Jocko Willink - Extreme Ownership

Full transcript: Jocko Willink on London Real

10:32 This is London Real I am Brian Rose, My guest today is Jocko Willink, who is a retired Navy SEAL officer and author of the Number One New York Times and Number One Wall Street Journal Best-selling Book Extreme Ownership How U S Navy SEALs Lead and Win. You spent 20 years in the Navy SEALS, where you rose to become the commander of Task Unit. BruisEr, the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War, where you were awarded both the Silver and Bronze Star. Afterward, you returned home to become the officer in charge of training for all West Coast SEAL teams. In 2010, you retired from the Navy and launched Echelon Front, where you teach the leadership principles you learned on the battlefield to help companies lead and win.

11:24 You’re also a black belt, Brazilian Jujitsu and an avid surfer. Jocko. Welcome to London, Real thanks for having me on. It’s a pleasure having you, you know, you’re a bit of a paradox when I look at your Twitter profile, it says leader, follower, reader, writer, speaker, listener, student, teacher. It says discipline equals freedom. On one hand, you had one of the most Alpha roles imaginable as the commander of Task Unit Bruiser. And yet you cite humility as the most important quality of a leader you say Drop the ego, exercise, humility work. As a team, I was wondering, Do you ever find yourself trying to explain these two sides of your personality when people meet you? Well? I always talk about. The dichotomy of leadership is something I talk about all the time, and there’s a dichotomy really, with everything in in life, there’s a dichotomy. The dichotomy of leadership is very evident. You got all these opposing forces that are pulling you in different directions. When it comes to leadership, you know you’ve got to be aggressive to make things happen, I mean, if you.

12:22 Don’t if you’re not aggressive with things, they don’t happen, they don’t move. And at the same time, if you’re overly aggressive, you can number one, you can put yourself in a bad situation. You can run to your death, even with your team, if you’re over aggressive with your team. All of a sudden you’re overbearing and they’re not. They’re not wanting to give you any feedback because you’re going to beat them up. So there’s a dichotomy at everything, and, you know, that’s one of the reasons why that’s my little Twitter. Uh, what is that called profile? I think so, yeah, so that’s that’s why, you know, it’s like, Yeah, I am a student because I’m always looking to learn, but at the same time I know I’m teaching people things. So that’s just sort of the nature of life. And I think recognizing that dichotomy gives you a little bit of freedom, you know, it gives you a little bit of freedom. To say, Oh, I can go and do this, it’s okay, and it doesn’t mean I can’t do the other thing on the other side. And I think I’ve heard you say that. Sometimes you’re in the situation in your head, and then sometimes you’re constantly stepping out and saying observing yourself and observing the situation. Not from, say, Jocko’s perspective, but from, say, another perspective. And then coming back into your head. Um, do you find that you do that more now in your business life, or were you always doing that as a seal? Like I said, I mean, I learned that being a

13:35 Seal. Because if you get caught up in that chaos, you’re not going to be able to make the right decisions. And so you have to be able to detach. And then when I started kind of expanding that into the rest of my life, yeah, and and I saw improvement in my life. You know, the better, the more detached I came from the emotion and from the from the meat of humanity. The more I got out of my own head, the I seem to do better. And and then, yeah, I’ll be working with businesses and having a conversation with somebody and sitting there, thinking to myself, how you know from the outside, how is this being perceived? What are they thinking, what are they, what’s their reaction going to be? And I can see that from, from a clearer view when I’m not wrapped inside my own emotional, crazy mind. I think people are craving for some some realness, you know, and I think people are tired of the political correctness.

14:30 I had a guest in here named Dan Pena. And he says political correctness is the manifestation of lack of self<unk>esteem. I don’t know if he’s right, but I’ve been thinking about that a lot. And if you see, say, the emergence of Trump love or hate Trump, you have to admit he is winning in the polls. And is that a sign that people are tired of the Hollywood answer? The politicians answer this the straight answer. That helps their business model. Or gets them more Twitter followers and that they can sense and crave someone who’s got a real true message. I’d say, You’re probably right. I do think that that’s what’s fueling. You know, Donald Trump’s rise is that he’s just, he’s, he’s speaking his mind, there’s no doubt about it. He’s speaking his mind now, maybe he’s in the background calculating it, but it certainly comes off as he’s speaking his mind and he’s saying what he wants to say, and I do think people are, you know, over the whole politically correct thing, seems like they’re over that. And I would say, I agree with that. Okay, that sentiment, and you think that’s why people like to listen what you’re saying to a certain extent, perhaps perhaps, but but honestly, I don’t really talk about politics that much, which is which is a little bit strange. Because I talk about war all the time. You know, my podcast is about war for the most part, um, and I. But at a certain point, war is no longer political.

15:52 When you get on the battlefield, it is no longer a political thing. It’s a raw struggle of will against human against human, and so that’s the sort of thing that I guess people do like to talk about. Okay, I want to talk about your experiences in war. First, can you tell me about, you know, going to buds in San Diego, where I’m from? And and that whole process of just even wanting to be a seal?

16:22 And you spoke to this about this a little bit before. But I just wondered if you could tell people why that, and was that always the only option? Like when you were in your teens, I was going to go go and do that, yeah, I always wanted to be a commando ever since I was a little kid. And I heard that the SEALS were really tough and that the training was really tough. And so that’s the one I went to. And I also heard their station in San Diego, which I grew up surfing in in New England. And so to have an opportunity to go be stationed where there’s legitimate, great waves all the time. I was all over it. So that’s that’s one of the major reasons why I went this, why I picked the Navy and the SEAL teams. And then, you know, once you get in, everyone makes a big deal out of buds. That’s, but it’s it’s in the SEAL teams. It’s no big deal, everyone goes through it, it’s you get cold, you get wet, whatever you do. A bunch of push<unk>ups and pull<unk>ups and dips.

17:15 But it’s not, it’s anyone that gets to the SEAL teams and does deployments overseas and has a real career. They’re not talking about buds training. It just me, it just doesn’t mean anything. I wasn’t a great athlete, you know, I was, you know, you got kids in there that played that ran college track or swam in college, and anybody that ran college track or college Cross-Country is going to breeze through every run. Anybody that swam is going to have no problem with the swimming, but you know, there’s there’s it. It finds people’s weaknesses. And so I was like a gray man, that was.

17:51 Just in the middle of everything I was, I was in the middle of the pack on the runs. I was the middle of the pack on the swims, I was the middle of the pack on the obstacle courses. I was just in the middle of the pack. But when you had guys that excelled in some areas, some guys, I mean, some guys just were really good athletes and they excelled in everything, but some guys excelled in one area. They were incredible runners, but they couldn’t swim and they they wouldn’t make it. You know, I had guys, I don’t know if I’ve ever said this on on a podcast before. But I had guys. I had a guy that was, you know, a N.C.A.A. water polo team captain, champion. And he quit, and I had a guy that was an Olympic ultimate gymnast, and he quit. So those are two guys that are way better athletes than I would ever be. But they quit. And the same thing you find is when you get to the SEAL teams.

18:38 Just because someone’s a good physical athlete. It doesn’t mean that they’re a good seal because being a good seal is a lot more than just being a good athlete. In fact, being a being a good athlete is like the baseline and it’s everything that you’ve learned to do after that. That makes you a good seal and what makes a good seal. A guy that’s a good leader, a guy that’s tactically sound, a guy that makes good decisions, a guy that’s good under pressure. A guy that doesn’t ever give up on trying to accomplish a mission. So those are the things that make a good seal, not just being able to run fast. You’re constantly growing in the SEAL teams every time you go through a workup, which is our training cycle. You’re getting better, you’re getting more efficient, you’re getting more confident with what you’re doing, so you’re always learning and growing. And I was always learning until the day I retired because it’s not a It’s not a a boom. This happened and everything changed. It’s it’s a constant addition of skill, set and repetition of situations where you become competent at your job. And how many years was it until your first deployment? Well, you know you’re doing deployments, even in the even in the dry years in the 90s? So I missed the first goal for so when I got through, first got to a SEAL team.

19:57 We would deploy overseas, but we would deploy to train other countries and do exercises overseas. So I was doing that my whole life, and then my first combat deployment to Iraq was in 2003. And in fact, here’s a good story. So one of my platoon commanders, this is when we got to Ramadi. One of the platoon commanders went out with about eight of his guys or seven of his guys.

20:21 They went out accompanying a army unit, the army unit that is actually an Iraqi and an army unit. The Iraqi army unit that they were with had a very experienced U.S. Army guy that was going with them. That was their kind of their, their co<unk>leader, right? So they had an American co<unk>leader to help this Iraqi unit. And this guy had been in Ramadi, which was the worst city in Iraq. He’d been there for, I don’t know, six months fighting in urban combat, and he was a he was a reservist and his civilian job, he was a cop. So the guy is a legit guy that’s seen a lot of stuff and been in sustained combat, both in America and in Iraq. So they all got on this patrol, they get into a firefight, the platoon commander hunkers down behind the wall. There’s rounds hit in the wall.

21:09 And he’s down there with this major and he looks at the major and says, Hey, sir, I can take my guys over. We’ll get on some high ground, we’ll flank him and kill him. The major’s like, Okay, go do it, so platoon commander gets down, crawls out, grabs, musters up the guys. They maneuver down half a block, get up on a building, they flank the enemy, they kill them, drive them away and come back, Yep, mission’s over, come back to base, and I’m actually there. I met him at the gate when they came back from from the Op and the the Major. And again, this guy has all kinds of experience. And this was the first real op that this platoon commander had run and been in a firefight on. So they come back and the major says to him, You know, Hey, captain, he says, captain.

22:00 Because the rank structure in the In the In the Navy is different from the Army. So they. He thought he was a captain, he was really a lieutenant, he says, Hey, captain, you did you did awesome out there? You must have been in a lot of urban combat. And the lieutenant, the platoon commander looks at him and says, Actually, sir, that was my first firefight. So the training that we get, the preparation that we do is is very sufficient to prepare you for that. Now. All that being said, when you’re in combat now, there’s a possibility that you can die, you can get severely wounded.

22:38 From. From my perspective, I was never worried about that because I don’t know if it was, I don’t know, didn’t care. The thing that you’re worried about from a leadership position is you’re worried about your guys, you’re worried about one of your guys getting hurt. You’re worried about one of your guys getting killed, and that just completely trumps every other emotion that you have. You’re you’re, you’re seeing your guys and you’re looking and you’re saying, Okay, is this guy doing the right thing? Pull this guy over there? There’s a thread over there, how do we handle that? That’s what’s on your mind. The fear of getting shot or killed is not on your mind. When you’re in the moment, you know it’ll build up. When you’re waiting to go out, you know, there’s times you’re waiting to go out and you’re like thinking yourself, Okay, there’s a lot of bad things going on out there and someone would happen to me. But I think at some point you, you realize that there’s nothing you can do about that. I mean, other than just quit and and just.

23:35 Resign yourself to a life of cowardice. But if you opt to not do that and you step up and say, Okay, I’m ready, and if I die, I die. And once you overcome that, then nothing else to be afraid of. You said early on you were prepared and almost expecting to die in battle. I was, I don’t know if I was expecting to die in battle, but I was okay with it. I was okay with it. And I think you’d go crazy when you’re not okay with it. You know, I think it just you got to, you got to realize that if it happens, you know it’s going to happen. I want to talk about Ramadi, but I want to contrast it. With your first tour in Iraq, O3, you’ve been kind of waiting 13 years, you’ve been preparing, wanting a combat situation. I’m guessing if you prepare this for your whole life, I’m guessing you really want to do that. What’s it like when it when it comes? Yeah, I, I’d be lying. If I said I didn’t want to go into combat, I’d be, I’d be grossly lying. I always wanted to go into combat since I was a little kid and when it happened I was happy it was happening, and when we were done, I wanted more. And I think you’ve described it as you were kind of, I think you described his bag dag spot. At one point you you were just were, you were out gun gunning everybody. You were coming in doing the business some resistance, but you were very dominant. Yeah, we dominated, we dominated. Yeah, six months you’re in, you go back after six months, had things quieted down, like, did you feel like I wish I would have

25:19 Stayed or had a lot of the action and stuff happening finished? And you’re like, Okay, well, we came back thinking that we had a great deployment because we did a lot of operations. Capture killed a significant amount of bad guys, so that felt like, Hey, we did our job. But what happened at the end of actually middle of 2004, just it was happening as we left. But you started to hear a different word over there. That was insurgency, and and what that meant was this was no longer just former Saddam thugs or criminal elements that were out there. Just trying to cause problems and make money and and and do bad things all of a sudden you had. The insurgency is organized and they started to conduct organized operations against American forces. And and that was so now I was home and things started to get worse and worse and worse. And so I knew when I was going back, it was going to be a different story. Were you pretty sure you were going to go back when you got home in 04? Oh yeah, absolutely okay. So the more information that you get about what’s going on over there, you probably prepare specifically for that when you’re back.

26:29 We do, we do, and that being said, we always prepare a broad skill set. You know, even though it’s in the middle of the desert. We still do water work. Even though we’re mostly using vehicles, we’re still jumping out of airplanes and fast open out of helicopters. So we we maintain the well<unk>rounded skill set, even if we’re No. Even if we because you never know for sure. Even if we strongly believe that we’re going to go into one area we’re ready for, we’re ready for anything.

26:55 And those live<unk>action drills are jumping out of helicopters, live fire stuff. I think you’ve talked about it where if you’re using paint guns, if you do get killed, your unit has to carry you back. I mean, it’s really you’re putting a lot of taxation on your on your fellow man, when you do these drills and these things can last a long time. Well, yeah, the training operations, just depending on what type of mission it is, but the type that you’re talking about where you’re carrying a down man out of the desert, you know you might be carrying him for five or six kilometers. It’s not fun, okay? And with the paint, guns and all the gear, does it? Does it do a very good job of simulating pieces? I mean, without that, would it change the actual combat situation? The The best thing about it is you can fight against other humans and it. If you compare it to martial arts. It’s like in the, you know, in the 60s or 70s, when martial arts with fear was theoretical. And it was, well, if I would have hit you there, it would have caused this and you to do this, and therefore I would have beat you in a fight. And as we found out with the UFC coming out and saying, Okay, you know, the first UFCs were awesome. Whether it’s just style against style, no time limit, no rules. It doesn’t get any better than that, and that’s when we figured out what worked and what didn’t work. And so, with the Sim munition you found out again, you’re allowed to fight against another human. Because

28:19 Prior to that, if you only have live fire, you’re just shooting against paper targets. Paper targets don’t, don’t shoot back, number one number two, they don’t move. So what makes combat? I mean, the the the Crux of Combat is maneuver. You know, being able to move and the way you do that is fire and move, cover and move. So one element is shooting and keeping the enemy’s head down, while the other element maneuvers. That’s what combat is, that’s that’s the basis of combat is cover and move or fire maneuver. And so when you take away the ability of the enemy to maneuver because they’re made of paper, well, then you’re not really challenging yourself.

29:06 So once we had Sim munition or paintball or laser tag or whatever mechanism we used where the enemy could now maneuver on us, the enemy being other seals that were role<unk>playing as enemy. Well, now the challenge was that much greater and we got to figure out what worked and we got to be that much more prepared for the combat situations. And you’re using those laser tag guns that can shoot out to a couple hundred meters. And you got GPS on everybody so you can.

29:33 Go back and analyze this whole thing on a Google map and really see what’s working, what’s not working, that’s what it is. Will you pretty? I mean, will you feel like you were really climbing a steep learning curve? When you were doing that, you were like, Okay, this is really going to pay off when we get into battle. Really. Those, the the mechanism of the really good laser tag came after I got back from a body. But what what I had on my side was I had experience and I had paid attention to my elders when I was a kid and when I was getting trained. And there was no war going on, and it was the 90s, and I’d hear a guy, you know, someone whose name you’ll never hear. But a guy that if you’re in the SEAL teams, you know who that person is. Because they were a legit badass Vietnam War hero.

30:19 You’d hear them say something, I would hear them say something, and I would collect that and I would hang on to it. And, you know, and cover and move is a great example. This is a principle that’s one of the most basic principles in combat, and you wouldn’t really hear it that often. And and when I first heard a An old Badass Vietnam Seal explain that very briefly didn’t make a big deal out of it. But it just stuck. And that was the main principle that keeps people alive on the battlefield cover move. So that’s what prepared me was that experience of growing up with listening to my elders, and then luckily, having deployments where they weren’t that bad. And when I came back, I could drill guys and and push them hard and prepare them.

31:08 And so that’s that. That’s what it was. It was really just the experience and the the listening to the elders and paying attention. The SEAL team doctrine wasn’t written down anywhere. It was all word<unk>of,<unk>mouth and and passed down from generation to generation that way. And making sure that you’re not being cocky, making sure that you don’t have the attitude that you talked about earlier of.

31:34 You know, we’re always going to be better than the enemy. We’re always going to win because you’re not always going to win. And especially if you think you’re always going to win, then you’re not going to prepare that the way you should. You’re not going to give everything you can to your training to making sure that you are prepared for that moment. When it comes.

31:51 And it might come once on a deployment, it might not come on a deployment and it might come on a daily basis. Will that always be an issue with the military as far as the knowledge base will kind of taper out in between conflicts and come back? Or is there a way to preserve it now through video through highly documenting things? Or will we always have that that lag? Unfortunately, when there’s peace, there’s no longer a focus on war, and so people easily forget that that should be the priority. You know, we change the the Department of War to the Department of Defense, you know, it used to be the Department of War. So when that’s the attitude, of course you’re going to lose it. Because the focus very quickly turns from war fighting to whatever else administration. And so you’re, I think you’re you’re always going to lose some of the knowledge in between wars. So it’s 2004 2005. You’re starting to hear back that things are really changing in Iraq, and I’m guessing you’re already starting to prepare for a second deployment out there. And and I just wanted to ask this organization that happened, and I want to hear more. What it was like that that first week in Ramadi that they started doing. Was that something that they had been planning for years, or was it just a natural progression of what happened? You know, when we first went in and them doing the regrouping No. It was because the folks that were regrouping

33:14 That were organizing the regrouping were not Iraqis, they were foreigners. They were al-qaeda, coming in from from other areas from Syria from from all over. They were coming in there, they were starting to organize, they had the financial backing, so it was that was who was organizing it. It wasn’t the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people were happy to be rid of Saddam and looking forward to living in some kind of a peaceful society. And then income the insurgents and the extremists and the terrorists who have their own plans. Is it more about money than it is about religious freedom or a jihad? Is it? Really? Are these guys gangsters just running numbers and a money rocket in the end of the day? Or is there a lot of blurred lines as to why people are fighting?

34:03 It’s both, it’s both, they, they are definitely power hungry, they’re, they’re money hungry and power hungry. And I guess you could say that that roots back to they want money so they can fuel their their viewpoints. But it’s it’s all combined. They want power because always strikes me. That fight happened in Ramadi. It didn’t happen, you know, in the middle of the desert, somewhere in the Sahara, where there’s no resources like it’s happening there for a reason, it’s happening there for a reason. You get back to Ramadi in 2006 when you land on the ground. How does it feel different if it already does, and what’s that first few days like, in contrast to your first tour?

34:45 Well, almost immediately, we’re going to memorial services for Army guys, Marines that are killed, which you know was a rude awakening. So that’s that’s the welcome to Ramadi. The welcome to Ramadi is, you know, you’re going to go and pay your respects to some guys that were just killed. And and there’s firefights in the city, so we’re, we’re just across the river, from the city, there’s firefights in the city all day, there’s firefights in the city all night.

35:19 We’re on the rooftop of our building, you can sit there and watch tracer fire, go back and forth. We’re shot at from, you know, across the riverbank, there’s, yeah, it was, it was legit, it was legit combat, it was a legit, bad scenario with sustained combat operations. How do you lead your men through that when you know they’re dealing with not only the funerals, which definitely take a psychological toll? But then even that just constant firefighting over there. I mean, do you have to switch up your gear and think, Okay, I gotta lead stronger or maybe a little easier in certain scenarios, are you changing? Yes, you do have to modulate your your leadership and you have to do that. If you’re in the business world, you have to do that. If you’re leading any kind of team, you’ve got to modulate and you’ve got to recognize when your guys need to be pushed and when your guys need to be not pushed and given a rest. So you’re constantly doing that, regardless of what kind of team you’re leading and in combat. Like, you know, I say all the time. It’s amplified because if you push your guys too hard in combat, they’re gonna break, you know, whereas in business, oh, maybe they make errors on something, or maybe they do snap. I mean, it does happen in the business world where people like can’t take it anymore, but in combat it’ll happen very quickly. And and so you know you do, you’re constantly modulating and and taking measure of where your guys are at.

36:41 And, you know, sometimes I didn’t do a great job of that. Sometimes I went a little far and said, Oh wow, I just saw the look on that guy’s face. He’s he needs a rest, and I should recognize that earlier. And, you know, you make mistakes, no doubt those first few weeks in Ramadi, what are you assessing, what are you deciding that you have to do differently, and what are you? As a unit? I know there’s a lot of other, uh, you know, units there, what are you deciding you need to do, you know, very differently than than the previous two? Well, one of the biggest things was the the strategy, the strategy while I was there on my first appointment and the strategy.

37:18 Throughout the beginning of the Iraq war, all the way up until 2006 was to go out and capture or kill the bad guys. You know, you find out where these insurgents are, you find out where these terrorists are, go out, capture and kill them. So that was the the strategy, and the thought was, and it’s a very common thought, and it’s one of those sentences that makes so much sense, so much sense that everyone believes it. And that is, if you cut off the head of the snake, the snake dies, right? That’s that’s a common common thought and statement, because it’s true, right? If I cut off the head of the snake, the snake dies. So the thought was if we can cut off the head of the snake, meaning the leadership of the insurgents, then the snake will die, the insurgents will die.

38:05 And it’s just not true, it’s it’s just not true. And there was a group of U. S. military people that that knew this. And General Patreus was one of them. Who wrote the counterinsurgency manual, along with a core group of Really I. I don’t know if they take this as an insult, I take it as an insult. They probably don’t, but intellectuals, guys that were intellectuals, guys that were smart.

38:33 H.R. MCMASTER Um, uh, General Patreus, a guy that I ended up working for. Colonel Shawn McFarlane. Those guys understood that. Cutting off the head of the snake, it just this, the snake grows another head. And what you have to do is you have to change the environment that the snake is in.

38:50 And so the battle. The decisive terrain in this battle was not a building or a mountain or an airfield like it would be. In World War II. The decisive terrain was the people, it was the populace, it was the local populace of Iraq that are normal people that wanted to live simple, peaceful lives. So they recognized that and they brought in a new strategy, which was, Hey, look, we’re going to continue to do those operations because part of counterinsurgency is to go out and still capture and kill bad guys, of course, but what you have to do is you have to secure the populace. You have to make the populace feel that you are the stronger side. And that they don’t have to live in fear of the insurgents. And so that strategy was called Seize, Clear, Hold and Build. And when. The 11 ad, which was the large brigade of soldiers and Marines that came in and took over Ramadi from the last unit that was there? So when we arrived in Ramadi, it was a reservist unit and they were awesome guys. The 228 out of Pennsylvania. And if you don’t know what a reservist is in England, it’s the TA. It’s the it’s people that are, you know, plumbers and physicians and drivers and normal teachers, just civilians that have to. They do whatever it is one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer. But all of a sudden they get called up, their number gets pulled, and there they are, they’re in Ramadi. They were there for 14 months, they fought heroically,

40:22 Did an amazing job, and by the time we got there they were battle hardened warriors. But it was their turn to go home. So in to take their place was this. Armored brigade called the 11 a.d the Ready First Armor Gate, the first brigade of the First Armored Division. They came in to take over and they brought in Sean McFarlane, who, like I said, was an incredibly smart guy who had again experience plays a big role. He had been in northern Iraq in a city called Talafar, where this other Colonel McMaster had used this strategy up there and won and pacified the city. And he turned over with Sean McFarlane and Colonel McFarlane, then came to Ramadi and knew the strategy to use. Which was completely different than what we’ve been doing. It was a lot more risky, it was a lot more aggressive and it was the right.

41:13 Thing to do, which is go into these enemy controlled neighborhoods and build these combat outposts. These these reinforced buildings where coalition forces meaning both American soldiers and Iraqis, would go there and live and stay and drive out the insurgents. Not just one night, go get a bad guy and leave, but stay there permanently and drive out those insurgents from those areas and protect the local populace so the local populace could live in peace, turn against the insurgents and finish, finish them off. Do you remember your first reaction when you heard about that strategy, such a counterintuitive strategy, to say the first, the previous? Well, I actually when I got over there and I saw that what we had been doing, what we America had been doing. And I saw the same type of target lists of bad guys, which when I left there was a big target list of bad guys.

42:08 When I got back two and a half years later, there’s a big target list of bad guys. Something wasn’t working. So I I immediately started thinking to myself, What can we do differently? And I actually literally sat down and and pulled. There’s a There’s a counterinsurgency manual written by again, the U S. Army wrote it. I literally sat down my first night in Ramadi, or maybe it was my second night, pulled it off. It’s on the it’s on the Internet. I had to pull it off the Internet, didn’t even have a copy of it, pulled it off the Internet, read the whole thing.

42:36 I said, We’ve got to, we’ve got to help people do this. And then it was just, I guess, coincidence that McFarlane showed up with that plan. And I I knew then, Okay, he’s, he’s gonna execute counterinsurgency. This is how we can help them. And is the crux of that strategy that you go into the Loki population and you show them that you are here to stay, absolutely. And is it encouraged them, to a certain extent, to separate from those, you know, those terrorist elements?

43:04 It does. Okay, so if you’re in America, if you’re in a gang ridden part of town, you’re not. You’re not listening to what the cops say, you listen to what the gang says, they tell you to do something, you’re going to do it. Otherwise they come in breaking your house and kill you. That’s what the insurgents did, so the local populace it was either. It was pretty much passive support, meaning, Look, we don’t, we just don’t want you to kill us, so go ahead. You want to use my building to launch mortars, well, use my building, launch more. You want to take some of our bread, take the bread, just don’t kill us. But they were living in fear, and because when they did step out of line, guess what? They were getting brutally murdered. They were getting tortured, they were getting raped.

43:45 It was awful so they didn’t want it, but they had no choice, they didn’t have the strength to stand up against the insurgents. Well, guess who does we do? And so when we went into those neighborhoods and said, Listen, we’re not going away, we’re staying right there will. We will be back here tomorrow to help you will be back here the day after that. To help you again.

44:02 You need water, you need food, you need medical attention. That’s what we’re here to do, we’re here to help. And when they realized that, that’s when they switched, switched to our side and I say, switched. It wasn’t that they were on the insurgent side, but they were providing passive support because they were living in so much fear. But as soon as they realized that we were the stronger tribe, then they said, You know what, thank you, thank you. By the way, there’s a There’s a bad guy that’s staying in a building four doors down, go get him. We can take, we can take care of that, and that’s 99 of the people in that city. Is it that skewed of people that just want to live their life, that that that don’t want to be there? It’s a vast majority of the people when you go into their house, especially after we had established ourselves when we go into their houses. They would, you know, give you the smile, the kids would talk to you, they’d be talking with the Iraqi soldiers.

44:55 Yeah, absolute majority, and and this is something that you don’t. It’s very hard to get this through the media because you know when’s the last time you saw a news story on? You know, on an American cable news company or cable news program of an American family going to the store to go grocery shopping, have you ever seen that? No, because it’s not news, but when you see people rioting in the streets, of course you see that because that’s news. So what what do you see of the Iraqi people? The only Iraqi people you see on the news are the ones that are rioting in the streets. That’s not normal. What’s normal to them is the same thing that’s normal to you and the same thing that’s normal to me. Let’s go to the store, let’s get some food, let’s make dinner, let’s fix the car, let’s, let’s, you know, put a new addition on the back of the house here. Let’s let’s get some screen windows, let’s build the front porch. That’s normal, and that’s what they wanted. And so really, when we, when we pulled out completely, it didn’t take long for the insurgents to for the for al-qaeda. And now, uh, ISIS, to say, Oh, now the the people are undefended again, let’s go back and crush them again, and that’s what they did. So no force, in any scenario can can survive without the local population, at least being passively with them. Is that is that a constant in all war or in all society? Yeah, I mean, I, I don’t know if I could make a blanket statement

46:19 Like that right now because I’d have to. You know, think about all the wars in humankind and see if that’s ever happened. But generally the the local populace that lives there, you. They have them, they they’re the ones that live there, it’s their, it’s their area, it’s their region so. If someone comes into that area, is that person that comes in going to stay longer than them?

46:43 Most likely not. You know, that’s what happened in the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese people stayed there. You know, how long are we going to stay there, were we going to stay there forever? Because that’s how long it takes to win. It takes a long time. Yeah, there’s a great movie called Fog of War with Mac Namara, and they talk about. And I think he met with one of the Vietnamese leaders way, way, way, way after the war. And and he said something to him like, You know, we were, it’s our home like, We’re not gonna leave, so why do you think you could ever defeat us, you know, and said something? And it was just some simple truism that kind of rang into his head. Yeah, just can you summarize. I probably can’t summarize, but those first six months in Ramadi, I mean, you had this idea a very risky idea to go in and build these. You know, these compounds in the middle of enemy territory, even building them is dangerous. How did that play out over that next six months? Again? I, I always just want to make it clear that this was not my idea, and and it wasn’t me.

47:40 Or the seals that built these these combat outposts. It was soldiers and Marines that were braving unbelievably rough combat situations. Because, as you said, it’s a construction project and you’re you’re literally. These Army engineers would be doing these construction projects in the middle of the day. With full body armor on a helmet and a hammer. That’s their. Their weapon is not a weapon, it’s a hammer. Or, you know, a jackhammer. Or whatever construction equipment they need to build these combat outposts. So that’s what it was. It was, you know, every couple weeks put a new combat outpost in, you know? What we would do is as they were building these combat outposts, they were very vulnerable for the first 48 hours, 24 to 48 hours, very vulnerable. The construction projects going on.

48:32 And one of the main weapons of the enemy was a suicide car. So they load a car or truck up with massive amounts of explosives and drive it right into whatever kind of base they could and detonate it. They did it dozens of I don’t know if dozens of they probably did it. They did it a bunch of times. While we were in Ramadi, where they where they literally overran.

48:54 Entire companies of Iraqi soldiers killed several Americans, but they would. They would start with machine gun fire and then mortar fire and then rocket propelled grenades. And then, as as the the centuries that are trying to hold down the Fort and Protect would take cover from all this. All this enemy fire that was coming at them in would come a big suicide vehicle. Born IED Truck truck loaded bomb. And they would just drive right into the compound and detonate themselves and kill dozens of people. And they did that on multiple occasions. They did it times where they did it to multiple areas at the same time, so that’s how coordinated the enemy was. They were, they knew what they were doing, were you impressed by them? were you ever like? I didn’t expect that to happen, or did you ever have a respect for their tactics? I absolutely always had respect. I respect the enemy. Absolutely, um, and the minute you’re not showing respect to the enemy and their capabilities is again. That’s a lack of humility, and it’s going to get you killed, you know they you, you have to respect your enemy at all times. At one point, did you realize this strategy was going to work? Because I’m sure the first few months of this, you’re taking massive casualties or casualties. Um, at what point was there kind of a turning point or a click that this is going to work? Well, it’s going to get you killed, you know they you, you

50:17 Have to respect your enemy at all times. At one point, did you realize this strategy was going to work? Because I’m sure the first few months of this, you’re taking massive casualties or casualties. Um, at what point was there kind of a turning point or a click that this is going to work? Well, what’s what’s hard about that is that Americans and I would even say modern society, but absolutely Americans. They want the instant gratification they want. You know, I want my McDonald’s now, I want my Starbucks now, I want my Amazon Prime. Now. You know, in America you get Amazon Prime in one hour, like, how fast do you need something? So we want instant gratification.

51:03 And I actually got some pressure through my chain of command saying, Hey, we’re looking at the metrics, we’re not seeing a real change in the metrics. This was early in the deployment, and luckily for me, I had read the the counterinsurgency Manual. And one of the statements in the counterinsurgency manual was that the average counterinsurgency takes seven years to complete. So when my chain of command was asking me for metrics within three weeks of arriving, I said, Hey, um, it’s been three weeks. The average counterinsurgency takes seven years to complete. You’ve got to give me a little bit of time to see where this is going. So to answer your question, we actually did the work and saw progress in terms of real estate being taken back. We saw anecdotal evidence of the local populace being on our side. But the the real turn came about three to six months after we left is when they went from when we were there. It was 30 to 50 enemy attacks a day after we left it. It quickly went down to, you know, two or three a day, then one a day, then one a week. And by January I left. In October of 2006, by January of 2007, there was one attack a week, so it just tipping point, boom. It was done. The insurgents were defeated. Did you ever think it would happen that fast?

52:34 No, I I didn’t. I thought it would take, I thought it would take longer than it did. I definitely thought it would take longer, it did, and the reason I remember specifically thinking that is two reasons. Number one. When the guys came to relieve us, the guys that came to the SEAls that came to take our place in Ramadi. You know, I thought they were facing the exact same deployment that we had and that was a rough turnover. You know, you’ve got guys that are coming in and and and in thinking about it. It really probably wasn’t since Vietnam that a SEAL team task unit or platoons were coming into an area that they knew was going to be that bad. And and and we just thought it was going to be like that for, you know, I thought, Okay, seven years.

53:17 It can be a seven<unk>year fight, so it was really rewarding to see it change that quickly. And also it proved that it proved that the that the strategy was great. And they used what happened in Ramadi as a model to execute without the rest of the country. And that’s that’s one of the things that they used to convince the government that the surge needed to happen. If we have these extra troops, what are we going to do with them? We’re going to do what we did in Ramadi, and that’s what they did. They did it. And, you know, throughout Iraq, with those surge troops, they took them out, pressed into these enemy controlled territories as a matter of fact. Uh, one of the guys, that was, uh, one of my platoon commanders that worked for me. He took my job and he went back. And they did the same type of operations in the worst part of Bagdad and and had the same exact results. Did an outstanding job with, Uh, with with his task unit? Your men had to fight alongside Iraqi troops and you had to, you had to sell that to them or to lead them through that experience. And I know what at first you had to think, like, What, how are they thinking, are you? I think you had to think, How are my leaders thinking, and why are they doing this? How how hard of a leadership task was that? Well, so we got told, You have to work with Iraqi soldiers now, set this up, right? You’ve got to remember that when you’re working with SEALS, you’re working

54:46 With guys that you know, guys that have a baseline of training. Guys that are motivated. For the most part, guys that are skilled, guys that have the best gear in the world, the best training in the world. You feel really confident, high performance people as much as confident as you can feel going in the field is when you’re with your brother. SEALS now. And you got to rely on because in case you don’t know when, when you and I go to to a hallway or to a street corner when I turn one way and face down the street corner. You, as my seal brother are going to take my back, are going to look the other direction and protect me. So if if someone starts shooting at me from that direction, they’re going to hit you and you’re going to save me. That’s what it’s like. You have that complete reliance on the other person to do their job and keep you alive.

55:38 So now we get told that that other person that we’re going to rely on is going to be an Iraqi soldier. So the Iraqi soldiers completely different culture, you know, the Iraqi soldiers are very uneducated. Most of them, I mean, the, uh, the enlisted troops, the the normal troops, they’re uneducated, they’re poorly trained, they’re poorly equipped, unmotivated, scared. I give them credit because even to be enlisting in the Iraqi Army meant that when they were gone from their home, insurgents or terrorists would come and find their families and kill them. so they were dedicated but poorly trained, poorly motivated. And with that dedication, some of them did have a little bit of a dedication in the wrong direction. So some of them were borderline supporting the insurgents at certain points. So here I am tell. I get told that my guys are going to have to take these Iraqi soldiers with them. And they actually put like a ratio on it and said, For every, you know, one American, you have to have five Iraqis with you. And I forget what the actual ratio was, and maybe if we were in another part of Iraq that had settled down, you deal with it. But facing that going into Ramadi was was very disheartening, to say the least. So I actually thought to myself, Okay, this doesn’t make sense. Why on earth would we be doing this?

57:12 And now I’m saying to myself, How, how am I going to get my guys to do this? And and one of my principles of leadership, and really one of my principles of being a man is if I don’t believe in something, then I’m not going to do it. So here I was, and I’m not believing in this. This idea. So how am I going to either avoid doing it, or somehow not do it? So I had to get myself to believe and not saying I had to falsely convince myself to believe. But I started saying to myself, Okay, why are they telling us to do this? What is the reason why? Why would the senior leadership in the military that’s here in Iraq, in the in the military that’s back at the Pentagon, in the White House? Why would they be telling us to do this, to take more risk, going out on the worst battlefield? Why would they tell us to do this and it? As I asked myself that question, I realized what the answer was, and that was that we needed a transition plan. We needed the Iraqi soldiers to be able to handle the security in their own country. And when I realized that, I realized, Okay. If we don’t get them to be able to do that, then who’s going to do it? And the answer was no one. And so I brought the platoons together and said, Hey, guys, here’s the deal, you know, if we don’t get to. If we don’t get the Iraqi soldiers able to a point where they’re able to handle the security in their own country. Who’s going to do it and how are we ever going to win here, how are we?

58:48 Ever going to turn this over to them? And so the guys realized it and it wasn’t, it wasn’t like they realized it instantly. I mean, there was still resistance because they were putting their lives in the in the hands of these Iraqi soldiers in many cases. Now we actually ran up the chain of command and said, Look, the the ratio that you’re talking about. I can’t do that, I’m going to put the force that I need out there of sEAls on every mission. Regardless of how many Iraqis we have with us and I got approval, you know, the the chain of command chain of command was smart. They looked at me and said, Yeah, understood, you do what you got to do. JAco, and that’s what I did.

59:24 And and that was, uh, that was sort of a critical element of turning that. Turning that piece around was getting these Iraqi soldiers to learn how to fight for themselves. And again, it wasn’t just Seals that were doing it all. The army units that were there had had Iraqi soldiers that they were working with as well. How was that reality? You know, working with them and having them in the field?

59:43 Not good, okay, did it get better? Was there a learning curve there for them? They they, they sometimes got better, but it was, It’s they’re not good, just heightens the stress level on everything. Yeah, okay, I mean, they had accidental discharges, meaning they shot rounds when in buildings where there’s no bad guys near missing seals. Yeah, it was, you know, you’d see them running down the street, just shooting their weapons, literally, not looking shooting their weapons over their heads back towards what they thought was the enemy. When you actually had seals running in that from that direction as well, so yeah, it was, uh, it was, uh, it was a it was very risky, extremely risky. I can’t think of anything more challenging than putting that element in a highly trained elite team. It’s like the probably the worst thing to put in with that team.

1:00:32 Yeah, it was, uh, it was tough. You asked the chain of command for a lower ratio. You had a history of not asking for very much, and when you did ask for things, it was because you really needed. It. Was that one of those times where you were, you just went ahead and said, We can do this, but I, I need this ratio. Yeah, my goal with every position I’ve ever been in is to have a good relationship with my boss. Regardless of whether my boss is, you know, an ego maniac control freak or whether he’s a laissez faire tactical genius. It doesn’t matter what my boss is, my goal is always to have a good relationship with him and by good relationship. I mean a high trust relationship where they trust me and they’re gonna let me do what I want. And so I had that relationship. I built it through the chain of command, you know, and you know, when I talked to my boss, they they listened to me and they understood that. I was coming from a place of reality and I pretty much always got what I wanted. And this is this concept of extreme ownership. Yeah, yeah, I mean,

1:01:39 If your boss isn’t giving you the support that you need, whose fault is it you? It’s easy to point your finger at your boss, but whose fault is it? Really? It’s your fault because you haven’t educated him, you haven’t influenced him, you haven’t, given you haven’t built the relationship with him. You haven’t built the trust with them because your your goals are going to be aligned with your bosses, whether it’s a business or whether it’s a whether it’s war, you know your boss wants to, you know, wants you to be ethical and wants you to make profit, that’s what your boss wants. So if you’re staying in those guidelines, well, then if you’ve got an idea that’s going to help bring in profit and is still ethical.

1:02:20 Why would your boss not want you to do that? Of course, he’s going to want you to do that, so he’s going to give you that support. As long as you ask for it in the right way and you’ve built the right trust, and it’s the same thing with war. My boss wants us to win the war, wants us to keep guys live, wants to kill the bad guys. So if I’m presenting ideas that are going to help win the war, keep us alive and help kill bad guys. Why would they not support it? The only reason they wouldn’t is if I’m not educating him influencing him, explaining it. Uh, you know, jumping through whatever little bureaucratic gates that get put up. You got to jump through those gates, you know, you got to do what you have to do. And and of course, I always have to caveat this. That just because you take ownership of that doesn’t. And you you explain things to your boss doesn’t mean you’re always going to get it. Because there’s resource constraints, you know, there’s there’s funding restraints where they just can’t afford to give you something. You know, Hey, I want, you know, you know, laser guns that shoot through walls get MIT working on that like, No, that’s not going to happen, even though that would help you. We can’t do that, we don’t have the assets for it, we don’t have the resources for it. So you’re not going to always get what you want, but you at least get a reason. And then you can pass that reason down the chain of command. Here’s why we’re not getting

1:03:29 This new piece of gear. You know, we’re we don’t have enough money this quarter, we’re we’re going to invest in next quarter and we’ll be ready. Okay, at least the guys understand that. You led men in battle in her Mahdi, you came home, you went back to the West Coast to run the operations after the SEALS. Did you ever think you might go back or hoped you would go back? Or, um, how do you live after that intense period where you’re doing something you train your whole life for, you know, leading men in the most intense combat, probably imaginable. What happens after that? Well, I I was obsessed.

1:04:01 And when I took over training, I, I got completely obsessed with making sure guys were ready for combat. Because again, I didn’t think that this thing was going to be over. I thought we were going to send continue to send guys into that grinder, that meat grinder for the next five years. And so when I got back and and I got the opportunity to take over the training, I was, I was completely motivated to do that. And I was obsessed with making the training as realistic as possible and teaching guys as quickly as I could as much as I could so that they would stay alive and and win over there. So it was a It wasn’t even a thought, I mean, that’s what I did. I came back and took over training and started running it, and I was obsessed with that. Um, why did you leave? In 2010?

1:04:50 I had done 20 years and for a bunch of different reasons that, uh, it was just a bunch of different reasons. You know, probably the number one being a family, uh, that I barely knew at this point because I’d just been on deployment after deployment. You know, somebody else taught my son how to swim, which, you know, I wasn’t around. When he learned how to crawl, I wasn’t around when he learned how to walk? I was on deployment deployment, uh, but then when I wasn’t around, he learned how to swim as a frog man. I didn’t think that was too good, and so that was. That was definitely a piece of it was recognizing that, you know, my family was absolutely suffering from my obsessive behavior with the SEAL teams because the SEAL teams was my priority.

1:05:40 Like, let me make that perfectly clear family was not my number one priority. The SEAL teams was my number one priority, and by a long shot, nothing else mattered. And so I realized that from a detached state as I looked at my life and as I looked at my family. And as I looked at what I had left to do in the SEAL teams, I had to weigh the reality of it all and and make a decision. That was not a that was, uh, was not. I didn’t do the selfish thing, the selfish thing was to do what I wanted to do.

1:06:16 Uh, not that I didn’t want to be with my family, but I definitely, you know, I needed to make a sacrifice for my family and I’d. I’d done what I could do for the SEAL teams, and I felt like I could go and take care of my family. Now. You told the story of I think your wife asked for a picture of where you were sleeping when you were in Iraq. And and you went to take a picture of it and you realized there was no pictures of your family. And you kind of brought them out to take a picture. And then you put them away because I think you were compartmentalizing the kind of your family. When you’re in a situation of war. I just wonder if you could speak on why you did that. Yeah, just a staged photo to to give the impression of my family that I was thinking about them.

1:06:58 And the reality was, I wasn’t, and I didn’t want to, because I mean, I had. I had guys to take care of and I didn’t want to think about my family for a second. Because that second might be the time that I thought of something that’s going to make us perform better on the battlefield. So, yeah, I just didn’t want to, didn’t want to think about it. And I’d call my, you know, I’d call my wife once a week and check in at a certain time, just to, you know, maintain some kind of a connection.

1:07:36 But yeah, I didn’t want to be sitting there Looking at my family every night and thinking about them or thinking that I might not see him again. Didn’t need that thought. So, yeah, I compartmentalized it, and just, you know, when I had to take that picture for my wife, my wife wanted. My kids, wanted to see where I was sleeping at night. And I first, when I looked at the first picture I took and I realized that, you know, it was nothing. It was a copy of about face. The book that I always talk about was sitting on my nightstand, which is insane to be sitting there in in Ramadi. And the only thing I’m reading about is about more war. But that’s what it was, was copied without face and it was a empty wall. So I just, yeah, pinned up. Some pictures, took him out of a, took him out of a notebook, pinned him up on the wall, took a picture, took him back down. Did the rest of the deployment did you notice that you got extremely close to your men like in Ramadi? I’m sure you got very close to them when you’re training and being a seal anyways. But when that wartime happens, do you get so close as a unit, as as family, to where you even step out your side yourself and and it’s it’s it’s a really tight knit unit. Or does it become emotional? It’s definitely a tight knit unit. I mean, there’s no doubt about it.

1:08:50 And what was, you know, the the Seal the Seal platoon is. I mean, it’s it’s a it’s a gang, and it’s a family, and there’s no doubt about it, there’s no doubt about that. And you get, I guess, you get even closer when you’re in these going through these horrible situations. Uh, but was what was also really maybe stood out in my mind more than that? Because that’s, you know, that that’s what you grew up with. I mean, I grew I, you know, my whole adult life was in seal platoons, so I was totally used to that. And that Brotherhood. But what was more, I wouldn’t say surprising. But what impressed me and was what I noticed more was the relationship that we had with the Army units and with the Marine Corps. And how these guys, they were our brothers, too, they were absolutely, you know, we. We formed a bond with them very quickly. That and that had nothing to do with training, had nothing to do with it, just was because we were all there in combat, together with a unified mission. And so that I noticed, I noticed that greatly. And I’m not. A I’m not the most social person in the world, and so, you know, I I don’t like, reach out and communicate.

1:10:10 I I won’t talk to you again, look after this, like you’ll hear from me in six months. I’ll say, Hey, man, I’m in England, you know, you want to get dinner, you’re not going to hear from me in between those times. Uh, you know, Joe Rogan, I’ll shoot like Joe Rogan a text and say, Hey, bro, you know what, what’s happening? Or. But I’m not like a big social communicator, and that’s the same way with my buddies and SEAL teams. I don’t say, Hey, what’s going on? Bud, hope everything’s cool.

1:10:37 Happy birthday. No, I don’t. I don’t get birthday messages, I don’t send them, you know, just, I’m not like that. But when you saw this, this bond form between us and the and the Army and the Marine Corps, it was outstanding, it was truly outstanding. You dedicated your book to three men Mark Lee, Mike Monsoir and Ryan Job. Just wondering if you could tell me about them or why you dedicated the book to them. Well. RYAN Joeb Those were the the three guys from tasking a bruiser that were from from our task unit that were killed in Ramadi. So Mark Lee was the first SEAL killed in Iraq.

1:11:16 Mike Monsoir was the second SEAL killed in Iraq, and and he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. He, uh, he jumped on a grenade to save three of our other teammates. And Ryan Joeb was the, uh, the last guy who was shot in the face by an enemy sharpshooter of some kind and gravely wounded. He lost, he lost sight in both of his eyes and he, but he made it back to America. And he was, you know, medically retired from the Navy and was kind of moving on with his life. Getting married. It was actually actually had. His wife was, uh, was pregnant. And after the 22nd surgery that he had to to repair the damage that had been done to his, his face and his head.

1:12:08 There were complications and he died as well, and that’s why we dedicated the book to those guys. Do you find a way to to deal with those kind of deaths, or or is that something you have? Each one is something you have to kind of put your heart around each time. Uh yeah, I mean, every one of those guys, absolutely, there’s no, I don’t think there’s a methodology to that. There’s just remembering, and when you lose someone in your unit during that wartime situation, you have to go to a funeral and you see someone else in your unit that is taking it really hard. Or you don’t know if they’re going to be able to do it. Is there do you say something to them, or do you just try to keep your leadership strong to keep people moving forward? I mean, we’re our own therapy.

1:13:12 So you, you act as your own therapy with your guys, and you know, in fact, that’s that’s one thing that I think I like the guys from World War Two. When they came home, they had to ride a ship home, so they were stuck together to debrief. Stuff and talk about stuff and get it out of their systems. And, you know, in the Vietnam War, and plus those guys in World War Two, they were with their unit. They were with those guys that they had served with and they came home together. Whereas, like in the Vietnam War, those guys were. You could get pulled out of the field and go home by yourself.

1:13:54 And you know, one day you’re in the Bush, and then 48 hours later, you’re on Main Street, USA. So who did you debrief with? Answer Nobody who did you get therapy from? Nobody because guys don’t want to go and say, Hey, man, I really want to talk about this to you or you, because I don’t know you. And you don’t know what I know and you haven’t seen what I seen, so I’m not going to talk to you about it. But when you’re stuck with them or you’re with them, then okay. You know, you can go through those memories and you can talk about those things. And I think that’s that. We provided our own therapy for each other to the best of our ability. When you look at Iraq now with ISIS and everything that’s happened, does it disappoint you? Does it feel like I don’t know? It was a wasted effort or you had gained ground that was given back?

1:14:43 What’s your perspective on it now? Yeah, we gained good ground and we gave it back. It’s it’s horrible, I mean, especially literally. Ramadi was taken over by ISIS and there was literally a black flag of ISIS flying over the government center in Ramadi. And so, you know, that’s complete symbology of what happened, and that was awful to see. Mainly not not, you know, yes, because we fought for it. Yes, because Americans sacrificed greatly to to provide that city the opportunity for stability. And especially my friends and my brothers, that died, so that was just heinous to see. But then also because we knew that I knew what it was like, I knew that there was families there. I knew that there was Iraqi families that were there that were now under this brutal reign of terror. And we got reports back because we, you know, we still know people.

1:15:51 And ISIS came in. And anybody that had any suspicion of at any time ever having anything to do with the Coalition. They murdered the whole families, whole families, so there was something like 500 families that ISIS went and murdered everyone. So, yeah, when you hear that and you realize that, you know it was, it didn’t have to happen. You know, we had.

1:16:19 We had taken Ramadi and they had rebuilt it. And, you know, in the in the years after we left, there was. It was completely normal, safer than, you know, a lot of American cities and those people had the real opportunity and were living in peace. And to see that just be, you know, completely go backwards was was awful to see. And those go ahead. I was going to say now.

1:16:47 In recent months, the Iraqi military took Ramadi back again. And so I was, I was, you know, I was. Happy to see that. The the American forces that were there provided incredible support, training, equipment, guidance, strategic guidance and air power to to take the city back. But it was still a really tough fight, so that was. That was good to see. Because at least you’re seeing a fight and you’re seeing effort and you’re seeing that good will overcome evil.

1:17:19 You use the word savages. You save that word for people that are just doing horrible, despicable things to the local populace. And just, you know, wreaking havoc and use that word for people like in ISIS. And I think you said before they need to be killed, it’s a cancer that needs to be cut out to change their way of thinking. Um, can you explain what you mean by savages or what you think of when you think of ISIS? I think you just wrapped it up. But, you know, you’ve got a group of people that, you know literally puts other people into cages and sets fire to them. Or a group of people that systematically rapes 10 year old girls and 10 year old boys, by the way.

1:18:13 So when that’s your culture, you don’t, in my opinion, deserve to have a culture. And how hard would it be to eradicate them? Right now? It would not be hard. I mean, let me let me take that back. It would be a challenge, it would be a hard fight, there’d be sacrifices made. I hope that the Iraqi Army continues to press forward and onto Mozul next and and and continues in this in this. It really is a war of of of epic proportions, because you’ve got a group that is counter to everything that normal society should be. So I hope that they and wish the absolute best to the Iraqis and the Americans that are on the ground there. That they press forward and continue to this fight against the enemy, it’s it. It is not impossible, though, and they can absolutely be eliminated. A hundred percent.

1:19:25 Do you think what keeps us from doing this is a. This may be a need for political correctness or need for instant gratification. Do you think America is not willing to? I don’t know, make a sacrifice. Oh, absolutely, America is not ready to make a sacrifice on this. I mean, we’ve been at war for 15 years and it is, you know, it’s very challenging and you look at it, you say, You know what, we’ve been over there, we’ve been fighting you for fighting these bad guys for 15 years. How about you guys?

1:19:52 Step up to the plate and make something happen now. That being said, America, you know, should be taking a leadership role in this, maybe not on the battlefield, but providing the support, the strategic guidance. And and, like I said, the leadership to ensure that this happens, we should absolutely be doing that. You once said that when a nation goes to war. They have to be prepared for two big things and one is they have to be prepared to kill and then prepared to die. Do you think America is necessarily ready for those two aspects when it comes to ISIS? They are not, they are not, and it’s the will, it’s the will, it’s the will to kill, and the hard thing about the will to kill is everybody has the will to kill ISIS, right? Or many people say, Yeah, we have the will to kill ISIS.

1:20:46 These are horrible, savage subhumans that are doing horrible, despicable things to other people, so most people say, You know what, these they deserve? To die. So that will is not hard to have. The problem where the will to kill comes in is that we forget that war is an imperfect effort, and that war is a confusing thing and a horrible thing. And there’s going to be collateral damage, and when you go and drop bombs on ISIS, you’re going to kill some civilians, you’re going to kill some civilians. You can kill some kids, you can kill some women, and it’s awful and it is the reality of war. And, believe me, we go to extreme lengths to mitigate that risk as much as possible. I mean, in fact, the whole battle of Ramadi was fought in the way it was fought in order to avoid collateral damage as much as possible, because otherwise you just bomb it.

1:21:45 But we didn’t want to do that. We knew that there’s civilians there. We knew there was good Iraqi people, families and kids and women, so we went in and took extreme risk. Not only in the strategy, but in the tactics of how we cleared it and how we went through it and the discretion that was used. So so, but but even with all that, civilians die, and so that’s part of it.

1:22:08 And we might have some of that will to kill ISIS, but I don’t know if we have the will to accidentally kill some civilians. Now you gotta remember, ISIS does not care, ISIS does not care at all. They don’t care if they kill civilians, they don’t care if they kill well, they intentionally kill civilians, they intentionally kill women, they intentionally kill children, that’s what they do and they kill each other. So so they’ll have a fracture side. It means nothing to them now, as far as the willingness to die. America has been grinding away for 15 years and taken, you know, many, many thousands of Americans in the prime of their life killed in action. And so that is something that it is. I think America’s, I think we’re the state we’re in right now. We’re not looking to jump into another ground conflict and and being in being in a sustained combat situation. No, we’re not looking to do that right now. But something that something about America that is always there, is that when it reaches a certain point and when when we’ve had enough, then stand by. Because we will come and we will, we will do what needs to be done. And hopefully it’s not at a point where, you know, the ISIS has made progress. And I, you know, they’ve been since. We got to continue to contain them, but hopefully we don’t wait so long that they actually have real legitimate power in some way. Say Trump got elected and he calls you up and says, Jocko.

1:23:48 We’d like you to go back in and we’re actually going to take care of this this time. Do you have any interest in that scenario? Yeah, I do that absolutely okay. Do you feel like either kind of a connection to that place in Iraq and those people there, or is it just a sense of justice, like a humanity sense to go back and do that duty? Both both the people on the ground and again, that’s something that gets. It’s it’s very. It’s very easy for someone to look at me and go, Love, this guy’s a Warhawk, this guy just wants to go to war. And, you know, as I, I think it was Sam Harris that I told, You know, Believe me, there’s. There’s no one that cares more about the frontline soldier than people that have served in combat and had their friends get killed.

1:24:38 So to think that we’re the people that are beating the drum and saying, Let’s go to war, let’s go to war. No, we actually know it’s our friends that are going to war, it’s our kids that are going to war, so we’re not the ones beating that drum. That being said, when you have pure evil in the world, somebody has to take care of that problem and there’s going to be sacrifice, there’s going to be risk. But somebody has to step up and take care of that problem. And, you know, if it comes the time that it’s for us to do it, then we do it and they have to be killed. You can’t reeducate these people, you can’t talk to them to a certain extent. Historically, does it come down where they have to be killed, they’re going to be killed? Yeah, yeah, and will there be some, you know, some small fraction that, you know, come forward and say, Hey, I got caught up in this? Maybe I don’t know, but anybody that gets caught up in that it. No, I don’t, I don’t see, uh, I don’t see them turning into a productive member of society that I want to have around. Right understood, Did you ever think you would be talking to corporations? Uh, you know, say, 10 years ago, did you ever think you’d be flying around the world coming here to Europe? Um, and giving advice to companies as far as what you learned on the battlefield, no, I did not think that, do you like it? Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s again, it’s it’s very rewarding, and what’s what makes it rewarding is that the biggest challenges

1:26:16 In combat is leadership and leadership is dealing with other people and trying to figure out what’s making them work or where the friction is in the team, that’s the challenge, and that’s the reward, is making all that happen. So when you’re working with a business, it’s the same thing you’re going into these businesses, they’ve got problems or issues, or, you know, we sometimes we go into businesses that are doing really well and they want to do even better. That’s awesome, but there’s still friction in there that that’s what you’re trying to clean up, that’s what you’re trying to improve. Sometimes you’re going into a situation where the company’s failing and we’re going in. We’re getting called in to turn this company around, get their leadership back on track, so we see a spectrum like that. But regardless, what you’re doing is you’re working with other humans. You’re trying to figure out these complex leadership relationship scenarios and then find solutions for them. So it’s it’s very rewarding. What’s that like? When you walk into the boardroom that first day and the employees see you and what are you? What’s over those reactions? I’m guessing when they see you, they probably expect certain things, they probably know a little bit about you. I don’t know what they’re thinking. I think there’s generally, um, a feeling of. But I think generally when I start talking to them, they they realize

1:27:37 That, Okay, I, I, we’re gonna get a lot out of this, you know, maybe maybe there’s one person. Maybe the CEO brought us in. Or the COO or H.R. or, you know, someone or the board brings us into work with the company. And then there you’ve got to break through that barrier, because now you’re an outsider that’s coming in to assess. So there’s a lot of there’s a There’s all kinds of little things to deal with. But I I think they realize quickly, number one that we’re there to help and number two. I think they realize very quickly that what we learned on the battlefield is absolutely applicable to what mission they have. And whether your mission is go out and capture, kill Bad Guys or your mission is to produce something or sell something or manufacture something or design something. Trying to get that team to be unified behind a plan and execute it efficiently, it doesn’t matter what the mission is. You’re still dealing with human beings, you’re still dealing with people. And the fact that we were in this environment where everything was amplified and intensified, and we got to see these human emotions very clearly. Like dog years, you know, we got so much experience in this short period of time working with these guys in these high stress environments that we’ve seen. A lot of examples. And and the people, it’s funny because I always say, People, number one, people are crazy, right, like you’re crazy, and I’m crazy, but I do

1:29:00 Things, I’m just, I’m that. Why would I ever do that? That’s the crazy that’s just doesn’t make any sense. I’m crazy, we’re all crazy. So so as a leader, you’re dealing with all these crazy people, not to mention you’re crazy yourself, right? So you’re dealing with all these crazy people. And at the same time, even though everything’s crazy and different at the same time, everybody’s falls into these categories and you can. It’s very quick to you, it’s you can very quickly say, I see what this guy’s like, I see where he’s coming from. This guy’s got a big ego or this guy’s not very confident with their skill set, so they’re trying to make up for it. By acting this way, it’s.

1:29:36 Very once you see these personalities and again we’ve got to see them and magnified, we saw them magnified. So now when you see them, you recognize them quickly and you go, Here’s what you’re dealing with. Here’s what this Here’s why this this girls act in this way, or this guys act in this way, or this individuals smashing his people or this individual is afraid to step up. We can recognize it. And then and then, like I said so. I think once we get over the kind of the barrier and they realize that what we have is applicable. They become very open very quickly to to learn and to change and to step up in leadership and in their own world and make things better.

1:30:19 And that’s why I think we’ve been successful. Sounds like a very emotional job, you sound like a therapist to a certain extent. Well, yeah, it is, and it also is because, yeah, I have kind of a personality that I I like, that problem solving, which is weird, because I never. You know, you get you talk to someone that says, Oh, I really like math because I like problem solving, I’m not that type of person, but when I start hearing the little political things that are going on in a company or the the problem with this personality over here and what they’re driving towards? I I immediately start saying, Okay, here’s what’s going on, let’s break that down. Wait, let me talk, I’m gonna go talk to that person. I’m gonna go find out what they’re thinking. I’m gonna talk to that person’s subordinates and find out how they view that person. Then I’m gonna talk to that person themselves and give them some key indicator from the subordinates and see how they react to that. So it’s all this it is. It’s a very complex puzzle that’s fun to unwind and learn, and it’s especially gratifying. When you know you, you sit with someone and you just, you just lay out for him. What what to do or what they did and and what the mistake was, and they recognize it and they go. I can’t believe I did that, you know, and it’s so obvious sitting right here, you know, I just. I was in a meeting the other day and I was with a guy who was. He was leading leading

1:31:41 Change and it was. It wasn’t going well. And then when I when I showed up, you know, to help out and I, I talked to one of the people that was involved in the change. I said because they had started to get some progress and I said, Hey, when did all that progress start? And he said, Oh, it’s when the leader came in and sat us down with just, you know, five of us, real leaders. We all sat down, we all hashed stuff out, face to face, we got all out all on the table. We talked through it, and that’s when we realized that’s when we stepped up and we. We went out and started making changes.

1:32:12 And so I was giving. I was talking to the guy and I said, You know that meeting that you had, that’s what changed everything, that’s what got your momentum going. So that was a great meeting and he was kind of, he was kind of excited. You know, he kind of got that good look on his face like he did a good job. And I said, It’s a shame. He didn’t have that meeting nine months ago, and it’s a shame you didn’t have one of those meetings once a week. And he was, and he just looked like he knew he knew that he should have, but it didn’t matter anymore. He was on the right course and he realized the impact of those meetings and realized how important the communication was and what role. He needed to play in bringing those pieces together because he didn’t realize that.

1:32:47 So once you realize it, so then boom. That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about, and I enjoy identifying those issues and finding a way to sort through them. You mentioned communication that’s a big one right up the chain, down the chain. And like message sent message, received message, Know what I’m talking about? I mean, that seems like one of the big pillars of what you guys do. Yeah, and it’s one of those things where you can Google whatever if you Google, you know, business problems, probably communication would come up, so it’s it’s a cliche, right? But at the same time, how do you solve that communication problem, and what does it really look like? You know, a lot of people, okay, well, did you, did you tell your guys what was going on? Did you tell your troops what was happening? Yeah, I did. Oh, you did, because a lot of them didn’t know, What do you mean? They didn’t know. I sent them three emails a week. Well, there you have it, you know, I’m guessing a lot of what you do is take it from electronic to in person. A lot of it, a lot of it is, and and at the same time, take it from in person to electronic. Because guess what if you and I have a conversation?

1:33:52 And we decide we hash out the plan, and and you’re telling me what to do when we get done with that conversation. You know, you have one thing in your mind and I have a different thing in mind. So I will take an email, email, the bullet points. Hey, just want to make sure I’m clear on your direction. I’m going to do this, this and this is that right? My way, do we do? We have the same conversation, and I do that from a leadership position as well. If I’m telling you something, we have the conversation when we get done, we’ll write you four bullet points.

1:34:18 Hey, just to clarify, great talking to you, I think you are going to crush this project or this initiative. Here’s the three things that we’re going to focus on boom, boom, boom. Now you go great, got it, we can move forward because it’s, you know, you got to over communicate. To an extent, you train with some of the best you serve with some of the best on the front lines. When you bump into these CEOs and you come into these companies, what’s your general impression of them? As you know, as high performance individuals, I would guess that you would at first look at.

1:34:50 Them and be like, this is, you know, I’ve dealt with so much higher performance. But is that not true? Do you have a Do they surprise you? Do you respect them in the same way? Oh yeah, well, first of all, you know, this myth that every seal is this high performing dominator is not true. I love the seals, but sEALS is filled with humans, they’re people, and there’s a bell curve, just like anywhere else.

1:35:09 And you got guys that are crushers at the top end of the spectrum. You got a bulk of guys that are awesome guys, and you got low hanging guys that are not, you know, long ball hitters. So that’s just to set that myth aside. But so working with the CEOs, I see the same thing. You know, you get guys that are fantastic guys, awesome leaders, you know, just dominating personalities that understand leadership really well. And then you get, you know, guys that are that are not that are making mistakes. But, you know, to be a CEO of a big company, you’ve been through some leadership challenges. You just didn’t show up there. So I’m not, I’m not walking in there, you know, telling the CEO, Hey, I’ve got something to teach you, No, I’m going in there, Hey, let’s look at where you’re at. Just like I would work with other SEAL leaders and say, Let’s look at where you’re at. I’m working with the CEO, not from a level of, you know, student teacher, it’s, Hey, it’s an outside view, which is always helpful. I don’t care who you are. Outside view, Let’s look at what kind of reactions you’re getting. Let’s look at where the business is going, and that way it’s it’s a It’s a collaborative effort to improve. It’s not sense.i Jocko coming in from a position of higher authority. No, because I’m going to learn from them, too. And another misconception about the military is People don’t do exactly what you say. You have to lead and

1:36:33 Sell and do all the other things that happen in the corporate world, absolutely. So the whether you’re in the CEO teams or whether you’re in the Army or the Marine Corps, the people that are working for you are not robots. They’re people, and you cannot give them orders and expect them to just execute like a robot would. And the worse your plan is thought out, the less response you’re going to get? And just like in business world, the less input I get from you. As we create this plan, the less apt you are to execute it correctly. So when when it comes time when you have to go execute something, I want you to plan it, I’m not going to plan it for you, I want you to plan it. Now I’m going to come and check out your plan, and we’ll collaborate to make sure it’s the best plan. Because maybe I have more experience than you, or maybe I have some strategic vision that you don’t have, but I want you to plan it that way. You own it, and if you own it, when you go to execute it, you’re going to put that much more effort into it. That that’s hard to quantify, but that’s real, that is real. If you come up with a plan, you’re going to put more effort and more pride in executing that plan. Then if I come up with a plan and I give it to you and tell you to execute it, that’s just a reality. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t care who you are, that’s a reality, so that type of thing is is absolutely true. And the other piece of this is this idea

1:37:50 Of, you know, just that. We’re going to order everyone to do what what to do, and they’re just going to do it. If the military was like that, then military leadership would be the easiest thing in the world. It would be so easy because you just tell your guys what to do and they go do it and guess what? Being a business leader would be the easiest. Because I, I was having this conversation, I always have this conversation, which is, you know, my guys wouldn’t just do what I told them because I outranked them. And I kind of get that funny. Look, I won’t let me ask you this, I’m here because your employees aren’t doing what you want them to do, right?

1:38:22 Can you just fire them? Well? You can’t realistically fire, but don’t they work for you, aren’t they supposed to follow you because you’re in charge and you write their paycheck? But all of a sudden they’re not doing what you tell them to do. Why is that? It’s the same exact reason because they’re people and guess what people want to own their own destiny. They want to be in charge of what’s happening, they want to take ownership, they want to create the plan. That’s how they want to go through life. They want to go through life, being treated like a robot, they want to be treated like a human. So don’t talk to me about. Oh, well, it was easy for you because you had these highly trained, highly disciplined, you know, uh, Terminator robots that work for you. Not true, in fact, the opposite. I had a bunch of hard<unk>headed, you know, the guys that you talked about. I had a bunch of hard<unk>headed, very determined, fixed gold guys that, you know, I had to get them to do what I wanted them to do, I had to get them to want to do what I wanted them to do. I had to make them think that it was what they wanted to do. That’s the goal, and that’s what the leadership really comes.

1:39:25 That’s what leadership is, because ordering people to do things does not work. You actually have to lead them, and that’s another buzzword out. There is. This is accountability. You know, you got to be accountable, you got to be, you got to hold your people accountable. And and to me, accountability is a tool. It’s a it’s a it’s a tool of leadership, but it’s not the primary tool of leadership. It’s actually a crutch. It’s actually a tool to use when you don’t pull off leadership correctly, so what you want to do? I, you know, I, I, I talk about this all the time. I didn’t hold my guys accountable, I didn’t, you know, walk down the line and inspect what they were doing. And no.

1:40:10 I didn’t have to hold them accountable, they wanted to do the right thing, they wanted to do what was aligned with the mission. I had to hold them back, never mind make them do it, and that’s what leadership is. It’s not about accountability, it’s about leading and getting them to lead themselves and getting them to take ownership of things. That’s what that’s. That’s when you know you’ve succeeded as a leader when you’re just about out of a job when you’re sitting back. And you don’t have to do anything because your frontline troops and your subordinate leadership is making things happen with almost no effort from you. And the only time you have to step in is when something’s going sideways or you see something getting off track, you got to step back in there. But the ideal is that you can sit back, observe, start looking at what the other strategy is. What what to do next, other problems other parts of the world. But you can just let your people do what they want to do because they want to do it. Not because you have to breathe down their shoulder and hold them accountable, not the way to lead, right? But they’re doing that because you’ve done all this leadership in the past and you’ve taken the worst job on the boat and you’ve done all this. I guess work yourself to show them what you’re all about. Then you can kind of sit back and then focus on other things. But if you haven’t done that, then you,

1:41:24 Then you have to put in that work. Oh yeah, you’ve got to train, you’ve got to train them, you’ve got to educate them, you’ve got to lead them, you know, and then you got to build that trust. And once they become efficient at doing it themselves, then you can, then you can back off very little leadership, training, even business school. I spent a little time in business school at M.I.T. I didn’t finish the degree. But there’s not a lot of real leadership training, there’s some management training, but I think that’s very different. Oh, it’s it’s very different. I guess that’s why you have a job. Um, let me ask you, Oh, I was asked. A bunch of questions came in for you, the fire and move analogy in business. How does that translate to business? Bunch of people wanted to know well, and that was one of those things that when we first started talking about this to businesses, right? So principles of combat that I always talk about. The number one principle combat is cover and move number one principle combat. So what it means is if you and I are going to assault a building over there, I already talked about this today, but I’m going to start shooting at the bad guys and when I’m shooting at them. They’re going to get down because they don’t want to die, so they’re going to hide, and while they’re hiding, you’re going to get up and you’re.

1:42:29 Going to move to a better position a better tactical position when you get to a better tactical position you’re going to start shooting at the bad guys once you’re shooting at the bad guys and you’re keeping their head down i’m going to get up and move to a better tactical position than you have once i get there i’m going to start shooting and we’re going to continue to do that and bound forward until we’ve closed with the enemy we kill them that’s That’s cover and move. It’s the fundamental gun fighting tactic. So when I first started working with businesses, I thought to myself, you know, we got these laws of combat, most of them translate pretty easily.

1:43:06 This one, I kind of strapped my head, you know, how can I turn a legitimate gun fighting tactic into a tactic for companies? Didn’t know if I was gonna be able to do it and I wasn’t gonna force it. The first meeting I ever had with a company, and they started explaining to me what their business was like. I said to myself, well, this is a no-brainer because, and now I realize, you know, since that time, every single business, I don’t care what it is, has multiple elements inside of it.

1:43:35 And those elements have to work together to accomplish the mission. Because by the way, if you’re up and moving towards that target and I stop shooting, what’s gonna happen? Do you know what’s gonna happen? I’ll get shot. The enemy’s gonna stick their head up because they’re not scared anymore, they’re gonna see you up and running and they’re gonna kill you.

1:43:57 So with companies, you’ve got, you know, whether it’s the sales team, the operations team, the marketing team, the HR team, all of these different elements, and they all have a role to play. And if one of them fails to do their role, yeah, they suffer, but everybody suffers. And so the key thing is that as you do Cover and Move, first of all, you’ve gotta recognize that you are together as a team, even though we’re siloed, even though I’m a sales guy over here, or I’m an operations guy over here, or I’m a marketing person over here, even though you’re siloed, you need to break down that silo because if one of your elements isn’t working correctly, everyone’s gonna die.

1:44:41 So that’s how Cover and Move works and it works very well. And when we make that analogy with companies and we explain to them how reliant on their, a lot of times they don’t even realize, they know it, but they don’t behave like they know it. So you gotta get them to behave like they know it, which is, look, if I fail operationally to support my sales team, or I fail operationally to support my compliance team, we’re gonna die. So we have to work together. And that’s why Cover and Move works very well with the businesses.

1:45:14 I’m already thinking about it right now because in order for you to be here, we had to have someone that contacted you months ago, right? And they followed up with you. And then in order for us to see you right now, there’s someone that’s taking this as a camera picture. There’s someone that’s gonna produce it. It’s also someone that’s gonna tell the world about it.

1:45:30 I had to prepare for you to be here. And if anybody failed in that job, then this wouldn’t happen. So yeah, you already got me thinking about it. Cover and Move. Cover and Move.

1:45:40 Let me ask you about jujitsu, your black belt. I’m wondering if rolling on the mat with a guy like Dean Lister is one of the closest things you can come to a life-death situation. Is it true that a lot of seals are drawn into the martial arts because it’s so real?

1:46:02 There’s definitely seals. I mean, seals like to fight and seals like to train. They like to know how to fight and how you’re gonna learn how to fight, you gotta train. So without a doubt, I was always the first time I ever trained with someone and you get choked. And I was 19 years old, I think, and I had this old seal master chief who knew jujitsu.

1:46:32 This is in 1992 or 1993. I didn’t know anything. No one knew anything. And he had been training with the Gracies up in the Torrance Garage. So he knew jujitsu.

1:46:43 He was like a high-level white belt at the time, which meant he knew the basic moves. And here I was, this young seal, and here’s this old master chief. He’s choking me, arm-locking me. I couldn’t do anything. And I realized that this was a power.

1:47:00 This was a legit power. And I didn’t ever wanna be in a situation where somebody would have this power over me. How have you found watching the UFC evolve? Remember when UFC won and two and three where it was just all these styles and a lot of reality entered people’s minds, like when you started simulating real combat training and the learning curve was so steep. You look at the evolution of fighters.

1:47:25 How do you find it these days? Do you still think the learning curve is as steep? And where do you think it’s going? It’s not as steep. I mean, there was a time where people didn’t know jujitsu and just got destroyed by Horace Gracie.

1:47:41 Bigger, stronger, whatever, it didn’t matter. Jujitsu would just win. And now everybody knows jujitsu. Everybody knows wrestling. Everybody knows boxing.

1:47:49 So now you’re gonna get to a point in the near future where it’s about the athlete. We’re close to that now, where it’s really about the athlete that’s executing. And so I think that’s cool. It’s not quite as fun for me as seeing the skill set, because basically everyone’s gonna have the same skill sets shortly. And it’s gonna be boiled down to who is the better athlete.

1:48:14 Now, there will still be some piece of creativity in there. And creativity can win. So I always give the example of guitar, right? If you go to any guitar store in England or in America and you hang up a sign and say, hey, I need a experienced guitar player that can play all these songs, you’ll get all kinds of applications and they can really do it. But the question is who has the creativity to break out and create something new?

1:48:46 And so that’s what you’re gonna start to see. Still, I believe that will stay in the game somewhat is who can be creative and who can take the basic principles and the basic skills and add something or use them in a way that hasn’t been used before. So I think that’ll be fun to watch, but it definitely, it’s turning into more of how good the athlete is, not how good the martial art itself is. Yeah, creativity, I think of John Jones in his early fights, very creative.

1:49:18 Greg Jackson was always like, I wanna keep your creativity. I don’t wanna train too many fighting memes into you. And like Anthony Pendess and just all of that, you can see how that wins fights as opposed to just the skill level. When you see someone like Conor McGregor, you train people that probably mentally are what makes them better than other people ultimately. When you see someone like Conor and you watch his mental game, even his creative game, what do you see there that’s different in him?

1:49:47 I think he’s got a really good creative mind for the game and that’s something that you’re kind of born with because you can look at, we could name dozens of fighters that you never saw them do anything creative. And some of them, possibly were even world champions, but they just had the honed skills and the right skill sets that they were able to excel and win. But I think Conor’s very creative. He’s confident enough that it allows him to be creative. And then I think he’s a real showman.

1:50:21 So good on him. But what about the mental warfare aspect? He does seem to, even when you know it’s coming, he seems to get in people’s heads regardless. And these are guys that are, their job is not letting guys in their heads to a certain extent. And he still seems to squeeze in there somehow.

1:50:36 Yeah, he’s getting after it. It’s fun to watch. I just wanna ask you a few questions about kind of your daily habits. Your Twitter feed is full of pictures of your watch varying from 404 in the morning to 445 if you happen to start late. It’s becoming a meme.

1:50:51 So congratulations, you’ve got a meme that’s spreading. And the other day you retweeted a bunch of people’s watches this morning. Talk to me about your early wake up routine. When did you start doing it? And why do you still do it?

1:51:05 And what does it do for you? Do you think it’s Americans when everyone gets everything instant gratification and the big cars and the relative safety and everything?

1:51:43 Is it an easy thing to forget? Do you think as an American in America, what we have? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. There’s a bubble around America for sure.

1:51:53 And it’s hard to break through that bubble because the standard of living there is amazing. And when I say that, I know that there’s people that live in tough situations in America, for sure. But go to Rwanda,

1:52:17 Go to Liberia and let’s talk about standard of living. So it’s a definite bubble. It’s a bubble that I’m happy is there. I’m happy that people in America and in the first world countries in Europe and can live inside that bubble. But I’m concerned when they think that the bubble is the reality of the world.

1:52:45 So we, as a civil society, need to be careful to not believe that and to make sure we take measure of the world outside of the bubble and outside of freedom and outside of capitalism and make sure that we realize what a blessing it is to have all those things and also how fragile they can be. What keeps you awake at night these days? Well, first of all, I’m not sleeping. So there’s nothing to keep me awake. Why is that?

1:53:27 Just don’t sleep a lot. You’re not asleep. When I get done with the day, yeah, I’m usually tired when I get done with the day. I lay down and I go to sleep and I wake up. I know that that’s not the question you’re really asking me.

1:53:41 The question that you’re really asking me is what am I concerned with in the world as a whole. I think the world, again, it’s probably the answer that I just gave in that it’s very easy to be lulled into complacency because we have it very good in the world. And you’ve just gotta be cognizant of the real threat that there is to freedom and democracy and humanity, humanity.

1:54:24 So I get concerned that we, as a country in America, forget about that. I get concerned that we, as a civil society, throughout the, like I said, the first world countries that have the blessings of being in first world countries, that we take it for granted and lose the awareness of how fragile it can be.

1:55:00 Yeah, if you haven’t spent time, I think, protecting your own freedom, I’m just thinking back to hunter-gatherer days where you would have spent time protecting that tribe and protecting that clan and you would have seen people die and you would have known that was a core part of why you were still there and how removed we are from it, including myself. And how it’s always been pretty safe. And every now and then you hear about this and you meet someone that protected your freedom, but then you forget about it.

1:55:28 And it’s easy to kind of assume it’ll always be there. You know, we’re in Europe and I’m in London and there’s this famous YouTube video that shows the map of Europe over the last thousand years. And it is like a colored diagram that changes borders every 50 years and massive countries expand and contract and scratch. And I meet people sometimes and they’re like, well, war’s over. And I’m just like, have you seen the last thousand years?

1:55:54 War is going to be here soon. People are saying, oh, passports don’t matter. It’s a global, it’s a global, I’m a global citizen. I’m like, really, okay. See what happens when the shit hits the fan and you have to rely on your country and your tribe.

1:56:07 And now you’re really fighting over things that matter. And I don’t know if it’s me, because I’m in my 40s now that I seem to appreciate the fact that we have that safety and that most likely in my lifetime, things are going to change in Europe, even in this close to home, whatever that means. And that there are going to be some real hard decisions to make and some sacrifices to make to keep what we just think is the normal time here in our lives. Yeah, and as a matter of fact, when I leave here, I’m going to meet one of my British buddies who’s going to take me to, I said, hey, take me to some war memorials.

1:56:40 And so I’m looking forward to that because Britain absolutely, they held the line against the Germans. And it’s amazing that they could ever forget that.

1:57:00 And I do. Those things start to slide away from memory as generations go by. But there’s 50 years ago, there was a chance that Britain wasn’t going to be anymore. And that’s amazingly horrible to think about.

1:57:19 So yeah, I agree with you. There’s always war on the horizon. And again, that doesn’t mean I’m pro war. Because I know how awful war is. But there’s a war on the horizon.

1:57:40 And let’s just be proactive about taking care of those problems before we do start seeing movements of borders on maps of things that have been established for a long time and that should remain that way. This country knows more than most. I mean, in 1940, there’s a great memorial for Bomber Command. It’s been up in the last couple years. You must see it.

1:58:08 Actually, we did a moving conversation with Edo Portal, one of the movement guys for O’Connor McGregor. And we filmed there. And it’s a very powerful kind of outdoor memorial about Winston Churchill talking about never in history of so many lives been owed to so few. And it was just about how that year was, there’s the cabinet war rooms as well where they were dug down deep in the ground, just being bombed, people not knowing what was gonna happen next. And this country knows that so well, or at least they did 75 years ago.

1:58:42 And there’s another thing just on that note that I noticed when we had the bombings here and it was 05. One thing I noticed about the British people was the next day, everybody went back to work. And I remember thinking there was no drama. It wasn’t overblown. There wasn’t a lot of whoa and this.

1:58:59 It was like, we go back to work here because we’ve done this before. And I was really impressed. My wife’s a Brit. And her parents got bombed and remember it. And actually, Britain is,

1:59:23 They’ve been through the wringer and they’re a warrior culture. And I think sometimes that gets forgotten. But it was interesting when my mother-in-law was with us in San Diego. She would come out to visit and it was right after America went into Afghanistan for the first time. And the first SEAL got killed in Afghanistan.

1:59:51 And as a guy that I knew, I was at team two with them many years ago. And it was the first guy that I knew that had been killed in combat and I was watching it on the news. And I remember I was sitting there, I don’t know what kind of look I had on my face, but my mother-in-law with a, she just said to me something along the lines of, that’s what your jobs are and these things are gonna happen. And I don’t think an American would have said that to me. I don’t think an American would have, well, let me rephrase that.

2:00:37 I don’t think a woman in her mid-60s in America would say that. But someone that had lived through the bombing and someone that remembered the sacrifices, she knew, she understood war better than me at that point. And that’s definitely a spirit in Great Britain and the UK. Great Britain and the UK. And I’ve worked with Brits a couple of times in my career and they’re just outstanding, just outstanding, outstanding soldiers.

2:01:16 And you can feel the culture, the warrior culture with the British military. It’s deep. Deep, yeah. I was gonna ask you about the SIS. I guess you’ve met with some of those guys in the past.

2:01:36 Yeah, as a matter of fact, worked with the SIS, again, on a handful of occasions and just outstanding professionals and actually one of them, I was in Iraq and we’re doing some operations with the SIS. And I was standing there with the commander, the troop commander of the SIS and we’re looking at a map and we’re kind of deciding how we’re gonna conduct this operation. We’re talking through it and he’s gonna here and there. We step back and we’re just kind of looking at it.

2:02:08 And I just had an opportunity and I said, hey, I’m actually married to a Brit. And he didn’t take his eyes off the map. He just kept looking at the map and he just said, I’m sorry to hear that, mate. Chuck, I always ask everyone at the end a simple question and I’ll ask you if you could make a quick phone call to the 20 year old Jocko and give that young man a bit of advice. I guess you would have been through buds at that point.

2:02:35 Yeah. If you could tell him one thing, like literally talk to that young man on the phone, what would you tell him? I think the main thing, the main point that I would try and get across and this is actually something that I’ve said to, I used to say this to young MMA fighters. When these young kids would come in and they’d wanna be an MMA fighter and I’d say, I’d get done training with them and I’d beat them up because I was more experienced and I’d say, well, how old are you?

2:03:10 And they’d say, I’m 22. And I’d say, listen, you got all kinds of time. Don’t worry about it. You just come in here, train, you’re gonna get better. Just, you’ve got all kinds of time.

2:03:21 And when I look at myself as a young seal at 26 years old, which is what I was, you feel like your life is gonna last a long time. And if I was to talk to my 26 year old self, I would tell that kid that you don’t have time. And you really, you don’t know when it’s gonna end. And so, get out there and do the things you wanna do. Get out there and get after them now.

2:04:03 Don’t wait another second, take advantage of it. Get out there and live and strive to be better because the life you’ve got, which I just said was a gift, it is a gift. So live it. And to that same young man that wants to be a seal, the guys that wanna be like Jocko one day, what do you tell that, that 20 year old that sees this thing and says, I wanna go do that? What advice do you give to them?

2:04:43 Well, first of all, don’t try and be like me. Be better than me, crush me, make me look like a baby. That’s what you do. And don’t talk about it, don’t mull it over, don’t plan for it, just get after it. Get after it, make it happen.

2:05:04 Use your force of will to make it happen as a human being. The strongest thing you’ve got is your force of will. So take that force of will and make that happen. I’m gonna end on that. Thanks so much for your time, Jocko, I really appreciate it.

2:05:24 I’m looking forward to this for a couple of weeks. And yeah, thanks for giving it to us straight. It’s nice to hear and very refreshing. Thanks, appreciate it. All right, take care.