Literacy and Strength | Jocko Willink - Jordan B Peterson Podcast S4 E13

[Music] hi everybody i'm pleased today to be talking with jocko willick who i've talked with on his podcast on three separate occasions i don't think i've had jocko on mine and my memory isn't what it should be so but i'm i'm quite sure that we've so far when we've talked it's been on your podcast so i thought i'd take the time today to get to know you in some more detail jocko is an american author podcaster and retired naval officer who served in the navy seals he co-authored the books extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership with fellow retired seal leaf babin would i pronounce that right it's actually leif babin oh so i didn't pronounce it right at all leif babin he hosts a weekly podcast with brazilian jiu jitsu practitioner echo charles called the jocko podcast he has a million subscribers on youtube and his podcast attracts many more listeners he co-founded the management consulting firm echelon front llc and has extended his business development on a number of additional fronts his military service included combat actions in the war in iraq where he eventually commanded the sealed team's three task unit bruiser that fought in the battle against the iraqi insurgents in ramadi and was honored with a silver star and bronze star for his service he achieved the rank of lieutenant commander good to see you again jaco it's good to be here i'm yeah i feel the same way that it's good to be here um i'm really looking forward to our conversation so i'm glad i'm glad that you were able to gut through that ridiculously long bio and i felt that as you got to the end of it you were breaking free of the chains of that reading so i'm glad it's over with yeah well it's so much better just to talk than to read in in this sort of format but at least everybody who doesn't know already has some sense of of who you are some minimal sense of who you are so tell me what's been happening online with you over the last couple of years because we haven't spoken i would say it's got to be two years i think something like that and so i i've i've cast an eye on what's been happening with you on youtube and some of my staff have filled me in but i'm really curious tell me about what's happening with your youtube channel and your online activities your podcast and all of that um yeah a few years ago i started a podcast i i that was actually was quite a few years ago now it was in 2015 it might have been kind of as the as the explosion of prior to the explosion of podcasts in fact i think i read something that said at that time it was like 17 of americans were listening to podcasts and that number's much much higher now and i kind of got lucky because at the time uh tim ferriss was had one of the most popular still very popular but at the time just because the numbers of podcasts that existed his podcast was even more popular and and i went on his podcast and when he got when we got done recording and he pressed stop on the on the record button he looked at me and said you should have your own podcast and i kind of took that you know and and noted it and then uh a little while later i was on joe rogan's podcast and he had you know obviously another one of the most popular podcasts in the world and he told me in the middle of that podcast that i should have my own podcast and so when guys like tim ferriss and joe rogan are telling you to have your own podcast you have your own podcast now i came to realize later that joe rogan actually would tell everybody to have a podcast so maybe here he would tell everyone oh you should start a podcast well i actually listened to him and and so i started that podcast and i would say i probably if if if somebody would have asked you know what should a person do to make a good podcast or or or maybe not a good podcast but a popular podcast somebody would probably say um make it probably a half an hour to an hour bring a bunch of different guests on so that you can hear a bunch of deep a bunch of different people talking and you know talk about positive things in the world and so instead of doing any of that what i did was i have a podcast that's between two and five hours long oftentimes it's just me talking reading from a book and reviewing a book and usually the books are about war or suffering or some kind of human atrocity and so that's what my podcast is and really what it boils down to is it's it's an it's learning about human nature and for me human nature is best revealed or most clearly revealed in times of suffering and one of the i guess a pretty good monopoly on the market for suffering is is war and right in there and as well as you know human atrocities so i started that podcast and and like i said when i started it there weren't that many there weren't as many as podcasts as there are now so it got some traction out of the gate and it kind of just stayed there so i was very lucky in that respect and i've been doing it ever since i've i've put out one podcast a week for five years i've only missed one one week in there and and that was when um my my best friend was killed in a parachute accident and so i didn't put out a podcast that week but other than that i've been very consistent and then the youtube channel is well it's it's kind of the podcast and then we do some excerpts there and little clips and stuff like that and and echo charles uh i forget what you called him in the bio a brazilian jiu jitsu practitioner he's also a a video guy and so he makes his little he makes little um clips and puts special effects in them and stuff because he's creative and bored which means it's a great combination for someone that you're that you're working with it is indeed so i think that's what's been happening online for me and for the past few years who who do you who's your audience do you think or do you know yeah i know actually quite well that my my demographic is people it's people it's human beings really it's it's all over the place and when i go and do live events i'll have just the entire spectrum of humans there hey look is there a is there a you know kind of a typical person yeah there's a typical person but we get everybody on the spectrum from the grandma to the the little kids you know i've written a bunch of kids books and the little kids show up as well great pretty pretty body kids books yeah pretty broad demographic that's i meet all kinds of people everybody from a i'll meet a firefighter and then a hedge fund guy and then a stay-at-home mom and then a retired marine it just meet everybody it's and that's the audience do you do you have any sense of what it is that's attracting people to your podcast i mean you you you sort of approach that tongue-in-cheek in some sense for for a dark topic you know you concentrate on things that are that are pretty negative or they're pretty dark and so as you said that might fly in the face of any advice you'd get about what to talk about but obviously i mean one of the things i've encountered is that there's a very there's a vast hunger for serious dialogue and i i mean one of the things that struck me always about your podcast was you often read something that's very very uh emotionally demanding stark harsh rough and well and it's interesting to think about why people might be attracted to that what's your sense and also why are you doing it i think that it's emotional i think that these are emotional topics i think these are things that people can be a little bit afraid of and a little bit nervous about and being able to brush up against them a little bit gives them a little bit more familiarity with them and therefore when you see when you come close to things that are that stark and dark and horrible it also makes you look up around at the present situation that you're in and maybe it doesn't look as awful um yeah so so there you touched on two things about knowing something about history that might be really useful or about human affairs right one is that i mean it's a tenet of of of clinical psychotherapy that a voluntary approach to what's frightening threatening even disgusting is curative it has to be voluntary and it it can't be too intense right because if it gets too intense it can actually hurt you but if it's voluntary and measured that actually seems to strengthen people it develops resilience and i would say that's one thing that virtually all well-trained clinicians agree on is that that kind of exposure whether it's discussing old difficult experiences in an autobiographical manner or whether it's actually going out into the world and facing things that you're afraid of if you're an elevator phobic for example you might be faced with confront confronted with the necessity of at least looking at an elevator which is something you might avoid if you're phobic and then so that's the first thing so there is some pronounced human tendency to be attracted to what's dark because that is a pathway to mental and physical resilience and then the second thing is which i also think is extremely important is it's useful to cultivate gratitude in my estimation and one of the ways that you can do that because you you take a lot of what's good in your life for granted it gets invisible especially if it's predictable it gets invisible and that's unfortunate because it's still rare and precious and if you know how terrible things can be have been or could become then that can alert you to how fortunate you are when all hell isn't breaking loose right now everywhere in your life so yeah and you can also sort of learn some skill sets of how to handle these tough situations when you get in them and if you can see that someone went through something that's much worse and what did they do to deal with it how did they get through it what did they think about what did they do you can say okay well i've seen that before and the situation i'm in isn't quite as bad but i know that that person took action i know that person's stood up and and made a move and made things happen and tried to move forward and maybe that's what i should do too so you can you can definitely garner some skills from the past and right so that's a third element is that it can expand your notion of human competence and that's you know i think that's partly that's one of the reasons that people love watching um high-end sports performances you know because you think well look there's that's what a human being is capable of isn't that so remarkable and i am one of those and so that's a limit case but there's obvious obviously room for me to develop and that's all that's something that's very hopeful and so if you are in dire straits and you've seen that other people can get through that you think well maybe maybe i could get through that if i could just learn how to do it so i i had a guy on my podcast who had written a book his name was william reader and he had he was a helicopter pilot in vietnam and he was shot down well he shot down two times the first time he was shot down he was able to make it back to friendly lines the second time he was shot down he was captured and he was captured in south vietnam which is actually worse you you didn't want to get captured in south vietnam because then they had to get you to north vietnam to the prison and getting to north vietnam while you're patrolling through the jungle for months on end is not a good thing and at one point he's in a two foot tall bamboo cage in the jungle and he's his legs are shackled and it's night time and he's trying to sleep but he's having trouble sleeping because the rats are gnawing at the wounds on his legs and so knowing that someone could suffer through that and survive and get through and and make it out the other side and then carry on with a completely productive life tells me that we are pretty resilient as a species if we can dig deep and find that resiliency yes well that's exactly the kind of story that also makes you much appreciative of the fact that you have a bed in an air-conditioned room that in a in a house in a town that's not burning to the ground with rioters and you have that every night and so you take it for granted but but it's still worth noting that it's a kind of miracle compared to all the alternatives that might manifest themselves yeah i think people appreciate that i think people you know look how many movies are have been made about war countless movies have been made about war countless books have been written about war so human beings are definitely have some sort of a i don't know if it's a fascination or or at least an appreciation for the sacrifice and the effort that goes into fighting a war and and i will tell you and i i can't speak for everybody but certainly me and the kids i many of the kids i grew up with and then many of the people that i served with that's what we wanted to do we had some kind i had some kind of an interest it's such a great thing for you to be able to say you know because there's there i remember watching this kid once i saw him in montreal and he was standing he's a big kid about 6'5 i would think and he was wearing these punk boots that were like military knock-offs essentially and um he was standing there he's about 17 or 18 and he's standing there on the corner of this outdoor shopping mall carrying these two pink shopping bags and looking completely out of place and i thought you know if you went there and offered that kid a chance to go off and have an adventure you know to have a battle he'd drop those shopping bags and be gone in two seconds because he wants something more than to be he's not built for that it was so incongruous you know he wasn't built for that and william james the american philosopher said that we needed a moral equivalent to war because war calls people to extremes right to to to to the extremes in their life and there's something about that that was obviously compelling as you as you say it's uncomfortable as well to to to state that blatantly because obviously peace is a desirable condition but the question is then well how do you put sufficient adventure into the piece and that's a very very that's a very complicated problem uh yeah you know it's um it's it's it's very true in the fact that in war i was lucky enough to go and i was lucky enough to serve in in combat and to be in a position of leadership in combat and in those situations i was able to witness with my own eyes on the one hand the most heinous and despicable acts that human beings can partake in and i was also able to witness with my own two eyes these soldiers marines the guys that were in my task unit making the most incredible sacrifices for their friends so yes there is an extreme to war and like you said it's not something you wish on anybody and i had this conversation with sam harris a while ago because he called me out and said you know you're talking about how hard war is and it's terrible but at the same time you say it's the best thing that you have been through and i i asked him if he'd ever known anyone that had cancer and survived it and oftentimes those people will say it's the best thing that happened to me i wouldn't wish it on anybody but i'm glad it happened to me and that's kind of how i feel about war too i i wouldn't wish war on anybody but i am i wouldn't i wouldn't trade it for anything so when you look when you look back on your involvement in the war in in iraq and your country's involvement what what do you make how do you make sense out of it morally i mean we're in that domain right now you know you you tell tell me already that you're pulled between these extreme views you don't wish war on anyone i'm i mean if you have do you have a son yes how old is he 18. i well so so then you think i presume but i or perhaps i wouldn't i wouldn't deign to presume if you could have what you wanted for him would that be peace of course okay okay well that right okay so of course of course of course but well right right exactly well the other thing the other thing that you do as far as please correct me if i get any of this wrong but i mean part of what you're also offering to people is the is the the call of a kind of radical discipline right now you post on instagram your the times you wake up in the morning correct it's yes 4 30 something like that and pretty regularly and i guess you do that to show people that you can get the hell out of bed at 4 30 and get your day going and yeah maybe not i would love to tell you that i was that um had that much for forethought into when i started doing that but i was on tim ferriss's podcast and he told me i should join twitter and i kind of said what's that and he showed it to me a little bit and he said you really should join this it's a way you can communicate with people and i said okay fair enough so i signed up for twitter and then whatever the next day i woke up in the morning and didn't know what to write or what to do so i just took a picture of my watch and you know here i go and other people kind of noticed that and so that's kind of how that whole thing started but yeah well it's not it's not always the case that when you do something new and creative you know why you do it and sometimes you have and even if you think you know why you do it you might find out five years later that there were 10 other reasons that you did it that you weren't aware of at the time like we live beyond ourselves all the time that's especially true if you're entrepreneurial and creative because you're changing who you are all the time and there's no reason to assume that your understanding of yourself would keep up with the changes so my take on my take on the instagram posts was well what i just what i just mentioned it's like well you know yeah you can sleep until 10 o'clock in the morning if you want but you can also get a jump on the day and i think part of what makes your i think part of what makes what you're doing attractive is that there's so little emphasis in our popular culture especially especially with regards to the so-called mainstream media on discipline and responsibility that there's a tremendous hunger for anything that pertains to that and you have a right to be discussing that i would say because of your because of your background which if nothing else required a tremendous amount of discipline yeah and i i ended up writing a book called discipline equals freedom and i'm lucky that i wrote it when i did because if i would have written it two years later everyone would have said oh everyone's talking about discipline now so yeah discipline absolutely discipline does bring you freedom in life and that's something that i kind of figured out over time i didn't well so what do you mean by that like how did you figure that out and what do you mean by that because they're often and and you know the the classic sort of uh what would you call it romantic rebel is someone who has is free from excessive order let's say they don't see they see freedom and um discipline as antithetical rather than seeing one as a precondition for the other and so so how did you learn that discipline was a precondition for freedom if i've if i've got the equation how did that manifest itself in your own life so we'll start off by saying this and look i was a young kid i joined the navy to go in the seal teams i went through seal training i showed up at a seal team seal team won and when i got there and as i look back this is a very powerful thing even though it's very simple when i was so i'm 19 years old when i show up at seal team one i'm done with the basic seal training and i have a goal in my head which is that which is this i want to be a good seal that's what i want to do that's like i don't know about anything else i this is what i want to do i want to be a good seal that's what i want i want to be a good seal and so as a 19 year old with all kinds of energy and we haven't talked about my childhood yet but i was kind of like a very rebellious kid when you talked about seeing a kid that looked like you could have handed him a a a a a club or a battle axe and he would have probably been feeling a little bit better i was like that i was constantly looking around for a club or a battle axe because that's what i felt like i needed to do and it was beautiful because i was running around the running around the woods as a young kid playing army and i just went and actually played army you know that's what i ended up doing so i never really had to do do you know force myself into some mold that i didn't want to be into so i got to seal team one and now i i just want to be a good seal that's what i want and so now that starts steering some of my decisions and and for the most part it steered my decisions in it in a decent direction now there were some times where as i look back now what i thought was a good seal was a little bit off but luckily it wasn't 180 degrees off it might have been 30 degrees or 40 right right and as i got older and more mature and i figured out more about what that ideal should look like to me and i could keep chasing that idea that was good but even even to be a 19 year old kid with a with a 70 or 80 degree corridor to move forward in is not a bad thing no it's a gift it's a gift exactly so then i'm looking around at other seals that were older than me and more senior to me and trying to figure out which one of those guys is a good seal yeah and what i realized was that the guys that were working harder for the most part were good seals now they were look there's just some people that are just way talented right we'd show up you know three minutes before a run or three minutes before we do a shooting competition and they could just walk through it no problem right and that's great for them it wasn't me i i wasn't i'm not that great at anything but i saw other guys that might not be great at anything either but they worked hard they showed up to work early they did the drills that they were supposed to do they had discipline and when you have has amalgamated statistics i hope i get this right but it's approximately correct if you work 10 longer hours you make 40 percent more money right and so and and i think your comments about talent are also dead on it's like in any field of enterprise there are people who are phenomenally gifted and and then if they work really hard they're even more phenomenally gifted right those are the people who break records but that talent apart hard work actually works and with virtually everything it might not make you the best at whatever it is you're pursuing but it will certainly make you better than you are and and then i have in this i have this new book i hope you got a copy because we did you get a copy okay so i'm bringing it up for a particular reason i have a chapter in this book called uh well there's two that are relevant imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that that's one and then the the course or what would you call a complementary chapter is uh work as hard as you possibly can on one thing and see what happens and that's also predicated on this idea that discipline is a precondition to freedom so so you were fortunate like you had this goal right so that meant you had a goal which is a really big deal because you could learn about goals you had a sense of uh what a higher mode of moral being that i would rather be a good seal than the person i am now well it's a it's a code of behavior and a way of perceiving so there's an ethic in that and then you said as well you know your conception of what good seal meant changed as you matured but that's also fine it wouldn't have changed unless you would have pursued that initial um only partially accurate goal and so that's also a really good thing for people to understand is like if you don't know what you're doing aim at something is it the right thing no but it's better than just shooting randomly so you aim at something and then as you aim and you move towards it you're going to find out why you're wrong and then you might recalibrate your aim and that's going to happen over and over because as you move towards a goal it recedes or it broadens or it recedes and broadens and otherwise you'd run out of things to do so but anyways back to the back to the story you're you you have this this this identity and you said it was it was there in you all right from the beginning because you would play army in in the by yourself even in the in the in the forest by your house i presume and how how old were you do you think when how long back can you remember having that as a fascination i do not remember wanting to do anything else so would you say what is is that as early as four three five preschool something like that can you remember playing when you were that young i i i can't remember um you know a specific age but if i think back to hey that looks like what i want to do i remember i want to be a soldier and do you okay you remember when you were a kid i mean i'm fascinated by this because well one of the things i really noted when i had kids was how much their personality was there right from the beginning like my children are quite different they have their similarities but they're quite different from one another and those differences were there right from the beginning and they've maintained themselves throughout their lives um and so that it's fascinating to see that that destiny in some sense is built right into the person to begin with and so while this was built into you by all appearances and so it manifested it in itself in what attracted you even in play as a as a child and that's the beginning of identity formulation that that play and so what was it about being a soldier that you think attracted you when you were a kid like what what was it that was so compelling because being a soldier is a multi-dimensional identity there's there's there's the the the physical combat element of it there's the strategic element of it there's the the discipline the camaraderie what what were you playing do you think i got asked this i was talking to some folks at the special operations command the other day and they asked me they set me up with this kind of beautiful possibility or opportunity for me to give some kind of an incredibly beautiful answer to this very question you know and there was something along the lines of you know at what point did the did the opportunity to serve and sacrifice for your country reveal itself to you or something along that those lines and all i'm thinking about is when i'm 8 years old 12 years old 15 years old i want a machine gun and i want to go fight a war that's what i want to do i would love to tell you i would love to tell you that i you know read some heroic book i i read the odyssey and and realized that i don't read any of that stuff well that wouldn't be anything to do with it anyways right i mean that's why i'm curious about what it was so early you know and so okay so for you it had something to do with weaponry apparently i got to tell you a story about my father okay and tell me if this act ec like produces any echoes before you go yep weaponry was like for sure that's fine but it could be a club it wasn't it wasn't like i wasn't a kid that was obsessed with guns okay it was and and maybe it was just we're gonna get out and and run around with sticks and try and hit each other or get into rock fights do you ever have rock fights well we we had ice fights because it was northern alberta but also dirt lump fights and now and then those would have rocks and i can remember um it was usually the protestant kids against the catholic kids i mean there wasn't that much of a division between those two in our town but the catholic kids had their high their junior high in high school and we had ours and so our gangs were separate and so we would have dirt lump fights in the vacant lots where buildings were being constructed and those were extremely exciting you know now and then you'd take a dirt lump rock in the mouth and that was a little bit on the painful side and but but but there's no doubt that it was extremely exciting and so and you know i cut you off about your dad and the gun oh well my dad told me something and then this might be more relevant to to to guns but my dad collects single-shot rifles and he has a lot of them like hundreds of them and he's a gunsmith and and makes stocks and hand carves them and anyways he's he's an artisan in that regard and it's really it's a it's a real focal obsession he's a great shot he shot at the provincial level which would be the state level in the u.s um but it was single shots and and he hunted and so we grew up on moose meat and elk meat and and he brought elk into northern alberta as part of a repopulation attempt anyways um i thought for i could never understand his fascination with with guns because it was really a deep fascination so it was it was uh something that elicited my curiosity and at one point i realized that he only hunted with single shots so he had one shot at whatever he was hunting so it had to be a good shot and so he was pushing himself and then i realized well he was really obsessed with hitting the target taking aim and hitting the target and i it was about that time i learned that the greek word for for sin hamartia meant to miss the target so there's this tight alignment between taking careful aim at the center of something precisely and then bringing yourself into alignment so that you would hit that target there's a deep morality in that it's a morality of hunting it might be a morality of combat and it's really deeply embedded inside of people and that was what had my father in its in its grip and so i would i i was wondering if the if if you're if you're uh the automatic interest that that even the club elicited in you had something to do with that that seeking that hunting that that target seeking or if you know perhaps i'm barking up the wrong tree i would say i know but when you when you were talking about getting hit in the head with a dirt clump and whether you get hit or not when you get done with that situation you are in an elevated state of mind because that was dangerous and it was a very high level competition because even when you're throwing a baseball or or you know kicking a soccer ball around there's no real danger in that situation but when someone's hucking dirt clumps at your head you get a legitimate rush from that and it feels good and it feels it's exhilarating one of the most fun yes there's no doubt that it's exhilarating one of the most fun days i ever had as a child this was less dangerous i i lived next door to a policeman an rcmp officer and we went out one day i was probably about eight into my neighbor's backyard and she had green tomatoes everywhere far more than she was ever going to eat and we had a green tomato wore for like an hour and a half and he was moving them at a pretty good velocity so if they caught you especially in the head you know you kind of remembered it but it was exhilarating and it was really fun to engage in that with him and i really do remember that and i do remember those i hadn't until today but i do remember those dirt lump wars and there is an exhilaration in pushing yourself like that so and i also don't i don't want to give the impression that i was you know running around with camouflage paint going to high school or i was you know i i was doing a bunch of other stuff too i played soccer i played basketball i i we had you know a bunch of different bands we played music i i played bass in a band i sang in a band i played guitar we we did all kinds of other stuff but yeah i was always kind of just in the back of my mind sort of wanted to do that job all right so you went to the seals and tell us about that a bit it was awesome you know it's you're uh you're making more money than you could ever figure out to do with you know i'm 19 years old and i am the richest person that's ever existed in my mind because i'm making whatever it is however many thousand dollars every two weeks and you know my expenses were nothing and so you're just totally stoked you're getting you got a great job you're working out you're shooting machine guns you're blowing things up you're hanging out with a bunch of bunch of other guys that like to blow things up and you you you can fight each other at the drop of a hat and then you get done with a fight and you shake hands and then and then you go eat a steak and so you're just in this environment and it's perfect it's it's freaking awesome so what was it like it was awesome that's what it was like it's funny you read accounts of the navy seals and i've never read it as enthusiastic an account as that account right there and so then how long after you what happened after you were done your navy naval seal training what direction did your military career take yeah so i got done with seal training i went to seal team one it was 1991. i just missed the first gulf war i was all brokenhearted about that because this war had happened and i didn't know when another one was going to happen and so what what do you do is you train and and we trained a bunch i did a bunch of seal platoons which is you form up with a group of guys you do a a training cycle together as a platoon and then you go on deployment overseas and when there's no war going on you go to other countries and you work with foreign nationals and you train them on the skill sets that we have and learn some stuff from them and then you come back and you do it again and then eventually from there i i went into uh where i became a trainer at seal team one um and taught the tactics to the the seal platoons that were now training to go on deployment and i did that for a couple years and then i got picked up for a commissioning program and became an officer in the seal teams which moved me up into a leadership position and then i did a couple deployments as a young seal leader then i had to go to college the navy sent me to college because in order to be an officer in the in the navy you have to go to college and i hadn't been to college where did you go i went to the university of san diego you went to the university of san diego what did you take there i i was an english major all right so you finished college and then what happened you're not going to ask me why i was an english major why were you an english major i thought when he hears english major he's going to say wait a second here you are this guy talking about machine guns and blowing things up what in god's name are you going to go study english for i have to say that that thought did pass through my mind okay uh why was i an english major i was an english major because believe it or not when you're in the seal teams and especially when you're in any officer position you have to write and read all the time so when one of your troops does something and they deserve some kind of recognition for that you have to write them an award and if the award is written well there's a much better chance that it'll actually that be given to the person that you're writing it for you have to write evaluations for your troops and the evaluations that you write is how your troops are judged so that they can be promoted on top of that if you want to go do a mission you have to write a concept of operations which is a document which is five six seven eight pages long that you send up the chain of command that then they scour through and see if they're gonna prove your mission or not you know that's so insanely important you know i mean one of the things i did a talk at harvard four years ago and i pointed out two things to the students in the audience one was that a tremendous amount of civilization and effort had gone into producing the institution that they were now part of and that everyone who was part of that institution was hoping that they would come there and learn everything they possibly could that was relevant and important and that they would be the best possible people they could be and they would go out in the world and do as much good as they possibly could that was the essential mission of the enterprise and that was really the case and also that learning to write in particular was going to make them more powerful than they could imagine and a number of students came up to me afterwards and said i really wish someone would have said that to us when we first came here and it's the writing part of that i i kind of got obsessed with that when i was working as a professor and i'm working on a piece of software right now to help which will launch soon to help people write because what i observed in my own career and it's so interest the parallelism is so interesting but not surprising is that nothing can stop you if you can write and it's for the reasons you just laid out it's like when you write you make a case for something whatever it happens to be and if you make the best case well then you win and you get whatever it is that you're aiming at and so you know you said maybe that's why i didn't ask you why you went into english i i guess that might have been the reason is that the utility of learning to write is so self-evident to me that it could pass by without question but it's also interesting to think about how it fits into this this broader well let's say at least partially military strategic way of looking at things you know you you describe the intense relationship between marshalling your arguments properly getting everything in order on the page and making strategic progress truly in the military sense that those things are tied together very very precisely and it's obviously your ability to communicate as well that's that's well look what it's done you have your podcast you have your youtube channel you have your books which many of which you self-published so that ability to communicate is it's i just can't understand why it's not presented especially not entirely but especially to adventurous well let's say young men we could say young people you're adventurous you want to make a mark is you bloody well better learn how to write because if you learn how to write well then you can think and you can communicate your thoughts so not only are you deadly strategically you become extremely convincing and then you can go and do anything you want and no one will stop you and that's never told to people and i i i don't really understand why you know you hear the pen is mightier than the sword which is just a cliche unless it's fleshed out but the reason you laid out the reasons perfectly yeah you have to communicate what happened as well as having it had had it happen right so you you already connected the dots but obviously not only am i having to write and present my argument i'm also having orders being issued to me which are written i'm sure you've heard the term rules of engagement well rules of engagement is a 12-page document that is in a bunch of legalese and i've got to translate that document to my troops some of whom you know barely graduated high school and so i've got to be able to do that so i've got to be able to read and then write and be able to then communicate and and talk to the team and brief them in a manner that they can actually understand what it is i'm talking about and what it is our mission is and why we're doing this mission so that was why i decided to study english when i when i went to college and believed so that was a conscious decision absolutely and with that end in mind that it was so tell me exactly what the decision was with regards to studying english what did you know that because it's not as you pointed out it's not self-evidently the most practical of pursuits and not necessarily what you'd expect someone with a military orientation to pursue right here's the here's the thought process i want to be a good seal the good seals that i see can communicate they can write and they can read that's what i need to learn how to do i need to learn how to do that better so that i can persuade my chain of command that we need to do this mission or we need this piece of gear or this guy over here needs to get an award or he needs to get promoted all those things are done by being able to write and communicate properly okay so so let's say you take the example of a seal who's got it all but this literacy okay so what what happens to him compared to someone who has all those skills well if he can't if he can't write well and he's in charge of six guys and one of those guys works hard or does something that deserves to be recognized this is the responsibility of that leader to write that person an award okay so he can't reward his he can't reward his his good workers his good soldiers he can give him a pat on the back but the battle back isn't going to get him promoted an award is actually worth some points towards your promotion and the people that are on that board that are giving that reward they're never going to meet that leader and they're definitely not going to meet that guy there's no there's no bias it's based on this piece of paper that you hand in you're handing this piece of paper they read the piece of paper and they say award approved or award not approved or you want to do a mission and you send that up the chain of command and it's the same thing it gets to a certain point where they're just looking at it and reading and trying to decipher this pile of junk that you put together and by the way if i'm in charge and jordan sends me a concept of operations that doesn't make any sense why would i possibly let you go out and execute an operation that i can't even understand what it is you're trying to do so it has a huge impact it has a huge impact okay well i'm dwelling on this because it's it's upsetting to me i would say that young people in particular aren't stringently instructed that the ability to that literacy makes them powerful in every way they can possibly imagine except the absolutely immediate and so it's just sad to me that it's not sold in that manner you want to be weak stay illiterate you want to be strong it's like put yourself together physically fair enough man get brave and street smart but then you could add some literacy to that and you're an unstoppable machine so i concur 100 and you know you said being literate makes you powerful and throughout recent history if we're trying to oppress someone what we don't want them to be able to do is read or write or or articulate themselves right well we haven't even talked about reading you know we just talked about writing and fair enough so but obviously you studied english so you also read and so what's the advantage to that as far as you're concerned practically speaking well um obviously there are so many lessons that you can pull out of books and you you can get to a point where nothing really surprises you because you've at least seen some indication of what can unfold through reading so again for me it's very much focused on combat and war but there's there's lessons that you learn and you say oh i i've seen that before there there's a book it's it is a book called about face which i think the last time you and i talked you were i think you were writing the forward for for the gulag and i was about to write the forward to i don't know if that's your favorite book but i i was lucky enough to be able to write the forward for my favorite book which was re-released because i was talking about it all the time and the book is called the book is called about face and it's it's about a guy that was in the korean war in the news in the vietnam war and his name is colonel david hackworth but i would read that book when i was on deployment i would read open up that book anywhere and i would read two pages or three pages before i'd go to bed if i was in my bed that night and and there were so many lessons that correlated to what i was actually going through and a real obvious example was when he was in vietnam he's working with the south vietnamese soldiers and therefore by proxy the south vietnamese government and guess what they're all corrupt and they're not motivated and they don't have the right gear and here we are in iraq and we're working with iraqi soldiers and therefore by proxy we're working with the iraqi government guess what they're all corrupted they're they're they're not well equipped and how do you how did he deal with it how do we deal with it so there's an example of when you read you can learn and you don't have to you don't have to go through the school of hard knocks you don't have to get punched in the face repeatedly with things that turn out to be situations that other people have absolutely gone through and the amount of the amount of the the the the level of capability increases so much by seeing something one single time well if i see something one time i i'm i'm infinitely better than if i'd never seen it before so if if it's like those those little puzzles they give you a little puzzle some kind of a mind bender right the nine benders only work on you one time the riddle only works on you one time then you i know the answer to that that's the answer you never get fooled by that again so just knowing just seeing it one time you're infinitely better so when you read enough you're capturing all these lessons and and you know what it's i gotta say this it's not just reading it's not just reading and and i learned this because as i started doing my podcast and many of my podcasts are just me reading books i realized how to read more intently even more intently than i did when i was going to college and i was going to be you know writing a paper about a book and so i'd read it in a certain way but you even that reading was a little bit detached a little bit detached because you're looking for a theme or you're looking for character development or what have you but when you read to learn about human nature and life you you you detach less and you kind of put yourself in there and you experience it a little bit closer and then when you take a step back you go oh yeah i i know what he was thinking right there because i was right there with them and so there's a certain attitude you kind of have to put yourself into the work and and really read it with that kind of uh intensity for lack of a better word is it is it possible for a human being to read intensely because that's what i try and do i get it that's no different than than acting intensely or playing intensely of course you want to put the book on you want to become that person that can rattle you up man especially if the person is thinking all sorts of things that you've never thought i mean i love reading for that reason i could pick my peers too which i really loved it's like well you know i have these people around me but then there's these people who who've lived before me and in different places and i can set them up on my shelf i can enter into their world and i can benefit from everything they've thought and saturate myself with that person it's and it's very disruptive especially if the person that you're reading has a mind that's more powerful and more well developed than your own i mean friedrich nietzsche spun me around for about three years and i was reading young at the same time intensely and the same thing you know it was very disruptive but unbelievably useful unbelievably useful to try on other people like that and you get the benefit of their entire life distilled into their into their book you know it it's 30 years of work i read this one book called the neuropsychology of anxiety which is a it's a great scientific work i think it's the greatest neuropsychological work of the last 50 years it's very hard book i think it has 1800 references something like that and this guy jeffrey gray he actually read all those references and he understood them and so it took me six months to read the book but i got an entire education out of it i got to experience in six months what it took him 30 years to learn like what a gift that is it's it's it's unbelievable i was i was listening to an interview with uh gary kasparov i think you said russian he was a chess world champion for 20 years something like this and he they asked him anyway the interviewer didn't ask him directly if he could beat this young young guy named magnus carlson who's the current kind of prodigy of chess he's just phenomenal in the highest chest rating ever et cetera et cetera and he didn't get asked directly if he could beat him but it was definitely implied if i remember the interview correctly and and what was very interesting to me gary kasparov there was two things that i found interesting number one was he said i he's younger than me and he didn't mean that and like that was an advantage for for gary he meant it he's younger than me so he has an advantage as an advantage because he's younger and i kind of thought to myself well that's kind of weird because this isn't a physical this isn't a wrestling match this isn't a jiu jitsu match why would that help and then sure enough you learn a little bit about cognitive decline and gary kasparov is 57 years old when he did this interview and guess what you start well depending on who you are but you start to see cognitive cognitive decline around that time and i'm still it kicks in at 25. there's you can iq is pretty unitary but you can fracture it into crystallized and and fluid and fluid iq is what enables you to learn and it declines from 25 onward crystallized intelligence continues to grow roughly speaking because it's partly dependent on such things as vocabulary which you can learn and which accumulate but interestingly enough you know you were talking about physically the best way to stave off cognitive decline is not cognitive activity it's exercise weight lifting and cardiovascular exercise can will is the it's by far the most potent means of staving off cognitive decline so kasparov would have the advantage in terms of experience but the younger guy would have the edge on sheer raw brain power that's what i thought too that's what i thought too but guess what it's wrong and it's wrong for the exact reason that you just said so magnus carlsen when he's 11 years old he gets to open up a book and see every single match and move that gary kasparov right that's what they do they document that stuff and so what he got to do was what you got to do you got to learn a person's 30 years experience in six months well this young kid ma so so this where it might have taken gary kasparov you know eight years or four years to figure out how to get out of some particular quandary on the chessboard well magnus just opened to a page in a book and said oh that if i ever get in that quandary i'm there and so what magnus got to do is he got to start from here right and build and so i make this point from a leadership perspective yeah we can do the same things as as leaders we don't have to figure all this stuff out we can jump up to gary kasparov's level or at least get a baseline of what he knew and and win because we learned it's very interesting to me well you think and again with regards to selling this sort of thing um you know i'm stunned that it's possible to make history boring for example people should be so enthralled with history that they can't get enough of it but with reading imagine you have this opportunity to learn whatever you want from the greatest people who ever lived along that dimension and and well it's stunning to me that that is a hard sell it's mysterious that that it's that that it isn't something that everyone is just clamoring for i mean that to me that points to a devastating failure inadequacy of the education system a mysterious inadequacy yeah there's a i think maybe the transaction isn't always clear for people i i always talk about well if you're gonna sell somebody if you're gonna sell somebody a book you know if i'm gonna sell you a book jordan you've gotta give me 20 and eight hours of your time right that's what you know you're going to give me you're going to give me 20 and you're going to give me eight hours of time which you would probably you know have other things that you might need to do and the transaction is not always clear of what you're going to get out of that especially when look you can spend a lot of time reading books and not get as much as you might want you might not get your twenty dollars worth out of a book so you have to be somewhat selective now luckily it's not even that hard to figure out which books to read because there's so many reviews and and and history about where these books came from and the and the productivity that they resulted in so but i think it's hard sometimes for look i can i can only speak for myself when i was younger it was really hard for me to figure out that transaction yeah fair enough like i had a librarian who um when i was 13 who told me what to read which is what a teacher should do right there's nothing a teacher can do for you that's better than say well here's 10 books that will change you completely and who actually knows that to be the case one of the things i'd really like to do i i've toyed with um well with the whole concept of online education one thing i'd really like to do is to divide up the variety of of domains of learning and identify the top 10 books in each domain so to ask an expert it's like well you're a historian you're a great historian what 10 books are crucial and i have a list on my website a list of recommended books there's about 100 of them that have been instrumental for me and lots of people have used that list to purchase books so that's been really good but i'd really like to extend extend and expand it yeah i have the same thing on my website the books from the podcast and same thing all kinds of those books get sold and it's it's beautiful to see but the people that are checking the website or listening to the podcast they know that that those books have been through a filter they're there for a reason they're there because they're going to be worth that transaction and i think that's a a tough sell for for a lot of people they can't figure out maybe they've invested in books before and they didn't quite get the return on investment that they wanted and buy two or three books and 50 or 60 dollars and 20 or 30 hours yeah that's that's a great observation i think because one of the advantages to coming from a literate background is that you do in fact reduce the transaction costs because there's an infinite number of books i mean well no there isn't but as far as we're concerned there might as well be and so the question of what to read really is daunting if you don't know anyone who reads where do i start and and and how can i not be a fool in doing this so well okay back to english so what what were you reading when you were in university was it was it fiction novels was it non-fiction what what were you what were you focusing on uh it was like your basic english literature that's what i studied and so i read everything i read everything you know from each one of the little periods and it took the various classes and and really uh as trite as this may sound it was actually the the most impact was from shakespeare it was the most impact on on multiple levels and i'll tell you the primary level and when i've covered shakespeare on my podcast i explain this to people people think well you know i didn't really understand i i read it i didn't understand it and i i said so i start off when i talk about shakespeare on my podcast i start off by saying listen if you think you're gonna just pick up shakespeare open it up and read it and understand it you're not going to because it's barely written in english it's barely written in english it's almost another language and so you're not going to be able to just pick it up and read through it it's it's it's written in in almost other language so what you have to do is you have to start to interpret it and so what i realized with with shakespeare is number one the weight of the words that these words were so pregnant with meaning that you had to pull those words and parse those words and pull those words apart to see all the depth that each individual word had and then the way that they're put together and what was great about this was by the time i was back because then i went right back into the seal teams and somebody would hand me a rules of engagement document that was written by some lawyer in washington dc and i'd pull it out and say wait a second this word i don't know what this word means let's pull this word out let's see what this let's see what this actual definition of this particular word is and how that changes my viewpoint of these rules of engagement and how can i translate that for my troops so that they actually know what to do so that part uh for me was from a reading perspective starting to read shakespeare and and saying oh okay you're not gonna understand this and if you don't understand something that's okay you pull out the oxford english dictionary and you look it up and then you not just find out what the meaning of the word is but what's the root word and where does it come from and what kind of depth and what kind of and that's really that's that's unbelievably useful too to discover the connotation of words and the oxford english dictionary is particularly good for that because you you discover things that you'd never guess by looking at how the word developed i mentioned the word hamartia like the fact that the word for sin was derived from an archery concept was revelatory to me it's like that's so cool it ties this moral concept abstract philosophy back down to something as as primordial as weaponry and hunting and just the fact that that's the metaphor is absolutely fascinating and and then there's the overlap in meaning that i already referred to and virtually every word is like that because word is an ancient artifact it's like it's it's it's like an it's like an animal in some sense it has an evolutionary history and it transforms across time and each word kind of it carries the echoes of its past with it too because each word um attracts other words in a particular unique way so it kind of lives in a word ecosystem as well and the ecosystem contain information about the history of that word and you think well why is that important it's like well hey guess what you think in words you talk in words you have all these archaic uh what are what these archaic entities these words these living entities that you use it's like the more you know about them the more you know about you the more you know about other people and the better you are at formulating and communicating your ideas there's nothing left there's nothing lost in that kind of investigation nothing there's nothing but gain there so yeah and that's that was so that was the uh that was the english road for me and and it was good thing i asked you that question eh yeah it was really really insightful for you to come up with that thank you thank you all right so so and you did you had did you enjoy university did you find a community there no okay so when i was going to university i was married i i had two kids when i got to university i had three kids when i left i was not a university student i was in fact in fact i would sit in the front row during my classes i would have three pencils and three pens lined up and staged on my desk i would be ready to take notes when the when if the teacher said something i didn't understand i'd be sitting in the front row raise my hand i don't understand what you just said can you explain that and i mean you know i'm 28 years old and there's a bunch of 18 years olds in there and they just want to you know go out and hang out with their friends and i'm there i'm in there to i'd love to really sound come off sounding good and tell you that i was there to learn but i was there to get a's which meant i did have to learn so i i went at it as a competition and i was competing not with the other students i was competing with the teachers because i'm a little bit crazy sometimes i would want to make sure that they couldn't ask me a question on their test that i didn't know the answer to so that's what i did and so did i have fun maybe not and one thing when i got back to the seal teams what i told the guys i'd say you know what i learned in college and they'd say what and i said i learned never ever ever ever get out of the teams ever never get out of sorry get out of never get out of the teams the seal teams never get out of the gate okay okay well you know i taught um older students in boston and undergraduates and the the undergraduates especially in boston but also at the university of toronto were very very bright and generally very hard working the older students were generally not as highly selected but man they were committed and most of them had had jobs that they weren't thrilled with let's say and had a hunger for what education could bring them that the younger people lacked and so it does seem to me often and maybe this is just because i'm getting older that after high school it might be good for people who want to pursue university to go do something that they're qualified for which isn't much at that point for a year or two so that when they do go to college or university they understand just exactly what they're being offered yeah but i i couldn't agree more working in the regular world will definitely make you appreciate the opportunities that you may have if you go and learn more in the world all right so you you came out of university you had three kids you were married what happens next uh go back to the seal teams and be go through the rest of my career uh dude showed up at a seal team september 11th it happened so i show up at a sealed team i i become a platoon commander at a seal team and then go on deployment i get done with that deployment that deployment was primarily to baghdad although we worked kind of all over iraq got done with that deployment i went and became the aid decamp for the admiral that was in charge of all the seals at that point in time and so that was uh sort of an er well not even sort of it was a very administrative job but it was also a huge opportunity for me to get to see the seal community in the most broad way that i could so i got to learn a lot there and then i went back to a seal team and was now what's called the task unit commander which is two sealed platoons combined together and i was in charge of two seal platoons combined together which is called the task unit my task unit was called task unit bruiser and we deployed to ramadi iraq and that was in the summer of 2006 very tough fighting a very tough battle and came home from that deployment hey so can i let me let me ask you there so can you tell me can you describe a typical day or a typical week like what was it like to be there i like all the details what you get tell me what happens when you get up in the morning what did your day look like so we're there we showed up there and as soon as we got there and we knew going into it in 2005 2006 if you can remember watching the news in 2005 2006 just about every day you would see in the news that there was three soldiers killed in a lombard province or five marines killed in al-anbar province or three marines wounded in al-anbar province and the capital of alambar province is the city of ramadi and the vast majority of those casualties were happening inside the city of ramadi and and we knew that going there and when you say we you say we were deployed there who are you you're obviously referring to the country to your country but what does we mean when you make when you say that when i say we in this particular case i'm talking about my seal task unit so i had and that's how many how many people yeah so i had about 35 to 40 seals most of the time and then another 60 around 60 support personnel and these people are armorers that you know can fix our weapons and and mechanics that can fix our humvees and intelligence people that gather information for us and radio operators that can receive our radio calls so there's a big support network that goes with the the sealed task unit as we deployed and why was it a seal enterprise what was specific about this deployment that that required this the whatever it is that the seals bring and what is it exactly that the seals bring that's specific so on this particular deployment at this time at this point in time seals were deploying to iraq all the time where there was always seals in iraq my first deployment was in 2003 2004 and we were in the beginning of that deployment we were the only sealed platoon there and then by this time there would be many more seals i forget what the number is but so we were in iraq and we were conducting special operations missions and in particular in ramadi when we got there so standard seal operation on my first deployment was get gather intelligence from various sources so so through various sources we would gather intelligence about the location of a bad guy okay so you had you had a variety of people who were targets identified and they were leaders of of what made what marked them out as bad what were their characteristics these are these are people well we want to talk about their psychological characters no no no i mean you might not be able to do a better job than that i can tell you what they were doing for a living was trying to kill americans trying to kill coalition forces trying to kill other iraqis trying to create chaos and mayhem for the interim government in iraq these are were they generally leaders of leaders of a group that you would target or the are these people who were involved in the army on the other side or like put them in context yeah so there's no there's no i mean the iraqi army is actually on our side right so these the iraqi army is our friends and that's who we're working alongside and now early in the war not so much because the the coalition forces made a decision to disband the entire iraqi military right well this is why i wondered if there were people with on the military to what degree there were people with military chaining that were facing you yes so since that happened a lot and as a matter of fact in in the city of ramadi there used to be a massive military iraqi military base there and so a bunch of former iraqi military lived there there was a whole area that was called the it was there was an area called the officer housing there was an area in ramadi that was called the officer housing where iraqi officers used to live so and i'm not nailing that name but it's something like that um so yes there was there was former iraqi regime army people that were out there fighting there's also foreign fighters and so would they have their own little groups there are bands of people that were fighting with them you were talking you were targeting leaders i'm just wondering how people were selected so the seals were after specific individuals generally speaking yes and here's what we figured out if you only target the leaders well it's going to be a lot harder to catch them because they're laying low and they're moving around and and they try and they try and give misinformation about where they are and what not so well we'd go and go out and grab you know one of their lieutenants grab one of their soldiers and find out where the lieutenant is grab lieutenant find out where the leader is so there would be these cell networks these little these little networks and maybe they're a mortar cell and they're they're dropping mortars they're a roadside bomb cell and that's what they're doing and so we would figure out who these bad guys were and then through these various intelligence sources we would find out a location maybe it was a mid-level guy maybe it was a high-level guy maybe as a low-level guy and then once we know their location we're going to get them what were the typical motivations of the people that you were pursuing what were they fighting for so there's a variety of motivations some of the you know if you're a front line guess what if you're a 15 year old kid with no money guess what's a good motivator money and you and the insurgency yep the insurgents say hey we'll give you 100 bucks to go launch an rpg at the american base that so that's their motivation end of story uh the higher you get up the chain of command the the more you're going to start leaning towards legitimate jihadists that now there's jihadists throughout the chain of command don't get me wrong and and i mean hardcore jihadists and and i remember the first time i i was in my first deployment the first time i saw a legit hardcore jihadist you you can tell that these this guy hated us and it was very clear from the look on his face when we captured him it was completely he he was filled with seething hatred so there's jihadists throughout the chain of command and that guy was like so so the the jihadist motivation was well by definition in some sense a religious motivation but your experience of it was that it was primarily a visceral hate and hatred for what do you think i mean obviously you're an occupying force let's say and you know and and america is seen at at least among the jihadists of that time as as a a truly satanic force i suppose i mean what's motivating what was your experience of what was motivating the hatred yeah it's it's everything you just said but i mean you can trace it all the way back to the israeli-palestinian conflict i mean you can they're they're gonna draw and see view view the west as evil as the great satan and and so that's what what did you think at that point about the morality of the endeavor i mean because this is why i'm curious like and please do correct me i'm sure i'm wrong about many of the things that i think but it seems to me that the clearer your moral sense when you're engaged in a battle the more likely you are all things considered to win because you're not part of you isn't going to be fighting against you right and i mean in any enterprise it's like that if i find that if i'm involved in a pro project and i have reservations then the part of me that has reservations 20 of me pushes against the other 80 and then i'm only 60 as effective as i might be and so whenever i engage in an enterprise i try to walk through it ethically and see well am i actually committed to this what qualms do i have what what doubts do i have what resistances do i have because that's going to make me weak and so when you go into battle i presume it's the same thing that you have to believe i know they say that soldiers also fight very hard for the guy who's in the foxhole next to them so there's that brotherhood camaraderie but you go there as a representative of your country as well your nation and and there is that there has to be that ethical dimension to it and so what how did you guys deal with that looking at what we're doing and and what's what's really interesting is even though when you stare at it from a strategic perspective when you say oh as a western power as this country we're going in here and we could argue all day long about whether that's a right call or a wrong call whether that's morally correct or whether it's an immoral move we could have arguments about that all day yes well they've been going on for 3000 years in the middle east right right endless arguments about what's right and and here's what here's what one of the nice benefits of being on the ground is you get to see what's happening what's actually happening so what you see in iraq when you're actually on the ground is for instance in ramadi what you see and what we saw is the iraqi populace who are a bunch of normal people that want to carry out their lives and raise their kids and run whatever business they're going to run that's what they want to do they want to they want they actually want life liberty and the pursuit of happiness is what they want that's a normal iraqi family when we would when we would go to an iraqi family's house that's pretty much what you're dealing with and amongst those normal people that just want to live their lives in peace there are insurgents and the insurgents want power they want control and they are willing to do anything to get it and so when you see fathers beheaded and their heads left in the yard of a family because he had you know had really he he was he was working with a shake that had said things against al qaeda and now this guy is beheaded uh we there was a guy that was skinned alive there was torture there was rape so when you are on the ground and you see this stuff happening and you see the local populace clapping and cheering when you kill insurgents your strategic vision isn't quite in focus as much as what you're seeing right in front of you with your own two eyes and so therefore the 20 of you that might be arguing uh whether this is right or wrong when you see families slaughtered you you very quickly um tell that 20 of your brain that you you don't you need to look at what's happening right here this is this this is this is immoral and we need to do what we can to help these people and do you did you feel then and and then again now i mean it's a quagmire it's an ethical quagmire the middle east and so it seems in some sense that no matter what you do there it's wrong and i'm not trying to convince you of that believe me i'm i'm really curious about this you felt when you were there that you were on the side that was doing the right things do you um and now when you look back i mean i don't know what to make of what what happened with the us in the middle east over the last 15 years i'm just as happy and perhaps you are as well there's less engagement in foreign wars now than there was 10 years ago in the u.s right that seems to have receded to some degree and that perhaps that's a good thing what do you think about the in about about america's involvement in iraq what conclusions have you come to so you you talked about this argument that you're going to have in your own head well you are also going to have that argument on a national level right you're going to have a national level argument of whether this is the right thing or the wrong thing to do so my scale my measure of this is if you are going to go to war if you are going to go to war you have to make sure before you go that you have the proper will the proper will and there's two types of will that you need to have if you're going to go to war the first type of will that you need to have if you're going to go to war is you have to have the will to kill you have to have the will to kill and guess what i am sorry to inform everybody it is not just the will to kill the enemy because when you go to war war is an imperfect is an imperfect endeavor and no matter how hard you try to just kill the the enemy you will kill civilians you will kill women you will kill children that is what is going to happen that is what is going to happen if you go to war so you have to make sure you have the will to do that that sometimes you're going to drop a bomb and it's going to land and it's going to kill women and children that's what's going to happen and anybody that thinks anything different is naive and ignorant we seem to let our politicians often convince us that that's possible but it's not so you have to have the will to kill and then on top of that obviously you have to have the will to die you have to have you have to know and understand that if you embark in a war your sons and daughters are going to be killed that is what is going to happen and anybody that says it's not going to happen is naive and ignorant now i think before we go to war oftentimes we rationalize that we can mitigate the risk of killing we can mitigate the risk of dying and for some reason we think we can mitigate those risks down to zero which is impossible so if you have the will if you look at a situation and say we need to do something here for moral reasons for national security reasons we need to take action okay so let's so let me ask you a question there if you don't mind um you know whenever i have had to take difficult action in the past so take to take a risk my justification for that so what allowed me to organize my will let's say was a belief that inaction was a worse crime so i'm trying to think through what it takes to conjure up the will that you just described morally speaking and it's very difficult to talk about the morality of war but it's absolutely necessary clearly do you believe that in the situation in iraq do you think that the argument was laid forth it's it's it's such a sh it's it's so there was a terrible attack on new york 911 and the response was focused on iraq that's correct so far yes on afghanistan immediately and yes thereafter focused on iraq yes all right it was never obvious to me why the focus shifted to iraq do you do you have any sense of why that was i know that there was a lot of thought at the highest levels of the american government prior to 9 11 about iraq and so there was a plan that was already in some sense in place for iraq but it isn't obvious to me why attention was shifted towards iraq in the aftermath apart from the fact that that plan already existed uh i think the shift came from i'm trying to think of some kind of a metaphor here but you know you've got you've got some rats in you know in the garage and the rats have nod through some of the wiring and so you go and you you you know you try and kill the rats in the garage and you realize you know what this isn't the only place that these rats seem could could be there could also be some rats over here in the basement and we have wires over there too we better go handle that situation as well you said that you were overwhelmed by the reality of the situation on the ground my first deployment to iraq we we worked with we we just worked with seals basically all the operations we did was just with seals when we went back to iraq in ramadi we were ordered to work with iraqi soldiers now the iraqi soldiers were poorly trained they were poorly equipped they had low motivation some of them were not very trustworthy and we were going out into the worst battlefield on planet earth at the time and it was it was pretty hard to make sense of that order right but when i thought through the order you know why why is why is why is my senior leadership ordering me to do this well the answer is quite clear after i thought about it a little bit hey the reason that we have to do this is because we need to work with the iraqi soldiers so that the iraqi soldiers become proficient enough that they can handle the security in their own country of course yes okay so my my senior leadership isn't telling me to do something because they want me to die or want my troops to get wounded and killed they're telling me to do something because it's a strategic move where in hopefully two or three years the iraqi military will be at a level where they can handle security in their own country okay got it okay that's part one well when when we got ordered to work with iraqi soldiers it wasn't just it wasn't just my seal task and it was everyone all coalition forces all american army and marine corps was getting told you'll work with iraqi forces and everyone kind of had that nervous feeling right hold on a second you want me to have this person that has a rusty ak-47 and a pair of sandals you want that person to to to support me out on the battlefield that doesn't make any sense and so what the american forces did was when they were ordered to take iraqi soldiers with them on an operation then they would go out with a platoon of 40 americans and they would take two iraqis with them because they were told to take iraqis plural so that means two that's what we're going to do and they'd leave them in the humvee and they go conduct their operations well senior leadership got wind of this and this obviously is not in the spirit of of what we're being told to do you're not going to get a nation's army trained up by taking two soldiers out so the next thing the leadership said was okay here's the new order for every one american that you bring out you have to have seven iraqi soldiers with you so yeah so they imposed a ratio on us now ramadi at this time was a complete war zone other parts of iraq were actually somewhat pacified and in many of those pacified areas that order actually made sense the the the iraqis in some areas the iraqi soldiers in some areas were actually capable of conducting decent operations with very little american oversight and the level of violence in those areas wasn't that bad so it was okay well in ramadi it didn't make any sense whatsoever so i'm being ordered to take one seal for every seven iraqi soldiers well first of all because of the fighting was so bad in ramadi many of the iraqi units only had 10 or 15 or 20 people in their platoon so if i was going to send out seals i would only be able to send out two seals 15 iraqi soldiers so now which two seals am i going to send am i going to send the medic well i want to send a medic for sure but guess what i also need to send a machine gunner in case we get into a firefight what about the radio man that actually calls for help what about the point man that actually knows where we're going what about the leader who's going to make decisions out there what about the explosive ordnance disposal guy that can dismantle bombs from going off so who am i supposed to leave behind it doesn't make any sense the the danger to the troops is so much higher in that situation so what did i do did i say hey that's what i'm being ordered to do no i took all this into consideration and i and i you'll appreciate this i wrote a point paper up my chain of command explain the situation of what was happening explain the number of casualties explain the level of violence explain the size of the iraqi elements that we were working with and said can i please get a waiver for this and allow me to take however many seals i've deemed necessary to take to be safe and my chain of command read it and said yeah sure jock will do whatever you want to do thank you so that's okay so what you what you what you're telling me is that you take what you're told to do and you take what you know to be the case on the ground and you try to do you try to take both of them into account as much as possible well you're also shunting information back up the hierarchy hopefully to modify their decisions the decisions they're making that aren't in accordance with the reality on the ground right right so you do i mean you do your best under the circumstances but that that makes that that that seems to be that's that seems to be a good answer but but it escalates obviously it can escalate higher than that right it can the decisions the orders that we're being given can escalate to a point where maybe this entire thing that we're doing i think is wrong right right okay so now we get into a situation where and the reason that i i have to explain all these other things is because it happens very rarely it happens very rarely that you know someone in the military is looking at a decision that's being made on a big scale and says i think this is totally and completely wrong now i will tell you and i wrote about this in my last leadership book leadership strategy and tactics if you're being told to some to do something that you believe is completely wrong well i would love to tell you that that's a black and white decision but guess what it's not even that's not a black and white decision because jordan if you order me to go and assault a machine gun nest that's that's on a hill with my squad and i know that this is a machine gun nest in a bunkered position in an elevated position with interlocking fields of fire and if we go up that hill we're all going to die and i look at you and say hey hey boss i don't think that's a good call they're elevated they're bunkered they're interlocking this doesn't make any sense and you go no jocko shut up and do it i said i'm telling you jordan this isn't a good idea and you say no shut up and do it now here's my decision point if i say you know what i will not do it i will not do it you know what you do you go cool jocko you're fired and you get your yes man come over and your yes man comes and you say go assault that machine gun nest and he takes the squad up and he gets everybody killed so i surrendered my influence when i when i drew that line in the sand and said no and you doomed other people to death and i doomed other people to death now my boss orders me you order me and i say okay boss got it you you definitely want me to do this there's no way out yes you definitely got to do it okay all right guys here's what's happening we're going to start we're going to get into a covered position we're going to start maneuvering towards this thing we're going to see what kind of fire we receive if we start receiving overwhelming fire i'm going to lock some of you guys in that position and i'm going to send another squad over to the flank and we're going to we're going to take out this machine gun from that's from another angle or i'm going to hunker down in that position and we're going to call for air support so you're decomposing you're actually decomposing the process then into micro elements and then testing the micro elements then you can report back with that information yes right right very smart very good we have to be very careful so when you talk about oh i don't think we should go into iraq i don't think we should go okay so what am i gonna do hey i don't think we should go now are there times where that might be the right decision there are some times like that where maybe i think that me as a senior leader standing up and saying no to my boss is gonna make you know jordan suddenly looks at me goes wait a second jaco's always been a good guy and now he's sitting here telling me no he's really serious about maybe i maybe i'm not seeing something maybe i can get you to rethink your position that's a risky move though it's always a risky move to kind of draw a line the sander kind of an ultimatum because when you use up your capital you burn your leadership capital it's even worse than that you just completely surrender your leadership you don't even use it you you you obliterate it it's gone you have no more influence you're done so we have to think very long and hard about those things and so when it comes if if i was i was never put in a position like where i didn't where where i thought that what we were doing as a country was wrong i'll tell you actually probably the closest i've come to that was i think it was 1993 the the massacre was unfolding in rwanda there was the the um the uh hutus were killing the tutsis by the hundreds of thousands and i was on a navy ship um off the coast of off the coast of africa on standby to go into rwanda as this slaughter took prey took place and we didn't do anything we didn't do anything so that's the cost of not going to war there austin not going to war and there's a very you know it's a very interesting i'm sure you've heard of the the the massacre that took took place in me lion vietnam and and one of the most interesting things in that reprehensible scenario is what stopped it what's so this is this this this horror is unfolding there's there's murder mutilation rape just going berserk a company of american soldiers is murdering raping mutilating bodies just absolutely heinous absolutely reprehensible and while this is happening a helicopter pilot comes in and sees what's going on and these guys have lost their mind really the guys on the ground have lost their mind the helicopter pilot flies back to base he walks into the tactical operation center and says hey they are killing civilians out there the commanding officer gets on the phone and says hey stop killing people and they stopped immediately they stopped immediately that's that's what tells you how important leadership is leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield and if you have a leader that's going to let things start to go in this direction all it takes is one person to step up and say hey everyone stop what you're doing this is wrong so you get a situation like rwanda we didn't really do anything we we didn't do anything and what would it have taken if if we rolled in there and said hey no more don't stop do they look around with their machetes covered in blood and wake up of their neighbors and say oh wait wait a second yep okay we're gonna stop so i'm not saying these are easy predicaments but certainly you know the idea of are there situations where it's better to do something than nothing i'll tell you what rolling into baghdad and going into saddam hussein's torture chambers which we did and you see the the the uh the the hook there was hooks like hooks hanging from ceilings and and and drainage where blood would drain in these torture chambers you see that a couple times and you think i'm okay with us being in here and getting rid of this guy i'm going to switch topics i want to talk to you about your books and i i'd like to know look you said right at the beginning of this interview that you wanted to be the best navy seal good navy seal that's what you said you didn't say the best you want to be good the best was aiming a little bit too high yeah yeah i know that's why i wanted to get the words right um what are you doing now what i mean i i presume that that your life is still being lived in an expansion of that the pursuit of that initial ideal you've transformed multiple times you're a civilian you you're you're a communicator mass communicator in a variety of different in a variety of different ways i think you mentioned we were talking offline a little bit for example that you have a clothing line and i'm going to ask you about that because that's that's that's a curious thing to me um and that is i'm definitely curious about that but like what's your mission and is that the right question is is that an appropriate question so there's a there's there's a there's a quality let's call it so as as i as i went through that that as i created in my mind that ideal of of what a good seal is what is a good seal and and i'm sure you could i could say okay what do you think jordan oh he's probably strong and he's probably fast and he's probably smart and he's probably tactically sound and he can probably shoot a weapon straight and all those things absolutely all those things are there and as you would kind of burn away the the or if you were to set up a hierarchy of importance of what makes a good seal yep you might think that some people would think oh well it's probably being the best shot or it's probably being the strongest or it's probably being really good in the water all those things all those skills that you think it might be and you could talk to different seals and they would all kind of you know some guy would say it's running some guys say it's strong some guy would say it's the best shot whatever best tactician but if you offered them one thing 99.9 percent of steels would agree on what makes you a good seal and that is you look out for your teammates you put your team above yourself yeah so that's a real inversion of the things that you just described dave because all of those things are dimensions along which you could be excellent in a manner that distinguishes you from the group and elevates you above them but you derive from that a claim that that should all be subordinate to a reciprocity and any seal that's a good seal would tell you that that would be at the top of the hierarchy you can be the best shot you can be the best shot you can be the best diver you can be the strongest you can be the fastest you can be the best tactician if you don't take care of your teammates none of that none of those other things matter you you're not even wanted in the sale teams that's that's that's what it is so well do you think that that seems to me to be true for functional organizations in general is that and and certainly the people i've seen this is part of the reason why casual critiques of hierarchies annoy me so much because the people i've seen who are radically successful don't get there from power they get there from mobility but also reciprocity and yeah um 100 right so when you say to take care to look out for and to take care of i think you said to look out for what flesh that out what does that mean in the situations that you've been in and how did that guide your behavior it's a it's a it's it's a literal constant daily hourly by the minute attitude which is okay hey my my buddy needs me to to to move over there and cover for that area that's what i'm gonna do my buddy needs to me to bring him some more ammunition my buddy needs me to help him clean this weapon my buddy needs to you carry the boat i need to pick up the boat because we're moving across the beach all these things so what are you doing you're looking so what like you said moment to moment so what are you doing you're looking for ways to be useful constantly how can i support my teammates what can i give to them how can i make them how can i make their situation better right now and and that that guy that has that attitude is going to have a great reputation in this year well then you can think too of course then the fact that you're outstanding on any number of dimensions let's say that becomes an asset of the team rather than something that's a competitive liability because like if you're going to be looking out for me and i really believe that the fact that you're stronger and smarter than me is actually really good because now i've got someone who's stronger than me and smarter than me who's looking out for me and so whatever competitive jealousy there might have been there could be easily subsumed under appreciation for those positive attributes yes and we are going to work together because guess what you might be the strongest but i'm a little bit faster than you right right right and you might be a good shot but i'm better in the water than you are and we're going to be in the water and shooting so we're each going to have a chance to be number one yes so the reason i went to that how long did it take you to figure that out like you said something interesting about assembling the image of an ideal seal in in your imagination and so was that something that were you consciously aware of doing that while you were doing that or did you see that you were doing that in retrospect uh unconscious and saw that i did it in retrospect and the team the the support your teammate is something that you hear immediately and if you listen to it it's you you can't miss it now guys miss it guys definitely miss it but if your eyes are open and your ears are open you can't miss it it's day one seal basic indoctrination you take care of your swim buddy they literally say that day one they'll say take care of your swim buddy and what does that mean in this in the swim buddy context what how would that what does that translate to practically that means before jordan gets inspected by the instructor i take a look at jordan's gear and make sure it's all squared away and say you're good to go as opposed to seeing that your life jacket's got a twisted strap and just sitting there looking straight ahead no i want to make sure you're okay that's actually before i check myself i'm checking you before i check myself i'm checking you i'm making sure that you're good to go see this is partly why these claims the broad claims that are being made in the social world at large now about hierarchical power um being the the fundamental attribute of society is so disturbing to me because this that this this is not true it's literally not true only when a hierarchy becomes radically dysfunctional does individual power come to dominate the rest of the time it's something like what you're saying is that and then that's that's that's and and that's true let's you know capitalism has a bad rap let's say morally because of its selfishness but the functional organizations that i've seen that are business organizations if if the people in there aren't um motivated by the ethos that you're describing no no one bloody well wants to work with them no one wants to buy their material no one wants to partner with them across time they don't even want to go golfing with them so it's just not it's it's so not true it's completely not true and that's i mean that's the essence of the books that i've written about leadership is that story over and over again i had a i had a seal platoon commander that operated via power his his authority and his power that's how he operated we did what he told us because he told us to do it because he was the highest ranking guy and you better be quiet and listen to me and it's going to be my plan and you all better just shut up and get on board with it and we had a we had a mutiny we had a mutiny in that seal platoon where we we went to his boss and said we're not working with this guy and he actually ended up getting fired so everything you just said right while you well that's exactly right look there's there's no stable organization no organization can run stably across time if it's predicate of operation is raw power and the reason for that at some point is that the people who are being tyrannized are going to band together and say no we're not going to do this we're going to take you out and so if you don't want to be taken out you can't exercise tyrannical power it's it's the intrinsic weakness of tyranny and to to confuse functional and competent organizations with tyranny is also to make a mockery of the fact that this cooperative ethos is actually the dominating principle if the if the if the organization is functioning properly yeah and as i pointed out i actually lived through that and i lived through the other end of the spectrum too when that platoon commander got fired the platoon that commander that took his place was very humble listened had an open mind gave us ownership told us to come up with a plan and we love that guy and that's the guy that i try to emulate to this day and we would have followed that guy anywhere and it it's it's precise right and so that's not power that's not power it's precisely because he didn't use his tyrannical power to to drive us to do what he what he wanted us to do look whenever i've been in a situation and wanted to get the best out of the people that are working under me or with me for that matter um i seed as much responsibility and authority to them as possible partly because one of my predicates of operation is that if i'm going to engage in an enterprise with you and i have to tell you what to do and or if i told you what to do you would do a better job i should find a different person all that is is indication that i chose the wrong person if you're the right person i'm going to grant you as much autonomy as possible partly because then you get to have your own domain partly then because you're self-sufficient partly because you do better but even more so because then you're fully committed to the task and i i don't believe that anybody occupies a position of leadership for long who doesn't know those things and they're certainly not effective if they don't know them no they're not and i i talk to leaders all day every day in every every possible industry that you can think of and it's you know one of the things that i end up saying a lot to leaders is you know when if you're working for me jordan and you come to me with a plan of how you want to execute a project or an operation or a task my goal my goal is that we're going to use your idea that's my goal my goal is that whatever you present to me if it's if it's going to get the job done we're good we're going with it you know then at least the person can learn from what they're doing and be better the next time right if it's minimally viable why not let them run it yeah sometimes it's an emergency and you can't do that but yeah yeah and by the way if there's urgency and i can't do that okay by this time you and i have built an up enough trust that you know that if i say hey we need to go over there right now you go yep got it right right and so so we do get into situations like that happens right and that's that's something you don't want to do too often because just as we discussed earlier you burn up your leadership credibility by doing that so you can use power if you're a leader but but judiciously and seldom and you need a good rationale and people have to trust you and so that's the other issue is that we could we could think about the preconditions for trust because if the organization isn't running on trust then everybody's at each other's throat constantly and all there is is backbiting and confusion and so to trust means i i have to i have to i have to what would i say i have to have faith in your motives and i have to see that you're doing your best to align your motives with mind and i have to believe that that's genuine because otherwise the enterprise isn't going to succeed given all the other things it's going to have to face yeah it's a it's another you know you bring up the term alignment and when i work with companies sometimes sometimes we'll start talking about alignment and and quite frankly in most cases in vast majority of cases if you and i are at a company if we go high enough high enough up what i call the the ladder of alignment if we go high enough up that ladder we'll get to a point where we're gonna be aligned because look right definitely we're trying to um take care of our team we're trying to provide a good service to our clients and we're trying to be profitable and if look if that's what we're trying to do and 99.9 of the times the companies that i work with i have to talk them through this but i can say we can get to a point where we are aligned now what alignment has like a like a like a like a cousin or or maybe a step cousin called agenda where where you've got your agenda over here and i've got my agenda over here and you're trying to get more funds for your department and i'm trying to get more funds for my department and so we can kind of sometimes it can feel like our agendas we're not aligned yeah now oftentimes i say look if if jordan's agenda is to get more funding for his department so he can invest more and make more money for the team his agenda is aligned and that's great that i have no problem with your agenda it's when you know you're try trying to create your own fight them because you're going to leave the company and you're going to go do something else and i start to sense that and and whenever yeah and all that's going on underground and no one's really talking about it right right when i get a company where they can't come to a they can't come to an agreement about something they can't they cannot so we walk them up the the alignment ladder and all of a sudden you realize oh wait a second this person's just trying to make money and this right really wants to take care of the team now i'll tell you i'll take them further up the alignment ladder and say listen if you really want to make money and you want to take care of the team guess what if you have a good team that you take care of you're going to make more money yeah yeah yeah but you can get aligned unless people are starting to take care of themselves instead of take care of the team which goes back to what we were just talking about which is also extremely short-sighted in my estimation because for a bunch of reasons i i lined some of this out in in this new book this i realized a long time ago that there isn't much difference there might be no difference actually technically speaking in in taking care of yourself and in taking care of other people and here's the reason so you might say well i'm one person and everyone else is a group of people and so there's that competition between me as one person and what this one person wants and the group but that's not true because i'm actually a group and the reason i'm a group is well there's me today but there's me over the next week and there's me over the next month and then there's me over the next year and over the next five years and over the next 10 years and the me that exists right now can't betray the me that's going to exist next week by doing something short-sighted and impulsive that will you know produce a burst of impulsive pleasure but will compromise the future and so if i'm taking myself into account seriously which i'm an entity that has multiple incarnations let's say across very large spans of time then i immediately have a community that i have to serve i have to serve the 80 year old person that i'm going to become and the difference between that and serving 80 year old people in the community is negligible it's the same thing so if i'm taking care of someone in a in a senior's home for example there the difference between that and how i'm going to be taken care of when i'm 80 is negligible and so there there's no there's there's there's no way out of the ethical demand of of serving the group even if you're even if your selfishness is is is of the most enlightened kind well that's one of the most beautiful things about this about this the whole thing conceptually is that if i put the team before myself if i put the mission and the team before myself and by being a good team player i i lift up jordan and i and i make you look good and i give you the support you need the beautiful thing about this is eventually i'm going to win right i'm 100 going to win and people get short-sighted as you're talking about where i think you know what if i can if i can pull this project away from jordan i can raise my head up and get some credit for this the boss is going to look at me and he's probably going to give me a promotion and that that might work once that might work once yeah or twice and then my reputation is oh you don't want jocko on your team because he's the one that's going to be moving around trying to make himself look good instead of trying to accomplish the mission yeah so ultimately if if you take care of people if you're a good seal if you're a good team player you will win in the end that's what's going to happen and yes and you'll win you'll win surrounded by people who are thrilled to death that you won and so and that's that's that's a much better form of winning than to be bitter and alone yes snatched standing on the mouth right right absolutely and and the fact that it's on you know you can only get away with that once or twice is dead relevant because human beings are very sensitive to negative emotion we remember and one of the things we really remember is betrayal and so if if you don't play the game straight and you have to play the game over and over with the same people then you're dead in the water and then you're going to be in your own little hell you're going to think well why does it why won't anybody play with me and the answer that is well you don't play fair and people gave you a chance a few times and you demonstrated that and like there's no coming back so yeah and the reason i went off on this tangent yeah because you asked me your mission now what am i doing now you bet you better and i think that along the way in my career in the in the navy i was so ingrained with the fact of trying to be a good teammate yeah that when i retired i kept just trying to help people out and say hey you know what i i i can teach you something about leadership do you want to know something about leadership i i can i can maybe i can help you with this or i can at least talk you through and maybe i can share some stories of what i've learned about human nature and and that way you don't have to learn those lessons by beating your head up against the wall and and then maybe i can help you out with hey putting some stuff together that you can take as supplements and that's going to make you a little bit healthier and stronger and and by the way we're we're trying to rebuild our community in new england where we came from where we used to have a bunch of factories making clothes and maybe we could rebuild that and that way everything ah so great so there's this question and so so tell me tell me about that so because it's kind of a surprise right to you have a clothing line i think well that's so that's so funny and i that that jocko has a clothing line it's it's so cool that that's the case and not not expected so i knew there was a back story there so um i don't imagine that it stems from an obsession with fashion you called it dude okay so so what happened and why did you get interested in it and what's going on okay so um i was you know i started my podcast and i was interacting with people and i i talk about jiu jitsu a lot brazilian jiu jitsu i'm a a very big supporter of people training jiu jitsu and mixed martial arts in general but i am absolutely a jiu jitsu guy so a lot of people started doing jiu jitsu and they started training and and so they would ask me that the the uniform for jiu-jitsu is called a gee and people would ask me hey i'm starting jiu-jitsu or i started jiu-jitsu and i need to get a ghee what kind should i get and i knew from having ghees over the years that gees were made in china and whatever horrible slave labor scenarios are happening there and and i knew that there was also one company up in maine and i'm i'm from new england as well one company up in maine that was actually making these jiu-jitsu gis in america and and i had seen them online and and the story was kind of presented online that this guy named pete he was a new england kid and saw the factories get shut down and we all you know we all did that we all saw when i was growing up the factories there was no there was no one in them yep and and he saw that and he was also a jiu-jitsu guy and so he wanted to make these jiu-jitsu in america as he started to go down that path he realized that the material that you would get to sew together a ghee was not produced anywhere in america so he decided he was going to get a loom to weave this material and he starts asking around and poking around and eventually finds that in a 500 000 square foot abandoned factory in lewiston maine there is one loom that hadn't been shipped overseas and the woman that kind of owned it was planning to one day put that loom in a museum and he said i'll buy it from you and so he bought this massive loom you know it's as big as a couple beds put together weighs thousands and thousands of pounds and he gets some of his buddies and they go and drag this loom out of this factory and they take it apart what a cool finding what a remarkable piece of equipment completely remarkable and he finds a guy he finds people that knew about these things find some old-timers there was a guy named lenny who since died but he used to work on looms and he hired him and said why we he says what do you want to do he said we got to make this thing work so he starts making he starts weaving this material gets this thing up and running so one day and i'm following the story i've been following i've been following that story for three or four years and i'd actually reached out to him and said hey man i know you're up in maine i'm from up there um what do you think you know can i get some of your geese i'd like to like to have some of your gis and how much are they or whatever and i wouldn't even hear back from him because he's in maine these guys you know i make fun of him because he's up in maine he's in farmington maine population seven thousand so anyways one day i'm doing like a a live social media interaction with people and someone says hey i'm just starting jiu jitsu what kind of geese should i get and i said i'll tell you what you should get an origin gee and by the way i said if anybody on here knows this guy named pete roberts that runs that company up there if you could please tell him i want to talk to him that'd be really cool so a few days go by and i get like a message that says hey i reached out through my business connections and i found this guy pete roberts here's his number or whatever here's his email so i say all right great so we set up a a skype call this was a few years ago and we meet each other and we talk for four hours and i come walking out of my office and my wife says it sounds like you were talking to yourself in there because we were just you know we were on the same page so i ended up flying up to maine we we we had a stake and we had a handshake and we merged and and started working together and what was great was he had he had this great people up there and was building these keys but he didn't have a platform he's in farmington maine there's not a bunch of jiu jitsu studios in farmington maine well i had luckily a platform to talk to people right well and no matter how good your product man and everyone needs to know this the world will not beat a pathway to your doorway for your damn product you need to pay attention to sales and marketing and you can't be contemptuous of it it's like who the hell is going to buy something they don't know about so we shook hands we started working together and once so then we started making jujitsuki's and believe it or not you know now we had a bunch of people that wanted these jiu-jitsu because they're the best in the world they're made in america they're made by americans with with their american cotton and woven on american looms so it's just it's a beautiful thing it's a beautiful thing and and one day i was in the airport and i'm sitting there in the airport as we're selling a bunch of jiu jitsu and i'm i'm looking around and i called up pete and i said hey pete i said how many people do you actually know that do jiu jitsu and he said he's like i don't know like maybe 50 or 100. and i said how many people do you know that wear jeans and he said everybody and i said why aren't we making jeans and he said let me let me go so the next thing we did was we started making jeans because because because the iconic american genes that you wear aren't made in america the iconic american genes that people think represent america they're not made in america and and that's wrong and and the other crazy thing about this is you know so do you make good genes we make the best jeans in the do they have spandex in them they do they do they have their they have a little bit of stretch in them we've got a heavy pair and a lighter pair and yeah they're it's where can people find these or how do they look for them origin usa.org if you go to jaco.com you can find all this stuff and and um so we started everybody needs good genes then we started making boots yeah and we're making everything we're making you know we we started making a bunch of supplements and that started from i drink tea another shocking thing you might want it is shocking i'm married to a brit and at some point i started drinking tea and so i started making tea and then i i started making other supplements and and again it was like make high quality stuff that works and people need it they want it and we're doing that thing of being a teammate of helping people out so that i knew there was a good story in that clothing it's a great story it's a great great story absolutely if you've ever seen a i don't know maybe you could help me with my with my personality what i like about that too i've learned something in the last while like i i noticed very much that people allow a casual and unconscious contempt to stop them from well to elevate the status of what they're doing i would say but also to to allow them the luxury of not having to consider the importance of all the things they're not doing now and that stops them from taking opportunities so you know well it's i was watching this show last night it was the devil wears prada it was about fashion industry and this girl who started you instantly thought of me absolutely i thought that's right the jocko fashion special but this girl um she has contempt for the fashion industry you know and that's portrayed as a moral virtue and i wasn't on her side to begin with i thought no you know there's probably something to this and what you should do is shut up and learn about it before you criticize it but it's more comfortable in some sense to have contempt for things you know and it's so interesting to talk to you about your clothing line you know you saw opportunity there in all sorts of ways and it fitted into this context of let's say of being a broader service and because you didn't have contempt for it at all at any level for the machinery for the manufacturing for the fact of making clothing for having your name associated with that for all of that and then it enables you to see an opportunity there and to do something immediately and then to make an enterprise grow and work and so that's another thing is that that that casual contempt for what you can't do that's a that's a real ethical mistake yeah that one will definitely i see among academics you know there's always contempt for businessmen and and and and the immorality of the capitalist enterprise and then i see among businessmen you know contempt for intellectualism in the ivory tower and i think it's not doing either of you guys much good you know because you both have something to bring to the table in a real sense and some appreciate appreciative appreciation for what the other one knows that you don't is well worth everyone's attempt and then everybody gets to win too it's like well great man you've got this business enterprise more power to you and and then you can say too well you know great you teach all these people and you have this advanced learning and isn't the world better because we can both bring that to the table no need for for that envy not at all just it just contaminates things yeah unless you let your ego slide in there and and you start to think well i've been i studied so hard and yet i'm only making whatever i'm making as a yeah well that's that's a huge but look it's a huge part of the culture war i believe is that there's a there's a tremendous resentment in the university about the fact that uh high-level intellectual endeavor doesn't attract disproportionate salary when other occupations do but it certainly has no shortage of other rewards you know absolute job security being one of them and freedom for that matter so anyways anyways um actually i've been surprised that in all you know there's all this talk in america right now about the divisiveness in america and yeah i've been surprised that the the the ego hasn't come up more often because you mean as a topic as a as a as a causal effect yeah yeah okay sure you know of the fact that while i go to have a conversation with someone and i just think that i'm right i think that my viewpoints are right and your viewpoints are wrong and worse worse not just wrong contemptible exactly that's like the ultimate expression of wrong right they're beneath my consideration right yeah and that's that's not good that's definitely not good how do i how do i listen to anything that you say how do i how do i find any common ground with you if i think that what you think is contemptible and so therefore we can have a conversation if we don't have a conversation we can't find any mutual ground and that means we can't find solutions to the problems that we're facing and yes and it means when push comes to shove we have to fight yes it does i'm here to tell you that's not a good option you know that's a good place to stop fair enough that was great man thank you appreciate it i loved it well thank you appreciate it yeah so it's good to see you it's good to see you too and it's so it's so nice to see that that all of what you're talking about is finding its audience i like the kids books too we never talked about them oh yeah the kids books i i i feel like um there is no more there's no better gratification for me than the handwritten letters the the the emails that i get but mostly the handwritten letters from kids that are six seven eight nine years old just did my first pull-up got an a on my math test guys oh isn't that cool it's crazy yes how could you have anything better than that to know that you were part of that so so tell me about that maybe we'll stop with that tell me about that like tell tell me about the kids books how many you've self-published them how many have sold well so i didn't i didn't self publish all of them okay i the first two went through a normal publisher and what happened was so so the first one is called way the warrior kid and and right basically i have four kids myself three daughters one son as i was raising my kids i couldn't really find books that articulated the values that i might want my children to be reading about and so i wrote my own books so the first one way the warrior kid it's a kid he's bullied he doesn't know his times tables so he thinks he's stupid he doesn't know how to swim so he can't do any of the fun stuff that the other kids are doing and he's getting bullied this is common things that kids face and he kind of breaks down last day of school everything kind of hits him at once and he goes home and um he remembers that his uncle is coming to stay with him for the summer and his uncle his uncle is in the seal teams and he presents all these problems that he's having to his uncle and his uncle says listen we can solve these problems but you got to commit it's going to take discipline it's going to take hard work teaches the kid how to study teaches the kid how to make flash cards teaches the kid how to eat right teaches the kid how to work out brings the kid to jiu jitsu classes so he learns how to defend himself kid goes back to school and he's he's in a much better place and and so then that series carries on with different types of situations that kids get into and so i wrote the first one way the warrior kid the second one mark's mission and then i had written a kid's book um a kid's book called mikey and the dragons and and i had written it i finished it in august and i talked to my publisher and i said hey you know i wrote this kid's book i'm sorry you know it sorry i didn't let you know earlier but i really want the book to come out for christmas and my publisher said yeah well you know that's not really going to happen and i said yeah but i really want it to come out by christmas and by this time i think i'd written like three new york times best-selling books for whatever that's worth so it wasn't like i was you know scrapping around trying to throw this together i had a pretty good vision of what to do here and i said here's a lot yeah so i said please can i you know get this thing published by christmas and they and they said they said there's no scenario where this book gets published by christmas and i said i said are you sure and then yeah yeah and i said watch this and so i started publishing about a week yep i started my own publishing company we finished the uh the art inside the book and the book came out before thanksgiving and that was the beginning of of jocko publishing and so yes i've published it and then i just wrote the uh the latest way the warrior kid book way the warrior kid four field manual and and again the most rewarding thing that happens to me on a daily basis is i get to open up letters from kids that are seven eight nine 10 11 years old that just you know did their first pull-up or ran a mile in a certain amount of time or they so cool they like it's so cool to see that because i mean it's it's an unbelievably deep instinct that makes that satisfying like i have the same experience i don't ever see anything as satisfying as getting a message from someone who says um i've followed what you've been talking about and here's what i've done that's improved my life because of it it's this is there's a you know when you read online comments the negative ones are salient right they've got potency but and people are wired to feel more negative emotion than positive emotion it affects us more more uh we feel a loss more strongly than we feel an equivalent gain um the one exception to that might be those kinds of letters they're so salient and it's really curious i mean that must be the deep that must be something like the deep instinct of fatherhood that that pleasure that's intrinsic in watching someone who's younger younger generally speaking not always but generally speaking thrive it's so satisfying and yeah i think that goes back to the to the concept of being a good teammate yes definitely it's the deepest part of it and you're helping someone get on the correct path when they're eight years old and you you know when i people say oh me all the time the parents write me too the parents say hey you know thank you i got more out of this book than my kids did right they they say right as well the the the the way that these books come together it's like you're being a good teammate because you're putting someone on the right path at a young age i always people say i wish i would have had this book when i was right right well yes absolutely me too that's a father between pages that it is exactly that because the fundamental role of a father as far as i can tell is encouragement and i mean that technically is that you your job is to instill courage in or to or to or to encourage courage i suppose in in in your children to make them resilient in that matter to make them confident in their ability to face the world but also able to face the world and that warrior kid book it's such a different approach to the problem of bullying it reminded me when you were talking about it about the simpsons there's nelson manse is the bully in the simpsons and he's quite a complex character actually and if he bullies you there's a pretty high probability that the reason he's doing it is because you're doing something stupid and contemptible so he's got this kind of corrective function and he's not a bad kid even though he's a bully some of his bully compatriots are bad kids but he's not he's from a family that's not doing well he has his reasons for for what he's like but he is kind of a corrective you know um and there's a scene too in the simpsons where one of the teachers says to ralph poor ralph that the children are right to laugh at you ralph which is a hilarious line but also absolutely terrible but you know in your warrior kid book the message there is one way of dealing with your inadequacies is to rid yourself of them and it isn't self-evident that people who point out your inadequacies are your enemy now that doesn't mean that bullies can't exploit and it doesn't mean that bullying isn't reprehensible but by by the same token you know critics a critic who points out a weakness has actually offered you a pathway to development a true pathway to development so and your your attitude to the kid was look kid no one's gonna laugh at you if you're the best swimmer or maybe you don't even have to be the best but but you could swim you could be stronger you know you could you could elevate yourself yeah it's um it's it's it's so fun to write these books because i mean i got first of all i got to experience it and you know i always tell people people say oh did you get bullied because i'm i'm a bigger guy now i was like oh when you're 10 you get bullied by 11 year olds that's right all right exactly there's always going to be somebody that's bigger than you um in the second book the bully is like a psychological bully his name is nathan james and nathan he's not physically threatening you but he's he's making fun of you and he's picking on you and he'll take it to the point where he might you know feel some repercussions but then he'd be quiet and so you know this kid mark says to his uncle hey i'm gonna fight this kid i'm gonna fight him and the uncle says well okay if it comes to that but before you fight him so that's when you published yourself i presume uh no no no this was this was still this was still um this is book two oh really okay well my mistake i said surprising well that was a while ago do you think you could get a book like that published now i'm not 100 sure i've got another i've got i wrote a novel that's coming out which we should probably touch on uh which which went through like multiple screenings to make sure that it wasn't offensive and whatever else uh nathan james the bully he picks on the kids but he talks and and his uncle you know the kid mark says hey i want to fight this kid and his uncle says okay if it comes to that but before you fight him i want you to gather some intel he says what do you mean gather some intel i want you to collect some intelligence i want to know why he acts this way and so he watches he uh mark watches this kid nathan james for a couple days and he says goes back and reports to his uncle this kid he he doesn't eat healthy he eats potato chips half a bag of potato chips he's dirty he doesn't change his clothes his socks don't match he's got holes in his jeans he's a slob totally lacks discipline i think i should fight him and then he says well why do you think he's like that you need to do further intel and i'm sure you can see where this is going eventually follows him and realize the kid is kind of on his own and the reason he has a bag of potato chips a half a bag of potato chips because his mom's not home at night and there's no dad to be found and and we don't even know what's going on but he lives in some in some apartment building above a auto repair shop and and maybe his jeans wears the same jeans every day because that's the only pair he's got and so instead of fighting this kid maybe you should try and help him mm-hmm and that's where that goes so yeah there's uh there's another novel that i wrote which is coming out in the fall is um it it's it's it's definitely going to be interesting what the critics say about it i'm looking forward to it i'm looking forward to their um their assessment it's about a it's about a two brothers one brother is kind of a handsome kind of street smart kid smart good looking the other brother is uh got some kind of a unidentified disorder mental disorder mental handicap and basically is an autistic guy and he's obsessed with washing machines and he works at a laundromat and um well the the laundromat is eventually going to be up for sale and the brother the younger brother who's a little bit more street smart besides if that happens my my older brother is never going to be happy again because he's not going to have this laundromat and he decides he's going to do something to get money to buy that laundry mat and the only way he can figure out to do that is by doing something that's not legal so he goes for it and well that's the story but and that's coming out when it comes out in the fall it's called final spin how long have you been working on that uh well i write about uh probably i wrote an original draft of it probably 15 years ago and then just kind of set it aside and this is then i i dusted it off because it never left my mind this story never left my mind because ultimately it's about a you know it's about can you be happy and what kind of sacrifices are you willing to make to be happy and what about people that are stuck in a rut you know when i was growing up there was all these kids that were smarter than me and funnier than me and better athletes than me and and i would look around and they would get stuck in a rut right right and not really do anything and it would be a little bit sad yes very and you know i was lucky enough like you said i i joined the navy and all of a sudden had a goal and had an aim and wanted to be a good seal and that was enough to kind of put me in the right direction yeah so what what's next what do you want where do you want to take this what's your ambition teaching people you're communicating with them on a very broad level that's where do where do you see this going if it went where you want it to go the the ambition the goal is to help more people is to help more people help more kids become more confident help more leaders do a better job of leading their teams help people be on a better path in their life healthier and and doing productive things in the world that's i think the best thing i can do right now at this point yeah well that just seems like generally speaking that just seems like the best i think well once it isn't clear why you would be motivated to do anything else it's like that actually is the best thing you talked about these letters it's like what could you do that would be better than that i mean if you were as greedy as you could possibly be you can't get better than that so it's so rewarding so yeah and and again the biggest reward is is when you when you get a letter from somebody that decided they weren't going to kill themselves yeah yeah right because they heard you talking on the podcast or they read they read the book discipline equals freedom and they said wait a second i'm trapped why am i trapped trapped because i'm blaming other people i'm trapped because i'm not sticking to the things that i know i should do right and they get on the right path and you know they always say you changed my life and i always said and change your life you did which is the truth thanks a lot thanks for having me man good seeing you good to see you too

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 886,412

Rating: 4.9456091 out of 5

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, military, JBP, podcast, top podcast, discourse, jordan, peterson, jocko, marines, navy seals, Jocko Willink

Id: HA4Bkybx1ps

Length: 149min 21sec (8961 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/fantomas_]

I really love Jocko. Lots of insight in this podcast. Loved it.

[u/letsgocrazy]

I had the pleasure of inviting Jocko Willink onto my podcast for the first time.

I've been on Jocko’s podcast several times in the past and now get the opportunity to reverse the interviewing role to learn more about his life and endeavors. We discuss his experience in the military and war; exploring time in the Navy Seals, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Jocko recounts what it looks like to be on the ground in combat scenarios and the requirement of strong leadership in the Seal teams. I ask him about his formative years growing up with a warrior personality. We cover other engaging points of interest in his kid books, time as an English major, restarting a clothing line in a dying factory town, and much more.

Jocko Willink is an American author, podcaster, and retired naval officer who served in the Navy SEALs. His books include New York Times bestseller Extreme Ownership, Discipline Equals Freedom a field manual, and his children’s book The Way of the Warrior Kid. Jocko also has one of the most successful podcasts out there so check out the Jocko Podcast.

Find more of Jocko Willink on his podcast website, check out his clothing line www.originmaine.com

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