Jocko Willink’s Tactical Playbook

25:02You should have contingency plans and everything that you do. So that way you are taking ownership. So once you have that attitude that you're going to take ownership of everything that's going on, it actually over time becomes a habit. And it's a pretty solid habit to have. It's a lot less excuses. That's really interesting, like the power of a backup plan, because yes, I agree with that. But also it takes a lot of experience to know what sort of situations could come up that you need a backup plan for. Yeah. And in that case, you know, in Iraq, 99 % of the time, you know, it doesn't rain over there.

25:35There's no, well, very seldom does it rain. So you very seldom do you need a backup plan for the weather when it comes to helicopters, except for the fact that helicopters break down, air crew can't make it, you know, things happen. So we always had a backup plan, but that's just one example. You know, there's, there's so many things when you're in a leadership position, you know, when you're in a leadership position and you've got a team of, you've got, let's say, 100 people at your organization and you own some stores, right? You own some stores. And at one of your stores, one of your cashiers is rude to a customer and the customer writes a bad Yelp review.

26:13And you could say, well, you know, it's just one of my cashiers is an idiot. You know, that's it. That's not my fault. And it's pretty easy to understand that, right? It's pretty easy to say, well, you know, it's not my fault. I'm not even, I don't even in the store all day. And one of the cashiers was rude to customer. We'll fire them and move on. That's not taking ownership at all. Right. And so therefore you don't change anything. And guess what happens in a week later? Someone else is another cashier is rude to a customer and you have the same problem. But if you say, Oh, one of my cashiers was rude to a customer.

26:45That's my fault. As the CEO of this company with a hundred employees, that's my fault. from now on i need to make sure i properly train all my cashiers i need to make sure that the cashiers understand why it's important i need to screen my cashiers a little bit stronger to make sure that they have the right attitude going in there and i need to do some kind of spot checks so that they see that i'm there so that they know that they need to treat our customers with respect so there's four changes that i just made based on the fact that we had this problem and i took ownership of it now does this guarantee that i'm never going to have a rude cashier no it doesn't but it's definitely going to improve the situation.

27:19So again, taking ownership is infinitely superior to shrugging your shoulders or placing blame and saying, no, that cashier is just a bad person. Okay. What did you do about it is the question. Right. And it's interesting. And it's actually related to the woman who asked you about how her child had a disease and how can she take extreme ownership of that? Sometimes a cashier might really be a bad cashier and you just simply have to fire them. But does that mean you throw ownership on them? No, you still have to figure out where the ownership is in yourself. Like, how do you react to this situation?

27:51Do you fire the cashier? Do you train future cashiers better? Do you, do you improve the manual and on and on? And of course, firing might be a solution, but, but you're still taking ownership of what happens going forward. Yeah. And that's a pretty common question we'll get as well. You know, if, if you're working for me, James, and you're not meeting the standard and I say, well, it's my fault. I need to take ownership. So it's my fault. I got to train James better. so I invest more training in you I sit down with you you still can't do the job and so I said well it's my fault I need to take ownership so I I get you somebody to mentor you and now you got a mentor that's helping you still can't do the job eventually I have to take ownership of the fact that you are hurting the team and I need to get rid of you now most of the time we can train people up but there's some people that aren't capable of doing certain jobs so yes you're right when you take ownership, sometimes taking ownership means you have to get somebody out of a position that could mean demoting them.

28:47It could be laterally transferring them to a different department, or yes, it could mean firing people. Uh, you know, have you been in situations where you fired clients? We have, we have fired a couple clients, not that many. Um, but, but a couple times we've fired clients or we've just, you know, we usually, we just, uh, are able to maneuver the situation so that we're not working with them anymore. But a couple, a couple people along the way, you know, they, they're demanding things that don't make sense. They lack the humility to make a change. We go through, of course, when someone doesn't, doesn't listen to what we're saying, that's our fault, right?

29:26So if I, if James, if you hire me and you're like, well, I don't get it, Jocko. I say, okay, let me think of another way to explain this. And you say, well, it doesn't make sense to me. That's my fault. I got to figure out a better way to explain it to you. Eventually, I might realize that you are not going to change and I am wasting my time. Usually James, just FYI, if you're in that bad of a situation, I'm going to write you a letter. I'm going to write, I'm going to put it in writing what's going on. I'm going to explain it to you. And if I ever write you a letter, James, you should listen to what I say, because what I'm saying in the letter is correct.

29:55And whatever consequences I state in the letter are probably going to happen. So I had a CEO that I was working with who I was trying to help The board brought me in to help. I was trying to help this guy and he liked me. We were getting along great, but he wasn't listening to what I was saying. And I kept asking that he make these changes. You know, he was showing up late to his own meeting, showing up late to board meetings. He was, you know, not coming in prepared. He had a flippant attitude. And I was telling him, listen, you've got to change this. And, you know, he said, I really appreciate the feedback, but this is not the way it works.

30:35And so I wrote him a letter and just went line by line. This is what you need to change. And I said, or you're going to get fired. He said, they can't fire me. And I said, I'm telling you, they're going to fire you. And sure enough, he got fired. So if I write you a letter, James, please listen to what I say. I know now I'm scared. Like I don't want to open the mail, but, uh, you know, I find though, you know, I've dealt with hundreds of companies either as an entrepreneur or as an investor or an advisor. And I find that bad habits are really hard to get rid of, particularly among leaders. Like they just, it's really hard for people to change.

31:10Yep. There's for me, there's, there's, there's two things that can happen. Number one, a person can recognize and you, this is what you hope for a person recognizes that they have shortfalls. A person has an awakening of some kind and they say, oh yeah, you know what? I get it. I can see it. And that's always my goal when I'm working with a company or when I'm working with the leadership team is to let them see, let them, let the truth be revealed to them so I don't have to throw it in their face. So that's one thing people decide, oh yeah, I get it. This was my fault. And the other thing, you know, unfortunately is like some kind of traumatic incident, whether they get fired, whether they lose a bunch of money.

31:49And those aren't guarantees either, because there's been people that have been fired, like, you know, or when you lost a lot of money in the stock market, you said to yourself, it would have been easier for you to say, well, you know, I had this bad stockbroker. And instead, you said, you know what, I made some dumb decisions. And I'm not going to make those decisions again. So you grew. A lot of people, they just sue their stockbroker and say, this wasn't my fault. And they don't grow at all. So usually from my perspective, people either have some kind of a traumatic event that elicits change in them, or they have an awakening where they become self-aware of the mistakes that they're making and they start to change.

32:24But yes, barring those two events, it is definitely difficult to change people's nature. And as you know, I got a section in the book, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, where I talk about utilizing people's nature. People have a certain nature to them. Don't fight it. You know, I'm not going to take you, James, who's a cerebral guy and put you as my frontline, you know, prisoner handling combat crew. That's not what I'm doing with you. No, I'm going to have you in the back gathering intelligence and assessing things and giving your opinion about what you think the enemy is going to do. I'm not going to have you out there on the front lines, you know, in hand to hand combat with a with a sword in your hand.

33:00Doesn't make sense. Yeah, you're just you're telling me I'm just going to die if I get transported back in time. But that's OK. I think that's what will happen. But, you know, I like how, I mean, first off, again, about your book, like what I love the most in this book is the table of contents, because I got so excited reading the table of contents. You know, you talk about the foundations of leadership, the core tenets. I'm just scrolling down it now. The principles, you know, what to do about yes men, what to do about when you have imposter syndrome, what to do about, you know, you talk more about extreme ownership.

33:32uh you know the imposter syndrome one is is great because that's something i feel all the time uh you go into the details of maneuvers communication i mean this is like a real manual about leadership there's so many like boring books about leadership this is like a real encyclopedic guide filled with stories and techniques and and tactics it's it's it's really, how long did it take you to do this? This is a real big project. You know, I write about a thousand words an hour. And so this book is, I don't know, 80 ,000 words. So it took me 80 hours to write. And you're right. It is a field of, so a military field manual is when you need to, um, when you need to figure out how to do an assault on a target, you can pull out the field manual and it says target assault, you follow the instructions.

34:25And that's what this book is. That's what it was meant for. That's why the table of contents is very detailed because I wanted people to say, oh, here's the problem I have right now. My boss is weak. What should I do? Boom. Open up the book, look up the section on weak boss, and you can figure out how to maneuver through that. And where a lot of it came from was after I wrote Extreme Ownership and Dichotomy of Leadership and Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, after I got done writing those books, I'm out working with people and I get asked the same questions, right? I get asked this question over and over again.

34:55Hey, my boss is indecisive. What should I do? Hey, you know, next client. Hey, my boss is indecisive. What should I do? Finally, okay, here's what I need. Or my boss is a micromanager. How should I handle that? Like get the same questions over and over again. And what you end up with is a book where I'm actually giving some pretty pragmatic advice on how to lead. Yeah, like if I could read some chapters here, you know, when to yell at subordinates, making an ultimatum as a subordinate, dealing with when an ultimatum is placed on you, tactfully delivering the truth, balancing praise. Like there's a lot of like very specific kind of situations, you know, like, and actually it was interesting, the section on insubordination, particularly with your background coming from the Navy SEALs and military and combat situations.

35:46And there's sort of the obvious, which is, Don't just follow orders because that's how many, that's how millions of people have gotten in trouble in the past. But how do you, in a military situation where you could be kind of executed for treason, let's say in some situations, how do you, what does it mean to be insubordinate?

36:07Listen, if you're getting asked to do something that's immoral, illegal, or unethical, you can't do it. You're culpable. just because somebody orders you to do something that's immoral, illegal, or unethical, you're culpable if you execute on those orders. So that's just a non-starter. What the more common case is, is getting told to do something that doesn't make as much sense or getting told to do something that you think there's a better way or getting told to do something that you think is excessively risky. So those are the times where, you know, we end up in a situation where we need to raise those questions up the chain of command.

36:43And that's exactly what I did throughout my career was raise earnest questions, use questions to talk to my boss and say, Hey boss, what is the exact outcome you're looking for? Because I don't think I, I don't think I understand it. And I want to make sure I'm able to execute what it is you want. Because when we ask questions of people, again, instead of us telling them, Hey, Hey James, you know, if you're my boss, Hey James, your plan doesn't doesn't make sense you're going to get defensive immediately i think what do you mean it doesn't make sense but if i say hey james i want to make sure i understand your plan fully can you explain to me the end state you're looking for just so i can make sure i can execute it the way you want well now you start to explain it with more detail and now if there is something wrong with the plan the truth is going to be revealed to you not from me but by you and that makes it much more palatable now there's also a chance that james you say oh well here's the deal jaco here's why we're doing it this way and here's what's going to happen and here's the other support we have and I go oh thank you for explaining it to me and by the way now our relationship is still strong because I didn't you know throw some some accusatory question at you James your plan doesn't make sense right I don't want to do that so by asking earnest questions and making sure we understand why we're doing what we're doing you're going to get either an understanding or an explanation of, okay, I get it.

38:04Or perhaps your boss will say, oh, I didn't know that you were going to be impacted. I didn't know that your team was going to have to work 60 hours of overtime in order to achieve this goal. And that would cost us a lot of money and it would burn out the team. What alternatives do you have? And I say, well, here's a couple of things that we thought of. So having a good relationship with your boss, being able to have good conversations where you're asking earnest questions, where you figure out the why, those are critical to leading up the chain of command. I think one way, which in terms of managing upwards, like in that situation, or even managing downwards with subordinates, and one theme that kind of, there's several themes that kind of go through this leadership manual, which is that try to make everyone look good.

38:53Like make the boss, the boss has to know you're going to make him look good to his boss or her boss, or your supporters are going to know they have a career with you, not just being, not just robots being given orders. Oh yeah. Take, you know, I talk about this in the book as well. Take, there's a saying in the SEAL teams of, of take care of your gear and your gear will take care of you. And what they mean by that is you take care of your parachute, right? You do the proper maintenance on your parachute and you pack your parachute correctly. You take care of your parachute. When you pull the ripcord, the parachute will open.

39:23You take care of your dive rig, so you do the proper maintenance and you set up your dive rig correctly so when you're underwater, you can breathe, and it works. So you take care of your gear and your gear will take care of you. Well, it's the same with taking care of your people. And you're right, that goes up and down the chain of command. Take care of your people and your people will take care of you. If you take care of your boss, your boss will take care of you. If you take care of your team, your team will take care of you. If you take care of your peers, your peers will take care of you.

39:49It's a mutually supporting scenario that you set up and it ends up good.

40:09What if you're in a situation where like your boss says, hey, look, I'm just following the orders of my boss. And he said, ride these helicopters through the sandstorm so we can get to the other side and meet everyone. And so we have to do it. What do you do when you're up against like an immovable wall? So this is one of those situations where I talk about a little bit in the form of an ultimatum. And there's a great example of this. Did you ever see the TV series Band of Brothers? No, I didn't see it. So in Band of Brothers, it's a phenomenal miniseries. It's on HBO and it's about Dick Winters, who is a heroic guy from the 101st Airborne.

40:49And it's like the war, they're waiting for the peace treaty. Like the war is all but over. And he's got his, his battalion and he gets ordered like what you're, just what you're talking about. There's a river that they're kind of set up on this river and they get ordered to cross the river and do a reconnaissance. And, you know, he says to his boss, Hey boss, I'm not sure if this is a good idea. The war's almost over. The boss says, nope, you're going to do it. He says, okay. They go into a reconnaissance that night and they get into a gunfight and a guy gets wounded or maybe a guy gets killed.

41:25I forget the exact scenario, but they come back across the river. You know, this is a total waste and pass the report up the chain of command. And the next night, the colonel says the same thing. Hey, you're going to do another reconnaissance across the river again major winters says hey this doesn't make any sense the war is almost over he says nope you shut up and do what i told you to do he says okay roger that and he goes and he gets with his men and they go into one of the buildings on their side of the river and they just sit down and they drink wine all night and the next day he sends up the report yep we did the reconnaissance we didn't see anything so he disobeys the order now this is what and again i talk about this in the book.

42:11If Dick Winters would have said, no, I refuse to do it, what would the colonel have done? The colonel would have fired him. And the colonel would have put someone else in charge that was going to obey his order and do what he told him to do. There would be no risk mitigation whatsoever. So then they would have gone across the river, maybe lose two or three more guys. So what Dick Winters did was tactfully disobey this order. Now, you see a lot of cases like this in the military, the book About Face, which is a book that I wrote the forward to when this book got re-released, but it's about a guy named Colonel David Hackworth who fought in the Korean War, fought in the Vietnam War.

42:49He was a battalion commander. He spent like four straight years in Vietnam, one of the most decorated soldiers at the time. And he got so fed up with the way the war was being fought that he ended up doing an interview that he basically said, hey, we're going to lose this war. And it was one of the first senior ranking people that said that from the army, he immediately got fired, drummed out of the army. And you question whether that was the right move, because once he was drummed out of the army, he had no more influence. He couldn't mitigate the risk anymore for his troops. He lost all of his influence.

43:28So it's something that you have to carefully weigh. I mean, the same thing happened with Mattis, right? You remember General Mattis. He was working for Trump. He, at a certain point, just said, I'm not, you know, he quit. He resigned. And he was trying to make a statement. But, you know, 24 hours later, the news cycle had run its cycle, and he was out of the news. And now he didn't have any more influence. And so you've got to really think about what you're doing and think about how you're handling this situation. So James, if you tell me to take my squad and charge up a hill with a machine gun nest at the top of the hill, and I know if I charge up that hill, all my people are going to die.

44:10And I say, I refuse to do it. And you just fire me and send someone else up the hill. They're all going to die. But if I say, okay, James, I got it. I'll take care of it. And I go and start going up the hill and we start taking heavy fire. And I say, you know what? We're going to do a different maneuver. We're going to call for fire. We're going to get aircraft in here. I can handle at my level without losing all my influence because I decide that I'm going to make a stand and fall on my sword to protect my ego. And also, in a way, I think I'm doing my best to protect my troops, but really, in the end, how much do I protect them if I just get fired and now I've lost all control and I can't mitigate the situation?

44:48So this is one of those things that makes leadership so hard, is knowing that sometimes you've got to do your best to support Are there times where you've got to say, hey, I absolutely refuse to do this? Sure. There are times where I would do that. If I was getting told to do something that was immoral, illegal, unethical, or that was just going to get a bunch of people killed and there was no way to mitigate it. Yeah, I'm going to say, look, I'm not doing this. But in most cases, you're getting told to do something. It's not immoral. It's not illegal. It just doesn't make sense. So am I better to stay in my leadership position and mitigate the risk as much as possible, satisfy what it is the boss wants, but also mitigate the impact, the negative impact to the team?

45:34That's probably what I am going to do. You know, this is related to your fourth law of combat leadership, which is decentralized command. So in an organization where you're given an order and then it's up to you to figure out how to fulfill it. So that's the decentralized aspect. And then it's easier for you to mitigate risk. Sometimes, though, I imagine it's not easy to mitigate risk because they kind of have an eye on you. They're seeing everything you're doing and whether you're following orders or not. And it's impossible to be insubordinate, tactfully insubordinate in those situations. I mean, I'm making impossible situations, really.

46:11So at some point, it's going to be impossible. They're not impossible situations, but what kind of relationship do you have with your boss, right? I've got to have a great relationship with my boss. How do I do that? I build that relationship over time. And I talk about this in the expanded edition, right? I've got to build trust. I've got to listen to what they say. And if I give them trust, they're going to give me trust. If I listen to them, they're listening to me. If I treat them with respect, they're going to respect me. If I allow them to influence me, I'm going to get influence over them.

46:41Right? And if I care about them, they're going to care about me. So if I build that relationship, those five components of a relationship, all of a sudden, you know, my boss is listening to me. So if I've put myself into a situation, James, where you're telling me you're my boss and you're telling me to do something, let's say we're not, not a war situation, but you're telling me to do something in a, in a company that's going to lose a bunch of money or a bunch of my people are going to quit. And I can't go back to you and say, Hey, James, can I, can I just ask you some question about this, the expenditure that we're about to make and what it's going to cost us and what kind of profitability we're going to lose because I'm not sure I understand this.

47:17And you don't say, wait a second, we're going to lose money or wait a second, we're going to have people quit. Hold on, Jocko, sit down. Tell me what's going on. I want to fix it, right? You and I would have to not be aligned. And in most cases, we are aligned because James, if you and I have a business and you're my boss, what I guarantee we're aligned on a couple of topics. I guarantee we both want to make money. We want to be profitable. We want to take care of our customer because that allows us to make money. and we want to take care of our team because our team also allows us to make money.

47:46So if I'm going to do something that's going to hurt the team, hurt the client and lose money, why on earth would you not listen to what I was saying? So let's make sure that we build a relationship up the chain of command. And I did have this happen. We were ordered to use Iraqi soldiers and conduct operations with Iraqi soldiers. And I understood why we were doing that, but they actually told us we had to take what was it? Seven Iraqi soldiers for every one American. And that didn't make sense where we were. And I pushed back up the chain of command. I explained the situation on the ground. I explained what the alternatives were.

48:24And when I did that with my boss, my boss said, yep, no problem. You do what you got to do. So it's important that we build a good relationship. It's important that we can have good conversations. It's important that we can ask earnest questions up the chain of command. And it is important that we are aligned because if we're not aligned, that's the one time where we'll probably have some kind of a failure. If you say to me, you know, Jocko, here's what I want you to do. And I say, hey, James, that's gonna get a bunch of people killed. And you say, I don't care about that. We have a problem. Or if I say, hey, James, if you do this to my team, they're gonna get burned out and they're all gonna quit.

48:58And you say, I don't care if your people quit. We're not aligned. Or if I say, hey, we're not gonna make any money on this deal if we execute the way you want. And you say, I don't care about making money. Now we're not aligned because I know we can't have a business if we don't make money. so as long as we're aligned and we can have good conversations and we can put our egos in check because that's the other thing that kills us right your idea versus my idea and you're the boss and i don't like your idea i think my idea is better and i i put a stake in the ground over the fact that i like my idea better than your idea that's something that's stupid it's just dumb right we don't know what the future is we don't know what the market's going to do we don't know what the do it, James, your plan is bad.

49:42And I can't even articulate why my plan is better than yours. And then I draw a line in the sand and say, I'll never do what you're telling me to do. That's stupid. That's stupid. And I wonder though, like when, you know, sometimes there's big egos involved, like take a Silicon Valley company where the top of the organization, they're not only, let's say the founder and the boss, but there are multi-billionaires and the employees want to please their superiors. And so they might not agree with everything, but they're kind of afraid for a lot of reasons to complain. Like maybe they want to, it's like your chapter on Yesman.

50:15Like they want to look eager and ready for the boss so they get promoted and they too can become wealthy like their bosses. You know, how does the leader sort of figure out what's really going on? And in the same token, how do they avoid the ego of, you know, let's say they were a success at the age of 24 and it kept going. Yeah, that's something that they're usually, unfortunately going to learn the hard way, right? When they realized that they didn't listen, you know, think of how successful you were at certain points, right? And you were thinking, hey, I can do everything I do. Everything I touch turns to gold, right?

50:49Yeah. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, wait a second. Maybe I need to put my ego in check a little bit. Maybe I need to listen a little bit more. That's one thing about combat. One of the best things about combat Combat is very humbling, right? It's very humbling. And same thing with the Silicon Valley CEOs. Like, sure, you've seen some of them that have done really well, but there's some of them that have done really well and then they fall apart. And they make bad investments or they make bad decisions. You know, there's a bunch of series on TV about some of these individuals that have done great, but at a certain point, their ego takes over and they're not making the best decisions.

51:26They're not listening to anybody else. And they make decisions that are bad. And they end up destroying their company or destroying their lives and being removed from these companies. So at some point, yes, humility, you have to look in the mirror and say, you know what? I'm glad I was able to get the company to this point, but we're in uncharted waters. I need to listen to what other people say. I mean, there's examples of people, they don't listen to their employees, nevermind their employees, they don't even listen to their board, right? Their board is asking them to do things and they say, well, we're not going to do it that way.

51:58and again what do you think that the board wants you to lose money do you think the board wants the company to fail no the board wants the company to succeed that's why they're giving you this advice so we have to be humble enough to listen and again this this goes back to building relationships because one of the best ways to break down the ego is by just having good relationships with people where you go oh you know what james james smart guy he's been he's got some lessons learned we're good friends i listen to what he says and he listens to what i I say, and we can come to a good conclusion together.

52:30But if you and I don't know each other or we're at odds with each other, all of a sudden it's your ego against my ego. I'm not listening to a damn thing that you say, James. And now I get myself into trouble. Yeah. It's interesting about not listening to the board because this gets back to, you know, CEOs, you know, because they're, they're put in charge or they're the founder of a company, there's a certain ego that almost has, or a certain confidence, let's say that has to go with that. And so they are going to in general, trust their opinion probably more than others, particularly if there's not that relationship in place.

53:01But I almost choose not to go on boards anymore because so many times I've had to kind of take control of a situation where a CEO is, I think, doing the wrong thing. But it's my fault. I'm saying that I didn't build the relationship enough so that we would have an open dialogue when things went bad. Things were always great. It was a great open dialogue when things were going good. But let's say the CEO didn't realize his burn rate, It was going to put him out of business. And I did realize this from my own experience, that there was no way he was going to raise money in time. There sometimes would be painful situations.

53:33And it's scary. You have to take extreme ownership, but also a lot of it is maybe I didn't build the relationship enough or maybe I had to be harsh at the end because it was an emergency situation. I don't know. I would often get into situations where I found it was hard to really communicate when times were bad because we didn't have enough practice at that. and it just became too painful for me to be on boards in many cases. Yeah, the reason we talk about, well, the reason we talk about everything, everything that I talk about, there's a reason I talk about it. It's because human beings have these natural tendencies.

54:09So one of them is ego, especially when it comes to people that are in positions that took a lot of success to get there. So for instance, guys in the SEAL teams, guys in the SEAL teams, the officers in the SEAL teams, the leaders in the SEAL teams, they've been selected. They've gone through this hard training. They've made it through the training. They, so they've been put in this position. And of course that builds their ego up. Right. And they have to have some ego. Otherwise they wouldn't have even tried. Same thing with a CEO of a company, a startup who thinks, Oh, I can pull this idea together and I can build this company.

54:43And then they succeed at it. And their ego grows even more. The reason we talk about ego so much is because we as human beings, especially in leadership positions, tend to believe, we tend to start to believe that we're great. We tend to start to believe that we are unstoppable and that every decision we make is great. So that's why we talk about it so much because like you, I've seen it bite so many people, both on the battlefield, in business and in life. It's so interesting. You know, people, well, you know, I'm not going to let my ego drive that. And then you realize there's military history chock full of decisions that were ego based decisions that ended up getting thousands of people killed.

55:27Sometimes the individual that was making the decision himself got killed because they didn't want to admit that they were wrong. So if that can happen, if people can literally ride their ego to their death, it certainly influences the way people think on as the CEO of a company that's making decisions that thinks, you know what? I've been right this whole time. I don't need to listen to anybody else. They just need to believe they need to get on board. And it turns out bad and it gets ugly quick. Yeah. Particularly like, and you have a chapter on this, don't take things personally. Like if, if up and down the hierarchy of an organization, somebody is taking things personally, it can be very painful.

56:07It just sort of like a, a radiation that spreads out. Like if, you know, one time I was in a situation where an employee was very upset at me that I had sold the company and the new ownership, you know, was firing people and this person was extremely upset at me. And it's very important in those situations, and you talk about this in the book, it's very important to detach and to really understand what this person is really saying. Even if they're throwing every insult in the world at you and really hitting buttons to try to hurt you, you still have to be detached because they're having their human experience in your organization.

56:43Yeah. And they're probably right. That's why it hurts, right? That's why these things hurt. And I've found so often, number one, when someone's angry, when someone else is emotional, what you have to do is listen to them. And you've got to be careful. actually, James, you can't detach too much where you come into my office and you say, Jocko, I can't believe you did this. You sold this company. Now they're firing everybody. And I say, you know, Hey James, that's business and you need to calm down. That is not going to help our situation. Again, this is another part of reflect and diminish. I need to reflect some of your frustration, right?

57:19I need to show you that. Yes, I understand that you're mad and listen to what you have to say. You know, when people are mad, I listen to them. When people are complaining, I listen to them. When people are frustrated, I listen to them. People say, what do I do when someone's mad? What should I say to them? Don't say anything. Listen to what they have to say and actually try and find where you agree with them. Someone says, I can't believe you sold this company. Now they're firing everybody. And you say, well, how was I supposed to know? You say, you know what? You're right. I did not assess that properly.

57:47I didn't think they were going to cost this drastically. And now we got to figure out where we're going to go from here. This is on me. And it's like, hey, I actually listen to what people have to say. That's why I think I'm relatively hard to insult because pretty much when, you know, you, James say to me, you know, you're, you're, uh, I think you could have done a better job on this book, Jocko. I'm going to say, well, I actually agree with you. Yeah, I know. I think it could have been a little bit longer. I think there's some areas that could have gone into more detail where you say, you know, Hey Jocko, your podcast, uh, is too focused on war.

58:22And I say, well, yeah, you know, you're probably right. I can only relate to so many people. So when people want to bring something to my attention or try and insult me, I usually, they're, they're probably right. And the more it stings me, that means the probably more right that they are. And it's just a good way to deescalate things to say to yourself, all right, well, James is saying that, you know, I was too short. I was too, uh, I was too quick in making this decision to sell the company. And you know what? He's probably right. And the more that bothers me, the more you're probably right.

58:57And I probably made too quick of a decision. I'm going to have to frame that and hang it up behind my desk. You're probably right. Because that is the correct response in almost every one of these situations. So, you know, the government is a weird type of organization because unlike a very, let's say a company where the founder and CEO brought in the people who brought in the people who brought in the people. So it's a very kind of linear type of, you know, a natural evolution of the leadership levels in the company and everybody's kind of supposedly on the same page, at least ideally. The government is interesting because at the very top level, you have elected officials who change all the time.

59:42Then at the next level, whether it's state department officials working in embassies or officers and military, they're lifers in many cases. So they go through Democrat, Republican, Democrat administrations that are always changing. And then even lower, let's say the difference between an enlisted person and an officer, the officer might've just had an education, an ROTC, and then suddenly they're a lieutenant somewhere. But meanwhile, all these people that they command have been there forever. So it seems like government in particular is like a screwed up type of leadership situation. And you see that maybe in how policy is enacted around the world.

1:00:24Yeah, for sure. The way the government is run is definitely challenging. And I think the longer we kind of continue in this direction, the more difficult it's going to become because the more dug in people get around the world that they've created for themselves. So, you know, like you mentioned, the people that have been in government for 20, 30 years, 40 years, they don't, they've got, they're going to keep their little world as pristine and as protected as they can. And regardless of who gets elected, they have a lot of power to protect their world. And I think we're seeing a lot of that, you know, in a bunch of different areas of the government, whether it's the bureaucratic system that runs healthcare or the bureaucratic system that runs education or the bureaucratic system that runs energy or the bureaucratic system that runs defense, like all these are big, giant bureaucratic systems that are very, very difficult to change.

1:01:26There's just nepotism there and people are protecting their part of the government. They're protecting their little existence. And some of this tension is normal, right? Some of the tension is good, right? Let's say the military people should be saying, we need more money. And there's a natural tension between the energy sector that's saying, oh, well, we need money too, and the environmental sector. So there's a good natural tension. but where the problem comes in is where is when we lose alignment with the overall mission and when my little part of the government becomes more important and i'm willing to undermine your part of the government to take from you even though i know it might not be their best for the overall country and that's where we weren't running to a problem where people aren't willing to say you know what we've spent enough money on this department and we don't need to grow this department any bigger right now.

1:02:29Instead, there's no one in the government. No one in the government ever says, you know what, my department is big enough and I can actually give up. No one ever says that in the government. All they say is I need more people. I need more money. That's what they all say all the time. No one ever says, hey, we're big enough. I don't need any more people. And we can we can lower our budget. These are words that are not spoken. Right. And that's where you run into a problem. They're not doing the best for the overall country. They're only trying to look out for their small sector of the government.

1:03:00And that's a disaster. Yeah. And like you said, it doesn't really reverse. So like ultimately it could take hundreds of years, but you know, that's why people are worried about the future of America in some cases, because we can't get out of this power spiral that, you know, different leaderships take at different times. And I'm not even talking about anyone. I mean, this has been happening every single president since John Adams. So it's, you know, and again, it's, it's, it's dangerous to predict the end of America. A lot of people have lost huge bets doing that. And I would never do that. But it does seem like it's hard to reverse process when when the actual mechanics are broken on the inside.

1:03:43Yeah. That being said, you know, just like what we talked earlier about people changing when traumatic events happen. And I think that's one thing that America is able to do is when things get bad enough, we make changes. And so look, even though, you know, the country is very divided right now, even though there's some economic turmoil, Well, you know, we still have basically everyone has an iPhone. Everyone has Wi-Fi. Everyone has food. Like there's you can't say that things are that bad. Right. In fact, they're not, you know, a lot of people talk about the divisiveness now. And first of all, we've had an actual freaking civil war where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

1:04:29But even in the late 60s, early 70s, you know, there was massive divisiveness in the country. There was people, there was police officers getting murdered. there was like 35 or 40 police officers that were executed in that timeframe. And so it's, yeah, sure, it's rough right now, but it's not as bad as we often think it is. And it's definitely not as bad as the media wants it to be, right? The media, every story you click on from the media is catastrophic. The sky is falling. That's what happens every day. The sky falls if you follow the media, right? Every storm is the worst storm ever. You know, we just had this hurricane out in California.

1:05:07Barely even rained, James. I was there actually. So, right. I'm like, I remember thinking, oh, I guess if someone just spits on the ground, the media causes a hurricane in California. Yeah. I mean, there were some parts that were definitely impacted in a big way, but overall compared to, you know, a big hurricane that hits the East coast and causes billions of dollars worth of damage. It wasn't even in the ballpark, but that's the way the media reports that, you know, every, everything that happens is catastrophic world ending. Cause they want you to click on that. They want to make their money.

1:05:42And all it does is exacerbate the emotions of, of our fellow countrymen. And it's a, it's a negative thing. So I think there'll be a little bit of burnout on that. I think even right now, I think people are tuning less and less into the mainstream media to find out what's going on because they know that it's just a big hype train of emotions and we're not buying into it. We know it's not healthy. It's not healthy to think that every day that the world is going to fall apart when the reality is the world's going to be okay. Yeah, I think it's always helpful to hold on to that, that we have seen extreme conflict, like you said, in the 1960s and the 1860s was certainly worse than what we're experiencing right now in terms of national divisiveness.

1:06:28And I'm sure there's plenty of other times that we're just as divisive and we survived it. There's other issues with economics and so on, but take the Ukraine situation. And without necessarily revealing or talking about the politics of it, how would you, again, there's like 20 layers of leadership until you get to weapons being sent to people on the ground. Like, how do you think you would deal with what's happening in Ukraine? Again, to me, this boils down to relationships, right? What kind of relationships? How well do you know the people on the ground that are making decisions? And listen, if you give weapons and technology to a country, they're going to keep fighting forever, right?

1:07:17especially when it's their homeland so the ukrainians you know this is their home they can't they can't give up their home there's this is not an option for them so they're going to keep fighting and as long as we keep sending weapons and they think they can they can maintain what they've got there's not going to be any compromise they don't have any reason to compromise when they've got an unlimited supply of weapons now at some point they're going to run out of people too and then maybe they'll compromise but what have we what have they been through then a generation of men killed? Is that what it's going to take before they come to the table?

1:07:49So right now, you know, I think no one seems to be focused on finding a diplomatic solution. And anyone that says to look for a diplomatic solution are often saying, well, oh, but Russia invaded. Yeah, Russia invaded. That was wrong. You know, they're going to get punished for that. And they are getting punished for that. They're losing a lot of people, but we can sit here on the sidelines and keep, you know, throwing weapons into the, into the fight. So I think we need to use our, I think we need to use the leverage behind what we're giving to get people to start having some serious talks around how to get this thing solved.

1:08:32It's a freaking bloodbath over there. It's a nightmare. I know. And like, it's so cavalier the way people make decisions where thousands or even tens of thousands of 18 year olds might get killed. It's like a horrible thing. Yeah. Nevermind might get killed. I mean, they're getting butchered on both sides right now. And I mean, it's, it's, it's also very difficult to tell what's really going on over there because no one can give an accurate report of how many Russians can, no one can give an app accurate report of how many Ukrainians have died. We don't know. You know, some people say it's been over 100 ,000, several hundred thousand.

1:09:11Like no one knows. They can't even give an accurate number. So you're right. This is what I do know. An 18-year-old kid that's a Russian kid that's been sent there as a conscript to go and fight, he doesn't care. He doesn't care. And an 18-year-old Ukrainian kid, yeah, he wants to protect his home, but he doesn't want to die. and what this is the thing with war war is a test of wills that's what it is it's a test of wills and it's a test of wills that we didn't know the outcome and that's why we're fighting so right now who has the stronger will who is willing to sacrifice more of their blood and money who's willing to sacrifice more that that's what this boils down to and there's only one way to know.

1:10:01And that's when one side gives up. You know, we made this tragic mistake in Vietnam. We thought that if we can kill a hundred Vietnamese soldiers for every one of our soldiers that dies, we'll win. And we did. That was what the kill ratio was like. That was like 100 to 1, sometimes 150 to 1. When you look at the overall casualties in the war, we killed hundreds of them for every one American that they killed. But guess what? They didn't care. They had the will. It was their country. They had the will to sacrifice, and we didn't. But you're right, though. You look at the Republican debate. One side says you can't let a murderer invade a sovereign country, and the other side says people are dying, so we've got to stop this.

1:10:52But both sides are making sense, right? They both have their huge groups that agree with either side. And it makes it complicated because on the one hand, it seems sort of naive to say, well, I'm not going to support any war because death. And on the other side is, look, you can't let dictators have their way or else all your allies will get destroyed. And so it's really like this gray area where it's hard to know what to do. Sure. Yeah. But what you do need to do is you need to talk and you need to figure out what the compromise is going to be. You have to figure out some kind of a compromise.

1:11:30And until you figure out some kind of a compromise, there's going to continue to be a bloodbath. And just like anything, you have to put the egos aside. And that's what makes this really difficult. You know, you look at the Donbass region, Donbass region is like 95 % Russian speaking people, ethnic Russians. And that was sort of the, you know, the Crimea, like there's a bunch of things that weigh in here, but what is, where are we willing to compromise? And at what point, you know, at what point have you taken enough damage? You know, when I say, Hey, James, you have to do what I tell you to do.

1:12:07I'm going to cut off one of your fingers. And you say, no, I'm not going to do it. So I cut off one of your fingers. And then I say, no, you have to do what I tell you to do or else I'm going to cut off another one of your fingers. Eventually you say, okay, I'll come to here. Don't cut off any more of my fingers. We make a deal, right? That's what we have to do. By the way, I want something from you, James, right? That's why I'm threatening you. I'm going to cut off your finger unless you give me this amount of money. And at a certain point, you know what? You say, you know what, John, I'll find.

1:12:31Here's the money you can have. I couldn't give you, you know,$5 million, but I can give you$2 million. And this leaves me with, you know, seven fingers left. and that's where I'm good. I don't want to give up any more fingers. We make a deal. And listen, I wanted 5 million. I don't get it. You wanted all your fingers. You don't get it. You don't get all your fingers. I don't get all the money I want. We have to make a compromise. Otherwise, guess what happens? I cut off all your fingers. You can't even pay me anymore because you can't make that money because you have no ability to. And now we all lose.

1:13:06So you got to come up with a compromise in these situations. And the idea of no compromise, it only works if we are going to do total war, which means we have to fight everybody, which doesn't make any sense because who's willing to do that? And you have to keep feeding in the weapons and keep spending the money because, like you say, it's not going to end as long as everybody keeps feeding weapons into it. Yep. I mean, we could – I mean, they could literally kill all the Ukrainian men. I mean, there's less humans. There's less military-age males in Ukraine. Right. We could keep giving them weapons until they're all dead.

1:13:42So let me ask you this. Here now you've written all of these excellent books on leadership. Hopefully these books are taught in leadership class for generations to come. But you do an excellent podcast about war and you know an enormous amount about, and you're constantly learning about the history of war, current wars, war strategies, fighting strategies, and so on. why don't you do your next book on the topic of war and and get a voice in this arena well i'm actually already very close to done with the draft of my next book so it's it and you look all my books are somewhat about war but well they use war as examples and then use those to those examples to teach about leadership but you don't really kind of go in there wait in and say okay, this is what we're doing.

1:14:35This is different from how we did it in Vietnam or World War II or these other situations around the world. So here's how maybe we should consider things. Like you don't really dive into the current situation. Yeah. So one thing that I've been slow rolling on is a series of podcasts of why we lost these wars. Why did we lose in Korea? why do we lose in Vietnam why do we lose in Iraq why do we lose in Afghanistan why are we losing these wars and there's a bunch of reasons and you know I'm going to talk about them but one of the one of the key components is that we have not ever lost a war that we needed to win.

1:15:26We only lose wars that we don't need to win. And so that would tell you very quickly, don't get into wars that you don't need to win. Don't get into wars that you don't need to win. If you don't need to be in the war, if you don't need to win the war, don't be in the war because you're not willing to make the sacrifice. You're not willing to make the sacrifice. So why do it? And we go into wars that we don't need to win all the time. yeah that's interesting i never thought about that way are there any wars we didn't need to win that we won oh sure if you end up you know we went into grenada we we you know we got in and out there pretty quick the first iraq war we didn't need to win it but we went with overwhelming power we you can win just like you can win fights that you don't need to win right because you're just stronger and you can overpower your opponent but if it turns into a brawl and you don't really need to win it and you look the bell rings in the 12th round and it's and it's gonna go on for unlimited rounds around the 12th round you say you know what i'm not doing this anymore and you don't come out you don't answer the bell you have made enough sacrifice and you don't you don't need to win it so you walk away and that's what we've done we don't need to win these wars so we walk away it's it's a terrible situation to get yourself into yeah and even even this ukraine thing.

1:16:47It's really unclear what our involvement is, what we're trying to win on either side, Russia or Ukraine. And, you know, it's just a confusing thing. Yeah. And I mean, Russia is not the Soviet Union. Russia is not communist. Look, Putin might not be the nicest guy in the world, but that's not the government that we fought the Cold War against. it's a different group of people it's it's many of them from the same thread but they're not running communism that's not what they're doing so it's a it's it's definitely a tough situation and certainly that's a war that ukraine needs to win and you could also say it's a war that russia needs to win probably not as bad as ukraine so when it comes to a test of wills it's most likely the ukrainians that will prevail from a test of wills except for the fact that this is a war of attrition and this the russians have more people and you know if you and i had two companies and we were your company you you were a well capitalized company and i didn't have as much money as you did even though i really wanted to beat you and it all came down to advertising you could outspend me on advertising and you're gonna win great and the good the good thing about companies is that it's not like you're protecting specific land and real estate.

1:18:13Like you could outmaneuver in your own way. So when you're smaller, that gives you some advantages over the entities that are bigger. And you could play on, you could sort of define the playing ground when you're in a company in a commercial situation. Yeah. You can say, okay, I'm not going to sell all the books in the world, but I'm going to be a content media company about military history and sell books, podcasts, whatever. And that's what you do. And that's how you fight Amazon. And it's interesting because the Ukrainians are doing a lot of, and we've kind of suckered them into this. The Ukrainians are doing a lot of conventional warfare.

1:18:48You know, you see them running around in trenches instead of doing unconventional warfare. And it's going to be tough to beat the Russians in conventional warfare. But that's what - What would be an example of unconventional warfare here? Unconventional warfare is guerrilla warfare. Unconventional warfare is, you know, snipers, sneak attacks, IEDs. It's what we fought against in Vietnam. It's what we fought against in Iraq. It's what we fought against in Afghanistan. We're fighting against unconventional warfare. And it makes it very difficult for a large conventional force to achieve victory.

1:19:23And yet somehow the Ukrainians have gotten suckered into going toe-to-toe attrition warfare, in many cases against the Russians, which is not a good move. So why aren't they doing at least a little bit of both? Like, why aren't they doing the IEDs and snipers and so on? They're definitely doing some, but I'm not sure why they haven't done that yet. It also, it's because it requires humility. Because what you have to do is you have to give some land up. What you have to do is you have to run away. What you have to do is you have to sucker punch people. it's it's very counter ego you got to be like like think of a gulf war ii iraq when we it was very confusing when we actually got into iraq in whatever it was 2002 because no one was there or 2003 i forget what year now but yeah so but no one was there we got into baghdad and like everybody had left and so that's something that a country has to be willing to do now at the time we we didn't know if this was a good strategy or a bad strategy for them.

1:20:33It turned out to be, actually, I don't even know what the final outcome of that strategy was given what happened. Yeah. What happened there was we disbanded the entire Iraqi military instead of saying, all right, you guys lost. Now we're going to put you to work. Instead, we disbanded them all. We put them all out of jobs. It was just, we made a bunch of really bad decisions and it's because we hadn't thought through things the way we should have. Yeah. And so that's, this is what What makes me worried about the state of things in the long run is that it seems like we keep veering towards worse and worse decisions, both on a military level, an economic level, you know, dealing with this pandemic and so on.

1:21:11Like the major decisions that affect the lives of everyone, it seems like we're just trending towards bad decision making. Yes, we are doing a lot of dumb things globally and nationally in America at this time. You are correct. So given that, A, I hope people read your book, and I'm going to say the title again. I'm always – this happens to me every single podcast. I can never – I'm always afraid I'm going to say the title wrong. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, expanded edition. There you go. And second, final thing is I want to ask you, if I were to just drink Jocko Creatine, you have all these supplements out there.

1:21:53I saw an ad for Jocko Creatine the other day. if I was just to just drink it or use it without doing a workout, what happens? What does creatine do if you don't like burn it off in a workout? Well, one thing that's good is they found recently that creatine is not only good for being stronger, it also helps your mental acuity, helps your cognitive growth. So it's a good supplement to take all around, not just for the physical effects. Okay. I didn't know that. It won't have a bad effect if you're not like burning it off through working out? Oh no, not at all. No, it's definitely, it's definitely good for you on multiple levels.

1:22:26I'm going to have to try some Jocko creatine. I'm going to order it today. Order it up. You could use it, I'm telling you. Thanks so much, Jocko. Thanks once again, and I look forward to the next time you come on the podcast. Hopefully, we'll do it in person again. Right on, man. Looking forward to it. Good seeing you as well.

1:22:54Thank you.