Jocko Willink: War, Leadership, and Discipline

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Jocko Willink,

00:00:02.680 | a retired US Navy SEAL, co-author of "Extreme Ownership,"

00:00:06.800 | "Dichotomy of Leadership," "Discipline Equals Freedom,"

00:00:09.840 | and many other excellent books.

00:00:11.760 | And he's the host of Jocko podcast.

00:00:15.040 | Jocko spent 20 years in the SEAL teams.

00:00:17.440 | He was the commander of SEAL Team 3's task unit, Bruiser,

00:00:21.520 | that became the most highly decorated

00:00:23.400 | special operations unit of the Iraq War.

00:00:26.640 | This conversation was intense and to the point.

00:00:30.440 | We agreed to talk again, probably many times.

00:00:33.400 | And what I find very interesting,

00:00:35.120 | aside from the talk of leadership,

00:00:38.120 | is the conversation about military tactics

00:00:40.720 | of specific battles in history.

00:00:43.240 | Quick mention of our sponsors,

00:00:45.120 | Linode, Indeed, SimpliSafe, and Ground News.

00:00:49.360 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

00:00:52.440 | Since it's the 4th of July, a holiday in the United States,

00:00:56.280 | let me say a few words about what this country, my country,

00:01:00.800 | the United States of America means to me.

00:01:03.720 | First, by way of background,

00:01:05.440 | I was born and raised in the Soviet Union,

00:01:07.760 | just long enough to get a bit of the Russian soul,

00:01:10.520 | an appreciation of Soviet history, music, culture,

00:01:14.280 | of wrestling and mathematics, of engineering and philosophy,

00:01:17.880 | stoicism and humor, tragedies and triumphs

00:01:21.040 | of war and revolutions,

00:01:22.640 | all in ways that are uniquely Russian.

00:01:25.640 | I do happen to at times mention that I'm Russian.

00:01:29.480 | This is what I mean, that I got a bit of that Russian soul.

00:01:34.360 | But of course, who I really am is an American.

00:01:37.360 | This country gave me the opportunity,

00:01:39.480 | the freedom to become and to be who I am,

00:01:42.360 | to stand as an individual.

00:01:44.760 | This seemingly simple freedom to be a sovereign human being

00:01:47.840 | in the face of all the beauty and cruelty of life

00:01:50.920 | is why I love this country.

00:01:52.960 | Much of life can be unfair, unjust, even tragic,

00:01:57.320 | but this is the country where if I'm clever enough,

00:02:00.280 | work hard enough, and just get lucky enough,

00:02:03.000 | I have a chance to dream big and make my dream a reality.

00:02:06.840 | The United States welcomed me, my family,

00:02:09.640 | and millions of immigrants throughout its history

00:02:12.120 | so that we can make something meaningful of ourselves,

00:02:14.760 | to love, to dream, to create, to find joy and meaning.

00:02:18.640 | It lets me be the weird kid I am,

00:02:20.800 | who wears a suit, talks about love,

00:02:23.760 | and has a fascination with robots.

00:02:26.560 | I know some people these days have an aversion to pride

00:02:29.400 | and love for their country.

00:02:31.120 | I don't.

00:02:32.200 | I love America.

00:02:33.760 | I also love humanity.

00:02:35.480 | I believe these two, patriotism and humanism,

00:02:39.720 | are not in conflict, much like loving your family

00:02:42.640 | and loving your country are not in conflict.

00:02:45.200 | They are all manifestations of the human spirit,

00:02:47.800 | longing to strive for a better world.

00:02:50.760 | I was born a Russian, but I believe I will die an American,

00:02:55.040 | a proud American.

00:02:56.640 | Hopefully not too soon, but life is short.

00:02:59.920 | I already had one hell of a fun journey,

00:03:01.880 | so I'm ready to go when it's time.

00:03:04.560 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,

00:03:06.280 | and here is my conversation with Jocko Willink.

00:03:09.700 | Is it tragic or beautiful to you

00:03:12.440 | that some of the closest bonds that are formed

00:03:15.560 | between people are through war often?

00:03:19.400 | - I think it's both.

00:03:21.160 | Both tragic and beautiful, and for the obvious reasons.

00:03:25.760 | - What are the obvious reasons?

00:03:30.960 | Why is it so obvious?

00:03:32.420 | - Well, it's tragic because a lot of people die,

00:03:37.380 | and it's beautiful because you form bonds with people

00:03:41.160 | that are very difficult to break

00:03:45.920 | once you've been through them.

00:03:47.400 | - What is it about the trauma of war

00:03:52.120 | that makes bonds difficult to break?

00:03:54.880 | - Because what you realize when you're in a war

00:03:58.920 | is that the people that are next to you,

00:04:02.760 | you rely on them, and they're relying on you to survive.

00:04:06.940 | And without them, you will not survive.

00:04:11.120 | And when you realize that you need to work together

00:04:13.520 | as a team to live, that forms a very strong bond.

00:04:18.520 | - And there's nothing like that team

00:04:22.360 | outside of the realm of war?

00:04:25.560 | - I don't know because there's a lot of things

00:04:28.520 | that I haven't experienced in my life,

00:04:30.520 | but I think the pressure and the consequences of war,

00:04:35.520 | there could be similar situations in survival scenarios,

00:04:40.840 | in various atrocities where people need to work together

00:04:45.840 | in order to survive, and I think you could probably

00:04:48.320 | get something that was similar.

00:04:52.640 | - There's a very particular nature to the kind of war

00:04:55.040 | that World War II was, especially for the Soviet Union,

00:04:58.240 | where it didn't just influence the lives of people,

00:05:02.200 | it created culture, the music, the poetry, the literature.

00:05:08.160 | It's in the way people think,

00:05:10.960 | it's in the way people see the world,

00:05:12.600 | it's in the way they talk even still to this day.

00:05:15.840 | And of course, I was talking about

00:05:20.840 | the directly relationship between two soldiers,

00:05:25.140 | but there's something about the depth of human connection

00:05:28.500 | that results from this, almost like reverberations of war.

00:05:33.500 | Like generations later, you're still close to other humans.

00:05:38.120 | There's a coldness towards other humans in Russia,

00:05:42.300 | but once you open up, it's depth,

00:05:47.720 | you seek depth of connection

00:05:49.920 | versus like breadth of career kind of thinking,

00:05:54.440 | how can I make friends with this

00:05:55.960 | so I can move into this direction?

00:05:57.320 | What can this person benefit me?

00:05:59.200 | Instead, you seek a depth of human connection

00:06:02.120 | and appreciation that brings a lot.

00:06:04.520 | And maybe I'm romanticizing war here,

00:06:08.040 | but it feels like that's inextricably connected

00:06:11.660 | to World War II for Russians.

00:06:13.960 | Does that resonate at all?

00:06:15.800 | - So if you look at military training,

00:06:19.760 | what they do is they take people in the military

00:06:22.420 | from the civilian world, they bring them into the military

00:06:24.600 | and they put them through bootcamp,

00:06:26.960 | which is the stereotypical thing that you see on TV.

00:06:30.720 | You're gonna get yelled at, you're gonna get screamed at,

00:06:32.640 | you're gonna get put in the mud

00:06:35.080 | and you're gonna be made to do hard things together.

00:06:38.840 | And what does that do with those civilians?

00:06:43.080 | Well, it gives them a common background.

00:06:46.080 | It gives them a common suffering

00:06:47.500 | that they've been through together.

00:06:49.480 | And they form some sort of connection, some sort of bond.

00:06:53.800 | Now, to make that bond a little bit stronger,

00:06:58.200 | after you get done with bootcamp,

00:06:59.500 | they send you to advanced infantry school

00:07:03.020 | and you suffer some more together.

00:07:06.160 | And when you suffer more together,

00:07:08.360 | now you're in a smaller group too,

00:07:09.640 | 'cause now it's infantry, it's not supply people anymore,

00:07:12.440 | or logisticians, it's strictly people

00:07:16.920 | that are going to fight, they're infantrymen.

00:07:18.900 | So they go through school together

00:07:20.120 | and now they get a little bit tighter.

00:07:22.680 | Get done with that and maybe you go to an airborne division,

00:07:26.760 | so you go to airborne school

00:07:28.260 | and now you all overcome this fear

00:07:30.020 | of jumping out of an airplane together

00:07:31.520 | and you celebrate surviving that.

00:07:33.680 | Then maybe you get done with that

00:07:37.000 | and now you go at an airborne division,

00:07:38.400 | now you're an even tighter group

00:07:39.800 | 'cause you've suffered together.

00:07:42.240 | What comes next is special forces training

00:07:44.360 | or ranger training.

00:07:45.320 | And what they do is they put you in these situations

00:07:47.400 | where you're going to suffer together

00:07:50.080 | and you're going to build these bonds

00:07:51.440 | because as I said earlier,

00:07:52.520 | you have to rely on each other to survive.

00:07:55.320 | And by the way, not everyone does,

00:07:56.560 | not everyone makes it through this training.

00:07:57.840 | So you sort of have these memories

00:07:59.040 | of people that didn't make it.

00:08:00.240 | You share that connection as well.

00:08:02.320 | And you can keep going down this road

00:08:05.120 | until you go into combat with a military unit.

00:08:08.160 | And military units that go through combat

00:08:11.080 | have an even tighter bond.

00:08:12.560 | And the harder the combat that they go through,

00:08:14.360 | the tighter the bond is going to be.

00:08:16.680 | So I think when you talk about

00:08:19.000 | what the Soviet Union went through in World War II,

00:08:22.240 | there was a shared suffering to survive.

00:08:28.480 | And so the entire nation has that common thread.

00:08:32.720 | And that's probably the thing that you sense or feel

00:08:36.640 | when you refer back to the bond

00:08:39.760 | that resonates all the way back to World War II.

00:08:43.280 | - So in your podcast and your writing,

00:08:46.560 | you talk about some of the most fascinating things

00:08:50.800 | I listen to talk about in terms of military conflict

00:08:55.620 | is tactics and sort of the details of combat.

00:09:00.480 | But allow me to stick on World War II for a second.

00:09:05.360 | There's a particular aspect to that war,

00:09:09.280 | I don't know if you can speak to it,

00:09:11.040 | where twice the number of civilians

00:09:14.160 | died than military personnel.

00:09:16.000 | So the Soviet Union especially.

00:09:24.540 | My grandfather was a machine gunner in Ukraine

00:09:29.540 | as the Germans were marching towards Moscow.

00:09:33.520 | There's this important push in 1941

00:09:36.680 | where they were trying to get before the winter to Moscow.

00:09:40.320 | And what Stalin was doing is he was basically

00:09:43.640 | throwing bodies to slow the attack.

00:09:48.640 | And what that meant is everybody understood

00:09:51.960 | that your job was, you have this heavy machine guns,

00:09:55.800 | it's almost unreasonable to be able to be mobile

00:09:59.960 | in any kind of way with them.

00:10:01.280 | So you're thrown at the front

00:10:03.580 | and you're just nonstop shooting.

00:10:05.600 | And 95 plus percent of people are just dead,

00:10:10.600 | of the soldiers are just dead.

00:10:12.640 | And then you just go back and back.

00:10:14.560 | And you're trying to protect as many civilians

00:10:17.080 | as you can throughout this whole process, but you don't.

00:10:19.920 | And so you have millions of civilians

00:10:21.920 | that die along the way into this march.

00:10:24.880 | Is there something you could say about this complete,

00:10:27.880 | perhaps it's naive of me to say,

00:10:29.280 | but a war that lacks tactics, that lacks strategy,

00:10:34.280 | and is purely about just no consideration of human life

00:10:45.560 | and just throwing bodies and bullets

00:10:50.560 | into a mix together where millions die.

00:10:55.000 | And that in particular felt much less like conflict

00:11:00.840 | and much more like torture or suffering.

00:11:06.260 | It didn't come off as torture,

00:11:11.400 | only that interestingly enough, as you probably know,

00:11:15.120 | my grandfather, including everybody else, volunteered.

00:11:19.720 | They were proud to do this.

00:11:21.720 | They were proud to march to their death for country,

00:11:25.320 | for love of country.

00:11:26.520 | But the question on the civilian side,

00:11:30.720 | when more civilians die than military personnel,

00:11:33.640 | what do you make of that?

00:11:34.880 | - It's awful.

00:11:37.760 | It's awful when a soldier dies.

00:11:41.000 | It's awful when a civilian dies.

00:11:43.180 | It's awful when 10 civilians or 10 soldiers,

00:11:46.600 | and it's even more awful when millions and millions

00:11:50.080 | of soldiers and civilians die.

00:11:51.860 | I think it's safe to say that the Soviet Union

00:11:57.200 | was facing an existential threat to their existence

00:12:01.160 | against the Nazis.

00:12:03.240 | So to not fight would be to die as well,

00:12:08.240 | maybe die a death a few years later,

00:12:12.040 | maybe die a different way,

00:12:13.400 | but the choice was die now, trying,

00:12:18.400 | or die later on your knees.

00:12:23.360 | And I think the choice was pretty clear

00:12:26.220 | as far as the tactics go.

00:12:29.460 | I mean, this is attrition warfare.

00:12:32.220 | That's what that is.

00:12:33.180 | We are going to keep, you said throwing bodies

00:12:36.640 | at the problem, that's attrition warfare.

00:12:39.300 | And the Soviet Union had a lot of bodies,

00:12:42.420 | more than the Germans.

00:12:44.300 | And when you fight with attrition warfare,

00:12:46.300 | whoever has more men and material will eventually win.

00:12:49.120 | It's an awful way, but that's what the strategy was.

00:12:54.120 | - You often talk about leadership.

00:13:00.740 | Let's put the evils of Hitler aside.

00:13:07.060 | The boldness of Hitler in making some

00:13:10.660 | of the strategic decisions he did was considered

00:13:13.900 | by many military historians quite brilliant

00:13:16.980 | early in the war, or insane and brilliant.

00:13:21.980 | Stalin, on the other hand, I think universally is seen

00:13:25.500 | as somebody who is terrible military strategist,

00:13:29.380 | especially early in the war.

00:13:31.140 | He did not see all the possible trajectories

00:13:34.660 | that the war could take.

00:13:36.060 | Is there something you could say

00:13:36.940 | about failure of leadership?

00:13:38.980 | Stalin, also the United Kingdom before Churchill,

00:13:43.660 | and also FDR on the United States side,

00:13:46.220 | who basically was trying to turn a blind eye

00:13:51.220 | to everything that was happening over there

00:13:54.820 | with a perspective of we just want to make,

00:13:59.060 | we wanted to keep America's interest as the primary interest

00:14:04.420 | and everything else let other countries

00:14:06.220 | work out their problems.

00:14:07.820 | - You know, I think one of the things with Hitler

00:14:09.340 | was in the beginning of the war,

00:14:10.620 | he listened to his advisors, he listened to his generals,

00:14:14.460 | and therefore they did pretty well with that.

00:14:17.820 | I think as the war went on,

00:14:19.220 | he believed that he was smarter than he was

00:14:23.380 | and made decisions that were bad,

00:14:26.520 | that cost him dearly.

00:14:30.360 | You know, I mean, case in point, as everyone knows,

00:14:32.820 | going and attacking the Soviet Union

00:14:35.120 | while you're still fighting a war on the other front

00:14:36.860 | is not a good move.

00:14:38.740 | There's an example of, yeah, bad leadership,

00:14:41.140 | letting your ego get in the way,

00:14:42.660 | believing that you can do things

00:14:44.420 | that are beyond your capabilities.

00:14:46.480 | But, you know, as you mentioned in the beginning

00:14:50.040 | with Blitzkrieg, those were really dynamic and bold moves,

00:14:55.020 | and they worked.

00:14:56.220 | And what does that do?

00:14:58.660 | That fuels your ego and makes you think that you can win.

00:15:03.380 | - Many people consider that war a just war.

00:15:06.280 | What do you think makes a just war?

00:15:10.140 | - I think you have the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese

00:15:15.920 | trying to impose their will

00:15:17.460 | on other nations and other peoples.

00:15:19.860 | And when that happens, I think on a grand scale,

00:15:23.700 | people look at that and believe it's just to step in

00:15:28.700 | and do something about it.

00:15:31.220 | - Is there some gray area here?

00:15:33.140 | - There's nothing but gray area.

00:15:36.520 | - The United States has been involved

00:15:39.300 | in a lot of military conflicts since then.

00:15:42.180 | How do you draw the line to the gray area?

00:15:44.620 | What war should we engage in and not?

00:15:49.220 | I know you don't get into politics much,

00:15:51.760 | but the decision to go to war.

00:15:55.180 | - You have to look at the situation that you're going into

00:15:57.300 | and you have to make sure that you have

00:15:59.300 | the will to go to war.

00:16:02.900 | And the will to go to war means that

00:16:05.980 | you are willing to kill people.

00:16:08.380 | And when I say people, I don't just mean enemy

00:16:11.380 | because in war, civilians are going to die,

00:16:14.140 | women and children are going to die.

00:16:16.620 | A lot of people are going to die.

00:16:18.100 | And you are going to kill them.

00:16:20.860 | Doesn't matter what kind of smart munitions you have,

00:16:23.580 | doesn't matter how disciplined your soldiers are.

00:16:25.960 | When you go into a war, civilians are going to die

00:16:29.700 | and you have to understand that.

00:16:31.700 | And the other thing that you have to understand is that

00:16:34.340 | your troops are also going to die.

00:16:39.120 | And it seems like sometimes we're a little bit naive

00:16:43.440 | about the calculation of what that's going to look like.

00:16:47.000 | And maybe we think, well, not that many civilians

00:16:50.140 | and maybe not that many of our personnel are going to die.

00:16:53.620 | And that's where you get into sticky situations.

00:16:56.760 | And another thing, when you were talking about

00:16:59.320 | the Soviet Union versus the Nazis, that's total war.

00:17:05.320 | That's what that is.

00:17:06.160 | And we don't engage in that very often.

00:17:07.440 | It's total war.

00:17:08.500 | It's we will do absolutely anything to win.

00:17:12.300 | And America doesn't fight like that very often.

00:17:15.440 | In fact, the last time we fought like that was World War II.

00:17:18.480 | It was total war.

00:17:20.780 | We will do whatever it takes to up to and including

00:17:24.560 | the atomic bomb to destroy the enemy.

00:17:27.140 | So those are the kind of things you need to think about

00:17:31.840 | before you go to war.

00:17:33.240 | And I don't think we think about that very often.

00:17:35.680 | - Even the United States, the atomic bomb, nuclear weapons

00:17:41.040 | is an interesting one because there's a lot of,

00:17:43.480 | there's a lot of hesitation on that.

00:17:49.000 | There's a lot of critics of that decision

00:17:50.700 | as it was happening.

00:17:51.700 | So even America, you can imagine other countries

00:17:55.220 | like Germany would not be so hesitant

00:17:57.220 | to use nuclear weapons.

00:17:58.620 | It's interesting to think about

00:18:03.100 | in deciding military strategy to inject ethics into it,

00:18:10.180 | into morality, it's not just about winning the war,

00:18:14.940 | but should we do this?

00:18:17.180 | And doing the calculation of human life.

00:18:19.360 | Usually those decisions are made by leaders,

00:18:24.780 | not by the soldier that's going to be implementing

00:18:29.320 | that decision.

00:18:33.660 | Do you put some responsibility, I should even say blame,

00:18:37.600 | on the leaders in not doing that kind of calculation here?

00:18:41.740 | You could say that about the Vietnam War,

00:18:43.960 | you could say that about even the war

00:18:46.040 | that you were involved with in Iraq.

00:18:48.500 | Is there some criticism here that you could apply to leaders

00:18:52.220 | for failing not to consider the broader moral questions?

00:18:55.500 | - Yes.

00:18:58.060 | - Natural, like all leaders will make these mistakes,

00:19:05.700 | or should leaders not make these mistakes?

00:19:08.160 | - Leaders are going to make mistakes.

00:19:12.660 | It's impossible to know what's gonna happen in war

00:19:14.580 | just like it's impossible to know what's gonna happen

00:19:16.260 | in life.

00:19:17.140 | You make decisions based on the information

00:19:19.500 | that you have at the time.

00:19:20.940 | And you will make mistakes.

00:19:25.080 | And if you fail to admit that you made a mistake,

00:19:28.440 | that's where I have a more significant problem

00:19:31.620 | than someone that makes a mistake and says,

00:19:35.020 | "Hey, this is the mistake that I made.

00:19:36.780 | "This is the intelligence that I thought we were utilizing,

00:19:40.540 | "and it actually is not what I thought it was going to be.

00:19:44.080 | "And here's the new direction that we're going in."

00:19:47.260 | We don't have enough of that type of ownership

00:19:52.260 | in leadership globally.

00:19:56.240 | - Just saying I made a mistake

00:19:59.300 | that resulted in a loss at scale of human life,

00:20:05.360 | being able to say that.

00:20:07.080 | - And when you don't say that,

00:20:09.000 | you end up with a more loss of human life.

00:20:14.040 | - Can I ask you about the loss of human life?

00:20:16.300 | How does killing a human being change you?

00:20:20.520 | What does it mean to kill a human being?

00:20:26.140 | What does it feel like to kill a human being?

00:20:28.380 | - Well, I mean, I guess you'd have to look

00:20:34.780 | at what circumstances a person's in

00:20:36.860 | when this is taking place.

00:20:38.140 | If you've got someone that's in a fit of rage

00:20:42.100 | that goes and kills somebody,

00:20:43.740 | they're going to come out of it and think,

00:20:47.560 | "Wow, I've just really messed up."

00:20:50.080 | If you've got someone that is a sociopath,

00:20:54.080 | they're not going to feel anything,

00:20:58.100 | and that person deserved to die, and that's why they died.

00:21:02.080 | If you've got a soldier who feels like

00:21:05.300 | they're trying to protect their friends,

00:21:07.500 | they'll move through that.

00:21:11.760 | If you've got a soldier that's doing it

00:21:14.480 | because they want some kind of personal glory,

00:21:17.840 | they'll probably not feel good about it later.

00:21:21.240 | So I think it depends on the situation.

00:21:24.320 | I think it depends on the psychology

00:21:25.880 | of the individual that's going through it.

00:21:27.960 | - You said move through that.

00:21:31.540 | Is there some calculation here that a soldier,

00:21:39.200 | when they kill another soldier,

00:21:41.200 | a realization that it's just another human being,

00:21:45.220 | I mean, is there some heavy burden to that aspect

00:21:49.520 | that it's ultimately just human on human?

00:21:54.420 | - I think it depends a lot on the scenario.

00:21:59.280 | I know that when I was in Iraq fighting,

00:22:01.620 | we talk a lot about the dehumanization of the enemy,

00:22:06.820 | and it's something that the governments will do.

00:22:10.900 | I mean, governments will do that to each other.

00:22:13.940 | I mean, the Japanese dehumanized the Americans,

00:22:16.860 | and the Americans dehumanized the Japanese,

00:22:19.380 | and the Americans dehumanized the Nazis,

00:22:22.620 | and the Nazis dehumanized the Americans,

00:22:24.620 | so that to remove as much of that human on human killing

00:22:28.400 | aspect that you're talking about,

00:22:32.220 | and what I've said is that when we were in Iraq,

00:22:37.220 | we didn't have to dehumanize the enemy

00:22:39.740 | because the enemy dehumanized themselves

00:22:42.780 | through their actions, through their behaviors.

00:22:45.860 | When we know that they are torturing, and raping,

00:22:50.480 | and murdering the local populace,

00:22:52.780 | they've been dehumanized.

00:22:56.540 | And so as far as looking at them and thinking,

00:22:59.540 | oh, this is a human, another human that's on the level of,

00:23:04.540 | you know, my uncle or my brother,

00:23:09.660 | I didn't think of them that way.

00:23:12.500 | I thought of them as murdering, raping, evil,

00:23:16.500 | subhumans.

00:23:25.700 | - Yeah, Iraq is different,

00:23:28.180 | and America's position is different.

00:23:29.580 | You're right that America's not involved in a war

00:23:32.820 | where it's quite like two humans fighting,

00:23:36.860 | like teenage boys fighting against each other.

00:23:40.180 | - And you've got to remember, I mean,

00:23:42.300 | we're seeing these Iraqi kids

00:23:45.600 | that are living under this sadistic terror.

00:23:50.600 | The Iraqi women that are being raped and abused

00:23:55.900 | by these insurgents.

00:23:57.440 | And so on the one side, we become,

00:24:01.460 | the Iraqi populace is very humanized to us

00:24:05.940 | because we're talking to them, we've got interpreters,

00:24:08.700 | we understand, we're seeing them day after day,

00:24:11.340 | the same individuals.

00:24:12.540 | And so we form a bond with the local populace,

00:24:17.460 | and yet we see what the insurgents are doing.

00:24:20.820 | And so it's, again, not difficult to dehumanize people

00:24:25.480 | that behave in that manner.

00:24:26.880 | - Yeah, I suppose I worry about the dehumanization

00:24:32.420 | at a much larger scale when it's not the kind of case

00:24:35.900 | that you're talking about.

00:24:37.220 | Even now, hopefully I'm not fear-mongering,

00:24:42.220 | but there's a sense in which there's the drums of war

00:24:48.060 | slowly starting to build with China.

00:24:54.980 | In the best case, it would be a cold war

00:24:58.960 | of there's a dehumanization aspect

00:25:01.120 | that's happening with China currently,

00:25:03.740 | which is they're the other,

00:25:06.140 | and they're after stealing all of your data.

00:25:08.200 | There's a cybersecurity, it starts with cybersecurity,

00:25:10.920 | and it worries me because it creates the other

00:25:15.160 | out of a very large population

00:25:22.200 | that may ultimately lead to conflict,

00:25:24.600 | in the worst case, hot conflict

00:25:28.080 | that would no longer be the situation you are in in Iraq,

00:25:31.980 | and more similar to the Soviet Union conflict with Germany,

00:25:36.980 | that it's kids, and then they're dehumanized

00:25:43.360 | to where you're at scale slaughtering them,

00:25:46.840 | or at least hurting their quality of life

00:25:50.220 | in a way that's maybe, suffering has many forms.

00:25:54.460 | It doesn't have to be through just a hot war.

00:25:56.820 | It could be through starvation, through camps,

00:26:00.660 | all those kinds of things, and I worry about that.

00:26:04.920 | We kind of tend to think that these wars are behind us,

00:26:07.700 | and I'm not always so sure that's the case,

00:26:10.820 | at least in the way that it ultimately starts with hate,

00:26:17.380 | and again, hopefully I'm not being too dramatic,

00:26:21.360 | but I see that there's a kind of brewing of,

00:26:25.020 | it starts with dehumanization,

00:26:27.620 | then turns to hate of the other.

00:26:30.180 | You see that with China, you see it a little bit with Russia,

00:26:33.180 | and you have an early podcast between,

00:26:37.260 | where you break down the tactics

00:26:39.420 | of the Chechen War versus Russia, it's fascinating,

00:26:43.300 | but that's the kind of conflicts I'm referring to,

00:26:45.840 | and I don't know.

00:26:50.460 | There's a, I know you're a bit of a musician.

00:26:53.200 | I love Diaristraite's song called "Brothers in Arms."

00:26:57.940 | I don't know if you know that one,

00:27:00.100 | and there's a line in it.

00:27:01.340 | I think they play it quite often at military funerals,

00:27:06.060 | which I just recently learned,

00:27:07.440 | but it's this powerful song that has a line,

00:27:09.860 | "We're fools to make war on our brothers in arms."

00:27:14.460 | Do you think there's some sense in which,

00:27:17.600 | at the leadership level, but just as human beings,

00:27:21.000 | we're perhaps foolish in engaging in military conflict

00:27:26.000 | as much as we have?

00:27:30.680 | Or is fool a very inappropriate word here?

00:27:35.880 | - Well, I think that using the term "brothers in arms"

00:27:40.540 | means the people that are on my side, right?

00:27:43.120 | So it doesn't make sense to start wars

00:27:47.200 | with people that are on your side.

00:27:48.920 | So that might just be the way the lyrics are written

00:27:52.280 | so that it fit the song or whatever.

00:27:55.420 | I think broadly what you're asking me is, is war foolish?

00:27:58.680 | - Yeah.

00:28:00.720 | - And I would say the answer is yes,

00:28:02.800 | and if you can avoid it, you absolutely should.

00:28:05.100 | But if there is a bear or a wolf

00:28:12.240 | that is trying to get into your house,

00:28:14.520 | is it foolish to shoot that bear or shoot that wolf?

00:28:19.800 | I think the answer is pretty obvious.

00:28:22.240 | So when you're threatened or your family is threatened

00:28:25.800 | or your way of life is threatened,

00:28:27.640 | then you have to do something to try and defend your family,

00:28:32.640 | your way of life.

00:28:34.700 | It should be the last resort.

00:28:36.320 | Should be the last resort.

00:28:38.480 | - You had a conversation with Jordan Peterson.

00:28:42.820 | - Yeah.

00:28:43.660 | - He asked you a question

00:28:47.300 | in terms of war being the last resort,

00:28:53.080 | whether you would like your kids to grow up in peace

00:28:57.220 | in a time of no war.

00:28:58.520 | You said yes, but, and so it happens

00:29:03.140 | Jordan didn't let you finish.

00:29:05.340 | Can you elaborate what follows the but?

00:29:10.100 | - Well, you and I have been talking about the fact

00:29:12.700 | that struggle brings people together

00:29:15.180 | and brings out the best and the worst.

00:29:18.380 | Brings out the worst in people.

00:29:19.500 | War brings out the worst in people.

00:29:20.820 | It also brings out the best in people.

00:29:22.720 | So would you want your kid to go

00:29:28.660 | and enter in a wrestling tournament

00:29:32.140 | where you paid all the other kids off and your kid won?

00:29:37.140 | Or you enter them in a jujitsu tournament

00:29:42.140 | where they're a purple belt

00:29:46.980 | and you know that everyone that they're gonna fight against

00:29:48.860 | is a white belt.

00:29:49.700 | And so they get the big W, they get the win,

00:29:52.660 | but they don't really get tested

00:29:55.420 | and they don't really struggle.

00:29:58.420 | And if you don't struggle, you don't grow.

00:30:00.060 | So that's the but, right?

00:30:05.260 | The absolute best times of my life were in combat

00:30:10.260 | and the worst times of my life were in combat.

00:30:16.660 | And so even though I wouldn't want any of my children

00:30:20.420 | to suffer through the worst of times,

00:30:22.300 | at the same time, the but is I would want them

00:30:26.460 | to have the opportunity to feel that bond

00:30:30.180 | that you're referring to earlier

00:30:31.740 | and to see human beings that are willing

00:30:36.100 | to sacrifice their lives for their friends.

00:30:38.500 | - You mentioned the worst.

00:30:41.620 | What are some of the worst aspects

00:30:44.540 | of when you were in Iraq?

00:30:46.460 | What are the things that,

00:30:47.900 | the hardest on you?

00:30:53.500 | - Having my guys killed.

00:30:58.660 | - Is there a absurd cruelty to it?

00:31:03.340 | Was it due to mistakes or natural consequences of fighting?

00:31:08.340 | Is there any difference?

00:31:11.740 | Is that at the end is just losing those brothers in arms?

00:31:16.340 | - There's a million different ways to get killed in the war

00:31:19.260 | and you can go out on an operation

00:31:20.820 | and you can do everything wrong and you can survive.

00:31:25.100 | And you can go out in an operation

00:31:26.420 | and do everything perfect and you can get killed.

00:31:28.860 | - Is there some aspect which makes it worse

00:31:32.140 | when there's mistakes made?

00:31:34.180 | - Well, yeah, if there's mistakes made,

00:31:36.580 | then you're gonna sit there and beat yourself up eternally

00:31:40.660 | for mistakes that were made.

00:31:42.060 | - But to you, the things that hurt is just losing,

00:31:47.660 | losing people close to you.

00:31:49.100 | - Yes.

00:31:52.300 | - Are you yourself afraid of death?

00:31:54.060 | - No.

00:31:56.900 | - Do you think about it?

00:31:59.500 | Does it make sense to you that this thing ends?

00:32:02.980 | Like do you, the Stoics contemplated death.

00:32:07.660 | It gives flavor to life.

00:32:09.220 | It makes you appreciate.

00:32:11.140 | There's something about finiteness of life

00:32:12.900 | that makes it, this Jaco Discipline Go drink,

00:32:17.900 | sour apple that I'm enjoying is delicious.

00:32:23.340 | It makes it taste better because I'm going to die one day.

00:32:27.380 | And I think about that a lot.

00:32:29.060 | Do you think about it?

00:32:30.180 | - Other than I know that it's gonna end,

00:32:36.460 | I mean, but I don't think about it on a daily basis.

00:32:39.060 | I think about-- - It's just a fact.

00:32:40.780 | - I think about, I know that I'm lucky to be here.

00:32:44.020 | I know that many people sacrificed

00:32:46.940 | to give me this opportunity to be here.

00:32:50.340 | So, but I don't dwell on it.

00:32:53.220 | - What about when you were in combat?

00:32:58.340 | Nothing.

00:32:59.180 | There's tactics, there's strategy, there's the mission.

00:33:04.060 | And then your mortality is not part of the calculation.

00:33:09.060 | - I think you get to a point where you accept the fact

00:33:12.860 | that you can die.

00:33:14.480 | Like I said, you can do everything right.

00:33:17.740 | You roll out the gate, you hit an IED,

00:33:20.260 | a triple stack subsurface IED, and you're done.

00:33:23.340 | And there's nothing that's gonna stop that.

00:33:25.140 | It's gonna happen.

00:33:26.260 | And I think if you're scared of that

00:33:28.820 | or you're thinking about that,

00:33:30.060 | it's gonna inhibit your ability to do your job properly.

00:33:33.660 | And I think it's also gonna drive you crazy.

00:33:36.460 | The thing that I thought about more

00:33:38.220 | was that happening to my guys.

00:33:40.720 | And that's the gut-wrenching terror that you feel

00:33:44.460 | when operations happen.

00:33:49.120 | - Can I ask you about love of country?

00:33:51.020 | It continues to...

00:33:53.740 | Just how much I've studied Stalin recently

00:33:58.400 | in the past few years, it continues to surprise me.

00:34:03.220 | Not surprise me, it's just tragic in some kind of way.

00:34:07.200 | I'm not sure exactly if I could put words to it,

00:34:10.520 | but how many people, and still do,

00:34:12.560 | but at the time were willing, loved Stalin,

00:34:17.600 | and were willing to die for country,

00:34:20.400 | for the love of country.

00:34:22.220 | And I, too, maybe because I was born there

00:34:26.460 | and now I am a red-blooded American,

00:34:28.800 | I love, nationalism is a bad word,

00:34:35.360 | but I love the love of country.

00:34:37.640 | It somehow gives meaning, like a brotherhood,

00:34:42.640 | like we're in this together.

00:34:46.400 | I love, that's why I love the Olympics.

00:34:48.820 | That's just the unity of it.

00:34:53.880 | It takes a step out of the selfish pursuits

00:34:57.640 | of any one particular ant,

00:35:00.160 | and looks at us as a big ant colony.

00:35:02.700 | And it's inspiring, it's exciting,

00:35:06.760 | but at the same time, it seems to get us

00:35:08.660 | to do horrible things

00:35:12.860 | if manipulated by charismatic leaders.

00:35:17.860 | What do you make of this love of country?

00:35:19.980 | Is it a bad thing?

00:35:21.700 | Is it a thing that gets in the way?

00:35:23.460 | Or is it a good thing?

00:35:26.220 | - Well, I think like anything else,

00:35:28.780 | if it's balanced correctly, it's great.

00:35:31.700 | And if it goes to some extreme level,

00:35:34.060 | then it becomes a negative.

00:35:35.620 | And I think it's probably sourced

00:35:38.460 | in some sort of animalistic tribalism

00:35:42.820 | that we all have to be part of a tribe.

00:35:44.980 | And this is a real big tribe that you get to be a part of.

00:35:49.340 | And all you have to do is kind of show up.

00:35:51.260 | And so when someone says,

00:35:52.500 | "Hey, we're gonna play hockey against the Russians."

00:35:55.880 | Well, we're gonna cheer for the American boys.

00:36:01.080 | - So my area of work is artificial intelligence.

00:36:05.720 | It'd be interesting to ask your thoughts about something,

00:36:09.240 | which is autonomous weapon systems.

00:36:12.440 | US has now officially released a report

00:36:17.360 | saying that they're open to, not open,

00:36:20.540 | they're engaging in adding more and more autonomy

00:36:24.980 | in artificial intelligence into its weapon systems

00:36:27.340 | because China is doing it.

00:36:29.060 | And so these are the first steps

00:36:31.100 | in something that AI folks worry about,

00:36:33.860 | which is a race, an AI race

00:36:40.100 | in the space of autonomous weapons

00:36:42.280 | that can run away too quickly.

00:36:45.240 | Is that something, I don't know if in general,

00:36:48.360 | if you have thoughts about weapon systems

00:36:51.880 | that make autonomous decisions

00:36:54.360 | at the small scale of just targeting where to shoot

00:36:58.000 | and at the larger scale of military strategy

00:37:01.120 | of just being given a mission

00:37:02.880 | of destroy this particular target,

00:37:05.020 | this particular, say, terrorist human being,

00:37:09.880 | and then figure out what is the right bombing campaign

00:37:12.600 | on your own to accomplish this task

00:37:15.300 | that minimizes civilian death.

00:37:17.060 | And then just loading that in

00:37:19.820 | and letting the AI system automatically decide that.

00:37:22.420 | What are your general thoughts about it?

00:37:26.260 | Do you worry about it?

00:37:28.380 | Because as the positive effects

00:37:30.620 | that in the best version of that world,

00:37:34.020 | you kill fewer civilians,

00:37:37.100 | you kill, hurt fewer of your own human beings.

00:37:42.100 | But at the negative side of that,

00:37:44.740 | you might lose the thing we kind of talked about,

00:37:50.340 | which is the basic humanity,

00:37:51.680 | even in the individual soldier

00:37:55.100 | of what is right and what is wrong,

00:37:57.180 | and not making huge mistakes

00:37:59.780 | that hurt thousands or millions of people.

00:38:02.620 | - I guess what you're asking me

00:38:05.380 | is if they could make a machine

00:38:06.540 | that could do more surgical attacks on enemy individuals,

00:38:11.540 | would I be for it?

00:38:14.420 | Yes, I would be for it.

00:38:15.580 | - The problem is, if you've ever used machines of any kind,

00:38:21.560 | their initial design may not be,

00:38:26.260 | there's unintended consequences.

00:38:28.620 | There's ways in the machine actually behaves

00:38:33.900 | that you realize there's bugs in this thing.

00:38:37.580 | - So do we not put protocols in place

00:38:40.740 | to prevent something from going too far outside

00:38:43.340 | the boundaries of what we want it to execute?

00:38:45.780 | - You do, but the question is,

00:38:48.100 | this is the first time in human history

00:38:50.780 | you can create things, machines, toaster, microwave oven,

00:38:55.780 | that's smarter than you in this particular task.

00:39:00.580 | I mean, it's not yet there.

00:39:03.540 | What you're learning a lot with military strategy

00:39:05.580 | is humans are actually really damn smart.

00:39:07.860 | It's very hard to improve on a human.

00:39:11.740 | And so most actual drones that are unmanned

00:39:14.540 | are still piloted by humans.

00:39:16.260 | It's very difficult to do every aspect of war,

00:39:20.880 | but it's not out of the realm of possibility

00:39:23.780 | that machines will start doing those things better,

00:39:26.980 | and certain things,

00:39:29.940 | certain more precise targeting of the enemy.

00:39:33.480 | The question is, so what happens

00:39:37.740 | when you start to rely on the machine

00:39:40.940 | to do some of the task is you get lazy.

00:39:45.940 | You forget what it is like to do that task,

00:39:49.300 | or more importantly, you lose the knowledge

00:39:52.020 | of the intricacies of that task,

00:39:54.360 | and you forget the ways it can go wrong.

00:39:56.560 | So the protocols may not be sufficient

00:40:00.560 | to constrain the power of the ways that things go wrong,

00:40:04.280 | especially when things are moving really quickly,

00:40:08.060 | especially when the ethics of the two sides

00:40:12.140 | aren't perfectly aligned,

00:40:14.020 | when people are, some certain sides,

00:40:16.500 | like on the Chinese side, may be more willing to take risks

00:40:20.280 | for dangerous consequences than others.

00:40:24.940 | So what happened on the bioweapon side is internationally,

00:40:29.040 | maybe you can speak to this more,

00:40:30.320 | but my sense, what I was told,

00:40:33.220 | there is a sense globally

00:40:36.080 | that bioweapons are not going to be used.

00:40:38.380 | They're unethical.

00:40:39.980 | There's a sense like we're not going to engage in this,

00:40:43.140 | and with AI currently, China and US said,

00:40:47.700 | green light, I'll go ahead.

00:40:52.660 | It's totally ethical.

00:40:54.180 | If it can decrease the loss of human life, why not?

00:40:59.180 | My worry is that it's much easier

00:41:05.820 | to design weapons that are effective

00:41:10.180 | than design weapons who have the depth of ethics

00:41:16.740 | and morals that humans do,

00:41:18.260 | which I think we don't, as human beings,

00:41:21.500 | don't acknowledge enough

00:41:23.260 | that even the cold calculated killing of others,

00:41:27.640 | precise, effective execution of a mission

00:41:31.740 | still has ethics in it at every level.

00:41:34.980 | You know what's right and what's wrong.

00:41:36.700 | And I don't know if you take that away,

00:41:39.700 | you're not going to make huge mistakes that you regret.

00:41:42.560 | Is that something you don't worry about?

00:41:48.820 | - I don't really worry about it,

00:41:52.020 | but as you design something, like I said,

00:41:54.620 | you put protocols in place,

00:41:56.360 | and from what I am hearing you say

00:41:59.220 | or trying to hear you say,

00:42:00.520 | there's be a point where our protocols

00:42:02.420 | wouldn't be sufficient to stop the machine

00:42:07.820 | from doing something that was unethical.

00:42:10.280 | - I'm kind of worried that this is something

00:42:17.740 | you don't worry about,

00:42:19.500 | because a lot of people I respect don't worry about it.

00:42:22.540 | And I don't know what to do about that.

00:42:24.860 | A lot of generals don't worry about it.

00:42:27.100 | A lot of people who know much more about war,

00:42:30.060 | like you, than me, don't worry about it.

00:42:33.320 | And that worries me.

00:42:34.400 | - Well, that's because you have a vision

00:42:37.340 | into the shortfalls of AI, and I don't.

00:42:41.740 | I don't have a vision of the shortfalls of AI.

00:42:44.300 | I don't know enough about it.

00:42:45.820 | As far as I'm concerned,

00:42:47.340 | you put a on/off switch somewhere,

00:42:49.660 | you put a kill switch on a system,

00:42:54.140 | and if it starts going awry,

00:42:55.580 | you hit the kill switch and that's it.

00:42:57.740 | So if, you know, when you look at me and say,

00:43:00.060 | well, there's no possible way to put a kill switch

00:43:02.500 | that would be 100% effective,

00:43:03.800 | and here's, you draw out those concerns to me,

00:43:06.700 | and we could talk through it and say,

00:43:08.220 | okay, well, here's where we should draw the line.

00:43:11.140 | - Yeah.

00:43:12.580 | I mean, it's like, again,

00:43:13.780 | for the Soviet Union, Chernobyl meltdown,

00:43:17.000 | there was always the ability, I believe,

00:43:19.440 | to have a kill switch.

00:43:20.560 | The problem is the more power you give to the machine,

00:43:25.160 | the more opportunity you give

00:43:30.120 | to the human supervising that machine to make a mistake

00:43:34.800 | and not shut off the switch at the right time.

00:43:38.440 | So yes, the solution, I mean,

00:43:40.560 | you're putting the responsibility still in the human hands,

00:43:42.760 | and I think that's the correct place to put it.

00:43:44.780 | There should be good protocols, good leadership,

00:43:47.400 | good execution, competency all around.

00:43:50.200 | Your protocols should consider the basic failures

00:43:53.280 | of human nature, the human factor of how things go wrong,

00:43:56.160 | so there should be multiple people

00:43:57.440 | supervising the system, all those things.

00:43:59.740 | But I am just very skeptical

00:44:02.980 | of greater and greater power in the machine

00:44:05.920 | that can create war, that cannot lead to death.

00:44:09.920 | - Yeah, and that's why, like I said,

00:44:12.560 | and like you just said, you have protocols in place

00:44:14.820 | that are a kill switch.

00:44:16.380 | And if you think about the amount of nuclear weapons

00:44:19.160 | that we've had on planet Earth

00:44:21.160 | for the past however many years,

00:44:23.020 | and there's been no rogue element that said,

00:44:28.980 | "You know what, I'm going to shoot this thing."

00:44:30.720 | There's been no protocol that took place

00:44:33.020 | where all of a sudden we said, "Oh no."

00:44:36.780 | I mean, there's been escalations,

00:44:39.560 | but the protocols worked, have worked so far.

00:44:42.580 | Now, that's a scary thing to think about,

00:44:45.800 | that we rely on these protocols

00:44:47.300 | to stop some rogue element out there

00:44:50.860 | from launching a missile that could kill millions of people

00:44:54.300 | and trigger a global war.

00:44:56.900 | So yeah, the protocols should be strict.

00:45:00.000 | - Okay, can I ask a Jocko Wanko ridiculous question?

00:45:05.380 | If human civilization goes extinct,

00:45:09.300 | what would be the reason?

00:45:10.780 | You mentioned nuclear war.

00:45:12.100 | Do you worry about this?

00:45:14.500 | The reason I bring that up,

00:45:16.620 | a lot of people in the AI community

00:45:18.880 | worry about artificial general intelligence,

00:45:20.980 | so super intelligent AI systems creating a lot of damage.

00:45:24.560 | Autonomous weapon systems is one possibility.

00:45:26.960 | A lot of folks recently, especially with this pandemic,

00:45:31.380 | if you want to be terrified,

00:45:33.480 | listen, somebody I talked to recently, Sam Harris,

00:45:36.860 | did a four-hour podcast on how bioengineering of viruses

00:45:41.860 | is likely to destroy human civilization.

00:45:45.460 | I recommend that highly if you were too optimistic

00:45:48.540 | about the future of the human species.

00:45:50.820 | So apparently, in the space of bioengineering,

00:45:54.060 | it's becoming easier and easier and easier

00:45:56.020 | to engineer viruses, engineer pathogens.

00:46:00.580 | (sighs)

00:46:04.100 | (laughs)

00:46:05.580 | This is the world's most depressing question.

00:46:07.820 | Is there something in particular you worry about,

00:46:12.220 | like that we should be thinking as a human species about?

00:46:15.340 | - Yeah, I'm sorry to disappoint you again

00:46:19.280 | with my lack of worry for all these problems,

00:46:22.700 | but I don't worry too much about it.

00:46:25.280 | (laughs)

00:46:28.340 | You know what, we've made it through a bunch of wickets

00:46:31.300 | so far as a species, and we'll make it through some more,

00:46:35.240 | or we won't.

00:46:36.780 | And if we don't make it through some of these wickets

00:46:38.620 | and someone decides that what they're gonna do

00:46:41.460 | over the weekend is create some crazy virus

00:46:43.860 | that spreads and kills everybody, yeah.

00:46:48.340 | - You know what, I'm usually extremely optimistic

00:46:51.180 | about this stuff.

00:46:52.000 | I am now, I'm with you, except that we won't.

00:46:55.960 | Well, there's always a chance we won't,

00:46:59.580 | but I have a sense that human, first of all,

00:47:03.420 | I believe that most people have much more capacity

00:47:06.240 | for good than evil.

00:47:07.080 | All of us are capable of evil, I believe,

00:47:09.040 | but most people are much more capable of doing good

00:47:12.840 | and want to do good.

00:47:13.920 | And I also believe in the resiliency of the human species,

00:47:19.760 | we're an innovative bunch, and we can respond to tragedy.

00:47:23.440 | Especially we respond more to tragedy

00:47:25.600 | as the scale of the tragedy grows,

00:47:27.720 | and our response is much better.

00:47:29.360 | - So that's why I'm not worried about it, bro.

00:47:33.380 | (laughing)

00:47:35.620 | - What makes a great man?

00:47:39.320 | Let's start at the individual.

00:47:40.760 | What makes a great man?

00:47:42.040 | What makes a great woman?

00:47:43.320 | What makes a great human being?

00:47:44.880 | - Somebody that puts others above themselves.

00:47:49.240 | - What makes a great leader of humans?

00:47:53.360 | - Same thing.

00:47:54.400 | - But that sentence does a lot of work.

00:47:57.520 | There's, when you're a leader, there's a lot of egos,

00:48:01.120 | there's a lot of tension, there's the humans,

00:48:03.760 | the human factor.

00:48:05.300 | There's people who are timid, there's people who are

00:48:08.300 | assholes, there's people who are incredibly competent,

00:48:12.220 | but self-obsessed, I don't know.

00:48:14.820 | There's complexities of human nature.

00:48:16.820 | How do you get all those people

00:48:18.540 | to be the best version of themselves

00:48:22.880 | and to lift up everyone else around them?

00:48:25.900 | - Okay, so now that question is a little bit different now.

00:48:29.220 | So now it's getting into a more specific question,

00:48:32.440 | but at the same time, a more broad question of

00:48:33.960 | what elements does it take to make a good leader?

00:48:37.520 | So you're right, that different people have

00:48:40.240 | different personalities, different tendencies,

00:48:42.680 | different levels of ego.

00:48:45.320 | And the way that I try and explain this is

00:48:49.820 | like a video game, and I'm not even a video game player,

00:48:53.920 | but I've seen this before, where video game characters

00:48:56.800 | have various skills, various strengths and weaknesses.

00:49:01.520 | So maybe they're strong, but they're dumb,

00:49:03.620 | or maybe they're strong and smart, but they're slow.

00:49:06.560 | They just give them these ratings.

00:49:08.200 | And so that's what human beings are.

00:49:10.020 | And that's the way leaders are.

00:49:11.440 | And you can have different leaders

00:49:13.460 | with different characteristics.

00:49:15.080 | And depending on how all those characteristics match up,

00:49:21.000 | you can have somebody that is very introverted,

00:49:24.780 | but they're still a very good leader,

00:49:28.280 | because when they do communicate,

00:49:30.700 | they do it in a clear, simple manner

00:49:32.460 | that everyone understands.

00:49:33.480 | So even though they're a little bit introverted,

00:49:34.940 | people still respect them and listen to them

00:49:37.440 | because they communicate in a clear way.

00:49:39.880 | You could have somebody that's extremely charismatic,

00:49:44.600 | extremely charismatic, and everyone looks to them,

00:49:48.240 | but they're slow in making decisions.

00:49:51.360 | And so now we've got someone that can't really

00:49:54.480 | make decisions when decisions need to get made.

00:49:56.540 | So even though they're charismatic,

00:49:57.980 | they're still not a good leader.

00:49:59.760 | So depending on the human being that we're talking about,

00:50:03.720 | and you just mentioned earlier that human beings

00:50:06.000 | are more complex than anything and do a better job

00:50:09.100 | at just about everything than a robot.

00:50:12.080 | So that's the same thing with leadership.

00:50:13.400 | You've got all these different characteristics

00:50:14.760 | and you match them or mix them together.

00:50:16.840 | And depending on where the ratings come out,

00:50:20.240 | depending on how that thing does in the end.

00:50:24.560 | - Can we almost like as a case study,

00:50:26.480 | look at a few people in the tech area

00:50:28.160 | that I'm familiar with and I know well?

00:50:30.880 | - We can, the only caveat being that I may have

00:50:34.280 | no familiarization with them whatsoever.

00:50:36.280 | You may have to brief me on them.

00:50:37.360 | - Yeah, so I'll do my best to brief,

00:50:39.720 | I'll do my best to reduce human beings

00:50:42.340 | into simple descriptions.

00:50:44.280 | And then you can give me insights

00:50:45.680 | of why the hell there are such effective leaders

00:50:48.640 | based on my description,

00:50:49.720 | not based on your actual deep knowledge of the human beings.

00:50:53.640 | - So that caveat of my inability to speak

00:50:57.280 | both the English language and describe humans well.

00:51:00.240 | Let's talk about first Elon Musk.

00:51:03.160 | So he's known as being quite harsh

00:51:07.880 | in the sense of first of all, a very high bar of excellence

00:51:12.240 | and also willing to what he calls

00:51:16.680 | the kind of first principles thinking

00:51:18.600 | of asking the questions that hurt,

00:51:22.600 | which is why the hell are we doing it this way?

00:51:27.380 | Why can't it be done a lot better,

00:51:29.040 | not just better, but a lot better?

00:51:30.880 | - So let's, I don't wanna hear his whole character.

00:51:35.080 | I'll go one section at a time.

00:51:36.780 | So we got a guy that's harsh

00:51:38.180 | and asking the really hard questions.

00:51:42.720 | How can that be good or why is that good?

00:51:46.000 | Well, first of all, it can be horrible.

00:51:48.080 | And there's leaders out there that are harsh

00:51:49.800 | and they're hated and no one likes them

00:51:51.240 | and no one wants to work for them

00:51:52.200 | and they never do anything.

00:51:53.880 | So what is it that Elon Musk does

00:51:56.440 | that makes, gives him the ability to be harsh?

00:51:59.280 | So I was hearing a description of me

00:52:04.280 | when I would give feedback to young SEALs

00:52:09.200 | that had made mistakes during training operations.

00:52:13.360 | And the description was that same thing,

00:52:17.080 | like this harsh blunt force trauma

00:52:21.480 | and just totally direct sledgehammer of truth

00:52:26.480 | that I would hit guys with.

00:52:29.960 | But it's interesting because I always talk about,

00:52:32.120 | you know, building relationships

00:52:33.360 | and making sure you're not offending someone.

00:52:35.560 | So how do these things match up?

00:52:38.280 | Well, I can tell you how they match up.

00:52:40.260 | When I was being harsh,

00:52:42.320 | the guys that I was being harsh with

00:52:44.360 | knew without one shred of doubt

00:52:47.880 | that I cared about them more than anything else.

00:52:50.100 | And that the reason I was giving them this feedback

00:52:52.080 | is because I wanted them to be able to lead their troops.

00:52:54.600 | I wanted them to be able to go accomplish their mission.

00:52:56.760 | And I wanted them to be able to bring their guys home

00:52:59.400 | from war.

00:53:00.280 | So I wasn't being harsh because it elevated my ego.

00:53:04.440 | I wasn't being harsh 'cause I wanted to denigrate them.

00:53:07.160 | I was being, actually being harsh

00:53:08.960 | because I wanted them to accomplish the mission.

00:53:11.360 | So if that's where Elon comes from,

00:53:15.360 | hey, listen, we got to make this happen.

00:53:17.340 | This is for the good of the world to do this.

00:53:20.920 | And people know that, then it works.

00:53:23.520 | - I'll bring this point back up

00:53:26.040 | with another guy, Steve Jowes.

00:53:27.600 | But let me stay on Elon for a second.

00:53:29.400 | The other thing he does, which is interesting,

00:53:35.520 | I see the value of this.

00:53:37.000 | It'd be great to hear you speak about it.

00:53:40.040 | It's unlike many of the other CEOs,

00:53:42.160 | very rich billionaires, you know,

00:53:46.360 | involved in leading a lot of people.

00:53:47.980 | He puts a lot of time into making sure

00:53:52.980 | he's on the factory floor.

00:53:55.220 | He famously sleeps on the,

00:53:57.380 | sort of like in the middle of things.

00:53:59.580 | And he puts a lot of effort.

00:54:01.820 | He's also very good at it, is being a low-level engineer.

00:54:05.540 | So like whatever the task is,

00:54:07.140 | he wants to understand the details.

00:54:09.020 | And he'll talk to the lowest level person

00:54:12.020 | in terms of like, you know, somebody who's like,

00:54:15.500 | working literally on putting parts together.

00:54:19.220 | He wants to understand what the problem is,

00:54:20.820 | what the challenge is.

00:54:22.100 | If there's an emergency,

00:54:23.860 | he wants to understand the actual details of the problem.

00:54:26.460 | Not like delegating it to a manager,

00:54:28.820 | but like, 'cause a lot of CEOs, a lot of managers

00:54:31.940 | will talk about sort of the power

00:54:35.140 | and the importance of delegation.

00:54:37.060 | Here, he wants to know if there's a big problem,

00:54:39.340 | he wants to know the exact detail.

00:54:41.220 | He wants to know the exact problem.

00:54:43.180 | He wants to, at the fundamental level,

00:54:45.240 | understand how to solve that problem.

00:54:47.360 | Whether it has to do with materials,

00:54:48.840 | whether it has to do with the actual manufacturing,

00:54:51.200 | the mechanical engineering aspect.

00:54:53.680 | Like we're talking about like engineering.

00:54:55.680 | This is a guy who wears a suit, is a CEO,

00:54:58.960 | tweets about Dogecoin, but like actual job,

00:55:03.560 | he's low-level engineering.

00:55:05.800 | And that, to me, was always inspiring

00:55:08.860 | to see somebody who knows what the fuck they're doing.

00:55:12.800 | That's what it, like he gains the respect

00:55:16.200 | of engineers at the lowest level.

00:55:18.360 | I don't know if that's scalable,

00:55:22.160 | but that's always been inspiring to me.

00:55:23.800 | And I wonder how many people it's inspiring to.

00:55:25.960 | Maybe you could speak to the value of doing that,

00:55:29.000 | of no matter how high your level of leader is,

00:55:31.960 | to be able to do the low-level shit.

00:55:34.320 | - Yeah, and that's a common trait that good leaders have.

00:55:39.320 | And maybe he doesn't necessarily know how to do everything,

00:55:42.280 | a good leader, but they go down there

00:55:44.560 | and talk to the frontline troops and say,

00:55:46.440 | "Hey, what is the issue that you're dealing with?"

00:55:48.480 | Or, "How can I support you?

00:55:50.920 | "How can I give you help?"

00:55:52.080 | And one key point that you said is he said,

00:55:54.040 | "When there's a problem, he gets in there."

00:55:56.960 | So there's things happening at his companies

00:55:59.400 | that they're working.

00:56:00.960 | And so he doesn't have to die.

00:56:03.080 | I'm not saying he never does,

00:56:04.220 | but he doesn't have to spend as much time working on

00:56:07.680 | or looking at some subsystem that's functioning well.

00:56:11.800 | He's got a good leader in there that's handling it,

00:56:13.780 | and he checks in with that leader,

00:56:14.940 | and the leader says, "Yeah, it's working perfectly."

00:56:16.520 | He says, "Great."

00:56:18.200 | That when there's a problem,

00:56:20.320 | that's when he might have to get down there

00:56:21.960 | and dig into some details so that he fully understands it.

00:56:24.480 | So that he, when he digs down in the details,

00:56:27.380 | and this is important,

00:56:28.500 | he's coming from an altitude where he has

00:56:31.880 | better, bigger perspective,

00:56:34.520 | not necessarily better, but a bigger perspective.

00:56:36.440 | So if you sit there and work on a problem, whatever,

00:56:40.000 | for eight hours, and you're staring at,

00:56:42.480 | if you were planning a mission,

00:56:44.000 | and you were planning it for eight hours,

00:56:46.740 | you're staring at the maps and the charts,

00:56:48.960 | and you're figuring out where all the troops

00:56:50.120 | are going to be located,

00:56:51.640 | and I come in after eight hours,

00:56:53.240 | and I look at your plan from a distant perspective,

00:56:57.620 | there's a good chance I'll be able to see holes in your plan

00:57:00.340 | that you couldn't see because your perspective was too close.

00:57:03.200 | So that's good for me to be able to come in

00:57:06.640 | from a higher perspective and have a look at it.

00:57:08.880 | But also there's times where I need to get down there

00:57:13.320 | and actually look.

00:57:15.000 | You know, if you're looking at a problem and you say,

00:57:16.440 | "Look, I can't figure out, boss,

00:57:17.560 | I can't figure out how to get to this target.

00:57:20.040 | And I'm looking at it from a distance and I don't see,

00:57:21.760 | I might need to start digging in and looking and saying,

00:57:24.760 | oh, here's a route that we can take

00:57:26.760 | that actually makes sense, let's try that."

00:57:30.000 | So I think it's a good example of someone

00:57:33.600 | going up and down in altitude to look at problems,

00:57:36.560 | understanding what's happening with the frontline troops,

00:57:38.360 | and at the same time, being able to go back

00:57:41.000 | to the strategic level.

00:57:41.960 | And I can, it's probably this way.

00:57:45.840 | The reason that he's successful

00:57:47.000 | is because he doesn't get stuck down there.

00:57:49.600 | Because if he felt the need to micromanage

00:57:51.960 | each and every part on a Tesla,

00:57:54.160 | it wouldn't be, it would be very unlikely

00:57:57.720 | that he would have the capacity to do all that.

00:58:00.680 | Now, he can hand over some broad chip design and say,

00:58:04.920 | "Hey, this is what the function needs to be."

00:58:06.360 | And he gives it to Lex and Lex goes there with your team

00:58:08.240 | and you figure it out and you make it happen.

00:58:10.080 | If he had to actually do that all himself,

00:58:12.360 | most likely not possible.

00:58:14.400 | So that's what leaders should be doing.

00:58:16.400 | They should go elevate and then get down in the weeds

00:58:20.320 | when they have to, and then go back up.

00:58:23.000 | - The sad thing, this is the part

00:58:25.960 | that makes me not wanna do a startup,

00:58:27.800 | is basically his whole life is dealing with emergencies.

00:58:33.440 | Just like you said, he's not dealing,

00:58:36.960 | this is not shooting the shit about details of engineering.

00:58:40.720 | It's dealing with like, in the case of a company,

00:58:44.320 | life and death, like something that can just

00:58:47.800 | completely damage the production line, right?

00:58:50.440 | So he's constantly dealing with emergencies,

00:58:52.080 | putting out fires.

00:58:53.720 | And I don't know if there's something to be said

00:58:56.080 | about that psychology of how,

00:58:58.380 | like he's spoken himself that he's worried

00:59:01.560 | whether his mind can hold up much longer.

00:59:03.660 | - So hopefully in the near future,

00:59:06.640 | he will start to form more decentralized command

00:59:10.200 | where he has some subordinate leadership

00:59:12.120 | that he fully trusts.

00:59:13.680 | And most important that he is properly trained

00:59:16.560 | so that they can handle these day-to-day fires,

00:59:18.940 | at least 80% of them.

00:59:20.840 | So only 20% of the time does he actually need to go in

00:59:24.800 | and solve a problem.

00:59:26.280 | If he's not doing that right now,

00:59:28.500 | then that's going to end up being a problem.

00:59:31.040 | Anytime, so I work with companies all the time,

00:59:32.960 | and that's what's interesting about this is,

00:59:34.880 | I go and work with a CEO or with a C-suite of a company,

00:59:38.760 | it takes a little while to figure out what's going on.

00:59:41.120 | I'm kind of going off of the things that you're telling me

00:59:43.720 | almost anecdotally, right?

00:59:45.440 | But let's say that what you get,

00:59:47.440 | and also I don't know how familiar you actually are

00:59:50.600 | with the inner workings of his companies,

00:59:53.760 | but if we were to assume that what you're saying is accurate

00:59:58.480 | then my advice would be, hey, listen,

01:00:01.260 | you need to start putting a little bit more time and effort

01:00:03.360 | into training up some subordinate leadership

01:00:05.400 | that has the trust, knowledge, and expertise

01:00:09.320 | that you will be able to turn over some of these details to,

01:00:14.160 | for two reasons.

01:00:15.000 | Number one, so you can let your brain,

01:00:17.000 | you can survive a little longer, as he put it,

01:00:20.480 | but also all the time that you spend as a leader

01:00:23.200 | looking down and into your organization

01:00:25.440 | is time that you're not looking up and out.

01:00:27.440 | So when you're not looking up and out,

01:00:28.720 | you're not seeing what the competitor's doing,

01:00:30.880 | you're not seeing where the market's going,

01:00:32.360 | there's problems that can come from that.

01:00:35.200 | So if right now he's spending too much time

01:00:37.000 | looking down and in, and you mentioned,

01:00:39.280 | you said, I don't know if I wanna do a startup.

01:00:40.520 | When you do a startup,

01:00:41.360 | you're gonna be looking down and in for a while.

01:00:43.240 | It's gonna take a while,

01:00:44.200 | you're gonna have to do all this work yourself,

01:00:45.840 | you're not gonna have the finances

01:00:46.880 | to put people, manpower behind these things.

01:00:49.880 | So that's probably, maybe he's in that mindset a little bit

01:00:53.960 | 'cause he's done so many startups over the years,

01:00:56.000 | and so he's in the, he's habitually in the weeds.

01:01:00.720 | So my advice would be, all right,

01:01:02.360 | let's start looking at formulating

01:01:04.120 | some subordinate leadership that has the, like I said,

01:01:06.680 | the expertise, the trust that you can start to turn over

01:01:09.640 | some of these more minute details to them

01:01:13.880 | so that you can start looking up and out.

01:01:15.680 | - Yeah, I think he's done that more successfully

01:01:18.200 | in some places than others.

01:01:19.400 | At SpaceX, a lot of people give the credit

01:01:24.400 | to Gwen Shotwell for the CEO, the COO of SpaceX

01:01:29.840 | as a very successful person that runs shit,

01:01:32.560 | but in Tesla, not as much.

01:01:35.360 | So I wonder if you can comment on something

01:01:38.960 | a lot of people worry about,

01:01:40.200 | and this applies to a lot of tech companies,

01:01:42.440 | which is a lot of people worry about

01:01:46.800 | that if Elon disappears, the innovative spirit,

01:01:51.800 | the company as we know 'em today will collapse,

01:01:56.560 | will stagnate, and will basically fail to do

01:01:59.840 | what they've been doing for so many years successfully.

01:02:02.600 | Is there some aspect to what makes a good leader

01:02:05.880 | that if you disappear, it's still,

01:02:10.760 | the thing still lives on, and not just lives on, but thrives?

01:02:14.680 | - Yeah, so what we have to do in those situations

01:02:16.740 | is we have to establish a strong culture

01:02:19.120 | inside that organization.

01:02:21.200 | And if you're, there's reasons why this happens, right?

01:02:26.440 | If I have a big ego, and I form a company,

01:02:29.040 | and I love the fact that everyone looks at me and says,

01:02:32.120 | "Oh, Jocko made this company,

01:02:33.560 | "and he's the creative force behind this company,"

01:02:35.800 | and that fuels my ego, and it makes me feel good,

01:02:38.160 | and I'm working with you, Lex,

01:02:40.400 | and every time you come up with an idea,

01:02:42.120 | I say, "Lex, you need to stay in your box."

01:02:44.520 | - Yeah. - Right?

01:02:45.400 | So I'm not creating a culture

01:02:47.080 | that rewards that sort of creativity.

01:02:50.720 | And eventually, when I die,

01:02:53.360 | I won't have educated my team

01:02:57.080 | on how to maintain that creative aspect.

01:02:59.680 | So again, hopefully, inside that organization,

01:03:04.000 | he's encouraging and growing that culture

01:03:09.040 | where creativity is rewarded,

01:03:10.840 | where it flourishes, even when he's gone.

01:03:14.720 | That's what we have to hope for.

01:03:16.560 | - He is, but I also seem to notice

01:03:19.600 | that there's not many people like him.

01:03:22.400 | People become complacent too easily.

01:03:27.400 | I've been disappointed by people a little bit.

01:03:32.040 | It's like success makes people soft.

01:03:34.520 | With Elon, it seems like success doesn't have any effect.

01:03:40.680 | It's like the reverse effect.

01:03:42.640 | It's always like, what's the next biggest thing, right?

01:03:48.080 | He's living that exponential growth,

01:03:50.320 | which I think that's the problem

01:03:52.920 | that you have to have somebody

01:03:54.200 | who's constantly trying to find the 10X solution,

01:03:58.400 | like trying to constantly improve things and restlessly.

01:04:02.720 | That probably has to do with finding the right people,

01:04:06.240 | not just creating the culture,

01:04:07.560 | but creating a culture with the right set of people.

01:04:10.200 | Speaking of which, Steve Jobs.

01:04:13.820 | There's two things I wanna mention there.

01:04:19.720 | Once again, the harshness, but a very different kind.

01:04:23.000 | And the second is team building.

01:04:24.540 | So on the harshness, he is much harsher than Elon

01:04:29.540 | in the following way.

01:04:34.920 | Having a sense that you will not like this,

01:04:38.200 | but I'd like to defend it,

01:04:40.320 | is he loses his shit quite a bit.

01:04:42.320 | He was famously, at least especially early on,

01:04:46.440 | being very emotional.

01:04:48.480 | He was letting passion dominate the discussion.

01:04:51.520 | There'd be a lot of firings.

01:04:52.840 | There would be a lot of mean things said to people.

01:04:55.400 | I don't know what you make of that.

01:04:59.800 | How much as a leader are you allowed to just lose your shit

01:05:04.280 | in your love for the thing you're doing?

01:05:06.280 | And how effective is that?

01:05:09.660 | - As a leader, you shouldn't be doing that very often.

01:05:12.860 | So you can look back at me and say,

01:05:14.600 | well, Jocko, here's the most profitable company

01:05:17.400 | that's ever existed, and so you're wrong.

01:05:21.360 | Well, going back to that multitude of characteristics

01:05:25.520 | that human beings can have,

01:05:27.320 | well, it's the same thing with businesses.

01:05:28.540 | It's the same thing with companies.

01:05:30.280 | Steve Jobs was off the charts in some of his traits,

01:05:37.480 | his ability to understand design,

01:05:41.280 | his ability to understand human interface

01:05:44.300 | with computer systems.

01:05:46.760 | So far off the charts that despite his bad temper,

01:05:51.760 | emotional behavior, the company still thrived.

01:05:58.800 | That can happen.

01:06:01.660 | You can have people that are horrible leaders

01:06:05.880 | that develop something that's so universally outstanding

01:06:10.880 | that you end up with a company that's successful.

01:06:16.560 | I get asked that a bunch.

01:06:19.400 | People always ask me, 'cause I say,

01:06:20.760 | look, you shouldn't be losing your temper as a leader.

01:06:25.440 | Well, what about Steve Jobs?

01:06:26.520 | He used to yell and scream all the time.

01:06:28.080 | Great.

01:06:29.200 | When people say that to me, I say,

01:06:30.440 | oh, okay, are you as good at design as Steve Jobs was?

01:06:34.320 | Are you as good at marketing as Steve Jobs was?

01:06:39.220 | He had a certain amount of skills that were off the charts,

01:06:43.680 | and so he was able to be successful

01:06:45.600 | despite the fact that he would lose his temper,

01:06:48.560 | treat people horribly.

01:06:49.760 | That's not good.

01:06:51.580 | It's not good.

01:06:52.780 | And it would have been even more successful

01:06:54.480 | if he wouldn't had those characteristics.

01:06:57.280 | Now you might say, well,

01:06:58.520 | his anger is what pushed things.

01:07:04.560 | Well, let me ask you this.

01:07:06.380 | What leader wins?

01:07:09.800 | The leader whose team is afraid?

01:07:14.280 | The team who executes the mission

01:07:17.120 | because they're afraid of their leader,

01:07:18.980 | or executes the task because they're afraid of their leader,

01:07:21.640 | or the team that loves their leader so much

01:07:24.600 | that they don't wanna let them down?

01:07:26.680 | Which team wins?

01:07:28.140 | - You're implying a confidence

01:07:30.080 | that love is more powerful than fear, but I'm not so sure.

01:07:34.080 | This is the Machiavelli question.

01:07:35.720 | You're saying ultimately it's always better to lead

01:07:38.600 | by inspiration and love

01:07:41.260 | than by putting the fear into the team.

01:07:46.260 | - What I'm saying is that I've seen countless times

01:07:50.440 | is me leading through my authority,

01:07:53.520 | leading through my rank,

01:07:54.980 | leading through punitive measures

01:07:58.560 | is infinitely worse than me and you

01:08:01.220 | working together as a team to win.

01:08:03.320 | - On the second point of Steve Jobs

01:08:09.260 | is he has this idea of philosophy of A players

01:08:12.620 | where you have a group,

01:08:16.200 | like the power and the productivity

01:08:20.460 | of a group of what he called A players

01:08:23.380 | is invaluable.

01:08:27.500 | So you wanna get a team of people

01:08:29.420 | who are the best at what they do,

01:08:31.160 | but the most important aspect to him

01:08:33.500 | was that a single quote unquote B player

01:08:37.140 | on the team destroys the entire productivity of the team.

01:08:41.300 | Is there something that brings true to that?

01:08:43.220 | So he was, this could be a temper thing,

01:08:46.100 | but vicious about firing and removing

01:08:50.180 | what he felt was a toxic B player in a team.

01:08:55.180 | So A players feed off of each other

01:08:58.120 | unless there's one B player present.

01:09:00.860 | - Depends on the nature of the B player.

01:09:03.940 | Is the player a B player because he's a little bit lazy?

01:09:08.940 | Is he a B player because he doesn't have good vision?

01:09:14.220 | Is he a B player because he's got a big ego

01:09:17.180 | and always thinks he's right

01:09:19.620 | and now creates conflict in the team?

01:09:22.540 | So there's a bunch of different B players.

01:09:24.180 | Look, if you're working for me

01:09:26.820 | and you're kind of a B player, but guess what?

01:09:28.460 | You're a grinder and you get stuff done.

01:09:30.340 | I want you on the team.

01:09:31.540 | You might not be the smartest person I have,

01:09:34.220 | but I know that you're committed to the team

01:09:37.620 | and I want you on the team.

01:09:39.580 | So you're a B player, but that's okay.

01:09:42.620 | Now, if you're Lex with a giant ego,

01:09:47.220 | I'd rather have Lex that's not quite as smart

01:09:50.820 | 'cause I got other people that are smart.

01:09:52.300 | I got other people that are smart on the team.

01:09:53.460 | Look, you're gonna need some smart people on the team,

01:09:56.140 | but a team is made up, it's a team.

01:09:59.140 | And so you take these different components of a team

01:10:01.860 | and if you have complimentary components,

01:10:04.160 | you'll end up with a superior team

01:10:06.060 | than just basing it on the level of,

01:10:10.300 | and what's an A player?

01:10:11.980 | Sometimes in the SEAL teams,

01:10:13.380 | they would get something called the stacked platoon.

01:10:18.860 | And what that would be is someone,

01:10:21.820 | some senior person in that platoon

01:10:24.420 | would manipulate and maneuver

01:10:27.560 | to get the quote best guys that he could in that platoon.

01:10:31.200 | So, the most experienced guys,

01:10:33.140 | the person that had great, great reputations.

01:10:35.900 | And sometimes those platoons would be great.

01:10:38.260 | Sometimes they would implode

01:10:39.940 | because what you end up with is a bunch of A players

01:10:43.440 | and now no one wants to follow anyone else.

01:10:46.300 | No one wants to agree with anyone else.

01:10:47.660 | Everyone wants to do it my way, not it's my way,

01:10:49.540 | not Lex's way.

01:10:50.380 | Lex is stupid, no, you're stupid.

01:10:51.980 | We end up with problems.

01:10:53.760 | So can one person derail a team?

01:10:56.620 | Absolutely.

01:10:57.500 | Under good leadership, one person should not derail a team.

01:11:02.700 | - This could be a tech thing too.

01:11:08.520 | There's some multiplying effect of just pure excellence,

01:11:12.280 | no matter the personalities.

01:11:14.120 | I think for Steve Jobs,

01:11:17.920 | the ego doesn't matter.

01:11:21.480 | None of that matters.

01:11:22.400 | What matters is the quality of the output,

01:11:25.020 | the genius of the result.

01:11:26.780 | And that somehow multiplies itself.

01:11:29.560 | And the ego's actually,

01:11:31.240 | like one of the problems with egos

01:11:33.560 | is like what does ego usually say?

01:11:37.000 | It says I'm much better than you.

01:11:38.840 | When you have people that are really good together,

01:11:41.320 | it's very hard for the ego to flourish

01:11:43.280 | 'cause you're like constantly being shown

01:11:45.360 | that you're not as good.

01:11:46.520 | And there's a competition.

01:11:48.320 | So like, I think his idea was that like,

01:11:51.360 | if you get people that are really good at what they do,

01:11:54.200 | it turns as opposed to you being complacent

01:11:57.620 | and not doing much

01:11:59.300 | and thinking you're better than everyone else

01:12:01.300 | and your opinion is better,

01:12:02.460 | is you almost getting in that competitive race.

01:12:05.340 | You know that magic that happens

01:12:06.700 | when you're at the end of a marathon

01:12:09.020 | and you're just like head to head,

01:12:10.800 | like you're just going full steam

01:12:13.420 | with a person that is as good as you.

01:12:15.020 | There's no place for ego there.

01:12:16.780 | - Which is great.

01:12:18.220 | Which is great.

01:12:19.560 | Let's use that example.

01:12:21.060 | You and I are racing.

01:12:22.100 | We're at the end of the marathon.

01:12:23.860 | We're both highly competitive, highly competitive.

01:12:27.440 | We have massive egos and we both want to win.

01:12:29.960 | We both want to win so bad

01:12:33.020 | that we give everything we've got.

01:12:35.700 | That's totally positive, right?

01:12:39.120 | - Yeah.

01:12:39.960 | - Isn't that totally positive?

01:12:40.800 | Now imagine this, same thing.

01:12:42.440 | We're in a race, we're in a marathon,

01:12:45.920 | we're in the last hundred meters,

01:12:47.360 | it's you against me and our egos are huge

01:12:50.240 | and we're pushing to win.

01:12:51.360 | And you start to pull ahead of me.

01:12:54.040 | And my ego is so big and I hate losing so much

01:12:58.800 | that I somehow accidentally push my knee up

01:13:03.060 | against your foot on a back stride

01:13:04.640 | and throw you onto your face.

01:13:06.920 | So that's what, ego is an awesome driver

01:13:11.340 | unless you let your ego control you.

01:13:13.760 | And you let ego drive your decision making process

01:13:16.400 | in which case it turns into an incredible problem.

01:13:19.780 | So you might have someone that is excellent.

01:13:22.760 | You might have someone that's outstanding.

01:13:25.820 | You might have someone that's 10s across the board

01:13:29.180 | but their ego is so big that they can't work

01:13:31.980 | with other people.

01:13:33.260 | They can't accept anyone else's ideas.

01:13:34.940 | They can't compromise on something

01:13:36.260 | 'cause they think their idea is better all the time.

01:13:38.500 | And that is going to be problematic.

01:13:40.420 | And I don't want them on the team.

01:13:43.500 | Now, as a good leader, guess what I'll do?

01:13:46.180 | I'll put them into a situation

01:13:48.340 | where I can utilize their best aspects

01:13:51.320 | but not have their ego destroy the team.

01:13:55.200 | So I might say, "Hey Lex, you know what?

01:13:57.220 | "I actually want you to take lead

01:13:58.720 | "on this part of the project over here.

01:14:01.520 | "And since you're so smart and you work so hard,

01:14:04.540 | "I know you're going to pull ahead of everyone else.

01:14:06.040 | "So you grind on that.

01:14:08.520 | "Once you get that result, give it to me

01:14:10.740 | "and I'm going to disseminate it to the team."

01:14:12.940 | So I isolate you from wrecking yourself

01:14:17.220 | and the rest of the team with your giant ego.

01:14:20.440 | - So then looking at a completely opposite person

01:14:24.700 | who's just a fascinating person to me,

01:14:26.460 | is Sandra Pachai, who's the CEO of Alphabet,

01:14:29.420 | CEO of Google.

01:14:30.420 | I admire the, in a romantic sense,

01:14:37.140 | the madness that is Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

01:14:41.700 | So to me, the opposite of that, Sandra Pachai,

01:14:45.580 | who's like, everybody loves him.

01:14:50.180 | And he's also a great listener.

01:14:54.500 | So he always brings people together.

01:14:56.380 | And so the energy of that person in a room is like,

01:15:01.380 | the basic energy, if I were to summarize it,

01:15:03.620 | is like, I want to hear all the voices in the room.

01:15:07.260 | That's the energy he brings.

01:15:09.260 | And it's almost like he doesn't want

01:15:13.620 | to impose a final decision.

01:15:15.580 | He wants to hear all the voices

01:15:17.580 | and somehow always the decision just falls out.

01:15:20.860 | I don't know what to say about that style of leadership,

01:15:25.700 | but it's always surprising to me how

01:15:29.020 | that love brought a lot of people together.

01:15:33.220 | And still, I mean, some of the greatest things

01:15:35.940 | Google has done over the past several years

01:15:38.900 | could be attributed to that.

01:15:41.780 | Continued innovation, bringing out the best out of people.

01:15:45.220 | There's of course bureaucracy, which I could criticize

01:15:47.580 | at the end of the day,

01:15:48.420 | which always happens with big companies.

01:15:50.580 | I would argue actually the dictatorial style

01:15:53.220 | of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk helped fight the bureaucracy,

01:15:56.180 | which is one criticism I would give

01:15:58.460 | of being a listener and being kind.

01:16:00.740 | It's sometimes you can't cut through the bullshit

01:16:02.580 | as effectively.

01:16:03.900 | But he's one of the only people I've ever heard of

01:16:07.420 | who everybody loves.

01:16:09.380 | He's an inspirational figure to millions.

01:16:11.660 | Especially in India, he's a celebrity

01:16:15.140 | in the best kind of way.

01:16:16.860 | Is there something you could say

01:16:17.820 | about that kind of leadership

01:16:19.300 | where you're never the asshole,

01:16:21.900 | you're never the dictator, you're always the listener

01:16:24.860 | and the compassionate, empathetic glue

01:16:29.860 | that brings the team together, basically with love.

01:16:33.660 | - Yeah, that's great leadership.

01:16:36.440 | - If you had to choose for Google.

01:16:40.720 | For large companies, is there something to be said

01:16:45.720 | about what is more effective?

01:16:47.800 | The dictator, ruling by love or ruling by fear?

01:16:52.680 | - First of all, everything's a dichotomy, right?

01:16:57.240 | And so to think that all the time

01:17:00.000 | you're always gonna be able to just bark orders at people

01:17:03.840 | and they're always gonna listen to you

01:17:04.960 | and you're always gonna get the best result,

01:17:06.240 | that would not be smart.

01:17:08.120 | To think that every single time

01:17:09.920 | you're gonna come to a 100% consensus amongst the troops

01:17:14.200 | and that decision is going to reveal itself

01:17:16.400 | without you nudging it along,

01:17:18.080 | that would also be short-sighted and naive.

01:17:22.440 | So what a good leader does is they stay balanced.

01:17:26.920 | And as much as they can,

01:17:28.040 | they listen to what the troops have to say,

01:17:30.400 | they take that feedback.

01:17:31.720 | Maybe they quietly nudge things.

01:17:34.960 | And I'm sure he does that.

01:17:36.040 | I'm sure he does some nudging

01:17:37.720 | that maybe no one even picks up on.

01:17:40.600 | I like to say the best forms of leadership

01:17:43.320 | is leadership with minimum force required.

01:17:45.880 | So if I can go into a room as a leader

01:17:48.920 | and not say one single thing

01:17:50.720 | and the team can come to the right consensus

01:17:52.400 | and move in that direction, that's my preferred method.

01:17:55.120 | Maybe I have to give them a little bit of a nudge,

01:17:57.040 | a 10% nudge in one direction.

01:17:58.880 | Okay, that's better than me walking in there

01:18:01.080 | and giving them 100% dictatorial direction

01:18:05.160 | of exactly what I want to have happen.

01:18:07.580 | Now, occasionally, if we have an emergency situation,

01:18:11.040 | people are starting to be frazzled

01:18:13.280 | and they're not sure which direction to go,

01:18:15.180 | then sometimes as a leader,

01:18:16.200 | you have to walk in and say,

01:18:17.040 | "All right, everyone, here's where we're going."

01:18:20.000 | And people get on board.

01:18:21.400 | Why?

01:18:22.220 | Because for many years or months or however long,

01:18:25.860 | you've trusted them to come up with a plan.

01:18:29.160 | And when you as a leader trust your team

01:18:31.720 | to come up with a plan,

01:18:33.760 | the team starts to trust you

01:18:35.920 | and you get leadership capital.

01:18:37.480 | And as you build leadership capital,

01:18:39.200 | occasionally you need to cash in

01:18:41.600 | some of that leadership capital,

01:18:42.560 | you need to spend some of it.

01:18:43.880 | And maybe it is,

01:18:44.720 | "Hey, listen, here's the direction we're going right now.

01:18:47.360 | We'll debrief it later, but we got to make a move."

01:18:50.240 | And the team who trusts you says,

01:18:52.860 | "Roger that, boss, we got it."

01:18:54.520 | - And all of them actually do this interesting thing.

01:18:58.620 | I'd love to hear your opinion on it.

01:19:00.420 | Sandra certainly does it to a large degree,

01:19:03.300 | which is, it's in the process of delegation,

01:19:08.300 | trusting a person to do a really difficult thing.

01:19:14.500 | Like tossing it up,

01:19:17.500 | saying like, "I trust you can get this job done."

01:19:23.320 | Even if your resume does not support that.

01:19:28.280 | I'm actually kind of amazed the human beings

01:19:31.540 | when they're given the trust to get the job done,

01:19:34.720 | they step up very often.

01:19:36.720 | That's kind of an amazing property of human nature.

01:19:40.120 | - People often ask me issues about leadership

01:19:42.440 | and I always say that one of the best tools

01:19:44.840 | for teaching leadership

01:19:46.540 | and for teaching a bunch of other lessons

01:19:48.460 | is leadership itself.

01:19:50.040 | So when, it happens all the time.

01:19:52.140 | When you elevate someone into a leadership position,

01:19:54.560 | they do step up and they do make things happen.

01:19:57.720 | So that's not surprising to me.

01:20:00.200 | You do have to mitigate risks.

01:20:02.300 | So saying, "Hey, Lex, I know you're,

01:20:06.060 | haven't been in the military before.

01:20:07.580 | I know you have very limited weapons experience,

01:20:11.460 | but I want you to run a target assault

01:20:14.180 | on a real mission in whatever country."

01:20:17.420 | That would not be good.

01:20:18.800 | That would not be a good move on my part.

01:20:20.980 | Now, if I said, "All right, Lex, you know what?

01:20:22.660 | I want you to get some leadership experience.

01:20:25.060 | I've got a training mission

01:20:26.540 | and it's going to be using paintball

01:20:28.140 | and I'm going to put you in charge of it.

01:20:30.020 | I got no problem doing that."

01:20:31.480 | - Some of that is judging human character.

01:20:37.100 | It's like there's potential,

01:20:38.180 | there's something in this person

01:20:39.880 | that they have enough demons

01:20:43.000 | or whatever the hell it requires to have that fuel,

01:20:45.800 | they'll figure it out.

01:20:47.240 | They'll hate themselves if they don't.

01:20:49.740 | And they'll find the right,

01:20:51.640 | they'll find the tools, they'll find the path,

01:20:53.400 | they'll, to achieve the,

01:20:55.080 | whatever the level of perfection they can.

01:20:56.960 | It's been really surprising to me.

01:20:58.160 | It's been making me rethink the whole hiring process

01:21:02.200 | because I often, now I'm thinking and looking,

01:21:05.520 | so I'm looking for people,

01:21:06.720 | both for the startup, but just for my own life,

01:21:09.360 | to help.

01:21:10.280 | And I almost want to see evidence of excellence,

01:21:14.160 | but maybe you want to just,

01:21:17.460 | based on just judgment of human character,

01:21:20.240 | without evidence of excellence,

01:21:22.320 | have people step up.

01:21:23.540 | Like Joe Rogan with Jamie,

01:21:26.760 | that's a funny side of,

01:21:28.280 | I didn't understand how little Joe knew about Jamie

01:21:31.360 | when he hired him.

01:21:32.760 | And Jamie stepped up

01:21:34.080 | and now runs one of the most successful podcasts ever.

01:21:37.040 | And that's an incredible kind of,

01:21:38.840 | and he's one of the best producers in the world now,

01:21:43.080 | not to let it get to his head.

01:21:44.520 | And by the way, the funny thing about him--

01:21:46.480 | - And one of the best Googlers in the world.

01:21:48.480 | - Best Googlers.

01:21:49.560 | The funny thing about Jamie,

01:21:51.680 | this is, okay, you might not like this,

01:21:53.760 | but what I like,

01:21:56.640 | I'm constantly exceptionally self-critical

01:21:59.640 | to a point of self-hating sometimes.

01:22:02.960 | I deeply appreciate every single moment I'm alive,

01:22:05.960 | but everything I've ever done, I feel like is shit.

01:22:09.040 | And when I talk to Jamie about everything he's done,

01:22:12.200 | he's just in every way he carries himself,

01:22:15.320 | he's so self-critical.

01:22:16.560 | He's so worried that it's wrong, it's bad,

01:22:20.100 | that anxious energy, I love it.

01:22:22.360 | 'Cause that's how you lead to growth and progress.

01:22:26.240 | You might, a therapist might say,

01:22:29.040 | that's probably not good for your well-being.

01:22:31.800 | Fuck it.

01:22:32.640 | What's good for your well-being is to create awesome things.

01:22:37.720 | That's ultimately what leads to happiness,

01:22:39.920 | is to create the best thing you can in your life.

01:22:43.240 | And so when I see that in somebody like Jamie

01:22:46.120 | or anybody I talk to, when you're really self-critical,

01:22:49.120 | that's a good sign to me.

01:22:50.480 | Is that ridiculous? (laughs)

01:22:52.320 | - It's not ridiculous at all.

01:22:53.400 | And it goes back,

01:22:55.360 | the way you were phrasing these questions

01:22:57.160 | about what makes a good person and what makes a good leader,

01:23:00.160 | the way you phrased them kind of eliminated

01:23:05.180 | the normal answer that I give.

01:23:08.020 | The normal answer that I give,

01:23:09.640 | you ask me what makes a good leader,

01:23:10.760 | what makes a good person, is being humble.

01:23:14.860 | So when you're going to hire someone for your startup

01:23:20.240 | or whatever company you're creating,

01:23:22.160 | that is a key characteristic to look for,

01:23:24.560 | is someone that has the humility, like young Jamie,

01:23:27.920 | to say, "Yeah, I could have done this better,

01:23:31.000 | "and here's what I can improve,

01:23:32.120 | "and here's what I need to work on."

01:23:34.040 | When you have somebody that thinks they know everything,

01:23:36.560 | out of the gate, you're already got someone

01:23:40.440 | that's going to be hard to deal with.

01:23:41.360 | They're going to be hard to coach.

01:23:42.260 | They're going to be hard to mentor.

01:23:44.080 | When you have somebody that's truly humble,

01:23:45.640 | you barely, again, it's minimum force required.

01:23:48.000 | Because when you say to Jamie after a show,

01:23:51.120 | "How do you think that went?"

01:23:52.200 | He says, "Well, I did this wrong,

01:23:53.700 | "and I didn't have this set up in time."

01:23:55.160 | And you don't barely have to do anything,

01:23:57.360 | because he's got the humility.

01:23:59.040 | If you've got someone that's a big ego,

01:24:00.240 | and you say, "Hey, how did that show go?"

01:24:02.920 | He goes, "It went awesome on my end."

01:24:05.560 | Now guess what you have to do?

01:24:06.640 | Now you have to start applying force as a leader,

01:24:09.160 | which is expending leadership capital,

01:24:10.740 | which we don't want to do,

01:24:11.840 | because we always try and conserve our leadership capital

01:24:13.960 | as much as we possibly can.

01:24:15.280 | And when we have to expend it just to get Jamie

01:24:18.780 | to make some improvements, that's bad.

01:24:22.200 | So when you go looking for people,

01:24:24.040 | look for people that are humble.

01:24:24.960 | Now, does this mean you look for people

01:24:26.280 | that don't have any confidence?

01:24:27.420 | No, that's not what I'm saying.

01:24:28.560 | There's a balance to all these things.

01:24:29.840 | That's the dichotomy of leadership.

01:24:31.680 | But people tend towards, and look,

01:24:35.140 | I work with a lot of military troops in the past.

01:24:38.680 | Now I work with companies.

01:24:40.160 | The reason I talk about humility all the time

01:24:42.000 | is because for someone to get into a leadership position

01:24:47.000 | in the military, they have to have confidence.

01:24:50.060 | So the tendency is that their confidence

01:24:52.780 | is going to outweigh their humility at some point.

01:24:56.380 | Same thing with civilian companies.

01:24:58.820 | If you get to a point of leadership inside of a company,

01:25:02.340 | you have to have confidence to get there.

01:25:04.060 | You don't get to a position of leadership

01:25:06.020 | inside of a company lacking confidence.

01:25:08.660 | So the tendency is for confidence

01:25:11.500 | to grow a little bit too much.

01:25:15.020 | And we have to put that confidence into check.

01:25:17.980 | We have to put that ego into check.

01:25:19.420 | Really good leaders, they're confident, but they're humble.

01:25:22.580 | That's the balance of the dichotomy.

01:25:24.380 | - Hear that, Jamie?

01:25:26.460 | Don't get cocky.

01:25:27.300 | On occasion, rarely you talk about discipline.

01:25:32.820 | What does a disciplined life look like?

01:25:35.580 | - Doing what you're supposed to do.

01:25:37.380 | - What if I want to lay on the couch

01:25:42.420 | and eat Cheetos and watch soap operas?

01:25:45.460 | That's not, that doesn't feel like discipline.

01:25:49.260 | Do you think you're supposed to do that?

01:25:51.300 | - Well, you could argue from a sort of

01:25:58.060 | meaning of life perspective that perhaps

01:26:00.300 | happiness is the most important,

01:26:01.820 | and if it makes me happy, perhaps that's,

01:26:05.260 | if it's fulfilling, of course eating Cheetos

01:26:09.700 | and watching soap operas is fulfilling for nobody whatsoever.

01:26:13.400 | - Next question.

01:26:14.380 | - But there's something about discipline

01:26:16.700 | that's more than that, which is,

01:26:19.340 | like the rigor of habit, right?

01:26:23.100 | You wake up early in the morning all the time.

01:26:28.100 | What is it, Jordan Peterson talks about make your bed,

01:26:33.060 | one place where you probably agree with Jordan.

01:26:35.780 | - People ask me if I make my bed, I don't.

01:26:37.880 | - Oh, there you go, there's a disagreement

01:26:40.660 | with Jordan Peterson. - Yeah, there we go.

01:26:42.940 | You know, when I was younger, before I was married,

01:26:46.500 | I didn't make my bed because I had one sleeping bag on it,

01:26:51.460 | and I would get out of the sleeping bag,

01:26:53.180 | there was nothing to make.

01:26:55.260 | Now I'm married and I can't make my bed

01:26:58.380 | 'cause my wife's in my bed, so I don't make my bed.

01:27:00.940 | - Okay, so what in your life, maybe we can talk about

01:27:06.980 | the one that's most publicly facing,

01:27:09.260 | which is you wake up at four o'clock,

01:27:12.120 | or around four o'clock in the morning,

01:27:14.420 | you post on social media a picture of your watch

01:27:19.420 | it being early just to remind people

01:27:23.500 | that you are man of your word.

01:27:28.340 | What's that about, what's the philosophy of the four o'clock?

01:27:32.300 | What role does that play in a disciplined life for you?

01:27:35.520 | - Okay, from that perspective, what role it plays

01:27:38.460 | is getting a jump on the day.

01:27:40.960 | And when you wake up early and you get a jump on the day

01:27:44.720 | and you've got your workout done

01:27:45.980 | and you've got a little bit of work done,

01:27:49.420 | by the time normal people are getting up, that's a win.

01:27:54.420 | That's a psychological win,

01:27:56.160 | and it's not just a psychological win, it's an actual win.

01:27:58.760 | It's an actual win.

01:28:00.480 | So that feels great.

01:28:02.260 | It doesn't feel great maybe when your alarm clock goes off,

01:28:04.680 | but by eight o'clock in the morning

01:28:07.200 | and you've already accomplished some of the major tasks

01:28:10.800 | that you have, some of the most painful tasks

01:28:13.080 | that you have for the day, you're off to a great start

01:28:16.080 | and it's gonna feel great.

01:28:17.400 | - Let's break this down then.

01:28:22.000 | What does then the rest of the day look like?

01:28:24.160 | What is the perfect, productive, disciplined day

01:28:29.160 | in the life of Jocko Willink look like?

01:28:32.380 | - Wake up, workout.

01:28:36.120 | - Wake up when?

01:28:37.600 | - Four, 4.30.

01:28:39.000 | - Workout when?

01:28:40.740 | - Five, five to six or seven.

01:28:44.600 | - No eating.

01:28:45.760 | - No.

01:28:46.600 | - And then what does the workout look like?

01:28:48.640 | - Depends on the day.

01:28:49.740 | - What's the perfect?

01:28:52.060 | We're talking about body weight, lifting, cardio,

01:28:55.960 | heavy bag, jiu-jitsu.

01:29:00.760 | - Okay, yeah, when I say workout, I mean no jiu-jitsu.

01:29:05.180 | So jiu-jitsu comes later in the day.

01:29:07.920 | - So this is just you alone?

01:29:10.640 | - This is me alone working out, yep.

01:29:12.680 | And I'm gonna be doing a wide variety of things.

01:29:15.540 | - This is the thing that has the pictures of the aftermath

01:29:19.960 | with some sweat at the end.

01:29:22.740 | So the goal is to do whatever the hell results in some sweat

01:29:25.960 | and that takes an hour.

01:29:27.540 | - Sometimes it takes 12 minutes,

01:29:29.260 | sometimes it takes three hours

01:29:31.340 | depending on what kind of mood I'm in.

01:29:35.520 | - You got some demons to work through

01:29:38.100 | or is this just work?

01:29:40.320 | So you got the David Goggins who clearly has demons

01:29:47.080 | screaming inside of his head

01:29:48.720 | that he's trying to work through.

01:29:50.340 | Are you just getting the work done out of the discipline?

01:29:53.140 | I think Joe is a little bit with David Goggins

01:29:57.120 | is like there's some ego, there's some bullshit

01:29:59.980 | that you're trying to get out through some of the exercise.

01:30:02.380 | That's a good way to kind of humble you

01:30:03.780 | is just doing that exercise.

01:30:05.440 | - Well, exercise is certainly humbling.

01:30:08.080 | I mean, but it's physical conditioning, right?

01:30:12.100 | It's preparing your body so that you can handle

01:30:15.700 | whatever it is you're gonna do.

01:30:17.480 | - Perfect.

01:30:18.320 | What do you do after?

01:30:21.420 | Let's talk about food.

01:30:23.380 | - Hopefully surf if the waves are good.

01:30:26.380 | - Surf for?

01:30:27.820 | - How good are the waves?

01:30:30.500 | - Let's say they're good.

01:30:31.660 | This is a perfect day.

01:30:32.660 | It's a perfect, perfect waves.

01:30:34.900 | Why do you surf?

01:30:37.240 | - It's fun.

01:30:38.260 | - Okay, this is fun.

01:30:39.560 | Okay, man and nature,

01:30:42.780 | which is like what surfing is the ultimate

01:30:44.620 | is the infinite power of the ocean

01:30:47.420 | versus a little silly looking man on a board.

01:30:53.700 | - You could say it's the infinite power of the ocean

01:30:56.180 | versus a silly looking man on a board

01:30:58.060 | or you could say it's fun.

01:30:59.360 | - 'Cause it's Russian and romance.

01:31:02.660 | This is for fun in the morning, beautiful.

01:31:05.340 | And this is you're still haven't eaten.

01:31:07.020 | - No.

01:31:07.860 | - Okay, so when do you eat?

01:31:09.420 | - I'll usually start grazing around 11 o'clock.

01:31:14.120 | - And grazing, what's the diet?

01:31:16.900 | Is there a perfect diet or do you graze?

01:31:19.740 | - I'll eat some nuts, something like that.

01:31:23.580 | I usually start grazing.

01:31:24.480 | Maybe I'll have a little piece of meat

01:31:26.480 | or something like that.

01:31:27.960 | - Does work enter any of this?

01:31:29.540 | I'm sure you have a lot of people that want your attention.

01:31:32.120 | - Yeah, yeah, no, work is about to happen.

01:31:36.280 | 'Cause even if I woke up at four,

01:31:39.300 | worked out from five to six, surf from six to eight,

01:31:42.560 | now I'm starting to work.

01:31:45.240 | Writing, recording, reading, talking to clients.

01:31:50.240 | - Is there parts of the day where you try to find moments

01:31:56.840 | to think deeply, to read deeply, to sort of really focus?

01:32:01.480 | 'Cause this world is full of distractions, right?

01:32:04.880 | Even talking to, like even work stuff,

01:32:07.640 | the emails and all those kinds of things,

01:32:09.320 | they can scatter your mind.

01:32:12.240 | Is there times you seek to have that focus?

01:32:14.760 | - Well, I read a lot of books.

01:32:17.440 | And so usually when I read,

01:32:18.960 | I'll be reading for a chunk of time,

01:32:20.840 | maybe an hour at a time, maybe a little bit longer.

01:32:24.180 | And I might do that twice a day.

01:32:26.580 | So I don't know if that counts as what you're describing.

01:32:30.760 | But then same thing with writing,

01:32:32.680 | when I'm writing something.

01:32:34.320 | I mean, I just, that's what I do.

01:32:36.520 | I write usually, usually write for about an hour.

01:32:39.120 | I can get about a thousand words an hour out of me.

01:32:41.960 | So that's sort of what I do.

01:32:44.780 | - What does the rest of the day look like?

01:32:48.320 | Just a lot of work, but one is the jujitsu.

01:32:50.520 | I want to find out about the jujitsu.

01:32:52.160 | - So round four, 30 or five o'clock at night.

01:32:56.320 | - You train. - Yep.

01:32:57.320 | - And how hard?

01:33:01.720 | You still, how are you doing body-wise?

01:33:04.560 | Are you still, does the old man still got it or?

01:33:08.900 | - Are you talking to me?

01:33:11.240 | - It'd be good for viewership and ratings

01:33:16.880 | if I die before the end of the podcast, so.

01:33:19.760 | - I still train with the same guys and I'll train, you know.

01:33:24.480 | So I've been very lucky when it comes to getting injured

01:33:27.440 | and stuff like that.

01:33:28.280 | So I've had some injuries, but they're healed.

01:33:31.280 | And so, yeah, I train.

01:33:32.600 | - And food-wise, you mentioned grazing

01:33:36.520 | of some nuts, a very light kind of things.

01:33:39.280 | Is there a main meal here?

01:33:40.560 | - Yeah, at night. - At night.

01:33:42.880 | High in protein or is it anything?

01:33:46.680 | - Yeah, I'll have like a steak and salad.

01:33:48.440 | I'll usually have, for dessert,

01:33:51.800 | I have like a protein shake, so.

01:33:54.760 | - Is there a thing where at the end of the day,

01:33:58.720 | you have like a samurai sword and you meditate on death

01:34:03.720 | and all those kinds of, is there some weird ritual

01:34:08.880 | you partake in?

01:34:09.800 | - No. - Or you just go to bed?

01:34:11.000 | - When I get done with the end of the day,

01:34:12.480 | I might read a little bit more.

01:34:14.040 | - Read more. - Yeah, because reading--

01:34:15.960 | - So read early on and read later.

01:34:17.440 | - Reading makes me tired, usually.

01:34:20.560 | So I'll read a little bit more.

01:34:22.240 | - Is there a key to you that you can speak to

01:34:25.440 | that makes for a productive day?

01:34:28.560 | Just the way you approach it mentally?

01:34:30.760 | - Yeah, write down what you're supposed to do,

01:34:32.520 | wake up early and start doing it.

01:34:34.920 | - And then get it done.

01:34:36.640 | - Yeah, I know it's a miraculous trick.

01:34:40.360 | - Can I ask you about jiu-jitsu?

01:34:42.320 | - By all means.

01:34:44.360 | - What have you learned from being a practitioner?

01:34:47.840 | You're a black belt.

01:34:49.720 | What have you learned from this journey

01:34:51.880 | of being a martial artist?

01:34:58.120 | - Jiu-jitsu for me was the connective tissue

01:35:02.280 | that started to join my mind together

01:35:05.740 | with all the different aspects of my life.

01:35:08.120 | And so jiu-jitsu for me was really important,

01:35:12.220 | and I don't think I would be doing anything

01:35:13.960 | that I'm doing right now if it wasn't for jiu-jitsu.

01:35:16.480 | So there's various aspects of my life

01:35:19.860 | that were in existence,

01:35:21.980 | but I didn't understand how they were connected

01:35:24.200 | until I started training jiu-jitsu.

01:35:26.000 | The primary things are interacting with other human beings

01:35:30.320 | and combat tactics and strategy and jiu-jitsu,

01:35:35.320 | and all those things are connected.

01:35:37.640 | They all follow the same guiding principles,

01:35:40.040 | and I wouldn't have recognized those guiding principles

01:35:43.040 | if I didn't do jiu-jitsu.

01:35:44.620 | - Can you elaborate?

01:35:47.400 | 'Cause you've trained for many, many years.

01:35:49.800 | Is it the hardship?

01:35:53.000 | Is it the humbling nature of just being tapped all over?

01:35:55.960 | Non-stop?

01:35:57.160 | I actually don't know how many times.

01:36:00.200 | - I've tapped more times than you.

01:36:02.120 | - Okay, so good.

01:36:03.600 | Is it just the hardship of physical training,

01:36:06.680 | like the honesty of the mat in the sense that

01:36:09.700 | you know what works and what doesn't work?

01:36:11.600 | Which aspects were the most impactful for you?

01:36:15.520 | - All aspects.

01:36:16.520 | So yes, from a humility perspective,

01:36:18.700 | when you realize, when you think you know what you're doing,

01:36:22.320 | when you think you have certain skills,

01:36:24.560 | and you realize that there's always somebody better than you

01:36:26.400 | and you realize that,

01:36:27.240 | hey, maybe I don't have all the answers all the time,

01:36:29.800 | and you bring that to a leadership perspective,

01:36:32.440 | and you walk into your platoon and you realize that

01:36:34.660 | maybe you don't have all the answers all the time,

01:36:36.360 | and maybe you should listen to what other people have to say,

01:36:38.840 | you bring that to a combat situation,

01:36:41.140 | and you realize that you think,

01:36:42.880 | if you sit there and think that you're smarter

01:36:44.560 | than the enemy, you're going to be complacent,

01:36:47.240 | you're going to make mistakes.

01:36:48.880 | So there's one aspect, out of the gate,

01:36:52.520 | as far as, you know, if I'm going to try and get your arm,

01:36:57.520 | do I attack your arm?

01:37:00.140 | - Maybe not directly, unless I'm a white belt.

01:37:04.920 | - Exactly.

01:37:05.760 | What do I do?

01:37:06.580 | I attack your neck, and when you reach up to defend your neck

01:37:09.000 | that's when I get your arm.

01:37:10.560 | Well, if I'm out on the battlefield

01:37:12.600 | and there's an enemy position,

01:37:14.240 | should I attack frontal assault into that position?

01:37:17.320 | - No.

01:37:19.640 | - No, I shouldn't.

01:37:20.460 | I should put down some covering fire,

01:37:21.520 | and I should maneuver around to the flank.

01:37:23.200 | It's the same thing.

01:37:24.440 | If I'm dealing with you and you're my boss,

01:37:27.100 | and you've got a giant ego,

01:37:28.840 | and you've come up with a plan,

01:37:29.880 | and I don't like your plan,

01:37:30.760 | should I walk up to you and say,

01:37:32.000 | hey Lex, your plan isn't good?

01:37:34.200 | - No.

01:37:35.040 | - Or should I say, hey Lex,

01:37:36.840 | can I ask you some questions

01:37:38.000 | about how you want us to execute this?

01:37:39.680 | 'Cause I want to make sure I understand your vision.

01:37:42.280 | So all these things are connected.

01:37:46.320 | - Yes.

01:37:47.160 | - And I wouldn't have realized that,

01:37:48.000 | and we could sit here and do this forever.

01:37:50.200 | We could, I could tell you these comparisons forever.

01:37:52.840 | But this, all this connective tissue

01:37:57.320 | bringing all these things together,

01:37:59.040 | I wouldn't have seen it without,

01:38:00.360 | I don't think I would have seen it without jujitsu.

01:38:03.400 | So jujitsu to me had a incredible life impact on me.

01:38:08.400 | Not, look, the physical part, yes, absolutely.

01:38:13.720 | Does it keep you humble when you know

01:38:17.560 | that there's 145 pound individual

01:38:21.280 | that can tap you out when you're 220 pound,

01:38:24.680 | 25 year old guy,

01:38:27.240 | and there's 135 or 140 pound,

01:38:29.960 | 46 year old guy that can make you tap out?

01:38:34.920 | That's humbling.

01:38:36.480 | And what do you do with that?

01:38:38.240 | Do you run away from it,

01:38:39.440 | or do you continue to pursue it?

01:38:41.440 | Same thing with life, same thing with anything.

01:38:44.000 | So jujitsu is an incredibly powerful,

01:38:47.160 | not just physical aspect,

01:38:49.480 | but it's a way to understand, it's a way of thinking.

01:38:52.760 | - You've also competed.

01:38:56.080 | Is there something you can speak

01:38:57.160 | to the value of competition?

01:38:58.520 | Obviously you've been through combat,

01:39:02.440 | actual military combat is many, many,

01:39:05.880 | many orders of magnitude,

01:39:07.360 | more high stakes than competition

01:39:11.800 | in a silly sport like jujitsu.

01:39:14.040 | Nevertheless, it still has some of the echoes

01:39:18.880 | of the same challenges.

01:39:20.960 | Is there something you can speak

01:39:21.960 | to the value of competition for you?

01:39:24.520 | - Yep, competition will reveal weaknesses in your game

01:39:27.760 | that you can then go back and train to rectify.

01:39:30.920 | - So that's very useful to sort of,

01:39:35.360 | yeah, as a testing ground.

01:39:36.920 | Of course, training can be that testing ground as well,

01:39:39.440 | or that feedback.

01:39:42.840 | - Yeah, but as you and I both know,

01:39:44.440 | if you and I train together all the time,

01:39:46.720 | you'll know my game, I'll know your game.

01:39:48.280 | And even if we have five other people,

01:39:49.600 | we all kind of understand each other's games.

01:39:51.960 | And you're not doing something to me that I don't expect.

01:39:54.640 | So when I go and compete,

01:39:56.280 | this random person has a game that I've never seen before.

01:40:00.800 | And I may or may not know how to deal with that game.

01:40:03.660 | If I know how to deal with it, great.

01:40:05.360 | I get the victory, maybe I don't learn as much.

01:40:08.120 | If I don't know how to deal with their game,

01:40:09.920 | I get the loss and I get the win of learning

01:40:14.680 | what some weakness in my game is.

01:40:16.320 | - So you mentioned offline that you're friends

01:40:20.520 | and you work with Dean Lister.

01:40:22.200 | Dean Lister is one of the people that inspired John Donaher,

01:40:26.760 | who I've very much been,

01:40:28.940 | I've gotten a chance to talk to quite a bit recently.

01:40:33.440 | I don't know what you think about this.

01:40:36.480 | This is not a therapy session, but.

01:40:39.320 | - Looks like it's turning into one.

01:40:41.320 | - It's turning into one.

01:40:42.640 | He's a fascinating person, John Donaher,

01:40:48.440 | in terms of creating almost a science of jiu-jitsu

01:40:53.440 | to a level that I haven't seen before,

01:40:56.280 | which is systems thinking about,

01:40:59.520 | like you can think about military combat

01:41:01.240 | as tactics in a particular situation,

01:41:04.440 | but then you zoom out and you want to create

01:41:06.560 | entire systems of tactics in all situations.

01:41:10.200 | He's very, kind of wants to keep zooming out

01:41:12.760 | and creating giant systems,

01:41:14.440 | and which I appreciate that,

01:41:17.640 | even though the task is probably impossible

01:41:20.960 | to do completely, but there is something

01:41:26.440 | that's in terms of competition that

01:41:28.160 | he kindled a fire in me that I want to get back out there.

01:41:36.120 | He has a particular thing that did it,

01:41:38.500 | which is very different from my personal journey in jiu-jitsu

01:41:43.080 | which was to a degree that people I worked with

01:41:48.940 | cared about competition, it was always about winning

01:41:52.160 | and or doing well, all those kinds of things.

01:41:58.040 | For John, it's about winning.

01:42:01.840 | That like winning is not even a thing that's important.

01:42:05.760 | What's most important is winning by submission

01:42:08.400 | or dominance, right?

01:42:12.960 | And not just the end, it's the entire time competing

01:42:18.720 | such that the only thing that matters

01:42:21.440 | is that kind of victory.

01:42:22.800 | And that's a very different level of competition

01:42:25.120 | that's actually liberating in a certain kind of sense.

01:42:28.260 | I remember so much of my competition

01:42:31.760 | was about kind of fear of not taking risks.

01:42:35.680 | You get up on points or you hold a strong position,

01:42:39.400 | you kind of advance and you get more points,

01:42:41.500 | maybe you chase the submission,

01:42:43.080 | but there's always a fear of risk.

01:42:45.520 | And for him, you embrace the risk.

01:42:48.960 | You should not be competing out of fear.

01:42:51.540 | Live and die by the sword versus stay in safety.

01:42:56.800 | I don't know if there's something to be said here.

01:42:58.920 | - Well, I mean, this is not,

01:43:01.280 | you said it's novel to you, it's not novel to me.

01:43:03.280 | The entire, my entire journey on jiu-jitsu,

01:43:06.360 | in jiu-jitsu was only about submission.

01:43:08.880 | And as you mentioned, Dean Lister is my coach

01:43:13.720 | and my main training partner for 20 something years.

01:43:16.960 | And if you ever watch Dean train or fight,

01:43:20.520 | that's what he's trying to do is submit as everyone.

01:43:23.760 | That's what he's always done.

01:43:25.840 | That's what he always will do.

01:43:27.360 | He has the highest, I think he has,

01:43:30.600 | in fact, I know he has the highest submission victories

01:43:34.800 | in ADCC, that's what he does.

01:43:37.500 | So this is, in fact, as jiu-jitsu got more popular

01:43:42.500 | and we started seeing people competing to win by points,

01:43:47.960 | that was what was novel to me in the beginning.

01:43:50.840 | Now it's the standard.

01:43:52.380 | So it's not novel to me.

01:43:54.000 | I love the fact that John Donahuer

01:43:57.620 | and all of his troops go out

01:43:59.640 | and they try and submit people.

01:44:01.000 | I think it's awesome.

01:44:02.000 | And I think that's what jiu-jitsu is.

01:44:04.040 | - All right, let's ask for some advice for white belts.

01:44:06.880 | There's a lot of white belts who listen to this.

01:44:09.200 | What advice would you give,

01:44:10.760 | you've been in jiu-jitsu for many years,

01:44:12.620 | in terms of a successful journey through jiu-jitsu,

01:44:17.620 | what advice would you give them, people just starting out?

01:44:20.720 | - Just keep training, keep your ego in check.

01:44:22.800 | Don't freak out, try and use the techniques that you learn.

01:44:25.320 | And all this stuff, I'm like saying it,

01:44:27.080 | notice how I'm saying it.

01:44:28.480 | Hey, tap out, keep your ego in check.

01:44:31.440 | And everyone, but the thing is, everyone says this all the time

01:44:33.720 | and white belts still start off by going completely nuts

01:44:36.440 | for at least three to six months of,

01:44:39.400 | I'm not going to let this guy tap me out

01:44:41.240 | and I'm going to tap this guy out,

01:44:43.520 | not by using technique, but by just using strength.

01:44:46.200 | And it's just inhibiting your learning.

01:44:49.500 | So as much as you can,

01:44:50.720 | I know you got to get it out of your system.

01:44:52.400 | I know you don't want to tap

01:44:53.400 | and I know you want to tap somebody,

01:44:55.220 | but as soon as you get that off your chest,

01:45:00.220 | then try and relax and try and learn the techniques.

01:45:03.660 | - It's perhaps counterintuitive, it never was to me,

01:45:07.180 | but it's counterintuitive that to start on the journey

01:45:11.420 | of really sort of mastering jiu-jitsu or whatever,

01:45:13.940 | or improving, is you have to relax.

01:45:16.600 | And that seems to be a very counterintuitive lesson.

01:45:19.540 | I learned that early on with,

01:45:21.120 | that was thanks to the Russian system.

01:45:24.340 | I played piano and music,

01:45:26.060 | but basically actually, this is true for basically any sport

01:45:29.780 | that includes the human body,

01:45:31.180 | is like relaxing is the way you start learning stuff.

01:45:34.760 | You have to learn, you have to literally,

01:45:36.860 | and most people don't seem to understand this,

01:45:38.620 | is like you have to learn what it means

01:45:41.380 | for the human body to relax.

01:45:43.240 | Like, I guess you have to have enough knowledge

01:45:47.040 | of all the muscles involved

01:45:48.600 | to know what it means to relax those muscles.

01:45:50.580 | So for piano, you have to understand

01:45:52.700 | what it means to relax your wrists and your fingers

01:45:55.700 | in order to learn how to move them.

01:45:58.860 | Like, if there's tenseness in the fingers,

01:46:01.420 | you're not going to, like,

01:46:03.580 | you have to learn how to try hard while relaxed.

01:46:08.140 | The, I guess the beginner,

01:46:10.120 | if you don't internalize this lesson,

01:46:13.220 | will try hard by tensing up hard,

01:46:17.180 | and like trying hard, tensing up more,

01:46:19.740 | as opposed to relaxing more.

01:46:21.420 | And that lesson cannot be conveyed through words, I guess.

01:46:25.600 | I've had the great fortune of having dictatorial teachers,

01:46:30.140 | as they do in Russia, for piano and so on,

01:46:33.080 | where you get, like, hit if you don't learn to relax,

01:46:36.740 | which is a counterintuitive notion, but it works.

01:46:39.860 | - Yeah, this brings me to one of my favorite pieces

01:46:42.300 | of coaching advice that I will tell white belts

01:46:44.400 | while they're struggling on the mat.

01:46:46.180 | I'll tell them to relax harder.

01:46:48.360 | (both laugh)

01:46:49.900 | - Okay.

01:46:51.580 | - That's beautiful.

01:46:54.500 | For somebody who studied war, who participated in war,

01:46:59.420 | what do you think is the best martial arts for,

01:47:03.760 | let's call it self-defense,

01:47:06.480 | for hand-to-hand combat outside the constraints of sport?

01:47:12.900 | - So, it's not one answer.

01:47:15.480 | The answer to me is jujitsu, boxing, wrestling,

01:47:21.480 | Muay Thai, judo, sambo, and on down the list.

01:47:26.480 | I definitely start with jujitsu.

01:47:29.760 | The reason I start with jujitsu is

01:47:31.280 | because in a self-defense situation,

01:47:33.280 | if you are a big monster human and you wanna fight me

01:47:38.840 | and you square off with me, guess what I'm gonna do?

01:47:43.400 | Run away.

01:47:44.240 | 'Cause I don't wanna get involved.

01:47:47.200 | Even if I see skinny little Lex out on the street

01:47:52.040 | and you start yelling at me and saying you wanna fight me,

01:47:54.000 | I don't wanna fight you.

01:47:55.440 | It doesn't matter.

01:47:56.600 | I don't care if I can beat you or not.

01:47:58.000 | What if you stab me?

01:47:59.080 | What if you sue me after I get done

01:48:00.720 | throwing you onto the concrete?

01:48:02.480 | There's a million bad things that can happen

01:48:04.440 | and almost nothing good.

01:48:05.640 | So, for self-defense, my first self-defense

01:48:10.320 | is my feet to get away from you.

01:48:11.960 | And if you square off to punch me, I can run away from you.

01:48:16.400 | If you square off to kick me, I can run away from you.

01:48:19.200 | If you push me, I can run away from you.

01:48:21.880 | So, great.

01:48:23.280 | I don't need to know how to box to run away from you.

01:48:25.720 | Where this all changes is when you grab me.

01:48:29.180 | And now I don't have the option to run away anymore.

01:48:33.560 | Now I actually have to know how to get away from your grip.

01:48:38.360 | And that's where jujitsu comes into play.

01:48:41.080 | So, especially if you get me on the ground,

01:48:43.240 | if you grab me and get me on the ground.

01:48:46.200 | Now I need to know how to get you off of me

01:48:49.060 | and get up and get away from you so I can run away.

01:48:51.560 | So, that's why I say start with jujitsu.

01:48:55.120 | And from there, boxing, wrestling, judo, sambo, muay thai.

01:49:00.120 | - Yeah, in the standing position,

01:49:05.280 | I mean, I'm a judo person as well.

01:49:07.160 | And the judo is very limited in their understanding

01:49:10.600 | of the full grappling spectrum,

01:49:13.280 | even though they do all the things on the ground as well.

01:49:16.120 | But it's so focused on the feet.

01:49:19.180 | But nevertheless, it's important to understand

01:49:21.680 | the thing that judo has as a sport,

01:49:27.200 | and it's good to practice, that jujitsu doesn't,

01:49:30.720 | is not just the skill of grappling on the feet,

01:49:35.720 | but the skill of explosive aggression.

01:49:39.980 | That sometimes jujitsu is more about,

01:49:43.840 | in terms of tactics, is more about patience.

01:49:46.600 | And I mean, it depends how you practice it,

01:49:48.000 | but because so much is about control and technique,

01:49:53.000 | that sometimes you don't get to practice aggression,

01:49:57.160 | explosive aggression.

01:49:58.320 | And judo is so much about aggression implemented

01:50:02.800 | in such a way that the demonstration of power is effortless.

01:50:07.160 | Right, that's the beauty of jujitsu.

01:50:09.040 | - Yeah, and same thing with wrestling.

01:50:10.120 | Wrestling also has a high level of intensity

01:50:12.480 | and aggression as well.

01:50:13.320 | - Yes, yeah.

01:50:14.160 | - So that's where I agree.

01:50:15.560 | Judo and wrestling, absolutely.

01:50:19.120 | Awesome, get some.

01:50:20.840 | And striking, boxing, Muay Thai.

01:50:23.800 | You should train all these things.

01:50:27.760 | - Are there books and movies in your life,

01:50:31.080 | long ago or recently, that had a big impact on you?

01:50:33.600 | - Yeah, the main one is "About Face,"

01:50:37.560 | which is sitting right here.

01:50:39.180 | There you go.

01:50:41.280 | This is written by Colonel David Hackworth.

01:50:43.240 | It's the book that really had a massive impact on me

01:50:48.080 | from a leadership perspective.

01:50:50.020 | And I ended up, I talked about it enough

01:50:52.640 | that it started kind of coming back

01:50:54.240 | and started selling well.

01:50:55.320 | And they contacted me and I wrote a forward for it.

01:50:58.200 | So that book had a huge impact on me.

01:51:00.480 | And I still, when I read it,

01:51:04.200 | I still get lessons out of it just about every time.

01:51:07.240 | - This is the Vietnam War.

01:51:09.160 | - And Korea.

01:51:10.120 | - And Korea.

01:51:11.680 | - And he got in towards the end of,

01:51:14.200 | right at the end of World War II.

01:51:15.880 | So he was kind of raised by the soldiers

01:51:18.780 | that fought in World War II.

01:51:20.640 | And then he went to Korea and then he went to Vietnam.

01:51:23.920 | - An exceptional warrior, a soldier's soldier.

01:51:27.160 | If you can give a little inkling,

01:51:28.920 | what made him a soldier's soldier?

01:51:31.720 | - So he died in 2005.

01:51:39.220 | So I never got to meet him.

01:51:40.560 | And I had a guy on my podcast who worked for him in Vietnam,

01:51:46.440 | a guy named General James Mukayama.

01:51:51.680 | And luckily his son had reached out to me and said,

01:51:55.980 | "I think you're talking about my dad."

01:51:59.160 | 'Cause I read some passage in there

01:52:00.720 | that Jim Mukayama was young captain Jim Mukayama,

01:52:05.000 | company commander in Vietnam.

01:52:06.520 | He said, "I think you're talking about my dad.

01:52:09.820 | Would you want to talk to him?"

01:52:11.100 | And I said, "Absolutely."

01:52:12.820 | Well, here's the thing that I didn't really understand.

01:52:14.260 | And you read one quote,

01:52:15.260 | but there's all these quotes in that book

01:52:17.500 | that talk about how great Hackworth was

01:52:19.820 | and what an incredible leader he was

01:52:22.340 | and how he was the best combat leader

01:52:23.980 | anyone had ever seen.

01:52:24.900 | And all these just really complimentary things

01:52:27.100 | that are said by a bunch of different people.

01:52:29.500 | And when you read the book,

01:52:31.260 | you're reading this guy's account of what he went through.

01:52:36.140 | But I never really knew if that was all true

01:52:40.280 | or did he just cherry pick his friends quotes about him

01:52:44.240 | and cherry pick the stories that he wanted to tell.

01:52:47.360 | And so it was very interesting for me

01:52:50.340 | when I met Mukayama, General Mukayama,

01:52:52.960 | he became a general eventually.

01:52:54.720 | When I met him and we were talking about his life

01:52:58.120 | and I was very curious and I was a little bit nervous

01:52:59.880 | going into this interview because I was thinking

01:53:01.800 | maybe my hero, my mentor,

01:53:04.320 | this guy that I've never met before,

01:53:05.960 | maybe he's just an arrogant jerk

01:53:07.800 | that talked himself up in this book.

01:53:11.020 | So I'm sitting down with General Mukayama

01:53:15.220 | and I finally got to the part where he's meeting Hackworth

01:53:18.980 | for the first time.

01:53:20.740 | And I said, "Did you know who Hackworth was

01:53:25.740 | when he showed up?"

01:53:27.780 | So he was Mukayama, Muk, they call him Muk.

01:53:30.580 | Muk was the, like the adjutant to the general.

01:53:36.340 | That was going to, that Hackworth was gonna be working for.

01:53:39.740 | So when Hackworth comes into the office,

01:53:41.300 | the first person he meets is this guy,

01:53:43.020 | this guy, Captain Mukayama.

01:53:44.520 | And so Hackworth walks in and I said,

01:53:47.540 | "When Hackworth walked in, did you know who he was?"

01:53:51.780 | And Mukayama says, "Everybody knew who he was,

01:53:55.140 | Mr. Infantry."

01:53:57.100 | And so he ended up explaining that everything

01:54:00.540 | that is written in there about Hackworth,

01:54:03.240 | they just loved him, they adored him.

01:54:05.080 | Up the chain of command,

01:54:10.220 | it turned out a little bit different.

01:54:11.620 | And the title of the book is "About Face"

01:54:13.660 | and if you're familiar with military drill,

01:54:16.540 | about face is when you turn around 180 degrees.

01:54:19.260 | And at the end of the Vietnam War,

01:54:20.960 | towards the end of the Vietnam War,

01:54:24.300 | he was so disgusted with the way

01:54:26.620 | that the war was being fought.

01:54:28.000 | He was so disgusted with the decisions

01:54:30.060 | that were being made by the leadership

01:54:32.020 | that he did an interview.

01:54:33.080 | He was the first colonel, first senior officer

01:54:36.540 | to do an interview that spoke out against the war

01:54:40.260 | that was happening.

01:54:41.100 | And this is while he's in Vietnam, by the way.

01:54:43.180 | So he got drummed out of the army

01:54:45.460 | and he was forced to retire and that was that.

01:54:49.100 | So there's an element of rebelliousness to him.

01:54:53.360 | And when you talk to me about,

01:54:56.140 | are there times when the leaders making the leadership,

01:54:59.980 | this absolute senior leadership,

01:55:02.020 | the civilian leadership is doing the wrong things?

01:55:03.880 | Yes.

01:55:04.960 | And there's times when people speak out against it.

01:55:07.920 | And there's an argument for and against that too,

01:55:09.720 | even with Hackworth.

01:55:11.140 | When you quit your job or you do something

01:55:15.460 | that gets you fired, which is what he did,

01:55:17.520 | you immediately give up all your influence

01:55:19.980 | over what's happening.

01:55:22.460 | So they get another battalion commander to take his place.

01:55:25.560 | They get another colonel to step in and take his place.

01:55:27.100 | That's what they do.

01:55:28.500 | And now he can't help anymore.

01:55:29.840 | He can't help his troops.

01:55:31.560 | But at that point in the war, he loved his men so much

01:55:36.560 | that he was sickened with the situation on the ground.

01:55:43.240 | And he spoke out about it.

01:55:45.960 | So that book had a huge impact on me.

01:55:49.680 | And like I said, I still read it all the time.

01:55:53.120 | I reread it all the time.

01:55:54.920 | And I always take lessons from it.

01:55:57.320 | - Let me ask you about love.

01:55:58.800 | This is not usually associated with Jocko,

01:56:00.580 | but what role does love in terms of friendship,

01:56:05.000 | in terms of family, play in a successful life,

01:56:08.280 | in life in general?

01:56:09.380 | - Again, this is putting other people above yourself.

01:56:13.200 | - Do you see that as love?

01:56:15.400 | That's ultimately the implementation of love.

01:56:18.280 | - I would say, yes.

01:56:19.520 | - Jocko, I've been a huge fan of yours.

01:56:23.600 | You're somebody who inspires me to get up early,

01:56:27.480 | to get shit done, to be disciplined about my life,

01:56:31.220 | and to be the best leader I can be.

01:56:33.380 | It's really truly an honor.

01:56:35.060 | And thank you for wasting all your too valuable time with me.

01:56:39.820 | I don't know what you were thinking,

01:56:40.980 | but thank you for doing it.

01:56:42.620 | - Well, thanks for having me on.

01:56:43.900 | I can guarantee I'm not as cool as you just made me sound.

01:56:47.240 | I'm just out here, like I said, trying to help people out.

01:56:51.460 | And I think you're helping a lot of people out

01:56:53.160 | with your podcast.

01:56:54.000 | So thanks for having me up here

01:56:55.100 | to share some of my experiences.

01:56:58.140 | - And hopefully I'll see you on the mat one day.

01:57:00.140 | - For sure, looking forward to it.

01:57:01.860 | Could be sooner than you think.

01:57:03.180 | (laughing)

01:57:04.100 | - That sounds like a threat.

01:57:05.380 | I love it.

01:57:06.940 | Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:57:08.460 | with Jocko Willink.

01:57:09.540 | And thank you to Linode, Indeed, Simply Save,

01:57:13.300 | and Ground News.

01:57:14.820 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

01:57:18.260 | And now, let me leave you with some words

01:57:20.460 | from Jocko Willink.

01:57:22.420 | There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

01:57:25.700 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

01:57:29.340 | (upbeat music)

01:57:31.920 | (upbeat music)

01:57:34.500 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Jocko Willink: War, Leadership, and Discipline | Lex Fridman Podcast #197

Chapters