Jocko Podcast - 337: When You Think You've "Made it", You Can Still Do More. W/ SEAL Officer, Mike Hayes

Episode Date: June 8, 2022

Mike Hayes. Navy SEAL Officer and lessons from combat.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 337 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. We had planned to take down an insurgent cell known to be located in three or four buildings in a village overrun with Sunni extremists. I was one of the four seals on the outskirts, making sure the area was clear before establishing the command and control position. Suddenly, through my grainy green night vision goggles, I saw a family, a mom, a dad, a 10-year-old kid, and a baby, sleeping outside a shack on a two-foot-high platform. This wasn't entirely unusual, given the middle of the night heat in Iraq, families often slept outside. But something about this situation felt off to me.

I saw the father start to reach for something. Instinct told me this was bad. I spoke firmly and clearly to the guy behind me calling his name, Joel, Joel, Joel, so he would know that I was about to make a move and could cover me. And I held the Iraqi man in my crosshairs, ready to shoot him at any moment, as I rushed as fast as I could toward him before he could grab what did turn out to be a weapon. He was reaching for an AK rifle just as I put my foot on his arm so he wouldn't be able to point the weapon at me or any of my teammates. Then I quickly put my muzzle on his chest and subdued him and enlisted Joel's help to properly detain him with flex cuffs.

I could have shot him at any time. But as I first approached him, I didn't know for sure that he was armed. and my instant and instinctive calculation made me confident that I would be fast enough to get him before he could take a shot at me or anyone else if he did have a weapon. It turned out that the AK was fully loaded and he had three magazines. And after we got him cuffed, his family under our control and our target secured, we realized through our interrogation process that he was in fact the number two most wanted enemy in Western Iraq at the time.

So that right there is an excerpt from a book, a book called Never Enough, which was written by Mike Hayes, who is a retired SEAL officer, who served 20 years in the teams, which included tours at Team 4, Team 8, Team 10, and also a tour as the commanding officer of SEAL Team 2. and in his career he deployed to South America, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

He also served in the White House as part of the National Security Council under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And I actually did serve with him for a short time in Germany when he was the operations officer. And we are lucky enough to have him here with us tonight to discuss some of his experiences. and lessons learned. Mike, thanks for joining us, man. Jocko, great to see you, brother. Great to be here. Yeah, we haven't hung out much

since we were playing combat water polo in Germany, which was circa 1998, and you were stationed at Unit 2. Were you the ops officer? I was the assistant ops officer, but close enough. Okay, so you were the assistant.

Oh, that's right. COXO, OPS. You were the assistant officer. So that, you know what that made me, right? As an answer. I was like the assistant assistant ops officer. So we'd have these games, these water polo games. Did you actually play water polo?

I didn't play in college, but Man Alive Combat Water Polo with you was one of my best memories. I obviously sucked at water polo, but I was good at Jiu Jitsu even then. And I used to more, for me, it was more just watered Jiu Jitsu, especially against, the guys that actually could play water polo. And there were some guys, there was a couple guys that played water polo in college. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah. There was a couple guys that really needed to get taken out of the game or at least mitigated as much as possible.

Yeah, I mean, for people listening, the rules, there's just really one rule. If you let go of the ball, you're supposed to let go of the person. So, you know, it was intense. And I always did my best to be on your team. Oh, right on. Good times. All right, let's get right into it. Let's talk about you and let's talk about where you grew up. Where's where'd you grew up? You're a New Englander, right? Yeah, well, dad was in the Navy, so bounced around a good bit, but from ninth grade on, Portsmouth, Rhode Island. What did your

dad do in the Navy? He was a combination, a submariner out of college and then supply officer, so kind of a joint career there. And how long did he do? He did 20 years, 23 years or something like that. And so you were all over the place. I was until 9th grade. Where? Where were you up until 9th grade? I lived in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Guam, you know, just a couple places around the U.S. and then just was really happy to settle down in 9th grade onward and call the biggest little state of Rhode Island home.

How long were you in Guam for? What grades? Seventh and eighth grade. Was that pretty? What year was this now? That was 83 to 85. So Guam was remote. in 83, 84.

We'd get the Super Bowl mailed to us like four weeks after it happened. Because I went to Guam in 1992, 93 when they started sending seals there on deployment. And it was, I mean, you were not really connected. I mean, there's no internet or anything. So everything took a while to show up there. It was a very educational part of my growing up.

You know, there's the simplicity. It was awesome, but at the same time, you know, you definitely give up some of the amenities of modern life. Did you go to school out in town or did you go to school on base? Went to a private Catholic high school, actually junior high school high school. Okay. Yeah, seventh and eighth grade. So you didn't get like the crap beat out of you by the loks? Oh, no, I did.

Of course I did. I got a friend that was at SDV in Hawaii, but he grew up in Hawaii. Hawaii and he was actually at team three as well but he said it was so it was rough man growing up he was a howley kid in Hawaii he said it was rough bad echo Charles commentary yes sir rough for the howley kids I can be it depends it depends it really depends for sure well this particular guy who's a great guy where I think he might have been claiming a lot of it had to do with him being howley I think it may have also had to do with his mouth which is rather large that is typically

either case yeah for sure oh classic um so you know you mentioned that your dad was in the navy but you you have a section in here about your grandfather as well and i'm just going to go to the book here and read this because it's a pretty awesome piece of history you say my grandfather graduated from the naval academy in 1940 and was nursing a hangover in a bungalow on the pearl harbor naval base the morning of december 7th 1941 when the japanese began bombing he was with seven others at the time, and when he heard the first wave of something going on, he knew he needed to get in his Jeep and go toward the harbor back to his ship. None of the others would go with him. They all believed they were safer where they were. He told me the scariest part was

heading toward the ship, driving past a Marine guarding the gate at 45 miles an hour without stopping, worrying the guard would shoot him. My grandfather made it to his ship and manned his battle station. He was on board that ship for the third wave of attacks and tended to many of the wounded that day. In the wake of the bombing, he realized that he didn't want to spend his career on the ground or at sea. When he'd tell me this story, he would point up with the sky and say he wanted to be up there. He put in a transfer to become a pilot. And after flight school, as a World War II, raged across the Pacific. He ended up stationed in the Aleutian Islands doing long-range bombing missions from the out.

most islands and helping to attack strategic sites in northern Japan. He took over as the commanding officer of his 35 plane bombing squadron at age 26 after his own commanding officer was shot down and he later served as a test pilot for the Navy's first helicopters and the commanding officer of the Navy's first helicopter squadron during the Korean War. He ended his career as a professor of naval science at Holy Cross and commanding officer of the school's ROTC training unit. He taught me about causes greater than self, what it means to serve, and how to keep pushing yourself to get better.

No offense, bro, but if anyone should have written a book, it sounds like it would be the granddad, huh? I agree. Larger than life. He's a real, like, absolute hero. You know, it's, I was blessed to be able to grow up around a person that didn't say, what do you want to be when you grow up? He would always say, who do you want to be?

And, you know, there are a few of us in the nation and on the planet that know what it's like to set your personal desire aside and assume risk for the nation. I grew up with the stories of my grandfather who did that quite regularly, and it was always inspirational. And I'm really thankful. It unquestionably made an indelible mark on who I am. So he was the commander of the ROTC unit at Holy Cross. that's awesome to think you had a guy that did all that. Did he fight in the Korean War when he used to have a helicopter pilot? So he was actually here at North Island, California.

And as the H-U-1 was the unit name, and I just remember it because I can still see a lot of his plaques that he had on his walls, which are almost memorized in my brain. But in Korea, what the Navy would do is put a couple helicopters out on some of the frigates and the ships and then use that to go fly search and rescue. And so he, like those of us who were in leadership positions in combat, he didn't have to get into the cockpit and go fly. But every time he went to visit the troops and there was something that happened, he said, told the young J.G. to step aside and he was going to fly this one. And I'll never forget one great story that he told from Korea about, you know, being shot at quite heavily going in to rescue a pilot and just very calmly looking at his co-pilot. And after this co-pilot was freaking out a bit and saying, Siler shoot net a guy. They're shooting at us. They're shooting at us.

And of course, I'm sure my grandfather just, ice in his veins just said, son, we're at war. That's their prerogative. I was on a, I was on a, going on an operation. It was my first deployment to Iraq. And we're driving in a convoy. And we're heading south of Baghdad. And it was a long transit. We were going down to that Jof as a matter of fact.

So it was a long haul, a few hours, maybe even like four or five hours. But we get ambushed. and a couple RPGs, some small arms fire, and the RPGs missed us, one of them went over. And I'm in vehicle two, and it was a long convoy. We had some, a vehicle, another type of vehicle in the middle. So we probably had six vehicles. So the, and, you know, we're driving blacked out, and it's at night.

And we, so we get, so my vehicle, we make it, no, nothing happens to us at all. And then we see, I, the first thing I saw was I was looking kind of outboard, and I just see, an explosion, which the first thing that I saw, I saw a couple tracers, but then I saw an explosion, which was an RPG that went high, and then another one went low. And we just, you know, kept driving. I think, you know, push through was the typical call, whatever.

And then my platoon chief, who's a freaking great guy, that he was in vehicle six. So he's the one that got to, like, watch the RPGs near missing all this stuff. And he comes up on the radio and he goes, he's like, hey, sir, you? We just got ambushed back here. We took some R.P.G. fired and some freaking small arms.

And I came up on the radio and I went, Roger. And he got a big kick out of that. Maybe I should have been more understanding at the time. But, yeah, I got to try and stay calm. Sometimes empathy works and sometimes it doesn't, right? So you're growing up, so you do your high school years in Rhode Island. What sports were you doing? Did you play sports?

Yeah, soccer, basketball, baseball, you know, was very, you know, average at all three in a town that was, or in a state that wasn't exactly competitive either. So that's, that's a harsh statement about poor old Rhode Island. And so you're just a decent athlete? I mean, how tall are you? Six, four. And you didn't play, were you good at basketball? I was, you know, I was decent. But in college, all my friends were on the varsity team.

And I was like, man, I can't hold a candle to these guys. And what about? grades were you studying hard i was i was a good student in high school were you uh what kind of music were you listening to oh gosh wow that's a great question so mid 80s it was like you know rush a little quiet riot maybe uh what else would that have been you know that that pretty much dates it dude quiet riot day uh was that come on feel the noise is that am i or is that twisted sister man i'm messing up my hair metal bands and then Since your grandfather worked at Holy Cross, you went to Holy Cross.

Was that pre-ordained? Or how'd that happen? My family has a long history with Holy Cross. My great-grandfather is in the Varsity Hall of Fame class in 1910. And so my grandfather, there's a lot of relatives who've been there. So no one ever pushed the Navy or Holy Cross or anything on me. It was more of just, hey, son, here's what's out there. There's this thing called a four-year ROTC scholarship.

And, you know, I just love for you to be familiar with it. And, you know, I'll never forget my grandfather and dad put me in the car like summer of junior year in high school and driving me up to Holy Cross and actually meeting the major who was in charge of the unit at the time. And that was a guy who, to this day is a great friend of mine, Joe Dunford, later became the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So, you know, Holy Cross is a storied institution with a lot of history. And it was a no-brainer for me. Then you show up there and you're instantly, you take an ROTC scholarship out of the gate. I did. So that means they're paying for college?

Everything. That's pretty good deal. Yeah. At the time, I was just thinking to myself as the oldest of four, this is a great chance to not burn any cash and save money from my younger three siblings to be able to go to college. And, you know, I thought I'd do four years as some sort of a supply officer and get out or, you know, have great leadership experience for four years. And then you recall, we invaded Panama in 89. There was a guy named John Connors who was killed on the Pitea runway. John was a Worcester Polytech graduate, but Holy Cross ROTC.

So my first exposure to the SEAL teams was the memorial service in the chapel at Holy Cross where the SEAL community came together and remembered John Connors. And that left a real mark on me. But freshman year, dude, I was 6'4 and, I don't know, about 105 pounds. I don't know. But there was no way at that age I even thought about myself being capable of going through SEAL training. But then later on as the years progressed, and I went from one push-ups to one and a half or something like that.

You know, then I went to mini-budds and then became... Was that your first sort of knowledge of the SEAL teams? Yeah, first. Was when Panama happened? Yeah. Because Panama definitely influenced me as well, because I thought to myself, wait, there's a war going on. As far as I was concerned, there's a war going on.

And I was thinking of myself, how is this happening? And I'm not there. And how do I get there, ASAP? And that's why I joined the Navy. Well, you know, for me, it was not what went through my head at that time. For me, it was more of like a beef come familiar with it and set it aside for a couple years. And, you know, in ROTC, you spend a week in the summer with the pilots, a week with the, you know, the submariners and the surface guys. And you try to figure out what do you want to be when you grow up?

And, you know, I had a great aviation cruise. I flew in an A6 off of the USS Saratoga. And it was right after Top Gun came out. So there's like 92-ish or something, and I was like, you know, partying like a rock star and thought, I'm going to go be a pilot. This is freaking awesome. Then I went to three weeks of minibuds and became perversely attracted with that challenge. So Holy Cross, have you ever been to Notre Dame before? I have, yeah. So Notre Dame, I've been there a few times and it, you know, like the females aren't allowed in the male dorms.

And if they are, they've got to be out of there by 10 o'clock at night. Like, it's pretty strict from a college-aged person. perspective. Is Holy Cross like that as well? It's not as strict. Okay. The, uh, there were, you know, at this point maybe, I'm going to guess roughly 10 or 15 Jesuit priests on, as, as professors when I was in college, it's less now. But, uh, you know, there were some that would, would go out and enjoy a glass of wine

or more for, but they disappear around 10 o'clock at night. And, and, and, but it was a, it was a, it was a, there was a great relationship between, you know, the, the student body and the faculty. Mm-hmm. So now you're saying that you did summer cruises. and for those people that don't know, this is when you're going to college, you're in ROTC, the Navy will take young college kids

and send them out to get a little taste of the different parts of the Navy. So did you do a ship one, just a straight up shipboard one? I did for a day, you know, and I was like, this ain't me, you know? That's all it took on that one. That wasn't hard.

Did you actually go like onto a ship somewhere that was on deployment or what was that? You know, I think what we did was got helicoptered from Norfolk, over to some frigate for 36 hours or something. It was, thank God, it wasn't longer. And then what, and then what year?

Was that after your freshman year? 92, yeah. Then when did you do the pilot thing? What year was that? That was between junior and senior year. Okay. So in between your junior year and your senior year, you get the full on top gun experience.

I did. And then the full on buds experience after that. So that was in the same summer? Same summer. That was an optional three week thing. And I thought, you know, in order to really figure out, do I want to be a pilot or do I want to be a seal, I've got to go do this mini-buds thing.

And they took 32 kids out of college for that program. What year was the mini-buds? It was the summer of 92. So you show up to mini-buds. What are they doing? This is three weeks long. It was a legit, they legit three week, one week of each of the three phases of training. And, you know, when you're going through it, you're like, how does this compare with the real thing?

It was after going through the real thing, I look back and say, we got a legit. full treatment for each of the three weeks. And I think nowadays they use that sort of, it's called something else now. I think it's called SEAL officer assessment and selection. And it's, it's something like mini buds, but it's sort of the selection and how they're going to figure out who gets to go. Was it like that for you guys? It definitely was. We came out with like grades out of the 32, you know, like not grades as an academic, but like just an all around score of how you did. And, you know, I remember having a pretty high number and thought, I think I'll be probably, this will stand me pretty well if I applied to circle back and go to buds. And history has it.

I did. And they took 16 guys out of ROTC my year, 16 guys out of the academy. So there are 32 officers taken into the program. And as you know, I don't know the number, maybe 15 of those made it through ultimately or something like that. Was there any quitters in mini-buds? Oh, yeah. There were. It was fun.

It was just like, okay, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way. out, you know. And so this is now 1993 that you graduate from Holy Cross and you get your, you get selected. I mean, the selection process for officers now is totally insane. I mean, it's insane back then, but with all the hype around seals and all that, it's just ridiculous. But still taking 16 from ROTC and 16 from the Naval Academy, that's slim pickings. It was tough, and the hard thing as a rising senior and needing to make a life decision was that I knew that if I applied for buds, I would not get my number two choice of pilot because, you know,

once you work through and they take the washouts who they don't pick for seal training, all the pilot slots are gone. So it was a little bit of a gamble. Well, it was a lot of a gamble, but like anything in life, go for what you want. And then you would have been on that ship that you didn't like very much. Yeah. And then you show up to, what buds cost were you? 192.

192. So you show up for Bud's class, 192. How prepared were you, you think? I was very prepared. I wasn't far from the most gifted physical athlete. You know, friends that showed up and did 50 pull-ups and I'd struggle with my, you know, eight and a quarter, you know, or something like that. But, you know, 6-4-2-30 at the time, like all.

I ran real fast to swim like a fish. The O-course was no trouble. For me, pull-ups were my downfall. But, you know, I came in feeling pretty strong. Was there anything that really challenged you? For me, it really was the pull-ups. But never to the point where I wasn't, I joke around about the eight and a quarter. But I just, you know, I just knew I was going to, I was there for reason.

You know, if something's worth doing, it's worth overdoing. And I prepared as well as I could. And I just took it really seriously when I went through and kind of limited my drinking when I was going through buds. At age 21, everybody's drinking like a fish. I was pretty serious about recovery and just knew I needed every advantage I could possibly help myself with. When I went through both, I didn't leave the barracks, really. Yeah. Like, I was a total nerd.

I would sharpen my knife and polish my boots like all weekend long. And I didn't even think about the recovery aspect. I think that's a new thing. Like the idea of recovery. I don't know. I didn't really have that. I didn't really think of that. You didn't have guys walking around with those big jug, the gallon jugs of water?

No. That was the thing in our time. Just pump the fluids after the day and for the weekend. Yeah, I didn't really have too much of that. Now, I've always thought that if you were, if you couldn't do pull-ups, you were going to have a problem with the O-course. And it seems like you had problems with pull-ups,

so you still didn't have a problem with the O-course. Dude, I honestly, I flew through the, I was always top five in the O-course. And you sucked at pull-ups? That's really bizarre. Well, I mean, it's just a different type of strength, pulling just a little bit laterally sometimes. You know, it's just that dead overhead up and down for pull-ups is a little

different than like rope climb where you're at that, a little bit of an angle. How, were you good at rope climbs too? Yeah. Yeah, it was really good. That's what? You must just have some weird genetic anomaly where pull-ups are hard for, because that's crazy, right, to be able to do the O-course in a top five position and suck at pull-ups. That seems crazy.

Yeah, I mean, I can't explain it. I can just tell you what I experienced. Yeah. Well, the cool thing about sucking at pull-ups is, you probably won't fail buds because you suck at pull-ups, right? You can fail. You can get dropped from buds for running. You can get dropped from buds from swimming.

You can get dropped from buds for the O-course. But for pull-ups, you might get, you know, teased, basically by the instructors during a PT. But you're not going to get dropped. Yeah, no, it's very true. It's very true. How many people quit? How many did you start with and how many people quit? We started with 120 and 19 graduated.

Started with 120 and 19 graduated. Were you, did anybody quit that you were like, dang, how's that? Oh, hell yeah. You know, you got guys that look like you who walk in on day one and you're like, man, and what am I doing here? But, you know, guys just drop like flies. And, you know, you remember in the beginning, they assigned swim buddies. You just throw people in the pool and go swim, you know,

a mile or half a mile. I can't remember what it was, but it was just swimming as fast as you can. And with 120 guys in the pool, you're crawling all over each other and just doing, and then they just pair up, you know, number one and number two or swim pair one, number three and number four,

swim pair two and so on. So myself and Chris Cassidy were swim pair one. And so Chris and I, like lifelong friends from, you know, day one of buds and the two of us just, we're always had this fun, healthy sense of talking trash at each other. And, you know, he ended up, as the honor man for the class.

And I, I, I, uh, years later went back to Buds. And I, I told them that I pulled all the records and recalculated the math. And, uh, at this point, he was an astronaut, of course, you know, and I said, hey, I, I just got some bad news for you. I'm having your name taken off the plaque and my name's going up. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, no, no, no, no, it was like the rest of us, but just powered straight through. Yeah.

So then you get assigned to, so it's now 1994. Is it 94? 94. And you get to assigned to Team 4. Did you speak, did you speak Spanish prior to that? I was almost a double major in Spanish. So good in the books, but never real, at that point in life, not a lot of practical Spanish. Because that was when we were coming up.

If you spoke Spanish, you were going to Team 4. Yeah. Pretty much guaranteed. Yeah. So being a new guy at the team. I have a good new guy story from your book here. And we'll go to the book. It says,

Another story again from my time is a brand new seal. The Navy needed four of us to test out some new equipment. I was voluntold to take part in the exercise. They took us in a boat two or three miles offshore, dropped us in the water and told us to swim to the beach, stay for a few minutes, and then swim back to the boat together. It turned out that conditions were unexpectedly harsh,

40-knought winds, nearly eight-foot high. waves and the four of us immediately lost each other unable to see more than a few feet in front of us man that's scary in its own right I swam for what felt like hours before I finally got to the beach and once I was there I could not see my teammates I waited and waited but there was simply no sign of them I figured maybe I had missed them maybe had gotten slowed down by the waves maybe they'd already made their way back so I got back in the water and tried to return to the boat even though I couldn't see In my mind, I had to complete the assigned mission at all costs.

Just keep going. This is what a seal has to do. I couldn't find my way back to the boat. Because of the harsh conditions, I was using my silver ranger compass to do my best to swim a straight line of bearing to the planned link-up point. But it didn't work. I realized I must have drifted much more than I expected. I couldn't see back to the beach either. For a few hours, I was basically lost at sea, wearing the other three more.

experienced seals would think I was a total screw-up. I had broken a fin strap and at one point I was startled, okay, scared when I was moved about 10 feet in the water, bumped hard by a massive sea mammal. I imagine that no one would ever find my body and everyone in the seals would think I must not have been a good swimmer, despite entering Bud's training with one of the fastest swim times in the history of the program and along with my swim buddy Chris Cassidy coming seconds away from the fastest ever two-mile swim and buds. Finally, the boat found me and picked me up, and I was quickly exorated for being stupid enough to make the swim back out to sea. My three teammates had ended up down the beach from where the current had taken me, just a bit

too far away from me to see them, and they stayed on the beach until the boat came for them, knowing conditions were too miserable to even attempt to head back. I'd put myself at risk for a training exercise because I confused doing the hard thing with doing the right thing. My decision was far too risky to make sense even as a confident and capable swimmer. There's so many little lessons in that one right there, that little story. And by the way, so your book is filled with a bunch of lessons and obviously I'm just reading excerpts from it. And this chapter was choosing the hard path and doing the hard thing.

And of course, everything's a dichotomy and you can do things where you go too hard. But, man, I can't even imagine you with your Silver Ranger, which is, for those of you that don't know, it's a little compass that you used to navigate on the land. And you probably had it with you for like E&E or some whatever. And you actually pulled this thing out. You're trying to swim a bearing, which is literally impossible to do. Like, this is totally ridiculous. And what I love about this is so true. The main thing you're worried about, you're lost at sea for hours, you're getting pushed around by sea animals.

The main thing you're worried about is looking like a loser from your teammates and being a bad team guy. That's exactly right. You know, I still vividly remember being, you know, pushed this, you know, eight or ten feet or so in the water and just thinking, okay, this is going to be the end. But the worst thing is people are just going to think I was a terrible swimmer. And it's just not what you want. It's not the look you want. I was like, no, I'm a good swimmer. Please don't think that, you know.

So, yeah, there's a million lessons in there. You know this well. When you write a book, if you're the president of your own fan club, by definition, you don't have a book. And so sharing these things where we didn't make good decisions or in retrospect were actually stupid, I think that's where the learning is and that's what I tried to do in the book. You as a new guy, meaning this is the universal you, me, you, all of us as new guys, man, you do some dumb, dumb things. And this is a classic example of like this is all the other guys that were experienced. We're like, hey, we're not swimming back out.

Are you kidding me? We'll all die. And you, of course, hey, that's what the mission is. We're going to go and do it. Well, a little bit of two. It's an interesting thing. I'd be interested in your perspective on this. But, you know, growing up in the teams before 9-11, it was mission, mission, mission at all costs.

Post-9-11, our community got much better at saying, you know what, there's new information. let's incorporate new information to what's going on. Let's think about risk. Is the risk worth the reward in constantly reassessing that risk? You know, it became okay to turn around on a mission in Iraq or Afghanistan and say, hey, you know what? The risk profile just changed massively. We'll come back another night for this group of terrorists.

This risk is not worth assuming and let's not do the mission. And when I was growing up and when you were growing up, we'd be excoriated for not doing the mission. Later on, we were held up as smart. Yeah, well, there was a big difference, you know, when we were coming up before the war started, we were literally training for the big Mish, singular. Like, hey, you're going to do this one mission. We didn't know what it was, but that's what we were training for. And yeah, there was no way. It didn't even seem like a feasible idea that you would turn around on a mission or not complete the mission.

And then, yeah, obviously, as the war kicked off, and once we started to get combat experience for our generation, it was like, oh, this doesn't. make any sense. Oh, the risk is too high. Oh, the enemy has what? Well, we're not going to get them then. And yeah, that's something that we had to learn just as our forefathers had to learn. And it's unfortunately one of those lessons that it's almost like we, well, we had to relearn it, you know. I wrote about this in leadership strategy and tactics. We used to set up this training scenario in, in Mount or Salk or whatever you want to call it, the urban training where the guys would be clearing like down a building down a hallway and there'd be we'd have a barricaded shooter at the end of the hallway and everybody that ended the hallway would get riddled with paintball and get put down and you'd

see unfortunately just about every leader would fall victim to us two more guys go they get mowed down two more guys go two more guys go they get mowed down and and then you know finally after you know three quarters of the task union is laying dead in the hallway we'd say hey man take a step back and think about what's happening what are you doing it does this make any sense and they would have, that's what they have to do, is they'd have to learn to detach and take a step back and go, oh, this is obviously bad and I shouldn't continue to do this. So, yeah, that's definitely a lesson that we learned and that we had then to pass on to the next generation of SEALs to make sure they understand that quitting is an option. And, you know, you don't quit from a strategic perspective, but with whatever tactic I'm using right now is going to cost us lives or get people killed or doesn't. make any sense. I got no problem saying, I was wrong, this is a bad move, we're not doing it

anymore. Totally agree. And it's a lot of people ask me, how does your business career, now that I've been retired for 10 years and help run the operations for VMware, a really large software company, you know, the applicability is the exact same. It's, hey, we have a certain amount of, you know, capital to invest. Do we invest it in place A or place B or C? And wait a minute, you know what, we're getting feedback from the market that our original choice wasn't quite right. Are you going to keep trying to invest your way through and throw bad money after good money after a bad path?

No, you're going to make a decision. Sunk costs are sunk. Let's go try something different and quickly dynamically assess. And so the parallels between business and the SEALs are in the military writ large are really, really perfect. Yeah, I often end up talking to companies

and that's the exact example I'll use is, hey, we tried this marketing campaign. It's not, we're not getting the ROI. we expected. Let's put more money into it. Okay. And they still don't get the ROI or expected. Okay, well, let's put even more money.

It's the same thing as sending guys down a hallway to get shot up. Awesome. So you get to Team 4. That's kind of an example of Team 4. What else was going on at Team 4 when you got there? Do you get put right into a platoon? I was relatively quick at maybe six months or so of kind of like schools and individual time, but yeah.

Did you go to, so you went through STT at the team or was it? At the team. Okay. So your team is running STT. Was that a good course of instruction? It was, it was good. You don't know what you don't know at that age and that time in life, you know. But look, everything was learning at that point, learning what to do, sometimes learning what not to do.

You know, we, but immediate exposure to what was going on. I remember in demolition training being at Fort AP Hill, one range over from us. there were four Marines that were in a demolition accident and basically vaporized. And it was terrible. And so what was the accident? There was something called a meeklyke charge. It was like a line charge. And it went low order.

And they, you know, collected all the C4 and put it in a pile and then went to burn it, but forgot that there was this little thing called a booster in the C4. And so when they went, because you can burn C4 as everybody, as you know, but not everybody necessarily does. And that caused it to go high. order and so you know right away we're exposed to you know real situations and so lots of like you know a lot of the biggest learning comes from the hardest situations what a what schools did you go to as a new guy officer well you know it's funny one of my greatest friends in life warren nickerson

was the operations chief and as a brand new ensign I remember walking in and saying all right chief nick the only question I have is do I go to free fall and then sniper or sniper then free fall and he's like shut up new guy you got some dog and ponies for you so you know so I was you know hitting the road doing you know the dog and pony shows and all kinds of stuff but I you know I went to you know at the time it wasn't like you could get right into free fall school so it took me three or four years to be able to get there and so I don't even my schools were so unremarkable at that time that I don't even remember what they were yeah I know as a new guy got sent to like uh well I was very lucky that I got sent to the calm school on the east coast which was awesome but other than that it was like demo driver school

and just other just here's how you chain up the trailer to the vehicle and stuff like that just complete new guys schools it was freaking horrible and then you get put into a platoon assistant platoon commander yep assistant platoon commander and uh how's your workup you you're doing a six month to uh you know you're doing a six month deployment at this time team four deploys to south america yeah it was deployment was to panama and then from there just a lot of what j sets joint combined exchanges for training where we we bounced around and you know we trained you know El Salvador, you know, Chile, Peru, just the local operational forces that were similar to ours. And it was just a big, you know, a big bunch of fun. It's there just wasn't, there was no real, real stuff going on, but lots of learning. How was your, you know, what would you feel like as a new guy officer? If you were talking to yourself when you were younger, you were talking to a young ensign or Lieutenant J.G that's rolling into a platoon right now, What would your advice be? Look, I think one of the things that young officers always wrestle with is how to walk the line between being a leader when a leader is needed to step forward,

but at the same time really have the humility that a lot of other people know a lot of things that you don't know. And to me, that's what makes the team special is when you think about how you make decisions and who makes decisions, we just grow up with that just built into who we are. And that's really, you know, the thing you test is, when do I step forward and say, all right, guys, shut up, lock it on, we're going this direction? And when do you kind of step back? Like you, a spouse, in a lot of your work, is leading from the rear is okay. Yeah. No one ever expects the seal leader to say, hey, lead from the rear, right?

Yeah. Are there times you got to lead from the front? Yes, absolutely. You're doing something that's dangerous or something that's horrible or something that's even monotonous. Sometimes you've got to step up and say, all right, I got this. But yeah, well, if I have the opportunity and someone on my platoon or my team wants to step up and lead, no problem. Go for it. I like to say, I like to try and lead with minimum force required, right?

Well, you know, I think there are a couple great points here. First of all, I always say the L and CEL stands for lazy, right? And like we find the easiest path to go achieve the goal because that gives you more time, effort and energy for the next problem. or lets you rest and recover for the next problem. But, you know, it's like in business, we're always thinking about succession planning. And the only way you're going to get your second line ready to be the first line is if the first line

can take a step back and let the second line be the first line. So the only thing you need to do if you're in the leadership position and what I try to do now, I think it's one thing I do decently, is to step back and let other people make the decisions and only weigh in if and when needed. Most importantly, it's the process. Does the process to make decisions make sense?

Is it thinking about like the seals are a meritocracy, as you know, is who cares where the idea comes from? You get all the ideas on the table. You find the best idea and the best idea wins. And that's the way you're going to go do the mission. And that's exactly the way we need to operate and often do operate in business. Yeah. And of course, this doesn't mean you let the second string, you know, run off the cliff. But you can let them bump into the guardrails and get a little dinged up.

And they're going to learn from that. Put some Bondo on there and they'll be all right. But a lot of times people are paranoid. They don't want to take any risk at all and think that, oh, you're going to make a mistake. It's like, hey, yeah, they're going to make mistakes and that's how they're going to learn. Dude, it comes down to comfort in your role, right? I mean, it's, if I describe careers in three phases. The first phase is getting really good at something, whatever it is, doctor, lawyer, seal, whatever.

The second phase is trying to show the world you're really damn good at what you've chosen. And that third phase, which many people don't get to, is being so confident that you are good, that you no longer need to prove it to anybody. And that's what lets you step back. I think when I see in the business world, the people, the leaders who don't step back, what I see is oftentimes a lack of confidence that makes the person feel like if they're not in front of the room making the decision, then they're not seen as the one in charge. And so it's really, I think, a failure of leadership when you can't step back.

Yeah. I had one of the things I used to teach the JOs was you have nothing to be. prove, but everything to prove. And the nothing to prove part is, hey, I don't care how we build this palette. I don't care, you know, I don't care who goes on this operation. I don't care what route we take in. Like, there's a bunch of little decisions that are going to get made that if your platoon makes them, it's perfectly fine and you don't need to prove, well, my way of getting to the target would be a little bit more efficient than yours or my way of building. We might not get our feet wet. Yeah, yeah. Just like all these little things where sometimes is that insecure

Junior leader feels like they need to prove to everyone that they're in charge and you don't you have nothing to prove You're actually in charge you're de facto in charge and that's fine you don't need to prove it What you do need to prove is that you're going to listen that you're going to that you're going to pay attention that you're going to make the right decisions at the right time that when it is time to weigh in You're going to do something smart not something rash so yeah all good things to think about Speaking of not being rash, here's a little scenario you talk about in the book. My platoon was once training at the Altahama. Am I saying that? Altamaha.

Altamaha River in Georgia. And we had an enthusiastic seal named Max. We were carrying kayaks with a good amount of gear inside, trying to find the most convenient way to transport guns, paddles, and sensitive reconnaissance equipment that had to stay dry as we waited. through the shallow water. Suddenly, Max very calmly stopped and said to me, Mr. Hayes, there's a gator on my leg. His calm demeanor in the face of such an alarming statement caused me to doubt him until he lifted his leg out of the water and I saw a three to four foot baby alligator had indeed latched around his knee. Max, to his extreme credit, did not overreact. He stayed calm, certainly calmer than I would have been and took deep breaths until the alligator decided to

open his mouth and let go. Max was unharmed other than four bite mark tooth scars. Many of our enemies are not as cooperative as that baby alligator ended up being, which is why our reactions to situations are so important. The smartest seal isn't the one with the greatest raw intelligence. It's the one who has the best and quickest reaction to the problem. The seal who can quickly assess and decide the best course of action is the one I want on my team, not the seal who gets emotional. and lets his feelings or his fears get in the way of pure rationality. I said in chapter one that I would take someone with hunger over someone with greater ability every time.

I'd also take someone who reacts well over someone with greater raw intelligence. You want both intelligence and control, but in the stressful moments, control matters a lot. I would love to find people who are smart enough to predict the future, but I haven't come across many of them. So I need people who react well, no matter what the future turns out to hold. No matter the context, the importance of having good, controlled reactions to surprising situations can never be overstated. So there you go. Freaking gator chomps on your leg. Yeah, you know, the saying, you don't have to out swim your buddy. You just have to, excuse me, you don't have to out swim the shark. You just have to outswum your buddy. So, you know, it's like, should I go

on a dry land and get away from this guy. I remember that situation very well, but in all sincerity, it is the expression, calm breeds calm, excitement breeds excitement. You've been shot at and rocketed enough to know that anytime you're not calm, you are just using emotion that could be used to solve the problem. Do you think that that buds weeds out some of that? It's a good question. I think to some degree, but not perfectly. Yeah, it's definitely not perfect because I know you and I both have seen plenty of team guys. Go freaking. Like this guy, Max, is a great example of like the Com Cool Collected seal that you want in your platoon,

either in charge of your platoon or one of your machine gunners in your platoon. Having a guy like that is awesome. Having somebody that just loses their mind is absolutely horrible. I think that's one of those traits that you can learn, though. I'm sure you're asked a similar question that I am frequently, which is talk to me about what's innate leadership. What are you born with? what can you train through time. I think that calm is a thing that you can learn and train through time.

Would you agree? 100%. And, you know, I got really lucky in that the last tour that I did was run and trade at out on the West Coast. And so I got to run this freaking leadership laboratory, which was, I honestly think it might have been the greatest leadership laboratory that's ever existed in the world. That's what I think. just to be able to put these guys in these stressful situations with so much on the line.

And look, was it life or death? No. So I guess combat is an even better leadership laboratory except for in combat, you can't take a guy and put him through iteration after iteration after iteration because he's dead if he's bad. So you can't really, it's not a laboratory. It's a real world test. Is combat a better real world test than going through training? Yes, it is. But the training that we had was really crazy good.

It was realistic. It was hard. And you would see guys develop these traits. You would watch guys. You'd see them and you'd put them into a situation and they'd lose their mind or they'd start getting panicked or they'd start freaking out about something. And you'd see everything would fall apart. Their platoon would fall apart.

And then maybe, you know, the next time you say you'd debrief them. Hey, listen, man, when you start yelling and screaming on the radio, no one's listening to you. anymore. It's not getting through to anybody. They can't make sense of what you're saying. You need to calm down. You need to think about what you're going to say, simple, clear and concise language. So you brief them on that. And then the next time, maybe they start getting excited. You go, hey, man, hey, Fred, come here. Take a wrap off. Think about what you're going to say. What are you going to tell you to get, oh, no, hold on. What are you going to tell them to do? I'm going to tell them to get, hold on. What are you telling them to do? I'm going to tell them to move to building 34. Okay.

Now come up on the radio and just say that. Or just yell it. Just put the word out. And then you'd see the guy do it and you could see that they would learn. So yes, you can absolutely learn this stuff as long as you're humble enough to, as long as you're humble enough to take criticism and assess yourself. So there was a bunch of things that you can improve at. Look, there's some things that you can't improve. Right? There's some genetic things that you have that you can't improve. This is another thing I wrote about leadership strategy and tactics. I had a guy coming through who's a task unit commander. Super smart guy. Good. tactician, the voice of a mouse, right? So when it came time to put out word, you know,

like to tell everyone what was going on, he just didn't have, he couldn't project his voice at all. And so I'm talking to him like, hey man, listen, you got to start putting the word out. And in my mind, I'm thinking, you know, maybe this is just, maybe I'm just super biased towards being loud because I have a loud voice. Maybe I'm just biased. And so I'm watching him and I can see he's trying to put out word. No one can hear him. It's a problem. So I say, hey man, if you don't start upping your volume, people can't hear you. I don't even know if you can do this job, which is a real like horrible thing to tell someone. This guy's a task unit commander. He's been in the teams for 12 or 15 years or something. This is a senior guy. And now I'm telling me,

hey, you can't do this. And then the next iteration, I'm watching him. And he's got to make the call. and he grabs like big mouth Bill in his platoon or one of the platoons is like hey Bill, tell everyone to get to building 34 now. And Bill's like, and I was like, oh cool, problem solved. So you've got to, you've got some things that you can't get better at.

You know, some people aren't articulate talking in front of a crowd. Okay, cool. Hey, Echo, you're good in front of a crowd. You put the word out to the troops. Or some people can't simplify a problem. So it's like, hey, Mike, I'm having a hard time getting through this. Can you simplify this thing so everyone can understand it? So there's some things that you're going to naturally not going to be great at.

Put your leadership team together where you've got some people that are good at that. And then be humble enough to say, you know what, Mike's a lot better at simplifying things than I am. And Echo's a lot more articulate than I am. So I'm going to have Mike figure out the problem and I'm going to have Echo talk about it. And we're going to be good to go. I'm going to sit back and just try and get these guys what they need. So there are things that you can not get better at. You can usually improve them a little bit, but you might not become an expert at them.

But there's definitely some things that you can absolutely improve on. And being calm and being able to detach and take a step back is most certainly, most certainly one of them. So that was your assistant platoon commander. Was it anything else? You got one story on that deployment about kind of getting hell. Was this when you got held up at gunpoint? Yeah. Talk us through that.

So 1996, we were with a squad in Peru, squads eight seals. So it's myself and seven guys. And we were just training the Peruvian seals, nothing crazy. And I will say that in those days, the leader of the Shining Path, Sandero Luminoso, which was a terrorist organization, was in jail about a mile or less than a mile from the Peruvian Seals compound. So we were likely watched or people knew that there was somebody in country helping the Peruvian Seals. But myself and my LPO stayed back in Lima. for just a day while the rest of the guys flew forward to Akitos Peru, which was deep in the jungles of the Amazon. And we were just literally out to dinner one night, driving back from dinner

unarmed, and two cop cars pinned us in really, really quickly, jumped out with three or four guys armed rifles and basically opened the door, held me a gunpoint, threatened me with execution, and they drove us around and basically interrogated us, asked us a bunch of people. of questions that nobody ever really wants to answer, you know, how you want to be tortured, how you want to be executed, how do you want to die, you know, and a lot of worse things than that. I had a point where I could have jumped out of the car that my LPO, Ken Needham, was in the back of this SUV. I was in the middle seats. And I could have jumped out when the car was going 40 or so, saved myself. And I very, very vividly remember I can never ever jump

out of this car because I couldn't live with myself if I bailed on Ken and I lived and they killed just not who I wanted. Back to my grandfather. Who do you want to be? So, you know, we learned never bail on your swim buddy. And I was not, I was fortunate after that incident because I could answer really, really truthfully, knowing that in a life and death situation that I would not bail on my swim buddy. So it was a lot of learning at a young age.

How did you get out of that scenario? You know, I did what I would have wanted victims to do if I were in the other role. Don't look at the victims so we can't identify, or excuse me, don't look at the assailants so that we can't identify them. And the threat goes down and just be compliant in answer to our previous part of the conversation around calm. I was so uber calm. You would never think that I was even 1% remotely worried about the situation I was in. In Spanish, I was like, hey, we're economists, we're desk workers. We work at the embassy, and we were just out to dinner.

These things happen all the time. We get it. You guys need the car. Take the car. We have insurance. Take it. It's all you. And just really totally mellow answered these questions.

And I think these guys just figured out. These guys aren't a threat. These guys can't possibly be seals. So they drove us around and after the interrogation of about an hour, they brought us out of the car at gunpoint. And I was like, okay, this is the point where they either pull the trigger or they don't. Myself and Ken just kept walking because I remember very vividly thinking, hey, a 10-foot shot is harder than a zero-foot shot.

You know, maybe they'll miss an organ. And so I just quickly put space between me and the, guy who had a gun and at the point he just I wasn't looking backwards so I can't tell you what he was doing I was just ready to be shot and um and they they never pulled the trigger that doesn't sound like a very nice last day in the in the city of there I have not been back to Lima and so that's what you did on that deployment you travel around this is pre 9-11 you're traveling around your training other forces and and and then what happens after that after that tour Is that, that's when you go to Germany?

Went to DLI for learning German for nine months. Then ended up, you know, just going over to Germany. Oh, you went to DLI first, huh? I did, yeah, yeah. So you speak three languages then? Well, depends on the account. No, I'm still working on English. So you go to DLI and then you come over to Germany.

This is where I meet you. 97, 98? 98. Because I went, I basically got done with OCS. I showed up at SEAL Team 2 and immediately went over there. And it was the master chief there

who was one of my platoon chiefs. And apparently the conversation went the commander over there or the ops officer said, hey, we need someone to come and help out with ops. And they were sending,

they're sending this ensign. And they're saying, oh, these guys are sending us Team 2 sending us a damn ensign. Like, what good is this guy going to do? And then the master's, Chief sees my name and goes, wait a second, I know this guy. You say that name again, Ensign Willink.

We want this guy over here. And so sure enough, I showed up and we played water polo. Yeah, I don't know what we did beside that. If in all truth, we probably filled out some forms and almost like in the, almost the pre-computer days, you know, so I don't know what in the world we possibly, we weren't delete an email in those days. Well, I'll tell you a funny story. We went to, we did some big joint exercise.

And the skipper at the time, he's like, all right, Jocko, you're going to go forward and you're going to run the tactical operation center. And like, you know, these days when we think of a tactical operation center, you know, we're talking plasma TVs and satellite links and internet. You're talking, you know, like a Star Trek looking scenario. I shit you not. We went on this mission and I fit this, quote, tactical operation center into one single rucksack. I had like a sack off computer radio or something. I had a bunch of maps. I had some like I thought I was squared away because I had, you know, like some overlays for the maps.

And then how much the world changed between that time? So this is 1998. I literally had the tactical operation. I mean, this isn't a big exercise, a big giant joint exercise that was taking place all over Europe. And I had a little, you know, we had a little, the seals there had a little role in this exercise, but it was a big exercise. A lot of stuff going on. And I literally had the. entire tackle operation center set in my rucksack. That's scary. That's some good times right there.

So then how long were you how long do you spend in Germany for? Two years and that was the Bosnia-Cosovo days and so there was some good learning there too and I felt like I would be a better platoon commander if I went overseas in a role like that for two years and honestly those two years really set me up to be in my in my opinion a much better platoon commander when I got to seal team eight in 99 yeah and and just kind of had some epic leadership over there too the unit that you were at um I mean those leaders are just incredible leadership over there incredible really really strong Rick Smethers yeah yeah just great guys that awesome times um any major so you say oh there's there's lessons that I learned or there's things that I got from that deployment. I mean,

is it just learning what it's like from the other side when you're on deployment? Yeah, it's taking a look at a seal platoon and saying, what is the effective employment of a seal platoon? When you're in the platoon, you're a little bit, I don't want to say biased. You have a narrow view. You know, and so understanding the difference between what success and, and I wouldn't say failure, but like some average performance is, was really important to me because, you know,

hearing, having the opportunity at a young age, at a junior senior senior seniority to see the senior leadership say, hey, that was really awesome or what the hell are those guys doing? Just those statements themselves carried value. I was in training cell at SEAL team once.

I was like an E5, and I went on my first trip where I was kind of like the trip, lead and it was to Florida to Hurlbutt field Florida and we put a platoon out in the field for recon and whatever and like they they flew down there went right in the field they might have even jumped into the field but anyways they go down there they go right in the field and of course I was there on advon getting the target set up and all this stuff and then they get done with the operation and we pull them out of the field and now they've got whatever it is three days in

Fort Walden Beach Florida and I'm like for it was the first time that I saw a platoon from the outside and I was like oh my god this is going to be a problem like there's no way these guys are going to get through three days of liberty here we this is going to be crazy and I remember that was the first time I was not in a platoon because when you're in a platoon you don't you're just like oh we can go out now cool oh we're done with our op cool we're going to go out and do whatever we want in wherever we are and that was like the first time I saw it from the outside and it was a good learning lesson for me. Yeah, you know, like we often say now, it's you don't know what you don't know. And so how do you take things from that unknown unknown quadrant and make them known?

Like, whether it's the seals or in business, all of the risk and all of the opportunity is in that unknown, unknown quadrant. So how do you get into that and identify it and pull it back out? So we didn't realize it in those days, but that's what we were doing. Yeah. Yeah. That's another lesson, another, We're, I should say a reiteration of the lesson of to take a step back and see something. Because when you're in that platoon, you don't, you don't. And you'd been on deployment before. You knew what it was like to go on deployment, but you were in a platoon. And so you don't quite know the perspective of not being in the platoon and not understanding what that looks like from the outside.

And not understanding what it looks like when there's some kind of an incident and how much that disrupts everyone and how much it hurts our reputation as seals. You know, that's something, you know, when you're in a seal platoon, someone gets in trouble, you're like, oh, Fred got in trouble. You don't think about it from, you know, what does the fleet think of that? What does that army commander that's there think of those things? You just don't, well, at least I didn't. I had, you know, I was young, dumb, and, well, just young and dumb, I guess. You don't need to finish that. So you wrap up there.

You wrap up there. And then where do you go? Seal teammate took over as a platoon commander and did work up. and then deployed down to a Kosovo. So what year is it now? So 99 I moved back to Virginia Beach and take over as a platoon commander. And when you get there,

how are you feeling? How are you feeling you getting your platoon? Dude, so great. It's like finally like I'm ready. You know, it's been a year of like put me in coach. And then you're finally in and it's just off to the races and just, you know, you remember the feeling well,

I'm sure. It's everything it's cracked up to be in more. And so you said this is that teammate. Yeah. And so now you guys are basically fighting to try and get to go back to Yukon. Yep. And go to Kosovo, Bosnia, whatever's happening in that theater, because that's the only show in town. That's the only show in town.

But we made it back. And, you know, we did a deployment there where we were doing, you know, small four or six men special reconnaissance missions. And, you know, we'd go out on three or four day ops. and then we'd stand QRF for three or four days while another, a sister, part of the unit would go out and then we'd have three or four days off. So we were actually in quite a regular predictable cycle while we were overseas.

You talk a little bit about one of these operations here in the book. Here we go. I was in Kosovo in 1999 in the middle of winter, leading a small surveillance team in the mountains just a few hundred meters from the Serbian border. Freezing cold temperatures, the darkness of night, howling winds, and both Kosovo, Serbian and Albanian armies somewhere in that same snowy terrain, weapons ready, looking for an enemy to fight.

As we suffered through the elements, the sun soon to rise, we knew we needed to find a place to rest and hide for the daylight hours. From our vantage point halfway up the side of a mountain, struggling to maintain our balance on the steeply sloping ground, we could see a natural line of drift below, railroad tracks, a 10-foot, wide patch of flat ground, a path that could, that would have called out to anyone as the comfortable place we should naturally set up camp. Of course, we wanted to move down there. I remember a young guy on our team incredulous that we could even be out in this kind of weather. Humans can't survive in this, he said. It's miserable. The temptation to head down toward the easier path and the more comfortable sight was real. But if it was calling out to us, we knew it would be calling out to anyone who happened to be coming that way. Going down there would make us more visible,

more vulnerable, and more likely to run into trouble. So we set up camp a couple hundred meters up the steeply angled slope and sure enough within an hour and just a short time before sunrise, what looked like the entire Albanian army marched straight down that natural line of drift. Had we been camped there, they would have found us for sure. Doing the uncomfortable, exhausting thing, the hard thing saved us that day. So those are the type of operations you were doing. You're a great reader, by the way. Yes.

Did you guys do Winter Warfare in your workup? We did. And this was after, I guess, Team 8, or sorry, Team 2 had sort of given up the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the lock they had on Winter Warfare? They, they did. And, you know, it was all of, you know, four or six weeks or something. something like that in the Colorado, what are they, 13,000 or 14,000 foot peaks. And so we did, you know, slept in snow caves and attempted to get good at telemark,

but certainly get good at snowshoeing. And we did all the winter work up and it really paid off because those operations in Kosovo were sometimes really miserable from a weather perspective. And, and then on that particular passage you just read, I mean, I just very vividly remember thinking, like if we would have given in and done the easy thing there, we probably would not have survived. We, at a minimum, would have been captured and interrogated. So you did a full six-month deployment down in that AO?

Yes. And you're doing pretty much three days on in the field, three days on a QRF and then three days off? Yes. It's forward stage of QRF and sleep in a Humvee for three days or, you know, just be at the ready to go help whoever is in the field, maybe, you know, 10 or so kilometers or whatever it might be from the main element. Anyone ever get contacted?

We did on one operational. It actually was the quick story is that we observed an arms transfer. Recall we were enforcing the Dayton Peace Accords and we saw Russian forces handing weapons to Serbians, which is not the date and peace accords. And this is early, early in the day of no light cameras and near real-time sat-com sending it back. We got pictures and documented the whole thing. And then we weren't set up to do any sort of offensive operations. You know, we had whatever, 80 pound packs for three days and, you know, as many ham sandwiches as you could stuff in your backpack.

But there was a nearby Army Special Forces house that could get out and get underway. We called them in. They went and looked through the building where the transfer had happened. And I mean, I just assumed that that meant we would be, our mission would be. be over. You know, the age old saying, if you think you've been compromised, assume you have, and if you have ex-fill. And this was a leadership thing that I got put against, the Army Major at the time, who was in charge of the Soxie, the Special Operations Command and Control Element, said Charlie Mike, continue mission. And I was, I remember over computer, kind of getting in a little bit of an

argument with him saying, hey, here's what we do in the seals. This means we're over. Ultimately, he talked about it with the couple of us, the six of us that were in the field. Said, hey, boys, what do we think here? This is, we have time to talk this through. And everybody said, you know what? Let's, let's just continue mission. Let's not make this an issue. We don't feel that threatened.

So let me just catch everyone up here. So you're in the field. You see this weapons transfer. And you do this. You tell the story in the book with great detail and it's an awesome story. But you're in the field. You're doing a reconnaissance. You see this weapons transfer take place.

And it's illegal. And it shouldn't be happening. And you actually get photographs. of it and you push those up over Satcom which this is not like the movies this is this is a legit effort to get that done and very cool that you guys were able to pull that off you get photographs of this weapons transfer taking place and then you send that up the chain of command and what the chain of command does is pushes a special forces group out to go inspect the area which clearly anyone with any sort of tactical sense is going to go oh we

just did a weapons transfer and now the U.S. military is there, there's someone watching. And so your thought is, okay, once the green berets go and inspect that site, we need to get that hell out of here. Well, you get told by the chain of command, no, you're not leaving. You're going to stay eyes on. And this is where you have the discussion. Hold on a second. What do you mean to stay here?

And so that's where you're at. And so what's the decision? So we stayed. And then not a few hours later, we were being, you know, actively hunted by, we counted 19 armed individuals looking through this tree line and trying to figure out where we were. And, you know, we were set up with two OPs, observation posts, and then one CP command post. So, six people in the field, two, two, two, and two. I was in the command post with my radio and I did not have eyes on. I was back a bit. And then there's, in one of the command, in one of the

observation posts, Chad Wilkinson, who, you know, rest in peace, hero, you had some, you had Sarah Wilkinson, another amazing American hero on your show recently, just, you know, one of my lifelong friends. And basically radioed back to me and said, hey, boss, we got to make a decision here. We're, there's somebody coming down the tree line, and we either need to, you know, take him out or fall back. And I just said, listen, Chad, here's the deal. If you take him out, just know that we're going to have, you already know this. We'll have 18 other people hunting us even more actively. But do whatever you think is right, and I'm behind you. And he ultimately, with one other guy that he was with, pulled back, took eyes off, didn't shoot.

And to this day, I think that was one of the greatest decisions ever because the six of us got back together and then we just worked our way out of a really tricky problem. I remember two or three times having my weapon in hand coming off safe, finger on the trigger with like an Albanian, you know, insurgent, if you will, walking feet from me and saying, okay, please don't let me have to shoot this guy. it'll be a bad day. Yeah, that's good. And we made it out. We ultimately made it out. Yeah. And this is, like I said, and it's hard for people to really, it might be hard for people

to comprehend this. This is pre-9-11. So you're out there doing real operations before the war kicks off and getting yourself into leadership situations and learning a lot and really being pretty lucky in that situation for sure. Big time. So you get done with that deployment, and then what do you do next? Well, I screen to go to SEAL Team 6, and as you know, they take only a handful of officers every year.

And I screen positive. I needed to come back from deployment just a couple of weeks early to go to what they call Green Team. And my commanding officer said, Mike, you can't come home early. You can apply again next year. And I just remember being so disappointed. And I came home, and I was like, you know what? Forget this. I just don't see a future in the SEALs for me after this.

And that's right around, that was literally the time when we started deploying again as two platoons going overseas. And they said, Mike, I got a different job for you. Stay here at SEAL Team 8, be in charge of two SEAL platoons. And I had a hard decision to make because I just wanted to go to development group and be the best of the best. And in those days, like, that's where you went if you really wanted to, you know, be in the mix. The regular teams weren't in the mix nearly as much. and I just ultimately, you know, like many times in life, don't overreact and stay calm and think about what's the best thing. And to this day, I look back at that decision as incredibly fortuitous because my life wouldn't have panned out the way it did.

And so, you know, 9-11 happened and all of us in the teams had way more work than we ever would have wanted. And so life works out. You don't always think it does in the moment when you get really frustrated with a decision that's not breaking your way. but when you zoom out over time, things usually work out. Where were you when September 11th happened? I was on the pull-up bars at SEAL Team 8. So a handful of us just doing a command PT and just really just never forget the moment. So at this point, were you a task unit commander?

Yeah, I was in charge of two SEAL platoons, and we were in our workup. We weren't close to being deployed overseas, but like everything, we were scrambling. actually remember there were questions like, who knows how to operate Stinger missiles? This is when there were planes in the sky. Nobody knew what was going on. And we were getting ready to go, you know, arm, basically protect the ships and just homeland defense, if you will, if that's what it took. So we ended up not doing any of that, but just watching on TV, just like everybody else. But as you know, that that infamous day really changed all of our future. And then where'd you go on deployment when you, so now did you take that task unit on deployment? We did.

And we went over to Germany in the European Command, and we were really ready to go and didn't get put into the mix early on. So, again, a little bit disappointing. And I said to myself, what in the world? I'm sitting here as a task unit commander ready to serve the nation. And we have forces at the ready, but we're in the wrong theater. And there was talk about every day, there was talk about pulling us from Europe over at Ucom, over to Sentcom to help out. It didn't happen. And again, I said, all right, you know what,

if this is the way that things are going to break, I applied for the Paul Mill Fellowship, the political military fellowship. No seal had ever been picked for two years of fully funded grad school. And I said, all right, I'm at the stage of life where I need to think about other things. And I thought, let me just put my name in the hat here. And I was the lucky squirrel that was picked. And I got two years of fully funded grad school. And then went to grad school in Cambridge Mass for two years, from 03 to 05. So the whole early phase of the war, I was largely an observer. When you, there's a, I asked often about this, especially from young seal leaders right now,

because, you know, every seal joins the, well, you hope that every seal joins the teams because they want to go to war, and then there's no wars going on. How was it, so you're in a task unit, you've got a fully capable task unit. September 11th has happened. When is this deployment to Ucom? Is it like 2001? So that would have been, yeah, 01, it was 01. Yeah.

So you go on deployment, 01, 02, and you've got a bunch of hungry frogmen, and they're sitting around in Europe. That's exactly right. What did you do to try and keep your forces focused on the mission at hand? Pull-ups. Yeah, that's a rough one. Yeah, it was a rough one. I've had, I've told many. Young SEALs that I was in the SEAL teams for 13 years before I ever shot my weapon at the enemy and

You don't know and all you can do is keep going keep doing workups and keep going on deployment Keep training that's the best thing you can do is keep doing workups keep going on deployment keep trying to get better and They're the nation's gonna call at some point Totally agree So you are you thinking maybe once you get done with that deployment sounds like you're also the young frog man that's pretty pissed off in not going to war So you apply to go to school, you go up, you get, are you thinking you're going to get out after that? Well, no, you incur a three-year obligation. So at that point, I had, I don't know, 12 or so

years in, but I was like, I wanted to finish 20 years with a master's degree. And so, you know, the Kennedy School of government was a really good path. You know, being the first seal for this program, I thought, great, I applied at Harvard Business School. And then the detail it was like, wait, that's a little too far off the reservation. You can do a master's in public policy at the Kennedy School. And I applied there and got in. So that was, that took me from 03 to 05. And then as you know, a date burn in every seal's head is June 28, 2005. I had orders to SEAL Team 10.

All the guys on the other helicopter were all teammates from SEAL Team 8. And I went overseas right away and took over for Eric Christensen, God rest him, and basically took over for the guys who weren't shot down on June 28, 2005. So, so that shot, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that. shit happened I don't know the better way to say it and you are the guy that goes then to team 10 and you go on deployment and you take over for Christensen yep I'd already been a task unit commander and I was like so privileged to be able to do it again I you know I felt like my calling was to help all the guys who were who lived through that who really had a hard hard hard day you write

in the book about some of the some of the things that you implemented to try and help guys out from, I guess, a psychological and spiritual perspective. Talk us a little, talk us through that a little bit. Not only what you did, but also what gave you the awareness. You know, this is pretty early on in the war. And you seem to be, you seem to somehow instinctively or intuitively know that guys were going to need some help.

Yeah, I think, look, I like to say in life, I just have varying levels of ignorance on everything and some things I'm a little less ignorant on. But this was definitely one of them. In talking to the guys, I realized that this isn't a problem we're going to solve alone. Kind of to your voice example for the squeaky voice guy earlier, you know. And so know what you're good at, know what you're not good at, and know how to bring in teammates that are better at things than you. And so I asked to have a psychologist and a chaplain come out and took everybody in the platoon aside.

And I said, listen, I've had one-on-one conversations with every single one of you. You are all struggling with different things and in different ways. I will never talk about any of our conversations with anybody else. It's not for public knowledge. But here's the deal. I want every single one of you to spend at least five minutes with the chaplain and five minutes with the psych. It was very countercultural at the time. You know, all we did was grow up showing either strength or perceived strength.

And this was kind of like weakness. It could be perceived as weakness. Clearly not. But in those days, could be perceived as weakness. And, you know, we had the guys who would, you know, beat their chest and say, no, effing way, am I talking to the chaplain? And blah, blah, blah. And I was just like, okay, the way to get through this is make everybody do it. And there'll be no stigma for who did and who didn't talk.

And there wasn't a single person who didn't talk less than several hours to each of the psych and the chaplain. We had to extend them there for a couple weeks. And really, I think, set the foundation for a couple things. Number one is for each of those guys in their own lives as they dealt with, you know, the post-traumatic stress of doing the body recoveries from the downed helicopter and putting their buddies in bags and bringing them home, which clearly isn't easy. And just the extreme loss of teammates. And such it was the first real mass casualty that the seals had in the modern era.

And so I just felt like it was a no-brainer to me to bring in, to be a, to bring in, to bring in help and then I ultimately as I returned from that deployment made a real push to get a psychologist on the staff and to begin the era of of really saying asking for help is a sign of strength not weakness yeah you definitely get some credit for some foresight there because yeah that's that that culture that we have in the seal teams of like just suck it up just deal with it and that's just the way it's going to be for you to sort of see beyond that that's definitely um that's an admirable move right there we're we're just here to help each other um so you guys get done with that deployment and come home and and now what do you do

now are you the ops officer at team 10 or the x-o this is the era where the ops officer at a team became an o four so i'd already been an ops officer as an o three i became the ops officer as an o four So this is why my career has been, it was awesome. I just spent it as SEAL teams my whole life. I never did a boat unit tour. I never did an SDV tour. I just was in this perfect storm of always SEAL team, SEAL team, SEAL team. So now I'm an ops officer again.

I already know how to do the job pretty decently. We, and that's really, you know, 05, all the way through late 07, which included a six-month deployment as the deputy commander for SOTO West and OnBarr, which you know very well. I was, I was like a couple months after you is when I got there. And so just with some augmentations, I got to get out to theater a couple times during the workup for a month. We were really aggressively augmenting guys forward as you recall. So you guys roll out to Iraq in what? 2007, you take your, the team is going on deployment?

Yeah, it was spring of 07. And this is when Jason Redmond's out with you. guys, Redmond's, when he got, he got wounded and the other guys with him got wounded. What was that deployment like from your perspective? Dude, that's where all my, it was night after night of stopping bad people from doing bad things to good people. You know, we were literally like vampire hours, one cycle of darkness operations, you know, as soon as the sun goes down, think about, you know, you vary your operation. Do you leave the FOB at 1030 p.m. or 1145 p.m.? You know, it's like, and you remember these days really well, but just one cycle of darkness,

you get back before sunrise, you know, you lay down around 6 in the morning and you get back up at 10 a.m. and you rinse and repeat, it was a really high op tempo. And in Sodef West, we had about, I want to say about 15 or maybe 18 kind of outstations throughout the On Bar Province. And so there was always something going on somewhere. And I'll say I was really fortunate. It was team 10 and Team 7 came together. So the CEO of Team 7 was the CEO of the, of On Bar, and I was the deputy commander. And, you know, really privileged, just a quick aside. One of my favorite most memorable Buds instructors, Mark Krampton, just beat the hell out of us and used to do berm sprints and just would get out there and lead from the front. And I was just always so impressed with this man

back in 93 when I went through training. On this deployment in 2007, Mark's the command master chief for SEAL Team 7. And one of my, some of my greatest days were Mark and I strap hanging and going out on operations and literally the two of us, you know, two guys who didn't have to go on the operations going out every third night. And it was just super meaningful for me. And that's why, you know, as I visited Coronado yesterday, so one of the, the way I started my workout was going to the very berm where Mark used to make us do those berm sprints.

and I just had some quiet time all by myself and just spoke in my head to Mark and just paid a huge tribute to him just yesterday and made myself super effing miserable and you know it's this is this is the weight that we all carry you know so for those who don't Mark Mark died by suicide about three weeks ago just before Easter this a couple weeks ago.

Yeah, a guy that I never saw him without a smile on his face in my whole career, never saw him without a smile on his face with a great attitude, looking to help everybody, just pure positivity. And just shocking. I don't know how to explain it. Were you guys working with Iraqis?

Was every element out there working with Iraqis? We were, but you know as well as I do, a lot of it was window dressing. You know, hey, guys, we got to start building these guys up. We got to take six or 12 Iraqis with us on the mission. and it was early in the days of actually, you know, really committing to trying to build the Iraqi army. We tried. We tried to build the Iraqi army.

And we would take them out. And it was definitely one of the biggest challenges was trying to work with the Iraqi army, especially at that time. And that's why it was very, it was very rewarding when they pushed into Missouille later in 2017, 18, 19. And the Iraqis did a lot of the fighting. And they made incredible sacrifices, which, you know, at the time when I was there in 2006, you wouldn't anticipate them. Stepping up as much. Many of them stepping up at all. You know, there was a few brave Iraqi soldiers for sure, but a lot of them you would think, well, they're not going to be able to ever do this for themselves.

Yeah, well, for us, I mean, so I got sprint, that deployment started, I think it was March of 07. And I recall the peak of the insurgency by using the metric of attacks on Americans, which, we know is a flawed metric when you have more Americans or more attacks on Americans. But the way to kind of quantify it is my first 30 days in theater in Fallujah, we lost 35 Marines from the greater Fallujah area. And so it was just night after night. We were in the real early innings of being able to actually confidently take a lot of Iraqis out on operations and let them take the risk for their own nation.

What did you bring back from that deployment for lessons learned? Wow, that's a great question. I think the main thing is sustained operations, the importance of efficiency and making sure that you don't have seals or special forces doing things that don't take seals to do. You know, when I grew up, there was a little bit of an attitude in coming out of buds that's like, I'm a seal, you're not. you know, there's the seals and there's the non-seals at the team. And I think the, I know you live this way also, the faster you learn that an integrated team is what it needs, what it takes to be successful, the faster your trajectories to success. These are things that weren't learned quite as quickly in the early days.

But in that deployment, all of the younger guys that were able to hand off, you know, the Iraqis, the insurgents that they took off a target, hand them to somebody else to interrogate them. And, you know, there's a lot of people that can ask questions and interrogate. have to be a seal to have that skill or intelligence analysts or whatever the case may be. And so I think we got really good at saying what's the part of the job that just takes a seal to do? What's that comparative advantage? And then how do you hire people for everything else? Yeah. Yeah. Even I tell this to leaders all the time. Do you should be doing things that only you can do. And if someone else can do it and you're in a leadership position, let someone else do it.

And if there's no one else can do it, cool. Then that's an indication that maybe you should start training someone to do that other thing that you only at this time can do. Because as long as you're the only person that can do a job, guess what? You're going to be doing that job. And that should be your goal not to be doing the same thing forever. And if you're doing that job, that means you're looking down and in instead of being able to look up and out and see what the next horizon's going to be, see what the next market's going to be, see where we can maneuver to. Those are all things we need to look at. You get done with that deployment. And this is this when you went to the White House? Yeah, I finished three years basically of running pretty hard as the

XO. So I was the the ops officer and then fleeted up as the XO at SEAL Team 10. Did you deploy again with SEAL Team 10 as the XO? I did. And then where'd you go on that deployment? Oh, sorry, that was the Iraq deployment. Okay, got it. That was that deployment. So I did two deployments. One as like the right out of grad school. Got it. And then the XO SEAL Team Iraq deployment. So come back. And for everybody listening, we're really good about succession planning in the seals. You know, once you're in the seat, a seat for two or three years, you're thinking how to, you have to get out of your seat and make room for the next guy. And we do these diversity tours. I was fortunate. My first diversity tour was, you know, graduate school for two

years in Cambridge Mass. And it was time for me to get out on my chair as the ex-O-Siel Team 10. And I applied for the White House Fellowship. It's a non-military program. It is a great leadership public service program. I threw, I say threw my name in the hat. It's quite an extensive application process. And ultimately was picked. There are thousands of applicants. The nation picks 14 to be White House fellows every year.

And I got placed as the director for defense policy and strategy for Bush. So literally report to the National Security Advisor who reports to the president. Like day seven, I'm running my first meetings in the White House Situation Room. It was a lot of steep learning. walking around pretending like you know how to your way around Washington DC you know I'm like you know dumb team guy you're all of a sudden thrown in the policy world but uh you got speaking of getting this job in the selection process you got a cool thing in here that that talks about that a little bit going back to the book my interviewer sat me down and asked a bunch of question

a bunch of introductory questions then stared at me with intensity and said Mike what do you know about the start treaty I took a breath looked at him and said with dead pan seriousness, I know how to spell it. Honestly, I didn't know anything about our nation's nuclear treaties, not a bit. But what I did know, and I told them this too, was how to get the right people into a room and how to run a decision-making process. I knew how to figure out what motivated people, how to get them to generate ideas, how to cooperate, and ultimately how to leave the room with the best possible outcome. I wasn't afraid to admit that I didn't know a thing about nuclear policy.

And I think that's what got me the job. Being humble enough to admit what you don't know, but still confident enough to explain where you can add value is a balance that's often hard to strike. But you need to recognize that it's a strength, not a weakness, to know what's beyond your knowledge or understanding at any point in time instead of pretending otherwise. I walk into any room and always assume that people in it are smarter than I am, faster than I am and more agile than I am. That way, I can never be wrong. I never assume I have the idea. I have an idea. Maybe it's the best one or maybe it's not. But honestly, it shouldn't even matter because our job in

any room is to find the best answer for the problem we're working on no matter whose answer it is. We have to listen to each other and really hear each other. And the best way to do that is to walk into the room knowing there's no doubt that everyone in there has something useful to say. So that's how you ended up with that job. Not by being the, not by being the smartest guy about nuclear treaties, but by saying, hey, look, I don't know everything about that, but I can help make a decision. It's exactly what you talk about in extreme ownership. It's the exact same way we've grown up in the seals and just espousing that for sure. So you're working at the White House. So what's this job? What's the first job that you get when you get there as a White House fellow? What's the first job? Well, the White House Fellowship has kind of like three legs of the stool. As an active White House fellow, you're wearing a suit to work every day. It's not a, it's not a uniform job. And so the program has, places you in a full-time job throughout the year. And some people opt into a job that's a little bit more a little bit more fellowee, meaning you don't have really that many obligations.

you're there to learn, you just get to observe. And I'm like, you know, I want to really get in the mix. You know, so I had opportunities at Department of Commerce, and I had opportunities at National Security Council. And so I thought, you know, do I go deeper in something I know, national security? Do I go to commerce and learn something new? And ultimately, you can't pass up the role where you're going to be in the West Wing and be just in the mix with the nation's hardest problems.

And so that, so with that the fellows also get together, though, a couple times a week and you listen to, you know, cabinet secretaries, the vice president, the president, and so on, and just ask them questions and you learn it's all off the record and 14 fellows plus the president or 14 fellows plus the vice president. And it's just a tremendous program. But you're really, if you pick a job that is a real, a job with real responsibilities, it's a hard year. When you see the news now and, I mean, I guess it's, It's just like seeing like a movie about like a military movie, how you and I will watch a military movie. And it's like, oh, that would never have.

Oh, that's, oh, how is it for you now? You look at what's happening in the White House and you know all these inner workings of what's going on behind the scenes. What does it? Give us a little glimpse of what it's like going on behind the scenes. Yeah, you know, I think the real thing that is not sexy is process, but process is what accelerates outcomes. And so when you think about it, there's 17 acres of the White House, but there are, a bigillions of different decisions that need to be made. And so not everybody can bring their decision to the top of the House.

And so at my level, I ran a certain meeting in the White House situation room. And it's simple. It's a binary outcome. You know, with, it's either we agree in which case national policy is made or if not, then we suss out. What are the different stakeholders think? What does Department of State or Department of Defense or energy or the intent? community think and why can't we compromise? And so by definition, only the harder issues are bubbling up to then a deputies committee meeting where the number two runs it. Again, binary outcome at a

deputy's committee meeting. They either agree and make policy or not. And then it becomes a principal's committee meeting where you have the national security advisor chairing it and you've got the SEC DEF, the SEC state, all of the number ones of all the departments and agencies around the table. Again, binary outcome, agree or not. If agree, great, policy made. If you're If not, that's going to the president. And so by definition, you've created a system where you get volume and flow, but only the hardest things are making it to the top. Sometimes that runs well.

Sometimes that doesn't run well. And so as I sit back, you know, I think about, you know, how are things working? Are they working like they can or should? As soon as decisions get made outside of that process, you actually diminish the probability of the best possible decision getting made. Because you know as well as I do, if not everybody's at the table and you make a decision, you've kind of alienated a bunch of stakeholders

and you don't get everybody rowing in the same direction. So that's kind of the lens that I look at Washington, D.C. And, you know, I think sometimes we're way more broken than we should be. But other times I think, you know, it's seen the smartest mind solve some of the really hardest problems. We have a lot to be proud of and we have a lot to work on in this nation. So which meeting is it that you? you would run. You said, out of all these meetings, which one were you? Which level of meetings

would you run? So every administration changes the name a little bit just because they need to, you know, put their own stamp on what it's called, but a policy coordinating committee was what it was called in the Bush administration as an example, a PCC, I think it was. If I might even be wrong on that, but three letter acronym that was, you know, something that changes. But, but, but, But the point is, I'd be at the head of the table and you'd have basically assistant secretary level people or, you know, roughly two, three starish generals from the Department of Defense, you know, just whoever the stakeholder was for the particular issue, some people from undersecretary defense in the policy shop sitting there.

And look, I'm not trying to glorify myself or be the president of the fan club. I'm a guy who ran the process. But the thing is, that's the role. If you can run the process really well, then it makes the nation. run well. You know, and, you know, I've been often asked a little bit of a segue here, but, you know, hey, as we got out of Afghanistan, what went wrong? The thing that went wrong was policy process broke down. Who are we bringing home? We didn't have an answer to that question. And so that caused a lot of chaos and a lot of people rushed to an airport hoping to get onto a flight.

You know, so anyways, that's just one example of how policy, the engine and the machine should work. How many hours a day are you working in that job? Oh, that was long hours. That was, you know, I'd get in it, you know, not, I'd always get my workout in in the morning. I honestly got there, you know, 7.30, 7, 8 o'clock, something like that. But it was home at 10 o'clock on a lot of nights. And then a lot of times, you know, paying attention to the Blackberry, I'll date myself, 0708, 2009 time frame. And in fact, I remember very well one night at 3 in the morning, the Blackberry just buzzing nonstop,

which usually didn't wake me up, but it did this night. And that's where the guy, Captain Richard Phillips, got taken, was hijacked on the Marisk, Alabama. And then I called a friend of mine, Chris Domencic, who was at Team 6, and said, hey, man, a million layers between you and me, but you got to go start looking at this right now. And hours later, I'm in my suit in the basement of the Pentagon and the NMCC, the National Military Command Center,

and just trying to work the problem. and ultimately ran that whole thing from the National Security Council. And one of the cooler things was running these meetings, and President Obama would walk in. And there's only about four or five, six of us kind of running this situation. And when the whole thing was done, President Obama wrote a really nice note on White House stationary. Mike, great job on the Somalia situation. You made a family very happy at Easter. Barack.

Jack. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah, you have a little section here that I thought was pretty cool talking about that. As this is going down, you get these texts or whatever, the Blackberry is buzzing. You say, I called the Pentagon and a one-star admiral who is on duty told me that his guidance was not to prepare any options to deal with the situation. I responded with something I said only twice in my two years in my position at the National Security Council. quote, sir, please take this as direction from the White House, end quote.

I told him that the Department of Defense needed to prepare military options to rescue the crew and keep the pirate captors from selling Captain Phillips to Al Shabab or another terrorist organization. The only question I said to the Admiral is how fast can you have options back to the National Security Council? By the afternoon, my biggest worry had become real. The pirates had left the ship putting the crew out of danger, but they had done. taken Captain Phillips with them and were holding him hostage on a lifeboat heading towards shore. Fortunately, by that point, the Department of Defense had done what it does best and was giving the National Security Council and the president real options to address a really hard problem.

My friend Scott, commander of the entire task force being deployed for the mission and Chris, a leader of the tactical response itself, arrived on scene halfway around the globe in a matter of hours after the mission was launched. They averted a crisis on Easter Sunday as they shot three pirates with three rounds in the darker night while both their ship and the pirate's lifeboat rocked up and down on the swells of the open ocean. Scott, Chris, and their snipers were the true heroes of that day. It's no different than third phase of buds. Do you remember when we're thinking, we're told, think about what can go wrong on your mission. Think forward.

What are all the things that can happen? So it's not like I was anybody special in the White House. I was just doing what I grew up with. And the SEAL teams, it's the same thing you or any other seal leader would have done, which is, hey, this can actually go bad. And here's how it can go bad. And we're going to prepare for the worst case, not the best case. Have you been to the UDTCL Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida?

Not lately, but I have. They have the lifeboat there. Yeah. I don't know if you know that. I've seen pictures of it, but yeah. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. That's pretty awesome group doing pretty awesome stuff there. So that's this White House fellow position.

And that's an interesting going from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. What did you notice about those two leaders? First of all, great governors of people and great leaders in different ways. You know, the press has a certain view and a certain lens on things. And having been on the inside, it's really obvious statement, but just don't believe everything you see or read. So that was another great set of lessons that what came out of that, two years in Washington, D.C. for me. The White House Fellowship was supposed to only be a year,

but after that Captain Phillips thing, President Obama said, hey, can you stay my whole administration? So I stayed a second year and continued in my role. But, you know, really at the end of the day, it was about seeing an administration in year seven and a half is a lot different than an administration in minute one. And so people can think about, oh, the right and the left, for sure. That can There's, of course, policy differences, not as many in national security. Ironically, once you get briefed up and you're really like in the TSS, top secret sensitive compartment information of like what's happening in the world, politics actually causes the opinions to narrow a good bit because there's only so many

solutions to the national security problems. But the thing I would say is setting aside right and left issues, it's really an energy. You know, you're seeing the third or fourth person in the role. at year seven and a half of an administration and you're seeing somebody else on Minute One who's got incredible energy and they're just happy to be there. They might not know where the light switches are

for the first few weeks, but that's the beauty of the permanent staff that kind of works as part of the institution in D.C. And I've always felt, you know, people will complain that nothing ever changes. Well, there's some positivity to things being hard to change in our government. Would you say that's an accurate assessment?

Agree 100%. Like, I don't want the government to be at the whim of whoever's in charge to just whip it one way or the other. No. I think our nation's forefathers made it easy to kind of bump down the highway, but not to get off the road. Awesome. So you wrap that up and while you're there, is this when you figure out that you're going to

go to SEAL Team 2 as the CO? It is. And, you know, I was handling Afghanistan policy as well. and Scott Moore was the detailer, the Scott that you just referred to in the previous passage. And he said, hey, Mike, you're going to take over SEAL team, too. Can you get yourself out of the White House? Like, we can't pull you out. Like, you're the only one who's going to have to, you know.

And of course, after two years, dude, I was ready for my next challenge. And ultimately got permission to leave. And I said, I've got a great opportunity. And I knew I'd be deploying back to Afghanistan because, as you well know, the Naval Special Warfare community doesn't frequently get real estate to own. And so we had southeastern Afghanistan, and it was a great opportunity to not just take a seal team overseas, but to integrate a bunch of green berets, a bunch of infantry from the army, and just every single aspect of what the nation's Department of Defense really is.

Yeah. What a huge step for the community. I was talking to Admiral Richards, and those guys that had this sort of vision that we should be deploying in that, even with the idea that we should be deploying like that, like as a team CEO deploying overseas, like that was, those guys came up with this idea.

And thankfully, they came up with it before September 11th. And they kind of, it wasn't there yet. I mean, what was? Remember Vision 2000 and all that? That was them trying to formulate this idea. But yeah, this is an example of how well that has. actually worked, the opportunities that were there. So, so awesome.

And so exciting as a commander of a SEAL team to be able to bring your whole team overseas to one, to one effort and to make a meaningful impact. Yeah. I mean, for, just so everybody knows for pretty much for the entire history of the seal teams, it was going to be onesies and twosies, a platoon going here, maybe a couple platoons going there. And that was what they did in Vietnam. It was like one or two platoons at a time deploying the SEAL Team commander.

was back in Coronado or back in Virginia Beach and they were just kind of watching and and then to have this idea that actually a SEAL team the whole team should be able to deploy and then the team should be able to take on other assets and utilize those assets I mean it's it we got to be very thankful for those senior leaders that came up with that plan for sure totally agree and I would say that you were you you were definitely a benefactor of those things couldn't be couldn't be more accurate so so So you show up at a team. What was your attitude coming back to the team? Oh, fired up, man. To like get out of the White House and wearing a suit every day for two years, I was ready for some sand and surf zone.

You show up and the workup, anything particular that you guys focused on during the workup? Well, you know, we knew, of course knowing, it's a real benefit to also know you're really preparing for Afghanistan. And you get to not prepare for a bunch of different things. And so we minimized, I hate to say this, but we, we, we, minimize diving. We had to make hard decisions. Like, we're not going to be diving in Afghanistan. Let's not go spend three weeks diving. It just doesn't make sense. And yes, it kind of moved us away from our roots a little bit, but that was, that was, that's what commanders do, is you make those types of decisions. And so for me, I was really moved when I went overseas, I went to Afghanistan to spend a couple weeks out in theater early on in command. And, you know, I was there when we lost three seals in a helicopter,

crashed out in Zobble province and of course terrible terrible incident you know being there really left a serious mark on me I mean of course you know I'd been exposed to everything already in my career but when you really feel that you feel that you are the owner of the risk of the whole team it's a different feeling there's a I used to think when I was second in charge of a seal team that it wouldn't really be that different to be overall in charge I couldn't have been more wrong. So when I when a senior leadership team from from SEAL Team 2 did our advanced reconnaissance if you will, we came home on a medevac where I'll never forget. There was a young man who was blown up in an IED who was really just being flown to Germany just so he could pass

away in Germany next to his wife. He was in a coma and I'll never forget like a six or eight our flight, just spending it next to this whole guy, just with my hand on, I'm talking to him, and just some army trooper who I don't even know his name. But like when you're really around that, it, I got back to the States and I, I already worked hard, but I worked, like, it really stepped up the, like, this is real. Like, I will bring all my guys home and, and we'll do everything we can. Yeah. So, um, those, we, we experienced that going, Getting to Ramadi, like as soon as we get there, there's soldiers and Marines getting killed just about every day. And we would go to those services whenever we could, but it was out of the gate.

We were hitting two, three services in a row. And it's a wake-up call to everybody to the recognition of what's going on out in that battlefield every single day, which, which is, you know, you could hear it going on. You could see it going on. You could see vehicles. You could see guys getting Kazevacked out. We were giving blood whenever we could get blood, like just that. heavy reality of going into these scenarios. You guys, you guys finish your workup,

you go on that pre-deployment, and now you've got your platoon, your team over there, your whole team, never mind, just the platoon. Now you've got the whole team, and it's not just your team, it's you've got SF guys, you've got an entire, like, force here.

It sounds like from the book, you had a little bit of a rough relationship with the conventional commander that was there. Initially, with the one who was right next to me in Taryn Cout, this guy just didn't want to get out and put his force at risk to go do great things. And you know as well as I do. You just don't respect people that don't want to do their job. So that being said, you're determined and you're going to go make things happen.

You got some, you got your platoons, your teams, your forces. still out there, still getting after it. But you got to know when it's time to not get after it. Got to know when it's time to push back. You got a thing here that's a really good lesson. And it's a really good lesson. And you do this in the book. You counter it to the time when the major told you in Kosovo.

Was it Kosovo? To stay out in the field. And you go, you know what? We're just going to stay out in the field like you told us. You know, that seems like the right call right now. It's a little bit different here. Going to the book, to ensure civilian casualties were as limited as possible and that the innocent Afghan civilians wouldn't turn against our forces, the military set up a policy called Boots on the Ground Battle Damage Assessment. This meant that after every bomb we dropped, we were required to physically go to the site to confirm that no civilians had been killed.

The theory, a smart theory, was that knowing we would have to acknowledge civilian casualties would make it less likely that there would be any civilian casualties. A talented team of Army Green Berets within my command had intelligence at one point that there were approximately 10 Taliban members gathered together at 3 in the morning in an area no civilian would ever go and certainly not at that time. The team used surveillance techniques to view the site, and we knew as a certainty that there were no civilians there. They asked me for permission to drop a bomb from an unmanned aircraft, and following the decision-making process I'd put in place, I granted it. They went ahead, and eight of the Taliban fighters were killed. An army colonel from the commanding general staff in Afghanistan called and asked my watch officer for our BDA report. And my watch officer explained that we didn't have one, that it was simply too much risk for not a good enough reason. The road to the site was too dangerous to travel, and we knew there were no civilians present,

and to ask anyone on my team to go down this isolated path in the middle of the night was an unnecessary risk to their lives, and one, it made no sense to take. I got on the phone with the colonel, and we went back and forth. This is the policy. but the policy in this case makes no sense to achieve an already known outcome I will not take unnecessary risk that my men will die There are consequences in the military for not following the orders of a superior Truth is the lack of organizational flexibility is a huge problem for the military on the ground We were living a never agile enough kind of life but in terms of the larger hierarchy the structure had its weaknesses I could have been fired and sent home from the deployment as

an insubordinate but in that moment I couldn't I couldn't just blindly follow the policy I had to act consistently with my values and make a judgment and subsequent decision that I was going to be able to live with if the worst happened the colonel said that since I wouldn't comply he was going to report my noncompliance to his boss the commanding general in Afghanistan and that he would ask his peer in charge of our Afghan partner force to order men to unilaterally inspect the site instead I urged him not to do that but that decision was out of my hands 12 Afghan soldiers drove down that isolated road in three

vehicles to make their assessment of the bomb site the first two trucks hit an IED and three of the eight people in those two vehicles were killed with others seriously wounded soon after I flew by helicopter to the outstation where the Greenbrae team was stationed sat with them and and told them how incredibly proud I was of their amazing bravery, the remarkable work they did night after dangerous night. It was one of the more emotional moments in my life.

As we started our meeting, silence fell over the room and one of the guys on the team opened by looking me square in the eyes and quietly but resolutely thanking me. He knew that the easier decision would have been caving to the pressure from above and deviating from my beliefs. And we all knew that would have meant some of the men in this room would have died. The Green Beret had no idea that his words made my throat almost close as I choked up and how hard I had to fight off tears.

I was simply overwhelmed by the real life impact, by the reality of the situation. The overwhelming magnitude of these kind of decisions made under the pressure of intense nightly combat take a toll on people that's difficult to understand for those who haven't experienced it. Now, with the benefit of several years of hindsight and the time to fully reflect on those past events, I have an even greater belief in the importance of process, your own process, and of values-based decision-making. Process can. No exaggeration. Save people's lives. Yeah.

A point I like to bring up in situations like this is if you're in a leadership position and someone below you in the chain of command, is refusing to do something or pushing back that hard, you should probably listen to them. And this is a situation. I mean, as I was reading this, as soon as I saw, you know, it go to, oh, he's going to order someone else to do it. I just was, I already knew the outcome.

Because I know you're not pushing back for no reason. You're pushing back for good reason. It might be hard for people. to understand the kind of pressure that you're under to kind of concede and and just go with what you're being told to do. There's times in life you've got to just put it on the table and say be ready for the outcome, be ready to be fired. You always hear pick your battles.

This was unquestionably one of them. And this is why you are in command. And this is why everything that you've trained to do at that point in life is for that, it's for a moment like that. It's to have confidence in yourself that you're right. and to not take that unnecessary risk. I still get, you know, emotional. As you were reading it, I haven't, you know, I, you know, I sit back and I can very tactilely feel sitting in that room in the silence.

And me looking at all these guys and really knowing that, that me having the backbone saved, you know, several of their lives and not being able to look at which guy wasn't there or which guy, you know, it would have been. but it's just the weight of combat gets really hard over time. And there's certain moments like that where you just say to yourself, this shit is real. How long was this deployment? That was 10 months. That's a long deployment for SEALS. It is.

Were we correcting a deployment cycle or something like that? Was it one of those things? What happened? We were just trying to stretch our forces more, get more out of the forces we had. So lengthen it out a bit. And then you could put more people on the battlefield. and that it was not more complicated than that.

Sometimes NSWs had to kind of make adjustments and extend someone and cut someone else short, but it wasn't that, huh? We were just trying to. No, it was a line with the, you know, there were, aligned with the command leadership structure for the Joint Special Operations Joint Special Operations Task Force throughout Afghanistan. There were, you know, five different regions, if you will. So I was southeast, but there was also, you know, obviously south and west and it did a, And that was the cycle that the special operations community was on.

And so if the SEALs wanted to, you know, play the game and have the battle space, you just had to acquiesce and do the 10 months. You can't get off cycle with the rest of the rest of the force. But, yeah, decisions like that very frequently and literally life and death. What was your kind of battle rhythm, your personal battle rhythm during that deployment? Like, what time are you going to sleep? time you're waking up. Is there any rhythm? Jocko, I had no rhythm. You know, I had a red light in my ceiling that was anytime there was, it was a tick, troops in contact. You know, my, my bedroom was

about a 30-yard sprint down this like, you know, plywood palace kind of hallway to get to the, the, the operation center, the antithesis of the talk in a rucksack that you talked about at the beginning. You know, we had the, we had the plasma TVs and the terrain mapping and the unmanned aerial vehicle feeds and everything. And, you know, you would just get the calls that, you know, you'd hear the crazy machine gunfire coming in over the satellite radio. And you'd hear one of your key leaders whose voices you know immediately, even though they're not saying their name on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the sitcom radio. And they're just calmly saying what they need. It's a, it's a, I need a 500-pound J-DAM dropped like yesterday on this particular location.

And, and, and, uh, and I was the one to make the decisions on when we dropped bombs and when we didn't. and what operations we went on and what we didn't. And so because I had, I don't know, was roughly 25 different outstations throughout the southeast and sometimes literally, I think that five, six, seven different elements in a tick at a time, I was just on.

Did you, were you the approval for air? I was the approval for air, yep. Yeah, so you're busy. Yeah, it was, I mean, we, I don't know if I don't think I've ever said this number publicly, but it's not, you know, a secret, but we had over 1,100 air to ground drops over 10 months. And I'm proud to say we didn't harm anybody we shouldn't harm.

There were times that we said no. It wasn't a lot, but mostly the leadership in the field knew when not to ask for something. But occasionally there were times that came up when I said no, and it just wasn't comfortable with something. So the other thing that's interesting when you ask about the battle rhythm, though, is that it was also important to me to go out on some of the operations with the guys. and I didn't go out quite as frequently as I did in Iraq, but I still got out maybe once a week or something like that. And I didn't do that in the beginning of the deployment because I wanted

the staff to kind of see the judgment, the decision-making, et cetera. But I had an incredible XO, Rocky Russell, who I had supreme confidence in. So I'd go out on an operation and be with the Afghan commandos in a seal platoon for, I don't know, a day, day and a half, two days at times. And that's a tough decision also because as soon as you, as you swing and go on one operation with one unit, dude, you don't know what's happening with the other 24. So that takes an element of confidence and trust. But of course, as you know, it makes you a better leader because it helps you understand and maintain perspective. And frankly, just to share the same risk as the guys, you know, and as a whatever, I'm 51 now, as a 41-ish-year-old seal team commander,

you know, that deployment we got shot at and rocketed and the, the, I cut one of my guys' legs off on that deployment and what happened there? There was somebody in an IED who was blown up and we had a mass casualty situation and so you know it was it was a

we had you know doctors but they were busy and you know I was kind of under it wasn't like I did it on my own. The doctor kind of said hey okay do this do this do this and cut this and you know go and because it was a it was an all hands on deck kind of thing in the in our in our

in our headquarters at the it was kind of like the mass unit, if you will, you know. Oh, so you had casualties come into your location? Yep. And it was a mass casualty. Yeah, it was, yeah. And so you were there freaking scrubbed up getting it on? I don't even think we scrubbed it.

I mean, we, you know, we did a, I don't remember perfectly, but I just remember we didn't. I met this guy at the helicopter who had three tourniquets on, and one of them had come loose and he had arterial bleating. coming from the middle of his leg that was missing. And I had to, you know, reach in and hold pressure on arterial bleeder and take him from the helicopter and get him all the way into the, get him all the way into the medical unit.

And there was another guy who was, I mean, blown up beyond recognition, but, I mean, I knew who it was, of course. But, I mean, it was just, it was really, really bad. And, and then it was just there were only a handful of seals in the headquarters at the moment. And, you know, the tick was gone. So that was taken care of. And so it was just all hands on deck and dealing with the medical situation.

And that was one night, but there were several nights where we had an overwhelming number of people who were shot up or blown up that we were taking care of. But somehow from your SEAL team, from SEAL team, too, you guys made it through that deployment without losing anyone. No one was killed in action. Yeah. Any other thing to wrap up on that deployment? I think it's really the main, it really is the inexplicable pace and, and dedication that our entire entire Department of Defense has is really remarkable. You know, it's, you just get humbled every day to see how hard people work in the yustere

conditions and, you know, both seals and green berets and non-seals and non-green brays. is out in these hinterlands, literally just not showering for months on end, only eating the food that helicopters drop into them, and just really putting country and others before self. I just was constantly humbled to be part of an organization with such great Americans. So you get home from that deployment, and I'm going to go to the book here. I had been home from Afghanistan for just a few weeks when I found out that my replacement as commander of the Special Operations Task Force who had taken over my team finished when my team finished its deployment had decided to take his own life shooting himself with his pistol in his

room in the bed I had slept in for the previous 10 months. I was shocked and devastated. He and I were good friends, former roommates, buds, classmates 20 years earlier. We had come up the ranks together. Before we each got married and started our families, we shared a house in Virginia Beach for three years. We were inseparable in those days. We had bonded over our mutual frustration at the pull-up bar during Bud's training. One Saturday morning after we both failed the day before to come them anywhere close to matching the 15 to 20 pull-ups, our fellow trainees were able to do. We decided to go find a pull-up bar to

practice on far away from the bud's compound where no one would stumble upon us despite a full night's sleep we were still struggling as we fought as we each fought through our fourth pull-up I can still see his face and hear the chuckle in his voice as he turned to me and said world's finest right here he was loyal genuine a man who could find humor in absolutely anything another time in training we were so cold on a boat ride back to the compound after an icy swim that we found our fighting over where to place one rubber fin that was shielding very small parts of us from the 40 not wins there we were two grown adults sealed trainees fighting over a tiny rubber fin to help make us a

tiny bit warmer and we and just a little drop less miserable we stopped for a moment and realized what we were fighting over and we both just broke out and hysterical laughter it seemed like we were always laughing back then. When I was deployed, he would check in on my family, and when he was deployed, I would check in on his. I would say that I trusted him with my life, except that it was so much more than that. As SEALs, we have no choice

but to trust everyone on our team with our life every minute of every day on the battlefield. But when you bond with someone, it's not so much about trusting them with your life. It's about wanting them to be there in the trenches with you, feeling better because you know they're right alongside you. He was so much more than a fellow seal.

He was a friend, a teammate, a brother, a shining example of the bravery a human being can exhibit. You know, you talk about the pressure and the pace and the battle rhythm

or lack of rhythm and the lives at stake and it's hard to describe what that feels like and it's hard to it's hard to it's hard to it's hard to describe what it feels like I guess is all I can say But man this was this was just a a travesty and a shock To have the the commander on the ground Who had just taken your place someone you grew up within the team somebody I was at team two with I mean just freaking Good good mug

It's so hard to understand Yeah, this one hurt. They all hurt. Some of them hit closer to home than others, you know, as I know you've experienced too. And, you know, this is the thing I was talking about and not describing well enough before, but it's the weight that people carry. It's the, it's the, not always knowing the weight that people carry. and yeah that was a tough one for me you talk a little bit in the book um you know i mean obviously

we all have the we all go through the you know what could i have done differently maybe i could have said this or seen that or done this or done that is there anything as you look back is there any pattern did you have any indication i mean you did a turnover you know i i was looking I was looking at there's an article in the New York Times about this. And there's a, there's a situation that you describe in the book where, I guess the local Afghans had gifted you some kind of a, you know, ceremonial head garment of some kind.

And he was with you and they kind of ceremonially gave him as well, the same thing. And it's, I don't know if you've seen this. I'm sure you have, but there's, so you write about that in the book and there's a picture in the New York Times of, of you in that,

there's the picture of when that happened. And for me, it was very tough to look at because I read it and I kind of imagined it. And then I go on the New York Times. I'm reading this article and I think, oh, there's the picture. There's exactly what Mike was talking about. Is there anything that you look at

that you think we need to do a better job of looking out for? Yeah, well, let's start that with me, right? I think that, you know, we've grown up saying, Look, we can always go blame the world at everything, but guys like you and me grow up starting with ourselves and say, what could I have done better? And so when I look back at this particular situation, I recall very vividly on a Friday afternoon, 2 o'clock in the afternoon or so at a team picking up the red line and trying to dial him and just check on him and see how he's doing. And there was a new policy where you needed a four-digit pin or something like that.

And I was like, oh, the comms guys have already gone home. I'm not going to bug them on a Friday afternoon and make them make my phone work. I'll just call overseas on Monday. Well, that Saturday is when he took his own life. And I sometimes look back and say, you know, did I do enough? And I certainly wrestle with that. And it leads me to a lesson that I talk about, which is not seeing intrusive as a bad thing. You know, it's a good thing to be intrusive in people's lives.

and to ask the question of like, hey, really, how are you really doing? Have you ever considered harm to self is a hard question to ask. And it's a little bit embarrassing sometimes to ask it. But I'll take 99 embarrassings for the one yes. I miss that here. And I won't miss that again. And since then, since that happened, I've had plenty of yeses where I've been able to step in and help. I certainly wish I could have helped more in the past.

When you guys were doing a turnover, the turnover, I mean, just to, to so everyone understands, this is like, it's the commander of the team. It's the commander of the team, but also the turnover, this is, for lack of a better word, this is like the most intimate, intellectual exchange you're going to have with another human being in your life. Hey, I've been on the ground. I've been fighting these troops. We've been at war. I'm going to give you everything I can to help you do the job.

I mean, this is as close as you're going to intellectually transfer information between two people. And then plus, on top of that, you guys are brothers from buds. And, I mean, as you're doing this, is there any, there's nothing? There's no. You know, Jocko, I've never said this publicly. There's just one shred of a little thing when I play back in my mind. You know, we didn't lose any Americans. And in my last, you know, session with the leadership, I celebrated that.

but the incoming team was also there. And my friend, you know, pulled me aside afterwards and said, hey, that was, you know, really rough for us to set the bar to expect that we're not going to lose anybody. And it turns out that the leader from the East Coast SEAL teams had also pulled my friend aside and said, hey, listen, just do the same thing Mike did, just bring everybody home. And he had lost four guys in his first month. And so I think that pressure of losing people, and, you know, it's, it just, it didn't, it didn't add up. So I mean, I don't say that's the cause, but it's certainly unquestionably a contributor.

Yeah. Yeah. I actually remember turning over with the guys that took over for us in Ramadi. And I told them, well, because I had lost guys. And I'm like, it was a, I remember thinking myself, am I going to say this? Yes, I am. You guys are going to take casualties. Like you there's a hundred percent chance you're going to take casualties

There's a hundred percent certainty that you're going to take casualties and I mean I've talked to guys since then that were in that group then that task unit that relieved us and they were like that was the wake up call for them was Holy shit like we got our we got the SEAL team commander of the task unit telling us we are a hundred percent certain going to take casualties But all you can do is look at wake up calls as fuel for improvement in the future Yeah. Right. And that's how we, I know both of us live our lives this way now is we do carry inexplicable weight.

And we're just here to make everybody else's lives better. And how do we make the families who have borne the cost lighter and better? And how do we help the nation better learning from the things that we've learned? Oh, you know, one of the really heartbreaking things in the book that you write about was you're going to, I guess were you part of the Keko team? No, I was home on post-deployment leave, but in Virginia Beach. And so being such a family friend, we were, of course, we were some of the few in the house. Yeah, and you're talking about on your way to let, you know, his wife and his family know what had happened. You called a child psychologist, and you asked, you said, do we tell his daughter now the truth of what happened or do we wait until she's older so she can better understand it?

and the psychologist says you have no choice but to tell the truth now. Tough stuff. I mean, I'll never forget being in the house with my wife and daughter. And I mean, this merits a super quick story. It's, you know, when I was overseas, of course, their family was checking on my wife and daughter. And one of the things before I came home was that my daughter made a deployment box that had 10 months worth of note cards written out to her friend. my friend's daughter. And they said things like,

when you miss your dad, go into his closet, take out a shirt of his, put it on and pretend it's a hug. You know, notes like that to say, here's how you're going to get through the deployment. And so then, you know, just a month later or so,

me being there and seeing the deployment box that she had told me about, which neither my wife nor I gave her the direction to go do that. That was her entirely on her own. And sometimes, you know, the kids and the wives and the spouses never get enough credit for,

as strong as they are. But being in that room, and I'll still never forget her screams, you know, he said he'd come home and, and then more importantly, like, my daughter being there and consoling her friend who had just lost her dad. It's these are, these are weighty things, man. Makes you grow up fast. How much longer after that did you decide you were going to, you were going to retire? I was really close at that point. I was weighing it, pros and cons in my head. That's not what influenced me in any way. I made the, I actually frankly can't recall if it was how soon after that I made the decision, but, you know, it ultimately was about continuing to make a difference. And I was at year 20 and after being commanding officer of a team, I just felt like there's

so much more to do in life. And while it's awesome to be a seal, and I'd already been privileged to to run meetings in the situation room and like, what am I going to do? Like another six years and return to attend the meetings that I've already run. So I was like, let me just pivot and go spend a chapter of my life in the private sector, which I'm 10 years into now and have been really fortunate and learned a ton. And at some point in my life, I'll return in some capacity to serve this nation. And I'm not sure what form or fashion that will take. I really have no idea. I just know that when you're open to service, it will find you. And the ways we serve now are genuinely doing things like writing books and trying to make a difference for gold star communities

and just continuing to to elevate the conversation. How was your transition when you retired? I know people ask me that question a lot and I always give the advice of like, hey, when you get out, you need a new mission because you've been on mission, super hyper focused on this one thing for your whole life, for everything from how to freaking put your web gear together in the most efficient way. your magazines are on the right place for an offhand draw, like all those little things that we are focused on for 20 years,

and then you go up through the ranks where now you're focused on how can my platoon do this better. How can my task you do this better? For you, it's how can I do this better for my team? How can I better support them? And then one day, in one day, you clean out your locker and you're a civilian. And I always tell guys, hey, man, you've got to find a new mission.

And it sounds like you got on mission pretty quick when you got out. Did you already have that? Did you already have a job set up when you retired? Yeah, I did. I was, again, I've been very fortunate because I had exposure that few people are privileged to have, whether it was the White House Fellows Program or two years of a pretty reputable graduate school. And so, you know, I didn't know what I would do when I made the decision to retire, but I had a lot of conversations to try to go find that thing.

I had great mentors. and ultimately, you know, had offers at Goldman Sachs and at J.P. Morgan and at Bridgewater, the hedge fund where I ultimately went. A good, really good friend of mine, Dave McCormick, who actually just ran for Senate in Pennsylvania, who was in the Bush administration, the Treasury while I was at the National Security Council, but Dave is a good, really good human and really good friend, and just asked him for some advice, and he ultimately created another option that I wasn't trying to create and I jumped into Bridgewater with him and a couple of other really great leaders and learned a ton there. And that was my first chapter. So look, it's really,

it can, when you look in the rearview mirror with transition, you can say, oh, it must have been really easy. No way, man, it's super freaking hard. Because we're all planners. You know, in the teams, we're not like, we're not letting life just happen to us. We're planning life. And this is an element of time when you're like, it takes patience for the plan to come together. It's not like you can plan harder and create things to happen in 12 hours. And, man, I'm bad at a lot of things, but patience is definitely one of my weak spots. You have this section, which I think kind of wraps up some of your transition here. You say this.

I hear the question all the time, how did you manage to move from the military to the government to the private sector when those arenas are so different from each other? My answer is to premise the challenge or challenge the premise of this question. Of course, there are different details, different specifics, but the truth is, in my experience, all high-stakes organizations and all high-stakes decisions are pretty much the same. The concrete knowledge you need is the easy part. Anyone can learn that. But the details don't matter if you don't have the right process. And if you do have the right process, you can go anywhere.

It's why strong leaders are able to jump from one industry to another, one organization to another. So that's what you did Apply to your your decision-making process Your your lessons learned from the military You applied them to the government sector, I guess And then to the to the civilian sector So you did Bridgewater for a few years And then you ended up

Actually entering another business right with Cognizant Yep And then what was that experience like? Well first of all Bridgewater is a phenomenal place Four years it is it is it is is a crucible of talent that is all trying to be more talented and do great things in markets and ultimately how to manage the company so that they can outperform in markets. And the mission is very simply to figure out what's going on in the world and how to capitalize

on that for their own investors, you know, police retirements and teacher retirements and, you know, sovereign wealth funds and things like that. I like the mission of figure out what's going on in the world, right? It's a large statement. Yeah, it was, so. That they do quite well over there at Bridgewater. Very well. And so, but after, you know, four years or so, three and a half four years, I was ready to pivot.

And a really good friend of mine started a company called Cognizant. He spun them out of Dun & Bradstreet at the time 25 years ago or 25 years prior. And then they had an activist investor take a billion sixth position in the stock and start agitating. And I just called them and said, hey, man, here's what you need to be thinking about, just this, this and this and that the other thing. And he said, Mike, just come help me run the company. And I was like, I'd never been at a large public company. And I was like, look, let me bet on myself. This is risky.

I'm not sure I'm going to be great at this, but I'm going to go figure it out. And it's what you just read in the book. And honestly, I think I did very well there. And I've continued to, you know, pivot. I'm now running global operations and transformation and security and real estate, et cetera. For VMware, it's a large software company. and with very public news right now about a potential acquisition or an acquisition. Again, very public knowledge.

And VMware is an awesome organization in so many different ways and just bringing the same exact, you know, skill set, if you will, to VMware, but with some of the knowledge that I've learned along the way of the 10 years. So it's a combination of specific knowledge, but also, you know, the management skill of seeing forests and trees, but definitely both. Yeah, we've been my company, Eschon Front's been working with VMware. We've worked with VMware a decent amount. But the fun thing is for me, the first time I worked with them was telling them,

hey, I used to carry VMware stuff in the field and hook it up to my satellite radio and make comms. And they were all pretty stoked. And they got a good veteran community there at VMware. So awesome company. Well, you know, and I forgot to mention the, I know that the team thought incredibly highly of your and, Eschon Front's leadership and instruction and motivation and inspiration, everything that you are that you espouse has made a huge positive impact on people. And whenever that that finished up, I think it was about a week ago or something like one of

them was the most recent was about a week ago. I got multiple emails saying, hey, this guy's awesome. Everything from like people who know that we know each other. And others like, hey, you ever heard of this willing guy? You know, like, yeah, yeah, I heard of them. Right. So you got that going on in the civilian sector, that chief digital transformation officer. And in the meantime, you know, you mentioned giving back and you are giving back.

And one of the things that you're doing, which is incredible, is this book that we've been reading through today, this book, which is called Never Enough. You've taken all the profits from this book, all the profits from this book. and you are very specifically giving the profits to Gold Star families and very specifically in order to pay off their mortgages. And this is, you know, home ownership is not only the American dream, but it's also the American nightmare when you've got a mortgage to pay or when you don't have a place to live or if that comes under pressure, there's just, there's just, you know, your home is your castle. And so this idea, and I'm not sure quite how you came, you probably came to the conclusion the way I just spoke through, which is, listen, if there's anything we could give a Gold Star family, the best thing we can give them in terms of security and peace of mind is to say,

hey, you can, you don't have to worry about where you're going to live forever. And so that's what you're doing with this. And, you know, it's funny, I was asking you, well, like, is there a website we can put out or anything? You're like, nope, it's not. It's it's it's you're you're you don't even want to spend money on a website you're like a hundred percent it all goes to buying these houses for gold star families and I personally know some of the people that you've done this for again I can't imagine a better gift to give a gold star family than the absolute peace of mind of here's a place for you to live and security for the rest of your life

how did you get to that how'd you get to that goal well it's thanks for sharing that I really appreciate that because that is really, you know, multiple goals with never enough. One is to elevate the conversation, but a very, very tangible one is to literally pay off mortgages like you described. And just from seeing firsthand the situations where, you know, the government doesn't really cover nearly as much as you would expect in a situation where there's somebody killed in action or who dies by suicide. And I just felt like there's a gap in the community. there's plenty of fishing trips and mental health outlook, like all very, very good things. But the most fundamental thing is for these families not to feel the pressure of needing to move from the communities that have hugged them for the previous one or 15 years of their lives.

And could you imagine being a gold star widow all of a sudden, none of them make that choice. Nobody wants that title. And being pressured to leave your community. Like, it's unfathomable to me. And so I just really was fired up that we don't do more. And so at this point, we've very, very confidentially paid off six mortgages. And I'm on a drive to do more and ultimately alleviate this burden for really every one of these families that has experienced this. And I wish we could wave a magic wand and do all of them all at once.

But look, it's really what drives me in one of the ways that I try to not. I mean, that I am giving back. And if people want to help that cause, it's real simple, go and buy this book. That's how you help this cause. Hey, look, will you get awesome lessons? Cool. Will you get some cool stories? Yes, you will.

But you'll be able to help out these Gold Star families. So freaking outstanding. You're also involved with the National Medal of Honor Museum. So tell me what's going on with that. Yeah, great. I'm on the board of a museum that the nation hasn't built. So about four years ago, I got asked to give somebody some advice. There was something that was a small local effort in South Carolina.

Long story short, this person asked me to join the board. I said, you know, like all of us were too busy, don't have time, excuse, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then for personal reasons, after sharing a story back and forth, I said, okay, you've got me. I'll join the board on one condition. We get to fire everybody who's on the board, and we're going to make this thing. Ningo National. So we've raised at this point $165 million. We've got about $60 million more to go. It took us three years, but we worked through concept to city selection. New York City offered us Governor's Island and Washington, D.C. offered us a spot in the mall. We ultimately

did a bake-off between those, plus Denver and Arlington, Texas. We chose Arlington, Texas. We're building the museum right next to AT&T Stadium. We've got an incredible board. We've got all of the ex-presidents, with the exception of President Trump, mostly from a timing perspective, you know, we're, we have great momentum. This is irreversible at this point. Of course, not surprisingly, the CEO of the museum is my swim buddy that we've talked about, Chris Cassidy. He's a phenomenal American, you know, SEAL, astronaut, and now CEO of this museum.

And what we're really doing with this is we're on a mission to inspire America. we will take the lessons that the Medal of Honor recipients have, that they espouse, the character, the values, et cetera, and talk about that to make the nation greater. And the vision is for, you know, some young kid to see the Brits Lubinsky and what he did and learn about his character and values or, you know, strike Brits name and replace it with any recipient and say, how do I, you know, I'm seeing this little third grade situation develop. I see a girl being bullied on the school yard. How do I step in and go make this situation right? That is what we want to stop that or school shootings or having the bravery of the courage to step in during a school shooting and stop the shooting from happening or just to make our nation stronger and better.

And the premise is really to inspire America. We will open in about a year and a half. We haven't completely determined our opening date. But this will be one of the nations. if not the, I should say, the premier museum for the nation that will tell the stories of the roughly 3,500 recipients and 64 living recipients, many of them, many of whom you personally know and just get their stories out there. Yeah, that's just awesome.

I mean, just the idea of giving people examples to read about and to be introduced to that they can try and follow in their footsteps, at least be inspired by. and yeah that's just that's just phenomenal um a while ago maybe a couple years i guess it was maybe a year and a half two years ago you you like hey you shot me a text hey you know we're looking for a CEO of this uh of this uh of this uh the Medal of Honor museum thing if you know anybody let me know and i was like i racking my brain a little bit um i definitely couldn't give you i couldn't have given you a candidate as good as Chris Cassidy so you that's that's that's an awesome guy to to take the lead on that. And so did they start construction already? Yes. Was that when you,

were you doing the groundbreaking ceremony when we were both cross paths? We missed each other in the hotel by whatever an hour or something. March 25th is Congressional Medal of Honor Day. And that's the day we broke around. We had President Bush. We had just, we had a like 17 or 18 of the living recipients there. And yes, that's when we came like minutes from linking up with each other. Well, that's awesome. Does that bring us up to date on your life right now? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, life is busy.

I can't sit still just like you can't. It's all about giving back. And I really do appreciate for everybody out there pushing never enough. I promise you it won't disappoint. It's not been extreme ownership and therefore you can buy it a lot cheaper on Amazon. So, but really do appreciate that great support. And if people, people want to find you, you have a website, which is this is mycase.com. You have Instagram, which is this is dot Mike Hayes.

You have Twitter, which is this is Mike Hayes and Facebook, the real Mike Hayes. Yeah. So I don't know about you. Social media was foreign to me about a year ago, but, you know, it's like, like the discomfort, leaning into discomfort, it's part of the new us. Yeah, it's definitely a very strange thing to go from zero social media and also being anti-social media, which we were absolutely had to be. Were you kidding me?

But yeah, it was, I guess it was a combination. It was, it was Leif Babin's wife, Jenna, who was like, you got to get on social media. I'm like, no. I think Laif imitates me now, you know, where I'm like, no, we don't need it, not doing it. And then Jamie, who's the CEO of one of my companies is like, you should really do this? I'm like, I don't think we need to. And then Tim Ferriss, who said, dude, you better get on Twitter or you're an idiot. I was like, all right.

There's a bunch of people that are telling me to do this. Well, what's real, I have to say, you know, what's really funny is, of course, I follow you. And when you show the zero, 430 wakeups, I keep saying to myself, I'm going to get the exact same watch and set it for one minute early. than you and take my picture and just show that my I'm a minute earlier than you every single morning, but I just haven't had the energy to actually pull it off. Yeah, there's been some campaigns on that. I know Andy Zump for a while was he, I forget if he was waking up earlier or he was doing something, something like that. There's also a whole host of people that that, you know, show their their watch at 1042 in front of a box of donuts and say, you know, just got after it. Yeah. But yeah. So that's where people can find you. Echo, you got any questions? Oh, yeah, real quick. You know the fellowship program or your job at the White House? How often do you see the president? It depends on what role you're in. The fellows get together a couple times during the year with the president

and have these candid off the record conversations. And then if you're in a role like I was at the National Security Council, sometimes it was three times in a week and then it'd be a month without seeing the president. So a little bit varied depending on what was going on in the world. Interesting. That's your question? That was an easy one man. It's throwing softballs.

I was looking for the high and inside fastball from Michael Charles. Charles just over there cruising. It's feeling sorry for me. Taking it easy for me. That's what else wondering. Awesome. Mike, any closing thoughts? No, just extreme appreciation.

I think that's maybe the next extreme appreciation besides extreme ownership. But just so appreciate you and all of our community and the nation for helping elevate the conversation and just recognizing that, you know, while we were in the service, we're ultimately all here to serve each other, and it takes different forms and fashions. And I just encourage people to get off the sideline and serve in whatever way makes the most sense to everybody listening. And just great appreciation for being here, Jocko.

It's a real special day for me to be able to be shocking when we go from, you know, water polo and killing each other or you killing me in the pool. And then this many years later, seeing where we both are in life. It's fun. Kind of crazy, man. Well, speaking of service, thanks for your service to the country, to the nation, to the teams, for what you've done in your past, and for what you're doing today, not only the civilian

sector, but more important for what you're doing today to take care of the families of our fallen teammates. So thanks for coming out, man. Sorry, it took us a while to get this together, but appreciate it, man. All good, brother. It's my pleasure. Thank you, Jocko. Thank you, Eka, Charles.

And with that, Mike Hayes has left the building. Echo Charles. Yes, sir. Key takeaways? What do you got? The one key takeaways. Kind of a reminder, something that I guess, yeah, yeah, I guess you talk about this.

But anyway, he said on a few occasions, process can save lives, the process. Because, and it's one of those things where I'm personally, I think I fall victim to this a lot of the time where I kind of, I'm not used to having. You're a victim. For lack of a better term. Conquer.

Where, like, you know, I don't have any many. I guess I do have some processes in place. But sometimes I can't put it this. I can get distracted from the process. You don't even know a process on when to take joint warfare, dude. Yeah. I'm not saying I have all the processes for all things, for sure. But I get distracted from the process kind of easy.

Even though I know that if I stick to the process, the chances of success go way up exponentially. And I think that's kind of like, and I think about myself and I think how generally speaking this can be the case where if you allow that to happen, like whether it be because of stress, because of, you know, just whatever kind of distraction or whatever, that's how it works. Where if you just stick to the process, you can keep yourself out of a lot of trouble, even in like hectic kind of situations. Yeah. Yep. And the dichotomy is sometimes you got to get outside the process. You know, it's people literally say things.

think outside the box. Yeah. So you got a no index when to sit, stick to the process and when to make an adjustment. Yeah. Like the process can be somewhat flexible, but the process is the process for a reason. Yep. It's like, okay, so think of it in terms of like Jiu-Jitsu, for example. Like when things start to get, you know, let's say I'm rolling with you.

And, you know, you start turning up the heat on me all of a sudden for whatever reason that's going on in your head. I can't get all panicky and start going off. natural like instinct I got to stick to the technique yeah seems saying sure I can turn on my urgency but I stick to the process which is the technique it's a good idea stick to what you've learned like that kind stuff that's that's a version of the process yep but there's also a situation where you might have to do something that's against the process look at Jeffrey Glover Jeffie Glover will do some

wild things yeah but they're not it well then again I can't read just mine yeah but I will say this the stuff the creative stuff that he does is all within the realm of jujitsu that he's either learned or experimenting it. No, no. Because nowhere in jiu-tuceu does it say like, oh, turn your back. Now, and it doesn't say that anywhere. Well, that's his version of Jiu-Sut. He might say it now.

I would say this. And I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, but this is what I'm- What about Pete the Greek going for wrists all the time? Okay, so that's still, that's still jiu-jitsu, though, is what I'm saying. So think about this. No one was telling him like, I'm talking about this. I'm put it this way. They're not doing it.

Focus on wrist locks. They don't do that. No one said that to him. They don't do that because they get distracted or taken out of their game. They do that voluntarily as part of the game. Yeah. See what I'm saying? Outside the process, though, is all I'm saying.

Maybe that is within their process. Maybe their process is just more flexible. I'm telling you that no, there's no process in jiu-jitsu seven years ago that said, hey, turn your back on the person's, on the person. There's no one that said that. Do you predict? Jeffrey Glover just did it. I know you can't read Jeff's fine or Pete the Greek or anyone for that matter,

But would you say yes or no, would you say that turning his back done out of creativity, do you think that's part of his process? I didn't say it wasn't part of his process. I said part of the process. All right. Because you said trust the process. And what I'm saying is, okay, your process. And how about that?

Trust your process. Hey, if there's a process in place, I'm saying. If there's a process in place, go ahead, trust it. Yep. To a significant degree. the significant. Okay. And what I'm what I mean what I mean in jujit what I'm saying don't get distracted meaning don't go on like if you start going all crazy hard. Is it beneficial for me to involuntarily go all crazy hard back?

Yeah. Now you throw all kind of quantifiers on there like involuntarily and stuff like this. Well you're making let's face it. You're making me get off specific over here with the and his and all this other stuff. So I'm trying to I'm doing the best of can of right. Right on. No, point taken. Oh, now right on. No. Okay. I'm trying to trust the process myself.

You're trying to make a point. I'm trying not to ridicule it too hard. Yes, there is process. That's why we have standard operating procedures, right? And you've got to stay within those standard operating procedures to your point. A lot of the times. Yeah. But you can't get stuck in them.

So what? Complacency, distraction, panic. These are all things that can make you deviate from the process. Yep. And then which kind of goes along to my secondary thing, take away, which is how and you guys, well, you say this a lot all the time too, it's like staying calm.

And really make it a point to stay calm, which kind of can be rolled into the process, right? Not only is it part of the process, potentially, it helps you stick to the process when you peak. All right, so we're sticking to the process. Speaking of sticking to the process, get yourself a subscription to

joint warfare, let's say, super cruel. Yeah, okay, so the process is we're main, and here's the thing too, this is important. Follow me. So in life, life process, no matter what your job, career, whatever. You have certain things in life that if you do stick to, don't get distracted, complacent, or panic about, these things are going to benefit you in life, not only exponentially, indefinitely, working out, reading and getting smarter, keeping an open mind.

Doing jiu-jitsu. Doing jiu-jitsu, yes, part of that game, for sure. So when you work out, get yourself some supplements to help you. Working outside easy all the time. Not only can you help you work out. It can help you keep working out. Because let's face it, you can get jammed up. Yes, you can.

So the process is work out, eat good, take relevant supplements. And I do say relevant because that's something. It's not nothing. Some people take your relevant supplements in my opinion. So take relevant supplements. You stick to that process. Now you're on the right track. There you go.

Joccofuel.com. Get yourself some of those relevant supplements. It's true. Not what do you call the other supplements? Irrelevant. Not irrelevant supplements. You didn't vary too much on your vocab there. You've been relevant and irrelevant.

Which is fine. Correct. You know, we talk about effective ineffective. You're doing the same thing. It's cool. Authorized. You're staying with the process. Jockofuel.com.

You can check it out at Wawa. You can get the drinks. By the way, this is probably worth saying right now. We got all new flavors coming out. Not only new flavors, but the old flavors, which, let's face it, some people didn't like that much. we'd redid them all.

And I'll tell you what, they're all amazing now. And I don't say that lightly. This isn't like, you won't find me in the past saying, oh, try this. It tastes. Try our, try Jocco, Discipline, go drink. It tastes amazing. You wouldn't hear me say that before. Because it wouldn't be true.

It tastes good. And maybe to me, some of them taste pretty amazing. But I wasn't throwing out that blanket statement. Blanket statement right now. The new drinks. taste amazing. And that's a bold statement. But I'm making it.

Reformulated. So check those out. They're kind of hitting the stores right now. So as the old drinks run out, the new drinks are coming in. Is there a way to tell which one is the, you will be in like a month, but we have to use up the old cans.

So the old cans right now, starting maybe like this week, the old cans have the new heat in them. But how do we know in the can? You don't know. You'll know when you taste it. When you taste and you're like, damn, Joggle wasn't lying about that.

This tastes amazing. Gotcha. That's what you're going to get. Gotcha. So check out those. Check it out at Wawa. Check out the vitamin shop. The vitamin shop's got all this stuff too.

So there you go. Get some of that. You probably saw me down at the, do you see me at the factory? I saw the video. Video. Okay. Then you saw me at the factory.

OriginUSA.com. Making stuff in America. The highest. quality the best gear it's what you need pair of jeans you need a pair of jeans yes okay where you gonna get them origin are you gonna get him from someplace that utilizes slave labor i would prefer not too not yes how about you don't yeah don't do that i don't have to anymore yeah it's true it's correct origin usa.com get yourself a guy yeah you can wear a gie that feels good that's a weird thing, right? It's weird. Because

can a ghee have a feeling? Oh, yeah. Yes, sir. Okay, well, isn't it nice when it feels good? Yes. And you can focus on the jiu-jitsu part of the experience. Not on the discomfort of your ghee. Yeah, the third man in the match. Yeah, it's you against your opponent and against your shitty old ghee. Kind of against the guy. Yeah, yeah.

Now it's you and your ghee against your opponent. Your opponent has to wear this old crappy ghee that's already bothering him. Brutal. No, I don't have to do that. You can have the ghee on your side. It's true. Get the ghee on your side. That's my message.

Go to origin, USA.com for some of that. It's true. There you go. Also, when you're on the path, you want to represent, go to jocco store. com is where you can get your t-shirts,

your hoodies, light and heavy, by the way. Not super heavy, we'll say regular hoodies and then your lightweight hoodies. Come on, bro. The more and more people that acquire these lightweight hoodies,

the more and more good feedback I get from them. There is such thing as light hoodie environments and whether. Conquer? A little bit. Also, we have a little thing called the shirt locker.

Okay, recently we've been getting heavy positive feedback from the shirt locker design. So what it is, is if you don't know, which most people do, but if you don't, new shirt,

new shirt design every month. Subscription automatically comes to you. Very creative, I guess, for lack of a better term, but yes, very good, positive feedback in that one. So check that one out at jaco store. If you want to get a cool,

shirt to wear that not many people are going to have. Because you know, you know sometimes like someone, a girl goes out to a party and there's another girl there. And they're wearing the same dress. Yes. And it's drama, man. It's drama.

Or as my daughters would call it, you know what that is? It's tea. What do you? A tea? Tea. No, tea. It's just tea. It's tea.

There's a meme of like someone drinking tea and it's sort of like drama. So you can say that's tea. See, you're not caught up. No. No, no. You're not hip like me. I don't see the correlation between tea and drama. It comes from a meme where someone's drinking tea.

Oh, and it's a dramatic. Yes, Kermit the Frog is drinking tea and it represents drama. Okay, so the meat, I don't know, I think you might be right,

but maybe the, so, Kermit the frog is drinking tea. And he says it all, the meme will always say something, something, something, but that's none of my business. There you go.

And he's drinking tea. So you will get, let's say, what group is this? Millennial? No, it's lower than millennial. Not lower, but what's younger than millennial? I think it's Z. So Gen Z, they'll say, oh, and they won't say tell me the gossip. They'll say, tell me the T.

Do you not know this? This is news to me, yes. Okay. So, no, I did not know that. That's good. That's new. That's good. Cool.

Oh, so yeah. So there you go. If you want the T, get a good T-shirt. No, right. You were saying what you were saying when girls show up to the party and somebody's wearing the same outfit. That's some tea for your. There's drama, right? So when you get, when you're part of the Sherlocker, no one's showing up with the same t-shirt as you.

Well, actually, technically. And if they do, you're kind of like, you're kind of down. Yeah, no tea. Well, here's the thing. It's kind of cool. The tea scenario with the girls. You might take over the small country when you do that. You show up with the same Sherlocker t-shirt and you're like, what?

Let's go. Let's take over this nation. Start planning. Plotting. No, that. So technically the female drama when there's the same outfit in the same location is opposite with males. It's opposite. Oh, okay.

That's like the thing. This is why you can carry when you show up and you're wearing the same t-shirt. Like, ah, fist bump. Yes, exactly. Yeah, you will bro out. Like. You, Dave Burke. Good deal, Dave.

Same deal. Show up with the same t-shirt. But I'm telling you like, if you went to the, okay, if you went, okay, you're wearing this, you know, no matter what you're wearing, you go somewhere and someone else is wearing the same thing. You don't feel like, oh, you're wearing it. You kind of feel, it's a positive feeling, is what I'm saying? See what I'm saying? Check out you. It's a sociological expert over there.

Either way. Shirt locker shirts, jaco store stuff. No exception. You're going to feel the camaraderie is what you're going to feel. Speaking of subscribe, subscribe to the podcast, don't forget about jaco underground.com. Appreciate the support over there. Don't forget about the YouTube channel. That's true.

If you want to see some, some just really sort of award-winning, assistant directing happening you can come and check out some of my AB activities it's incredible actually there's some new stuff on there on YouTube like the stuff of the top gun review like some kind of one off videos yeah

pretty solid the top gun on the I put some underground clips on there too for the people just so they can get a little taste of what's going on down there sometimes the things are important they are that they need to know about so check that out psychological warfare on

MP3 platforms Flipside Canvas, Dakota Meyer, speaking of Medal of Honor recipients. Dakota Meyer is a medal of honor recipient. He's badass. He's funny as hell. I have conversations sometimes with Dakota where we're laughing so hard and neither one of us can talk. This is rare. And he also has a company called Flipsidecanvus.com where he puts cool stuff to hang on your wall.

So if you want something cool to hang on your wall, cool. You might as well get it from Dakota Meyer. Books. Hey, first of all, never enough by Mike Hayes. Check that book out. Listen, all the profits for that book, all the profits go to Gold Star Families. So just get the book. And are their lessons learned?

Yes. Are there cool stories? Yes. Will you help out Gold Star families? Yes, you will. So check out that book. Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay. Check out that book.

If you want to know what was going on in Iraq and Syria, then I got a bunch of books that I've written. You can check those out as well. I have a leadership consultancy called Eschalonfront where we teach leadership to companies. And leadership is how you solve problems inside of organizations. So if you need to help there, go to Eschalonfront.com. We got the muster coming up. There's like a couple more seats left.

I don't even know if I should say anything because it might be sold out by now. If you want to come to the muster, go to Ashlandfront.com. The next one is June 15th through the 17th, Denver, Colorado. I know it's late. But if you want to come, come and check it out. We also have an online training academy. If you want to learn how to lead, you don't necessarily have to leave your office, your house.

You can learn to lead online. You cannot just learn to lead others, because that's not what it's all about. Some of it's about that. Some of it's about how to lead yourself, how to make good decisions for you, how to be on the path. So check out Extreme Ownership.com for that.

And if you want to help some service members, active and retired. You want to help them get medical treatments that they might need that the government doesn't pay for for whatever reason and there's a bunch of reasons why they might not pay for it. Check out America's mighty warriors.org.

That's Mama Lee organization, Mark Lee's mom. Check that out. Also remember heroes and horses.org Micah Fink up there in the wilderness taking people out on horses and letting them relearn how to live so check that out and once again don't forget about

never enough and helping out Gold Star families not have to worry about a mortgage or a place or a house or a home or a castle because that's what Mike's giving them so that's awesome and if you want to find Mike Hayes

on social media this he's at this is Mike Hayes you can find him on Instagram Twitter Facebook also Echoes on there I'm on there Echoes at Echo Charles I'm that jaco Willink

Hey and when you get there Just watch out Because you know all the algorithms sneaking up on you Thanks once again in my case for joining us And for your service and sacrifice For our great nation Appreciate you coming by and thanks to the rest of our Selfless military members out there

Right now on the front lines Protecting us and protecting our way of life We kind of take it for granted It's real easy to take it for granted. It's real easy, but we're not taking it for granted here. Also, thanks to our service,

the service of our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all the first responders that are out there doing the same thing, sacrificing to protect us here at home. Thank you. And everyone else, you know, I know.

Sometimes you've been on the grind for a while, right? The grind. You've been working, you've been staying focused, you've been holding the line. And at some point, maybe you feel like you're there.

Like you got there. But that's a good time when you feel like that. That's a good time to remember that that's not enough. It's never enough. We can all do a little more. Work a little harder. Be a little bit better.

So reload and recharge and go out there every day and get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.