Special Forces Commander's Weird Trick For Overcoming Anxiety, "This Is The Reason People Quit", "Imposter Syndrome Is A Good Thing!"

26:39Okay. There it is. It's on the table. I don't know everything. I'm not that experience in this particular thing, but I'm humble and willing to listen and I want the team to do well. No more imposter syndrome. Is that the same in the Navy SEALs? Because one would assume that you, you know, as a leader, you've got to tell people what to do. That is wrong in the Navy SEALs. And that is not a good assumption. In the SEAL teams, you, the good leaders in the SEAL teams absolutely have an open mind, want to hear other people's opinions on how to execute an operation, want to hear what shortfalls there are when a plan is presented that, hey, what about this?

27:18and what about that? And a good leader is not going to impose plan as in fact, my standard operating procedure was to have my subordinate leadership come up with plans instead of me trying to come up with the plans. In fact, that's the best way to operate. That means you ask them for the plan. 100%. Why? There's a multitude of reasons. Number one, I want you to have the ownership of the plan, right? So if I'm imposing a plan on you, then that's not really your plan. I want you to come up with a plan. And I want you to go to your team and I want you to collectively come up with a plan that you all embrace and understand and buy into.

28:00So it's going to be a better plan from your perspective if you come up with it. Also, if I come up with a plan, I'm in the plan. So when I'm in the plan, I can't see the plan as well. I want to be outside the plan, looking at it from the outside, from a different perspective, where then I can see the holes in the plan and I can ask you some questions about the plan that you came up with. And finally, if I'm coming up with a plan, if I'm staring down at the map coming up with a plan, well, who's looking up and out? Who's looking at the follow-on operations? Who's looking at where our other units are out in the battlefield?

28:36Who's checking on the intelligence that we're gathering about the enemy. If I'm looking down and in, I'm not looking up and out. If I'm coming up with a plan myself, I'm looking down and in. If I'm letting you come up with a plan, I can look up and out, you can look down and in, and we can have a lot more awareness of the battlefield. Often leaders and managers, we get, I think, caught up in the proverbial trenches. We get a little bit too close to the paintings, we can't see the picture. How important do you think it is to be the leader that's able to take a step back? That is the job of a leader.

29:16That is the job of a leader, to take a step back, detach from the situation, and see the entire picture of what is unfolding or what is being planned or what is happening. If you are in the problem, you won't see the solution to the problem. it you we will very rarely so you have to be able to detach and that's one of the the main things that i tried to teach young leaders when i was in the seal teams it's the same thing that i try and teach leaders now is to take a step back detach from the chaos detach from the mayhem detach from your emotions detach from your ego and be able to assess the best way to execute and give you know The book is called Extreme Ownership that you referenced.

30:03That doesn't mean that I do everything myself. In fact, what I want to do is I want you to take ownership. And how do I get you to take ownership? I give it to you. Hey, Steven, how do you want to run this project? And listen, what if you come up with a terrible plan? Let's say you come up with a... Let's say I come up with like... In my mind, I've got something that's going to be a 95 % solution. and I say, well, you know, I'm going to delegate. So Steven, how do you want to do this? And you come up with like an 80 % solution. Now, what should I do? I'll tell you, I'll still let you, I'll still run with your plan.

30:42I'll be like, okay, Steven sounds good. If you come to me with a 70 % plan, I might say, Hey, Steven, what about this? And you go, Oh yeah, I'm going to make adjustment there. And all of a sudden we got it to a 78 % plan and we're still good. If you come to me with the 20 % plan. Now I can ask you three or four questions before you say, hey, Jocko, let me, I'll be back in a couple hours. I'm gonna go reformulate this thing. And by the way, all that's training you, right? All those questions are training you. You coming up with a plan is training for you. Because if I've got people that work for me and they can't come up with a plan by themselves, I'm a complete failure as a leader.

31:15So I'm going to train you so that you can come up with plans and I can look up and out.

31:23Takes a lot of patience, doesn't it? Because you know in many of those situations that you're not going to get from A to B as fast as you possibly could have. It's an investment in a long-term efficiency. Because even though I might have to invest a little bit more time right now and I spent 10 minutes explaining to you why this tactic would be better than that tactic, even though it's going to cost me 10 minutes right now or maybe a half an hour, we look up in six months and you're actually coming up with better plans than me. You know, I read throughout your books, you went from being that young teenager who passed training to really like leading the Navy SEALs in many respects.

32:02Well, leading an element of SEALs. When you look back on that accomplishment, have you figured out what it is about you in particular that allowed you, enabled you to do that? Is there something, is there a muscle you grew?

32:26I was, I'm a hard worker. I, you know, I was never great at anything. Like as a kid, I wasn't the fastest. I wasn't the strongest. I wasn't the smartest, but I did, I did know that I could work hard. I had to work hard and I listened to people. I didn't think I knew everything. Even sometimes I'll joke about, yeah, you know, when you're young and arrogant, even when I was young and arrogant, like we all are when we're 23 years old or 22 years old and you're young, you think you know everything. Even then, I always had that little like, you don't know everything. And I think that humility played a big role in me being able to be successful because I was never afraid to say, hey, I'm not 100 % sure what to do right now.

33:20What do you guys think? Or, hey, I feel like I've reached the limitations of my thought process. I need some help. And so I think that's one of the main reasons that I was able to do a good job, to do a good job. When I meet someone like you, I wonder, I go, this guy must have seen so many things. So many things that the average human being will absolutely never see, you know? And I, because you were sent all around the world on some absolutely incredible, unimaginable missions for 20 years, for the average person who has no idea what your eyes have seen,

34:04can you paint me a picture of some of those extremes?

34:10Well, it's war.

34:14So, it's war. it's people being wounded people being killed in Iraq with the insurgents that we were fighting it's them torturing people mutilating their bodies raping beheading people

34:40horror

34:49but you know it's interesting when when i talk to other people when i meet people i always think to myself what you're saying that you think when you see me i always think that when I see other people. Because other people, we don't know what they've been through. You don't know what kind of childhood they've had. You don't know what kind of horrors they've seen. You don't want to kind of abuse they've suffered. You don't want to kind of, you don't know what kind of trials and tribulations other people have faced. So I don't, I look at everyone. And also the trials and tribulation that someone faces, someone faces, that's profoundly difficult for them, regardless of what it was.

35:39Regardless of if they were a person that, you know, got injured really bad there when they were in high school, they're 15 years old and they broke their leg and they couldn't play their sport anymore. And now they're 17. But that was a traumatic thing for them. and yeah so when I when I look at other people when I talk to other people I always think everyone everyone every human faces challenges and you don't know what they've been through and they they might have been through things that are worse than what I've been through and I usually my assumption is people have been through a lot of challenges and they they persevered through it and here they are.

36:23So I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

36:29But humans aren't supposed to be exposed to those kinds of images. And I think if you spoke to a, I know, trauma psychologist, they would, they would class a lot of those things that you've seen as what they call like tall T traumas, like really, really traumatic events. How, how does someone like you go about processing those things to ensure that that trauma doesn't show up in later life. You know, we talk about soldiers coming back from war suffering with PTSD and things like that. What have you done to sort of insulate yourself or at least help you understand some of the things you saw? There's evil in the world.

37:04And there's evil people in the world. And evil people are going to do heinous and atrocious things. And that's a reality. And that's always been the reality.

37:21and the best thing that I can do is, well, when I was in the military, do my best to stop that kind of atrocious behavior, and when I'm out of the military, try not to try and help people move away from those thoughts. I mean, when you're talking about my family, Like my family didn't, my wife wasn't tracking what was going on when I was overseas. She didn't know what was happening most of the time. You know, when my guys got wounded or my guys got killed, she knew. She went to the hospital to visit them. She went to their funerals. but I wasn't dragging her down the, the, the, to the depths of human nature.

38:19I took that and same with my kids. I didn't share with them that these things happen. So, and, and that's, so, so I think from my perspective, you know, it's like the reality of the world is, yeah, there's evil people in the world. I accept that reality. I understand that reality. There's also good people in the world. And there's people that do amazing things. There's people that sacrifice their lives for their friends. And that's part of humanity. So I like to focus on that part of humanity rather than the dark side of humanity. But if you really want to appreciate the light and the good, then you have to recognize that there's darkness and there's evil.

39:15Was there a hardest day while you were in the Navy SEALs? Is there a day you look back on and say that was the most sort of emotionally testing day? Yeah, losing guys in combat.

39:32and that stays with you oh yeah always

39:41I just can't imagine you know I just can't I've never lost a friend I've got two older brothers I've never lost my brothers I just can't imagine I can't imagine how difficult it is to like go forward when you've lost, you know, you refer to these people as your brothers.

40:10And I'm not unique.

40:15And the guys we were over in the Battle of Ramadi, when we were over there, the army and the Marine Corps, they were losing guys every day. This is not unique. I'm not unique. There's guys that were in charge of units that lost 10, 12, 15 guys.

40:34And it's not unique for human beings either. Because even though you haven't lost any friends, you haven't lost any of your brothers, you will. This is part of life. And so this is part of life. people have you know everyone's died and in combat people have died and people carried on and i know that my friends that died they would not want me to sit around and mourn and and and break down and drink and and pop pills they wouldn't want me to do that at all they'd want me to live. That's what they would want. They would want me to live. They would want me to go out and make things happen and drive on and enjoy and surf and play guitar and do jujitsu.

41:32That's what they'd want me to do. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. In fact, they would be disgusted if what I did with the gift that they gave me was piss it away. They'd be disgusted and I won't do that. Not a chance. I'm going to live like they would want me to. In those moments, that's certainly what logic tells you. But those moments, it's hard to be logical in those moments, right? Yeah.

42:15I ended up with some pattern recognition. on this whole scenario, unfortunately. Because when you lose friends over and over and over again, you start to see what happens from an emotional perspective, from a spiritual perspective, from a physical perspective. And what I began to recognize as a pattern is, is, and the way that I explain this to people that go through loss like this, is you're going to have, you're not going to be in control of your emotions sometimes. So, and since you're 31 years old, you've had control, pretty good control over your emotions since you were seven years old or eight years old.

43:09Occasionally you'd break down, occasionally you'd lose your temper, but you've gotten more and more in control the older you've gotten. So you're not used to not being in control of your emotions. We as adults are not used to losing control of our emotions. So what's going to happen? You lose one of your friends, you lose one of your family members, you're going to get hit with waves of emotion that you can't control. And this sometimes causes people to really overreact and think that they're in this terrible place because they think, oh my gosh, I've been able to control my emotions for the last 30 years and now I can't control my emotions.

43:51There's something wrong with me is what they think. And this is what I learned is that those waves of emotion, they're going to roll back and you're You're going to get control again. You take a breath. And then you're going to get hit with another storm. But it's going to go away. And you're going to get hit with another storm. But it's not going to be as strong. And then it's going to go away. And you're going to get hit with another storm. And it's going to be a longer period of time. And it's not going to be as strong. And what this is, is this is your... This is you processing what happened.

44:35and eventually you do get, you regain control of your emotions and there's still gonna be times. There's still gonna be times where you're gonna be three years, five years, 10 years down the road. You're gonna hit with a wave of emotion and you're gonna be caught off guard. It's gonna catch you. I had a guy on my podcast that was in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. and so we were we talked about world war ii where he was you know a young private soldier and then he was a little bit more senior when he was in korea and then in vietnam he was a battalion commander so he's in charge of 700 guys and we were talking and i i i said something along the lines of i asked him something about his the casualties that he took in his battalion And so now this is, you know, he was in Vietnam in, I don't know, 1967 or 1968.

45:35So it's been 60 years. And I asked him about casualties that he took and he got choked up. Got choked up, lost control of his emotions for a second. And when I saw that, I felt so relieved. I felt so relieved because I thought, oh, it's always going to be like this. and that's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's normal. Lost your friends, lost your brothers. Is it wrong that you get choked up when you talk about it? There's nothing wrong with that. Here's a guy that lost some of his men 60 years ago, and he's getting choked up right now. Why? Because he loved them. Because he wishes he could have brought them through that conflict, and he didn't.

46:28And he feels it. And he lived a normal life. Retired from the army, got follow-on jobs and had another career. But he lost his friends, his brothers, his men. And that hurts. And it's not going to go away. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with you. Nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with me. Do I get choked up sometimes? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I lost some of my best friends. Does that hurt? Yep. Do I wallow in that? No. Do I dwell in those emotions? Nope, I don't. And they wouldn't want me to. And they'd be disappointed if I did.

47:18I think it's really important because as men, we get conflicting messages about emotion and how to express it. and what that looks like. And if there's weakness to certain emotions or if, you know, but the psychology seems to be pretty clear that the suppression of these emotions, the trying to hide them, the total compartmentalizing of them doesn't actually make them go away. They just appear somewhere else in a bottle or in some kind of recreational drug or somewhere else. And nor does suppressing them isn't going to help. And nor is letting them run your life. so because you're sad now you're going to make a bunch of bad decisions because you're sad no no it doesn't doesn't work like that it doesn't work like that you're sad okay you get emotional sometimes okay got it now get control of your emotions and carry on with your life and sometimes you're gonna get hit with those waves and that's okay i think that's a big misconception it sort of relates to what you're saying.

48:22Oh, I'm having an emotional moment right now. There's something wrong with me. No, there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. The other extreme is, oh, I'm letting my emotions run my life and I'm making a bunch of bad decisions. And my excuse is, well, you know, I lost some friends or I had this traumatic experience happen to me. That's why I'm doing, that's just an excuse. And it's a very easy excuse. And in society, the last thing I want to say to you is, well, you can't act like that. Oh, you lost one of your friends. Hey, that doesn't mean you can make excuses. You can't use that as an excuse.

48:56No, I go, hey man, okay. That's what I say, right? I'm a polite person. I'm an empathetic person. You're sad. You're making bad decisions. You're saying it's because you lost your friend or you went through this traumatic thing. And I go, okay, how can I help? Instead of saying, hey man, Yeah. Guess what? It's time to carry on. Don't dwell on it. I've told a thousand veterans this. Remember, don't dwell. Remember. Remember your friends don't dwell on the past though. Remember, don't dwell. That's what we have to do. And the emotions, yes. embrace those emotions, but don't let those emotions embrace you.

49:45Don't let those emotions run your life. There is, there is a, because people say, oh, suppressing your emotions is bad. Okay. So I'm just going to let all these emotions out and they're going to run my life now. No, no, no. At a certain point you say, okay, my emotions are now leading me down the wrong path. I'm in control. I'm not going to allow my emotions to make my decisions. They're in the calculus. I'm not saying take your emotions out of the calculus, but they have to be one component of your calculus, not the whole equation. The equation has to include emotions, yes. Logic, yes. Future, yes.

50:28Goals, yes. Family, yes. Work, yes. Finances, yes. All those things have to be in the calculus. Emotions has to be a part of that calculus. You can't pull them out of there or they'll bite you. But you can't make them the overwhelming denominator of everything that you do. Or it's going to be problematic. I heard you tell a story which I thought was really inspiring. Actually, I was just listening to it before you came about a friend of yours who was going through hardship in their life. And your advice for them was to start walking. Yeah. yeah, it was a guy who was, yeah, going through hardship with his job, with his marriage, and the marriage was coming to an end.

51:13The job was not, was going to come to an end as well. And he's out there and doesn't know what to do. And the analogy that I set up for him is, if I'm in the woods, which is where you are right now, you're in the woods and you don't know where to go because the wife's not there anymore. The job's not there anymore. You don't know where to go right now. So if you're in the woods and you don't know where to go, start walking. You've got to start walking because the perspective is not going to change. You have to start moving forward. You have to start taking steps in order to improve your vision, improve your perspective, change your perspective, make some kind of progress.

51:54And worst case scenario, you figure out that you walked the wrong direction. Okay. Now you can a walk in the other direction. And that's going to be fine. But standing there lost and not doing anything is just waiting to die, waiting to starve to death. Don't let that happen.

52:13It's overthinking. It's that anxiety. It's that ruminating that I think, I mean, I've done it multiple times in my life when the solution is I can't get to certainty on the problem. So I try and think my way out of the problem, which only seems to cause more harm than good. Yeah, there's definitely a level of risk conditioning that you get inside the military because you're just not going to be certain about anything. And you have to be able to say, yep, I'm going to make this decision right now and here's what we're going to do. I'm going to make the smallest decision possible. I'm going to take the smallest step possible, but I'm going to take a step because I'm never going to know everything.

52:56And if I take the time to try and know everything, everything will have changed by the time I know it. So I'm going to absolutely take that step and take that action. I mean, that's a metaphor for life as well, because there's a lot of people trying to get to 100 % certainty, whether to leave the job or the marriage or start the business. And they're struggling maybe at 60, 70, maybe 80, 90 % certainty. But for some reason, we seem to need certainty. to. That's why I use the, what I, what I call the iterative decision-making process. I'm only to take small steps. So am I trying to leave my, I don't like my job.

53:30I'm miserable there. Okay. Does that mean I walk in tomorrow morning and say, Hey boss, I hate it here. I quit. No, it doesn't mean that. It means I say, okay, I'm gonna start putting my resume together. I'm going to start checking out LinkedIn. I'm going to start seeing what qualifications I might need that could improve my ability to get a new job. Once I've done that, I'm going to start sending out my resume. I'm going to start building some relationships with some people. And now I look up and I get another job offer. So I didn't make a crazy short-term emotional decision. I made a slow, progressive, iterative decision-making process that led me from a situation that I didn't like to an opportunity that seems more promising.

54:18And this could apply to just about anything. I see this a lot in businesses. I see that the real cost in business, I spent about 10 years working in marketing. So my job was to work with the CMO and the CEO, helping them to try and make certain marketing decisions, you know, invest in this platform, do this thing, whatever. And I came to learn over time that the biggest cost wasn't making a bad decision. It was the time you waste, the nine months waiting for Joanna to get back from annual leave so we can have a meeting with Dave and procurement to get the invoice signed off versus the CEOs that I worked with that said, let's do it now when the decision was quite clearly low cost, relatively low cost or reversible.

55:00It was always speed that seemed to pretty much speed that seemed to win out because most decisions are either reversible or actually more inconsequential than you think. very few decisions are final. Very few decisions are final. Even something like buying a house. Should I buy this house? Oh my gosh, it seems like if you buy a house and you decide it wasn't the house that you wanted, you sell the house. It's like, now look, could you get caught in a bad market and could, yeah, that can absolutely happen. So you need to be smart about your decisions that you make. But most things are not as final as they seem.

55:37Most things you're going going to be able to, and we look, you paid the realtor. So you lost 3 % there. You paid the other realtor. You lost 3%. You had to pay the mortgage fees. So you're going to lose some money, but it's not like you buy a million dollar house and then you decide you don't like it. You don't lose a million dollars. You lose 80 grand or whatever, you know, and it's okay. Two years, three years, you get it back. So people think of decisions as being permanent. Yeah. If you're marketing opportunity that we'd like to get you into. And I go, how much did it cost? And you say a million dollars.

56:15And I say, well, that's a lot of money. Can I try it for a shorter period of time? Well, yeah, but you won't get as much volume. And I say, okay, well, still, I don't want to invest that much because I'm not sure about it. Let's test it and see where it goes. And you say, okay, we'll try that. And here's a hundred grand and let's see what feedback we get. And if it's good, it's good. If it's not, we go somewhere else. Do you think you're conditioned in some ways to have this sort of bias towards taking action? Because if your background in the SEALs, there was often some kind of time urgency. There was some factor that's causing you to have to take a decision.

56:51Is that? Yeah. In business and life, there's not. There's not like, we're going to lose this, or someone's going to die, or there's going to be an attack. In the business world, the consequences are prolonged and usually not as extreme. So you can get away with less action, even though eventually it will catch up with you. And you've got an example of that in your book and the father-son deal. And one of them takes nine months to execute and the other one executes immediately. And the one that executes immediately is successful. The one that doesn't takes nine months to execute fails. So eventually inaction will cost you.

57:29And you say, interestingly, that, oh, in the SEAL teams, you must be conditioned to do this. I had to condition people to take action, even in the SEAL teams. Even a young SEAL leader who you would think would be, by nature, aggressive and an action taker, you put them in a pressure situation where there's not a ton of information and they need to make a decision, they don't want to act either. So one of the things that I would teach was that their default mode was to be aggressive. Their default mode was to take action. I would teach that. Same thing we just discussed. I wouldn't say, hey, look, that means you have to take action, but your default setting should be, I'm going to do something.

58:05Cause I'd have a young SEAL officer and there'd be some training mission and there'd be a problem in a building and there'd be a bunch of paintball flying around in there. And he wouldn't want to go solve that problem. He'd back away from that problem. And I would have to go like push him in the back and say, you see that problem over there? You got to go solve that problem. It's not going to go away. You got to be aggressive. That's got to be your default mode is to take action and make things happen. Because most human instinct is to wait. Most human instinct is to hesitate. Most human instinct is to let things go longer and stick with the status quo.

58:41And that seems to be on the front, the lowest risk in the situation is to not do anything. It usually appears to be the lowest risk. But just like the example that you gave in your book, it definitely seems lower risk. Oh, well, he wants money, he wants investment, new thing. I don't know. The lowest risk in that situation is to not do anything. And that's what many people do, whether they're in the SEAL teams or whether they're in business. So to train people to, oh, I need to take risk, some level of risk, take action, because in the long run, I say seven out of 10. Seven out of 10 times, action is better than an action.

59:2170 % of the time, action. There's definitely times where you got to hesitate. There's definitely times where you got to hold back. There's definitely, and that's the other book you got there is called the dichotomy of leadership because there's times, yes, absolutely. Action. Aggression. There's also times the other end of the spectrum was like, now's not the time to make a move. So it's, it's definitely a dichotomy, but the, to me, 70 % of the time, better take that action. That's gotta be your default mode. I asked you what your hardest day in the SEALs were and you said about losing friends what was your proudest day?

59:58is there a proudest day where you go do you know what I really showed up in a way that I to a standard that I held myself to and because I did we accomplished something great together against the odds there's a multitude of times where I was in Iraq I was in a detached moment in time, you know, moving down a street, sitting in a vehicle, maneuvering, and I was watching my guys. I could see my guys. And I could see what they were doing. And I could see.

1:00:47one of the most beautiful things in the world which was guys that were exceptional at their job working together as a team, maneuvering, protecting each other, accomplishing the mission. And I got to see that many times. And that's always, it had nothing to do with me, had to do with them, had to do with being able to see, look, were we perfect? No. But were there moments when you see an element cover and move for each other on the battlefield? A simple plan with the right priorities, with decentralized command. Was there times when I got to see all those things? Yes. That, without a doubt, those are the best days.

1:01:43There's something about, you know, and I think I've kind of seen this throughout your work is you have a real focus on service serving others as a path to i guess fulfilling yourself and we often think i think many people think in life that the path to self-fulfillment is to serve yourself but it seems that you've kind of figured out that the path is by serving others yeah i think that's there's there's an underlying

1:02:12core component and belief and innate DNA in the SEAL teams. And that is you take care of your friends. And that's not, in fact, if you're the type of person that doesn't take care of your friends, you're not going to be a good SEAL. You're not going to be a good SEAL. if you put yourself before the team, look, you can be a great shot, you can be strong, you can be fast, all those things, but no one's going to really want you in a platoon if you put yourself above them. And people don't really talk about that. No one ever told me that, but you feel it. And if you're not self-aware, you might slip into where you're looking out for yourself and it's a problem.

1:03:02And this happens in life too. You know, if you're, if you, it happens in business where I see a guy that he's taking care of himself. And, and, you know, it's a smart guy and he usually thinks he's pretty smart and usually thinks he's a little bit smarter than everybody else. And usually thinks that no one else is going to notice that he's taking care of himself. And everybody sees it. Yeah. And they dig themselves a grave. They, they dig themselves a grave. And they, I'm not saying they don't get away with it a little bit. Usually they get a couple of promotions. You know, they get to a spot, but ultimately people don't want to work with that person.

1:03:37And so they burn their relationships and they don't do as well as they should. And which is the, the kind of nice thing is if you take care of other people, they'll take care of you. If you screw over other people, you're going to get screwed over. So yeah, I think there's, there's, there's definitely that underlying theme in the SEAL teams. I've seen it now in business. And it is going to, if you look out for yourself all the time, it's going to catch up with you. I think everyone can relate. If anyone's ever worked in a business and they have colleagues, I think everyone will be able to think about the colleague who is always seeking credit, is always being selfish in the way that they're showing up.

1:04:30and then they can also think about the colleague who's the complete opposite of that and it's often it's funny it was making me think as you were speaking that leadership is in fact in many respects it's given it's not taken i.e the person that's showing up for other people but also delivering on their own work is often kind of elected the leader of the group this is you know we talk a lot in business i think it was steve jobs that said the very very best leaders in my organization were those that were so good at their job and they were never thinking about like being a leader, but that's the reason they ultimately became it.

1:05:01Yeah. When people ask me, and I got a book I wrote called Leadership Strategy and Tactics, like how to get promoted. How do you get promoted? Don't worry about getting promoted. Focus on the team. Focus on the mission. Focus on doing a good job. Focus on supporting your teammates. If you do those things, you're going to get promoted. And it takes, you'll have this, you know, the dark part of your personality will say, yeah, but they're not going to notice. They need to see me now. And you'll raise your hand and say, I want credit for that. And the minute you do that, the minute you raise your hand and say, give me credit, your credit goes down.

1:05:33It's an unfortunate truth. The minute you ask for the accolades, your accolades are decreased. Because you're looking out for yourself and everyone can smell that. And they don't like it. Yeah, you're saying that I'm more important than the mission in some respects. Terrible. Terrible. Did you have people like that in the services when you were out there? people that were clearly selfish in the SEALs? Absolutely. How did you deal with that? Well, if they were my boss, then I would make them look good.

1:06:12Build a great relationship with them. If they were my peer, I'd make them look good, build a great relationship with them. If they worked for me, I'd make them look good, build a great relationship with them.

1:06:24I think that as you, you know, some people that have that kind of, um, you know, they've got some kind of, is it a defect? I think it's probably a little bit of a defect, but they, they just, they just feel like they need that recognition. They feel like they need to take care of themselves. And again, going back to what I was saying earlier, like, what did they go through in their life that makes them think that they got to look out for themselves. And it'd be kind of nice if I could be a person that they go, man, this guy's treating me really good. And maybe I could help them transform from someone that doesn't trust that they're going to get the recognition that they need to, hey, there's good people out there and I'd like to be a part of this team.

1:07:13Were you ever successful in that transformation? I was successful. I was also unsuccessful. You know, some people are, some people, they have that defect and it's strong and they're going to look out for themselves. And there's very little you can do about it. And you, you know, you try, try. But it's, it's a very, the ego is a very, very powerful thing. I mean, you know, the ego is so powerful that there's countless cases of military history where a human being got himself and possibly his troops or his troops killed because of his ego. So if you can die because of your ego, you can absolutely make some pretty dramatic mistakes in the business world because of your ego.

1:08:01And it happens all the time. It happens all the time.

1:08:06leaving, leaving the military. I have this quote where you said, so I'd say if there's anything that I struggle with now, it's just that does anything else matter? And the answer is no. The answer is no. Nothing else matters. Nothing else is close. So I have to deal with that. You said that on the Tim Ferriss podcast, talking about your time in the services, but also more specifically the Battle of Romadi, as being the highlight of your life. How does one go through sort of 20 years of high intensity combat and all that adrenaline and all of the, you know, gosh, it's harder to think of many greater senses of like purpose and fulfillment and mission and then real life.

1:08:56Yeah. So number one, as I mentioned earlier, remember but don't dwell and have you seen the movie napoleon dynamite no that's a bummer there's a character in the movie napoleon dynamite his name is uncle rico and uncle rico played football in high school and now uncle rico uh lives in a van and sells cooking ware so he kind of peaked in high school and he lives in the past. He's always talking about state championships. And if he would have had that extra point and if coach would have put him in, he's got, he's living in the past. And so while that quote right there, no doubt that you just read from me is accurate.

1:09:45I mean, there will not be, I don't think, anything in my life that will have as much intensity, as much mission focus, as much meaning, as much opportunity, as much loss. Like, that is, combat is like life but amplified and intensified. So every emotion that you have, like you have an emotion when you formulate a new plan and when you sell a business or buy a business, you have emotions. That's like combat, but it's amplified, it's intensified, and it's a lot more. So that quote that you read is true. Nothing will compare to that. It won't. But I don't want to be like Uncle Rico, living in the past, talking about how this is what it used to be like.

1:10:40And if only, yeah, there's my big game. I don't want to do that. I want to, as I said earlier, I want to remember, but I don't want to dwell on the past. Has it ever crossed your mind to go back? In any capacity? Oh, yeah. Of course. Yeah. Every time like a, every time a war breaks out somewhere, you, you, you want to get your, get your knife out, sharpen it up and let's rock and roll. Of course. Because. Yeah. Well, because of that quote right there, like this is, this is it. Like that's, that's it. I'm lucky that I got to do what I got to do. You know, like that's a blessing. That's a, it's the, it's what I wanted to do since I was a little kid and I got to do it.

1:11:24And so if you asked me if I got the chance to do it again, would I? Yeah, I would. 100%. You could though, right? You could go be involved in some capacity in the SEALs. Yeah. There's ways, there's things that I could do to, you know, like be a gunslinger again and all that. But there's also, it's also not the same. So, you know, if I, because I retired from the Navy and, and so I'm not in the military anymore. I still work with the military. I still train the military.

1:11:55But to go and be a gunslinger again, now you're, now you're doing something different. Now you are a mercenary. Now it's a different situation. and that component that you talked about of like mission, brotherhood, is not going to be the same for me. And quite frankly, I think that part of me wants to not sour that memory and all those memories. I don't want to sour that memory. I have a beautiful, beautiful memory. And I don't want to tarnish it with me chasing around the past. You know when fighters, they retire from fighting. And then they want to go back. They do it again. And it's just not the same.

1:12:54Anderson Silva was like that for me. He was Superman. And then he went back a couple of times. and I didn't want to watch him getting beat up. It was like... Yeah, that's how... I feel like that. I feel like that. I don't think I could rematch my Anderson Silva, the Spider championship run. I don't think I could rematch that. Discipline is Freedom. The title of your book here, Discipline Equals Freedom. Now that seems like it's untrue because when people think of discipline, They think of rigidity and taking away their freedom, having to be disciplined. Why does discipline equal freedom?

1:13:37Because the more discipline you have in your life, the more freedom you will end up with.

1:13:44So if you lack the discipline to exercise and eat healthy, you will end up being a slave to disease. If you lack the discipline to work hard, save your money, you will end up a slave to finances. If you lack the discipline to manage your time correctly, you will end up with no free time. if you have self-discipline, if you have the discipline to save your money and work hard and invest your money properly, if you have the discipline to manage your time correctly and not waste a bunch of time, if you have the discipline to exercise and eat healthy, you will end up with freedom. And I know it's counterintuitive, it's contrarian, but I've seen this over and over and over again.

1:14:52If you want freedom in your life, you have to have discipline.

1:14:59There's going to be some kid listening to this now. I always think about the personas that are listening and they are, you know, eating Doritos off their belly. Spit them out.

1:15:14Spit them out. Start now. because if you're a kid right now and you're eating Doritos off your belly, I know they taste good and there's some immediate gratification and I get that, but I'm going to tell you, it starts right now. Throw that bag of Doritos away. Get rid of it. Go do some push-ups. Go spend$12 at the hardware store and hang up a pull-up bar in your room and start doing pull-ups. And if you can't do one pull-up, hang on that bar and you're going to start to get a little bit stronger. You're going to start to get a little bit healthier. You're going to start to get more focused. You're going to start to become more resilient.

1:15:50And you're going to start to be able to do a pull-up. And you're going to start to eat healthy all the time. And you're going to start to understand the world better. And you're going to start to progress in every aspect of your life. And you'll see that if you have that kind of discipline right now, you're going to end up with freedom. And if you don't have that kind of discipline and you keep eating those Doritos and you don't work hard and you don't exercise and you don't apply yourself, you're going to end up shackled. You end up shackled by a boss that you don't like Doing a job that you don't like to do With sicknesses and diseases that you don't want Relying on people that you can't even count on Alone And you don't have to

1:17:01But if you have discipline if you have discipline you will attain freedom

1:17:13and it starts with just spitting the doritos out starts with spitting the doritos out yes indeed one of the things you do which is yeah i mean you're super famous for it is this idea of waking up early now i'm not someone that wakes up early i know you no alarm clock and you're usually up by 11 i well like so no meetings before 11 okay so i i stay up quite late yep um what's the best case you could give me for changing that and do i need to change that because i what i what i do is you know i flew into la i'm jet lagged i'm flying back in a couple of days i'm going to be jet lagged when i land as well so what i'm trying to do is just protect my sleep at all costs because i've come to learn that it's really the foundation of my performance so if i if i'm unslept and i show up at work the chance that i'm not going to show up correctly in a variety of ways, emotionally, creatively, whatever, is high.

1:18:05And that for me is the greatest risk. So I just, in the last sort of year or two of my life, I've just said, okay, prioritize sleep because then everything else seems to follow. But when I heard that you wake up sometimes at 4.45 or 4.30, like pretty much all the time, and I've literally seen you on social media, upload your alarm clock day after day after day, okay, shit, maybe I should rethink. No, I think if you've got a system that's working well for you, then I wouldn't change anything, right? If you feel like you're performing well, you're physically healthy, you're getting all the work done that you need to do, you're naturally more of a late night, late morning type person, I'd run with it.

1:18:49If you were telling me, yeah, sometimes I get up, sometimes I don't, sometimes I work late, sometimes I don't, I'm not, don't work out every day. You know, sometimes I feel groggy. If you were telling me that kind of thing, I'd say, okay, pick a time and start waking up at that time every day. It doesn't have to be 440. It could be eight o 'clock, could be seven o 'clock. It doesn't matter. It could be 11 o 'clock, but try and go to bed around the same time and try and wake up around the same time. And that's going to be a great foundation for everything that you're doing. And I would say when you wake up in the morning, do some kind of exercise, because I think that is very helpful in getting your day started correctly.

1:19:27What are your non-negotiables in your life in terms of habits, routines, disciplines? I wake up early and I work out every day. That's kind of my, those are the minimum requirements in my life. Train jiu-jitsu, I don't get to train jiu-jitsu every single day, but if I can train jiu-jitsu, I'm going to train jujitsu. I'm going to work out every day. If I can surf, I'm going to surf. You know, I obviously have to work every day. I work every day doing something. You know, I've got a bunch of different companies. I got to write books, podcasts. So I work every day. Are you ever undisciplined? Oh, yeah.

1:20:12Yeah. Yeah. Chocolate chip cookies. they're a they're a discipline lapse for me uh yeah so yeah i'm i'm not a cyborg when people look at someone like you that's you know done all the things you've done you've been a seal and you've you've written all these books and started these companies and actually the drink i'm drinking now is one of your your products which is the what's that in front of you yeah it's a it's an energy drink called go cool go um delicious by the way oh thank you i think my My mouth has been connected to my brain during this interview, so I think it's working. I understand there's misconceptions that people have of me because they assume, it's kind of like the halo effect.

1:20:51We assume because someone's done something well, they do all things well. But there are so many things that I think would really liberate people and make them inspired if they could see how deficient I was in so many things in my life. You know, because they just assume that if you've done one thing well, you have a good podcast, you must be like, you know, the perfect picture of what are the big misconceptions generally, moving away from this idea of imperfection, but just generally about Jocko? Because you realize you've become a bit of a character, right? You know, like Navy SEAL that comes with an identity package.

1:21:27Yeah, I think the biggest misconception, I think, and it's not just me, but it's really the military in general, is the misconception of this kind of authoritarian, and even authoritarian dictatorship from a leadership perspective. And even when we were having this conversation, I said, I'm gonna let my subordinates plan. And you kind of had a stunned look on your face. What are you talking about? Why would you let your subordinates plan? And so there's an idea and a misconception that the leader is gonna stand up and bark all the orders. So that's one misconception. The, another one is I look like a Neanderthal.

1:22:08And so people are thinking I'm going to scream and yell at everybody. And I never, I never yell at anybody. You know, I, I, my business partner, Leif Babin, who's worked with me, he was in my task unit at, at SEAL Team 3 and deployed to Ramadi with me. And we, now we've written a couple of books together. We have a business together. And he was like my direct subordinate in Ramadi and during a workup and, you know, I never yelled at him. And he likes to point out that he gave me plenty of reasons to yell at him. But never yelled at him because what good is that? And by the way, if I have to yell at somebody, what does that say?

1:22:45That means if I have to yell at you to get my point across as a leader, I've made like 47 other mistakes. My goal is that I don't even have to say anything. That's my goal as a leader. My goal is I don't have to say a word. And you already know what to do. And you make it happen. And I look at you and give you a thumbs up and say, good job. That's my goal. So I think the biggest misconception is the idea of someone in the military or myself being a authoritarian leader, being very closed minded. Like, you know, I got asked a question the other day about, you know, if you were if you were if if China attacked Taiwan and you were taking troops in there, what would you be focused on?

1:23:25And I said i'd be focused on keeping an open mind Because if you have a closed mind About what the mission is about how it's going to happen about what your troops are going to do about what the enemy is going to do If you have a closed mind about those things You're going to get caught off guard You have to have an open mind. You have to be Accepting of the information that you're receiving. You have to be accepting of the Other ideas that other people have and if you have a closed mind, you're going to fall apart kind of counterintuitive in some ways, because the reason people often think they've been made the leader because they have loads of the correct ideas.

1:24:01So I think as people often climb in life, they go, well, I've been right so much that they've put me here as CEO. So now I need to defend my righteousness at all costs, even when I'm not sure, because that's a weakness. Yeah. And you quoted Steve Jobs earlier. And I think actually it's from your book, which was I don't hire people so I can tell them what to do. I hire good people so they can tell me what to do. So yes, in a leadership position, you should be listening more than you should be talking. You were talking a second ago about shouting and aggression. It made me, as you're saying, I was thinking, there is a stereotype that a man is aggressive and he shouts and all those things.

1:24:46There's a bit of a stereotype there. what I was actually thinking is it's never been so unclear what a man is than in 2024 in the context of how a man's men show up are they meant to be masculine or feminine or somewhere in between or whatever and for many men you are a man's man you know when we think of Navy SEALs we go men do you know what I mean so I was wondering because it's never been as clear I think what a man should be, you know, when you're raising a kid that's a man or when you're being a man yourself, what do you think a man should be? And I want to give a bit more context here. There's a lot of men struggling right now.

1:25:31There's a lot of men, if you know, I talk about it a lot, if you look at the stats around suicidality in the UK, the thing that's most likely to kill someone between the age of like 18 and 40 is themselves for a man. You know, men are clearly struggling in some capacity with purpose or meaning or something. So I almost feel like, you know, a lot of these sort of toxic influences of what a man should be have now emerged to offer our answers. But I doubt those toxic influences. And I say there's got to be another role model, another sort of blueprint for what it is to show up as a man. Well, I was going to give you a real, I guess it would have been a real cheap answer of, I think it's Marcus Aurelius, stop discussing what it is to be a man and be one.

1:26:11I was going to walk out of here with that one. I'd be like, Like, pretty good question avoidance there. Which, but there's some merit to that, right? Like, and I was almost thinking like, do we really not know? Do we really not know what it is to be a good man? And I would go so far as to say to be a good human being, right? Because when a few years ago, there was these discussions going around about toxic masculinity, right? And you take these traditional masculine traits and people were saying this is toxic masculinity and they're bad. And I wrote a couple articles about it. If you take any trait of a human being and you take it to an extreme, masculine or feminine or otherwise, you take it to an extreme, it's going to be a problem.

1:27:04It doesn't matter what it is. So if you take even a really positive trait like generosity, generosity if you're a super generous person that's wonderful is it possible to be too generous well yes it is now you're getting taken advantage of and now you end up in an abusive relationship like there's all kinds of problems that can happen so when we talk about masculine traits and what's a man well what are some of the traditional masculine traits um to be competitive now is it bad to be hyper competitive where you screw people over and you hurt your health because you want to win in this particular category is that bad yes it is does that mean we have people that are not competitive at all and they don't care if they win or lose no that's not good either so that's that's one trait what's another good mask aggression aggression is a masculine trait is it good if I'm walking into a restaurant pushing the hostess out of my way of course that's terrible it's terrible is it good if you and I are working together and I say hey shut up and do what I said is that good no it's not good so can you take aggression too far yes you absolutely can can you get to a point where you're not even asserting yourself at all and you're getting yes, you can.

1:28:26Is that good? No, that's not good either. So there's a bunch of traits that we could run through that are considered traditional masculine traits. And if you take any of those traits and you take them to an extreme, they're going to be bad. Stoicism, right? Being stoic, being unemotional. Is it good to have no emotions whatsoever? No, that's called a sociopath, right? Is that good? No. Is it good, like I was talking about earlier, to let your emotions run your life and make your decisions based on your emotions? No, that's not good either. What do we want to be as a human, as a man? We want to be balanced.

1:29:02We want to be balanced. You don't want to be extreme in any direction. Even when you ask me like, oh, Jocko, what are you undisciplined on? I told you chocolate chip cookies. I could have also said, yeah, sometimes I like to eat mint chocolate chip milkshakes. Sometimes I get lazy in a workout. I'm like, you know what? I freaking warmed up and this sucks. And I'm, I'm leaving. Sometimes I'm supposed to, I was going to write something and now I didn't write anything. I'm supposed to write a thousand words today. I didn't write any. And guess what? I didn't write any tomorrow. I'm a slacker. So if I was so disciplined that, you know, my wife was like, Hey, I'd like to go out for dinner.

1:29:39I was like, no, I still got to write my thousand words. Is that good? No, it's not good. So any, any characteristic, if we take it to extreme, it's going to be a problem. And so we, as people, should be balanced. And I think what we need to be attuned to is it's much easier to be extreme. It's much easier to be extreme. It's much easier to say, oh, no emotions, cool, and turn them off. That's easier. Or total emotion, mayhem, that's easier. It's harder to find balance. It's harder to find balance in business. It's harder to find balance in life. It's hard to find balance. And what we have to do is we have to be attuned to the feedback that we're getting.

1:30:28We have to be attuned to the feedback that we're getting. So if we're talking to our wife and she says, you're not going to be home for dinner again tonight for the ninth night in a row that you're going to stay late at work. Okay. You need to be paying attention enough to say, oh yeah, guess what? I'm a little too focused on work right now. and then the other end of that spectrum is my boss says, hey, Jocko, you're leaving early again? Well, you know it's wrestling season. My daughter's got a wrestling match, so I'm going to leave. Okay, I need to be attuned enough to say, yeah, if I focus 100 % on my job, I'm going to lose my family.

1:31:04If I focus 100 % on my family, I'm going to lose my job. We as humans are supposed to be balanced, and by the way, there's going to be some things that we don't control. Somebody asked me the other day, what did I learn about myself from the highs and lows of my life? The highest point of my life and the lowest point of my life, what did I learn about myself? And I said, I learned that I don't let the highs and lows affect me too much because we're going to have wins. We're going to have losses. We're going to have successes. is we're going to have failures. We're going to have good nights. We're going to have bad nights.

1:31:47We're going to have good relationships. We're going to have bad relationships. We're going to have good ideas and bad ideas. We're going to make money. We're going to lose money. All these things are going to happen. And if you oscillate emotionally up and down drastically, it's going to be problematic. So finding a good, stable, centered way to be and look at the world and take everything that you see with a little bit of a grain of salt and don't get swayed too drastically in one direction or the other, you're going to be okay. and if I was to try and sum up some of this idea about being a man or being a good human it's like those books I wrote a book called extreme ownership that number one take responsibility for what you're doing take ownership of your world take ownership of your life there's number one number two the second book dichotomy of leadership be balanced be balanced don't be extreme extreme Look, do you have to sometimes get out there in the fringes a little bit?

1:33:02Occasionally, you probably had some business situations where you're like, all right, I got to let go half of my staff right now. That's an extreme move, but that's how we're going to survive. Do you have to do that sometimes? Yes, you do. But don't let that be where you live. Live in the center. Live in a stable area. And then finally, discipline equals freedom. A couple of words you used throughout this conversation make me want to add some things to that list of what it takes to be a, maybe not a good man, but at least a happy and fulfilled man. One of the words he used is brotherhood. And I was thinking about all the things you got from your time in the SEALs.

1:33:33And it's almost a bit of like a microcosm of what I think a lot of men are looking for. You know, that sense of purpose, that brotherhood. And they find it these days in like video games and stuff, right? Which video games, I've got to, you know, I cost no judgment on people that play video games. I've played video games my whole life. But it seems like there's a reason we're getting like increasingly addicted to these video games because they're giving us something that we're searching for in real life and not getting. You used the words brotherhood, purpose. These are things that the SEALs clearly have in huge amounts.

1:34:04Is there anything else that you'd add to that list of what it takes to feel fulfilled? Yeah, jiu-jitsu. It almost has become a joke amongst me, my friends, people that listen to me, is you got some kind of a problem in the world? You got some kind of problem in your life? Go train jiu-jitsu. There's a reason why I say that. Because the things that you just mentioned, discipline. Guess what you need to go train jiu-jitsu when you're tired and you don't feel like it? Discipline. Guess how you feel when you're done? You feel awesome. You get a bunch of dopamine. Guess who you're there with? A bunch of dudes that you can relate to.

1:34:39And guess what you're going to do together? You're going to struggle. You're going to go through some hardship together. You're going to sweat. You're going to choke. You're going to get your arm broken. like those things are going to happen. Not going to get your arm broken, but you may. But you're going to be with a little brotherhood. And by the way, women train jiu-jitsu too. My daughters all train jiu-jitsu. It's all good. It's all good. So yeah, jiu-jitsu is one way. Now look, could you go to the rock climbing gym? Yes, you could. Could you go to the CrossFit gym? Yes, you could. Could you go to the soccer field, football field, whatever.

1:35:20Yeah, you can do that stuff. So yeah, go do that stuff. Go do that stuff. That's shared suffering together with a group on a regular basis, whether you want to or not. That's some, those are all little components of being in the military or being in the SEAL teams. That's what it is. That's what you're doing. What does a SEAL platoon do? They train to get ready for go to war. How do they do that? They go to the desert. They carry their guns. They run through little choreographed moves. They get hot. They carry weight. It's suffering. It's just shared suffering and they're working together and they're learning skills.

1:35:56That's what you're doing in a jiu-jitsu gym. That's what you're doing on the soccer field. So go out and do those things with other human beings. And it's going to make things better for sure. It made me think of business as well. Business should be that way. If you're in an organization, you're doing the exact same thing, right? We've got a problem. We need to solve it. We've got to allocate resources. We've got to come in late tonight. We got to make this thing happen. We got an emergency. Like that's what a business is too. That's the way it should be. It should be. We're working together to solve problems.

1:36:27And when we're successful, we get rewarded for that. So yes, this is called human interaction. I'm sorry that it looks like war is the best way to do it. It's not. I would much rather people start a business and create a product and create jobs. I would much rather people do that. And you can find that same kind of camaraderie in business. In fact, it's interesting. You know, I have a consulting business. And so we work with companies. And companies that went through the 2008 economic downfall, they're so bonded. Because they went through this traumatic experience together. Companies that kind of did well out of the gate, people are leaving and people are coming.

1:37:12But companies that went through some trauma together, they stick together. So, yeah, if you frame things right in your life, if you frame things, if you frame a business challenge as an opportunity to build a stronger team, if you frame a personal challenge as an opportunity to overcome and improve yourself, these things that seem so horrible are actually very positive components of your existence and they're going to make you better as you said that i thought damn i should take all of my teams we should go do like a survival week we have uh we we run a program like that at echelon front where we teach we teach people like some basic tactics and we have these high speed laser tag guns and we send them out on missions and there's explosions and there's gunfire and there's role players that are screaming and yelling and it's it's mayhem and those teams that go through that they bond they also learn how to make decisions under pressure they also learn how to detach they also learn the fundamental principles of combat leadership that you can apply not just to the battlefield but you can apply to business and you can apply to your life as well so yes is that helpful it absolutely is struggle sucks depends on how you frame it

1:38:38right depends on how you frame it because i'm thinking about you stood at the beach the you know and they say walk out jocko link arms and walk out you described that as sucking yeah but what you're also saying is there's huge value in things that suck on the other side is something that sucks. It's something worth cherishing. I would say not just huge value, but the value. The value. You want to know if you're talking about young men that might not have any direction right now, go do something that's hard. Go try and accomplish something that's hard. You may win. You may lose. You may succeed.

1:39:21You may fail. I'll tell you what, you'll be better. If you avoid those things that are hard, if you don't accept that challenge, if you don't step up and step into that cold water and you sit on your couch and eat Doritos, I can tell you this is not a good move. This is not a good move. Don't do that. Don't do that. Just get up. Move towards that challenge, whatever that challenge is. Move towards that challenge and go attack it. And you may be successful and you may not be successful but you will be better. And the next challenge, you're gonna be more prepared for. And the next challenge after that, you're gonna be even more prepared for.

1:40:10And you're gonna fail and you're gonna fail and you're gonna fail and you're gonna fail and then you're going to win.

1:40:24And that's life. Life without those challenges, it's just existence. Don't just exist. Go live.

1:40:42You used the word balance a second ago And from reading through your story, it appears that when you were in the SEALs, you didn't have a whole lot of work-life balance in whatever way people will define work-life balance. I'm talking specifically here about your relationships, your family, your wife. I'm right in saying that you were out of balance through that season of life in terms of, you know. Yes, I was out of balance. I was out of balance. I was out of balance, but the ship was still moving in the right direction. So what does that mean? That means that my wife picked up the slack. That's what she did.

1:41:33So I was out of balance. She recognized it. She recognized that I had a job and that that job was important. She recognized that I was going to war. I was taking guys to war.

1:41:52My decisions could mean the lives of these guys, the deaths of these guys. My wife understood that.

1:42:05My wife understood that what I needed to focus on at that time was making sure that my guys and me were prepared for war. That has to be the focus. That has to be the focus. To not focus on that means I might not be coming home. Means some of those guys might not be coming home. She understood that. She knew that. She stepped up. She, I was out of balance. She was in balance. She pulled the family unit into balance. And I treated my wife like a princess. I mean, I gave my wife everything except for time. I could not always give her the time that she deserved. She never complained about it one time.

1:43:08And that's legit.

1:43:17She knew.

1:43:28She knew that. She understood it. It's a team. First law of combat leadership is cover and move We work together as a team While I was doing my job While I was Serving the country She covered for me Where I couldn't deliver on the home front With three kids and then four kids She covered the finances the water heater that's broken the car tire that needs changing she did all that stuff I can see the emotion in your face when you say that where does that come from what is that emotion

1:44:20that's appreciation

1:44:26it's appreciation it's like I'm gone. And she's there. She doesn't know what's going to happen to me. Doesn't know if I'm coming home. She's got three freaking kids running around. Like, and this is my wife. Guess what? There's hundreds of thousands of military wives that did the same thing. And spouses as well. Because there's guys that are married to females that go on deployment as well. that hold the line and do the job on the home front.

1:45:06And, you know, they don't get the appreciation, the outward appreciation, the recognition that the people that are in the military get, but they deserve it.

1:45:19Do you think you could ever express the gratitude you have for her in words? Do you think, do you think it's possible? for her to know how much you appreciate her for holding the line and for covering you. Do I think I could express it? In words? Probably not. Does she know? Yes, she does. Jocker, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. They leave it in this book. Question that's been left for you. If you could bring someone back who's no longer with us and have a conversation with them, who would it be and what would that conversation entail?

1:46:15Well, I'd bring back Mark Lee, Mikey Monsoor, and Ryan Jobe.

1:46:27and I tell him thank you

1:46:32thank you

1:46:45Thank you.

1:46:52What would you be thanking them for?

1:46:58Everything.

1:47:08okay thank you thank you for i mean the list is quite extensive but thank you for putting your life on the line to make the world a better place that's um i think a level of gratitude and appreciation that we can't really express um in words to people like you that put your lives on the line and sometimes don't come back from war and put your families through it things that the average person frankly wouldn't be willing to do for the sake of an important cause. Thank you for that. Thank you on behalf of all of the people that will never be able to say it to you. Thank you for what you're doing in this chapter of your life, because you are, maybe whether you know it or not, you are saving, improving and changing lives with everything you do with your incredible podcast, with all the books you've written.

1:47:55You've written this, you know, you're writing children's books as well now to try and help shift the mindset of people at the They're very, well, they're still seeds and they're formative. I think that's also going to change, improve lives. And thank you for all the inspiration you've given me over the years, because you'll never get to see all of the people who hear a line that you say, the way that you say it, the stories that you tell. And for some of those people, it's just the subtle nudge that they need to take that first step, to spit the Dorita out and to change their lives. You know, when I think about my friendship circle, and I told some of my friends that are speaking to you today, those are young men and women that can all pinpoint the moment where they encountered you and they can pinpoint how it moved their life forward in some way.

1:48:38You'll never meet these millions and millions of people. But I just want you to know for sure that they're there and they're watching now and they've been watching and they'll continue to watch. So Jocko, thank you. It's been an honor. It was an honor to serve and thanks for having me on here. Appreciate it.

1:49:03Thank you.