Jocko Willink: Discipline Equals Freedom - Danger Close with Jack Carr

[Music] this is the danger closed podcast beyond the books with me jack carr [Music] welcome to the danger clothes podcast an ironclad original presented by sig sauer my guest today is jaco willink jocko is of course the host of the jocko podcast jocko underground author of extreme ownership the dichotomy of leadership the way of the warrior kid series mikey and the dragons leadership strategy and tactics and the discipline equals freedom field manual if you don't have all of these i suggest you get them today it's also the author of the new book final spin it's his first foray into fiction i was fortunate enough to get an early copy is absolutely fantastic we discuss it on the podcast it is out november 9th be sure to pick that up and we also talk about jocko's entire time in the military and what he's doing today which is a lot because in addition to the books and the podcast he also has origin he has jocko go he has echelon front so be sure to check them out echelonfront.com they do the muster which he is doing right now as i record this and just a fantastic guy so he was also the oic the officer in charge of the training department that put me through two of my workups one as an officer in charge as a platoon commander and the other as a troop commander so i was very fortunate to go through my urban warfare training with jocko in charge of training and my desert warfare training my land warfare training with him in charge as well after he had recently returned from leading task unit bruiser in the battle of ramadi so he was fresh off the battlefield and we talked about that on the podcast as well so i feel very fortunate that i got to go through that training with him as the oic and i'm just so fired up for everything that he has going on today so go to jacopodcast.com to link to everything he has going on and now without further ado jaco willink yeah man look at this bam final spin look at that i read it the first dish as you like to say is on the way so that shows up on publication day uh because i always buy books from uh from people that uh that send them and it's also super cool to get the advanced readers edition and then have that first edition as well so um this is awesome and i want to talk about this uh not in too much detail because i don't want it to ruin it and i think people should not listen to your podcast that you did uh on it when you talk about it or read the publisher's weekly review which is a great review until after they read this because there are there are two things that that publisher weekly review gives up yeah two things yeah that as i read it and i'm so glad that i read it without reading that review without listening to you guys talk about it on the podcast first because it's uh those two things yeah were pretty important and pretty important to be semi-surprised about as you're going through this thing yeah i was a little surprised that publishers weekly gave out at least one of those details i was a little surprised about that but i was also surprised that they gave me such an awesome review so we'll take it yeah i know take it for sure it's awesome um and for me as i was reading it so uh and i don't say this lightly and usually i don't compare books to other authors but having read a lot and having read this and having been really excited to read this because it's your first foray into the fictional realm here uh cormac mccarthy with a dash of quentin tarantino is that's what that's what i took as i was that's i read it and i read it totally blind didn't know anything about it opened it read it loved it and that that was what i was thinking yeah well i mean i guess it depends on which cormac mccarthy because if it's cormac mccarthy if you're if you're thinking of either the road or no country for old men that's a pretty good fit if it's if it's blood meridian then it's just totally off you know because blood meridian is such a dense book and this book is not written in banner but no exactly that's great yeah i know that is a compliment and uh yeah so a more readable cormac mccarthy that's for sure blood meridian is tough like you got to dedicate you got to go all in on that you can't just kind of pick it up and breeze through it you got to devote time energy and effort to that one but uh but before i get to this and before we go into this um i want to i never i don't think i've ever asked you i'm sure you've talked about it on your podcast before and i'm sure anybody listening to this listens to your podcast um but where were you with the first time you heard about the seal teams and what a seal was um you know my my original my original look into i guess maritime commando operations was when i was a little kid i had all these little airfix toy soldiers the 132nd ones that are about this tall i had different soldiers from all over the world from different wars and my favorite ones were the british commandos which were these guys that had little zodiac boats and they all had little beanies on and stand guns and and kayaks and i thought that that was the coolest of the all the different soldiers i had i thought they were the coolest and eventually at some point i made the connection between the the the american maritime commandos was the closest thing was the seal teams and that's kind of i don't know when i made that connection but i had a friend that went to boot camp in between our junior and senior years went to army bootcamp used to be able to do that army reserves you go to boot camp between your junior and senior year he went and apparently when he was down there he came back and told this story that um he was out on the track and with his with his training group whatever that was and there was a guy with a t-shirt on camo pants boots a rucksack long hair and a beard like hair in a ponytail and my friend says drill sergeant who's that guy and the drill sergeant just looking off in the distance at the guy just goes delta and then my friend goes hey drill sergeant is there anyone that's tougher than delta and the drill sergeant without looking at him just keeps looking ahead and says seal team and when i heard that story i was hooked line and sink or done and obviously we know that's not true they're incredible people in every special operations group but whatever that whatever that drill sergeant had heard whatever rumors he'd heard whatever myth you'd heard it was good enough that when it got passed on to me i was hook line and sinker going to the teams oh yeah dude roomant rumors intelligence that was very powerful especially back then before you could check out anything online yeah and uh you know similar with me going down to the library and researching seal teams back in the early 80s with hardly anything written well i read that hey it's the toughest training ever devised by a modern military and these guys are some of the best special operators in the world and i was like boom age seven you know i'm in like that's all i needed to hear one sentence or two sentences in a book or a magazine article back then so very powerful you know when you get these influences because i could have gone to research something else and have a whole different path in life so it's so important which is why these books are so great uh the the kids books that you write they're so important because there are so few books for kids that get that uh i don't know aren't trying to aren't trying to manipulate them maybe don't have some other other intent behind them and these are so great love them you signed them for my kids i sincerely appreciate it and as i ran up to their room before this to get them you're right there next to captain underpants and in this house that's like being on the top of the new york times list to be your next captain underpants up there so that's a that's a big big deal so uh when you get to the seal teams you still have guys from vietnam that are there so you get there in 1990 is that right 1990 i went yeah 19 i joined the navy in 1990 i got to seal team one in 1991 yup so you're still having some of these these vietnam guys in there um so what do you remember what are some of the things that you learned from them that you carried forward and then on your podcast when you're talking to a lot of these vietnam vets is there anything that you have learned as you've been talking to these guys we're like ah that's where that came from uh some things that guys have taught taught you in the early 90s yeah 100 um you know the the there's a there's a guy named roger hayden he's been on my podcast a couple times he was a very legendary seal even though he never would say anything like that but uh i was at a i was at a old seal reunion back in the early 90s i think i was actually a new guy so this was probably 1992 maybe the summer of 1992. they they had c udt seal reunions but it was there'd be 50 people there and they were just all from nam and me and my running mate team guy we would go down to these things and hang out and talk to people but i remember i was sitting there talking to a couple old vietnam guys and i said who is the most badass murder and seal and nom and these guys both were like oh roger hayden and just without missing a beat um so then there's there's there's obviously there's a lot of guys that that were total badasses in vietnam but i always remember that about roger hayden but roger hayden was the first guy that taught me cover and move which is the first principle of combat leadership that i now have wrote about in extreme ownership and dichotomy leadership and leadership strategy and tactics and i taught it to a lot of people not just in the teams not just in the military but in every aspect of life and that came from roger hayden you know he was looking at me talking to me saying hey when you when you you can't move unless someone else is shooting that's cover move you got to do that every single time and everything you do and i just thought roger that and that so yes there's an example of of you know what i learned from a vietnam guy and what's interesting when when roger came on my podcast he was talking about how when they got back from vietnam and he went out to our desert training site and they set up the the point man's course which is something that we still do to this day we go out run the point man's course you're looking for tripwires you're looking for targets to shoot you're trying to sneak through be quiet and that's something that they brought back from vietnam and instituted in you know 1968 or something like that and it's what you and i did 30 40 50 years later the same exact stuff so there's there's a lot of those traditions and and pieces of information that were passed down through through word of mouth and what's really interesting is and i was talking to the uh special operations association yesterday i was talking about the fact that when when i got in the seal teams when you got in the seal teams there was almost no doctrine whatsoever you didn't you couldn't go to a manual in the army in the marine corps they've got doctrine for everything and and it's outstanding that they do and if you don't know if you're a if you're a first lieutenant and you've never done an assault on a building before you can pull out a book you can pull out you know uh fm seven tac eight uh infantry squad and platoon and you can look through that book and figure out how to do a raid and what everyone's jobs are and the best methodology but in the sealed teams if you want to know how to do raid you got to ask your platoon chief you could ask a guy that's you know senior to you that's been longer so everything is word of mouth that it was you know we got we got some stuff in doctrine towards the end towards the time i retired towards the time you retired but every almost everything that we know is was passed down word of mouth in like the oral tradition of history inside the seal teams and some of it unfortunately got lost another good example that is i had mike thornton on my podcast and mike thornton medal of honor recipient a legendary legendary seal and who who performed an incredibly not just incredible heroic act a multitude of heroic acts in one event in one mission to and where he received the medal of honor and he even though i was in the seal teams for 20 years and even though i actually had met mike thornton and actually knew mike thornton decently well um when when mikey monsoor received the medal of honor posthumously i met mike thornton in a more direct way and talked to him and became you know kind of friends with him and yet with all that i never got a good detailed explanation or detailed review of what actually happened until he came on my podcast and explained for three hours exactly what happened on that whole mission how it went down and and so yeah there's you learn something new every day and talking to these vietnam guys is just an amazing opportunity no it's incredible to that you're capturing all that and yeah that oral tradition passing on those lessons learned word of mouth passing it down there was something that was cool about that in the seal teams uh something that differentiated us a little bit but at the same time uh there was something there was a there's maybe it's tough because there's maybe a tiny bit of lack of professionalism there and you risk losing a lot based off just telling that secret around a circle as a kid when it comes back to you it's a little different than when it started um but but when i got to that yeah it allows us to maintain a lot of flexibility and adaptability and we we keep very open minds so when a seal platoon gets tasked with a mission they might not go to the book but the book might be wrong for that particular mission so i think it's it's got it's got benefits to it but it's also got some new attractors as well yep no got to be able to uh to adapt just like anything anything in in life but uh so that's what's so important about your podcast i think is that you're keeping that old school tradition alive of passing on some of those lessons and for a lot of these guys i mean they might not be around that much longer i'm about to head out at pearl harbor here in in december to help some of these veterans that might probably a lot of them will be their last time for this 80th commemorative event out there and uh somebody's going to help and get them around get them where they need to go do whatever i need need to do there but uh i mean the vietnam guys are getting up there as well and it's it's so important to capture this not just to pass on these lessons to another generation who needs heroes right now probably more than at any time in our history because there's so many other distractions out there um but also for there for their families because a lot of these guys probably never the stories that that they told tell you on these podcasts they probably their daughter their son is probably hearing it for the first time when they listen to the podcast it's so so powerful yeah i had a guy named uh doug the frenchman letourneau on who is a sog guy in vietnam and he came on the podcast told his whole story incredible story and he died two weeks after three weeks after i interviewed him two weeks after the podcast came out but you know his son came to me his son came to one of my events and and just was so thankful that we were able to capture his whole story and those sod guys they didn't they weren't allowed to talk about what they did for for 20 years they didn't even start talking about it until the 90s and so a lot of them had just kind of suppressed it and they just didn't talk about it anymore so yeah it's a real honor to be able to talk to those guys and capture those stories for sure yeah there's been project delta in in vietnam that charlie beckwith was actually the uh one of the many officers of as a as a major back then but those guys didn't talk about that until just a few years ago like five or six seven years ago some of the first books about project delta came out they did some incredible missions in vietnam it's it's incredible um but uh so when you first got to the teams did you go to some schools that uh that uh some of these old vietnam guys were teaching or what were some of the first schools that stood out to you like there's a new guy are they sending you to dive soup and stuff like that or are you going uh to some some schools that made an impression back then so i had like every other seal i checked in and thought oh i'm just going to be a machine gunner you know give me an m60 which is what we used back then and i was standing watch on the quarter deck we used to have watch on the quarter deck of oh yeah and i was standing watching my the the the the officer of the watcher whatever we called the officer the watch the chief beauty officer whatever it was he was a lieutenant and he said hey if you want to go on every mission you should be a radio man because no matter what mission happens the radio man has to go and i said roger that went to bed that night this is when we used to sleep right there in the quarter deck they have a couple racks in the back and i i woke up in the morning got my gear on i knocked on the door of the of the radio room and said hey uh you know i'm jocko i want to be a radio man and sure enough they were like because no one volunteered to be a radio man back then no one it's about i got voluntold yeah i got told to be a radio man it's a bunch of extra weight you got to carry it's not very uh not a very sexy job you're not slinging lead you're talking on the phone basically and but it was it was what i thought would guarantee me a spot on missions and so that's what i did and i ended up going to a communications school com school an nsw com school actually went to an east coast one which was run by a really squared away chief and and then um that was a great introduction for me i was the primary calm guy in my first platoon and my second platoon and my third platoon which was really cool to be a new guy and be the be the primary comms guy so that was that was kind of how i started off that guy wasn't a vietnam guy uh so you know that mostly you know probably one of the coolest interactions i had with uh the vietnam era seals was when i checked the seal team one of a brand new guy and i am going around checking into the various departments and our exo was a prior enlisted vietnam seal and he's a pretty famous you know in in the seal team's seal and he's one of the guys you know the picture of the dirty dozen in nom they're holding like a uh nva flag yeah yeah he's one of those guys one of those guys in the dirty house he's just an awesome guy so i'm in my whatever i'm in my uniform and i'm checking into the various departments and it's finally time for me to go check in with the xo who's the second last guy you see before you go see the co and so i go to see the xo and i knock on his door and it's this seal this vietnam seal and he's got his big rack of ribbons on you know bronze stars silver stars uh purple hearts it's it's like pushing his trident up onto his shoulder and i'm sitting there looking at him and he you know of course he's like the oldest looking guy i've ever seen in my life which was probably like five years younger than i am right right but he's looking at me and you know he looks up and he goes willing he's looking at my paper and and yes sir and he asked me you know what do you want to do i didn't this was before i became a radio man he just you know what do you want to do and i said oh machine gun or whatever and then he's checking through my stuff and he looks up at me and he goes um i'd give anything to switch places with you right now and it really struck me because i'm sitting there thinking i'd give anything to switch places with this guy right now because he's this war hero and he's got all these experiences and he's a salty old frog man and that's what i want to be and now you know what you fast forward at that time you know that was 30 something years ago and now when i go talk to the young seals i tell them that story and i tell them all i would do anything to switch places with them right now because that's exactly and i said someday you're going to be saying the same thing so take advantage of it enjoy it it's the best job ever and and just relish every moment that you're in the teams yeah no that's uh yeah that's got that's the circle that's how it goes and uh yeah same thing with me comms was a definite was the way to go and it helped me so much when i became an officer because i was involved in that mission planning process even though it morphed after september 11th but still you get those basics down forced me to learn some powerpoint you're in those rooms as you're you're talking with your chief and your oic and all those guys and you're you're part of that planning process and then when you become an officer the comm guy can't fool you and they're not babysitting you like programming your radio and doing all that stuff you're not just you don't look totally helpless so it was it was awesome i love being a you know looking back i love being a conga although at the time i want to be a point man of course like everybody did you know get on that 60 or be appointment uh reading patches watson book but uh so at some point you decide to go to college to go to ocs what was what uh why did you make that decision did you have a mentor or a couple mentors in the teams that uh directed you down that path or did you have a uh what is oftentimes the case a uh not the greatest leadership example and decided hey i can do this better uh than it was done for me or how did that come what was that path for you yeah so this is a story i told in leadership strategy and tactics because it really was a a fundamental moment in my life that changed the way i thought yeah i i had a platoon commander who was not good who was arrogant who had a big ego who was clearly insecure about the amount of experience that he had and he didn't listen to anybody else in the platoon didn't listen to the platoon chief didn't listen to anybody didn't listen to the lpo the lpo had experience combat experience which was rare at the time the the platoon chief was a really brilliant guy the the lpo like i said was squared away there was a bunch of good e5s and there was just a bunch of good people and this platoon commander didn't listen to anybody well it caused a lot of friction the friction eventually escalated to the point where the platoon commander took a swing at the lpo as they were arguing about how to do a certain training mission so we all jump in break it up but this turned the frustration it kind of it kind of gelled the frustration that we had in the platoon we had a mutiny and we went to our our our uh seal team co and told him hey we don't want to work for this guy and of course the seal team ceo is like this sounds like a mutiny we don't have mutinies in the navy get the hell out of here but then he was also a very good commanding officer and so he started pulling the threat on what was going on in this platoon with this particular officer and he fired the guy two or three days later and then we got another platoon commander who was another legendary seal everybody knew who he was i never met him before but everybody knew his name he'd been in every different seal team there was he was a prior enlisted guy he was a prior enlisted senior chief before he became an ensign and then uh you know then a jg and then a lieutenant and now he was coming to be our platoon commander and i kind of thought well they're sending this guy in here to uh you know to put these mutineers in check and it turned out that the first time he came into the platoon hut you know he said hey it's really good to meet you guys i'm looking forward to work with you all and this guy was again one of the oldest people i'd ever seen in my life so he was probably in his mid 30s so he was probably he had gray hair i remember that and thinking geez this guy's like a grandpa he was also you know five foot i don't know maybe five foot six five foot seven maybe 150 pounds so we were all you know these jacked uh young guys and i'm thinking how's this this legendary guy well it turned out legendary because he's just an incredible leader and he was was super humble listened just just made life good for us guys in the platoon and when i got done with that platoon i said to myself if i can one day in my life i'm gonna make i'm going to make life good for 16 guys in a sealed platoon and that's what kind of put me on the path of trying to become an officer so i could be in charge of a seal platoon and make life good for 16 guys in a platoon and that's what i ended up doing and very thankful to have that leader that that uh that showed me how to lead yeah no it's uh it's interesting you say these guys in their mid 30s early 30s are so old i mean i thought the the same thing when i go back and and think about it uh and then you read like a black sheep squadron by pappy boynton he was 28 or something like that uh leading the black sheep squadron as a major in world war ii and they called him papi yeah like he's so old at age 28 um but maybe back then i mean yeah some of those pictures he does look pretty old and some of those pictures because uh there was some serious business going on back there uh so you you you're doing bravo's you're trying to get on these all these deployments trying to be ready um for the call when it comes um but where were you on a 911 did you uh were you in college or what was that afterward or so i had um i had gone i i did this program called the c minute the old semen admiral program which they stopped and they had to stop it because it was the most ridiculous good deal that it ever been so great for anybody yeah i missed that good deal but it's an awesome deal yeah so i was an e5 at seal team one with no college i went to officer candidate school for 13 weeks and they sent me to seal team two as an ensign it was just awesome and then when i did a couple deployments of team two got done with that and then i had to go to college because i hadn't been to college yet and and so i started college in the year 2000 and so september 11th happened 2001 i was in college i immediately called the detailer who i had worked for when i was at seal team two and i said hey sir please get me out of here i'll go to college later i'll do online schooling whatever you need to do but get me back to a seal team and he with a great bit of wisdom said to me you know jocko don't worry this war is going to last a long long time and of course i didn't believe him but he was 100 right and the other interesting thing i was talking with him the other day and he ended up becoming an admiral and he's just a great guy but when i you know i thought oh i'm gonna call and i'm gonna try and get back to a seal team well what else was going on every single seal that wasn't as a seal team was calling back and saying hey give me two a seal team please get me to a sealed team so that's the guys in the community there was a war about to happen and everyone had wanted to go and and and go do what we are supposed to do so that's the that's the great community that we come from but uh so i was in college when september 11th happened i finished college and then again luckily i knew the detailer and he i mean he sent me to seal team seven which was getting ready to deploy to iraq or at least they were sending a platoon to iraq in three months or four months and so i showed up at that seal team this commanding officer of that seal team i had worked for before and he almost immediately fired one of platoon commanders gave me that platoon and then sent me to iraq so i i i'm the luckiest uh luckiest guy ever yeah no we all thought everybody thought they were gonna miss it september 11th if you weren't deployed you were like oh man they thought you were gonna miss it and obviously that was not the the case but um so it was very wise of whoever that that detailer was at that time to take a breath and kind of look long term or to recognize that because not many people did i certainly didn't i was like i was man i was felt so lucky that we were deployed and that we were on planes to the middle east and we thought we were going to afghanistan we ended up doing the team three shipboardings when those guys uh ended up going to afghanistan but um still you were we were closer and we were doing something that uh that felt real and even us doing the ship boardings we were a little bit upset like oh man those guys went to afghanistan we kind of missed it because the shipboardings were going on before september 11th reinforcing that u.n embargo and they were really kind of high speed before september 11th on september 11th they became not so high speed anymore um but looking back it was some of the most interesting not the most interesting but it was it was an interesting thing to have done uh for a time because i look at it like pulling up a police officer pulling a car over you don't really know what you're walking up on so same thing crawling up the size of the ships in the middle of the night as they're speeding towards iran in rough seas like you don't really know what you're what you're getting into so it ended up being kind of cool but uh so you've done team one you've done college you've done ocs you're a team seven uh you've done team two before before that and then team three comes around uh right after that team seven deployment yeah so i i had an awesome deployment with seal team seven like i said i was very lucky i got put into a platoon and we went to baghdad and when i first got to baghdad we were the only only seal platoon in the country which was crazy right it was awesome and we were just doing all kinds of missions you know probably every night every other night just just it was just it was as good as i could have asked for it was also a nice relatively gentle introduction into combat operations so you know i think back to the guys that their first combat operation was d-day that's that's a crazy thought i had a very nice uh relatively nice easy slope going into combat operations of doing these direct action missions that we had a lot of control over and so and it was a great deployment we had a did a bunch of a bunch of cool stuff got back from that actually after that i went and became the admiral's aide for 13 months that was my commanding officer my commanding officer told me that his last mission as the seal commanding officer of seal team seven the last thing he was going to do is make sure that i become the admiral's aide and and i can see why he did it um you know the admiral the admiral at the time he's a great guy and he actually ended up he just was on my podcast not too long ago but just just a great guy but also you know removed from being in a platoon hadn't been to iraq so what they want is they want to have a guy that is fresh off the battlefield that can talk to the admiral and and help him understand what's going on and answer questions for him and that was that was me and so that's exactly what i ended up doing and it was it was an honor to be able to do it and working for for that admiral admiral mcguire joe mcguire he's a great guy a guy that loved the seal teams a guy that would ask in every meeting that he had when people were talking about all these grand plans and where we're going to spend our money he would almost always bring that meeting back to how does this help our seal platoons because that's what we are it's very easy just like in any corporate structure you get into a big bureaucratic structure people forget about why why we exist and the reason the seal teams exist is for the seal platoon to go out there and capture kill bad guys so he was a great guy i got to learn a lot from him and then after that i went to seal team three where i was tasking a commander and uh emma mcguire he's yeah hilarious also by the way if you listen to that podcast with you he's so funny i've been had a i've been fortunate enough to spend a little time around him we were hunting together not not too long ago um but uh yeah yeah great guy and uh it's awesome that he came on the podcast here you guys reminisce about about those times um but yeah then team team three and i wanna ask you a little bit about uh team three but i'm gonna come come back to that um and talk about extreme ownership here in a second but uh after i'm gonna jump ahead real quick to trade at oic where i get to go through your training not once but twice and you are fresh off the battlefield from ramadi and uh we were doing a lot of down man carries out there in the desert in nyland um so my my memories of that time i mean i i you taught me a lot and i passed them on to everyone that i've worked with since a lot of them i still think about today particularly prioritize and execute um in my regular everyday life when there's so many things going on now taking a breath looking around making a call and it was clear to me back then that you had you had this gift for passing on this knowledge not just knowledge but this wisdom because you're passing along not just successes but failures to make the next generation uh better going forward um and we miss that a lot uh strategically and and tactically but i learned a ton during that training but man that was yeah that was pretty serious that was a lot of down band drills so yeah thanks for that i i would say i was a little bit i mean i was i was very i was i was still very emotional you know about the war and and actually you know admiral mcguire when i came back he he just said you know it's a very is a tough deployment um and there was a lot of things happen on that deployment and he said hey what do you want to do where do you want to go and there was no doubt in my mind what i wanted to do i wanted to go to trade i wanted to make sure that the lessons that i learned that that i was able to pass them on to the to the guys that were about to go to this exact same place and do the exact same thing and so yeah i mean it was uh it was like i said i was very you know i don't know i don't know what the quite the word is it's a little bit i was a little bit crazy you know i remember like for instance during during urban warfare training i would be watching a platoon and i'd see a guy standing out in the street in the open and i would feel sick to my stomach because i was waiting for him to get shot because that was the feeling i had for a long time and so that just translated into you know like oh i was just very serious about it and really wanted to make sure that guys knew what they were getting into and and the down man thing you know that was i know i was a little bit brutal about that and you know for people that don't know what we're talking about if you were out on a on a land warfare operation and i when i was running that training you might have three four five seven down men that you have to now carry out you know seven or eight clicks across the desert it's a complete and utter gut check and like that's what we did and and you know part of that was um like hey it's a physical thing but it's also a mental thing of hey you know we found out like carrying down guys is a hell of a lot harder than oh i'm gonna grab the guy you know oh jack's down so i walk over and you kind of stand up and so then you can just kind of jump on my shoulder and i just kind of run a little bit it's not like that like dead weight it's a freaking nightmare and yeah um tried to get those lessons across and and that was my that was my mission at that time yeah i know you did it in a way that uh had never been done before and there's some things that i had even though these things weren't written down just from studying warfare from a very early age reading all these books trying to take the lessons out of these books especially specifically from the vietnam guys back in the 80s and 90s reading reading these things continuing to read everything i possibly could about warfare some of those covering moves keeping it simple uh that decentralized command um about so so i kind of had that just from from study and then from being interact from being in afghanistan but once again all verbal all just observing just on-the-job type type training um but the prioritizing execute that's that's the one that i really really hit home um from you because there's a platoon commander out there and you're throwing these down men all over the place and you have another contact over here and then you're like hey there's a helo that just was coming to rescue you it just crashed over here and you're like uh as a platoon commander but then it's like you just think about these rules these uh these laws of combat that you passed on and i printed them out and i passed them out tell my guys same thing with the dichotomy of leadership i still i still have it i printed it out right here and uh i'd give that to my guy same thing with a true believer quote that was in my second novel i gave that to them as as well but uh but being able to take that breath look around make that call okay adapt from there but then if there's multiple things going on prioritize and execute i mean you when you pass that along to me as a platoon commander uh that made the job when i stepped into that troop commander role uh so much not easier but it's just uh it it makes it uh it gives you some something to fall not fall even fall back on but just because it does it makes it logical yeah i guess it does make it easier because you're not like running around like a crazy person not knowing what to do you're like oh i know what to do here i take a breath make a call oh a few things are going on okay let's prioritize this boom boom boom and then i get to pass those along to the next people if they're if there's a trade at oic who's not doing that well guess what i can talk to my chief i can talk to my my junior officers i can talk to the platoon talk to the troop and talk about these things and pass on what i learned from you to them and then like i said i still use all that stuff today but you you also found a book along the way and this is my copy of it from high school so right here so this is a this is a first a dish it's not signed and i know you have a i think you have like a side galley copy an advanced reader's edition of this that which is incredible to me so uh in high school like i was reading everything even in junior high anything about warfare of course this has a helmet on it you know so i'm like okay i need to read this and uh and i did and uh and you found it at some point along the way too and then eventually you get to write the forward to to a new edition which is what i mean what an honor i mean incredible and then those laws of combat you say you know they're they're rooted in what you learned from hackworth and about face uh can you talk about a little bit about how you found uh this book to begin with and then how you took these lessons and then applied them to to what you did in ramadi and what you're doing today yeah um i again this the guys in the shield teams you know guys like the my my second platoon commander um those those vietnam guys they definitely passed on a lot of information to me but i i always have to kind of admit that my biggest mentor was david hackworth even though i never met him before and and that book right there about face it's not a book about leadership it's not it it never even refers i mean maybe it does a little bit but it doesn't talk about leadership as this sort of reflective thing he's just actually explaining what his leader is doing or what he's doing or what he saw and if you read it through a leadership lens it's an absolutely incredible book to teach you about leadership and that's what i ended up doing and i don't actually remember when i got i don't remember when i read it for the first time because now it's just so embedded in my brain that i don't remember when i read it for the first time i still have my first my first copy is a paperback copy i don't know where it came from i don't know how i got it now i have i i think i have about 15 or 20 copies about five of them are signed and yes i have an advanced reader's copy signed and it's wild it's it's i a guy came to one of my events and he walked up to me and he goes hey i have this for you and i looked at it and and i was taken aback because i recognized what it was but i also didn't recognize because i'd seen most of the different versions before and it's thinner like it's they must have added another two or three hundred pages after the advanced reader copy came out so it's a much thinner version uh and i and i take it out of the plastic and i look at it and it's signed and i just i just i said do you have any idea what this work is worth and he says well i i got it for 30 bucks in canada at a bookstore and i said well are you sure you want to give it to me and he said absolutely so it's in my it's well i'm not going to say exactly where it is but it is in a very very very safe place but yeah reading that book as i read through that book and the book what's interesting about the book is he's a rebel right he's a rebellious person now he's a rebellious person that's totally on board with the with the army and he loves the army and he loves his soldiers and he does everything to the best of his ability but he also questions authority he doesn't blindly follow and the the na the name of the book is about face because at the end of the vietnam war he went on to he went on on a an interview and said that if we don't change the way we're fighting this war we're gonna lose and he was the first senior officer to make that statement and they drummed him out of the army and that was that and i was a little worried you know people write books and maybe they try and make themselves look a certain way and i had an opportunity to have a guy named general james mukayama who was one of his company commanders in vietnam and i got to meet him and have him on my podcast and as i was going to meet with him i thought to myself you know what if this guy's like uh you know hackworth wasn't all that he's kind of a blowhard he was an egomaniac whatever what if he says that and then it's kind of you know that'll kind of crush my the image i had in my mind and so when i met general mukayama who is just an incredible human being awesome guy but he was explaining when he first met hackworth and he was a young captain and he was working as the adjutant for the general when hackworth came to check in uh at fort lewis washington and he says you know so mukuyama says to me he says so hackworth walks in and i go did you know who he was he said everybody knew who hackworth was mr infantry that which i to this day i think that is the ultimate nickname of all nicknames if your nickname is mr infantry but and then he just went on to say that everything that uh everything that i thought about hackworth was 100 right he was just an incredible leader his guys loved him he stood up for his guys he fought hard he's too brave beyond you know brave beyond anything um and just just an incredible leader that everybody loved so that that was very nice to hear but yes that book had a huge influence on me and it i think it did a good job of keeping my mind open because you it's it's it's it's something we have to watch out for in the military of the hierarchy and the rigid structure and the disciplines that are imposed upon you it can start to close your mind and and for me it was always very important to to keep an open mind and to question why we're doing this and is this the best way that something should be done and not just say hey this is what i'm being told to do so i'm going to go do it and so i think hackworth was very instrumental in in in balancing me out because i was definitely like hardcore hey i love the seal teams the sealed teams is my life but if somebody says something just because they're senior to you or just because they've been here longer that doesn't necessarily mean they're right and this doesn't mean i was a contrarian because i wasn't but i would at least have the thought in my head of maybe this isn't 100 right and maybe there's another way to do it and i should always keep them open-minded to that but uh but yeah they when they approached me they asked me to write a blurb for the back of the book and i said uh can i write an entire forward and they were like yeah if you want to and and it happened they have a a division of that of that book cell of that publishing company that's called i think it's called archived books or something like this and they just try and resurrect old books and this is a rare book that had been resurrected through no effort of their own and they started to pull the thread on why this book got resurrected and why it was you know the number one vietnam biography number one korean war biography and they figured out that was because some random guy was talking about it a bunch on his podcast but that random guy was me they figured it out very cool it is awesome yeah i was going to ask you how that uh how that came about because that's uh it's it's so cool that you got to to do that and it's a it's not just a couple paragraphs it's a long forward i encourage everybody to read this book uh and read that forward from from jocko um and one thing that stood out to me about the the book and about when you talk about him is for the soldiers same thing you said about admiral mcguire you know for the guys for the team guys how is this going to make their lives better how it's going to make us a more effective efficient fighting force downrange you know why are we doing this asking those those questions and for the soldiers which which is uh part of i guess a ironic slash dichotomy perhaps that uh that that's what led him to come forward and actually talk about what was not working in vietnam which eventually led to him being drummed out of the military the title of the book about face and led to this and led to really his legacy so it's very interesting he got to pass those lessons along uh because of that so it's interesting how that all how comes about how it all comes full full circle and there's something very cool in here also in the dedication um so he's how he writes he says to all the doughboys the ground pounders the grunts the american infantrymen past present and especially future to them this book is dedicated that's pretty cool and that's what you're doing too with with your with your books right here the kids ones uh most especially is laying that that foundation for this next generation of leaders um so hopefully they don't have to learn the same lessons that uh that we did in blood um and uh and you took a lot from from hackworth also bruiser instead of bravo i mean awesome uh the discipline side of the house uh of course uh snipers using snipers something that uh the regular military wasn't too keen on but that that hackworth really recognized the the value of uh and then the training side of the house and uh and all this stuff continues to influence you today yep yeah i mean you just summed it up like all those things i named my task unit tasking bruiser why did i do that because hackworth renamed his units when he would take over and that i ripped that off 100 from hackwood the sniper thing look we always had snipers in the seal teams but on that deployment to ramadi i i thought to myself hey hackworth you know he said that these things just were kind of a game changer and we started employing snipers just as aggressively as we possibly could and had a huge impact on the battlefield yeah the training knowing and understanding that training is the most important thing we can do for these young for the for the next generation you know that's what brought me out to our desert warfare and and had you guys running down mandrills over and over again and you're one of those lucky guys man i meet guys today and they'll be like yeah i went through the i went through your you know i i got in in 2009 i went through land warfare with you i went through mount with you and there's a few guys that went through twice and uh that's pretty awesome man the lucky few yeah yeah i remember uh when you walked in the room because i think we did mount first i think in that platoon so we were at fort knox at the uh uh urban warfare training facility up there so i think in that platoon usually for whatever reason all my platoons was always land warfare first but this time for whatever reason it was the one that wasn't and so we got to do mount first and then go to uh to land warfare so i had an introduction in uh in the urban warfare venue and then got to go out to an island and do the desert warfare out there and then for the next one it was flipped again so you got to do the land warfare with you with you twice which was which was amazing um but uh so when you start so you're out at land warfare and now you start thinking about transition and getting out of the seal teams and did you just was that a slow process to realize that it's time to time to move on or was it hey after ramadi you get back look around once again take that breath look around make a call realize hey i'm going to pass along these lessons as long as i can at trade it and then i'm moving on like did you know that back then at what point did you know that you weren't going to go and be a commanding officer and be an admiral one day and how did that how did you make that decision um i don't know when i specifically figured that out but um it was definitely the hardest decision i've ever made it wasn't like one day i woke up and said i'm gonna get out it was something i was in my gut and wrenching my gut for months for literally months but you know i the bottom line is i i had a family i had four kids my kids barely knew me um when i went when i went on my first deployment to iraq my sons couldn't even crawl when i got back he could walk uh when i got back from my next deployment he could swim and i didn't like i was a frogman i didn't teach my own son how to swim the same thing was happening with my daughters and i was just sort of this random dude that showed up at the house occasionally and i realized you know for me that my priorities were not my priorities was the seal teams that's was always my priority like if if it was hey you know go to the birthday party for your daughter or go to the platoon monster i was going platoon mustard that that's just the way it was that's the way i thought things needed to be and they kind of do need to be that way and you there's no you know my guys in my platoon my guys in my task unit they're counting on me to be ready to make the right decisions at the right time and if i make bad decisions they don't come home and and by the way i might not come home either so really to take care of your family you have to put your job first and that's what i did i did it for 20 years and at one point i just said you know i this isn't the right thing to do to my family i'm not i haven't had anything balanced uh with my family so i need to be a better husband a better dad and and then on top of that uh the career at that point you know i i was probably looking at another seven years before i would be the ceo of a seal team so what would i do for those seven years well i would do a disassociated tour i'd do a deployment with you know sitting in a jock somewhere and it just wasn't it just wasn't really what i thought i wanted to do at that time and um the other thing there's a gamble because then you become a commanding officer you there might be no war going on we're talking seven years from now uh there might we might just be sitting around and so ultimately i just i just had to look at the situation i was in and and put my family first and that's what made me decide to to retire and guys there's guys that do 30 years there's guys that do 40 years i got friends that are approaching 40 years in the teams right now and like hand salute to those guys god bless them it's amazing and i'm so thankful that those guys stick it out when guys like me didn't um but they said they stay in there they keep that continuity they they pass on the word they keep the traditions alive they hold the line so i'm very thankful that i got friends that are doing 30 and 40 years in the seal teams it's amazing yeah matt matt h because he's still in so i'll just say h but who's my senior listed advisor in that troop commander tour and uh he's getting ready to get out he's good friends with jason gardner of course who works for for echelon front and has uh has been on your podcast and is an awesome guy so and that's i think 30 years maybe even a tad bit over 30 years for for him and these guys that put in that time especially back in the day when you didn't have a physical training thing or all you did was lift as hard as you could and ran as fast as you could in soft sand for as long as you could maybe down to imperial beach have drink whatever like we did not put a lot of thought into the longevity of our troops back in the 80s and 90s and these guys are uh they're showing some of that that that wear and tear but i think also you can get almost a little too comfortable with going to physical training kind of like those people that show up at buds who have been olympic athletes or have been in uh professional sports where if they're like a lamborghini where they get that oh some of the rattle little rattle over here gotta go see gotta have somebody rub it out well guess what no one's going to massage that thing out of you and tell you how great you are you'll be right back in you know the exact opposite is going to happen so there's a there's a balance there i think for for sure and uh and you might same thing with me it's very very similar in that that pendulum i looked at it as the pendulum and people talk about a pendulum quite a bit but it has to be on the side of the team that's what you owe the guys that uh you're taking down range that's what you owe their families that's what you owe the mission that's what you're the team the country by default um and it has to be that way and for me being able to articulate that to my wife i think that's kind of why we're still together is that we talked about that okay it's over here it's not always going to be over here but for now it has to be because these guys are counting on me and that's why when i'm home that's why i'm reading all these books and i'm reading all these things to make myself a better operator that's why i'm still training on my own time or going on the weekends when we're home where am i going i'm going up to do a three-day pistol course somewhere with uh with larry vickers or pat mcnamara or kyle lam or whoever who happens to be passing through to make myself a little little bit better um and but now that pendulum can come back a little bit still building the business i mean you got to keep that in perspective as well so i have to constantly tell myself that hey the pendulum's supposed to be on the on the family side right now so it's something that's uh i think it's always a struggle for for some of us that dive dive right into everything that we that we do um and you're probably not gonna remember this so right before you got out uh we were at a change of command i think it was or it was a retirement on the buds grinder and uh you walk by and we talked for a few minutes and i asked you what you were going to do and you played your cards very close and in my head i don't even know if you knew what you're going to do yet but in my head i was like i know what this guy's gonna do because i knew how talented you were at passing these lessons on and i'm like okay he's not gonna go work for somebody he's not going to law school he's not going to medical school he's not going to go into finance and work for somebody and work his way up some no he's going to go do something on his own and in my head i'm like he's gonna pass these these lessons on and uh and and transition them over to the private sector um and i so i was thinking that in my head back then before while you're still in uniform um and so when did you start thinking about what you're going to do after you make this decision to get out um when did you start thinking about what that next chapter in life was going to be yeah so about six months before i actually retired so it was about a year out when i went and told the admiral um that i was gonna retire and and then then i told everyone else in the chain of command um but then after that i was like okay what am i gonna do and i really wasn't thinking about it so i had a gym in san diego i had a mixed martial arts gym trained jiu jitsu and it was going great and i figured you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna teach you to train jiu jitsu surf hang out with my kids and uh you know that's that that's that that's what i'm gonna do and it seemed like a pretty good plan i love doing jiu jitsu i love surfing i love hanging out with my family so this is a great way to ride off into the sunset about six months prior to me retiring a guy that i knew that was the ceo of a big company said hey i want you to come and talk to my executives about leadership and i was like yeah okay cool i didn't even think anything of it i was like yeah he's a friend of mine cool so i went up and he was up la based and i went up and talked to his executive team and i think he thought i was gonna say you know you need to get out there get after it yeah but instead i talked about cover move simple prioritize and execute decentralized command taking stream ownership being default aggressive i started i i basically gave them a declassified version of the brief that i would ended up giving all the teams as they were getting ready to start trade at prodev or sorry ult and so when i got done he had a look on his face of like oh and even during the q as soon as people started asking me questions i was like oh this stuff is a hundred percent applicable to the civilian sector and i got done answering questions and i walked back to the ceo and he says i want you to do this for every division i have my company and i was like well i'm getting ready to retire and he's like i'll pay you and i said okay well how much and he offered me money and i was like okay so i started then talking to these other divisions and then i retired and at one of those divisional meetings across the country the ceo of the parent company was there so i did me did this leadership talk and i got done and the ceo of the parent company came up to me and said hey i want you to come and talk to all my ceos and he owned like 45 or 50 companies at that time so i went to this ceo summit and by the time i got done with the ceo summit a bunch of those ceos came up i want you to come and talk to my company i want to come and talk to my company i want to come and talk to my company and all of a sudden i had like a job and then leif got out and i was like hey bro i need some fire support over here do you want to come and you know start doing this so leif comes and we i i had too many too much to do and so they lace starts picking up and do it doing it as well and then of course we start getting asked hey do you have this stuff written down anywhere can you got something we can hand out to the people that can't make it to the meeting and so we were like well yeah we can write this stuff down and that that ended up becoming extreme ownership yeah and that and uh this thing for me i mean i don't know who doesn't know um but i get the new york times list thing every week my publisher sends it to me and i i really have no reason to go beyond the first two fiction non over here but i always go and i scroll down to that business section there the bottom right uh these things i get sent weekly this is always on there this has been on the new york times list for who knows how how long and then i was thinking about it right before this and i went over and looked on amazon it's like number one number one number one on those three little categories under there so um this thing is i mean you guys did an amazing job with it but what was it did you have a little bit of a struggle when it came time to like hey we need a deliverable we have these lessons we're talking about them in these these venues um did you struggle with writing them down at all making it a book because of the uh i don't know the climate at the time at the in the seal teams and how did you how did you work work through that and also was it therapeutic to uh to write all these things down and pass these lessons on that you and leif write about in extreme ownership yeah so the first part you know overcoming the quiet professional um idea of like hey my whole life in the seal teams you didn't talk about it um i didn't have you know you didn't put a sticker on your car you didn't do any of that stuff that was just the way it was you didn't say anything that's the quiet professional that's the way you're supposed to be and so there's no way to write a book about your experiences and not on some level violate that protocol you can't do it you can't do it it doesn't work and so yeah i had to come to grips with the fact that okay these are important lessons that need to be learned these are these are things that are helping people we're helping people with them every day that we're putting out this word we need to get it to out to more people and we just need to do it in a way that and i think this is the key thing that i think really pisses off people inside the seal community if you try and portray yourself as something that you were not when you were in the seal teams so if you try and portray yourself as the ultimate badass if you try and portray yourself as the most awesome seal ever the the people in the community are going to get pissed and and and that's why i mean it was just how do we write this thing and make sure we are humble and we're not trying to say that we're better than we were because we made all kinds of mistakes and that's why a lot of the book is our mistakes what we messed up i mean the opening chapter of extreme ownership is a fracture side that took place a blue on blue that i was in charge of and there's nothing worse that i can think of that can happen in combat than having a fracture side and that's the opening of the book so we tried to just stay as as humble as we could and write it from a perspective of of hey look we're not saying that we're great we're saying that we were lucky enough to learn some good lessons that could help you as well and that's what we tried to do and you know of course there's still there's still seals that it's like that's just a violation that's just how it is i i was very thankful that most of the guys would be were like hey dude this is a good book and and what i think really happened was along this time there was a lot of books coming out a lot of sealed books coming out a lot of not just necessarily books but just a lot of uh publicity and all of a sudden people were concerned about how seals appeared from the outside and and people my friends would say thank you for doing a good representation of the teams and i was like well thank you for not thinking i'm a total piece of [ __ ] because i wrote a book yeah mcraven said the same thing at the end of your podcast i mean he thanked you for for being uh such a good representation of what a seal can be both in uniform and out of uniform as well so that was that was pretty cool for him to to say that that was awesome yeah super super humbling and and and you know like i a i only am where i am because of the seal teams you know that's that's the seal teams gave me everything they they they i was raised in the ceiling that's just what i was and what i am so i i never want to do anything that makes the seal teams look bad ever you know they mean too much to me and and it's a great community and look do we have flaws of course we have flaws do we screw things up yes we do i did you did we we make mistakes the community makes mistakes we but we also have a reputation and we also have a part of what we are and part of who we are is that when something goes wrong we we fix the problem and so look we we have problems and we work as hard as we can to get them straightened out and that's something we can never stop doing yeah and we're going to go back to the therapeutic question um that circle that you had in the seal teams like obviously you influenced me you influenced an entire generation of combat leaders in the seal teams and those those uh those lessons are still still out there being uh being passed passed down um and uh and now in this book it's not just war stories it's not just how you apply those to business there's a lot of personal stuff in here it applies to your personal life as well i think that sometimes gets gets missed um when people are talking about business and and combat military leadership and all that stuff there's a lot of personal accountability that you talk about in on your podcast that you talk about on social media sometimes in interviews that sort of a thing but uh this isn't just for business leaders uh or people that are in the military i want to learn lessons that that you and leif took from from ramadi um you can take these things and apply them to your personal life and be much better for it i think we'd be a better country if everybody's just gonna if you're gonna read a few things if you were just to read these things only and i don't i obviously recommend people read a lot i do monthly reading lists and all that but if you were just to read these and internalize these concepts and take accountability and responsibility for your own life and your own actions we would be you wouldn't have a better life we'd have a much better country we have a much better world yes exactly exactly so that's why i think the real value in here is what you can take and internalize for personally that then you start influencing your circle and what is that maybe it's your wife maybe it's your your one kid maybe it's your two kids maybe it's their friends maybe it's your circle at work that's five people maybe it's a hundred whatever that might be and everybody is getting better moving forward so um yeah so i think it's fantastic in that respect but um when you're writing it was it uh was it therapeutic because writing mind even though they're fiction very therapeutic especially that first one for me to write and it continues to be that way even though they're fiction but was it therapeutic in any way to write i think i think it is um i i think writing is good therapy and and this is advice that i give when if you if you lose somebody and you know i've been unfortunate enough to have lost a lot of friends like you and one of the things that i've also had the honor of doing is giving a bunch of eulogies for my friends and i i realized that when you write a eulogy it's that is very therapeutic and it's really hard it's freaking heartbreaking it's soul-crushing but you're getting those you're capturing what your thoughts and feelings are and it allows you to kind of take a step back and and process them a little bit better and so i think it's very important to whatever whatever you're going whatever you've gone through in the past you i think it's a really good way to address it is to write about it and yeah so i think in these books all my books being able to write about things i've been through things i've seen it helps you understand them better it helps you process them so yeah i think therapeutic is the is a good word the only thing i that makes me pause a little bit on the word therapeutic is it sounds like almost oh if you do this you're going to immediately feel better but i think it's more of a long-term um just a way of life of of of thinking about these things and putting them on paper so you can detach from them and see them from a different perspective so yes therapeutic but in a very strategic way got it no that's exactly that's exactly it and then you guys do the dichotomy of leadership and this is right here i printed it out because i still still have it still have laws of combat this is the an original an og right here print out from you from back in the day but uh i was gonna read a couple of them right now you go through them all you just do some of them in extreme ownership go deeper into economy a leadership book but uh but i love these because once again they're not just for military they're not just for business they're for life and some of these are confident not cocky courageous not foolhardy competitive but a gracious loser attentive to details but not obsessed by them strong but also have endurance leader and follower humble not passive aggressive not overbearing and then we just talked about this quiet not silent calm not robotic logical not devoid of emotions uh closer to troopers but not so close that one is more important than the others and then this was one i thought about quite a bit in the teams uh nothing to prove but everything to prove and i thought about that probably daily after you pass that along to me because i think it was something that you you instinctively know but you don't put words to it um and that that's a great way to put it nothing to prove but everything to prove uh infield debate enlisted have the experience love that uh resign your commission or get one but not working together equals failure and i think you said that a couple times uh to different troops and platoons going through that uh that are having debates out there in the middle of land warfare and this is a this one is too this is so valuable for for the guys and will continue to be valuable for them going forward law of arm conflict don't do what you think is right do what is legal i mean that that right there distills it down all those briefs that you get from the jags and and everything right before you put your minds on something else so you gotta go to sign something or whatever else you're out the door do what is legal i think that one right there everyone needs to take that to heart that's going going downrange um and anything you can do be made public do it right pick your battles open mind humility i mean they're so fantastic um but there's this last one here this is this one's pretty sweet article 99 and uh you say any one well article 99 says but you uh instilled it in us any member of the armed forces who in the presence of the enemy runs away surrenders casts away his arms quits his place of duty or and this is caps fails to do his utmost to encounter engage capture or destroy enemy troops shall be punished by death yeah article 99 ucmj i wrote it on the wall in uh in basra on that deployment with matt h that we did uh for my troop commander tour but uh yeah i mean those lessons right there uh just writing those out and passing those along to the next generation and then now making them a part of people's lives by passing them along through through these books but when did the dichotomy of leadership come to you when did you realize hey there's this dichotomy out there that people need to think about you need to internalize you need to um you know you need to verbalize you need to articulate what did that what did that come to you there was this dichotomy out there i was at lamb warfare and watching a platoon go through and you know i was always saying hey look you got to be aggressive you got to make things happen that's got to be your default mode and like this one platoon a couple leaders in the platoon just went hyper aggressive and ended up just you know getting a bunch of people killed this is just in training getting a bunch of people shot with paintball and it was just a big disaster and i thought to myself well i can't be mad at them because i was telling them that they needed to be aggressive and and then i said hey listen there is such a thing as being too aggressive that's what you guys just did and then i then i immediately thought to myself and this is what you know what's interesting is you were reading that list which is awesome i actually want you to send that uh take a picture of that to me and send it to me but this is weird and i talk about this in leadership strategy and tactics i was always paying attention to leadership part of the reason was because i wasn't really that great at any of the just normal stuff even as a little kid like i wasn't the best athlete but i could get i could figure out how to win by a maneuver and then when i got in the seal teams i wasn't the best shot i wasn't the fastest i wasn't the strongest but i could figure out what to do during an assault if like things were going sideways i was good at that part and the reason i was good because i would take a step back and detach so it was like for me i had all this context in my head about leadership so as soon as i saw this platoon that was too aggressive i was like hey they were too aggressive and i told them i said hey i can't be mad at you i told you to be aggressive but you can't be too aggressive and as soon as i got done talking to him i thought you can be you can take any of these things that i talk about and you can go too far with them and there's got to be a balance and everything and then it was the next jotsy class that i went to talk to lay's class i i went through the dichotomy of leadership and explained it to him hey all these things have to be balanced and then the reason we wrote the book is the title of first book extreme ownership a lot of people thought it just need to be extreme and and that's not what we were trying to say you need to take extreme ownership but this doesn't mean be extreme it means actually the opposite you want to be balanced and so many of the questions that we would have to answer would be because people were out of balance in the dichotomy of leadership so we ended up taking the last chapter of extreme ownership and turning it into the dichotomy of leadership so that what people would understand the critical element of leadership is to be balanced yep no it's uh when i got the junior officer training course uh lace and it was a couple years after leif had left already and his briefs were still in there and i had all your stuff that you'd given me i had the my experience and i got to add all this and i got to give those junior officers and so for people listening or watching the junior officer training course is something that uh we started to do finally is give a little bit of leadership training in the seal teams and it comes between buds so between your six months of just proving that you are tough enough to be there that you are comfortable in the water and that you are safe with demo and firearms then the officers come out their class goes on to seal or to uh uh sdt social tactical training um and they go to a junior officer training course and then they'll jump into the next class to go through that more advanced block of training but i would pass them exactly what i read right here i'd pass them that i'd pass them jacqueline's laws of combat but not only would i just pass them out we'd talk about them they were classes um so once again you're not even there and your experience lace experience once again through me influencing an entire generation of of new frogmen um but uh let's talk about final spin i mean and that's why i also have to read the dichotomy leadership and extreme ownership you have to read them in conjunction with one another so i highly recommend that uh final spin so man so your first foray into into fiction and like i said don't listen to jaco's podcast on it till after you read it and it comes out early november is that november 7th is that right november 9th november 9th this thing is out you can order it right now and do so uh but don't read the publisher weekly review and don't listen to the podcast till after you order this and and read it um but uh and i hadn't like i said so i opened this thing to read it and there's a character in here artie with special needs and as soon as i read that in the first chapter i'm like oh man because as you know we have a middle child with severe special needs and uh that's our mission in life is making sure that he is taken care of for a lifetime of full-time care so that's our my wife and my mission after the military that's that's our mission so i read this and i'm like oh man this is going to be a lot more emotional than uh than i thought when i when i cracked this thing and that is true it certainly was it was it's a very emotional emotional read um but before we get into that what inspired you to write this in particular like you could have chosen anything in the fiction realm and they did this yeah this is the one that bubbled to the surface you know in my head i have hundreds if not thousands of stories that i want to tell and this is the one that was knocking hardest on the door wanting to come out you know i but i had this conversation with my my literary agent and this was a couple years ago you know she went to uh i think she went to yale or harvard and she majored in history and english literature and now she's a she's a you know a writing agent and once i said to her i said hey what you know why don't why don't you write books and she said i look at a blank screen on the computer and i have nothing to write and i said i look at a blank screen on the computer and i have hundreds of things that are fighting to figure out which one's gonna get to get put on the page and uh this one this one is the one that won that fight and got out the door and it's something that i think was really rooted in how i grew up and the a bunch of experiences that i had as a kid and the way the world looked to me when i was younger and the way it still looks to me now that i'm older and just some some lessons and some experiences from life that i've had that this just seemed to be a story that that was just it was just coming out of my was just coming out of my head i just couldn't it was just there and what's great about this is that you don't over develop these characters we all know people we all know and already we all know it johnny we all know a goat we all know what jessica we all know the gerald longstrom got like you know these characters you don't need to do the whole background and i i found that that fascinating and it's uh it's something i've been thinking about a lot even before reading this in developing my characters and developing situations and describing scenes uh and letting the reader do a lot of that because you already know off what an office looks like you don't need to describe every detail of it in my novels because everybody's been in an office before and they're all going to have a little bit of different idea of what that is and that's fine but for you there's a lot of personal uh there's a lot of you in here and one artie is someone that you worked with at a wendy's uh back in the day of course i didn't know this until i was reading it when i was reading it i only knew it after when i listened to your podcast um but you worked with someone who had some some special needs and a woman named jean all right and uh so and it's episode 301 of the podcast so after you read the book listen to listen to 301 and it'll make it a uh it's already a full reading experience but then you get to kind of go behind the curtain and find out exactly what uh what inspired all this um but uh we can talk a bit about the characters i don't want to talk about the two things that the publishers weekly review talks about but um so you're working at a wendy's and there's this a person there who it was impactful to you and it's obviously stayed with you all these years later yeah yeah there's a woman she was probably 55 years old her name was jean and she had some kind of mental impairment she was you know she was fully functional but she had she had some kind of mental impairment and she ran the salad bar when wendy's used to have a salad bar and she was very like almost obsessed with making sure that the salad bar was everything was clean and the dressings were filled up and the salad was fresh and it kind of seemed in a way like she was being abused because she was working there you know getting paid whatever six dollars and 30 cents an hour and she would work incredibly long hours it seemed like she was kind of getting abused like the luckiest wendy's manager in the country happened to get this person that's obsessed with running the perfect salad bar for dollars and 30 cents an hour but at the same time she was like happy she was happier definitely happier than anybody else definitely happier than me and because i'm flipping burgers and hating life and that's pretty much everyone that's there is in the same way even the people even the manager the day manager the night manager no one was happy they were all miserable and here's this woman who is happy and and i was always nice to her you know i was always just i would try and talk to her i try and talk to i try to figure out like what was going on in her life and she would never really talk about anything about the salad bar about the pineapples about the croutons the croutons were fresh the croutons were crunchy like that's what she would talk to me about but i would just always be nice to her and and you know sadly um some of the other people were not nice to her you know they would they would kind of talk down to her and make fun of her and she didn't really know that that was happening uh but yeah it definitely stuck with me and that the fact that you know if for me i always saw in life there was like this underlying sadness around me and and when i saw people when i looked at people when i talked to people i always felt like like life isn't really going to work out the way you wanted to and and that's a that's that's a a pretty rough thing to to look at the world to look at the world i don't know why i don't know why i noticed that but it's just something that i kind of felt that when i looked around at people i always thought life didn't quite go the way you wanted it to or life is not going to go quite the way you want it to and you're going to end up you know like everybody everybody's going to end up your friends are going to die you're going to die your family's going to die the people you love are going to die you're going to have a crappy job it's going to be a gut check like there's all these negative things and it seemed like that was sort of what life was and then there was gene who was who is actually pretty happy and so i always remembered that and that's where that's where that character came from and i didn't i made this guy already obsessed with laundry uh because i don't like doing laundry and i just thought what's the what if there's something that the worst the the most horrible thing that i have to deal with my life you know on a daily basis like oh i got to do laundry i thought what would be the worst thing to be obsessed with a guy that's obsessed with doing laundry he loves doing something that that i hate doing and and the other funny thing is you know we all get obsessed with things you know we're obsessed with jiu-jitsu we're obsessed with archery we're obsessed with climbing we we and there's groups of people that are obsessed with those things and that's their life and it's just kind of funny to have somebody that's obsessed with doing something that most people find completely mundane and boring yeah it's amazing how chat that uh that that experience ends up in the pages of this but final spin i mean it works on a couple different levels which people will realize once they once they read it but when you talked about him being happy i mean for me once again super emotional because uh years and years ago when i was still in the seal teams uh a guy hunting buddy in in san diego ron province uh he we're talking about our son and uh and he's he said he's gonna be happy like and that and at the time i was kind of like ah but it's true i mean and that it's something that i think about every single day is that uh that my son is is a happy and uh for that i am so thankful um so when i read that here and here and heard you talk about it i'm like oh geez but uh just just super emotional but uh then you have another guy you have johnny and uh there's and and it's not in here but i heard you talk about it how you dedicate the the book to the person that uh that really influenced that character and obviously impacted you a lot uh jeff lang is that saying um and he's a friend of yours growing up who took a took a different path but uh but you dedicate the book and he had an impact on you what's uh what was his story so jeff lang and i were best friends from i want to say first or second grade through about seventh grade fifth grade we were actually in the same class together and we were completely out of control um he was hilarious he was a great athlete he was super smart and but he was a troublemaker for sure i was a troublemaker too we'd get in trouble he would always get in a little bit more trouble than me he had a little bit less of a of a restraint on his personality than i did and so he would always you know when the teacher would say i'm going to kick you i'm going to send you to the principal's office i would kind of settle down he would get sent to the principal's office and as we grew up you know i started i started going down the path of sort of i was listening to heavy metal and then hardcore music and then i was going down that path and he started listening to uh i guess hippie music and that kind of path and our paths kind of diverged although we always were friends like we were such good friends as kids that it didn't matter that he was a smoking dope and doing drugs and i was not doing any of that we still were always friends we would still see each other at school and hang out talk and then but but we ended up on very different paths and so i ended up joining the navy and he was you know had i think he at this point dropped out of school and he was just going down a bad path in life and uh when i when i joined the navy kind of the last time that i remember talking to him he said something along the lines of like you know i heard you go in the navy and when we were kids before he be you know got went down that path we'd run around and play army freaking 10 hours a day you know shooting each other with bb guns and building forts and all the stuff that boys do and now you fast forward whatever it was 10 years 12 years and i'm going to join the military and he's not going to and he's headed in a completely different path and he said to me something along the lines of i wish i hey i wish i could go with you and i was kind of said back to him you can you know do it do it and he kind of had a look on his face of no i can't and it was not a positive look it was kind of a sad look because he was just too down the path of of that you know bad that bad path of drugs and alcohol and so i ended up you know i left for boot camp and started buds and all that and and it was somewhere around i want to say maybe sometime shortly after hell week i might i talked to my mom or i maybe called my mom to say i made it through hell week or something like that or called my mom and dad and my mom told me that jeff lang had killed himself and you know it just it always stuck with me that and what really stuck with me was the fact that he was a lot better than me and in in just about everything he was smarter than me he was funnier than me he was a better athlete than me he was just a really a really good human being and he had a good heart and he just made some bad decisions along the way and and that's what happens you know that's what has happened to my friend jeff lang i've seen it happen to a lot of my friends along the way and and so i got lucky you know i got lucky when i joined the military all that angst and energy and and anger that i had as a kid i i focused it on one thing and that was so i want to be a good steal and that what a beautiful opportunity and how lucky is that that i got to take all the things that i thought were cool and apply them in my life and if that wouldn't happen i don't know what would happen to me so yes that that's where this character of johnny he's not necessarily jeff lang he's more an amalgamation of of there's definitely he's he's jeff laying strong but goat is also jeff lynch yeah they're both they both have some jeff lang in them but they also have just a bunch of other kids you know i've i have other friends that you know i had a friend that like got drunk and drowned in a freaking in a little creek you know when he's 25 years old or something like this and you just think man great humans with all this opportunity in it and they're just making some some bad decisions and they end up in a bad spot and and so i've known a lot of people like that in my life and i i definitely jeff lang it's a it breaks my heart you know to think that that that that he what he could have done with his life and and how it ended up being so tragic it's it's a it's a sad story for sure yeah but what connects people to this book and why i think it's going to resonate with so many people is because people know whether it's first hand whether it's second hand they know people like this that have had these experiences most of them will know people in their own lives that uh that they'll recognize as a johnny as a joke especially as a jessica and i mean you don't overdevelop i want to keep going back to that because uh once again everyone already knows these characters um we all know that jessica um well maybe the seal teams you know a few more to a few jessica's but uh gerald also long strong i mean what everybody's gonna gonna relate to that because in life you have to work and you're all you're gonna have somebody out there that's a gerald longstrom ish type person uh and uh was he just fun to write everyone was fun to write and and yeah it's it's interesting because even though it's obviously it's a pretty tragic story in the end but man there's i had so much fun like uh just reading reading the audiobook you know i would be i would have to redo stuff because i'd be laughing you know too hard at my own jokes at the at the things that the guys are saying to each other there's just the whole thing was really fun to write and and yeah lundstrom we we all knew it a jerry nickname that they call him the weasel everybody had the weasel in their life you know if you had a minimum wage job at some point you worked for the weasel 100 and he thought that he was you know the coolest guy in the world because he was the manager of the night shift and he was an [ __ ] about it and and so yeah we've all worked for those people and it was definitely fun to write yeah i know it's great i mean the themes we talked about obsession uh the consumerism part of it the underlying sadness to the to the whole thing um that comes from from life in general you're gonna get dealt cards in your life and now it's up to you to play those cards the best you possibly can that part's on you um so not being able to undo the past that's the other thing that stood out to me in this is johnny thinking hey i'm going to make this better we're going to figure this out like anyway i don't want to talk too much about it but not being able to undo the past so so then what do you do and you don't really talk about this in the book but the lesson to me anyway and hopefully the people reading is like oh you take that foundation then you build upon it you can build upon those failures and keep moving forward wiser for it um but i kept thinking like i'm reading i'm like no i'm like no don't ah so uh so what would you say is the is the main lesson of final spin that you want people to when they close that they turn that final page what do you want them to to walk away from this book with uh you know you know part of the part of the huge part of it is the sacrifices that people make in their lives and and you know there's a huge sacrifice that takes place in the book and you know the people are doing that every day and it was interesting for me you know i i've spent so much time with so many people that have served in the military obviously served in the military for 20 years and there's people that make sacrifices every day whether they're a a waitress single mom waitress working free jobs whether they're you know in this particular case you got a guy like johnny that's trying to support his brother trying to support his alcoholic mom and and that's what his life is that's where he ended up and he doesn't do a great job of it but he's trying he's trying hard and i think just to to you ever had those dreams have you ever had a dream where you did something wrong in the dream and it's like a major mistake in your life and then you wake up and you realize that it's a dream i i have a dream sometimes where i'd commit some horrible crime and i leave the crime scene and when i leave the crime crime scene i get back to my house and i realize i left my wallet at the crime scene and like i am 100 gonna get busted for whatever heinous crime i committed and i wake up and i'm just so just horrified and i'm so depressed and sad and just the worst feeling and it lasts for like five seconds and then i go oh wait a second where's my wallet oh my wallet's on my bed oh that was the dream and i'm so happy and it's like it's like a new lease on life right it's like a new lease on life and i hope that this book when people read it they they realize that you know we all have a new lease on life you know and and if as long as you're not if you if you're still alive you can still you can still make things happen and and and i would also say that the most important um thing that i've found in my life is doing things to help other people is the is the way that you win it's the most gratifying thing it's the way it's the way it's the way that you can get satisfaction in your life not buy not buy the consumerism stuff not by buying a bigger house or a bigger car whatever not by you know getting moving up in your corporate hierarchy you know becoming the best night manager and being the most uh being the sternest boss none of those things are are really going to move you in the right direction and but if you if you can help other people if you can make some sacrifices for others i think that's where where happiness comes from and i think that's that's portrayed in the book yeah i wrote that down here happiness putting yourself putting others before yourself um as a as a takeaway and you're doing that every day i mean you got you have the books out there the kids book uh mikey the dragon i mean you're doing so much to help other people uh you must be a very happy guy these days jocko um and uh i'm certainly glad that you've decided to pass these things on and i want to be cognizant of your time but also um i do want to ask you about a few a few things um more current events type so you did this presidential address ish a few minutes long uh and i know you were probably getting texts from everybody and people ask me on social media what do you think of afghanistan what do you think afghanistan and you didn't reply for a little bit but people want to know what your thoughts are on this and then bam you did it and essentially dropped the mic walk away type of a thing uh and i'm sure people definitely go out and check that out you can find it anywhere just type it into the search bar um but what would it take do you think to get you involved in uh in politics from not just being a supporter but to actually to step into the ring like i'm not asking if you would do it or not what would it take to for you to do that yeah it would take really major catastrophic events happening and a complete lack of leadership you know i really i don't i don't want to get into politics it's just not something i i want to do but i also love america and if things just get to a point where i don't i can't sit by and watch it anymore i would i would i would do something about it but politics is just a nasty ugly world and yeah i just don't i just don't know yeah it would have to get pretty bad it would have to get pretty bad yeah i think that's the easiest question i get asked about is about politics and my answer is it's an easy answer no it just it's not a real i'm very comfortable in the fighting part and i'm very comfortable in the not fighting part and the learning and all that but that middle part where people it just it's not a place where i think i would what excel it's just not my my forte it needs to be all all in fight or the other side yeah i just i think i might i might do good as a benevolent dictator there's something about that about you know it you know having a king because when you have a king or someone like that or a dictator guess what you can overthrow that that person um and uh anyway that's a whole nother another thing i do think i do i am hopeful i have a positive attitude that you know they they say when someone has problems in their personal life right they got to reach rock bottom before they kind of turn around and and fix their life i mean i think we're getting pretty close to a rock bottom scenario with our political environment the way you know there's looking at the the people that are in power right now their behavior their attitudes uh their lack of leadership i think we're really close to the to to that rock bottom politically as a country and i think people the the actual humans the people of america are are like just so fed up and i think there's going to be some i don't know what it is but i think something will happen that will put us in a better spot sort of a semi-radical change whether it's some kind of a third party whether i don't know what but something that's something that's somewhat different that that that puts that puts us on a different track this track that we're on right now is is awful to watch i mean it's just absolutely awful to watch it's sickening that people could act this way and behave this way and and have these type of attitudes and they're supposed to be in charge of of of america so i think the i think the uh the people of america aren't really going to put up with that much more yeah it's heartbreaking to watch and i think what's part of what's happened is that they've found there is power and division uh for them and it's just been exacerbated by the rise obviously of social media and then we become aware of these algorithms that are working on us to click a button to see advertisements or whatever it is well guess what political realm they're recognizing that too maybe a little slower than some of the tech giants but they're recognizing that power and division and then they get to exacerbate these problems for their own personal gain uh or the gain of you know whatever constituency they uh and not to mention and not to mention there's other nation states that want nothing more than to watch america fail and fall and so they do their best to incite that division as well and i just had this conversation with someone the other day if there's a platoon and there's two clicks in the platoon and they don't get along how's that platoon do compared to a platoon where everyone gets along and and they don't get along perfectly but they can at least say hey you know what jack your call on this will i'll support you if they can get to there where they just put their ego aside and just let's move forward that platoon that works together utterly destroys the platoon that is fighting with each other and that is so obvious and yet we run around in this country arguing on social media taking divisive stances you know if if jack believes this thing over here then i categorize his whole personality and i hate him and i won't talk to him or if jack disagrees with me on this point then i hate jack instead of saying oh well why do you think that jack maybe i could learn something from you i don't understand that maybe as well as you do and instead of listening to each other it's just hey shut up i'm not talking to you i hate you that's that's where we're at and people don't realize how bad that is for a seal platoon and how bad that is for a country and there are agents in the world that are out trying to sow these seeds of divisiveness inside of our country this is not me being uh you know imagining this these this is this is what has happened factually so if we don't start paying attention to that we're gonna end up in a tough spot but i do think we are starting to pay more attention and i think america i think americans are starting to get just fed up with it and we're ready to work together and move forward well i'm glad you're hopeful because it's very hard for me to remain hopeful i try to have my public face be hopeful but uh you know privately when i sit down with my wife at the end of the day and we're talking on the couch sharing a glass of wine or whatever it's uh it's hard to remain hopeful when you see the direction we're going how far we've gone down this path already and then my last book the devil's hand was all about putting myself in the enemy's shoes and what lessons they learned from watching us on the battlefield iraq and afghanistan what have they learned uh from watching our response to kova what have they learned from the civil unrest in our in our cities what have they learned and how have they applied those lessons to their future battle plans and as i was going through this research and putting myself in the enemy's shoes for about a year and a half as i was writing this thing i felt horrible because my takeaway was man i wouldn't do too much if i was the enemy right now i might just sit back and watch instigate a little bit over here with a few bots or whatever they have going on that's about it we're doing a pretty good job of destroying ourselves from the inside and that part is heartbreaking yes it is heartbreaking that one luxury i have jack that allows me to be have a little bit more of a positive attitude is i i i travel the country and even if i'm not traveling i work with all these companies all over the country in every industry that you can imagine and all these companies they're all working together all want to want to grow their business they all want to figure out how to be better leaders so there's so many people in america right now if you if you if you think america is twitter it's a freaking disaster it's a failed state if you think that america is america and you get to travel and you know i go like i said i work with countries companies all over this country in the middle of the country on the coast tech companies finance companies energy companies health care companies and they're all thinking hey what can we do better how can we get better so that i think is what is maintaining me give allowing me to maintain a little bit of a positive attitude even though twitter looks like a failed state i love that twitter looks like a failed state i might put that in the novel i'll put it in the acknowledgements for sure uh that's fantastic um but i'm gonna tell it's my wife tonight uh uh when we when we finally sit down at the at the end of the day that that you have hope here because uh yeah if you just look at twitter or the comments maybe in a youtube video it's uh exactly that it's uh it's not inspiring uh if you're thinking about future generations and what they're going to have to contend with um and when you're looking at at ramadi in particular or iraq as a whole or now afghanistan we've seen how after 20 years how we essentially rushed to failure at the end uh when we had we didn't even have to go back to the soviets we didn't have to go back to three british incursions in the 1800s and early 1900s we didn't have to go back to genghis khan or alexander the great we had 20 years of our own experience to learn and adapt and prepare and yet it ended up the way it did when you conceptualize that or think about it take a breath or talk to people about it especially parents who ask you hey was it was my son or daughter's sacrifice worth it when they're looking at what's happened in afghanistan what's what how iraq looks right now um how do you conceptualize that personally and then what do you what do you tell them what's your message to them the the thing is when when we as a nation go out and and try and have an impact on the world that that's that's going to be a hard thing to do it's a hard thing to do and you know you've probably heard me say before that if you're gonna go to war you have to have the will and the the will that you have to have when you go to war is you have to have the will to kill and when i say kill i don't just mean the enemy because when you go to war you are going to kill innocent people that's just what's going to happen so you have to have the will to kill and you also have to have the will to die because if you go to war americans are going to die so i think we need to weigh that very heavily i don't think we do a very good job of weighing that i think our ego allows us to say well you know we have smart bombs so we won't kill any civilians and we'll be the good guys and nothing will ever go wrong and because we have uh body armor and m raps we will we won't take casualties and and those two things are just wrong so when we go to war we're going to take casualties and anybody that thinks anything different is is just being naive and when we go to war we're going to kill innocent people and anybody that thinks anything different is just being naive but as far as these efforts you know in afghanistan and you and i both have very close friends that have served over there we've both lost friends over there in afghanistan and and look it's it's 20 years there's a bunch of positive things that came out of that 20 years number one we didn't suffer any other terrorist attacks in this country that it why is that because there was pressure on the enemy over there that that's a really positive thing and you mentioned jason gardner earlier uh jason gardner was given a brief the other day right as this afghanistan thing was unfolding and he he put up a picture of jason gardner in afghanistan in his uniform with his weapon and he's surrounded by a bunch of kids and in particular he's kind of interacting with a young afghan girl and he says you know with this girl in the 20 years that we were there this girl got an education she has an opportunity she had an opportunity to understand the world and there's massive sacrifices that were made for this but that that is at the end of the day this is a positive thing that happened now i iraq it's the same thing you know we we were able to go there and again i always like to talk from a tactical perspective when we were in ramadi there were people in ramadi the the civilian populace in ramadi who was being tortured raped butchered murdered by the insurgents they were so happy and joyous that we were there to give them their city back and give them the opportunity to live a normal life and a stable life and so there's these massive sacrifices that were made and in both those cases you could look at those cases and say yeah but in the end what difference did it make and if that's if that's what our at if that's what your attitude in life is like you're a nihilist right like don't why do anything why make any effort in the world we we as americans we should do our best to try and help out other people in the world but here's you know and here's where uh the negative part comes in the negative part comes into this is we need to understand what we're doing and we need to put leadership in position that understands how to lead and right now you know the leadership that we have doesn't understand what's happening they they you know i that's a bold statement right that's a harsh statement to say that the leadership of the country doesn't understand what's happening but when you look at the withdrawal from afghanistan everybody everybody can i shouldn't say everybody but almost everyone in the world saw what was going to happen and what is going to happen but like this is so obvious and yet we had leaders that seemed to be completely oblivious to everything that unfolded and were surprised by it and are continuing to be surprised by it so we need to do a better job as americans of electing people that understand the world understand the globe and understand leadership and we failed to do that this is this is you know this is my fault this is your fault this is our fault we've allowed this to happen we've put leaders in positions that should not be in those positions and and we need to do a better job and if like i said i think we're getting to a point where we're getting to a rock bottom where people are looking around saying how is this happening how do we let that happen we let that happen look something i say all the time all your problems are leadership problems so when i go work with a company every problem that they have inside that company is a leadership problem and guess what leadership is the solution leadership is the solution and right now we need better leadership we need real leadership in this country and if we don't get it we're going to continue down this bad path where we we look around and our position in the world is waning and there might be some people that say well you know you were too big and too strong anyways we were big we were strong and and you know what when you're the biggest strongest person in the schoolyard you can prevent people from being bullied you can prevent kids from getting their their cheetos stolen from them and and that's that's what we should be doesn't mean we're the bully it means we're we have the capability to stop other people from bullying and and that's the way we should be that's the way america should be and i think that's the way we need to get back to yeah no it's about understanding the nature of the conflict we're talking about committing u.s forces understanding the nature of the conflict in which you're about to commit america's sons and daughters um and we failed to do that throughout the last 20 years i think as a as a whole and when you say everybody looked at afghanistan it's not really uh an overstatement um calvin klaus was said that the uh one of the most important attributes of a leader is common sense and so that's why the person who has never served in the military never read a book on leadership never read a book on tactics or strategy can look at afghanistan and say hey what because they have common sense and uh is just so so hard to watch and for me internalizing it i look at it as the way i deal with it anyway is that hey we need to take these lessons and pass them on to the next generation there's so many lessons from the last 20 years that we seem to just be sweeping under under the rug but we need to take those whether they're military lessons whether they're uh strategic political lessons and we need to learn from them and pass them on to the next generation and turn them turn that experience into wisdom and oftentimes we don't do that we have an experience okay fine we're moving forward and we don't learn from it but it's taking that experience and turning it into wisdom for the next generation so we all get stronger so that's kind of how i how i think about it because it's yeah otherwise it's it's too heartbreaking to contemplate but uh but you have a lot going on i mean it's it's awesome echelon front you got have origen pete roberts out there you guys are crushing it bringing american manufacturing back to this country um i love what you guys are doing there jocko go you're in all these wawas up and down the coast i mean it's amazing to see it's so inspiring to see so at the same time you have all that going on i guess i should ask you um how did the relationship with uh with pete roberts in and how did that all come about what inspired you to to go down that path because once again like you're taking a risk here moving into fiction what did you do with american manufacturing and taking these old factories that are rusted and it's amazing you can go online you can see these videos of these guys putting these new uh manufacturing facilities together and resurrecting it it's awesome to see um but what was that what was that what was the inspiration behind that was the opportunity that presented itself that you seized as as i started my podcast and people were listening to the podcast and people would start training jiu jitsu could i talk about jiu jitsu all the time and um people would ask me what kind of jiu jitsu to get and i would tell them to get an origin key because i knew that there was this random human up in maine up in new england where i'm from that was making american-made geese the only one in the country the only one in the world and so i and i had reached out to him a couple times and i never heard back from him and eventually i was on a facebook live and i was doing a q a and somebody asked me what kind of jiu jitsu to get and i said get an origin key and i said and by the way if anyone can get in touch with this guy pete roberts please tell him i want to talk to him well someone on that facetime or on that facebook live reached out through various business contacts and got in touch with pete and we we set up a meeting we had a call we had a four-hour zoom call or it was a skype call at the time and when i got off the phone my wife said it sounded like you were talking yourself in there and what we realized was you know he had this this manufacturing capability and i but he was in farmington maine where there's 17 people and i was you know and i had a platform where i was talking to millions of people every week and so i and i wanted to make american-made products and so really all we had to do is a perfect storm we shook hands and we started making stuff and it just been it has been incredible we now we now have multiple factories we're making boots we're making jeans we're making geese we just we just acquired another factory in north carolina um that's really helped our capability so and we're looking at other factories in other areas literally as i speak right now and and all this is you know for me look i i served my time in the military they met the american military is incredible power incredibly powerful force but america gets its strength from the economy and when i was growing up i saw you know pete and myself when we were growing up we watched those factories empty out we watched those machine gets sold overseas and it was sickening to see people lose their jobs and see those factories abandoned and and and it was really this sounds uh really cliche but it's it was corporate greed it was corporate greed when someone says you know what i can make this pair of jeans in america for 17 i can make them in china for 15 and i'll make two dollars extra pair of jeans and and that's what they did and and so many manufacturers did that and it got to a point too when people started raising their voices about it they said well there's no way it can be done anymore we can't do it we don't have the knowledge and so pete pete should get i don't know what i don't know what award but for bringing that knowledge back hiring people that were you know 60 years old that hadn't worked in 20 years because there was no jobs for them and having bringing them them to help to help teach people how to sew to help teach people how to run the looms and now we have that knowledge we talked about passing on knowledge we have that knowledge passed on we had a guy that was a an expert on looms and weaving and he he recently died his name was lenny freaking outstanding american patriotic american and before he died he he passed on all that knowledge to 21 and 22 and 23 year old people that can now do that job so we're totally passionate about this um it's it's a huge impact on the communities we got a few hundred employees right now that number is going to be growing and we're going to we're going to prove to the world prove to these big corporations that america can and will manufacture in america again and if you if you want to bet against me go for it i'll take your money it's so awesome yeah go online check out on youtube the video with the looms when you guys are talking about that i mean obviously the video is great and all that the presentation content all that stuff but the story is so inspiring it's so cool everybody should go check that out i think we got it into the terminal list so chris pratt and terminalist we have an origin key there in his garage with his belt his daughter's belts are there and all that stuff to help tell that story i got a josh hall surfboard in there i think he drove it up i was like we need a surfboard in this scene and and uh he drove it on up so we got that in a scene i got sore neck stuff in the gym in the garage so knock-ons in there sigs in there winkler knives origin keys so it's really cool to be able to incorporate uh good people and great companies uh and stuff that that i actually use my characters use into that uh that story and hopefully you know widen people's aperture or introduce people to some of these different companies or stories behind the company so it's uh it's super cool and then uh also you got you got into archery recently you've been on a few hunts uh you're putting elk on the table we just had moose here last night um and uh you got into that recently so you have so much going on out there that is that is inspiring to people no matter what they're doing they don't have to be a jiu jitsu guy them to be a military guy they need to be a business leader there's so many things you're doing to to inspire people which is what i love about what you're doing in this next chapter and then you have these musters and so the musters uh correct me if i'm wrong or what originally gave you that idea was that hey we have we go to these different groups and i'm talking to 50 people 100 people um from a company let's do something where we can open it up have an open enrollment type of a thing and bring anybody in that uh that wants to come so you bring the cost down for different companies that will consent a few people um so how these musters been been going i know you had to cancel a couple during covid craziness but they're back up and running i think you're about to do one in vegas i'm in a hotel in vegas right now we're doing one this week but yeah they've been awesome yeah and the original deal was as we got more and more demand for echelon front to come and work with companies we unfortunately priced out of the market a lot of small businesses and you know we were just working with you know huge companies and i felt i felt guilty about that because i you know we want to help people that have you know a little construction company with 17 people or a landscaping business or a manufacturer that's only got you know 23 people at it and they couldn't afford the big corporate price tag and we just decided hey let's do something where a bunch of people can come from a bunch of different small businesses and that way they kind of collectively can get this information then that's exactly what we did we we did the first one i want to say 2016. um we rolled the dice i think we pl we started talking about it in august and the thing event took place in october and i i said hey listen if we do it and it goes well you know that'll be great if not we'll get 30 or 40 people it'll be the best experience of their life you know 100 grand and that's that but we sold out the first one and we sold out all of them so yeah it's very cool it's a great opportunity to come to come together teach these leadership lessons that you and i were talking about earlier and how they apply to people in their business on the battlefield and like you said in their lives and it's uh it's a lot of fun to to not only uh get to put out that information but then also receive information and meet people and there's you know six or seven hundred people that are all have the same goals that want to get better so they're great great events and they're a lot of fun to do yeah that's my favorite part about signing books or even being on social media for me it's being able to thank people and it's getting harder to do as the big bigger things get but that's my favorite part of it is to be able to just say thank you you could have done that in 1985 if you were an author um you know unless you were at a in-person book signing but now you can with these different platforms that's my my favorite part of doing something either in person or even online engaging with people but uh so your podcast also you have these incredible guests you're collecting histories from these guys um are there a couple that have changed your perspective on life or leadership um that you've then incorporated into what you pass along to either businesses or individuals this is the sophie's choice question jack the sophie's choice question of like okay which guest was the best no no and it's like even even the one even the way you phrased it which i'll give you credit was a nice way of phrasing this but man it is so hard you stack up the people that i've had on the podcast and the things that they talk about and i i the whole thing has it changed me a hundred percent um have i learned i can't even fathom the amount and and even the guests and also the books that i read you know when there's no guests but i'm just reading an old book you know i read the whole book and outline the whole book and highlight the whole book so people always like oh i learned a lot from your podcast and i'm always thinking i learned i'm lucky enough to learn even more and even the guests that come on you know you meet them and you interact with them so man it's just been it's been so it's been so powerful and and and most of the things quite frankly they just reinforce the things that i know and and come at it from a different angle and you know i one that one that since you asked me one that comes to mind is i had captain charlie plum on who was in the hanoi hilton for six years after he was shot down in in vietnam and one of the rules that they had was if your cell mate is annoying you for whatever reason that's your fault you're the so if jack if you and i if you're my cellmate cellmate and you're snoring and that's annoying me that's my fault if you're picking your nose and that annoys me that's my fault if you're [Music] picking the toe jam out of your toenails and that's annoying me that's my fault and and that's like such a high level of extreme ownership and if you think about the truth and that's how you have to be you're in a cell you and i are in a cell for six months and they would rotate you know every six months every nine months maybe every year but i'm gonna live with you for a year and if i'm gonna allow these things to bother me that's actually on me and imagine how much better our relationship is if i just say you know what jack's snoring at night and i gotta fashion some earplugs because i can't let that annoy me that's on me it's just it's just one of those things that sticks out to me but yeah the the the information that i've gotten the the the blessing i've had of being able to talk to all these incredible people uh you know rose schindler who is in auschwitz who who was sneaking in and out of the death line like in line to go into the gas chambers and somehow sneaks out at the last second and does that over and over again you can't you can't even imagine the the strength of character another one is william reader who's captured shot down twice in vietnam the second time he shot down he's captured he's in a two foot tall bamboo cage he's trying to sleep his legs are shackled and he can't get to sleep because the rats in the cage are gnawing at the wounds on his legs i mean like don't complain about anything in life don't you we have nothing to complain about nothing and he endured that you know the interestingly the hanoi hilton that you know it's kind of a joke of a name but for some guys that had trekked through the trek through the jungle to get there it was like the hilton it was a luxury to be there rather than being on the jungle transport trails that they got walked up to which took i think in his particular case i want to say it took him like seven months um so yeah i mean dakota meyer and then getting to talk to people with people like jordan peterson it's just it's it's it's crazy man i can't i can't that's why whenever somebody asks me these types of questions i throw up the sophie's choice defense i can't i really just can't grade and stack and rank the lessons learned and the people that have been on in the books that i've read on the podcast it's just it's just too much it's it's it's all too good yeah i know for the listener obviously the person that watches they're getting so much from it so for you to have that even deeper experience in person and having read the whole book if they have have a book get to get to talk to them before and after the podcast i mean incredible and they're so emotional so many of them are so emotional that's why i said earlier about the family members hearing this stuff for the first time um through your podcast it's it's incredible uh and now you have jackal underground so now you have something else that's uh as if you need more to do but uh it seems that's a great way because once you get so big on these different platforms it must become hard to do what maybe you did in the beginning which was maybe engage uh individually with people and it seems like jackal underground is a way to do that and because people are now investing in it and uh which makes them take ownership of a bit of it and you're doing this choco underground thing so um and it's still fairly new right has it been a year or so yeah it's it's it's probably about a year old and there's a bunch of reasons for that and the number one reason was i don't control the platforms right i don't control the podcasting platforms i don't control youtube i have no control over them and there's some things that they've done some things with me but like for instance they'll inject some podcast platforms will inject advertisements into my podcast which is which which is weird right like here i am talking to rose schindler about being in auschwitz and all of a sudden you're hearing a commercial for a damn whatever um whatever whatever item and that's that's that's that's not okay and and then you know that we had i had some podcasts that got uh flagged i did one on the armenian genocide that got flagged and had the information or whatever put under it and which again what if they just decided we're not just gonna flag it we're gonna we're gonna ban it we're gonna get rid of it and to not have any control that to not have freedom of speech basically essentially is what i'm saying is to not have freedom of speech to me is to me for me to not have some kind of a contingency plan in case those platforms are taken away and again they've been fined so far for the most part um you know we've we haven't had any issues i haven't i have had friends that have had have had issues so i just talked to echo one day and said hey man we need a contingency plan you know there's we could say something or do something or somebody could decide that who a person we've had on the podcast shouldn't be on there and we just need some kind of contingency plan and so we made this kind of alternate universe of the underground where people could yeah they can pay it's eight dollars and 18 cents a month and what that allowed us to do is to build this whole platform out now my goal is to give the stuff away for free that's my goal and as long as i can possibly make it free it's gonna the the jocko podcast is gonna be free and that's that's how we're gonna do it um but to not have a contingency plan in case things go sideways you know there's another thing that like there's rumors about certain big podcasting platforms going to pay only and so now all of a sudden it's like oh now you're going to pay this company who's just going to take what we created put advertisements all throughout it and i just didn't like it so so we created that and then in order to in order to like give some give the people that want to get in the game and be on the platform in order to in order to give them some reward we just started recording another little podcast where we talk about kind of adjacent topics and then they can send in q and a's and we've been through hundreds of answering questions which i used to do more of that on my on the jackal podcast but at a certain point the questions are there's there's just two i can't i can't see them all and so it just became you know i can't really make this happen so yeah that was fantastic definitely check out choco underground i love it uh crushing it there uh great for high school college kids also you know getting at that ground level uh and now people can now you can have probably kids that read one of these one of your uh the way the warrior kid books in like i don't know fifth grade or something like that now they're in high school maybe uh or something like that and now they're moving on to the next book uh they're listening to the podcast now they're in jocko underground now they're training jiu jitsu i think that's i mean you're making a stronger country but when you get a chance to talk to these let's say a high school kid or that uh is thinking about the military or just graduating uh or the college kid doesn't know what he's going to do next or what she's going to do next um what do you tell them i mean you have so much so you can just say hey read these books but when you get asked that by somebody who's eager and young what do you what do you pass along to that to that kid this is when they're specifically asking about joining the military no just in general like they're taking that next step in life and uh and maybe they're asking about the military because i'm sure you get that question quite a bit um what do you pass along what are you hoping that uh let's say what are you hoping that somebody that knows about you that's listening to the podcast that's on the path they're in high school they're in college and now they're going into the world uh what do you want them to take take on that journey with them well one thing i think is very important and i wrote about this in leadership strategy and tactics and the it's something that i call preemptive ownership and what this means is extreme ownership is really awesome but it's past tense right oh i made this mistake i'm gonna take ownership of it i'm gonna fix it well there's there's preemptive ownership which is which is actually the ideal which is hey if we go on this mission and something goes wrong it's on me so i need to set it up in such a way that nothing does go wrong or if i'm a you know i always like to talk about the commanders of of ships if a navy ship runs the ground that commander's getting fired so if i know that then i go through steps i take pre-emptive ownership to make sure my people have the training to make sure they understand what they're doing to make sure that the systems are all up and running so i take pre-emptive ownership because i can i can have much more control that way and that's the same with your life like we have so much control over our lives so if you're 16 17 18 19 20 21 25 13 whatever age you are you have so much if you take ownership of what's going on in your world preemptive ownership to say okay this is what i want to be doing here's how i can get there this is where i want to be here's how i can move to get into that position here's who i want to be and here's what i can do to become that person that i want to be and i was like like i said earlier i was very lucky because i joined the seal teams i joined the navy and all of a sudden my goal became very clear and i took all this energy just i just wanted to be a good seal jack that's what i want i just want to be a good seal well you can pick pick that out of your life if you're a young person you can say this is what i want to do and you can start to move in that direction look am i a pollyanic person that says yeah you can do whatever you want to do you can do anything in life no there's limitations to what you can do but i'm going to tell you what you can try and you will become the best possible version of you that you can ever be if you try and do something that is that that that you set your sights on so i would say take pre-emptive ownership of your life look at where you want to be in the future and start to make moves that will get you in that direction i think one of the biggest disconnects that kids have is they don't understand how their present day life impacts their future and i feel very lucky jack because by the time i was looking around saying i wonder what i'm going to do with my life i've been in the seal team for 15 years it was like i i was so lucky i had other friends that at 15 years after high school were saying you know maybe i should do something besides landscaping maybe i should do something besides you know painting buildings maybe i should do something besides you know working at the restaurant it took them 10 years 12 years to to make a move you and i well i can at least say i i was very lucky i by the time i looked around the first time i looked around i was the admiral's aide the first time i looked around and said you know what i don't know what i should do with my life i was the admiral's aide i've been in for 15 years and then it was like okay well what should i do oh i guess i kind of do have a career oh yeah i guess this is a career can you can you can make those steps so if you're a young person out there figure out what you want to do figure out where you want to be and you don't have to be perfect i say this all time five year plan i don't really have a five year plan because all kinds of windows of opportunities are going to open up i don't know what those are but figure out who you want to be figure out where you want to be and put a plan together to get you moving in that direction and if you do that you'll be you'll you'll look up in three years and you'll be shocked at the progress that you've made and it'll be awesome yep no love it and uh understand those capabilities and limitations so that you can then improve i think that's uh people talk about capabilities but it's also important to know those limitations uh so that you can then work on them so that when you go into these situations that uh that you know both of those things i think are very important and uh so before i let you go i want to read and you've read this before on your podcast and you've talked about it but i was there at your your retirement ceremony when you gave your kids your your booty hat and all that so it was awesome to see was so cool to to be there for that and i hear you give this speech in person but uh you said as i walk away from the teams today i assure you that i will never forget i will never forget your sacrifice and sacrifice i will never forget you my fellow seals for getting me here to this day for leading me for following me and for watching my back i will never forget our fellow soldiers sailors airmen and marines who have fought and sacrificed so much i'll never forget those big tough frogmen and hardcore seals that came before me particularly the ones that raised me in the teams and taught me the true way of the frogman and finally i will never forget our fallen brothers the many seals who have sacrificed their lives for our freedom especially mark lee mike mansour ryan job seal team three tasking a bruiser who lived and fought and died like warriors man that was awesome to hear you say that in person and uh you know i think about that stuff every day and i know you end your podcast at the uh at the end thanking everybody who's down there downrange whether it's uh it's it's military or whether it's law enforcement or first responders they're allowing us to to do what we're doing in this uh this post military chapter of uh of our lives so um you can find that i think you talked about the whole thing somewhere online or on the podcast um but i also want to thank you for uh for putting me through training twice uh my back's still a little sore uh that's all right i'm working through it and then uh bam mikey and the dragon so our littlest guy we have three kids and uh you signed this to to our littlest one who's now 11. but uh you tell them this you say stand up and fight the dragons jocko love it love it man thank you so much for for coming on and uh and spending so much time with me i sincerely appreciate it um people have read my novels and have read your work uh know that a lot of what you passed on to me weaves its way into into my novels i usually put it in italics and it's usually my protagonist my main character thinking prioritize and execute or whatever it might be but i put those in italics in there and that's uh that's all due to uh to you passing those on and continuing to pass those on and influence uh not just a next generation of combat leaders but uh next generation of americans in general so uh thank you so much for for all you've done and continue to do yeah man thanks for having me on it's it's been awesome to watch everything that you've been doing um you know you i in when you were on my podcast talking about this was a vision that you had for for your pretty much your whole life and to see you out there executing this vision um comes as no surprise to me but it doesn't make it any less enjoyable to see you out there and see the show coming out uh it's just awesome it's gonna be it's it's just incredible to see so thanks for everything you're doing and and appreciate the good words back in my direction man thanks so much and uh yeah take care have a great muster and hopefully i'll see you in person maybe out on a hunt or at a uh total archery challenge again one of these days soon right off man awesome all right man take care thanks for everything today's gear highlight segment is brought to you by 10 000. now 10 000 is an athletic apparel company they make hands down the best training workout shorts that i've ever worn and i've worn quite a few over my time both before the military in the military and today i've been wearing their seven inch tactical short which is these ones right here and they're interval shorts that i'm wearing right now but uh these things are incredible uh and i've been putting on the pack heading up into the mountain i've been running i've been doing throwing the kettlebells around and uh as i continue on to get back in shape here this is my short of choice i love it so much that i'm gonna get all the other stuff that they have out there as well you can find them ten thousand dot cc online and also instagram ten thousand dot cc there as well but i'm looking forward to trying out their shirts and all the rest of the stuff they have going on there and i wanted to read their brand ethos because it's uh uh it's very close to what i think about each and every day and uh here it is it says at the heart of ten thousand is a stoic dedication to continuous improvement every day faster every day stronger every day better than yesterday and hashtag better than yesterday is their hashtag on instagram which i absolutely love because that's always the goal to do it better than we did yesterday uh to learn from what we did yesterday and do it better going forward turn those lessons into wisdom that's what i try to do with the kids as well is pass some of that along to them we don't believe in overnight success miracle drugs cure-alls quick fixes or shortcuts we believe in works in progress we believe in the value of our failures we believe in dusting off and getting back up we believe in grit tenacity and grinding yes absolutely love that uh these shorts i just want to make sure i get this right uh ultralight rip stop fabric toughest nails waistband permanent anti-odor treatment no bounce pocket medium compression anti-shape liner side slits and four-way stretch for maximum range of motion yeah what all that means is that these are awesome shorts 10 000 makes gear specific to other types of training from running to olympic lifting to boxing you can also find a short for all the ways you train pick up the short that is best for your training and then personalize it with custom liner and inseam options so awesome definitely check them out online they have free shipping and free returns and a lifetime guarantee i'm going to read this call to action because you can get 15 percent off your purchase if you remember this so write it down 10 000 is offering our listeners 15 off your purchase go to 10 000 dot cc and enter code danger close 15 to receive 15 off your purchase once again that is danger close 15 to receive 15 off your purchase that is 10 000.cc and enter danger close 15. awesome welcome to the gear highlight portion of the danger clothes podcast because my guest today was jocko willink of echelon front the jocko podcast jocko underground all the books uh i figured it would be appropriate to highlight a couple seal-owned businesses guys who have transitioned out found that next passion in life and gone after it and crushed it so the first one resco watches so resco instruments.com and so this is my first rescue i have a few r-e-s-c-o so right there and rob smith is a former seal who had a passion for watchmaking from an early age and as he was getting out he started this company resco and this is my first one right here uh this is the patriot and you just might catch a rescue watch on chris pratt's wrist in the terminal list series coming to amazon in 2022 if you've read the novels you'll know that that's what james reese the protagonist of my novels navy seal sniper that's what he wears so um rusco awesome and i think i've been fascinated with watches from an early age and not because uh they're flashy or they complement uh something you're wearing or anything like that but because of what they represent and time is something that once it's gone we're never getting it back and we get to choose how we're gonna spend that limited time on earth so no matter how much money you have or what kind of person you are that time is limited that time is the same for all of us meaning it is limited so you get to choose so i think that's why i've been fascinated with watches and uh resco right here awesome rob smith thank you guys so much uh for such a great product and for being such an inspiration for people that are getting out of the military to find that next passion in life so very cool so in a similar vein bam half face blades andrew arabido buddy awesome so right here i have quite a few as you can tell and if you've read the novels you know that uh james reese uses these in the novels and uh this one in particular in the terminal list but uh i have a few you can't really walk too far in this office or this house really without tripping on one of these but uh andrew makes some amazing stuff i think they go up every friday i want to say and uh they sell out i think within seconds certainly within minutes but i think within seconds and you can go check out his stuff half face blades he's spec operator on instagram as well and uh just makes some really cool unique looking blades uh this one here i think it's the numos spike is that what you call this one beeto so look at that bam don't take that one through the heart pretty sweet actually got my publicist at simon schuster david brown atrium mystery bus on twitter got him a blade because he was opening book packages in the office with just scissors and i couldn't couldn't have that for for my publicist so now he has a sweet half-face blade with which to do his unboxings and andrew also makes some look at that some folders and uh just awesome so very cool check them out half faceblades.com i think the drops happen maybe on instagram i'm not sure how that all works but uh if you want one you got to be on the ball so yeah just a few blades uh another thing that i've been fascinated with since i was a little kid probably because of how primal they are in nature but uh face blades rusco watches check them out thank you for tuning in to the danger clothes podcast in ironclad original presented by sig sauer you can find out more about what jaco has going on at jacopodcast.com link to all his platforms from there you can also go to echelonfront.com to find out more about his leadership consulting business and about the muster that we discussed on this podcast you can follow me at jack carr usa on the social channels and you can go to my website officialjackcar.com to find out more about what i have going on you can also link to jetcar usa for the merch my latest book in the blood comes out in 2022 so be sure to pre-order that right now until the next time take care stay safe be strong keep fighting

Channel: JackCarrUSA

Views: 54,306

Keywords: jocko willink, jack carr, ironclad, echelon front, final spin, danger close podcast

Id: gPx5J4E3h9o

Length: 141min 38sec (8498 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021