#55 - Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL, Part I of II: objective, strategy & tactics, leadership, protocols, dealing with death, and applying the many lessons learned from war

Foreign. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia. The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful, top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics@peterattiamd.com.

Hey everybody.

Welcome to this week's episode of the Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast and why instead we've chosen to rely entirely on listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better. I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives. Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this space is overwhelming. I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. 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My guest this week is Jocko, and like Madonna, Sting or Cher, he's one of those rare individuals that only needs to go by one name. For those not familiar with Jocko, he spent 20 years in the SEAL Teams where he was a commander of Seal Team 3's Task Unit Bruiser, I believe, which led the Battle of Ramadi, becoming one of the more decorated special operations units of the Iraq War. Jocko returned from the Iraq War, served as an officer in charge of training seals on the west coast, and ultimately when he stepped down from that role, he co founded Echelon Front, a leadership consulting company. Along the way he's become a New York Times Best selling author on leadership and has also written a number of frankly fantastic kids books which my kids adore. He hosts the Jocko podcast which is an amazing podcast and of all the podcasts I've ever Been on that episode that I did with Jocko is certainly one of my favorites. He's a black belt in jiu jitsu and the co founder of VictoryMMA in San Diego. I met Jocko maybe four years ago through another mutual friend, Kirk Parsley, himself a seal. This podcast was a ton of fun. It also took a while. We sort of lost track of time. And before you knew it, I realized this was going to have to be released over two weeks and not just one. In this episode, Jocko and I cover objectives, strategy, tactics, both in concept, but also using specific examples from his experience. We talk about training versus actual combat. When you should be humble and when you shouldn't. Being wrong as a person and as a leader. Being dealing with loss and the prospect of death. The importance of having protocols in place, what is worth putting energy into and what is not. What SEAL training was actually like. Transitioning from deployments and post military life into civilian life, obeying orders. And then we actually had this total tangent where we talked about US history with respect to various wars from World War I all the way forward. At the end of this episode, we talk a little about decisions and hindsight. So without further delay, please enjoy the first part of my conversation with Jocko. Dude, it is so nice to have you here.

Thanks for having me.

And I have to tell you right up front, when my daughter left this morning, she said, you have to stall as long as possible because I want him to be there when I get home from school.

What time does she get home?

I don't know.

We'll make it happen.

You're sort of like Snuffleupagus to her. Like she knows so much about Snuffleupagus. She sees videos of Snuffleupagus, she listens to Snuffleupagus talk, she reads his books, but she doesn't know if he exists.

He exists, but I don't want to disappoint her. Maybe we should keep the mystery there and I should get out of here.

And I'll be like, oh, Olivia, I'm so sorry.

You just missed me. Yeah. And then you gotta say, he wanted to stay, but he had to go and save the world. So he couldn't stick around.

There was a crisis. Yeah. Big Bird was in trouble and he just had to go.

There you go.

When we had dinner, was that about two, three months ago?

Something like that, yeah.

Which means when I watched you have dinner.

Oh, yeah, that's right, because you were fasting.

That was looking hummus I'd ever Seen.

I'm sure it was. I'm sure it was. You were four days in, three days in.

I was on day five.

Oh, yeah.

Which actually is easier by day five. You're over the hump.

Got it.

Your energy is incredible. You're smoking down the ketones. It's all good. If that dinner were day two, it'd be hard. It would have been more unpleasant. But we got talking about something that we had been talking about for a year, which was there may be few people who can speak to a concept that's near and dear to my heart better than you can, which is this notion of differentiating between an objective strategy and tactics. And I think this came up. It literally came up through something in social media where I had made a point. I don't even recall what the point was, but. So I'll use a different example, but your response was epic. It was sort of like in 140 characters, you just completely embodied what I was trying to say poorly in a treatise. Right. So I'll tell sort of my story about it quickly so that I want you to be able to sort of expand on this. So I met this guy once named Dennis Calabrese, and he really changed the way I thought about this because he has this sort of framework for solving hard problems, which is you have to start with defining your objective, and you have to do that really clearly. Most people actually even miss that step. You then have to actually put a strategy in place. And strategies are frameworks, are scaffoldings upon which you will hang tactics. And he said, most people, if they're lucky enough to form the objective correctly, which they usually aren't, immediately go to tactics without this strategic piece in the middle. So when you think about that, I mean, you lived that, right? I mean, that's sort of anyone doing something senior in the military is intimately familiar with that. Was that something that you learned along the way? Was it something that was specifically taught or modeled?

I think I learned it from a leadership perspective, realizing at some point in my leadership career in the military that if the frontline troops didn't understand things at a little bit higher level than the tactical level, then they couldn't make decisions on their own. And then decentralized command doesn't work, and now we've got a real problem. So one of the things that can happen is, and this is something that I would try and teach the young seals when I ended up in that role, is that a mistake that you make on a tactical level can have a strategic negative impact. So the classic examples of this are. One classic example, I would say, just from the Iraq War, is the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. So you take a bunch of young soldiers, and they're literally 18, 19, 20 years old. You put them in charge of detainee treatment at a holding facility in Abu Ghraib. They're guarding people that they believe to be terrorists or bad guys. And so what do they do with them? They treat them bad. And then you can kind of decipher what that really means. You know, were they torturing anyone? Maybe not really. Were they out of the bounds of how a prisoner should be treated by Americans? Yes, they were. And what is torture? And we could try and discuss that. I think you actually can come up with a decent answer. But they were doing things that they shouldn't have been doing with these prisoners. And some of it, if it leaned up against some kind of torture. Okay. I looked at it as more like things that it was basically like hazing.

God, it's amazing, by the way, to think how long ago that was. Like, it's such a coincidence. So you met Josh earlier today?

Yep.

So Josh was working on me yesterday, and I remembered while I was on the table and he was grinding on me that the Iraq invasion took place on my 30th birthday, because it was March 19, 2003. I remember having dinner that night. Nothing special, Right. And just having dinner on my birthday, but I just remember it was my birthday, and that was the night of the invasion. And I was like, how is it possible that was 16 years ago? Like, I remember that day so clearly. And not just that day, the days that followed. And when I think about how tangentially and irrelevant I am to any of these things, and to think, like, how much more would you remember that?

Right?

How much more can you think back to what happened when the pictures and the videos came out from Abu Ghraib? I mean, it's interesting to think of how everybody's psyche can be sort of seared and scarred by these events.

It can. And certainly those events that took place in Abu Ghraib, where I was going with this is these young kids did these stupid things with these detainees. It was bad. Even worse, they took pictures of them. And then what happened was those pictures got into the hands of Al Qaeda and Al Jazeera, and they put them up and said, hey, Americans are evil. And the pictures looked horrible. And there you go. So it had a huge negative strategic impact and did a lot to fuel the insurgency and make a lot of people that would have otherwise said, oh, you know, the Americans are trying to do their best here. And then they see pictures of Americans torturing these Iraqi citizens because that's what the propaganda is coming out as. So this is a massive strategic negative impact because these frontline soldiers didn't fully understand the strategic situation that they were in. So if they understood that, if they understood, hey, we're trying to make sure that the Iraqi people think that we're good guys, and if we do anything that presents us in a different light, it's going to really have a negative impact. So don't do dumb things. If they had understood that, then perhaps they would have thought a little bit more about what they're doing. So there's a classic example of troops on the front line not understanding the strategy at all. And therefore their tactics are totally off base. Their tactics were beyond off base. Just because of their tactics. They were doing some dumb stuff. But it's the same thing. It's like you're doing dumb things, dumb tactical decisions on the front lines because you don't understand what the strategy is. So that's a classic example nowadays that I still talk about with young seals and young military people. Hey, you've got to make sure that your troops understand what it is you're trying to accomplish. Because if they don't understand what they're trying to accomplish strategically, they're. Tactical decisions can be bad based on that fact of what they're missing.

And the other point you made even prior to that strikes me as even more ubiquitous, which is if you don't understand the strategy and all of a sudden you get separated from central command and you have to call an audible, you have to pivot tactically, you're lost.

That's why decentralized command works, and that's also why centralized command fails. Because oftentimes you are separated. You don't even have to be separated. If you're one of my snipers and you're looking down a street in an overwatch position and you see something, you don't have time to call me and say, hey, jocko, this is what I'm seeing. What do you think I should do? No, you have to understand what your mission is, what the rules of engagement are, what our overall strategic mission is, what risk we're willing to take against that strategic mission. And then you can make a decision, by the way, in a half a second whether you're going to kill someone or not. And so, yeah, you absolutely have to understand the impact of what you're doing. You have to understand the strategic mission, not just because you're going to be separated, but you have decisive moments where you're going to have to figure if you're going to go one way or the other way. And that's based on your understanding of the strategy, not just the tactics.

Yeah, the way I've always thought about it is through a much less crucial lens in the moment, because it's a longer lens, but it's through health, it's through longevity. People want to talk about tactical things all the time. Peter, should I eat this much or should I eat this much? Or should I fast like this? Or should I fast like that? Or is a keto diet better than a Mediterranean diet? Blah, blah, blah. And one. I just don't like talking about that stuff all that much. I guess I'm just bored. But more importantly, I try to discourage that kind of discussion because it's very tactical. And if you ask tactical questions or questions that demand tactical answers, you'll never get the bigger picture. And therefore, when the information changes, which it will, as sure as God made little green apples, sure as Tuesday follows Monday, what we know about nutrition today is going to be far less accurate than what we're going to know about it in 10 years. So instead of pegging yourself to what's the right thing to eat today, peg yourself to the principle of nutritional biochemistry. And then you can sort of evolve over time. And so again, that's not a minute by minute decision the way you're describing it, but in many ways what you're describing is the pinnacle of that thinking because it's going to require split second decision making, which means it almost has to become autonomic. You have to be that wed to the objective and the strategy.

Anytime that you miss out on that again, what you're talking about, like health and nutrition, everybody wants to hear the tactical answer because it makes life easy. It takes the decision out of their hands. So if I'm a sniper and I'm waiting to shoot, and guess what, I'm not sure if I should shoot or not. The easiest thing in the world is just to have Jocko say, hey, if this is exactly what you see, then you take the shot. Or if this is what you see, you don't take the shot. Hey, cool, you're free and clear. You don't have to think. You don't accept any blame. You're just doing what you were told. And so people want that, right? It makes life very easy. If I go, hey, Peter, I want to lose Weight. What should I eat today? What should I eat for my next meal? That's really easy, right? Because they don't have to think about it. But as you just said, in the long run, guess what, you're in an airport, guess what, you're at a hotel. They don't have the food that Peter told you to eat. So now what are you going to do? Well, if you have the strategy, if you understand the strategy, then you can make a good decision and that's going to get you through. Whereas if you're sitting there waiting for the little tactical moment, it doesn't exist. Because how many situations can I describe for that sniper? Can I describe 30 things that he can see? Sure. Can I describe 50 things that he can see? Sure. Can I describe 100 things that he can see? Now we're starting to get to the reality.

And even if you could, is he gonna have like a Tom Brady armband that's got every. I mean, it's impossible.

Yes. And the other thing is combat things are gonna happen that no one, no one thought was going to happen. No one could have predicted this in a million years that this individual is gonna do what they did. One time I was watching isr, so the overhead coverage and I got my troops are out in the field and I'm watch this ISR and we see a vehicle pull up and then the guys get out and they're kind of looking around and all of a sudden the trunk goes open and. Okay, so now we're focusing our eyes on this thing.

And tell me in that moment, what is the range of possibilities you are entertaining when that trunk opens? What is the best scenario you can imagine and what is the worst scenario you can imagine?

What I assume is happening is this is the beginning of some kind of an attack, Right. These people have pulled up and there's.

An RPG in the trunk.

There's an RPG in the trunk.

More likely.

I was thinking mortar because it was pretty typical. These guys would pre stage a spot. They knew the range that they had to fire a mortar. If you know anything about firing mortars, it's a tricky thing.

I know nothing about it.

Yeah, it's a tricky thing. You've got the angle and elevation. It's indirect fire. It's going to go a thousand feet up in the air and it's going to drop down. So you've got to know the range, you've got to calculate the angle that you're going to set the mortar out. You've got to calculate how much explosive you're going to put on the mortar so that it projects as far as you want. So it's a complicated thing. So what these guys would do is kind of pre measure everything and know the, hey, when we pull up our car to this spot, we know how many meters it is. We got our charges ready, we got the angle of the mortar set, so we can do it in 30 seconds, boom, we're out. We set up the mortar, we drop three rounds, we put the mortar back in, and we leave. So that's kind of what I was thinking.

So you are planning for the worst. Is there anything that's crossing your mind that says these dudes are literally on a meditation retreat? I'm using this to be facetious, but, like, they're just here to get their smoke on.

Well, you definitely have to think about that, because in Ramadi, for instance, there was 400,000 civilians living there, and there was probably anywhere between a thousand and five thousand insurgents. Yeah, yeah. It may have been less than that, may have been more than that at certain times, but.

And they blend well.

They blend very well. So my mind isn't thinking, oh, they're open their trunk, that's definitely an attack. And actually, I'll go over another situation where the same thing happened to me before. So this was something that I'm kind of used to. So I'm watching this happen, and the guys, they're kind of mulling around the car. They're looking, and you're thinking, okay, here they are. They're getting ready to set it up. And sure enough, the guy pulls something out of the car and you can't make it. And the other thing that's really hard.

About, by the way, what distance are you at?

I'm in a tactical operations center. I'm two miles away. And this is one thing that makes it hard on the city. When people talk about ISR and you've got coverage overhead, well, just imagine you've got buildings, and as the angle changes, all of a sudden the person disappears behind the building. Right. You just can't see them until the orbit of the platform gets back to where you can see. So there's a little bit of that going on. And by the time the orbit comes back on, boom. Here are the guys. They're pulling something out of the trunk. Oh, what is it? And it's hard to tell what things are. And to make a long story short, they were getting a jack out of their car to jack up their car. They had a flat tire, and they pulled off their tire, and they changed their tire and they left. And meanwhile, my guys got attacked from another position that I wasn't paying attention to. Right. Why wasn't I paying attention to it? Now, is there a chance that these guys were a decoy? Actually, a pretty high probability. Most of the people running around in the city doing things, things like this were generally bad. And when firefights were going on or when there was big movements in the city, most of the civilians knew, okay, the Iraqi soldiers and the Americans are sweeping through this area. Guess what we're going to do? We're going to go in our house and we're going to stay there. That's what we're going to do. We're going to try not to bother them. We're going to stay in our house. So when you see someone doing something, you are definitely more suspect than in a situation where there's people going all over the place anyways. The streets would clear when we would go out or when the enemy was going to attack, the streets would clear and that was the way it was. So to see someone out there doing this, you're definitely suspect. And there's probably a pretty good chance that these guys were doing that specifically to draw attention away from this other element that was attacking. They're good, they know what they're doing. So those are situations that you can't predict. And if people don't understand what the strategic vision is, then they can't make decisions out there.

Another example that I've experienced that is so dwarfed compared to both the stakes and the risks of what you're describing is bow hunting. So I just came back from my first bow hunting trip and game changing experience for me, I mean, when I bought my first bow two years ago, I didn't think I would ever hunt. I specifically went in there to say, look, I just want to shoot targets all day long. And they said, well, you sure you don't want to hunt? Nope, don't want to hunt. Just want to shoot targets. Fast forward a couple years and now I want to go and hunt. And what a learning experience, right? So when you're sitting there shooting targets all day long, you're putting all of your emphasis on precision. Perfect fire, perfect shot, over, over, over again. How far can you be and make that perfect shot. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Then you get in the field. And we were fortunate to be going after one of the hardest pieces of game in North America, the Axis deer. In their terrain, incredibly mountainous. So there are places where you can hunt them flat, but we Were in a place that was staggeringly mountainous. All of a sudden, two things occurred to me within 48 hours. One, it's happening way faster than I've ever prepared for. Meaning when a deer is anywhere within shooting distance and our guide is like, knock. Now put the arrow. Like, knock the air. You know, it's like, but I don't have good footing. Like, I can't see where I am. Like, I don't know how far the animal is. I haven't got my range finders. Like, everything's going wrong. Secondly, the noise that you make, the fumbling around to get in position. The deer's gone. The deer's gone. These things can hear, see and smell at a level that makes us seem like single cell amoeba that are pointless. Like, so now, of course, by the end of the trip, six days into this, we're figuring this out. I'm getting so much better at anticipating what's happening, but it actually made me think in my tracks, how frightening is it for a soldier to train? Which again, your training is better than my training. Meaning the way that a soldier's training for combat is much more comparable to the event than the way I'm training to shoot. But it's like that saying, right? Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. I can't imagine what it's like the first time a patrol is out there and a roadside bomb goes off and someone gets their leg blown off, Right? Like, so now you're seeing this. And to me, that's another example of how when stuff goes really, really, really bad, one, you have to understand, have you been trained enough to automatically do the right thing? And two, do you start making a whole bunch of tactical errors? Because that wasn't a planned reality. I mean, how in the hell do you train someone for that?

Well, thankfully, the training evolved so much even while I was in. So when I first came in the seal teams, we used blank fire for land warfare and we used live fire for CQC close quarters combat. So that means you're going into a building and you're using live fire, which means you and I are going to be a foot away from each other. We're shooting rounds, really in close proximity at targets.

Why would you be using blanks at long range versus well, okay, so we.

Do the same thing. We do live fire in the desert as well. And in the jungle, we do live fire primarily. We would occasionally use blanks, but we used blanks in the land warfare with this old system that the army used. Called miles gear, which was basically a laser tag so system. Right. But it's not that great. That was the problem. It wasn't that great. And so a lot of times it was like, ah, you know what? This really isn't that great. And so we just said, you know what? The most intense thing we can do is train with live fire. So I should have completed that statement, which was we tried using blanks and this miles gear. There's two factors. I shouldn't just blame the miles gear. As seals, we weren't that good at it. We got old equipment, we'd get it from the army, it wouldn't be that good. We didn't really know how to sight it in correctly. And so guess what? We end up with something that's not. Not all that great. So we just kind of focused on live fire. And live fire. Let's face it, that's like, hey, we're going live fire. That's just. The intensity is higher. That's what we do. We're SEALs, we train live fire. And then you go in the kill house and you're training live fire and you're shooting at targets. And it's intense because you know if you screw up in the kill house, you can easily shoot one of your buddies. So it's intense. The problem with it is you're going against paper targets. And there's two things that the enemy will do that will have a massive negative impact on your brain and on the situation. And that is the enemy will shoot back at you and they'll maneuver. Those are the two things that the enemy has. That's what the enemy does. Well, there's two things that a paper target can't do. Shoot back or maneuver. And so guess what? We used to just crush these paper targets. I never got beat by a paper target in my life. And I spent many years in the SEAL teams where we just, just kicked the out of paper targets. And we felt really good about it. Right in the late 90s, we started using something called simunition, which is you use your real gun, but there's a different barrel that you put on the gun. And the barrel that you put on the gun allows the gun to fire paint rounds. Even though you're loading with a magazine, you still have 20 or five rounds.

So it's a blank that's being fired. That's pushing out a paintball.

Yes, basically it's a paintball gun. You still have to do magazine changes. You're still getting the same weight, the same kind of sight. Sight Picture. So it's very similar, I should say. And that had just a huge impact on us tactically because all of a sudden these tactics that we were using where the enemy never maneuvered and never shot back at us, all of a sudden they didn't work. A classic example is we used to stack in a hallway to move through a building. We would all just stack in the hallway and then we'd go down the hallway putting people in the rooms. You take this room on the left, next two guys take the room on the right. Next two guys take the room on the left. So there you go, you got 20 guys in the hallway, and then you move down the hallway and you clear the rooms as you go down the hallway. Well, what we didn't realize, because those paper targets never popped out of the door and shot back at us, as soon as we started using simunition, you are all stacked up in the hallway. So you got 20 guys in the hallway, and somebody way down at the end of the hallway sticks their simunition gun around the corner. They don't even expose themselves at all. And they spray off a magazine of rounds, 25 rounds comes down the hallway, and guess what? Eight guys are hit. And there's this pushback against that. There was actually some pushback against that, which was, that's not realistic. That guy didn't even take a sight picture. That guy didn't expose himself. So it's not realistic. And my thought was, wait a second, it just happened. And Believe me, an AK47 would have been even worse than a simmunition.

That's what I was going to ask you. I mean, is the paintball under or overestimating the potential spray of the round?

Underestimating.

Oh, so then you're right, Right, yes.

And there were some guys that would say it's not realistic. And there were some guys that would say actually what's messed up is our tactics. And so that was kind of the beginning of us putting pressure on each other with more. We call it force on force training. We eventually got a system for our land warfare because the problem with simmunition is it's accurate to like 20 meters, 10 meters, not very accurate. Whereas land warfare, our guys can shoot you at 800 yards, 700 yards, pretty easily. This isn't like a big challenge. Even me, I'm not a sniper, but with my weapon and a scope on there, I'm going to knock you out. You know, at 500, 600, 700 yards, it's going to happen. So the paint doesn't simulate that eventually ended up getting a very good laser tag system for external movement for land warfare. And it had little speakers on the system, little speakers next to your shoulders. So as you were getting shot at, if it wasn't hitting you but it was close to you, it would make noises like there was rounds going over your head on these little speakers. It was so good. When I was running the training, the punishment for getting shot was your buddies had to carry you for 2 km, 3 km in the desert at night, on night vision. You and all your gear.

And let's put that in perspective, your gear weighs because you're in body armor. So what's the total poundage of gear.

Armor, everything pack probably 60 to 100 pounds depending on the position the guy has in a platoon.

So you're easily carrying 280 to 325 pounds easily.

And carrying bodies is much, much harder than it seems. And it's much, much harder than it.

Looks in the movies by the way. It doesn't seem or look at all easy. When I see, I mean again not to keep coming back to this hunting thing, but it's just so fresh in my mind like, like even when we would shoot an 80 pound animal and you would field dress it and then carry it out, I'm like this isn't that heavy but why is this so awkward? Yeah.

And then imagine that that deer isn't dead but it's wounded. It's a lot harder than people think it's going to be. And realistically, oftentimes carrying one person can take four people. If you lay out a litter and this guy weighs 200 pounds and you got his gear on there and now it's £280 and you're going through the desert and by the way, everyone's already carrying 70, 80 pounds anyways. So it's very, very problematic. So as we got more and more engaged in the force on force training, we got better and better and better and more prepared for what combat was really going to be like. Now there are still are discrepancies because one thing that you can't train or what I was going to say about the realism. I would see guys out in the desert because the punishment was you'd get carried. And it's not punishment for you actually it is punishment for you because guess.

What, you feel horrible that your boys.

Are getting and not only that, they're not going to do an effective job. They're going to drop you, you're going to fall, you're going to Lose gear. It's like getting a beat down for two or three hours in the desert. So the punishment was really hard. And so when you'd see, like, a guy starting to get shot at and rounds were getting close to him and he was hearing those snaps on his little speakers on his gear, you would see them dive for cover as if they were really getting shot at. It was kind of crazy to watch that sometimes. That being said, they still knew that they weren't going to die. They weren't going to literally die. So you would still see guys take risks that you think to yourself, would you really take that risk? If that building was getting hit with AK47 rounds were impacting right outside the door, you probably wouldn't do the Medal of Honor run. You'd hesitate. You'd go, okay, what can we do to mitigate this? So there were some times where that becomes a little bit unrealistic on both sides. Both the opposing force that the guys would be going against versus the good guys, the quote, unquote, good guys, because they're all seals.

Do you remember the first time you were in combat and you had that moment of hesitation, which was, this is live rounds. This is all the marbles here. I guess what I'm getting at is, was there a moment that you recall when, if it were training and you couldn't die, you would have done something. But in the situation you were in, your instinct was actually to do something more conservative.

The first time I was in a situation where and I got very, very lucky. The reason that I got lucky was almost as if it was planned. My career in combat slowly escalated. It slowly escalated. It wasn't like, oh, all of a sudden. I mean, my whole first deployment to Iraq was six months long. But the amount of we did a bunch of operations, and we generally had the upper hand almost all the time. So a really good confidence builder. The few times we got ambushed or whatever, we responded really well, felt really good. And so I got to kind of experience that and kind of get it out of my system. But I was going to say, the first time I had a guy, we were doing a convoy. We were going to a location in Baghdad. I had a guy get on our way to where we were going. We started taking rounds. And I actually didn't know it because I didn't know what it was like. And you're in a Humvee and you can't hear. And what I saw was. And it's day or night, it's nighttime. And what I saw was it Looked like somebody was throwing cigarettes out of one of the Humvees ahead of me. Because I'm the number two Humvee, and I think to myself, who's smoking right now? We're on patrol. What is. I see a couple sparks fly, and then I see more sparks, and I'm thinking, wait a second, now I got multiple smokers in the lead Humvee. What's going on here? And then it occurred to me, I was like, oh, idiot, you're getting shot at right now. And then, sure enough, we had a guy that took a round in the head and actually was okay again. The miracle of what bullets do when they actually hit it was probably a ricochet. And it went underneath his skin and then kind of wrapped around the outside of his skull, so it didn't penetrate his skull. So it was clearly. It was a ricochet or something like that.

But that's such an interesting example, right? Like here, someone like me listening to this, you look at a Navy SEAL and you think, man, you guys must know everything that's happening in every moment. Like, you're like cartoon characters, right? But yet in that moment, there's a vulnerability, which is you literally didn't even realize you were being shot for a few minutes. You had to go through the processing of, oh, my God, this is real now. This is actually happening.

And there was a lot of that steep learning curve. And these kids that are coming in now, I call them kids. I don't mean disrespect by that, because the young guys that came in, the seal teams in 2005 and 2003, I mean, I came in in 1991, okay. The first Gulf War was about to go down, and I was excited about it, but it was over really quickly. So there's a whole time period where people were coming in, the SEAL teams, and they. They didn't really have anything.

I didn't realize that. I know we had talked about this years and years ago. I think I had forgotten that you were in the early 90s. I don't know why. I thought it was, like, mid-90s. So, I mean, 10 years before 9, 11.

I didn't shoot my weapon at a bad guy for 13 years of just training and trying to be ready. And I guess to your point, your question was we had trained so much at this point that we all felt pretty good about what was going on.

Now, let's talk about the difference between an enlisted guy who's coming in in 2003 into the army. I mean, he can't have A fraction of the training that you've just described, right?

That is true. That is true. And that was one thing that was a real disparity is like, for instance, we got to Ramadi. The guys that were on the ground in Ramadi, when we got there, they were National Guard unit. And so these guys were part time soldiers and they had been on the ground fighting in Ramadi for 14 months and they had done an unbelievable job and they took some very hard lessons. But it just shows you the professionalism of the military and the dedication of these soldiers. We were in awe of these guys when we got there. Every one of these National Guard units, every one of these guys in these National Guard units had more combat experience than anyone in my whole task unit.

That's a humbling experience. I can't imagine what you're thinking when you roll into that.

I'm humble about it. I'm thinking to myself, what can we learn from these guys? And we did. That's what we did. We said, hey, you guys are the professionals here. What do you think about this mission? What do you think about this area? What do you think about this tactic, this technique? And they would tell us what they thought. And what was kind of cool was a lot of the young soldiers, they would look at us and go, you guys are SEALs, you guys are Navy SEALs. And so they kind of had a little bit of respect for us just because whatever kind of stories they'd heard or whatever, the legendary seals. And for us to go in and say, hey, how do you think we should do this? Or what do you think about this tactic? These young Marines, these young soldiers, they were just awesome guys. And it is very humbling.

What took 14 months? Is this a resource issue? I mean, why were National Guardsmen sitting there for 14 months in one of the most violent parts of the world without a greater support system?

That's the way it is. I mean, this is something that the recruiter's not going to tell the people that join the National Guard or join the Reserves. It's in the fine print that if we're at war and we need you, you're going to get called up and you're going to go. And so that's what happened. That's awesome. These guys were teachers and electricians and plumbers and lawyers and doctors. And one day they get told, hey, you're going to go to Iraq. And you know what they do? They get their gear on and they go to Iraq and they do a hell of a job over there and make just Incredible, incredible sacrifices for the mission. And so, yes, we held those guys in the highest regard and still do think about the guys that were there when we got there, who definitely had less training than us, but, man, they were hardened combat warriors by the time we showed up. And they definitely helped us and kept a lot of us alive because they were able to share with us the way that they operated. And to the credit of my guys, all the guys in my task unit. Task unit, Bruiser. We were listening. We were all ears. We were humble and wanted to learn from these guys who had been fighting for so long there.

Is that a lesson specifically that you talk about? Because so much of the work you do today is working with people who have never held a gun and are never going to hold a gun.

Gun.

Right. They're in a boardroom, they're wearing a suit. Do you see that parallel lesson show up?

In the business world, I always say that humility is the most important attribute or characteristic for a leader to have, and it really applies to everyone. Remind me to talk about the counter to this, because there are situations where humility is not something I need to stress with someone. But, yes, in the business world, in any leadership position, when you're in that position and you don't have humility or you think you know, I already know everything. Think about this. If my task unit, if we showed up in Ramadi and thought we knew everything, these guys were learning lessons. These guys were fighting so hard, they were learning so many lessons, we were all ears because we were humble enough to think to ourselves, hey, guess what? These guys have been fighting for 14 straight months. These guys have been out in this. This road that we're going to go on patrol tonight. This army private, he's gone down that road a hundred times, literally a hundred times. And we're all fired up because we're going on this mission and down this road, and we go to this guy, hey, what should we watch out for? Oh, here's a couple things. Guess what? The enemy likes to set up in these buildings over here. Thank you. We'll hold extra security on them. Guess what? If you do get in a firefight, here's where they're going to try and push you towards. Be careful, because they'll choke this point. Like, these are just common things. And so in the business world, that happens, too. You get someone that's been in the industry. You hear this all the time, right? I've been in this industry for 22 years. I've been in this industry for 27 years. No one's going to tell me what's going to happen with the market. No one's going to tell me me a new methodology of doing something. No one's going to tell me how to run my company. Okay, cool. We'll see how that works out for you. It generally doesn't work out good. Now, I'm not saying that in 22 years you don't have some good knowledge or in 27 years you don't learn some good stuff. You absolutely do. Do you know everything? Are there any times when you should maybe listen to what somebody else has to say or look at the way someone else is running something and maybe think yourself? Oh, that seems like a good idea. I mean, the classic examples that I talk about a lot of is BlackBerry, right? BlackBerry. Was their market share 80%? It was 90%.

Was it that high?

It was crazy.

Someone just told me what the share price on RIM is today and how. I mean, it's a completely different company. Obviously it doesn't exist in the format that it once did. But yes, that was at the height of that market. I mean, that must have been $140 a share company in 07.

Yeah. And who could ever teach them anything? Who could ever explain to someone that, you know what, what you're doing right now might not be the same in a year. Same thing with Blockbuster, right? We're gonna do videos. You're gonna come and you're gonna rent videos from a store. I have to explain that to my kids. My kids are. They can't even comprehend that. What do you mean? You would go somewhere and get a movie from somewhere else. What does that mean? And yet there's arrogance there, right? I mean, tell me Blockbuster didn't have the capital to start streaming movies during that time. They could have easily said, oh, that seems like a pretty decent idea. Let's get in on that game right now. Instead, it was denial. And again, I'm kind of assuming this just looking at the outcome. I don't know the people that ran Blockbuster, but there was had to be some level of denial that some. Oh, what are you gonna do? You're gonna stream movies? My Internet barely works. I can barely stream a one minute video. How are you gonna stream that? Doesn't make any sense. We're gonna keep doing what we're doing. People will keep coming to our stores. Come on a Friday night, you see how crowded my store is? Where are all those people gonna go? They love coming to our store and buying some popcorn and getting a video. So there's arrogance there, there. And so that's why you have to be humble as a leader, so that your mind is open so you can listen to what other people are saying and you can make an honest assessment of whether it's right or not. You can constantly look at yourself and say, you know what? Am I really right? Am I really right? I'm constantly asking myself that, am I really. You know, it's okay. I feel pretty good about it, but I'm not 100%.

There's a great book on this called I'm Going to Screw this up. So the show notes will definitely correct me. I think it's called Being Wrong. And I believe the author is Catherine Schultz. So I could have gotten both of those wrong. That's the beauty of reading this book is you. It teaches you something that I really needed to be taught. So I have a pretty good memory. I would say my memory is better than average, at least when I'm paying attention. So I actually have a bad memory with names and things at a party because I'm generally not paying attention. I don't have like sort of that Bill Clinton like memory of everybody's name. But for little details and things that I deem important, I have pretty accurate memory. This book goes into how often we are wrong and wrong in times when we are convinced we are right. So I read this book and it's riveting. It's sort of on the list of sort of 15, 20 books I've read that I can't freaking stop reading once I'm into it. Like I'm on my bike in the garage. This is pre audible or at least I didn't use audible at the time. I'm literally sweating over this book, flipping the pages. Right, Right. For me that's a. To interrupt the workout to do that is a big deal. But it leaves me with this vulnerability, which is what if Katherine Schultz is right? What if my memory is not as good as I think it is? And I started just putting a tiny bit of humility into statements I was making. And I remember having an argument's too strong a word, but it spirited debate with a friend of mine about something that occurred in the past and could be verified. And so we go into this discussion and I've got my point of view, which is Peter the Great is right because I freaking remember everything. And by the way, the friend that I'm debating is notoriously moronic at remembering stuff. So like the pretest probability is so high that I'm correct and I'm like, yeah, no, no, it's exactly like this. Like, this is exactly what happened. But then I remember. I'm like, you know what? Remember that book you just read? And I go through all the sort of thought process that she brings to it and why we get tripped up and why we are so arrogant and blah, blah, blah. And afterwards, I'm like, I'm actually going to go check if I was right. And sure enough, I was back. Ass. I mean, I couldn't have been more wrong, jocko. I was 100% wrong. I mean, on the one hand, it humbled me. On another hand, it scared me. It made me think, how. How many times have you been so sure of yourself in the last 40 years only to realize you were probably wrong?

Yeah, when this really occurred to me is when I started telling people this statement. It's kind of the opposite statement. I would tell guys that I was teaching, I would say, listen, I don't know everything. But let me tell you something. If I tell you something that I know and I tell you it's 100%, I'm going to guarantee that it's 100% right. Like you're gonna hear me say it so seldomly. But, like, I'd have somebody that I was teaching something, and they maybe would say, well, you know, they'd have their opinion about something. And 95% of the time, 99% of time, I'd say, you know what? Yeah, let's give that a try. Let's see if that tactic work. Let's see if that functions. And then occasionally I'd say, listen, if I'm telling you that I know something 100%, you should listen to me, because I don't play around with that statement. And I don't. You will very seldomly hear me say I know something 100% because it's so rare that it actually happens. And my mind is open because what I think is just what I think right now. And there's definitely other ways to come. So I definitely don't ever box myself into a corner of saying, I'm right and you're wrong, or what I'm saying is 100% right. Unless there are some principles in the world or some tactical things that I know or some leadership things that I know where. I say again, very few, but I'll say this is the truth right here. And there's very few of them.

Let's hear a couple of them. Even a specific example that might be contextually sort of limited.

Well, one of the fundamental Truths of combat is cover and move. It's the number one law of combat that I wrote about in Extreme Ownership and I talk about all the time, but it's just the way it is.

Meaning if you're taking fire, cover and move.

Well, what it really means is you and I have to work together. One of us has to put down cover fire and the other one has to move. If we decide, guess what, you and I are just going to go for it together at the same time, and there's no cover fire. That's wrong. It's just wrong. And what's going to happen is we're both going to die. So what we should do is if you want to get across the street, I'm going to get in a good position, I'm going to lay down cover fire, and then you're going to move while I'm shooting at the bad guys and they can't shoot back, or you're going to put down cover fire and I'm going to move. But if someone says to me, well, what we're going to do is we're just going to run for it. Now, are there situations where it's like, okay, if you said to me, hey, you know what? We're both going to go and we're both going to shoot at the same time, I'd be like, so you're going to cover for yourselves. Kind of fits in there. Okay, we can try it. There's situations where you may have to do that, but that's not the rule we want to follow.

It's different when you say, just because you get away with something doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.

That's true, too.

Which is an example. Right. So you almost would assert that that's almost an axiom. We reserve that term for something that on first principles is immutable or dogmatic. Right. So in biology, there aren't many things that we are so confident in that we say that about, but one of them is that DNA codes for RNA codes for protein. That has just become an axiom of biology. There aren't really ways around that. And of course, on the margins you sort of talk about, like, is a prion sort of an exception to that and maybe blah, blah, blah. But yeah, this is as close to axiomatic as you can get in biology. Or in your case now, was that something that came naturally to you to have that humility? Because it doesn't come naturally to me. I think arrogance and grandiosity are my natural default states. So I have to work staggeringly hard to pause in my tracks and consider the world through another person's lens.

Yeah. So go into combat and you'll get humbled by it. I mean, now this doesn't always work because there's sometimes where, like my first deployment to Iraq, I've felt pretty good about it. Felt like kind of badass, like, hey, we can handle this second deployment to Iraq, to Ramadi, very humbling. Because there's going to be situations where as good as you might think you are, you're not going to be able to control it and things are going to go wrong and it's going to be a nightmare and you're going to be holding. It's like trying to hold on to water. Right? You're trying to hold on to the situation and it's going to humble you.

But I still think that says just as much about you as it does the situation. Because I think there are a lot of people in that situation, Draco, that are going to blame their surroundings. They're not going to be humble by that. When everything goes wrong, they're going to say, it's because of this, it's because of that, it's because of him, it's because of her, it's because of the insurgents. So I still think you're pre wired and preconditioned to be able to fail and say, okay, that's humbling. I think that's an admirable trait. I'm trying to understand if it came, did you come out of the womb with that?

I think I saw great examples of that along the way and realized how if you want to do well, then that's the attitude that you're gonna have. And I had a boss that I worked for who was the most experienced guy that I ever worked for. He was the most tactically savvy guy I'd ever worked for. He was the most experienced guy I had ever worked for, and he was the most humble guy I ever worked for. And all of us in the platoon, he was our platoon commander, all of us in the platoon, we wanted nothing more, nothing more than to make that guy look good, to not let him down. And I felt that I was a young SEAL, I was 21 or 22 years old. And here's this guy who has all this experience, combat experience in the 90s, which not many people had. And we, me, the rest of the guys, we just wanted to make this guy look good and we didn't want to let him down. And it was because he was so humble. That was like the initial opening for my life of thinking to myself, why do I want to follow that guy? And it was a very interesting situation because. Because we had a mutiny against the previous platoon commander. So there was a mutiny. Us young enlisted guys went before our commanding officer and said, we don't want to work for this guy.

How many times does that work?

It doesn't. I mean, that's a mutiny. You know what the punishment for mutiny is?

Death.

It's death.

Yeah. That's treason, basically. Right.

So we had a mutiny in a SEAL platoon in 1990. Whatever. And the guy that we were mutinous against, he was not humble. And I got to see this. This incredible contrast between these two guys. One who was extremely arrogant and inexperienced and arrogant, which is a horrible combination. The other guy who was extremely experienced and super humble. And the contrast between those two guys painted a very clear picture in my mind as a young guy. Okay, what was the difference between these two guys? Why did we all hate this other guy? And why do we all love this one? Well, here's the big difference. This guy thought he knew everything and acted like it. And this guy knew everything and acted like a humble guy that wanted to listen to us and left the biggest imprint on my mind. And that's why humility has always been so important. Now, I told you to remind me about when is humility not important? And I talk about this now. And there is. There's a dichotomy in all these things. That's why I wrote the dichotomy of leadership is because there's a dichotomy in. Can people be too humble? Yes, Absolutely they can. And I went and talked to somebody, some underprivileged kids up in la, a pretty unique group of underprivileged kids who kind of had, let's say, some kind of potential. They were smart kids that had. And they were young, too, between the ages of, I'd say, 8 and 13, something like that. And they'd been kind of selected as kids that had some potential, even though they were in these underprivileged situations. The reason I say that is because when I went into this room and I was going to talk to them about what I've learned, and one of the big things I was going to tell them is that you got to be humble. And I'm looking around this room and every one of these kids in this room, just about every one of them was shoulders folded forward, eyes towards the ground, heads hung low, so they were already broken they were already broken. You know, they were beat because, you know, you can go to the city, you can go to the inner city, and you can meet kids that are not humble at all. They're arrogant. They're super hyper confident. They're overconfident. That's why I had to make this distinction. These weren't those kids.

So this was another example, by the way, tying it back. You made a tactical decision on the front line in real time. You went in there with a plan, but you understood the strategy. What are you trying to do? You're not here to give a talk. That's a tactic.

Yep. And the immediate change was I talked to him about confidence. I didn't talk to him about humility. I said, hey, you put your shoulders back a little bit. Sit up. Look at me. Well, you want to ask me a question? Stand up. And then the question comes like, well, sir, no, hey, talk to me louder. That's what you got to do. Right? You got to instill that confidence in these kids. So there's a balance with all these dichotomy. And can you be too humble? Yes, you absolutely can. Can you be too humble as a leader? Yes, you absolutely can. You can be too humble. Where Peter, you come in and you're barking about something, and I go, well, Peter's probably right, and I'm just going to go with it. Well, no, if I disagree with you, I need to say, hey, Peter, can you explain to me why you want to do it that way? Because I'm not really seeing it. That's not me being arrogant.

Yeah. That's not confrontational. It's very confident in your opposition.

Exactly. And so there are times where people are too humble. Again, that's why we wrote the dichotomy of leadership. Because every trait that a human being can have can be negative and positive. You can take something too far. Any of them. What's the most positive quality you can think of a leader to have?

Poise. Okay. Poise.

Can you be a person that gets so poised and is so elevated above the situation that people are looking at you going, hey, wait a second. This guy's not even absolutely. He's even connected to what we're doing.

He's a robot.

We're down here gridding it out, and Peter's up there, no sweat on his face, and he looks like he doesn't even.

Or even, just a more extreme example, is not showing emotion is generally a good thing. But sometimes it's. People need to know that you hurt, that the leader is also devastated by this finding. When you even look at presidents, I mean, some of the most powerful moments are when presidents show their emotions, which, again, notwithstanding the current one, it's generally quite rare to see a president's emotions.

Yeah, no, it is.

And when you do think about George W. Bush standing at the base of the Twin Towers, think about Barack Obama after, I think it was one of the school shootings. I mean, these are very powerful moments. And it doesn't matter if you agree with the politics, by the way. It doesn't matter if you agree with what's going on and what the implications are. Oh, is this about gun control? No, no, it's not about that in the moment. It's. That person's a human.

Yeah, that's another great example. We talk about this in the dichotomy of leadership. It's like, yeah, if you have no emotions, you're a robot, and people don't follow robots. You won't have any connection with them. So having control over your emotions is one thing, but not having any emotions at all is not going to make you into a good leader. It's just not.

The story you told a second ago, I think is almost going to have to become the litmus test for great leadership, because to hear you tell it made me think about the person that I most thought of in that way, which, actually I spoke about. I spoke about this guy on your podcast, like, four years ago. His name is Chris Sonande. He was the best senior resident I ever had when I was in surgery. And. And it's exactly that thing which is when you have a senior resident that you're in service of, all you wanted to do was make sure 1. You never let them down. Like, you never wanted them to ask you a question and you didn't know the answer or you hadn't done what they asked you to do. But it goes beyond that, and that's the point that you made. They are the interface between the person, the attending, the higher up. And all you wanted, everything you did was through the lens of, will this make Chris look better? Will this make Chris shine more in the eyes of the attending? And that's a rare, rare benchmark. But it's interesting. It's exactly what you described.

I'm sure you also worked for guys that were arrogant jerks that thought they knew everything. And you.

Most people were in between, but there were more extremes at the other end.

You take the extremes at the other end, and now you're actually hoping that they fail. You're Hoping that things fall apart on them. You're praying for it, which is a.

Disaster when you think about it. It's the worst morale imagined.

It's a total disaster. And this is why I always answer that question with humility being the most important characteristic for a leader to have. Because in most situations, the reason that the leader ended up in the position is because they have some level of confidence already. So it's not normal for a leader to end up in leadership position, but they lack confidence and they're overly humble. That's not normal. It does happen occasionally, but it's not normal. The normal case is you've got someone that's an Alpha, you've got someone that's fought their way to get up the through the ranks. You've got someone that was confident enough to be like, hey, I'll take control of this. Hey, I'll run this. People elevate to that position because they're confident, and that's why it tends to be the greater percentage of the time. There's a problem with humility. It's because they lack humility, not because they have too much humility. Occasionally you get a tech company with a startup where you had some really humble guy that kind of figured something out and he started a little company, and all of a sudden he's the CEO and he totally lacks confidence and he's overly humble. He doesn't think he can make any good decisions. That's a different situation. That's a more rare situation. The more common situation is I'm at the top because I deserve to be. I made it here, and that's why everyone should listen to me. And that's why I'm not gonna listen to anyone else. And the minute you're in that situation, you're going in the wrong direction. It needs to get balanced out.

So let's back up for a minute. You finished high school in 90? 91.

89.

89. What did you do right after high school?

Went in the Navy.

You went straight in?

Yep.

And talk to me about that decision. It's 89, right? So the Cold War is over. This is like the most peaceful time in the world. World people are thinking, most peaceful time in the world.

Except for what happened in Panama. So there was the invasion in Panama. Four SEALs were killed on Patilla airfield.

Oh, I thought that was 1990.

No. And it was like December of 1989. And I saw that, and I couldn't believe that a war happened. In my mind, that was just a war, that a war happened And I wasn't in it. And went and talked to the Navy recruiter and Rock and roll.

Did you talk to your parents about it?

I told them afterwards.

What did they say?

My dad said you're not going to like the Navy because you don't like listening to other people and you hate authority. That's what my dad said.

What'd your mom say?

She was happy I had some kind of a job prospect.

You wrestled in high school?

No.

What sports did you play in high school?

Soccer and basketball.

When you were in junior year, were you thinking college? Like, what were. What was going through your mind?

My mom sent me something ten years ago that was like sixth grade, something like that. What do you want to do when you grow up? And I put Marine Corps.

Wow.

Yeah.

I remember you telling me once you weighed like a buck 60 in high school, right?

Yeah, probably.

Maybe you were not a walking wall.

No. When I checked into SEAL training, I was 174 pounds. And then I gained 10 pounds in SEAL training, 11 pounds, because I graduated at 185.

You had already gone to the recruiter before you finished high school or.

Yeah.

Okay, so then you come out of high school and now it's what, 90? And they ship you off where you come to San Diego?

No, I went to Orlando, Florida.

Okay. And tell me what you do. What's the first week like away from home?

Went to boot camp. And the coolest thing about going to Navy boot camp for me was it was a clean slate. Nothing else mattered. They don't care what your high school. They don't care what your grades were. They don't care what sports you played. They didn't care what, how good you were at any sports. They didn't care about anything. What they did care about is could you do what we're telling you to do?

And did you pick the Navy because of the seals in 89?

Yes. Yep. Yep. I liked the water. And I wanted to get out of New England. I look back now and I love New England. And I got my company up in Maine, and it's awesome to go back up there. But as a kid, the small town thing wasn't for me. I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to literally see the world as they say. And so the SEAL teams are Virginia beach and San Diego. And I grew up surfing in Maine. And so I knew that San Diego and Southern California had epic surfing. And I said to myself, well, if I'm going to go in to be a commando, let's work in the water. And get stationed in San Diego, California. That to me, it's hard to comprehend this, I guess, but it'd be like right now saying, hey, I'm going to go and live on Mars. That's how foreign it was to me, to think to myself that I had a pathway where I could actually go out and live in California. I was amazed that that opportunity was there. And so that was definitely a big reason, a big reason to pick the SEAL teams. And I heard that the SEAL teams had the hardest training and I won the hardest training. I also heard that SEALs had a 50% casualty rate, which is probably drawn from the fact that in the D day invasion, the NCDUs, the Navy Combat Demolition Units, they did have a 50%.

This was the precursor. The SEALs have been around since, like 1970.

1963. Yeah, well, 62, 63. So those guys did suffer a 50% casualty. But, you know, whatever pre Internet knowledge I had heard through the rumor mill was, hey, if you're in the SEAL teams, you got a 50% chance that you're going to die.

So why did that appeal to you when you were 18?

I wanted to fight.

Wanted to fight or wanted to die?

Wanted to fight. Wanted to fight wars. Yeah. Didn't want to die, no. But I wanted to fight war. And plus, when you're young, you don't think it's going to be you. You're not the one that's going to die.

I see. So it was. This is the highest stakes thing that I can do.

Yes. Bring it, bring it. And you're fired up for that. And again, you know, it's always important to remember that you don't think it's going to happen to you. You think that you're. I think you and I have talked about this before. Like, I think if I'm on an airplane, on a civilian aircraft, commercial aircraft, and it blows up in the sky, I think that I'm going to be.

The guy that you might be able to do a somersault.

No, I think I'm going to live. I'm going to come down, I'm going to get in a free fall position, I'm going to track to a pool, and I'm going to land in a pool and I'm going to break my leg and it's going to be cool. That's what my mentality is. So that's ignorant and stupid and fine.

But you could also argue that that's necessary.

Yeah, I guess so. But here's the reality. When you're a kid, you think that it's not really going to happen to you. And I guess if you did think it was going to happen to you and you were afraid of it, well, then that would be a problem, right? But you have to. At some point, you're like, okay, you know what? If I die, then I'm dead, and this is what I'm gonna do with my life. And you're over it. I'm not afraid of that. I'm still not afraid of it. I could die, okay? In the battle of Ramadi, the guys were facing. And it's like, if you go out, there's a good chance you're gonna die. There's at least a decent chance. Maybe it's not a good chance there's a chance you're gonna die. We're going to memorial services almost all the time for the soldiers and marines that were out there fighting. And so that's a reality is, guess what? You can die and you can't. In my opinion, if you're afraid of that, you're going to have a real hard time. You're going to have a real hard time doing your job.

Do you think that changes once you have kids?

I know it changes once you have kids, and it doesn't change in the way that you think it might. When I had kids, I was like, okay, cool. Well, at least now if I die, I got kids. I wasn't like, oh, now I want to stay alive more. I thought to myself, okay, I have kids. They'll carry on my genetic pool, and that's cool. And do I wish I could see them? Yes. But they'll know that I did my job and did what I was supposed to do and did what I wanted to do. I loved my job. Best job in the world. Best job in the world.

When did you meet your wife? In this process. I want to come back and go through this story in some detail, but.

I met my wife in 1994.

And at that. Because you could argue, well, your wife is not your lineage, right? She's your partner. Did that change anything in your mind about the willingness to survive?

Like, I wanted to survive more?

Yeah. Did that change? I mean, not that you didn't want to survive prior to that, but did it introduce an element of not wanting to die more?

No, not really.

Going back to something you said a second ago, did you ever see the movie Taking Chance? Do you know the one I'm talking about with Kevin Bacon in it?

No.

It's a very interesting movie. It's a very touching story, and I Believe it's a true story. And if not, it's based on a true story. It's an entire movie about what is involved to bring a Marine home after he died. So the name of the marine in this movie, I believe was his last name was Chance.

Last name was Chance. Now I do remember. I remember hearing about it, but I haven't seen it.

I saw it many years ago, like when it came out, which is 060708 or something like that. And then I saw it again recently, a year ago, and it was just as moving. And I can't imagine what it would be like for you to see that. Having seen. My guess is you've seen each piece of it in. Along the way. Yeah, it's a very powerful movie. It's slow. It's not like this is not high drama. Right. This is just. The drama is the silence. The drama are the pauses. The drama is the humble realization of how many times that happened.

Yeah, I was going to say if it came out in 2002-2006-2007-2008, I mean, there was. That was just. Incredible amount of guys were getting killed. And you're right. And every single one of those guys is an absolute tragedy. Every one of those guys has a family, has a wife, has a mom, has a dad, has brothers and sisters, has dreams, has goals in their life, has things that they want to do, has inherent ideas and knowledge and thoughts and wisdom that is completely and utterly unique to them. And we never get to see that. We never get to see what would have manifested from these kids. And it's. It's awful.

What was the hardest loss you ever saw there personally? Meaning the person that died, you knew them and you couldn't distance yourself from it emotionally.

Well, my guys.

Any one of your guys.

Yeah, yeah.

So how do you do that? I don't understand that. That for most of us in civilian life, when we do encounter that, you lose a parent, you lose a child. I mean, you think of the worst things that you can imagine. You get to. If you choose to completely retreat, like, you don't have to go out and do something in that next moment. Whereas that's quite different from what you're doing. You don't have that luxury of saying, I'm going to spend the next three months in therapy dealing with this.

No, as a matter of fact, you're saying, hey, in 48 hours we're going to go back and put our gear on and lock and load and go do what we're supposed to do. That's what you're saying. And lately I've been talking a bit about the fact that as Americans, we've taken all these different cultures and we've kind of compiled them all together. And in doing that, we've lost normal protocols that other cultures have, right? And one of the protocols that we've kind of lost and mixed up or mismatched is what's the protocol for death, right? In other religions or specific religions or in other cultures, it's like, okay, this person died. Okay, here's the ceremony that we do now. Here's the next thing we do down the line after that, we're going to have this party. Then we're going to get together, then we're going to say these things, then we're going to use these words and we're going to make these motions. Then we're going to do the final thing, and then everyone's going to go back to. Everyone's going to move on. Because that's what we know. That's how it works. And in America, we've put so many of these things together and we've combined them and separated them and lost pieces that. That there is no real immediate, hey, here's the protocol. Cause when bad things happen, you need to follow a protocol, right? You need to have a protocol in place. You should have a protocol in place, right? When your house burns down, your kids have a protocol of where they're gonna go. You have a protocol of what you're gonna do. And boom. That's what happens if there's an accident, right? We work with all kinds of different businesses, but we work with businesses or companies that run a fairly high risk of having something bad happen. You go on a big construction site, people get hurt. You gotta have a protocol for that. This is what we're gonna do. Not just what we're going to do on the job site, but what we're going to do with the family, how we're going to follow that stuff up. So you've got to have protocols in place. And for us, we don't really have these both psychological, spiritual protocols. Now, again, there's some religions that people follow in America, it's like, oh, yeah, this is the protocol. But even those people have been, I don't want to use the word polluted, but your protocol has been polluted. If you're a Catholic or you're a Protestant or you're a Muslim, your ideas have been mixed in with some other ideas along the way. And maybe it's been taking that Protocol a little bit out of your. What it was, and now it's not 100%, and you're not 100% about it, and you don't really know how to follow it because you've never followed it before, and no one else you know has. So what are we going to do? What are we going to do? So that's a big problem. So when we went to Ramadi, we didn't have any protocol. We didn't really even think about the fact, like, what do you do from a operational perspective? You get 16 guys in a platoon and one of them gets killed. That's 1 16th. That's one specialty inside of a platoon.

What do you mean you didn't have a protocol? Meaning outside of the immediate tactics of a person's deceased and the body has to go here, and then there's a whole team that takes over. You're saying you didn't have a plan for how you would all deal with that?

Yes.

To the point of you had never discussed it?

No. Nope.

The 16 of you are going into the most dangerous.

Yeah. And actually, so we're talking two SEAL platoons. We got 40 guys. Did we talk about it? Sure. Just so you know, the military has what's called a CACO procedure that you follow. There's a book you open up, and we had a book that we opened up.

What does CAICO mean or stand for?

Casualty Care Officer, Something like that.

Okay.

And so there's a book that you follow. There's a manual. So, yeah, the protocol did exist. The protocol, the outward protocol of like, hey, this is what you're going to do. This is how the whole SEAL team of, whatever, 200 guys and plus the support people, that's 800 guys. This is what's going to happen. Okay, cool. Everyone follows that protocol a little bit. What happens in the platoon and what happens with your head? What happens with the guy that just lost his best friend? What's the protocol for that? The answer is we don't have one. And so then what do you do? And I'll tell you what I did. I tried to create one. I said, okay, guys, this is what we're gonna do. And my basic protocol was to do what I knew how to do. And this may be wrong. I may be wrong. My protocol is to do what I know how to do, is I know how to work. That's what I know how to do. And I know that letting your mind be idle, letting your mind sit there and think about what just happened to me, that's not a good protocol. The protocol is, here's what we're going to do. We're not going to do anything tonight. We're going to do a service tonight, tomorrow, and the day after that. We're going to say goodbye. And then guess what we're going to do. We're going to get on our gear, we're going to lock and load in weapons, and we're going to go back to work, because that's what our brothers would want us to do in this situation. So, you know, Mark Lee was the first SEAL killed in Iraq. The first SEAL killed in Iraq. Mikey Munser was the second SEAL killed in Iraq. When you're surprised that we hadn't talked about that, who's going to kill us? We've been fighting here for three years. We're good. It's like, maybe not. So we ended up losing Ryan Jobe as well. But each time it's like, okay, here's what we need to figure out. And, you know, I've been discussing now on my podcast, writing a book about protocols, because here's another protocol that people don't have is you just got dumped. You're 21 years old, you're 18 years old, you're 23 years old, you've been with the same girl or with the same guy for six years, three years, two years, they're the love of your life, they dump you. And guys don't have a protocol for that. What do you do? So guess what? If you have a protocol to follow, you open up the book, you figure out what the protocol is, and you execute the protocol. There's all kinds of things. Sick, disease, what's your protocol when you get fired, if you don't have a protocol, what do you do? What do you do? And the answer is, you follow the protocol. So I will likely be writing a book of protocols so that people know what to do when things happen. By the way, you need a protocol for good things, too, right? What's the protocol for? You just got married. That's a great thing, right? That could be a great thing. It can also be a disaster if you don't have a good protocol to follow once you're married, you bought a new house. What's your protocol? What's your protocol? What do we do now? We got this house. What do we do? How do we handle that going forward? So there's all kinds of things that we need protocols for, and we don't have them. And it's not like it's that complex. It's not like I would need to do a year worth of research to figure out what the protocol is. When your girlfriend of two years dumps you, this is not a hard problem to figure out, but when you have no idea what to do, it's a real problem. And I think I heard this recently, and you could probably confirm this, but when people kill themselves, they killed themselves because they got dumped. One of the biggest reasons is they lost their significant other. And I talked about this on my podcast as well. I was going through buds, going through basic seal training, and I talked to my mom and my best friend, who was my best friend from, like, first grade through seventh grade. He ended up going down the wrong path, and he ended up killing himself. And my mom, you know, said, hey, this kid Jeff, he killed himself. And why did he do it in the relationship? And he's young, and he doesn't have a protocol to follow, and you don't have a protocol to follow. What do you do?

I think the point on suicide, that's really tragic. So I don't want to quote stats because I just don't know them, but directionally, oftentimes when someone kills themselves, it's due to an acute issue.

Oh, for sure.

In other words.

Oh, I get you.

Yeah. When you reflect on that for a moment, it's very upsetting because, yeah, the example could be, I just lost my job and the shame of not being able to do X, Y and Z, or I just got dumped, or I'm in an acute phase of depression. Very acute. This isn't like I've been sitting in my room for three years with a razor blade just grazing over my wrist, and then I finally work up the nerve to do it. No, that's far less likely and far less often, this scenario. And so actually, what you're saying makes a ton of sense, because I would argue that where protocols are most important are in acute moments. And that's why you want a protocol.

Yes. So you don't have to think about what to do. Because another thing that's good is when you have problems, when you're caught up in something, psychologically, one of the best things you can do is do something right. Take some kind of action that moves you forward. What you don't want to do is stay stagnant and dwell on what's happening. You want to say, okay, this horrible thing happened. Let me get out the book and follow the protocol, because that's going to move me in some direction and it's going to start to get me to the point where I can move past this, whereas staying here, stagnant. It's not a good protocol.

I was just about to say this is going to be a long book, my friend, and you are prolific. I mean, your discipline. Maybe a couple times ago when we were playing patty cakes, I was just blown away at the discipline with your writing. Because writing's hard. There's just no way to put it. I can't say this in any easier way. It's the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. And I'm constantly amazed at the quality of stuff that you can put out whilst doing so many other things. So it's hard enough to write if you're a writer. If your job is writing, all you.

Have to do is write. That's hard. That would be a luxury.

It's a luxury, but it's still hard. Yeah, but if writing is your night, weekend job, which that's what it is for you, that's what it is for many people that we know. That's what it's sort of becoming for me. It's really difficult. This will be a long book. There's a lot here.

There is, but I'm actually looking at it right now as a pretty. Keeping it pretty narrow, keeping it on.

The big things, like 10 scenarios kind of thing, maybe 20.

Also, this is interesting. There's protocols for what to do when you don't know what to do. Right? There's protocols.

That's the protocol.

The reason that I know this is because, again, when I was running SEAL training, I couldn't put a guy in every scenario that they were going to be in. Just like we already talked about, I couldn't put you in every scenario that you're going to see. There's going to be some scenarios that you can't predict and I can't predict.

This is the strategy. Protocol. The protocol for what to do when you don't know what to do. It's come back to the strategy and the objective it is.

So tactically, what do you do if you don't know what to do? Part of it is definitely going back to the strategy. But tactically, what does that mean? What do you do? Okay, so we're getting shot at. We're in this situation. What do I need to do? Here's the protocol that you follow, and there is a protocol you can follow there. Like, take a step back, look around, make sure you assess everything that's happening. Think about what your possibilities are. What decisions could you make right now? And what would the General outcomes of those decisions be, if you can follow that and then say, okay, take an iterative step towards what you think is the best decision. Not a giant step because you don't even know what's going on.

Yeah. Maybe even a reversible step.

Yeah, I guess that's what I mean by an iterative, a smaller iterative step. That's not a full commitment because you're not ready to, to commit because you don't even know what's happening. But we think it's this direction. So that's what I'm going to do. It's a very simple protocol. I'm going to take a step back, I'm going to assess everything that I see. I'm going to think about what my possible maneuvers that I can make are. I'm going to think about the outcomes. Then I'm going to take a small, what you call it a hesitant step.

Yeah, just a non committed step.

A non committed step that I can somewhat move in the right direction. That right there, if you know that's the protocol when you don't know what's happening, that's a great protocol. That's a fantastic protocol. And that's going to cover a lot of bases because guess what? Even though we Write to cover 20 scenarios or 20 protocols of bad things that can happen, good things that can happen, it's not going to cover them all. There's going to be things that you don't expect.

There's sort of a parallel here between what you're describing and what Jordan Peterson has written about in 12 rules. And I don't know Jordan, but I know you know him pretty well. Have you guys talked about this? Because just listening to this, I see this significant parallel.

We haven't talked about this specific thing because I've only truly started talking about it in the last six months. You know, it came up on my podcast and it actually came up on the podcast. I had discussed it before in terms of people dying. Right. I've discussed that before. And then basically there's two podcasts that I did where I covered two protocols. One of them was someone died. A father had written in and said, my wife and I lost our kid. I don't know what to do. And when someone asks you that question, the sad thing is is I actually do know what to do because I've dealt with it a lot and I know what I've done. I know what I figured out to do. I didn't know it at first, but I figured it out over time. Like this is what you actually do. Here's the protocol that I'm recommending to you. Do these things. Do these things. And that's going to get you. And the other thing I gave them was an understanding of what you're going to feel. Because what's going to happen is you're going to get hit with a tidal wave that you are going to think is going to consume you forever. That's what it's going to feel like. And what you don't realize, especially when you first get hit with a tidal wave, is that tidal wave is going to eventually subside a little bit. A little bit. And what happens is people feel guilty about that.

That.

Because they say all of a sudden, oh, wait, for a split second, I wasn't thinking about this person that I lost. I'm a bad person. It's like, no, that's actually. You're not a bad person. You're starting to move, right? And that's okay. And eventually, these waves of pain, the period of these waves is going to separate more and more, and the strength of the waves is going to subside. The other thing that's scary about it is when you lose someone and you have that kind of heavy sorrow, sometimes for the first time in your life, you can't control your sorrow. Like, you'll be sitting there and you'll look at something and it'll remind you of someone and you'll start crying. You'll break down, and you can't control it, which is scary for people. It's very scary to have that happen. And they think, this is the way it's going to be from now on. And what I try to explain to people is like, no, that's not what it's going to be like from now on. This is what it's like right now. But those waves of sorrow are going to diminish over time. And that's not bad. That's not bad. It's good, actually. It's good. And you should look, when the sorrow diminishes, when the wave is a little bit weaker, you should be like, okay, cool. I'm starting to process this. I'm starting to get through it. I'm starting to accept the situation I'm in. And then the final thing that I told this particular individual was like, okay, when you get to a point, then what you do is you're going to write a letter to your child, and you're going to explain to them how much they meant to you, how much you love them, how much you cherish the time you were together and how you are going to move forward and you're going to live a beautiful life, and you're never going to stop thinking about them. But you're going to move. You're going to do incredible things with your life to honor them, and then you're going to take that to where they're buried and you're going to give it to them. You're going to read it to them, and then you're going to walk away. You're going to move on because you have to. Because otherwise, what are you doing? You're burdening. You're burdening this soul with your own sorrow. You're ruining your life on account of them. They don't want that. They don't want that. They want you to move on. They want you to be happy. So go and move on and be happy. So that was one protocol. And the other protocol was like, okay, when you break up with someone, what are you gonna do? And if you have a good protocol to follow and you have a good way to think about that, then it's gonna be very positive for you. I think the big connection I made there is explaining to people that when someone dumps you, the main thing you have to consider to get through that is when you get dumped, you have to recognize that the person that dumped you is not the person that you thought they were. So if my girlfriend dumps me, I have her in this elevated position. She's a freaking angel, right? She's an angel, but she dumped me. She's not an angel. The person that dumped me, the person that I missed, the person that I thought I was going to spend, that person doesn't exist.

Exist.

It's not that person for sure, because that person wouldn't have dumped you. So you have to get through that part. And there's a bunch of other things to do from a protocol perspective when you get dumped. But I think that's the key fact. The key fact. You have to recognize that the person that you thought was your everything doesn't exist. That's a hard reality to face, but it's a better reality than the person that I was. My forever person doesn't want me forever. That's a worse reality to face, and it's also not the reality.

And there's probably even another side to that. Going back to what you said earlier, which is we could also take the view of. I'm probably not completely without fault here. There's almost inevitably something I can learn about this that I can do better next time.

Yeah, for sure. There's no doubt about it. And I think that's something to consider more when you're in the relationship. When you're in the relationship and things are not going the way you want them to, most likely you're doing something wrong. Now, I can tell you right now, a good relationship will have challenges, right? So if all you're doing is submitting constantly to your partner, that's not engaging for them. So that attitude of like, well, I've done something wrong. What can I fix? I've done something wrong. What can I fix? I've done something wrong. What can I fix? The reality is, okay, it's not, hey, I've done something wrong. It's, hey, the ownership that I'm taking is, I have feelings for this person that I shouldn't actually have. They're actually unrealistic feelings. So I'm not necessarily going to be looking at, hey, there's a problem in relationship. It's my fault, and I need to change the way I am to strengthen this relationship. If I'm going out with a girl and things aren't right, I take ownership by saying, hey, you know what? Maybe I've done a bad job selecting this situation. Now, once you're married and you have kids, guess what? You got to take ownership of some problems because you're in there. You're in there and you want to make it work. And something as stupid as what I'd say in the other day is doing some kind of a Q and A in an event or something. And it's like, hey, if your wife makes bad sandwiches, or. No, I was saying if you're. If your wife didn't wake up in time to make sandwiches for the kids, and you could say, like, hey, you didn't make sandwiches for the kids. Your immediate reaction, that is not going to be good from her. You know, I've been up all night. I was this, I was that. You need to, why don't you make the sandwiches? And you're already in a bad situation. Whereas if you wake up and say, hey, I noticed you didn't get to make the sandwiches, is there anything I can do to help? Maybe it'd be better if I made the sandwiches in the morning. And that's gonna move your relationship in the right direction for sure. So get some.

My $0.02 on relationship advice. And I wish I kept it, but in high school, college, medical school, I actually physically had these pieces of paper that I kept with me that were two lists. So each time you went through a relationship and it could be a really meaningful one or it could be one that turned out not to be very meaningful. But I always felt like there were two things I learned from these relationships and they fed these two lists. The first list was things that I now believe are absolutely essential in the person I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. And then the second list was things that I under no circumstance am ever willing to tolerate in a person. And every relationship should be able to add at least one thing to those lists. And by the way, the best relationships will add to both, both of those lists. And it's hard in the moment to think about that sometimes. You can only think about that in the months that follow or beyond. I wish I still had those things because I remember some of them.

Protocol checklist for relationships.

It would be good. I wish I still had it. And I don't know. Luckily my kids, I say, luckily my kids are still young enough that we haven't had to have those discussions yet. These will be things that we talk about at some point. And I don't know, that's a whole other world, frankly, that I don't want to think about, which is because it's one thing when your heart's broken. It's another thing when you. I imagine for parents listening to this, it must be much worse when your child's heart is broken.

I got a lot of experiences in this in the SEAL teams because you always had guys that were in relationship. One of your friends, one of your bros in platoon is in a relationship with a train wreck, legitimately a train wreck. And it's so clear, it's so obvious, you're looking at him and there's not one single way in any, any possible situation, any possible thing that you can say that's going to get them out of the scenario they're going in. And it's awful. So this is what you see with your kids, right? You see your kids. And then the other thing that happens with kids, and it happens a lot, is everything is so important. Things that you know from your 47 year old self or your 27 year old self, you're like, oh, this is literally no factor at all ever in the world. And you are broken about it. This is also a good little sanity check to put on yourself, you know, and like how often are you upset or you're. This is something that I don't know when I figured out, but bad things happen to me. I'm like, okay, this is just no factor. I'm not going to waste one little bit of energy about what's going on right now because this is going to be fine and this doesn't matter. But believe me, I've had conversations with especially my older daughters because I think, well, for me, my daughters are a little bit more. They will care more like my son. Oh really? Whatever. Like move past stuff, just no factor, just that mentality. And although in each of my daughters is particular in their own way, they can move past some things, other things maybe not. But you're looking at them going, this will have no bearing. I remember telling my daughter, I remember saying, hey, the girls that I went out with in high school, I can't even remember them. They don't even exist. And of course, when I was 15 years old and I had the girlfriend, she was the whole world. She was the whole world. Haven't even thought about her. I haven't thought about her in 30 years. Zero factor. And that's where you're at right now. I know that this situation seems like it's the whole world, whether it's school, whether it's grades, whether it's some boy and you think it's a big deal, it literally means nothing. But here's the deal. I could say that over and over and over again, just like I could say it to a young seal that's going out with a girl that is a disaster. And they're not going to listen to you because they can't. They get trapped in that heart shaped box and it's. You can't use logic. It doesn't work very seldom.

Just hearing you say that. I'm reflecting on all of these things that anyone listening to this can imagine, right? Which is all of these things that we thought mattered so much. And then of course they don't. One of my favorite TED talks, arguably still my favorite TED Talk, it was maybe 2010, 2011. Rick Elias R I C We'll link to it. E L I A S very short talk, seven or eight minutes. And he was one of the passengers on the US Air flight that landed in the Hudson. Listen, actually just 10 years ago, that was January of 2009, was that flight and his TED Talk. And Rick has now become a good friend and I actually can't wait to have him on the podcast at some point. His TED talk is so much for me, like the David Foster Wallace commencement speech. This is water. Which are just things I listen to so often because they're such stark reminders. And one of the things that he talks about is having this gift of knowing you're going to die in a minute. And I've had the luxury of not only getting to know Rick closely, to be able to speak about that in much more detail than he can talk about in a seven minute TED talk. But I also went on to meet another guy who I've since introduced Rick and this other guy who was in a very similar situation. He was in a helicopter crash and it turned out he had about a minute until impact. He survived. One other person survived, Everybody else was. Was torn into pieces. Like, I mean, he was trapped under shrapnel and metal, looking at dead people all around him that all died in the helicopter crash. And independently, they both describe it the exact same way, which is one time slows down to a degree you can't imagine taking a detour for a moment. People who have survived the jump off the Golden Gate Bridge all say the same thing. That's about a 2.9 to 3.1 second fall, 220ft until you hit what will turn out to be concrete when you hit the water. The Golden Gate below the bridge. Every one of those survivor accounts that I've read says the same thing. It's the longest three seconds of your life. I mean, feels like minutes, right? And so similarly, both Rick and Dan, this other guy, are talking about that minute that you're just waiting to die. It's like takes forever. Second thing they both said independently, not scary, because Dan hadn't even. And didn't even know who Rick was until I introduced them, even though Rick had already given this talk. Now, for me, that's hard to imagine. I think for you, that's not hard to imagine. I feel like you understand what that would mean for me. I don't know. I think that would be really scary. But I think the part that they also both talked about really resonates with me, which is how sad it is. Like you just don't want it to end. You're sort of like, I'm not ready for this to be the last moment. There's something else I want to do. There's one more hug I want to give. There's one more person I want to see or, you know, these things. But both of these guys have this incredible gift, which I think to some extent you've also captured through seeing things that our sanitized world doesn't show us, which is you very quickly start to realize what's worth putting energy into and what's not. And that's one of these things that Rick talks about is when you basically die and then miraculously don't and you get a gift, which is you get a do over in life, you really start to think about. He describes it very eloquently, which is just like, all the time I wasted on all the things that don't matter. And yeah, this just fits into that category, right? It's negative energy, it's sad energy. It's all of these things. And I still, I do it every day, Jocko. I mean, just a week ago, someone said something on Twitter, which why I'm even looking at Twitter and reading comments, like, I need a smack in the head for that. But I don't often, but sometimes I do do. And sure enough, it's Twitter, right? Like, it's literally the world's worst neighborhood. It easily stayed within me for like three hours just thinking about, why would somebody say that? Like, you know, blah, blah, blah, like, and it's again, it's not like pure negative energy. It's not like I want to kill that person. No, no, it's just like, why would they say that? Like, how can they not understand this? What do they think?

Blah, blah, blah.

And then you look back and you, like, like you wasted three hours. Yeah, you were doing something else, but you weren't doing it to the level you could have been doing it. Right? You were distracted. You pride yourself in never having a phone at the dinner table. Okay, great, give yourself a pat on the back. But how many times are you sitting at the dinner table and your mind is somewhere else at some email that some patient sent you that was snippy and they were rude and blah, blah, blah, and it's like, dude, you're wasting time. So, I mean, can you come up with a protocol for that? Because to me, that is the problem of civilization is like, we have lost track of what problems really are.

Well, I can tell you one protocol is go overseas and have your friends and see a bunch of guys sacrifice their lives and come home and then realize that you talk about these guys, how they realized they were given this gift. Like, that's how I feel every single day.

I can only imagine.

And, and I think many of the guys that serve in the military and women that serve in the military that went overseas and spent that time over there, Like I said, hey, maybe it's not a good chance you're going to get killed, but you got to face the fact that, yeah, it's going to take some luck to get through this. And you realize life is a gift without question. Without question. It's a gift, I think, also something that I talk about a lot and I suppose there's some big philosophical kind of realm behind it because I hear people talk about it, but just having the ability to detach from what's going on and look at things from the outside. And this is something that I specifically know for a fact that I started doing when I was in the SEAL teams. I know why I started doing it. I understood the benefit that it gave me, but I started applying that to basically everything that happened, happens to me, is oftentimes I just am detached from what's going on. So I can see that, oh, this doesn't matter. This thing right here doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to me. These things are not important. And from a leadership perspective, I talk about the same thing. Because good leaders, they realize what's important and what's not. And a bad leader gets wound up about something that doesn't matter, that just doesn't matter. And it's really hard to watch because just like your teenage daughter doesn't realize that this thing doesn't matter, you get someone that's a leader and they're mad. They're mad about this guy disobeyed me and he didn't do the thing that I told him to do. And you're thinking to yourself, this does not matter. And so you tell them, this doesn't matter. You know what they say, But. But it, you know, but you don't see. No, it's like, no, I'm telling you this doesn't matter. I talked about that on my podcast. When you get good at Jiu Jitsu, you realize that there's some things that don't matter. Like, it doesn't matter. Someone's grabbing your hand, your arm here, that doesn't matter. What matters is what you're doing over here with your hips. That's what matters. And so the more advanced you get Jiu Jitsu, the more you realize what's important and what matters and what doesn't matter. And so it's the same thing with life. The better you get at life, the more you're able to detach from inside your own just storm, emotion filled, ego filled, crazy brain. The more you can get out of that thing and you can take a step back and look at what's actually occurring, the better decisions you're going to be able to make. Again, I'm not saying you should be devoid of emotions, and I'm certainly not devoid of emotions, but I know that if I'm going to make a decision. I want to take a step back from those emotions. I want to take a step back from that chaos and mayhem because. So you can actually see what's important and what's not. Because you're 100% right. When you're going out on an operation and you're going into an area where there's been. There's been 20 guys killed in the last two months from big IEDs that blew up, by the way, you have no control over that.

Okay?

You do your best. You study the intel. You do mine clearance. You try and take the routes that have been cleared. You do all those things, great, that's fine. It doesn't matter. You can still get blown up and you can still die. That's the way it is. So you say to yourself, okay, you accept that. And now when you come home, after you do that, for an extended period of time, you come home and you're like, I'm actually this little thing over here. Doesn't really matter. I'm going to be all right.

I mean, the IEDs are. I can't imagine that, because I don't know why. It just strikes me as by far the thing I would be most afraid of if I were in the situation of those soldiers. Because as you said, I don't know what the hell you do about it. You could do everything right. Not that you can always do everything right, but it's different from saying, well, no, look, if I'm in a theater of combat, that I can be more defensive, I can take this posture, I can take less risk. Well, like ied, and especially, as you said, in areas where they seemed completely endemic. I mean, they were as ubiquitous as sand.

Yeah. What do you do then? Well, the thing that's interesting that you're saying is that would worry you the most.

Yeah. Paradoxically, the thing I have the least control over, I would spend the most time wasting time thinking about.

And you wouldn't.

Well, hopefully, I would have been working for you, and you would have beat that out of me.

It would have been like, okay, there's nothing we can do about that. Well, actually, there is. There's some things we can do. There's some things we can do to mitigate the risk, and we're going to do those things. And once we've mitigated the risk to the best of our ability, now we're going to worry about the things we can't control, and we're going to focus on the things we can't control. And that's what we're going to do to get through this. Because you do not want to get stuck like that.

No. And my guess is you saw people who couldn't get out of that way. I mean, there must have been guys that were paralyzed by that fear.

There definitely are. That's one thing that I. I don't want to say this as a rule, but it makes me nervous when people are nervous. Right. When you're nervous, you're going to hesitate. When you're nervous, you're thinking about the wrong things. So it made me nervous. When guys were nervous. I didn't like it. I liked when guys were confident, they weren't scared. That's the guy that's going to do something aggressive that's going to keep everyone alive because, oh, we're getting shot at. I'm going to go attack that person. As opposed to, oh, we're getting shot at. I'm going to hide. Because when you're hiding and you're not shooting, guess what the enemy's doing. They're maneuvering on you. They're going to kill you. So I think about that to this day. Some situations happening to me, I don't hide from it. I'm going to go after it. I'm going to get aggressive. Like, I'm going to default aggressive. That's going to be my mode because to sit back and allow and wait things to happen to you. The more you do that, the more defensive you are, the more defensive your mindset is, the worst things are going to turn out.

Let's go back to training. Because I've never really heard the full story of how you make this progression. So when you show up as an enlisted kid in the Navy, it's like you and a billion other kids, right? How many of you are actually thinking, I'm going to go to buds? Is that the next step? Like after you do some basic period of time in the Navy?

I have no idea what the number of people that join the Navy to be in the SEAL teams is, but you end up with a bunch of people that go to basic SEAL training and a bunch of them don't make it.

So how long were you in Orlando before you came out to San Diego?

8 week Navy Boot camp. Navy boot camp is pretty straightforward. What you're learning in the Navy, you're in some kind of an industrial job, right? That's what you're doing. That's what the regular Navy does. They're running engines, they're maintaining weapons. Weapons. They're working on the ship, that's what you're doing. You're doing some kind of a mechanical. Generally that's what the Navy is. Right. It's a bunch of ships. The ships are big machines with engines. Oh, you might be working on aircraft, guess what? Or you're flying an aircraft or you're navigating the ship. Right. So everything is, is a technical.

And so you have pilots in the Navy that are distinct from Marines, which also have pilots. Correct.

The Navy has pilots. The Air Force have pilots. The Marine Corps have pilots. In the army, everyone has pilots. I think I want to say the Navy has more aircraft than the Air Force does. I might be wrong about that, but it's very similar. And the army might. Probably has more aircraft than both because they have helicopters and they have a 10. So there's. Every service kind of has their own thing. And just like the army has boats, right? The army has boats. The Marine Corps has some kind of boats as well. So, yeah, everyone's got a little bit of everything. But what I'm saying is the Navy is pretty, pretty technical.

Yeah, there's less hand to hand combat in the Navy than the others, presumably.

Oh, no doubt about that. And that's one thing that's a disadvantage for the SEAL teams. The disadvantage for the SEAL teams is you don't have the basic infantry because you go through army or Marine Corps boot camp, you're getting basic infantry skills, whereas the Navy doesn't give you basic infantry skills.

Now, are there guys that go from being in the Marines to the seals?

There are. You have to get out, you have to transfer, you have to go into the Navy. But that's. It happens.

Oh, so when you enlist as a Marine, you're not enlisting in the Navy.

First you're in the Marine Corps.

You're directly in the Marine Corps.

Yep.

Okay, so eight weeks in, eight weeks out, you now go straight to buds.

Yeah. And then you go to buds. Well, and this is one of those things where what they do right now is you go from boot camp, you go to, I think it's, it's like a prep course where you go for two months in Chicago and you basically run, swim and get in good shape to go to buds.

Okay, now you were already in pretty good shape showing up, I'm guessing. Did you know what you were going to have to do and did you train to do that? But back when you were in New.

England, we had no idea. So for instance, if I thought, well, I know we're gonna do a lot of pull ups so I'm gonna do a lot of pull ups. What was a lot of pull ups to me when I was 18 years old? A lot of pull ups was like five sets of 12. Right. That's what you're gonna do. That seemed like a good workout now. I mean, I do hundreds and hundreds of pull ups when I do pull ups now. Hundreds and hundreds. 500 pull ups. Right. That's a normal workout, but I didn't know that. So you go to BUDS and you don't know it. Just same thing with push. Like you're gonna do so many push ups. So, no, I wasn't ready.

You weren't ready for buds.

The kids now are much more prepared because they know more about what's gonna happen. There's training programs. You can watch the whole damn. You can watch all of buds. I didn't know anything about buds.

So BUDS is basic underwater demolition, SEAL training.

Yeah.

And how many weeks is it?

The basic part is 26 weeks. So it's six months.

And what is the process or what is the attrition rate over that 26 weeks? Is it mostly in the beginning?

Yeah, it's mostly in the beginning, yeah. 70 or 80% attrition rate.

And is the Hell week very early in that?

It actually changes around. When I went through, it was like the fifth week, I think, and it's somewhere around there. Maybe it's the fourth week, maybe it's the sixth week, but it's somewhere around there. They give you a month or so to get ready, and then you go through Hell Week. And.

And Hell Week. Is that the greatest period of attrition?

It is the biggest period of attrition, yeah.

So let's talk about what Hell Week is.

You do a bunch of working out.

For five days, and the conditions are pretty tough. I mean, you're in San Diego. The water ain't warm. Yeah.

The water's cold. You don't sleep, and you work out a bunch. The thing is, man, people make SEAL training into this mythical thing, and it's really not.

But you've told me stories. I remember you telling me about a guy who was in your class, who was like, the top water polo player coming out of ucla. You couldn't create a better aquatic machine, a better specimen than someone who can keep their hands out of water, maneuver and propel themselves. Like, I am as good a swimmer as the average schmo out there. I can't do that very well. So how does this guy not pass buds?

He didn't want to be there, apparently.

So that's the part I'm interested in.

Right.

It's like the mental fortitude that is required to suffer.

Yeah, but there's knuckleheads that make it through, I'm telling you. I mean, I've had a couple of my buddies reach out to me and say, you said buds is easy. It's not. And they're right. It's not easy. And I had as hard of time as anyone. I made it through one class, which means I didn't get rolled back. But what does that mean when I went through? If you failed, there's three phases that you'd go through. And you know what, don't quote me on this stuff. It's like kind of what I remember, but in first phase.

So basically there's two things going on. One, they're waiting for you to quit. Yes. But two, there's metrics you must hit during the workout.

So run, swim, obstacle course. And then they have these other kind of evolutions that are just gonna crush you. So like underwater knot tying, you go down to 15ft, they've got a little cord down there, you tie a knot on it, they give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down, you retie it and then you go up, you get a breath, you come down, you tie another one. This is the kind of thing where it's like, it doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but a bunch of people fail. Underwater knot tying, life saving, same thing. You're going to rescue a SEAL instructor from quote, unquote, drowning, and this person's.

Doing everything to drown you, they're going to drown you.

So that's one pool competency, which is where you're learning scuba and they're bringing you down there and they're ripping your mask off and they're pulling your regulator out and they're just going to. They're basically going to. Again, they're going to make you as uncomfortable as they possibly can in the water and you're either going to bolt to the surface, in which case you fail, or you're going to do the wrong procedures, in which case you fail. So they got these kind of things that you're constantly doing.

There was also some crazy thing you told me about that. Like in the water, you had to do something like a pretty long breath hold with a pretty significant task. It was beyond the knot tying.

Well, there's a 50 meter underwater swim which is not that big of a deal.

Without fins or with fins.

That's. Without fins. Jeez, that's Hard. I guarantee you could do that. You're a swimmer. So anyways, there's those and then these timed evolutions that you have to do. Run, swim and obstacle course. So to make a long story short for me, none of those were easy. I was not a good runner, I was not a good swimmer.

What was the run criteria? Roughly?

Those I remember because those haven't changed, but there's a caveat to them. So the run first phase, four miles, soft sand boots, 32 minutes. Second phase, 30 minutes, third phase, 28 minutes.

So meaning you had to do three runs and clear those times successively.

They were weekly.

Okay.

And. And you had to hit those times. And if you missed those times, you failed.

So the last one's 28 minutes. So that's a seven minute mile.

Seven minute mile. Which is a joke, right?

Well, it's a joke on pavement, but it's not a joke in sand.

Here's the caveat. The caveat is you're in sand, you're in boots. You, the night before did 1,000, literally 1,008 count bodybuilders, which is like a burpee with another movement in there. You slept for three hours, you're on the beach, it's cold, and the run that's supposed to be 4 miles is actually 4.42 miles or whatever. You have no idea.

But.

So it's not as easy as it sounds.

It doesn't sound easy.

It crushes plenty of people. Now, if you ran track in high school, it's not going to be hard for you. If you swam in high school, the swims are going to be easy for you. If you wrestled, you're probably going to do pretty good on the obstacle course. So there's some advantages you can have. For me, it was all hard. I wasn't great at running, I wasn't great at swimming and I failed to run. I failed to run because I decided I was going to pace myself. And by the way, you're not allowed to wear a watch. And so I wasn't wearing a watch. I paced myself. I said, oh, you know, I'm gonna save a little energy. So I went out and was coming to the finish line and the guy started pointing to the. You can go over there and take a knee. He's pointing to the ocean, which means you failed. And so I'm seeing him like, damn it. But from then on, I just had to run as hard as I possibly could because you have no idea how long long it's going to be. You have no idea what your Time is. So I would just go out from then on.

And you don't run together. You're staggered in the start.

This is like on your market. Set, go.

Everybody.

Yeah, everyone. Every man for himself. And so, yeah, some people pass, some people failed. That's the one that I failed. So I failed to swim as well. And. Same thing. And actually, this one, I was swimming with a guy who wasn't the best swimmer. And this wasn't a funny story. I swim with a guy who is not a great swimmer. And there's something called guiding, which means you're looking at the shore and you're keeping yourself going in a straight line.

By the way, what are you wearing when you swim in the ocean?

What we used to wear was crappy, useless wetsuit tops with a beavertail bottom that let water flow through them. It was almost pointless. Nowadays they wear a little bit nicer of a shorty wetsuit. So when you guide, you're looking, you're keeping the distance, keeping the distance. You're going in the right direction. So myself and my swim buddy, we failed to swim. And so now we're all lined up with all the other people that fail failed to swim, and we have to go and explain what happened. And my swim buddy, he says, what went wrong with you guys? And I said something like, didn't swim hard enough, right? Which is the right answer. My swim buddy says, willink doesn't know how to guide, meaning it was my fault. And I was kind of taken aback because I didn't expect it. And the instructors were like, okay, fine. They split us up and put us with other swim buddies, and I passed the next one, and this guy failed it again.

But this all happened in one week because you said a lot of people have to repeat buds, right?

There's a lot of people that get rolled back, which means you got hurt or you failed. So when I went through. And again, this is to the best of my recollection, because here's the thing, man. SEAL training is a little tiny fraction of your career. No one freaking cares about it. We never sit around in the studio telling stories and talk about it like it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. No one cares about buds. Here's the deal with buds. You work out a bunch for six months. That's the deal. You compare buds to being in a convoy getting ready to roll out in the city of Ramadi or getting ready to patrol out of one of the Ford operating bases there. The mentality is not even close.

It doesn't compare Does BUDS accomplish what it sounds like is one of the most important or two things that seem the most important? One, making sure that the soldier is. Is physically prepared at a certain level. And two, and perhaps more importantly, making sure that the mental fortitude is at a level as well.

I'd say it does a decent job. You get, like, probably a 90% solution on those physically ready. Like, yeah, 90% of the guys come out of there and they're pretty good to go. Once they get to a team, 90% of the guys, they get out of there and they're pretty good to go. As far as, like, hey, we're not going to give up. But you still end up with guys in the SEAL teams that are totally weak and totally mentally pathetic. And this is the way it is every organization. You can't perfectly screen anything. Right. I mean, it just doesn't work.

And I'm guessing that BUDS is not a predictor of your success as a seal. In other words, BUDS has almost zero.

Prediction of what someone's going to be like as a seal. Because you can be a great athlete.

Right. It doesn't test leadership, for example.

It doesn't really test teamwork to a high level. Sure, there's teamwork things that you have to do, but you can play the game to get through the training, and then you can show up at a team and be a complete, complete idiot and look out for yourself, and then you're not a good team member.

Does it test intelligence?

Barely.

Yeah. So you've got intelligence, intuition, leadership. There are lots of things that are necessary to succeed as a seal.

Yeah, BUDS is pretty. As far as all that stuff goes. Yeah. If you took guys and said, okay, this guy did great in buds, what are the chances that he's a great seal?

It's a random number generator. It's a coin toss.

Yeah, it's pretty much a coin toss. Those guys that go through buds, that are studs, and they're just horrible seals. They're just horrible seals and no one wants them.

So we don't hear about these seals. We sort of think, well, if you're a seals or if you're a Ranger or if you're Delta, like if you're elite of the elite, by definition, it's a meritocracy. Isn't everybody perfect?

Everybody's awesome. That's the funny thing is everyone thinks, oh, if you were in the SEAL teams, then you're a great leader. If you're in the SEAL teams, then you're got incredible teamwork and everyone Thinks that. But no, it's not true at all.

All.

I'm a perfect example because people think, oh, jock was super strong or jock was super athlete. I'm not a super strong, and I'm not a super athlete by any stretch. I'm kind of, like, average. I'm kind of, like low average, you know? And do I work out a lot? Sure, I work out a lot, but I couldn't win a damn weightlifting competition in any situation. Just not that. So I'm a good example of the fact that people get a mythical idea that every SEAL is a great leader or every. Every SEAL is a great athlete, or every seal was incredible mental fortitude.

When did you get out? 11, 20, 10. God, it's hard to believe it's been that long.

It is. It is.

Oh, my God. Time does go faster the older we get. Yes.

Yes, it does indeed.

What was the hardest transition for you to getting out? Your kids were young.

Pretty young. Yeah.

What was it like? Were there moments when you're at a stoplight and. And it occurs to you like, no one's actually trying to kill you?

That's coming home from deployment. When you come home from deployment. That part is a very clear one. Especially my first deployment, we were in vehicles all the time, and the IED threat was high, and you were getting used to it. And we were doing convoys in Baghdad, and it was like, okay, cool. These people, we don't want to let them in our convoy. And you're driving really aggressive, so there's a little bit of that. But once I came home, I was from my last deployment was doing work, and you get rid of those feelings after a little. We had a little. When we came home from Ramadi, we had a little. I'd call it a little decompression time, where it wasn't formal, but we were going hard. We were celebrating life. I'll put it that way. We were happy to be home. We were mourning the fact that we lost guys, and we were a little bit. I know I personally was going. I was just going. Living hard. We'll say that. Living hard.

Was it hard for your wife to Sort of. I guess it's hard for me to put myself in her shoes, or your shoes, for that matter, but more so in hers. To think I've kind of been holding down the fort here, and I'm really glad you're home, but I'm confused as to why you're doing this. Or was she totally understanding of, my.

Wife is a saint. My wife is a saint. And first of all, when I was gone, my wife was raising our three kids at the time. She was holding down the fort. She was giving me zero concerns, like I was overseas. And as far as I knew, everything was fine. Everything was perfect. No water heater was broken, no car was broken down, no kid was sick, no diapers were being changed. Everything was just handled. That's what was going on. And then my wife was going to visit my guys that were wounded in the hospital. My wife was going to my guys funerals, and she was doing that. And by the way, when you've got families of seals that are going to the funerals of guys from the task unit, every single one of those wives knows that there's just a coin toss, that that's not my husband, that that's not my son, that's not everybody. They feel that. Right. So basically, when you're going to. To bury one of your spouse's teammates, there's no way. You can't think that. What are the chances that this is my husband?

And it never occurred to me until you just said that. But you're not there. No, I never really thought about that. Yeah, the funerals are the families without the soldiers.

Well, there's seals there that go, that.

Are back, but many of the families are going without their spouse.

Yeah. So everyone from Tasking to Bruiser, every one of those spouses, Miles's kids, they're all going, and they're seeing one of their dad's friends get buried.

So your kids. Was your oldest even old enough to have gone?

My kids did not go. No, my kids did not go when they got older. And there would be, especially my son. I would take my son. If a SEAL gets killed, we'll go to the memorial service because I want him to see what it's about. You know what I mean? You need to understand what this is, because everyone thinks, like I said, when you're a kid, you think, oh, no, this will never happen to me.

Me.

You know, but you got to realize, no, this is real. This is what happens. And that's part of life, that's part of war. And all the glory that people talk about a war, they don't show this part of it. So. But my wife was doing all that. And so when I came home, man, she was just happy I was home more than anything else. And my wife has always been very emotionally independent. She also knew that I'm not normal. And she made that pretty clear to me maybe a year or so ago when I was explaining something I was Trying to explain the way someone was behaving. And I was kind of saying, well, I would never do that. And she's like, you're not normal. And she didn't say it.

That's not a derogatory statement.

It's the first time where she said. Because she had said it before, but she said it in a way that was. I was thinking about it. She goes, the thing is, you're not normal. And I thought about it. I thought, you know what? She's right. I'm not normal. And that's fine. But as far as me coming home, she was awesome. And she. When I said that, she basically supported me with what I was doing. Here's an example. I'm a total jerk when it comes to Jiu Jitsu. And we were married. I was in. In a platoon, I was in a task unit. And when I'd come home from work at 7 o' clock at night, I would grab my bag and I'd go train Jiu Jitsu. And then I'd get up the next morning at 5 o' clock in the morning, and I'd go to work and she wouldn't see me all day. And. And I'd come home and seven o' clock the next day, and I'd pick up my bag and I'd go to Jiu Jitsu. And I would say, of the hundreds and hundreds of times that I did that, there was probably three times that I can remember where she was actually looking at me with a look of disappointment, like, are you serious right now? You've been gone for three weeks, you've been working every night until seven o', clock, and you're gonna actually go and train Jiu Jitsu instead of hanging out with your kids for an hour before they go to sleep? Sleep. And three times out of hundreds and hundreds of times is pretty legitimate. But she realized that I'm not normal and that she realized that her objections to that were not worth it. Because now, all of a sudden, I'm not doing something that really is important to me. Not that my family's not important to me, but this is my release. This is my thing. So she cleared me hot almost every single time, other than maybe three.

But it's funny, I remember we were talking maybe last year at some point, and you said something that really resonated with me because each passing day, I feel it more and more. And it was. We were talking about doing something, going somewhere, and you were like, you know, there is nothing I like doing more than hanging out with My family, like, when it's me and my wife and my daughters and my son and we're at home, like, there's really nothing else I want to do and nowhere else I want to go. And it's sort of funny. Like, I've been reflecting on that, and I was like, you know, I kind of feel the same way. Like, I just never like going anywhere anymore. I really most enjoy being home.

Yeah.

And that's a relatively recent phenomenon for me. I don't know. Was that an evolution for you?

Well, two things. Number one, I'm doing jiu jitsu, right. I'm working out every day. If there's waves, I'm surfing. I play guitar a lot when my family's sitting around, whether they want to hear me or not. But those are some things, so I definitely want to do those things. And to be quite frank, if there was a war going on and I was still active duty, then I'd want to be going doing that. And this is another crazy thing about my wife is, like, I used to tell my wife, think about this. This is hard. And I caught some flack. I said this on the podcast, but here's the reality of the situation. I told my wife, I was like, the teams is my number one priority. The SEAL teams is my priority in my life. You are up there. But that's my number one priority. And that's a crazy thing to say, right? That's just a crazy thing to say. And one of the things that I didn't really make clear on the podcast when I talked about it is one of the reasons that it's not just it is my priority. It has to be my priority. It has to be my priority because here's the deal. I'm going to go overseas. I'm going to be in a combat situation. The best thing that I can do for our family is be completely and utterly as prepared as I possibly can so that when things happen, I'm ready so I can come home. And by the way, it's not just me. I got 40 guys that are counting on me to make the right decisions at the right time, so they come home, too. So when I say that the SEAL teams is my priority, the reason is because that's my tactical priority right now, so that strategically, in the long run, I'll be here in the future, and so will my. My friends. So I had to clarify that a little bit because that's a pretty harsh statement to make.

Do you think that most of your peers felt the same way?

Most. I Don't know, but a lot of them. A lot of them, man, I'm telling you, when you're in a SEAL platoon, when you're a young guy in a SEAL platoon, there's nothing else in the world. The rest of the world doesn't exist, or it exists only for you to go and get into.

But thinking about what you said a moment ago, right. Which was. Was if tomorrow there was a need for you to go back and serve under the same conditions. So not in some nice green zone where you're there in part, but you're actually back out there in front of the IDs, you would do it again?

Yeah. Today, yes.

You have three kids, you have a wife.

I have four kids.

I mean, you've got different responsibilities than you had when you were 25. And yet you would be willing to go out there and make that sacrifice. And I have to tell you, I wouldn't.

Understood.

I've never really thought about it until now. But the way you frame it that way, like, I would not be willing to do it. I think I'm too selfish. I would not do that. And I wonder how many of your peers today, meaning the guys that you were with in your 20s, in your 30s, who now are in the situation you are in, which is they've been civilians for a decade, they have families. Do you have a sense of how many of them could actually go back and put their lives at that type of risk?

A decent amount. Wow. Yeah. A decent amount. Yeah. There's something. You use the word selfish to describe yourself and I mean, that's obviously pretty harsh. But to go in the opposite direction. There's something incredibly unselfish about the guys that I used to work with and the guys that still serve right now. And it's not a completely. I don't want to make everyone out to be these kind of angelic people because there's definitely some self gratification in it. Like you love doing this. And so it's not 100%, just you're an angel, but there's guys that are willing to sacrifice. I mean, that's what the US military is filled with. The US military is filled with men and women that are willing to set aside everything that they have, including their life, because they believe in a higher ideal. And yeah, that's a huge, huge, incredible thing. That's why it's so incredible to have been part of that in any way. It's incredible.

Do you think part of it is just if you believe the idea that there's no such thing as true altruism. Right. So even when we act at our most altruistic, it's because we are getting something from that. We are getting a sense of connectiveness. We are getting a sense of joy, a sense of pride, a sense of. Of relational connectivity. So what you're describing is like this higher calling that says, look. I mean, there is no higher honor. Do you think that there's just something missing from the world today versus the world in the 1940s, post World War II? You know, David Brooks has written about this quite a bit in a book that he wrote several years ago called the Road to Character, where he talks about the difference between eulogy, virtues and resume virtues. And he talks a lot about a big turning point, which was sort of post World War II. During the Second World War, you didn't just have to be a soldier to understand sacrifice. Right. The women who weren't going to war were killing themselves here, making ammunition. People were. Everyone in the country knew what a sacrifice was. Now, the highest sacrifice was paid by the young men on the front lines, but everybody was connected to that. Vietnam, which would be the next major conflict, I guess Korea. But then Vietnam, it became disconnected. And I would argue that what you went through was even more disconnected. So part of the argument of Brooks is we lost something when we lost that connection. I don't think he articulates it that way, but the gist of it was many good things happened from the progression of society through the 60s and 70s and beyond. But one of the things we sort of lost was this sense of something greater than ourselves. I guess. I wonder if that's part of what appeals to you still is why would you risk today, potentially, again, as a thought experiment, not seeing your family again? There must be something really, really amazing to take that risk. And that amazing thing is, is it this sense of a purpose that goes so far beyond anything you can contemplate as a civilian?

Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is. Because it's very clear to me. Yeah. When you ask this question, it's a little bit, as I listen to you, the fact that you miss it, you're like, no, I wouldn't do that. Not even, like, well, you know, I get it. And we could press you further. Like, if it was an existential threat to you and your family, you'd be on the front line. So there's the difference. I guess there's the connection part that you're talking about. And I guess for me, I still have a connection in my blood to the Guys that I worked with from the guys that raised me in the SEAL teams, that if there was something that they needed me, your thought is, well, yes, I'll be there.

I think part of it is I just feel like my world is shrinking as I get older and I feel less and less important. I think I'm converging on a point where I think. Think technically, the only thing that matters is my family. And they're the only ones who I can really influence in a way that matters, and therefore my life is not that important. Outside of that, I don't think I have enough belief that I matter or can make a difference outside of that. That sounds like such a nihilist view, which is not how I. I don't want to take that to an extreme, or I can just. Just imagine how many people are going to write and say, oh, you're an idiot for saying that. But again, I'll try not to read it right, But I just think I have a shrinking view of my place in the universe. I think I feel less and less significant as time passes on, and that's not a bad thing for someone with my appetite for grandiosity to feel less and less significant. But it converges to, yeah, you know what? In the end, like, outside of your kids, your wife, your closest, closest friends, family, you're sort of irrelevant. If you fell off the planet tomorrow, it wouldn't matter. The Earth wouldn't even slow one degree on its axis. And so more of that effort feels like those are the only people who matter, and those are the ones who I want to make sure I'm doing the best for. So I guess that's where it comes from. But it also says that I probably can't relate to even when I watch a movie like Saving Private Ryan, which, I mean, I'm sure everybody has seen that. But if you listen to this and you haven't seen it, you must watch it. That opening scene is riveting on many levels. But one of the levels, because I actually went to Normandy, by total coincidence, I was there in December of 99, and I happened to go to Normandy on December 6th of 99, which, if you're like me and you like to do the math, you realize is 666 months to the day from the D day inv invasion. June 6th of 44 or 45.

Sorry.

So in December, which is not a nice time in the year to be in Northern France, the weather was horrible, but it actually looked just like the photos of that day, which is why that Invasion was so challenging because you didn't get what you expected in June. One of the gifts of doing that was there was not another soul at the cemetery. So you could see 10,000 crosses virtually under, unobstructed. Also, when I climbed down the cliffs at Omaha, it was, like, awful. It was like the weather was awful. And so I got to look up and see, or at least try to imagine, what it would have looked like to be a lamb in a slaughterhouse. And what occurred to me was what you said a second ago, which was, how many of those kids died? How quickly did they die? And how easy is it to forget? Right? How many dreams were never realized? And that was another thing that, I mean, just made me cry was looking at the dates on the crosses, because even by that point, I was in my late 20s or something, and I realized that virtually all of them were younger than me. And I was like, wait, this guy never got to go to school. This guy never got to go to college. This guy never got married. And I don't know. On the one hand, I think they died with more purpose than I'll probably ever have. But more than that, I was riveted by. But did that person's actual life matter more dead or alive? In other words, would we have lost the war if John Smith hadn't died on that day? These are silly arguments that are circular.

But the answer to that question is no. We wouldn't have lost the war if John Smith didn't die on that day. But if we didn't have hundreds and hundreds of thousands, millions of John Smiths that were ready to go and make the ultimate sacrifice, darkness would have prevailed.

Changing gears for a. How do you think about warfare in that evolution that we just talked about? Right. World War II, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

Don't forget Korea.

I have forgotten Korea twice now.

They call it the forgotten war. Yeah, there's a reason. Yeah, there's a reason. And Korea was a complete nightmare in many respects. And all wars are hell. And Korea's right up there. Right up there.

Korea was 50.

Yeah. What, 51, 55, something like that.

How much of an evolution took place between World War II and Korea? From a military, strategic, and tactical point?

Pretty similar, except for the fact that towards the end of Korea, it turned into almost like a trench warfare scenario.

Like almost a World War I type scenario. Over the demilitarized zone.

Yep. They were in trenches. I mean, not even kind of. They were in trenches, and they're fighting over, could we push their trench back 100 yards so that kind of happened. But we had at least learned like, okay, you know what, we're in their trench and they're in their trench. It's kind of hold what we got here for a little while instead of which World War I. To me, World War I is the ultimate just nightmare of a war.

Remind me the casualties because they always blow my mind. And this is like I talk about how good my memory is. This is so something I constantly forget because it's so upsetting.

World War I, Battle of the Somme, 60,000 casualties in the first 24 hours.

To put that in perspective, what was the casualty on the American side from 911 till today?

Approximately, I don't know, less than 10,000.

And 10,000 was the D Day invasion within four days.

Yeah. So the casualties are in. Those wars were completely insane. Completely insane. And World War I was a special kind of nightmare. The thing that I hate about World War I is it didn't really matter how good you were with tactics, with leadership, with your skill level, you were going to get told at 0600 when you hear the bugle or you hear the whistle, you're going to go over the top and you're going to charge. And by the way, at 5:45 another battalion went and you're going to hear them get mowed down. They're not going to survive. And 10 minutes later another battalion is going to go, they're not going to survive. And then at 6 o' clock you're going to go and you're not going to survive and there's nothing you can do about it. That is the most sickening war. I hate that war. I hate all wars. But that one I especially hate because of that and because there's some horrible things in World War I. If you were an able bodied man in England and for whatever reason you weren't in a uniform or you weren't going into service, so let's say you were the sole support for their family and they wouldn't have to go. There was a thing that they would, the women would give someone a white flower, which means you're a coward. So to think about that, that's the way the society was. And by the way, and then you were going to go and you were going to sit in a trench until you got told to attack and you were going to die. And the fact that these soldiers on both sides did this day after day, month after month, year after year, it's incredible. It's incredible that no senior leader called bullshit on it. No one said you Know what? This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I'm not going to send my 700 man battalion to die tomorrow. Not going to do it. You can shoot me. And by the way, they did, did a podcast about that shot at dawn. They took British soldiers that had serious PTSD and traumatic brain injuries that couldn't fight anymore, refused to fight, bring them out in the morning and shoot him. And they were all pardoned. But it's just crazy. It's crazy to even think about. So that's why I get very, I always talk a lot about the fact that, that people think in the military you just follow orders. Like, oh, you just follow orders. That's what you're going to do. It's like, no, actually, no. If something's not a good plan, then I'm not going to obey it. I'm not going to obey orders just for the sake of obeying orders. That's a tough one too.

And that's a great business lesson, right?

That's not cut and dry either. Because if you tell me to do something that's going to get my platoon killed and I say, Peter or sir, Captain Peter, I'm not going to do it. And you go, okay, cool, you're fired. And here's one of my other guys who's a yes man, and he's going to take them and he's going to do what I told him to do. So would I have been better to have said, you know what, Captain, I totally disagree with what you're doing. Here's another plan. Here's an alternate. No, do it my way. I really disagree. I think it's going to get people hurt. I don't care, do it my way. Am I better off at that point saying, okay, I'll got it, and I go, and I mitigate risks to the best of my ability. Or am I better off holding the line and saying, you know what, you can find someone else else. And maybe that's enough to wake you up and say, wait a second, Jocko's been a great guy. He's been really supportive. Now he's telling me, no, I must be wrong. There's that fine line.

Well, it's going to depend heavily on both of those things, right? It's a function of your track record and it's a function of that person's humility.

For sure, for sure. But as the young leader, that's a decision I'm going to have to make, which is going to be better for me, which is going to be Better for my troops. More importantly, which is going to be better for my troops? Is it going to be better for me to hold the line and say, boss, this is such a bad plan that I am not willing to execute it. You can fire me, you can send me to court martial, whatever, but this is a horrible plan and it's going to get people killed. And then you go, fine, you're getting court martialed. And by the way, here's Joe and he's going to do what I told him to do.

When I read Krakauer's book, Where Men Win Glory, it's a powerful book on so many levels. But a big part of it again is the complete and utter futility of the mission that cost Pat Tillman his life. Like, I couldn't understand. And you have to help me understand this. You remember the details, right? There was like, I don't know, it was like a helicopter or a Humvee that was down. Like they basically had to go in and get a downed piece of equipment and go through what was clearly a completely risky exposed terrain. And then of course, on top of that, to die, a friendly fire just is the ultimate, you know, injury upon insulting. But I'm reading this and of course you know how it ends when you're reading it, which makes it hard to read. And you're thinking like, how did nobody. Because there was like, it's been so long since I've read it, but one of the very senior people on the ground, so not in command but on the ground, was like, it's an awful idea. This is an awful idea. Like we're going to risk the lives of 10 men to get a piece of equipment. Nope, that's the plan. We're doing it. And you think, well, okay, that story got written by Krakauer because of Pat Tillman. How many times did that story happen? How many Pat Tillman's are there?

That's why I tell people all the time, and I tell them in business too, because it happens in business too. But in the military and business, if you're a subordinate and you have an obligation and in some cases a moral obligation to stand up and say, hey, I don't know, I don't think this is the best plan. Again, I wish it was that cut and dry because there's a good chance that if you're Pat Tillman's platoon commander and you say, hey boss, this is a horrible idea, I'm not doing it. The general or the colonel says, okay, fine, you're not doing it. Cool. I'm sending this other group of guys, I'm firing you, and I'm replacing you. This is what makes leadership so hard. It does happen in the business world, too. And what does all this stem from? It goes back to what we were talking about earlier. This is a lack of humility up the chain of command. You've got people that are not humble. You can also take ownership of yourself. Because if. If you're telling me to do something that I don't think is smart, and I haven't developed a good enough relationship with you where you actually listen to me, which is, by the way, everything that I'm trying to do as a subordinate leader, I'm trying to get a relationship with you so that you trust me. So that when I actually say to you, hey, boss, this isn't a good idea, you listen. And that's the goal, right? Because if I don't take any ownership and it's like, hey, my boss told me to do something, I just have to go do it, like, no, you have to take ownership of that relationship. You have to make sure that they understand that you have to support. Support them enough so that you trust me. Because if everything that you tell me to do I object to, well, then I'm just a boy that cried wolf. And eventually you just say, oh, Jocko doesn't want to do anything I say. But if I do what you tell me to do and I support you and I carry out the things that you want me to carry out, and then eventually you tell me to do something and I say, this doesn't make any sense, you'll listen to me. So we have to take ownership of the relationship that we have up the chain of command. Otherwise, you're at the whim of some random person that you don't know that that doesn't listen to you.

I can't remember which organization coined this term, but the obligation to dissent is basically what it's called, right? Which is you actually, as a subordinate, you have an obligation to speak up when something is wrong. Not that it's an option, it's an obligation. Is that becoming more ingrained in the culture of the military?

It's interesting. Napoleon said that. Napoleon said, if you get told to do something that you know is a bad plan, and you execute it, you're culpable. That's Napoleon. So this idea has been around for a long time as to where it falls out in the military. Today, it's all over the place.

In other words, it's still so. Even the style of leadership. Is that decentralized?

When I said it's all over the place, I used the wrong term. I meant that it's scattered. So some places have it.

That's what I mean. It's heterogeneously laced.

Some people are good leaders that listen to the decentralized command and some people are not. And that's the way it is. And are we moving in the right direction? I sure hope so. I'm doing my best to get it there.

So going back to World War I, the time between World War I and World War II is about 20 years, right?

Yeah, 1918 to 1939.

And when we think about like 20 years ago, seems like yesterday. In that 20 year period, what were the significant changes in either technology, strategy, maneuver warfare?

Maneuver, yeah.

Because World War II has almost nothing in common with World War I in terms of the fighting.

Right towards the end of World War I, the Germans started to employ decentralized command. That's what they started to do. They started to say, you know what, Sergeant, we got some bad guys over here. Go and figure out how to handle them. This actually came from the Napoleonic wars where the Germans, the Austrians, the Prussians got beat up by Napoleon. And they started to say, why are we getting beaten by Napoleon? And what they realized was they had too much centralized command. They had a bunch of fundamental problems. And so they started to make plans to figure out a better way to run their organizations. That's where you find the famous command staff, the German Austrian command staff. That's sort of like a famous thing. And that's where it started. Well, they didn't really get it going till the end of World War I because it's so, so hard to change a big organization's attitude. By the end of World War I, they started doing it. They started doing decentralized command. They started doing maneuver warfare. It would have really helped them, but they were way late. They waited till the end and by then they didn't have the men or materiel to continue the war. So you take 20 years, so they realized that at the end it was working. They still are going to lose. They get crushed by the Treaty of Versailles. And now when they start rebuilding, they start rebuilding with the attitude, we're going to move fast forward. We're going to use maneuver warfare. We're going to use decentralized command. And that's what they did. That's what blitzkrieg was. It was decentralized command, maneuver warfare very quickly. And they would have done exceptionally well and continue to do well, the Germans, had they not started decentralized everything back again to Hitler, who started making decisions and started telling the generals that were on the Eastern front what to do.

What year approximately, did Hitler kill Rommel?

It was towards the end.

It was toward the end, right? It was like 4. 43. 44.

Yeah. Yeah.

I've only read one book on Rommel, and I don't know why I find him to be such a fascinating character. I imagine there are Rommel scholars out there.

What book did you read?

Attacks, Yellow cover. I can show it to you. I still have it, and it's been about 10 years.

I thought of doing Rommel on the podcast, and I'm actually going to start it off with how he. The circumstances under which he killed himself or which he was murdered, depending on what I say it. Very interesting circumstances. They brought him and said, okay, you're either going to go out as a hero and we'll take care of your family, or everyone dies. So what do you want?

Unbelievable.

Jump in the car. Hitler thought he was part of the group that tried to kill him, which.

I don't think he was. Certainly that's not how I read it, was that he was not one of the guys who worked for me many years ago. Loved the book so much because after I read it, I think I bought a copy for all the guys that I was working with, and he typed up these incredible notes from it. I'll find them and send them to you. You will love this. It's like 20 pages of like.

Was it a book by Rommel? No, because his most famous book is Attacks.

Yeah, no, that's the book.

When George C. Scott is playing Patton, he's saying, I read your book because that book is about World War I, and it's a great book, and there's some really, really good lessons in there. It's written very German, dry, straightforward. These are the facts. Every section has a little section at the end that's like the lessons learned, which is probably the high level. Like, when I do it on the podcast, I'll probably spend most of my time in those sections. It's also very, very tactical. Now, inside tactical lessons, there are leadership lessons, there are strategic lessons. Inside tactical lessons, for sure. But it is very tactical, very tactical book.

The Rommel papers. Okay, that's the one.

I'll take a look at that one.

Yeah. And it's funny, you think about how even at the level of an enormous war, slightly different decisions, right? Like, you could argue Hitler's arrogance In North Africa 100% cost them the war.

And his arrogance. To think I can fight on two fronts in the west and in the east, that's probably the bigger one. And I'll tell you what, the Stalingrad scenario, I covered that one on my podcast. And most of the books that I cover on my podcast are first person accounts. Guys that were there, I covered one that was from a German guy. They're listening to Hitler on the radio, talking about the great sacrifice that was made. Past tense. You guys are still alive. They're getting said, hey, these guys held the line, they did their best, they fought on. We're going to win because of their sacrifices. They're still alive. They're trapped, they're starving, they're freezing, they're getting killed. But that's what Hitler did. Just wrote them off and said, no surrender. That's it. Horrible, horrible situation. But the difference is that World War I was, hey, we're going to be in these trenches, no decentralized command. And then that's the big thing that the Nazis changed was we're going super decentralized command at the beginning of the war. And that's why they were so effective with Blitzkrieg. Here's the goal. The goal is take Poland, take the Rhineland. That's the goal. Make it happen. And these guys were cut loose to go and do that. And they did it, and they did it quickly, and they did it well. And then, like I said, by the end of World War II, all the decisions had been centralized back through arrogance. Because guess what? When you win every victory, every increases your confidence and your arrogance, right? And it doesn't take long to tip it in the wrong direction. Where you think, ah, I can take Russia. Hey, no problem. We've got plenty of time. Winter won't come. Oh, no, my friend, Winter is coming. Winter is coming. And that's the big differences there. Now you get to Korea. Like I said, Korea was definitely, Wait.

One last World War II question, which is again, just sort of a philosophical or theoretical thought. Thought experiment. If the Japanese had not attacked Pearl harbor, in fact, if the Japanese had said, we're never going to wake the sleeping giant over there. We're going to just keep mucking around over here on our side of the Pacific Rim, how does World War II end?

Would have been rough.

Would the Americans have got involved eventually?

I think they would have. I think so, yeah.

Would it have been too little, too late?

Could have been. But I'll tell you what, when you flip the switch on the American machine, the production, I'm Talking about the industry, like, okay, the warfighters, for sure. Incredible. I mean, I remember speaking of the Internet, when the Internet first kind of started, I was on some martial arts. I don't even know what they're called back then, but it was like a chat page or a forum. And I was into jiu jitsu. And so this is like 90.

Yeah. This is in the mid-90s.

Yeah.

This is like 90, 93, 94, 95.

Maybe. It's when I got Internet.

I know exactly this moment.

And anyways, somebody was talking about the Japanese martial arts and the Japanese warriors and all that, and the incredible fortitude of the Bushido mindset that the Japanese Empire had. And it was like the first snide Twitter comment I ever made. But I said, the Japanese Bushido warrior spirit was defeated and destroyed by the United States Marine Corps and the Pacific campaign. And that's the way it is. So the soldier, the marine, the airman, the sailor from America. Man, that is a. You know, there's another great quote, and I wish I had this quote on the top of my head. It was something along the lines of, when the Germans attack, they yell. When the British attack, they scream. When the French attack, they sing. When the Americans attack, they're silent. And they just keep coming. They will not stop. And that is like just such an awesome. In my mind as a kid hearing that, I was like, wow, that's powerful. Right? There's no singing. What we're going to do is we're going to do our job. We're going to do it quietly. We're going to crush. So on top of this American fighting, from a humanistic point, from this culture, this warrior culture, that's what we have in America. Then you want to talk about what. But we've lost a little bit. We still have it. But there's no doubt there is an American culture of fighting which is deep, right? It's deep. It's part of American culture. Like, we're war fighters, we're revolutionaries.

And do you think it's because we are close enough to our independence relative to some of the other countries?

I certainly hope so, because you're right. I always say that, hey, when people get a taste of freedom, that's like the ultimate peacemaker, right? You want a country to be free or to stop being hostile. Give them a taste of freedom. Freedom. Give them a taste of freedom. And people start seeing that. A vast majority of people will say, wow, I like this lifestyle. You know what? People don't want freedom. The people that don't want freedom are the people that fear that their status will come undone because they'll be judged on their performance. This is really right. So if you take a country where there's no freedom and freedom starts to manifest itself, the people that will be scared of the freedom are the people that think, if there's freedom, I'm going to be tested against everyone else and I'm going to fail. So I'm just going to keep everyone under the heel.

Now, do you buy the argument that certain parts of the world, let's just take Egypt as an example, benevolent dictatorship is a better model than freedom, or do you say that freedom can be included within benevolent dictatorship? In other words, I don't want to expose myself as the complete ignoramus that I am when it comes to the politics of the world. World. But could you make the argument that under a Mubarak style of leadership, where basically the fundamentalists were shut out? Right.

I think where you're going with this is to find out my opinion. I think that those types of situations can be good to usher in true freedom over time. That's what I think. Because what you have there exactly that situation, you've got the Muslim Brotherhood that is scared of freedom because they're going to end up in a situation that they don't have any control over, that they're going to have to compete with other people, that they're going to be judged on their merit rather than just being judged on their force. Right. And so they want to stop that. So then you have the government come in and say, okay, you know what we're going to instill, we're going to impose freedom. We're going to impose discipline. Right? We're going to impose discipline on the situation, get rid of people that feel that way, and then hopefully that creates a culture where we can eventually evolve to truly free society.

I mean, the biggest challenge with this, it actually was something that my daughter and I talked about two nights ago, just by a complete random coincidence. But we were, it was our turn cleaning up the kitchen. And I don't know how it came up, but somehow she asked me, she said, who is your favorite president? And I said, probably Lincoln. And I gave all my reasons. And I said, but you could ask 10 people. And I think half of them would probably say either Teddy Roosevelt or fdr and kind of walked her through sort of high level history. And she said, well, what about recent presidents? And I said, you know, it's really tough, Olivia, to evaluate a president whose presidency has taken place in the last 40 years. And I don't know if my argument to her made sense, but she seemed to get it, which was like, look, by definition, any decision a president makes is brutal. Any book you read on presidents, it's like, no easy decisions come to them. So by definition, they're only dealing with the world's worst decisions. And maybe part of me getting a little older is realizing the humility of that, which is it's a very long arc of history to be able to truly judge what another person did. And I think, if anything, I've got more empathy for things that at the time, I felt very strongly about. Like, I remember very strongly in 04, seeing Bush talk about what was clearly looking like a botched war in Iraq. I just wanted him to apologize. I just wanted him to say, I screwed this up. Here's a plan to fix it. And he didn't. He kept doubling down on, no, this is right, this is right, this is right. And I remember just being completely turned off, right? And of course, now I look back and I said, look, if we're going to be brutally honest, Olivia, I don't think we have enough time to know if any of these things made sense. You could argue, well, I think it's been enough time since Vietnam to say that maybe that wasn't the right thing. But even there, once you really start to understand what happened in Vietnam, and now that it's become quite clear how long, meaning how many generations of presidents had seen what was happening there, it's not just about blaming one president either. You can't just say, well, look, this was Johnson's war, or this was even Kennedy's war. No, no, this goes back. This goes back to probably Truman, right? So this idea that. That you can't look through the retrospectoscope with a short lens is a scary idea on some ways, when you consider how reactionary we can become. Right?

Another point to that is you're making decisions with what you know at the time, right? Of course, this happens a lot with combat, where people want to armchair quarterback in hindsight, right? It's not even just armchair quarterbacking, which is, hey, I'm sitting out here and I could tell what you could do, but we're armchair quarterbacking. In hindsight, with all the perfect knowledge that we have, you don't have that situation. You're making decisions based on what you know at that time, and you're making the best decision you can. And it's almost impossible to actually get in that person's frame of mind when they're making those decisions. So not only does it take time to pass to see if that was the right decision or not from a presidential standpoint, but you got to look and say, what did they actually know at that time? And okay, you can say, I would have done something different. Really? Really, really? You would have done something different? And here's another thing that can happen. You can make a great decision and things can go horribly wrong, and you can make a bad decision and things can be fine.

That was a flip side of the discussion with her, which is, on one level, presidents have to make these really hard decisions, and they only have so much control over it. On the other level, it's like you almost wonder how much they matter sometimes when. Especially when you talk about things like the economy. Every president wants to take credit for a good economy. Economy. There's like a hundred other forces there. Right. That are playing a role. How much credit does Clinton deserve for the booming economy in the late 90s? I don't know. I've read arguments that say none. I've read arguments that have said all of it. Probably neither of those extremes.

Yeah, there's all kinds of factors playing into all those situations, but the economy's.

Obviously, it's one of my favorite examples of things like presidents touting what the stock market is doing. Like, they've got their hand on that scale.

Yeah. Especially if they knew what was going to happen, which it's going to go down. They might want to keep their mouth a little bit, a little bit to themselves when they start bragging about how good the economy is doing, because it's never going to keep going in that direction for too long.

So Now World War II to Korea is a very short period of time. What was the big strategic, tactical, or technological change? Even though it was a bit of a reversion to this horrible sort of trench warfare, it was.

There wasn't that much time between these two wars, actually. And a lot of they called up veterans from World War II and said, okay, reload, we're going again. And one really interesting story is, you know, Dick Winters, who is the guy that's the commander of the second of the 506 in the band of Brothers series. You've seen that, right?

I have, but I don't recall his name. Okay.

So he's just an incredible leader. I've covered books about him and his book on my podcast, and I talk about Band of Brothers all the time because Band of Brothers is really incredible leadership story. And Dick Winters got Recalled, go to Korea. And they got to San Francisco and they said, hey, don't know what the criteria was, but it was something like, if you've done two years, World War II, step over here. And they went over there and they said, does anyone not want to go? Because you don't have to go. And Dick Winners was like, I'm not going. So this was what I was thinking about when you were asking me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, there's an example of a guy who. Commitment and whose leadership is impeccable. Impeccable. And he'd come home and, I mean, he saw infinitely more. Infinitely. I can't make that word big enough. More combat than I ever even came close to seeing. He came home, started a farm in Pennsylvania or whatever and started doing his thing, carrying on with his life, and got recalled. And they said, hey, if you don't want to go, you don't have to. And he said, yeah, I'm going home.

Home.

And he did. He went home. So that's the way some people. And no one's going to say anything to Dick Winters, ever. He died, but no one would ever question his patriotism, his willingness to sacrifice, his leadership, his commitment. No one would ever question that in any single way. And when they said, hey, do you want to go? He said, nope, not going.

Cool.

I'll go home. Don't need you. So what was Korea like? Definitely a lot of similar things from World War II, and then it kind of stagnated into World War I.

And now Vietnam is. Is 20. No, not even 20 years later. It's basically 10, 15 years later.

Yeah.

And is that the introduction for Americans to guerrilla warfare?

It definitely is the introduction on a large scale to guerrilla warfare, and that's what made it so challenging. We're fighting against asymmetrical situation where we're bigger, stronger, more well equipped, technologically, more advanced against a foe that is inferior in all those ways. Technology, industry, capability. And we came up against someone that knew how to fight against us and figured it out just like they'd figured out against the French. Vietnam's never been taken. That's a proud history. You've been around for thousands of years, and you've never been taken. Why is that? Because you know how to fight.

In retrospect, aside from not going into Vietnam at all, knowing everything we know today, and perhaps. Perhaps what we've learned through the next huge asymmetric war, which was the one you were a part of, what is the lesson you take back to that war? If Jocko's in a time capsule. And he goes back to 1964.

Yeah. These are the common lessons that everyone talks about. The big thing in a counterinsurgency is you have to win over the populace. And we didn't do that. We didn't do that in Vietnam. You know who did that? The Viet Cong did that. The communists did that. They won over the populace.

And that's because they are the ones who protect you, who allow you to be camouflaged, who you mingle like. Aside from winning hearts in the rebuilding. Right. Which clearly that makes sense. It seems like that's also important in combat.

Yeah. At a minimum, they're going to passively support the insurgents, which is basically what happened in Vietnam. There's passive support, like the villager doesn't care. The villager just wants to grow rice. The villagers wants to raise their kids. Whatever. That's what the villager wants to do. Well, the Americans are just dropped the bomb. The Americans shot one of my kids. The Americans did this. And the Viet Cong are coming in saying, hey, why they do this to you? We'll protect you. We'll help you, and plant these booby traps for us. So those are the mistakes we made. One of my favorite. Well, actually my favorite book is called About Face by Colonel David Ackworth. And he was trying to fight that guerrilla type war, trying to win the hearts and minds. That's what he was trying to do. And he did it, and they did very well with it. But that strategy did not spread. And what you had was the Wiz kids. This is another great dichotomy. The Wiz kids saying, hey, this is how we're going to beat them. These are the metrics we're going to use to decide if we're winning or not. And everyone knows now that the metrics that they decided to use was the body count. And so if we're killing more of the enemy than they're killing of us, then we'll beat them in a war of attrition. And what was that kill count? It was the I Drang Valley is kind of where we started. Started to realize, wait a second, we can kill way more of them than they can kill of us. And I think the I Drang Valley, the kill count was like 173 to 1. So for every one American that was dead, we killed. We suspected that we killed 173 or something like that. It's some crazy kill count. And so as Americans, we think to ourselves, okay, well, who's going to put up with that kind of situation. No one. No one's going to put up with that. What we didn't realize. You know who's going to put up with that? The Viet Cong are going to put up with that. And you know who's not going to put up with losing one? America. There it is. There's the answer. We fought the war with the wrong strategy, and you stick to your guns and those whiz kids. And my point is, because I do this with businesses, the leadership consulting company, and sometimes what we deal with is we deal with companies that are looking at metrics, and they're looking at metrics really hard, and they bring in a consulting company with what's that consulting company going to do when they get there? They're going to look at the metrics and they're going to start saying, okay, here's what you need to do to win. You need to drive these metrics over here, and that's cool. You've got to look at metrics, but you got to balance out what's going on. The human side, the human factor, the leadership, what's unfolding inside the company. What's the culture inside the company. Because if you don't have the right culture inside the company, the metrics aren't going to matter. And so you have to find that balance between the two. Sure, you got to check the metrics. You got to make sure that you're not sacrificing more people than they are. But at the same time, you can't drive your strategy based on pure metrics. And if you do that, you absolutely have problems. Absolutely.

So is McNamara still alive or has he passed away dead?

I believe Wesmoreland's definitely dead, because I remember when he died.

I'm trying to remember. Wasn't McNamara the one that they did the documentary on the fog of war?

Possibly.

I feel like there was a pretty good documentary done. Either I didn't see it, or I saw it so long ago, I don't remember it. Did he ever come to grips with the mistakes of Vietnam?

I don't know. Not a whole lot of ownership across the board, though, I can tell you that much.

So then we fast forward to first Gulf War, Right. Which is in many ways the greatest technological leap forward, right?

Yes.

In terms of Warcraft?

Yeah. Yeah. Because we're talking smart bombs. Yeah.

Yeah. Stealth, right?

Yeah. Night vision.

Oh, my God, I never even thought of that. You didn't even have night vision.

Vietnam, they had, like, starlight, but it wasn't anything even close. Not even remotely close to what we have now.

So in some ways you could argue, quote, unquote, the problem with the first Gulf War is maybe a false sense of confidence that this new style of warfare, this shock and awe, this complete, like, there's probably no greater delta in the technologic advantage between two entities than that war. Right.

That's a good one. Yeah.

And then that becomes the setup of the hubris a decade later, right?

Yeah, I guess. But let's say in the second war in Iraq, we just said, you know what we're going to do? We're going to get Saddam out of power and then we're going to leave. If we did that, we would have done it really quick. It was over pretty quick. And then if we would have said, okay, cool, we're done, figure it out, that would have been. We would have been similar. It would have been a similar situation over very quickly. I mean, the first one was over in 72 hours, I think of ground fighting. The second one few months.

It's interesting, as a civilian, I had a hard time in my mind when the news was coming on to understand the difference between the different fronts, to understand that there was something going on in Afghanistan and there was something going on in Iraq. And these were under very different control. Right. How interchangeable were the macro units between those two? In other words, were there teams of seals also in Afghanistan, but the groups that were in Afghanistan were always going to stay in Afghanistan when they were deployed? Or were you going back and forth?

Potentially all services were going back and forth, yeah. So Marines were going both, army were going to both, the special operations were going to both. Yeah, for sure.

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