Jocko Podcast - 383: Wisdom of the Bullfrog. Lessons From SEAL Admiral and SOCOM Commander, William McRaven

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Admiral William McRaven shares wisdom and lessons from his new book, "Wisdom of the Bullfrog".Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 383 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening echo. Good evening. Ambush right. Ambush right. Someone screamed. From the high bush on my right, the sound of blank fire erupted in a deafening roar. The ambush was on.

Simultaneously, all the men in the platoon dropped to the ground and returned fire into the tall grass. Grenade, grenade. Another voice shouted out. To my immediate left, just to the side of the point man. A grenade simulator exploded first one then another booming in my ears with stunning effect on the ground around me my platoon continued to fire Changing magazines and waiting for me to give the order to move We couldn't counterattack through the brush brush it was too thick we couldn't move to the right the instructors had sealed off our exit It appeared our only choice was to move left and try and get out of the kill zone in my mind. I knew that was the textbook answer

But I had a better idea Without hesitation, I jacked another magazine into my M16, jumped up from my prone position, and ran around the left edge of the heavy brush, nodding to the point, man, as I bolted past him. I would flank the instructors, circle around the bushes, come up from behind them, and counter ambush them myself. This was going to be awesome. Like a man possessed, I charged past the row of bushes, jumped over a few small boulders and found myself unopposed on the high ground behind the instructors flipping my selector switch to full auto I pulled the trigger and raked the bodies of the

seven men lying behind the high brush I moved forward continuing to fire as it methodically shot each man with blank ammunition we had one what the hell are you doing mr. Mack instructor faculty yelled jumping up from the ground killing the bad guys was my quick and proud retort doc Jennings one of the few black Frogman of the Vietnam era stood up from where he was lying and gave me a complete look of disdain Sir, you're a damn fool, he said or words to those effect You left your platoon lying in the kill zone did they know what you were doing Somehow this wasn't going as I had imagined get back with your platoon mr. Mack Jennings said sternly

I thought the worst of my ass chewing was over surely the platoon would appreciate my quick thinking They would understand what I was trying to do. I had defeated the instructors. That must count for something. Sir, what the hell were you thinking, Varner said, echoing the words of faculty. We had no idea where you went, LeBlanc piped in. I quickly tried to explain, look, guys, I saw an opportunity to flank the enemy and save the platoon. I reacted.

Well, sir, that's just fine, but we had no clue what you were doing or where you were going. Marshall Lubin had swung around to join in the conversation. Yeah, man, I thought you were running away from the thing. the firefight no no come on guys I was trying to save the platoon sir with all due respect varner said a little less caustic now your job was to get us out of the kill zone to communicate your intent so we could all move together and survive I just nodded I knew they were right Jim varner's words stayed with me for the rest of my career your job was to get us out of the kill zone to communicate your intent so we could all move together

and survive and that right there is an excerpt from a new book that is out it is called the wisdom of the bullfrog which was written by admiral william h mcraven admiral mcraven spent 37 years as an active duty seal officer becoming eventually the commander of the united states special operations command four star admiral in charge of all american special operations forces He oversaw thousands and thousands of missions during the global war on terror, including organizing and overseeing Operation Neptune's Spear, the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. And he has been on this podcast before, episode 290. If you haven't listened to it, go listen to it. It's just outstanding to hear his stories.

He's written a bunch of books, a book called SpeckOps Case Studies in Special Operations Theory and Practice. A book called Make Your Bed, Little Things That Can Change Your Life and Maybe The World, a book called C Stories, My Life in Special Operations, a book called The Hero Code, Lessons Learned from Lives Well-Lived. And finally, and most recently, this book, The Wisdom of the Bullfrog, Leadership Made Simple, but Not Easy. And that is where that opening came from, from a training mission. And that one kind of cracked me up, and I heard you laughing as I was reading it, too, sir.

It's an honor to have you here once again to talk about some of your lessons learned in your life and pass on some of that wisdom from the bullfrog. Thanks, Jacko. Yeah, always good to be with you. Yeah, so I ran training for the West Coast for the last three years I was in, and I got to see so many young lieutenant rambos get up and decide. It seemed like a good idea at the time, you know. It certainly did. The bullfrog.

We touched on it last time you were on, but tell us what the bullfrog is. Yeah, so the bullfrog, as you know, Jocko, is the title given to the longest serving Navy SEAL on active duty. And for your listeners, of course, as Navy SEALs, we are first and foremost, Navy Frogmen. So when you are the senior frogman, you are the bullfrog. But what a lot of people don't know is when you become the bullfrog, they give you this god-awful trophy. And I think a little bit of it is to make sure you don't get too fully yourself. So the trophy looks like it was made at some dime store, but it's got a big toad on top of it. You know, it's not some grand bullfrog.

It's a toad. So it's like, okay, brother, yeah, you've served longer than anybody else, but that doesn't mean a whole lot, you know, other than the fact you've been around for a while. Yeah, that's definitely, we always kind of knew who the bullfrog was at any given time in the SEAL teams. I actually know who it is right now. Now listen the last episode we we went through basically your life chronologically and your upbringing how you ended up in the teams You know growing up with your dad as a a war hero himself a fighter pilot and what your experience was like in the teams And if people want to get that background, which you definitely do I actually relisten to the podcast and it's just it's awesome to listen to It's episode 290 so if you want to hear you know all the the backstory

from the Admiral's life growing up, then go check out episode 290. But look, this is a new book. Though it's called the wisdom of the bullfrog and there's certainly a lot of wisdom in it. And so let's get into this thing. When this has come out? Came out April 4th?

It just came out a couple weeks ago. Yeah. So you say here in this, leadership is difficult but not complicated. To do it right doesn't require a sophisticated chart, a calculus formula or a complex algorithm, but it does require some guidance. So how do we make the difficult nature of leadership simple? Well, for thousands of years, militaries have relied on mottoes, creeds, parables, and

stories to inspire, to motivate, and to guide leaders and followers alike. These sayings serve to reinforce certain behaviors. They provide a memory prompt, a Pavlovian response, and an inspirational surge that helps direct individual actions in the midst of uncertainty. So that is the basis of this book is that there's these military mantras that you hear and you're definitely going to hear them. And depending on what unit you're in, you may hear certain ones more often than others. But you can you can definitely take those things and kind of shrug them off like no big deal. But what you've done in this book is pointed out how they truly can be a mental checklist about how you are going to function and what decision.

you're going to make. And I often say culture, good culture is the ultimate form of decentralized command. So if, if, and I actually talk about the Marine Corps a lot because the Marine Corps is such a strong culture that every Marine understands what a Marine ultimately should be doing. And they know when they're doing right. They know what, when they're doing wrong. And they can make decisions based on just the culture of the Marine Corps. And a lot of that culture comes from these mantras that they have, even right down to,

you know, Semper Fidelis always faithful. So that's really the basis. of this book and taking these mantras and modos and breaking them down and talking about how you discovered them and then you let them guide you. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. A couple of years ago, my publisher got hold of me and said, hey, what would you think about writing a leadership book?

And of course, the other books, as you pointed out, Make a Bad Hero Code, they're different style. They're not really leadership books. They are books about, you know, various qualities and traits and things that I think make for good heroes. But it's not a leadership book. And I said, yeah, I'd love to write a leadership book. But I struggled with it because I had so much I wanted to say about leadership that I couldn't figure out how to frame the book.

I actually had to push it off for a year. I got back hold of my publisher and said, I can't do this just right now. I haven't figured it out yet. Well, at one point in time, I think it was after a couple of martinis or a couple of beers, I started thinking, okay, so how did I learn leadership? What were the things that resonated with me? And I remembered very distinctly when I was a young officer at one point in time, I was getting ready to do something. And the guy that was kind of my mentor at the time said to me, hey, if you do this, can you stand before the long grain table? And so that quote, which has been around for a while, really kind of comes from

World War II. And back in the day, and actually even when I joined the teams in the early 70s, we still had them. The conference tables in the conference rooms, long, you know, a piece of wooden table, but it had a very thin green felt that was on top of the conference tables. And so whenever there was some sort of official proceeding or something, you as the officer who was being questioned would come and stand before the long green table. And the implication of that saying, can you stand before the long green table is, look, if you're about to make a decision or you're going to take an action, If you had to stand before reasonable men and women who were judging those actions, could you do it and make a case for it?

Because if you can't, then you better rethink your actions. And so, again, for some reason when I was an insin, this came up. And ever since then, when I had a very difficult decision, when something seemed very risky, or I would say to myself, okay, if this goes south, which it very well could, can I justify why I took these actions? And that was kind of the epiphany for me in terms of, well, shoot, it's not only the long green table. Of course, it's the seal mantra.

The only easy day was yesterday because we as seals, of course, understand immediately that every day's hard. So then I started thinking, well, what are the other quotes and mottoes and as you said, mantras? And that became the framing mechanism for the book. But the first one that jumped out was this long green table. Yeah, that's a good one. And there's a modern version of that that I used to tell guys, and that is you're out there in the field and you do something, you have to assume that it's going to be on CNN. Right. It's the Washington Post-C-N test.

You're right. They're going to be sitting there. There's someone with a camera. That person that you think is just running away. They're actually filming. And so you've got to think, is what I'm about to do, am I going to be proud of this if it goes on, you know, viral over and everyone watches it. And that, you know, some people might say, well, that's not, that's not the right attitude to have. have because that means you were thinking about doing something bad. Well, if it's the thing that

keeps you in check and from doing something bad, then so be it. Right. And speaking of which, this is the first one that you go over in this is, is kind of the class, it might be the most classic of these mantras. It's death before dishonor. And honestly, you sent me a PDF of this and I was reading it and said, well, that's, he's coming out of the gate with death before dishonor. Okay, and you say this in the book. Legend has it that the phrase death before dishonor began with the Greek Stoics who were prepared to die rather than compromise their values. Later, Julius Caesar is quoted as saying, I love the name of honor more than I fear death. The samurai of Japan were steeped in the tradition of honor and always prepared to die rather than dishonor their service to their emperor.

And in modern times, the United States Marine Corps has unofficially adopted the saying death before dishonor after legendary Marine Sergeant John Bazelonone. had the motto tattooed on his left arm. So that's like the hardcore take. But what I think the slant that you put on this or the perspective that you put on this is applying this not to, oh, I'm facing the enemy and I'd rather die than run away. But hey, I've got a hard decision to make.

And I'd rather do the right thing, the honorable thing, then, and have to suffer a little bit, then take the easy way out. Yeah, and I struggled early on with deciding whether or not that should be chapter one. And frankly, even the term,

death before dishonor. I'm thinking, okay, somebody's going to pick up this book and go, you've got to be kidding. This is, as you said, right out of the gate. We're going to come on hard. But I realized, and you know this exceedingly well, Jocko, at the end of the day, the great leaders,

and women that we respect, are those people that are honorable, that are honest, that are trustworthy, that kind of respect the people they work for. Now, we all have our foibles, and I point out in the book several times, look, I'm very cautious about, you know, offering advice to people recognizing my own shortfalls. But if you don't have a code of honor, a personal code of honor, and pick something, and I list a lot of them in there, it's not just, you know, death before dishonor. I mean, the Boy Scout Code, the Girl Scout Code, the Hippocratic Oath. I mean, there's a lot of, things out there that recognize the value of honor. The one I kind of pull out is from West Point. When I went up there to do what's called the 500th night, I had an opportunity to talk to the juniors

that were going through West Point. And the kind of honor code for West Point is about as simple as it gets. It says, I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. And I thought, that's it it doesn't have to be death you know it's not about dying but it is about doing the right thing and you always know people have asked before well you don't always know what the right thing to do oh hell yeah of course you know the right thing to do it's just hard to do and in fact the the beginning of the book i start off with a quote from carl von klauswitz the 19th century prussian general who wrote the book on war and in the book on war which is why the subtitle he says everything in war is simple. It's just the simple things are difficult. And I remember I was heading

back to Afghanistan in about 2009. I'm on a plane and I'm reading some foreign policy magazine. And this is when we had just become kind of a surge to Afghanistan. And these two kind of East Coast academics are talking about the fact that, you know, the military, a little condescending. The military just doesn't get it in Afghanistan. If they would only build roads, they could connect the villages to the districts and the districts to the province and then build more roads, the province to the central government.

The military just doesn't get it. You know, why don't they build roads? Well, no, shit, why didn't we think of that? And the answer is, we did think of that. It's just that when people are shooting at you and trying to blow you up, it's a little hard to build roads. And so this was a little bit of the foundation

of my thinking on leadership. You say, hey, be an honorable man or woman. Well, that sounds easy. I could get up on a chalkboard and say, you know, lead from the front, take care of your men and women, you know, be men and women of a good character. It's just hard to do. It's hard to do because we're humans. We make mistakes. We have our foibles.

You know, you say, well, lead from the front, except when people are shooting at you, sometimes do you have the courage always to lead from the front. When all of a sudden you realize your reputation or your advancement or your promotion hinges on some action you're going to take, are you going to do the honorable thing. But what I've found over time, and frankly, the older and more experienced I get, the more I think this is true, is, yes, there are captains of industry out there who have built, you know, billion-dollar enterprises, there are companies, there are universities, but invariably, if they have not been honorable, it's a house of cars they're building. It's the Enron's of this world. It's the laymen brothers of this world. It's the universities that are seeking a national championship but have recruiting violations. pick something. Invariably, those organizations or those people will have an existential event because they were not honorable, because they thought the ins justified the means. And so this idea of honor is not just some kind of polyanish view. It's really something that you find if you do it and you do it well. And even when you go off track, if you know what's right, you can kind to come back and do the honorable thing again.

And it'll make for a better organization. It'll make for a better culture. It will make for a better human being. Not easy to do, but you know what it looks like. Yeah, and I think another thing that I think about as well, similar to what you're saying, is usually the unhonorable thing, the easy road, is going to be a short-term win. It's going to be a short-term gratification.

but like you just said, ultimately, strategically, it's going to be a loser. So when you're taking that, when you cave to the pressure, when you make a decision that you know is not the best way to go about this, when you make those mistakes, or you make those decisions,

you're going to find out in the long run that that was not the right thing to do. I had my platoon commander, and we were on an ARG platoon. My platoon commander was CB. And so we... Oh, by the way, so I'm sorry to interject here, but you know, CB and I were sharing the bullfrog for the first year.

Yeah. One of the finest officers I ever served with, as you know. Yeah. So, CB, he was my platoon commander, and we were on an ARG platoon. So we go in to do a hydrographic reconnaissance. There's big waves. It's up at Camp Pendleton. It's miserable.

It's freezing. We're in the boat. I'm in the boat pool because I'm a radio man. We suffer through the night. The swimmers are getting washed up on the beach. It's just a horrible event. It takes us all night to get it done. We get it done.

We're freezing cold. We get back to the ship. The cartographer from the platoon, the two guys, they go and make the chart. They give it to the Marine Corps. We go back in to the beach. We call in the Marines. We're freezing. We're suffering.

It's just miserable. We get done. The Marines land. And an hour after the Marines land, they turn around and go back. They go back out to the ships. We're going, what's happening? It turns out the Marines didn't like the way the, the landing went down.

They say, we didn't do a good job. We want to do the whole thing again. So we get tasked once again, but we're going to do repeat of the operation. So we're doing another hydrographic reconnaissance. We all pile in the zodiac boats. We do the 12 nautical miles over the beach to get to the beach. We put this,

we're sitting there in this boat pool. And we just did. We just did this hydrographic reconnaissance not, well, I guess it was 36 hours before. And it's hard work. You know, this is like six or seven hours of swimming. I've done a couple of hard. So we're sitting in this boat pool and there's kind of a silence.

And finally, someone, thank God it wasn't me, says, you know, hey, are we actually going to do this again? And there's silence. And then CB says, well, we don't have to. But would that be the right thing to do? And as soon as we heard that, everyone was just like, oh, whoever said that's a terrible person. And we all were so glad we didn't say ourselves. But you were all thinking of it, right?

So that for me, that was the quote that you heard of the long green table. That for me, that was my second platoon. And that for me, is this the right thing to do? And there's an easy way to do it. And actually, we just did the hydrographic reconnaissance. It was totally good to go. We could have easily sat in those boats and relaxed for a little while. But it wouldn't have been the right thing to do.

And that guidance from from CB stuck with me for for the rest of my career and to this day That's where those things come from but that's one of those situations where look. He's feeling the pressure from From from the platoon that's going to be suffering for the next five hours six hours seven hours But he knew it wasn't the right thing to do it and what the interesting thing was all he had to do is ask the question Would that be the right thing to do and we all knew that wasn't the right thing? So that's why Brian Cieber Vanaller was one of the great officers in the seal teams. Oh, absolutely. I've tried to steal as much leadership as I possibly could from him.

And he was the guy that made me realize what, well, first of all, he's the guy that made me want to become an officer because I said to myself, we had, we had fired a platoon commander and he took over. And when he took over, I was like, gosh, this is awesome. Like, this is so, it's a totally different world. Right. And I said, if one day, maybe I can make the world good. for 16 guys in a seal platoon, that's what I'm going to do.

I think you did that. I think you did that, Jock, for more than a few guys. Sent me down the path, but all thanks to CB, all thanks to him, and just the example that he set as a leader and as a frogman. He was also just awesome at everything, you know. He was just awesome at PT. We, of course, thought he was an old man. Because he had gray hair.

He must have been at least three. Well, he had been a senior chief, I think, before he. a senior chief. Yeah, before he became an O. Yeah. So there you go. That attitude right there, you say, you wrap, I'm not going to do this for every chapter, but you have a little wrap up in these chapters.

You say it's simple. To be fair and honorable in your business dealings, it's the only way that you and your employees can leave a legacy to be proud of. Never lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. The culture of your organization starts with you. Own your lapses in judgment. it happens to everyone, correct the problem, and return to being a person of good character. How does that mesh up with if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying?

Yeah, you know, I never liked that saying. So, Jaco was referring to a saying when we go through SEAL training a lot of times, I say if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying. And it concerns me that this continues to be kind of discussed and bought into in the training. To me, it was about, are you being, Are you being flexible enough? Are you being creative enough? It wasn't about cheating.

It was about being creative. It was about having this kind of commando mentality that says, okay, you want me to go from point A to point B, but I understand the best way to do this isn't to go from point A to point A to point B is to go to from point A and a half and do it faster than you would think, you know? And you would find creative ways to solve problems.

Sometimes people said, well, the instructor said to do it this away. So if you're not doing it that way, then you're obviously cheating. And as you know, as a former instructor, that's not exactly what you were trying to do. You were trying to find out who were the leaders in the class that could think on their feet, that could be creative when they were given a challenging problem. But from the student standpoint, they're like, well, I'm sorry, the instructor said, do this exactly, and now you're telling me to do something different, you, the O, and the class.

It's not cheating. It is about, you know, thinking differently and thinking, creatively. And, you know, this is what's expected of all leaders, particularly those of us in the kind of the commando, broad commando ranks. So, yeah, the cheating piece, I never liked that saying, don't like it today, because I think it implies that you are circumventing the ground truth of something. You're trying to do something illegal or wrong in terms of cheating. You're violating the rules. Now you're not violating the rules You're playing within the rules

You're just being creative in how you do it And it sounds nuanced but I do think it's a It's a different approach to things Yeah, when I went through we we'd heard it We said it and then eventually the instructors Would say you're only cheating yourselves Right which made sense to me But I totally agree with what you're saying

I was going through Mount Warfare So urban combat training And I was a assistant and platoon commander and I was out at team two and the the role players you know the other seals that are acting like bad guys they captured one of our guys and they had him in like the third third story of this building and they were you know it's getting all theatrical they had him yelling for help and all this stuff and we're all you know like oh we got to get him and we had

been taught yeah you know when you enter a building you clear you clear the first floor then you move to the second floor, you clear the second floor, then you get to the third floor, you clear the third floor. And to me, it was like, oh, they were going to wait and they were to cause problems for us and they were to kill this guy. And so I said, hey, here's what we're going to do. I said, we're just going straight to the third floor. We're going to get on this outside stairwell. We're going to go right to the third floor and don't clear any of the other rooms because we could tell what, what room he was in. I said, we're going to go straight up there. We're going right to that room. And sure enough, I mean, this was within two minutes. You know, they expected us to come up with a plan

and then reassess and then go clear the building from the top to the bottom. So within two minutes, we're on that ladder well heading up. And sure enough, we literally walked into that room and just shot all the bad guys in the back and surprised them. To me, that's what that motto is about. It's about thinking about outside the box. Absolutely right.

Being creative, thinking outside the box, getting the problem solved without necessarily following through all the steps that you think are necessary. I mean, that's what's expected of good officers and good leaders. Next one, you can't surge trust. And in this one, and again, yeah, I'm obviously skipping around this book. Get the book. There's all, every one of these you give really good one, two, maybe three examples of where

these things played in history, where they played in your career. They're just, it's just a great compilation of these things. The crux of this one, to be a great leader, you must be trusted by your employees. If they do not trust you, they will not follow you. It takes time to build trust, but it is time well spent if you intend to lead effectively. Now, you say employees in this. It's actually not just your employees, it's your peers, and it's the people above you in the chain of command. And you go into that, and that's one of the major points of the entire book, this idea of building relationships.

And you talk about building trust. And I've been talking a lot lately about what relationships are. What are they? And I talk about, well, trust is definitely one of them. If you don't trust me and I don't trust to you, we don't have a relationship. Listening, if I don't listen to you and you don't listen to me, we don't have a relationship. Respect, if I don't treat you with respect and you don't treat me with respect. And it doesn't matter if you're the admiral and I'm the chief, I'm going to treat you with respect and you're going to treat me with respect.

And if we are not treating each other respect, we don't have a good relationship. And by the way, if you're the admiral and I'm a chief and you don't treat me with respect, we don't have a good relationship. You're not going to get much from me beyond what you mandate being able to influence. So if you've got to actually open your mind and allow other people to influence you so that you can have influence with them. If I don't listen to anything you say or I don't allow you to influence my ideas, we're not going to move forward. And the last one obviously is take care. If you don't care about me and I don't care about you, we don't have a relationship. This idea of trust, and this is a question I've gotten asked.

many many times is you know my boss is telling me to do something that doesn't make sense what do I tell the troops I can I've already told my boss that doesn't make sense but he's just saying go ahead and do it anyways and I always tell people yeah when that it would happen to me and it believe me it happened to me just like I know what happened to you it's gonna happen with no matter what career you're in I would get told to do something that didn't make sense what did I do did I go back to my troops and say hey this doesn't make any sense the boss is stupid because that's the truth no what I'd say is hey listen he

Here's what the boss wants us to do. I'm not exactly sure why he wants to stick with this plan, but I do know this. I want the boss to trust me. And what we're going to do is we're going to do this. We're going to do the best of our ability. We're going to knock it out of the park so that the boss realizes that we're a good platoon and we can get the job done and he trusts me.

And that way the next time he's got a wild idea like this, he'll hopefully listen to me a little bit more. So being able to tell the truth is so important and there's really no reason to deviate from that. Yeah, you know, certainly in my time in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, there were times where we were looking at doing pretty complex missions. And sometimes, and a lot of times, you know, you're putting the troops at high risk. And I always felt that as the commander, I had an obligation. And you talk about the trust.

I had an obligation to sit down with the platoon, the unit, the tat, whatever it happened to be, and say, guys, here's why we're doing this. And you've got to be prepared to hear their concerns. I mean, to your point, you've got to listen. you've got to listen to their concerns. But what you hope is that the good leaders, and I talk about Sergeant Major Chris Ferris in here a lot. So the Sergeant Major, as you know, was my command sergeant major, both at J-Socke and then at Socom.

And Ferris never hesitated, never hesitated to come into my office, close the door and say, hey, sir, this is a bad idea. Or have you thought about it this way? And you need someone like that that is going to tell truth to power. And you expect, certainly as a leader, I always expected, and I encouraged the officers that worked for me, the senior enlisted to work for me to say, hey, look, boss, I need to tell you something. Good. Tell me, I won't wire brush you for it. I need to know what your concerns are, or I'm going to make a bad

decision. And Ferris would always come in, and we'd have the conversation, but once I made the decision, and this is an important part of leadership, is the followership part of it. once I made the decision, even if Ferris disagreed with it, or even if the master chiefs that worked for me before disagreed with it, they would say, okay, sir, I got it. They'd kind of salute smartly and move out, and they owned that decision. In fact, I talked about this discussion at West Point. So I have all these, you know, a thousand kids or whatever there were, juniors at West Point cadets. And I said, you need to be very careful about kind of becoming as a junior officer, because I'm, you know, a thousand kids, or whatever they were, juniors at West Point cadets. And I said, you need to be very careful, you need to be very careful about kind of becoming as a junior officer, because I'm I know I fell into this trap. When I was young junior officer, the commanding officers of my teams, they were old guys. They were probably in their 40s or something. And, you know, they were balding and maybe they'd put on a little weight. And, you know, as a junior officer, you tend to kind of make a little fun of them.

And, you know, their spouses weren't exactly, you know. And you get a little too righteous, you know. I mean, you're like, oh, you know, these guys just doesn't understand how things are done, you know. And I told these young cadets, I said, be careful about being too righteous. and thinking that you know more than the commanding officer or the person senior to you. Because when you get to be that person, and if you're lucky enough to be that person one day,

you will find all of the things that are impressing upon that individual to have them be forced to make certain decisions and why they're doing things certain ways. And really, you have an obligation as a leader to explain the decisions you're making. People say, well, as a leader, you don't have to explain anything. Oh, yeah, you do. Of course you do.

particularly when people's lives are at risk. You have to explain why you're doing it, but you hope that once you've explained it, and once people have talked it out, when the decision is made, the good kind of follower leaders, they say, okay, boss, I own that decision, just like you were talking about.

Hey, if commanding officer wants this done, we're going to do it to the very best of our ability. And, you know, that served me well both as a senior leader and as a follower later. I have good conversations with people. and along these lines and they'll say yeah but you know

what if I go into explain the why we're doing something and I start getting asked questions and I don't know what the answer is and I always say maybe your idea is not that great maybe you need to rethink

what your actual plan is if I can't articulate to you hey this is why we're attacking this target from the north or this is why we're moving on to this target from the south This is why we're using helicopters. If I can't articulate that to you in a way where you nod your head and go, yeah, okay, I understand.

That makes sense. Well, maybe I should actually listen to a little bit more to what you have to say. I've been using this. My latest patented invention is called the explanation effort meter. Okay. And what this is is how hard is it for me to explain why we're doing something? And at a certain point, if I'm exerting so much effort to try and explain something, if that meter starts getting in the red, I might need to rethink what my decision is.

Well, actually, when I became the chancellor of the University of Texas system, my first day on the job. So now all of a sudden I'm in charge of 230,000 kids, 100,000 employees, 14 different institutions. I've got no experience in higher education or health care. And this was the huge part of the university system. So I come in to meet my staff, and I had met them a little bit ahead of time, but this is really my first meeting. And as I had done, frankly, at Socom at J-Socket, every command I'd ever been to it, I sit down with them and I said, okay, folks, let me tell you how this works. I said, you know, there are going to be times when I'm making decisions. And if I'm making the wrong decision, please tell me, give me your input.

I want your input. And I want you to feel free and comfortable to talk to me if things don't seem right. But here's the other part of this. If I find out later on that you knew I was walking into a minefield and you didn't tell me, you and I are going to have a conversation. And so it was, one, as a leader, you've got to create an environment where, whether it's your staff or the platoon or whoever, is comfortable talking to you and saying, hey, this is all screwed up. But at the same time, they also need to know that there's a little bit of pressure that if they see you doing something wrong and they don't tell you,

You guess what? That was their responsibility too. And again, that served me well over time both in the military and out of the military. Yeah. Yeah, the other thing that comes to play is do you really think, you know, when the boss tells me to do something that doesn't seem to make much sense, is that because the boss wants us to lose a bunch of money or, you know, not be able to take care of a client or make a bad product or in combat? Does that mean, oh, the boss just wants us all to get killed? That's why. No, that's not happening. They just don't see something that you see or you haven't done a good job communicating up the chain of command so that you can explain, hey boss, actually, here's a new TTP that at the end he's been using.

This is not a good idea. Oh, well, thank you for telling me that. So all good stuff. Next one, when in command, command. And this is, like I said, you've got a bunch of stories in here, some of them history, some from your experience. This one here is from, it's actually you going to college and you're learning about, Um, learning about Admiral Nimitz. And you hear this in the spring of 1942, the intelligence on the Japanese intentions at Midway was anything but solid.

Many in the admiral's own ranks question the strategic benefit of trying to save Midway. And even more officers feared that an American defeat at Midway would mean a quick Japanese victory in the Pacific. The ramifications of a bad decision were calamitous. But the ramification of no decision might be an existential. disaster. Nimitz reviewed the intelligence, consulted with his staff, and talked with his commanders, but the ultimate decision was his. He anguished over the decision for days, what would happen if he were wrong, thousands of sailors might die, thousands more would perish in fighting on Midway, and the island chains leading to Japan. The fate of the entire Navy, and perhaps our nation, rested on this

decision. Legend has it that during a conversation with Admiral Bullhawesi, Nimitz confessed his apprehension the weight of the decision about midway was overwhelming him Halsey blunt as ever reminded the Admiral of Nimitz's own personal conviction you once told me Halsey began that when in command command it was the clarion call that Nimitz needed he understood that commanders are expected to make the tough decision to act with purpose to be confident and lead from the front to accept the challenge and steal yourself for the rough waters ahead. A commander must command.

Command the situation. Command the troops. Command your fears. Take command. And like I said, this was a course that you got when you were, I think, a freshman or midship and ROTC. And what I really found just pretty amazing was I'm going to read a little bit more of the book here. It says 38 years later as a four-star admiral and commander. of the US Special Operations Command,

I walked into my office in Tampa to find a new desk waiting for me. I was a bit confused, as the old desk had seemed perfectly fine. When I inquired about the desk, my administrative assistant, senior master sergeant, Dana Hughes smiled and said, well, sir, we thought this might be a better fit for you. Perplexed, I looked at the desk again.

It was older than I first realized, a large executive-style desk with deep grain wood and leather side panels. As I approached the desk, there was a small framed picture resting on the edge. The man in the picture was unmistakable. It was Admiral Chester Nimitz, and this was his desk. The Navy archives had been kind enough to loan it to Socom for my use. I was humbled beyond all measure.

For the next three years, I sat at that desk, and whenever I thought I had some difficult days, I would remember where I was sitting. I would remember the lives that hung in the balance, the decisions that affected millions, the sense of loss and the sense of victory that Nimitz must have felt. And on those days, when I felt indecisive, when I took too much counsel of my fears,

when worry threatened to stall my actions, I hearkened back to Nimitz's words when in command, command. And with those words as my guide, I always tried to do the right, do right by the men and women who served me. Sometimes people really do the right thing, don't they? Whoever figured, hey, we got the four-star admiral that's now running all of the special operations,

we need to get him Nimitz's desk. That's incredible. So Dana Hughes was this remarkable senior master sergeant, as I mentioned, the Air Force Senior Master's Sergeant who worked for me out in my front office. And at one point in time, I think I had flippantly said something about, you know, I need something naval around here. because as you know, Socom, now, Eric Olson had been right before me, but historically Socom had been an Army command. And frankly, still was adorned with a lot of Army memorabilia. So I had gone away on a trip for a couple of weeks. I was heading over to Afghanistan or something, and I come back and here's this desk.

And of course, nobody says anything when I come in. But I can see a little grin on Dana's face as I come back out and say, what is this desk? And she said very, you know, straight forward. She was, well, you said you wanted something, Naval. She says, it's Nimitz's desk. And I was like, you're kidding. And as you point out, it really was for me. It was kind of a physical manifestation of the difficulty of command.

But, of course, my decisions, as the commander of Socom, paled in comparison to any decisions that Chester Nimitz had to make. And so, you know, you realize, look, have an obligation as a commander, as any leader. I don't care whether you're leading Starbucks or whether you're leading, you know, a hamburger joint. People expect you as the leader to make the decisions, to make the hard decisions. And yeah, it's hard. Good luck. You're in command. Yeah, you're in charge. Make the hard decisions. And there were times, you know, as the SOCOM commander and as the JSIC commander, you struggle with these things. But when you realize that people have

come before you that have had to make really, really, you know, monumental decisions and they did the right thing, then you need to do what is right by the people that work for you. You need to make the decision. You're going to be wrong a lot of times. I was wrong a lot of times. But frankly, they appreciate the decisiveness of the people in leadership positions. Now, again, this also assumes that you've taken all the advice, and as I talked about the little story about Nimitz head of time, his staff had told him, sir, we think this is a bad idea. You know, mailing the fleet out to Midway, this could be a Japanese trap. The folks in D.C., the senior officers in D.C. did not think it was a good idea.

But Nimitz's experience at that point in time, you know, he'd been in the Navy for 30-plus years at that point in time. He really had an understanding of what the right thing to do was. He just struggled with making that decision. Of course, as you know, Jocko, Bull Halsey, Admiral Bull Halsey was this kind of bigger-than-life figure in the Navy, brash, very, you know, courageous and risk. not risk adverse. And he had this kind of gruff demeanor. And so when Nimitz comes in, he goes, well, Admiral, you always told me, you know,

when in command, command. And so that has stuck with me all these years that from my time as amid shipment, again, getting this course in the ROTC. Yeah, you've got to make tough decisions when you're in command. That's what's expected of you. Yeah, and you mentioned the fact that you look, this is after you've listened to people. And you got to in your in your breakout here you say be decisive. Don't take too much counsel of your fears be thoughtful but not paralyzed by indecision now this is a much

Well, not much, but this is a slightly different version of patents what you know what patent gets attributed to quote of Do not take counsel of your fears period do not take counsel of your fears what you say is don't take too much counsel of your fears. This is why I wrote a book called the dichotomy of leadership, because if you're not balanced, if someone reads this, if you're a young junior officer right now in the military, and you say, hey, when it's time to command, command, I'm going to just make decisions. That's not what we're, that's not what I'm saying. That's right. It's actually listen, make sure you assess. And then when you, when it's time to make a decision, you make a decision. Don't take too much counsel of your fears. That means you should actually listen to your fears.

You, if you, if you're saying, I don't know if this is the right thing to do, okay, what does, explore that? Right. Don't just say, oh, I'm a commander, so I'm just going to command. Well, let me dovetail with that, because later on the book, I talk about who dares wins. And as you know, the Special Air Service, British Special Air Service, that's their motto, who dares wins. But I'm quick to point out in the who dares wins piece of this is, yes, you want to be aggressive, yes, you want to take risk, but they need to be calculated risks. And so I also want to make sure that the reader understands, and part of this course is talking a little bit about the bin Laden raid. And I said, look, everybody, and I'm not sure I talk about it in the book,

but everybody that's seen the movie, Zero Dark 30, which I have not seen, by the way, long story behind why I haven't seen it, but I have not seen the movie. That makes two of us. I haven't seen me either. So, but I know in movies about seals, you know, what they show, of course, is, you know, the Daring Do and the sexy stuff that makes movies or books.

What they don't talk about is that three-quartered. of your time is spent planning and rehearsing, right? You know, nobody wants to see a bunch of seals on a whiteboard with got our markers, but as you will know, if you don't do that up-front work, then the mission goes awry. So this understanding of, yes, who dares wins, or win in command command, to your point, Chaco, you bet. You know, you want to be decisive, but you want to be decisive after you have thought through all the risks. After you have taken as much of the risk out of it as you possibly can, then be prepared to move out. Listen to the people that are providing you that counsel. Listen to your fears. I mean, you have reason to be counsel of your fears. You ought to

listen to that little voice in the back of your head that says, I don't know here. Sooner later, though, you've got to say, you've got to resolve that. Okay, if the little voice in the back of my head says, hey, you know, you guys are jumping out too high or you're jumping out too low or you're going into a risky situation to get the shadow governor of this province and do you really want to you ought to think through that but then once you've thought through it you can't be paralyzed by your decision you know it's a you can't have this analysis by paralysis and continue and continue and continue sooner or later you've got to make the decision to move out here's a little trick I used to play on the junior officers when when they were coming through the jotsie course the junior officer

training course so I was over running trade at my buddy layf was running the junior officer training course and I would set the scenario up for him. It was a scenario that we lived through, which was we were, we were got a mission in Ramadi for a hostage rescue. We get the word that this guy had been kidnapped somewhere in Fallujah and now we had the location. He had been moved by these insurgents to Ramadi and he was being held hostage and they wanted $50,000 money that was going to finance the insurgency. We, the first thing we got when we got this word I said let's just wait let's get this confirmed this sounds it sounded a little bit wild so sure enough we wait 24 hours we gather more intelligence and it gets more solid more solid

and we've got grit now we have really good intel you know the probably the best intel that you can get we have that this guy where he is and what's going on so okay we're going to go rescue this guy we you know the platoon does their platoon planning they're brief in the mission I'm sitting there and there's a bunch of things that happened on this that made it a very interesting mission. So we come up with the plan. We're going to go hit this target. And we get done with the brief. And the ensign, I had the intel, you know, I was at a task unit of 40 SEALs.

You know, our intel officer was an ensign. A great guy, but he comes running in and he's her, sir, sir. And I'm like, what's going on? He goes, I just got more intel. And I'm like, okay, what is it? And the lay standing there with me. And he says, we just got intel that they have IEDs planted throughout the yard and they have heavy machine guns. And if anybody comes to try and rescue this guy, they're going to kill everyone and they're going to kill him.

And at that point, so I would tell this story to these junior officer training kids. And I'd say, all right, who would go on this mission right now? And half of them would raise their hand and say, yep, we're going. We're going to rescue this guy. That's what we do. The other half would raise their hand and say, I wouldn't send my guys, you know, we're not going to take a bunch of risks to get blown up by IEDs to To rescue some random Iraqi kid

And so we'd we'd always get that you always get and both those answers, you know, you can see where they're both coming from and my point in Setting them up like this is I'd say hey, that's great that you guys think this That's great that you all those guys think this Here's the reality. This isn't a black and white question What we can actually do is we can mitigate risk and that's what exactly what we did you know so what we did was we put an overwatch on the building we observed the fact that there was people walking around we that mitigated the fact that there was IEDs we couldn't see any we would put air assets overhead

we realized it wasn't any machine gun on the net on the on the roof of the building and then we did a massive explosive breach on the gate which we normally wouldn't do normally we'd climb into a building but we did a massive explosive breach which would disrupt IEDs we sent dogs in first then Iraqis our Iraqi counterparts, we sent them in, and then we went in. So my point was, hey, guys, look, there's not always like a yes or no answer. A lot of times you just need to rethink things and how can you mitigate this to the best of your ability. And all that being said, we would also add on the point that you can never mitigate all risk.

You can't mitigate all risk. And what you do is you mitigate what you can. And regardless if we were going on that target or some other target, we would make adjustments based on the threat level. And so, yes, when you're in command, command, but think. It seems intuitive, but it isn't always. You're right. And the really scary thing is when people let their ego get wrapped around issues like that. And I've been pointing out to people lately that there's countless, you wouldn't think that your ego would get you killed or you wouldn't think that you wouldn't make an egotistical decision that would get thousands of men killed.

But there's just example upon historical example of combat where people, Let their ego just drive people to their death and sometimes including themselves All right speaking of ego You got the next one is we all have our frog floats which actually told the story on the on the first time you came on the podcast But it's worth rehashing you got your you first show up at a seal team or as actually a UDT team and of course you expect the big mission is coming and you get recalled and by the the way you get recalled by a guy named a petty officer Larry L. Jones comes and tells you, hey, they need to see you right now. The skipper needs to see you. And interestingly, with one of these crossover things, this guy is a guy that was known in the seal teams is double

L. And when I was, when I got to SEAL Team 1, there was a SEAL team one ball at the Hotel Del Coronado. And we had a cake. And the cake cutters were the oldest seal at SEAL team one and the youngest seal at SEAL Team 1. And double L was the oldest seal at SEAL team one. And the youngest was me. And so we cut the cake together. Yeah. So there you go.

So you get recalled for this big mission. And the big mission that you get recalled for is to build a parade float of a big frog for the 4th of July. That's what you get tasked with. And obviously it wasn't going into, you know, Soviet harbors or something like that. So you're kind of bummed out. Now, let's go to the book. You hear this deep raspy voice behind you in the locker room as you're walking around all bummed out. He says, what's the matter, Ensign?

I turned around to see Master Chief Herschel Davis, the senior enlisted man from our sister team, UDT12. Davis was the personification of a frog man, tall, lean, tan, with a ruddy face, steel, gray eyes, and a huge handlebar mustache. He had seen more combat action than any 10 men I knew. Nothing important, Master Chief. Uh-huh. He said in a fatherly tone as he took a seat beside me. Why did this feel like I was in the confessional? I confessed.

Skipper just called me into his office and told me he wants me to take charge of building building the frog float for the Fourth of July parade. Hmm, the Master Chief grunted. And my guess is you would rather be jumping out of airplanes, locking out of submarines, going on a mission to save the world. Exactly right. I told him. Let me tell you something, Ensign.

I've been in this canoe club for almost 30 years. years sooner or later we all have to do things we don't want to do but if you're going to do it then do it right build the best damn frog float you can and there it was build the best damn frog float you can throughout the rest of my career I would be asked to build a lot of frog floats asked to do those menial tasks that no one else wanted those tasks that seemed beneath the dignity of my rank but each time I remembered the words of the master chief and tried to do the best I could to be proud of whatever job I was given. I found in my career that if you took pride in the little jobs,

people would think you worthy of the bigger jobs. On July 4th, 1978, the UDT Frog Float was awarded the top prize in its category, and the picture of my first mission hung proudly in the UDT11 compound for years afterwards. It was funny. So as I was promoting this book, I think it was Fried Zakaria. It was my first TV spot a couple of weeks ago. And Farid had read the book. And I think people wondered, not necessarily Freed, but people wondered, okay, is this just some story or was it really a frog float?

And of course, I had a picture of the frog float. So I sent it after the fact, I sent it to Farid. And he was like, whoa, that's a big float. I said, yes, it was. So you may recall, because I think it went out to the island. The frog eventually went out to the island. So later on, so it was just just. giant paper mache frog that we had built around a four-by truck.

And then we pulled a flatbed. And on the flatbed, we had the capsule from one of the Apollo missions, I think, and then we built some fake wave, and we had a bunch of guys on an IBS. I mean, it was quite the do. But after that, that was the last time that frog flow was used. Well, eventually, they took the paper mache frog off of the chassis of this truck, and they sent it out to San Clemente Island. And they put it on the top of the hill where when I went through training, in class 95,

we used to do what they called airplanes. You'd take a wooden pallet, put it on your back and run up the hill. We did it too. So later on, when the frog finally got out there, the guys had to carry frog eggs, you know, which were big boulder, find the big boulder and carry it up the hill to the frog, you know, to the mother frog. But eventually a storm came in, wiped out the frog, and it was never seen again. But, you know, the point of that chapter, as you all know, is like, you know,

All of us, and it goes back a little bit what you said earlier about kind of leadership and when your boss says, asked you to do something. You don't always know the reason. And the point I'm making there is, look, if at the end of the day it's best for the organization, and look, my commanding officer thought building the frog float was good for UDT11 and good for the teams and it was going to represent us in the city of Coronado, that was his idea and the Commodore's idea, well, I mean, if that's what they want done and I've been tasked to do it, then just do the best damn job you can. And throughout the course of my career, I said you got tasked to do a lot of things. I remember as a seal one time on deployment.

I had a Marine Colonel come to me, and he says, look, you know, you guys, you got this crackerjack seal platoon here, elite commandos. I need you to clean up the beach. And we were in Columbia, and the beach had been, you know, polluted. It had, you know, trash all over the place. I'm like, really? I mean, we're like a world-class seal platoon, and you want us to skin dive and pick up trash on the beach. And the colonel said, yeah, we need to do this great for community relations. So I had to, back to Europe, I had to go back to talk to the platoon.

And needless to say, my seal platoon was not too happy that we were going to go clean up the beach. But an interesting thing happened. We got out there, and, of course, I said, sir, if that's what you need us to do, we'll clean up the beach. And I had to explain it to the platoon. I'm not sure I ever explained it quite well enough. But we got out there, we cleaned up the beach. And, of course, afterwards the locals come out, and they brought us beer, and we had a little picnic afterwards. And it turned out to be a great community service project.

guys had a good time and actually we felt pretty good about cleaning up the beach. I mean, we picked up a lot of trash and you had a lot of those. And then, you know, you get into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, you think there's no small things to do, but there's a lot of small things. People ask you to do things that you think, well, you know, I'm supposed to be out here saving the world, winning the war in Iraq, winning the war in Afghanistan. No, we need you to do this thing that seems insignificant, but may actually have a much bigger role to play. You just do the best you can. Yeah. I know I was also tasked for the 4th of July

Cardinal parade. I wasn't an officer. I was just an e-dog, so I had to put on a PRC 77, and we put a bunch of camouflage paint on and drove at high speed toward the Boy Scout landing and then got out and patrolled through the crowd.

What year was that, Jocko? Because I was probably in charge of that Fourth of July demonstration. It would have been 1992. So I got the C-L-T-T-1 in 19. 91 and yeah because you were the exo there in 88 89 90 yeah so I missed you yeah because well you know back then which is a shame because a lot of people said that I was actually outstanding in the 4th of July but as you remember before 9-11 for your audience listeners I mean 4th of July the seals every 4th July we'd put on a big demonstration Gloria out of bay and

it was it because later on when I became the seal seal team 3 and then the Commodore and I ended up doing it five times, being in charge of it five times. I kept trying to get out of it. Say, this isn't fair. I mean, I've been doing it because it was like running a complex tactical missions. You know, we had free fallers, we had static liners, we had SDV guys, we had guys on, you know, the fast attack vehicles. And if you screwed this up, you know, 40,000 people were going to be watching seals screw up.

And some of it was pretty dangerous trying to jump into Gloriaita Bay and all this. So it was my first opportunity to run a complex, complex steel mission in front of a lot of people. And I remember Admiral Ray Smith, it was the Commodore one point, or it was the Admiral. We had done a demonstration, and a conics box I had on a platform out in the middle of Gloria at a Bay caught fire. And there was this huge black billowy smoke that just went from Coronado all the way over to San Diego.

And needless to say, that did not go so well. The Admiral and I had a conversation, Bill, you know, this is not supposed to be sure I got it. We'll get it fixed. Those things were, it was even, so I did it in 1992, and there was like a massive crowd. Oh, I mean, when I got out of that little zodiac boat and started patrolling, like there was a crowd pressed up against the shore. It was very popular evolution. But yeah, since, I don't think we stopped. We stopped it.

We stopped it. September 11th happened. Next one. The only easy day was yesterday. And this is something, you know, that obviously, is it comes from buds. I think it comes from buds or originally it comes from buds.

But you say this here. In 2002, when I was serving in the Bush White House, the commander of the East Coast SEAL, SEALs, invited me down for a conference. As was typical, the SEAL gathering. We started each day with an hour of calisthenics,

followed by a long run. And again, listen to the podcast 290. You talk about this parachute accident that you had a terrible parachute accident. You were all messed up from that. You weren't really healed yet. But here's this, you know, here's this PT.

And so what are you going to do? You're going to man up and go do the PT. So you get done with the PT. And now it's time for a run. And you say this. As my fellow seals started off in a sprint, I was only able to keep up for the first 100 yards and then began to fall back. Within a few minutes, I couldn't even see the pack anymore.

The course was five laps around a two-mile stretch of State Park. As the minutes passed and I lumbered along the first runner, Young SEAL lieutenant began to lap me. Slowing momentarily, he pulled up beside me, and knowing about my parachute accident gave me a penetrating and confused look. Sir, what the hell are you doing? He asked. What do you mean? I responded.

He shook his head and said, sir, why are you even out here? You don't have anything left to prove. Before I could answer, he bolted away and ran off into the distance. I was a Navy SEAL captain at the time. I had already completed my major command and important milestone in an officer's career. to this young lieutenant, I had nothing left to prove. But I wanted to tell him, what I wanted to yell at the top of my voice was how very wrong he was. The day you no longer believe you have something to prove, the day you no longer believe you must give it your all,

the day you think you are entitled to special treatment, the day you think all your hard days are behind you, is the day you are no longer the right leader for the job. Yeah, I mean, and you know this better than most, Jack. The fact the matter is, and I tell folks, look, you've got to bring it every day. Every single day. And sometimes, you know, as you become more and more senior, you think, well, I got here, maybe there's some perks. No, the only perk you have is working hard, working harder than everybody else. It's more people watching you.

More people watching you. You know, you should be honored to lead. And again, whether you're leading a coffee shop or a burger joint or whether you're leading, you know, all of U.S. special operations, you should recognize that it's an honor to lead. There are no special perks. Come in earlier than everybody else, work harder than everybody else, stay late, come in on the weekends, do whatever it takes to take care of the men and women that are working for you, to get the job done.

The only easy day really was yesterday. Every day is going to be hard. And the day you start thinking that, hey, man, my easy days are behind me. You know, I've made it, you know. I got money in my pocket. I'm a four-star admiral. I mean things are good. I really don't have to work too much harder. No That's not the way it works. You just got to work harder. This led me or maybe think about something again going back to this junior officer training course that I used to go and guest lecture at if it can be called that when when Leif was running it. I did it when the other other guys were running as well, but one thing I would tell those guys is you have nothing to prove but everything to prove and the reason I would tell them that is because you'd get these young officers sometimes. and they would feel like they had to prove that they were in charge.

So they would dictate everything and they would impose their will on the team and they would make these decisions that didn't really matter. I mean like really doesn't matter what, you know, I want to meet at 7 o'clock in the morning. And the chief says, you know, we're going to meet at 7.15. You're like, no, make it 7. Like there's really, you just lost so much leadership capital trying to prove that you were in charge.

So you have nothing to prove, but the interesting dichotomy is you have everything to prove. You have to prove that you're going to do the right things at the right time, make the right decision that you're going to take care of the team. You're going to get the mission accomplished. That's what you're trying to prove. And that's the external of what you're trying to prove. And then you've got here, you know, what you're talking about, this internal thing of like, hey, every single day. Every day.

And they got to, they did a good job with the seal ethos of you got to earn your Trident every day. Every day. That doesn't go away. Well, because, you know, you earn your Triton every day because you owe it to all the people that came before that wore the Trident. and all the people that are going to come after you. And I just tell people, it ain't your Trident. Yeah, I got it. You know, it's on your chest.

It's got your name, but it's not really your Trident. It's everybody that ever wore a Trident. It's the team's reputation. And so you better wear that Trident and remember the people that came before you. Remember the people that you're going to represent in the future. Do it with honor. Do it with integrity. Do it with all the right intentions.

because at the end of the day, you know, it's all of our tritons. You're just lucky enough to be wearing it. That's the truth right there. Next one. Run to the Sound of the Guns. And you've got a whole section in here about one of my favorite leaders of all time, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. We go out to Gettysburg and we take people out there and we do a battlefield, you know, review.

And it's just awesome. And actually right now, right now at this moment, Little Round Top is closed because they're doing a bunch of work up there. But usually we get to go right up on Little Round Top right now. We take people up to Devil's Den and you can look across it at Little Round Top. But we've done a bunch of, we've, on this podcast, we've covered the book, Bayonet Forward. We've gone through that thing in great detail.

I also did six podcasts taking us up to the Battle of Gettysburg with a friend of mine named J.D., who's a Marine, retired Marine that, worked at the Naval Academy who's a fanatic civil war history buff. So, yeah, this is, this talks about that event happening and what happened at the Battle of Little Roundtop. Again, you do a great job of capturing the essence of that. And you take this run to the sound of the guns and break it down and your kind of capture here. You say, be aggressive.

When you see a problem, do something about it. That's what is expected of leaders. Move to a place where you could best assess the nature of the problem and provide guidance and resources to resolve it as quickly as possible. And number three, communicate your intent every step of the way. I was at a team and we were talking and just reviewing some tactics and stuff. This was maybe like two, three years ago. And there was, I got presented with this.

argument of hey where should the where should if we got a if we got a troop out there where should the task unit commander be well we I think you should be up front all then the other guy was saying I think you should be in the back or whatever whatever they were saying and I said who you know what do you think what do you think and finally I said hey that task unit commander should be where he can best like see what's going on not get totally overwhelmed with what's happening right in front of them shouldn't be shouldn't be have to be handling prisoners and and shoot his gun but he shouldn't be so far away that he

can't understand what's going on. So that's when you say move to a place where you can best assess the nature of the problem and provide guidance, that's it. Yeah, you know, and I think you captured it well there. You know, I talk about run to the sound of guns and the implication is, again, go to solve problems. I used to see folks more so after I left the military. But there were times when I was in charge of academics when I would see a problem at a particular

university, I would call up and talk to the president. and I'd say, okay, so what do you plan on doing about this? And they would say, well, you know, I'm going to let the chair or the dean or the provost handle this. It's like, I don't think so. This is kind of the Washington Post test, as you mentioned. You know, this is not good, and you need to move because you can solve this as the president where the chair and the dean probably can't. But, of course, a lot of times leaders, and not just in the academic world,

The leaders are afraid to move to where the problem is because they know that then they own the problem. And so you see it in the corporate world as well, you know, things get dirty and get ugly. And it's like, well, I need to distance myself from that. No, no, that's not what you need to do. You need to move right to where that is so that you can garner all the resources so that you can make the decision so that you can solve the problem. Now, will you get painted with that brush? Absolutely. Guess what?

You're the leader. That's part of the job, right? And I talk in there the story about the Deepwater Horizon. So the oil rig that blew up in the Gulf several years ago. And there were, you know, I remember pictures on the news at night, you know, the mom and pop stores that were flooded with oil, the birds that were lying dead on the beach. And the CEO, you know, was a long ways away in the UK

and did not come to visit the site there on the Gulf of Mexico. And at one point in time, somebody stuck a camera and a microphone in his face and said, you know, what are you doing? Why aren't you coming to this? What's going on? And the CEO said, you know, this has been really busy for the last couple of weeks. You know, I'm really tired of this. I just kind of want to get back to my life. Ouch.

Needless to say, he did not last as a CEO. They eventually did go down to the Gulf, but by that time it was too late. And the point is, hey, something bad happens in your organization, boy, you better move to where that problem is quickly. And again, I was fortunate, you know, growing up in the teams to see this time and time again. Then after 9-11, of course, I worked for some remarkable Army generals. And I watched, again, part of the culture in the Marines as well. And, you know, part of the culture for the big generals was, hey, you know, Jim Mattis would be in Ramadi and in Fallujah. Stan McChrystal would get down in Afghanistan.

Ray O'Dierna would walk along the markets in Baghdad. I mean, these guys understood, hey, be forward, be up front. And when things go bad, you're right. You don't necessarily need to have a Jim Mattis picking up a gun shooting, but you've got to be in a position where you can see what's unfolding so that you're in a position to make the best decisions to resolve the problem. But once again, my time in the corporate world and in the academic world, I found the same problems.

Again, this is the book, yeah, I pull on military. military examples. But at the end of the day, this is about leadership. It's fungible. You know, whether you're in the military, whether you're in the corporate world, whether you're in the academic world, no matter where you are, the leadership principles are the same. I used to get asked all the time, you know, when I was the chancellor of the University of Texas, I'd be talking to large donor groups or something like this. And invariably somebody from the back would ask what they thought was a rhetorical question. And they would say something about the fact that, you know, well, you know, Admiral, you know, when you were in the military,

of course, you know, you just told people what to do and they did it. But now that you're in charge of all these faculty, you know, and they're kind of eccentric and they don't like discipline, you know, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with these people that don't just follow orders like they did in the military? And I would pause and I'd say, well, let me tell you, if you think that when I was in the military, you just told people what to do and they did it, you never spent a day in the military.

Because, you know, no matter where you are in leadership position, you have to inspire people. You have to manage people. Every once in a while, you've got to kind of kick them in the fourth point of contact. But at the end of the day, this is, I don't know in my 37 years that I ever gave anyone an order. You know, again, the order was implied. But leaders, you've got to inspire and you've got to manage and you've got to help people understand the nature of the work they're trying to do.

And that's good leadership. And again, so I think those principles apply kind of wherever you go. Yeah, two things for me. Number one, if your boss calls you and asks you about a problem, you need to go address that problem. That's like if my boss calls me and says, hey, Junker, what's going on with this thing? I'm on it. I'm going to go figure out what's going on and I'm going to get that problem solved. So if your boss is calling you, that's his very nice, indirect way of saying, you better get this squared away right now.

And yeah, I spent quite a bit of time now working with civilian companies. And right out of the gate, one of the first CEOs that I had to be. call with to set up I was going to work with his company and he said you know I just can't wait to you come up here and whip my people in the shape and I said hey listen if you're looking for someone to whip your people in the shape you should call someone else because if we're whipping is what you do to dogs and horses and slaves and you don't get results that you want and you definitely aren't going to form a a world-class organization so yes leadership is required and another thing I'll tell people's you know you think you can just tell people what to do in the

Military, you're telling them to do something that might get them killed. There's actually no place where people will push back more than when they're being told to do something that could get them killed. That's where they say, hey, you're an idiot. I'm not doing it. That's what happens. And actually, that does get reflected in movies from time to time. They show, you know, especially they show the Vietnam area. I'm not doing that.

That's ridiculous. So, yeah, that's too bad that we have that reputation. And I think it does come from all the boot camp scenes, right? All the boot camps are yelling and screaming. But, you know, your point about, you know, when things go wrong, and you and I were talking before we started the podcast, the nature of combat is always challenging. And unfortunately, we have civilian casualties.

And I can tell you, you know, when I ran my three-star command in Iraq and Afghanistan, just the nature of, you know, 10,000 guys out there conducting combat operations every night in Iraq and Afghanistan, we had civilian casualties. And every time we had these, as I mentioned, you know, We did a thorough, thorough investigation. But when those casualties were significant enough, I mean, I would be the guy that would move to, you know, the side of the casualty or I would talk to the general.

You can't avoid the ugly problems. And the uglier and the harder they are, the more you as a leader need to be right up front. And again, will it potentially cost you your job? Will it cost you your reputation? Will it cost you? It could cost you all those things. but if you do it, it will also gain you the respect to the people that work for you

because they know that you took on the hard problem. You knew the ramifications because you're going to own that problem. And if it turns out that problem is really ugly and it's on you, yeah. But the people that work for you, they expect you as a leader to get out there to address the problems to be the face of both the problem and the solution. Yeah, that's one of the good things I learned from the Army. we had you know we're in combat all the time and people are getting killed and people are getting shot and one of the things I learned from the army was oh the best thing you can do if something happens

is say hey come investigate this right now yeah like if something happens let's do an investigation because I want to know what happened I want to make sure everybody knows what happened I want to see what we learn from it and our motto one of our models was investigate us come and investigate us You want to see what we're doing? You want to understand what we're doing out here, how it's happening, how these things transpire, come investigate us. And sure enough, I mean, number one, we did shooter statements all the time for all of our engagements for that reason to make sure people knew. Like, here's exactly what happened. Here's the enemy tactics, techniques, and procedures that were witnessed.

Here's the rules of engagement that were followed. Here's what happened. And here's how it happened. And then when we did, if anything. Anything expanded beyond that? It was like yes, please come and investigate us and I learned that from the army the army the army said hey if anything happens You should raise your hand and say investigate. Yeah, and that's the best possible thing to do get someone else down here Because if you look like if you look like you got your hand down and you're looking in the other direction and you're saying I don't want to get investigated You're you're gonna you're gonna sound guilty and there's probably a reason that you're gonna sound guilty probably just doing something stupid

So we would raise our hand yep this is what happened come investigate come and check it out come and give us your two cents We want to know that you know what's happening. So I love that attitude. It's also a really good attitude that everybody in my, everyone that works for me knows that that's my attitude. Like every single person knows what I'm going to do. There's not going to be any coverups. We're not, you know, I literally said,

hey, there will be no coverups. If you work for me, there's nothing getting covered up. If you think I'm going to brush something on the rug, it ain't happening. If you're doing something stupid, it's going to come out. So don't do anything stupid. You know, our rules of engagement. Engagement, hey, you better make sure. If you kill somebody, you better make sure that they are bad.

If they're not bad, don't kill them, obviously. And we put those rules out, and that's how we executed. That's how we operated. So I really like that idea up and down the chain of command. Come investigate us. Next one. Suaspante. Am I saying that right?

Suisphonte. That's right. Suisphonse. See, I wasn't saying it quite right. If I put an E in there. The Rangers have a Latin saying. Suesponte. It means of your own accord. In other words, doing what needs to be done without being told to do so. There is often misguided belief that soldiers only follow orders, but the strength of the American military is that the great soldiers, the truly great leaders, do what is right to protect their men and women. They do what is right to uphold the reputation of their unit. They do what is right to bring honor to their country. They do what needs to be done, whether ordered to do so or not. This sense of initiative separates the great leaders from the mediocre ones.

Yeah, so I start off that chapter talking about Ralph Puckett. Ralph Puckett, who received the Medal of Honor for Actions. Army Ranger received the Medal of Honor for Actions in Korea. And then I think also received the Distinguished Service Cross in Vietnam, highly decorated guy. But the story, I think, that is almost more compelling as strange as it sounds. Because, you know, in the case of Ralph Puckett, the Rangers are moving into this position in Korea.

They're taking fire from the North Koreans and the Chinese and puck it in order to draw the enemy's fire so that the Rangers can direct fire on the enemy runs across an open field, not once, not twice, not three times, but four or five times. So the Rangers can find out where the fire is coming from. And then as soon as they see where the North Korean gunners are, then they engage them, right?

And at some point in time, later on years later, somebody was asked, why the hell did Ralph Puckett do that? And the young ranger replied, well, somebody had to do it. And Lieutenant Puckett knew that he was at somebody. He kind of did it of his own accord. But I tell a much simpler story, because obviously, you know, we're not all going to find ourselves in the Ralph Puckett position where, you know, our lives are at stake. But this idea is still important, this idea of sua sponte, of your own accord. And I mentioned that when I was Commodore, we were commemorating a building in Hawaii for Moki Martin, for one of the great seals, Lieutenant Philip L. Moki Martin.

Moki was born and raised in Hawaii. And in this building for an SDV building, we were going to name the building in his honor. Well, as we get up to do this, we've got the hangar, the high bay is full. We've got, you know, a couple hundred folks are there. You've got dignitaries from Hawaii there. And Moki, as you know, is in a wheelchair. So I get up to give my comments, and we had correctly positioned the microphone for Moki to give his comments. But we had not positioned it absolutely correctly.

So Moki wheels up to give his remarks, and you can't hear him. And I'm kind of sitting in the back, and I'm thinking, okay, well, I'm the senior officer. I'm the dignitary here. It's going to be a little awkward, but I think I need to get up. and go reposition the microphone. Sounds like a small thing, except now everybody is kind of, you can tell they're not.

So as I start to get up out of my seat, all of a sudden a young seal from formation, breaks formation, comes out, walks past the 200 people, comes right up to Moki Martin, promptly salutes him, adjusts the microphone, steps back again,

salutes him again, does an about face, and returns to formation. And we didn't miss a word of, Mokie's comments. Small thing. You know, not life or death, but it was the importance

of the event. This was meaningful. And this young seal knew something had to be done. So, you know, nobody told him to do it. It was of his own accord. Nobody said, hey, you need to break formation to go fix that mic.

No, he just said, hey, you know what? And oh, by the way, not the senior guy. Of course, I was a senior guy. I wasn't even the senior guy in the formation. I think he was a young second class buddy officer. But he knew something had to be done. So my point to the reader is, look, this isn't always about life and death. None of these things are about life and death. Death before dishonor is, you know, that's a saying, but it's about just being honorable. But in this case, sua sponte is, if you're a leader, and you see something that needs to be done, do it. You don't always have to ask, if it's the right thing to do, just

move out and do it. But as you know, people are like, I don't know, I don't know, maybe I shouldn't do this maybe you go do it that's what good leaders do yes putting up putting a seal troop through urban combat and there's total chaos going on there's paintball flying everywhere explosions going off humvees are in ditches it's just total mayhem and there's there's this one kid he's an e5 at the time i still know he's a freaking awesome guy but he's an e5 and i've been watching him through land warfare and watching him in cc i knew he was a squared away guy and so he's sitting behind this wall, you know, paintball flying over everywhere and I kind of walk over to him. I go, hey, bro.

And he looks up at me and I go, what do you guys think you should do right now? I go, what do you think he should do right now? And he goes, we go get in that building, man, strong point that building. And I go, freaking make it happen. And he looked at me with like big eyes. Like, wait a second, I can do that. And I go, do it. And so he goes, hey, everyone, strong point that building right there.

And boom, all of a sudden, all these troops start to pass the word and they all strong point that building and they carry on. But it was that idea that this kid, he's an E5, he shouldn't be making big tactical decisions, but that's what the freaking seals are for. That's what you're supposed to do. You see what you need to make happen? Make it happen. Who dares win. Who dares wins.

We brought this one up. Clearly an important one. You can say this. In 1991, I was a student at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. For two years, I worked on developing a theory, especially. operations I wanted to know why special operations mission succeeded in spite of the fact that they were exceptionally high risk was their boldness alone enough to carry the day where their commandos so superior to the enemy that they were bound to win in a fight was their technology so exceptional that it gave them an overwhelming advantage as it turned out those factors were necessary but certainly not sufficient for success in each case who dares wins had to be backed up by who plans and prepares wins. It was only through extensive planning and preparation that the special operations leaders

were able to identify the major risk factors and develop options for addressing them. To those on the outside looking in, the risks appeared great. However, to those on the inside, the risks were manageable. Every great leader must exhibit some sense of boldness because the rank and file don't want to follow a timid soul. Those leaders must be prepared to act when others are weak need and fearful of failure. They must embrace the motto who dares wins. But no leader should confuse daring and audacity with brashness and impudence.

The former is fine. The latter will surely result in failure. Well, it goes back to the discussion we just had earlier. You know, when your platoon was looking at taking, rescuing this hostage, same thing. You know, you look at it and you say there is a whole lot of risk here. and there's going to be some guys that say, and we're going to go. No, you need to take counsel of your fears, but you also need to kind of plan your way through the hard part.

So whether it's breaching the heavy breach in the gate, whether it's making sure you got the ISR overhead, so you know what paths. And, of course, you know, I saw this every night in Iraq and Afghanistan where you were always worried, as you know, about pressure plate mines, about IEDs. But if you put a pred overhead or a Reaper or something, and you watched it long enough,

and you would see them come in and out of the buildings. You know, the seals and the rangers on my end, they would map it out. You know, okay, so we know this is a clear path because we've seen the women and children walking along this path. But by the way, we've never seen anybody walking over here. That may not be a good place to be. But this idea is, yeah, who dares once? You have to be audacious. You have to have a little swagger.

I always tell leaders, look, you know, like I said, nobody wants to follow somebody that's too timid. every leader needs to have a little bit of swagger. That's okay. But, you know, hubris and being a little bit too cavalier with the lives of your men and women, that's not okay. Have a little swagger, but back it up with hard planning, hard rehearsals, good discipline, all the sorts of things that are really going to make it successful. And then maybe you can swagger a little more after you're successful. You mentioned how in the movies they never show the planning. They never show the guys at the whiteboard.

They never show the, you know, four-hour discussion about what the best approach to take is. They also don't show the months and months and years and years of standard operating procedure that gets developed. And I know going back to my first deployment to Iraq, so we're there. And when we first showed up there, there was only one platoon in Iraq.

And it was us. So it was awesome. And then my, you know, my command started showing up. And I had a great relationship with my commanding officer who is also my executive officer team too. So we had a great relationship. I was stoked for him to show up. And we're there for a while now.

We're sort of, you know, we're doing a lot. We're working all the time. We're working every night. And at some point, you know, somebody asked him a question. He said, he wanted to know, hey, Jocco, how much time do you need to be able to launch on a target? Because, you know, we'd gotten past when the war started. It was like, oh, we'd 96 hour planning cycle and that kind of thing. And so now we're way past that.

But so, you know, he comes down to talk to me and he says, hey, Janko, like, you know, we're getting asked. Seed Gisota wants to know, how long do you need before you can launch on the target? And I look at him. I go 15 minutes, you know, and he kind of like was a little bit surprised and, of course, thought I had, you know, like a little bit maybe extra swagger. But, but, and I explained it. Then I sat down.

I said, hey, sir, here's the deal. Like, we know what we're going to do. You pointed us at a building. It's not a plan. It's a standard operating procedure. This is what we're going to do. And if you tell me where the target is, you tell me what frequency the conventional forces are, that are in that AO and where the friendly forces are located, that's the information I need. You tell me to go hit a target.

We can leave in 15 minutes. That's how long it takes me to get my battle dress on. And so it takes me 15 minutes and we'll be in those Humvees rolling. But all of that wasn't based on our planning. It was based on the fact that our standard operating procedures were so solid at that. Because we were running Obs every night, we know what we're going to do. So those are included too. Yeah.

And it's, you know, when I tell people a lot about the bin Laden raid, I said, look, we went through the standard, as you know, our procedures at that command, very, very detailed before any mission. And the night before the mission, I do a four-hour debrief. And so as the commander, everybody that's part of the mission is there. And, you know, they all come up to me. I'm sitting in the front row in the hangar. And they say, you know, sir, I'm cheap pedios. So-and-so. here's what I'm doing. And of course, we got the model in front of us.

So my job is do this, this, this, and then I quiz them and I check it. So, but of course, no plans to rise first contact, right? So the idea, you know, we had the, you know, first heel was going to come in, guys were going to fast up into the courtyard, second helo was going to come in, guys are going to fast up onto the roof. None of that plays out. And, of course, we had plan A, we had plan B, we had plan C. But also, you talk about the standard operating procedures, team guys knew what to do. Okay, look, now we are not where we thought we were going to be. We're not even in the same. compound. We're isolated. Oh, by the way, the second group is outside the building. Well,

we didn't plan on being outside. But you know what? We've been outside a lot of compounds in our time, right? And of course, every one of these guys, a lot of combat experience. So the SOPs then kick in. Okay, I got it. Breacher. Breach this wall. Guys know how they're going to flow in. Everybody knows how they're going to clear the rooms. And the SOPs kind of take over after, you know, plan A, B, and C. So, yeah, the, but this is what a lot of folks don't understand. But if you're a brand spanking new platoon, you don't have that muscle memory on the SOPs, you know, particularly if you've got new guys in the platoon. But after, like your platoon, like after you've been in combat for a while and every night, it's another building in Ramadi. And it's, you know exactly if you go into the

carport, you're going to enter into the kitchen because every guy on an Iraqi house has got the kitchen off the carport. You know, these are SOPs. But it's when all of a sudden the target becomes different than what the SOPs have called for, and that was the case in the Ben Laden raid. The compound large trapezoid, but it was just a little bit different than what we'd expected, you know, kind of from the standard compounds. Boy, then you've got to plan the heck out of it. Yeah. Yeah, the, we got really good as a community in those 20 years of fighting.

Yes, we did. Next one. Hope is not a strategy. Never underestimate the power of hope. And again, I'm fast forwarding. Get the book. Get the book for all the examples. I'm given some of them, not given all of them.

Never underestimate the power of hope. Hope is what inspires. Hope is what encourages. Hope is what empowers. And without hope, nothing worthwhile can be accomplished. But hope alone is just wishful thinking. Pair hope with a sound strategy, a detailed plan, and a lot of hard work. And nothing is out of reach.

I tell people pretty regularly without hope nothing can be accomplished but hope by itself accomplishes nothing. You know, when I was writing my thesis of the Naval Postgraduate School, the one that became SpecOps, I had a chance to interview some of the great leaders

of the World War II missions in particular. And one of them was the mission to go get the Terpets. Terpets was a huge German battleship ship, it had been slightly damaged and had been sent up into Kafeiord, up into Norway, where the Brits could not get to it. So for two years, the British decide that they're going to build a plan using X-Craft. So X-Craft were these three-man, small dry submarines. They're going to send six of them from Scotland across the open sea to get into the Fjord, to make their way up to

long way up the fjord to put large explosives on the battleship turpets and sink it. So for two years they rehearsed this. Well, in the planning, the little submarines were being pulled by big submarines. And back in the day, they had two kinds of lines. They had standard manila lines, kind of cotton woven, big housers, big lines. And they had this new thing called nylon. The nylon ropes. Well, as they rehearsed this, again, they had almost two years to rehearse this.

They never did a full dress rehearsal in towing the little minisubs. Because when the mini subs towed behind the big submarine, they would oscillate up and down. And the guys got violently sick in the back of these little minisubs. They could only handle it for about an hour and a half. And they said, you know what, when the time comes, we'll gut it up. It was like a seven or eight hour transit across. They said, we'll just, we'll gut it up. So they never rehearsed that part of it.

Well, when the mission finally came about, the six big submarines towing the six mini-subs, three of them are sunk and lost before they ever get to Norway because the Manila lines broke, because they didn't test it out to its full extent. All the nylon lines held. And the point of that, and as I talked to the guy named Godfrey Place, Lieutenant Godfrey Place, who successfully got his ex-craft up the fjord and actually blew up the USS Terpets. Damaged it enough that it never sailed again. But in talking to him, he said, you know, if only we had done a full dress rehearsal,

if only we had planned that part in it and really done and executed and rehearsed that full part of the plan, we'd have known the manila lines were going to break. And we probably would have saved nine guys. And he carried that burden even when I, I interviewed him back in the 90s. I mean, it was like, we had two years, and we never did a full dress rehearsal on that. And it is about this, they, again, they hoped, they hoped it would all work. But hope wasn't the right strategy. If they had planned and rehearsed it, they would have known that part was going to fail. And, you know, you see it all the time. Like I said,

I tell leaders all the time, look, it's great to be inspirational. It's really important to be inspirational. It's important to give the men and women that work for you hope and inspire them. but if that's all you're bringing, it probably isn't going to work. You better be also prepared to pull out the stubby pencil and do the hard planning, build the tactical plan, the strategic plan, figure out how it's all going to work together because that's what's expected of a leader at any level. Hope is definitely not a course of action. That's for sure.

Similar, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Again, you just mentioned this, but you covered more indefinitely. in the book, you talk about the bin Laden raid, you talk about the multiple contingencies that they had to go through in order and to be prepared for those and then to execute on them. And you say here as a leader,

always ensure that your organization has put forth the effort to plan for the worst case scenario, even if it seems the least likely to happen because no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Always be ready. Yeah, I mean, as you know, this is, everybody always, you know, sometimes you'll look at the worst case,

scenario and I've seen it before more again more outside the military because military understands look you're at a plan for the worst case scenario but outside the military sometimes they they look at it because it's going to cost them money to plan for the worst case scenario so like I mean what's the chance of this happening so I think in there I talk about the Exxon Valdez a little bit the tanker that sunk off off Alaska when they when they did the forensics and they did the after action, they did the investigation, there were a lot of people that thought, this could happen, this could happen. Yeah, but you know, the chance of it happening is really,

really slim. And in order for us to prepare for it, it's going to require a lot of people, a lot of planning, a lot of money. So it was such a small percentage of chances that I thought it could happen that they never planned for the worst-case scenario. So again, this is the nature of it. You've got to figure out how far down do you plan. I mean, there's, you know, there's always a worst-case scenario. But, you know, in the military, we know, like I said, no plans to first contact with the enemy, you better have a plan A and a plan B, and you better think through the worst case scenarios so that you're prepared to make the decisions. But I don't say in there is on the bin Laden rate, I had a decision matrix that I had the guys make up for me. And I said,

every step of the way, if this bad thing happens, if this bad thing happens, what am I going to do? I don't want to have to be thinking about it and debating it, you know, right in the middle of the mission. I want to know, and so we had one, so, you know, if the helicopter, cross into Pakistan and they're detected, do we keep moving or do we turn around? And the answer was, if they're detected on the border, we turn around. How about a quarter of the way through? We turn around. How about halfway through? We turn around. How about past halfway through? So then there were a couple branches of that, which was have the Pakistanis, do they know where we're going? And if the answer was no, then we press on. What happens if we lose a helicopter? Do we keep going? I mean,

what happens if we have a mass casualty? So all of these scenarios I had so that in the heat of the battle, I didn't go, oh, man, I don't know. What do you think we should do? That's not the time to be thinking through the most worst-case scenario. You better have figured out what you're going to do at that point in time. And so I thought about all, particularly the mass casualty. What happens if one helicopter goes down?

What happens if two helicopters go down? And we've got 24 seals dead on the ground or injured. Well, I had a backup plan for that, right? We had a whole contingency of guys waiting in Afghanistan to come pull them out. But I wanted to make sure I didn't waffle on any of those decisions. So when it was warm and cozy, I said, this is the right decision to make if things go south. And I will know what to do in the heat of the battle when bad things happen, because I'll have thought through it ahead of time. This is when people are climbing at Everest or whatever peak that they're climbing and they say, hey, if we haven't gotten to this point or whatever it is,

At 10 o'clock in the morning, we're turning around and going back down. No matter where we are. It could be 50 meters away. 10 o'clock, we're turning around and going back down. And when people don't follow what they've set up, that's when they get killed. You know, it's another thing I used to teach guys was, you know, you're on patrol. You're out in the city or you're out in the jungle. You're out in the desert.

As a leader, you should be looking, okay, if we get contacted right now, where we're going to go? Because this is going to change every 20 yards that you walk. And if you're constantly thinking, oh, there's a good out over there. There's some high ground over there. You're constantly thinking through that as soon as you do get hit with something. You already thought through it. So this is the idea of just having the pre-thought. You've fought through 97% of the information.

Sure, there could be some 3% that, well, the helicopter went down, but it went down over here and it actually landed okay. And so now we've got some people. You could make some little minor adjustments, but the vast majority of your thinking, which is going to cause all kind of smoke to come out of your ears, a vast majority of it's already done. And you have a little 3% to make a decision on,

and you can do it very quickly. number 11 pays to be a winner pays to be a winner and as they say in buds it also sucks to be a loser you are on board a ship at this point I'm going to read a quick story at 0800 I heard my name I think you're on deployment yeah you're on deployment on a ship you know with a platoon at 0800 I'd heard my name broadcast across the ship's intercom commander McRaven report to the bridge this was not a good sign. I knew that the Commodore, my boss, would be waiting to grill me. As I made my way

from the birthing area up three flights of ladders to the bridge, I started to prepare my defense. Yes, seals had gotten into trouble, but how did that compare to the 22 Marines who were equally egregious? Entering the bridge, I found Mike Camatos. Comados, the Commodore sitting in his captain's chair. I approached the chair and came to a modified attention. Sir, you called for me. Comados. down from the chair and I could see the anger in his face a Vietnam era helo pilot He was tactically brilliant and over the course of the past 18 months I'd come to deeply respect him for his leadership of the amphibious ready group To this day I count Mike Kamadas as one of the finest leaders with whom I ever served only five foot five He closed the distance between us and glared up at me just inches from my face one of your seals got into a bar fight last night and beat up a couple of Marines

This is entirely unacceptable Yes, I completely agree, I started. And then I made a fatal mistake. But, sir, I would also note that 22 Marines got in trouble last night. Before I could continue, Camados moved toe to toe, his face now fully flushed with anger. Their young Marines, Bill. I expect them to get in trouble. And then I was reminded why I was a Navy SEAL.

But I hold you and your SEALs to a higher standard. And I expect you as their leader to do the same. We clear. I hold you and your seals to a higher standard. Those words resonated in my head for the rest of my career. While as a seal organization, we have occasionally failed to meet those high standards and dealt with the painful and embarrassing aftermath, we have never stopped raising the bar and trying to be the best.

And I have always known that as a leader in this community, my job was to ensure the standards of conduct and professionalism were met, which meant not only establishing the state standards, but holding people accountable. Boys getting in trouble. Yeah, this was, we had pulled into Subic Bay, and it was the deployment that ended up being Desert Shield and Desert Storm. But, you know, we'd been at sea for 30 days across in the Pacific on the USS Okinawa and the Fort McEnary.

And, of course, the team guys got in and they got out on Liberty, and that didn't go so well. But I found out about that, and so I went to the XO to find out who else got in trouble that night. And, of course, I find out that, okay, one SEAL got in trouble, but 22 Marines got in trouble. And I thought this was going to be a great defense until, you know, Commodore Komodas made sure I understood. Look, you're a Navy SEAL. We hold you to a higher standard. And we ought to expect to be held to a higher standard. And as I point out in the book, yeah, you know, we've made it in the press a lot lately.

for not upholding the standard, but I tell people all the time, I got it. You know, some people don't meet the standard, but the standard of conduct, the standard of professionalism, the standard of duty, honor, and country is I would offer as high as it's ever been. And we expect people to meet that standard. And when they don't, and some of them don't, then you got to hold them accountable. And every great organization, every great organization, again, I keep bringing back this point, but it doesn't matter what the organization is. Nobody is looking for a mediocre organization. You don't say, hey, where is that mediocre organization? That's what I want to join. I want to go be mediocre like those people over there. Everybody wants to be part of a great

organization. How do you become a great organization? You set high standards and you hold people accountable to those standards. Now, you've got to give them the training. You've got to give them the resources. You've got to give them the latitude to do the job, but you set high standards and you hold people accountable. That's how you make a great organization. And so if you're not prepared to set the standards and hold people accountable, then you're never going to have a good organization, a great organization. And after a while, people won't be part of you because you will have had,

you will become a mediocre organization. And this idea, you know, it pays to be a winner, as you well know, and I don't know whether it's a term that they still throw out because not having been to buds in a while. but, you know, it was every instructor would get on your case about, you know, in my case, Mr. Back, pays to be a winner. And as you know, there was a veiled threat behind that, too, which was, you know, if you're not a winner, you're a loser and you're going to pay the prize. You're going to have the goon squad.

You're going to have circus, whatever comes next. But in my mind, it was all about, look, how do you become a winner? A winner means, I say, you're a great organization, you're a great person, you're a great whatever, great leader. and you become a winner by setting high standards and holding people accountable. And that, again, that served me well. But when Cuomadus called me up and I tried to defend the fact

that, well, we were just as good as the Marines, maybe even a little bit. It was like, no, that's not the point. You're the Navy SEALs. My expectation for Navy SEALs is that you're the best. And if you're going to be the best, this type of behavior is unacceptable. And he was right.

He was right. Jack. A shepherd should smell like his sheep. And this one, you tell a great story. You're on a midship mentor. You're on the USS Allette. And you meet a sailor named Ricky. I tried to find his rank and what his rate was.

I think he worked in the boiler room. He was. It was a second-class military. There you go. Boiler tech. And you say, so you're there. You're young midship, and you're not even a commission officer yet,

and you're experiencing what it's like to be in the fleet. Your introduction to him is when you step on his head or his face or something while he's trying to sleep and you're trying to get into your bunk. And I'm going to fast forward a little bit. But you say, knowing I would someday be wearing ensign bars, Ricky and his other crewmates made sure I understood what they expected from their officers. That dude, Ricky said, referring to a young lieutenant. He shows up every day and spends an hour in the boiler room with me. Now that's a good officer, bro. The X-O, he's a hard-ass when he wants to be.

but he cuts us some slack when he can. He's good, too. The skipper rides us hard, but he always makes sure we get the best spot on the pier. The officers they respected the most were the ones who showed up in the boiler room when it was 120 degrees, who got greasy and turned wrenches with them, who picked up a broom and helped with the evening sweep down,

who brought them water when they were painting the side of the ship, and who thanked them routinely for their efforts. But they also wanted an officer who made the tough decisions, held them accountable, worked hard, and above all, they wanted an officer who valued them for their tough work they did. Finally, they wanted an officer they could be proud of, even if they didn't say it publicly. They wanted someone who was smart, athletic, looked good in their uniform, and didn't embarrass them on liberty by getting too drunk or too rowdy.

Three years later, I was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy and headed off to some basic underwater demolition seal training. The lessons from my time with Ricky were never far from my mind. Share the misery. Share the dangers. Share the camaraderie. Listen to their stories and you will learn about your sailors and you will learn what they expect from you.

You know, I tell folks, I think this is the single most important lesson I ever learned even before I got to the teams. So the Navy, again, in its wisdom back then, in between your freshman and sophomore year, they sent you on what they, you've mystically called the cruise. And as you point out, I was on the USS Oled. It was a fast frigate. And so here you are as a prospective officer,

but they want you to understand what it means to be a sailor. So for seven weeks, I'm living with the sailors, I'm cleaning the heads, I'm buffing the floors, I'm doing all the things sailors do so that you can understand the impact of your decisions as an officer. Every decision you make as an officer is going to affect that sailor at the deck plate level. and you better understand that relationship.

And somebody later on talked to me about professional distance and the importance of professional distance. And the idea was, look, sometimes as we go through shield training, you know, that professional distance, that distance between the decision makers and the rank and file, maybe gets a little too close. But if you ever get to the point where you're sitting in your office drinking coffee while the troops are out, you know, on the battlefield,

then that professional distance has gotten way too wide. you need to make sure that that professional distance, whether you're an instant or a four-star admiral, is such that you understand how the decisions that you're making are affecting the men and women that you're serving. And it can never get too far, but also you've got to be careful about it getting too close because you're going to have to make the hard, tough decisions. Sometimes decisions that are affecting your friendships, that are affecting guys' families, that may be affecting guys' lives. But sometimes you've got to make that decision, and if you're too close, sometimes that becomes challenging.

But this idea that the seven weeks I spent with Ricky and the other sailors on the USSO Let was a time I never forgot because it was just this recognition that it is about the sailors. It's always about the sailors and making sure the sailors can run the ship, run the platoon, whatever the organization is. And it really is this reflection, I think, about servant leadership as well. As you know, when I first came into the military in 1977, there weren't a lot of what we were called servant leaders. It still had, for the Navy, it had this kind of surface warfare mentality, which was, you know, the CEO of the ship was the king, whatever the CEO said you were going to do. And it was a hard, the young officers were put in crucibles. And if they survived the crucible, then I guess they

were going to be a decent officer. Then the all-volunteer military comes into effect. And there were a lot of guys said, I don't have to put up with this crap anymore. You know, I can't be yelled at constantly. And this idea that, look, as a servant leader, your job, is to make sure that the, you team is successful. That once again, you know, you give the men and women that work for you, the tools do the job, you give them the training to do the job, you give them the latitude to do the job, you hold them accountable when they don't do the job. But if the leadership ever becomes about you, if it's about your promotion, if it's about your ego, if it's about your glory, you're probably not the right person for the job. I mean, this is, I tell folks all the time, we're called the seal

teams for a reason, because it's about the team. You can't get the job done. unless the team does it. And if a leader, if you're not inspiring that team, if you're not managing that team, if you haven't come up with a good plan, if they're not prepared to follow you, then it isn't going to work. So this was, again, a marvelous lesson early on in my career.

And the Navy still does it. Those cruises have gotten a lot shorter, unfortunately, because of money. But best seven weeks, I think, I spent learning leadership, and it was about learning about the troops. Yeah, and it's awesome that people ask me, You know, who's your mentor? People will ask me that. And I would say, well, I have all kinds of mentors.

I have mentors that are books. You know, my biggest mentor is Colonel David Hackworth, who I never met. But I just read his books and stole everything from him. You know, that's who the mentors are. And here you are, young ins and you're getting mentored by this, you know, BT2 in the U.S. Navy. How long I'm thinking of the abusive, tyrannical, authoritarian officer in the fleet. and then you end up with this like cycle of violence, you know, cycle of abuse. And that's how I got treated.

So that's how I'm going to treat the next guy. Did you get to see that sort of, you know, as the volunteer Navy came on board? Did you watch that transition? I did. And, you know, the teams were never quite like that because the commanding officers I had in the teams. Because, again, we'd all gone to buds together. So there was a little bit of a different leadership mentality from the commanding officers. in the teams.

But some of those commanding officers had been ship drivers at some point in time. But I spent a lot of time early on. As I mentioned, I was on amphibious ready group, but I spent time on carriers and submarines. And early on in my career, there was a little bit of this, you know, tyrannical sort of commanding officer that that's the way they were trained.

You know, they were trained to yell and scream. And that was the expectation. In the 80s, things began to change a little bit. And a lot of this was the Vietnam officers, And I think of guys like Colin Powell and I think about Norman Schwartzcoff, the Army guys that had come out of Vietnam, said, hey, look, we've got to change the approach to how we lead. And I don't know when the term servant leadership began to apply. But yeah, I did see this change over time, this recognition that, hey, no, guess what is a leader? You just don't tell people what to do and they do it.

You've got to, once again, you've got to inspire, you've got to be out there with the men and women, your sailors, your soldiers, your airmen, Marines. the Army understood this, I think, because it was more part of the Army culture than it was the big Navy culture. Because in Navy, there's officers' country, and there's a distance between the officers and the sailors, even though, again, don't misunderstand me, there were some fabulous, absolutely fabulous commanding officers and officers on ships and submarines that understood that they had to earn the respect of the sailors. So don't misunderstand that part.

But in general, there was a little bit of a separation, whereas the Army officers, the Marine officers who were in Vietnam, I mean, they're in the mud with the troops. And so they had, there was a little bit of a different leadership style there. And so as the 70s and the 80s and then the 90s came along, you saw this transition between the hard-ass CO to the CO that, yeah, you still need to be hard-ass because, oh, by the way, you're driving a ship, but you've got to earn the respect. You don't get the respect just because you're the commanding officer. You've got to earn the respect every day, and you've got to figure out the best way to do that.

By the time 9-11 comes along, I think what I saw by that time, and it's why we were, I think, again, I've said before, we are the finest military, I think, in the history of the world. And you think back on all the great militaries, whether you go back to the Roman legions, World War II, doesn't make any difference. I don't know of any force that stayed together and fought for 20 years straight. 20 years. I mean, you think about your time, Jaco. Think about all the guys you know, particularly these guys that came in right after 9-11,

that signed up after 9-11 knowing they were going to war, and they stayed for 20 years. And they did 15, 18, I don't know how many deployments, constantly at war, and your point about the SOPs, the standard operating procedures. After a while, you could pull any platoon with the guys together who'd been spending time in Iraq and Afghanistan and say, okay, we've got to target. How many minutes do you need?

I need 15 minutes. Why? Because they'd done it so many times before. Most of the Roman legions, of course, were kind of part-time troops. You know, you had some professionals, but they were only professionals for a couple of years. They drew on the farmers a lot of times to make the Roman legions. You think about World War II, incredible Americans, the war only lasted for four years. A lot of these guys were on the line for maybe, you know, 30 days on, 30 days off, maybe 18 months in Europe or the Pacific.

These guys were, you know, 20 years in combat. Yeah, from 18, 19, 20 years old, up until they're 42, 43, 40. And so the leadership had to change. Now, you know, not every leader changed. Not every leader got the memo. You know, we still had some kind of hard asses out there that didn't understand. We needed to leave. But I was fortunate, again, in my time as a Navy officer essentially serving in the Army, as you know, in my joint command,

I watched these really remarkable general officers. I remember one point in time a young Army major wrote some scathing critique of the Army leadership. And the senior army leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan. And frankly, I was pretty livid looking at the article. And this was kind of the, as I've said before, the junior officer righteousness, you know. The generals are sitting up there in their place. They just don't understand. You know, they're up there drinking their coffee and the hard work is being done.

Well, let me tell you, every general officer I knew, Army, Marine, and then the Navy flag officers were in there, they understood what the troops were going through. They had this tremendous respect for the troops. And the great ones, again, the Petraeus, the O'Dearno, the McChrystal, the McEarinen. I mean, these guys would get down, you know, and oh, by the way, they were in their 50s, and yet they would go out with the guys. They would put themselves in harm's way because they respected the troops so much. And that was a certain amount of servant leadership.

It was this recognition that, hey, I'm in charge, but you know what? I got to earn the respect every single day. And the only way you're going to earn the respect, do the hard work. Share the fear. Again, share the discomfort, just like Ricky told you. me coming to the boiler room you know share the hazards share the discomfort spend time with the troops that's how you're in their respect and part of that is the next section troop the line trooping the line is steeped in army tradition historically

generals have ordered their soldiers to muster on the parade field so the officers could inspect the troops ask questions about their training and ensure the general's orders were being relayed to the youngest private in the formation you got to talk to your people yeah and find out what what's going on. So I mentioned in there, so when I was over in Afghanistan and Iraq, but I think in this particular example, I'm talking about Afghanistan. And generally I'd stay in the jock until, you know, most of the guys were kind of on their

way home or something. And then I would walk around at night. And it was normally, so Afghan time, it's probably like four or five in the morning in Afghan time, but, you know, we were on Zulu time, so it was always at 11, 30, 12 o'clock. And I would get, you know, every evening I'd kind of walk around. I'd talk to the soldiers. Now, for your listeners, while our special operations force was on this kind of, kind of of Camp Alpha, most of the soldiers that were supporting us were, you know, conventional soldiers

who frankly didn't have a clue who we were. They were man in the guard towers or they were, you know, running the laundromats or they were up on the motor pool, but they didn't know what we were doing day in and day out. But this one particular time, as I tell the story, I'm wandering around and I remember going into the laundromat. And so we had this, you know, plywood building that the CBs had built long, typical laundromat, right? Just like you see in the civilian world. I don't know, 20-30 laundromats in there. And about half of them weren't working. And so I come in about 2 o'clock in the morning, you know, and, you know, the soldiers are bitching about the fact that, you know,

damn laundry's not working. Of course, I come in and they see me, oh, sir, how are you? It's good. I hope everything's going fine. What's going to have, you know, laundry mat. Laundries machines aren't working. Yeah, interesting. So the next day I've got my global video teleconference, you know,

and, you know, so here I am talking to the entire force, thousands of people on the video teleconference, and they're waiting for, you know, the great admiral to give them some guidance on winning the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so I got to go down the same. I said, okay, I said, I want all the senior NCOs that are kind of in charge of the contombering area, the garrison, go check the laundromats. And, you know, I can see the eyes rolling on the video like, are you kidding me? The three-star is telling the NCOs to get the laundry machines fixed. But the point was, you find out about things when you

troop the line. Maybe it wasn't going to save the war, but it was going to save the morale a little bit of the soldiers that were working for me. So we got the laundromats fixed, we got a bunch of things fixed, and that's important to an organization. When I was the chancellor of the University of Texas system, I built this kind of electronic suggestion box, and I would watch it every day.

And people could add anonymously, you know, things all screwed up, and at one point in time I kept seeing this thread come up, and it was about the paper towels. Paper towels. So we worked in this big office building, and it turns out, somebody said, well, these are like Soviet

style paper towels. Rough, you know, I'm like it. So all of a sudden, more and more comments kept coming in about the paper towels. And so I'm thinking to myself, I am the chancellor of the University of Texas system in charge of 230,000 men and 100,000 employees. I am going to fix the paper towel problem, right? And so I get a hold of the guy who's essentially my logistical officer. I said, look, get new paper towels.

And, of course, I think it's going to be an easy decision. He's like, sir, it's not quite that easy. We buy a bulb. I said, so we go fine, I said, okay, I don't care if I got to pay for the freaking paper towels. We're getting new paper towels in. So I finally get the paper towel problem fixed. It was very interesting dynamic. The rank and file, the employees thought, you know, here's the chancellor, who I got it. He is solving big problems with the universities, but he also cared enough to get the paper towel problem fixed. Now, you know, as a leader, you don't always have a chance to worry about paper towels. You know, that's what the, that's what the sergeant's doing. That's what the

petty officers do. But every once in a while, in a large organization, you find that little problem that seems intractable, that nobody else seems to be able to fix. I mean, the laundromats have been broken for a long time. You know, and the paper towels had been Soviet-style paper towels for about a year or so. And you fix that problem, and the troops then understand, he's listening to us, he cares about the little problems, wasn't going to save the world, world, but we got the Soviet paper towels fixed. And interestingly enough, the rank and file were very appreciative, just like the soldiers were a priestiff that all of a sudden the laundromats worked, you know? So you can do those sorts of things when you troop the line. Yeah. You wrap this one up.

You said, get out of your office and talk to employees at the far end of the chain of command. Find an opportunity to solve small but seemingly intractable problems. Ensure your senior staff know that these little problems can have major effects on morale. Next section. Expect what you inspect. And you've got a story in here about the Sontay raid and the commander of that raid. We actually had a guy, a Sante raider on the podcast. Yep.

Terry Buckler, podcast 329. Terry Buckler, he was brand new in special forces. And his first operation was the Sontay raid. And his entire time in Vietnam was 20 minutes as one of the Sons. Sante Raiders. He got off of the helicopter and killed a dude in like 10 steps. I'm like you have the best shortest time to contact of anyone. I mean, that's just like unbelievable. Yeah, he just joined right at the end of the Vietnam War and boom, there you go, Sante Raid. But Colonel Elliot Bud Sindor, who we talked about on that podcast. He was the GFC on the Sante Raid. And he ended up in

another job. He was running the convoy security for sensitive material. You got a quick story in here about that. Sindor had relinquished oversight of the mission to the senior federal agents or agent, a police captain. The agent was now in charge and would oversee the actual movement of the material. This is like a big convoy that's happening. As Sindor observed the final preparations for movement, one thing caught his attention. At no time had the captain conducted a personnel inspection of each guard on the truck. He approached the agent and tactfully said, I'm sorry, Captain, but I noticed you.

didn't conduct a personnel inspection of your troops. The captain, looking somewhat annoyed, rolled his eyes and said, well, Colonel, we're all professionals here. There's no need for an inspection. Sindor, a man of quiet disposition, but with a penchant for detail, replied pointedly, well, captain, if you were real professional, you would understand the value of an inspection. The captain paused, remembering the service of the man in front of him, and within minutes, each agent was lined up as the captain went by man by man by man,

to ensure all their equipment was in place and operational. The captain knew that if anybody understood the value of inspection, it was Bud Sindor. Yeah, so, and Colonel Sidnor told me that story himself. When I was doing the, for my thesis, I did the Sante raid. So I had a chance to interview a lot of the Sante raiders. But, and I've said before, I said it was probably the best planned, rehearsed and run mission of all the missions I looked at in my thesis, even though, obviously,

the POWs were not at the camp because the intelligence didn't realize that they'd been moved earlier. But in the planning and preparation, the Green Berets who were running the saying, I mean, they were inspecting guys constantly. Because again, as you know, that was kind of an army mentality from being young rangers or young soldiers, whether it was boot camp or ranger school. they understood, hey, you know, we're going to inspect everything about you. Before the Sontay Raiders got on the helicopter to get ready to go on the mission, there was a guy there going, okay, how much ammunition do you? How many magazines do you have?

Do you have your water? Do you have a radio? Is it on this frequency? You know, every man before bored in the helicopter. So when we were doing the planning for the bin Laden raid, I mean, this was constantly in my head. And I talked to the ground force commander and I said, look, you know, and, of course, I'd known the ground force commander for a long time. I said, look, I need you to do this.

I need to make sure the Mass Chief, whoever inspects every single guy. And, of course, guys didn't have a problem getting inspected. They understood the value of this inspection. And I can't think how many times as a young officer, I was getting ready to go on a training op or something. And at the last minute, you go, oh, shit, you know, I forgot my whatever it is, you know. And I also always made sure that before the big men, missions if I was in charge them, I would tell the guys, I want you ready at this point,

even though we had an hour before we would get on the bird. And I did that for the bin Laden raid, and I did that for a lot of things, because invariably when you do the inspection, then all of a sudden somebody goes, oh, yeah, forgot to bring that. Okay, we'll run back to your hooch, grab it, and get it, because we got time. If all of a sudden you plan the mission, okay, we are leaving, you know, the garrison at, you know, 2200 and then all of a sudden 2,200 comes and guys still aren't quite ready, then the fun factor all of a sudden it starts to complicate itself. Things get harder and harder.

But this idea of inspecting, yeah, I got it. But if you're going to go do something really complicated, you better spend some time inspecting people. And Sidnor really understood this. And the story about this police captain, and I love the line. I mean, he's telling me the story over the phone. And he said, I told him, look, if you're a real professional, you'd understand the value of an inspection.

And he just said it casually. And I thought, oh, that's golden because that's what real professionals understand. Yeah. As you're telling this, I'm realizing that such a huge part of me being a decent seal was the fact that I had a swim buddy that, you know, I went through buds with,

and then we did three platoons together, and then we three platoons together, then we worked in training cell together, And then I became an officer. We split up. But for, and we lived together the whole time. So we were roommates.

But we inspected each other without, without even, without even a word. You're like, we were getting ready for a dive. We did walk over to each other. We knew exactly, we were getting ready for a jump. We knew he was getting ready to go to, you know, out on a training op. We would just walk over to you. We're guaranteed we're going to inspect each other. I never forgot anything.

At least never made it past him. You know, never made it past him as a buddy. But, you know, we, you know, we, do that to your point, you know, you're getting ready to go on a dive, the dive supervisor, somebody's inspect you. You get on the bird, you know, it's like check parachutes, you know, everybody, everybody on. But for some reason, a lot of times you're getting ready to go on an op, and if you don't have somebody that says, they're going to be able to line up, okay, you know, who's got the tie-ties, how much ammunition you got, you got, you got the radios on this freak,

and then all of a sudden you're like, did you put batteries in your radios? Yeah, yeah, the inspections are helpful to us. Yeah. Next one, communicate, communicate, communicate. And this is the story that I opened up with Enson Rambo McCraven on the attack. Again, what I really liked about that story is you realize how that these, you're learning a lesson in training. That's so valuable. And I think that's one of the reasons that we've been successful is that our training reflects combat.

And one thing that I remembered about that, when I hear communicate, communicate, communicate, I remember I was going through STT. and when we went through SCT, they made us do every position. So you know, you might be a radium in this time, you'll be a point man next time, you'd be an AW gunner this time. And eventually, on some long patrol, I ended up as like rear security.

And I had no freaking idea where we were. I had no idea how long we'd been walking for. I had no idea where we were going. I had no idea how long we were going to take a break for in this perimeter. Just didn't know anything that was happening. And I was so absolutely irritated by this that when I moved into a leadership position, I always said to myself,

I'm never going to let anyone feel like I felt when I was a rear security on a patrol. So that idea of passing the word and making sure people understand what's going on, this is so critical. And you think you're communicating well? You're not. You're not.

You send an email out, right? Oh, I sent everyone an email two weeks ago. No, they got 47 other emails that day. They didn't open that email. You got to hit them with multiple times and multiple different directions, but... So when I took over So, Of course, as a four-star, you know, you get your general officer staff and the colonels are on the staff.

And I would do this. I'd say, okay, guys, here's what I want to do. I want the staff do this, this, this, this. And so a couple months into my command tour, I called the staff together. I said, are you guys making sure this word gets down to the, you know, we had 3,000 people on the staff? Oh, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir. Tell me how that happens. And so I pulled some colonel aside.

He said, well, sir, you know, right after I come out of this meeting, I go into my office, and I call my majors in, and I tell them what you told me, and then the majors meet with their people, and they tell them, okay, okay, good, good, good. So that afternoon, I go troop the line. So I walked around for a couple hours, and I would just go into various departments. I'd show up, you know. And, of course, people are like, oh, shit, there are four stars here, you know. And walk in, I'd start talking to some, you know, young sergeant or something. I said, Sergeant, did you hear this? No, sir.

Well, interesting. So I kept going around and just about every young trooper I talked to, sir, I don't know what you're talking about. Okay. So I did kind of this informal survey and I found out that 75% of the time, the word I was passing just wasn't getting down. That's the four-star freaking admiral. And it took me, I mean, I did this over a period of a couple of weeks,

kind of doing my own little assessment. So finally, a month later I pull my staff in again. I said, okay, boys and girls. Let me tell you what I found out. And so I started going through this. I said, let me tell you, this level of folks, they're not hearing this at all. And of course, they were like, well, I don't know why they're not hearing it. You know, I'm passing the word.

And to your point, boy, you've got to communicate, communicate, communicate. I mean, up and down the chain of command. And I just found that it was kind of the classic kids thing. You know, you start at one level, and before long, the word is either incorrect or it's not getting passed. you have to actively pursue making sure the information gets down to the rear security. And of course, I mentioned in that one, Marshall Lubin, who was quite the seal and one of the oldest guys that went through training with me. He's the rear security for this particular one. And he had no clue what hell I was doing.

Rambo McRaven was off on his own. Yeah, I don't know how many companies I've talked to where I've talked to the C-suite leadership. Like, oh, do you think everyone knows what's going on there? Oh yeah, of course, we communicate really well, and you go talk to the front line and they have no idea what's happening. I also often bring up the idea of the one MC on a ship, which is a very powerful tool.

And, you know, there's a microphone that this commanding officer of the ship can pick up and he can talk to every single person on that ship at one time. And sometimes there's events that happen, there's things that occur that you need to tell people yourself, what's going on? You know, if we had a change in the rules of engagement, if we had a drastic change in the way we're going to be doing operations,

I wouldn't tell the platoon commanders who could then tell their, platoon chiefs who could then tell their LPO's, who could then tell their squad leaders, who could then tell them what's going on. No, I was going to get everyone into a room, and I was going to tell them what's going on. So sometimes got to come from the horse's mouth. Well, you talk about the one-MC. So because the communications problems, it's so common, because, again, you've been down there.

I mean, huge facility, 3,000 people, and the word, no matter how hard I tried, wasn't getting down. So I put in essentially a 1-M-C. I put in a PA system. And when I went to my IT people, I said, okay, look, I want to put a PA system. hearing the guy says, sir, you mean like elementary school? I said, whatever it takes, brother, we're going to put in a PA system. Well, it's complicated. I mean, you put in speakers all around this massive building.

It was not cheap. But at the end of the day, every morning, I would get on the PA system and say, okay, hey, here's what we're doing today. Here's what's going on. So-and-so got, and I knew the word would get past. And that is that simple little thing, having a public address system, I'm having a one-MC, as we called on the ships, as you know. It's absolutely crucial.

Everybody on the ship gets the word from the commanding officer. There you go. Next one, when in doubt, overload. And this is something that is in reference to demolitions. And you talk about this in the book. You explain like, hey, if you're going to blow up a obstacle on a beach and you're trying to figure out how much demolitions to put on that obstacle, the answer is too much.

Double it. Double it because you want to make sure that thing is gone. It's not costing you. Maybe it costs a taxpayer a little something, but it's not costing you anything extra. So you're going to, when in doubt, you overload that. But the metaphor that you make in here is the amount of work you are going to put in. And you talk about, well, you talk about getting fired.

Yeah. You got fired as a, what? Lieutenant. Were you lieutenant when you got fired? You tried to push something. And we talked about this on the last podcast a little bit. You were trying to change some things. inside of a command and they weren't the commander wasn't ready to change those things and so you

ended up getting fired and then you also talk about it um you have an opportunity for a mission there's you're you're now you're just taking over special operations one of the special operations commands you've got an opportunity for a mission you you know the you take the risk doesn't go great Luckily, no one was killed, but it doesn't go great. It's not a good look for you. You start to hear rumblings about your ability, and this happened both these times. And what you do is you basically double down on how freaking hard you're going to work. Yeah, this was, I said, early on in my three-star tour.

And in order to go into this particular target, which was not in a country we were supposed to be in, I mean, I had to convince everybody. And I spent a couple of months, you know, getting CENTCOM approval, getting the Pentagon and the Secretary of Approval and then going to the White House. So I thought this mission was that important. And there were a lot of people said, man, you're risking way too much here. And as you point out, boys go across. Mission does not go well.

Fortunately, none of our guys were killed. We had a guy winged. But the bad guys we were going after who we'd hoped to capture, who didn't capture, they'd get killed in a firefight. And then all of a sudden, you know, I start hearing Rumlins. Well, maybe McRaven's not the right guy for this job. I was the first Navy guy to lead this command. So there were a lot of doubters out there.

And early on in my tour. And of course, when things like that happened, when things don't go well and you put a lot of effort into it, you begin to doubt it yourself. Am I the right guy for this job? And I found over the years, and it wasn't just getting fired, in the course of a long career, you stumble often. And it happened to me when I was in command of SEAL Team 3,

and it happened in me when I was at Group 1. I mean, there are always times when as a leader, things don't go well, and the troops sometimes wonder, I don't know, is this the guy we wanted leading us? And I always found that the way to overcome that and to re-earn the respect of the troops was to, okay, now I'm going to come in earlier than I came in. I'm going to work harder. I'm going to stay later. I'm going to come in on the weekends. I'm going to do whatever it takes to re-earn the trust of the men and women that are, that you're serving. And I found that nothing kind of overcomes those problems quite like hard work.

Because, you know, even if they don't like you and not everybody liked me, they will at some point in time begin to respect you because you're putting in the effort. And so, like I said, this went in doubt overload. Again, I was a frogman when I started, did a lot of underwater demolition, and you laid it out perfectly. This was just the nature of the problem set. You know, we're going to, we've got a Japanese scully. that ought to take 20 pounds.

Well, let's put 40 pounds on it, you know. And you're right. The metaphor is about, look, you got those hard problems. You just double down on the work. I had, speaking of getting fired, I had one of my friends get fired, and he ended up, you know, there's whatever the dozens of little issues you have that lead to getting someone fired, my friend got fired. And he had to go see, you know, the big boss.

And he's calling me. from overseas, hey, I got to go see the boss. What should I tell them? Should I tell them about this? Should I tell them about that? Should I tell them about the other thing? And I said, what you tell him is you're here because you got fired because you didn't do a good job and you want to get better. And that's it.

That's it. And that's exactly what he did and ended up, you know, on the right path again. But yeah, that taking ownership of when you do something and you say, yep, I messed that up. And I'm going to work hard and get it fixed. I mean, that's all you can do. And to your point, you can't blame somebody else for your mistake. It doesn't matter whether there were other people to blame or not. That's not what leaders do.

Hey, if you were in charge, you're responsible. Don't deflect, you know, don't deflect the problem. Don't deflect the blame. You raise your hand, you say, I'm responsible. I'm going to get better at it. Yeah, and by the way, that was part of it. Part of it is, hey, buddy, you got fired. It's like, you know, there's, this guy might not have a good personality and that other person might not have got along.

And this might a person might not have the wrong concept of operations for people to be doing. And guess what? You weren't able to work all through that. So when you tell the boss, that's why you got fired because you messed up. It's not because you're trying to persuade him that you're better than you are. You got fired because you messed up. Right. That's what happened.

And if you couldn't get along with your boss over there or you couldn't get along with the people, your peers, And you screwed that up. That is on you. It's on you. So go and say sorry and take ownership and move on. You got this one. We already discussed this one briefly. Can you stand before the long green table?

And you have this quote in here. You got a bunch of quotes in here, but this one I kind of had to read because it's 99% of all failures come from people who have a habit of making excuses. And that's from George Washington Carver, who was an agricultural, scientist born into slavery. Eventually, he became a professor at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee

Institute, who we covered Booker T. Washington's book on this podcast up from slavery. But 99% of all failures come from people who have a habit of making excuses. I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership that is about not making excuses. And you mentioned this story, but I still wanted to hit it real quick. In October of 1925, the nation was fixated on a court martial trial of an American hero, General Billy Mitchell. Mitchell was a highly decorated pilot who had received the nation's second highest award for valor for his exploits in aerial combat during World War I, but Mitchell was also a fierce advocate for airpower, believing that another war was on the horizon and that a unified air force should be built to rival the army and the Navy.

Mitchell was particularly adamant that airplanes carrying heavy bombs could sink a battleship. However, the Navy leadership and the White House had made a case to Congress for additional battleships and defended their position vehemently. To prove their point, the Navy orchestrated several demonstrations of the battleships survivability, but the exercises were rigged in the Navy's favor and Mitchell exposed the deception. Finally, after insisting on a legitimate test, Mitchell proved beyond a doubt that air power could dominate on sea and on land.

Nevertheless, the services fought back hard against the idea of a unified air force. Mitchell was eventually court-martialed when he accused the Army and Navy leadership of almost treasonable administration of the national defense. That's what Mitchell did. The court-martial had a jury of 13 military officers, including a young major general named Douglas MacArthur. Among those who testified on Mitchell's behalf were a who's coup of military royalty,

including World War I Ace, Eddie Rickenbocker, General Hap Arnold, General Carl Spatz. The latter two officers would go on to lead the U.S. Air Force. over the course of the seven-week trial. Mitchell stood before the long green table of assembled officers and made his case. He never wavered from his position that he had a moral, legal, and ethical obligation to raise these issues to the leadership of the Army and the Navy. War was coming, he stated, and a failure to recognize the inevitable and plan for the fight was near treasonous. In spite of all the support he received and his passionate defense, Mitchell was found guilty on all counts.

of the 13-member jury, MacArthur was the only officer who voted to acquit. He said a senior officer should not be silenced for being at variance with his superiors in rank and accepted doctrine.

Seven years later, one of Mitchell's early critics, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became his strongest advocate by 1942. The skies over Germany was filled with American bombers. And in 1947, by an act, Congress, United States, Air Force was established.

History would reflect that Billy Mitchell stood tall in the face of withering criticism and career-ending threats for his unwavering support of air power and his principal stand on aviation mobilization, General Billy Mitchell would forever be known as the father of the Air Force. So this is what you talked about earlier. Interestingly, I didn't know who Billy Mitchell was,

except for in the book about face, when Colonel Hackworth is getting interviewed, he throws it out there. He says in one word, And he says, I wouldn't want it. No one wants to be a Billy Mitchell. And that's all he said. And I eventually looked up.

This was years ago. I looked up to figure out who Billy Mitchell was. And this is a guy that, you know, was ready to stand and do the right thing. Yeah. So as you mentioned earlier, my dad was joined the Army Air Corps in 1941 and then served in World War II. Had a 26-year Air Force career. But of course, the Army Air Corps became the Air Force in 1947. And so I grew up with these stories about MacArthur.

and, you know, Truman firing MacArthur, and my dad always felt that was the right decision to make. MacArthur stepped over the line, didn't support the civilian leadership. But dad would also tell the story of Billy Mitchell. And his point to me was, in spite of all the criticism Mitchell received, and Mitchell probably was a little too adamant, a little too boisterous, but he's so firmly believed in this principle of air power that he was willing to get court-martial.

for it. And my dad used to make the point. Every once in a while, you're going to have to stay on your ground. And if you think it is that important, stand tall. Yes, you may get eviscerated for it, you may get court-martialed for it, but if it's the right thing to do in the long run, you'll be not only exonerated as Mitchell was in the long run, but people will recognize that you did the right thing for the right reasons. And again, I was fortunate to grow up with two parents who you know, I think taught me all the right lessons that they had learned, you know, growing up themselves. I was getting investigated one time, got investigated a bunch of times. But one of the times I got investigated, you know, like I said, part of that's because I was always saying investigate me.

One of the times I got investigated, I get into, you know, there's a, there's a Navy captain. I get called into Warcom on a Thursday night. I get called into Warcom and there's a Navy captain. And it's 8 o'clock at night. So this is not a good sign. Not normal. And so I go in, yeah, what's going on? And there's a Navy captain sitting there and there's an 05, you know,

lieutenant, or sorry, commander that's a note taker. This is also a good side. And yet at the same time, you know, I am always ready to stand on the, in front of the long green table. And I sit down and I said, you know, so what's going on? And he says, you have the right to remain silent. anything you say can and will be used against you to court a law. He reads me my rights.

And so now I'm thinking, what is going on? And I said, before I respond, can you just tell me what this is about? Like, I have no idea what this is about. And he tells me what it's about. And I said, you know, sir, when I joined, when I got to the SEAL teams, the people above me in the chain of command, my platoon chief, my platoon leading pedigoths they tell me, hey, if you ever get read your rights,

don't say another word and get a lawyer. And I said, and I've actually told guys that because that's good advice. When you get read your rights, what you should do is get a lawyer and don't say anything. And I said, but in this case, what you're talking about,

I actually can 100% guarantee you I've done nothing wrong. And I'll waive red or white rights. You want me to wave? Let me sign. And I'll tell you whatever, I'll tell you all about this. I'm ready to go.

Come investigate. And the guy had a really surprised look on his face. And then he started asking me questions. And eventually he was like, gosh, well, this is kind of a crazy scenario. And I said, good. Let's, you know. And so it was, you know, it was another time that I got investigated. And I'm thankful I was investigated.

I'm always thankful to be investigated because then people know what happened. But that, I can't, I'm glad I don't have to, I never had to walk into situations like that thinking they got me, you know? My legitimate mental questions were what could this possibly be about and not, oh, my gosh, they got me. Well, as is the nature of the business we're in, I have also been investigated many, many times. And there were some very senior officers investigating me. And I did the same thing. I said, look, I'm perfectly comfortable with the decisions I made.

And I had, again, interestingly enough, while it was an overarching Department of Defense investigation in one case, with a three-star Air Force general that was the investigating officer. I was a Navy captain who was a JAG at the time, who came at me pretty hard. Maybe it was the same guy. Was he from Socom? No, he was not. He was a conventional Navy JAG.

But right up front, I said, look, yeah, I'm happy to waive my rights. And he was surprised, too, because he thought I was going to lawyer up. I said, look, I am perfectly comfortable with the decisions I made. Were they tough decisions? Were they ugly decisions? was it all of that's true this is combat things aren't always as clean as you'd like but i've got i've got you know no regrets about the decisions i made so bring it on and for three weeks i mean i was kind of had the cleed lights on me and guys were and at the end of it it took him

about six or seven months to resolve the investigation and the three star finally called me and i was out in afghanistan at the time and he calls me up he says hey we have we've completed the investigation. And there's this kind of long pause. I'm thinking, okay, he's about to tell me I'm going to Leavenworth or something. And he said, you know, we had a chance to interview everybody, and there were hundreds of people in mind. He said, it's going to be all right. You actually came out of this looking pretty good because you, you know, you did all the right things. I said, look, you always try to do the right things. You know, I mean, it's, you don't always do it. I mean, sometimes you make bad mistakes because, again, we're human. But in this case, as ugly as this

particular situation was, I knew I had done the best I could do, and I was happy to, happy to put it on the record, so to speak. Because that's saying, as I mentioned, when I was a young ensign, can you stand before the long green table? I always ask myself that, and then this, again, I can't go into it on this, on this net. But suffice to say, these were some tough, tough calls. But I felt comfortable in the decisions I was making. Yeah, and the tough calls that you make, you're making them with the information that you have at that time, which you don't have the luxury of hindsight. You don't have a crystal ball to know what happened or what we're wrong. You know, and this also goes back to the idea of covering things up and what happens

if you try and cover things up. I know from life that you can't cover things up. You cannot, especially in the damn seal teams. Look, you know, the kid that, you know, when I was 23 years old and, you know, whoever got on a fight down in Coronado on a Thursday night or a Friday night or a Saturday night and no, we won't tell anybody. Everybody's going to know. And so now you take that into a combat situation, everybody's going to know. And I would always tell there was a couple army guys, and I don't remember all the details of the story, but there was a couple army guys early on in the Iraq war. They shot and killed somebody, and they went and planted an AK-47 on it. And they went to jail. And I think they, I want to say they got something like 10 years.

There's no reason to plant. If you're looking at a street and someone's doing something, they're digging a hole, they're acting suspicious, and you decide that they're a threat, you can kill them. You can't. And that's okay. And you can explain, hey,

this is what I saw, this is the TTPs that they were emulating or that they were doing. This is the behavior that I saw. Here's the rules of engagement that I acted within, and here's why I shot a person. And they didn't have a gun, and I know that, but it sure looked like they were planning an ID.

It sure looked like they were passing information. It sure looked like they were spotting for someone else. And that's why I did this. And every one of those, the jag would say, okay, we understand what happened. The minute you go out and plant a gun on somebody, just throw everything else out the window. You just committed a war crime and it's going to be bad. And that's exactly what happened to those guys. So the idea of covering something up is just, it's not going to work.

It never works. That's right. And then to make sure that you are ready to go stand in front of the long green table. And then on top of that, make sure that everyone that works for you Right knows where you stand on this Because if you start to give the impression of like well, you know As long as you're kind of staying within the rules It's like no we're staying within the rules this is what's happening

That's what you have to do and you have to make that clear otherwise you put yourself in a terrible situation Where you know what is what did you say earlier about the West Point? I won't lie cheat steel or tolerate those who do So once you give the indication that you'll tolerate and somebody does something that they shouldn't have done, and now you're not going to tolerate it after the fact, you've really screwed yourself and you screwed that person. And look, that person might have done something bad that they shouldn't have done and that's on them. But for the fact that you gave them the impression that you were going to be okay with that in any way, you also screwed up really bad. And you're putting yourself in just a terrible situation.

You know, I told folks in my time in Iraq and Afghanistan, what I tried to do for the soldiers, of Sailor, Airmen, Marines that were working for me was to have bright, bright red lines that said, these are the lines you don't cross. You can do anything you need to within those lines. Law of iron conflict comes into play, you know, the rules of engagement come into play, but within this bright red lines, you stay in that lane. And I realized I needed to do that for a number of reasons. One, it was the right thing to do, but also what I didn't want to do was put these guys in a position where, and you know, war can get dark. The guys can go down a very dark, bad path when they start killing the enemy. If they begin to like that too much, they keep

moving down this path and they move outside the bright red lines. And then at the end of the day, they will end up living with that when the war is over. And they'll come back and they'll go, wow, I did some bad things. And I know that now. And in the heat of battle, sometimes you don't think about it, or you put it down deep and you justify it, but when the war is over, you come back, you're going to have to bear that burden. And so there were times when, I mean, I jacked guys up big time to make sure that the force understood this is unacceptable behavior. And if I find anybody doing this, you're out of here. And oh, by the way, if I need to, I will courts marshal you. And I fortunately didn't have to do that often. And I got a lot of pushback from guys going,

You don't understand, sir. I mean, the Afghans fight like this. We need, stop. These are the law of arm conflict. This is the rules of engagement. You are going to stay within these lines. And while the guys weren't always happy with it, I hope at the end of the day, when the dust settles and they look back, they go, you know what?

I didn't commit any war crimes. I didn't do anything bad because I was forced to stay within this box, even if at the time it didn't seem the right box to be in. I tell leaders sometimes, look, this is what's expected of you. back to kind of setting the standards. You're right. We're never going to cover anything up. You know, we are never going to have, you know,

retribution to guys that come and speak truth to power. We're going to do things that are, you know, that are honest and that are within the rules. Because if we don't, back to the, whose Trident is it? Ain't your Trident. It will reflect poorly on every person that ever wore a Trident and every person that ever wore an American flag

on their shoulder, too. Don't do it. but it's hard sometimes. You know, the guys are isolated. They're out there on their own. And as a leader, you've got to keep them within those bright red lines. Yeah, no doubt about that. And the brighter you make those red lines, the easier it is for them to see them.

The more they know what the consequences are if they cross those bright red lines, that's what you need. They should be definitely afraid of stepping over those lines. Otherwise, you're going to have issues. And by the way, also, they're going to test you. They're going to brush up against them. They're going to see what happens. Oh, and they're going to do that. And that's why you need to be really clear about this stuff.

So I really like that idea of the bright red lines. That's awesome. The last one of these is something I just talked about. Always have a swim buddy. Every frogman knows that in the turbulent waters of life, you always need a good swim buddy. And you wrap it up with this. Find a person you can trust implicitly. Be prepared to lean on them in times of great.

great stress, except both their support and criticism with equal grace, be a swim buddy to others. Someone out there needs you. Yeah. Yeah. Having somebody that's going to tell you how stupid you are is a lot more valuable than someone that's going to tell you how great you are. That's right.

And especially, I mean, I was only a lieutenant commander. So I was many, many miles below you in the chain. and I would have guys being very, very nice to me, laughing at my jokes, thinking my ideas were great. And I can't even fathom what it was like for you as a four-star to have, to put the bullshit. Oh, I was great every day. You don't understand. My jokes were always funny. Just absolutely brilliant tactician strategist.

Oh, great admiral. And a comic to go. Yeah, so you've got to watch out. That's the swim buddies you want. The swim buddies you want are going to tell you. You're going to be able to rely on them, but you're also going to be able to rely on them to tell you when you're jacked up. I want to close this out the book with a section that you from the conclusion of the book that you write You say this in his book it worked for me

Colin Powell tells the story of an old general sitting in the officers club who is approached by a brand new army Second Lieutenant the general is on his third martini when the young lieutenant gets up the courage to approach the senior officer The general is very courteous and after some small talk the lieutenant finally asks the question he's been dying to ask. How do you make general? The lieutenant inquires. Well, son, the general answers. Here's what you do.

You work like a dog. You never stop studying. You train your troops hard and take care of them. You are loyal to your commander and to your soldiers. You do the best you can in every mission and you love the army. You are ready to die for the mission. and your troops. That's all you have to do.

The lieutenant replies, wow, and that's how you make general? Nah, replies the general. That's how you make first lieutenant. Just keep repeating it. And then let them see what you've got. So there you have it.

That's all it takes. That's it. But you know, it's a great story that, and I got to be close friends with General Powell, Secretary Powell, before he passed for the last couple of years, and he would tell that story occasionally, and then he had it in one of his books. And I thought it was very emblematic of what we know as leaders. As I mentioned earlier on, you know, you got to bring it every single day. And I don't care whether you're an ensign or a

four-star admiral or whether you're a seaman recruit or a master chief. You bring it every single day. You've got to work hard. You've got to take care of your troops. You've got to lead from the front. You have to do all these sort of things every single day. Not Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You know, not Tuesdays and Thursdays, but every single day. And you won't.

You won't bring it every day because we're human. We've got bad days. But those days you don't bring it, you ought to be a little sick to your stomach and say, shit, I didn't bring it today. I'm going to have to bring it even more tomorrow. And, yeah, it's hard. It's hard every single day. but you've got the honor of leading

you know great soldiers sailors airmen Marines civilians whatever it is remember it's an honor to be in a leadership position every day you gotta do that that's how you make first lieutenant second lieutenant yeah and as I read that I was just thinking about you and thinking about what you've done in your career and and how that's

that's literally what you did you know and what you just said I I wrote about one of my books It's called Leadership Strategy and Tactics. I wrote about that I pulled my radio man aside. When I was a platoon coming, I said, hey, listen, you're the most important guy in this platoon because if we get into a firefight, something happens, you're going to be the guy that's be able to call for help.

And then I talked to the machine gunner, and I said, listen, you're the most important guy in this platoon. Because if we get into a gunfight, you're going to be putting down suppressive fire that's going to allow us to maneuver and either take out the enemy or get away from the enemy. And then of course I talked to the Corman. And I said, hey, doc, you're the most important guy in this platoon. Because if someone gets wounded, you're going to be the one that's going to save their life. And this goes on.

And obviously what I was telling everyone in the platoon, that they're the most important person in the platoon. And what made me think of that is you're talking about whether you're a BM2 or a seaman apprentice or you're a private first class or you're a individual contributor at a company, what you're doing inside of an organization. Number one, you're a leader. You are a leader no matter where you are inside of an organization. But also, what you do has a huge impact. And the more you work and the better you, the more you try to do a good job, the more positive impact you will have on that organization and ultimately the mission and ultimately all that will come back to you and you'll be able to get promoted.

And when you get promoted, guess what you get to do? You get to take care of more people. More work. That's right. Get to take care of more people. And that's what it's about. And yeah, leadership, the hardest of human endeavors. And that is why it is the most rewarding of human endeavors.

I don't know. That gets us up to speed, I think. That's the book. Like I said, I hit the wave tops of some of the book. Books outstanding. Echo Charles. Yes, sir. Do you have any questions?

Yes, I do. Oh, here we go. Actually, that last part kind of reminded me of this question that I was wondering. How do I become admiral? You know, there's another story at the end of the book. And it's from Stephen Presfield's Gates of Fire. And, you know, for your listeners, you know, Gates of Fire, it's a fictional account of the 300 Spartans at Thermopy.

And, of course, talks about, you know, Zerxes the great 480 BC sweeps across Asia Minor, comes to the borders of Greece, and the 300 Spartans move to Thermopy, where they're going to hold the pass. Well, they hold it for three or four days until every one of them is killed but one guy. And in reality, the truth of matter is the Persians continue on into Greece, but they're frankly so exhausted from the fight at Thermopy.

Eventually, they get beaten and they retreat. But on their way out, as Pressfield tells the story, he's got the single Spartan, and he brings the Spartan to him. And, of course, King Leonidas was the king of the Spartans, and he led the fight at Thermopylae. And so Xerxes brings the Spartan, Martin in and he says to him, he wants to know, why did they fight so hard for King Leonidas?

What was it about the king that made them prepared to sacrifice their lives for him? And the quote goes something like this, you know, that the king does not abide in his tent while his men bleed and die on the battlefield. The king does not dying while his men go hungry, nor sleep while his men stand watch upon the wall. The king does not earn the respect of his men through fear or the price of gold. The king earns their love through the sweat on his back and the pain he endures on their behalf. The king is the first to lift the heaviest burden and the last to put it down. And I think, you know, to answer your question, if you want to get to the top, be the guy that

picks up the heaviest burden first, and puts it down last. Yeah, that's how you make the next rank. That's how you make first lieutenant. That's how you make first lieutenant. So that process in the, can, like, do you have to be in the Navy to be admiral? Or like, how does that, I don't know. Oh, yeah, or the Coast Guard, I guess. Actually, part of why I said, how can I?

Because, let's say I just joined the military. And I'm like, hey, one day I want to be like admiral. You know, is there a specific, you know, is there a specific? That's a good question. It's interesting because, you know, when I joined the SEAL teams back, I went through Buds in 77 and 78, I joined the teams. There were no admirals. You know, there were only two Navy captains, so that's like an Army colonel, right? Nobody, when I came in, nobody had any expectation of being an admiral.

Nobody had any expectation to be in a Navy captain because there were only two of, one of the East Coast at Group 2 and one of the West Coast at Group 1. All I wanted to do was be a SEAL platoon commander. And I think the Cole and Powell story is pretty important because it is, I mean, I got to underwater demolition team 11 and this was my task to be the best ensign I could be at UDT11 and then from there I went on and everywhere you went

it's like I'm just going to do the best job I can right here I didn't look too far down the road it was just like hey this is my job now be the best I can be and after a while like Cole and Powell's story show them what you got and you'll get promoted you keep moving

what does concern me about you know the special operations community today is guys can come in and they can be four-star admirals and they can be four-star generals. And I want to make sure that those people that are thinking about that, well, that better not be your thought when you're going to seal training or ranger training. Your thought ought to be, how can I be the best petty officer I can be today? How can I be the best incident I can be today? How can I be the best sergeant?

Whatever it has, do the best you can where you're at and then show them what you got. So as you get promoted up the ranks, you're promoted essentially above, others though, right? Like, do people like, are they compete? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, sure. Yeah, there is a competition. I, you know, I was fortunate. So when I went through my peers were all of us, none of us expected to make flag officer. I don't think most of us expected to make Navy captain. We were all very close friends. And we stayed close friends today. And so there was never this sort of, you know, backstabbing, you know, we all were thankful that we got as far as we did. we were all appreciative when somebody else, you know, made flag before we did or when everybody

else was successful. It was a great environment to grow up in because, you know, it was we were friends before we were competitors, and that friendship held ground. And today, I remain tremendous friends with, whether it's, you know, Admiral Eric Olson, Admiral Joe McGuire, Admiral Joe Kernan, you know, Ed Winters, Bob Harwood, the list goes on and on that are all flag officers that you know, we all grew up together. But yes, to answer your question, there's a board, but not only one person comes out. So, you know, when you make lieutenant commander, there's, you know, 20, 30 guys make lieutenant commander, whatever.

But then as the pyramid gets smaller and smaller, next rank, fewer guys make it, next rank, fewer guys make it, next rank. So when I made admiral that year, I was the only seal that made one star. And then we kind of picked up one admiral every year after that sort of thing. Gotcha. So let's say, for example, like E4, we'll say. To become an E5, that's not the case, right? Because everyone can kind of become E5, right? And then as you go up, then it starts to kind of diminish as far as like... Yeah, but even in the enlisted ranks, I mean, it gets smaller. I mean, to make cheap petty officer. So, you know, yeah, from an E3 to an E6, you know, and then all of a sudden you're going to be a cheap petty officer.

Well, that's still a pyramid. And it gets smaller and smaller. Okay. Yeah. That being said, there's people that are getting out. There's people that don't want to get promoted. There's people that are just, you know, they're they're getting out of 20 years. They're getting out. You know, a lot of, a lot of seals get out at 20 years. Okay.

So they get out, there's, that means a bunch of people, yeah, there's a bunch of openings you're going to get. But, um, do you get a bigger house when you become Admiral? You do, actually. Right on. Yeah, yeah,

there you go. But, but the interesting thing about it is, it's a bit of a gilded cage because, so the house, the first house I had when I was a one star was out of Fort Bragg because I was on an army base. And,

and we, and frankly, it wasn't, I mean, it was just a standard army house. but I was gone all the time, so it really didn't make a difference. But when I came back as a three-star, now I was actually going to be the senior guy there at Fort Bragg, and so the base commander calls me, I said, sir, we got a big house for you.

I said, no, no, I want the old house I was in. But sir, we got this other big. I said, I understand. I like the old house. Yeah, sir, but that's kind of where the June. I said, okay, brother, maybe you don't understand this. My wife and I want to move back into that old house. But yeah, you know, there's, there are perks, but again, as we were talking,

The perks really mean nothing. I mean, at the end of the day, the more senior you get, the expectation from yourself ought to be, that means I've got more people to lead. It means you've got to work harder. People from the outside, they see the perks, but you realize pretty quickly that those are just window dressing. Great to see you again. Yeah, good seeing you. Thanks. Sir, any closing thoughts?

No, you know, Jocko, as always, I appreciate you having me on. you know, as I mentioned before, you do a remarkable job, not just of on the podcast and the books, but of representing the SEAL community. I'm incredibly proud of you. I was talking to Jim Worthington last night, who you remember well, a chief petty officer. He didn't know that I was coming today. We got talking about the time when we were setting up Quantum Leap and we had the Blue Force trackers and you guys were on your way up to Miramar or something.

He's telling this story and he goes, so Jocko was my radio monitor, I think, at the time or something like this. And I got to laugh and thinking, man, that's been a few years ago. But I'll tell you, everywhere you have been, Jock, you have represented the community with incredible dignity, incredible honor. You personify every single leadership quality that is in this book and in your book. So let me tell you, it's an honor to spend a little time with you. Well, sir, I appreciate that. Obviously, you need to do a little bit more research about me. Hey, for me, the honor's all mine.

And I'll tell you, I went to the SEAL Team won 60th anniversary a few months ago. And what struck me was, you know, there's all the old guys from SEAL Team One, the Vietnam guys. But when I was a young SEAL, I went to the 30th anniversary. So I went to the 30th anniversary now 30 years later. We're going to the 60th anniversary. And it's just, you know, when you think about the tradition of the seal teams, it's not that old. Like every one of those admirals that you just rattled off, I know every single one of them. That's kind of crazy, right?

The fact that, you know, I'm sitting here talking to you and we both worked with double L Jones. Like these are, these are crazy things. And the community is just so small and yet has had a big impact. impact and and for me you know I always say I try and give back what I can to the teams because the teams gave me everything so I know you feel the same way absolutely honor to have you on here thanks for sharing the wisdom of the bullfrog with us all thanks for your leadership in the teams the Navy and special operations thanks for your leadership for the country you made an incredible impact on on our community I mean you think about we've been around for

60 years, you were around for 37 of those years, and I'm not just trying to make you feel old. But that really is incredible. And we're grateful for your service, for your sacrifice, and for your leadership always. Thank you, sir. It was an honor. Thanks, Jock.

And with that, Admiral Bill McRaven has left the building. Just a real honor to have him on here. And, you know, as he was leaving, 37 years he was in the seal team's only been around for 60 yeah that's most of it that's you know legit and all those lessons

learned I'm glad he's capturing this information solid advice simple advice and as the cover of the book says simple but not easy which is actually in the book extreme ownership same thing is talking about leadership in there simple not easy

which I actually in the book extreme ownership a tribute to Dean Lister. I attribute the quote, simple, not easy to Dean Lister. Because that's the first person I heard say it. Oh, when you're doing jih Tjitsu and you get caught in this position,

you got to move your hips over here. It's very simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. He does say that a lot too. Yes. And it's often very true. And that's what this book is about. You know, leadership made simple, not easy.

It's not that hard. You know what's right. That's the way many were. worthwhile things are in life. So it makes them valuable, right? Is that they're simple, they're not easy. If they were easy, as they say, everyone would do it. But like constant, the constant work that it takes to become better mentally and physically.

Everybody kind of knows. Like, let's face it, you could go on the internet and look up eight million different workout programs that are various levels of complexity. Or you could just start lifting weights. doing squats and you'd be getting stronger. Just like that. Well, you know one of the tried and true protocols for lifting that's still even today,

this was like, I don't even know when it was invented or introduced or whatever. It's the five by five, just five sets of five. For sure. Simple. Not always easy. Not always easy.

By the way, the questions you were asking at the end, they were way out of bounds. No, no, no, no. They were in bounds. No, no, no, no. It made me realize how little you know about the military. Oh, okay.

I didn't think when you asked the admiral, the four-star admiral, yes, sir. The commander, the former commander of all special operations in the United States of America, the most powerful country in the world. Yes. You asked him, if, do you have to be in the Navy to be an admiral? Should I, I might as well just say, do I have to be in the military to be an admiral. That would have been just, that would have been a similar question.

be saying do you have to do you have to do you have to do jiu jitzu to be a black belt in jiu jitz that's kind of a similar to question so now we know now we know look you you you know a lot about a lot of different stuff sure even though you you know you there's some things you don't know about but you know a lot about a lot of stuff i didn't realize how much you did not know especially after you've been listening to this particular podcast for 382 episodes by the way well and to say hey sir in order to be an admiral, do you have to be in the Navy?

That's no. So, well, hey, look, no, I don't want to split hair here, but technically my question was, how do I become an admiral, which could technically be even more ignorant because,

Echo, you cannot be an admiral, but that was more of an expression like, hey, if I'm a person who I'm not in the military yet, I'm 18, 19, and whatever, you know, how do I become admiral in the event of me wanting to become an admiral? And actually,

his answer was even better than I, expected the answer was he took a crap question and turned it into a freaking outstanding answer. He totally did. Hey, I want to review the tapes all that because I think if we drill down and capture his expression when you're asking that question, I think he might have thought you were joking. I was almost like, wait, is what's echo? Is he trying to be funny? What is going on here?

And he took your junk question. No offense. Sure. Hey, can we look back and say it was kind of a junk question? Um, I, I can't refute that. Okay. He took that and gave an epic answer. Yeah.

You got to give even a little extra credit for the admiral today. Oh, big time. And, and the idea too that even, it had a lot to do with actually essentially the same thing as becoming a general, right, what he was talking about earlier, where it's like, hey, you just do the, you know. Yeah. Be freaking awesome. Be freaking awesome. Work hard. It wasn't just keep showing up.

It was like, work hard, make sacrifice. Be ready to die. Like there was a lot of stuff in Colin Powell's answer. Yeah. And he just went straight to Leonides's answer. Yeah. Well, he was in, you know, what do you say? Something every day, right?

Bring it every day. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. So, and so that kind of, to me, translated 100% over to the whole black belt thing. Especially when I ask the question. So when I'm like, hey, how do I become admiral? The thing is you don't ask, you don't come into jiu-jitsu, ideally from an ideal standpoint.

You don't say, you know, I'm going to join jiu-jitsu to be a black belt. You don't do that. You just go and learn jiu-jitsu. You get a white belt. You get it, you know. And you essentially approach it the exact same way. That's going to be the best. It's hard to argue that that's going to be the best way to do it.

So it's like that big parallel right there. Yeah. And it's another parallel is like in Jiu-Jitsu, don't worry about getting promoted. Don't ask about getting promoted. How do you get promoted at work? Don't ask about getting promoted. Don't say, hey, when can I get promoted? Just work hard.

And eventually it'll come your way. And that's the basic concept from Colin Powell and then the basic concept from the Admiral as well. But yeah, I want to, I want to review the tapes. We'll see if he didn't, if he doesn't give you at least a little bit of a smirk or something, I'd be, I'd be even more impressed. Yeah.

Even more impressed. He was, I can't read his mind, but put it this way. If he thought I was joking, in hindsight, I would not be surprised at all. I think I was, even I, I mean, I know you pretty well. And even I was like, wait a second, is he have a follow up? Is there some comedy thing that's about to go down?

Is there some deep, philosophical path and it found turns out no no no all right but I was for real wondering about that because you know like what did you actually mean by this okay so overall how do I be coming out okay so I have to be in the Navy if I had a bunch of if you remember I kind of like threw that in like hey let me make sure I have this right almost kind of thing now is the whole thing about do you have to be in the Navy I figured but I could be wrong I don't know shoot I'm not an admiral.

I don't know these stuff. But so, no, no, no. The whole comprehensive question in a nutshell, if that even makes sense, was kind of like, you know how like if you want to be mayor or governor or judge or whatever. Like you got to do certain things first. Then you kind of got to get elected and all this stuff. There's like this kind of zigzag process that goes on, you know, where, you know, in certain companies, for example, you start out in the mail room. I don't know. It's arbitrary.

Um, start in the mail room. Then you move up and you move up and you just work hard, work hard, work hard. And then you're done to know, CEO, whatever kind of a thing. It's, it's more linear, you know. Yeah. Oh, it's actually pretty linear in the military as well in, in the Navy. Yeah. Like you get commissioned as an officer.

Then, and you could track the career for like what a pilot does. Like, oh, you become a pilot. Then you become a squadron commander. Or a squadron ops and you come a squadron XO. Then you become a squadron commander. Then you become and you go up. Right. If you're in this in the Navy for the for the seal teams you become an assistant

platoon commander a platoon commander a troop commander an ops officer an executive officer a commanding officer a major commander and then an admiral yeah so there is actually a progression that you yeah yeah okay so that's perfect right there so you don't like you don't become this because get promoted to this position and then you got to kind of run for admiral or people got to vote for you or nothing like that no it's like although although people actually kind of do vote for you because You'll be up on a selection board, and there might be four people that are up for Admiral, and the other admirals are voting on it.

Like, okay, yeah. Like, you know, Echo has been just a stellar combat leader, and he's been in charge of a, you know, a major command, and he's been in, let's pick him. So they are actually essentially, they do vote on you. Okay, I got, okay. Yeah, yeah, see perfect right there. See us, like me, you know, I don't know that kind of stuff. I do now.

Now you know. Another one last expression that I'm going to bring with me as well is using the expression wire brush as a verb. Yeah, that's good. I'm not going to wire brush him or standby. He came out of the gate with that one too. Yeah, and he used it again too. I was like, oh, I need to roll that into my everyday vocabulary. Well, what's interesting is in the Navy, that is a very specific thing, right?

Like, you're going to be the normal Navy person is going to have much more chances of literally use, Utilizing a wire brush and in the seal teams you get a wire brush to clean out your UDT life jacket and keep it all squared away Usually wire brush on your weaponed You like you legitimately will use a wire brush Yeah, but I like the fact that it transfers even to a civilian that doesn't even know that you need to be in the Navy to be an admiral Still understands a wire brush up and down my left side We know how that's gonna feel we know how it's gonna feel I got you know it's not gonna be a good feeling no I don't like it

lots of lessons learned speaking of wire brush doesn't feel good you know what does feel good lifting yes sir doing jiu jitsu good training you get been good you kind of kind of getting back in the game

over here on your side echo Charles I would say we are back for sure you know what it was is one of those conscious things and actually you've helped me a lot actually I even told you this but you helped me a lot where like you'll I used to like

I used to for like a better way of putting it I get reminded that hey echo you you actually do Jitzy. Did you know, kind of a thing when you'd post pictures or, you know, this kind of stuff or whatever. I'd be like, freaking, it's, oh, it's too late. And the days that I would make it, it'd be like I'd right in the middle of something and it flashes to me.

Hey, wait, if I left like in five minutes, I could make the training. You know, that's when I would make it. But now, since it's more of my mind, you're always reminded me. I'm like, oh, yeah. And then you go a few times and you're like, okay, that's part of the schedule now. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I even rolled the kids in, brother, they're going, you know, so it was like, it was just

that one small, teeny tiny thing. Like it was almost like her all I needed was the reminder just need that reminder to get back on the mats We're back on the mats now we're back we need the fuel yeah get yourself some jaco fuel go to joccofuel. Go to joccofuel. Get yourself some pink lemonade which I'm drinking right now Yeah pink lemonade just delicious energy in a can yeah That's what you need get some go get some I just by the way as soon as the Admiral left I pounded a banana mulk Yeah, RTD ready to drink yeah, let's go down real quick too By the way my kids now Prefer the banana. Okay

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You're pushing the envelope. We're thinking outside the box a little bit on that one. Yes, but well within the red lines, yes. That's a good point because it's true. We don't defy the hard set boundaries of the path. We don't know with these designs. Anyway, people seem to like them. JoccoStore.com.

Check that out if you like something. Subscribe to the podcast. Subscribe to Jocco Underground. Jocco underground.com. We're putting out another little podcast talking about things that will help you in life. Curiosity, overcoming little challenges. We're answering a bunch of questions.

We answer all the questions that come in. I think we're on question. We're 400 300 something like that. So we answer questions on that jocco underground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. If you can't afford it, it's okay email assistance at jocco underground.com. We'll take care of you. But that's how we protect ourselves from being shut down off of a platform. We don't own this platform. We own jocco underground.com. We'll always be on there putting the word out. So check that out. Check out our YouTube. Check out psychological warfare. Check out flip. SideCanvas.com. Check out the books, Wisdom of the Bullfrog by Admiral William H. McRaven. You heard us review the wave tops of it today. There's all kinds of really awesome stories in there and awesome knowledge. Check out the rest of his books as well. You can find them on our website. Check that out for sure. And then, of course, I've written a bunch of books. Some of them about leadership. Some of them are about laundromats, by the way. Got a book called Final Spint. It's about a

laundry mat kind of I've written a bunch of kids book kids books get those kids books if you know a kid between under the age of 14 between zero and 14 immediately right now go and get these books go to warrior kid dot com and just get all these books for these children there's literally nothing better you could do for them nothing go get on these books also get Mikey and the Dragons check out about face by David Hackworth you heard me mention it today a couple times Extreme ownership, the dichotomy of leadership. We also have a leadership consultancy called Eshalonfront.

Go to Eshlawnfront.com if you need help inside your organization. We have an online training academy because leadership training is not an inoculation. A leadership book doesn't teach you how to lead in one sitting. You need to actually train it, just like going to the gym. So go to extremeownership.com. Learn how to live your life. and if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families or Gold Star families.

Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org. And also, don't forget about Micah Fink, who is up there currently. Latest report, he is wearing a bear skin and he is stalking a giant elk.

So what he only has by the, way a twig that he sharpened up on a rock but he's up there heroes and horses dot org he's taken veterans and helping them find themselves if you want to connect with us on social media you can you can echo is at echo I am at jockel willing just just be careful because it's not just us on there there's a whole algorithm on there a monster algorithm that will try and grab you and try and get your time from you get your attention take you off the path.

Algorithms just a big baseball bat that's trying to knock you off the path. It's true. So watch out for that. And thanks once again to Admiral McCraven for joining us, sharing his lessons learned. And most important, thanks to the Admiral for his selfless 37 years of service and sacrifice to our great nation. And thanks to all the military men and women out there right now, who tonight, As we speak are serving and protecting our country

from those who seek to destroy it. And also thanks to police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders, thank you for what you do every day to keep us safe here at home. And everyone else out there, let's remember what the admiral wrote

when he put in words, the day you no longer believe you have something to prove the day you no longer believe you must give it your all the day you think you are entitled the special treatment the day you think all your hard days are behind you is the day you are no longer the right leader for the job and I'll take that one step further that day that day when you feel entitled and you feel special and you feel like you don't have to give it everything you've got that is the day you start so don't let that happen stop fighting don't stop striving don't stop working matter what don't stop getting after it and until next time this is Echo and

Jocko out