Jocko Podcast - 389: Fix Your World. "Super Power in Peril." With Dave McCormick

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

>Join Jocko UNDERGROUND <After his graduation from West Point, McCormick went to United States Army Airborne School and to Ranger School; he was named the Honor Graduate of Ranger School. He joined the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1987.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 389 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. An American-led coalition orchestrated by President George H.W. Bush had given Saddam Hussein an ultimatum. Leave Kuwait by January 15th, 1991. He didn't. And on January 16th, the world witnessed what the greatest fighting force ever created could do. The invasion went in two phases. First, an air war where the combined might of American and

allied militaries reigned thousands of tons of ordinance on the Iraqi army. Weeks later, the coalition smashed through Iraq's barricades and military in a two-pronged ground attack. To the right, American-led forces surged into Iraq near the Kuwait border. Meanwhile, another contingent launched a left hook across the Iraqi desert. My unit joined that assault. At the last minute, we had been attached to a French tank division charged with protecting the left flank. We crossed the border into Iraq early on the morning of February 25th, our Humvees cutting through the desert with close air support in the distance. When the sun came up, carnage met my eyes. I remember vividly the skeletons of enemy tanks, trucks, and artillery that had been hit by precision guided missiles.

The bombing campaign so precise and watched on TVs around the world was unprecedented in human history. Pushing farther in, we encountered some resistance from retreating Iraqi Republican Guard forces, but the majority shed their uniforms and blended into the populace or surrendered by the thousands. My unit was assigned the missions of clearing minefields and destroying Iraqi munitions, and military equipment a platoon from 27th engineer battalion also from fort bragg was attached to my company soon after crossing into iraq it was assigned the mission of clearing munitions from airfields after coalition bombing had rendered them inoperable sadly when clearing cluster munitions the bombs went off killing seven including their platoon leader first lieutenant terry plunk

whom I'd gotten to know well. It was a tragic and very personal reminder of the costs of war. And that right there is an excerpt from a book called Super Power in Peril, written by David H. McCormick. David McCormick is a West Point graduate. He's a Ranger School graduate.

As you can tell from that excerpt right there, he fought in the first Gulf War. He's been the CEO of companies, including Bridgewater Associates. He served in the Second Bush administration as the undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs and also as under secretary of commerce for industry and security. He's got a wide range of experiences. And it's a pleasure to have him with us here tonight to hear about. his experiences and lessons learned in life.

David, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Jocko, I appreciate it. Yeah, the, thank you, Echo. Yes, sir. Oh, Echo's getting thanks. Is that how it's gonna be? We're gonna accept that one. We're gonna accept that.

Yeah, starting off with the Gulf War, definitely we'll get into some of that and what that buildup was like. That was when I had just joined the Navy. I joined the Navy in 1990. So I missed the, I missed the first Gulf War. We'll get into that. But before we get into the Gulf War,

let's talk about, you know, how you grew up and what happened and we kind of start at the beginning. And, you know, the book is filled with all kinds of cool little anecdotes and stories. You start off on the book, you say this. I was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, a few short miles from that evening's rallies when you were running for political office in Westmoreland County and was raised in a small industrial town named Bloomsburg.

50 miles south of Scranton and everybody knows where Scranton is now because of the office. For sure. And Joe Biden said that he, you know, he lived there for like a year, but he keeps talking about growing up in Scranton. Are those his roots? It's the original roots, I guess. Yeah, before Delaware. Bloomsburg was a sort of place where on the Monday after Thanksgiving, the schools would shut down and we would head out of the hills for the first day of deer hunting season. While we lived in town, my family owned a small farm and I grew up working in the summers, trimming Christmas. trees and bailing hay on the weekends I bus tables at the local magi is that right McGee McGee yeah McGee Hotel on Main Street I did well enough in school but I wasn't a great student I found a home competing on football fields and wrestling mats across

northeastern Pennsylvania so that's a little bit about about where you're from tell us about your parents what's going all of your parents yeah my mom and dad are both teachers they grew up in western Pennsylvania so my dad grew up in a little town called Marion Center and his dad owned a pharmacy, a little drugstore. And he was my dad's father, my grandfather was a Democratic County Commissioner in Indiana County. And my mom was born in the famous Punksitani, where Pung Satani Phil comes out. We're like the seventh generation of Pennsylvanians in Western Pennsylvania. And as I say in the book, one of the great traditions my dad has is he's doing it next week,

is every Memorial Day, he drives out to Western Pennsylvania. go put flowers. He promised his mom when she was passing on all the graves of the relatives. And so we got him, we got grave, we got graves across western Pennsylvania. So it's a, it's a day and a half affair. And then he went into higher education. My mom became a teacher. My dad went into higher ed. And he got a doctorate at University of Pittsburgh. And, and that was his career. Was there any military background in your family? None. Uncle Charlie, who I don't remember, apparently served in World War I. And we uncovered some boxes recently where we found his draft card or his his military ID. Did you figure out what he was with or anything? No, I didn't. But poor Uncle

Charlie. But nobody, nobody, which was why West Point for me was such a, you know, out of character. And what happened with that is I got recruited to play football at West Point and to wrestle. And I had no interest in going. And I wanted to go to Penn State and play football, which of course I wasn't good enough to do that or Lehigh to wrestle. And you weren't good enough for that? I would know. I might have been good enough for that. I'm not sure. But, uh, but my dad said, listen, apply to West Point. You don't, you don't have to go, but just apply and see what happens. And was your dad just looking at this from like a financial perspective? Huge. Huge. So it was $40,000 of savings, more or less. Um, so was financial. But he also, it was just,

he thought the honor of going to one of the academies. And so what happens? What, when you were growing up, you were into sports, you say your grades were okay. Were you not that into school? I was okay into school, but not, it wasn't the driving force. And my dad was, you know, this academic guy, and he was the president of this little college in Bloomsburg. And my dad knew nothing about sports, although he was in, you know, would attend every, every game. And so, how old were you and started wrestling? I started wrestling young, maybe sixth grade. And then football, a little bit later, football came in more in the high school area. You can kind of catch up on football. Yeah. Right? It's a little harder to catch up on wrestling. Well, the football,

you know, the football thing, the amazing thing about football was I wasn't very good. I was kind of warmed the bench for the first couple years. And the coach got fired at my high school between my sophomore and junior year. And my sophomore year, I would sit on the bench. And then when we were winning big or losing big, they'd say, hey, go on in. And I'd play defense. So this is your sophomore year? It's my sophomore year. So the new coach comes in and he looks at all the films and he sees this guy that keeps coming in in the fourth quarter and you know has big makes big tackles so he calls me over the summer and says listen I think you can be the starting linebacker for the football team but you're going to have to work your butt off so I work my

butt off this is like one of the most seminal moments early in my life I work my butt off so when you say you work your butt off like uh you are in the weight room you're trying to put on weight sprints I mean every day we're just going full rocky montage Rocky Montaigne, baby. I'm going for it. And we have the camp. So two weeks of camp at the end of the summer. At the end of the summer, he makes me co-captain of the team along with another guy.

As a junior? As a junior. So this inconceivable to me. It seems small looking back at the time for me. It was huge. And I started to see myself differently after that. And he saw something in me that I truly didn't see it myself. And then he was ruthless.

from that point forward because he was taking no quarter. I mean, he had big expectations. And we turned out to have a great team, and that was sort of a changing, a really transition point in my life. And this is Coach Lynn, we're talking about. Coach Tom Lee. And again, you get the book.

I'm going to read some small excerpts from the book. The book's got all kinds of details in there. But you had one experience with Coach Lynn where he kind of chewed you out that definitely seemed to have left the mark. Oh, man. He took me to the woodshed. And so what happened, I started to, you know, in the local paper, I started to get recognized.

And, you know, they were talking about blast game. And, you know, I started to be impressed. So we have a game. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was North Scuyl in the, you know, in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. And it was a rainy night. And we just were getting our clocks clean in the first half. And he came into the locker room.

And he was, I mean, he was a tough guy, tough love, I would say. and he went around the thing and he's one to each person and he said you're doing a terrible job this is awful you know you're you're getting run over and you're not making your blocks and then he looks at me and he says and dave you're doing such a great job those all those nice things they're saying in the paper about you they really i mean you are really a superstar and he just was and then he'd go back and and so you you know it was just singling me out i think you've been reading the headlines dave you're doing so well and so it was awful and uh and to the second half we turned things around and we did better,

but he laid it on me. And Pennsylvania is a mecca for football and wrestling. It really is. And you were in both of them. Yeah, it really is. My wife is from Texas. And she's like, what's this wrestling thing? I said, wrestling.

I mean, you go to the gym on a Friday night. I mean, it's packed. Everybody's come. This is the biggest sport. And it's, you know, you know this from your own experience. there's nowhere to hide. You're out there in the middle, the lights on you, and the crowd's going crazy.

And now Penn State is the greatest, you know, wrestling college in the country by far, number one for the last 10 years. But it is, and they make quarterbacks and, you know, and wrestlers in Pennsylvania. Yeah, one of my friends lives in Pennsylvania, and he was telling me about the NFL players from Pennsylvania. Yeah, long, long. Just, like, crazy number of NFL players. Long, long list.

these little towns, you know, they, they kids grow up. All they do is play sports and it defines them. So you're wrestling since sixth grade. So you, so you must have been a good wrestler. How are you doing? Are you making it to state? Are you winning state? Where are you at? I finished fourth in the states my senior year. Which in Pennsylvania is a big deal. Pennsylvania was good. And then I went to West Point. Wait, now, you said though you wanted to play football. Yeah. Like slow man. I didn't have the speed. It didn't have the speed. It didn't have the speed for division. one football and wrestling but is that you want to play football why do you want to play football instead of wrestling I think I think football I like the contact I liked being a linebacker I would have probably been a defense it may be a defensive back in college but I I

liked them we were good and you know in retrospect wrestling was probably the better sport because it didn't I didn't I didn't come out of it with a major concussion or anything but but as it turned out I wrest I could make the team at West Point as a freshman. So I wrested all four years varsity at West Point and was the captain of the team there. So going back to application to West Point, yeah. Your dad says just apply. He's thinking I'm going to save some money. Yeah. He's thinking it's the honorable place to be. Anybody that's been to West Point, I've been to West Point. It's like just an outstanding. You get you get fired up just being there and seeing the cadets

walking around and it's a beautiful campus. So your dad must have visited at some point. be like, yeah, I'm going to get a kid in there. We visited when I was a kid. I remember visiting once. My mom had a college classmate that lived nearby, and so we visited early. And I didn't have a great experience. And then in a weird story, when I went up for the college recruiting visit for football, we stopped at a diner in Newburgh, New York on the way.

It was like we got up at 4 in the morning and drove up my friend and I, and something was bad about what, that I ate for breakfast. So throughout the course of the day, getting the pitch, I would go into the bathroom and throw up. So I had terrible memories of my first visit to West Point. And then what happened, I got accepted, and the whole town kind of just embraced it. And it was in the newspaper, and nobody had gone to an academy for like 20 years. And, you know, in that part of Pennsylvania, military, the military is widely admired, even though my family hadn't served. And so all of a sudden it kind of took on a life of its own and didn't seem like a choice.

I just was going and it turned out to be great. I'm glad I did it. But it wasn't something I'd always thought about. You get into West Point. I think this is going to the book here. It says on a balmy day in early July 1983, my parents dropped me off at West Point's Michi Stadium. I'm saying that right? Mikey Stadium.

A short briefing to parents and their soon-to-be cadets ended abruptly with parents exit to the right and new cadets exit to the left. My military career had begun. By the end of the day, after hours of vaccinations, uniform fittings, a buzz cut and parade practice, the West Point class of 1987 marched across the parade field with the reviewing stands chock full of teary-eyed parents looking down on their transformed and in some cases teary-eyed new cadet. The rising seniors or first classmen firsties ran the show. They bombarded us with information and barked orders as they heard us around West Point's historic grounds. There's no gentle orientation day at West Point or the 60-day Beast barracks that follows. They intentionally shock the system with a time-tested process that takes this cohort of wide-eyed teenagers and begins to break them down to be remolded as leaders and officers. It was all perfectly, orchestrated a test for the older cadets who are responsible as well as the new plebs in their charge. I'd realize only years later when it was our turn to welcome to new class just how much work went into preparation for this century old tradition. So there's your welcome aboard. How ready for you were you for that mentally? I don't think I was very ready.

Yeah, I wasn't ready for it. You know, I ended up I ended up adjusting and adopting, but I wasn't ready for it because there's no and you've had your own version of this there's no debating there's no reasoning there's just learning to do and and responding and surviving and so it was a shock to my system for sure I think the thing that catches catches people when they enter the military and you go through that indoctrination period is just a complete and utter loss of freedom yeah like it is completely gone anything that you You can't sneak away to the bathroom for an extra minute and 30 seconds to have some alone time. It's not happening.

Every moment is accounted for. You're only doing what you're told to do. And it is a serious shock to the system. How long did it take, how long did it take for you to say, all right, I guess I'm just going to have to deal with this? It took a while to just embrace it, you know? And, you know, the saying, which people have been saying for decades, you know, I love the size. and just embrace that it's going to suck, and you just got to hold your breath and get through it.

And wrestling helped in that regard because, you know, it was an outlet where I'd have two workouts a day. I'd start early in the morning, do all the cadet stuff, have practiced at the end of the day. And I found, to my surprise, that, you know, I didn't know what to expect, but that I could compete and there was an opportunity. And that became a big focal point for me during my whole four years,

but particularly that first year. Did you know you weren't going to play football when you went to the? Yeah. Okay. I had made the decision that I was, you can only do one sport, and I'd made the decision that wrestling was going to be what I'd try to do. And so what are you going to college for? Like, what are you learning?

What's your degree going to be in? Well, this is the remarkable thing is I decide I'm going to be a mechanical engineer, which turned out to be a terrible decision. I'm not a good engineer, but I got halfway through it. I'm like, I'm going to muscle my way through this. So it was. miserable. You know, I wasn't, I wasn't great at math or economics or math or design or any of the mechanical engineering things, but I got through it. And along the way, I figured out that I didn't

want to do that, which is always good when you figure out what you're not going to do. And, and at the end, it take four years to figure out what you're not going to do. Exactly. But it teaches you how to think in a particular way. It's very systematic. And at the end of my senior year, in wrestling, I break, I hurt my knee. I, I, I have, have a toy are all my ligaments. I have to get a knee reconstruction. At the time, they have these vortex implants. Um, so they implant a vortex ligament in my knee, my senior year after wrestling season. What ligament? Uh, ACL. They put a Gortex ACL. Gortex ACL. I had not heard of this. This was, this was the, if you remember the time, there was this great football player,

Gastino with the jets. They did the same for him. So this was an experimental thing. The army was using it. And I still have it. I had never had it replaced. So it worked. It worked. I went to Ranger School and jump school. I did 80 jumps on it. How come people don't do that anymore? No, they found much better sources of- Now they use cadaver or they use your own. Patela. Yeah, they used to use pig. Now they use your cadaver-Baddle. But so I can't go right to the Army. So I'm supposed to go to Ranger School on the basic course. I can't do all that. So West Point keeps me for six more months. And I can use the GI Bill to go to grad school. So I apply to Columbia, and I do two courses at Columbia. And one of the courses is taught by this guy named

Roger Hilsman, who's like this epic guy. He was West Point graduate, fought in World War II in the OSS. He's got this incredible story about rescuing his father from a POW camp in Burma, and he is the professor. He goes on and he works in the Kennedy administration in the state department. And I'm listening to this guy in front of the class. I'm saying, that's what I want to do. Like that life sounds so much more interesting than being a mechanical engineer. And so that was in my head and that that helped shape a lot of the things that came after. When you're at West Point, what do you think formulated in your brain? What lessons did you really grab onto from a leadership perspective?

You know, they drill into you these concepts of duty on a country and people throw those off quickly. but I think that was it. I think this notion that there's this whole institution, I mean the military, West Point being part of it, that the entire purpose is to have people defend America, that the whole thing is selfless, about selflessness, the idea that leadership, which isn't what you think about when you read the books,

the leadership isn't about you. It's about service to others. Those were the concepts, and it got drilled into your head, both by what you were taught, but also by the example that others that you'd see in others. So I think it was like fundamental. I'm so grateful I had a chance to do it. I don't think I had that concept of service to others embedded in me the way it came through after four years there.

And so as you get this knee injury and as you realize you don't want to be an engineer, do you decide, hey, I want to be an infantry officer? No, I applied. I was an engineer officer. Okay. So I was an engineer officer in the 80 seconds. So, you know, there's, which I found out when I got there is the same as an infreumen. You just have to carry more shit.

You'll excuse me. You have to carry a lot of C4. Your backpack's bigger. Well, the engine, what's crazy about the engineers is, you know, during the recent wars, those guys are the guys that were out clearing mines, clearing roadside bombs. And so that's another thing. You think you're going to be out there building bridges. And you're not out there.

Well, they're built bridges too, but a huge percentage of the job that the engineers have done like in the Battle of Ramadi the engineers yeah they went out and built the combat outposts in downtown Ramadi under fire but then on top of that in order to get to those combat outposts they had to clear all those roads the the engineers were just were just awesome yeah did an awesome job um so so it takes you six months to heal up yeah and you're you go take those classes at columbia you maybe get a glimpse of some other things that you might like like to do in the future did you ever think about doing special forces because this guy was OSS, which is sort of the... I did.

Yeah, I thought hard about staying in. You know, I went to the 82nd. I went to basic course, went to Ranger School. How was Ranger School? Ranger School was... Well, no, before you get to Ranger School, how was the officer course? Officers course was great, because at that time, it was Fort Belvoir. So it was right next to D.C.

So imagine you're like, you know, you're stuck in West Point for four half years in the middle of nowhere. So I show up there. I'm six months behind all my classmates. But I've got I mean it was you know an incredible six months of not I'm not focused so much on on school I'll tell you what we had James Webb yeah on the podcast and you know he went from You know the basic school Marine Corps basic school the Naval Academy Marine Corps basic school The the officer infantry course for Marine Corps infantry officers had I think it was 12 days of leave got on a plane took the plane took the plane took the plane took him to Vietnam got on a helicopter got in a Jeep got on a patrol out there in the middle

of the jungle somebody pointed at a ridge and said like hey your platoons up on that ridge go take over he walked up there and said like hey I'm here to relieve the officer and they're like oh we don't have an officer you know sergeant's been running it staff sergeant over here has been running it so you're in charge now sir and then that night they got into a huge troops in contact and he was calling for fire and I said to him did you feel like you're You were prepared. He said, I was fully prepared. Yeah. So this was in, I think, 1968, 1968, 1969.

But the level of training that, you know, can you imagine at the height of the Vietnam War, how well the lessons were learned were coming back and the feedback loop. Yeah. Officers that were just in Vietnam were now teaching you. But now you're going through in 19, what year is it? 1980. This is 1988. 1988, yeah. So 1988, we, I mean, there just hasn't been a lot of combat going.

It's all Soviet. Everything is, you know, there's the two big training centers at the time, which I think we're probably still around in your time as a national training center out Fort Irwin. Yeah. Still there. But then there was the joint readiness training center, which was all the insurgency stuff, which was in Arkansas at Fort Chaffee. And that we would do, you know, 10 day, 14 day things.

And you were fighting against a Soviet armed sort of insurgency. And that was... And everything was through the eyes of Soviet weapons and Soviet tactics. So not really. Not in some ways very prepared. In some ways, not very prepared. What about from a leadership perspective? I think Ranger School was another really important, you know, moment for me in terms of developing as a leader.

Because you get the school and the West Point experience, and I had done a number of things in preparation. But Ranger School, you know, everybody strips off their rank, as you know, and you're just back to, okay, who's going to be a lot. leader and everybody has to be a leader at at at the moment in time and you learn to be a good follower as well as a good leader to help your ranger school classmates and you see the worst of people uh when they haven't eaten and they have steals your crackers steals your food and you see the best of people yeah somebody gives you crackers when you're hurt exactly so for me it was uh it was a it was a great experience i did well i emerged in that as someone who was a who was a good gave me a lot of confidence.

Did you have any challenges in Ranger School? Was there anything that was particularly hard for you? Not really. What about what you used to cut in weight from wrestling? Did you cut a lot of weight in college for wrestling? Yeah, I lost a lot of weight for wrestling, and I lost a lot of weight in Ranger School. I think I probably was 20 or 30 pounds in Ranger School.

I do remember a moment. You know, you realize that, not that this is anything like, you know, some of the dangers others have faced, but you really realize you have to overcome fear. And I remember being in a, like a helicopter at night, doing a night jump and it was over a bunch of trees and you know it was just it didn't feel like it was going to go well i remember thinking man i really don't want to do this but then i thought that the horror and the shame of not doing it was far worse than getting killed or maimed so you roll out he roll out of it

and you say okay i'm going to go on as one of my buddies who's one of the toughest guys ever uh my friend tony fratty who is a seal with me and then he was one of the platoon chiefs when i was in when i was a tasking a commander and he's absolutely petrified of heights like absolutely petrified and he was on a training exercise in Hong I think I want to say Hong Kong and they had to do a repel like a like 50 story or a 30 story repel out of a building face first jump off the edge and he said he was so absolutely terrified and he's and then he said but I would rather have died yeah you know than the shame. Not do it.

So that happens. But from a leadership perspective, you're going through Ranger School, and it's a great school because you get put in all the different positions. Sometimes you're the patrol leader. Sometimes you're a machine gunner. Yeah. What did you,

what characteristics do you think made a good leader going through Ranger School? I think, you know, clear, being able to maintain clarity, clarity on mission despite the haze, despite the hunger, just, you know, like the focus on mission, the fact that you're exhausted, just that recognition that you have to be on point. And the idea that, you know, if you're not the leader, that you

have to know everything that's going on because you might be the leader next. And so that, that rigor associated with that and the getting your, you know, getting your buddies through it. That was a big piece, which is nobody succeeds in life or in Ranger School alone. And, you know, You do the rating system at the end of each thing where everybody can rate who does poorly. And you know, you can do that in a way where everybody makes it or you can do that way where the, you know, the guy who's a real asshole gets thrown out. Yeah. And you see the assholes get thrown out and the people that help their teammates get through it.

That's a cool system that they have called peering. Yeah. Peer, peer evals and you can peer someone out. They didn't, when I went through seal training, we didn't have that. We got rid of a couple guys that were just bad. But we didn't do it through any official system. It was, I think, you know, the class leader. We all talked to the class leader,

and the class leader eventually talked to the instructors and they got rid of some guys. But that's a really good system to have in place where, hey, look, if we all work together, we can all stay here. We can give each other the proper evals at the proper time. But if we just, if someone's not good, we can get rid of them. What was the attrition rate?

Do you remember what the attrition rate was like? I think the original class, it was like 25% graduated, and then through recycle and everything else, you get another 20%. I think it was like 45, 50% eventually got through. But it was high. And it's three phases? Yeah, at the time, I think they've changed it was like 72 days. It was four phases.

It was the original phase, which is Benning. You do the mountain phase in Delonica. Then you do the desert phase in Utah, Dougway Proving Ground. did the final phase in Florida. And Florida is where you finish. Jack. So. So you get done with Ranger School now and then your first job is at the

82nd. Yeah, platoon later at the 8th second. Platoon. So are you in charge of an engineering platoon? Yeah. At the 82nd. Yeah. And there's no war going on.

No. At this time. This is 19, what, 1987, 1988? No, this is 88. So 1988. It's just preparing for the,

World War III with the Soviets, basically. That's what you're doing, right? Right, and you're doing the three rotations, where you have one rotation where you're on readiness, where you're not doing much. You're ready because you've got to be ready to go up and be on the 24 hours anywhere in the world. Yeah.

So that's one of the three phases. The second phase is your preparation phase where you're hardcore training. You're out in Dougwood, you're out in Joint Readiness Training Center, you're hardcore, and you're in the field, come back, clean up two days. And how long is that?

How long is that phase? It's a third of the time. So I don't know if you're, I think it's every, like three months, four months. Every six weeks. I think every six weeks you rotate through phases. So like it's a hardcore six weeks of training and you're never home. You're out in the field. And then there's six weeks of basically clean up evaluations, you know, vacation, whatever

you're going to do. Like that's, that's the sequence. And so you're, I was a single guy. You know, we're running hard all over the place. And I loved it. I mean, I love being up and doing it. I felt prepared. Just to your point about Jim Webb,

I felt prepared to be a platoon leader. I felt prepared to learn, and it was great. Yeah, the peacetime military can be an interesting thing because it's really easy for the peacetime military to get focused on things that aren't about war fighting. Right. And you can start focusing on other things. Whether it's literally shining your boots,

which sometimes people get really into shining boots and starch in uniforms, or whether it's just, I mean, I guess in today's day and age, you can list all kinds of things that the military might be focused on that have very little to do with war fighting. Completely. I mean, that's one of the things I talk about in the book, which we can talk about later, but it's the fact that the military today, the Army, as an example, rolled out under President

of Biden its climate change strategy before its war fighting strategy. This is like this is the world of limit. And you're right. Yeah, I shouldn't be laughing because that's actually very disturbing. And it's easy to get distracted. But I felt like the 82nd was a serious. in that sense of mission. And while I was there, we had Panama,

which my unit didn't, you know, only one brigade deployed the first brigade, but I was, they put together a second platoon to go to Panama that I was going to go support the first brigade. And I, the battalion commander picked me to be the platoon leader. So I was like ready.

We were loaded. We were on the airplanes ready to go. And they didn't send you. So we thought we were going to have a chance to go to Panama and then eventually Iraq happened with the Gulf War. Yeah. The airborne divisions are freaking outstanding.

I worked with both of them. I worked somewhat with the 82nd. I worked a lot with the 101st, and they're just freaking outstanding. Like, they're total professionals all the time and everything that they do. So I can imagine that even when the rest of the military is getting distracted,

that the airborne units are still staying focused and making things happen as they should be. So you're in this platoon. commander and then the first Gulf War starts to spin up. Were you now a company commander at this point? I was an XO. Okay. So I've become an XO. We go to, we're deployed like a fourth deployment or something to the joint radio training center. And then literally in the middle of the night, we get a radio call, go to this grid. And there was one of these big runways. We're in Arkansas and they, they were bringing the C-141s and C-5s to load up all the equipment and go back to Bragg.

And this was Saddam Hussein had crossed into Kuwait. And then I think we had 24, 48 hours of cleaning the equipment and getting ready, loading up, loading ammo. And then we flew out again and went to Ramstein, Air Force Base in Germany to refuel. And then ended up in, we landed in Damam in Saudi Arabia. And so the 82nd was the first unit there. So you guys actually executed the recall procedures. Absolutely. That's freaking outstanding.

Yeah, absolutely. The whole thing. And remember, I mean, there was no email. There was no texting. There was no cell phones. So you can't tell your mom and dad what's going on to your family. So you're just packing up and leaving. And all of a sudden you start writing letters.

And you're in a letter, you know, you're 12 months of letters. That's how you're communicating with your family. And you're getting, look, we look back, or at least I do. And I think most people do they look back at the first golf. We kind of shrug your shoulders. I was like, oh, you're 72 hours, blah, blah, blah. But I specifically remember that I was watching CNN, and they're saying there's going to be, I forget,

they're saying there's going to be 40,000 casualties in the first 48 hours. Yeah. And I'm thinking, I was now, I'm in the Navy. I'm waiting to class up in Seagel training. And I'm thinking, oh, yeah, this is like we're going to fight. This is the big one. Yeah.

This is going to be World War, you know, like World War II for us. did you guys as you guys were preparing what was your mindset we definitely thought that it was going to be a very hardcore combat situation where there's been a lot of casualties we all were reading the newspapers and seeing these estimates and you know doing the stuff like before it was all built up to this invasion day for remember there was the air war and then so we thought the invasion day was when you were going to be like in world war two kind of land warfare that we'd all been talking about. So people writing letters, like the letter to give to your folks

if you don't make it, that kind of thing. Especially the they have some of the chemical warfare threats. We saw the scuds being shot. I remember seeing the scuds shot over our heads into Israel and us donning the chemical equipment on a number of occasions. So we thought we were in for a hell of a fight. And it turned out the whole thing collapsed through a combination of the air war

was just so punishing. A combination of the troops recognized they were being overwhelmed and just discipline and command and control being lost. And then the inability to keep the people in the uniforms to the passage you wrote, they just blended in. They just put on civilian clothes.

Next thing you know, you see him driving by in a pickup truck. That, you know, I was hearing about this the other day, I was reading about this the other day. We had this, I forget who said. One of the generals said something along the lines of after that first Gulf War, like, oh, we've gotten over our Vietnam, whatever, hangover.

I forget the terminology that they used, but, you know, Vietnam was this other thing, and now we know how to do it right. That, you could say that that victory, that expedient victory, didn't bode well for us in terms of the way we looked at war. to follow on wars. Yeah, wrong lessons maybe. Well, the Powell Doctrine, you know, if you remember that the thing that was so unique about that was this incredible buildup, six-month build-up.

I mean, I don't know, it was 450,000 troops or something like that in totality. All the allied coalition. So it was like, yet all this time to build up, which was a precondition to going in. This was what I think Powell and President Bush and so forth were promoting. But then the second thing was that the disqualied. decision to pull out, which now in retrospect looks like it was totally obvious and clear, but at the time it wasn't obvious and clear. And I think what happened in the, in this, in the, uh, rock war after 9-11 was that the first lesson of being able to rapidly overcome the

forces did happen. Same, same similar, the kind of thing, unbelievable speed and unbelievable firepower, but with less troops. Less true. Because they were like, well, you know, so easy last time. This is like, oh, you know, you, you got into a fight with this guy, so we'll just go, We don't really need to, we got to fight with another gang. We beat them really easily last time. We don't need to bring over guys. We just bring a few. But the second thing was to stay with the goal of, you know,

helping this transition in Iraqi society. And then you've read all the same books I have. But the fact that the disassembling of the Iraqi military, when that was such a critical part of the stability in the society and the Bathurst Party. So doing that with a lot of clarity and very surgically, as opposed to what eventually happened, which was really chaos. And then the ability to bring about order was lost as a consequence of that decision and the way it was handled.

So back to the invasion day. Are you talking to your troops? Like, hey, I mean, did you give a like, hey, not all of us are going to make it? Hey, be ready for casualties. You know, I always think back like in my life, I've given those talks to my guys about We're killing the enemy. We're going to take out like those are intense things to you know that you're doing and Were you having those talks with you? Yeah, because you had no idea no No absolutely you guys are getting hit with chemical weapons. You think the Republican Guard is going to stay and they're going to fight and it's going to be

House to house tank to tank whatever the case may be that was what you guys were thinking man it must have been so weird. Yeah. Okay, so before we get to the weird part of, hey, you just roll in there and they kind of roll over. So you're in that mode. Absolutely in that mode. Thinking we're in for a hell of a fight and being prepared for that, both mentally

and with every bit of preparation that we're doing, trying to figure out the missions, prepare for the missions, mind clearing, explosion, taking out bridges, whatever it's going to be. We're in it. And we have the complexity of being attached to this French armor division at the last minute, which is, you know, we're trying to figure that. that out. So absolutely. And then you get across the border and 24 hours in, it's kind of like Planet of the Apes. If you remember the movie where you're walking, it's like society has sort of

civilizations gone and like everything's wreckage. And the air war had just done, been so devastating. So you guys rolled into Iraq? Yeah. Or did you guys roll into Kuwait? You rolled into Iraq. Yeah, we went straight into Iraq from the Tapline Road. And are you seeing, sir, are you seeing like the highway of death, which was in, you must have seen some of the remnants of the highway of death. The vehicles that made it far enough north into Iraq, you're seeing that kind of destruction. Right, just on the sides of the roads, just literally, you know, you'd see a tank chassis with a hole right through the engine block

where a precision guided missile would have just taken out the tank. You know, it was kind of remarkable. I don't even think I knew we had that capacity, you know, until I saw the actual destruction that it had brought. As your troops are going, as you're telling your troops, you're getting ready to go in, you're giving them, hey, that speech. What's the looks on the faces of the guys as you're rolling in? I think we're all scared, you know, all scared. But I'm feeling a deep sense, which I'm sure you do, of like, man, I'm responsible.

You know, I want to get these, I want to accomplish your mission and get these guys through this. I'm feeling that anxiety and that fear, but I'm also feeling that sense of that weight of responsibility. And I think we're all scared, but we all. all, you know, determine that we're going to do our part. What was the end state of your assignment going into Iraq? So, look, we knew that we weren't going to stay there. We weren't planning to stay there. We weren't pushing to Baghdad.

We weren't going to stay there. Was your end state to get in, hold this long enough? Kuwait's now secure. And then you were going to leave. Was it something along those lines? Well, the leaving part was never pre-communicated. Oh, so you guys thought we're just going in. We're going in and, you know, take control of whatever area we were.

responsible for. And then in the end, what it turned out to be was there were these huge enemy depots of ammunition, which when the decision was made to pull out, they wanted to destroy all the munitions. But these were like city blocks of munitions. And it was, you know, things that the Iraqis had put together over decades. So the final mission was to destroy all that stuff on our way out of town. And that was high adventure because we, you know, we were essentially rigging city blocks with, you know, C4 and, you know, secondary explosions and some of it didn't go off. You had to go back in and reset it. It was, it was messy. But, but eventually we accomplished it. How long were you in Iraq for then? You know, I'm, I can't give it,

Probably 20 days, 25 days, something like that. And you're just blowing up all these two-poss? Well, the story you tell about that, you know, two things were happening. There was any munitions everywhere, but then there were these cluster bombs that we had. Right. And those were covering all the airfields. So to create the airfields so we could use them, we had to clear the cluster bombs off the runways. And that's what happened with that platoon.

That platoon had actually been attached to me when we deployed. And then when we got over into right before the invasion, it went back to its original battalion and somehow got a different assignment. And then, you know, we heard a day or two into it that they had lost all those guys on that one mission. Terrible. So, yeah, 20 days in, whatever it is, you get the assignment.

Okay, you're leaving now. We're leaving now. That's what's happening. Yeah. And you guys must have been like high fives. We're all good. But, you know, you know the military, going home is not going home. Like, you're going back and, you know, you're, you got another month and a half of, like, cleaning up your equipment and getting everything.

So it was an extended withdrawal. But I think the whole thing was a total of August to April, end of April, May. So, oh, that's because you guys were the first one on the ground. So you guys were sitting there forever waiting to do this. Yeah, we were at first a screening force on the Iraqi, on the Kuwaiti border. So we were up around that beach town, Kofi, and which if they, if they, to come across there's nothing we could have done because it was basically to create a deterrent by saying if you you know if you cross you're going to be in a fight with the u.s government or u.s. military and then we

moved over into the middle of the country more above riod and we we bounced around a good bit and more forces came on the ground so you wrap up that you you finally um get back to america while you're in while you're in and while you're wrapping up are you already thinking like hey i think i might get out of the Army? No. I'm thinking I'm staying. So I, my plan is to command a company. I haven't done that yet. I get, I get, I've got to go to the advanced course. I get a request, an invitation from West Point to go to grad school and teach. So my plan is to go to Korea, command a company, go to graduate school, go to West Point. And that's the path I'm on. And I'm in, I'm in Missouri at the advanced course and I'm, you know, I got a good plan. And I'm filling out my essays

to go to grad school because West Point tells me to apply to grad school and then defer it, and you can come back after Korea. So I'm writing the essays. And the essays are about what do you want to do with your life. And none of the essays end with, I want to be a career army officer. You know, none of them end with that. And if I did that, it would have been two years in Korea, two years in grad school, four or five more years in the Army. That was. would have basically said, I was gonna make a career of it. I was gonna do 20 years. And so I realized I really wasn't,

I really wasn't ready to do that. I wanted to do something else. So you were writing these essays. Yeah. And as you're writing these essays, you realize. That's interesting. I was taught, when people ask me about how to detach emotionally

to make decisions properly, I always say one of the best things that you can do is write down because it physically detaches you from your thoughts, and now you're looking at them on a piece of paper. So that's exactly what happened to you. It's exactly what happened. And so,

I'm sort of stuck because I go to the commander of the advanced course. I say, listen, I'm going to resign. And this was in 1991. You're kind of a war hero. Yeah. Well, I'm a, I'm at the time, you're a combat. Did you get your combat infantryman badge and all that? Yeah, all those, we got a combat patch, 82nd, all that stuff.

So I say I'm going to go. My father, at this point, who is in love with West Point and the Army, Me says to me his first words are you're gonna lose your pension and I'm like you know you got 15 more years you already got a pension I'm like dad it's gonna be all right so uh 15 years is in eternity when you're 25 years I don't care so uh so I've already sent these graduate school application it's a mindset though by the way right there's a mindset you know people that people that they're looking at you know they think you know many people have said to me like man if only I would stayed in. I could have been retired. I could have had that pension. There's definitely people

that do 20 years. And at about the four year mark, they think, well, only 16 more years and I'll have that pension. Yeah, that was my dad. That wasn't me. So, but here I am. I don't have a plan. So I've sent these applications to grad school. And it's November of 1991. I've got like leave built up until February or March. I've got like 10,000 bucks of savings because I got this guy ever got paid for it you so I buy a $5,000 TWA around the world ticket and the rule with it you just as long as you go in the same direction you can do as many flights as you can get so I I go through Christmas with my folks and I take off and I travel around the world so I go to Greece yeah you cover to the book like I bought around the world airline ticket from

TWA the ticket which drained about a third of my Gulf War savings let me take as many flights as I wanted as long as they took me in the same direction, circumnavigating the globe. I tracked overland through the Middle East, including Turkey, Syria, and Jordan spent three weeks in the Holy Land. It was my first time in Jerusalem. I had the opportunity to visit and pray at the Western Wall, one of the great holy sites of the world.

From there, I scuba dived off the beautiful reefs of the Sinai Peninsula, saw the Coptic churches for the first time, a memory that would come flooding back when I met my wife and her devoutly Coptic family. After three months in the Middle East, my travels continued farther east. I spent almost a month exploring the incredible rainforest of Borneo before making my way north to Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, and eventually China, where I saw a nation on the cusp of modernity. Eight months and about 20 flights later, my adventure ended at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii,

where my brother was stationed. That's it. It was a whirlwind. And so you link up with your brother, and your brother was in the Army at this point, too. Yeah, four years behind me. He was West Point, four years behind me. Do you wrestle at West Point as well?

He wrestled. He was first in his class at West Point, which brought my dad to say to be at one point, what do you think happened? Were you just not focused? Black sheep. That's exactly slacker. Just a loser.

Slacker. So, yeah, so he was there. What number were you in class at West Point? Oh, I don't know. 300. Not even in the running. No, not even. Your brother was number one.

Number one, yeah. How was Thanksgiving dinner with that situation going on? It wasn't until they used to, my brother and my dad, because there was these stops and starts. My brother and my dad would talk on weekends until I was mid-30s, and my dad would start it by saying, what do you think we're going to do about old Dave? He's directionless.

This poor guy can't find a direction. You did end up getting into grad school. You ended up going to Princeton. Yeah. What's your experience there going to Princeton? You know, it was incredible for me because I had that eight months traveling had kind of gotten the military out of my system in some ways. Like it was a bridge to something totally new, you know, and I was by myself. So I met people on the way I travel with people. And it was a total adventure.

And I was psyched to get into a new environment and learn. and I moved in with plutonically with three women who I shared a house with. And it was like the college that I had missed. I mean, I was like a 27-year-old guy that was like, oh, my God, you know, I've been in West Point in the Army. And this is, so I loved it. And I had a couple great professors. And I wasn't very confident about my academic abilities. You know, I hadn't been a good student.

And I was surprised I even got into Princeton. I think your dad was surprised. My dad was surprised. We were all surprised. And I had a couple professors who really took an interest in me. And there was one guy who was an elderly guy. He was a very dignified gentleman named Dick Olman. And I had a class with him.

And he had been in the whiz kids with McNamara in the 60s. And he had been on the New York Times editorial board. He was a Democrat. But he just took an interest in me and military people in particular. And I would submit an essay in his class, and I would get it back, and there would be these light marks like A, B, C, just look at it. And you'd get at the end of it. And then if he'd get done with the alphabet, he'd do double A, double B. And when you get to the back, there's typed comments attached to every letter.

And the comments were as long as the paper. And this guy was so, I mean, he would just, he was super tight logic. and strong intellect, and he just invested the time. And so he started to help me become a good writer, and he really invested it. And he, you know, a year and a half, two years, and he said, I think you should do a PhD. I'm like, you think I can get through this. He goes, you can do this. And so I applied to the PhD program and eventually did a PhD.

And it was because this guy took an interest. And then I had a couple other professors. And so I ended up doing a PhD while I was there. So I did. I did a PhD at the essentially international relations. Did you have some kind of a goal at this juncture? Well, I thought it was going to be a professor. You know, I thought back to that professor that I had seen at Columbia and my dad,

and I got about halfway through it, which is another reason. My dad was concerned. I said, I'm never going to be a professor. I'm not cut out for this. I want to do things. So I finished the PhD, and I went to visit my brother who went to head gone to business school at Harvard. and I go up and see him. So wait, this is your Army brother?

My Army brother. So he got out of the Army? He got out of the Army after five years. And I go up there and I'm saying, what am I going to do? I don't have a, and he said, you know, there's these, all these McKinsey guys here. And they say that McKinsey's hiring people with PhDs. I'm like, okay, sign me up. I want to go see McKinsey.

And so I go interview with McKinsey and I get an offer. And they say, we've got a great offer for you in New York City. And I said, I thank you. I'm excited. but I don't want to go to New York. I want to go to Pittsburgh. I want to go to the Pittsburgh office of McKinsey. And they said, you're the first person in history of McKinsey.

The waiting list is zero. That ever insisted on Pittsburgh. And so that's how. Why were you so fired up to go to Pittsburgh? I wanted to go back to Pennsylvania. I had been born in Pittsburgh. I had family roots in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was on the cusp of this, you know, real renovation.

And so I wanted to be part of that. And it turned out to be great. Then this is so this is like now 1996 that you graduate that you get hired at McKenzie Yeah and when you go and you're work like When you get this job at McKenzie what they have you doing Were you doing it's typical analyst stuff? What they have you doing? You know they all the clients were Manufacturing companies so GM and you know automotive or tier one automotive steel companies weirton steel Westinghouse

So these were gritty like operational Efficiency I say again And what did they want you to do? Yeah, I didn't know anything, right? PhD in international relations. No, I did, they taught basically everything. So I did supply chain stuff, reduced costs, negotiate new contracts.

I mean, I just, I was a, it just stuck me in and I got trained. Who trained you? You know, there's a bunch of, it's like being in the military, the trainer. The trainers are the next generation of people. So there have been a bunch of army guys that went there. Got it. The Pittsburgh office of McKinsey was a little different than the rest of McKinsey. It was sort of a gritty, you know, you know, you know,

know the client base this was just had different feel to it and there was a number of military guys there that had been part of why I got hired in the first place and and that became just a great way to learn business and a great way to make a transition to the business career and that's what ends up happening you spend three years there and then you you join up with a company called called free markets free markets yeah and it sounded like your timing was good 1999 yeah it was Perfect. The timing was awesome. We went public that year, and this is the ridiculousness of the moment. But there was for a point in time, I think when we went public, we had $19 million of revenue or something like that. And we're losing money. And it was valued in an IPO at something like $9 billion.

And then I became the CEO. I sold the company six years later in 2005. It was $150 million in revenue and profitable. and we sold it for $500 million. So that just showed you the crazy journey. We went from, I don't know, 70 people when I joined, I think, to 1,000 people when we sold. And so it was a crazy. So what was your job when you started at free markets? My job was initially working with the business was essentially trying to digitize purchasing.

And if you looked in the purchasing world, there was all this stuff. you could buy paper and things like that online. But this was direct materials. So the things that go into things you build, castings, forgings, machining. So we were helping companies take those things, make them in digital drawings,

and they do a competitive bid online where you could source the things. So it was really kind of innovative. And we started to help the government do that too. So we helped the United States Postal Service. We helped the Navy. And I initially ran the little national, the public sector business,

and then I ran all the businesses, and then I eventually became CEO. What do you think was your key to doing well, making things happen, getting selected for promotion, getting selected to lead this bigger organization and getting selected to CEO? What do you think was your key component?

I think, you know, I think some of the basic leadership things from the military, just finding good people, getting alignment, holding high standards. I think those things were, you know,

important to be a platoon leader, important to be a successful CEO. I think the thing that ended up being the strength I had through all business was I was always a client-facing or customer-facing executive. So I would always go help sell the deals. I would be at the front end of, I was always that at Bridgewater. I was at free markets. And that was the thing that we needed at the time to grow. So there's different kinds of CEOs. There's those that are the product developers or those that are the commercial. I was always more of a commercial client-facing CEO, and that's what free markets needed at the time.

And you said they had $16 million in revenue? Maybe 19, I think. 20, let's call it 20. And you went public with a valuation of $9 billion, you said? Billions, many billions. Yeah, I think the $9 billion. That's insane. Yeah, it was, and you see some of that same,

some of those same things have happened, but that was the height of the tech bubble, and then the bubble burst. And, you know, fortunate, we had a business that could survive it and continue to grow, but it was tough. And I tell the story in this book, which is, which is just, it tells you, this was like creative destruction witnessed firsthand because there's this huge consolidation and software firms are gobbling up software firms and so forth.

And about the time I was CEO, Bridgewater, maybe 2000, three, four, something like that, maybe 2002, I do a Kleiner Perkins, which is the big venture capital company, I do a CEO conference and the partner at Klinea Perkins says yeah I wanted to meet these guys they've got this new company it's called Google's weird name Sergei and Larry and I'm like that'll never work what a joke that'll never work and meanwhile you know where where our industry consolidates and they become Google so where are you on September 11th 2001 I'm in the and we have a tower in Pittsburgh that has our name on top of the building of free markets and we're in a management

meeting and right next to it is the is the cafe sort of cafeteria area and somebody comes in and says there's a plane that just hit the plane that just hit the tower and so we go in and we're all watching and we all think it's some sort of accident and then the news come to and then we see the second plane it was like oh my god and it was interesting because we had we had an international business So we had people that week from all over. We had a little business in Australia. We had a business in India. We had a man that ran our India business that was a Sikh.

So he wore a turban. And we couldn't get anybody home. So we have all these people and these international people that are trying to get home. They can't get home. So we're working over that over the next week or two to try to once the airlines start moving again. And then this particular man really had a tough time because he was getting harassed. a lot on his on his way home because people were trying to make sense of what had happened and you know they they didn't know yet they didn't know who was who or whatever and it was very

very memorable because we brought all the senior team to our home and talked about the company but also talked about what was going on in the world and what did that do to free markets you know it didn't didn't affect us in any in any really meaningful way you know I had um we'll talk about this I'm sure a bit but I had helped President Bush when he was governor run. So I had helped write some of the defense-related speeches when he was the governor. And when he had won the presidency, I had made a conscious decision not to try to serve, but to stay at free markets. So I was kind of doubling down on free markets, but I stayed really close to what was going on in public policy.

How were you connected to Bush? You know, I was connected through some people I knew who were on his team in the National Security team. a guy you may know Rich Armitage, who is sort of a... I don't know him personally, but I know who he is, yeah. He's a defense guy who served in the Navy, I think in Navy Special Ops. And he had been a big player in the Reagan administration, and he was helping to chair Governor Bush's defense team. And so I had written my dissertation on reforming defense, reforming the Defense Department. And so I helped write a couple speeches that the governor eventually gave one at Citadel about his vision

for reforming the Pentagon. And that's how I got involved. But I didn't go in when he won, but that laid the groundwork to go in later when he won a second term. And then what year do you end up selling selling free markets? We sell it in 2004

and close the deal in 2005. And did you stay on once the deal got closed? Did you stay on? I stayed on and I had a deal, which was a really interesting deal. I had a deal that if I wasn't, I became the president of the combined company and I actually ended up.

up in the rare instance where I really liked the CEO that had acquired our company. So we worked really well together. It was really a joint effort. But I had a deal that if I didn't become CEO, I'd leave or get a payout and so forth. So I was on the track to become the CEO, and I chose to do the government instead. So I went into the Bush administration about a year after the transaction from, I was the president of a rebate, which was the acquiring company, I wanted to become the undersecretary and the Commerce Department. And then how was how was that welcome to the welcome to the Beltway and all that stuff? I mean, you're now, you've been looking at the government from the outside.

I mean, I guess you did some speech writing and whatnot, but, you know, now you're in the mix. Well, you know. How horrible was that? It was so interesting because the job that I was in is a job that's written about a lot these days because it was the job that decided which technology we could export. around the world. So all this talk about export controls and tightening up on China. That was the job that I was in. And it was so was interesting. But it's thankless in the sense that no one ever is happy because all the business people say, don't restrict us. You're killing us. And all the national security hawks are saying, hey, wait a second. You know, you can't give away. And so you

have to have a lot of judgment in trying to figure out the things that make the most sense. And you're dealing with your allies who are doing all sorts of selling all sorts of things which you can hurt U.S. business relative to them. So it's a thankless business in some way, but it's a job, but it's a very important one. And what became obvious early in that tenure is the challenge with China. And I was responsible for putting in place a rule that was going to restrict certain technologies to China, further restrict, and put China in a different standards. than some other countries. And the Chinese went crazy. And President Hu complained to President Bush about this directly, about this thing, and essentially this guy in the Commerce Department

who's making this rule. And so President Bush doesn't even know I exist. He doesn't know that's office exists. And I get called to give a briefing to the National Security Council about this, you know, this policy, which they eventually agreed with and we went forward on. And But that was the first insight into the fact that the Chinese were very predatory about technology, about intellectual property. I mean, others were saying this too. But it was much more obvious even then that they had a strategy for really dominating in the technological space. And we weren't well equipped to deal with it. And that challenge has become much greater in the last 15, 20 years.

So did you pick that up when you were in China, when you were traveling through China? Did you start to see? How did you pick that up? Well, I picked it up when I got back. So I went through China as part of that trip we talked about, but I was, you know, I had no money and I had a backpack. So I was just trying to find the next place I was going to stay. But I started to go back in 2005, 2000. I had done a little, our business had had a little exposure, but not much to China. But in 2005, I started to get much more involved as the undersecretary of commerce.

And this was the hot issue that we started to study. And so it became clear that the intellectual property theft of the Chinese was over the top. I think there was Keith Alexander who ran the NSA some years ago said in testimony, it's the greatest theft in the history of mankind, what China has stolen from the United States in terms of intellectual property. And that's true. That was even clear in 2005, but it's just become much worse. Yeah.

And the obvious things that back in the day in that time period was like, oh, is it really obvious that they're stealing our like literally like our Disney movies were being whatever put on DVDs and sold and the music was being stolen so all those but the the much more important thing is the actual technology and that they are that they continue to try and get from us so that they can utilize for their own for their own purposes oh completely and it's it's it's insidious and it's very purposeful so there's not intellectual property protection so it's things like you said DVD and so forth, but they force companies to do their manufacturing onshore in China for this specific purpose of building that indigenous capability. You know, it's, and it's worked. Yeah, so I was

about to say, like they've succeeded. They've succeeded. There was a great, not great, but a very depressing, I should say, story in the journal about a month ago, the Wall Street Journal, which had this Australian think tank that did an evaluation of the 44 most important technologies to our economic well-being, but also national security, it's like artificial intelligence, quantum science, bioscience, satellites, China, according to this Australian think tank, in the lead in 37 of the 44, right? So China's got a plan. This is the point I make in the book. China's got a plan for global dominance, techno-authoritarian dominance. We don't have a plan, and that's a big part of our risk right now.

And Americans think, like you could really give Americans the benefit of the doubt and say, oh, they think in a four-year cycle. They're probably thinking a two-year cycle. A lot of us are thinking in a 24-hour news cycle, maybe a 40-hour news cycle. And the Chinese are thinking in a 100, 200-year strategic cycle. That's what they're thinking. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And when I talk about the motivations of the Chinese and where they're headed, it's not like I'm making this up. you just go read President Xi's speeches. So our interests were diverging with China for, you know, the last 25 years. You know, the bet we made, the thing that we were we were hoping for and was bipartisan was that if we brought China into the global trading system, that we get reciprocity, we get access to their markets, and this would also help them become a benign entrant. And none of those things have happened. We're 0 for three.

We're O for three. So there's not been reciprocity. They've stolen our technology. They've become dominant in technology. They become dominant geopolitically. You know, in the last three or four weeks, on the one week, you had Xi visiting Putin in Ukraine, and you had the foreign minister of China brokering the deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia. So these guys are on the march.

They've got a plan. President Xi has a very clear path, which he's talked about for more than a decade. And it's a real challenge to America's role in the world. And it's a challenge to, you know, our security and American way of life. So in 2005, you see this. You see this. The people you're working alongside see this. You start putting some of these restrictions in place.

Thankfully, you were able to convince other people, in this case, President Bush, that these were the right moves. And really, once someone shines a light on it, it's very clear that these are the right moves. it's very clear that these attempts to, you know, formulate relationships with China. It's just like an abusive, codependent relationship that you end up in. This isn't going to be helpful. You're inviting people to the party thinking like, hey, if we have them over and have a couple beers with them, they'll probably end up being cool. Right.

Not so. And it doesn't work that way. They actually steal all your furniture. In fairness, I would have said I had skepticism. So I was skeptical and I was worried about the Chinese military. But I, to be honest with you, I had no idea. What's happened is so far beyond what even a skeptic would have imagined happening because what they've done is they've created real dominance.

Their military is truly consequential. Their Navy is larger than ours. Their economy is not as big as ours, but gaining. And their technological leadership is high. So if you sort of would have taken my worst case scenario, I think we're worse by a long shot. And so unfortunately, we really missed it. And there's a bipartisan consensus now that we need to do something. There's not much of a bipartisan consensus on what to do.

And so one of the things I try to do in this book is lay out the what to do. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll get into some of that. It's interesting, though, to hear the seeds of your thought pattern on this. You eventually go from that position to being, do I have this right? the George Bush's personal negotiator and representative to the G8? Yeah, so this is a job that's been established over the last couple of minutes.

It's the deputy national security advisor for economics and national security. And that person also is the negotiator that goes on behalf of the president to negotiate the summit. So the G20, the G8. And it's an amazing thing because there's weeks of meetings that lead up to these. meetings where you're negotiating the U.S. position on behalf of the president and then when the meeting actually happens there's usually a couple open issues and when the meeting actually happens you're the person that sits with the president so if

there's you know 20 world leaders sitting around table each of them have a desk behind them and and and that that's the person that I that I like whispering in his ear your whispering his ear yeah so I have a funny story on this if you if you want to hear it which is when president Bush, when I first got hired for that job, I didn't really know President Bush. And so I was hired by the chief of staff and the National Security Advisor to do this job. And I get hired in August of 2006. And in September is the first summit, which is in Vietnam. And it's of the ASEAN country. So it's like, you know, 25 leaders. It's Chinese. It's Putin. It's this is a big deal. And I'm learning all

these issues. It's nonproliferation with Iran. It's, you know, beef exports to Japan. I mean, you name it, all the whole range of issues. And I'm trying to get the U.S. position clear. And I'm trying to get to see the president. And I keep hearing, President's not available, president of available, he'll make time. Finally, I hear you're going to brief the president on the airplane. So I've got these big binders that are full of all the position papers and the U.S. position on these. How big is your team that's putting all this stuff together? You know, because I'm in the White house, I can co-op the whole government. So I have a team at the State Department and Treasury. Everybody's working. Do you have like the Japanese cow export expert? Do you have the whatever?

So you got experts for everybody in there pulling this information. They're briefing you. Briefing me. But then, you know, when we get into the game, it's just me because I got the binders and I got the, so we get on Air Force One and I've never been on Air Force One before. I don't know the president. And I get a note that says, President wants to see you up in the front of the plane and the conference. I walk up. You're getting past notes. my binders, you know, and I walk in as president. I say, Mr. President, here's the main topics. And he goes, this is not my first rodeo. I don't need any more preparation. I'll be fine. I'm, oh, geez. So I go back to my seat. And we get in Vietnam, the summits of Vietnam,

we go through the whole couple one-on-one meetings with Putin and various leaders. And then he and I go in the car. And we go to this big conference center where the summit's going to take place and we walk into the room and I've been briefed that there's going to be all the leaders on their big chairs in a circle with their people, me, the Sherpa, sitting behind him. I walk into the room, there's no Sherpa tables. I'm like, holy, where am I supposed to be? And all the Sherpas, they say, are going to be in this back room where you can sit and if your leader wants to talk to you, they can have you called up. So I'm like, oh my God, this guy doesn't. He's doomed. He's doomed. He doesn't, like he doesn't have the wisdom that I, you know, I'm going to bring him. I've got the

papers. So I go, I go sit down there and it's like a scoreboard, which has every country, and if your leader calls for you, a light goes on. So I'm sitting there, I'm listening, we got the headset on, everything's getting interpreted in the different languages. And it's like five minutes in, the red button goes on. United States America, I'm like, oh shit, I can't believe it. He's calling me. What's he want to know? I got my binders. I'm, you know, is it North Korea, whatever. I'm walking in. So I walk into the room. They let me through the security. These guys are sitting a circle. It's just the leaders of the world. And I walk along the wall and I come up behind him and I lean over to him. I said, Mr. President, you had a question?

He said, I pushed the wrong button. So he had meant to be the push the I want to talk button. And he pushed the I call your Sherpa button. So that's, so I took the walk of shame back to the Sherpa room and all the Sherper said, what do you want? What do you want? And he pushed the wrong button. So I tease Bush about that sometimes. He goes, no, no, that was, I, I, That was just testing the new Sherpa. And how did you do in the meeting? He did fine. You know, he was right.

It wasn't his first rodeo. He did just find. I noticed there's some videos of Bush when he's running for governor in Texas. And he'd get up there during those debates. And he was like just good to go. Very relaxed, very calm, articulate. And then it seemed the longer he was president. Well, when he got, when he became president, it seemed like, I don't know if handlers get

into his head and they're saying, don't say this, you better watch the other than you better not say this. And it just kind of seemed to make him less fluent when he would speak than he was when he was just running for Texas. And then I met him before and I've seen him speak in other events now that now he's not president. And it's back to that kind of same way. So it seems like a lot of his reputation came from the way he presented himself when he was president kind of in the restructed. strained sort of, you know, a controlled environment where like, don't say this, don't say that. And behind the scenes and I have friends that worked directly for him and they were like, no, he's totally good to go.

Same. So that's your assessment as well. Yeah, I think, I see some of those clips too, like the formal speeches or like the formal press conferences, it just wasn't his thing. I don't know what happened either. But like you see him in the, on the, even just with leaders at these summits or whatever, He was fantastic. He was comfortable.

He was funny. He was, I mean, he's a hard boss. He was a very demanding boss, but he's a very capable guy. And, you know, I don't agree with everything that President Bush did. But I definitely think he was a high integrity leader. And there was a lot to like. So then after that, you become undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs? Am I getting these, right?

You kind of a lot of, you were moving or could. Couldn't keep a job. That's my, that's couldn't keep a job. So Paulson calls me and says, you know, I'd like to have you be undersecretary treasury. The treasury, the way it's organized, you've got a deputy, and then you have three divisions. You have international, domestic, and terrorist financing. And so this international division was like the, it's the lead financial diplomat for America. It's an incredible, you lead the G7 negotiations and all these things.

It was a, it was a big, big job. And I said to my, listen, Hank, I don't know, I don't really know anything about markets. You know, I took this company, I was at this public company, but I don't really know. He said, don't worry about it. You know. You're about to say I took this public company from $9 billion to $500 million. I don't know if I'm your guy. Beat that.

That's exactly right. So I said, I don't really know that much about this stuff. He said, you know the president and you know all the economic policy makers around the world because you've been doing this Sherpa job. And, you know, you'll be great. You'll learn what you need to learn. And I'll teach you what you learn. And everybody who's advising me says, whatever you do, don't do that.

You're in the White House. You know, this is going to be a backwater. Nothing's happening for the next two years. Whatever you do, don't go to Treasury. So I ended up going to Treasury, and I get there in the financial crisis heads. You know, and it's like a wild, crazy ride of, you know, almost a year and a half, 18 months in the center of that storm. And with Paulson, which was a great, great, great honor. What does it look like from the inside as everything's falling apart?

It's like standing in the middle of an eight-lane highway, and you have trucks and cars coming at you like 100 miles an hour. And just when you avoid, you know, a truck running you over like Bear Stearns, you stand up and look around and you have another one coming at you, Lehman Brothers or AIG. It was that kind of feeling like you're just. going from one fire, one crisis to the next. Without, and, you know, Paulson might disagree if he heard me say this. I don't think there was a theory, an adequate theory of here's exactly what's going on at the root cause level. And therefore, what's the, what's the whole, what's the movie going to? Like strategic big solution?

Yeah, there's no, I mean, when you're in a fire, you have to put out the fire. But there was, you know, ultimately, I think through lots of iterative, you know, know, good thinking we got to an answer that saved the world, in my opinion, at least. Like people who now say, well, we didn't need to do that. I mean, I think we were staring into the abyss. I think we could have gone into a depression. I think the banking system could have collapsed. I think it was that close. And we ended up doing some things that I wish we had done or had to do. But that's the moment we were in. And, you know, the thing I respected most about Paulson is when something didn't work, he just said, okay, that's not working and try something new.

And he'd own it. Like he wasn't, he wasn't worried about his, you know, he wasn't worried about people blaming him for being wrong. He was trying to solve the problem. He was stepping into the breach and owned it. Completely took responsibility. And, you know, that's, that's an admirable quality in a crisis. Yeah, it's a quality that would be nice if more people had it because I noticed a lot of this

during the pandemic, people wouldn't change their minds based on new information. Right. They were just sticking with whatever information they had. Yeah, we're just, hey, we're gonna do this. And okay, we did it, now it's not working too. Well, we're gonna keep doing it. And you'd be thinking, hey, maybe make some adjustments.

It's okay to say, hey, I was wrong, I misjudged this, I didn't think it was gonna go this way. Here's a new course that we're gonna take. You don't see a lot of that from the government. Right. And we were in unprecedented, you know, unprecedented waters. I mean, we really were in a whole new world.

And so we had to, to break precedent in terms of how to respond to it. What are some of the moves that you had to make that you didn't, that you look back and say, well, I wish we wouldn't have done that or could have done that differently? Well, the big, you know, we're living it again. The big thing was the bank, the capitalizing of the banks, which, you know, ended up to the taxpayer, not a cost at all because the banks have paid back beyond that. But anytime you're, the government standing behind the banks, as we are now, you're

creating a bit of a moral hazard. And I think we're in the middle of doing that again with the deposits. And getting that balance right in terms of letting the market discipline bad behavior and at the same time not jeopardizing our system, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to make sure that bad behavior is punished by market forces, but not hurting mom and dad who live in Peoria just because they had their money in a regional bank. Yeah, so like that legit could have happened with the Silicon Valley Bank. Yeah. Well, the Silicon Valley makes a good example because what happened there is that you had terrible, I mean, terrible management. I mean, there was just a hearing the other day, which you saw the CEO couldn't even defend their behavior in terms of how they held their deposits and the risk they took on. So it was terrible behavior. At the same time, you had terrible oversight by the Federal Reserve. So the regulators were completely failed. The management was completely failed.

and by bailing out Silicon Valley Bank and protecting all the deposits, the people you protected were essentially the guy who lived down the street from Silicon Valley Bank that had 10 million, it lives in a $10 million house and has $10 million of deposits. And who you didn't help is the creditor, the guy that has the lawn mowing service that's mowing the lawn outside Silicon Valley Bank, he got hit. And so that's a bit of the dilemma. Now, if you don't intervene and play some role in person, protecting those deposits Silicon Valley Bank.

The risk is that you create a run on the... How do we not help the lawnmower guy? Because if you're a creditor, you got hair cutted. So if you were a shareholder, you got wiped out. If you were a creditor, like the Silicon Valley Bank owed you money, you got wiped out or you got a haircut. If you were a depositor, you got 100% protection of your money. So, but as practical terms, that's what...

When you say it like that, you realize who got protected and who didn't get protected. And so that's a problem. That's a problem. And now we're in the middle of this dilemma of how we're going to treat deposits above 250,000 and what are the implications going to be. And so we need some more fundamental reform on that. But this particular crisis started with really bad management and bad oversight. And when you, I always picture these situations happening and you're reinforcing my assessment,

is that there's a few people in a room that are trying to figure out what to do. Yeah. That's basically what's going on. Yeah. And the decisions that they make, how much power, like, did Paulson have to make these decisions? Like when he's, or with this Silicon Valley Bank, the people, how many people are making that call? Handful. Yeah, in the case of, I mean, I can't speak to Silicon Valley Bank other than by imagining what's happening.

But in the case of the financial crisis, you had Paulson, you know, a handful of key advisors working for him in the Treasury. and a couple people from the White House that were connected, and then he would go make his case to the president, and he'd get the president's thumbs up, and then, you know, to the extent that it required legislation, he'd go try to make the case on the Hill, which we, you know, we live through a number of iterations on that. And the one thing I'd say on that,

and, you know, maybe it's because he wasn't a politician, but I think Paulson to his credit was solely focused on what the right answer was. Damn the politics, and the politics were bad, by the way, they turned out to be terrible. And I remember a moment where Paulson had to make changes because the initial thing was they were going to create this good bank, bad bank for the treasury assets. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. There was supposed to be this plan.

And they had to throw the plan out the window and do a new plan. And I remember being with Paulson when he had briefed Bush on the original plan. And then he came in a couple days later and said, we're going to do a new plan. We're going to, you know, do this capital injections in the banks. and Bush was like geez you know like what we were just doing the other thing and Paulson laid out the logic and Bush said just do what's right you do what the right thing is for America for the economy I'll deal with the politics you just do what's right and then in that moment finding people that just say let's do what's right because the politics are nasty that's we're lucky to have them

So you wrap up that job and what, you leave when Bush leaves? Yeah. So I leave when Bush leaves. I, you know, the way it works is you submit your resignation for noon on the day that the new president swore in. So I remember going down and, you know, exiting and going down and watching the swearing-in of President Obama. and I was done. And, you know, I went to three or four months and not doing much, you know, walking around sweatpants and not shaving and finally landed a job at Bridgewater,

which was the next chapter. And how do you end up at Bridgewater? So Bridgewater, I had not know much about Bridgewater. Bridgewater is a very, you know, prominently well-known investment firm, but it wasn't as well-known then as it is now. And I got a call in like October. of 2008 saying, hey, would you interest in Bridgewater? I said, first of all, we're in the middle of a crisis.

I can't talk about anything until after I leave. And, but I hadn't heard of it. So I said, call me back in March or April. And they did. They called me back in March and I went up and interviewed. And the founder of Bridgewater's a guy named Ray Dalio, who's sort of a bigger than life guy. And I go through this interview process.

I call my wife. at the time from the call. You interviewed directly with Ray Dalio out of the gate? No, I didn't have a bunch of people, but Ray's one of them. And I call her on the way home and I said, there's no way that's gonna work. Like this guy did not like me and I did not like him.

This is off to a bad start. So this is interesting, but not gonna happen. What gave you that impression? He was very antiseptic. It was like this, you know, and it was combative. It's a little, you know, why would you do that? It's like sort of the interview process

was not one of cultivating your, you know, it was sort of in your face. And he called me. And he said, let's come back up and let's continue to explore this. So we did that three or four times. Were they all combative? Do they get nicer? They didn't get much nicer. And it all ended with a cell dinner, you know, Ray's idea of a cell dinner where the two of us

were having dinner. There's others involved in recruiting me. But he and I had this cell dinner, you know, where we sat across from each other. And he said, you know, I think you'd be great. I think this is going to be a good fit for you. And he said, I think there's a 50% chance you'll make it. And I was like, that's yourself? This is you trying to get me to come.

And I said, no, I'm just being honest. I think it's not for everybody, but I think this could be a good fit for you. I talk to clients when they talk about interviewing people, and I say, well, you could give them the Willy Wonka. And people, I said, what's the Willie Wonka? And if you remember in the movie, the original Willie Wonka movie, what happens at the end is Willie Wonka?

has the kid and he goes off on him and he says you stole from me you violated this thing he's yelling at him this ridiculous good day sir and the kid sad Charlie Charlie in the chocolate factory the kid said because he had stolen that that everlasting whatever the everlasting candy he had stolen one and so Willie Wonka yells at him and screams at him but not about that about something else and now the kid's gonna leave and before he leaves he gives him that thing and it was all just a ten Test. So Ray Dalio was giving you the Willie Wonka test. He gave me the test. You know, because if he's treating you bad and you're like, you know, maybe he's looking for you. Can you stand the combat? Can you, you know, who knows? But that's an inch. I've done that before. We're like, oh, let's see what this person's really like. I'll tell you what the SEAL team is definitely like that. You're going to push people hard to see what they're like. And now you go, okay, the person seems pretty cool. I know Hackworth like wouldn't wouldn't smile or make any jokes for four weeks. And when I was in charge of stuff, I made it six weeks. Be the, little bit. No smiles for six weeks. No jokes, no smiles. Oh man. It's all business. Yeah, well, you and Ray would get along

well. That was, yeah, it was safe. So you get the final, the great offer comes that you have a 50% survival rate in this job. Well, and I didn't survive it. So, so the way this thing goes down, I joined. What did you join as? I joined as like he was trying to put together a succession plan. He had, he had a 10-year vision of the succession. So he was trying to hire a number of people who could be successors and basically came in and joined this management committee to run the place and then over time took on different things. And so I came in and went off to a pretty good start and about 18 months in, he said, I'm ready. I want to step out and be the chairman. And he wants you to be CEO. Be CEO with another guy, co-CEo. Co-CE. With a guy who I admire him was his protege who had been in a big investor. You been there for 18 months? I've been there for 18 months. So I take this job

and, you know, it's tough because Ray's trying to be chairman, but he sort of has a foot in, foot out. He's had a little time, a little hard time let go. A little time let go, right? And 18 months into it, he fires me. Fires me. I mean, and it is like, and I'm in the Wall Street Journal, and, you know, people know I've been fired and I'm debating.

I've got young kids. I'm thinking about leaving. I think he'll resign. He doesn't fire me from Bridgewater. He fires me from the job. From the CEO job. So, a little demotion. A little ego check.

Big ego check. And I make the decision to stay at least until I figure out what I'm going to do. And I'm thinking of, I'm going to leave. I notice even right now you're whispering. Exactly. I'm going to stay as long as I can. Stay as long as I can, right? And I finally start to hit my stride.

And things start to go well. And I'm building the business. And I'm, you know, I'm running around the world. I'm the biggest traveler of Bridgewater because I'm getting the clients and all that stuff. And so it starts to go great. So I'm staying. And it goes really long. But you're not CEO.

You got fired from co-CEO. Your new job is biz dev or president. President. And I remember in the book, you're saying you had the most miles of anyone at Bridgewater. Exactly. Which is a lot of miles. A lot of miles. I was all over the place, Middle East and Singapore.

Are you thinking you have a chance to go back to that CEO position? Not really. You're just thinking, I'm going to get what I can out of this, do a good job, and I'll look for another opportunity. Yeah, that's right. Or maybe after a while, maybe not even look. like after a while, you know, maybe being CEO isn't the greatest thing in the world anyway, you know, that kind of thing. And then he comes back and asks me to be the CEO again. And this time I'm saying, well, listen, I don't think, are you sure you're ready?

Because I don't think you were ready last time. And he says he's ready. And we, we, I write a note to him about what's going to be, because he's a bigger than life character. I said, you can't, yeah, let me be CEO. So I read a note to him about what would be required. So like, you know, I've got to have all rights on decisions around people. and compensation and you know we agreed on what that would be and I took the CEO job and it was with it with another person and then eventually just me and it became great what year was

that 2017 2017 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2017 so you become now the co-ceo and then the CEO Bridgewater what are you doing on a daily basis when you're in that job you know I think you're spending I'm probably spending 30% of my time with clients because business model is very engaged in consulting, helping them think about not just the Bridgewater investment, but their investments more broadly. I'm spending probably 50% of my time, trying to oversee the day-to-day management. Are we making good decisions? Are we managing our cost? Are we doing the things we need to do? I'd probably spend 20% of my time on people, 30% recruiting, you know, assessing. There's a big people piece of it. Even though it's a strong,

Relatively small firms, 1,500 people, but it's a big part of the job is getting the people right. How much of your job is tracking, like, what's going on from a financial perspective in the world so that you can at least understand the decisions that are getting made with all this money? I'm pretty engaged, but it is a machine of understanding. It's an understanding machine. There's hundreds of people that are doing nothing but understanding and compounding that understanding. and so I'm a beneficiary of all that good work, so I need to stay abreast of it, but I'm not, I'm not the investor. I am the person that's overseeing the whole enterprise in trying to make sure

the investors are doing a good job of allocating the capital. Is there any way that they stratify like the tactical investments that are happening versus the overall strategic? Do you literally assign people like, okay, you're looking at oil futures, but then someone else is looking broadly at energy. Do they have it stratified where you have tactical operators, operational operators, and then strategic operators? Is there something like that going on? Because I could see where, you know, the person that's looking at oil future, he thinks he

really has a good slice of what's going on and he's pushing for certain types of investments. And then meanwhile, somebody looking at a more strategic picture is like, oh, solar is taking over whatever the case may be. You know, the way Bridgewater invest is really unique. It's characterized as fundamental systematic. diversified. What that means is it starts with a bunch of smart people in a room trying to think about how should the economy work. How should this particular market work? What should happen when inflation goes up? What should happen when the Fed pumps a lot of money into the

system? How should that affect it for markets? Taking that understanding and then building it into an algorithm, an equation that reflects that, and then testing that over and over again. and then when that fundamental understanding is systemized in an equation, then we start to trade it in a certain way based on how much confidence we have, and we do that in a highly diversified way, so no single position counts for that much. So think about it, think about our investment strategy is a whole bunch of little P&Ls, which are the algorithms that should perform with a certain set of outcomes over time. And if the algorithm is performing like we would expect, then we keep it in.

If it's not performing like we expect, we pull it out and adjust it. And so every day is about trading based on what those algorithms are saying. It's not based on anybody waking up and saying, hey, I think this. Whatever that thinking is, it has to get built into the machine. And so that allows you to have a whole lot of capacity to scale your investment process. And the people that are working on the investing are studying different markets to try to see what they should be systemizing or what they might be missing. So it's like compounding.

The whole idea is to compound understanding because the same things in markets happen over and over again. That's the premise. So what, from a leadership perspective, what did you take? Well, let's just go through the co-CEO, fired CEO. What were your big leadership takeaways from those three things? The big two big takeaways, both which were the feedback originally. So while I didn't love being fired, I think there was merit in what the feedback was. The first one was, how do you take, and this bridgewater is like this, but lots of organizations are,

this incredibly opinionated smart inputs you're getting from everywhere, and how do you wrestle those to the ground in a way that you do a good job of making a decision? So how do you put yourself in a frame of mind where you're totally open-minded? You're not arguing. You're listening. You're countering. You're seeing different sides of a perspective. you're taking all these strong voices and synthesizing into the view that you take. And so I learned the ability that I can get into a room on any topic.

And if I have a bunch of smart people with different opinions, I can get some level of understanding and what I think we should do because I'm not anchored to my own perspective. That's a key skill in leadership. It's one, few, two people have. They think because of the leader, they have to have the answer. Yeah, no, this is definitely, I mean, we just did, I did back. to back podcast one of them was you don't need to have an opinion about everything right and recognize my growing up in the SEAL teams recognizing that just about

every question has more than one answer right and as soon as you're in that state of mind it's like look I don't care if we use your idea or my idea or which one makes the most sense that's that's what we're gonna go with which one makes the most sense and and you know what the one that you're totally passionate about if you're totally passionate about it we can roll with it because it's not gonna be that big of a deal, you know, compared to Echo's idea that he's totally passionate about, but we're just not going to do dumb things. Right. But yeah, so open mind, listening, not going in with a preconceived notion of what you think is correct. That's one lesson.

Yeah, sort of the way we would say is open-minded and assertive. So you want to be open-minded, but then you want to push and stress test. When you're hearing somebody say something, the way you get to the understanding is you have to be open-minded, but you have to stress test what they're saying to really see whether it's anchored. And that ability to get in a room with smart people stress test, be open-minded and assertive to get to resolution

on what you think you should do. It's a superpower if you can get it right. The second lesson is the lesson of just the need to drive change. So when in doubt, change. When in doubt, it's violence of action. It's when in doubt, move.

So if you're studying some and you think they're up for the job, but you're not sure, and you can't make a decision, make the decision. You know, the idea of taking decisive action, recognizing that you're going to get some stuff wrong, but that by acting you're going to learn more and then you can evolve and grow, that's an important lesson.

Both of those lessons I learned from failing the first time as a CEO, and I'm not saying I was the greatest, the second time, but I was a hell of a lot better because of those of those two lessons. Yeah, I wrote a book called Leadership Strategy and Tactics, and I talk about the iterative decision-making process. I talk about the fact that while I was in the military,

I was known as being very decisive, but I kind of cheated all the time because all I would do was look at big problems and make really small decisions really quickly and then adjust my decision based on the feedback loop that I would get. Yeah. And it sounds like that's what you're talking about. Yeah, that's exactly right.

The feedback loop's key. And don't be scared to get it wrong a little bit and just act on the feedback loop. How did you, I could only imagine the shot to your ego when you get demoted from CEO. What was that process like of saying? Hard. Yeah, hard. You know, on the surface level, I had had my challenges, but I hadn't really ever failed at anything.

So, you know, if you sort of people look at me and say, oh, he's gone from one success thing to the next, it's not quite true. But this was a clear not true. You know, this was a clear face plan. And it was hard. And because in Bridgewater World, the hero is the person that, you know, is embracing their challenges and growing and evolving. But in the world world, no, that's a big kick in the head, right? And you're trying to explain to your friends what happened. That's okay, you know.

And it was a shot to my ego. The turning point on it was just embracing it. Wait a second. Like, you know, I'm at one of the most highest performing companies in the world. I fell short. I learned a lot from it. I'm adding a ton of value. I'm getting better.

And all of a sudden, it became a superpower because I could talk to anybody about our culture at Bridgewater and say, wait a second. It's all about evolution. It's all about growing. It's all about embracing your challenges. That's how we get actually. That's how Olympic athletes become Olympic athletes. So, you know, I'm the role model on this, or I'm trying to be. and it gave me a lot of empathy,

understanding what it's like for people to fail. It gave me courage, I think, to make more decisive decisions on people that needed to, you know, needed to change jobs. So I thought it was a real gift, but at the time it didn't feel like it. Meanwhile, while you're doing, am I right, did I capture this right in the book

that you became a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee with General Mattis during this time as well? Yeah, well, I came, I became a, so I didn't know President Trump at all, but when he was elected, I got a phone call from Mike Pence, who I also didn't know that said, come interview for Treasury Secretary. So this is a funny story. I'm driving down to Bedminster, and I think this is a secret meeting, you know, where I'm

going to come in the back and interview with President Trump for Treasury Secretary. And my wife calls me on the phone and says, no, I think people are going to see you. I think it's going to be very public. I said, well, how do you know? She said, I just watched Mitt Romney walk out of Bedminster. There's like 200 cameras there. And I said, I'm not Mitt Romney. I'm going to come in the back.

And she said, I don't know. So I drive in, it's like cameras crazy. And I walk in, I interview with President Trump. And the first thing he says, I've never met me. Out of his mouth is, you'd be good on TV. That's the first thing he said when I meet him. And I interview for Treasury Secretary. I don't get the job.

but when I walk back out on the front porch, he said, I'm going to give you some good press here. And he says, I'm going to act like we're talking about something very important. So he's saying, so how's it going? What are you doing? He's like, we're not talking about anything. And then, you know, I'm standing there,

and the cameras and the thing, I'm on the main stage, and people are calling my mom and dad, what the heck is going on? And then I leave. And I don't get the job, but I get offered the job of deputy, Defense Secretary, which I decline, given where I am at Bridgewater, what I'm doing. And so I get put on the Defense Policy Board.

That's the introduction to it. And I almost went to be Deputy Defense Secretary, but declined to do that. And then President Trump came back later when I was in, later in the administration, asked me whether I want to come and do some other things. And I held off on that, but that was my initial introduction to him. But then your wife ends up working for Trump. Right. My wife ends up working for him. And how's that happen?

Same thing. She didn't know anybody. She got a call from Ivanka Trump, went in and interviewed with the president eventually. She did better than you. She did better than me. She succeeded. But then what happened, she was there for a month or two. And then a friend from the military, H.R. McMaster, who I had known from my time of the Treasury, became the national security advisor. And he asked her to be his deputy.

So she was his deputy during her year and a half in the White House. And he left. She left and he left soon after. That was kind of a bloodbath in there oftentimes. It was a tough. Yeah, it was it was tough. It wasn't a coherent team, which is, you know, tough. And cohesive?

It wasn't a cohesive team. That's right. It wasn't a cohesive team. But beyond that, it wasn't in the world of national security, which, you know, If you think about something where we need to be aligned and put a strong, clear vision forward and a face forward, it was a challenge at times. So she works there for a year and a half? A little more than, yeah, not something like that.

And when General McMaster leaves. She left a little before General McMaster came back. She was commuting. We had kids still in high school. And so she had always said she was only going to spend a year. She spent a little bit more than a year. And so what year did she wrap up there? I think she must have wrapped up in

2018. Then at what point did you decide, so you continue at Bridgewater, you continue with that job as CEO, at what point did you decide you're going to run for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania, which you did? Yeah, so...

And you failed again. Yeah. Thank you. Sorry. Thank you for calling that out. I'm going to embrace that. So the second... We're embracing, you know, our challenges. Exactly.

So he, to me said he was going to step down, I think, early in the year. And some people had approached me about running. And I thought about it and we decided not to do it. And then, you know, sort of had in the back of our mind, but decided not to do it. And then the Afghanistan thing happened. And that, to me, was such a debacle and such a humiliation, the way we left our allies hanging, the people dropping out of the wheel wells, the 13th. You know, it was just, and I thought to myself, God, I want to.

I want to get in the ring and try to do something about that. So I decided to run. We then had a health scare in our family with my wife. And we, so we said, we're not running. You know, that's a little divided. Did you leave Bridgewater? I did leave. I didn't leave.

No, in August I didn't leave. We had this health, literally, like right after we decided. And so we went through that with her. And she, by Thanksgiving, it looked like we were going to be okay. So we said, we're going to run. And I told Bridgewater. and Bridgewater said, these are people I've worked with for more than a decade. They said, great, we'll support you 100%, but stay through the end of the year so we can get a good succession, plan in place, which I did.

So I launched the campaign January 13th, and the primary was May 17th. So it was a five-month crazy, you know, crazy campaign, but a great experience. And as you're doing that, so you end up in the, this, this, this, race is the Republican for the Republican seat and you end up running against that guy Mehmet Oz right who's a guy from from I think he's on Fox News I believe is he on Fox News no he was on he was a had a huge show Oprah his initial show business move into show business was through Oprah Oprah had him on her show and then he got his own show and it was a huge show he's extremely when I was thinking about getting in

everybody said Oz has a hundred percent name I and my wife would say, well, you have no name ID, and everybody thinks McCormick's a spice. So this is going to be a problem for you. I was like, okay. But he, so he was not viewed as a conservative, but he decided to jump into the race. He had gone to medical school in Pennsylvania, and he knew President Trump quite well, and he was very close to Sean Hannity, and that was, you know, really his base of support. you make this effort and like you said you're going to go up against someone with 100% name recognition

and then you don't have any name recognition other than the fact that like you said pepper right and then trump kind of trump ends up coming on board and and supporting oz and and you did you guys know at this time you would be running against this guy fetterman yes well we didn't know for sure but was was really strong in the Democratic primary. And so, I mean, he was from, from my perspective, we thought he was a pretty good candidate to have because he was so left, so progressive. This was before any of the health issues were evident.

He was so progressive that it felt like that'd be a good matchup for a Republican because he seemed too liberal for Pennsylvania. So you, you know, and you go into some really interesting details and interesting is a word. it's just it's a little bit it's hard to read you know when you read you start reading about all that's going on the political situation and just what you're up against and like how these elections are taking place it's worth reading the book just so you better understand that because I think it gives people a better perspective when these elections are happening of what's going on and what they actually mean you're you're going through that and then and then Oz wins and then Oz loses to Federman

which it seemed kind of shocking. Why did that happen? Yes, I'm unclear. I think there's a couple things that happened. I think Oz had trouble convincing Pennsylvanians that he was a Pennsylvania. I think in the end. You're like seventh, seventh generation.

Seven generation. You're seventh generation of Pennsylvania. Thank you for repeating that, Chaka. That's impressive. I live in California where there's like very few people that are more than first generation. Everyone's, everyone moved here like three weeks ago. Never mind first generation.

Yeah, so he, he had that, that was tough. That was tough. And then he, I think Federman ran a really clever campaign, particularly given his health issues, where he didn't get exposed until late in the cycle with the debates. They ran a very successful mail-in ballot campaign where he had 700,000 mail-in ballots before the election day. So he was an elite.

And then I think the, the Dobbs decision really motivated turnout and and I think that that was that all made it a harder hand for Oz than he expected yeah that was very strange to watch unfold and again it sort of shows you as a just normal American citizen it was shocking to me it was shocking to me to see that happen and then Trump weighing in for Oz how did that does that make people You know, Trump being such a divisive figure, does that make people come out stronger against the person that Trump supports? Yeah, you know, when we got into it, we were very clear-eyed. You know, I'd never run for elected office, but my wife and I have been around politics enough to know.

So we thought we had to do five things to win. These are, this is a hard, hard thing to get right. We thought we had to appeal to the base, which are largely Trump voters, MAGA voters. That's right where I grew up in Pennsylvania. my military background we thought would appeal. My policies, I thought President Trump had done a number of good things on policy, would appeal. So that was first. We also had to appeal to the more moderate Republicans around Philadelphia.

40% of the voters are in the five counties around Philadelphia. So we had to run a campaign that appealed to both conservative elements and more moderate elements. We had to run a campaign that didn't require President Trump's endorsement. We didn't believe we needed that to win, but we believed we didn't, you know, have him attacking us. Him attacking us would be a problem, which eventually was. But it's a purple state. So you need to run a campaign that can also get independence and conservative Democrats.

And then finally, you got to wake up every morning and look in the mirror and like that person and say, I believe that this guy's running for the right reasons and staying true to his values. That's what you got to do to succeed. And in the end, I think that path was the path I was on. President Trump, I had heard he was going to endorse Oz. He knew Oz and all that. I had expected that was a possibility. I hoped it wouldn't happen.

So I called him. And I said, I'd like to come down and talk to you. This is probably, I don't know, six weeks out. And I said, I was winning. I was up in the polls by about eight points. So I went to Marlago. And President Trump came in and he asked his assistant to come in and run a video that he had taken. And the video basically had me.

talking about that I was being asked on Bloomberg about the January 6th and I in the polarization of the country I just said as a leader President Trump shares responsibility for that and and then Biden came up on this screen and saying he wanted to unify the country and the interviewer said what do you think of that and I said I wish him well he's our president I wish him well and unifying the country so President Trump was upset that I had said those two things he said those are very bad very bad and then he said to me you know Dave you can't win unless you say the 2020 election was stolen.

And I said, Mr. President, I'm not going to say that. And so based on that, he endorsed Oz two days later, and I was still winning. Did Oz say that the 2020 election was stolen? He didn't say that exactly. He said we need to go back and look at it and said a bunch of things. And then what happened was 10 days before the election, they did a rally. I was still up in the polls, and President Trump came to town. And he laid into me.

He took me to the woodshed. And they made a commercial out of that. And that ultimately, I think, was when you lose by 900 votes, there was one point four million cast and I lost by 900. So when you lose by 900 votes, there's lots of things you could have done differently, but certainly having President Trump opposed to me, didn't help me any. Is that Dr. Oz? Yes, that's who it is. Yeah. Yeah, it's Dr.

Oz. I think I've seen him on Fox News getting it. That's why I thought he's been interviewed a lot on Fox News. That's probably it. But he didn't have a show there. Yeah. But he had a show, though. Right.

Yeah. He said he was on Oprah. Then he had Dr. Oz. Right. It's a big show. Yeah. What do you think of this guy?

Because I don't really know him. Echo Charles. I don't know. I don't know him politically. What kind of show was it? It was like a doctor kind of talk show. You know, like, hey, you got pimples here's a way to pop it. For real.

For real? Oh yeah. That's what it was. Like, hey, you have gastrointestinal scenarios going on. Here's what you can eat. And it's like a health show. Healthy medical. Right.

You know. And then they had another one called like the doctors. Yeah. You do a lot of daytime TV. Well, he does a lot of TV, period. That's because we entered his strong zone right there. Man, I have a certain unique level of expertise in many things. And while you, so as you're going through this whole thing, that's when you decide that,

that's when you decide and you start writing this book right here. Well, no, I started writing the book a couple years earlier. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'd sold the book to Center Street based on this idea of the country, you know, Everybody's talking about decline. America's in decline. And there's not a lot of talk about what to do. And I said, like, I agree it's in decline.

Now I'd like to write the what to do book. And so I started writing it. And I got about with this great guy, James Cunningham, who was my colleague. And I got about 60% done. Then I decided to run. So the book kind of went on hold. And then I finished it after.

All right. So this book, and again, look, I've read a couple excerpts from the book. and get the book for the for the stories but then really essentially what you said this book isn't you use the stories anecdotally to support what you're talking about or to give some background but essentially this book is what are we supposed to do what should we be doing right now um let's talk through some of that stuff um you know first of all let's talk about the fact is american in decline you said yes you agree why are we in decline what's happening yeah it's it's a it's a moment it's

We're in economic decline. So what's that mean? We're $31 trillion of debt. We have 40 or high in inflation. Hey, if I was a family guy and I had a family, I had three kids. Well, we'll just make it me. I'm four kids. And I have, what, how much debt do we have?

31 trillion. 31 trillion. What's that? If you put that into household terms, how far into debt as is my family and I make, let's say I make 50 grand a year? I think it's something. like a hundred thousand dollars per person if you take the population of the United States divide divided by 31 trillion yeah okay let me what I what I want is a is a

comparison for my family for my family to be 30 trillion dollars of debt how much debt is is my family and I make 50 grand a year yeah so your family is your family is You're in debt by, you make $50,000 a year and you're in debt by over $100,000, $120,000. Because our GDP is $18 trillion or something like that. And our debt is $32 trillion. So if I say, hey, my mortgage, you know, I got a $200,000 mortgage. So that doesn't sound that bad. Yeah, you got a $200,000 mortgage, but you've got an asset, right?

So the problem is that you've got this mountain of debt. And the servicing of that debt is getting more and more expensive. is interest rates goes up. So the government, that's crowding out our capacity to invest in the things that we need to make America great. And on top of that, it's one of the big drivers of inflation. And that the problem that your family has is not only the debt, the problem they have is that inflation hurts us all, but it really hurts working families because your dollars, your $50,000 is buying less and less than it used to. And so working families and elders on fixed income or who gets screwed by inflation. And that's a big problem. If you have assets,

then you're living large right now. That's the big thing I learned on the campaign trail. They saw it up close and personal. The last 20 years have sucked for a big chunk of Americans. If you had assets, you did great. All these people with assets, investors, they think they think they're geniuses. Every asset went up in the last 20 years, right? But if you were a living paycheck to paycheck, which is 60% of Americans, 90% percent of Americans, 90% percent, percent of Americans don't have any material assets. Real income's been flat and inflation's gone up. Crimes gone up. Drug crisis has gone up. It's been a bad 20 years for a big chunk of Americans. And those are the people that are most pissed off about the direction of the country.

So going back to this metaphor, if I am $200,000 in debt, I make $50,000 a year, but it's not a mortgage because it's not against a house. It's like money that I blew. Right. Yeah. It's like debt, it's like debt you have hanging out there with no asset behind it. And it's on a credit card and the interest rate is high. And it's starting to get to a point where my monthly paycheck no longer covers the interest rate, just the interest rate on the money that I owe. That's perfect metaphor. That's where we're at. That's where we're at. And so the economic problem's big, but the national security problem is big because we have this emergent challenge with China. We talked about the technology leadership. We talked about their capacity to challenge us on the world stage,

but we also have a spiritual crisis because the notion that America is exceptional, the notion that a country conceived with individual freedom as the driver is at risk. You see this in what the history being taught in our schools about America conceived in sin. You see this in our business community where the idea of capitalism and merit is chipping way. You see it in the military where the climate change strategy is coming before the military strategy, where this progressive ideology. So all of these things are leading to 80% of Americans thinking the country's headed into the wrong direction. Two-thirds of Americans think that their kids are going to be less well off than they are.

60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. That's why we're in decline. And so that's the bad news, and it's bad. The good news is we've been here before. This is the American story. We get to the edge of the cliff. We pull ourselves back. It happened before World War II.

It happened in the Civil War. It happened in my lifetime in the late 70s. We had 16% inflation. We had gas lines around the block. We had odd days and even days. You could only go get gas on the odd day or the even day, right? I remember that too. Right?

We had Desert One, this disaster where we lost eight service members on the Iranian sands where we tried to rescue our hostages, right? Four years later, I'm at West Point. You're joining the Navy. And we have inflation under control. The economy's on fire. We're in the middle of the Reagan defense buildup. There's optimism.

There's hope. It's mourning in America. And four years later, Ronald Reagan, with some of the policies we need to do now, but also some new policies for now that we need to do now, not just Reagan policies. But leadership makes a big difference. So this isn't hopeless. Declines not inevitable, but neither is renewal. It depends on what we do. And that's what, if you're worried about one thing today, I think the thing you should most worry about is if you're,

you turn on the TV if you read the newspaper, there's not a hell of a lot of people saying, talking about what we should do. It's mostly backwards looking, it's mostly grievance looking, there's not a lot of vision forward looking, and that's what I'm trying to do in the book. So some of the things that you point out in the book

is cultivating our nation's talent, which is a reform of education, a focus on education, technology, which you've mentioned somewhat already, you have a quote in the book from The Economist, and it says the world's most valuable resource is no longer oil but data. Yeah. Yeah.

So there's three pillars that I'm talking about. And you know, when you're a CEO and you know this with your businesses, there's like 100 things you could fix. There's so many things you need to fix. And the challenge is to pick the three things or four things and get focused on what's going to make the biggest difference. And these three things that I'm zeroing in on, I think have the best chance of bringing back a renewal. in America, but also helping us to confront China. Because the biggest thing we need to do with China, I'll talk about what to do in confronting China, but we need to go to the gym. We need to build our muscle at home. And so it starts with our people. Our people are our number one asset,

and school choice is the path to reforming our school systems. Conservatives have been beaten the drum for school choice for decades. COVID was a huge step forward because you had parents looking over the shoulders of their kids and seeing the history that's being taught and seeing the terrible scores and standards that we have in terms of we're 22nd in the world among industrialized countries. They see the sexualism that's being taught in our schools. So school choice really has a moment where conservative governors, school board elections, there's a real turn, and I'm optimistic. Second thing is something I know you feel strongly about, which is we need skilled training. Not every kid needs a four-year education, right?

I'm on the campaign trail. I'm going to fracking sites, these great $100,000 a year technical jobs. They're importing kids from Oklahoma and Texas because we don't have skilled training programs. Every manufacturer I visit in Pennsylvania, their biggest inhibitor to growth, skilled workers. So we need to take the GI Bill, all sorts of benefits, and double down on our capacity

to help our young people get skilled training that's going to give them great middle class lives and opportunities. Yeah, and quit brainwashing them that the only path they can take out of high school is to go to college. Totally. Which is a path for not. everybody. In fact, I would go so far as to say this, most kids could at least go out and spend

four or five years doing a trade, doing something that doesn't take any college whatsoever. And cool, if you want to go to college, good, but you're going to end up in debt. You better figure out that that's what you want to do. Look, you're a great example. You went to a four-year college that got your degree in engineering something you realized two years into is something you never wanted to do. And it wasn't very good at. That's a classic example.

But luckily you were in the army and you ended up with a job in the army, you figured out your path. But a lot of kids are trying to make a decision of what they want to do for the rest of their life when they're 18 years old. They don't know what they want to do. They need to go out there and get a job, get a trade, get a technical skill. And perhaps that leads to a great life. And you can get further education on down the line. So we got the choice of schools, which again seems so obvious. And if you've been a parent, I got four kids.

Like you got four kids. You can look at the schools and you can figure out. what's going on. And imagine being in a situation where your kid, you don't want your kid to go to that school, and you're not allowed to do it. Right. That's crazy.

Well, and the thing that, the thing about the school choice that's so ironic is the people that hurts most are minorities and working families because they can't afford another choice, right? They can't afford, that middle class white people in the suburbs of Philadelphia can afford a choice. African American kids in downtown Philadelphia can't afford choice. So if you want to create opportunity for all, what America is supposed to be about,

school choice is the way you do it. You put the money with the kid, and that's the path to creating competition and quality. So that's a big piece of it. The other thing I talk about, which is really important is immigration. And the border is a disaster. I went to see it. We've got to stop it. The fentanyl crisis in Pennsylvania, we lost 5,000 people.

We've got to stop the border. We've got to get illegal immigration under control. Biden's been a disaster. But we also have to... Have you gone down to see the border here? Diego no no I've gone to Yuma went in Arizona yeah I mean you can see the same thing here we got friends that are border patrol it's crazy it's you know it's it's it's actually insane right it's actually insane what's going on I mean when you talk to the guys that are on the

ground supposed to be protecting the border their border patrol they have waves of people coming over when they come over and they get then they get obtained by the border patrol what patrol takes them to a hotel Yeah. Gives them money, a phone, and a report date six months in the future and then says, good luck. See ya. That's what happens. I think they get $1,700 or $1,300 or something like that.

All of them. Yeah. And then they never see them again, obviously. That's what's happening. It's happening every single bad. It's crazy to think about. Well, you know, the ironic thing is that, I mean, a place like Pennsylvania is a big deal. I mean, Pennsylvania is one of the worst states in the country on fentanyl.

That fentanyl crosses the border. The cartels manage it through, you know how small and compact it is. They can come across border. In 24 to 48 hours, they can be in the northeast part of the country. My hometown's right on Route 80, and these small communities have this huge influx of fentanyl. Fentanyl is super cheap. It's super compact. So they cut everything with fentanyl.

So marijuana, whatever. So all of a sudden, you get people at, or worse, dead, and that 5,000 deaths in Pennsylvania, doesn't even include all the people that are in drug rehab and everything else. So this is like a huge blight on our society. So we gotta fix that, but the thing we can't lose is that reforming skilled immigration

is also an important part of the future. So we can have legal immigration that works. My wife's a legal immigrant from Egypt. My wife's a legal immigrant from England. Yeah, we gotta do this, right? We can't, so that's the talent piece. The technology piece is, here's the reality. We are competing on a terribly unlevel playing field.

So if you want to make microchips, then you've got to have way more capital. You've got to deregulate in a lot of these technologies. And the Chinese are heavily subsidizing these state-owned enterprises. So it's a tragedy that we have lost our domestic semiconductor industry. I mean, 90% of the semiconductors that we need are manufactured 90 miles from mainland China, right? China's built 32 chip fabs in the last 10 years. We built zero. So this is the result of stupidity.

And we're going to have to change that. And the way I describe it in the book, we can't become China. And we can't become the Democrats with this industrial policy that we just are giving money to companies and imposing all sorts of social policies like daycare and diversity inclusion, right? We can't do either. We need to have a unique American innovation policy where we essentially use public policy with tax incentives. or capital to draw private sector capital into the areas that are most important for us strategically. And that's the way to let the private sector forces work. So let me give me an example.

If you want to compete in the AI industry, create a fund. The private sector invests $10 billion. The U.S. government invests $10 billion. And that private sector capital is allocated to companies, that capital is allocated to companies based on where they think the highest return is. And the U.S. government takes first loss, so we make the capital a little more attractive and caps its upside at 15%. So you just took a private sector opportunity

and you just juice the return. There's going to be a lot of private sector capital that flows into that and you're going to keep the benefit of our capitalist constructive destruction that we have in our system. So those are the kinds of things that I recommend in the book.

And then just broadly speaking, China. Like for I mean I think first of all people don't recognize there's plenty of people that don't recognize what's happening with China You already went into what China's doing what they've been doing and what they're trying to do It's really obvious to anybody that pays attention to this kind of thing So what's what do we do in broadly speaking for China? China China has a plan we don't have a plan so for us I think there's three or four things we need to do first we need to strategically decouple What does that mean?

semiconductors, pharmaceutical, satellites, 5G, we can't be dependent on China for those things. We need either have those things at home or we need to have them in those supply chains in the hands of our closest allies. Second, we can't invest in Chinese companies that are doing things that are in direct support of the PLA or the Communist Party. So right today, in California, in the Silicon Valley, there are companies that are investing in artificial, intelligent companies in China that do business with the Communist Party. We can't do that. We have to stop that. There needs a review process that stops that. We need to hold China accountable for bad behavior. COVID is the best example. So here we go. Three years ago, it was suggested that maybe the virus that started in Wuhan might be affiliated

with the Wuhan lab that does research on such viruses. That was heresy. The liberal media went crazy on that. Here we are three years later, the intelligence services say that's a strong possibility. So we got to hold China accountable for those kinds of things by sanctioning them and calling it out. We're not even calling it out. And then the fourth thing we need to do is have a smart ally strategy with Australia, Japan, and South Korea to really isolate China in the South Pacific and really build alliances that give us added power. Those are the four things we need to do. Now, here's the rub.

I'm not saying, and some of my colleagues and friends are, that we should cut off all relationships with China. I think we have to coexist with China economically, too. So in York, Pennsylvania, in one day, I walk into a manufacturing shop, those Chinese, they're dumping on steel. We got to sanction them. We got to stop globalization. We got to go after the Chinese.

I'm running as a kid. I hear you. I go next door. It's a machine. shop that builds racks for Harley Davidson motorcycles. Harley Davidson's based in New York. They build motorcycles. And the guy says, whatever you do, don't mess around with China.

That's our biggest market. So that's the reality of manufacturing. So I'm not making the case that we need to stop all trade with China. I am making the case, China is a threat. And we have to make sure the most strategic things are done here at home and hold China accountable. Yeah, clearly, I'm doing my best over here. We're making clothing in America. not in China.

We got factories in Maine. We got factories in North Carolina. We're going to build more factories. But that's just one industry and clearly all industries. And that's a very basic industry. Now, listen, it is an important industry. But the rest of manufacturing needs to be moved back here clearly. You lay out all these in much more detail in the book.

And as you said, it's someone that sat down and thought, okay, what do we actually do about all this? So that is the premise of the book. I kind of want to wrap up here, just reading a, to close out the book here, you say, we are at a pivotal moment in our nation's history. Behind us, we see a grand legacy of victory and failure, ingenuity, and war, decline, and renewal, all of which have brought us to this point. Ahead of us lies a great unchartered territory. It is up to us to change.

choose the path and is up to our leaders to guide the way, uniting us once again around the creed of liberty and opportunity that binds our national fabric. This is the exceptional American story. We get to the edge of the cliff, then pull ourselves back. America can renew itself with a rebirth of liberty, opportunity, and American power, but we all must do our part to fulfill that promise. Americans are a resilient bunch. They know how to take a punch. And no matter how many times they get knocked down, they always get back up. Though times may be tough, they believe in America.

They believe we can do better. They believe we can revive our nation and achieve America's promise. Their faith is the rally point I return to when my own fails. And it fills me with an unerring confidence that we can, and must meet the moment. So we certainly have to meet the moment. And, you know, I know you reference Reagan a decent amount in the book, but, you know, we are the last hope.

Yeah. And we have to step up. Yeah. No doubt about it. Well, there's this great, there's this great quote from William F. Buckley, who's this great conservative, as you know. And he talks about citizenship. And citizenship is a privilege to be born and to live and to prosper in the greatest

country in the history of the world. But it's also a responsibility to do everything we can to preserve it. And so right now I think we're long on privilege and short on responsibility. And I think that's what's going to have to change to make what I'm talking about there a reality. And I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. So what do the citizens need to do? Well, need to vote.

Need to vote. Elections have consequences. If there is any doubt about that, go to Pennsylvania. Look at what happened there. I don't think anybody in Pennsylvania is looking at their senator right now and John Federman and saying, we are being well represented. And so they got to vote. They got to be active.

Right now, what's happening is that 15% of people on the right and the left are driving the national conversation. They are driving where we're headed as a country. And 70% of the people in the middle who agree on a lot of stuff are basically not being represented because they're not actively voting. And, you know, unfortunately, and not actively participating, rather, and unfortunately, until we really mobilize ourselves around what we need to be successful, which is solutions that are looking forward, competence. It used to be that public life and public office was based on competence and success. Those were the drivers, right? And we don't see that.

So the last part of the book talks about, you know, you can have all these great ideas, but if you don't have leadership, leadership really matters. And it doesn't, you know, we don't need thousands of leaders. We just need a handful of the right people in the right places. You know that from your career. The right people in the right places at the right time can change the future of everything. And that's what we need. So it doesn't, we just need to keep pushing.

You think you're going to take another crack at this thing? Thinking hard about it. You know, last time I was outvoted seven to one, and I did it anyway. Six daughters and one wife. So we're rallying the votes again. We'll see what happens. Where can people find you? Dave McCormickbook.com.

And I'd appreciate any engagement on the book. The book is meant to be a real effort to say what we should do. And I think the more we're going to be. we can talk about what we should do, I think the more we're going to be in the right direction. And then you're on Twitter at Dave McCormick, PA. Yep. Instagram, Dave McCormick, PA, you're Dave McCormickpa.com as well. That's right.

So, I don't know, if you decide you're going to take another crack at it, that's where people can find you. Echo Charles. Yes, sir. You got any questions? Yeah, quick one. Gonna rewind. Brace yourself. Yeah, yeah.

This is the intense part right here. This is actually the thing I kind of always want. So, okay, so you reference playing football two days or camp, football camp, right? Fall camp. Yeah. Is that two days? Yeah. Okay, so how would you compare, and how long is that one week or two weeks?

I think it's two weeks. Yeah, too. So how would you compare boot camp to that as far as like lack of freedom and just like the constant? Oh, man. Boot camp had no freedom. And Rangers School had even less freedom, where like you literally have. no agency. Even moment to moment. No, everything, everything. You got a you got a drill, drill instructor crawling up here, you know what? The whole time. Because I remember in football camp,

same deal, two days, but aside from just resting between workouts and stuff and meeting, we had a lack of freedom as well. That's the only reference I have obviously, I'm going to boot camp. But, so I always wonder, like, how does that compare? So it's like way worse. Way worse. Way worse. I understand. Way worse. Way worse. That's why it shocks people. Yeah. You know, that's why it's why it's, I think the loss of freedom is the biggest shock when you go to boot camp. Yeah, because I have friends who I played football with who went into the military and stuff, and they said it's, they said, it's just like football just worse.

Maybe physically. That might be physically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're good. Thank you.

All right on. Any, David, any closing thoughts? No. Hey, listen, thank you for having me. I'm going downstairs and looking at the merch section. See what you got. We got plenty of merch, that's for sure. Appreciate you coming on.

Appreciate you joining us and sharing your lessons learned. And obviously, thanks for your service. Leading troops in combat and protecting and preserving our great nation. And thanks for coming on and sharing the battle plan to renew America. Thanks for having me. Thanks for everything you're doing. And with that, David McCorm. Rick has left the building.

Echo Charles. Yes. Maybe the country's in rough shape. You know? We talk to Mike Glover. You know, we got to be ready on that perspective. Gotta be prepared. You know, we got to do what we can to help the country out.

One thing you can do is, you know, when you want to help out the country, we want to help out the world, when you want to make things better, start with yourself. You know what I'm saying? Start with yourself. Get your own world in order. That's a good place to start and it will help the rest of the world as well. So you know read study exercise do some jiu-jitsu is my recommendation. Okay, maybe get yourself some some workout of the day.

Sure, hell yeah. You know what I was there. So there you go when you do that kind of stuff you're gonna need to fuel your body and do that. I recommend I recommend you do that with JoccoFuel at joccofuel. I recommend you get some protein. I just in the break had a protein. I had a protein cookie and I had a protein mulk.

You're talking 17 plus 30. You know what that is? Sure, 47. 47 grams of protein I just got in in four minutes. Yeah, probably less than that. That's no joke. Yeah. That's legit.

Oh, yeah. I'm rebuilding. Yeah. And if you're, okay. As we speak. You're over there. Are you catabolic right now? I had a mulk shake.

Okay. So what was in the game? G-TG. Good to go. Yeah, fully. And hey, so, you know, we always say, hey, we recommend Jocko fuel. Right? We say why, but I think it's important to say, I think, I don't know, I could be wrong.

But it's important to say, hey, I recommend this fuel and this is why. Okay, because, hey, look, let's face it, there's a lot of fuel out there. There's supplements, there's this and that or whatever. But along with, let's say your garden variety supplementation is some downside. There's no downside for this one. It's a beautiful thing. Like, consider the energy drinks, no poison in there. No sugar in there.

No oddball preservatives that your body is going to reject, by the way. And there's a whole physiological process for that rejection, which is it's not fun to listen to. But it happens nonetheless. These other ones, it's true. 100%. Very little of what you say is fun to listen to. Okay.

All right, man. You're going to be glad you know this stuff if you don't. I'm telling you. I'm just saying. This is the clean fuel, Jocco fuel. So keep that in mind. I think it's important. All right.

So there you go. Jocofuel.com. Get yourself some joint warfare. Get yourself some super krill. Just get yourself some jocco fuel. You can get it at joccofuel.com. You can get it at joccofuel.com. You can get it at Wawa, go that bottom right.

We're getting to squeeze at Wawa. That's okay. We're at G&C. What do you mean get that bottom right? What is that? That's where in the shelves. Oh, okay, yes. When you approach the shelf.

The big beverage empires bought our space. Yeah. For a lot of money. Yeah. Because they're just, they're big empires. I get it.

They see a rebel threat. And they're like, we got to eliminate this. Bro, I'll tell you what that's like. I feel like I told you this. It's Star Wars, bro, to be honest with you. Yes. But you know what they did was they pull, you know, like when you do Google search, right? You have all the sponsored ads in front.

It doesn't necessarily it's the most appropriate for you. It's just the ones that they paid for. In this case, it's not appropriate for you. It's actually bad for you. That's what I'm saying. They're paying money to poison you. Yeah. They get in front of your eyeballs when you walk in that in that aisle.

We're not down for that. So just like how you said, look down to the right, just like you have the scroll. Roll down to maybe the third or fourth option, the real one, the organic, the real one. Yeah, there you go. So, there you go. You can get it there, vitamin shop, G&C, military commissaries, Hanifords, dash stores in Maryland, Wake Fern, shopper, H.E.B. You know we're in H.E.B. going strong.

You know, we're in Meyer up in the Midwest. They're Harris Teeter. I saw someone tweeted where we went to Harris Tweeter out of stock. Always bums me out. It kind of bums me out, but also makes me fired up because that means a bunch of people in there getting it. Get more. We'll send more.

Sorry if it's not in stock. Lifetime Fitness. Shields just went into Shields. Those are some incredible stores. We're in a bunch of small gyms everywhere. That's growing. That's growing. Jiu-Jitsu gyms, cross-fit gyms,

people that are getting after it in one of those two ways, they want access to the good stuff, the Janko Fuel. If you own one of those gyms, if you want a Jiu-Jitsu Academy or you want a CrossFit gym, you can email or any kind of gym or any kind of Jiu-Jitsu Academy. You don't need to be a very gym. Victory, you could be any, any kind of gym, any kind of fitness location. Hey, look, it could be a knitting club.

Yeah. If you got knitters that are like, you need to focus during that last little knot that you're tying. That's true. Knitting clubs, you're welcome into the game. My youngest daughter went through like a knit phase. Bro, knitting is something I can't do. I don't have the attention span. It's a tedious job.

Knitting. You've seen the two sticks and they're knitting? Yeah, yeah, fully knitting, crocheting. You know what macromay is? Yeah, yeah, all that stuff. Bro, I did that. Yeah, I did it. I made like one knot and it was like throwing it at the wall

and stabbing somebody with the needle thing. That's what I'm doing. That makes sense. Hey, no matter what your little club is, if you've got that, you want that wholesale account, go to J.F Sales at joccofuel.com. Get yourself some of that. Thank you for the support.

Jock Fuel, growing, taking over. You know why? You make a good product that's clean and people are down for the cause. Who here is like, oh, I really like to go to the store and get some poison for my body. No one's saying that. look they might want the the upside they might want the upside they don't want the

downside but if there's not that option they just get what they get you don't do that anymore people are down so let's keep getting after at joccofuel dot com well that's where we got it's true also origin USA hey to talk about supply chains and all this stuff that you can do this is another thing you can do it's a big deal and man I you know how and I got to admit yes didn't think it was a patriotic move to buy a pair of jeans yeah didn't think you didn't think you supporting national security to buy a pair of jeans or to buy an American you weren't like oh I'm gonna help America with its national security today I'm gonna

go buy a jiu jih T-jitsu ghi from origin USA you didn't think that you didn't think the t-shirt was like oh now I'm really gonna help out the United States of America and our national security and my children and my grandchildren it's true I cut you off go ahead no no that that's actually part of what I was gonna say like you don't realize I mean I'm with you but you don't really realize it you know and And then it kind of, and it stands to reason that after a while when you think about it, you're like, wait a second. If I go and buy, even this goes for the, like energy drinks, for example, if I go and buy the poison one or the one that's just readily available without making the effort to look down into the right to see the clean one made in America, by the way. And I keep buying that poison one.

Now it's off the shelf. Now the poison producer just produces more. So, you know, so it's like this cycle. You see what I'm saying? And if you don't do the right in the in the in the in the in the in the case of American made if you don't do that we don't get that cycle going And that's kind of what's been happening no it's not happening anymore we're going the cycle in the other direction there Origin USA dot com get your hunt gear get your have you seen the RTX gear? Oh, I think you might have got some for me today or tomorrow. Oh really? I think so

But no the answer is no no no if if I got a box and it came to my house. Yeah And they didn't put Echo Charles on some shit? That's yours. That's mine. All right. Yes, sir. Well, we got some. Yes.

We definitely have some over on my side of the table. All right. There you go. The RTS tech training, training gear. It's been a long time coming. This is probably one of the first things I talked to Pete about. You know, we need a quick dry wicking, antifungal, like all those things. T-shirt.

Now. Yeah. It took a longer. Why? Because supply chains were jacked up because of what you do. just said. So they're not jacked up anymore. We got you covered. We got the shorts. We got the tops, the wicking, quick dry athletic training t-shirts. So all that stuff's coming. So stand by to get some of that. That's at origin, USA.com made. Not made in China. So there you go. What else?

Also, Jocko has a store called Jocko Store. This is one where, look, we're all in this path. maybe together, maybe individually, everything. Get an Origin USA Rashgard that is made in America, but it's from Jocko Store. That way you get, maybe you might like those designs better. Maybe. You might. Hey, man, you might. Maybe like the origin designs.

It's cool. You can go there. It is cool. But you can also go to Jocker store and get more of a jocco design. Yeah, it's a little bit different of a, how should I say this? Like the vibe. The vibe. The identity, I guess.

Maybe that's not the right one, but either way. Either way, you're supporting national security in this nation. It's true. Yeah. So, yeah, if you want to represent, discipline equals freedom. If you want to represent good. It's almost like a very personal element of your thinking on the path. I would say that's the best way to put it as of right now.

It's hard to skip a workout when you're wearing a Discipline equals Freedom T-shirt. Very hard. Or Rashgard. Very hard. It can be challenging. Very challenging. I don't recommend it. That's true.

Also, we have the on there. We have the shirt locker, which is the new design. Every month subscription scenario a little bit most recent ones seem quite popular most recently. Yeah, I got yeah literally got text and DMs saying like hey man's Just a very specific request for that design Okay, yeah there you know people seem to like it's called the shirt locker you know you click on there, but anyway Yeah, so on jocco store.com if you like something it's so jaco underground.com go subscribe to that so you can get the the the additional podcast that we do, which is called Jocka Wonderground, and we talk about subjects that are adjacent to,

yet not the same as this podcast. They're a little bit more focused on life. Yeah. A little bit more focused on pragmatic information to utilize immediately without filter. Yep. Yeah. Where it kind of sorted itself out to be straight up every week, life advice from Jocco.

That's definitely what it is. answering questions which is life advice exactly right very elaborate questions you know that that actually do apply to more people than just for sure that's a question so there you go jock underground dot com hey look it costs $8 and $18 a month that's how we own that that platform and we can never be denied our freedom on that platform because it's ours if you can't afford it that's okay email assistance at jocco underground dot com that's what we're doing it for we got a youtube thing Subscribe to that. Subscribe to Origin USA, YouTube, see what's going on at Origin USA. Check out the Jocko Fuel YouTube, where they're putting longer pieces of content together for you about what's going on there. Flipside canvas. Check out Dakota Meyer stuff to hang on your wall. You're going to want that stuff on your wall. Books, of course, we got Super Power in Peril by Dave McCormick. You heard some excerpts from it today. Check that out. And then, of course, I wrote a bunch of books, too. I wrote a bunch of books. Go check those, especially the kids book, to be honest with you.

You know, like you can impact a child infinitely by getting them these books. I know that because I've gotten thousands of messages, emails, letters about that impact. So if you know any kids, go right now to warrior kid.com and just order all the books for these kids that you know and you'll help them all. We also have Eshalon Front, which is a leadership consultant. where we solve problems through leadership go to eslamfront.com for that we have live events we also have an online training academy at extreme ownership.com where we help leaders from all walks of life in every level of leadership and we help them solve their problems there's courses you can take there's live sessions that you can join that's what we're doing extreme ownership.com

and if you want to help service members active and retired you want to help their families you want to help Star Families check out Mark Lee's mom mama Lee she's got a charity organization and if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to America's mighty warriors.org and don't forget about Micah Fink who right now is sitting beside a river that he just did a seven minute cold bath in now he's reheating his body on a fire that he started with a stick that's what's happening right now so check out heroes and horses.org once again if you want to connect with Dave McCormick, Twitter, Instagram.

He's at Dave McCormick, PA, and he's also on the web, Dave McCormick, PA.com. I don't know if he's running again. I don't know. Kind of sounded like he was leaning. He's a guy that's patriotic. He's a guy that wants to help America.

He doesn't have to run. I mean, he's obviously in a position in his life where he can kind of do what he wants, but he loves the country. So that's the type of person that's stepping up. So check him out and then of course on the interwebs Echo and I are also there echoes that echo Charles And I'm at jocco willing just watch out when you go on there because the algorithm is gonna try and grab you by your ankle

And drag you down into the underworld of wasted time and wasted opportunity Beyond that once again thanks to Dave McCormick for joining us Thanks for sharing your lessons learned. Thanks for your service to our great nation and also thanks to all military person L out there right now who are on the front lines as we speak keeping evil at bay we thank you all for standing the watch and to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders thank you for keeping evil at bay here at home and to everyone else out there to everyone else out there, the world can be a dark place.

And you can read about it and you can watch it on the news. There's a lot of bad things happening in the world. And you can focus on how bad it is and you can surrender your mind to that darkness. Or you can decide to do something about it. You can decide to make it better. And listen, maybe you can't change the whole world. Maybe you can't change the whole world, but I guarantee you can change your world. You can square your life away.

You can get smarter. You can get stronger. You can get faster. Healthier. You can get better. You can help your friends. You can help your family. You can help your neighbors across the street.

You can clean up your yard. You can repair that fence. You can replace the light in the garage. You can be better. You can make your world better. And when you do that, you make the whole world better. So don't complain anymore. Don't surrender to the darkness.

Instead, go get to work. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.