#257 Jocko Willink - Commander of SEAL Team-3 Task Unit Bruiser aka "The Punishers"

25:23Jocko Willink:Nothing. So I wasn't really intimidated, but I was just excited, man. I was just excited. And, you know, like I said, I wasn't the fastest runner. I wasn't the fastest swimmer. I wasn't really that good at anything in particular, but I wasn't that bad at anything in particular either. And I was young. I could recover quick. I was fired up. I was very used to the cold. But, you know, you're meeting guys that are total studs. You know, you're meeting guys that are D1 athletes and whatever. I had an Olympic alternate in my buds class for gymnastics. Like, how fast can that guy do the O course compared to me?

26:01Jocko Willink:You know what I'm saying? And some D1 water polo players and, you know, just the whole nine yards. And I was just young and just fired up to be there, stoked. How many people were in there? Do you remember? I don't really know. Probably... I don't know. A couple, I mean, 150? I actually don't know. A lot of people. I'd have to look at it, but... How did you, I mean, did you measure yourself up against... the people that you were seeing when you showed up? Like, oh, fuck, that guy's gonna make it, that guy's not gonna make it if that guy made it? You know what I'm talking about? There was a couple guys that, you know, seemed like studs that quit.

26:46Jocko Willink:The gymnast that I was talking about, Olympic gymnast or Olympic alternate gymnast quit. Had a D1 water polo player that quit. I had, there was definitely some studs that quit and I realized, oh, there's a wrestler from Iowa that quit. Not the college, but he was a stud. So yeah, I realized that this isn't all about, you know, what your athletic background is because it's about being cold, wet, miserable and suffering. and if you don't like that, you're going to have problems. Did you have any problems? I failed. I failed to run. I failed to swim. I failed to no course. I failed pool comp. I failed like everything.

27:24Jocko Willink:When I went through, if you failed something twice, you got rolled. But if you failed something once, you could stay with the class. And so if you failed two runs, you got rolled. And then if you failed one in the next class, you got dropped. So I only failed one of everything. And some of the ones were, you know, like there were some swims that pretty much almost everyone in the class failed because the tide or the current or whatever. There were some runs where a lot of people failed because it maybe wasn't quite four miles. Maybe a little over. Yeah, yeah, it was a little over. So I failed a little bit of everything, but not enough to get me rolled.

28:04Jocko Willink:And I stayed with my class the whole time, made it through one shot. How did you deal with failure? I just tried to go harder. You know, I failed a run. I paced myself on a run, which I wasn't fast enough to pace myself. I needed, for basically everything that I did in Buzz, I just needed to go 100%. And probably, I don't know, my third or fourth run in first phase, I was kind of like, oh, I'll try pacing myself. And so I went at a pace, and I just was wrong and failed. And so I never paced myself again on those runs. I just ran as hard as I could because that's the only thing I wanted to do, man, was get through that training and be a SEAL.

28:44Jocko Willink:So I just put out hard, and that's how I overcame. I overcame failure just by pure, just aggressive hard work, man. I failed pool comp, and me and one of my buddies, we got, this shouldn't even be legal, but we got dive equipment from dive phase to practice with, but we wore it in the dip tank. So we were pool comping each other in the dip tank on a weekend. And then got through it on Monday, you know? So for those that are listening, pool comp is an exercise that you do in second phase. It's open circuit diving. and it's one of the more strenuous weeks that you go through in buds a lot of people fail it's it's a lot of people say that pool comp they basically beat the shit out of you underwater with tanks on a lot of people say that pool comp is the is the last major hurdle that you're going to have to pass uh to get through buds yeah so but how did you i mean how did you deal with the mental stress, did that affect you at all?

29:58Or was it the physical stuff? Or was it both?

30:03Jocko Willink:I had fun. You know, I'm not saying it wasn't hard. Like, Hell Week's hard. It's cold, wet, miserable. But, I mean, I wasn't really mentally stressed. I was kind of having fun, you know? I enjoyed it. Like, man, you're gonna get to be a frogman? Yeah. You know, I'll do it. I would have done whatever they told me to do. I think there's some people that show up to Buds that they would rather die. And I was definitely in that category. So, you know, and I think they figured that out. You know, I think they figured out with guys. They go, yeah, this guy, we're not going to break this guy. Because they'll try, you know.

30:43Jocko Willink:But eventually they go, yeah, we can maybe hurt him physically, but we're not going to break him mentally. So for somebody that's going through Buds right now, would you have any advice for them? or what would your one piece of advice yeah i tell people this one piece of advice all the time don't quit love it you know and that statistically is right because the vast majority of people that make it through buds they quit they don't get performance if you like if you get rolled for a run you're gonna have six weeks to get better at running you'll you you can pass the runs if you get rolled for swimming if you get rolled for pool comp you're gonna get good at pool comp for the next six weeks until you start up with your next class what'd you do for those six weeks you practice pool comp over and over and over again so the people that don't make it generally speaking quit so if you don't quit you should be in a pretty good spot so don't quit yeah it's a good point

31:42Jocko Willink:so where do you go after buds got done with buds and i went to clt one how was that did you pick one? Yes. Well, I didn't pick one, but I picked West Coast. And, you know, it's, I was going to say this when you talked about being intimidated, showing up to buds. And I was kind of like, not really, because it's a big game and it's, you know, get wet and be cold and do pushups. It's kind of fun. But when I got to SEAL Team 1, I was definitely, it was intimidating going to SEAL Team 1. I was definitely... The atmosphere for a new guy at SEAL Team 1 was intimidating. I've heard the stories. Yeah, it was definitely intimidating.

32:28Jocko Willink:We went, myself and two other new guys were checking into the Master Chief. We're standing outside of his door in our uniforms and parade rest, and he calls us in there. We go to attention. We walk in, we're standing at attention. and he says uh he says fuck you fuck you fuck you everyone here has been to buds it doesn't mean shit get out of here cool so then the next we had like all the new guys assembled together and that master chief came in and said um he said don't be late don't forget anything and keep your mouth shut and your ears open those are really that's really good advice don't be late don't be light and and keep your mouth shut and your ears open and that's the way that's the way it was you know that's the way it was keep your mouth shut keep your ears open and try and absorb everything that's going on and again this is 1991 man like the gulf war that I thought I was going to be in, that they were reporting that there was going to be 30 ,000 or 40 ,000 casualties was over in 72 hours.

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36:15Real quick, I just want to go back to Bud's graduation. I mean, it sounds like the majority of your childhood you wanted to get into the military, found the teams, which, you know, is the, if not one of the best, you know, soft units to be in. I mean, what did it feel like for you to graduate?

36:35Jocko Willink:You know, back then we didn't get our trident or anything. You know, we just graduated and you still had a lot of hurdles to overcome. I was always pretty paranoid. You know, you asked him like when I failed something, I was very paranoid about failing, not wanting to fail. And so even going to knowing that I was going to SEAL Team 1, knowing I graduated BUDS, it felt good, but it didn't feel like I had completed the journey at all. It felt like, okay, now you got to get through SEAL Tactical Training and you got to get through your board with the team. So I didn't have some, you know, elevated feeling of I made it.

37:11Jocko Willink:I never really got that feeling in my 20 years. Gotcha. Gotcha. All right, back to Team 1. I mean, so you get into Team 1. What kind of team guys are there? What have they been through? I mean, we're in peacetime. We talked about Gulf War. You know, that was pretty short. What kind of experience was in SEAL Team 1 when you showed up? Other than a couple Vietnam guys, there was, relatively speaking, almost no experience. Almost no combat experience. No shit. And so it was kind of weird because the way we trained, you were training for something that no one really understood. And as much as the Vietnam guys passed down as much as they could, but it still was like you didn't really know what it was you were training for.

38:06Jocko Willink:And that made us train very, very hard, because it seemed like combat was this unfathomable, tough thing. And so we better train as hard as we possibly could. And we thought, we hoped and prayed that we would get to do one mission. You know, that was the hope and the prayer was maybe we'll get to do one, what we used to call a real-world mission. Yeah. You know, real-world mission. We would hope and pray that we would get to do some real-world mission, and we trained as hard as we possibly could. Everyone was very... There was a lot of... Team One was very... They called it Stalag Team One. And there was another name for it.

38:51Jocko Willink:But it was very strict. I've always heard No Fun One. No Fun One. Yep. They had a bunch of names for No Fun One, Stalag Team One. And yet in my first platoon, the older guys would say, team one, it's not just a number, it's an attitude. Which again, now that I, you know, when I got older, but I was young, dude, I was like, that's a real thing. Like, this is, this is our attitude. And so, you know, we literally had haircut inspections every two weeks, uniform inspections with our camis. Like it was, we had command PT every day. everything was very professional and that's how I fit in well with that you know and or I should say it fit me well because I liked the military and that's what we were doing that's interesting considering you don't like authority yeah yeah I think maybe at this point I had recognized that this was, this was, that professionalism was part of the job for me, you know, for like that, that level of professionalism that I saw was, that was what we were supposed to be like.

40:11Jocko Willink:That was the job. So I bought into it, man. You know, it sounds like

40:22when you went to one when you got into the teams it sounds maybe maybe similar to what guys might experience today you know you've got a lot of past experience it sounds like when you came in it was a little bit of past experience with the vietnam guys but i mean you know the g-wag guys it's every day there's got to be more and more guys you know retiring calling it a day moving on with their lives. And now you have this younger generation that's coming in that, you know, isn't, they're not doing, I don't know, maybe they are doing a lot, but I don't think they're doing a lot. I don't think we got a lot of guys in Ukraine.

40:59And so, you know, I mean, do you think it's, are we at a similar time today?

41:05Jocko Willink:It's a very similar time. A very similar time. I tell those young guys now, I didn't shoot my weapon at the enemy for 13 years. and in the way you just expressed that i would have never expressed that because i was having a freaking great time we were training hard we're jumping out airplanes we were you know diving and shooting machine guns and blowing things up and like that's what we were getting ready getting ready getting ready and so i understand the expression because now of course we all look back like gosh how could you wait around for 13 years but that's what it was That's what we lived in.

41:42Jocko Willink:That's the water that we drank. And so it was, hey, this is what we're doing. And by the way, you're with an awesome bunch of guys. We have fun. Everything is like super professional and also super fun. You know, it's being in a SEAL platoon, man. I would rather, if I could just, heaven for me would be just like SEAL platoon. SEAL platoon forever. That's what we're doing. And we go to war, cool. We go train, cool. That's what we're doing. It's the best job. And so I didn't know enough to go, I can't believe I got to go on deployment again. No, I want to go on deployment. Oh, there's nothing happening?

42:20Jocko Willink:Cool. We're going on deployment. We're going to go to this country, that country. We're going to work with these group, that group. Maybe something will happen. And if it doesn't, we're still going to be out here doing our best. So I didn't, I had a good attitude the whole time. Like it was exactly where I wanted to be. Being in a sail platoon was just as good as it gets, man. Yeah, I guess, you know, I could totally see that. I mean, I guess that attitude probably came in with my generation when we came in. It was, it had, I mean, I joined in July of 2001. And so by the time, actually, like two days after I graduated boot camp, the towers went down.

42:59So I knew, I guess I didn't know.

43:03Jocko Willink:Yeah, that's a different level of frustration, right? Where if your country is at war and you joined the teams to go to war, if you're not going, yeah, that's going to be angst, right? That's going to be problematic for sure. But when there's nothing going on, I didn't know enough to be frustrated about it. Yeah, we're having a good time. I mean, I think that would come in too. I mean, I think that attitude comes in as well when you see platoons go out and do something and you haven't yet. And then that creates, you know, I don't know if jealousy is the right. I mean, yes, it definitely creates jealousy and maybe some discontent throughout the community.

43:49But so where did you go? Where was your first deployment?

43:53Jocko Willink:First deployment was to Guam, and this is where I got introduced to Jiu-Jitsu. How did that happen? There was, we show up in Guam, and this is after our workup, so we're there, and we're sitting in our platoon hut one morning, and this master chief comes in, this old master chief, like, he had to be at least like 39 years old or something like that, but he looked like an old man, and he's old lanky old guy, and he says, who wants to learn how to fight and i'm like i don't know what this old guy think he's going to teach me but me and a few other guys new guys we raised our hands and all right so we went to uh the navy base had like a judo training mat and he told us to meet him there at a certain time and this guy's name was steve bailey he was a awesome master chief in the seal teams and he was a muay thai fighter and he had been training jujitsu with the gracies in torrance in the late eighties.

44:52Jocko Willink:So he was like, what right now would be considered considered like a mid-level white belt in jujitsu. And he just lined us up and just tapped us all out over and over again. It's, it's hard to explain to people how little we, how little human beings knew about fighting in 1992 before the UFC. Like no one even understood the guard or the mount or the rear naked choke or the commura or the arm lock. There was, it didn't even exist. It wasn't, it wasn't even, it didn't even exist, man. And so this guy, you don't even know that he's passing your guard. You don't even know what the guard is. You don't know that he's mounted because you don't even know what the mount is.

45:38Jocko Willink:You don't know that he's taking your arm. You don't, you have no comprehension of what's happening. And so he just annihilated us. And to me, I just thought to myself, whatever this freaking guy knows, I will do whatever I can to learn it. And so we started training with him. That was my introduction to jujitsu. Wow. It has stuck with you ever since. Yeah. So how long has it been since then? Well, that was in 1992, 1993. So. Wow. So what, 20, you know, holy shit, 30. Yeah. Whatever. 33 years. Is that right? Something like that. Wow. Wow. 33 fucking years. Yeah. Yeah, there was something that I recognized very quickly that it was...

46:23Jocko Willink:I had to learn this thing, this stuff. Yeah. And now you're a black belt. Yeah, yep. So that was my first platoon. We go to Guam, and this is 93. there's, you know, we go and do exercises. We work with other, you know, host nations. Again, I'm having a good time. Um, you know, we're training hard. We're, we're partying hard. We're doing what kind of like young seals do. Um, but you know, there's no war going on except for there was some things that were happening in Somalia. And so there was some guys on board ship from the East Coast and the West Coast that did some kind of operations in Somalia.

47:15Jocko Willink:Then they went from the ship to go do these operations. Now, SEALs back in the 90s, no one wanted to go on the ship, right? And so I got back from that first platoon and me and a few of my buddies, we were like, hey, we know what we did in Guam, which was nothing. And we know what the guys that were on the ships, they went to Somalia. Let's go on the ships. And so me and a few of my buddies from that first platoon that I'd gone through BUDS with, and we'd done that first platoon, we volunteered to go on a shipboard deployment. And everyone's like, what are you guys doing? We're like, that seems to have the best chance.

47:51Jocko Willink:So that's what we did. We did, we volunteered for what was called an ARG platoon on the East Coast. It's called a MARG platoon. We volunteered for the ARG platoon and we went and did a shipboard deployment, which for me was awesome because we had a lot of assets to train with. We worked very closely with the Marine Corps, which was awesome. We did, you know, we trained, we did like their shooting package with the force recon guys. We trained with them. We did shipboarding with them. We did stuff, a lot of stuff at Camp Pendleton after our own workup. And I also got to learn and understand the structure of the Marine Corps and how they operated, which gave me an insight onto conventional forces at large and what they were doing, interacting with the Navy.

48:28Jocko Willink:It was very, very beneficial for me. I was the primary comms guy in my first platoon. For whatever reason, they didn't have a primary comms guy. And I'd gone to comm school, as a matter of fact, on the East Coast, the SEAL comm school on the East Coast, which was awesome. And so then I was a primary comms guy in my first platoon. So now I'm the primary comms guy in my second platoon, which means I'm sitting with the officers during planning. I'm, you know, learning how the communications work, learning about contingencies, learning about loss of comms plan, learning about QRFs. Like I was learning things that I wouldn't have been learning if I had been a machine gunner.

49:09Jocko Willink:So I got very lucky that I was a comms guy and I had volunteered to be a comms guy. And the reason I had volunteered to be a comms guy was my third day at seal team one, I had quarter deck watch back when we used to stand watches and the officer of the deck, which was another seal said, Hey, new guy. I was like, Hey, sir. And he said, uh, if you want to be on every mission, be a comms guy, because no matter what the mission is, you will get to go, because if you know how to work comms. And the next morning when we woke up, I went up to the comm shack and I said, hey, I want to be a comms guy, which again, no one had ever volunteered to be a comms guy.

49:46Jocko Willink:So I volunteered to be a comms guy. And then I was a primary comms guy in my first platoon. And now I was the primary comms guy in my second platoon. And then probably one of the most influential things of my life happened in my second platoon. So there was actually a couple pretty pivotal moments. The first one was we had an assistant platoon commander in my second platoon. His name was Alton Lee Grisard. And he was an absolute freaking stud. He was the quarterback at the Naval Academy. He was record setting. Like he broke Roger Staubach's records at the Naval Academy. He was complete charismatic guy, fun, nice, charismatic, the whole nine yards.

50:35Jocko Willink:And I was really good friends with him, really good friends with him. And he got killed. He got murdered. He got murdered? He got murdered in a murder suicide. So So you can go back and look at the news on this. But what is a murder suicide? Meaning a guy. Suicide by a cop or something? No, he was, he was. There was a guy from the Naval Academy, another guy from the Naval Academy who was a submariner who had been dating a girl from the Naval Academy who I think was a surface warfare officer. They had been dating. They broke up. Grizz had been like hanging out with her. and this guy showed up at the BOQ, the Bachelor Officer's Quarter on Coronado, banged on the door, and Grizz opened the door, and the guy shot Grizz, shot the girl, and killed himself.

51:32Jocko Willink:Holy shit. And so, really heartbreaking, terrible scenario, and I was really good friends with him, and we'd had, we'd had, he was one of the first people that had a video camera, like a normal person with a video camera. And we had made this video, we were down in Panama doing jungle warfare training and we'd gone out and there was this song that said, whoop, there it is. You remember this song? And so he had filmed, we were hanging out with these Panamanian girls and these girls were saying, whoop a because they didn't speak english and we're just like in a you know parting with these girls and and he had taken this video and he'd shown his dad and his dad was a warrant officer in the navy and his you know his dad he'd grown up in japan for the most part and so grizz had showed this video to his dad of me and him you know with these panamanian girls laughing in a bar saying, whoop, AEA, because we were just laughing.

52:41Jocko Willink:So when we go to, they had a big service at the Naval Academy, because he's a hero at the Naval Academy. And I met his dad and, you know, his dad recognized me. And, you know, I told his dad because he had told me, because I said to him, I said to him one day, I told his dad, I said, you know, I said to your son one day, I said, hey, you grew up in Japan. Like, you're going to a Japanese high school. How did you learn to play football? And he said, my old man taught me.

53:21Jocko Willink:And as that happened, you know, I got, I was very, you know, obviously we're all broken up from this. but I don't know what I don't I wasn't behaving properly and my my running mate from the SEAL teams who I went through BUDS with I went through STT with I did three platoons with this guy I was in training cell and this guy was my roommate the whole time just like my my my running mate and he he pulled me aside and he was like hey grizz didn't you're not the only one that lost grizz and i thought to myself he's 100 right and what it made me aware of is that the way you perceive yourself is not going to be accurate all the time and you have to be very cautious in the way you behave because you, you think you're behaving a certain way, but the other people's perception is going to be different.

54:32Jocko Willink:And there's a really good chance that their perception is more accurate than your own. And that, that struck me. And this guy was, you know, this guy was my best friend. And, and he's telling me like, Hey bro, you're not the only one that lost Grizz. And I'm acting like I was the only one that lost Grizz. So it made me aware of that, that, again, just the way you perceive yourself is not the way other people are going to perceive you. So we go through that. How do you, hold on. This is, how do you find, how do you, today, I mean, that's a big fucking lesson. I would take that as a big lesson. It was a huge lesson.

55:15Sounds like you did as well. It was a huge lesson. So how did you, moving forward from that, How did you, how do you find out how people are perceived, are perceiving what you're projecting?

55:25Jocko Willink:I think it's generally speaking, they're going to pursue you. My assumption is that what I'm doing is viewed as negative. My assumption is that if I'm doing something, the assumption is it's viewed as negative. And so if you assume that what you're doing is being perceived as negative, it keeps me in check from behaving in a way that is going to be perceived as negative. I mean, to the best of your ability. I'm not saying, you know, of course, just like every other human, we're all going to slip up. But recognizing that like, man, and I'm so thankful that I had a good enough relationship with this guy to tell me that because otherwise I never would have, you never would see this disconnect between how you're perceived and what you think you're being perceived as.

56:21Jocko Willink:And it was something I wasn't like, I thought to myself, oh, here's how people are seeing me. I was just acting the way I was acting, but it was being perceived in a way that I didn't mean at all. It didn't have any intention, but I could see as soon as he said it, I go, oh yeah, that's right. That's right. You, you, you, you need to look at yourself. You need to detach from, you know, the sadness and go, Oh yeah. What does it look like? What does it, what does it feel like? Nevermind what it looks like. Cause their perceptions are not wrong. Like I said, their perceptions are right. Oh, I had this video, his dad recognized me.

56:57Jocko Willink:I must be, you know what I mean? Like that's all, that's all bad stuff. And I didn't recognize it until my, my buddy let me know. And I was very, very grateful. And it definitely made me recognize that, yeah, people's perception of you is not what you think it is. And that's, if you're not careful, you can really get yourself a bad reputation. And obviously, as you know, reputation in SEAL teams is everything. Your reputation in SEAL teams is everything. So I was just very thankful that he gave me that heads up. And then again, what made this platoon very impactful for me, SEAL Team 1 Alpha platoon, we had a platoon, our platoon officer, our OIC was pretty much a new guy who had flat transferred from another part of the Navy and he had come in as our platoon commander.

57:55Jocko Willink:And, which is no big deal, right? It's really no big deal. Like officers don't have a lot of experience. It's not that big of a deal. They listen to what you have to say. They listen to the platoon chief. They listen to the LPO and they figure it out. Except for this guy didn't really want to listen. And so it ended up causing some friction in the platoon. He, you know, it's one of those guys where, again, he probably didn't realize how he was being perceived. And he was being perceived as arrogant, being perceived as conceited, being perceived as not listening to the rest of the platoon, including the platoon chief, including the platoon LPO.

58:31Jocko Willink:And he was dictating, you know, like, this is how we're going to do this. And this is the way it needs to be. And just wasn't listening. So it's problematic. But, you know, what are you going to do? Carry on. well then we had a we were at a desert warfare training and he presented some plan to us and it was a bad plan and the lpo had like had enough of it was like so this plan is stupid and you know since the guy had a big ego they got in each other's faces and then the the oic takes a swing at the LPO. And we split them up. Yeah, which again, we've seen plenty of interplatoon fights. I mean, it's a thing.

59:16Jocko Willink:It's almost like its own sport, right? But when there's this much tension and negativity, it's a problem. And so we got done with that and we... We go back and we kind of had like a platoon meeting without the platoon commander. And we told the platoon chief, like, we don't want to work with this guy. Platoon chief brings it up the chain of command and we have a, we request captain's mask, like not official, but we want, we request to go talk to the CO. So we go into the CO's office and the CO like lines us up, you know, from the chief on down and he goes down the line, like, what's the problem?

59:52Jocko Willink:What's the problem? What's the problem? we're all saying the same stuff. This guy's arrogant. He doesn't listen to us. It's his way or the highway. And we get done. And the CO says, you know what this sounds like to me? This sounds like a mutiny. We don't have mutinies in the Navy. We're not going to have a mutiny at my SEAL team. Guys, go figure this out. Cool. We walk out of the office and the CO was a good guy who started to pull the thread, you know, once we left his office and talked to the training cadre and figured more about the guy's reputation and talked to the guy himself. And he realized like two or three days later, he fired him.

1:00:33Jocko Willink:And so big win for the E-5 mafia, we're all fired up that we get this guy fired and we proceed. And now we get our new assignment for our new platoon commander. We find out who our new platoon commander is going to be. And our new platoon commander is a legendary SEAL who I had never met him, but I had heard his name. Everybody kind of heard his name. He had been a prior enlisted senior chief. So he went up all the way to senior chief. He was at UDT. He was a plank owner at Dam Neck. He was at SDV. He was at a boat team. He was at team one. He had done everything in his career. everything you could possibly fucking want as a leader.

1:01:19Jocko Willink:He had combat experience from Grenada. So everything that you could want as a leader, he comes in and, and I'm thinking everyone's like fired up. And I go, hold on a second, guys, this is, this is happening for a reason. This is because we're a bunch of mutineers that got our last boss fired. And they're sending this guy down because he's going to crush us and like get us in line. And so when he shows up, this guy, I'm expecting, you know, a six foot five, 270 pound beast. And this guy shows up and he's like five, eight and maybe 150 pounds. And he looks like he's about, he's like the oldest guy I've ever seen in the SEAL teams, which was probably like, you know, 37 or something like that.

1:02:12Jocko Willink:Gray, graying hair and all the whole nine yards. And he walked into our platoon space. And I'm like, who is this freaking, this guy's supposed to be the legend. He walks into our platoon space and he says something along the lines of like, Hey, I'm sorry to hear about your last platoon commander, but I'm not worried about it. I'm just looking forward to working with you guys. and right there like the fact that he didn't come in and say you know i'm taking over i'm in charge there's a new sheriff in town he said i'm looking forward to working with you guys and i realized oh this guy is different and then that afternoon he's taking out the garbage you know sweeping up the platoon space he's taking out the garbage i'm like whoa that's a new that's that's not just a new guy's job that's like a new guy that's in trouble's job And then a couple of days later, we had our first training mission and he put me and my running mate in charge of the mission, which was awesome and crazy.

1:03:15Jocko Willink:Like from, you know, Hey, here's the mission. You guys figure out how you want to do it. And he just put that, that responsibility and gave us ownership. And so that guy, you know, when I was watching him and as I went through that platoon, he was just awesome. And he made our lives awesome. And, you know, when your SEAL platoon is your life and your SEAL platoon is your religion and you have a guy like that take over and the contrast between the guy that was arrogant and didn't listen to us and held on to all the power himself. I learned so much from seeing that contrast between these two guys.

1:03:56And so as time went on,

1:04:02Jocko Willink:that's, that guy left me with a lot of, a lot of lessons. And one of the most, one of the most important lessons that he taught me was we were, we were working with the Marines. We, like I said, we were an ARG platoon. So we were ships off the coast of San Diego. We're doing like the Marine Corps workup with them from the Marine Corps workup. They got to do beach landings. Red Beach up in Camp Pendleton. And before the beach landing goes down, SEALs, back in the old days, we went out with a lead line and slate like World War II and did a hydrographic reconnaissance. And that is a gut check of an operation, especially in a big sea state, especially off Camp Pendleton in whatever month it was.

1:04:41Jocko Willink:It's cold, giant waves. We're in our, you know, Zodiacs. It's such a gut check of an operation. It takes five or six hours to do. You're freezing the whole time. and you take a, you know, a lead line and a slate. So you take a lead line and you dip it in the water and it's got little markings on it to show you how deep the water is. And then you have this slate on your arm where you're writing down how deep the water is. And you do this whole, your whole platoon is doing it at the same time. And it's just a gut check. And we get done that night. And then you have to take all the, all the slates with all the information on them.

1:05:15Jocko Willink:And you bring them back to the ship. And then the cartographers, which are the guys in the platoon that like take all that information they build a chart to give to the marine corps and we go through all that and then that day early morning we then go out and mark the beach lanes so we swim across the beach again and we set up the beach lanes we mark them for the marines and the marines come in and land and so now it's like 48 hours of continuous operations freezing cold gut check and we get done and get a few hours into the beach landing and the marine corps decides that they didn't like their landing.

1:05:51Jocko Willink:And so they said, we missed our timeline. We didn't bring the vehicles in the right direction, whatever the problems they had. We're doing it again. We're reloading the ships and we're doing it again, which is like mammoth and ballsy for the Marine Corps colonel to say like, hey, I didn't like it. We're doing it again. This is massive. So we reload on the ships and we start the whole thing again. And we go out to do the hydrographic reconnaissance. And we're in our little boat pool. You know, we launch from the big ships. We go on the Zodiacs. We get to the point. It's been all night. And we're getting ready to get in the water.

1:06:29Jocko Willink:And we're in our little boat pool. And again, we just did this 48 hours ago. And someone in the platoon, it wasn't me, thank God. someone in the platoon says, are we really going to do this again? And the platoon commander just quietly says, he says, well, you know, we don't have to, but would that be the right thing to do?

1:06:59And not another word was said, we got in the water because you have to do the right thing.

1:07:07Jocko Willink:You're a frogman. You're a SEAL. You have to do the right thing. It's the hard choice right now. We just did it 48 hours ago. There's been no shift in the sand. There's been no obstacles put in, but this is what we do. And for me, that statement, is it the right thing to do? Stick with me for the rest of my career. And this guy, you know, I remember getting towards the end of that platoon. and again, when your platoon is your life and somebody makes it that good. And that was the first thought that I had about trying to become an officer because I said to myself, this guy made life so good for me and these 16 guys in this platoon.

1:08:00Jocko Willink:Someday, if I can, I want to make life good for 16 guys. in a platoon. And that was the very first thought that I had of following his path. And that's what I did. That's what I eventually did. I followed his path, and I always did my best to emulate. I would never be as good as him, but I always did my best to emulate his leadership. Do you think he knows this about you? Yes. Yep. Could I ask you what his name is? I'd rather not say. Okay. But he's well known in the SEAL teams. That's pretty cool. He has no, you know, he's very low profile. Very low profile guy. That's even cooler. Yep. I mean, the best of us are, right?

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1:11:44You know, I'm just curious, when you make a switch, you know, how fast did you see morale recharge, you know, when you saw the leadership change and when he came in and said, I'm excited to work with you? Overnight. Overnight. It was that fast.

1:12:00Jocko Willink:Instant. Instant. Yup. And that was just instant.

1:12:08Jocko Willink:And then that deployment, you know, again, we were on board a ship. We were actually... We were actually staged off the coast of Africa when the Rwanda genocide was going on. And we were like planning to go and getting our gear ready. And of course we never went. This is where, you know, the face that you made earlier that I, where you went, like, that's how, that's the first time I felt that of like, wait a second. There's, I think it ended up being 800 ,000 people slaughtered in a hundred days, but we were there. We were off the coast and we didn't do anything. Why didn't we do anything? Well, what had just happened in Somalia a year prior?

1:12:54Jocko Willink:It was Black Hawk Down. It was like, yeah, they were not willing to take that risk. We did the same thing. There was a couple missions we got spun up for in Somalia and had our gear loaded, had 40 mic mic. I remember loading out 40 mic mic for the first time for real and being like, oh yeah, we're going. And we didn't go. So that was probably the first time that I felt that level of frustration of, you know, why aren't they sending us? Like, we can help. And that's the way it was, you know? Definitely a letdown. How did that platoon end? That was it. You know, we went on deployment. I think we spent some ridiculous amount of time, because they call them Gator Squares, which is when you're just going around in a circle off the coast of...

1:13:36Jocko Willink:We did Gator Squares off the coast of Rwanda, or off the coast of... Not off the coast of Rwanda, but off the coast of Kenya for several months, and then we did Gator Squares off the coast of Somalia for another period of time. And then we went up into the Persian Gulf because at some point, I think it was this platoon, there was something going on, like Saddam had pushed troops, moved troops or something going on. So we went up and did Gator Squares in the Persian Gulf for a while. So I think we were at sea like 174 days out of 180 or something totally insane like that. Yeah, just riding that ship, lifting all day, shooting off the fantail.

1:14:15Jocko Willink:Again, did we have fun while we're doing it? Yeah, dude, we had a blast. We had a blast. Also, in the couple of days that we were not on the ship, I met my wife. How'd you meet your wife? We went into Bahrain for some training, and the boys, we went out, and I met my wife, who was a stewardess at the time. Really? Yeah. How'd you make the approach? Um, oh man.

1:14:54Jocko Willink:So squad two had spent a couple of days, they went off the ship before us and squad one still had some, whatever we were doing, some work to do. And so when we flew into Bahrain, because we flew to Bahrain and we didn't know what Bahrain was, I mean, a country. But we didn't know that Bahrain at the time was like the Las Vegas of the Persian Gulf, meaning it was like somewhat westernized. They had bars and stuff like this. And so when Squad 1, when we landed in the helicopters, Squad 2 is like running to help us move our bags and stuff. We're like, what's going on? And they're like, there's girls here.

1:15:35Jocko Willink:tells me, yeah, you know, there's these girls here. There's these two girls. I've seen them each night. And like, I know you're gonna go and you're gonna go talk to them. And like, they haven't even given me the time of day. And I was like, bro, if there's girls, you know, I won't, I'll leave them alone. They're yours. You handle it. And so we go to a, we go to this bar. I know you're gonna talk to them. Yeah, yeah. Oh, shit. I look across the bar and there's this like, shockingly, stunningly beautiful girl with blonde hair and like a white freaking skin tight, gorgeous outfit on. And so I started just walked over to her.

1:16:09Jocko Willink:And yeah, this is the embarrassing part is, you know, when you're on a ship back then, there wasn't internet. And so we had a limited number of video cassettes. There's no DVDs, no streaming. And one of the movies that we had was Ace Ventura, A Pet Detective. And so, I had watched that movie at this point, like, hundreds of times. And I walked up to this beautiful blonde girl, and I said in like a Jim Carrey style, I said, you must be Aphrodite's goddess of love. And she looked at me like I was an idiot and then laughed, and, you know, we started talking. But that was the... I don't know whether it's more embarrassing that I said it to her or that she fell for it.

1:16:58Jocko Willink:I'm sure she's pretty embarrassed that she fell for it. But yeah, so we ended up having a long-distance relationship. But came home from that deployment and going to another platoon. Right off the bat. Yeah, this was the 90s. Just go on deployment, go on deployment as much as you can and hope that something happens. And so that's what I did. Just went back into another platoon, did another ARC platoon. So right back into the ARC platoon. New leadership? Yep, got a new platoon commander, got a new platoon chief, new platoon LPO, and all good dudes, you know. It was just good. Team 1 was a great team to grow up in for me.

1:17:42Jocko Willink:You know, they just had a... Other than that one officer, everyone else was just good people, and everyone was just hard-working frogmen, you know? It was good. Anything significant on deployment 3? You know, the only thing I can say was cool about that third deployment was that, um, we did some, we did like, I don't know if it was some, I think we did one shipboarding, like a real shipboarding. And I think we ran some security operations means, and again, this is how desperate we were. We locked and loaded our weapons and drove our ribs around like the boats, the ship, the Navy ships. And I was kind of fired up, You know?

1:18:23Jocko Willink:This is literally... To me, it was real. We locked and loaded our weapons, and then we did one ship boarding that was, you know, real. And again, in the 90s, I was freaking stoked that I got to lock and load my MP5, because we used MP5s back then. Nice. Yep, got to lock and load my MP5 and board a ship and get control of the vessel and turn it over to the authorities. And it ended up, it wasn't even like a... It was just some weird situation where they were making some kind of a distress call, but people thought they might be, you know... It might be a hostage situation, and so... Or some kind of...

1:19:06Jocko Willink:Maybe not a hostage situation, but some kind... They didn't know what was happening. What kind of ship was it? Some random... It was a foreign ship? Yeah, yeah, just some random, uh, you know... Like a Marisk or something? Yeah, smaller. It was a pretty... It wasn't that big. They're probably moving dates or whatever kind of produce from one of the Arab countries. It was literally nothing. I'm like bringing it up because it's funny that I was excited about it. And that's kind of how naive and into the teams I was. Did you board it? Yeah. How'd it go? Cool. We took it over. What happened when you took it over?

1:19:48Jocko Willink:Just walked up. They were like, we're not in distress. Yeah, we figured out that they weren't in distress. But we are now. Yeah, we stressed them out. They were actually thankful. I think they had some kind of problems, you know, some kind of problems with their engine or something like that. So we showed up and, you know, it was a non-opposed boarding. But, you know, we got to hook and climb on a, you know, we put our little water ski ladder. Like, we had little water ski ladders. We just hooked it on and climbed up. It was cool. Right on. I was happy. Happy to do something for real. You know?

1:20:20Jocko Willink:That's one thing. The Coast Guard... The Coast Guard, one thing that's cool about the Coast Guard is no matter what's going on in the world, the Coast Guard's doing real stuff, you know? The Coast Guard's always doing... saving people, you know? The ocean is mean. So, if there's a war going on or not, if you're in the Coast Guard, you can still do some really impactful things. Of course, now they're doing all kinds of drug interdiction too. Yeah, I love that. Have you seen that video that those guys that jump on that damn submarine and open it up? Oh, no, I haven't seen that. It's fucking awesome.

1:20:47All right. It's fucking awesome. Yeah. But all right. So when did you move over to two?

1:20:55Jocko Willink:So I got done with that platoon and I went into training cell at SEAL Team 1. When I was at training cell at SEAL Team 1 again, I'm still like single and I taught everything. You know, we just, we do everything. Do land warfare, taught diving, comms, CQC. We do everything. We just teach everything because we just didn't, we didn't have anything else to do. It wasn't like, hey, what do you want to do this week when you're home? No, I'll go to an island or I'll go to wherever to go make stuff happen. So I stayed in that mode. And then again, from my second platoon, I had, there was a, there was a officer program that was called the seaman to admiral program.

1:21:32Jocko Willink:And it was started by a guy named Jim Borda, Admiral Borda, who, if you know anything about him, he killed himself. I didn't. I don't know anything about him. So this is a, again, there's all these weird threads through people's lives. But one of the weird threads through my life is that one of my biggest mentors and heroes is a guy named Colonel David Hackworth. And Colonel David Hackworth wrote the book About Face. And he was a Korean War veteran and a Vietnam War veteran. He was one of the most decorated army soldiers. and he when he retired he had retired because during the Vietnam War he did an interview where he said if we don't change the way we're fighting we're gonna lose that's basically what he said and he got drummed out of the army for saying that because he was a colonel he was a senior officer he was the first senior officer to speak out against the war and the way we were fighting it and when he got out he you know he he kind of he wrote books but he was a little bit of a journalist and a little bit of a, you know, uh, yeah, kind of like a journalist.

1:22:38Jocko Willink:And he reported that Admiral Borda was wearing a V on his Navy commendation medal. So a Navy comm with a V. And he said he didn't write it because a V is an award for valor. And you know, like that's a big deal. Um, it doesn't stand for valor. It stands for combat, combat distinguishing device, but it's a V. And that story came out and Admiral Borda killed himself. But prior to that happening, Admiral Borda had started a program called the Seaman Admiral Program because Admiral Borda was a prior enlisted guy. And so he wanted to offer that to other troops. And so they started this program and it was 50 sailors from the U.S.

1:23:28Navy would get selected.

1:23:30Jocko Willink:And I heard about the program and actually one of my officers said, hey, they've got this program coming out. You should do it. And I did it and I didn't get picked up, but I got slated as an alternate, which was no, there were no alternate spots that opened up because everyone took it, but I was an alternate. So I knew I had a decent chance. And, and that the guy actually sent a note back to my commanding officer that said, make sure this guy applies next year. And so I applied again the next year and I got picked up for that program. No shit. I'm just curious. I mean, a lot of us know, you know, where this story's headed into Ramadi, but, you know, and maybe the knowledge wasn't there, but, you know, I mean, now, you know, actually maybe it was there because this was after your second platoon or during your second platoon.

1:24:20I mean, it's pretty common knowledge that, you know, officers, you join the SEALs to go to war. that's what you wanted to do now leadership package is presented to you you take it did you know you know that that you would have more time in a combat role as an enlisted guy than you would

1:24:41Jocko Willink:as an officer if yeah at that juncture in my career and the way the teams were this is 1998 it you know i had done three platoons so i maybe had an lpo and a platoon chief left so i basically looked at it as oh instead of doing an lp on a platoon chief you're gonna do an aylc and an oic gotcha and so it wasn't really didn't really make that much of a difference to me um you know when guys ask me now like what what should you do or what you know if they say hey i want to go in the seal teams what should i do i i i mean my career couldn't have gone any better Like it was great. But to your point, if you want to do the trade of being a SEAL, then you should enlist.

1:25:33Yep.

1:25:35Jocko Willink:That's just how. Why did you decide to take a leadership role? It all just boiled back to working for that platoon commander that made life in a platoon awesome. and I thought if I can make platoon awesome, if I can make life awesome for 16 guys and I'm going to do it. And yeah, that was it. That was it. That's a damn good reason. Yep. So when did you go? I went to officer candidate school in 1998. Yep. Early 1998, I went to officer candidate school. And, you know, that was, you know, you're pretty much, We had a decent number of prior enlisted guys in my class, but most of them, I'd say 70 % of them were kids out of college going to OCS.

1:26:22Jocko Willink:And so, you know, I show up there, I'm a SEAL, and the drill instructors, the Marine Corps drill instructors down at OCS, and great interaction with the Marine Corps drill instructors. You know, I became the class president, which seemed pretty obvious, I guess. but uh most of the class presidents are only class president for like three days in the first few weeks because they just they're just firing them but i became class president and i just stayed so i was a class president and then um went through ocs you know folding underwear literally with a ruler they have a ruler no shit um yeah so you know graduated from ocs and then went to team two.

1:27:07Did you learn anything significant in OCS?

1:27:14Jocko Willink:Yeah, you know, leadership was a cool leadership challenge, going to OCS and being the class president. You make things happen, and it was cool to work. You know, it's... People are... And this is another thing that I've learned along the way is like, people aren't going to be perfect, and they're going to make mistakes, and I'm going to make mistakes. And as long as their intention isn't bad, then, you know, I get it. And also, you know, to ask someone to perform, like, or behave in a way that they have to surmount their innate, like, habits as a human being, It's a lot to ask of someone. So when someone gets mad, when someone gets frustrated, when you see someone's ego come out, when you see someone look out for themselves, I kind of understand that that's the way people are.

1:28:17Jocko Willink:And I'm not going to be mad about it. I understand that people get, you know, there's, there's, people do crazy things, man. People do crazy things. and I understand and I think that going to OCS was one of those things I said yep there's kids were trying but the kids were also doing things where you go I see what he's doing man he's worried about this test and he's looking out for himself right now and I get it I get it and I think just a little bit of um understanding other people's perspective it was good for me to continue to be able to understand other people's perspective because if you don't understand other people's perspectives, you're going to be very judgmental.

1:29:02Jocko Willink:And if you're very judgmental, you're going to have a hard time interacting with other people. And when you're in a leadership position and you're having a hard time interacting with other people, that's not going to be good.

1:29:16Why did you go to two? I'm just curious why you went East Coast versus West Coast when you could of reintegrated back in with your old guys, you know what I mean?

1:29:28Jocko Willink:At the time, the officer community, if you went from enlisted to officer, they made you switch coasts. Gotcha. And I wanted to go to the East Coast, because I hadn't been out there. I'd spent all my time in the West Coast. And so, and Team 2, I came from Team 1. Team 1 was the traditional team on the West Coast, and the East Coast from my friends that I knew out there was the same way. Team 2 was the traditional team. It was the old school team, you know? And that's where I wanted to go. So I got to go to team two. How was it as an officer? I mean, what is it like walking through those doors as a prior enlisted guy now as a junior officer?

1:30:07It was pretty much the same, you know?

1:30:14When I was an E5 or an E4,

1:30:20Jocko Willink:you know i worked with like i said i was the uh primary comms guy in my first platoon i had a really good relationship with my platoon commander my second platoon good relationship with my platoon commander and then when he got fired i had a good relationship with the guy that took over so and and i didn't it seemed like good good guys they would just treat you like you know like mutual you know so i never really had a huge difference between the way i saw other people or the way, you know, I always just saw myself as another team guy. That's, this is my job. You know, when I was a calm guy, my job was to make sure the radios were good.

1:30:58Jocko Willink:When I was an officer, it's like, okay, I got to make sure that the plan is good. Make sure we have contingencies. Like there was other things I was going to be in charge of, but I'm still just a part of the machine that's going to take care of this. And if one part of the machine fails, the whole machine fails. So it was fine, you know, and you know, team two was great. I had a bunch of good guys there and, and yeah. And, and there was, um, like you hear about the differences between the East coast and the West coast and they were team guys, you know, they were, they were team guys that lived in Virginia, as opposed to team guys that lived in, in, uh, San Diego and a bunch of great dudes and i ended up almost immediately deploying to germany my the chief of my second platoon was the master chief in germany and they had been calling back for ops support they wanted j they wanted a jo to to go over to germany to help with ops support and he told me this later they were in like a morning meeting and they said, yeah, we finally got ops support coming from, from the beach.

1:32:11Jocko Willink:And they go, who is it? And they go, it's, it's a, it's an Ensign Willink. And the, the ops officer's like, what are you, what are you talking about? They're sending us an Ensign, like we need an ops guy. And he, and the master chief goes, hold on a second. What's that guy's name? He goes, Ensign Willink. He goes, we want this guy. And so, so I showed up and again, there was my, my old platoon chief, who is like a great guy who had a great relationship with, was like an awesome friend of mine. He's the command master chief. And so I show up and develop a great relationship with the commanding officer there and the executive officer there, just, and the ops chief there became awesome friends.

1:32:47Jocko Willink:And it was just great, you know, just great opportunities and work with these guys that are, again, man, just dedicated to the teams, you know just dedicated to the teams and i think that's the main thing is you know you get guys that the best the good guys their their commitment is to the teams and so you got a bunch of guys they're just committed to the teams and want to do a good job and that's so went over to germany and we actually like did some little mini deployments from germany um that were really cool and learned a lot and the skipper was a great guy and he ended up, you know, becoming the officer detailer later, which, you know, again, it's beneficial.

1:33:29Jocko Willink:And the SEAL Team 2 executive officer, again, developed a great relationship with him. Just a good guy that, you know, I was a hard worker. And that he moved from group from unit two. So I was with the XO in Germany. And then he becomes the XO at team two. So like when I get back there, I immediately get back put into a platoon. So I do a platoon at seal team two and a strike platoon off the aircraft carrier. Right on. Right on. Which was, again, working with a lot of assets and going over and doing VBSS over in the Persian Gulf, which again, at the time was a real thing. Did you get a lot of leadership experience as the OPSO in Germany or was that kind of just getting you ready?

1:34:20Jocko Willink:As far as leadership of troops, no, but understanding of the bigger picture, yes. Because the guy that I work for there, again, he's a friend of mine and just a great guy. And he had, you know, a lot of experience himself at the time, right? Not experience like guys have now, but at the time he had experience. And like, there was one time we were on a big exercise, a big joint exercise. and we we like put together a talk tactical operations center what's interesting about this is man you think of a talk now like you think of what a mobile talk would look like now i'm not kidding well i put together a mobile talk and i was the like the the ops officer for this operation this training operation and i had the talk in my backpack it was like three radios two maps, some magic markers, some pens.

1:35:15Jocko Willink:Like that's what we rolled with. And that's what we set up, you know, that's what we did. But there was a time where there's a platoon in the field and there's multiple elements that are getting ready to do target hits. And we're waiting for like a pro word from this platoon that's supposed to be set up. And we're waiting. And I go, sir, can I pimp them for this pro word? And he's like, give them another minute. And I was like, Roger that. And 45 seconds later, the guys passed the pro word. And it just reminded me that like those guys out in the field, you got to listen to what they're doing. You got to give them the benefit of the doubt.

1:35:50Jocko Willink:And that's what my boss was telling me. Like, hey, those guys got, they're not sitting in the talk right now. They're not, they're making decisions. So just good experience from that perspective and seeing, you know, the way the sock worked was good. so when did your i mean if this happened which i think it would happen i mean when did you know as enlisting guys we always have a lot of gripes and bitches and shit like that about you know the leadership and so you know kind of where i'm going with this is when did your mind kind of expand and realize you know what the opposition is and okay like there's a lot more to this than i ever gave it credit for as an enlisted guy.

1:36:32Jocko Willink:Yeah. That happened. It happened on that deployment, right? And I think what was good was I was bilingual, meaning I spoke two languages. Well, I mean, Mustangs, prior enlisted officers have fucking tremendous amount of respect in the enlisted man's eyes. So since I was bilingual and I could speak two languages, and I had to learn the officer language, but I spoke. I was fluent in E-Dog language. I mean, I was completely fluent. I was E-Dog mafia. If you go talk to anybody that was at SEAL Team 1 in between 1991 and 1998, I was a made man in the SEAL Team 1 E-5 mafia, 100%. There's no one that would ever deny that.

1:37:14And so I spoke fluent E-5 mafia language.

1:37:18Jocko Willink:And then as I started to learn the officer language, what I think I was able to do was translate what was happening with the officers to the E-Dogs. which I think a lot of times gets missed, to this day gets missed, because it really is two different perspectives that are happening. And there's a lot of things that happen at the officer level that don't ever get told to the E-Dogs. And that does create frustration and angst amongst the troops because they don't understand what the hell is going on. And when that happens, man, they get pissed. And I got pissed when I was an E-Dog and we weren't being told what was happening.

1:37:57Jocko Willink:we're freaking pissed you know i i tell this one story where we were on the ship this is my third platoon and we got told hey you guys are going to launch your zodiacs off the ship we go cool so we drag all the stuff upstairs it takes an hour and a half got to bring the fuel up which means you got to you got to notify the fire party and they got to set up all their stuff so you can bring the fuel up to the top deck so you can launch the boats inside the ribs and two or three hours into this, they're like, actually, you're going to launch off of the well deck. Oh, bring everything back downstairs another two or three hours later.

1:38:31Jocko Willink:They say, oh, you're going to use helicopters. Now we got to break all that. So we're getting whipped around the whole time. And this is, by the way, someone just saying, oh, why don't they use the helicopters? Oh, okay, cool. I'll tell them. And they think it's just like this, but it's not. So I always remembered what it was like. I also always remember, you know, when I was in STT, SEAL tactical training, we had to walk in every position in a platoon. So sometimes you'd be point man, sometimes you'd be the PL, sometimes you'd be the radio man, sometimes you'd be a machine gunner. And I remember, luckily or unluckily for me, we did a long patrol and I was rear security.

1:39:07Jocko Willink:And I had no idea where we were. I had no idea where we were going. I had no idea where we were gonna stop again. If we got contacted, I might as well have just like started running around like a chicken with my head cut off because I didn't know where the rally ports were. I didn't even know where the target was. And I hated that feeling. And I always said to myself, I am going to make sure that I keep the guys informed of what is happening. That is so important. It gets dropped all the time because you get focused on like, well, hold on. How much longer to the next? This is the platoon commander talking.

1:39:36Jocko Willink:He's only talking to the point man. And so now when he stops talking to the rest of platoon, they lose track of what's happening. And it's just a cluster. And so even as an enlisted guy, I realized that you have to make a concerted effort to explain to the guys what is happening. And if you fail to do that, they'll have no idea and you won't know that they don't know. And that's a disaster. So now when you move me up into this officer position, now I'm saying, oh, yeah, I bet the platoon has no idea why they're having the helos move to this position. or why they're being told they have to stand down from this operation or because they don't.

1:40:18Jocko Willink:They don't get told, oh, the charge d 'affaires in this country just said that we can't do it. And here's the risk that they don't aren't willing to take. They just hear, hey, it's a kankbird. And they go, so we just spent four hours doing this and now it's just nothing. But they don't understand why. And so it's incumbent upon the leadership to make sure that everyone in the chain of command understands not just what we're doing, but why we're doing it and why these changes happen. Because as you know, these changes happen all the time. They happen all the time. And so, yes, I think that one of the things that I had the capability of doing as I was bilingual, I talked to E5 and eventually I learned how to speak officer as well.

1:40:57Jocko Willink:And I could also bring the problems at the E5 level to my boss and explain to them in a way that they could understand that, hey, when you tell my guys, we're not allowed to explosively breach anymore, let me tell you what that means. And then they say, oh, okay, well, I didn't understand that. Thank you. Or when I get told, hey, you need to have this number of Iraqis with you, friendly Iraqi soldiers with you on every operation. I need to explain to my boss what that means on the ground. And if you have a good relationship, which I was had a good relationship with my boss. So when I would, I would explain something to my boss, my boss would listen to me.

1:41:46Jocko Willink:My boss would, because also I wouldn't complain about stuff. Like I wasn't going to complain. If I was going to my boss and telling them that something didn't make sense, they would listen to me because I would only say it if it was true. And so I just developed that good amount of trust with my chain of command and, and it worked, it would work out well. so yes as i got into that officer role i started to see oh okay i can understand why oh if the troops would have known that it was the commodore of the arg that now wanted to use helicopters because it's something they have to get checked off the box before they're allowed to go on deployment if the guys understood that they'd be like oh yeah well we got to get quals done too and this is the quals that they got to get cool let's make it happen but a lot of times you know, we, we fail as leaders to let people know.

1:42:37Jocko Willink:And then when I got to, in the platoon at SEAL Team 2, again, now we're on a strike aircraft. We got a lot of assets. We're, we're with, you know, a carrier air group, which is an awesome, like projection of power, unbeatable projection of power, but we're a little cog in that machine and helping the platoon understand what we're doing, why we're doing it was beneficial. Why do you think that the, maybe they are doing it, but they definitely weren't doing it when I was in, not to, I mean, it seems like with what you just described prior enlist mustangs prior enlisted going to officer. I mean, that's, that could alleviate a lot of communication issues within the military.

1:43:22Why do you think that they aren't if they aren't?

1:43:30motivating people, enlisted guys to become officers? Why aren't they giving more billets? I mean, this seems like it could be a key component to a 250-year communication issue.

1:43:44Jocko Willink:Yeah.

1:43:48With prior enlisted officers, some of the best officers I ever worked for or worked with

1:43:55Jocko Willink:were prior enlisted officers. Some of the worst officers I work with were prior enlisted officers. So I think it's more of an educational thing and more of an understanding that explaining to people that, hey man, this communication that goes up and down the chain of command, it needs to happen. It's a real thing. And when your platoon is complaining about something, you should listen to what they have to say because they're doing it for a reason. And of course, if you're asking me if they should take more prior enlisted guys and make them into officers, absolutely. That's awesome. I wish they would do that all the time.

1:44:28Jocko Willink:It's a great move. Anything significant on the strike deployment? Or the M - the M - the M - excuse me. Uh, it was a strike deployment, it wasn't a M - but it was, you know, it was cool. We did - we did a VBSS overseas. Again, this was like, when doing VBSS was as real as it gets. Get to lock and load your weapon and board a ship and get control of the ship, and it's, uh, as good as you could hope for, you know? We took down a big Russian ship, which was a... which was at the time, it was like on CNN, you know, it was a... Wait, what? We took down a big Russian... There was a Russian ship that was smuggling oil, and so we boarded that ship and got control over it and turned it over to the authorities.

1:45:09Jocko Willink:So, you know, that was kind of a cool walk to do in the 90s, you know? In the 90s, some things that aren't that big of a deal seemed pretty cool. What year, so what year is this? That, that was a millennium deployment. So we were on, we were deployed 99 to 2000. It was like the winter of 99, 2000. Where were you when September 11th, 2001 happened? So I get home from that deployment and I have to go to college because I didn't have any college. And again, this is why they changed that whole officer program that I did. I was a, I was in E5 at seal team one. I went to 13 weeks of OCS, no college.

1:45:52Jocko Willink:And then I went to a seal team two as an officer. So it was awesome. But when I got done, they're like, yo, you, you don't have any college. You have to go to college to be an officer. And I was like, oh no, I don't need to go. I can go when I'm, I can do it online. I'm already doing the job. And the officer detailer was like, no, no, you have to go to college. So I went back to San Diego to go to College University of San Diego. And I did that primarily because of jujitsu. I knew I was going to be, I knew I was going to be having some time during this three years of going to college. So I went back out to San Diego.

1:46:27Jocko Willink:So I get my own training, get with my old training partners and stuff. And then, so I got back out there in 2000 and I'm in the middle of college when September 11th happens. And when September 11th happened, my commanding officer or the commanding officer of unit two, who I was deployed with as an ops O, not the ops O, but as an ops J O, he was the detailer and I was friends with him. And I called him and I said, can you please get me back to a SEAL team right now? And he said, Jocko, this war is going to last a long time. Finish college. And I said, sir, I can finish when I, I can do online, like whatever.

1:47:11Jocko Willink:And he He goes, finish college. This award's going to last a long time. And I didn't believe him at all, but he was right. And I always want to make sure I make this point. He told me later that everybody called him. Everybody that wasn't at a team, everyone called him. I was just one of the other guys that called him. It wasn't like I was extra motivated. No, I was just as motivated as everybody wanted to get back to a team. And so he sent me, when I finished college, 2003, again like awesome he sent me to seal team seven seal team seven was like the next deploying team i got to seal team seven and my old xo from seal team two was the commanding officer

1:47:57Jocko Willink:and he welcomed me aboard and then a week or two later he fired a platoon commander and put me in charge. Oh, shit. And so, and we were slated to go to Iraq and we left, I don't know, a few months later. Yeah, actually probably quite a few months later because I graduated in like June, July, showed up at the team and we went on deployment in September. So that's, you know, good relationships with people, work hard. And, you know, he had a platoon commander that wasn't doing a good job. So, you can put me in there. This was in 2003? 2003. That's... I'm eternally grateful. Yep. So were you on the invasion?

1:48:42Jocko Willink:No. So SEAL Team... Three. SEAL Team 3 did the invasion. SEAL Team 5 had kind of established Baghdad. And then I went in and relieved them. How was it? It was the best thing ever. It was awesome. I mean, and there was a... So you've done basically five deployments? Yeah, so this was my fifth deployment. No, this was my sixth deployment. Sixth deployment? Yes, this was my sixth deployment. Yeah. I mean, dude, what's it feel? I mean, five fucking deployments of... I mean, you did some stuff, but now you're... Yeah, yeah. 9-11 happens, we've invaded Iraq, and you're in fucking Baghdad. I think you're in Baghdad.

1:49:35Jocko Willink:Yes, I'm in Baghdad, and I'm in heaven. Yeah, I was totally stoked. And for... So there was actually, like, there was... I had a sister platoon at SEAL Team 7, and they went to Baghdad, and then we replaced them in, like... Or we kind of, like, it was weird. we kind of replaced them within weeks. Like we started augmenting them and then kind of replaced them. And after a little while, like after a month or so, we were the only platoon in, we were the only SEAL platoon in Iraq. Holy shit. For a short period of time. And so, you know, we were just doing, you know, what the Team 5 guys had established.

1:50:19Jocko Willink:And then my sister platoon at SEAL Team 7 had kept up the pace. and it was just, you know, Baghdad SWAT is pretty much what it was. It was get intel from various sources, find out where an enemy was located, and then go get them. And we had a lot of targets, and we got to do a ton of it. And it was... It was like what... It was what we all joined the teams to do, you know? So it was awesome. Do you remember your first operation where you had an engagement? Yeah. Actually, the first time I left the Wire in Baghdad, the troop SEA was a friend of mine. Like, we were E5 mobsters at Team 1. And he had been there for, like, a month.

1:51:12Jocko Willink:And so we show up, and he goes... There was, like, a mortar attack or something, and he was like, hey, go take your platoon and go check these roads in this place. And we went out, you know, we went out the wire and like check these roads and drove to here, drove to there. And then we came back and he was like, you good? And I was like, yeah, yeah. He was like, that was just kind of a shakeout. And I was like, good call, dude. You know, like it was him saying, hey, like, there's nothing, there's nothing going to happen. We're going to, we're not sending you on a wild goose chase, but, you know, go to these couple points and check them for whatever.

1:51:52Jocko Willink:So it was just a good break-in of, you know, getting the guys, getting the platoon, getting the vehicles loaded up. Went out, drove around outside the wire. That was kind of the first time leaving the wire with my nods on. The first time we got shot at, I was in a Humvee, and I'm looking at the Humvee in front of me, and I'm like, I see like sparks. And I'm like, why is someone smoking? Like, why is someone flicking their, throwing their cigarettes out of the vehicle? And I'm like, oh, those are bullets, aren't they? And sure enough, one of the guys, one of the guys got caught like a ricochet in the head.

1:52:36Jocko Willink:Totally good to go. It like entered his, went through his skin and then like kind of wrapped around his skull. But he was fine. You know, we still took him to Charlie Med, But, and then, you know, we... That was kind of like the first time, and we got, you know... That deployment was relatively chill. I mean, what's that feel like, though? I mean, five deployments, you join to go to war when you're 18. Don't see any. Now you're in charge of your platoon, straight after college, after 9-11, and you're fucking leading a platoon. into battle in Iraq. I mean, that's fucking... Did it even hit you?

1:53:21Was it surreal at the time or are you just so in it, you're like, all right, this is the deal, let's go?

1:53:26Jocko Willink:I knew. Like, I knew... I think I'm very lucky because I was older, you know? I think I was, what, 33, 32 or something like that point. So I knew how rare this was. I thought the war was going to be over in a couple months. Like, I was very, very grateful for everything that we got to do. And I knew that every night. Every night I was, you know, like, playing the Super Bowl game every night, you know? Like, that's what I felt like. I was very grateful the whole time. And I had a great bunch of guys, great bunch of guys, like, that were just hard-charging, and just, it was awesome. It was great.

1:54:08Jocko Willink:And we did a lot of direct action missions, you know, and so we did it. We kind of got close a couple times to the idea of sniper overwatching. We did it a couple times, but it kind of left an imprint of my mind of what capability we had. But we were primarily just a DA force, and we would just roll out and hit targets. And I mean, it's, yeah, I don't know if there's anything else I can say to make it, for me to explain how happy I was. But that, to me, was just the most awesome thing. What about the pressure? I mean, I've always thought about, you know, I mean, I always felt a lot of pressure just going out the door.

1:54:57You know, do the right thing. But, I mean, what is the pressure like? And you don't really have any other reference because you hadn't gone on any kinetic operations until this point, but, I mean, what is the pressure like as an officer leading 16, 20 guys into battle at the beginning of a war where there's not a lot of lessons learned, there's not a lot of new tactics developed yet?

1:55:21Jocko Willink:Yeah. The pressure, I felt, was just wanting to do a good job, You know, not wanting to do anything, not wanting to... I wouldn't say not make any mistakes, because I was not a risk-averse person. You know, like I recognize that if you roll out on an operation, things can go wrong. And I understood that. And I understood that risk. So, but yeah, you know, you're worried about guys getting wounded, you're worried about guys getting killed. a little bit of a very distant idea to me. Guys getting wounded or killed. It could happen, I thought, but it was... Man, this is early in the war. The IED threat was relatively small.

1:56:03Jocko Willink:We would drive very aggressively at night on nods. We got ambushed a few times, but it was like, no factor. RPGs going over the, you know, lucky. RPGs going over the convoy, you know. machine gun fire going between vehicles. Like we got lucky. God's a frog man. But it was still a little bit distant to me that someone could get wounded or killed. It was there, but not... We really dominated the battle space. Like coalition forces dominated the battle space. And so I didn't have that much of that kind of pressure in my head. What about the pressure of winning your men over? Winning their trust? Winning...

1:56:56Yeah. I mean, you want to be the fucking leader that everybody wants to follow into battle. You know, that stuff, I would imagine, has to be going through your head. Am I making the right calls? How do my men... I mean, we have talked about perception earlier, and that's a conversation I want to bring up, you know, more towards the end. But, you know what I mean? Are you worried about the guy's perception of how you're leading?

1:57:16Jocko Willink:these guys are my bros and these guys are my friends and when i took over that platoon we were the first like the first maybe the first or second thing we did was a nighttime otb in san diego pilot recovery training operation so i had done three shipboard deployments man I know how to do over the beach. And we go over the beach and one of our boats like capsizes or die or the motor dies. I forget which. I think it just the motor died. And we're, we get the pilot and we come back and now we got a down boat. And, um, the guys who, when I took over the platoon, some of the guys were kind of friends with the old officer.

1:58:07Jocko Willink:And so there was a little bit of that. And some of the guys didn't like the old officer. And so there was a little bit of a friction, right? And I, so this boat's down and the guys like, we're in a perimeter and the guy's like, dude, we got to call admin. We got to call the trucks down here and get this boat towed back. And I was like, we're not doing that. And they're like, well, what are we going to do? And I go, this is what we're doing. And I gave him the plan and I put on my fins and took the boat and I was like, hey guys, you guys are going to paddle this boat. They're looking at me like I'm crazy, like paddling a boat through the surf like this is Bud's.

1:58:45Jocko Willink:And I said, as soon as we get deep enough, we'll set up a tow line and we did have a good long tow line. And I remember I beatered my weapon into the boat and I got in the water and I'm keeping the bow into the wave so we don't flip over. And then we get the other boat comes in. I get those lines secured and then they start towing us out. And then the guys drag me back into the boat. But like one of the guys in that platoon was like, after you did that, that night, like we were doing anything for you. Because I kind of, they had kind of said like, oh, we got to call admin. And I'm like, no, we're not calling that.

1:59:22Jocko Willink:We're going to make this happen. But there was all kinds of stuff like that. Like step up and do the right thing. And yeah, these guys are my friends. You know why these guys listen to me? Because I listen to them. You know why these guys treated me with respect? Because I treated them with respect. You know why they trusted me? Because I trusted them. And when that's what you do, that's how it is. That was the attitude that I had. I wasn't really concerned about that. These guys were my guys and I trusted them. They trusted me. And you didn't know any of them prior to you coming into that platoon?

1:59:55Jocko Willink:I knew the platoon chief. Yep, the platoon chief was another Team 1, E5, mafia guy from back in the day. So it was great. It was great to have that instant connection. But I don't believe I knew one single other person in that platoon because I'd been out on the East Coast and then I'd been in college. So I don't think I knew once. The sister platoon, my sister platoon, my old running mate, the guy that told me, hey, you're not the only one that lost Grizz, he was the LPO in my sister platoon. No shit. And I got to do some ops with him. Nice. Yeah. Which was as good as it gets. Nice. What would you say your most memorable experience of that deployment is?

2:00:41There was a few things that happened where you, like, there was the CPA in Najaf was being overrun.

2:00:52Jocko Willink:And we needed, they needed QRF. Najaf is five hours away by Humvee. And they need a QRF. And they called us. and I'm like, hey, there's like three other units between us and Najaf. Like why? And they're like, I don't know, but you guys are going. And I remember the SEA of that troop who, like I said, was the guy that was like, hey, go on this mission, which was kind of for no reason. He was a great friend of mine to this day. But I came out of like the talk and I was like, hey, guys, load up all the rockets, load up all the ammunition you can fit in the trucks. This is what's happening. We're going to QRF.

2:01:33Jocko Willink:We're going into JOF. CPA has been overrun. And we, 20 minutes later, we're jocked up. And that guy, that guy hugged me. And I was like, Hmm, this is interesting. And cause he was, he usually went with us, but he wasn't going with us. And so he like hugged me. And I was like, Hmm, interesting. Long story. No big deal. We got and a joff the the cure they didn't need a qrf the i think i want to say blackwater actually came in with their helo is that what that i was wondering if that's what it was um so we went down there we spent the night didn't do anything and then drove back but you know i remember thinking hmm that's that's interesting i'm getting this hug from my bro we ended up doing towards the end of the deployment, there was one of Sadr's.

2:02:26Jocko Willink:Muqtadaw Sadr was the leader of the Shiites in Iraq. And we, coalition forces, had been targeting him for months. Our whole deployment, he was being targeted. But they didn't want to hit him because they didn't know what the reaction would be. And so just before we were going home, we got tasked with hitting one of his top lieutenants. And it was a big operation, a lot of visibility on it. And we went down and that was also, I want to say that was in the joff. We went down, we captured this guy. And when we came back, it was kind of, once it got out, it was kind of the beginning or one of the triggering points of the true insurgency in Iraq.

2:03:18Jocko Willink:Like, I woke up that morning, and there was like, you could look out from our base, and you could see like fires from the highways, vehicles were being ID'd and stuff. And it was the beginning of the real formation of the insurgency, which I wasn't really quite 100 % sure on. But you could see something was changed. Something just changed, and you could feel it. And I don't think America was ready for that. We weren't. You know, we'd already made all kinds of mistakes, you know, standing down the Ba 'ath soldiers and the army, standing down the Iraqi army. We made all kinds of mistakes. Out of arrogance as a country.

2:03:58Jocko Willink:But I really don't think that we saw like, oh, damn, this is about to get really, really bad. And that was in the spring of 2004. And that is truly when things started to spiral. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Jaco, I know it's getting ready to get heavy with Tasking and Bruiser. Let's just take a quick break. When we come back, we'll pick up right here. Let's do it, man. We track sleep, fine-tune our macros, and try to chase every biohack. But real performance starts deep, at the cellular level. Armora Colostrum is nature's original superfood. Colostrum is packed with over 400 bioactive nutrients that help fortify gut health, help strengthen immune health, help fuel performance, and more.

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2:06:45All right, Jocko, we're back from the break. It's about to get real heavy here, but this is where you go to SEAL Team 3, take Task Unit Bruiser as the Task Unit Commander, correct?

2:07:00Jocko Willink:Not quite. Not quite. Because as I'm finishing my deployment with SEAL Team 7, um my commanding officer again who is my ops officer in unit two my executive officer at seal team two now he's my commanding officer and he says the last thing I do as a commanding officer is I'm going to make sure that you become the emerald's aide no one wants to be the admiral's aid of course because uh you know it's an administrative job

2:07:44Jocko Willink:but there's a reason why he wanted me to go be the admiral's aid and it is because at that point in time at that moment i was going to come straight off the battlefield you know this is 2003 2004 there hadn't been that many platoons gone over there i'm going to go straight off the battlefield and work directly for the Admiral. And that's what they want. They want somebody that has fresh combat experience that can tell him what is happening. And I, you know, I did all kinds of excuses and tap dancing to try and get out of it, but it was happening. So, and, you know, it's part of it is, it's very, it's outstanding professional development because you're gonna see things that you would not see without doing it so i that's what i get i get home uh from deployment and i check in to be the admiral's aid and yeah it was uh it was definitely a wake-up call because you know we always we had a thing was if you avoid wearing a uniform at all costs, if you have to wear, make it perfect.

2:09:02Jocko Willink:Right. That was kind of like a thing at seal team one. And I was really good at avoiding wearing a uniform. Like I didn't even like to wear a shirt at work, you know, as little as possible. And the first trip I went on with the Admiral, I think I had four uniforms with me, like khakis for the Pentagon, camis for Fort Bragg, dress blues for a ceremony, and civilian clothes. That's like one trip. Damn. So I check in to be the Admiral, and, you know, it was definitely an eye-opener of what's happening in the community and what's going on and what's happening at that level. and it was yeah a massive learning experience and again you know i had the e5 mafia language down now i learned the officer language and now it was learning i don't know what to call the next level up of officer language but it's like flag officer flag officer language because for that year i was in the Pentagon, I was, you know, and you'd be, it's weird when you're an aid, it's kind of like you don't exist, but you do.

2:10:22Jocko Willink:And I don't mean that in a bad way. My boss was great guy. He was, you know, just a great guy, nice guy, cared about me a lot. But like when you're in a room with a four-star general, like the aids are kind of these sub humans in the back, but you're listening to everything. You're seeing everything. And so it was a very educational experience as to what's happening at those levels. You know, you're going to meetings at the Pentagon, JSOC, like just really educational. A lot of inside baseball going on. Yeah. And, you know, for us and the SEAL teams, we don't realize often how much visibility we have, especially back then.

2:11:08Jocko Willink:Look, I guess now It's pretty obvious we have a lot of visibility. But back then, you know, you wouldn't think that an E-5 in a SEAL platoon doing something dumb on Liberty would get a phone call to the Admiral from the Vice CNO or the CNO or the SEC NAV. Like, these things are a big deal. And so that's what I learned. I learned the amount of scrutiny that we're under. The SEAL Team 5 guys, they had someone in that platoon uploaded digital pictures of their deployment to a website that was supposed to be secure that got breached. And so these pictures went out over the internet. And the pictures.

2:12:05Jocko Willink:So I'm there. when the CNO is calling the Admiral to ask him about each of these individual pictures, what is going on in these pictures. And implied in that was like, what is wrong with your troops? Example, there's an image of a guy, an Iraqi guy. He's being held by the jaw and he's got a pistol to his head with a flashlight in his eyes. And so he knows like, what is going on in this picture? And the Admiral like hits the mute button and I'm like, sir, they don't like to have their picture taken. So you got to face their picture to the camera. You got to face their face into the camera. And the light is so that you can illuminate the camera.

2:12:55Jocko Willink:You can illuminate the picture. That's why the closest flashlight you got is his pistol. That's what he's doing. Boom. Admiral tells him what's going on. Oh, shit. Next picture. A guy with a sandbag over his head, cuffed, blood coming out of the sandbag. What's going on with this picture? Hey, sir, that guy resisted. He got subdued. He probably could have been shot, but our troops are disciplined. And instead of shooting him, they captured him. They had to subdue him. They used minimum force required. And now they've got him handled. And now they take a picture of it. So like these little things where I realized that's the level of scrutiny we're under.

2:13:35Jocko Willink:And that's why, again, when I became a troop commander, being able to translate and explain to the guys what is going on and what the visibility is and how much it matters, what you do as an E-4, as an E-5 in a SEAL platoon, it has a strategic impact for the team. nation in some cases. And that was really clear with like Abu Ghraib, but also for the SEAL community. And if we are not professional, we don't get work. And that's not, I'm not saying that for the benefit of the SEAL teams. I'm saying that for the benefit of the country, because SEALs are good at what we do. And if we're not getting jobs that we should be getting because because of these kind of ancillary actions, it's bad for the country.

2:14:35Jocko Willink:It's bad for our warfighting capabilities. So I learned a lot about that when I was the Admiral's aide. And there was another couple of huge cases. There was, um... There was, you know, I got to hear about what was happening from a legal perspective. like there were some guys that shot someone this wasn't seals this was army guys regular army guys conventional army guys shot someone in south of baghdad somewhere and i don't quote me on the story but they had planted a gun on him and they they were going to jail like they were under trial for murder and i just would hear that and go what what were these guys thinking you know what why would they be doing this?

2:15:25And the immediate answer is, well, because they're afraid they're going to get in trouble, right?

2:15:30Jocko Willink:Oh, they're afraid that the ROE didn't allow them to shoot this guy and now they're trying to cover it up. The reality of this scenario is the ROE, if someone is, I'm trying to think of the exact terminology, reasonable certainty that they're committing hostile intent, not a hostile act, hostile intent. So if I think you're going to do something and I'm reasonably certain that I can shoot you whether you have a gun or not. And yet we have guys, this, this particular case, these guys were getting in trouble because they planted a gun. They didn't need to do that. So that was like another, just learning about how much scrutiny the military.

2:16:15Jocko Willink:So like I initially saw like, oh, there's the SEAL teams is under scrutiny. But then I realized it's not just the SEAL teams. There's a lot of scrutiny on everything that we do. And the Abu Ghraib scandal that caused so many people, that fueled the insurgency so much. And I saw that it fueled the insurgency. So what a couple, you know, 18, 19, 20 year old privates were doing in a prison fueled the insurgency. And the Al-Qaeda took advantage of it. They propagated those pictures. They propagated those pictures from Team 5. Like, that's what happens. And so, I guess I realized how the tactical actions of our units, SEAL teams, Marines, Army soldiers, has a strategic impact.

2:17:01Jocko Willink:And we have to think about what we're doing. That is something I never thought of. Where does the scrutiny come from?

2:17:15Jocko Willink:I mean, it's the law of armed conflict, right? It's like the Geneva Convention, the law of armed conflict. There are people that are in place to make sure that we are conducting war in a forthright and just manner, if there is such a thing. You know, can we go back to the quote from Apocalypse Now, like handing out charges for murder around here is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500. You can take that approach, but it's not going to help you. It's not going to help you. There's rules and we have just got to follow the rules. And if the rules don't make sense, then you got to raise your hand and say, hey, these rules don't make sense.

2:17:55Jocko Willink:And I did that. For instance, and I brought this up earlier, breaching. So when I first got to Iraq, that first deployment, we're breaching every door, of course, right? Well, so is everybody else. Everyone's just breaching the hell out of everything. You're going to enter a building, you breach the door because it gives you a tactical advantage, right? So guys, civilians were getting injured by breaches. And eventually they said, hey, no more breaching, no more explosive breaching, done. So I get this word and, you know, I talked to my guys, no more explosive breaching. And you know, what's their reaction going to be?

2:18:34Jocko Willink:Not good. Totally not good. Right. Hey, and it's exactly what, it's exactly what you would think it would be. Hey, wait a second. You want us to be at more risk. You don't care about us. You don't understand what it's like down here. This is a problem. You don't, you don't understand the battlefield. Screw you. That's basically the response. So, and I'm thinking the same thing, right? But now I'm thinking, wait a second, does my boss want to put my guys at risk? What do you think? Really? Does my boss want? No, no, actually, no, I don't believe my boss wants to do that. There's got to be something else going on.

2:19:10Jocko Willink:Hey boss, what's the deal with explosive breaching? Why are we being told we're not, why are you telling me we can't explosively breach anymore? And he's like, here's what's happening. Here's the amount of casualties from breaches. Here's the civilians injured by breaches. Here's, you know, the number of breaches that are happening every night in Baghdad or the surrounding areas. And the civilian casualties are so high that the generals are saying, don't do this anymore. And I said, okay. now boss if i'm going on to a target where the intel represents a higher probability of there being some kind of resistance on the target can i breach and he's like well what do you mean i said well if i get this intel that says that they're expecting them to have bodyguards or they expect there to be ieds can i use breach explosive breaches to mitigate that risk and he's like yeah that makes sense and that's what we did and that's also when we started doing call outs which initially guys were doing call outs all the way back then.

2:20:16Jocko Willink:We started doing that. Holy shit. I did not know that. We started doing call outs. And it was like, we were figuring out how to do it. Okay. What are we going to do? Because from my perspective now, all right, so I'm not going to explosively breach this door. So we're not going to really have the element of surprise that we want because when we sit in there with a sledgehammer or what even a lock pick is, or, you know, anything's going to make noise. We're going to alert them that we're there. So now we've got guys in the stack or waiting outside this building They're not behind cover. This is a problem.

2:20:45Jocko Willink:How can we mitigate that risk? Well, since we have to wake them up to breach the door anyways with a freaking sledgehammer Let's just get a little safe distance set up our vehicles and Wake them up and say hey, you got to come out and that's exactly what we started doing And then so what we ended up with was a good variety of tactics of sometimes we do a call out Sometimes we just mechanically breach the door and sometimes we explosively breach the door. But all those things were a result of me talking to my boss and then talking to the guys and saying, guys, here's why we can't breach. This is bullshit.

2:21:19Jocko Willink:Oh, okay. Well, we can't. Oh, there's a huge, super high risk? Explain that risk to me. And they explain to me, you know what? I agree with you guys. Boss, we're going to explosively breach tonight. Boss says, cool. My boss never told me no. Um, so those kind of things I think again where we get into the hey do just do what i'm telling you to do Both up and down the chain of command. I don't want my I want my guys to resist me. I want them to say We should be able to explosively breach. Okay. Tell me why and I should be able to look at my boss Here's why and by the way if my guys explain to me hey We should explosively breach and here's why and I explain it to my boss and my boss says no Okay, do I have an argument?

2:22:07Jocko Willink:No? Okay. Well, then how can I mitigate this? Well, I can mitigate it by not stacking my platoon up in front of the door or outside the building and doing a call-out. So, those kind of things, I think, get lost when it comes to communicating up and down the chain of command. I got a question for you. I mean, earlier when we were talking, I can't remember at what point we brought this up, but we were talking about leadership. I believe you've just gotten through OCS. Anyways, you had said that trust your guys, and that's how they trust you, right? And so big proponent of that. How do you just trust your guys?

2:22:53I mean, do they have to earn your trust, or do you give them the trust and let them fuck that up? Or give them the opportunity to fuck that up? I'm asking because for my own learning.

2:23:06Jocko Willink:I want to learn from you. The way you do it is a little bit of trust at a time. So if you started working for me, I wouldn't be like, hey, Sean, we got this op tonight. Why don't you take lead on that? I'm going to sit in the talk. Mm-hmm. I've never worked with you before, and I'm just going to let you go take lead on a mission. No, it's like, hey, Sean, we got this op tonight. Can you run external security for me? Or can you clear this back, you know, outhouse with your fire team? And you're like, cool, got it, boss. and you do it, you do it well. And then the next time, Hey, you're in charge of external security.

2:23:34Jocko Willink:And the next time, Hey, you're in charge of vehicles. Next time, Hey, you're in charge of the breach team. So it's like, I'm going to give you a little more trust each time. And then you keep making good calls. Maybe sometimes I have to tighten you up. Like, Hey, what were you doing? Going to clear this other building that wasn't part of the target. Yeah. But I saw a guy over there, but I don't care about that. But you didn't tell me. Yeah, but I didn't have time. Well, what if we have a blue on blue? Cause this, Oh, good point. So, you know, you learned a little bit. I took a little bit of risk, maybe a little bit of a little outside the zone.

2:24:03Jocko Willink:So that's what you do. Just a little bit of trust at a time. You build it, build it over time, but I have to trust you. And actually what's funny is I thought where you were going with that question is if my guys are telling me like, we need to explosively breach this target. Do I have to trust them? And the answer is yeah. Well, I mean, then you get a guy like me that works for you and we have to explosive breach every single fucking time. How do you trust me? Yep. And then I go, Hey, Hey, hey, Sean, if we do another one of these explosive breaches, we're probably not going to get approved for our next missions.

2:24:36Jocko Willink:And you go, what do you mean? I said, well, they've had a bunch of collateral damage. They've had a bunch of people in the Baghdad General Hospital that are wounded civilians from breaching charges, and we're just going to get told no. So now what are you going to do? I trust you, but do you trust me? And okay, well, that makes sense, Jocko. okay, can we mitigate it? How can we mitigate it? Well, we could do a call out. We could throw flash crashes through the windows. Like there's a bunch of ways we could figure out ways to mitigate things. But if I don't talk to you and you don't talk to me and I don't explain to you what's happening, how can we expect to be aligned?

2:25:15Jocko Willink:It's just not going to happen. And so that open mindedness and having good relationships with people is what it's all about. And by the way, this extends to like the other units that you work with, right? The other military army and Marine Corps units that you work with, you got to listen to what they're saying about their AO because that's going to have an impact as well. Makes sense. Makes sense. And I can't believe you guys were doing call outs back then. How would you do it? Set the vehicles in either usually an L type scenario, you know, so we'd be able to see the black side of the building, but we wouldn't set ourselves up in an envelopment.

2:25:56And then we'd get on the radio and say, hey, you're surrounded.

2:26:00Jocko Willink:You know, and our Terp would do it. Hey, you're surrounded. Come out. How would that work? Would they come out? Usually. Yeah. No shit. Occasionally, there would be no one there. What was the ultimatum?

2:26:16Jocko Willink:Uh, I don't know if we ever even reached an ultimatum. I think we had a couple where there was no one home And we eventually breached, which again, which is a good escalation, right? I guess, depending on how you look at it, but if they wouldn't come out and now when we explosively breach this thing, we'd, we'd explosively breach it like big.

2:26:38So there were some very valuable lessons in the Admiral's aid slot.

2:26:42Jocko Willink:Yeah. Yeah. And, and again, even that first deployment to Iraq, these kinds of conversations. You know, these kind of things, understanding what my boss was having to deal with. Do you feel, I mean, it sounds like you had a great relationship with him, but

2:27:06what I want to ask is,

2:27:12how is it, I've always expected my leadership to have more experience than myself. And so you're showing up at a slot to be the aid for the Admiral with more combat experience than the Admiral has. That's an assumption. Maybe he was a Vietnam guy. I don't know.

2:27:32Jocko Willink:It's a correct assumption. I mean, how... By the way, my commanding officer, remember I said I was the only platoon in Iraq for like a month or two? When my skipper showed up, he was no combat experience. and you remember what i was saying earlier about like i understand you know like i don't expect my boss who's never been okay like oh sir let me explain to you why don't you come on an op and you can see what this looks like like that kind of attitude as opposed to which is really easy from a judgmental perspective to say why the hell are you in charge or hey i'm trying to run operations down here.

2:28:14Jocko Willink:You're asking me a bunch of questions. It's like, no, actually, come on down. Sit through our brief. Tell me what you think. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm, I mean, I've had both leaders too. And I think I've always paid a lot of attention to how, how my leadership approaches me with, with, with, with certain issues and are they open to, are they open? That's really it. I mean, when you have a leader that comes in with a little to no experience, I mean, it's, once again, how are they going to project that? Are they going to project that and lean on us, or are they going to fucking hide from their inexperience and, you know what I'm getting at, and present like an overinflated bullshit confidence?

2:29:06Jocko Willink:Yeah. And what do you, so how do you deal with that? It's like, Hey boss, that sounds like a good suggestion. Let me, let me bring that to boys and see how, see how we can make that work. You know, it's like, what am I supposed to say? Boss, you haven't been here as long as I have. You don't know what you're talking about. Where's that going to get me? Yeah. So it's like, hey, boss, it sounds like a good suggestion. Let me get with the guys and let's figure out how we can implement that. Hey, boss, I was talking to the guys and I just want to go over a couple of things. There's a couple of secondary and tertiary effects are going to happen if we do what it is you were saying.

2:29:37Jocko Willink:It's going to cause this and it's going to cause that. I'm good. We got to mitigate this one, but I just want to let you know that's what's going to happen. I didn't know that. How do you recommend? Oh, here's what I recommend, boss. You see what I'm saying? So again, if I don't listen to him, he's not going to listen to me. if I don't put some trust in him, he's not going to trust me. Makes sense. Makes sense. So how does tasking a bruiser come about? So, yeah, I do that year at the Admiral's office, and then the next billet is to be a task unit commander. And a billet opened up at SEAL Team 3.

2:30:18Jocko Willink:And so SEAL Team 3, here I come. Could you explain what a task unit is to the audience? Task unit is the old name. Now it's called the troop, but it's the old name for two platoons combined together with a little headquarters element above it. So it's about, it's about 36 guys, but it really can be anywhere between 30 and 50 or 70. You know, it's, it's, it's, I think people are always surprised that the variables inside the military, like a infantry company can be 80 guys or can be 280 guys. You know, there's a big variation. But generally speaking, a task unit is two platoons or a troop is two platoons with between 16 and 20 guys in each platoon.

2:31:00And so you are tasked with leading the task unit. Yep. Two platoons. Man, I just had so many friends slash, you know, buds classmates that were in that. I mean, Cowie, Mark Lee, Leif Babin, Seth Stone. I think, I don't want to mention his name. He might still be in there. Andrew Paul. A fucking ton of them, man. I think Melendez maybe. Was Mario Melendez with you guys? But, yeah.

2:31:38A lot of these guys. Plus, a lot more enlisted, but I don't want to say all their names because I don't know who's in and who's not anymore. But this is where, man, you guys just have all positive things to say about you. I've never heard anything negative about you from anybody that you've served with. And that is fucking incredible. Yep.

2:32:05Jocko Willink:I work with some awesome guys, man, for sure. And you guys seem really tight. And that is cool to see, too. Yeah. It was a great crew of guys, man. Great crew of guys. I mean, it's almost like you took your task unit with you into your business career. Yeah. There's a lot of those guys that are in there.

2:32:25But I don't know where to start with this. So I'll let you start. Yeah, for me it was, you know, I thought that this may be,

2:32:39Jocko Willink:this could be getting towards the end of my operational career. There were some couple other options that may play out or not, but at this point, you know, just for me, this is just an awesome opportunity. You know, an awesome opportunity. And I love the SEAL teams. And to be a troop commander, tasking a commander for me was just awesome. I was, again, I guess I find myself struggling for words for me to be able to describe the things that I've had in my life, like being a platoon commander in Iraq when there's one platoon in Iraq. This is like if you played football your whole life and you get to go to the Super Bowl, you know, or you are in a rock band and you get to play Madison Square Garden.

2:33:30Jocko Willink:That's what it was for me. This is the only thing I ever dreamed of doing. The only thing I wanted to do was be in the teams, and now I'm in the teams, and now I'm getting to be in charge of some team guys. And yeah, it was awesome from the word go, you know? Showed up and I stole a lot of stuff from Colonel David Hackworth. And one of the key components that I stole from David Hackworth was he would rename the units that he would take over. So when he was in Korea, he took over Fox Company, he changed it to Fighter Company. When he was in Vietnam, he was in charge of the 439th, which was called the Hard Luck Battalion, and he changed it to the Hardcore Battalion.

2:34:15Jocko Willink:And he did that even with each of his subordinate elements. He would change their name to something cool. And so when I took over, Task Unit Bravo was the original Alpha Bravo Charlie, and I took over for Task Unit Bravo, and the first thing I did was change the name to Bruiser. And it's totally unofficial, and I just went with it. And that's what we got. So... Where'd you come up with Bruiser? Had to begin with B. And there was an old band a friend of mine had called The Bruisers. And I was like, hmm, that's too easy. So there we go. Right on. Bruiser. Coming in hot. And, I mean, let's face it, it's a pretty good theme.

2:34:56Jocko Willink:It is a fucking damn good theme. It's a pretty good theme. And that's... Very fitting. Just something that I took from Colonel David Hackworth. And it does have, I've worked with all kinds of companies now, you know, at Echelon Front. And there's so many companies that have told me that their sales team gave themselves this name or their concrete team gave themselves a name. Like this happens all the time now. And people report back that, yeah, man, it has an impact. You're not just Team Alpha or Team Bravo. You're tasking a bruiser. Let's go. Right on. Right on. I mean, did you know you were going to Ramadi when you took it?

2:35:33No, we didn't know where we were going at first. Anywhere? Like, or anywhere in Iraq?

2:35:39Jocko Willink:So there was one task unit that was designated to go to Iraq, and that was Alpha. And Bruiser and Charlie, one of us, one of those task units was going to go to PACOM, meaning no war. And so my commanding officer and Master Chief, they brought us all back. They brought the head shed from each task unit back. And they said, hey, we, if you want, we can take and we can split up the task units so that whoever hasn't been to Iraq, we can all put them in one task unit and they can all go to Iraq. And then the other guys that already have been to Iraq can go to Paycom, which is the fair ferry, right?

2:36:24Jocko Willink:Like when the fair ferry shows up to try and make everything fair. And yeah, I was, so I had my opinion, but I went back. and ask the guys, because we were just starting our land warfare. And I said, hey, here's what they're offering. They're offering for us to split up and guys that haven't been to Iraq can go, or we stay together and they send whoever performs the best to Iraq. And I kind of smiled and they're all like, hell yeah, let's go. So it was, you know, a little bit of a competition to see who goes to Iraq. And, you know, we were, we were very hardworking. Sounds like it. I mean, fuck, man, so many legends.

2:37:04Chris Kyle, Eli Crane's in there. I mean... Eli wasn't with us. Oh, he wasn't? Mikey Mansoor. Yeah. I mean, wow.

2:37:14Jocko Willink:Wow. Yeah, a bunch of, uh... And, you know, a bunch of guys whose names people don't know, who are just awesome guys. And I think... So Tony Afratty, he's the... might be the one guy that I... We were E5 Mafia Team 1, me and Tony. And I'm trying to think if I knew anyone else in there. I might have known the... I think I knew who the other platoon chief was, another good guy, I think, but we weren't ever at the same team, but I knew him. But other than that, I don't think I knew one single person in there. What do you think your reputation was for them? What did they think they were walking into with you as their task unit commander?

2:37:57Jocko Willink:I mean, Tony knew me. I mean, he knew exactly who I was. So he got the word out. Yeah, I mean, yeah. I mean, Tony's as hard as they come. And Tony has an outstanding reputation and had an outstanding reputation. And so, you know, he knew me. And so that was that. And, you know, my platoon in Baghdad had done a lot of stuff. And so we, you know, had a lot of experience at that time. Mm-hmm. You know, at that time, it was a lot of experience. And, you know, like I said, I was an enlisted team guy for eight years. Mm-hmm. So, at a minimum, you couldn't lie to me about what the radios could or could not do.

2:38:41Jocko Willink:You couldn't lie to me about, like, basic team guy stuff. You had to tell me what was what. I had to tell the truth about stuff. When did you find out you were going to Baghdad? So— Or not Baghdad, excuse me, Ramadi. So I would say about halfway through the workup, they said, all right, you guys, Bruiser's going. And look, Bruiser's going to Iraq. We're like, yeah. So we were planning to go to Baghdad and work with the ICTF, which is the Iraqi Counterterror Force. I went on Advan, as a matter of fact. and I went and did some ops with those guys and saw what they were doing and started the turnover with their task unit commander and that's what that was like kind of a very looked like it was gonna be an awesome deployment like those guys had a good force that they were working with they had a good op tempo they just had good stuff going on so looked like that's where we're going And when I got home from that PDSS, they wanted to align all of, because the East and West Coast were both in Iraq at the same time.

2:39:55And yet the West Coast had Western Iraq, except for they had an element in Baghdad. And then the East Coast had Eastern Iraq, except for they had an element in Ramadi.

2:40:14Jocko Willink:And you can already see this doesn't make much sense, right? Right. So as the as the two commanding officers were getting ready to deploy, they talked about it. We're like, wait a second. Why do we have our forces kind of disjointed? West Coast, you take Western Iraq. That's like Fallujah, Habaniya, Ramadi, East Coast. You take Baghdad, which includes the ICTF and then the other stations that they were had. And it makes sense. You know, like there's no two ways about it. And when I heard that, I wasn't on leave, but my guys were on leave, pre-deployment leave. Like, we were that ready to go to Baghdad.

2:40:58Jocko Willink:And my skipper called me to the office and said, hey, what do you think about going to Ramadi? And I was like, I knew exactly what was going on in Ramadi. I mean, the intel reports were very clear that Ramadi was a total war zone, total disaster. and it was the worst area in Iraq. And I said, yeah, roger that. And I tried to, inside, I was like, oh, hell yeah. Outside, I said, well, sir, you know, there's a couple more things I need and I bargained to get like a few, I bargained to get a few more people. I bargained to get like some computer stuff that we needed for our, you know, for our communication stuff.

2:41:39Jocko Willink:And he was like, yeah, I can get you that, I can get you that, I can get you these other people. And I said, I'm in. And that was it. Going to Ramadi.

2:41:48Did you know this was going to be, this was it, as far as kinetic deployments? Yes. Yeah.

2:41:58Jocko Willink:And then there was sustained fighting every day. Like, there was soldiers and Marines getting wounded and killed. every day. And this isn't a big area. Ramadi's not a big city. It's small. IEDs were totally out of control. So you had a pretty good idea what you were walking into. 100%. Yeah. Well, not 100 % because, you know, there's still some things you're going to learn. But I knew, I knew what was happening. I was, again, thankfully, I had done that deployment to Baghdad, I had, you know, experienced as a, as a enlisted seal working for the Admiral. Like these are all things that helped me understand as I got, as I, I was just a little bit ahead of the power curve.

2:42:49Jocko Willink:You know what I mean? Just, just enough ahead of the power curve. You know, did you ever get rolled back in buds? Yes. I didn't get rolled back in buds, but you could tell the guys that got rolled back. They were like, okay, like pool comp, they know what's coming. They're just a little bit ahead. And that's how I felt like I was going in Ramadi. It was just ahead enough to know, like, okay, I know what's coming. And I told, you know, once the task unit was on the ground, I'm like, this is going to be a historical deployment. Which is a big statement. That's not a small statement. I didn't throw that word around, but I knew.

2:43:28I knew. How many guys did you have that had experience? Like actual experience? Every guy that wasn't a new guy had been to Iraq.

2:43:39Jocko Willink:You had a lot of new guys, I think. We had a decent amount of new guys. It wasn't overwhelming, but we had a solid, probably normal, average number of new guys. Okay. Three, four guys per platoon, new guys, something like that. So not overwhelming. And all great guys. I mean, if you know what you're walking... Let me ask this. How many guys on your team or in your task unit had an idea of what they were walking into? I don't know if anybody did. I don't know if anybody did. How do you prepare these guys for that?

2:44:20I mean, just telling them what's happening.

2:44:23Jocko Willink:You know, you put the SIGACs, the significant activities, which are basically enemy attacks, brief the SIGACs in the last 24 hours. and then you brief them in the SIGACs in the last seven days and then you brief them in the SIGACs in the last month. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist because in the last 24 hours, there was three guys wounded, one guy killed, you know, 38 enemy attacks. And you think, whoa, that's a rough day. But then you realize it's every day for seven days and then you realize it's every day for seven months. Fuck. Or for a month and then that's how it's been. And just before we showed up, like, the 3-8 Marines had had a terrible about a week where they had lost four or five guys in that week before we showed up.

2:45:11Jocko Willink:And they lost a couple more before that. But, you know, that's what we're getting into. Who are your platoon commanders? Leif Babin and Seth Stone. Yeah. My brothers. Yeah, two guys. You didn't know them before. Didn't know them. Met them. And two guys from the Naval Academy. Neither one of them got selected out of the Naval Academy. They both had fought their way back from the fleet to get to the SEAL teams. Both of them from Texas. Both of them surfed. Neither one of them had much experience at all. but they were dude they just they wanted to be good they wanted to be good team guys and they wanted to they wanted to fight they wanted to fight for god and country and um they were tough they listened yeah yeah they were couldn't couldn't ask for better for better guys to work with you know for the for the two platoon commanders and And it's funny because Leif will tell the story about when I met those guys and how, A, I didn't smile to him and I wasn't nice to him.

2:46:31Jocko Willink:And B, Seth thought I was going to fire him. And I hated him.

2:46:40And it's actually true.

2:46:42Jocko Willink:Is it really? It's actually true. Not that I hated them, but that I might fire them. I didn't know who they were. I didn't know what their attitudes were. I didn't have high expectations that they were going to be successful or good. And you know what? This is another thing I stole from Hackworth. This is exactly what Hackworth would do. Hackworth's like, yeah, when I meet guys, I don't know who they are. I don't know what they're going to do. I'm not going to become friends with them because if they're not capable of doing the job, I'm going to get rid of them. And so, yeah, there's a reason why I didn't like bro out with them when I first met him, because I will fire them if they're not going to do their job correctly, or if they're more concerned about themselves than they are about the platoon.

2:47:36And if you're

2:47:37Jocko Willink:more concerned about yourself than your platoon, you will not work for me. You will not work for me and I will do everything I can to like get you out of the SEAL teams. So luckily and thankfully those guys didn't have an ounce of that in them. You know, they wanted to take care of the platoons. They wanted to fight. They wanted, that's what they wanted. And, uh, they did.

2:48:07Jocko Willink:Who are your chiefs? Well, the one chief was Seth's chief, and he's not in the public light. And the other chief was Tony Afrati. And Seth's chief was a great combination with Seth, hardworking guy, and a good compliment to Seth. and then Tony, Tony Afrati was Leif's chief, who again, he was E5 mob with me at SEAL Team 1. And like, just a stud, dude. I mean, honestly, he's on the platoon list that you form up for the apocalypse. Like Tony's, he's on the top of the list, you know, because he's not going to back down. And he's great. You know, there's a situation when we were in, um, going through workup and I was watching Tony and Leif.

2:49:09Jocko Willink:They were getting ready to do some training up, just a real simple training up, you know, target, like a, like an iteration training on a target assault or something like that. And they're sitting there in the, you know, in the sand, you know, with the freaking sticks and Tony tells him like, Hey, Hey, sir, we should come in from here, set up a base over here, move through here, rally point over here. That's what we should do. And Leif's like, hey, that sounds really good. Why don't you tell the guys? And Tony goes, I think it'd be good if it came from you. And I was like, damn, dude, that's a professional.

2:49:43Jocko Willink:He's trying to elevate the platoon commander. Instead of him being like, I want to show these guys that I'm the real guy in charge. Instead of doing that, he elevated Leif. Just in that little moment, that's one little moment in time where you see a guy that's like a real, true professional, whose ego is totally out of it, he wants to have a good platoon. So, yeah, just epic. And, you know, since I was, you know, I'm good friends with Tony. No, no, I grew up with Tony. And so we had a great relationship. Yep. Do you... Before we go to Ramadi, I just want to ask if there was... How did you address your team when you knew that's where you were going?

2:50:32What was... How did you tell them?

2:50:34Jocko Willink:Stand by to get some, boys. Yeah. It's weird. There was a time earlier, because I knew that Ramadi was the worst place, and I had said at some point, like, we're going to end up in Ramadi. I had said that. Like, I kind of knew it. So the guys were tracking, the guys knew what was what and bro, the idea, you know, it's like, I had a guy named Dean Ladd on my podcast, who is a Marine officer in World War II. And like, he's going into Tarawa and the threat brief that they're getting for Tarawa is like totally out of control. You can see it. The Japanese are dug in. They got mortars trained on the beach.

2:51:20Jocko Willink:They got machine gun pill boxes, the whole nine yards. And the tar was tiny. And I asked him the same kind of probing questions that you're asking me of like, well, how did you, you know, how did you feel? And I was like, well, were you nervous? Were you scared about getting wounded or killed? And he goes, that always happens to the other guy. And that's exactly, you know, that's how I felt. That's how I can just about guarantee you every guy in tasking a bruiser when they heard we were going to Ramadi was like, hell yeah. Every single one of them was like, hell yeah. Nothing bad is going to happen.

2:51:57Jocko Willink:We're going to go and kick ass. That's what we do, which is exactly what you want. Fucking awesome. Yeah. We're frogmen, dude. This is what we do. This is an opportunity, you know, the storied legacy.

2:52:17Jocko Willink:that the guys in Vietnam built, that we got to, you know, get to walk around in Coronado with a trident. I mean, you're not walking around, but guys know you're a SEAL. You go into a McPee's on a Thursday night, which I'm sorry you missed out on. But back in the day, you go into a McPee's on a Thursday night. Like, you know, you're a badass. And I didn't do anything during that. Nothing. I got to live off the reputation of the guys that came before us. So to have an opportunity, get some of that back, yeah, that's a huge opportunity. And it's a heavy weight. We got to hold the line. Yeah. So you get to Iraq.

2:53:01You're in Ramadi. Let's talk about day one. Yeah, so we were on the PDSS, or no, the ADVON, right? So a few of us came over on the ADVON, and yeah,

2:53:18Jocko Willink:everything I had read about what was going on there, it was going on there. And, you know, what day it was, I don't know, but we were going to a memorial service, like almost out of the gate. Right out of the gate, yeah. And again, what left a mark was I could tell in the memorial service that this was a routine. Like, it wasn't an ad hoc thing. Like, I'm looking around and I go, this is not an ad hoc thing. I've been in the military for, at this point, 15 years. I know what it looks like when you throw together a ceremony last minute and you get in there and you do something. This was not that.

2:54:01I'm looking at like the setup where they have the memorial crosses.

2:54:05Jocko Willink:Those things are not, those things are used. I'm looking at where the preacher's talking from. I'm like, oh, he's delivering remarks again. So that's the, that's the, my first memory of Ramadi was that, was going, yeah, these guys, these, you know, we're showing up here. These guys from the 228 under Colonel Goronsky, they've been here for 14 months. They've taken, they've lost almost 100 guys. They've taken hundreds and hundreds of casualties. And we're, we need to do what we can to help them. That was my attitude. It was like, we need to help these guys as much as we possibly can. Damn. And I'd like to, I just want to remind the audience, I mean, And your task unit, the most decorated SOF unit out of the entire Iraq war.

2:55:04That's what we're walking into.

2:55:07Jocko Willink:Yeah. We had, for some reason, we had 13 snipers. And I say for some reason because that wasn't normal, you know? Both the platoon chiefs were snipers. We just had, we were overloaded with snipers, which was a real blessing. And that seeing, remember I talked about being in Baghdad and we did a couple operations where I kind of caught a glimpse of what we could do with snipers, like a little glimpse. And when I saw what was happening there, I thought to myself, oh, I think I have an idea of what we can do here.

2:55:49Jocko Willink:and the the turnover with the guys from team two great great bunch of dudes um it was like there was areas where and same thing with what the coalition forces were telling us the 228 was like hey this area here you can't go there it's it's not passable areas you know there are too many IEDs to go down there, period. So it was, we knew, I knew, I knew it was going to be a fight because it was all around us. You know, you go, we lived, it's another weird thing. It was like growing up watching war movies. It was usually like, good guys are over here. bad guys are over there you go over to fight the bad guys like okay world war one was trench warfare even the trenches seemed like they were a little bit far apart and ramadi was like oh the other side of this wall right here there's bad guys it's like the other side of that wall there's bad guys and when you go out the gate you you go out the gate and there it is you're in it you're And, you know, there was people killed on Ramadi, you know, from mortars and rocket strikes and stuff like that.

2:57:07Jocko Willink:So it was all around you. How big was Ramadi? I never made it out. Probably like four miles across. That's it. Yep. 350 ,000 people, roughly speaking of civilians. Yeah. Camp Ramadi was a pretty big base because it was a former Iraqi army base. It was a pretty big base, and we had our little annex to that base right on the Euphrates River, as frogmen should be. And within, once the whole task unit showed up, like the night the task unit showed up, there was like a coordinated attack on various bases, ours being one of them. And like every guy in our task unit, the first night that they showed up in Ramadi was on the roof of our building, just getting after it.

2:57:53Jocko Willink:Oh, shit. Yeah. So that was kind of a good welcome to Ramadi as well. So you get, okay. So you're not in the middle of some big base. I mean, it's, you go on the rooftop and you can engage. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we did. Yeah. Day one. Yeah. And it's funny too, now that you mentioned that the, the Commodore at the time, who was the detailer that I asked to send me back to a SEAL team ASAP, who was the commanding officer when I was in Europe. So this guy's a friend of mine. And before we left, to a speech to the whole team, and I harass him about this to this day, he's like, hey, the chances are none of you are going to shoot your weapons.

2:58:40Jocko Willink:This is a different time and all this stuff. And I think I sent him an email or a webby thing. And I said, hey, sir, we've been here for 48 hours. Every single guy in my task unit and some of the techs have engaged. And he was like, yeah, Roger. Great guy. Great guy. So what was the mission set? Was it very specific or was it always something different? It ended up being pretty specific. And that is setting up sniper overwatch positions in support of the army elements on the ground. That's kind of one. We did do direct action missions with our Iraqi counterparts We did the overwatches with Iraqi counterparts, and we did, you know, clearance operations, patrols to contact, reconnaissance missions, demo raids.

2:59:31Jocko Willink:We kind of got full-spectrum frogman activities. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It was... The 228, who was the brigade that was on the ground when we got there, they had pretty much secured the outskirts of the city. And so there was just starting to initiate the idea of pushing into the city. And it seemed like, and as a matter of fact, while my guys, before my guys arrived, we were getting word that one of the courses of action was a Fallujah-type clearance of Ramadi. And so now I'm like, oh, it's completely on, right? It is completely on. But Maliki, who was the president, just been elected, he said, I don't want to do that type of assault on Fallujah because it'll cause a separation between the Sunnis and the Shias, and this will be a civil war.

3:00:39Jocko Willink:is there another way to do it? And so this is where when the 11AD showed up, which is the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, Ready 1st Brigade, when they showed up, they had a plan that had been used in Northern Iraq, Atalifar, to clear the city like a small section at a time. And that's what we ended up implementing. Do you think that was the right call? Yes, yes, I do. I do. Because it would have caused so much destruction in the city that it would have caused mass civilian casualties, displacement of people. It would have been very problematic had we done a Fallujah-type clearance of Ramadi.

3:01:26Jocko Willink:So, and I think there actually would have probably been more casualties had we done it that way on the US side. Certainly on the Iraqi civilian side, it would have been rough. So, I thought it was a good plan. What was the first operation that you took your task unit on? We started doing some, like almost immediately, some small DAs and stuff like that. Like I remember the first DA that Leif was going on. And this was, we had a, when we first got there, the first couple weeks, we were still under command of SEAL Team 1. So my skipper hadn't taken over yet. So I had taken over the Ramadi, Task Unit Ramadi space, but my SEAL wasn't in charge yet.

3:02:15Jocko Willink:And so my goal was to do as many missions as we could for the SEAL Team 1 CO so that my CO would be like, Jocko knows what he's doing. And that's what we did. And I had a good relationship. I had known the CO from SEAL Team 1. And when he came out and I met with him and I kind of presented the case and explained to him what I saw and how we were going to operate, he was just, we got along great. And so when I started running up, you know, missions that we were going to do, he was approving. And that was very cool. And we got very aggressive out of the gate. And like, but I remember Leif's first direct action mission.

3:02:52Jocko Willink:And he may have never done a direct action mission before. And I'm the task unit commander, but this thing was pretty close to the front gate. And I'm like, he can go do this thing. And so he's putting together the plan. And there's like a lot of stuff to organize. And he came to me and he's like, hey, bro. He's like, I don't know if we're gonna be ready for this. And I'm like, bro, you're gonna be fine. You're totally good to go. You got this. And he was like, you know, he trusted me, man. And I trusted him. That's why I was going. But he looked at me like with that kind of like, like, okay, if you say so type thing.

3:03:29Jocko Willink:And he went out and did it, you know, and it's all good to go. So we ran some missions like that. And then what happened was. And when I met the Colonel, Colonel Gronski, this is before the 1180 showed up because you're asking about the first missions that we did. So I had put Tony Afrati had taken a little sniper element with some Marines and him and some SEALs and a couple Iraqi soldiers out to this area where the Marines had been IED'd and lost Marines in early April. and so Tony went out there they're in overwatch for 48 hours or something like that 24 hours 36 hours nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing I go to meet the brigade commander and as I'm going to meet the brigade commander I'm walking through his talk like this is out of a movie I'm walking through his talk and they're announcing like through the radios that the SEALs just engaged two IED emplacers at this location where that IED had taken place.

3:04:37Jocko Willink:And I walk into his office and he goes, are those your guys? And I'm like, yes, sir. And he said, I need you over in Eastern Ramadi. And I said, Roger that, sir. Let me get it fixed. Let me get it together. And we chatted and he explained to me what was going on, this area called the Malab District run by the first of the 506th Band of Brothers, outstanding, outstanding army unit. I mean, just as awesome as it gets. They were in control of this or working to get control of this place called Malab district. And they were just getting annihilated with IEDs. I mean, it was absolutely horrible. And so went back and I put together a crew and to go over to Eastern Ramadi and conduct a massive clearance with them.

3:05:28Jocko Willink:So we're over there for a few days. We're getting to know the Iraqi troops. We're planning this big giant operation. And again, bro, when we're in the SEAL teams and we think of a big operation, we think of like a task unit, right? Maybe a task unit plus a company of Rangers or, you know, a company of maybe a platoon of infantry guys. When I say big, bro, I'm talking like thousands. Not thousands, but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of soldiers. Wow. So we're planning this operation, and it's weird. So now we're talking about what is the head shed doing? Like, so in Ramadi, the leadership had figured or made a decision that they didn't want any battalion-sized operations conducted in Ramadi.

3:06:23Jocko Willink:But this clearance was going to take that whole battalion plus to get it done. And they run it up the chain of command. Hey, we want to do this battalion sweep of this area. And it comes back, hey, no battalion-sized operations. And so they said, okay. So we took and broke up this battalion-sized operation into like multiple smaller operations that were company plus sized operations. It's a little bit of a shell game is what I'm getting at. But it was the mandate that had come down and the commanding officer of the battalion said, okay, that's the mandate we got to meet. Here's how we can maneuver around that and still accomplish the mission.

3:07:04Jocko Willink:So that's what we ended up doing. And this is, you know, you're talking about the first major operation. So this is the first major operation that we're doing. we're planning to sweep a certain section of the city first thing in the morning then we're going to reset do another section of the city then do another section and what do you mean by sweep clear talking about like route reconnaissance sniper overwatch i'm talking the iraqi soldiers with the u.s army but primarily the iraqi soldiers in the lead are going to enter every building in an area. It's a clearance operation. Okay. Meet with the people, see if they have weapons, talk to them about, we'll get atmospherics, and then go to the next building, you go to the next building, you go to the next building.

3:07:54Jocko Willink:So as they do this, they know that they're going to get attacked. So in order to interdict the attacks, and they also know that once you clear a street of IEDs in a matter of hours, they come out, and we call it reseeding the IEDs, which is, it happens so much they have a term for it. It's reseeding the IEDs. So they know that if we clear a road and get rid of the IEDs, the enemy will come back in and put IEDs. So when we put together this plan, I have a group of SEALs that are going to go with the Iraqi soldiers to help them and do C2 for their clearance operation. And then I have two elements of SEALs that are going to go out.

3:08:38Jocko Willink:and one of them is going to overwatch one of these long access roads and the other one's going to overwatch a shorter access road, but also the Ramadi soccer stadium, which is a staging area for the enemy. And then I am going to be with the company commander, who's an awesome guy, Joe Claiborne, crazy Joe Claiborne. I'm going to be with him because he's helping C2 and the Iraqi soldiers with elements of his company. there's a lot going on man yeah no kidding so we launch pre-dawn and this is another thing um pre-dawn operation and and we had done stoner had taken guys out with claiborne with joe claiborne like a few days earlier and he had gotten a big gunfight and when they came back, I was standing at the gate waiting for him and they came back and I, you know, he's like totally impressed and I walk with him to his battalion commander and this guy, this company commander, Joe Claiborne, who's been in Iraq for four or five months at this point, he's lost two guys, I think.

3:09:48Jocko Willink:He's had a bunch of guys wounded. I think at that point, like 20 % of his guys have been wounded or killed and he goes to the battalion commander and he says, I want SEALs with me on every operation I do from here on out. From one engagement with my guys, he was impressed. And we were, I mean, I was overwhelmingly impressed with him and his guys. They were outstanding. But that's how much we hit it off with these guys. And I've told him since that that was the best compliment I've ever got in my life, was when an army company commander goes and tells his battalion commander, I want SEALs with us on every operation we do from here on out after just getting in a major engagement.

3:10:29Jocko Willink:So now you fast forward a few days and we're going on this mission. And as we're driving in, it's eerie. And what the Moos would do is they would light tires on fire. And so you're rolling into town, black smoke everywhere. there's fires burning very very eerie as we roll in and i have already have my sniper elements had inserted at this point and one of they were inserting on the mine clearance vehicles so it's a pretty sneaky little operation you know the mine clearance vehicle goes by it stops to clear a mine but then some seals get out of the back and go set up an overwatch position very cool

3:11:17Jocko Willink:so they're in position what the one by the soccer stadium is in position the other group gets in their spot and the building that they had selected was not the way it looked like it was going to look on paper or the way the way it looked on the overhead imagery they didn't have a good view of this long axis road that was going to be utilized for the clearance which was bad because it was going to get cleared and then it would be hours before the ops started and now we'd have possible ieds getting reseated that's a problem didn't want that to happen so that element decided to move and now there's a lot of time compression the sun's starting to come up and we're like as they realize the sun's coming up they're like oh we don't have good visibility the road that we need that's our that's that's their commander's intent is to watch this road They can't see the road.

3:12:07Jocko Willink:They decide to move. As they move, they go into a building that is just outside the limit of advance. And I'm sorry for civilians that I'm talking in military jargon, but there's a point where the clearance operation was supposed to stop. And so they're on the other side of, it's a road. It's like, okay, the clearance operation, they will not go past this road. So now as things start to develop, I've got my guys, my sniper element over by the soccer stadium, they're starting to engage enemy. The seals that are pushing through, they're starting to experience resistance and they're starting to engage.

3:12:46Jocko Willink:My little element's starting to engage. So there's a lot of enemy fighters out there. And at some point, one of the Iraqi elements, which I don't know why they did this, or I did not know, no one knew that they were going to do this. They had decided that they were going to set their own cordon around the area that was being cleared. So by themselves, they ran from where the clearance was taking place all the way to the limit of advance road, and they went across it to enter the building and set up an overwatch position for themselves. That's where my guys were. so one of my guys, and again, there's so many little details that go into this, but we had seen, they give us Intel pictures and Intel pictures have body armor and helmets and AK-47s and chocolate chip camis that the enemy has.

3:13:49Jocko Willink:So we know that the enemy can be wearing body armor, chocolate chip camis, helmets, and we know they carry AK-47s. So one of my guys is in that Overwatch, and they're looking out the bottom floor, and they see a guy with an AK-47. Again, it's like not quite Nod's time. It's the worst time of day, dude. And the guy sees a guy with an AK-47 maneuvering through the courtyard, which they had zip-tied the courtyard shut. So this guy had actively entered the courtyard and was now maneuvering, and my guy shot him. obviously looking back this was a this was one of those iraqi soldiers that had run up there so now him and his iraqi soldiers and there was a small marine element that had gone with an anglico element had gone with these guys because the job of the anglico is to keep track of the front line trace of where friendly forces are so they see these iraqi soldiers run off and they followed him because they're freaking awesome Marines and they're doing their job.

3:14:56Jocko Willink:So now they get up to where this, where this guy is, where the small element is. And they're like, what's going on? They're like, Hey, you know, broken English, the whole nine hours. One of our guys went in that compound. He got shot. And so then what do they do? They all start shooting. So what we ended up with now, we're, now we're entering the blue on blue. This is a blue on blue happening. And as my guys in the overwatch position are now returning fire at the Iraqis that are dumping down rounds, trying to get their guy out of the courtyard, the Iraqis call for the QRF. So now a QRF launches to go down and it gets to that corner, 50 caliber machine gun puts it on the on the overwatch my overwatch position and again this overwatch position is iraqi soldiers and seals and starts engaging with 50 cal into this overwatch position as this is happening now my guys call the heavy qrf which is tanks and as this happens I look at the company commander, Joe Claiborne.

3:16:11Jocko Willink:I'm like, hey, those are my guys calling QRF. Let's go. Follow these tanks down there. Roger that. So we kind of break contact over here, and we pull out onto that main road. Farouk Way is what it was called. And as we're driving down this road, I'm looking and I see the tank, and I see red smoke, which is what we use for emergencies. And I see the tank, and I just, as soon as I looked around, I didn't know exactly what was going on, but I knew something. My gut instinct was telling me there's something, something is wrong. So I get out of the Humvee, and I'm with my SEA, he's a great dude. And I look, and I see the gunny sergeant from Anglico.

3:17:04Jocko Willink:And I'm like, well, what's happening? And he goes, there's Moos in that building right there. he goes he's like we're gonna call for fire like we got to take him out i'm like okay stand by because i didn't feel comfortable and uh looked at my like sea game like the head nod and he like got on my gave me the squeeze and i started walking up and as i'm walking up to this compound i see a white on the ground and on the door i see a white zip tie and I'm like my guys are in here and I kicked the door open and when I kicked the door open I saw platoon chief Tony Frati standing there and he's like stoked to see me because they called the QRF he's thinking I'm the QRF and I go what happened and he said hey a guy was coming guy was coming through the courtyard we engaged him and then they brought it and I looked at him I said it was a blue on blue and he looked at me like totally confused

3:18:11Jocko Willink:and he said can we get the guys out of here i said yeah and we had a 113 was down there as a kazavac already so got the seals and the iraqi soldiers that were in there put them in the 113 to get them out of there and tony stayed with me because tony's like there's a reason why i said Tony's like top of the list because Tony just got 150 rounds shot at him through a 50 cal. By the way, one of my other guys, Matt Hasby, he got fragged in the face. He had so accepted his death. It was wild. But Tony through all that was just like, hey, I'm staying with you boss. I'm like, check, no factor. Those guys go back.

3:18:50Jocko Willink:And I went up then to the company commander and And same thing. I looked at him. I said, hey, that was a blue on blue. And his same look, like, what? And I said, it was a blue on blue. And he radioed it in. So, and as soon as I saw that white zip tie, I figured out what had happened. You know, I was like, oh. And I saw the building from the map where my guys were supposed to be, where they were originally planning to be. I knew that I was at the limited advance. I knew what had happened. And talking to that Anglico guy was like, yeah, the Iraqis pushed down here. And I was like, oh, so we finished the clearance, you know, because that's what you do.

3:19:29Jocko Willink:Like there's still a mission going on. We finished the clearance. And as we finished the clearance, we then we're, we're now like some elements stay out there, but the bulk of the clearance force is now going back to base. I go back to base and myself and the company commander go to the same battalion commander that he had just totally won a SEALs with us on all of his operations. and this battalion commander is one of the best guys

3:20:02but seriously one of the best leaders i've ever met and he looked at me and he looked at he looked

3:20:09Jocko Willink:at uh joe and he's like what happened out there and there was a giant battle map like literally wallpaper and i just walked through with him i was like hey sir i had an element here had an element here uh my my element moved to here this iraqi element pushed down he goes they went past a limited advance my guys didn't know who they were engaged them uh they called the qrf my guys got engaged by the qrf my guys called the heavy qrf i came down and made the connection and he was like and this guy was you know he'd been in ramadi for six months as a battalion commander or five months or whatever it was at that time.

3:20:49Jocko Willink:I guess they got there in December. Yeah, so it'd been like four or five months. He was just awesome. And he was like, okay. He's like, we learned from that. Don't let it happen again. We got another mission to do. And I was like, roger that, sir. And so we went, rejocked, went out again, did a whole nother operation, got done with that clearance sector. And again, now everything's, you know, we didn't have any more of these things happen. and then we came back, did it again, boom, rolled out. So we end up doing clearances the whole day, engaging all kinds of enemy fighters, the whole nine yards.

3:21:27Jocko Willink:And then I get back once the last mission is done because these were daytime operations. Other than us inserting at night once the sun was setting, the Iraqi soldiers can't clear it at night. So it's a daytime operation. That's why. So I get back and I open up my field computer. And needless to say, I had some emails and some texts, you know, the webby texts to explain that, hey, stand down. Investigation is commencing as to what happened. And I'm like, yeah, roger that. so we consolidate and we go back over to uh western ramadi camp ramadi camp mark what we end up calling camp mark lee and now i'm getting ready to debrief and my my skipper sends me an email like hey we'll be out there tomorrow be ready to debrief and now i'm trying so now one iraqi soldier's dead multiple iraqi soldiers wounded and one of my guys wounded blue on blue dude it's a freaking nightmare so it's a nightmare so i spend the next however many hours trying to figure out who is to blame for this

3:22:51Jocko Willink:i'm my assumption is someone's getting fired right because you can't have a blue on blue and no one gets fired my assumption is someone's getting fired so it's kind of the question is who's getting fired. So I go down the list of like the element leader that was in charge of the Iraqi soldiers. Guess what he didn't do? He didn't keep control of those soldiers and let them go down and leave the limit of advance. The radio man that was in charge of that element that moved positions didn't tell me or anyone else where he's going. He just did it. Shooter shot a guy without doing a good PID. Like I went down the list and was figuring out who was to blame.

3:23:35Jocko Willink:And there was something in my gut that felt so disgusted by my thoughts. And I was probably, you know, a half an hour away from when the CO arrived. And I couldn't figure out why I felt so disgusted in this debrief. And it occurred to me, like a giant slap upside my head, that the reason I felt disgusted is because I was trying to blame people for things that were my fault. Because this operation, like every operation, when you are the senior leader on the battlefield, you're in charge of everything. And every one of those mistakes that happened are because of me. They're because of me, because I failed as a leader to convey how important it was to pass your location.

3:24:37I failed to convey as a leader how important the limit of advance was.

3:24:42Jocko Willink:I failed to convey how important it was to keep control of those Iraqi soldiers. Those things are my fault that that's happened. Not any one of those guys. And so when the commanding officer showed up and the command master chief and the investigating officer, and they're sitting there in the room with my wounded guy who's got his head bandaged up. It's Matt Hasbro. You know Matt, right? Matt was my swim buddy in second phase. So I'm looking at Matt in the back. I mean, it's only a miracle that he's alive, right? He had.50 cal punching through the roof. He's laying there. He drew out his pistol so he could, like, fend for himself as he got overrun.

3:25:23Jocko Willink:Fuck.

3:25:28Jocko Willink:So, and I will say with that moment, when I realized why I felt disgusted, I felt so relieved, like, oh, you're an idiot. This is you. And I felt, okay, this is you. This is what you did. You're in charge. You're responsible. And this is what the leader does. And so I went in the room and, you know, I asked that question, whose fault was this?

3:25:56and there was a there was a pretty good moment of silence and then something you know someone

3:26:02Jocko Willink:chimed in well hey it was my fault i did this and i was like no it wasn't your fault and then the raiderman said no it's my fault i said no it wasn't your fault your whole team was in there oh yeah yeah everyone in task unit bruiser was in there and the command master chief and the skipper and the investigating officer. And I went around the room and asked, you know, whose fault is this? And everybody, you know, whether it was they wanted to blame the Iraqis, whether they want to take ownership themselves, everybody was chiming in on whose fault it was. And then I said, no, it wasn't your fault.

3:26:34Jocko Willink:It wasn't your fault. It wasn't your fault. There's only one person to blame. And that person's me. And that is the truth. That is the truth. When you are in charge of a team and something goes wrong, it is your fault. And then I said, and here's some things that we're going to do to make sure that this doesn't happen again. And I started talking about time and space deconfliction. I started talking about how we were going to overly signal. We went through some protocols.

3:27:01But that was it.

3:27:03Jocko Willink:And, you know, my boss, who I already had a great relationship with, and the Master Chief, who's a great, you know, legendary Master Chief, he, you know, those guys,

3:27:17Jocko Willink:my relationship and trust with them went up in both directions because they understood what had happened. They understood that I understood. And I think, you know, if they would have been in their rights to say, hey, Jocko, you're done. Or they could have fired anyone in that long chain of command. I would have protested with my own job if they would have tried to fire someone else besides me. But I had a good relationship with them. They understood how complicated it was. They saw all these little things. There's a million other little elements I can tell you about. Like the fact that Matt Hasby, who was getting shot at with a 50 caliber machine gun, which you'd think, hey dude, you're getting shot at with a 50 cal.

3:28:13Jocko Willink:That's an American weapon. Like that's not common. Well, 12 hours prior to this, he was in a sniper tower and he got engaged with a Dishka 12.7 machine gun by the enemy. And he told me he's literally up there thinking, I can't believe these guys at the DISCA found me again. Because otherwise, if you think you're getting shot at with a 50 cal, you call ceasefire, you throw a red smoke, you do something to stop it. He had no idea. And so that's, you know, to the credit of my command master chief and my commanding officer, they listened to me, I listened to them and And we carried on. And that was a very rough way to begin the deployment.

3:29:01Do you have any idea how much credibility was boosted within you with your team that day? I don't know.

3:29:12Jocko Willink:But I can tell you that you and I have both sat in rooms where some officer blamed someone else other than themselves. and you and I both know that that is disgusting. And that's what disgusted me. The fact that I was even having those thoughts, part of it was me trying to truly figure out what happened, but part of it was like, oh yeah, this is you trying to look for someone to blame. There's no one to blame. You're in charge. So, you know, the guys in the troop, the guys in the task unit, like these guys, I'm not a hard person to figure out. I'm not maneuvering in some way. I'm not, I am who I am.

3:29:55And I'm, those guys knew that. And so, I think I would have lost a lot of respect.

3:30:02Jocko Willink:I think I did what they probably expected I was going to do, you know? Maybe some of them were pleasantly surprised, but I think most of them knew me. They didn't, you know, I think I would have been a, we would have been very out of character if I had gone in there and blamed someone else. That's not how it works. Again, this goes back to that platoon commander I had. That guy, he was responsible for everything. When we screwed something up, even when we screwed something up, even when one time, one of my friends got in trouble on Liberty and he wasn't even there. He wasn't even there. And he's like, yeah, I should have seen this coming.

3:30:44Jocko Willink:I was like, check. So, when things go wrong, you better take ownership of it. And they certainly went wrong in that scenario. And, you know, there's another, the Commodore of Group 2 at the time, who was a guy that was a legendary, legendary leader in the SEAL teams. And he had been a Marine in Vietnam. and he had come in at the tail end of Way City. And I can't remember if I talked to him or if he emailed me, but he said something along the lines of, hey, Jocko, I don't know if you know about me. Yes, I know about you, sir. I was in the tail end of Way City in Vietnam. I saw, you know, he was one of those guys that made it very clear that he was not in the Battle of Way City, but he showed up there afterwards or he's at the tail end of it.

3:31:42Jocko Willink:And he said, he rattled off the percentage, like a third of the casualties in Way City were fratricide. That's just one battle. It's like this complicated stuff. And it was the first, he let me know like, okay, this stuff, this is war. And by the way, the army, like that battalion commander, blue on blue was a part of Ramadi. You know, we think of in the SEAL teams, we think of blue on blue. It's like you're getting kicked out of the SEAL teams. Like if you and I are running around with Sim and I shoot you, there's a decent chance I'm getting kicked out of the SEAL teams. Like that's how much of a mortal sin it is.

3:32:25And the Army and the Marine Corps, they're like, it's just like we have to mitigate it as much as we can. But if you can't, it can happen.

3:32:36Jocko Willink:This is part of it. It's part of it. And it's a horrible part of it. And look, we had other blue on blues that potentially could happen. We had shots fired, but we never had it escalate like that one did. And that's because we learned a lot of lessons from that one. And we prevented all kinds that never escalated at all, that never happened. But, you know, it's one of those... It's funny, we, in Extreme Ownership, Leif and I were writing our kind of chapters independently. and it ends up there's three chapters in there that are about blue on blue one of them was chris kyle with a pid on a guy with a scoped weapon and he's telling leif like hey i got a guy with a scope weapon in this building is there any friendlies in that building and leif's calling the company commander hey do you got any friendlies in this building the guy's like no he's we got a guy with a scope weapon he's like kill him because there's snipers that are killing Americans.

3:33:32Jocko Willink:And Chris like, didn't quite feel comfortable. And Leif was like, Hey, he's saying we're cleared and goes back and forth. And finally Leif's like, Hey, we don't feel comfortable taking the shot. And the guy's kind of pissed. And this is a great company commander. Guy's kind of pissed. And he's like, okay, well, we'll go clear it. And Leif's like, Roger, we got, you know, we'll, we'll tell you what we see. And a few minutes later, the army goes to assault that building, but they come out of the building that they were going to assault. There was a... They didn't know we miscounted the buildings, or they miscounted the building, I forget what it was.

3:34:06Jocko Willink:But that right there, man, if Chris... Chris could have shot one of the friendlies, but you... We had to be so careful about these engagements. Damn. And then there was another one that I wrote about where we had a element, a sniper element on a rooftop, and there's a Bradley fighting vehicle on an intersection, and he calls back like, hey, we got, we see bad guys on the building of building 48J or whatever the building was. And the company commander's like, you got any guys on that building? I'm like,

3:34:37Jocko Willink:hold on. I'm like, cause it's, you know, multiple guys with scoped weapons on top of a building. I'm like, do me a favor, have the Bradley count the number of buildings he sees till he gets to that target. And he's like, what? And I go, please. he's like okay he says all right hey whatever dash one count the number of buildings you see before you get to that target building guy's like what he said count the number of buildings counts the number of buildings come back he said uh hey we mis-id the number of the building it's actually building 32 like yeah we got friendlies on that building do not engage so that's what we were dealing with a lot and there was cases in ramadi of people engaging home v's like there's probably no vehicle in the world with a more distinct silhouette than a Humvee.

3:35:27And we had

3:35:29Jocko Willink:guys in, there was soldiers and Marines that engaged Humvees because of the confusion and chaos of the battlefield. So that's how we started off with a massive lesson learned. With a lesson learned like that, and you took ownership of that, I mean, and this is advice for future leaders in war. I mean, how do you brush that off and get your head back in the game? Well, what are we going to do to prevent it? You know, like, we got lessons learned. And, you know, I think when you're shooting headplates and you miss one, if you start thinking about the one that you just missed, you're going to miss two more.

3:36:16Jocko Willink:And I think that's a really important thing to be able to do with other factors in your life of, hey, look, this happened. It went bad. We need to fix it. We need to fix it. And we need to move on. If you live in the past on stuff, it without, you know, you learn from it, but you can't, you know, it's like I say about when you, with losing people, if you lose someone like your friend, your parents, your brother, your sister, whoever, someone close to you dies, you got to remember them, but you can't dwell on the past. You can't just be there forever because then you're not moving forward. So, I think it's the similar activity here from my standpoint is like, okay, this is what we did wrong.

3:36:59Jocko Willink:This is the lessons that we learned, and here's how we move forward. Did you feel any type of reluctancy to address your men as their leader again after that? Immediately after that? No.

3:37:19No.

3:37:22Jocko Willink:Man, I was really close with these guys, you know, up and down the chain of command. These guys, we did a workup together. They've seen me in every different type of scenario. They're not like, these are my brothers. We had great relationships, you know? So I wasn't, if I would have blamed one of these guys, I would have been ashamed to show my face. You know what I mean? But they were more like, hey, this wasn't your fault. Like, yes, it was. Like, they've tried to re-explain to me, you know? Well, the other thing is they're all thinking, he's got our fucking back. And that's really definitely one of the most important attributes of a good leader, is knowing that your boss has your fucking back.

3:38:17Jocko Willink:Yeah. Yes, it is absolutely.

3:38:24Jocko Willink:And you got to know that they have your back. And this is one of those things where it turns into, or you have to watch out. because if you work for me and your impression of me that I give you is that no matter what you do, I'll cover for you. Now we get into a bad zone because you have to know that if you do something that's immoral, illegal, or unethical, I'm not going to have your back. Now, if you explain to me what happened and what went wrong and you had a, what we, what we learned from the army, which is a good shot, bad result, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. But if you are doing things that are illegal, immoral, or unethical, you need to know that I will not have your back.

3:39:19Jocko Willink:And even something, even, you know, even this isn't that extreme, but like I would tell guys, uh, Hey, you get a DUI. It doesn't matter what I do to your back because it's going to be in the system and you're going to get in trouble and there's nothing I can do about it. Like there's nothing I can do. Like I can go and be a character witness and tell the Commodore how great you are, but the Commodore is going to go, oh yeah, you had a DUI, you're getting busted down and you were pulling you're from your platoon. And it doesn't matter how much I have your back. That's what's happening. So, yes, you're right.

3:39:52Jocko Willink:But as a leader, you've got to put those parameters up to make sure that guys understand What the left and right lateral limits are and they can be big But they're not infinite and that's why I need to know that you have my back because if you're out doing something that you shouldn't be doing What are you doing to me, man? Because I am gonna I'm gonna take the fall as well It's not like i'm just gonna be like oh no he did it because I I am responsible You do something stupid or you do something illegal and you get rolled up I'm going down too, as I should, because I let it happen. So yes, a hundred percent.

3:40:30Jocko Willink:And these guys knew that. These guys knew that. That is how we have to operate. And luckily for me, like I said, I did that tour as the Admiral's aide. I understood what those left and right lateral limits were. I understood that very well. And that was a real blessing because there were no there wasn't really any ambiguity about that. If you do something that's outside the box, I will not have your back. Anything you do inside the box, and like I said, it's a big box, a big box. I got you. But you better be to the wrong building. Yep, they're going to happen. There are things that are going to happen.

3:41:18And I will have your back as long as your intent was good as long as you were doing the right thing for the right reasons all day and yeah my guys knew that for sure and i knew that with them how was it working with chris kyle great yeah

3:41:40Jocko Willink:it's great he was a very dedicated sniper he was a wise ass he was funny as hell he was a shit talker um in like a good team guy way and he was just a great guy to have on a platoon yeah man like you'd see him and Tony looking at imagery for hours, trying to figure out what building would be best, looking at the angles, looking at the distances, looking at the long axis. Like, that's what they did. And, you know, he was good, man. He was good. He would spend, you know, a long time on his gun in sniper overwatch positions. And he would set himself up for some good positions. You know what I mean?

3:42:32Jocko Willink:Like, he would set himself up on some long axis positions where he can see four or five blocks. And meanwhile, like, a new guy sniper might see half of an alley. So, but he earned that position, you know? He earned it with his patience and his discrepancy. Like, he was very, very good. He was as good as it gets. Was he good at passing on wisdom? Yeah, you know, I'd say I was a little bit out of the line of fire of him passing on wisdom because I wasn't a sniper.

3:43:08Jocko Willink:But, you know, he'd pass on some hassling to these new guys, I can tell you that. The funny thing is, you know, he liked to do, this is weird, but he liked to do like pranks, like a grade school kid, like he would prank people, do funny stuff, like that's what he's So he wasn't the, you know, in the movie, they make him out to be like super serious all the time and all this stuff. And he was actually just a funny, great guy to be around that brought a lot of, uh, brought a lot of entertainment with him, you know, a lot of entertainment. Right on. And we had, you know, and we had a good crew of guys that was, you know, that's a SEAL platoon, man.

3:43:51Jocko Willink:It's a SEAL platoon. I was, I guess there's SEAL platoons where they're not like having fun and, and ribbing each other and, you know, being brothers. But I was never in a platoon like that. I was always in a platoon that was freaking awesome to hang around. And, you know, when I was a young SEAL, what I do on the weekends, I went to the team. we went to the team on the weekends, which team on Saturday and worked on your gear, went to the team on Sunday and, and worked out with your buddies. That's all we did. That's what we did. Cause there wasn't anything else. And once I had a family, I had to like, at least take a little bit of time.

3:44:39Jocko Willink:But even then I was, my family was second to my platoon, to my task unit, to the teams. I, I would love to tell you that I'm embarrassed to admit that, or that that's not the right thing. But when you're in the seal teams, I think that is the thing. That's the way it is, man. That's the way it is. And, you know, God bless my wife, who was just like a saint, but she handled the family stuff, and I handled the war stuff. Were you married at this time? Yep. So going to Ramadi, I had three kids at that time. You had three kids. How were you handling... I mean, how was... How long... How many deployments had you done married with kids and or with kids?

3:45:24Two.

3:45:24Jocko Willink:Well, no, one. Three. Three. So my daughter was born, my oldest daughter was born the day before I went on the strike deployment in, at team two. She was born and I left. Never changed a diaper. And then while I was in college, I had two more kids, because I was home. And then, um, and yeah, I mean,

3:45:51Jocko Willink:I was in the SEAL teams, man. Like, we go on deployment, we go to war, and you want to be with your kids, but you're not going to be with your kids in the SEAL teams. It's not a good family environment. Now, if you have a strong family, you know, men have been going, you know, on some form of deployment since the beginning of time. You said this at breakfast, and I fucking love this. I mean, because I hear sometimes people like, oh, you know, the father's got to be around. But I wasn't around. You know? And a lot of dads weren't around. And they raised some awesome kids. And so, yeah, guys have been going on the hunt, on the sea voyage, on the crusade.

3:46:38Jocko Willink:Whatever you're going on, men have been going on that stuff for a long time. And the kids understand that, and the moms understand it, and they raise warriors. How long have you been married?

3:46:59Jocko Willink:I think 28 years. What is the secret to a successful marriage? There's a couple, but number one is marry a pretty awesome woman.

3:47:12Jocko Willink:And then, you know, just apply the principles of leadership to your marriage. You know, it's the same principles that you want your wife to listen to you, you better listen to her. You want your wife to trust you, you better trust her. You want your wife to respect you, you better treat her with respect. You want your wife to care about you, you better care about her. If something goes wrong, you better take ownership. So that's worked out great for me. And my wife's a saint. My wife's a saint. I'm sure she is. Want more from The Sean Ryan Show? Join our Patreon today for more clips and exclusive content.

3:47:54You'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guests interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus, unlock bonus content, like our extra Intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions. Our new SRS on-site specials and access to an entire tactical training library you will not find anywhere else. And the best part? Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly. Your insights can help shape the show. Join us on Patreon now, support the mission, and become part of the Sean Ryan Show's story.

3:48:42I'm sorry.

3:48:47so

3:49:03you

3:49:10Jocko Willink:You know, when you were asking me about the pressure on my first deployment to Iraq, and I told you that I didn't really feel

3:49:24Jocko Willink:this wasn't... The idea of someone getting wounded or killed was kind of a little bit of a distant thing in the back of my mind. And in Ramadi, it was front of mind.

3:49:48Jocko Willink:And when you see that many casualties happening,

3:49:54Jocko Willink:like on a daily basis, there is the odds are going to catch you.

3:50:05Jocko Willink:And of course, do you hope, am I fatalistic? Because that was my thought process? Maybe. But it was also just numbers, man. It was just the numbers. You just look at the numbers. And every day, every time you leave the wire, there is a chance. And so it's a daily basis. And listen, the Army and the Marine Corps are just making the most incredible sacrifices.

3:50:45Jocko Willink:You see it. You go to their memorials. You hear it on the radio. That's one thing that was, you know, you'd hear it on the radios. You'd hear, hey, there's one KAA heading back to Camp Ramadi, heading to, or three wounded heading to Charlie Med. Like you would hear these things. It's just constant. This is daily. Daily.

3:51:06So...

3:51:09Jocko Willink:And, you know, I try and give as much...

3:51:15Jocko Willink:admiration to the Army and the Marine Corps,

3:51:21Jocko Willink:who fought so hard in such terrible conditions.

3:51:28Jocko Willink:And that's what they were facing every day, and that's what we were facing. And...

3:51:38Jocko Willink:we had... the Blue on Blue happen... almost pretty quickly thereafter. Cowrie got wounded bad. And, you know, Cowrie's just a stud. And he's in Charlie Med. He's all doped up on morphine. And the doc pulls me aside and he's like, hey, I don't know if this leg's going to make it. Roger. And Cowie like, you know, bend over to like hold his hand. And he's like, the first thing's out of his mouth. Let me stay.

3:52:23Jocko Willink:Damn.

3:52:32Jocko Willink:So that's the kind of guys you got, you know. Let me stay.

3:52:42Jocko Willink:So, you know, this is, um, once the 11AD shows up with Colonel McFarland, later General McFarland, you know, that's when we start pressing in to the city. that's when we start supporting these combat overwatch or the yeah these uh combat outposts being built in the city which is a huge construction project and there's a time period when they're building these combat outposts in the city that they're extremely vulnerable because they're doing a construction project in the middle of a war zone and so what can we do to help that is we can set up sniper overwatch positions and when the enemy would maneuver in to attack them, we would kill them.

3:53:26Jocko Willink:And it was actually General McFarland. He wrote it in an article. It's like those combat outposts being built were bait. He didn't put them out there as bait. He put them out there on the grand strategy of taking over the city, but it's like a salt lick. You start building this construction project in the middle of downtown Ramadi, the insurgents are absolutely going to attack you. And when they do, my guys would be in an offset position, 200 meters away, 300 meters away, 400 meters away, looking down a long axis avenue of approach where the moos would come. And they'd kill them. And it was, you know, an ideal setup for us.

3:54:21Jocko Willink:you know and it was when we started doing this like this the amount of the amount of scrutiny for the 11ad for general mcfarland you know he was getting scrutinized on the amount of combat that his guys were getting the amount of casualties and the amount of killing that he was doing he was getting that scrutiny from his from the from the meth and i was feeling the same thing um and it was always like please come see come and see come and see what's happening here you'll it doesn't take long to figure out and thankfully you know they did you know i had the siege of soda commander who's a great guy at the time came down visited the you know the commodore visited the socom commander visited you know general general brown socom commander he came to see us in Ramadi.

3:55:14Jocko Willink:We got 35 SEALs, bro. He's in charge of all of the world of special operations. He came to Ramadi to see what we were doing, to talk to the conventionals, make sure that they were getting what we needed. So there was a lot of eyes on what we were doing. And part of that was because of the amount of people we were killing. And part of it was because they were very risky operations. Can I, I want to ask a question. You'd been studying this. you've been studying Ramadi since before you got there. SEALs have, what, a year-and-a-half workup? You started studying, sounds like, I think, did you say maybe you found out six months into workup that you were going to Ramadi?

3:55:56Jocko Willink:No, we didn't know we were going to Ramadi until like a couple weeks before. Okay. Yeah. Well, you're talking about doing dailies, weeklies, monthlies of troops in contact, casualties. You've studied this fucking battle space. It's very obvious it's hot. Why would anybody be under scrutiny for the amount of combat that they're seeing when they want you to incrementally take over a fucking city? That makes zero sense to me. Yeah. Yep. And again, it wasn't just me and Special Operations. General McFarland was feeling the same thing. And again, just like General McFarland had a great relationship with the MEF commander, I had a great relationship with my commanding officer.

3:56:47Jocko Willink:And so when I explained to him what was happening, you know, we started probably a few weeks, like three weeks into these sniper overwatches that we were doing. This was early in deployment. And we'd killed, I don't know, how many, probably, I don't know, 10, 15, something, mostly IED emplacers. and I talked to my headquarters and they're like, Hey, you know, you're killing these IED in places, but the IEDs haven't gone down yet. And I said, Hey, sir, the, uh, the average insurgency, according to the counterinsurgency manual last seven years, it's been three weeks. Can I get some more time to work?

3:57:29Jocko Willink:And he's like, yeah, check. But yeah, I mean, it, well, you know what it's like, you know what it was like for a SEAL rotation at the time. You know, you went to Iraq, right? There's not a lot of direct enemy contact. And there's not a lot of killing most of the time. You're doing DAs, they don't want to fight. Do they get killed sometimes? Yes. But Most of the time, they don't really want to fight. So they surrender. And you capture. The capture-kill part is mostly capture. For me, my first deployment was almost all capture. Killed very few. Well, now you're in this zone where there's enemy that are, like I said, like going to a salt lick.

3:58:19Jocko Willink:They are maneuvering through the streets. and we're in locations with tactical advantage that we selected with long access down multiple roads, you're going to start killing a lot of enemy fighters. And it was abnormal. It was abnormal. And so, you know, the scrutiny came, but I welcomed it. It's no factor. You know, we had to have guys sign a shooter statement for everybody that we killed. There was like a sworn shooter statement. And at first, guys like, well, you know, why we got to do this? It's like, hey, because in five years or 10 years or 15 years or 20 years, someone's going to come back and say, this person died here.

3:59:11Jocko Willink:Who did it? And we'll say either, oh, yeah, that was us because this is why or no, that wasn't us. so i again luckily for me that i had seen the the the officer side of things i understood that and i was able to explain it to the guys explain to the guys like hey there's a reason we're seeing this scrutiny it's because we're killing a lot of bad guys and they the chain of command needs to make sure that we're doing the right thing for the right reasons we are and they see that and we got We got such great support from the Siege of SOTIF, from my chain of command, from the Special Operations Chain of Command, for sure.

3:59:55Jocko Willink:Like I said, General Brown came out. And by the way, the Army and the Marine Corps was like epic. You know, I had the colonel that was in charge, General Sean McFarland had him on my podcast. And, you know, like, you can tell it was as good as it gets. and so yeah there's there's scrutiny because you're killing a lot of bad guys and there's also scrutiny because these are risky freaking operations and you know a big one was going out in the daytime why would you give up the tactical advantage of going out at night which we have because we got night vision we got lasers the whole nine yards why would we make that mistake well there's a bunch of reasons you know there's a bunch of reasons number one our mission from the siege of sodif was to train and fight company and platoon sized elements of iraqi soldiers so that means we are supposed to train them and go and fight with them company and platoon size elements not special mission units not da units company and platoon sized elements of infantry soldiers.

4:01:06Jocko Willink:That's what we were supposed to. That's what our task was. We put together some scouts. We put together some, some special mission units, but that was our task. They don't have night vision. They didn't even have flashlights. We used to give like a fire team of Iraqis a flashlight. So for them to do a clearance operation at night was like just a non-starter. So that means they're going to go out in the day. Well, since we're training and fighting them, guess who's out in the day? We are. So now since I got my guys out in the field during the day, I want to protect them. So what am I doing? Overwatch positions.

4:01:37Jocko Willink:What time is it? Daytime. And by the way, we killed 99 % of the enemy was during the daytime because at nighttime, the enemy came out a lot less. So that, and again, one of the big mistakes that I made was I never really explained that outside of my chain of command. So to the teams at large, most of the guys go, what were you doing? Oh, here's why we're doing it. They go, cool, cool. Occasionally you get a guy like that doesn't know what was happening, doesn't know how bad it was, couldn't conceive a reason to go out in the daytime or couldn't conceive how it's possible to kill that many enemy fighters.

4:02:21Jocko Willink:Bro, they are everywhere. And so I should have done a better of communicating that aspect of things. But I didn't really recognize it because my chain of command, they knew, and most of the people that were around me that were actually talking to me, they would be like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. We get it. Like I said, including the chain of command on both the special operations side and the conventional side. But you're going into these areas and the Army's taking casualties, Marine Corps is taking casualties, and I know that at some point we're going to take casualties.

4:03:07And the...

4:03:08Jocko Willink:You know, like I said, we had a couple guys wounded. Cowie was wounded bad. But on August 2nd, that's when Ryan Jobe got wounded severely. And, you know, he was shot in the face. And I know when you had Leif on the podcast, Leif gave you a pretty detailed description. But you had, you know, a guy like Ryan Jobe who... I had his parents on my podcast. Just... Man, you can't even describe just what I...

4:03:52What a being of light. You know, just tough, funny, like, we'll literally do anything for you.

4:04:09Jocko Willink:Just as good as they come. And he gets shot. thankfully he was had his weapon right up in his cheek well where he's supposed to have it you know three hours into a clearance operation on a rooftop and he still is a disciplined machine gunner he has his weapon up in his cheek well and he single shot hits his rifle hits his machine gun and hits him in the face and just devastating damage to his face and Leif, you know, they Kazevak him. And this kind of initiates one of the larger battles in the Battle of Ramadi was on August 2nd.

4:05:06and

4:05:07Jocko Willink:Leif and his guys go back to Cop Falcon which is a combat outpost and we have a great relationship with the 137 and Leif's great friends with their company commander Mike Baima and I'm great friends with Colonel Tedesco and now they're starting to take heavies out there in the field it's a big gunfight and Leif gets Ryan Kazovak, and it didn't look good, although he did stabilize. But Leif did not think he was going to make it for a bit. And these guys are back there, and the army, our brothers in the army, said, hey, we're taking contact from some of these buildings. We think this is where these insurgents are.

4:06:01Jocko Willink:can you help us?

4:06:05Jocko Willink:And, you know, Leith called me on the radio, and he's like, hey, here's what's happening. The Army needs our help. They want us to go hit some buildings. And I'm like, you good? He said, I'm good. I'm like, execute.

4:06:27Jocko Willink:And they went out to hit those buildings. And, you know, it's already, like I said, one of the biggest battles. And, you know, Leith and Tony, you know, Tony was the platoon chief down there, and just no hesitation from any of the boys roll out.

4:06:47Jocko Willink:They softened up the target with the Brad's, you know, 25-millimeter chain gun, and I think they went in the first building and cleared it. the second building they go into, and they take fire from an adjacent building, and Mark Lee,

4:07:13who's another guy that's just all good, like in his whole being, in his soul, he's good.

4:07:28Jocko Willink:and he gets shot killed.

4:07:32Jocko Willink:And, uh,

4:07:39Jocko Willink:I was actually, I was in the talk, and I'm watching this happen. Watching this happen, and I see, I see them carrying on ISR, I see them carrying a guy out. and one of the guys in the talk goes, maybe it's an Iraqi. And I actually knew that it wasn't because I knew that Leith didn't have any Iraqis with him. So I knew he was one of our guys.

4:08:07And Leith gets back to Cop Falcon.

4:08:13Jocko Willink:He calls me up and he told me what happened. He said, we have one KIA. And I said, who? And he said, Charlie won four.

4:08:33I'm sorry, man.

4:08:43Jocko Willink:So,

4:08:48got their guys together, you know, and came back to base.

4:08:59Jocko Willink:And, you know, I mentioned General Brown had come to visit. He came to visit on August 2nd. That was just when the scheduled visit was. and he came to the flight line for the angel flight and earlier that morning you know what the one of the marine elements that we worked with from 3-8 there was a fourth platoon i think it was lima company and tony and lafe and those guys had done a bunch of operations with them and gotten to know them and um they're a system platoon commander or their platoon commander. You know, he was kind of bro-ing out friends with Tony because Tony's Tony, you know?

4:09:48And, you know, it's weird.

4:09:50Jocko Willink:I heard this story from both guys at a later time, but

4:09:55when Tony gets up there and he sees the platoon commander from 4th Platoon, and he's like,

4:10:01Jocko Willink:dang they must have heard about Mark and the platoon commander told me later that he saw Tony and he said dang they must have heard about Joe because that morning Joe Tompsey from 3-8 he was killed

4:10:23Jocko Willink:wow

4:10:27Jocko Willink:so So SEALs, Marine, and Army, we stood there on that flight line and loaded those boys up to go home.

4:10:46Jocko Willink:And the war doesn't stop. and

4:10:54Jocko Willink:that was a shortfall for the SEAL teams out of the 90s you know you think you do an operation and when the operation's over it's over and if you lose a guy well it doesn't really I mean it matters but the operation's over but we never really thought about that and guess what the Army and the Marine Corps they understood that. We had to learn that immediately.

4:11:25Jocko Willink:How are you holding it together? I had to focus on the job.

4:11:34Jocko Willink:You know, I had to focus on work.

4:11:39Jocko Willink:We did the memorial service.

4:11:46Jocko Willink:told some stories about Mark at the memorial service. We were in Vegas, and he was like a maniac, dude. Just hilarious. He was gambling.

4:12:02Jocko Willink:And he would, like, I'd walk through the casino, and I'd see him gambling, and he'd be like, hey, sir, when are the new Cadillacs coming out? I'm winning big over here. Like, he was just that guy. and uh or if you're playing blackjack with him and the dealer would bust you know he'd yell out everybody's a winner and he'd get the whole casino saying that stuff so we got to tell some stories about mark um and then i also remember that day Seth, he had an operation plan on Eastern Ramadi. And this was like the day Mark got killed, before the memorial service. And he sent me like a webby, which for those of you who don't, it's like text messaging.

4:12:50Jocko Willink:He sends me a webby. He's like, hey, we're not gonna do this operation tonight. And I was like, hey, you're good to go, man. Like, I understand that, like, chain of command, don't worry, I got it. like you're clear to go and he's like he's like no no we're not gonna do it and i said no no you're cleared like you can do it and he called me on the field phone he's like hey bro i don't want to take the guys out right now i was like oh got it he's like guys aren't in the mental state we need 24 hours but again for for seth stone to be so in tune with his guys recognizing like they're not in a good psychological position to go out.

4:13:33Jocko Willink:So he calls me up and tells me like it's a no-go. Like that's leadership.

4:13:43Jocko Willink:And you know, it's just devastating, man. It's devastating because again, Mark, you know, we didn't seem like Ryan was going to live, you know, and we didn't really know he was going to be blind yet, but it seemed like he would live. and um but mark you know this is again just a terrible indescribable loss and when you talk to the army guys too it hit all them because

4:14:15Jocko Willink:we were we were getting after it you know and like i told you earlier when when when something happened there on the radio, like everyone would kind of hear it. You might not hear it directly, but if you're in my platoon and you hear, you'd hear reports. And if I'm an army guy and you're my platoon Sergeant and I hear, Oh, we just got mortared an hour ago. And then I hear on my radio, Hey, seals just took out, or it's like T you ramped engaged three mortar men with with three rounds of 300 Win Mag resulting in three EKIA. Bro, I'm going right over you. I'm like, hey, the SEALs just whacked those dudes.

4:14:56And that happened a lot.

4:15:00Jocko Willink:And, you know, we had been very lucky. And we had been very lucky for months. And so talking to the Army guys, you know, when Mark got killed, it was like the invincibility was shattered.

4:15:19Jocko Willink:but the war does continue. And so we stood down for like a day, did the memorial service the next day, and then we got our gear back on. Fuck, man. As a leader,

4:15:45what do you say to your men? for them to keep it together.

4:15:55Jocko Willink:I told them the truth. And that was that I did not know what to do. Except for one thing. Work. And I knew that every day that we weren't doing our job, there was going to be soldiers and Marines that were going to pay the price for it. And I knew 100 % that what Mark would want us to do would go. Go. Go and fight. And by the way, Mark's brother's a Marine. And by the way, Ryan Jobe's brother's a Marine. Like, you don't think that they want us to go out there and do everything we can? Seth Stone's brother in the Army. Like, this is... We... There was only one thing to do. Do I know... Did I know how to mourn?

4:16:47Jocko Willink:Did I know how to say the right thing about loss and death and life and all those things? No. I'll tell you what. I told them exactly. I don't know what to tell you. All I know is what I know how to do. And that's work. We're going to go back to work, and we're going to take the fight to these Muj. We're going to kill as many of them as we can.

4:17:10With as much loss as you've experienced up to this day, would you have changed anything? Would you have told them anything different?

4:17:26Jocko Willink:Maybe.

4:17:30Jocko Willink:But I don't know that there's anything else to do in a situation like that. I could tell them what we were talking about earlier, like remember, don't dwell, and that kind of stuff, but these are, you know, we're all very focused at this time on what's happening. Very focused on what's happening. And so I don't know what the broader, you know, life impact of that, you know, could I say some philosophical thing? I don't think so, man. I think I actually said the philosophical thing. we're going to get back to work. We're going to get our gear on. We're going to lock and load our weapons. And we're going to go do what we're supposed to do because we're frogmen.

4:18:23I can't think of anything better to say, to be honest with you.

4:18:29Jocko Willink:Yeah.

4:18:33Jocko Willink:We're frogmen. This is what we do. This is who we are. this is what every one of us signed up for. This is it.

4:18:55Do you want to talk about Cowie?

4:19:00Well, Cowie, he was home, man. um how he you know like i said earlier he said let me stay and i was like bro go heal up and you know he wasn't going to heal up not in four more months or five more months

4:19:22Jocko Willink:his his dude he took a freaking armor piercing round to the femur there was chunks of leg gone Like, it's a miracle that he kept his leg. Props to the Charlie Med, the docs that worked on him, and all the people at Walter Reed or wherever else, Bethesda, like, they kept his leg, man. But, you know, it was terrible for Cowie, because then Cowie wasn't there, you know? And, dude, he wanted to be there. You know, he wanted to be there. He would have given anything to be there. Yeah. And then, you know, you get Leif. Leif, just the same responsibility that I talked about when it comes to taking ownership of a thing.

4:20:10Jocko Willink:Well, there's Leif, man. And Leif is taking ownership of having one of his guys severely wounded and having one of them killed. And me too. Like, this is us. I approved all these operations. I came up with this whole damn idea.

4:20:30Jocko Willink:and Leif called me. Can we go? And I said, yes. Leif came up with this idea and I said, yes. And this is on us. That's the way it is, man. That's the burden of command. That's the way it is. And Leif was devastated, of course. Leif was completely devastated. And when he talked to me about it. You know, he said something along the lines of like, I don't know. I don't know if I made the right decision in going back out there.

4:21:22Jocko Willink:And I told him there was no decision to make. That's not a decision. there are army brothers that have gone out over and over again to pull us out of bad situations. And these fellow Americans are asking for our help. That is not a decision. That is what we do. That is what we do. And we do it every time. You ever talk to Vietnam guys, Vietnam guys, if it was a platoon in trouble or a down pilot, they were going. Same thing with the Sea Wolf pilots, by the way. SEAL platoon in trouble, they're going. That's what they're doing. And when our Army brothers are asking us for help, we go. That's not a decision.

4:22:19Jocko Willink:That is duty. That is being a frog man. And I also told him if we had a crystal ball and we could tell when something bad was going to happen, of course, we wouldn't do that thing, whatever that thing was, but we don't have a crystal ball. And combat is inherently freaking dangerous.

4:22:42Jocko Willink:And Leif understood that. Leif understood that. It didn't make it any easier for his soul, for his heart that was broken, but he understood. He understood that that's what Mark, you know, and I was talking to Mark's mom the other day and Mark has had a huge impact now. America's Mighty Warriors, like is an incredible organization that's helped out so many, not just SEALs, but other people. And she said, you know, if I could talk to Mark and Mark had a chance to go back and not sacrifice his life on that day, but none of this other stuff would have happened, he wouldn't he wouldn't come back i'm like i know

4:23:33Jocko Willink:so this is what we do

4:23:39this is what we sign up for and

4:23:47that's part of being a frog man and look we we had some

4:23:51Jocko Willink:You know, we had the 80s and the 90s.

4:23:59And, man, like, there was nothing going on.

4:24:03Jocko Willink:And Mark was the first, you know, Mark was the first SEAL killed in Iraq. And again, you're like, why? Well, look at the battle space, man. Look at the battle space. It was a complete war zone. Why did the 1-1 AD lose that many guys? Why did the first of the 506 lose that? My guys, why did the 137? Why did the 38 Marines? Like, just losses. Why? Well, it was a freaking war zone, man.

4:24:38And the war didn't stop.

4:24:42Jocko Willink:So it was back to operations.

4:24:47And that's what we did.

4:24:51Jocko Willink:got our gear back on, locked and loaded our weapons, and back to the field, back to conducting these operations.

4:25:04You know, and as far as what did we change?

4:25:09Jocko Willink:We honestly, there was, after that one, it was like we were so used to the city, you know? My first deployment to Iraq, we went all over the place. We went all the way from Najaf down south, all the way to Hadith up north. We went east of Baghdad, west of Baghdad. We went out to Ramadi. I was all over the place. This whole deployment, I only left Ramadi one time to let go to Balad for one meeting, the first three days, four days of deployment. And I was back in Ramadi the whole time. So we knew what was going on and so we continued to push and you know the guys every one of those guys night after night day after day jocked up getting in a humvee driving past the damn vehicle graveyard that had 75 or a hundred destroyed vehicles in it from ieds out again, out again, out again.

4:26:17Jocko Willink:The Army, the Marine Corps, and us. It's the way it was.

4:26:25Fuck, man. Jocko, what were you awarded the Silver Star for? Well, it was just this deployment. The whole deployment? Basically this deployment, yeah. How did the deployment end?

4:26:46Jocko Willink:Well, we continued to push operations. We continued to eliminate enemy fighters. We saw the beginning of the Anbar Awakening, which was an incredible process that took place. And again, General McFarlane and I talked about it for a long time on the podcast I did with him. But the local populace began to turn against the insurgents, which was the goal. And as this happened, we started seeing, you know, Intel would come in that there's enemy fighters in this area, or there's an enemy fighter in this area, or there's a group of IED makers over here. So we started pushing when I say we like coalition forces, we started really pushing and taking it to the enemy.

4:27:37Jocko Willink:Um, we had one, we, we had started really pushing some good operations and eliminating a lot, a lot of bad guys. And we were getting towards the end of deployment. Um, And, you know, again, man, I'm talking about, I'm just talking about my guys, but there are so many stories, you know, there was so much loss there and so much heroism there. You're hearing one person. I've had a bunch of guys on my podcast that were everybody from brigade commander, company commanders, battalion commanders, and gunners and medics to tell their little tiny part of the story. their little tiny part of the story, you know?

4:28:32Jocko Willink:The brigade reconnaissance element. Dan Pinion, he was like the sergeant major. And they had the heaviest casualties of any group, any company-sized element. He has a guy named Marquise Quick that jumped on a grenade to save some of his other teammates. and like it, it kind of just happened and almost got overlooked and they're trying to get him the medal of honor now, but that's a one, that's a one. And I didn't know about that. I didn't know about that until he came on my podcast and told me about it and I didn't know about it. So my, my point in saying all this man is I'm giving you like a little fraction of my view.

4:29:21Jocko Willink:And I had 40 SEALs in Ramadi. And I just want you and everybody to know that there was companies and platoons from the Army and the Marine Corps that were out there all day, every day, and they were taking the fight to the enemy, and they did an outstanding job, and they suffered insane casualties over and over and over again. And I've tried to tell as many people as I can about that. There's a reunion coming in Texas, January 16th, 2026, the 20-year reunion of Ramadi. It's January 16th and 17th. But I hope that as many people that were there can go to that. That is fucking cool. Yes. and General McFarland is leading it.

4:30:20Jocko Willink:And there was just so much heroism in that city. And to be able to witness some of it with my guys and with other groups, it was just... It was just... It's amazing to look back on. So much sacrifice. And such, you know, such incredible Americans.

4:30:48yeah it's it's humbling to think about and so as this deployment for us is now starting we're

4:31:00Jocko Willink:starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and one of the things that I I did on my last deployment I I always figured I never would tell someone like hey this is the last stop because I I think that's like bad luck. I didn't want him to freak out. I didn't mind bad luck, but I didn't want everyone else to feel bad luck. So we were getting kind of towards the end of deployment.

4:31:25And Seth, who, you know, is just incredible.

4:31:33Jocko Willink:And he's out there and he's in Corregidor, reading his guys. And they do an operation. in support of the first of 506 who again can't say enough good stuff can't say enough good things about the first of the 506 the battalion commander their company commanders their company sergeants their their e-dogs i mean just just awesome and and i think part of this is when you get into like a real fight like this dude everyone is just like wants to help out and if I'm thankful. And Seth and his guys had been out there with the first of the 506 for pretty much the entire deployment for them. And they planned an operation, set up two Overwatch positions, mutually supporting Overwatch positions, down in the Malab district, South Malab district.

4:32:33Jocko Willink:and Seth was in one overwatch position and the other overwatch position got attacked. They were getting attacked through the morning. RPGs, small arms fire, things were starting to escalate. And somebody through dead space got close enough to throw a grenade and threw a grenade. And Mikey Monsoor, who, again, just as solid as they come, man, as solid as they come,

4:33:10he saw their grenade,

4:33:13Jocko Willink:yelled out grenade. The way he was positioned on that rooftop, he was the one that could have gotten away from it. He could have left his guys exposed, but instead he jumped on it.

4:33:34Jocko Willink:The other guys were wounded bad, though.

4:33:39Jocko Willink:And called over to Seth, and Seth assembled his guys, left his Iraqis there, left their gear there, just brought their primary kit, rolled over, fought their way to that position, and then got that under control, organized, and got them Kasevac'd out and got back to base, Camp Corregidor. And then Seth had to take some of his guys that could still function mentally back to get the Iraqis and back to get the gear. So, you know, Seth just stepping up. And it was the battalion commander.

4:34:37Jocko Willink:He called me up and told me, hey, because I could hear what was happening over the radio. But once they were out of the field, he called me and he said, gave me a sit rep on the guys. One guy was like pretty good to go. Two guys were wounded.

4:35:01Jocko Willink:you know, they were gonna get medevaced, and he said he didn't think Mikey was gonna make it.

4:35:11Jocko Willink:He said they were doing CPR on him. He didn't think he was gonna make it.

4:35:19Jocko Willink:And he was right.

4:35:32So it was, I mean, immediately, I immediately knew that he had jumped on the grenade. And I talked to the guys once they got to Germany, the guys that had been Kasevac'd.

4:35:51Jocko Willink:And they told me, you know, and they were like sending me sketches of what happened immediately. And so it was like about as clear of a Medal of Honor

4:36:05Jocko Willink:action that you could think of. And luckily, like I said, for Dan Pinion and his guy, Marquise Quick, they were in the middle of deployment. You know, for me, we were almost done. Um, so started putting that award together. And, um... Did you write that award? Seth did. And he got the input from, um, Mike and Doug, who were like... and Benny, who were the guys that were saved. and uh yeah he he put it together he started writing it and then i mean i chopped it edited it or whatever but yeah it was

4:37:00Jocko Willink:you know and talking to mikey's sister it's like i mean many conversations over the years but one of the things that always stuck with me was she was just like it was not a surprise meaning like that's mikey so i'm a surprise i think he's gonna what do you think he's gonna do save his teammates or save himself 6 6 we weren't surprised by it it's fucking incredible man yeah i mean the the families of those guys just all just amazing people and uh

4:37:42you know, that maybe a day later,

4:37:47Jocko Willink:Seth had to come, he needed to come talk to me about something. And like, I remember they, it was to get down, to get to, from Camp Corregidor to Camp Ramadi was down route Michigan, which was like, not a good place to drive down. And he came to see me. And when he did the,

4:38:21Jocko Willink:the battalion commander sent him in a section of tanks

4:38:32Jocko Willink:to make sure he'd be alright, you know?

4:38:46Jocko Willink:and that's you know that's why that that bond with those guys is so strong you know the um just being in that battle space with those guys that what they would do for us was just so like Like, you could just tell that they were, they cared about us as much as we cared about them.

4:39:12Jocko Willink:And, you know, they put Mikey Monsoors on the first of the 506 on their memorial wall. The guys that they lost, he's one of them. Wow.

4:39:25Jocko Willink:And now, at this point in the platoon, in the deployment, you know, we were, that was September 29th and

4:39:36Jocko Willink:we were kind of running low on guys man

4:39:44Jocko Willink:but we kept doing whatever we could do guys from team 5 showed up and man they were fired up man and I remember telling those guys like to their task unit their whole task unit you will take casualties which is a horrible thing to say and i'm looking at them and it's like as you're looking at them you're like i don't know if they really believe me and those guys god bless them man they went to mikey monstor's funeral they went to mark lee's funeral but they had just gone to mikey's funeral they were showing up maybe a week or two later like their advan and

4:40:36yeah but they were man they were um they were they were fired up and we turned over the best we possibly could with those guys and you you know so much and you just can't like download

4:40:54Jocko Willink:enough information. I remember I was like, I don't know, maybe this was before Mikey got killed, but we were doing some big clearance operation, and I'm like, ended up in some rear security while we're doing clearance, but we had done the clearance. Now we're moving back. And I'm in this, you know, just like a nug, because I'm out there, but I'm out there, kind of just to be out there. Mm-hmm. You know, Leif and Tony have got it, but I'm watching as the platoon is like moving through the streets and you think freaking guys are good right now like it's it was a very awesome thing to be witness to and the reputation you know that we had earned was like I I could see it I could feel it the way the army treated us the way the marine corps treated us it was like it was awesome it's incredible man like i'm i'm i have to say it is incredible i mean the deployment that you had the losses that you took the action that you saw the lives that you guys took i mean it's a fucking hard deployment and i just want to commend you and all you guys man i mean you know from from an outsider looking in you know you see especially nowadays i mean we're kind of talking about this this morning i mean you see a lot of you just see so much of fucking animosity within the veteran community it's a real fucking shame and um man like the tasking at bruiser guys man i'm you guys are fucking tight i mean i'm not aware of any you guys just seem really tight and um you know to have an employment like that with that that kinetic it's the loss that you guys have experienced and the respect you know that your guys have for you and that you have for them is truly fucking unmatched yeah it was uh it was an honor and it was the boys you know um i've I've never seen anything like it.

4:43:19Jocko Willink:When you asked me if I kind of knew what was happening in my first deployment, like I was in Baghdad, we were doing DAs, and I was like, yeah, I knew. And on this deployment, I really knew. Like every day, I knew that every day this was gonna be, this was the highlight of my life. This was the most thing, this was the most, this was the highlight of my life. I knew it every single day. I knew every time I went out, every time I saw the boys off, I knew that this was the most important thing I would do in my life was this. And, you know, one thing that I leaned on, because, you know, there's the whole political aspect of this thing of like, oh, why were we there?

4:44:09Jocko Willink:What was it worth? All that kind of thing. And one of the things that the brigade commander said to me as I was leaving, and we had a four-minute brigade meeting. Of a 30-minute brigade meeting, he spent three minutes talking to me and kind of saying, hey, this group of SEALs is leaving us. The Tasking of Bruiser guys are gone. And, you know, he presented me with this, like, wooden tank that they had made, like a little, cool little sculpture of a wooden tank, which, by the way, the guy that was in charge of getting those tanks made was one of the brigade staff who was killed in combat.

4:44:53Jocko Willink:But he said, uh...

4:45:03He said, your guys kept hundreds of my soldiers and Marines alive.

4:45:11Jocko Willink:And when I got home and I talked to Mark's mom, I talked to Mikey's mom and talked to Ryan's mom. That's the one thing that I felt I could indisputably tell them about their sons. Politics, Iraq, Al-Qaeda, whatever. However, your sons made sure that hundreds of American soldiers and Marines were able to go home to their families. And by the way, those soldiers and Marines made sure that my SEALs were able to come home to their families. Because the CASAVACs and the QRFs and the fire support was all them every single time. and tanks, they lost nine main battle tanks. So you think you're doing okay?

4:46:17Jocko Willink:Like, I'm happy they sent Seth Stone down to see me in a section of tanks, but we lost nine tanks when we were there. And those guys sent those tanks out and those Bradleys out and those soldiers and Marines over and over again to support my guys, Kazevak my guys, extract my guys, fire support from my guys. over and over and over again. And the fact that we were able to repay that in some way, killing IED and placers, killing mortarmen, killing RPG and machine gunners enemy, it's at least... I know that that's meaningful. I know it's meaningful. Mm-hmm.

4:47:12Thanks for sticking with me on that, man. You want to take a break? Sure. Let's take a break.

4:47:49Thank you.

4:48:36See you later.

4:48:41What do you think Sean? We're high.

4:49:06It's not that impressive, I live here

4:49:12Alright Jocko, we're back from the break nice shoot man oh right nice shooting but um so we're wrapping up task unit bruises deployment and um you know one thing that i one thing i wanted to ask is and i i think you know throughout the four or five hours i've been interviewing you i think i know but i'm curious what your perspective is, why do you think that your men have such a deep respect for you as a leader? Yeah, it's what I said earlier.

4:49:51Jocko Willink:I treated them with respect. I listened to what they had to say. I put my trust in them. And when you give those things to people, they give them back. No, it's not a guarantee they could be a nefarious bad person you know and that that happens but those guys they were just uh you know it's what the teams for me was always supposed to be and what it was you know that was that that was that is the teams to me when i think about the teams, best job ever, best guys ever. And all my platoons, I had like just great people. And yeah, I think, you know, kind of, I, everything for me was kind of a bonus.

4:50:57Jocko Willink:Like, you know, I enlisted in the Navy when I was 18 years old, you know, and now I'm an officer. I hadn't even been to college. Like that's a pretty cool bonus. And now I get to lead troops in combat. That's a pretty cool bonus. Now I'm in Iraq. That's a bonus. And tasking a bruiser in an incredible war zone. It's just all a bonus. My point in saying all that was, it wasn't like I was going to be Admiral. You know what I mean? Like, it wasn't... I wasn't going to be Admiral. Well, I mean, I guess I could have been Admiral, but I wasn't... That wasn't my goal. That was never... That was never really something I thought too much about.

4:51:40Jocko Willink:My career was really about just being with the platoons. About the fucking job. Yeah. Yeah. The same reason you joined. Yes. and I get it. You know, it's another thing when I was, when I was the admiral's aide, I saw what the admiral did, you know, and it was, he had a great attitude about it. You know, on September 11th, I think he started his job in the Pentagon as an acquisitions officer. And one thing he told me, he said, when, when September 11th happened, I check into my job as the acquisitions officer, last job in the world I wanted to do, you know because he joined he probably got in the teams in 1976 or something no vietnam i don't think he no gulf war and now this big war starts and he's in the pentagon doing acquisitions and he said you know what jaco i said this is my foxhole and i'm gonna fight and that's what he did and i think that attitude regardless of where you are you know sometimes i get people that were in the military and they didn't deploy to combat.

4:52:49Jocko Willink:And they're like borderline ashamed about it. And I'm like, hey man, you signed that dotted line and you did what your country needed you to do. So, you know, thank you for your service. But yeah, for me, I think that I really just loved the teams and the teams man every day was was awesome why did you decide to separate i mean i think you kind of just said it but the reason i'm asking jaco is you know to have um

4:53:28and i mean this in the best most respectable way it is a real fucking shame for the SEAL teams for the Navy for the United States to lose a leader like you and so and you know there's a lot of frustrations I think you know there's a lot of there's always has been there always will be right there's a lot of frustrations but especially especially in the last eight years you know there's a lot of frustration um within you know the military ranks i hear it i'm sure you fucking hear it all the time too and and you know it seems like the best leaders in my opinion always wind up leaving early it can definitely happen i mean we do have some amazing leaders in the seal teams um but you know for me personally so i get done with

4:54:29Jocko Willink:that task unit, come back, the Admiral who, you know, I had worked for was still in charge. And, you know, he, he, he met me on the plane when we landed. And he told me later that he's like, when he got on the plane, cause he got on the plane, like the plane lands, he got on the plane's family are outside. And he said, when he saw me on the plane, he was like, Oh, like, uh-oh because bro we we were you know we were in the game and you know at a certain point you you don't care about anything else you know what i mean and i was definitely at that point by a long shot and you know of course respectful to the admiral said hi and thanks for coming and and i got off and i saw my family and he said when i saw your family i was like he's gonna be fine And so he also said, what do you want to do?

4:55:30Jocko Willink:Like, it was awesome. You know, when Mark died, I talked to him. When Ryan was moved, like he was just awesome, supporting. And again, my whole chain of command, you know, the Commodore, the Admiral, my commanding officer, like everyone, the senior enlisted guys, because I knew all the senior enlisted master chiefs as well. And everyone was just very, very supportive. And so when I got done with that deployment, he said, where do you want to go? And I knew where I wanted to go because Ramadi was not over yet. And we saw like a glimpse of change, but they did some of the heaviest fighting after we left.

4:56:18And so I knew, because I was in training cell at SEAL Team 1,

4:56:24Jocko Willink:and when I was in training cell at SEAL Team 1, I learned so much, and it was so important. I realized how important it was to train. And then having my guys, Leif and Seth and the rest of the JOs and the E-Dogs, like, bringing them up in the teams, I knew that I needed to do that for more guys. And so I knew that the one place that I could do that was going to trade it. And so I said to the boss, the Admiral, I said, you know, I want to go to the trade it. And he said, cool. And he gave me orders to trade it. And when I got there, it was exactly, you know, what I, what I knew it was. You know, I knew that we had guys, and, you know, we got home October 21st.

4:57:14Jocko Willink:Or when we left Ramadi October 21st, the guys from Team 5 that are depicted in the movie Warfare, that happened November 19th. So, you know, we had just left. And those guys got blown up and, yeah. Elliot and Joe, you know, got severely wounded, which was horrible. but I knew that that's what I need to prepare guys for. And I knew that there was no better place to do that than trade at. And so that's what I did. I went to trade at and, you know, it really turned out to be even better than I thought it was going to be because now, now I have so much context in my head about leadership, about combat leadership, about the big army, the Marine Corps, the Navy, the battle space, everything from CQC to recons, just every type of operation that we could do.

4:58:09Jocko Willink:I kind of, I felt pretty good about. And so I went in there and started teaching, you know, started teaching leadership and started running training. And it was, it was awesome. It was awesome to be a part of. It was awesome to, yeah, awesome to be a part of. And it was, it was a little weird too. Um, like we'd be doing mount training, urban training, and I'd be watching and I'd see like some new guy standing in the middle of the street. And I would get like a, like a sick, like knot in my stomach. And I would like go over to him and like, bro, get out of the street, man. You're going to get shot out here.

4:58:47Jocko Willink:And like, I really, yeah, it was, it was definitely, you know, it was, it was perfect place for me to be because I cared about the guys more than anything. and I just had a bunch of experience with this exact thing that everyone was going to do. So, you know, that's what I did. And when you asked me about why I ended up retiring, so I showed up there and I was probably at like 17 years or something like that. And, you know, it was just, okay, this is what we're doing next. Do this for a while. And then I started, there's one thing that I didn't like when I came home from deployment. When I was gone on that deployment to Ramadi, when I left on my first, sorry, my first deployment to Iraq, when I left, my son couldn't crawl.

4:59:46Jocko Willink:When I got home, he could crawl and he could walk. So I was like, hmm, that sucks. In Ramadi, which was, and I also, you know, of course, you miss all the holidays, whatever. But then I, when I got home from Ramadi, he could swim.

5:00:09Jocko Willink:I remember asking my wife, like, who taught him how to swim? And she's like, oh, it was, you know, one of the lifeguards down at the base. And I'm like, dude, I'm a frog man. And someone else taught my son how to swim. That sucks. So that was like a little deposit in the back of my head. And, you know, it was a trade at and just, you know, we're gone all the time at trade at. and as I started to and I got you know I had the luckiest career ever I got um deep selected to 04 like I very you know everything had always gone well for me in my Navy career from you know being selected for the the seaman admiral program in the first place which was probably because I was sailor of the year at seal team one when I was an E5 like I'd been doing I was on a very good trajectory.

5:01:03Jocko Willink:But I also looked at it and I was like, okay, what's my next billet? And he started looking at the billets and like, there weren't jobs that I was super excited to go do. And then I was thinking, well, okay, what's after that job? And it turned out when I measured it I was about seven years at that time from being a SEAL Team CO.

5:01:34Jocko Willink:And now, fast forward a little bit, because I'd come home from Ramadi the War Circle, but now it had started to draw down. And I'm like, man, I could hold on for seven more years. By that time, it was like five more years. And then what will I be doing? Okay, but I love the teams, but what about these people that live in your house?

5:02:00Jocko Willink:You know, who are these people that live in your house? And why don't they really know you? So I just did the, ran the numbers mentally on what that was. and I just decided I'd done 20 years. I'm going to go focus on my family. I did not focus on my family when I was in the SEAL teams at all.

5:02:32The teams was, I was married to the teams.

5:02:36Jocko Willink:I was married to the teams and my wife and family came second and that's not, I think I needed to give something to them. Maybe if I'd been more balanced, You know, maybe I could have sorted it out, but I wasn't very balanced. I was in the teams and I love the teams. And I felt like, yeah, if I can't give the teams everything, then it's probably not gonna be the best thing.

5:03:08Do you still battle with that decision?

5:03:11Jocko Willink:Yeah. Yeah, I do. I yeah oh shit oh yeah when did you retire 2010 fuck 15 years 15 years you're still battling that decision yep why the teams gave me everything you gave the teams everything yeah yeah there's nothing better than going to work in the teams you know you and i just got all giddy going out to dump some rounds out there you know what i mean you and me were kind of like in a different like we were like a couple kids out there and you and i used to do that all day every day until we were sick of it yeah you know so uh yeah and it was hard because i you know i had to go tell my chain of command and and And it was hard for me to go tell the Admiral, go tell the Commodore, and then tell my teammates.

5:04:19Jocko Willink:You know, that sucked because you're a quitter, you know? And I was not a quitter, but now I'm going to quit. When I left team one, you know, they used to say if you got out of the teams, you're a quitter, right? and and i said uh when i left team one i said because i was an enlisted guy and i was going to become an officer and i said hey the only thing worse than a quitter is a trader and i'm now going to the dark side you know but yeah quitting the teams was was uh bad but at the same time i you know i remember cleaned out my cage the last day i had a great you know i had great time at trade at and you know it was that's when when ryan ryan job who had been wounded so bad he died from uh complications from his medical stuff you know that was while i was at trade at and you know again that was one of those things where it was really it almost like hooked me back in you know because just knowing that ryan you know he's another guy like he was blind bro and I talked to him on the phone, he's like, can I come back?

5:05:25Jocko Willink:He wants to come back to Ramadi. He can't see. He wants to come back to Ramadi. Like, this is the kind of guy that I'm going to abandon right now to get out of the Navy and do some other whatever, like nothing else matters. So that was, you know, another thing that kind of almost hooked me. But again, I'd go home and see my kids, see my son. You know, you have three daughters, or yeah, I had three daughters and one son at this point. You go home and see them and they're like, what's your name again? Or who are you again? Like, that is an equal thing that's starting to pull. How old was your oldest?

5:06:05Jocko Willink:She was born in 1999. So she was 11. Wow. Yeah. And my youngest doesn't even like, no. My son can remember, because I would like... He was at... He was on training trips as a young kid, as like a little kid. He was hucking grenades and shooting machine guns and paintballs and all that stuff. So he remembers all that stuff. Did you have a tough time integrating him with your family? Not really. Did they have a tough time integrating with you? Not really. That's good. You don't hear that very often. Yeah. I always left my work at work. You know, I always tell like police officers and military people, like take your uniform off when you go home, don't leave it on, take it off and put on a pair of, you know, for me, it's flip flop shirt, surf shorts and a t-shirt and be in that mode as opposed to keeping your uniform on.

5:07:05Jocko Willink:So I felt like it was pretty, um, yeah. And then another weird thing that always freaked out, like Leif and Seth, is I never swore in front of my family. Yeah. I would, and you know, meanwhile in the teams, you know, every third word was an F-bomb and I'd come home and just never swear. Cause it was almost like I had a, you know, like a mental deviation when I went home and I was that guy. And then at work, I was the team guy. Man, I wish I could do that. Maybe I can. Let's try harder. But, I mean, did you struggle Did you struggle with the transition? I mean, we both know a lot of guys struggle with the transition.

5:07:46Did you have any plan when you got out?

5:07:49Jocko Willink:I didn't really have. My plan was to surf, train jiu-jitsu, and hang out with my wife and kids. That was my plan. That's a good plan. And, you know, and then I opened a jiu-jitsu gym. So I figured I'd be able to teach jiu-jitsu and hang out, surf with my kids, surf, and that's what my plan was. Probably about six months before I retired, I had a friend that owned a big company, and he asked me to come and talk to his executive team about leadership. And I knew him from Jiu-Jitsu. I was like, yeah, cool. And I went up and I gave the kind of leadership brief that I gave to the SEAL platoons. And I think in his mind, I was going to get up and be like, you need to do pushups or whatever.

5:08:44Jocko Willink:And all of a sudden, I'm talking about decentralized command and taking ownership and prioritize and executing all these things. And then they start Q &A and they start asking me about leadership. And I'm answering all these questions. And by the time I got done, he's like, I want you to talk to every division I have in my company. And I was like, well, I'm retiring. And, you know, and he's like, I will pay you. And I was like, well, he's like, oh, let's make a deal. I said, OK. So I started going around talking to all of his divisions. And at one of those divisional meetings, the CEO of the parent company was there.

5:09:15Jocko Willink:And the guy came up to me afterwards and said, I want you to come talk to all my CEOs. And he owned like 45 or 50 companies at the time. And I went and did that. And then it just started happening. And I eventually was getting like business, you know? And Leif had gotten out of the Navy. Leif had gotten out of the Navy. And he was like, kind of considering going to law school, I think at the time. And his wife was, you know, gainfully employed at Fox news. And, uh, you know, I was like, Hey man, I need some fire support over here. And he's like, we'll do a leadership company. And I, I'd kind of talked about it with him before, because when I started talking to these civilian companies, I realized that everything I had learned about leadership applied to all leadership.

5:10:11Jocko Willink:It wasn't unique to combat. It was leadership was leadership. And once I realized that, I realized that I had something that would be useful for a lot of people. And so then, like I said, it just grew word of mouth. And from there, this is kind of how all this stuff eventually happened. Because as Leif and I would talk to different companies and they would come up afterwards and be like, Hey, do you have this stuff written down anywhere? Do you have a pamphlet you can give us? And so we wrote it down. And then I want to, I think one of Leif's wife's friends or something was a literary agent was like, this could be a book type thing.

5:10:47Jocko Willink:And so we wrote a book proposal and yeah, uh, the book agent shopped it around. And one of the people, I think the third, fourth, fourth or fifth person at St. Martin's press was like we'll take it and so we wrote the book and you know um the book came out and it was really did well so yeah it did yeah it did really fucking well yeah yeah man and then i mean you've created i mean i think i counted seven businesses i'm probably off but am i off um you get the podcast extreme ownership the kids book which is going to be a movie origin jaco fuel fuck what am i missing jaco publishing jaco publishing yeah the soccer club yeah jiu-jitsu gym there's a that's true i guess you lost count yeah um yeah i i look at it people ask me about this so the podcast thing, you know, I went on, wrote, I went on Tim Ferriss's podcast and when we got done, he said, Hey dude, you should start a podcast.

5:12:02Jocko Willink:And then I went on Joe Rogan, heard that podcast and was like, invited me on his podcast. And this was 2015. Like podcasts weren't really a thing yet. Yeah. You're you're, you are an OG podcast. Yeah. I mean, way before anybody even knew what the hell it was. Yeah. Uh, I think, I think the numbers at the time, there was about 15 % of the population of America was listening to podcasts. I don't know if it's a hundred percent now, but it's pretty much everybody. But I went on Rogan in the middle of Rogan show. He's like, you should start a podcast. Of course, Rogan tells that to everybody, but he told me that.

5:12:36Jocko Willink:And I said, all right. So I got Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan, like two massive podcasts are telling me I should start a podcast. So I talked to my buddy, Echo Charles. I said, do you know how to do this? And he said, I'll figure it out. And then next day he came back and he's like, all right, I know how to do this. And I said, cool. He said, can I be on it? And I said, what are you going to do? And he said, you be Jocko and I'll be normal. And I was like, okay, cool. And so that's how the podcast started. And then once the podcast started, it was just, you know, people would ask me about like, what kind of supplements I used.

5:13:10Jocko Willink:And I was like, well, here's what I would like to use, you know, and why don't I make what I like? And then people would ask me about Jiu Jitsu Gis and my, there was a company up in Maine, you know, uh, New England where I'm from. And this guy, Pete was up there making Jiu Jitsu Gis a hundred percent in America. And I was like, get those kinds of Gis. Cause those are American made. And I ended up linking up with him and the origin kind of took off and Jocko Fue kind of took off and it was just, um, yeah. And then the kids books were somewhere in there. You know, I, there's, I went, I was trying to get my son, my son was not like a reader, right?

5:13:52Jocko Willink:Was he the little kid? So I went to try and find him like something that he might be interested in, right? And I picked up this book and it was like a pirate book. And I was like, cool, you know, pirates. What young boy isn't going to be into pirates? And I read this book, and it was the lamest, weakest, most pathetic pirates ever. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna read this to my son. And I just decided I'll write my own books for kids. And so, and the idea of the first Warrior Kid book was just like immediately in my mind. The whole thing, like start to finish. I had the whole thing in my mind almost immediately.

5:14:34and it's a real, it seems obvious, right? Like there's a kid, like all kids,

5:14:43Jocko Willink:who can't do any pull-ups, doesn't know his time stables, doesn't know how to swim and he's getting picked on by the school bully, right? That's, you go to anyone, any kid in the world, they've got one of those problems or a problem like those problems. And so I put those problems in the book and then I brought in a character, Uncle Jake, who's a seal, who is going to come stay with, you know, the family for the summer. And he's going to teach this kid how to fight, how to eat right, how to exercise, how to study, and how to swim. And that's the first book. And, um, it, you know, the feedback of all, you know, of all the things that I'm currently doing, getting feedback from like a 10 year old kid that says, writes me a letter and says, I did my first pull up or I got an A on this math test, or I started training jujitsu and I did my first competition.

5:15:41Jocko Willink:Those are the most epic things to receive. I love that, man. Yeah. There's that's awesome. Yeah. There's not a lot of, uh, well there, I should, shouldn't say that. There is a lot of guidance out there in the world right not a lot of it is good guidance, you know? And so the values that kids should be receiving, in many cases, they're not receiving. So I tried to give it to them in a fun way. They're funny books, but they're powerful too. When did the first one come out? I think it was two, I think it was 2017, because I was almost done writing it as Extreme Ownership was coming out. Oh, God. that's pretty cool man yeah yeah you're touching a lot of people i know you know that i would venture to guess that you

5:16:39it's hard to it's hard to it's hard to grasp that and uh but you're a huge motivation for me and um i hear about you all the time and and it's man i just i just it's fucking cool what you're doing you're pumping a lot of good into the world you're pumping a lot of what people need into the world whether that's adults or children and and um man there's just there's just um there's just that that many great role models for young people to look up to these days and and you're one of them, and that's fucking cool.

5:17:20Jocko Willink:Well, like I said, I had some great role models in the teams and left me with some, you know, especially the guys that I lost, you know? Those guys were just great, great role models.

5:17:37And, you know, sometimes people ask, like,

5:17:41Jocko Willink:if having kids made you more nervous about going to war, and for me, it didn't. Like, I felt, like, happy that I had kids. And Mikey and Mark, you know, they didn't have kids, man. And it's, you know, it breaks my heart. And luckily, Ryan, you know, Ryan, before he died, his wife got pregnant, and that's just awesome to see. But, you know, passing on what example those guys were. And, you know, the character in this book right here, the Warrior Kid book, the main character is named Mark. And there's another book I wrote for kids called Mikey and the Dragons. And clearly the main character in that book is named Mikey.

5:18:25And so those guys doing my best to make sure that, you know,

5:18:31Jocko Willink:people remember them and learn some of those things that represent their values of what they were like as people. So it's an honor to be able to share their memories and make sure that their names are never forgotten. And this is turning into a movie. Yes, it is. Yes. The movie has been filmed, and it will be coming out next year. That's awesome. Congratulations. Yeah. It was a pretty interesting experience to see, and a pretty awesome experience. Is it an animation? Nope, it's real people. No kidding? Are you in it? I am in it. Fuck yeah, man. That's awesome. I'm in it, but I don't play Uncle Jake.

5:19:16Jocko Willink:Uncle Jake is played by Chris Pratt. So, and, you know, Uncle Jake and Chris Pratt. Chris Pratt's just such a great guy. Is he? Oh, he's an unbelievable guy. Just, just... The first time I met him, I was going to UFC with Jack Carr and some of the other actors from the terminal list. It was like the promotion for The Terminalist. And I didn't know Chris Pratt at all. But I'm kind of like going and, you know, I'm like, oh, you know, I'm going to meet this Hollywood guy or whatever. And just super humble, super nice, super cool, self-deprecating humor, and super charismatic. Like, there's a reason why that guy is who he is.

5:20:03Jocko Willink:You know, funny, charismatic, just cool. And so I was really, really stoked. And what happened was he had... We were kind of connected on... through Jared, who was training him to get him in shape for Terminal List. And while he was training him, he was giving him Jocko Fuel. And so, he really liked the taste of Jocko Fuel and how it impacted him, got him in shape for that movie. And then he also was like wearing Origin clothes because he's a patriotic guy, he wanted American made, because now Origin makes jeans and T-shirts and hoodies and boots and we make everything. and he wanted to support America.

5:20:40Jocko Willink:And then he had a little break in between work movies. And he was talking to his business people and they're like, Hey, uh, you know, you need to find some more sponsors and this kind of thing. And he goes, you know, why am I out looking for sponsors when like, I like Jocko fuel and I like origin. Why don't I connect with Jocko? Cause I'm, he met me one, you know, I met that guy, he seemed nice enough or whatever. So he called me and he said, Hey man. And I was like in the mountains and he said, Hey, do you want to do something with Jocko fuel and origin? I'm like, Hmm, sure. You know, it's pretty awesome.

5:21:16Jocko Willink:And so we ended up connecting on that. And as our business teams were working through the business deal to kind of figure out what that looked like. I had been starting down the process of making the movie with a guy from Hollywood who had walked into his kid's bedroom and his kids were doing pushups. And he's like, what are you, what are you guys doing? And they're like, we want to be warriors. We want to be warrior kids. He's like, what are you talking about? And he gave the kids, gave, gave their dad, this guy, Ben Everard, the book and said, like, we want to be warrior kids, like this guy.

5:21:54Jocko Willink:So he reads the book and he's like, oh, I got to get this turned into a movie. And so he, friend of a friend of a friend, searched me out, came to my gym. And I had been offered to buy the movie rights to Warrior Kid. I don't know, maybe four or five times, but that's a real weird thing anyways. But he came down to my gym and set up a meeting with me and said, I want to talk to you about this. And he got the vision, saw the vision. So he and I had been, we'd gotten the screenplay written from a screenplay writer named Will Staples. So we kind of started moving. Meanwhile, I'm talking to Chris Pratt about Origin and Jocko Fuel, right?

5:22:31Jocko Willink:And Ben is like, you got to get Chris this script. And I'm like, dude, I am not giving Chris the script. I'm like, I'm not doing that. Because he was like a friend, you know? I'm not like a... I mean, at the time, I didn't know him that well, but he was like a friend. And I just... You didn't want to ask him for shit. Bro, I don't want to ask him. You know how many people these Hollywood people... Could you just... Yeah. So I just didn't. I'm like, I'm not giving it to him. Well, my business team had told his business team, yeah, well, you know, Jonko's, he's making this movie, and they're like, well, what movie is he making?

5:23:09Jocko Willink:Why don't we know about that? And then he's making a kid's movie, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, well, where's it at? Well, he's got the screenplay. So they give, my business team gives his business team the screenplay. And they read it. And they're like, okay, this is good. and they gave it to Chris's film manager. And it's a woman named Julie. And I found this out later. They called Julie Dr. No because she says no to everything. And so, but she got this script and she read it. And when I met her for the first time, the first time we, the first big meeting we had about trying to make this happen, she was in the room and she met me.

5:23:53Jocko Willink:She was super cool. She's like, my dad listens to you, or my husband listens to your podcast. My kid listens to your podcast. Like she was, she knew kind of the background. And she said, I got done reading this script. I wiped the tears from my eyes and I sent it to Chris and said, you better make this movie. No shit. And then Chris said, he said, yeah, I read the script. And I was like, okay, we're going to do this. And then I wish it was as easy as I just said it because then, you know, the cool thing is Chris and I shook hands. We're going to do this. and that handshake encompassed origin, encompassed Jocko fuel and it encompassed the movie.

5:24:28Jocko Willink:And two guys, we shook hands and that handshake held the whole thing together because bro, you get into this Hollywood and lawyers and ownership and it was crazy, but that handshake and you know, him being a good person and a man of his word and me being a man of my word. And despite all the chaos we got through And now Chris is like a part owner of Jocko Fuel, a part owner of Origin USA. And he plays Uncle Jake in the movie Way of the Warrior Kid. That is awesome, man. That's a hell of a story. Yeah. It's, I can't wait for it to come out. When does it come out? Sometime next year. Okay. You know, it's weird, but the way they make movies and the time it takes for them to then edit and assemble it.

5:25:20Jocko Willink:And then the advertisement of it, the marketing of it takes months and months. And so, you know, they want it to be released in a big season, you know, because they think it's going to be a big movie. Because it's, I've seen, like, I've seen it. You know, not a fully edited version, but I've seen it. And it's awesome. It is awesome. Congratulations. It'll make you laugh. It'll make you cry. It's really powerful. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Man, that's what I'm talking about, man. I mean, everybody... I don't talk to anybody that's happy about what's going on in Hollywood, what's being pumped into the theaters, what's on Netflix.

5:25:59Nobody. And so to see something like that, you know what I mean, come out, that's like... I mean, that's a feat in itself, you know? And so, and then, you know, congratulations.

5:26:12Jocko Willink:Yeah. Yeah, it was... You know, Skydance eventually came in. It's Skydance and Apple. And you're right. It's a movie that we haven't seen this type of movie in a long time. You know, the kind of movie that's gonna, you know, leave that impact on... And it's, I'm telling you, like, everyone in the family, the parents will love it, the kids will love it. Yeah, it's... Old-school family, good entertainment. Yep. That you're probably gonna learn something from. Yes, indeed. So, yeah, kudos to you. Yeah. Let's talk about Origin. Mm-hmm. What's... That's a fucking awesome company. Yeah, it really is, man.

5:26:49Jocko Willink:It really is. And, you know, growing up in New England in the 70s and 80s, and this is when everything was being sold overseas. All the big corporations just took and gutted all the American factories, literally took the machines out of them and sold them overseas and started making stuff overseas so that they could make more money for the corporate headquarters. And it just gutted a lot of New England. It gutted a lot of the Southeast, you know, the big textile mills just got annihilated. and uh i mentioned this earlier but when when i had the podcast and i was talking to people about jujitsu a lot and people were asking where should where should i get a jujitsu gi and i had seen this company origin this guy pete roberts was up there and he was making these gis in america 100 in america and so i started telling everyone hey if you got to get a gi get an origin gi and i started trying to reach out to him to see if like i could meet him or find out what's going on and I had never heard back from him.

5:27:47Jocko Willink:And finally I was on a Facebook live one day and somebody asked me, Hey, what kind of gear should I get? And I said, yeah, I get an origin gear, go to origin. I think it was origin, Maine at the time, origin, main.com. And those, that guy makes stuff in America. And I said, and by the way, if anyone here can find that guy, I think is, I said, his name is Pete. Tell him I want to talk to him. And a woman that was on that, who I since got to know named Sarah, like used her contacts and got in touch with him and said, hey, there's this guy, Jocko, he wants to talk to you. He's got a huge podcast.

5:28:20Jocko Willink:And Pete says, what's a podcast? Because he's up in Maine. That's awesome. So eventually, we link up and we have a conversation. And I could see, you know, he's just a patriotic guy that's trying to rebuild manufacturing in America. I flew up to Maine. We, same thing, as a matter of fact, we had a stake, and we had a handshake, and we teamed up. And basically, he had this ability to manufacture, and I had an ability to talk to people. And so those two things together were like a perfect storm. When we joined forces, I want to say there was like six employees at Origin making... It was something like 100 garments a week.

5:29:03Jocko Willink:And right now, we've got almost 500 employees, and we make like 15 ,000 to 20 ,000 garments a week. Yeah. So it's a totally different ballgame. And it's awesome because we had lost the ability to manufacture in America and the corporations just lied because they'd say, we can't do this in America. They would literally say, we can't make this in America. We can't do that. This is America. Are you telling me we can't make things in America? This is how we won wars. This is how we won World War II. We made stuff in America. So don't tell me we can't make a pair of jeans in America. Just like they've been saying for the past 10 years that we can't make any of these electronic components in America.

5:29:48Jocko Willink:Well, look who's coming back now. Right? So it's an awesome company. Got, you know, we're going to continue to grow. It's hard. It's very hard, especially because we're so strict about American made. So, you know, you got to get the cotton. Where's the cotton coming from. Literally everything in the product. The zipper, the boots, these rivets, everything, the sole, everything, the thread is 100 % made in America. And if we can't find a component that's made in America, we either make it ourselves or we'll find someone that we can convince to make it. Wow. That's what you have to do. You have to hold the standard.

5:30:24Jocko Willink:And it's good to see. Other people are coming back to America now. Good. Good. Bring it back. This is what we should be doing. This is how we rebuild our country. This is how we rebuild America. And if we don't have the ability to make things, to be self-sufficient, we will lose. So it's a huge part of, it's a huge part of me, of how I feel I can give back to what this country has given me. You definitely lead by example. That's for damn sure. You put your fucking mouth where your money is, well, that's awesome. It's hard to find these days. Yeah, well, I mean, that's literally what you just said.

5:31:05Jocko Willink:We put all of our money back into these businesses. All of it. You know, now we have four factories. Like, we put all of it back in there. And we bet on it, you know? This is where we put our soul, is into these companies. Because we believe in them. And we're patriotic. We love America. We love the people we work with and this is what we have to do.

5:31:33Once again, congratulations. Yeah.

5:31:37Jocko Willink:Yeah. And then out of that spawned Jocko Fuel because, you know, one of the guys at Origin, Brian, he had worked in the supplement industry and he was like, hey, you know, we can make supplements. We do jujitsu. And they had like made some supplements before. and how would you feel about making supplements? And I said, if we can make them good and healthy, yes. Look, I've been overseas drinking Red Bull and Reddit and Rip It and whatever freaking tiger's blood they were giving us over there. And that stuff's just not healthy. And so I didn't, and I, you know, we talk about people that, we talk about like veterans, you know, you mentioned veterans that are, I know you had some friends that had some bad experiences with drug addiction, alcohol addiction.

5:32:27Jocko Willink:Bro, I have friends that were drinking five, six, seven, eight monsters a day. That's horrible. And so we started the Jocko Fuel, and we just kept things as clean as we possibly could. And believe it or not, there's a market for it. Believe it or not, Americans want to be healthy. and we probably timed it very well because as COVID came out and people got more concerned about their health, people were paying attention. Is that the latest flavor? That's one of the latest flavors, yeah. Can I give it a, can I try it? Dude, yeah, yeah, there you go, man. It's a little iced tea lemonade. Iced tea lemonade.

5:33:17made. It's pretty damn good. Yeah.

5:33:19Jocko Willink:Yeah. And it's no artificial sweeteners. We had to, this is the extent that we go. So when you make a drink like this, you got to put preservatives in it so that it has shelf life. Well, those preservatives, as you might imagine, might not be too good for you. And I wanted to figure out a different way. And so Brian figured out a way to pasteurize it. In other words, you like basically cook it. So anything that could be in there that would interfere with its shelf life won't be in there anymore. It'll be dead. No shit. And so we had to find a line. We had to wait like nine months to get a company that, you know, bottles these or cans these to put a line in to pasteurize them.

5:34:05Jocko Willink:so that we could make them as healthy as possible. That's like what we're doing across the board. And yeah, that's what we're doing, man. That's awesome, dude. You know, we're kind of wrapping up the interview here, Jocko. But, you know, originally I'd reached out to you several months ago. And I had saw a tweet that you put out on X about our mutual friend now, Braxton McCoy, about the land grab. And, you know, like I had mentioned, we'd never met, but I've always been watching you from afar. And that tweet, basically, all you said, I think, is pay attention to this guy. So looked him up, paid attention to him, saw the sale of public land.

5:34:50And I was like, fuck it. Let's bring him in here. Maybe we can have an impact on this. And, you know, collaboratively, we did. It got pulled. Yep. It's a huge deal, man.

5:35:02Jocko Willink:Yeah. Thanks for doing that. it's my pleasure yeah and thanks to braxton what a guy yeah what a dude yeah but um but you know i just especially ever since covid you know i think whatever everybody knows you know things aren't things aren't going great and uh and you've you you just always a a voice of reason a stoic a voice of reason that makes a lot of sense And so I just want to ask you, what are some of the top things on your mind on what's going on in our country and what are we doing wrong? What do we need to get back to? Yeah, I think there's a lot of amplification of emotions and ego that happens through online platforms.

5:35:55Jocko Willink:So through social media, right?

5:36:01Jocko Willink:and when that happens when you're not interacting with another human being but you're interacting with a you know a fake human being or a bot or someone that you can't actually see or talk to and someone that it's very easy for you to say oh this person's bad or you just ignore what their perspective is which is what i talked about whatever how many hours ago we started this thing is understanding other people's perspectives and knowing that people see the world differently, man. Like, and there's a reason that someone sees it that way. And instead of just saying the way that they see the world is bad and the way I see the world is good, or the way they see the world is wrong and the way I see the world is right, saying like, oh, it's interesting that they see the world that way.

5:36:54Jocko Willink:I wonder why. And as I've said this whole podcast, if you listen to what other people have to say, they're going to listen to you more. If you say, shut up, you're wrong, they're never going to listen to a word that you have to say. But if you say, hey, what makes you think like that? And they explain it to you. And instead of you trying to figure out where they're wrong, try and figure out where they're right. And in most cases, in most cases, there'll be some kind of common ground in most cases. Hey, are there some people that are just evil? Yeah. If you're ISIS or you're like a communist, it's probably going to be hard to find some common ground.

5:37:36Jocko Willink:But if you're in between those, and I mean, I've... I mean, I guess, like I said, you can say ISIS, but most people say, oh, you got family? Do you want your kids to have a nice place to live? Almost all people will say, yeah. Almost all people will say, yeah, I want them to be healthy. So at least we have that common ground. now so if we if we look for that as opposed to looking for all the reasons why i should hate you and you should hate me i just that's that's not beneficial so and i think social media amplifies a lot of that and also social media is not real right and so people will say our country's so divided.

5:38:31Yeah, on Twitter it is, but I talk to people, I travel all the country. I have a

5:38:39Jocko Willink:leadership consulting business. I work with companies of every description, energy companies with people out on oil rigs, construction companies with people pouring concrete, finance companies in New York where they're doing deals for billions of dollars, and everyone in between. And the vast majority of people that I meet are like, what are they focused on? Oh yeah, they want to take care of their family. They want to do a little bit better at work. They want to make some more money. They want to be healthy. That's what people are doing. And it's very strange that we forget about that. And as I travel around the country and I meet all these different people, I see people that they have common goals.

5:39:20Jocko Willink:They have common goals. And if they have the same common goal as me, how we get there, you know, we'll, we'll try and figure out the best solution. And I don't see a lot of that. You know, if you say something that I disagree with, I hate you. And that's, that's doesn't, that doesn't bode well. But like I said, I think for the most part, that's online. Now, look, you can go show me, we can go look at riots in the streets of people that are, you know, actively trying to hurt other people. Like, okay, yep, you're right. There are people that are out there on the fringes, for sure. But that's a small group.

5:40:01Jocko Willink:There's 350 million people in America. You want to show me a riot that has 3 ,000 people in it? Yeah, that's bad. But it's not America. And so I would say, open your eyes, open your ears, listen more, try and understand other people's perspectives try and figure out where you can agree with them, which can be difficult, but usually you can. And if you can listen to what they have to say and ask earnest questions about what they believe, a lot of times you can figure out, oh yeah, there's some common ground. I understand them a little bit better now. And maybe I can move a little bit and maybe I can help them see something that I see because they actually want to hear my perspective now.

5:40:53Jocko Willink:Barking at people and trying to shove your perspective down their throat might feel good at the time, but it doesn't change any minds.

5:41:03It's a great perspective. Do you think this is happening because of the absence of the human connection because of social media?

5:41:13Jocko Willink:Social media certainly amplifies it. but also it's the way the algorithm is constructed. The algorithm is constructed. When I see something that makes me emotional, I share it. So your goal is to post something that makes me feel emotional. What's the easiest emotion to trigger in me? Anger. It's definitely anger because it's hard to pull at my heartstrings. You don't really know me. You don't know what, Like maybe if I had a dog that I lost, but you don't know that. Or maybe I had, you know, whatever, something happened to me in my past and, oh, thank you for sending me that. It's good. Makes me, you know, connect with these emotions.

5:41:56Jocko Willink:That's hard to do. But how hard is it to make me mad? It's not hard at all. You know, I'm a military guy. You can figure out 20 things out of the gate, right? Figure 20 things out of the gate that can make me mad if I'm a normal person, if I'm normal, you know, military person, or if you're a, what is it? You can tell me 15 things right now that will make a conservative mad. And you can tell me 15 things that will make a liberal mad. And so if you want to get reactions, make people mad. And so that's what the algorithm is set up for. And when you make me mad, I share it. If I have a strong opinion about it, I share it.

5:42:35Jocko Willink:And so that's what the algorithm does. It just amplifies strong emotions. And strong emotions aren't a good way to make decisions. And the strong emotions become polarizing. And so when people are polarized, they're not listening anymore. And everything I just talked about goes out the window. There's been a lot of talk about, I mean, I see it all over your comments section. There's, I mean, there's fucking hashtags about a Jocko for president. I mean, do you do you see yourself ever getting involved in u.s politics i certainly hope not i don't i don't really have any desire to do that uh and i don't i think that i mean i think that i guess it just depends you know because every time you think that things will settle down the pendulum will go swinging back in the other direction and back in the other direction so So I certainly hope not, man.

5:43:32Jocko Willink:I don't like politics. I don't think I would like to do that. I don't think you would like to do that either. But I think that's the problem. Everybody that's in there, there's nothing else they'd rather be doing than sitting on their fucking ass on the floor of Congress or the Senate or higher. Yeah, well, hopefully we get some of these term limits and things like that because career politicians are definitely problematic. But who knows? That means they have to vote themselves out of a job. What are the chances of that? Slim to none. Slim to none. But you get the Warrior Kids series movie coming out.

5:44:18The upcoming generation is Generation Z. They get a lot of shit. What are your thoughts on Gen Z? What do they need to be looking out for? Or what's your advice to them?

5:44:29Jocko Willink:Yeah. I think when I look at it, I forget. It's actually, I think Gen A, Gen Alpha is now, I want to say those are teenagers right now. Okay. It's like Gen Alpha, Gen Alpha, and then Gen Z is sort of above them. Maybe 20s? You think that's right? I think Gen Zs, they're entering the workforce and are already in the workforce. Yeah, man. This is America. and you can do, you can, can you do anything you want? Nope. No, you can't do anything you want, but you, you have a lot of opportunity in this country. You know, I was talking to a kid the other day and I was just like, man, he's in the fire department and you know, like there's a salary cap in the fire department.

5:45:18Jocko Willink:Right. And I said, Hey man, like save your money. figure out something else you can do. In the fire department, you've got time to do other things. What do you do in your spare time? Right there. I already know you're not doing much. So what can you do? And I kind of said, you know, like we're at my gym. And I said, look, you see all this? I go, all this was just like an idea at some point. Just a little tiny idea with no true value whatsoever. Nothing. And here you are in a gym. And that's the same for everything that I have in my life. Everything was just like nothing. But if you apply it and you execute on it, now all of a sudden they start to grow value.

5:46:06Jocko Willink:And so, you know, it's always surprising to me that the opportunity that we have in this country. So are you going to get it given to you? No. Is it going to take hard work? Yes. Will you have setbacks? Yes, you will. Yes, you will. enjoy it. Enjoy it. Like this is what, uh, here's a gen alpha tour term lore. You heard this lore? No. So like creating lore. So you're, if you look at when you have problems, those problems are how you create lore about what you did with your life. The kind of thing you can tell your grandkids, the kind of things you can tell your kids, Hey, this is what happened.

5:46:48Jocko Willink:Oh, yeah, I remember when I had my wife and my four kids in a 934-square-foot house. That's lore, man. My kids are kind of fired up for that. Like, there was two girls sharing a bedroom. I took the converted garage and split it in half, one for my son and one for my youngest daughter. That's what we're doing. That's cool. At the time, would I rather had some mansion? Sure. but that wouldn't have got me no lore. So when you go through challenges, you face things in life, look at as an opportunity to make some lore for your existence. It's going to be a struggle. But with America, if you work hard, you will be rewarded.

5:47:36And you're going to look, it's not like a guarantee, but if you work hard, you have to

5:47:42Jocko Willink:make sure you're playing the right game too. So I had this conversation with a guy, actually two guys consecutively a few years ago. And they were both hard workers in two totally separate industries, two hard workers working very hard and not able to get to where they wanted to go. And they're putting in, you know, 50 hour weeks, 60 hour weeks, 70 hour weeks, like really getting after it. And I said, Hey, listen, if that's what's happening, you got to check what game you're playing. Because if you put a lot of effort, the example I use was soccer and basketball. If you put a lot of effort into basketball, how many points can you score in a game?

5:48:24Jocko Willink:30, 40, 50? You get 50 points in one game as an individual player. If you're playing soccer, how many points can you get in a game? Maybe one or two. So if you realize that you're not getting the points that you want to get, you might have to say, I need to get into a different game. So you have to be smart. hard work isn't rewarded solo. You have to also, you know, detach, look around and say like, okay, is this game that I'm playing the right game to get where I want to go? So you have to keep that in mind too. But this is America. If you play the game and you play the right game and you play it hard, you're going to end up in a good spot, which is all we could ever ask for.

5:49:09Another great point, B.

5:49:13Jocko Willink:i would say first i'll give you the easy shot uh jp dannell next i'll go debbie lee and then i'll go

5:49:36Jocko Willink:johnny clark johnny clark who was uh Marine in Vietnam and he was a grunt. And, you know, our, our, our special operations guys, uh, get a lot of credit well-deserved, but sometimes oftentimes, and I tried to give as much credit as I could today to our conventional, uh, army and Marine Corps brothers and sisters that fought, but it's... They don't often get the credit that they deserve. And Johnny Clark wrote a book called Guns Up when he got back from Vietnam. And he got wounded three times. The third time he got wounded, when he finally got pulled out, he had lost like 40 pounds, 35 or 40 pounds patrolling in the jungle.

5:50:30Jocko Willink:Damn. For 14 days, 17 days, 20 days at a time. and he just, he's an incredible guy. It's a legendary book in the Marine Corps. You know, I got to shout out Guns Up. I did that event for the Marine Corps birthday up in Camp Pendleton, and I was able to get a Guns Up. Semper Fi, happy birthday, Semper Fi, Guns Up. But Johnny Clark, just an amazing guy and has had a really incredible voyage in his life that I think would, uh... I think everyone would be blessed to be able to hear his story, and I think that it would give a lot of people credit. You know, we've, uh... I had the honor of bringing a lot of the SOG guys into the forefront for the things that they did in Vietnam.

5:51:24Jocko Willink:And most certainly, you know, the most epic guys. But I always want to remember these grunts, the infantrymen. Thank you for saying that. And by the way, you did a fantastic job giving those guys credit. I talk about the exact same thing on here a lot, about those guys never get the credit they deserve. You talk a lot about special operations, non-profits, and it's like, yeah, great. We got another one. We don't fucking need any more. these guys need them yeah you know and and um so it's pretty fucking cool you're doing that and and uh that that actually is a segment that i've planned on covering but it slipped my mind is the sog guys i mean i started interviewing this year um a couple of vietnam guys and got inspired from what you and john striker meyer are doing over there and and um and you know and and for me I mean, those guys, that is the generation that motivated me, that made me want to serve the country, go to war, and ultimately become a SEAL.

5:52:38And I was, man, those guys are fucking something, aren't they?

5:52:43Jocko Willink:Yeah. As I've told John Stryker Meyer and I've told the rest of them, as a task unit commander, I wouldn't have approved any of those missions. i was like yo you're going out where wait across enemy lines you got three americans and four vietnamese and you're going out there into wherever with no ground support you sure about that but uh those guys were in a different a different breed yeah they are god God bless them all, man. They were just epic. And like I said, the infantry grunts in Vietnam, they were what they suffered through. And, you know, it was a small percentage of them, right? Just like any of these wars, there's a small percentage of people that fight them.

5:53:33Jocko Willink:There's a lot of people in the military. There's a small percentage of people that fight those wars. And the grunts in Vietnam, you know, even Hackworth, Hackworth, who was in, he was at the end of World War II. He didn't really fight in World War II, but he was there for the end of it. Korea, like, full on in Korea and Vietnam. And he said that the Vietnam soldiers had the worst conditions, which is coming from a guy that was speaking from a place where he could make a statement like that. So, the grunts from Vietnam, Johnny Clark, guns up. Yeah, if you could... I'm sure he'd be honored to come on here and share his story of...

5:54:10Jocko Willink:of his life, which is, like I said, it's an epic story. Right on. We'll reach out. Well, Jaco, thank you again for being here, man. And like I said, man, thank you for taking that trip with me today. I know that was really fucking tough. But, you know, at the beginning of this, we prayed that this would reach the right people and that this interview would touch a lot of people. And it's going to, man. And you're just a hell of a guy. Well, super thankful that we connected. It's an honor to be able to share these guys' stories. You know, again, not just my guys, but the whole team that was there.

5:54:54Jocko Willink:And, you know, again, I talked about me talking about these little fractions of guys, small group in Ramadi, that was my guys. And there was all kinds of those guys. But, man, you talk about there was guys all over Iraq. There was guys all over Afghanistan that were in terrible situations, suffered through so much. and they sacrificed for what we have and what we're, we have the opportunity. And that opportunity is based on the sacrifices that these men and women have made. And, you know, you asked me right before a break, right as we took a break, you were like, you okay? And I said, yeah. And I did a podcast with a guy named Tom Fife.

5:55:40Jocko Willink:And Tom Fyfe was in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. And he got a Purple Heart in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. And I was talking to him, and we talked about World War II, and he got commissioned for Korea. And by the time he was in Vietnam, he was a battalion commander. And we were talking through the different types of missions, and all good. And we got... I just was curious about, you know, what the operations were like, and I ended up saying, you know, well, how many casualties did you take as a battalion commander? And he got choked up. And I was sitting there watching him get choked up, and I was like, oh, this is 50 years ago?

5:56:33Jocko Willink:and he's getting choked up thinking about his guys. And that was a moment for me that I realized that's okay. And I think we've been told that there's something wrong with us, but there's not. Like you get sad when you think about your friends, it's okay. You get a tear in your eye when you hear the national anthem? It's all right, man. And you sometimes spend a little too much time thinking about something that you went through? It's okay. And I think it's important for us, our generation of veterans, to recognize, you went through some tough stuff. Think about it sometimes. It's hard. And that's okay, man.

5:57:25Jocko Willink:That's okay. Thank you. Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it. God bless you, man. Back at you. Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks. Appreciate it.

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