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March 22, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:02:32
What Does It Take To Be A Navy Seal? | Jocko Willink | LIFESTYLE | Rubin Report
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dave rubin
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jocko willink
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dave rubin
Joining me today is a leader, a follower, a reader, a writer, a speaker, a listener, a student, a teacher, Jocko Willink.
Welcome to The Rubin Report.
unidentified
How was that?
dave rubin
I took that right out of the bio.
jocko willink
That's good.
dave rubin
Right out of the Twitter bio.
jocko willink
That's my Twitter bio.
dave rubin
Yeah, my Twitter bio.
You're a little bit of everything.
That actually is a pretty good explanation of you.
jocko willink
It actually is a pretty good explanation of me.
I think I'm cover those multiple dichotomies fairly well.
dave rubin
Yeah, that would probably explain why you've written roughly 37,000 books, right?
How many books have you written?
I mean, I normally only put one book on the table.
jocko willink
We put four here.
So far, I've written three adult books and three kids' books.
I've got another kid's book coming out in the spring, and I've got another adult book coming out, going head-to-head with Jordan Peterson in January of 2020.
Uh-oh, uh-oh.
dave rubin
I probably will be on tour with him for that book.
That means that we're going to be in competition.
jocko willink
Okay.
Bring it.
unidentified
Uh-oh.
dave rubin
All right.
unidentified
We'll see.
We'll see.
jocko willink
It's nice to not actually have to compete with y'all.
dave rubin
Yeah.
Well, do you feel like you're in competition with anyone?
That's an interesting place to start off.
jocko willink
Well, I guess there's a dichotomy there, too, because I don't feel like I'm in competition with anyone.
And I feel like I'm in competition with everyone.
That's just sort of, you know, in my nature to just compete, but... No, I mean, in this world that I'm in right now, I don't really feel like I'm competing with anyone.
I feel like I'm just kind of doing what I do, talking about what I like to talk about, writing about what I like to write about, and...
Hanging out with cool people most of the time.
dave rubin
Yeah, pretty good, pretty good.
All right, well, I think 99% of my audience knows who you are, knows a lot about you, but for the people that don't, and by the way, I should say right before we start, I was saying, we have been trying to coordinate this for about 27 years.
I was born and raised in a small New England town.
I was a rebellious kid.
I mean, it really says, it's like, well, we're two people that are busy
and it was hard to really make this happen.
But for the people that know nothing about you, tell me a little bit about your history.
jocko willink
I was born and raised in a small New England town.
I was a rebellious kid.
My best way to rebel as a kid coming from a small New England town
was to join the military.
So I joined the military after high school.
I spent 20 years in the military.
And when I retired from the military, I started taking the things that I had learned from the military and teaching them to civilian companies and civilian leaders.
And eventually that turned into a book and a podcast and all this other stuff.
dave rubin
Yeah.
So tell me a little bit more about what you were like that made you want to go into the military.
What was that rebellious kid or whatever that was?
jocko willink
Yeah, you know, I just grew up in a little New England town and there was a lot of hippies and just kind of kids like that running around and smoking pot and whatever.
And I really wasn't into that.
And so, you know, I think a lot of kids when they rebel as kids, because all kids rebel, a lot of kids repel by drinking or they do drugs or whatever they're going to do.
And I went in the other direction and was like into hardcore music and Eventually said, oh yeah, I'm just gonna join the military because that's what I'm gonna do.
dave rubin
Yeah.
It's funny, when you talk about it, it almost sounds like you're slightly dismissing it, but you had a pretty good storied career as a Navy SEAL.
jocko willink
Yeah, no, I grew up in the SEAL teams.
I went right in the Navy, right in the SEAL teams, and that's where I spent my whole adult life.
And it was an incredible experience, worked with a bunch of awesome people, and got to do things that I had dreamed about doing since I was a little kid.
dave rubin
What should we know about the life of a Navy SEAL that you don't get in the movies, or however else we just sort of imagine these lives to be?
jocko willink
I would say the biggest thing to remember is just that people in the SEAL teams and people in the military in general, they're people.
They're just normal people.
They go home, they got wives, they got kids, they're trying to live a normal life, and then their job requires them to do things that aren't very normal.
And so they, you know, for me, I kind of learned to compartmentalize what I was doing in the military.
And when I'd come home, and I tell this to police officers and firefighters and military guys today, don't, when you get home, Don't bring your uniform home.
Don't wear your uniform home.
Like, physically change your, take your uniform off, leave it at work, put on your civilian clothes when you go home, and be a civilian when you're home.
dave rubin
How hard is that, though?
Once you're sort of in that locked mindset, which obviously has so much to do with the things that you write about and why your message actually is working and helping people.
jocko willink
You say how hard is it?
Oh, it can be hard.
It can be hard.
You know, because you've got one life that you're living where decisions are really consequential and then You've got your regular life that you're living, and things aren't that, they aren't as consequential.
I had a situation where I was at work, and there was a lot of stuff going on at work.
They were redeploying people to Afghanistan.
There was big decisions that were being made at work.
And I remember I came home from work one day, and like I said, tried to leave my work at work, but I'm sitting there thinking about how all this stuff is gonna unfold.
And my wife, I got home and my wife goes, I can't believe this.
And I was like, what happened?
Is everything OK?
And she says, no, it's not OK.
The Disney on Ice is the same night as some other event for the kids.
And I'm just thinking.
Hey, if that's the biggest worries my wife has, then that's a positive thing.
dave rubin
Then life's pretty good.
Yeah, life's pretty good.
Yeah, so how quickly did you realize that you wanted to sort of bring these ideas about personal responsibility and sort of owning your life and all that into sort of that world, the world where Disney on ice matters and the rest of it?
jocko willink
I was about six months from retiring.
I had a friend that was the CEO of a big company and he said, I want you to come and talk to my executives about combat leadership.
And I said, hey, sure, sounds cool.
So I went and did it.
And I don't think he really knew what to expect, because I look like a knuckle dragger, and I'm at least a good portion, I actually am a knuckle dragger.
And so he'd bring me in to talk, and I thought, I think he was maybe thinking I'd tell some cool war stories, and that'd be great.
But I actually started talking about how you lead.
And when I got done, he came up to me and said, I want you to do this for every division that I have in my company.
And I said, well, you know, I'm retiring.
And he said, well, I'll give you money.
And I said, OK.
So I started working with all the different divisionals.
And at one of those division meetings, the CEO of the parent company was there.
And when I got done, he came up to me and said, I want you to come and talk to all my CEOs for all these companies I own.
And he owned like 45 or 50 companies.
So I went and did that.
And when I went and talked to those companies, of course, then a bunch of those CEOs came up to me and said, hey, I want you to come and talk to my company.
So that's kind of the way that it started.
And it didn't take me very long at all.
I mean, it actually was the very first company, that first guy that I talked to when they started when that group started telling me about the problems they were having.
I was sitting there thinking to myself, well, I saw these problems in SEAL platoons when I was training SEAL platoons.
It's the same thing.
It's leadership.
dave rubin
Yeah.
Were you surprised that the big successful businesses were having such a leadership crisis?
jocko willink
I was surprised for about five minutes, and then I realized that these are all human beings.
These are the same human beings that are in a SEAL platoon, in an Army company, and in a business, and they all have the same Idiosyncrasies, they have the same egos, the same personalities, you can see it all.
And when you've seen it all over and over again, it becomes pretty evident, pretty clear when you're looking at it.
And the last job that I had in the SEAL teams I was training, I was running the SEAL training for the West Coast SEAL teams.
And this isn't the training where you see like the guys carrying the boats on their heads and carrying logs around and doing a bunch of pushups and stuff.
The training that I ran was the training where SEALs actually learn to go into combat and fight the enemy.
And this is where we really start focusing on combat leadership.
And so in this training that I ran, we got to take SEAL platoons and put them through really tough training scenarios, very realistic training scenarios, over and over and over again.
So every night I'd basically be putting a new SEAL platoon through another training scenario, which the next night would be another SEAL platoon going through the same training scenario, and then the next night would be another SEAL platoon going through the same training scenario.
You take these different SEAL platoons, and what's different about a SEAL platoon?
What's different about a SEAL platoon is really just boils down to the leadership, because you've got 16 SEALs in a SEAL platoon.
The guys are basically the same.
Sure, there's a bell curve, there's some top-end performers, there's some low-end performers, there's a bunch of guys in the middle.
So the real variation on their performance was based almost 100% on their leadership.
In fact, it was 100% on their leadership.
And so I got to see this and I got to watch these leadership scenarios unfold over and over again and see what leadership things worked and what didn't work.
And so by the time I left that job and entered the civilian sector, I'd watched some random team of leaders inside of an organization.
And I'd say to myself, well, their strategic message isn't getting down to the frontline troops.
They need to communicate this better.
Or, oh, their departments aren't working together, they need to cover and move for each other.
Or, their mission is way too complex and that no one has any idea what they're actually supposed to be doing, so they need to simplify this.
Or, this senior leader is making all the decisions and therefore everything's moving really slow and nothing's happening at a good rate of speed, so they need to use decentralized command.
And it was just so obvious when I started.
dave rubin
How much of leadership in general do you think is innate versus learned?
Obviously, you're teaching people the learned part, but there has to be some element that's innate, right?
jocko willink
Yeah, there absolutely is.
And there's the analogy that I give, and I don't play video games, but I've seen it.
But on video games, you have a character in a video game and you'll have a certain level of intelligence
and a certain level of strength and a certain level of agility.
And those levels are what you get and then you work with them.
Well, it's the same thing for a leader.
And there's different characteristics that you get that are good for leadership, right?
If you're someone that's really articulate, that's a great thing to have to be a good leader because you want the human beings that you're talking to to understand what you're actually saying.
So, and different people are naturally more articulate than other people.
It's good to be able to look at complex problems and be able to simplify them, right?
That's a very powerful tool to have a really complex thing to solve and be able to look at it and say, okay, simplify it and then simplify it not only for yourself so you can decide what to do, but simplify it for your team so they understand what to do.
That's a characteristic that some people have.
The one that I bring up a lot because it's very obvious is Is being loud.
Because if you're in a leadership position, you need to be able to make people hear you.
And some people are born with a very loud voice.
I was luckily born with a very loud voice.
And it's inherited from my genes, right?
And my kids inherited.
My kids can be very loud, which is sometimes problematic in a house.
But if you can't bark a command so that people can hear you in a machine gun fight, no one's going to be able to do what you ask them to do.
So there's these different characteristics.
You can improve upon them.
So, if you're not very articulate, you can read and you can write and you can speak and you can become more articulate.
If you are not very good at simplifying problems, you can start looking at complex problems and thinking about how you can simplify them and you can get better at that.
The being loud part is that there's definitely a genetic aspect to that.
So sure, you can learn to project your voice more, but some people aren't very loud.
They're just born that way.
And so what does a person do in that situation?
Well, what a person does in that situation is when they have to give an order, they tell one of the loudmouths in their platoon to tell everyone to get over in this other building now, and that loudmouth will pass the word.
And so what you do as a leader is you find members for your team that can complement your weaknesses.
So there are parts that you can improve.
And there are parts that you can improve.
And if you, the only real impediment to improving is someone that doesn't have the humility to say, you know what?
I think I could work on being more articulate.
Or, you know what?
I think I could work on solving problems and making them more simple.
Or, you know what?
I'm not that loud.
And instead of saying, you know what?
That's not a good way to lead.
Instead, I say, you know what, I'm not that loud, but Billy over here is loud, so I'm gonna let him put the word out when it needs to get put out.
But if you have the humility to do that, you won't improve as a leader.
dave rubin
Have you found those people that, even if you lay out what the right skills are that they have to work on, or where their blind spots are, et cetera, et cetera, that they just can't, whether it's ego or whatever else, that they just can't, that you just, certain people you just can't get through to?
jocko willink
Absolutely.
It's a horrible situation to be in.
And in the SEAL teams, those guys will get fired.
In the civilian sector, generally, those guys get fired.
Because, I mean, you go into a company and you've got a CEO that is not listening to anyone, up or down the chain, not listening to the board, not listening to his subordinates.
How is he going to improve?
He's not going to.
And by the way, why does he need to improve?
He needs to improve because his company isn't doing well.
So, but this person might think, hey, you know, I'm great.
I don't, I'm not going to learn anything from anybody.
I'm just going to keep doing it my way.
And that guy's not going to stay in that job because they don't have the humility to say, you know what?
I'm probably doing some things wrong.
That's why we're not making money.
And so I need to change some of the things that I'm doing so that we can make money.
But if you don't have that attitude and you're not humble, yeah, you'll end up getting fired.
dave rubin
So conversely, have you seen people that basically had none of the skills that have been able to overcome it just through perseverance, that just innately don't have the leadership traits, that don't have, you know, they don't speak loud, they aren't clear, they can't make decisions, but just out of sheer sort of force of will?
jocko willink
There's all these little aspects that you have, you can improve upon, right?
Now, you're not gonna take, I'm not gonna lie to you, and say you can take somebody that has no aptitude for leadership, and they're gonna turn into a great leader.
That's probably not gonna happen.
But you can take someone that has minimal aptitude for leadership, and they can improve the areas where they need to improve, they can complement themselves with a team that can cover for the areas where they're weak, and they can end up doing a great job in a leadership position, for sure.
dave rubin
Yeah, so handing some of this stuff off, people don't think of that in certain ways when it comes to leaders, like they have to do everything or know everything or something, but actually handing some of this stuff off is good.
Delegating actually is good.
jocko willink
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Like, for instance, big shocker, I don't really like doing paperwork a lot.
dave rubin
You know what I mean?
jocko willink
I know it might seem odd, but I always had guys that worked for me.
I'd figure out that guy that was really good at administrative stuff, and there you go.
Guess what he's going to do?
A bunch of administrative stuff.
And that's great.
And so whatever areas of weakness you have, get a member of your team, recruit someone,
bring someone on board that can actually make these things happen and it'll work out great.
dave rubin
Yeah, are you kind of surprised how much we need leadership sort of in society right now
that we seem to have like a complete dearth of leadership?
I mean, you mentioned Jordan Peterson before.
When I see the message that he's bringing to these people, it's really about getting yourself together, which is the most, I mean, it's very consistent with your message.
But the people that are coming are sort of looking for a leader to say that, that we just don't have, we seemingly don't have good leaders right now.
Do you think that's a fair estimation?
jocko willink
We do have good leaders.
There's plenty of good leaders out there, and I see them all the time in the business world.
I still work with the military, and there's great leaders inside the military.
There's great leaders inside the business world, for sure.
There's also always a lack of leadership, and I mean, on my podcast, I cover books about war, generally first-person accounts, and there's a lack of leadership back then, and there's good leaders.
So I don't know if it's gotten any better or worse, but the fact of the matter is that leadership is, It's the hardest thing in the world as far as I know.
It's the hardest thing.
People used to ask me when I first got out of the military, what was the most complex operation that you would plan?
I'm like, planning operations isn't that big of a deal.
Here's a bad guy.
Here's the assets that we have.
Here's what we're going to do to go take him out.
I mean, this is stuff that generally It's not that hard to do, but the hard part is leading human beings.
And so, why does it seem like we need better leadership?
Because you always need better leadership, and because leadership is so hard to actually do properly.
dave rubin
Yeah.
Do you think we need some sort of mandatory military service to get some of this through to young people?
jocko willink
I think military service is great for people.
I know it was great for me, and it worked out really well for me, but I really don't believe in mandatory service, because I really don't believe that it's good for government to tell people what you need to do.
I don't really support that, but I definitely support and encourage everyone to go in the reserves.
Join the Army or the Marine Corps or the Navy Air Force Reserves, where you go away for You know, six weeks or eight weeks, and you kind of learn what the military's about, and then you do one weekend a month, and two weeks in the summertime for, you know, indefinitely.
dave rubin
So I think I have a pretty good handle on your politics, but do you even have a label that kind of works for you politically?
jocko willink
I don't know.
I don't know what label.
I think it'd be pretty hard to label.
dave rubin
Well, if you were just sort of summing up sort of your political beliefs, what would you say?
jocko willink
I think that, I guess a broad statement would be I don't think that the government is the solution to our problems.
dave rubin
Yeah.
jocko willink
I think that generally unleashing individuals to try and make things happen is the best way for things to work.
It's consistent with decentralized command that I talk about in the first book that I wrote with my brother Leif.
You can't control everything.
Centralized decision making does not work.
It doesn't work on the battlefield, it doesn't work in business, it doesn't work with governments.
That's, you know, broadly speaking, yeah, I don't think that the government should control what individuals are doing.
As little as possible.
Do there have to be some rules and regulations in place?
Absolutely.
But the framework should be as loose as possible.
Just like if I'm running a SEAL platoon, it's not every man for himself.
It's here's our standard operating procedures, here's the areas where we commit to disciplined process, but then Once you understand those and you know those, you're allowed to operate freely within those guidelines to execute the mission.
And that's what works.
That's what makes, not just the SEAL teams, that's what makes any good military unit good, and that's what makes good businesses good.
Good businesses aren't good because someone is micromanaging every single decision.
Good businesses are good because people broadly understand the direction they're heading, they understand that, and they're allowed to move forward as they see fit.
dave rubin
Are you shocked when you say something like that, which obviously I agree with a hundred percent.
I mean, all I talk about here is personal responsibility over and over.
That doesn't seem to sort of be the kind of flavor of the day at the moment.
If you listen to mainstream media, it's sort of more, well, the government should give you this and we should take from some, give to others, that there's a more feeling of you are owed something rather than you got to get something.
jocko willink
You're asking if I'm surprised by that?
dave rubin
Yeah, because the way you're laying it out, it's obvious, you know what I mean?
I mean that in the best sense.
It's obvious, yeah, it's your life.
Go do something that has value and create something.
jocko willink
I guess the real easy answer is, no, I'm not surprised by it at all.
Because if I come here and offer you something for free, why would you not want it?
Why would you not want to take it?
If I say, hey, you can have this house for free, and you'd say, okay, that seems like a good deal to me, right?
And so, yeah, sure, I understand why people I think that sounds like a good idea, because it's something for free, and they wanna, in their own individual world, they think, okay, I do wanna take advantage of this and get something for free.
So it doesn't surprise me at all.
What is unfortunate is if you can't draw the line between, hey, everyone gets everything for free, and there's a price to that that somebody's gonna have to pay, that's where it becomes a problem.
dave rubin
There is some cost hidden in there somewhere.
jocko willink
Somewhere.
dave rubin
Yeah.
So tell me what it was like when you started writing, because that must have been a whole other ball of wax.
jocko willink
You know what it was?
I was actually an English major in college, and I went to college halfway through my Navy career.
I started off as an enlisted guy, went to college, and then became an officer, and then went to college eventually.
And the reason I was an English major was because, believe it or not, when you're an officer in the military, and actually almost any job in the military, You have to write.
Not just have to write, you have to read, you have to understand because you have to write concept of operations documents that are going to be pushed up the chain of command.
And they're going to read through them and ask questions and look at the document and try and comprehend what it is that you're trying to do.
You've got to write evaluations for your troops.
And your troops are getting promoted based on the evaluations that you write.
Same with awards.
You've got to write awards.
Same thing with after actions reports.
So if you do an operation and things don't go well, you have to be able to articulate and explain that, what happened, and then pass that word on so everyone understands.
Not only that, you're being given direction.
Verbal direction, yes, of course, but you're given written direction as well.
You're given missions in a written format, or you're given rules of engagement in a written format, written by lawyers.
And I realized while I was a young enlisted guy, and then as a junior officer, What I really need to be able to do is understand and communicate well up and down the chain of command.
So when I went to college, I said, yeah, I want to learn English.
I want to get good at it.
And so that's what I did.
And so obviously I did a bunch of writing and a ton of reading when I was an English major in college.
And then when I was in the military, I was writing.
You're writing all the time.
And then when I got out, and I was working with these companies, and it grew really quickly, and that's why my buddy who was one of the platoon commanders that worked for me in the Battle of Ramadi, Leif Babin, he was getting out of the Navy too, and I started to need some cover, and I said, hey man, you wanna jump in and get some of this?
And he was all on board.
And then as we started doing this, people would always say, hey, do you have this stuff written down anywhere?
Do you have a document you can give us?
And so we eventually wrote it down, and then that's how the first book came.
dave rubin
Yeah, can you lay out a little bit about the Battle of Ramadi?
You basically, you sort of wrote the plans?
jocko willink
The person that led the Battle of Ramadi that I was in was a guy named Sean McFarland, who was a colonel at the time.
He retired as a general.
Just a super smart, incredibly competent, and great leader.
He's a great leader.
And he came in with, so I had 40 SEALs with me, right?
I had 40 SEALs with me, and 60 support people.
Colonel McFarland had 5,600-man armored brigade that we supported and we helped and we worked together in the Battle of Ramadi.
Vicious fighting, very tough battle, and really took a city that was completely controlled by the insurgents in 2005, 2006, and by early 2007, it was almost completely pacified.
2006 and by early 2007 it was almost completely pacified.
So it was an incredible turnaround and an incredible testament to the capability of
Armed Forces.
dave rubin
Do you guys pay any attention to what's going on politically back home when you're halfway across the world?
jocko willink
Yes, absolutely.
You have to pay attention to what's going on politically back home.
Especially at this time when we deployed to Ramadi, so it's 2005-2006.
This is smack dab in the middle of the rising negative public opinion about the war in Iraq.
It's also where we had our own government officials here in America that were saying, this is unwinnable, this is another Vietnam, this is a quagmire.
We shouldn't be there, bring everyone home.
So yeah, you absolutely hear those things.
And that's not good.
It's not a positive thing.
It's not a positive thing to have your own government officials in America saying that you cannot win.
And meanwhile, you're going out on an operation.
dave rubin
That must drive you guys crazy more than anything else.
Sort of the political elite that often have no idea what's happening on the ground that are just spouting off stuff.
jocko willink
For sure.
For sure.
But, as I said, you listen to it, but you can only pay so much attention to it.
There's so much other things to focus on.
You think about it a little bit, but you're not caught up in the 24-hour news cycle like people can tend to do here in America, because you're working, and you're getting back from one operation.
You're preparing for another operation.
I got guys in the field.
I got another element in the field.
I'm going in the field.
You don't have time to be sitting around, hey, I wonder what this politician is saying about what we're doing.
dave rubin
How much of leadership that you brought to it was just about managing stress for your guys?
Just making sure that they were actually okay in the midst of the chaos?
jocko willink
Absolutely, you have to do some of that.
I mean, it's a balancing act between all kinds, there's all kinds of things that you're trying to juggle at the same time.
And managing stress on the guys is definitely one of them.
And in a situation where you're getting guys wounded and your guys are getting killed, that stress meter can get pegged out pretty quick.
So, you have to manage it.
You have to do it to the best of your ability.
It's hard.
It's hard because The war is going to keep going.
And you are going to keep, you have work that needs to continue.
So the stress is going to build up on the troops.
And it's different for every guy.
You know, the front line SEAL or soldier or marine, they're worried about getting blown up.
They're worried about getting shot and killed.
They're worried about their friends getting shot and killed.
They're worried about their friends getting blown up.
When you're in charge of a bunch of guys, you're worried about all those guys and that happening to them.
You're worried about If we make a mistake, if we do something wrong, if we cause some massive collateral damage that has a negative strategic impact.
You have all those stresses.
And to control stress, what do you do?
You look at the things you can control and the things you can't control.
You focus on the things you can control.
And the things that you can't control, you do your best to mitigate.
And then you don't worry about them, because they'll drive you crazy.
dave rubin
Yeah.
What do you make of where we're at now, having lived through the Iraq War?
Was it the right thing to do?
Should we have done things differently?
Should we have not just announced we were leaving one day?
The whole thing.
jocko willink
The whole thing is that hindsight is 20-20 and any normal human being can look back at American history as a whole and find out all the mistakes that we've made which are, you know, infinite, right?
We make an infinite number of mistakes and we do the best to try and repair those once they've taken place.
So for me to look at it from that angle is like, okay, yeah, there's all kinds of mistakes we make as a country, we have made as a country, and we will make as a country.
But the best way for me to kind of rationalize, or not even rationalize, because I don't think it needs rationalization, but when I look at it from a granular level, which is very straightforward, we went into a city, the city of Vermont, that was being controlled by Sick insurgents.
The most sadistic, evil, subhuman people that you can imagine.
They were raping, torturing, skinning people alive, murdering whole families, beheading people.
And when we went in there, and again, I'm not talking about we as this small group of SEALs, I'm talking about when this massive force of US coalition and Iraqi forces went into that city and liberated those people from the torturous and sadistic control of those insurgents the people of vermont were overjoyed and they would cheer when we killed insurgents and they would tell us where insurgents were and it was a beautiful transition to watch and it didn't really take place until after we left but after we left we saw
It was peaceful.
It was literally peaceful.
It went from a complete war zone to a peaceful city where they had markets open the street again, they had kids going to school, they had girls' schools now.
There was, in the city of Ramadi, there was schools for girls.
And this was just unheard of while the insurgents were there trying to Punish the populace with their psychotic brand of Al-Qaeda Islam, right?
And the people of Ramadi did not want that at all.
And so from that perspective, it's like I go to sleep every night.
The only regret that I have is that we couldn't do more.
Because guess what?
After America did pull out, ISIS took Ramadi, and when they got in Ramadi and we had friends that were there, ISIS went and found the families that had worked with coalition forces prevalently, and they murdered about 500 families.
So that sickens my heart.
That's horrible.
dave rubin
So when you hear that politically, it sort of gets back to what we were talking about earlier, that, you know, when they say, all right, well, we're gonna get out this day, like, oh, it's gotta be over, we gotta end this thing, we gotta get out this day, and you know that that's counter to what you've learned sort of on the ground.
That's just got to be the worst thing you could hear.
Yeah, one of the worst... Even if you don't want a conflict to continue... First of all, there's no one...
jocko willink
that wants conflict less than the people that have to go and fight it, right?
When we sign up for a war, it's my friends.
And not just my friends, but it's the military that's gonna go out and die when we sign up, oh, there's a conflict we need to take care of.
So yes, we don't want to go to war.
If you go to war, you go to war to win.
In the situation that happened in Iraq, We pulled out completely.
There was no one that had fought in Iraq that thought, oh, good call.
That's a great call.
There was embers of the insurgents.
The insurgency had been all but crushed, but it had not been completely extinguished.
And there were embers of Insurgents that were there.
And as soon as we pulled out, they started growing, and that's what turned into ISIS.
dave rubin
Yeah, so that's around 2008-ish, right?
Something like that?
jocko willink
Yeah.
dave rubin
So then what is sort of a more sensible way of leaving something?
So you do a certain amount of cleanup, let's say, and you free some of these cities, and good things have happened, but you don't want to be there forever.
How do you manage that?
And with the stresses of just the political machinations and all that stuff.
jocko willink
I mean, that's something that you have to look at every situation that you're in and you have to say, okay, well, what can we do here?
How much can we draw down our troops?
And it's not a certain amount of time.
It's not a certain amount of troops.
You have to look at each situation and do an assessment and figure out the best way to move forward.
And guess what?
You won't be perfect.
And that's why an absolute thing, like, hey, we're not gonna do this anymore, is a risky move.
dave rubin
So when Obama did that, what do you think his military leaders, who I'm sure you probably respect some of them, or maybe even know some of them, what do you think they were telling him?
Because it's so counter to what you're laying out here.
jocko willink
I'm sure they told him this is not a good idea.
This is not a good idea.
There's, like I said, there's no one that had spent time on the ground in Iraq that said,
"Oh, you know what?
"We're good, let's leave."
Because it was still a very A very fragile situation.
And it looked good, it looked good on paper, but you have to give the civilian populace enough time to really kind of figure out how to live this way.
Because it's a new way to live.
You're oppressed under Saddam, then you're oppressed under some Insurgency and to have that be lifted and then say, okay, we look around, it's going to take some time to figure out how we're going to do this.
And we needed to provide them with enough security and stabilization that they could.
And it's not like we were working hard.
The last few, Leif, who wrote the books with me, he deployed in 2010, I want to say.
They had, so while I was in Ramadi, there was a guy wounded or killed almost every day.
For the six months we were there, there was a guy wounded or killed almost every day in Ramadi.
Sometimes two, sometimes five, sometimes seven, sometimes one.
When Leif went back to Al Anbar province, so Al Anbar province, the province that Ramadi is the capital of, in his six month deployment, There was one fatality for all of coalition forces, and it was from a vehicle rollover.
dave rubin
Wow.
jocko willink
So it wasn't like we were over there gutting it out anymore with the insurgents.
The insurgents had been really, really suppressed, and we just needed to give the locals enough time to kind of put things together and start to move forward and become stable, politically stable, economically stable.
And that is what we should have done.
dave rubin
Do you think it's our moral responsibility to do actions like this, if we can help people that are living in these horrible situations, that morally, and we, I mean we, the United States, have to do it?
jocko willink
I think that we have to weigh the morality of taking care of other people and taking care of our own people, right?
And this is a very difficult decision to make and something I've talked about on my podcast was The genocide in Rwanda.
So the genocide in Rwanda happened and there was 800,000 Tutsis that were killed by Hutus in 100 days.
So this is more efficient than Hitler was able to pull off.
And by the way, most of the killing was done, 98% of the killing was done with machetes.
So this was just crazy.
When that was happening, I was sitting off the coast, in a SEAL platoon, on a ship, with a bunch of Marines, a bunch of Navy power, and we could have gone in there and done something.
And we didn't.
And I would say that the primary reason that we didn't is because a year earlier, Black Hawk Down had happened and we lost a bunch of service members in Somalia.
And so I was like, you know what?
We don't really want to get involved in that again.
And so that's what we have to weigh, is we have to weigh what are we willing to lose in order to save someone else?
And then what do we benefit from saving those people?
And is that benefit worth the expense in money and lives that we invest into it?
And sure, some of that benefit is feeling like we can look ourselves in the mirror as a country.
That's part of the benefit.
Sure, there's economic benefit.
Sure, there's political benefit.
But part of the benefit is, can we look in the mirror and say, you know what?
Almost a million people were butchered in this country, and we didn't do anything about it.
That's something that we have to contend with, and that's why these decisions are hard to make.
And when you do make these commitments as a country, then you need to commit and not go half-hearted into these efforts.
If you're going to risk American lives, you better be doing it for a reason that merits putting our men and women at risk.
dave rubin
What do you make of the catch-22 that America's in with this dilemma all the time, where it's like, if we don't do anything, no one does it, but then every time we do do something, there's always the unintended consequences and how long do we have to be there and everything else.
It's a really, it's a strange bargain that America's sort of put in, or put itself in.
jocko willink
Well, yeah.
We started off this conversation talking about leadership and why leadership is so hard.
Leadership is hard because decisions, it's not 2 plus 2 equals 4.
It's not that at all.
There's this insane amount of calculus and secondary and tertiary things that happen after you make a move that you think is good.
This is what makes it so hard.
That's why, you know, for America, as the leader of the free world, guess what?
Being in that leadership position, it's a hard position to be in.
And guess what?
Just like a leader, just like when I was a leader, when I was a leader of a SEAL platoon, when I was a leader of a SEAL task unit, did I do everything perfect?
Absolutely not.
I made mistakes.
I made mistakes.
I made mistakes where people died.
And that is the burden of leadership that you bear.
And so, as a nation, we're in the same situation.
The things that we do, we are not going to do things perfectly.
We have to do them with the best intent, which I believe we do.
But things aren't gonna go perfectly.
And guess what?
Some people are gonna be mad when you make those mistakes.
Some people are gonna be mad even when you do things right.
They're gonna look at you and say, oh, you shouldn't have done that.
That was the wrong thing to do.
Okay, here's what we weighed out.
And you've gotta be willing to take those criticisms.
Leadership is a very hard thing.
dave rubin
So what do you make of the guy in the White House now related to leadership?
Because even if we were just to look at Iraq, so it's like, all right, George W. Bush got us into Iraq.
You can argue whether that was good or bad or whatever.
Obama got us out, and as you just laid out, maybe the way we got out was probably not the right way to do it.
It doesn't seem that, at least from what I can tell, that Trump is looking to get us into extra wars or anything like that.
jocko willink
Well, it certainly doesn't seem like he's looking to get us into any extra wars.
I would agree with that.
Again, I don't believe that, hey, we're going to be an isolationist nation and we're not going to play on the world stage.
I don't think that's the best thing.
The other end of the spectrum is, hey, we're going to go fight and police up the world.
That's not the right thing either.
The right thing is to look at each situation as it unfolds in the world and try and make the best decisions you can as a leader at that time.
And again, these are not easy decisions to make.
These are decisions that you make them and they still unfold.
The day after you make a decision, the minute after you make a decisions, things unfold that you didn't expect, that you didn't anticipate.
And yet you made a decision.
So now you've got to make another decision and it's a challenge.
dave rubin
What do you make of him just as a leader?
If we were looking at the way you would grade a leader, how would you look at Trump?
jocko willink
From a leadership perspective?
unidentified
Yeah.
jocko willink
I think Trump is an interesting characteristic of some really broad extremes, right?
So he does things that I say, oh, good move.
And then, literally 20 minutes later, I'll be thinking to myself, how can you even think that this is a decent thing to do, right?
And by that I mean, you know, jumping out on Twitter and criticizing some kind of Some individual human being, some celebrity, hey, what are you doing?
Why are you doing that?
So I think the guy, who was it that just, the testimony that just took place?
dave rubin
Michael Cohen.
jocko willink
Yeah, so Michael Cohen gets up and says that Trump is a bad character.
And I'm like, okay.
You know, I mean, this is, this to me is not a surprise.
I don't think this is a big surprise to anyone.
This is not, this is a guy that, he's not the guy that you want your daughter to marry.
At least, at least I don't want my daughters to marry someone like that.
Okay, so what's his character like?
Not the one that we want to model ourselves after.
Do we want, do we expect, do we want a leader to be someone that we can look up to and model ourselves after?
Absolutely, absolutely.
We wanna look at our leader and say, wow, I really respect that person and I wanna follow them and I'm gonna emulate their actions and their behavior.
That's absolutely, that's what a leader is.
So does Trump fall short on that?
Oh yes he does, oh yes he does.
So it's a strange world that we live in that that guy Versus Hillary Clinton, who he ran against, neither one of those people are people that you look at and say, seems like a character I want to emulate.
That's what I'm looking towards.
I want to be that person.
I want to move in that direction.
You know, from the 300 plus million people in America, those are the two candidates that we put forward.
What is wrong with us?
That's a problem.
dave rubin
Well, what is wrong with us?
What do you think the answer to that is?
Is that just the way the political system's set up, or is that the media, or is that us?
jocko willink
I think it has to do with the political system for sure.
I think it has to do with the way that media is and the way celebrity is.
That the name is able to carry itself, the character, the self-branding that goes out, I think drives so much of this that we're not really assessing what type of leader this person is going to be.
We're assessing how popular they are.
dave rubin
So for a guy that talks about discipline a lot, when you see Trump tweeting, is that what's going on in your head?
You're like, man, this is just a discipline thing.
You get some of these things right, and if you could just discipline yourself in another way.
jocko willink
Yeah, and I would say that, I thought when Trump won the election, and I was just as surprised as anyone, when Trump won the election, I thought, okay, well, you know what, at least now we're gonna get to see him step up and act presidential and all that.
What did it take, 15 minutes before he looked at it and said, okay, I guess, okay, it's gonna take him a little bit longer than I thought.
But it hasn't changed.
And it was the same thing, you'd see Hillary Clinton do the same types of things, where you'd see doing behavior that you'd say to yourself, why are you doing that?
You don't do that.
You don't do those kind of things.
You don't behave that way.
And so, I think you just have to, you know, we have to kind of gut through.
I hope that this is a situation where this is a A pivot point for the country where we'll start looking around and saying, okay, we don't really want to do that.
We want to look for the right person that's going to do this job correctly, that's going to represent the country well.
dave rubin
Are you worried that we don't get out of this?
Whatever this thing is that everyone can sort of feel and no one knows exactly what What it is, just this endless bickering and how it seems like social media is making us all hate each other and that we don't have real, at least at the political level, leaders to look up to if you're looking for self-discipline and morality and whatever else.
jocko willink
You know, when people, I had people, right, when Trump got elected, people would just fly off the handle with me, right?
And I don't really talk about politics very often.
And the reason that I don't talk about politics very often is because Well, because from a leadership perspective, if I'm trying to get you to do something, the worst way to lead is for me to bark at you and tell you what to do.
That's not good leadership.
So I don't do that with people that I communicate with.
I don't say, hey, he's horrible and she's great or she's horrible and he's great.
I don't say that.
I just give examples from history about the way good leaders behave and the way bad leaders behave and let people make their own decisions.
But somebody was hitting me up Hey, you know, you need to speak out.
And, you know, I said, okay, here's my speech.
America is stronger than one man.
America is stronger than one man.
America is stronger than any one individual politician.
We're a massive ship, and a massive ship takes a long time to turn.
And the checks and balances that are in place inside the government, which are sometimes really bureaucratic and disappointing and aggravating because it's so hard to change things, they're hard to change for a reason.
So am I worried that That this tipping point won't come?
No, it'll come eventually.
Because eventually, free people, the free people of America won't allow for things to go so far in one direction or so far in the other direction.
We won't allow it.
Now, what makes it hard to reach that tipping point is because America, it's so beautiful in America, right?
It's such a stress-free life, right?
We were in the middle of two wars.
And that didn't affect the average American in any way whatsoever.
Not even the oil prices, nothing affected them.
They were still driving their SUV to Starbucks and ordering a latte with zero impact.
And that was when we were fighting two wars and losing people every day on those battlefields.
It was no factor.
What happens in America is we pretty much don't care as long as we're comfortable.
But if things start to get uncomfortable, that's when I think the real tipping point will come, and there'll be a backlash one way or the other.
dave rubin
Yeah, all right.
I want to shift off some of the war stuff, but very quickly, so since you mentioned the two wars, the one that nobody ever talks about or even thinks about is Afghanistan, which I think now It's the longest war we've ever been in, right?
I mean, this is the longest war.
It's still ongoing now.
It seems to me that nobody knows really why we're there or why this is so ongoing.
What the hell should we be doing or thinking about?
I mean, it's never discussed, period.
jocko willink
Yeah, and it's interesting because this is something when Trump, if you remember, Trump said, hey, what's the plan?
And he got a bunch of pushback and people were saying, oh, who's he to ask?
And I was like, well, he's the president.
And so, yeah, you need some kind of a plan.
You need some kind of a goal.
And I do think that needs clear definition in Afghanistan of what it is we're trying to make happen.
What does that look like?
You know, from my perspective, when you get into these countries where you're trying to build something or trying to, you're not trying to build it yourself, you're trying to allow them to be free.
That's what you're really trying to make happen.
You're trying to allow these countries to be free.
They're not gonna be the same as us.
That's one thing that I'm fairly confident about.
There's different cultures that are going to adopt freedom and democracy in a different way and You can't impose what we think it should be like on other cultures because it doesn't match up perfectly.
But it can match up pretty well.
And individual human beings in these countries, you know what they want?
They want a job.
They want to build a little business.
They want to be able to feed their kids.
They want their kids to have a better opportunity than they do.
That's what, when you can provide some of that, That will start to take hold.
And when you provide some of it, other people in that country will look at it and go, hmm, that seems to be a pretty good deal over there.
I would like to try that too.
And pretty soon you can get freedom and democracy, the attitude of it, to expand.
And so it takes a long time.
You know, the average counterinsurgency is seven years, but they can take a really, really long time.
But in my opinion, and really, through the history of the world.
Eventually, in my mind, eventually through history, eventually the free individual will rise to the top and rule.
And they will rule themselves.
And so you have to give that Opportunity for individual freedom.
They have to have the opportunity to grow and to take root.
Take good, solid root and to grow and be strong enough that when tyranny comes along, it can't just wipe it out.
Because tyranny can wipe out the individuals.
We've seen that in history too.
Tyranny can wipe out and destroy individual freedoms.
And individual aspirations.
They can just be mopped up and destroyed by tyranny.
So you have to give freedom, and individual freedom, not just the time to sprout up a little bit.
You've got to give it the time to take root.
Because once people have tasted true freedom and true opportunity, they don't give it up.
And that's what I think you have to do.
You have to stay somewhere long enough that people understand what true freedom is, they recognize that it's theirs to protect, and it has to be rooted strong enough that it can't be washed away by tyranny.
dave rubin
So then going all the way back, so what are we doing in Afghanistan?
I mean, do you sense that that's actually happening there?
Because it's something like 14 years or something.
jocko willink
Yeah, and it's one of these things where We oscillate too much on what it is that we're trying to accomplish and what we're willing to sacrifice to accomplish it.
Because, you know, from an isolationist perspective, from a, okay, let's just take care of America, oh, Let's take the Taliban.
Oh, you want to live in, like, a world?
You want your country to be, you know, back in the Stone Age, and that's how you want to live?
Okay, cool.
We'll be over here doing our thing.
Like, that's a legitimate plan.
Hey, you guys want to live in the Stone Age?
unidentified
Cool.
jocko willink
We'll be over here with iPhones.
That's fine.
We don't care.
But then it's like, okay, but we're going to breed terrorists.
But, okay, we'll come in occasionally and knock those guys out.
How's that?
Okay.
We could do that.
And if that's the plan, okay.
Let that be the plan.
But if we're going to stay there, if we're going to try and get freedom to take root, which I believe is the best thing to do because I do believe that we do have some level of moral obligation to try and support individual freedom throughout the world.
To me, that's pretty self-evident.
Does that mean that we have to jump in everywhere that there's oppression?
No, it doesn't.
And we can't.
It also means that inside those countries, the human beings inside those countries also has a moral obligation to rise up and fight on their own.
And that was nice about going back to Iraq was, you know, I've got friends that fought in Mosul as they took Mosul back, but those were Iraqi troops that were moving from building to building, taking massive casualties.
As a matter of fact, one of my friends that was there said there was, in the beginning of the Mosul campaign, The Americans were looking at each other saying, these guys are taking so many casualties, we're gonna run out of Iraqi soldiers.
Like, they're all gonna die.
And the Iraqi soldiers continued to go forward, and they continued to fight, and they ended up, you know, getting the upper hand.
dave rubin
So when they say that, that we were greeted as liberators, it actually is true.
jocko willink
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
I mean, in Mosul?
Oh, it was... And again, I wasn't there, and I never fought in Afghanistan either, but the guys coming back from Mosul, the people were absolutely just... They were...
They were being, I mean everything, enslaved, beheaded, tortured, everything.
It was absolutely, it was heinous.
It was a heinous war crime across the board.
So yeah, absolutely.
dave rubin
So we've done a lot sort of out of our borders here, but it's interesting, you mentioned that we can be in the middle of all of these wars and yet we can still get a latte and we can still pay no attention to it and live our good lives.
Do you think there's a risk to our freedom here because of that, that we've got it so freaking good?
that we almost don't know what freedom is anymore?
jocko willink
Do I think it's an actual risk?
[BLANK_AUDIO]
unidentified
No.
jocko willink
No, I don't.
I think that The minute things, the minute you start really talking about taking away the personal freedoms of Americans, there will be real problems.
So, okay, is that a risk?
Sure, that could be a risk.
I see that as a real small chance that things get bad enough where, where, Mass groups of Americans say, oh yeah, we're not doing that.
You just crossed the line.
The American Revolution, right?
Oh, you want to raise tea taxes?
No, actually, we're going to fight a war against you.
You're not raising the tea taxes, right?
Could it get to that point here?
Sure, but you've got to remember what's going to be sacrificed.
And that's one of the coolest things about the American Revolution is the people that fought it were the people that actually had the most to lose, the people that stood up.
So it would take a lot, but I don't I think it would take a lot to get there.
I think it would take a lot to get there.
unidentified
And if it gets there, that'll be sad.
jocko willink
It'll be a sad day.
But I believe that freedom would prevail.
dave rubin
All right, let's shift all together to sort of what you're doing now.
So podcasting, writing, all that stuff, having these kind of conversations.
It's kind of cool that people are paying attention to this stuff now, isn't it?
When you started doing the podcast, was that just sort of you were just going to throw it out there and see what happens and see if, oh, wow, people might want to listen to long form conversation.
jocko willink
Yeah, I did a podcast with Tim Ferriss.
And when he pressed stop on the recorder, he said, you should do your own podcast.
And Joe Rogan heard it and invited me on.
So it was on Joe Rogan's podcast.
In the middle of that podcast, Joe Rogan said, you should have your own podcast.
So when Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan tell you to have a podcast, you listen.
So I did.
And for me, it's a great medium.
I always, when I grew up, I grew up listening to radio shows.
I always liked listening to radio, and that's essentially what it is, is radio without commercials.
I get to talk about things that I'm interested in.
And again, some of the advice that I got when I started off was like, oh, you need to have guests all the time.
People are gonna get tired of you.
Don't talk about these dark, you know, don't talk about these dark, violent things.
You can't talk about war all the time and you need to keep them shorter and all this.
And I didn't listen to anybody.
And my podcasts are really long.
Some of them are extremely heavy and dark and talk about some of the worst In fact, I think we've covered most of the, really the worst things that have unfolded on the planet.
And they're long, and I don't have a lot of guests.
You know, I do have guests, but I don't have a lot of guests.
So, the interesting thing is, yes, shockingly enough, people listen to it, and the connection and the feedback is awesome.
dave rubin
Yeah, how do you think it's changed you by going to all those dark places and talking about all this stuff and expressing your ideas and all that?
jocko willink
Well, I've gotten a lot, I've gotten a lot of experience out of it.
The experience that I get out of it is, I, so I do a lot of book, I cover a lot of historical books, like I said, first person accounts of war and atrocity and that.
When I first started the podcast, I said, oh, you know, I probably got, I'll probably do five, because I got like five books that really had an impact on me.
So I'll cover those books and then, whatever, that'll probably be it.
And then I said, you know, there was one more book that I really wanna throw in this pile.
And then there was another one.
And it didn't take but five or six more podcasts where I said, I'm never gonna be able to do enough podcasts to cover the things that I wanna talk about.
And that's the way it's been.
So I've read, I read basically a book a week for the last three years.
I finished doing all the books that I actually had already read in like, I don't know.
dave rubin
So you're like, I better write some then.
jocko willink
Yeah, well I had already written my first book when the podcast came out.
So how has it changed me?
And the other great thing is I get to interact with all these people.
People come up, and I know they do this to you too, people come up to me and they say...
I know it's weird, but I feel like you know me, and I'm like, yeah, you do know me, because how I am on the podcast is actually how I am.
That's just me.
And then I tell them that I actually know them, too, because if they've listened to me for 500 hours, you haven't spent 500 hours listening to your wife, you know what I mean?
That's just not happening.
So I do know them, and then they gave great feedback, and I learned a lot from them.
from the books that I read, from the people that I have had on, and from the feedback that I get, and, hey, read this book, look at this aspect.
So it's made me learn a lot.
dave rubin
So from first-person war books and all your life experience, how do we end up with, we got two of them here, I think.
jocko willink
Yeah.
dave rubin
Children's books.
jocko willink
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
dave rubin
Right here.
jocko willink
Well, so.
dave rubin
There's the dragon.
jocko willink
Yeah, yeah, my dragon, so.
dave rubin
Yeah.
jocko willink
Yeah, I didn't write I didn't give Jordan any credit for it, but, you know, it's called Mike and the Dragons, Jordan.
Sorry.
I got four kids, and as I started Continuing to hear back from people that were listening to what I was saying and what I'd hear a lot is, I wish I had this when I was a kid.
I wish I had this when I was a kid.
And of course my answer would be like, I do too.
I wish I had the lessons from Extreme Ownership when I was a kid.
I wish I had the lessons from the Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual when I was a kid.
Absolutely.
And growing up, or watching my own children grow up, I just knew that The things that I tried to impart on them, I figured I could put into stories where I could impart those values onto little kids and make their lives easier and better.
And that's it.
So I started writing them and it was...
Surprising at the response.
The response has been, you know, people love him.
And, you know, one of my favorite letters I've gotten is I got this letter from this guy who, you know, he's saying I'm 37 years old, and I was drinking, and I was overweight, and I was doing, hadn't been promoted, and I got all these problems going on in his life, and he said, then I read your book, and I said, okay, I'm gonna wake up a little bit early, okay, I'm gonna start working out, okay, I'm gonna stop complaining, okay, and he went through his whole letter, And how now he had lost 52 pounds and he had been promoted and he had stopped drinking and all this stuff.
And then the last line said, the book I read was The Way of the Warrior Kid, which is, you know, aimed at kids.
But the lessons in there are completely universal and apply to your whole life.
So it's been great.
And I get a lot of social media posts of little kids studying flashcards because the premise of the Warrior Kid story is that there's a little kid who's He can't do any pull-ups.
He doesn't know how to swim.
He's getting picked on by the school bully, Kenny Williamson, and he doesn't know his times tables.
And the last day of school ends, and he's all sad, and then he remembers that his Uncle Jake is coming to stay with him for the summer, and his Uncle Jake was in the SEAL teams.
So his Uncle Jake comes to stay, and the first day he says, hey, you know, what do you want to do tomorrow?
You want to do something?
You wanna go for a swim?
And the kid goes, I don't know how to swim, and I don't know how to, goes, you know, I don't know my timetable's getting picked on, so the uncle says, look, these aren't problems, we can solve all these.
Gets him into jujitsu classes, teaches him how to swim, teaches him how to study using flashcards and other memorization techniques, and teaches him how to eat right, teaches him to work out, and the kid turns around.
And so, that's that one.
Mikey and the Dragons is about facing your dragons.
And little kid that's scared of everything, and he finds a book.
Under his bed.
And he opens it up quickly and there's a bunch of pictures in it that look scary of dragons and fire and so he doesn't want to read it but there's also a picture in there of a little kid that looks confident and like he knows what he's doing.
So he says, alright, you know what, I'm going to read this book.
And then you turn the page in this book and you are now looking at the cover of this next book which is called The Dragon Prince and that's the story of a kingdom where The king had died, and now there was no one to defend the kingdom from the dragons except for this little seven-year-old prince.
And so he's scared, he goes to get his father's sword, and his father's shield opens up this big war chest, and in there He pulls out the sword that's too heavy for him, and he pulls out the shield that's too heavy for him, and he's even more scared now, and then he sees a note at the bottom of the war chest, and he pulls it out, and it's a note from his father, the king, who explains to him what he needs to do to stand up and face the dragons.
And the story continues on.
So, I enjoy storytelling.
dave rubin
Yeah, well, I sense an animated movie, and I guess the last thing I got for you is, what do you do to relax?
After all this, after all the work and everything else, and it's a pretty intense life that you're living, I'm guessing you're gonna say working out, but give me something else.
jocko willink
Well, work, does that include jiu-jitsu?
dave rubin
Yeah, well, that's still within the working out thing, but whatever works for you, man.
jocko willink
You know, I surf, I do jiu-jitsu, I hang out with my kids, play guitar, and...
Yeah, I find this stuff relaxing.
It's enjoyable for me to write.
It's enjoyable for me to talk to people about leadership and go out with my company, Echelon Front, and teach and align executives on leadership and watch them be able to turn their company around or bring their company to the next level based 100% on leadership, which is what I tell them.
I say, look, you've got this problem, you've got that problem, you've got another problem.
Every problem that you have inside your organization Is a leadership problem.
dave rubin
I guess that means you slayed the dragon and you're doing the right thing in life.
It's been a pleasure, man.
I'm glad we finally were able to do this.
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