all that stuff. Also maces and other workout stuff. If you want to. You want to switch it up? You don't do a boring workout anymore or you're bored with your workout. Switch it up on it dot com. Jocko. Check out the workout gear. It's good. Get something. Also, when you buy Extreme Ownership Way the worry kid or any of the books Jocko may or may not review on this podcast. Don't worry, I organized all those books. I made a shirt too, by the way. It's a whole nother story. I'll go into that later. But I organize all the books by episode, by the way. Get them through there. Good way to support. It'll take you to Amazon, get your book, get whatever else you're getting and you know, carry on.

Lawnmower. I noticed that lately. A lot of lawnmowers. People buying lawnmowers. Ready for spring.

Yeah.

Through the Amazon. Click through.

Yeah, I think I. I'd say good way to support. Can you buy a driving lawnmower? Cuz when I think lawnmower, I think.

On Amazon you probably can.

Probably.

Something like this. I bought a leaf blower and I'm not joking.

There you go.

My daughter plays with it.

Rechargeable ones. Can you get an 84 millimeter recoilless rifle? Carl? Gustav?

No, I don't think so.

No, no, you got to go somewhere else.

That is a damn sham.

One of my buddies was asking me the other day, he was going to go shooting and. And he's a. He's a British guy and his name is English Pizza and.

Sure.

And English Pizza. You know, English Pizza. He's like, I'm gonna go shoot.

Do you call him English Pizza?

That's his nickname. English Pizza. P. E, T, A, H. English Pizza. And English pizza was going to go shooting with. With someone. And he says, hey, you know, I'm going to go. He says, hey, I'm going to go shooting. Would you like to come? Maybe we could work on some cover and move. And I was like. I was like. I was like, I can't make it. And then I saw him later and I said, oh, how was the shooting? He said, oh, we didn't get to go, mate.

We couldn't go.

Couldn't go. And I said, oh, that's a bummer. I said, you're gonna like it. He goes, I really want to shoot is like the rpg. And I was like, that's gonna be a little tricky to get. So we can check Amazon for rpg. Yeah, let's get some.

Yeah, Amazon, Yeah. I don't think they provide that kind of stuff, but if they do, hey, whatever. You know, when you buy your book, buy one of those. Cool. Also, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. Stitcher, itunes, Google Play, Spotify, you know Spotify?

I do. There's some more. You know what, There's a bunch of other podcast apps, and I don't even know what their names are. I need to start tweeting the. The locations of those. I gotta figure them all out. Yeah, well, there's a bunch.

Yeah. And they're coming out with new ones. It's like this just. You'd think, what we kind of said before, you'd think, oh, itunes, Right. That's where podcasts are. But podcast is a podcast.

Yeah. Hey, what's interesting, and I haven't seen this factually or I don't know where the number came from. So, like two years ago, 18% of America was listening to podcasts.

18.

18. Like when we started, that's the number I got. I was like, researching. Oh, how many people are listening to it right now? So it's been two years. 48% of America is listening to podcasts. And that right there is explosive growth. That's pretty amazing because it's a great medium.

Yeah. Yeah, it's like kind of like having a converse. Well, I guess it depends on the podcast, but yeah, I agree fully. So, yeah, subscribe if you want. Good way to support. Also YouTube. Subscribe to YouTube if you want. If you're interested in the video version of this podcast, wherever guest Leif Babin. The guest episodes, that's when people watch them. Typically.

Mostly.

Mostly, yeah. Well, I don't want. Yeah, not even really mostly. I'm just saying we see more people watching the episodes with. With guests. I want to see what they look like, apparently. Yeah. Nonetheless, if you're interested in that. And excerpts, if you don't want to necessarily watch the whole podcast, you watch just like, little clips of it or whatever. You want to share them with your friends, whatever, we provide that as well. Also enhanced excerpts. That's what we're calling them now.

Okay.

Some of that, too, anyway. Various video types on there.

And you've been. You. I've seen. You've been a little bit more. You're throwing more punches now.

A little bit more.

Yeah, Let him go more.

Yeah, we're gonna keep that going. So, yeah, there'll be more clips to choose from. You know, you don't listen or watch whatever. Yeah. So, yeah, subscribe. Good way to support. Also, Jocko has a store. It's called Jocko Store. Of course. Jocko store.com. that's where you can get Discipline equals freedom shirts, Victory MMA shirts. Someone Jocko wears every day while we do the podcast and otherwise and, you know, get out. Anyway, there's shirts on those podcast shirts, Jocko gear shirts. Also rash guards, Also hoodies. Also hats.

Did you mention a new shirt? Is there a new shirt?

I mentioned new shirt.

Okay. Is it out? Because I haven't approved or seen anything.

No, you'll approve.

It's unapproved. It's good.

Yeah. Yeah. It's in the limbo right now, but I. I'm very. We're confident.

It's like the patches. He secretly wants you to do it.

Yeah, yeah. No, this one he's gonna open. I think you'll approve because there's no colored shirts.

Okay, good.

Yet.

Approved.

And then, you know, actually it's called Back to the Book. Oh, no. Surprise.

Yeah.

We talked about it before, but.

Before.

But I think it's coming along. There's a few layers on there. And, you know, I'm gonna go ahead and offer it. Offer it up.

Yeah. You can't release it until there's enough layers.

Yes. No. Yeah. Layerless shirts are unapproved.

Who has the most. The shirt that I designed is the most layered shirt. Is that correct?

Yes, I think that's good.

You submitted quite easily there. Yeah, it's true.

The truth. You have that. What do you call it? The gift of truth or what it was it.

I don't know.

You know, when. When they're like, hey, what if the. Our competition is gossiping about us? You have the.

Oh, yeah, the big weapon.

Yeah. The weapon of truth.

The high ground.

Yeah. So you got numbers on your site nonetheless, Jocko store dot com. That's where you can get all the cool stuff if. Check it out. If you want something, get something. Also, psychological warfare. If you don't know what that is. It's an album with tracks. Jocko tracks. When you run into those moments of weakness in your campaign against weakness.

Speaking of which. So I'm getting in my car. You know, I've got thousands of songs on my itunes. I get in my car. You know how I have my Bluetooth on? Didn't realize it, but it just automatically synced up to my trucks. I. I jump on my truck and I didn't realize the radio was kind of a high volume, apparently. I think my kids were screaming in the back seats. I'm playing like, some kid tunes. But I get in there, I get in there and all of a sudden it's like Jocko's voice. I get it. I'm not paying attention. Backing up, and it's like, it's kind of, where does discipline come from? And of all the random, you know, thousands of songs that I have on my itunes, like, that comes up. I was like, what are the odds? And it was actually something I needed to hear at that moment and. And to. To remind me to get back on the path.

So there you go.

That is something that's extremely helpful.

Perfect.

And the. The universe.

The universe aligns. Thank Echo Charles for that. Because Echo Charles originally said to me, like, hey, what do you do here? And I answered him some questions. It was. It was like, when I skip work. Yeah, what do you. He's like, well, how do you not skip workouts? And I was like, I. He's like, bro, we need to record that and put it out so people can listen to it. He's like, and you should answer the rest of them.

You should be like, what?

What. How do you get out of bed? So I was just like, all right, ask me the questions. And that's where it came from. Echo Charles.

Yeah. A little additional thing where, you know, how the kind. I don't know if you've run into this where you're. You're like, I'm confused. Or I don't have the answer for this thing. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna ask Jocko what is. Just what does he think? Right as you're asking him? You're like, oh, I know what he's gonna say already. Right? So this one, he was like. I was like, oh, I know what this guy's gonna say right now he's just gonna say, stop being weak or something like that. So it's more like, I get it. Stop being weak. Okay. But there's a little bit more to that. Like, what do you say? Like, what do you think? Or whatever, you know, I'm like, all right, yeah, we're gonna record that. And these Jocko tracks, they have it for anything. Not just skipping workouts for procrastination, getting up early, all this stuff. So it's kind of like, even if your volume's not turned up, it's kind of like Jocko's actually telling you, like, how to not skip the workout. It's good.

It's encouragement. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I would say it's funny is how come people are always like, oh, you.

Should make a thing of you yelling.

At me to get out of bed.

Yeah.

You know, here's the thing.

That would work, but it would only work, like, a few times. After a while, it's kind of like, oh, you know. Yeah, you know, like, cool.

Shut him up.

Recording of Jocko yelling. But if you're. You know how, like, you're talking, like, you know, so, like, it's kind of like you're explaining. I'm explaining thickly, you know, like, this is this. What's going on? This. Would you kind of think it's.

It's enough a reminder of, like, hey, get back on the path.

There you go. There you go.

But, yeah, good one. Get that one on itunes. Basically anywhere where they sell MP3.

Yeah, yeah, it's available.

Psychological references.

The.

Also, when you're on Amazon, you can get Jock of White Tea. Now, the good thing about. There's some good things and bad things about Jack of White Tea. The bad things are you got to mix it up with hot water. That can take a little extra time. The good things is once you drink about a half a cup of white tea, this is what we're finding now, when you drink about a half a cup of white tea, you are then able to deadlift £8,000. A lot of people were wondering how much you had to drink. And the answer is you can drink a half a cup and you're there. So you can get Jock a white team. And it's also legal, which a lot of people are trying to get it outlawed right now by, you know, the Athletic Commission and the Olympics. They don't want people breaking records and everything. So, yeah, they're trying to just ban it. But get it while you can, right? Get it while you can before it gets banned, before it Gets banned and then you're just done. Also some books, the books that I read on the podcast, for sure. There's also a book called A lot of the books I read in the podcast are for adults. Clearly a lot of them are very. You need a mature audience. But kids also need to know how to get on the path. Am I right? You got kids, you got kids. Kids need to know how to get on the path. How are they gonna get on path? Well, number one, they can get the book way the Warrior Kid and they can get on the path with that. And now there's another book coming out it's way, The Warrior Kid 2 sequel.

The sequel.

Could it be a Jaws 2 fail?

There's always that chance. If I would have listened to my publisher. Yeah, because what do they want to do? They want you to churn out. Hey, you got a little hit going here.

Let's get another one. Let's ride the wave.

Right.

And by the way, let us help you shape, you know, where we think this could go. Oh, so you just want to take it down that path? No, we're not going down that path. Life's hard. Mark's going to face some more struggles and he does. Luckily he's got an uncle. Jake comes and help him out. Weigh the Warrior Kid. Mark's mission. You can pre order it right now. It comes out April 24th is the date that it comes out. You can get that also if you're an adult and you want to get on the path, stay on the path, be on the path, move down the path. You can get a book called Discipline Equals Freedom. Field manual, which Echoes apparently knows all about. Field manuals.

My favorite kind of manual.

Yeah, favorite kind of manuals. This is gonna help you stay on the path. That's what it's gonna do. Not only what you should think about in a section called Thoughts, but also the actions you should take if you want to proceed to get stronger, faster, smarter and all around better. And if you want the audio version, don't look for it on audible because it's not there. This is an album also with tracks and it's available in MP3 format from Amazon Music from Google Play, from other MP3 platforms.

And actually, Leif, why don't you talk a little bit about, I don't know, a couple books we wrote, a little company, we got, maybe a little event that we're doing.

First and foremost, if you want to dive deeper into the leadership principles that we've been talking about and referencing, get extreme ownership. That's we have people ask us like, hey, where did you make mistakes in your career? We wrote a whole book about them. That's what extreme relationships about the mistakes we learn on the battlefield, the things that happen to us, what we learn from them, and then how that principle applies to business in life. So go get that book on Amazon or anywhere that you can buy books. And if you're like me and you're super busy and you don't have a lot of time to read, then you can get the Audible book, the audiobook. It's on Audible. It's on anywhere. And. And get. Get that version.

And we read it, by the way.

We read it. James Earl Jones wasn't available, so apparently this Batman was. We. We. We had to read it. I didn't realize I was the Texas Batman until people are listening to this book.

Yeah.

Yeah, you are.

That's where that was born on social media.

I hear good things about the audio version, though, straight up.

There's little surprises in the audio version that, once again, we didn't listen to our publisher. Our publisher was like, well, that's kind of weird to put that. Well, we. Well, what would you rather hear for gunfire? You know, me going, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Or would you rather hear gunfire? What would you rather hear for an explosion? Leif going, kaboom. Or would you rather have explosion. What would you rather have for the call to prayer? Leif talking about the call to prayer coming. Because it can be pretty eerie in those situations. Or would you rather actually hear it? So there's. What would you call that? Audio theater.

Sure. You make it into that.

Would you call it that?

Yeah, Audio theater.

Okay.

They did a great job with that, with the audiobook. So get that. That's certainly an option as well. And if you have a company or you want to work, work with us. Echelon Front. That's our. That's our company. Echelon Front. And if you're looking to. To implement these leadership programs into your team, learn from us, learn. Learn those same principles that we talk about, then that's what we do at Echelon Front is we. We come out and work with your team. We. And we come out and work with your team and. And get these principles applied, apply it to your particular challenges so that you can lead and win on your battlefield. And that's just that. That what Echelon Front is, it's our company. It's Jocko, it's me, it's Dave Burke, it's JP Danell, guys. That you know, from, from this podcast and a whole team of folks, as Jocko talked about the Tank, where we talk about these leadership problems, we solve those problems and, and we help you lead and win. And that's awesome. We love that. So if you're interested in, in working with us, go to echelonfront.com and of course the Muster, which we talked about. This is the ultimate leadership conference. And, and we've had four of these so far. Every single one of them have sold out. Every single one of us sold out. So don't wait if you were interested in coming. We're only doing two this year. We're only doing two. We had a lot going on for us and we said we're going to do two amazing musters. That's what we're going to focus on. We did three last year, but we're only doing two this year. And that's in Washington, D.C. may 17th and 18th. And that's in San Francisco October 17th and 18th. And THAT'S IT. If you want to, if you want to come and be part of the muster, go to extreme ownership.com and get registered and we'll see you there.

And until the muster, if you want to kind of continue this conversation that we're having right now, you can find us continually conversing on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram.

And on that face.

Leif is at Leif Babbin. Echo is at Echo Charles. And I am at Jocko Willink. Echo Charles. Anything else? No.

Oh, self correcting machine. That's what happens when you start doing the extreme ownership thing. That's the added layer I gathered from today.

Legit. I like it.

Thanks for helping clarify. Always good to see you.

Thanks for having me.

Maybe not always, but.

Leif, any closing thoughts?

Good to be on again. Looking forward to the next time.

I suppose we'll do one more of when we're up at the muster. We'll talk more. Maybe we'll talk more about. Probably talk a little bit about extreme ownership. Maybe we'll talk a little bit more about the new book, which will be done for the most part by then. Awesome. Obviously, thanks for coming on. Thanks to everyone out there, especially those of you who are out there in uniform who have basically said, I am willing to give everything I have for freedom. We're here today because of you. So thank you. Thank you to the police and the law enforcement and the firefighters and the paramedics and the rest of the first responders that do their job every day, every day to make sure that we are safe here at home and everyone else out there that's listening and sharing and supporting this podcast. Thank you. But don't just listen and don't just support and don't just share.

But instead.

Wake up every day with a mission.

Wake up every day with a goal to be a little bit better than you were yesterday and become the self correcting machine.

That's not going to bring you to perfection, but it's going to bring you to a place that's a little bit closer to get out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Leif and Echo and Jocko out.