Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Jaco Willink, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL, coauthor of Extreme
00:00:06 Ownership, Dichotomy of Leadership, Discipline Equals Freedom, and many other excellent books,
00:00:11 and he’s the host of Jaco’s podcast. Jaco spent 20 years in the SEAL teams. He was the commander
00:00:18 of SEAL Team 3’s Task Unit Bruiser that became the most highly decorated Special Operations unit
00:00:24 of the Iraq War. This conversation was intense and to the point. We agreed to talk again,
00:00:31 probably many times, and what I find very interesting, aside from the talk of leadership,
00:00:38 is the conversation about military tactics of specific battles in history.
00:01:25 I do happen to at times mention that I’m Russian. This is what I mean, that I got a bit of that
00:01:31 Russian soul. But of course who I really am is an American. This country gave me the opportunity,
00:01:39 the freedom to become and to be who I am, to stand as an individual. This seemingly
00:01:45 simple freedom to be a sovereign human being in the face of all the beauty and cruelty of life
00:01:50 is why I love this country. Much of life can be unfair, unjust, even tragic. But this is the
00:01:57 country where if I’m clever enough or card enough and just get lucky enough I have a chance to dream
00:02:04 big and make my dream a reality. The United States welcomed me, my family, and millions of immigrants
00:02:10 throughout its history so that we can make something meaningful of ourselves. To love,
00:02:15 to dream, to create, to find joy and meaning. It lets me be the weird kid I am who wears a suit,
00:02:21 talks about love, and has a fascination with robots. I know some people these days have an
00:02:27 aversion to pride and love for their country. I don’t. I love America. I also love humanity.
00:02:35 I believe these two, patriotism and humanism, are not in conflict, much like loving your family and
00:02:42 loving your country are not in conflict. They are all manifestations of the human spirit,
00:02:47 longing to strive for a better world. I was born a Russian, but I believe I will die an American.
00:02:54 A proud American. Hopefully not too soon, but life is short. I already had one hell of a fun journey,
00:03:01 so I’m ready to go when it’s time. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation
00:03:08 with Jaco Willink. Is it tragic or beautiful to you that some of the closest bonds that have formed
00:03:14 between people are through war often. I think it’s both, both tragic and beautiful and for the
00:03:24 obvious reasons. What are the obvious reasons? Why is it so obvious? Well, it’s tragic because
00:03:35 a lot of people die and it’s beautiful because you form bonds with people that are very difficult
00:03:43 to break once you’ve been through them. What is it about the trauma of war that makes bonds
00:03:52 difficult to break? Because what you realize when you’re in a war is that the people that are next
00:04:00 to you, you rely on them and they’re relying on you to survive. And without them, you will not
00:04:08 survive. And when you realize that you need to work together as a team to, to live, that forms
00:04:17 a very strong bond. And there’s nothing like that team outside of the realm of war. I don’t know
00:04:25 because I’ve, there’s a lot of things that I haven’t experienced in my life, but I think the
00:04:31 pressure and the consequences of war, there could be similar situations in survival scenarios,
00:04:39 in various atrocities where people need to work together in order to survive. And I think you
00:04:46 could probably get something that was similar. There’s a very particular nature to the kind of
00:04:53 war that World War II was, especially for the Soviet Union, where it didn’t just influence
00:04:58 the lives of people. It created culture, the music, the poetry, the literature. It’s in the,
00:05:08 it’s in the way people think. It’s in the way people see the world. It’s in the way they talk
00:05:13 even still to this day. And of course, I was talking about the directly relationship between
00:05:23 two soldiers, but there’s something about the depth of human connection that results from the
00:05:31 almost like reverberations of war. Like generations later, you’re still close to other humans.
00:05:39 There’s a coldness towards other humans like in Russia, but once you open up, it’s depth. You
00:05:47 seek depth of connection versus like breadth of a career kind of thinking, how can I make friends
00:05:55 with this? I can move into this direction. What can this person benefit me? Instead, you seek
00:06:00 a depth of human connection and appreciation that brings a lot. And maybe I’m romanticizing war here,
00:06:07 but it feels like that’s inextricably connected to World War II for Russians. Does that resonate
00:06:14 at all? So if you look at military training, what they do is they take people in the military
00:06:22 from the civilian world. They bring them into the military and they put them through bootcamp,
00:06:28 which is the stereotypical thing that you see on TV. You’re going to get yelled at.
00:06:31 You’re going to get screamed at. You’re going to get, you’re going to get put in the mud and
00:06:35 you’re going to be made to do hard things together. And what does that do with those
00:06:42 civilians? Well, it gives them a common background. It gives them a common suffering
00:06:47 that they’ve been through together and they form some sort of connection, some sort of bond.
00:06:54 Now to make that bond a little bit stronger, after you get done with bootcamp, they send you
00:07:00 to advanced infantry school and you suffer some more together. And when you suffer more together,
00:07:08 now you’re in a smaller group too, because now it’s infantry. It’s not supply people anymore or
00:07:12 logisticians. It’s strictly people that are going to fight. They’re infantrymen.
00:07:18 So they go through a school together and now they get a little bit tighter, get done with that. And
00:07:24 maybe you go to an airborne division. So you go to airborne school and now you all
00:07:29 overcome this fear of jumping out of an airplane together and you celebrate surviving that.
00:07:33 Then maybe you get done with that. And now you go at an airborne division. Now you’re an even tighter
00:07:36 group because you’ve suffered together. What comes next is special forces training or ranger training.
00:07:42 And what they do is they put you in these situations where you’re going to suffer together and you’re
00:07:47 going to build these bonds because as I said earlier, you have to rely on each other to survive.
00:07:52 And by the way, not everyone does, not everyone makes it through this training. So you sort of
00:07:55 have these memories of people that didn’t make it. You share that connection as well.
00:07:59 And you can keep going down this road until you go into combat with a military unit and
00:08:04 military units that go through combat, have an even tighter bond. And the harder the combat that
00:08:09 they go through, the tighter the bond is going to be. So I think when you talk about what the
00:08:15 Soviet Union went through in World War II, there was a shared suffering to survive. And so the
00:08:25 entire nation has that common thread. And that’s probably the thing that you sense or feel when you
00:08:33 refer back to the bond that resonates all the way back to World War II.
00:08:40 So in your podcast and your writing, you talk about some of the most fascinating things I listen
00:08:47 to you talk about in terms of military conflict is tactics and sort of the details of combat.
00:08:58 But allow me to stick on World War II for a second. There’s a particular aspect to that war,
00:09:05 I don’t know if you can speak to it, where twice the number of civilians died than military personnel.
00:09:11 So the Soviet Union, especially. My grandfather was a machine gunner in Ukraine as the Germans were
00:09:26 marching towards Moscow. There’s this important push in 1941 where they were trying to get before
00:09:32 the winter to Moscow. And what Stalin was doing, he was trying to get to Moscow. He was trying to
00:09:38 get to Moscow. And what Stalin was doing is he was basically throwing bodies to slow the attack.
00:09:49 And what that meant is everybody understood that your job was, you have this heavy machine guns,
00:09:56 it’s very, it’s almost unreasonable to be able to be mobile in any kind of way with them.
00:10:01 So you’re thrown at the front and you’re just nonstop shooting and 95 plus percent of people
00:10:09 are just dead. All the soldiers are just dead. And then you just go back and back and you’re trying
00:10:15 to protect as many civilians as you can throughout this whole process, but you don’t. And so you have
00:10:20 millions of civilians that die along the way into this march. Is there something you could say about
00:10:26 this complete, perhaps it’s naive of me to say, but a war that lacks tactics, that lacks strategy
00:10:37 and is purely about just no consideration of human life and just throwing bodies and bullets
00:10:50 into a mix together where millions die. And that in particular felt much less like conflict
00:11:01 and much more like torture or suffering. It didn’t come off as torture only that interestingly
00:11:12 enough, as you probably know, my grandfather, including everybody else, volunteered. They were
00:11:20 proud to do this. They were proud to march to their death for country, for love of country.
00:11:27 But the question on the civilian side, when more civilians die, the military personnel,
00:11:33 what do you make of that? It’s awful. It’s awful when a soldier dies. It’s awful when a civilian
00:11:42 dies. It’s awful when 10 civilians or 10 soldiers. And it’s even more awful when millions and millions
00:11:49 of soldiers and civilians die. I think it’s safe to say that the Soviet Union was facing an
00:11:57 existential threat to their existence against the Nazis. So to not fight would be to die as well,
00:12:09 maybe die a death a few years later, maybe die a different way. But
00:12:13 the choice was die now, trying or die later on your knees. And I think the choice was pretty clear.
00:12:23 As far as the tactics go, I mean, there is this is attrition warfare. That’s what that is. We are
00:12:30 going to keep, you know, you said throwing bodies at the problem. That’s attrition warfare. And the
00:12:36 Soviet Union had a lot of bodies, more than the Germans. And when you fight with attrition warfare,
00:12:43 whoever has more men and material will eventually win. It’s an awful, it’s an awful way. But that’s
00:12:51 the that’s that’s what the strategy was. You often talk about leadership.
00:12:57 Let’s put the evils of Hitler aside. The boldness of Hitler in making some of the strategic
00:13:06 decisions he did was considered by many military historians quite brilliant, early in the war,
00:13:13 or insane and brilliant. Stalin, on the other hand, I think university is seen as somebody who is
00:13:21 terrible military strategist, especially early in the war. He did not see all the possible
00:13:29 trajectories that the war could take. Is there something you could say about failure of leadership,
00:13:34 Stalin, also the United Kingdom before Churchill, and also FDR on the United States side, who
00:13:41 basically, was trying to turn a blind eye to everything that was happening over over there,
00:13:49 with a perspective of we just want to make, we want to keep America’s interest
00:13:55 as the primary interest and everything else, let other countries work out their problems.
00:14:00 You know, I think one of the things with Hitler was in the beginning of the war,
00:14:03 he listened to his friends, his family, and he listened to his friends. He listened to
00:14:09 his generals. And therefore, they did pretty well with that. I think as the war went on,
00:14:15 he believed that he was smarter than he was, and made decisions that were bad, that cost him dearly.
00:14:26 You know, I mean, case in point, as everyone knows, going and attacking the Soviet Union,
00:14:31 while you’re still fighting a war on the other front is not not a good move.
00:14:34 There’s an example of yeah, bad leadership, letting your ego get in the way believing that you can do
00:14:38 things that you that are beyond your capabilities. But, you know, as you mentioned in the beginning
00:14:45 with Blitzkrieg, those were really dynamic and bold moves. And they worked. And that what does
00:14:53 that do? That fuels your ego and makes you think that you can win.
00:14:57 Many people consider that war a just war. What do you think makes a just war?
00:15:05 I think you have the Nazis, and the Imperial Japanese trying to impose their will on other
00:15:12 nations and other peoples. And when that happens, I think on a grand scale, people look at that. And
00:15:19 believe it’s just to step in and do something about it.
00:15:25 Is there some gray area here?
00:15:28 There’s, there’s nothing but gray area.
00:15:32 The United States has been involved in a lot of military conflict since then.
00:15:36 How do you draw the line to the gray area? What, what war should we engage in and not?
00:15:44 I know you don’t get a lot of questions about that, but I think it’s important that you
00:15:48 I know you don’t get into politics much. But what the decision to go to war,
00:15:55 you have to look at the situation that you’re going into. And you have to make sure that you have
00:16:00 the will to go to war. And the will to go to war means that you are willing to kill people.
00:16:09 And when I say people, I don’t just mean enemy, because in war,
00:16:12 civilians are going to die, women and children are going to die. Every a lot of people are
00:16:17 going to die. And so you and you are going to kill them. Doesn’t matter what kind of
00:16:21 smart munitions you have. Doesn’t matter how disciplined your soldiers are. When you go into
00:16:26 a war, civilians are going to die and you have to understand that. And the other thing that
00:16:32 you have to understand is that your troops are also going to die. And it seems like sometimes
00:16:42 we’re a little bit naive about the calculation of what that’s going to look like.
00:16:45 And maybe we think, well, not that many civilians and maybe not that many of our our personnel are
00:16:50 going to die. And that’s where you get into sticky situations. And, you know, another thing when you
00:16:56 were talking about the Soviet Union versus the Nazis, that’s total war. That’s what that is. And
00:17:04 we don’t engage in that very often. It’s total war. It’s we will do absolutely anything to win.
00:17:10 And America doesn’t fight like that very often. In fact, the last time we fought like that was
00:17:15 World War Two. We it was total war. We will do whatever it takes to up to and including
00:17:22 the atomic bomb to destroy the enemy. So those are the kind of things you need to think about
00:17:29 before you go to war. And I don’t think we think about that very often.
00:17:33 I don’t think we think about that very often. You know, even the United States, the atomic bomb,
00:17:40 nuclear weapons is an interesting one because there’s a lot of
00:17:46 there’s a lot of hesitation on that. There’s a lot of critics of that decision as it was happening.
00:17:52 So even America, you could imagine other countries like Germany would not be so hesitant
00:17:57 to use nuclear weapons. It’s interesting to think about in deciding military strategy to inject
00:18:08 ethics into it, into morality. It’s not just about winning the war, but should we do this
00:18:17 and doing the calculation of human life. Usually those decisions are made by leaders,
00:18:23 not by the soldier that’s going to be implementing
00:18:30 that decision. Do you put some responsibility, I should even say blame on the leaders
00:18:38 and not doing that kind of calculation here? You could say that about the Vietnam War,
00:18:43 you could say that about even the war that you were involved with in Iraq.
00:18:47 Is there some criticism here that you could apply to leaders for failing not to consider
00:18:52 that the broader moral questions? Yes.
00:19:00 Natural, like all leaders will make these mistakes or should leaders not make these mistakes?
00:19:09 Leaders are going to make mistakes. It’s impossible to know what’s going to happen in war,
00:19:13 just like it’s impossible to know what’s going to happen in life.
00:19:15 You make decisions based on the information that you have at the time and you will make mistakes.
00:19:23 If you fail to admit that you made a mistake, that’s where I have a more significant problem
00:19:30 than someone that makes a mistake and says, hey, this is the mistake that I made. This is the
00:19:36 intelligence that I thought we were utilizing and it actually is not what I thought it was going to
00:19:42 be. And here’s the new direction that we’re going in. We don’t have enough of that type of ownership
00:19:52 in leadership globally. Just saying I made a mistake
00:20:00 that resulted in a loss at scale of human life, being able to say that.
00:20:05 Being able to say that. And when you don’t say that, you end up with a more loss of human life.
00:20:13 Can I ask you about the loss of human life? How does killing a human being change you?
00:20:23 What does it mean to kill a human being? What does it feel like to kill a human being?
00:20:27 Well, I mean, I guess you’d have to look at what circumstances a person’s in when this is taking
00:20:32 place. If you’ve got someone that’s in a, a fit of rage that goes and kills somebody,
00:20:40 you know, they’re going to come out of it and think, wow, I’ve just really messed up.
00:20:44 If you’ve got a, someone that is a sociopath, right? They’re not going to feel anything.
00:20:53 And that person deserved to die. And that’s why they died. If you’ve got a soldier who feels like
00:21:00 they’re trying to protect their friends, they’ll move through that. If you’ve got a soldier that’s
00:21:09 doing it because they want some kind of personal glory, they’ll probably not feel good about it
00:21:15 later. So I think it depends on the situation. I think it depends on the psychology of the
00:21:20 individual that’s going through it. He said, move through that.
00:21:28 Is there some calculation here that a soldier, when they kill another soldier,
00:21:37 a realization that is just another human being,
00:21:39 I mean, is there some heavy burden to that aspect that it’s ultimately just human on human?
00:21:51 I think it depends a lot on the scenario. I know that when I was in Iraq fighting,
00:21:56 we, we talk a lot about the dehumanization of the enemy and it’s something that the
00:22:02 governments will do. I mean, governments will do that to each other. I mean, the Japanese dehumanized
00:22:09 the Americans and the Americans dehumanized the Japanese and the Americans dehumanized the Nazis
00:22:15 and the Nazis dehumanized the Americans so that to remove as much of that human on human killing
00:22:22 aspect that you’re talking about. And what I would say is that the Japanese
00:22:27 human killing aspect that you’re talking about. And what I, what I’ve said is that
00:22:35 in, when we were in Iraq, we didn’t have to dehumanize the enemy because the,
00:22:40 the enemy dehumanized themselves through their actions, through their behaviors.
00:22:45 When, when we know that they are torturing and raping and murdering the local populace,
00:22:52 they’ve been dehumanized. And so as far as looking at them and thinking, oh, this is a,
00:22:57 you know, a human, another human that’s, that’s on the level of, you know, my, my uncle or my brother,
00:23:07 I didn’t, I didn’t think of them out that way. I thought of them as,
00:23:11 as murdering, raping, evil, subhumans.
00:23:21 Yeah. Rock is different and America’s position is different. You’re right. That America has not
00:23:25 been involved in a war where it’s quite like two humans fighting, like teenage boys fighting
00:23:33 against each other. And you’ve got to remember that America
00:23:36 has not been involved in a war where it’s quite like two humans fighting, like teenage boys fighting
00:23:42 against each other. And you’ve got to remember, I mean, we’re, we’re seeing these Iraqi kids
00:23:48 that are living under this sadistic, sadistic terror, the Iraqi women that are being raped
00:23:58 and so on the one side we become the, the Iraqi populace is very humanized to us because we’re
00:24:06 talking to them. We’ve got interpreters, we understand we’re seeing them day after day,
00:24:11 the same individuals. And so we form a bond with the local populace and yet we see what the
00:24:19 insurgents are doing. And so it’s again, not difficult to dehumanize people that behave in
00:24:26 that manner. Yeah. I suppose I’m, I worry about the dehumanization at a much larger scale when
00:24:34 it’s not the kind of case that you’re talking about. Even now, hopefully I’m not fear mongering,
00:24:43 but there’s a sense in which there’s the drums of war slowly starting to build with China.
00:24:50 There, in the best case, it would be a cold war of, there’s a dehumanization aspect that’s
00:25:01 happening with China currently, which is they’re the other and they’re after stealing all of your
00:25:07 data. There’s a cybersecurity, it starts with cybersecurity and it worries me because it
00:25:14 creates the other out of a very large population that may ultimately lead to conflict.
00:25:25 In the worst case, hot conflict that would no longer be the situation you are in in Iraq
00:25:31 and more similar to the Soviet Union conflict with Germany that it’s kids and then they’re
00:25:41 dehumanized to where you’re at scale slaughtering them or at least hurting their quality of life
00:25:50 in a way that’s maybe, you know, suffering has many forms. It doesn’t have to be through just
00:25:55 a hot war. It could be through starvation, through camps, all those kinds of things.
00:26:02 And I worry about that. We kind of tend to think that these wars are behind us
00:26:07 and I’m not always so sure that’s the case. And at least in the way that, it ultimately starts
00:26:14 with hate and it, again, hopefully I’m not being too dramatic, but I see that there’s a kind of
00:26:22 brewing of, it starts with dehumanization that turns to hate of the other. You see that with
00:26:29 China, you see it a little bit with Russia and you have an early podcast with between the
00:26:36 where you break down the tactics of the Chechen war versus Russia. It’s fascinating. But that’s
00:26:42 the kind of conflicts I’m referring to. And I don’t know. There’s a, I know you’re a bit of
00:26:50 a musician. I love, I love Dire Straits song called Brothers in Arms. I don’t know if you
00:26:56 know that one. And there’s a line in it. I think they play it quite often at military funerals,
00:27:04 which I just recently learned, but it’s this powerful song that has a line, we’re fools to
00:27:09 make war on our brothers in arms. Do you think there’s some sense in which at the leadership
00:27:16 level, but just as human beings, we’re perhaps foolish and engaging in military conflict
00:27:25 as much as we have, or as fool, a very inappropriate word here.
00:27:33 Well, I think that using the term brothers in arms means the people that are on my side,
00:27:38 right? So it doesn’t make sense to start wars with people that are on your side. So that’s,
00:27:46 that might just be the way the lyrics are written so that it fit the song or whatever.
00:27:50 I think broadly what you’re asking me is, is war foolish? Yeah. And I would say the answer is yes.
00:27:57 And if you can avoid it, you absolutely should. But if there is a bear or a wolf that is trying
00:28:08 to get into your house, is it foolish to shoot that bear or shoot that wolf? I think that’s
00:28:15 the answer. Is it foolish to shoot that bear or shoot that wolf? I think the answer is pretty
00:28:22 obvious. So when you’re threatened or your family are threatened or your way of life is threatened,
00:28:29 then you have to do something to try and defend your family, your way of life. It should be the
00:28:36 last resort. You had a conversation with Jordan Peterson where he asked you a question
00:28:49 in terms of war being the last resort, whether you would like your kids to grow up in peace
00:28:55 in a time of no war. You said yes, but, and so happens Jordan didn’t let you finish. Can you,
00:29:06 can you elaborate what follows the but? Well, you, you and I have been talking about the fact that
00:29:12 struggle brings people together and, and brings out the best and, and the worst, brings out the
00:29:18 worst in people. War brings out the worst in people. It also brings out the best in people.
00:29:22 So would you want your kid to go and enter in a wrestling tournament where
00:29:32 you paid all the other kids off and your kid won? Or you enter them in a jujitsu tournament where
00:29:43 they’re a purple belt and you know that everyone that they’re going to fight against is a white
00:29:47 belt. And so they get the, they get the big W, they get the win, but they don’t really get tested
00:29:53 and they don’t really struggle. And if you don’t struggle, you don’t grow. So that’s the, but
00:30:00 right. Um, the, the absolute best times of my life were in combat and the worst times of my life were
00:30:13 in combat. And so even though I wouldn’t want any of my children to suffer through the worst of times
00:30:21 at the same time, the but is I would want them to have the opportunity to feel that bond that
00:30:28 you’re referring to earlier and to see human beings that are willing to sacrifice their
00:30:35 lives for their friends. You mentioned the worst. What are some of the worst aspects of
00:30:42 when you were in Iraq? Well, what are the things that, um, the hardest on you having my guys killed?
00:30:56 Is there, uh, absurd cruelty to it? Was it due to mistakes or natural consequences of, of fighting?
00:31:07 Is there any difference? Is that at the end is just losing? Those are brothers in arms.
00:31:13 There’s a million different ways to get killed in the war and you can go out on an operation and you
00:31:17 can do everything wrong and you can survive and you can go out in an operation and do everything
00:31:23 perfect and you can get killed. Is there some aspect which makes it worse when there is mistakes
00:31:30 made? Well, yeah, if there’s mistakes made, then you’re going to sit there and beat yourself up
00:31:36 eternally for mistakes that were made. But to you, the things that hurt is just losing,
00:31:44 losing people close to you. Yes. Are you yourself afraid of death? No.
00:31:52 Are you yourself afraid of death? No. Do you think about it? Does it make sense to you that this
00:32:00 thing ends? Like do you, uh, the Stoics contemplated death. It gives flavor to life.
00:32:09 It makes you appreciate, there’s something about finiteness of life that makes it, that makes it
00:32:14 this, uh, Jocko Discipline Go drink, sour apple that I’m enjoying is delicious. Makes it taste
00:32:23 better because I’m going to die one day. And I think about that a lot. Do you think about it?
00:32:32 Other than I know that it’s going to end. I mean, but I don’t think about it on a daily basis. I
00:32:39 think about the fact I think about, I know that I’m lucky to be here. I know that many people
00:32:45 sacrificed to give me this opportunity to be here. So, but I don’t dwell on it.
00:32:56 What about when you were in combat? Nothing. There’s, there’s tactics,
00:33:01 there’s strategy, there’s the mission. And then your mortality is not part of the calculation.
00:33:10 I think you get to a point where you accept the fact that you can die. Like I, I, you know,
00:33:16 like I said, you can do everything right. You roll out the gate, you hit an ID, a triple stack
00:33:20 subsurface ID and you’re dead. You’re done. And there’s nothing that’s going to stop that. It’s
00:33:25 going to happen. And I think if you’re scared of that or you’re thinking about that, it’s going to
00:33:30 inhibit your ability to do your job properly. And I think it’s also going to drive you crazy.
00:33:36 The thing that I thought about more was that happening to my guys. And that’s the gut wrenching
00:33:42 terror that you feel when, when operations happen. Can I ask you about love of country? It’s, it
00:33:52 continues to just how much I’ve studied Stalin recently in the past few years. It continues to
00:34:01 surprise me, not surprise me. It’s just tragic in some kind of way. I’m not sure exactly if I could
00:34:09 put words to it, but how many people and still do, but at the time were willing, loved Stalin
00:34:16 and were willing to die for country for the love of country. And I too, maybe because I was born
00:34:25 there and now I am a red blooded American. I love nationalism is a bad word, but I love the love of
00:34:36 country. It gives, it somehow gives a meaning like a brotherhood, like we’re in this together.
00:34:43 I love that’s why I love the Olympics. That’s just the, the unity of it. It takes a step out of the
00:34:56 selfish pursuits of any one particular ant and looks at us as a big ant colony and it’s inspiring.
00:35:04 It’s it’s exciting, but at the same time, it seems to get us to do horrible things.
00:35:11 If, if manipulated by charismatic leaders, what do you make of this love of country? Is it a,
00:35:20 is it a bad thing? Is it a thing that gets in the way or is it a good thing?
00:35:26 Well, I think like anything else, if it’s balanced correctly,
00:35:30 it’s great. And if it goes to some extreme level, then it becomes a negative.
00:35:35 And I think it, I think it’s probably sourced in some sort of animalistic tribalism that we all
00:35:43 have to be part of a tribe. And this is a real big tribe that you get to be a part of. And all
00:35:49 you have to do is kind of show up. And so when someone says, Hey, we’re going to play hockey
00:35:54 against the Russians, well, we’re going to cheer for the American boys.
00:36:00 So my, my area of work is artificial intelligence. It’d be interesting to ask your thoughts about
00:36:08 something, which is autonomous weapon systems. US has now officially released the report saying
00:36:17 that they’re open to, not open, they’re engaging in, in adding more and more autonomy and artificial
00:36:25 intelligence into its weapon systems because China is doing it. So there’s, these are the first steps
00:36:31 in something that AI folks worry about, which is a race, an AI race in the space of autonomous
00:36:41 weapons that can run away too quickly. Is that something, I don’t know if in general,
00:36:48 if you have thoughts about weapon systems that make autonomous decisions
00:36:53 at the small scale of just targeting where to shoot and at the largest scale of military strategy
00:37:00 of just being given a mission of destroy this particular target, this particular, say terrorist
00:37:07 human being, and then figure out what is the right bombing campaign on your own to accomplish
00:37:13 this task that minimizes civilian death. And then just loading that in and letting the AI system
00:37:20 automatically decide that. What are your general thoughts about it? Do you, do you worry about it?
00:37:27 Because there’s the positive effects that in the best version of that world, you kill fewer
00:37:34 civilians, you kill, hurt fewer of your own human beings. But at the negative side of that,
00:37:43 you might lose the thing we kind of talked about, which is the basic humanity, even in the individual
00:37:51 soldier of what is right and what is wrong and not making huge mistakes that hurt thousands
00:37:58 or millions of people. I guess what you’re asking me is if they could make a machine that could
00:38:04 do more surgical attacks on enemy individuals, would I be for it? Yes, I would be for it.
00:38:14 The problem is if you’ve ever used machines of any kind, their initial design may not be,
00:38:23 there’s unintended consequences. There’s ways in the machine actually behaves that you realize
00:38:32 there’s bugs in this thing. So do we not put protocols in place to prevent something from
00:38:38 going too far outside the boundaries of what we wanted to execute? You do. But the question is,
00:38:45 this is the first time in human history you can create things, machines, toaster, microwave oven,
00:38:53 that’s smarter than you in this particular task. I mean, it’s not yet there. What you’re learning a
00:39:00 lot with military strategies, humans are actually really damn smart. It’s very hard to improve on a
00:39:06 human. And so most actual drones that are unmanned are still piloted by humans. It’s very difficult
00:39:13 to do every aspect of war. But it’s not out of the realm of possibility that machines will start
00:39:25 doing those things better in certain things, certain more precise targeting of the enemy.
00:39:35 The question is, so what happens when you start to rely on the machine to do some of the task
00:39:42 is you get lazy. You forget what it is like to do that task or more importantly, you lose the
00:39:51 knowledge of the intricacies of that task and you forget the ways it can go wrong. So the protocols
00:39:57 may not be sufficient to constrain the power of the ways that things go wrong, especially when
00:40:05 things are moving really quickly, especially when the ethics of the two sides aren’t perfectly
00:40:12 aligned. When people are some certain sides, like on the Chinese side, may be more willing to take
00:40:19 risks for dangerous consequences than others. So what happened on the bioweapon side
00:40:27 is internationally, maybe you can speak to this more, but my sense, what I was told,
00:40:32 there is a sense globally that bioweapons are not going to be used. They’re unethical. There’s a
00:40:40 sense like we’re not going to engage in this. And with AI currently, China and US said, green light,
00:40:49 all go ahead. It’s totally ethical. If it can decrease the loss of human life, why not?
00:40:59 And my worry is that it’s much easier to design weapons that are effective than design weapons
00:41:12 who have the depth of ethics and morals that humans do, which I think we don’t as human
00:41:21 beings don’t acknowledge enough that even like the cold calculated killing of others,
00:41:26 like precise, effective execution of a mission still has ethics in it. At every level, you know
00:41:35 what’s right and what’s wrong. And I don’t know if you take that away, you’re not going to make
00:41:40 huge mistakes that you regret. Is that something you don’t worry about?
00:41:48 I don’t really worry about it. But as you design something, like I said, you put protocols in place
00:41:56 and from what I am hearing you say, or trying to hear you say, there’s be a point where our
00:42:01 protocols wouldn’t be sufficient to stop the machine from doing something that was unethical.
00:42:10 I’m kind of worried that this is something you don’t worry about. Because a lot of people I
00:42:20 respect don’t worry about it. And I don’t know what to do about that. A lot of generals don’t
00:42:25 worry about it. A lot of people who know much more about war, like you than me, don’t worry about it.
00:42:32 And that worries me.
00:42:34 Well, that’s because you have a vision into the shortfalls of AI. And I don’t. I don’t have a
00:42:42 vision of the shortfalls of AI. I don’t know enough about it. As far as I’m concerned, you put
00:42:47 a on off switch somewhere, you put a kill switch on a system. And if it starts going awry, you hit
00:42:55 the kill switch, and that’s it. So if you know, when you look at me and say, well, there’s no
00:43:00 possible way to put a kill switch, that would be 100% effective. And here’s, you draw those concerns
00:43:05 to me. And we could talk through it and say, okay, well, here’s where we should draw the line.
00:43:10 Yeah.
00:43:11 I mean, it’s like, again, for the Soviet Union, Chernobyl meltdown, there was always the ability,
00:43:18 I believe, to have a kill switch. The problem is, the more power you give to the machine,
00:43:24 the more opportunity you give to the human supervising that machine to make a mistake
00:43:34 and not shut off the switch at the right time. So yes, the solution, I mean, you’re putting the
00:43:41 responsibility still in the human hands. And I think that’s the correct place to put it. There
00:43:44 should be good protocols, good leadership, good execution, competency all around. Your
00:43:50 protocols should consider the basic failures of human nature, the human factor of how things go
00:43:55 wrong. So there should be multiple people supervising the system, all those things. But
00:43:59 I am just very skeptical of greater and greater power in the machine that can create war, that
00:44:07 cannot lead to death. Yeah. And that’s why, like I said, and like you just said, you have protocols
00:44:14 in place that are a kill switch. And if you think about the amount of nuclear weapons that we’ve had
00:44:19 on planet Earth for the past however many years, and there’s been no rogue element that said,
00:44:29 you know what, I’m going to shoot this thing. There’s been no protocol that took place where
00:44:33 all of a sudden we said, oh no. I mean, there’s been escalations, but the protocols worked,
00:44:40 have worked so far. Now, that’s a scary thing to think about, that we rely on these protocols to
00:44:47 stop some rogue element out there from launching a missile that could kill millions of people and
00:44:54 trigger a global war. So yeah, the protocols should be strict. Okay. Can I ask a Jack O Wonka
00:45:04 ridiculous question? If human civilization goes extinct, what would be the reason? You mentioned
00:45:11 nuclear war. Do you worry about this? The reason I bring that up, a lot of people in the
00:45:17 AI community worry about artificial general intelligence. So super intelligent AI systems
00:45:23 creating a lot of damage. Autonomous weapon systems is one possibility. A lot of folks
00:45:28 recently, especially with this pandemic, if you want to be terrified, listen, somebody I talked
00:45:34 to recently, Sam Harris, he did a four hour podcast on how bioengineering of viruses is likely
00:45:43 to destroy human civilization. I recommend that highly if you were too optimistic about the
00:45:48 future of the human species. So apparently in the space of bioengineering is becoming easier and
00:45:55 easier and easier to engineer viruses, engineer pathogens. This is the world’s most depressing
00:46:06 question. Is there something in particular you worry about? Like that we should be thinking as
00:46:13 a human species about? Yeah, I’m sorry to disappoint you again with my lack of worry for all these
00:46:21 problems, but I don’t worry too much about it. You know what? We’ve made it through a bunch of
00:46:30 wickets so far as a species and we’ll make it through some more or we won’t. And if we don’t
00:46:37 make it through some of these wickets and someone decides that what they’re going to do over the
00:46:41 weekend is create some crazy virus that spreads and kills everybody. Yeah. You know what? I’m
00:46:49 usually extremely optimistic about this stuff. I am now I’m with you except we won’t. Well,
00:46:57 there’s always a chance we won’t, but I have a sense that human, first of all, I believe that
00:47:03 most people have much more capacity for good than evil. All of us are capable of evil, I believe,
00:47:08 but most people are much more capable of doing good and want to do good. And I also believe in
00:47:17 the resiliency of the human species that we’re an innovative bunch and we can respond to tragedy,
00:47:22 especially we respond more to tragedy as the scale of tragedy grows and our response is much
00:47:28 better. So that’s why I’m not worried about it, bro. What makes a great man? Let’s start at the
00:47:39 individual. What makes a great man? What makes a great woman? What makes a great human being?
00:47:44 Somebody that puts others above themselves. What makes a great leader of humans?
00:47:52 Same thing.
00:47:53 But that sentence does a lot of work. When you’re a leader, there’s a lot of egos. There’s a lot
00:48:01 of tension. There’s the human factor. There’s people who are timid. There’s people who are
00:48:07 assholes. There’s people who are incredibly competent, but self obsessed. I don’t know.
00:48:14 There’s complexities of human nature. How do you get all those people to be the best version of
00:48:22 themselves and to lift up everyone else around them?
00:48:25 Okay. So now that, that question is a little bit different now. So now it’s getting into a more
00:48:31 specific question, but at the same time, a more broad question of what elements does it take to
00:48:36 make a good leader? So you’re right that different people have different personalities, different
00:48:41 tendencies, different levels of ego. And the, the way that I try and explain this is like a
00:48:51 video game. And I’m not even a video game player, but I’ve seen this before where video game
00:48:55 characters have various skills, various strengths and weaknesses. So maybe they’re strong, but
00:49:02 they’re dumb, or maybe they’re strong and smart, but they’re slow. They just give them these,
00:49:07 these ratings. And so that’s where human beings are. And that’s the way leaders are. And you can
00:49:11 have different leaders with different characteristics. And depending on how all those
00:49:17 characteristics match up, you can have somebody that is very introverted, but they’re a, but,
00:49:25 but they’re still a very good leader because when they do communicate, they do it in a clear,
00:49:31 simple manner that everyone understands. So even though they’re a little bit introverted,
00:49:34 people still respect them and listen to them because they communicate in a clear way.
00:49:39 You could have somebody that’s extremely charismatic, extremely charismatic and everyone
00:49:47 looks to them, but they’re slow in making decisions. And so now we’ve got someone that
00:49:53 can’t really make decisions when decisions need to get made. So even though they’re
00:49:57 charismatic, they’re still not a good leader. So depending on the human being that we’re talking
00:50:03 about, and you just mentioned earlier that human beings are, you know, more complex than anything
00:50:07 and do a better job at just about everything than a robot. So that’s the same thing with
00:50:12 leadership. You’ve got all these different characteristics and you, you match them or mix
00:50:16 them together. And depending on where the ratings come out, depending on how that thing does in the
00:50:23 end, can we almost like as a case study, look at a few people in the tech area that I’m familiar
00:50:29 with that I know well, we can, the only caveat being that I may have no familiarization with
00:50:35 them whatsoever. You may have to brief me on them. Yeah. So I’ll do my best to brief. I’ll do my best
00:50:40 to reduce human beings into simple descriptions. And then you can give me insights of why the hell
00:50:46 they’re such effective leaders based on my description, not based on your actual deep
00:50:50 knowledge of the human beings. So that caveat of my inability to speak both the English language
00:50:58 and describe humans well. Let’s talk about first, Elon Musk. So he’s known as being quite
00:51:07 harsh in the sense of, first of all, a very high bar of excellence.
00:51:13 And also willing to what he calls that kind of first principles thinking of asking the,
00:51:20 the questions that hurt, which is why the hell are we doing it this way?
00:51:26 Why can’t it be done a lot, but not just better, but a lot better. So, so let’s,
00:51:33 I don’t want to hear his whole character. I’ll go one at one section at a time. So we’ve got a guy
00:51:36 that’s harsh and, and asking the really hard questions. How can that be good? Or why is that
00:51:44 good? Well, first of all, it can be horrible. And there’s leaders out there that are harsh and
00:51:49 they’re hated and no one likes them and no one wants to work for them and they never do anything.
00:51:52 So what is it that Elon Musk does that makes, gives him the ability to be harsh? So I was, I was
00:52:01 hearing a description of me when I would give feedback to young seals that had made mistakes
00:52:10 during training operations. And the description was that I, same thing, like this harsh blunt force
00:52:18 trauma and just totally direct sledgehammer of truth that I would hit guys with. But it’s
00:52:29 interesting because I always talk about, you know, building relationships and making sure you’re not
00:52:32 offending someone. Yeah. So how do these things match up? Well, I can tell you how they match up
00:52:38 when I was being harsh, the guys that I was being harsh with knew without one shred of doubt that
00:52:46 I cared about them more than anything else. And that the reason I was giving them this feedback
00:52:50 is because I wanted them to be able to lead their troops. I wanted them to be able to go
00:52:53 accomplish their mission. And I wanted them to be able to bring their guys home from war.
00:52:59 So I wasn’t being harsh because it elevated my ego. I wasn’t being harsh because I wanted to
00:53:04 denigrate them. I was being, actually being harsh because I wanted them to accomplish the mission.
00:53:08 Because I wanted them to accomplish the mission. So if that’s where Elon comes from,
00:53:15 hey, listen, we got to make this happen. This is for the good of the world to do this.
00:53:20 And people know that then it works. I’ll bring this point back up with another guy,
00:53:26 Steve Jobs, but let me stay on Elon for a second. The other thing he does, which is interesting,
00:53:34 I see the value of this. It’d be great to hear you speak about it. He’s unlike many of the other
00:53:41 CEOs, very rich billionaires, involved in leading a lot of people. He puts a lot of time into making
00:53:52 sure he’s on the factory floor. He famously sleeps on the, sort of like in the middle of things.
00:53:58 And he puts a lot of effort. He’s also very good at it is being a low level engineer. So like,
00:54:05 whatever the task is, he wants to understand the details and he’ll talk to the lowest level person
00:54:11 in terms of like, somebody who’s like working literally on putting parts together. He wants to
00:54:19 understand what the problem is, what the challenge is. If there’s an emergency, he wants to understand
00:54:24 the actual details of the problem, not like delegating it to a manager, but like,
00:54:29 because a lot of CEOs, a lot of managers will talk about sort of the power and the importance
00:54:35 of delegation. Here, he wants to know if there’s a big problem, he wants to know the exact detail.
00:54:41 He wants to know the exact problem. He wants to, at the fundamental level, understand how to solve
00:54:46 that problem. Whether it has to do with materials, whether it has to do with the actual manufacturing,
00:54:51 the mechanical engineering aspect, like we’re talking about engineering. This is a guy who
00:54:56 wears a suit as a CEO, tweets about Dogecoin, but like an actual job, he’s low level engineering.
00:55:05 And that to me was always inspiring to see somebody who knows what the fuck they’re doing.
00:55:12 That’s what it, like he gains the respect of engineers at the lowest level.
00:55:18 I don’t know if that’s scalable, but that’s always been inspiring to me. And I wonder how many people
00:55:22 it’s inspiring to. Maybe you could speak to the value of doing that, of no matter how high your
00:55:28 level of leader is, to be able to do the low level shit. Yeah. And that’s a common trait that good
00:55:35 leaders have. And maybe he doesn’t necessarily know how to do everything, a good leader,
00:55:40 but they go down there and talk to the frontline troops and say, Hey, what is the issue that you’re
00:55:45 dealing with? Or, you know, how can I support you? How can I give you help? And one key point that
00:55:50 you said is, he said, when there’s a problem, he gets in there. So there’s things happening
00:55:55 at his companies that they’re working. And so he doesn’t have to die. I’m not saying he never does,
00:56:01 but he doesn’t have to spend as much time working on or looking at some subsystem that’s functioning
00:56:08 well. He’s got a good leader in there that’s handling it. And he checks in with that leader.
00:56:12 And the leader says, yeah, it’s working perfectly. He says, great. When there’s a problem, that’s
00:56:17 when he might have to get down there and dig into some details so that he fully understands it. So
00:56:21 that he, when he digs down in the details, and this is important, he’s coming from an altitude
00:56:28 where he has a better, bigger perspective, not necessarily better, but a bigger perspective.
00:56:33 So if you sit there and work on a problem, whatever, for eight hours and you’re staring
00:56:39 at, you know, if you were planning a mission and you were planning it for eight hours,
00:56:43 you’re staring at the maps and the charts and you’re figuring out where all the troops are
00:56:47 going to be located. And I come in after eight hours and I look at your plan from a distant
00:56:53 perspective, there’s a good chance I’ll be able to see holes in your plan that you couldn’t see
00:56:57 because your perspective was too close. So that’s good for me to be able to come in from a higher
00:57:04 perspective and have a look at it. But also there’s times where I need to get down there and
00:57:10 actually look, you know, if you’re looking at a problem and you say, look, I can’t figure out
00:57:13 boss, I can’t figure out how to get to this target. And I’m looking at it from a distance and
00:57:17 I don’t see, I might need to start digging in and looking and saying, Oh, here’s a route that we
00:57:22 can take that actually makes sense. Let’s try that. So I think it’s a good example of someone
00:57:29 going up and down in altitude to look at problems, understanding what’s happening with the frontline
00:57:33 troops. And at the same time, being able to go back to the strategic level. And I can, it’s
00:57:39 probably this way. The reason that he’s successful is because he doesn’t get stuck down there.
00:57:44 Yeah. Because if he felt the need to micromanage each and every part on a Tesla,
00:57:50 it wouldn’t be, it would be very unlikely that he would have the capacity to do that.
00:57:55 It wouldn’t be, it would be very unlikely that he would have the capacity to do all that.
00:58:00 Now he can hand over some broad chip design and say, Hey, this is what the function needs to be.
00:58:06 And he gives it to Lex and Lex goes there with your team and you figured out and you make it
00:58:09 happen. If he had to actually do that all himself, most likely not possible. So that’s what leaders
00:58:15 should be doing. They should go elevate and, and, and then get down in the weeds when they have to,
00:58:20 and then go back up. The sad thing, this is the part that makes me not want to do a startup
00:58:28 is basically his whole life is dealing with emergencies. Just like you said, he’s not
00:58:35 dealing, this is not shooting the shit about details of engineering. It’s dealing with like,
00:58:42 in this, in the case of the company, life and death, like something that can just completely
00:58:48 damage the production line, right? So he’s constantly dealing with emergencies, putting out
00:58:52 fires. And I don’t know if there’s something to be said about that psychology of that, of how,
00:58:59 like he, he’s spoken himself that he’s worried whether his mind can hold up much longer.
00:59:04 So hopefully in the near future, he will start to form more decentralized command where he has some
00:59:10 subordinate leadership that he fully trusts. And most important that he has properly trained
00:59:16 so that they can handle these day to day fires at least 80% of them. So only 20% of the time,
00:59:23 does he actually need to go in and solve a problem. If he’s not doing that right now,
00:59:28 then that’s going to end up being a problem anytime. So I work with companies all the time.
00:59:32 And that’s, what’s interesting about this is I go and work with a CEO or with a,
00:59:37 with a C suite of a company. It takes a little while to figure out what’s going on. I’m kind of
00:59:41 going off of the things that you’re telling me almost anecdotally, right? Yes. But let’s
00:59:46 say that what you and also, I don’t know how familiar you actually are with the inner workings
00:59:52 of his companies, but if we were to assume that what you’re saying is accurate, then my advice
00:59:59 would be, Hey, listen, you need to start putting a little bit more time and effort into training up
01:00:04 some subordinate leadership that has the trust, knowledge, and expertise that you will be able
01:00:10 to turn over some of these, some of these details to for two reasons. Number one, so you can let
01:00:16 your brain, you know, you can, you can survive a little longer as he put it, but also all the
01:00:21 time that you spend as a leader, looking down and into your organization is time that you’re
01:00:25 not looking up and out. So when you’re not looking up and out, you’re not seeing what
01:00:29 the competitors doing. You’re not seeing where the market’s going. There’s problems that,
01:00:33 that, that can come from that. So if right now he’s spending too much time looking down and in,
01:00:38 and you mentioned, you know, you said, I don’t know if I want to do a startup. When you do a
01:00:40 startup, you’re going to be looking down and in for a while. It’s going to take a while. You’re
01:00:44 going to have to do all this work yourself. You’re not going to have the finances to put
01:00:47 people manpower behind these things. So that’s probably he, maybe he’s in that mindset a little
01:00:53 bit because he’s done so many startups over the years. And so he’s in the he’s habitually in the
01:00:58 weeds. So my advice would be, all right, let’s start looking at formulating some subordinate
01:01:04 leadership that has the, like I said, the expertise, the trust that you can, you can start
01:01:09 to turn over some of these more minute details to them so that you can start looking up and out.
01:01:15 Yeah. I think he’s done that more successful in some places than others. The SpaceX, a lot of
01:01:20 people give the credit to Gwen Shotwell for the CEO, the COO of SpaceX as, as a very successful
01:01:31 person that runs shit, but in Tesla, not as much. So I wonder if you can comment on something
01:01:38 a lot of people worry about, and this applies to a lot of tech companies, which is a lot of people
01:01:46 worry about that if Elon disappears, the, the, the innovative spirit, the company is as we know them
01:01:54 today will collapse, will stagnate and will basically fail to do what they’ve been doing for
01:02:00 so many years successfully. Is there some aspect to what makes a good leader that if you disappear,
01:02:09 it’s still the thing still lives on and not just lives on, but thrives.
01:02:14 Yeah. So what we have to do in those situations is we have to establish a strong culture inside
01:02:19 that organization. And if you’re there’s, there’s, there’s reasons why this happens, right? If I have
01:02:26 a big ego and I form a company and I love the fact that everyone looks at me and says, Oh,
01:02:32 Jocko made this company and he’s the creative force behind this company. And that fuels my ego
01:02:36 and it makes me feel good. And you know, I’m working with you, Lex. And every time you come
01:02:40 up with an idea, I say, Lex, you need to stay in your box. Yeah. Right. So I’m not creating a culture
01:02:47 that rewards that sort of creativity. And eventually when I die, I won’t have
01:02:54 have educated my team on how to maintain that creative aspect. So again, hopefully inside
01:03:02 that organization, he’s, he’s encouraging and growing that culture where creativity is rewarded,
01:03:10 where, where it flourishes, even when he’s gone, that’s what we have to hope for.
01:03:16 He is, but I also seem to notice that there’s not many people like him.
01:03:21 Um, people become complacent too easily. I’ve been disappointed by people a little bit.
01:03:31 It’s like, success makes people soft. With Elon, it seems like success doesn’t have any effect.
01:03:41 It’s like the reverse effect. It doesn’t, it’s like, what’s the, it’s always like,
01:03:45 what’s the next biggest thing, right? He’s living that exponential growth,
01:03:50 which I think that’s the problem that you have to have somebody who’s constantly
01:03:56 trying to find the 10 X solution, like trying to constantly improve things.
01:04:01 And, uh, restlessly that, I mean, that probably has to do with finding the right people,
01:04:06 not just creating the culture, but creating a culture with the right set of people.
01:04:11 Speaking of which Steve Jobs, there’s, uh, two things I want to mention there.
01:04:19 One, once again, the harshness, but a very different kind.
01:04:22 And the second is team building. So on the harshness, he is much harsher than Elon
01:04:32 in a way, in the following way. And I’m having a sense that you will not like this,
01:04:38 but I’d like to defend it is he loses his shit quite a bit. He was famously, at least,
01:04:44 especially early on being very emotional. He was letting passion dominate the discussion.
01:04:51 There’d be a lot of firings. There would be a lot of mean things said to people.
01:04:58 I don’t know what you make of that. How much as a leader,
01:05:01 are you allowed to just lose your shit in your love for the thing you’re doing?
01:05:07 And how effective is that?
01:05:09 As a leader, you shouldn’t be doing that very often.
01:05:11 So you can look back at me and say, well, Jocko, here’s the most profitable company that’s ever
01:05:16 existed. And so you’re wrong. Well, going back to that multiple multitude of characteristics that
01:05:24 human beings can have. Well, it’s the same thing with businesses. It’s the same thing with companies.
01:05:30 Steve Jobs was off the charts in some of his traits, his ability to understand design,
01:05:38 his ability to understand human interface with computer systems. So, so far off the charts
01:05:47 that despite his bad temper, emotional behavior, the company still thrived.
01:05:57 That can happen. You can have people that are horrible leaders that develop something
01:06:04 that’s so universally outstanding that you end up with a company that’s successful.
01:06:14 The reason, I mean, I get asked that a bunch, people always ask me, because I say, look,
01:06:18 you shouldn’t be losing your temper as a leader. Well, what about Steve Jobs? He used to yell and
01:06:24 scream all the time. Great. When people say that to me, I say, oh, okay. Are you as good at design
01:06:30 as Steve Jobs was? Are you as good at marketing as Steve Jobs was? He had a certain amount of skills
01:06:38 that were off the charts. And so he was able to be successful despite the fact that he would lose
01:06:45 his temper, treat people horribly. That’s not good. It’s not good. And it would have been even
01:06:50 more successful if he wouldn’t had those characteristics. Now you might say, well,
01:06:55 he, his anger is what pushed things. Well, let me ask you this. What leader wins the leader
01:07:05 whose team is afraid, who the team who execute, executes the mission because they’re afraid of
01:07:12 their leader or executes the task because they’re afraid of their leader or the team that loves
01:07:18 their leaders so much that they don’t want to let them down. They don’t want to let them down.
01:07:21 Or the team that loves their leaders so much that they don’t want to let them down. Which team wins?
01:07:28 You’re implying a confidence that love is more powerful than fear, but I’m not so sure. This is
01:07:34 the Machiavelli question. You’re saying ultimately it’s always better to lead by inspiration and love
01:07:41 than by, by putting the fear into the team. What I’m, what I’m saying is that I’ve seen
01:07:48 countless times is me leading through my authority, leading through my rank,
01:07:54 leading through punitive measures is infinitely worse than me and you working together as a team
01:08:02 to win. On the second point of Steve Jobs is he has this idea of philosophy of eight players
01:08:12 where you have a group, like the power and the productivity of a group of what he called eight
01:08:21 players is invaluable. So you want to get a team of people who are the best at what they do.
01:08:29 But the most important aspect to him was that a single quote unquote B player on the team destroys
01:08:37 the entire productivity of the team. Is there something that it brings true to that? So he was,
01:08:42 I guess this could be a temper thing, but vicious about firing and removing the, uh, what he felt
01:08:50 was a toxic B player in a team. So eight players feed off of each other, unless there’s one B
01:08:57 player present. It depends on the nature of the B player. Is the player, is the player a B player?
01:09:04 Is the player a B player because he’s a little bit lazy? Is he a B player because he doesn’t have a
01:09:13 good vision? Is he a B player because he’s got a big ego and always thinks he’s right
01:09:21 and now creates conflict in the team. So there’s a bunch of different B players.
01:09:24 Look, if you’re working for me and you’re kind of a B player, but guess what? You’re a grinder and
01:09:29 you get stuff done. I want you on the team. You might not be the smartest person I have,
01:09:33 but I know that you’re committed to the team and I want you on the team. So you’re a B player,
01:09:40 but that’s okay. Now, if you’re Lex with the giant ego, I’d rather have, I’d rather have Lex.
01:09:48 That’s not quite as smart. Cause I got other people that are smart. I got other people that
01:09:52 are smart on the team. Look, you’re going to need some smart people on the team, but a team
01:09:57 is made up. It’s a team. And so you take these different components of a team. And if you have
01:10:02 complimentary components, you’ll end up with a superior team. Then just basing it on the level
01:10:09 of, and what’s an A player sometimes in the seal teams, they would get something called the stacked
01:10:16 platoon. And what that would be is someone, you know, some senior person in that platoon would
01:10:24 manipulate and maneuver to get the quote best guys that he could in that platoon. So, you know,
01:10:31 the most experienced guys, the person that had great, great reputations. And sometimes those
01:10:36 platoons would be great. Sometimes they would implode because what you end up with is a bunch of
01:10:41 A players. And now no one wants to follow anyone else. No one wants to agree with anyone else.
01:10:47 Everyone wants to do it my way. Not it’s my way, not Lex’s way. Lex is stupid. No,
01:10:50 you’re stupid. We end up with problems. So can one person derail a team? Absolutely.
01:10:57 Under good leadership, one person should not derail a team.
01:11:04 This could be a tech thing too. There’s some multiplying effect of just pure excellence,
01:11:10 no matter the personalities. I think for Steve Jobs, he doesn’t, the ego doesn’t matter. None
01:11:19 of that matters. What matters is the quality of the output, the genius of the result.
01:11:24 And that somehow multiplies itself. And the egos actually, like one of the problems with egos
01:11:31 is like, what does ego usually say? It says, I’m much better than you. When you have people that
01:11:36 are really good together, it’s very hard for the ego to flourish because you’re like constantly
01:11:41 being shown that you’re not as good and there’s a competition. So like, I think to his, his idea was
01:11:47 that like, if you get people that are really good at what they do, it turns out that you’re not as
01:11:53 good at what you do. It turns as opposed to you being complacent and not doing much and thinking
01:12:00 you’re better than everyone else and your opinion is better, is you almost getting in that competitive
01:12:05 race. You know that magic that happens when you’re at the end of a marathon and you’re just like
01:12:10 head to head, like you’re just going full steam with a person that is as good as you. There’s no
01:12:15 place for ego there. Which is great. Which is great. Let’s use that example. You and I are racing,
01:12:22 the end of the marathon. We’re both highly competitive, highly competitive. We have massive
01:12:27 egos and we both want to win. We both want to win so bad that we, we give everything we’ve got.
01:12:37 That’s totally positive, right? Isn’t that totally positive? Now imagine this same thing.
01:12:43 We’re in a race, we’re in a marathon, we’re in the last hundred meters. It’s you against me
01:12:48 and, and our egos are huge and we’re pushing to win and you start to pull ahead of me
01:12:54 and my ego is so big and I hate losing so much that I somehow accidentally
01:13:02 push my knee up against your foot on a backstride and throw you onto your face.
01:13:06 So that’s what ego, ego is an awesome driver unless you let your ego control you and you let
01:13:14 ego drive your decision making process, in which case it turns into an incredible problem. So
01:13:20 you might have someone that is excellent. You might have someone that’s outstanding. You might
01:13:25 have some someone that’s tens across the board, but their ego is so big that big that they can’t
01:13:31 work with other people. They can’t accept anyone else’s ideas. They can’t compromise on something
01:13:36 because they think their idea is better all the time and that is going to be problematic
01:13:40 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
01:13:45 situation where I can utilize their best aspects, but not have their ego destroy the team. So I
01:13:53 might say, Hey Lex, you know what? I actually want you to take lead on this part of the project over
01:13:58 here and since you’re so smart and you work so hard, I know you’re going to pull ahead of everyone
01:14:04 else. So you grind on that. Once you get that result, give it to me and I’m going to disseminate
01:14:10 it to the team. So I, I, I isolate you from wrecking yourself and the rest of the team with
01:14:17 your giant ego. So then, uh, looking at a completely opposite person was this a fascinating
01:14:24 person to me is Sandra Pichai, who’s the CEO of Alphabet CEO of Google. I admire the
01:14:31 the, uh, in a romantic sense, the madness that is, uh, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
01:14:40 So to me, the opposite of that is Sandra Pichai, who’s, uh, like everybody loves him.
01:14:49 And, uh, he’s also a great listener. So he always brings people together. And so he went,
01:14:54 the, the, the energy of that person in the room is like the basic energy. If I were to summarize it,
01:15:00 it’s like, I want to hear all the voices in the room. That’s the energy he brings. And, uh,
01:15:08 it’s almost like he doesn’t want to impose a final decision. He wants to hear all the voices
01:15:14 and somehow always the decision just falls out. I don’t know what to say about that.
01:15:22 What to say about that style of leadership, but it’s always surprising to me how
01:15:30 that love brought a lot of people together and still, I mean, some of the greatest things Google
01:15:36 has done over the past several years, uh, could be attributed to that continued innovation,
01:15:43 bringing out the best out of people. There’s of course, bureaucracy, which I could criticize
01:15:47 at the end of the day, which always happens with big companies. I would argue actually
01:15:51 the dictatorial style of Steve jobs and, you know, Musk helped fight the bureaucracy,
01:15:56 which is one criticism I would give of being a listener and being kind is sometimes you can’t
01:16:01 cut through the as effectively, but he. He’s one of the only people I’ve ever heard of
01:16:07 who everybody loves. He’s inspirational figure to millions, especially in the, like in India,
01:16:13 he’s a celebrity in the best kind of way. Is there something you could say about that kind
01:16:18 of leadership where you’re never the asshole. You’re never the dictator. You’re always the
01:16:24 listener and, um, the compassionate empathetic glue that brings the team together basically
01:16:32 would love. Yeah. That’s that’s great leadership. If you have to choose for Google, uh,
01:16:42 for large companies, is there something to be said about what is more effective?
01:16:47 The dictator, uh, ruling by love or ruling by fear?
01:16:54 First of all, everything’s a dichotomy, right? And so to think that all the time, you’re always
01:17:00 going to be able to just bark orders at people and they’re always going to listen to you. And
01:17:04 you’re always going to get the best result. That would not be smart to think that every single
01:17:09 time you’re going to come to a 100% consensus amongst the troops. And that decision is going
01:17:15 to reveal itself without you nudging it along. That would also be short sighted and naive. So
01:17:22 what you, what a good leader does is they, they, they stay balanced. And as much as they can,
01:17:27 they listen to what the troops have to say. They take that feedback. Maybe they quietly nudge things
01:17:34 and, and I’m sure he does that. I’m sure he does some nudging that maybe no one even picks up on.
01:17:40 You know, I like to say the best forms of leadership is leadership with minimum force required.
01:17:45 So if I can go into a room as a leader and not say one single thing and the team can come to
01:17:51 the right consensus and move in that direction, that’s my preferred method. Maybe I have to give
01:17:55 them a little bit of a nudge, a 10% nudge in one direction. Okay. That’s better than me walking in
01:18:00 there and giving them 100% dictatorial direction of exactly what I want to have happen. Now,
01:18:08 occasionally, if we have an emergency situation, people are starting to be frazzled and they’re
01:18:13 not sure which direction to go. Then sometimes as a leader, you have to walk in and say, all right,
01:18:17 everyone here’s where we’re going. And people get on board. Why? Because for many years or months or
01:18:24 however long you’ve trusted them to come up with a plan. And when you trust, when you, as a leader,
01:18:30 trust your team to come up with a plan, the team starts to trust you and you get leadership capital.
01:18:37 And as you build leadership capital, occasionally you need to cash in some of that leadership
01:18:42 capital. You need to spend some of it. And maybe it is, hey, listen, here’s the direction we’re
01:18:46 going right now. We’ll debrief it later, but we got to make a move. And the team who trusts you
01:18:52 says, Roger that boss, we got it. And all of them actually do this
01:18:57 interesting thing. I’d love to hear your opinion on it. Sondra certainly does it to a large degree,
01:19:03 which is it’s in the process of delegation, trusting a person to do a really difficult thing,
01:19:14 like tossing it up and saying like, I trust you can get this job done
01:19:24 for some, even if your resume does not support that. I’m actually kind of amazed that human
01:19:31 beings when they’re given the trust to get the job done, they step up very often. That’s kind
01:19:36 of an amazing property of human nature. People often ask me issues about leadership. And I always
01:19:43 say that one of the best tools for teaching leadership and for teaching a bunch of other
01:19:47 lessons is leadership itself. So when it happens all the time, when you elevate someone into a
01:19:53 leadership position, they do step up and they do make things happen. So that’s not surprising to me.
01:20:00 You do have to mitigate risks. So saying, Hey, you know, Lex, I know you’re,
01:20:05 haven’t been in the military before. I know you have very limited weapons experience,
01:20:11 but I want you to run a target assault on a real mission in whatever country that would not be
01:20:18 good. That would not be a good move on, on my part. Now, if I said, all right, Lex, you know what,
01:20:22 I want you to get some leadership experience. I’ve got a training mission and it’s going to
01:20:26 be using paintball and I’m going to put you in charge of it. I got no problem doing that.
01:20:33 Some of that is judging human character is like, there’s potential, there’s something in this
01:20:39 person that they are, they have enough demons or whatever the hell it requires to have that fuel.
01:20:45 They’ll figure it out. They’ll hate themselves if they don’t. And they’ll find the right,
01:20:51 they’ll find the tools that find the path to achieve the, whatever the level of perfection
01:20:56 they can. It’s been really surprising to me. It’s been making me rethink the whole hiring process
01:21:02 because I often now I’m thinking and looking, so I’m looking for people, both for the startup,
01:21:07 but just for my own life to help. And I almost want to see evidence of excellence,
01:21:14 but maybe you want to just based on just judgment of human character without evidence of excellence,
01:21:21 have people step up. Like Joe Rogan with Jamie, that’s a funny side of it. I didn’t understand
01:21:28 how little Joe knew about Jamie when he hired him. And Jamie stepped up and now runs one of
01:21:34 the most successful podcasts ever. And that’s an incredible kind of, and he’s one of the best
01:21:39 producers in the world now, not to let it get to his head. And by the way, the funny thing about
01:21:45 him. And one of the best Googlers in the world. One of the best Googlers. The funny thing about
01:21:49 Jamie, this is okay. You might not like this, but what I, what I like, I’m constantly exceptionally
01:21:57 self critical to a point of like self hating. Sometimes I deeply appreciate every single moment
01:22:04 I’m alive, but everything I’ve ever done, I feel like a shit. And when I talked to Jamie about
01:22:10 everything he’s done, he’s just in every way he carries himself. He’s so self critical. He’s so
01:22:16 he’s so like worried that it’s wrong. It’s bad. That anxious energy. I love it. Cause that’s how
01:22:24 you lead to growth and progress. Like you might, like a therapist might say, that’s probably not
01:22:29 good for your like wellbeing. Fuck it. It’s good for the what’s good for your wellbeing is to create
01:22:36 awesome things. That’s ultimately what leads to happiness is to, to create the best thing you can
01:22:41 in your life. And so when I see that in somebody like Jamie or anybody I talked to, when you’re
01:22:47 really self critical, that’s a good sign to me. Is that ridiculous? It’s not ridiculous at all.
01:22:53 And it goes back, you know, you were, you were the way you were phrasing these questions about what
01:22:57 makes a good person and what makes a good leader, the way you phrase them kind of eliminated the
01:23:05 normal answer that I give the normal answer that I give. You asked me what makes a good leader,
01:23:10 what makes a good person is, is being humble. So when you’re going to hire someone for your,
01:23:19 for your startup or whatever company you’re creating, that is a key characteristic to look for
01:23:24 is someone that has the humility like, like young Jamie to say, yeah, you know, I, I could have done
01:23:30 this better and here’s what I can improve. And here’s what I need to work on. When you have
01:23:34 somebody that thinks they know everything out of the gate, you’re, you’re already got someone
01:23:40 that’s going to be hard to deal with. They’re going to be hard to coach. They’re going to be
01:23:42 hard to mentor. When you have somebody that’s truly humble, you barely, again, it’s minimum
01:23:47 force required because when you say to Jamie after a show, how do you think that went,
01:23:52 he says, well, you know, I did this wrong and I didn’t have this set up in time. And
01:23:55 you don’t, you don’t barely have to do anything because he’s got the humility.
01:23:58 If you’ve got someone that’s a big ego and you say, Hey, how did that show go? He goes,
01:24:03 I went awesome on my end. Now guess what you have to do. Now you have to start applying
01:24:08 force as a leader, which is expending leadership capital, which we don’t want to do because we
01:24:11 always try and conserve our leadership capital as much as we possibly can. And when we have to
01:24:16 expend it just to get Jamie to make some improvements, that’s bad. So when you go
01:24:23 looking for people, look for people that are humble. Now, does this mean you look for people
01:24:26 that don’t have any confidence? No, that’s not what I’m saying. There’s a balance to all these
01:24:29 things. That’s the dichotomy of leadership you, but people tend towards and look, I work with
01:24:35 a lot of military troops in the past. Now I work with companies. The reason I talk about
01:24:39 humility all the time is because for someone to be, get into a leadership position in the military,
01:24:47 they have to have confidence. So the tendency is that their confidence is going to outweigh their
01:24:53 humility at some point. Same thing with, with civilian companies. If you get to a point of
01:24:59 leadership inside of a company, you have to have confidence to get there. You don’t get to a
01:25:03 position of leadership inside of a company lacking confidence. So the tendency is for
01:25:09 confidence to, to grow a little bit too much. And we have to put that, put that confidence into check.
01:25:16 We have to put that ego into check. Really good leaders. They’re confident, but they’re humble.
01:25:21 That’s the balance of the dichotomy. Hear that, Jamie, don’t get cocky.
01:25:25 On occasion. Rarely you talk about discipline. What does a discipline life look like doing what
01:25:33 you’re supposed to do? What if I want to lay on the couch and eat Cheetos and watch soap operas?
01:25:41 That’s that’s not, that doesn’t feel like discipline. Do you think you’re supposed to do that?
01:25:47 Well, you know, you could argue from a, a sort of a meaning of life perspective that perhaps
01:25:53 happiness is the most important. And if it makes me happy, perhaps that’s, if it’s fulfilling,
01:26:02 of course, eating Cheetos and watching soap operas is fulfilling for nobody whatsoever.
01:26:06 Next question. But there’s something about discipline that’s more than that. We have to
01:26:11 like the rigor of habit, right? You, you wake up early in the morning, all the time.
01:26:20 What is it Jordan Peterson talks about? Make your bed. One place where you probably agree with
01:26:25 Jordan. People ask me if I make my bed. I don’t. There’s a disagreement with Jordan.
01:26:32 There we go.
01:26:32 I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.
01:26:39 There’s a disagreement with Jordan. There we go. You know, when I was younger, before I was married,
01:26:46 I didn’t make my bed because I had one sleeping bag on it and I would get out of the sleeping bag.
01:26:53 There was nothing to make. Yeah. Now I’m married and I can’t make my bed because my wife’s in my
01:26:59 bed. So I don’t make my bed. Okay. So what in your life, maybe we can talk about the one that’s most
01:27:07 publicly facing, which is you wake up at four o clock or around four o clock in the morning.
01:27:14 You post on social media a picture of your watch. It being early, just to remind people that
01:27:25 you are a man of your word. What’s that about? What’s the philosophy of the four o clock?
01:27:32 What role does that play in a disciplined life for you?
01:27:35 Okay. From that perspective, what role it plays is getting a jump on the day.
01:27:40 And when you wake up early and you get a jump on the day and you’ve got your workout done,
01:27:45 and you’ve got a little bit of little bit of work done by the time normal people are getting up,
01:27:53 that’s a win. That’s a psychological win. And it’s not just a psychological win. It’s an actual win.
01:27:58 It’s an actual win. So that feels great. It doesn’t feel great. Maybe when your alarm clock goes off,
01:28:04 but by eight o clock in the morning and you’ve already accomplished some of the major tasks
01:28:10 that you have, some of the most painful tasks that you have for the day,
01:28:14 you’re off to a great start and it’s going to feel great.
01:28:19 Let’s break this down then. What does then the rest of the day look like? What is the perfect,
01:28:26 productive, disciplined day in the life of Jaco Willink look like?
01:28:31 Wake up, workout.
01:28:34 Wake up when?
01:28:35 4, 4.30.
01:28:36 Workout when?
01:28:38 5, 5 to 6 or 7.
01:28:42 No eating?
01:28:43 No.
01:28:44 And then what does the workout look like?
01:28:46 Depends on the day.
01:28:48 What’s the perfect? We’re talking about body weight, lifting, cardio, heavy bag, jiu jitsu.
01:28:58 Okay. Yeah. When I say workout, I mean no jiu jitsu. So jiu jitsu comes later in the day.
01:29:06 So this is just you alone?
01:29:07 This is me alone working out. Yep. And I’m going to be doing a wide variety of things.
01:29:13 This is the thing that has the pictures of the aftermath with some sweat at the end. So the goal
01:29:20 is to do whatever the hell results in some sweat. And that takes an hour.
01:29:24 Sometimes it takes 12 minutes. Sometimes it takes three hours, depending on what kind of mood I’m in.
01:29:33 You got some demons to work through or is this just work? So you got the David Goggins who clearly
01:29:43 has demons screaming inside of his head that he’s trying to work through. Are you just getting the
01:29:47 work done out of the discipline? Or is this, I think Joe is a little bit with David Goggins is like,
01:29:54 there’s some ego, there’s some bullshit that you’re trying to get out through some of the exercise.
01:29:58 That’s a good way to kind of humble you is just doing that exercise.
01:30:01 Well, exercise is certainly humbling.
01:30:06 I mean, it’s, but it’s physical conditioning, right? It’s preparing your body so that you can
01:30:11 handle whatever it is you’re going to do. Perfect.
01:30:14 What does, what do you do after? Let’s talk about food. Hopefully surf. If the waves are good,
01:30:22 surf for how good are the waves? Let’s say they’re good. This is a perfect day. It’s a perfect,
01:30:29 perfect waves. Why do you surf? It’s fun. Okay. This is fun. Okay. Man, man and nature.
01:30:38 It was just like, what surfing is the ultimate is the power of the, the infinite power of the ocean
01:30:48 versus a little silly looking man on a board.
01:30:53 You could say it’s the infinite power of the ocean versus a silly looking man on a board,
01:30:57 or you could say it’s fun because it’s Russian and romance. Okay. This is for fun
01:31:03 in the morning. Beautiful. And this is, you’re still having eaten.
01:31:06 No. Okay. So when do you eat? I’ll usually start grazing around 11 oclock
01:31:13 and grazing. What’s the, what’s the diet that’s the, is there a perfect diet or do you graze?
01:31:19 I’ll have, I’ll eat some nuts, you know, something like that. I usually start grazing. Maybe I’ll
01:31:24 have a little piece of meat or something like that. Does work enter any of this? I’m sure you
01:31:29 have a lot of people that want your attention. Yeah. Yeah. No work is work is about to happen.
01:31:35 Cause you know, even if I, if I woke up at four, worked out from five to six surf from six to eight,
01:31:42 now I’m starting to work writing, recording, reading, talking to clients.
01:31:51 Is there parts of the day where you try to find moments to think deeply, to read deeply,
01:31:59 to sort of really focus? Cause this world wants, it’s full of distractions, right?
01:32:04 Right. Even talking to, uh, like even work stuff, the emails and all those kinds of things that can,
01:32:10 they can scatter your mind. Is there times you seek to have that focus?
01:32:14 Well, I read a lot of books. And so usually when I read, I’ll be reading for a chunk of time,
01:32:20 maybe an hour at a time, maybe a little bit longer. And I might do that twice a day. So
01:32:27 I don’t know if that counts as what you’re describing, but then same thing with writing.
01:32:32 When I, when I’m writing something, I mean, I just, that’s what I do. I write usually usually
01:32:37 write for about an hour. I can get about a thousand words an hour out of me. So that’s,
01:32:43 that’s sort of what I do. What does the rest of the day look like?
01:32:48 Just a lot of work, but one is the jujitsu. I want to find out about the jujitsu.
01:32:52 So round, round four, 30 or five oclock at night and train. Yep. And, uh, how hard you still, how,
01:33:02 how are you doing body wise? He still is the old man. Does the old man still got it or,
01:33:09 or are you talking to me?
01:33:15 It’d be good for viewership and ratings. If I die before the end of the podcast. So
01:33:19 so I, I, I still train with the same guys and I’ll train, you know, so I’ve been very lucky
01:33:25 when it comes to getting injured and stuff like that. So haven’t, I’ve had some injuries,
01:33:30 but they’re, they’re healed. And so, yeah, I train and, uh, food wise, you mentioned grazing
01:33:36 us some, uh, of some nuts, a very light kind of things. Is there a main meal here at night at
01:33:41 night? Yep. High, uh, in protein or is it anything? Yeah. I’ll have like a steak and salad. I’ll
01:33:48 usually have for dessert. I have like a protein shake. So is there a thing where at the end of
01:33:57 the, uh, at the end of the day, you will like, you have like a summarize sword and you meditate on,
01:34:02 uh, uh, death and, um, all those kinds of, is, is there some weird ritual you partake in? No.
01:34:10 You just go to bed when I get done with the end of the day, I might read a little bit more.
01:34:13 Read more. Yeah. Because reading makes me tired usually. Um, so I’ll read a little bit more.
01:34:23 Is there a key to you that you can speak to that makes for a productive day?
01:34:28 Just the way you approach it mentally. Yeah. Write down what you’re supposed to do,
01:34:32 wake up early and start doing it and then get it done. Yeah. I know it’s a miraculous trick.
01:34:39 Can I ask you about Jiu Jitsu? By all means.
01:34:45 What have you learned from being a practitioner? You’re a black belt.
01:34:49 What have you learned from this journey, uh, of, um, being a martial artist?
01:34:57 Jiu Jitsu for me was the connective tissue that started to join my mind together with
01:35:05 all the F different aspects of my life. And so Jiu Jitsu for me was, was really important.
01:35:12 And I don’t think I would be doing anything that I’m doing right now if it wasn’t for Jiu Jitsu.
01:35:16 So there’s various aspects of my life that were in existence, but I didn’t understand how they
01:35:23 were connected until I started training Jiu Jitsu. The primary things are interacting with other
01:35:28 human beings and combat tactics and strategy and Jiu Jitsu. And all those things are connected.
01:35:37 They all follow the same guiding principles. And I wouldn’t have recognized those guiding principles
01:35:42 if I didn’t do Jiu Jitsu. Can you elaborate? Cause you’ve trained for many, many years.
01:35:49 What, um, is it the hardship? Is it the humbling nature of just being tapped all over,
01:35:55 you know, nonstop, or I don’t actually don’t know how many times more times than you. Okay.
01:36:02 So good. Is it just the hardship of physical training, like the honesty of the mat in the
01:36:08 sense that like, you know, what works and what doesn’t work, which, which aspects were the most,
01:36:13 uh, impactful for you? All aspects. So yes, from a humility perspective, when you realize you think
01:36:20 when you think, you know what you’re doing, when you think you have certain skills
01:36:23 and you realize that there’s always somebody better than you. And you realize that, Hey,
01:36:26 maybe I don’t have all the answers all the time. And you bring that to a leadership perspective
01:36:31 and you walk into your platoon and you realize that maybe you don’t have all the answers all
01:36:35 the time. And maybe you should listen to what other people have to say. You bring that to a
01:36:39 combat situation and you realize that you think if you sit there and think that you’re smarter than
01:36:44 the enemy, you’re going to be complacent. You’re going to make mistakes. So there’s one aspect out
01:36:50 of the gate, as far as, you know, if I, if I’m going to try and get your arm, do I attack your
01:36:59 arm? Maybe not directly, unless I’m a white belt. Exactly. What do I do? I attack your neck. And
01:37:06 when you reach up to defend your neck, that’s when I get your arm. Well, if I’m out on the
01:37:11 battlefield and there’s an enemy position, should I attack frontal assault into that position?
01:37:16 No, no, I shouldn’t. I should put down some covering fire and I should maneuver around to
01:37:19 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
01:37:26 and you’ve come up with a plan and I don’t like your plan, should I walk up to you and say, hey,
01:37:29 Lex, your plan isn’t good? No. Or should I say, Hey, Lex, can I ask you some questions about how
01:37:35 you want us to execute this? Cause I want to make sure I understand your vision.
01:37:42 So all these things are connected. Yes.
01:37:44 And I wouldn’t have realized that we could sit here and do this forever. We could, we could,
01:37:48 I could tell you these comparisons forever, but this, all this connective tissue, bringing all
01:37:54 these things together, I wouldn’t have seen it without, I don’t think I would have seen it without
01:37:58 jujitsu. So jujitsu to me had, it had a incredible life impact on me. Not look the physical part. Yes,
01:38:09 absolutely. Does it, does it keep you humble when you know that there’s 145 pound individual that
01:38:18 can tap you out when you’re 220 pound, 25 year old guy. And there’s 135 or 140 pound, you know,
01:38:28 46 year old guy that can make you tap out. That’s humbling. And, and what do you do with that? Do
01:38:35 you run away from it or do you continue to pursue it? Same thing with life. Same thing with anything.
01:38:40 So jujitsu is an incredibly powerful, not just physical aspect, but it’s, it’s a way to understand.
01:38:48 It’s a way of thinking. You’ve also competed. Is there something you can speak to the value of
01:38:54 competition? Obviously you’ve been through combat, actual military combat is many, many, many, many
01:39:03 orders of magnitude, more high stakes than competition in a, in a silly sport like jujitsu.
01:39:10 Nevertheless, it still has some of the echoes of the same challenges. Is there something you can
01:39:18 speak to the value of competition for you? Yep. Competition will reveal weaknesses in your game
01:39:24 that you can then go back and train to rectify. So that, that’s a big part of it.
01:39:31 So that that’s very useful to serve. Yeah. As a testing ground, of course, training can be that
01:39:38 testing ground as well or, or that feedback. Yeah. But as you and I both know, if you and
01:39:44 I train together all the time, you’ll know my game. I’ll know your game. And even if we have
01:39:48 five other people, we all kind of understand each other’s games and you’re not doing something to me
01:39:53 that I don’t expect. So when I go and compete, I’m good. You’re good. You know, this random person
01:39:58 has a game that I’ve never seen before. I’m, and I may or may not know how to deal with that game.
01:40:03 If I know how to deal with it, great. I get the victory. Maybe I don’t learn as much. If I don’t
01:40:08 know how to deal with their game, I get the loss and I get the win of learning what some
01:40:15 weakness in my game is. So you mentioned offline that your friends and you work with Dean Lister
01:40:21 and Dean Lister is one of the people that inspired John Donoher, who I’ve very much been,
01:40:29 I’ve gotten a chance to talk to quite a bit recently.
01:40:34 I don’t know what you think about this. This is not a therapy session, but
01:40:39 or maybe it is turning into one. He’s a fascinating person, John Donoher, in terms of
01:40:49 creating almost a science of Jiu Jitsu to a level that I haven’t seen before, which is
01:40:57 systems thinking about, like you can think about military combat as tactics in a particular
01:41:03 situation, but then you zoom out and you want to create entire systems of tactics in all situations,
01:41:09 right? He’s very kind of wants to keep zooming out and creating giant systems.
01:41:14 And, which I appreciate that, even though the task is probably impossible to do completely,
01:41:22 but there is something that’s in terms of competition that
01:41:29 he kindled a fire in me that I want to get back out there. He has a particular thing that did it,
01:41:36 which is very different from my personal journey in Jiu Jitsu, which was to a degree that people
01:41:45 I worked with cared about competition, it was always about winning or doing well,
01:41:53 all those kinds of things. For John, it’s about winning, like winning is not even a thing that’s
01:42:01 important. What’s most important is winning by submission or dominance, right? And not just the
01:42:12 end, it’s the entire time competing such that the only thing that matters is that kind of victory.
01:42:19 And that’s a very different level of competition that’s actually liberating in a certain kind of
01:42:23 sense. I remember so much of my competition was about fear of not taking risks. You get up on
01:42:34 points or you hold a strong position, you kind of advance and you get more points. Maybe you chase
01:42:39 the submission, but there’s always a fear of risk. And for him, you embrace the risk. You should not
01:42:46 be competing out of fear. Live and die by the sword versus stay in safety. I don’t know if there’s
01:42:54 something to be said here. Well, you said it’s novel to you, it’s not novel to me. My entire
01:43:02 journey in Jiu Jitsu was only about submission. And as you mentioned, Dean Lister is my coach and my
01:43:10 main training partner for 20 something years. And if you ever watch Dean train or fight, that’s what
01:43:18 he’s trying to do is submit as everyone. That’s what he’s always done. That’s what he always will
01:43:23 do. He, you know, he has the highest, I think he has impact. I know he has the highest submission
01:43:30 victories in ADCC. He, that’s what he does. So this is, in fact, as Jiu Jitsu got bigger and
01:43:38 bigger, in fact, as Jiu Jitsu got more popular and we started seeing people competing to win by
01:43:47 points, that was what was novel to me in the beginning. Now it’s the standard. So it’s not
01:43:53 novel to me. I love the fact that John Donoher and all of his troops go out and they try and
01:44:00 submit people. I think it’s awesome. And I think that’s what Jiu Jitsu is.
01:44:03 All right. Let’s ask for some advice for white belts. There’s a lot of white belts who listen to this.
01:44:09 What advice would you give? You’ve been in Jiu Jitsu for many years. In terms of
01:44:15 a successful journey through Jiu Jitsu, what advice would you give them? People just starting out.
01:44:20 Just keep training, keep your ego in check. Don’t freak out. Try and use the techniques
01:44:24 that you learn and all this stuff. So I’m like saying it, you know, notice how I’m saying it.
01:44:27 Yeah.
01:44:28 Hey, tap out, keep your ego in check.
01:44:31 It’s common sense.
01:44:31 But the thing is everyone says this all the time and white belts still start off by going
01:44:35 completely nuts for at least, you know, three to six months of, I’m not going to let this guy tap
01:44:40 me out. And they’re going to, and I’m going to tap this guy out, not by using technique,
01:44:44 but by just using strength. And it’s just, it’s just inhibiting your learning. So as much as you
01:44:50 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
01:44:53 you want to tap somebody, but as soon as you get, get that off your chest, then try and, try and
01:45:01 relax and try and learn the techniques. It’s perhaps counterintuitive. It never was to me,
01:45:07 but it’s counterintuitive that to, to start on the journey of really sort of mastering Jiu Jitsu or
01:45:13 whatever, or improving is you have to relax. And that seems to be a very counterintuitive lesson.
01:45:19 I learned that early on with, that was thanks to the Russian system. I played piano and like music,
01:45:26 basically, actually this is true for basically any sport that includes the human body is like
01:45:31 relaxing is the way you, you start learning stuff. You have to learn, you have to literally,
01:45:36 and most people don’t seem to understand this is like, you have to learn what it means for the
01:45:41 human body to relax. Like, I guess you have to have enough knowledge of all the muscles involved
01:45:48 to know what it means to relax those muscles. So for piano, you have to understand what it means
01:45:53 to relax your wrists and your fingers in order to learn how to move them. Like if there’s tenseness
01:46:00 in the fingers, you’re not going to like, you have to learn how to try hard while relaxed.
01:46:08 The, I guess the beginner, if you don’t internalize this lesson, will try hard by
01:46:14 tensing up hard and like trying hard, tensing up more as opposed to relaxing more. And that lesson
01:46:21 cannot be conveyed through words, I guess. I’ve had the great fortune of having dictatorial
01:46:28 teachers as they do in Russia for piano and so on, where you get like hit if you don’t learn
01:46:34 to relax, which is a counterintuitive notion, but it works.
01:46:37 Yeah. This brings me to one of my favorite pieces of coaching advice that I will tell
01:46:42 white belts while they’re struggling on the mat. I’ll tell them to relax harder.
01:46:47 Okay. That’s beautiful. For somebody who studied war, who participated in war,
01:46:58 what do you think is the best martial arts for, let’s call it self defense,
01:47:04 let’s call it self defense for hand to hand combat outside the constraints of sport.
01:47:13 So it’s not one answer. The answer to me is jujitsu, boxing, wrestling, Muay Thai,
01:47:24 judo, Sambo, and on down the list. I definitely start with jujitsu. The reason I start with
01:47:30 jujitsu is because in a self defense situation, if you are a big monster human and you want to
01:47:38 fight me and you square off with me, guess what I’m going to do? Run away. Cause I don’t want,
01:47:45 I don’t want to get involved. Even if I see skinny little Lex out on the street and you
01:47:52 start yelling at me and saying, you want to fight me? I don’t want to fight you. I don’t,
01:47:55 it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if I can beat you or not. What if you stab me? What if you
01:47:59 sue me after I get done throwing you onto the concrete? There’s a million bad things that can
01:48:04 happen and almost nothing good. So for self defense, my first self defense is my feet to
01:48:10 get away from you. And if you square off to punch me, I can run away from you. If you square off to
01:48:17 kick me, I can run away from you. If you push me, I can run away from you. So great. I don’t need
01:48:23 to know how to box to run away from you where this all changes is when you grab me. And now
01:48:31 I don’t have the option to run away anymore. Now I actually have to know how to get away from your
01:48:37 grip. And that’s where jujitsu comes into play. So, especially if you get me on the ground,
01:48:43 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
01:48:49 get up and get away from you so I can run away. So that’s why I say start with jujitsu. And, and
01:48:55 from there, boxing, wrestling, judo, Sambo, Muay Thai. Yeah. There’s a, there’s certain in the
01:49:04 standing position. I mean, I’m a judo person as well. And, uh, the judo is very limited in their
01:49:09 understanding of the full grappling spectrum, even though they do all the things on the ground as
01:49:15 well. But, uh, it’s so focused on the feet, but nevertheless, it’s important to understand
01:49:22 the thing that judo has as a sport and it’s good to practice that, uh, jujitsu doesn’t
01:49:30 is, um, not just the, the skill of grappling on the feet, but the skill of explosive aggression
01:49:39 that, uh, sometimes jujitsu is more about in terms of tactics is more about patience. It
01:49:46 depends how you practice it, but because so much is, uh, about control and, uh, technique
01:49:53 that, uh, sometimes you don’t get to practice like aggression, explosive aggression. And judo
01:49:58 is so much about, uh, aggression implemented in such a way that the demonstration of power is
01:50:05 effortless, right? That’s the beauty of jujitsu. Yeah. And same thing with wrestling. Wrestling
01:50:10 also has a high level of intensity and aggression as well. Yes. Yeah. So that’s where, that’s where
01:50:15 I agree. Judo and wrestling. Absolutely. Awesome. Get some and striking boxing Muay Thai. Yeah. You
01:50:24 know, like the, you should train all these things. Are there books and movies in your life long ago
01:50:31 or recently that had a big impact on you? Uh, yeah, the main one is about face, which is sitting
01:50:38 right here. There you go. This is written by Colonel David Hackworth. That’s the
01:50:45 book that really had a massive impact on me from a leadership perspective. And I ended up,
01:50:51 I talked about it enough that it started kind of coming back and started selling well and
01:50:55 they contacted me and I wrote a forward for it. So that book had a huge impact on me and I still,
01:51:03 when I read it, I still get lessons out of it just about every time. This is the Vietnam war.
01:51:09 And Korea. And Korea. And he got in towards the end of, right at the end of world war II. So he
01:51:16 was kind of raised by the, the soldiers that fought in world war II and then he went to Korea
01:51:22 and then he went to Vietnam. An exceptional warrior, a soldier soldier. If you can give
01:51:27 a little inkling what made him a soldier soldier. So I, he died in 2005 so I never got to meet him.
01:51:41 And I, I had a guy on my podcast who worked for him in Vietnam, a guy named general James
01:51:50 Mukiyama. And luckily his son had reached out to me and said, I think you’re talking about my dad
01:51:59 cause I read some passage in there that, that Jim Mukiyama was young cap young captain Jim Mukiyama,
01:52:04 company commander in Vietnam. He said, I think you’re talking about my dad. Would you want to
01:52:10 talk to him? And I said, absolutely. Well, here’s the thing that I didn’t really understand. And
01:52:14 you read one quote, but there’s all these quotes in that book that talk about how great Hackworth
01:52:19 was and what an incredible leader he was and how he was the best combat leader anyone had ever seen.
01:52:24 And all these just really complimentary things that are said by a bunch of different people.
01:52:29 And when you read the book, you’re reading this guy’s account of what he went through.
01:52:35 But I never really knew if that was all true or did he just cherry pick his friends,
01:52:43 quotes about him and cherry pick the stories that he wanted to tell.
01:52:46 And so it was very interesting for me when I met Mukiyama, General Mukiyama, who he became a general
01:52:51 eventually when I met him and we were talking about his life. And I was very curious and I was
01:52:57 a little bit nervous going into this interview because I was thinking maybe my hero, my mentor,
01:53:02 this guy that I’ve never met before, maybe he’s just an arrogant jerk that talked, talked himself
01:53:08 up in this book. So I’m sitting down with, with General Mukiyama and I finally got to the part
01:53:14 where he’s meeting Hackworth for the first time. And I said, did, you know, did you know who
01:53:23 Hackworth was when he showed up? So he was Mukiyama, Muk, Muk, they call him Muk. Muk was the,
01:53:29 was the, like the adjutant to the, to the general that, that was going to, that, that Hackworth
01:53:36 was going to be working for. So when Hackworth comes into the office, the first person he meets
01:53:40 is this guy, this guy, Captain Mukiyama. And so Hackworth walks in and I said, when Hackworth
01:53:46 walked in, did you know who he was? And Mukiyama says, everybody knew who he was, Mr. Infantry.
01:53:54 And so he ended up explaining that everything that is written in there about Hackworth,
01:54:01 they, they just loved him. They adored him. Up the chain of command,
01:54:07 it turned out a little bit different. And, you know, the title of the book is about face. And
01:54:11 if you’re familiar, familiar with military drill about faces, when you turn around 180 degrees,
01:54:17 and at the end of the Vietnam war, towards the end of the Vietnam war, he was so disgusted with
01:54:23 the way that the war was being fought. He was so disgusted with the decisions that were being made
01:54:28 by the leadership that he did an interview. He was the first Colonel, first senior officer to
01:54:34 do an interview that spoke out against the war that was happening. And this is while he’s in
01:54:39 Vietnam, by the way. So he got drummed out of the army, and he was forced to retire. And that was
01:54:46 that. So there’s an element of rebelliousness to him. And, you know, when you talk to me about,
01:54:53 are there times when the leaders making the leadership, this absolute senior leadership,
01:54:59 the civilian leadership is doing the wrong things? Yes. And there’s times when people speak out
01:55:04 against it. And there’s an argument for and against that, too, even even with Hackworth.
01:55:09 You know, did he when you get when you quit your job, or you do something that gets you fired,
01:55:13 which is what he did, you immediately give up all your influence over what’s happening. So they get
01:55:20 another, they get another battalion commander to take his place, they get another colonel to step
01:55:23 in and take his place. That’s what they do. And now he can’t help anymore. And he’s like,
01:55:27 and now he can’t help anymore. He can’t help his troops. But at that point in the war,
01:55:33 he loved his men so much that he was sickened with the situation on the ground. And he,
01:55:44 and he spoke out about it. So that book had a huge impact on me. And like I said, I still,
01:55:51 I still read it all the time. I reread it all the time. And I always take lessons from it.
01:55:56 But let me ask you about love. This is not usually associated with Jaco. But what role does love
01:56:03 in terms of friendship, in terms of family play in a successful life? And life in general?
01:56:10 Again, this is putting other people above yourself.
01:56:14 Do you see that as love? That’s ultimately the implementation of love?
01:56:18 I would say yes.
01:56:19 Jaco, I’ve been a huge fan of yours. You’re somebody who inspires me to get up early,
01:56:25 to get shit done, to be disciplined about my life, and to be the best leader I can be.
01:56:31 It’s really, truly an honor. And thank you for wasting all your too valuable time with me. I
01:56:37 don’t know what you were thinking, but thank you for doing it.
01:56:40 Well, thanks for having me on. I can guarantee I’m not as cool as you just made me sound.
01:56:44 I’m just out here, like I said, trying to help people out. And I think you’re helping a lot of
01:56:49 people out with your podcast. So thanks for having me up here to share some of my experiences.
01:56:54 And hopefully I’ll see you on the mat one day.
01:56:57 For sure. Looking forward to it. Could be sooner than you think.
01:57:00 Sounds like a threat. I love it.
01:57:03 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jaco Willink. And thank you to Linode, Indeed,
01:57:09 SimpliSafe, and Ground News. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now,
01:57:15 let me leave you with some words from Jaco Willink.
01:57:19 There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.
01:57:22 There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.