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