Jocko Willink: War, Leadership, and Discipline | Lex Fridman Podcast #197
the following is a conversation with jaco willink a retired u.s navy seal co-author of extreme ownership dichotomy of leadership discipline equals freedom and many other excellent books and he's the host of jaco podcast jacob spent 20 years in the seal teams he was the commander of seal team 3's task unit bruiser that became the most highly decorated special operations unit of the iraq war this conversation was intense and to the point we agreed to talk again probably many times and what i find very interesting aside from the talk of leadership is the conversation about military tactics of specific battles in history quick mention of our sponsors linode indeed simply safe and ground news check them out in the description to support this podcast since it's the 4th of july a holiday in the united states let me say a few words about what this country my country the united states of america means to me first by way of background i was born and raised in the soviet union just long enough to get a bit of the russian soul an appreciation of soviet history music culture of wrestling and mathematics of engineering and philosophy stoicism and humor tragedies and triumphs of war and revolutions all in ways that are uniquely russian i do happen to at times mention that i'm russian this is what i mean that i got a bit of that russian soul but of course who i really am is an american this country gave me the opportunity the freedom to become and to be who i am to stand as an individual this seemingly simple freedom to be a sovereign human being in the face of all the beauty and cruelty of life is why i love this country much of life can be unfair unjust even tragic but this is the country where if i'm clever enough work hard enough and just get lucky enough i have a chance to dream big and make my dream a reality the united states welcomed me my family and millions of immigrants throughout its history so that we can make something meaningful of ourselves to love to dream to create to find joy and meaning it lets me be the weird kid i am who wears a suit talks about love and has a fascination with robots i know some people these days have an aversion to pride and love for their country i don't i love america i also love humanity i believe these two patriotism and humanism are not in conflict much like loving your family and loving your country are not in conflict they are all manifestations of the human spirit longing to strive for a better world i was born a russian but i believe i'll die an american a proud american hopefully not too soon but uh life is short i already had one hell of a fun journey so i'm ready to go when it's time this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with jocko willink is it tragic or beautiful to you that some of the closest bonds that are formed between people are through war often i think it's both both tragic and beautiful and for the obvious reasons what are the obvious reasons why is it so obvious well it's tragic because a lot of people die and it's beautiful because you form bonds with people that are very difficult to break once you've been through them what is it about the trauma of war that makes bonds difficult to break because what you realize when you're in the war is that the people that are next to you you rely on them and they're relying on you to survive and without them you will not survive and when you realize that you need to work together as a team to to live that forms a very strong bond and there's nothing like that team outside of the realm of war i don't know because i've there's a lot of things that i haven't experienced in my life but i think the pressure and the consequences of war there could be similar situations in survival scenarios in various atrocities where people need to work together in order to survive and i think you could probably get something that was similar there's a very particular nature to the kind of war that world war ii was especially for the soviet union where it didn't just influence the lives of people it created culture the music the poetry the literature it's it's in the um it's in the way people think it's in the way people see the world it's in the way they talk even still to this day and um of course i was talking about the directly relationship between two soldiers but there's something about the depth of human connection that results from those almost like uh reverberations of war like generations later you're still close to other humans you're you're there's a coldness towards other humans like in russia but once you open up its depth you seek depth of connection versus like breadth of career kind of thinking how can i make friends with this so i can move into this direction what can this person benefit me you instead you seek a depth of human connection and appreciation that that brings a lot and maybe i'm romanticizing war here but it feels like that's inextricably connected to world war ii for russians is this does that resonate at all is it so if you look at military training what they do is they take people in the military from the civilian world they bring them into the military and they put them through boot camp which is the stereotypical thing that you see on tv you're going to get yelled at you're going to get screamed out you're going to get you're gonna get put in the mud and you're gonna made to be made to do hard things together and what does that do with those civilians well it gives them a common background it gives them a common suffering that they've been through together and they form some sort of connection some sort of bond now to make that bond a little bit stronger after you get done with boot camp they send you to advanced infantry school and you suffer some more together and when you suffer more together now you're in a smaller group too because now it's infantry it's not supply people anymore or logisticians it's strictly people that are going to fight their infantrymen so they go through a school together and now they get a little bit tighter get done with that and maybe you go to an airborne division so you go to airborne school and now you all overcome this fear of jumping out of an airplane together and you celebrate surviving that then maybe you get done with that and now you go at an airborne division now you're an even tighter group because you've suffered together what comes next is special forces training or ranger training and what they do is they put you in these situations where you're going to suffer together and you're going to build these bonds because as i said earlier you have to rely on each other to survive and by the way not everyone does not everyone makes it through this training so you sort of have these memories of people that didn't make it you share that connection as well and you can keep going down this road until you go into combat with a military unit and military units that go through combat have an even tighter bond and the harder the combat that they go through the tighter the bond is going to be so i think when you talk about what the soviet union went through in world war ii there was a shared suffering to survive and so the entire nation has that common thread and that's probably the thing that you sense or feel when you refer back to the bond that resonates all the way back to world war two so in your podcast in your writing you talk about some of the most fascinating things i listen to you talk about in terms of military conflict is uh tactics and sort of the details of of combat but allow me to stick on world war two for a second there's a particular aspect to that war i don't know if you can speak to it where twice the number of civilians died in military personnel so the soviet union especially um you know my uh my grandfather was a machine gunner on uh the in um ukraine as the germans were marching towards moscow there's this main there's this important push in 1941 where they were trying to get before the winter to uh to moscow and what stalin was doing is he was basically throwing bodies at at uh to slow the attack and what that meant is everybody understood that you your job was you have this heavy machine guns it's very it's almost unreasonable to be able to be mobile any kind of way with them so you're you're throwing at the front and you're just non-stop shooting and you know 95 plus percent of people are just dead other soldiers are just dead and then you just go back back and you're trying to protect as many civilians as you can throughout this whole process but you don't and so you have millions of civilians that die along the way into this march is there something you can say about this complete perhaps it's naive for me to say but a war that lacks tactics that lacks strategy and is purely about just no consideration of human life and just throwing bodies and bullets into a mix together where millions die and that in particular felt much less like conflict and much more like torture or suffering it didn't it didn't come off as torture only that interestingly enough as you probably know my grandfather including everybody else volunteered they were proud to do this they were proud to march to their death for country for love of country but the question on the civilian side when when more civilians die the military personnel what do you make of that it's awful and it's awful when a soldier dies it's awful when a civilian dies it's awful when 10 civilians or 10 soldiers and it's even more awful when millions and millions of soldiers and civilians die i think it's safe to say that the soviet union was facing an existential threat to their existence against the nazis so to not fight would be to die as well maybe die a death a few years later maybe die a different way but the choice was die now trying or die later on your knees and i think the choice was pretty clear as far as the tactics go i mean there is this is attrition warfare that's what that is we are going to keep you know you said throwing bodies at the problem that's attrition warfare and the soviet union had a lot of bodies more than the germans and when you fight with attrition warfare whoever has more men and material will eventually win it's an awful it's an awful way but that's the that's that's what the strategy was you often talk about leadership let's put the evils of hitler aside the boldness of hitler in making some of the strategic decisions he did was considered by many military historians quite brilliant early in the war are insane and brilliant stalin on the other hand i think universally is seen as somebody who is terrible military strategist especially early in the war he did not see all the possible trajectories that the war could take is there something you could say about failure of leadership stalin also the united kingdom before churchill and also fdr on the united states side who basically was trying to turn a blind eye to everything that was happening over over there with a perspective of we just want to make we want to keep america's interests uh as the primary interest and everything else let other countries work out their problems you know i think one of the things with hitler was in the beginning of the war he listened to his advisors he listened to his generals and therefore they did pretty well with that i think as the war went on he believed that he was smarter than he was and made decisions that were bad that cost him dearly you know i mean case in point as everyone knows going and attacking the soviet union while you're still fighting a war on the other front is not not a good move there's an example of yeah bad leadership letting your ego get in the way believing that you can do things that you that are beyond your capabilities but you know as you mentioned in the beginning with blitzkrieg those were really dynamic and bold moves and they worked and that what does that do that fuels your ego and makes you think that you can win many people consider that war a just war what do you think makes it just war i think you have the nazis and the imperial japanese trying to impose their will on other nations and other peoples and when that happens i think on a grand scale people look at that and believe it's just to step in and do something about it is there some gray area here there's there's nothing but gray area the united states has been involved in a lot of military conflicts since then how do you draw the line to the grey area what what war should we engage in and not i know you don't get into politics much but what the decision to go to war you have to look at the situation that you're going into and you have to make sure that you have the will to go to war and the will to go to war means that you are willing to kill people and when i say people i don't just mean enemy because in war civilians are going to die women and children are going to die every a lot of people are going to die and so you and you are going to kill them it doesn't matter what kind of smart munitions you have doesn't matter how disciplined your soldiers are when you go into a war civilians are going to die and you have to understand that and the other thing that you have to understand is that your troops are also going to die and it seems like sometimes we're a little bit naive about the calculation of what that's going to look like and maybe we think well not that many civilians and maybe not that many of our our personnel are going to die and that's where you get into sticky situations and you know another thing when you were talking about the soviet union versus the nazis that's total war that's what that is and we don't engage in that very often it's total war it's we will do absolutely anything to win and america doesn't fight like that very often in fact the last time we fought like that was world war ii we it was total war we will do whatever it takes to up to and including the atomic bomb to destroy the enemy so those are the kind of things you need to think about before you go to war and i don't think we think about that very often you know even the united states the atomic bomb nuclear weapons is an interesting one because there's a lot of there's a lot of hesitation on that there's a lot of critics of that decision as it was happening so even america you can imagine other countries like germany would not be so hesitant to use nuclear weapons it's interesting to think about in deciding military strategy to inject ethics into it into morality it's not just about winning the war but should we do this and doing the calculation of human life usually those decisions are made by leaders not by the the soldier that's going to be implementing that the the that decision do you put some responsibility i should even say blame on the leaders and not doing that kind of calculation here you could say that you could say about the vietnam war you could say that about even the war that you're involved with in iraq is there some criticism here that you could apply to leaders for failing not to consider the broader moral questions yes natural like all leaders will make these mistakes or should leaders not make these mistakes leaders are going to make mistakes it's impossible to know what's going to happen in war just like it's impossible to know what's going to happen in life you make that you make decisions based on the information that you have at the time and you will make mistakes and if you fail to admit that you made a mistake that's where i have a more significant problem than someone that makes a mistake and says hey this is the mistake that i made this is the intelligence that i thought we were utilizing and it actually is not what i thought it was going to be and here's the new direction that we're going in we don't have enough of that type of ownership in in leadership globally just saying i made a mistake that resulted in the loss at scale of human life being able to say that and when you don't say that you end up with a more loss of human life can i ask you about the loss of human life how does killing a human being change you what does it mean to kill a human being what does it feel like to kill a human being well i mean i guess you'd have to look at what circumstances a person's in when this is taking place if you've got someone that's in a fit of rage that goes and kills somebody you know they're going to come out of it and think wow i just really messed up if you've got a someone that is a sociopath right they're not going to feel anything and that person deserved to die and that's why they died if you've got a soldier who feels like they're trying to protect their friends they'll move through that if you've got a soldier that's doing it because they want some kind of personal glory they'll probably not feel good about it later so i think it depends on the situation i think it depends on the psychology of the individual that's going through it he said move through that is there some calculation here that a soldier when they kill another soldier a realization that is just another human being i mean is there some heavy burden to that aspect that it's ultimately just human on human i think it depends a lot on the scenario i know that when i was in iraq fighting you we we talk a lot about the dehumanization of the enemy and it's something that the governments will do i mean governments and will do that to each other i mean the the japanese dehumanized the americans and the americans dehumanized the japanese and the americans dehumanized the nazis and the nazis dehumanized the americans so that to remove as much of that human on human killing aspect that you're talking about and what i what i've said is that in when we were in iraq we didn't have to dehumanize the enemy because the the enemy dehumanized themselves through their actions through their behaviors when when we know that they are torturing and raping and murdering the local populace they've been dehumanized and so as far as looking at them and thinking oh this is a you know a human another human that's that's on the level of you know my my uncle or my brother i did i didn't think of them out that way i thought of them as as murdering raping evil sub-humans yeah iraq is different and america's position is different you're right that america has not been involved in a war where it's quite like two humans fighting like teenage boys fighting against each other and you've got to remember i mean we're we're seeing these iraqi kids that are living under this sadistic sadistic terror the iraqi women that are being raped and abused by these insurgents and so on the one side we become the the iraqi populace is very humanized to us because we're talking to them we've got interpreters we understand we're seeing them day after day the same individuals and so we form a bond with the local populace and yet we see what the insurgents are doing and so it's again not difficult to dehumanize people that behave in that manner yeah i suppose i'm i worry about the dehumanization at a much larger scale when it's not the kind of case that you're talking about even now hopefully i'm not fear-mongering but there's a sense in which there's the drums of war slowly starting to build with china there in the best case it would be a cold war of there's a dehumanization aspect that's happening with china currently which is they're the other and they're after stealing all of your data there's a cyber security it starts with cyber security and it it worries me because it creates the other out of a very large population that that may ultimately lead to conflict in the worst case hot conflict that would no longer be the situation you are in in iraq and more similar to the soviet union conflict with the with germany that its kids and then they're dehumanized to where you're at scale slaughtering them or at least hurting their quality of life in a way that's uh maybe you know suffering has many forms it doesn't have to be through just a hot war it could be um through starvation through camps all those kinds of things and i worry i worry about that we kind of tend to think that these wars are behind us and i'm not always so sure that's the case and at least in the way that uh it ultimately starts with hate and if again hopefully i'm not being too dramatic but i i see that there's a kind of brewing of uh it starts with dehumanization and turns to hate of the other you see that with china you see it a little bit with russia and uh you have an early podcast between the the where you break down the tactics of the chechen war versus russia it's fascinating but that's the kind of conflicts i'm referring to and um i don't know um there's a i know you're a bit of a musician uh i love uh i love dad straight song called brothers in arms i don't know if you know that one and there's a line in it i think they they play it uh quite often in military funerals which i just recently learned but it's this powerful song as a line um we're fools to make war on our brothers in arms do you think there's some sense in which at the leadership level but just as human beings were perhaps foolish and engaging in military conflict as much as we have or is full a very inappropriate word here well i think the using the term brothers in arms means the people that are on my side right so it doesn't make sense to start wars with people that are on your side so that's that might just be the way the lyrics are written so that it fit the song or whatever um i think broadly what you're asking me is is war foolish yeah and i would say the answer is yes and if you can avoid it you absolutely should but if there is a bear or a wolf that is trying to get into your house is it foolish to shoot that bear or shoot that wolf i think the answer is pretty obvious so when you're you're threatened or your family are threatened or your way of life is threatened then you have to do something to try and defend your family your way of life it should be the last resort should be the last resort you had a conversation with jordan peterson where he asked you a question in terms of war being last resort whether you would like your kids to grow up in peace in a time of no war you said yes but and so happens jordan didn't let you finish can you um can you elaborate what follows the butt well you you and i have been talking about the fact that struggle brings people together and and brings out the best and and the worst brings out the worst in people war brings out the worst people it also brings out the best in people so would you want your kid to go and enter in a wrestling tournament where you paid all the other kids off and your kid won or you enter them in a jiu jitsu tournament where they're a purple belt and you know that everyone that they're going to fight against is a white belt and so they get the they get the big w they get the win but they don't really get tested and they don't really struggle and if you don't struggle you don't grow so that's the but right the the absolute best times of my life were in combat and the worst times of my life were in combat and so even though i wouldn't want any of my children to suffer through the worst of times at the same time the bud is i would want them to have the opportunity to feel that bond that you're referring to earlier and to see human beings that are willing to sacrifice their lives for their friends you mentioned the worst what are some of the worst aspects of when you were in iraq what are the things that um the hardest on you have my guys killed is there uh absurd cruelty to it was it due to mistakes or natural consequences of fighting is there any difference is that at the end is just losing those or brothers in arms there's a million different ways to get killed in the war and you can go out in an operation and you can do everything wrong and you can survive and you can go out in an operation and do everything perfect and you can get killed is there some aspect which makes it worse when there's mistakes made well yeah if there's mistakes made then you're gonna sit there and beat yourself up eternally for mistakes that were made but to you the things that hurt is just losing losing people close to you yes are you yourself afraid of death no do you think about it does it make sense to you that this thing ends like do you uh the stoics contemplate a death it gives flavor to life it makes you appreciate there's something about finiteness of life that makes it that makes it this uh jocko discipline go drink sour apple that i'm enjoying it's delicious makes it taste better because i'm going to die one day and i think about that a lot do you think about it other than i know that it's gonna end i mean but i don't think about it on a daily basis i think about just the fact i think about i know that i'm lucky to be here i know that many people sacrificed to give me this opportunity to be here so but i don't dwell on it what about when you were in combat nothing there's there's tactics there's strategy there's the mission and then your immortality is not part of the calculation i think you get to a point where you accept the fact that you can die like i i you know like i said you can do everything right you roll out the gate you hit an ied a triple stack subsurface ied and you're dead you're done and there's nothing that's going to stop that it's going to happen and i think if you're scared of that or you're thinking about that it's going to inhibit your ability to do your job properly and i think it's also going to drive you crazy the thing that i thought about more was that happening to my guys and that's the gut-wrenching terror that you feel when when operations happen can i ask you about love of country is it's uh it continues to just how much i've studied stalin recently in the past few years it continues to surprise me not surprise me it's just tragic in some kind of way i'm not sure exactly if i could put wars to it but how many people and still do but at the time were willing loved stalin and were willing to die for country for the love of country and i too maybe because i was born there and now i am a red-blooded american uh i love nationalism is a bad word but i love the love of country it gives it somehow gives a meaning like a brotherhood like we're in this together i love that's why i love the olympics that's just the the unity of it it uh takes a step out of the selfish pursuits of any one particular ant and looks at us as a big ant colony and it's inspiring it's uh it's exciting but at the same time it seems to get us to do horrible things if um if uh manipulated by charismatic leaders what do you make of this love of country is it a is it a bad thing is it a thing that gets in the way or is it a good thing well i think like anything else if it's balanced correctly it's great and if it goes to some extreme level then it becomes a negative and i think it i think it's probably sourced in some sort of animalistic tribalism that we all have to be part of a tribe and this is a real big tribe that you get to be a part of and all you have to do is kind of show up and so when someone says hey we're going to play hockey against the russians well we're gonna cheer for the american boys so my my area of work is artificial intelligence it'd be interesting to ask your thoughts about something which is um autonomous weapon systems us has now officially released the report saying that they're open to uh not open they're engaging in in um adding more and more autonomy in artificial intelligence into its weapon systems because china is doing it so there's these are the first steps and then something that ai folks worry about which is uh a race an ai race in the space of autonomous weapons that can run away uh too quickly is that something um i don't know if in general if you have thoughts about weapon systems that make autonomous decisions at the small scale of just targeting where to shoot and the largest scale of military strategy of just get being given a mission of destroy this particular target this particular say terrorist human being and then figure out what is the right bombing campaign on your own to accomplish this task that minimizes civilian death and and then just loading that in and letting the ai system automatically decide that what are your general thoughts about it do you do you worry about it because as the positive effects that in the best version of that world you kill fewer civilians you kill hurt fewer of your own human beings but at the negative side of that you might lose the the thing we kind of talked about which is the basic humanity even in the individual soldier of what is right and what is wrong and not making huge mistakes that hurt thousands or millions of people i guess what you're asking me is if they could make a machine that could do more surgical attacks on enemy individuals would i be for it yes i would be for it the problem is if you've ever used machines of any kind their initial design may not be there there's unintended consequences there's uh there's ways in the the machine actually behaves that you realize there's bugs in this thing so do we not put protocols in place to prevent something from going too far outside the boundaries of what we wanted to execute you do but the question is uh this is the first time in human history you can create things machines toaster microwave oven that's smarter than you in this particular task i mean it's not yet there what you're learning a lot with military strategies humans are actually really damn smart it's very hard to do to improve on a human and so most actual drones that are unmanned are still piloted by humans it's very difficult to do every aspect of war but it's not out of the realm of possibility that machines will start doing those things better in certain certain things a certain more precise targeting of the enemy the question is so what happens when you start to rely on the machine to do some of the task is you get lazy you forget what it is like to do that task or more importantly you lose the knowledge of the intricacies of that task and you forget the ways you can go wrong so the protocols may not be sufficient to constrain the power of the ways that things go wrong especially when things are moving really quickly especially when the ethics of the two sides aren't perfectly aligned when people are some certain sides like on the chinese side may be more willing to take risks for dangerous consequences than others so what happened on the bioweapon side is internationally maybe you can speak to this more but my sense what i was told there's a sense globally that buy weapons are not going to be used they're unethical there's a sense like we're not going to engage in this and with ai currently china and u.s said green light i'll go ahead it's it's totally ethical if if it can decrease the loss of human life um why not my worry is that it's much more it's it's much easier to design weapons that are effective than design weapons who have the the depth of ethics and morals that humans do which i think we don't as human beings don't acknowledge enough that even like the cold calculated killing of others like precise effective execution of a mission still has ethics in it at every level you know what's right and what's wrong and i don't know if that i don't know if you take that away you're not going to make huge mistakes that you regret is that something you don't i don't really worry about it um but as you design something like i said you you put protocols in place and and from what i am hearing you say or trying to hear you say there's be a point where our protocols wouldn't be wouldn't be sufficient to stop the machine from doing something that was unethical i'm kind of worried that this is something you don't worry about because a lot of people i respect don't worry about it and i don't know what to do about that a lot of generals don't worry about it a lot of people who know much more about war like you than me don't worry about it and that worries me well that's because you have a vision into the shortfalls of a.i and i don't i don't have a vision of the shortfalls of ai i don't know enough about it as far as i'm concerned you put a on off switch somewhere you put a a kill switch on a system and if it starts going awry you hit the kill switch and that's it so if you know when you look at me and say well there's no possible way to put a kill switch that would be 100 effective and here's you draw those concerns to me and we could talk through it and say okay well here's where we should draw the line yeah i mean it's like again for the soviet union chernobyl meltdown there's always the ability i believe to have a kill switch the problem is uh the more power you give to the machine the more opportunity you give to the to the human supervising that machine to make a mistake and not shut off the switch at the right time so yes the solution i mean you're putting the responsibility still in the human hands and i think that's the correct place to put it there should be good protocols good leadership good execution competency all around your protocol should consider the basic failures of human nature the human factor of how things go wrong so there should be multiple people supervising the system all those things but i am just very skeptical of greater and greater power in the machine that can create war that can not lead to death yeah and that's why like i said and like you just said you have protocols in place that that are a kill switch and if if you think about the amount of nuclear weapons that we've had on planet earth for the past however many years and there's been you know no rogue element that said you know what i'm gonna shoot this thing there's been no protocol that took place where all of a sudden we said oh no i mean there's been there's been escalations but the protocols worked have worked so far now that's a scary thing to think about that we rely on these protocols to stop some rogue element out there from launching a missile that could kill millions of people and trigger a global war so yeah the protocol should be strict okay ask uh jacqueline a ridiculous question if human civilization goes extinct what would be the reason you mention nuclear war do you worry about this the reason i bring that up a lot of people in the ai community worry about artificial general intelligence so super intelligent ai systems creating a lot of damage autonomous weapon systems is one possibility a lot of folks recently especially with this pandemic if you want to be terrified listen uh somebody i talked to recently sam harris did a four-hour podcast on how bioengineering of viruses is likely to destroy human civilization i recommend that highly if you if you were too optimistic about the future of the human species so apparently the in the space of bioengineering becomes is becoming easier and easier and easier to engineer viruses engineer pathogens [Applause] [Laughter] this is the world's most depressing question what uh is do you is there something in particular you worry about like that we should be thinking as a human species about uh yeah i'm sorry to disappoint you again with my lack of worry for all these problems but i don't worry too much about it um you know what we we've made it through a bunch of wickets so far as a species and we'll make it through some more or we won't and if we don't make it through some of these wickets and someone decides that what they're gonna do over the weekend is create some crazy virus that spreads and kills everybody yeah you know what uh i'm usually extremely optimistic about the stuff i am now i'm with you except we won't well there's always a chance we won't but i have a sense that human first of all i believe that most people have much more capacity for good than evil all of us are capable of evil i believe but most people are much more capable of doing good and want to do good and uh i also believe in the resiliency of the human species that we're an innovative bunch and we can respond to tragedy especially we respond more to tragedy as the scale of tragedy grows and our response is much better so that's why i'm not worried about it bro uh what makes a great man let's start at the individual what makes a great man what makes a great woman what makes a great human being somebody that puts others above themselves what makes a great leader of humans same thing but that sentence does a lot of work there's uh when you're a leader there's a lot of egos there's a lot of tension there's the humans the human factor there's people who are timid there's people who are assholes there's people who are incredibly competent but uh self-obsessed i don't know there's complexities of human nature how do you get all those people to do uh to be the best version of themselves and to lift up everyone else around them okay so now that that question is a little bit different now so now it's getting into a more specific question but at the same time a more broad question of what elements does it take to make a good leader yes so you're right that different people have different personalities different tendencies different levels of ego and the the way that i try and explain this is um like a video game and i'm not even a video game player but i've seen this before where video game characters have various skills various strengths and weaknesses so maybe they're strong but they're dumb or maybe they're strong and smart but they're slow they just give them these these ratings and so that's what human beings are and that's the way leaders are and you can have different leaders with different characteristics and depending on how all those characteristics match up you can have somebody that is very introverted but they're but but they're still a very good leader because when they do communicate they do it in a clear simple manner that everyone understands so even though they're a little bit introverted people still respect them and listen to them because they communicate in a clear way you could have somebody that's extremely charismatic extremely charismatic and everyone looks to them but they're slow in making decisions and so now we've got someone that can't really make decisions when decisions need to get made so even though they're charismatic they're still not a good leader so depending on the human being that we're talking about and you just mentioned earlier that human beings are you know more complex than anything and do a better job at just about everything than a robot so that's the same thing with leadership you've got all these different characteristics and you you match them or mix them together and depending on where the ratings come out depending on how that thing does in the end can we almost like as a case study look at a few people in the tech area that i'm familiar with that i know well we can the only caveat being that i may have no familiarization with them whatsoever you may have to brief me on them yeah so i'll do my best to brief i'll do my best to reduce human beings into simple descriptions and then you can give me insights of why the hell they're such effective leaders uh based on my description not based on your actual deep knowledge of the human beings uh so uh that caveat of my inability to speak both the english language and describe humans well let's talk about first elon musk so he's known as being quite harsh in the sense of first of all a very high bar of excellence and also willing to what he calls kind of first principles thinking of asking the the questions that hurt which is why the hell are we doing it this way why can't it be done a lot but not just better but a lot better so so let's i don't want to hear his whole character i'll go want it one section at a time so we got a guy that's harsh yeah and and asking the really hard questions how can that be good or why is that good well first of all it can be horrible and there's leaders out there that are harsh and they're hated and no one likes them and no one wants to work for them and they never do anything so what is it that elon musk does that makes gives him the ability to be harsh so i was i was hearing a description of me yeah when i would give feedback to young seals that had made mistakes during training operations and the description was that same thing like this harsh blunt force trauma and just totally direct sledgehammer of truth that i would hit guys with but it's interesting because i always talk about you know building relationships and making sure you're not offending someone yeah so how do these things match up well i can tell you how they match up when i was being harsh the guys that i was being harsh with knew without one shred of doubt that i cared about them more than anything else and that the reason i was giving them this feedback is because i wanted them to be able to lead their troops i wanted them to be able to go accomplish their mission and i wanted them to be able to bring their guys home from war so i wasn't being harsh because it elevated my ego i wasn't being harsh because i wanted to denigrate them i was being actually being harsh because i wanted them to accomplish the mission so if that's where elon comes from hey listen we got to make this happen this is for this is for the good of the world to do this and people know that then it works i'll bring this point back up with another guy steve jobs but let me stay on elon for a second the uh the other thing he does which is interesting i'm i see the value of this it'd be great to hear you uh speak about it it's unlike many of the other ceos very rich billionaires uh you know involved in leading a lot of people he puts a lot of time into making sure he's on the factory floor he famously sleeps on the sort of like in the middle of things and he puts a lot of effort he's also very good at it is being a low-level engineer so like whatever the task is he wants to understand the details and he'll talk to the lowest level person in terms of like you know somebody who's like uh working literally on putting parts together he wants to understand what the problem is what the challenge is if there's an emergency he wants to understand the actual details of the problem not like delegating you to a manager but like because a lot of ceos a lot of managers will will talk about sort of the the power and the importance of delegation here he wants to know if there's a big problem he wants to know the exact detail he wants to know the exact problem he wants to at the fundamental level understand how to solve that problem whether it has to do with materials whether it has to do with the actual manufacturing the uh mechanical engineering aspect like we're talking about like engineering this is a guy who wears a suit there's a ceo tweets about deutsche coin but like an actual job he's low level engineering and that to me was always inspiring to see somebody who knows what the fuck they're doing that's what it like he gains the respect of engineers at the lowest level i don't know if that's scalable but that's always been inspiring to me and i wonder how many people it's inspiring to maybe you can speak to the value of doing that of of no matter how high your level of leader is to be able to do the low level shit yeah and that's that's a common trait that good leaders have and maybe he doesn't necessarily know how to do everything a good leader but they go down there and talk to the front line troops and say hey what is the issue that you're dealing with or you know how can i support you how can i give you help and what one key point that you said is he said when there's a problem he gets in there so there's things happening at his companies that they're working and so he doesn't have to die i'm not saying he never does but he doesn't have to spend as much time working on or or looking at some sub-system that's functioning well he's got a good leader in there that's handling it and he checks in with that leader and the leader says yeah it's working perfectly he says great that when there's a problem that's when he might have to get down there and dig into some details so that he fully understands it so that he when he digs down in the details and this is important he's coming from an altitude where he has a better bigger perspective not necessarily better but a bigger perspective so if you sit there and work on a problem whatever for eight hours and you're staring at you know if you were planning a mission and you were you were planning it for eight hours you're staring at the the maps and the charts and you're figuring out where all the troops are going to be located and i come in after eight hours and i look at your plan from a from a distant perspective there's a good chance i'll be able to see holes in your plan that you couldn't see because your perspective was too close so so that's good for me to be able to come in from a higher perspective and have a look at it but also there's times where i need to get down there and actually look you know if you're looking at a problem you say look i can't figure out boss i can't figure out how to get to this target and i'm looking at it from a distance and i don't see i might need to start digging in and looking and saying oh here's a route that we can take that actually makes sense let's try that so i think it's a good example of someone going up and down in altitude to look at problems understanding what's happening with the front-line troops and at the same time being able to go back to the strategic level and i can it's probably this way the reason that he's successful is because he doesn't get stuck down there yeah because if he felt the need to micromanage each and every part on a tesla it wouldn't be it would be very unlikely that he would have the capacity to do all that now he can hand over some broad chip design and say hey this is what the function needs to be and he gives it to lex and lex goes there with your team and you figured out and you make it happen if he had to actually do that all himself most likely not possible so that's what leaders should be doing they should go elevate and and and then get down in the weeds when they have to and then go back up the sad thing this is the part that makes me not want to do a startup is basically his whole life is dealing with emergencies just like you said he's not dealing this is not shooting the shit about details of engineering it's dealing with like in this in the case of the company life and death like something that can just completely damage the production line right so he's constantly dealing with emergencies putting out fires and um i don't know if there's something to be said about the psychology of that of how uh like he he's spoken himself that he's worried whether his mind can hold up much longer so hopefully in the near future he will start to form more decentralized command where he has some subordinate leadership that he fully trusts and most important that he has properly trained so that they can handle these day-to-day fires at least 80 percent of them so only 20 of the time does he actually need to go and solve a problem if he's not doing that right now then that's going to end up being a problem anytime so i work with companies all the time and that's what's interesting about this is i go and work with a ceo or with a with the c-suite of a company it takes a little while to figure out what's going on i'm kind of going off of the things that you're telling me yeah almost anecdotally right yes but let's say that what you get and also i don't know how familiar you actually are with the inner workings of his companies but if we were to assume that what you're saying is accurate then my advice would be hey listen you need to start putting a little bit more time and effort into training up some subordinate leadership that has the trust knowledge and expertise that you will be able to turn over some of these some of these details too for two reasons number one so you can let your brain um you know you can you can survive a little longer as he put it but also all the time that you spend as a leader looking down and into your organization is time that you're not looking up and out so when you're not looking up and out you're not seeing what the competitor's doing you're not seeing where the market's going there's problems that that that can come from that so if right now he's spending too much time looking down and in and you mentioned you know you said i don't know if i want to do a startup when you do a startup you're going to be looking down and in for a while yeah it's going to take a while you're going to have to do all this work yourself you're not going to have the finances to put people manpower behind these things so that's probably he maybe he's in that mindset a little bit because he's done so many startups over the years and so he's in the he's habitually in the weeds so my advice would be all right let's start looking at formulating some subordinate leadership that has the like i said the expertise the trust that you can you can start to turn over some of these more minute details to them so you can start looking up and out yeah i think he's done that more successfully in some places than others the spacex a lot of people give the credit to gwen shawwal for the ceo um the ceo of spacex as as a very successful person that runs shit but in tesla not as much so i wonder if you can comment on something a lot of people worry about and this applies to a lot of tech companies which is a lot of people worry about that if elon disappears the the innovative spirit the company as as we know them today will collapse will stagnate and will basically fail to do what they've been doing for so many years successfully is there some aspect to uh what makes a good leader that if you disappear it's still the thing still lives on and not just lives on but thrives yeah so what we have to do in those situations is we have to establish a strong culture inside that organization and if you're there there's there's reasons why this happens right if i have a big ego and i form a company and i love the fact that everyone looks at me and says oh jocko made this company and he's the creative force behind this company and that fuels my ego and it makes me feel good and you know i'm working with you lex and every time you come up with an idea i say lexi you need to stay in your box yeah right so i'm not creating a culture that rewards that sort of creativity and eventually when i die i won't have educated my team on how to maintain that creative aspect so again hopefully inside that organization he's he's encouraging and growing that culture where creativity is rewarded where where it flourishes even when he's gone that's what we have to hope for he is but i also seem to notice that there's not many people like him people become complacent too easily that disappoint i've been disappointed by people a little bit it's like success makes people soft now with elon it seems like success doesn't have any effect that's like the reverse effect it doesn't it's like what's the it's always like what's the next biggest thing right he's living that exponential growth which i think that's the problem that you have to have somebody who's constantly trying to find the 10x solution like trying to constantly improve things and uh restlessly that i mean that probably has to do with finding the right people not just creating the culture but creating the culture with the rights of speaking people which steve jobs there's uh two things i want to mention there one once again the harshness but a very different kind and the second is team building so on the harshness he is much harsher than elon in a way in the following way i'm having a sense that you will not like this but i'd like to defend it is he loses his shit quite a bit he was famously at least especially early on being very emotional he's letting passion dominate the discussion there'd be a lot of firings there would be a lot of mean things said to people i don't know what you make of that how much is a leader are you allowed to just lose your shit in your love for the thing you're doing and how effective is that as a leader you shouldn't be doing that very often so you can look back at me and say well jocko here's the most profitable company that's ever existed and so you're wrong well going back to that multitude of characteristics that human beings can have well it's the same thing with businesses it's the same thing with companies steve jobs was off the charts in some of his traits his ability to understand design yeah his ability to understand human interface with computer systems so so far off the charts that despite his bad temper emotional behavior the company still thrived that's that can happen you can have people that you there's you can have people that are horrible leaders that develop something that's so universally outstanding that you end up with a a company that's successful i the reason i mean i get asked that a bunch you know people always ask me because i say look you you shouldn't be you shouldn't be losing your temple as temper as a leader well what about steve jobs he used to yell and scream all the time great i might when people say that to me i say oh okay are you as good as at design as steve jobs was are you as good are you as good at marketing yeah as steve jobs was there's he had a certain amount of skills that were off the charts and so he was able to be successful despite the fact that he would lose his temper treat people horribly that's not that's not good it's not good and it would have been even more successful if you if you wouldn't had those characteristics now you might say well he his anger is what pushed things well let me ask you this what leader wins the leader whose team is afraid who the the team who execute executes the mission because they're afraid of their leader or executes the task because they're afraid of their leader or the team that loves their leader so much that they don't want to let them down which team wins you're implying a confidence that love is more powerful than fear but i'm not so sure this is the machiavelli question you're saying ultimately it's always better to lead by uh inspiration and love putting the fear into the team what i'm what i'm saying is that i've seen countless times is me leading through my authority leading through my rank leading through punitive measures is infinitely worse than me and you working together as a team to win on the second point of steve jobs uh he has this idea a philosophy of a players where you have a group like the power and the productivity of a group of what he called a players is invaluable so you want to get a team of people who are the best at what they do but the most important aspect to him was that a single quote-unquote b player on the team destroys the entire productivity of the team is there something that brings true to that so he was this could be a temper thing but vicious about firing and removing the what he's felt was a toxic b player in a team so a players feed off of each other unless there's one b player present depends on the nature of the b player is the player is the player a b player because he's a little bit lazy is he a b player because he doesn't have good vision is he a b player because he's got a big ego and always thinks he's right and now creates conflict in the team so there's a bunch of different b players look if you're working for me and you're kind of a b player but guess what you're a grinder and you get stuff done i want you on the team you might not be the smartest person i have but i know that you're committed to the team yeah and i want you on the team so you're a b player but that's okay now if you if you're lex with a giant ego i'd rather have i'd rather have lex that's not quite as smart because i got other people that are smart i got other people that are smart on the team look you're going to need some smart people on the team but a team is made up it's a team and so you take these different components of a team and if you have complementary components you'll end up with a superior team than just basing it on the level of and what's an a player sometimes in the seal teams they would get something called the stacked platoon and what that would be is someone you know some senior person in that platoon would manipulate and and and maneuver to get the quote best guys that he could in that platoon so you know the most experienced guys the person that had great great reputations and sometimes those platoons would be great sometimes they would implode because what you end up with is a bunch of a players and now no one wants to follow anyone else no one wants to agree with someone else everyone wants to do it my way not it's my way not lex's way lex is stupid no you're stupid we end up with problems so can one person derail a team absolutely under good leadership one person should not derail a team this could be a tech thing too there's some multiplying effect of just pure excellence no matter the personalities i think for steve jobs he doesn't the ego doesn't matter none of that matters what matters is the quality of the output the the genius of the result and that somehow multiplies itself and the egos actually like one of the problems with egos is uh like what does ego usually say it says i'm much better than you when you have people that are really good together it's very hard for the ego to flourish because you're like constantly being shown that you're not as good and there's a competition so like i think to his his idea was that like if you get people that are really good at what they do it turns as opposed to you being complacent and not doing much and thinking you're better than everyone else and your opinion is better is you almost getting in that competitive race you know that magic that happens when you're at the end of a marathon and you're just like head to head like you're just going full steam with a person that is as good as you there's no place for ego there which is great which is great let's use that example you and i are racing we're at the end of the marathon we're both highly competitive highly competitive we have massive egos and we both want to win we both want to win so bad that we we give everything we've got that's totally positive right yeah isn't that totally positive now imagine this same thing we're in a race we're in a marathon we're in the last hundred meters it's you against me and and our egos are huge and we're pushing to win and you start to pull ahead of me and my ego is so big and i hate losing so much that i somehow accidentally push my knee up against your foot on a backstride and throw you onto your face yeah so that's what ego is an awesome driver unless you let your ego control you yeah and you let ego drive your decision-making process in which case it turns into an incredible problem so you might have someone that is excellent you might have someone that's outstanding you might have some someone that's tens across the board but their ego is so big that big that they can't work with other people they can't accept anyone else's ideas they can't compromise on something because they think their idea is better all the time and that is going to be problematic and i don't want them on the team now as a good leader guess what i'll do i'll put them into a situation where i can utilize their best aspects but not have their ego destroy the team so i might say hey lex you know what i actually want you to take lead on this part of the project over here and since you're so smart and you you work so hard i know you're going to pull ahead of everyone else so you grind on that once you get that result give it to me and i'm going to disseminate it to the team basically i i isolate you from wrecking yourself and the rest of the team with your giant ego so then uh looking at a completely opposite person was this a fascinating person to me sandra pachai who's the ceo of alphabet ceo of google i admire the in a romantic sense the madness that is steve jobs and elon musk so to me the opposite of that is who's uh like everybody loves him and uh he's also a great listener so he always brings people together and so when the the energy of that person in a room is like the basic energy if i were to summarize it is like i want to hear all the voices in the room that's the energy he brings and it's almost like he doesn't want to impose a final decision he wants to hear all the voices and somehow always the decision just falls out i don't know what to say about that style of leadership but it's always surprising to me how that love brought a lot of people together and still i mean some of the greatest things google has done over the past several years could be attributed to that continued innovation bringing out the best out of people there's of course bureaucracy which i could criticize the end of the day which always happens with big companies i would argue actually the dictatorial style of steve jobs and elon musk helped fight the bureaucracy which is one criticism i would give of being a listener and being kind it's sometimes you can't cut through the bullshit as effectively but he he's one of the only people i've ever heard of who everybody loves he's an inspirational figure to millions especially like in india he's a celebrity in the best kind of way is there something you could say about that kind of leadership where you're never the asshole you're never the dictator you're always the listener and the the compassionate empathetic glue that brings the team together basically with love yeah that's that's great leadership if you have to choose for google uh for large companies is there something to be said about what is more effective the dictator the uh ruling by love or ruling by fear first of all everything's a dichotomy right and so to think that all the time you're always going to be able to just bark orders at people and they're always going to listen to you and you're always going to get the best result that would not be smart to think that every single time you're going to come to a 100 consensus amongst the troops and that decision is going to reveal itself without you nudging it along that would also be short-sighted and naive so what you what a good leader does is they they they stay balanced and as much as they can they listen to what the troops have to say they take that feedback maybe they quietly nudge things and and i'm sure he does that i'm sure he does some nudging that maybe no one even picks up on you know i like to say the the best forms of leadership is leadership with minimum force required so if i can go into a room as a leader and not say one single thing and the team can come to the right consensus and move in that direction that's my preferred method maybe i have to give them a little bit of a nudge a 10 nudge in one direction okay that's better than me walking in there and giving them 100 dictatorial direction of exactly what i want to have happen now occasionally if we have an emergency situation people are starting to be frazzled and they're not sure which direction to go then sometimes as a leader you have to walk in and say all right everyone here's where we're going and people get on board why because for many years or months or however long you've trusted them to come up with a plan and when you try when you as a leader trust your team to come up with a plan the team starts to trust you and you get leadership capital and as you build leadership capital occasionally you need to cash in some of that leadership capital you need to spend some of it and maybe it is hey listen here's the direction we're going right now we'll debrief it later but we got to make a move and the team who trusts you says roger that boss we got it and all of them actually do this interesting thing i'd love to hear your opinion on it asander certainly does it to a large degree which is it's in the process of delegation trusting a person to do a really difficult thing like tossing it up uh saying like i trust you can get this job done for some even if your resume does not support that i'm actually kind of uh amazed the human beings when they're given the trust to get the job done they step up very often that's kind of an amazing property of human nature people often ask me issues about leadership and i always say that one of the best tools for teaching leadership and for teaching a bunch of other lessons is leadership itself yeah so when it happens all the time when you elevate someone into a leadership position they do step up and they do make things happen so that's not surprising to me you do have to mitigate risk so saying hey you know lex i know you're haven't been in the military before i know you have very limited weapons experience but i want you to run a target assault on a real mission in whatever country that would not be good that would not be a good move on on my part now if i said all right lex you know what i want you to get some leadership experience i've got a training mission and it's going to be using paintball and i'm going to put you in charge of it i got no problem doing that some of that is judging human character it's like there's potential there's something in this person that they are they have enough demons or whatever the hell it requires to have that fuel they'll figure it out they'll hate themselves if they don't and they'll find the right they'll find the tools they'll find the path they'll to to achieve the whatever the level of perfection they can it's been really surprising to me it's been making me rethink of the whole hiring process because i often now i'm thinking looking so i'm looking for people both for the startup but just for my own life for help and i almost want to see evidence of excellence but maybe you want to just based on just judgment of human character without evidence of excellence have people step up like joe rogan with jamie it's a funny side i didn't understand how little joe knew about jamie when he hired him and jamie stepped up and now runs one of the most successful podcasts ever and that's an incredible kind of and he's one of the best producers in the world now not to let it get to his head and by the way the funny thing about him and one of the best googlers in the world about the best googlers the the funny thing about jamie this is okay you might not like this but what i what i like i'm constantly exceptionally self-critical to a point of like self-hating sometimes i deeply appreciate every single moment i'm alive but everything i've ever done i feel like is shit and when i talk to jamie about everything he's done he's so just in every way he carries himself he's so self-critical he's so like worried that it's wrong it's bad that anxious energy i love it because that's how you lead growth and progress like you might like a therapist might say that's probably not good for your like well-being fuck it it's good for the what's good for your well-being is to create awesome things that's ultimately what leads to happiness is to to create the best thing you can in your life and uh so when i see that in in somebody like jamie or anybody i talk to when you're really self-critical that's a good sign to me is that ridiculous that's not ridiculous at all and it goes back you know you were you were the way you were phrasing these questions about what makes a good person and what makes a good leader the way you phrase them kind of eliminated the normal answer that i give the normal answer that i give you ask me what makes a good leader what makes a good person is is being humble so when you're going to hire someone for your for your startup or whatever company you're creating that is a key characteristic to look for is someone that has the humility like like young jamie to say yeah you know i i could have done this better and here's what i can improve and here's what i need to work on when you have somebody that thinks they know everything um out of the gate you're you're already got someone that's gonna be hard to deal with they're gonna be hard to coach they're gonna be hard to mentor when you have somebody that's truly humble you barely again it's minimum force required because when you say to jamie after a show how do you think that went he says well you know i did this wrong and i didn't have this set up in time and you don't you don't barely have to do anything because he's got the humility if you've got someone that's a big ego and you say hey how did that show go he goes i went awesome on my end now guess what you have to do now you have to start applying force as a leader which is expending leadership capital which we don't want to do because we always try and conserve our leadership capital as much as we possibly can and when we have to expend it just to get jamie to make some improvements that's bad so when you go looking for people look for people that are humble now does this mean you look for people that don't have any confidence no that's not what i'm saying there's a balance to all these things it's the dichotomy of leadership you but people tend towards and look i work with a lot of military troops in the past now i work with companies the reason i talk about humility all the time is because for someone to be get into a leadership position in the military they have to have confidence so the tendency is that their confidence is going to outweigh their humility at some point same thing with with civilian companies if you get to a point of leadership inside of a company you have to have confidence to get there you don't get to a position of leadership inside of company lacking confidence so the tendency is for confidence to to grow a little bit too much and we have to put that put that confidence into check we have to put that ego in a check really good leaders they're confident but they're humble that's the balance of the dichotomy hear that jamie don't get cocky on occasion rarely you talk about uh discipline what does a disciplined life look like doing what you're supposed to do what if i want to lay on the couch and eat cheetos and watch soap operas that's that's not that doesn't feel like discipline do you think you're supposed to do that well you know you could argue from a a sort of uh meaning of life perspective that perhaps happiness is the most important and if it makes me happy uh perhaps that's um if it's fulfilling of course eating cheetos and watching snow propers is fulfilling for nobody whatsoever next question but there's something about discipline that's more than that which is um like the rigor of habit right you you wake up early in the morning all the time uh what is it jordan peterson talks about make your bed it's one place we probably agree with jordan people ask me if i make my bed i don't and i never know there's a disagreement with jordan there we go you know when i was uh younger before i was married i didn't make my bed because i had one sleeping bag on it and i would get out a sleeping bag there was nothing to make yeah now i'm married and i can't make my bed because my wife's in my bed so i don't make my bed okay so what in your life maybe we can talk about the one that's most publicly facing which is uh you wake up at four o'clock or around four o'clock in the morning you post uh on social media a a picture of your watch it being early just to remind people that uh you're you uh are man of your word what's that about what's the philosophy of the four o'clock what role does that play in a disciplined life for you okay from that perspective what role it plays is getting a jump on the day and i when you wake up early and you get a jump on the day and you've got your workout done and you've got a little bit of a little bit of work done yeah by the time normal people are getting up that's a win that's a psychological win and it's not just a psychological win it's an actual win it's an actual win so that feels great it doesn't feel great maybe when your alarm clock goes off but by eight o'clock in the morning and you've already accomplished some of the major tasks that you have some of the most painful tasks that you have for the day you're off to a great start and it's going to feel great let's break this down then what does than the rest of the day look like what is the perfect productive disciplined day in the life of jocko willing look like wake up work out wake up when four four thirty work out when five five to six or seven no eating no and then what does the workout look like depends on the day what's what's the perfect we're talking about body weight lifting cardio uh heavy bag jiu jitsu okay yeah when i say workout i mean no jiu-jitsu so jiu-jitsu doesn't jiu-jitsu comes later in the day this is just you alone this is me alone working out yep and i'm going to be doing of a wide variety of things this is the thing that has the pictures of the aftermath with some this is some sweat at the end so the goal is to do whatever the hell results in some sweat and that takes an hour sometimes it takes 12 minutes sometimes it takes three hours depending on what kind of mood i'm in you got some demons to work through or is this just is this just work like uh are we uh so you got the david goggins who's like who clearly has demons screaming inside of his head that he's trying to work through are you just getting the work done out of the discipline or is this uh i think joe is a little bit with david goggins is like there's some ego there's some bullshit that you're trying to get out through some of the exercise that's a good way to kind of humble you is just doing that exercise well exercise is certainly humbling i mean it's but it's physical conditioning right it's preparing your your body so that you can handle whatever it is you're going to do perfect what does uh what what do you do after let's talk about food hopefully surf if the waves are good surf for how good are the waves let's say they're good this is a perfect day it's a perfect perfect waves why do you surf it's fun okay this is fun okay man man and nature which is like what surfing is the ultimate is the power of the the infinite power of the ocean versus a little silly looking man on a board you could say it's the infinite power of the ocean versus a silly looking man on a board or you could say it's fun because it's russian and roman says okay this is for fun in the morning beautiful and this is you're still haven't eaten no okay so when do you eat uh i'll usually start grazing around 11 o'clock and grazing what's the what's the diet that's the is there a perfect diet or do you graze i'll eat some nuts you know something like that i usually start grazing maybe i'll have a little piece of meat or something like that does work enter any of this i'm sure you have a lot of people that want your attention yeah yeah no work is work is about to happen because you know even if i if i woke up at four worked out from five to six surf from six to eight now i'm starting to work writing recording reading talking to clients is there parts of the day where you try to find moments to think deeply to read deeply to sort of really focus because this world wants is full of distractions right even talking to uh like even work stuff this emails and all those kinds of things they can they can scatter your mind is there times you seek to have that focus well i read a lot of books and so usually when i read i'll be reading for a chunk of time maybe an hour at a time maybe a little bit longer and i might do that twice a day so i don't know if that counts as what you're describing but yeah then same thing with writing when i when i'm writing something i mean i just that's what i do i write usually usually right for about an hour i can get about a thousand words an hour out of me so that's that's sort of what i do what does the rest of the day look like just a lot of work but one is the jiu jitsu i want to find out about the jiu jitsu so around around 4 30 or 5 o'clock at night you train yep and uh how hard you still how are you doing body wise are you still the old man is the old man still got it or are you talking to me uh it would be it would be good for viewership and ratings if i die before the end of the podcast so i i i still train with the same guys and i'll train you know so i've been very lucky when it comes to getting injured and stuff like that so haven't i've had some injuries but they're they're healed and so yeah i train and uh food wise you mentioned grazing or some of some nuts are very light kind of things is there a main meal here yeah at night at night yep high uh in protein or is it uh anything yeah i'll have like a steak and salad i'll usually have for dessert i have like a protein shake so is there a thing where at the end of the at the end of the day you like you have like a samurai sword and you meditate on uh death and um all those kinds of is this some weird ritual you partake in no i just go to bed when i get done with the end of the day i might read a little bit more just more yeah because i read early on in and really reading makes me tired usually um so i'll read a little bit more is there a key to you that you can speak to that makes for a productive day just the way you approach it mentally yeah write down what you're supposed to do wake up early and start doing it and then get it done yeah i know it's a miraculous trick can i ask you about jiu jitsu by all means what have you learned from being a practitioner you're a black belt what have you learned from this journey of uh being a martial artist jiu jitsu for me was the connective tissue that started to join my mind together with all the different aspects of my life and so jiu jitsu for me was was really important and i don't think i would be doing anything that i'm doing right now if it wasn't for jiu jitsu so there's various aspects of my life that were in existence but i didn't understand how they were connected until i started training jiu jitsu the primary things are interacting with other human beings and combat tactics and strategy and jiu jitsu and all those things are connected they all follow the same guiding principles and i wouldn't have recognized those guiding principles if i didn't do jiu jitsu can you elaborate because you've trained for many many years what um is it the hardship is it the humbling nature of just being tapped all over you know non-stop i don't i actually don't know how many times i've tapped more times than you okay so good is it just the hardship of physical training like the honesty of the mat in the sense that like you know what works and what doesn't work which which aspects were the most uh impactful for you all aspects so yes from a humility perspective when you realize you think when you think you know what you're doing when you think you have certain skills and you realize that there's always somebody better than you and you realize that hey maybe i don't have all the answers all the time and you bring that to a leadership perspective and you walk into your platoon and you realize that maybe you don't have all the answers all the time and maybe you should listen to what other people have to say you bring that to a combat situation and you realize that you think if you sit there and think that you're smarter than the enemy you're gonna be complacent you're gonna make mistakes so there's one aspect out of the gate as far as you know if i if i'm going to try and get your arm do i attack your arm maybe not directly unless i'm a white belt exactly what do i do i attack your neck and when you reach up to defend your neck that's when i get your arm well if i'm out on the battlefield and there's an enemy position should i attack frontal assault into that position no no i shouldn't i should put down some covering fire and i should maneuver around to the flank it's the same thing if i'm dealing with you and you're my boss and you've got a giant ego and you've come up with a plan and i don't like your plan should i walk up to you and say hey lex your plan isn't good no or should i say hey lex can i ask you some questions about how you want us to execute this because i want to make sure i understand your vision [Laughter] so all these things are connected yes and i wouldn't have realized that we could sit here and do this forever we could we could i could tell you these comparisons forever but this all this connective tissue bringing all these things together i wouldn't have seen it without i don't think i would have seen it without jiu-jitsu so jiu-jitsu to me had it had a incredible life impact on me not look the physical part yes absolutely does it does it keep you humble when you know that there's a 145 pound individual that can tap you out when you're 220 pound 25 year old guy and there's a 135 or 140 pound you know 46 year old guy that can make you tap out that's humbling and and what do you do with that do you run away from it or do you continue to pursue it same thing with life same thing with anything so jiu jitsu is an incredibly powerful not just physical aspect but it's it's a way to understand it's a way of thinking you've also competed is there something you can speak to the value of competition obviously you've been through combat actual military combat is many many many orders of magnitude more high stakes than in us in a silly sport like jiu jitsu nevertheless it still has some of the echoes of the same challenges is there something you can speak to the value of competition for you yep competition will reveal weaknesses in your game that you can then go back and train to rectify so that that's very useful to sort of uh yeah as a testing ground of course training can be that testing ground as well or um that feedback yeah but as you and i both know if you and i train together all the time you'll in my game i'll know your game and even if we have five other people we all kind of understand each other's games and you're not doing something to me that i don't expect so when i go and compete i'm good you're you know this random person has a game that i've never seen before i'm and i may or may not know how to deal with that game if i know how to deal with it great i get the victory maybe i don't learn as much if i don't know how to deal with their game i get the loss and i get the win of learning what some weakness in my game is so you mentioned offline that uh your friends and you work with dean lister and dean lister is one of the people that inspired john donahue who i've very much been i've gotten a chance to talk to quite a bit recently i don't know what you think about this this is not a therapy session but or maybe it is into one it's turning into one i've uh that he's a fascinating uh person john donahue in terms of creating almost the science of jiu jitsu to a level that i haven't seen before which is systems thinking about like you can think about military combat as tactics in a particular situation but then you zoom out and you want to create entire systems of tactics in all situations right he's very kind of wants to keep zooming out and creating giant systems and uh which i appreciate that even though the the task is probably impossible uh to do completely but there's something that's in terms of competition that he kindled the fire in me that i want to get back out there here's a particular thing that did it which it was very different from my personal journey in jiu jitsu which was to degree that uh people i worked with cared about competition it was always about winning and uh or doing well all those kinds of things for john it's about winning like winning is not it's not even the thing that's important what's most important is winning by submission is uh or dominance right and uh and not just the the end it's the entire time competing such that the only thing that matters is that kind of victory and that's a very different level of competition that's actually liberating in a certain kind of sense i remember so much my competition was about kind of fear of uh not taking risks you know you get up on points or you hold a strong position you kind of advance you get more points maybe you chase the submission but there's always a fear of risk and for him you embrace the risk you're not you should not be competing out of fear you know uh live and die by the sword versus uh stay in safety i don't know if there's something to be said here well i mean this is um not you said it's novel to you it's not novel to me the entire my entire journey on jiu jitsu in jiu jitsu was only about submission and you know as you as you mentioned dean dean lister is my coach and my main training partner for 20 something years and if you ever watch dean train or fight that's what he's trying to do is submit as everyone that's what he's always done that's what he always will do he you know he has the highest i think he has impact i know he has the highest submission victories in adcc he that's what he does so this is in fact as jiu-jitsu got more popular and we started seeing people competing to win by points that was what was novel to me in the beginning now it's the standard so it's not novel to me i i love the fact that john donahue and all of his troops go out and they try and submit people i think it's awesome and i think that's what jiu jitsu is all right let's ask for some advice for white belts there's a lot of white belts to listen to this what advice would you give uh you've been doing jiu jitsu for many years in terms of uh a successful journey through gjso what advice would you give them people just starting out just keep training keep your ego in check don't freak out try and use the techniques that you learn and all this stuff so i'm like i'm saying it you know notice how i'm saying it yeah hey tap out keep your ego check and everyone but the thing is everyone says this all the time and white belts still start off by going completely nuts for at least you know three to six months of i'm not gonna let this guy tap me out and they're gonna and i'm gonna tap this guy out not by using technique but by just using strength and it's just a it's just inhibiting your learning so as much as you can i know i know you got to get it out of your system i know you don't want to tap and i know you want to tap somebody but as soon as you get get that off your chest then try and try and relax and try and learn the techniques it's perhaps counter-intuitive it never was to me but it's counter-intuitive that to uh to start on the journey of really sort of mastering jiu-jitsu whatever or improving is you have to relax and that seems to be a very counterintuitive lesson i learned that early on with uh that was thanks to the russian system i played piano and like music but basically actually this is true for basically any sport that includes a human body is like relaxing is the way you you start learning stuff you have to learn you have to literally and most people don't seem to understand this it's like you have to learn what it means for the human body to relax like i guess you have to have enough knowledge of all the muscles involved to know what it means to relax those muscles so for piano you have to understand what it means to relax your wrists and your fingers in order to learn how to move them like if there's tenseness in the fingers you're not going to like you have to learn how to try hard while relaxed the i guess the beginner if you don't internalize this lesson we'll try hard by uh tensing up hard and like trying hard tensing up more as opposed to relaxing more and that lesson cannot be conveyed through words i guess i've had the great fortune of having dictatorial teachers as they do in russia for uh for piano and so on we get like hit if if you don't learn to relax which is a counterintuitive notion but it works yeah this brings me to one of my favorite pieces of coaching advice that i will tell white belts while they're struggling on the mat i'll tell them to relax harder okay uh that's beautiful for somebody who studied war who participated in war what do you think is the best martial arts for um let's call it self-defense hand-to-hand combat outside the constraints of sport so it's not one answer the answer to me is jiu-jitsu boxing wrestling muay thai judo sambo and on down the list i definitely start with jiu jitsu the reason i start with jiu jitsu is because in a self-defense situation if you are a big monster human and you want to fight me and you square off with me guess what i'm going to do run away because i don't want i don't want to get involved even if i see skinny little lex out on the street and you start yelling at me and saying you want to fight me i don't want to fight you i don't it doesn't matter i don't care if i can beat you or not what if you stab me what if you sue me after i get done throwing you onto the concrete there's a million bad things that can happen and almost nothing good so for self-defense my first self-defense is my feet to get away from you and if you square off to punch me i can run away from you if you square off to kick me i can run away from you if you push me i can run away from you so great i don't need to know how to box to run away from you where this all changes is when you grab me and now i don't have the option to run away anymore now i actually have to know how to get away from your grip and that's where jiu-jitsu comes into play so especially if you get me on the ground if you if you grab me and get me on the ground now i need to know how to get you off of me and get up and get away from you so i can run away so that's why i say start with jiu jitsu and and from there boxing wrestling judo sambo muay thai yeah there's uh there's cert in the standing position i mean i'm a judo person as well and the judo is very limited in their understanding the full grappling spectrum even though they do all the things on the ground as well but uh it's so focused on the feet but nevertheless it's important to understand the thing that judo has as a sport that's good to practice that jiu jitsu doesn't is uh not just the gra the skill of grappling on the feet but the skill of explosive aggression that sometimes you just is more about in terms of tactics it's more about patience and it depends how you practice it but because so much is uh about control and uh technique that uh sometimes you don't get to practice like aggression explosive aggression and judo is so much about uh aggression implemented in such a way that the demonstration of power is effortless right that's the beauty of jiu-jitsu yeah and same thing with wrestling wrestling also has a high level of intensity and aggression as well yes yeah so that's where that's where i agree judo and wrestling absolutely awesome get some and striking boxing muay thai yeah you know like the you should train all these things are there books and movies in your life long ago recently that had a big impact on you yeah the main one is about face which is sitting right here there you go this is written by colonel david hackworth it's the book that really had a massive impact on me from a leadership perspective and i ended up i talked about it enough that it started kind of coming back and started selling well and they contacted me and i wrote a forward for it so that book had a huge impact on me and i still when i read it i still get lessons out of it just about every time this is a vietnam war and korea and korea and he got in towards the end of right at the end of world war ii so he was kind of raised by the the soldiers that fought in world war ii and then he went to korea and then he went to vietnam an exceptional warrior a soldier soldier if you can give a little inkling what made him a soldier soldier so i he died in 2005. so i never got to meet him and i i had a guy on my podcast who worked for him in vietnam a guy named general james mukayama and luckily his son had reached out to me and said i think you're talking about my dad because i read some passage in there that that jim mukayama was young cap young captain jim mukayam a company commander in vietnam he said i think you're talking about my dad would you want to talk to him and i said absolutely well here's the thing that i didn't really understand and you read one quote but there's all these quotes in that book that talk about how great hackworth was and what an incredible leader he was and how he was the best combat leader anyone had ever seen and all these just really complementary things that are said by a bunch of different people and when you read the book you're reading this guy's account of what he went through but i never really knew if that was all true or did he just cherry-pick his friends quotes about him and cherry picked the stories that he wanted to tell and so it was very interesting for me when i met mukayam general mukayama who he became a general eventually when i met him and we were talking about his life and i was very curious and i was a little bit nervous going into this interview because i was thinking maybe my hero my mentor this guy that i've never met before maybe he's just an arrogant jerk that talked talked himself up in this book so i'm sitting down with with general mukuyama and i finally got to the part where he's meeting hackworth for the first time and i said did you know did you know who hackworth was when he showed up so he was mook they call him mook mook was the was the like the adjutant to the to the general that that was going to that hackworth was gonna be working for so when hackworth comes into the office the first person he meets is this guy this guy cap mokoyama and so hackworth walks in and i said when hackworth walked in did you know who he was and mukayama says everybody knew who he was mr infantry and so he ended up explaining that everything that is written in there about hackworth they they just loved him they adored him up the chain of command it turned out a little bit different and you know the title of the book is about face and if you're familiar with familiar with military drill about faces when you turn around 180 degrees and at the end of the vietnam war towards the end of the vietnam war he was so disgusted with the way that the war was being fought he was so disgusted with the decisions that were being made by the leadership that he did an interview he was the first colonel first senior officer to do an interview that spoke out against the war that was happening and this is while he's in vietnam by the way so he got drummed out of the army and he was forced to retire and that was that so there's an element of rebelliousness to him and you know when you talk to me about are are there times when the leader is making the leadership this absolute senior leadership the civilian leadership is doing the wrong things yes and there's times when people speak out against it and there's an argument for against that too even even with hackworth you know did he when you get when you quit your job or you do something that gets you fired which is what he did you immediately give up all your influence over what's happening so they get another they get another battalion commander to take his place they get another colonel to step in and take his place that's what they do and now he can't help anymore he can't help his troops but at that point in the war he loved his men so much that he was sickened with the situation on the ground and he and he spoke out about it so that book had a huge impact on me and like i said i still i still read it all the time i reread it all the time and i always take lessons from it let me ask you about love this is not usually associated with giaco but uh what role does love in terms of uh friendship in terms of family play in a successful life in life in general again this is putting other people above yourself do you see that as love that's ultimately the implementation of love i would say yes jocko i've been a huge fan of yours you're somebody who inspires me to get up early to get shit done to be disciplined about my life and to be the best leader i can be it's really truly an honor and uh thank you for wasting all your too valuable time with me i don't know what you were thinking but thank you for doing it well thanks for having me on i can guarantee you i'm not as cool as you just made me sound um i'm just out here like i said trying to help people out and i think you're helping a lot of people out with your podcast so thanks for having me up here to share some of my experiences and hopefully i'll see you on the mat one day for sure looking forward to it could be sooner than you think that sounds like a threat i love it thanks for listening to this conversation with jaco willink and thank you to lynode indeed simplisafe and ground news check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from jacob willink there are no bad teams only bad leaders thank you for listening and hope to see you next time