#949 - Jocko Willink - How To Build Unstoppable Confidence｜Modern Wisdom

I know that you're a fan of the Thomas Sowell quote, there are no solutions, only trade -offs.

What's that mean to you?

That you're never gonna completely solve anything in your life or in the world, and there's always gonna be compromises that you have to make.

And if you aren't willing to make those compromises or you don't keep your mind open for those compromises, you're gonna run into some real problems. But if you look at it and the fact that you know you might put a little more effort over here that's gonna take away from some effort over there, you can't just do everything at once.

So yeah, no solutions, only trade offs.

How do you deal with the tension of feeling that other thing pull away from you, right?

You know that you need to focus and you know that by focusing on one thing, another thing is going to start to drop away.

But the classic overachiever mindset is well everything needs to be growing at all times.

So there's an emotional pain of watching something stagnate or watching something fall behind.

How do you try and navigate that?

just have to figure out what the priority is.

And at certain times, you know, certain things might be a higher priority right now than it is at some other point and something else picks up.

And sometimes the family needs to be the priority.

Sometimes the business, sometimes the other business, sometimes the health, like you're just going to have to weigh those things out and recognize it.

You can't do them all simultaneously at the same time, all the time.

It's just, it's not going to work.

So you got to figure out, we're going to make some compromises.

We're gonna make some trade offs.

Yeah, the sentence, you can be anything you want, but you can't be everything you want, is so good for that.

And, especially if you like novelty, like doing lots of different things, ah, this is interesting to me, I'm curious, I want to.

But yeah, okay, dude, but there is a limit, right?

And when you start to, it's the most obvious thing in the world.

If you spread yourself too thinly across lots of different things, you can't be that great at all of them.

You can't be really that great at any of them after you start to spin it up after a while.

Yeah, yeah. And it's one of those laws of combat that I teach and used to teach in SEAL teams, and now I teach the businesses prioritize and execute.

Like you've got to figure out what the priorities are and then execute on those things.

But you gotta figure out what the biggest priority is at any given time.

Like I said, whether it's this business or your family or your health, at certain times you gotta say, all right, I've got to pay attention to my family right now.

I can feel things are getting a little bit sketchy over there or all right, my family seems solid right now, they're not going to focus on this part of the business and then within the business this particular section of the business so you go right on down the line.

How do you think about moving between planning and execution in that way?

Is it something that you can do at the same time or is it really important to sort of step back, give yourself that perspective, and then go back in to actually enact the strategies?

If you end up executing things yourself you can only do so much at one time, right?

I mean, if you're...

if you've got something going on with your family Well, hopefully your spouse is going to be able to take some action on that, whatever that thing is.

And then you've got businesses, well, you've got departments inside your business and you, you know, assign some plan to someone inside the business, that's going to step up and take charge of that thing and run with it.

So that's deep. That's the fourth law of combat leadership, which is decentralized command, meaning you can't do everything yourself.

You need to allow your subordinate leaders to step up and lead and make things happen.

So, it's mandatory to do that if you're gonna execute on more than one thing in life.

What about when it comes to working out what your priorities should be for yourself?

It seems like, even that, not being able to see the wood for the trees, I'm currently in the midst of this thing.

But is this the best place for my attention to be spent right now?

Yeah, I think, first of all, you gotta be able to detach a little bit take a step back and take a look at what's going on in the world and take a look at what's going on in your world to go oh you know what it seems like this might not be the best thing because that's I think what happens is if you don't take a step back and you don't detach then you're not gonna recognize what's happening what's going on and that's how someone can work until they have no family left or pay so much attention their family that they lose their job go in the wrong direction so you need to be able to take a step back

and actually assess what's going on and you can't get drawn down into the of any particular thing for too long, right?

Like you can do it for a little while.

You can do it, depending on the thing.

You can do it for a day or a week or a month sometimes.

But then after that, you gotta say, all right, I gotta take a step back and have all the time.

Well, the same thing goes for health, right?

If you're gonna launch a new business, probably not gonna be in the best condition you've ever been in.

I'm just gonna take over.

Maybe I'll get a push -pull leg session in across the week or something like that.

You go, okay, if I really want to find my future husband or wife, I imagine that my sleep is gonna suffer, you know, I'm gonna have to go out more, I'm gonna have to be more social, maybe I'm gonna have to go to restaurants and like pretend to eat like a normal person.

It is a lesson that I think you can only learn with experience, it's very difficult to tell somebody you need to do this, it's really something that you learn through pain, that you go I let my foot off the gas with this one particular thing, look at what happened, Didn't go well.

I'd better not do that again.

I'd better not let my health get to the stage where I haven't slept properly for three weeks at a time and you know, that was when I got sick.

Yeah, and I think that actually health is one that you don't want to totally walk away from health at anytime.

And I think that's one of the reasons that I feel like I'm doing pretty good right now, is I never, I probably haven't taken more than, you know, two or three days off from working out in decades.

You know what I mean?

So yeah, I mean, okay, I had a surgery on my neck.

So okay, that was, I took some time after that.

But even after that, like after three days, I was in my garage gym walking around in circles, trying to make something happen.

But I think when people completely abandon their health for a month or two months.

I think that can be, I think that's where injuries start coming into play and you lose, you really go backwards.

It's foundational, right?

The other stuff that you're trying to do is build on top of that.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess actually using you as an example of sleep might not be a particularly good idea there.

What's your advice for how people can be more confident in their decisions in life?

Where does confidence come from in your opinion?

I think confidence comes from.

Well, clearly some of it comes from experience, but I think one of the most profound things that you can do to become more confident is to become okay with saying, yeah, I'm not exactly sure what to do right now.

And if you can say that, all of a sudden the world becomes just a lot easier.

And if we're in a meeting and we've got some, you know, a project that we're gonna get started on and it's something I've never done before, and I'm the boss." And I say, Hey, Chris, I'm not really sure what to do right now.

Well, that's okay. And you go, well, actually at my old company, we did the same thing, so let's make this move.

And I go, okay, that sounds like a good place to start anyways.

And so now we get started.

Whereas if I come in and I'm like, I don't want Chris to know that I don't know how to do this or I'm not sure of myself right now or I'm lacking confidence so I'm gonna pretend to be confident.

I think that's problematic.

So I think, look, no one knows everything, no one makes all perfect decisions, no one understands every element of the world so, I think a good way to gain confidence quickly is to admit the fact that you don't know everything and just be okay with saying, yeah, I'm not really sure what to do here.

Does that lower the pressure, lowers the bar of self expectation?

Absolutely. I think it, I think it lowers the bar of self expectation, not to a negative point where it's like, oh, I've got low expectations of myself, but if I was to be coming up here to to sit down with you and have this talk.

And I was thinking, what if he asked me about something I don't know about?

What am I going to do?

And I'd be a little bit panicked.

And then you'd ask me about a car racing Formula One racing.

Right. Which we were talking about before we started this.

and now all of a sudden you said well hey in Formula One the drivers do this what do you think of that protocol and I was like trying to formulate in my head pretend like I know what I'm talking about when I don't so instead I just say oh yeah I don't know anything about car racing so you tell me and and that means the whole drive up here to come and sit down with you and get interviewed by you instead of me being paranoid that you might ask something I don't know about and my confidence is now shaken, and set on rolling in.

And you're like, oh, yeah, if you ask me some stuff I don't know about, I can say, oh yeah, I'm not really 100 % sure about that.

What do you know? Or what's your opinion?

That's liberating, in a way.

I think it's very liberating.

Is that sort of humility?

That's, yes, I think that is humility.

And it's something that you get when you're in the military.

You know, you can be in charge of people that have more experience than you.

And if that makes you uncomfortable, they'll oftentimes people flex to try and act like they know more than they do.

When it's like, oh yeah, you've run these kind of operations before, Chris?

Well, why don't you take lead on this?

Okay, I'm the senior guy, I'm the boss, but I say, hey Chris, you've already run these type of operations, why don't you take lead on this?

Nobody do. That's, does your respect for me go down or does it go up?

Goes up. Exactly. As opposed to me saying, here's what we're gonna do Chris.

And I don't know what I'm talking about and you can clearly see this because you've done it 25 times and I'm an idiot.

So yeah, I would say be more humble and you'll be more confident.

It's really interesting to think where you're lowering the stakes.

There's no... So in that definition of confidence, there's no such thing as not having enough confidence.

There is just being yourself.

And then if you are yourself and you meet the limits of whatever your competence is, your understanding, hand it off to someone else or say, hey, does no one...

Oh, brilliant. No one here knows what to do.

You know a good example of this?

The first ever cinema production that we did.

So this is our cinema series, fancy cameras and big team of people and stuff.

The first one we ever did was in San Antonio.

We did it in the Alamo with Jordan Peterson.

And we're setting up, we've got the cameras here and it's the first time we've done anything like this.

So the production is a little bit more spit and saw dust, let's say, and we're about to get started.

And the guys do the soundcheck like we did before where you started screaming.

And they could hear in the background, they were like, someone's speaking.

There's someone speaking on the channel.

What the fuck is that?

They're like, is that?

It's a local FM radio station.

How the fuck are we picking up?

It was two mics plugged into a couple of inline amps and a fucking recording device.

And we're trying to work out like, is it the power?

Is there a radio station inside of the building?

and it's somehow sending radio signals through the socket and the wall or whatever it was, and no one knew.

And this is actually a rule for life.

If you have a problem, and I guess ChatGPT would probably be a really good solution for this now because it's good at searching lots of stuff.

But if you just put the problem that you have in and then the word Reddit afterward, almost always, so sure enough, one of the guys did, and what it turned out to be was if you've got very long XLR cables that attach to these microphones and they cross, they turn into an antenna, and sure enough, took them out, put shorter ones in, made sure they didn't cross, went away.

Holy fuck! But no one in there, I've seen this before, you listen to me, it's like, ahhh, ahhhhhh, just everyone's searching different shit, like unplugging stuff, trying to change things around.

Yeah, there's a sense of humility in the fact that, hey, I don't know what to do, I'm gonna go on the web and Google what to do.

Yeah. No factor. Yeah, yeah.

I like that idea that unconfidence comes from you positioning your level of expertise higher than it actually is.

And there's like a whole cycle too because it's almost like a circular thing because if you wanna be confident, you gotta be humble.

And then when you're humble, then you are more confident cause you're okay with not knowing.

You know, I had some guy ask me, it was about meeting girls.

Like it was a guy wanting to go out and meet girls and he was lacking confidence.

And he's like, you know, I'm 27 years old or whatever it was and I really wanna meet my mate and I'm searching and I'm going out.

And I said, well, first of all, if you walk up to a girl with the expectation in your mind that this could be the one, I mean, imagine the crazy pressure you're putting on yourself.

performance anxiety you're going to act like an idiot, and I said, man, just instead, just go up and expect that what she's going to say is like, when you say hi to her.

Hopefully she'll say hi back and maybe she won't.

And if she doesn't no big deal, like that's where you set the bar and that's going to make you, it's gonna make you perform a lot better in that scenario.

You know, there's another, another interesting thing I was talking about lately, and we were just talking about bow hunting and I had this thing where somebody asked me about like how to actually execute in the moment and get your mind right when you have to perform.

And I, I didn't never really thought about this before, and I actually thought through my whole life and what my attitude was, and if you need to perform, you need to be very, very humble.

And like, if I've got an event that I've got to do, I've got a mission that I've do, I've got to train, I've got to prepare, I've got to plan and that whole, all of that is driven from humility, right?

I, I don't think I'm ready.

So I'm going to, I'm going to prepare more.

I'm going to rehearse more.

I don't, I'm not thinking clearly about what the enemy will do.

So I need to come up with a better plan.

Like I'm going to be very humble and I'm going to therefore prepare very hard and very extensively.

But at the moment I put my night vision goggles on and I, and I, I lowered them down over my eyes, there's like a switch that goes off that I'm 100 % gonna win.

And where the, the reason this ties into bow hunting is I was up at one of the, one of the total archery challenges.

If you haven't been one of those, go to one of those.

Um, they're really cool.

They set up all these, uh, 3d targets all over usually ski mountains and you shoot and it's cool.

It's, it's a lot of fun.

A bunch of awesome people there.

And I had just gone through this answer to somebody about how to actually execute in the moment.

And I realized you go up to take a shot, like first of all, going to tack or going hunting, you're training all the time because you don't want to miss the shot.

You got to be humble.

You know how hard it is.

You're going to be out of breath.

The pressure's going to be on.

And so you've got to train, train, train, train, prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare.

But when you get up there and you like knock your, your arrow onto your bow, you've just got to be like, I'm going to slay this right now.

And I started consciously thinking about that attack and tax really, they set up courses that are, shots that are totally ridiculous.

And you know, you can lose five, eight, ten arrows hitting rocks and trees and everything else.

Yeah. And I went up with that attitude and I shot the whole course with one arrow, which is, look, is there luck involved?

Yes, there's luck involved, but still it's like that attitude of, hey, I'm walking up, I've trained, but now I'm going to just go slay this thing and all that performance anxiety is gone, you go up, get confident, yeah, I'm gonna punch this thing right through that target.

No factor. And you do it.

And I think that's a good thing to think about when it comes to execution.

Like, yes, be humble, be prepared.

But when you knock that arrow or you put your night vision goggles on or you step into that meeting to do that presentation, you should be like, oh, I'm about to slay this right now.

How do you avoid the humbleness and the humility be turning into performance doubt?

Because I think it has to be a conscious decision that you make, that when you go in there.

And for me, again, it was very, almost like getting into character, right?

Like I'm knocking this arrow, or I'm putting my night vision goggles down.

That's the switch, I'm going.

You go on stage now, right?

So hey, do you prepare prior to?

Yeah. You're like, oh, I gotta do my notes and get everything set up.

But when you walk out on stage, Like when you put that mic on you should be like, all right, it's go time.

And I'm gonna slay this situation that I'm going into.

I wonder whether this is part of the advantage of Beyonce has got an alter ego for on stage.

Kobe, alter ego for on the court.

Oh, 100%. And I wonder whether that allows the humility in practice sort of godliness in performance.

Have you ever seen the Facebook post that Kobe put after he ruptured his Achilles?

I'm gonna read this, it's so fucking good.

This is such BS, all the training and sacrifice just flew out of the window with one step that I've done millions of times, the frustration is unbearable, the anger is rage.

Why the hell did this happen?

Makes no damn sense.

Now I'm supposed to come back from this and be the same player or better at 35?

How in the world am I supposed to do that?

I have no clue. Do I have the consistent will to overcome this thing?

Maybe I should break out of this rocking chair and reminisce on the career that was.

Maybe this is how my book ends.

Maybe far the time has defeated me.

Then again, maybe not.

It's 3 .30 am, my foot feels like a dead weight.

My head is spinning from the pain meds and I'm wide awake.

Forgive my venting, but what's the purpose of social media if I won't bring this to you.

No real image. Feels good to vent.

Let it out. To feel as if this was the worst thing ever because after all the venting, the real perspective sets in, there are far greater issues and challenges in the world than a torn Achilles.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

Find the silver lining and get to work with the same belief, same drive and same conviction as ever.

One day, the beginning of a new career journey will commence.

Today is not that day.

If you see me in a fight with a bear, pray for the bear.

I've always loved that quote.

That's my mentality.

We don't quit. We don't cower.

We don't run. We endure and conquer.

I know it's a long post, but I'm Facebook venting, lol.

Maybe now I can actually get some sleep and be excited for surgery tomorrow.

First step of a new challenge.

Thank you for all your presence, support, much love always, Mamba out.

Kobe Bryant, 13th of April, 2013.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And I bet, again, he's a great example.

He wasn't walking around arrogant, thinking, hey, I'm so good that I don't need to practice.

No, he was the opposite, practicing more than anybody else.

And that way, again, going into the game, give me the ball, you know, give me the ball.

It's clotch time, it's go time, give me the ball, I'm gonna make this.

And that's the same with Jordan, same with Larry Bird. Like you look at the greats, they all practiced insane.

They were insane when it came to practice.

They tried to beat everyone to practice, they'd stay after practice.

And when game time came, they would first of all, talk smack, right?

Larry Bird was famous for talking smack.

But, give me the ball, because they know that they can make the shot.

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You spent a good bit of your career in situations that would cause most people to feel a ton of fear.

I think that fear is related to this confidence, conviction in my decisions.

What have you learned about how to deal with and overcome fear?

go? Go? Yep, it's you.

When all that - all that, uh, fear that's in your head, all the what -ifs and the scenarios that you create inside your own mind, that are way worse than anything that is actually going to happen, they all disappear when you go.

So just take action and and start moving forward. And it that is the that is the moment that can last a million years is waiting to go.

And I found I'm pretty good at it now where, Oh, I'm like, oh, yeah, I know what that is.

And I'm going and then that's it.

And once you go, you know, driving, even, you know, speaking of in being in combat, if we were driving to a target and you're, you know, so you're gonna go hit a target somewhere and driving to the target, the closer you get, you're thinking about all the things that go wrong, all the bad things that are gonna happen, all this stuff.

One of my guys gets wounded, what if they have IEDs in the yard?

Like, there's a bunch of things going through your mind.

Once you like stop, get out of the vehicle, all those things go away, yup, and you're doing the thing, and you're not worried about it anymore.

And so, it's just go, that's the answer.

So action is an antidote to anxiety, then?

Man, action is an antidote to all kinds of problems. Yeah, you know, I ski.

And I was up in Big Sky, Montana, and they've got this, you know, challenging trail.

And I was at the top of it.

And you're thinking, oh, this could be the end of my ACL.

And like all these stupid things are going through my mind.

And I'm like, as soon as I got there, just boom, just going, just go.

Cause that's something you always had?

What? That I feel fear immediately lean into it.

how trained is that versus how innate is that?

I think it's trained because you go through situations.

And it's interesting, you know, in the military they're probably doing it to you on purpose or maybe it's just the way it is, but okay, you're gonna go rappelling, right?

Rappelling is relatively, it doesn't feel that crazy.

Well, then you're gonna fast rope, which is a little bit of a step up, and then you're gonna fast, you're gonna rappel off of a building, right?

And then you're gonna rappel out of a helicopter.

Then you're gonna fast rope out of a tower and then you're gonna fast rope out of a helicopter And then you're gonna parachute and then you're gonna freefall parachute and all those things There are all things that you can be afraid of even going back to like the obstacle course Which I think the tallest obstacle on the obstacle course might be the the cargo net which is a cargo net that you climb up it's probably I don't know tall enough that you are not gonna be in good shape if you fall And you have to climb up the cargo net, and then you have to go over the top of it and then climb back down

the other side, but even that, if you're freaked out or you're scared, you're going to get stuck there.

And there's guys that do get stuck.

They don't climb over the top of it.

Not a lot, but there's occasionally guys that they, they're not, it's not happening.

So the longer that you sit, you hang on and look and stare and contemplate the chances of you falling off, it doesn't get any better, so eventually You just throw your leg over and get over that damn thing.

So I think I probably just experienced it enough and was cognizant enough to recognize that at some point, oh yeah, this feeling of caution and fear and all that stuff in the back of my head.

Yeah, I just need to get rid of all that and just go.

It seems to go away when I move toward it.

Yeah, it does go away.

100 % goes away. There's gotta be something that you do that makes you a little bit scared.

Mm -hmm. What? What's the stuff?

Going out on stage is one of those, three and a half thousand people in London, this big event that we've been building up to for six months and my least, my two favorite bits of it, three favorite bits of it, half an hour before I'm about to go on, as I go on and then just as I finish and as I come off, one minute before I go on it's fucking awful.

And it's the, in the Humvee driving to the Target with the people thinking about the things, you're like, uh, you know, but you see, uh, the gray hounds in the traps before they get set off.

It's the exact same.

And that's a really, really good way to put it.

The fact that the fear of the thing is only present when the thing hasn't started.

I wrote a kid's book called Mikey and the Dragons, and the story is - spoiler alert - the kid, his dad is The king, his dad dies.

The kid now has to defend the village from the dragons.

And he's scared because he's the only little kid and he can't pick up the sword and he can't pick up the shield that's too heavy.

But he's the kid, he's the son of the king, he's the prince, he's gotta go fight the dragons, and he gets a note from his dad that says, hey, stand up, go attack the dragons, you'll see that there's nothing to be afraid of.

And he gets up there and enters the dragon cave and guess what?

The dragons are little tiny cute dragons.

But, it is fear, is the same fear that we all build up for whatever that thing is.

Whether it's going onstage, or whether it's jumping out of an airplane, or whether it's taking risk with some kind of a business situation.

Well, the more you sit there and think about it, the worse it's going to get in your own head.

So good. I wonder how much of it as well is fear of the unknown versus fear of the thing.

It's like, the story that I've told myself, it's the fact that there's uncertainty on the other side of this, and I like control, That here is order and there is chaos.

And I don't want to lose some of this beautiful order by stepping into the chaos.

But as you do, you realize that it's not that that merges with you.

It's that you push this out of the way.

Kind of like how a little reality distortion sphere moves through.

And you locally, so this is, it was my Twitter bio for ages.

It's a quote from Naval, he says, I locally reverse entropy.

I fucking love that idea.

You know, you've got this entire universe, entropy, this force that is going to destroy everything.

The only thing that is not going to survive, or that is going to survive, entropy, right?

This permanent decline all the way down.

And you think, yeah, briefly for my time on this planet, for however many decades I'm gonna be here, I actually locally reverse entropy.

The fucking entire power of the universe bearing down on me.

It's like, not while I'm here.

I really love that.

I think it's a cool, like cosmic middle finger.

Yeah and it's just the fact that you can control a lot more than you think and the world is happening and if you let the world happen to you, it's going to happen to you.

But if you want to make something happen to the world, you can do that as well.

It's a choice you get to make.

Does being in firefights and driving in Humvees up to scary missions, does that make everything else seem less fear inducing?

I'm trying to work out how much carryover you get from a career of doing what you do to now.

Has it permanently sort of reset a baseline of that?

Yeah, it kinda is, man.

Like, what is the worst case scenario that's gonna happen?

And really though, when the fear that I had in combat, which was a deep, horrible...

um, one that you feel in your stomach knots is you fear that one of your guys is gonna get wounded or killed.

And... you know, fear of me getting killed, I didn't really care.

Uh, you know, I was over that, I accepted it, that's what could happen, that's like my job.

And not just my job, like, oh, this is what I signed up for, but that's kinda what I always felt like, that was...

just... who I was. But I'm okay with taking that responsibility for myself, but putting that responsibility on your friends is not something that feels good.

And so that gut -wrenching, horrible feeling is not something that...

I don't think you're gonna experience that in a normal job.

And even with businesses, you know, I've, look, I've had things go wrong in my businesses.

We've had, you know, made mistakes that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I've had my team reporting to me and telling me about this negative thing that happened, and I could see—because I got great people—that they're really disappointed and they really feel terrible, but I'm like, hey, no one's gonna die, and we're gonna recover from this and everything's gonna be cool.

It's alright. Rogan's got this insight that the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you.

Absolutely true. And if the worst thing that's ever happened to you is a fucking firefight in fellujah, or if the worst thing that's ever happened to you is accidentally spending 10 grand on the wrong business credit card. Both of those that you don't get, there's no Uber surcharge discount or whatever for the worst thing that ever happened to you being less bad than the worst thing that ever happened to somebody else.

And where I really learned that was with kids because as kids are in sixth grade, and someone, you know, uh, throws a rotten orange at them and everyone laughs at them.

That is horrible for that kid.

And, you know, when the kid comes home and they're crying, and they say, and you go, what happened?

That guy hit in the head, and they called me, you know, Orange Head, and you go, oh, yeah, don't worry about it, it's funny.

That doesn't work. Like you have to learn to, you have to learn to understand.

Deal with them as if they've just been in a fire fire.

Exactly, exactly. And, and, and you can help them get through it.

You know, you can help them because it helps.

It will help them when they see that perspective as well.

Just like when I was talking to my team, it's like, oh, we had this horrible thing happen.

It's the worst thing that's ever happened to the team collectively.

Okay. Me sharing the perspective of like, hey guys, no one's dead.

We're gonna be okay.

We're gonna, you know, no one's getting their bonus this quarter.

But okay, me included, but that's all right.

We're gonna get through this and we're gonna grow and we learn from it and we're gonna carry on.

So giving people perspective can help them, but you can't just say, oh, your problem isn't really a problem.

You can't say that.

That doesn't work. Yeah, denying, saying to somebody, the way that you feel isn't valid is not a constructive way.

It's not gonna work out well.

Not with your partner that comes home and says, you said that you were gonna do this thing, it's like, no, I didn't.

It's like, well, in their world, you said that they, and even the denial of that, it's like, look, how about I go and do it anyway?

Even though, well, you know, there's just a million different ways of communicating like that.

I wanna know just on the Firefight topic, I've been spending a good bit of time reading more like military history and trying to get a bit more of an understanding of, there's a great book called Atrosetology, which is the 100 greatest human atrocities across time, ranked by the number of people that were killed, and I've been sort of trying to think about that level of fear, that level of sort of kinetic engagement between people.

What is it that normal people don't understand about what a modern firefight is like?

What is it that they don't get what it's actually like to be that I think the the chaos of it and the not knowing what's So here's an example we We would in training when I was running training.

We would have guys shoot paintball at like really high -speed paintball guns, and so if you you were a Seal platoon commander your seal platoon commander Chris and I would have my seals in the training detachment going out with paintball and shooting your guys.

And you had paintball too, and you could shoot back.

So, I remember... guys would come to me and they'd say, well, you know, we've been in an urban environment, right?

So, like a fake city that we have. It's concrete buildings, but it's a fake city.

And the platoon commander, Chris, comes back to me and's like, hey, Jocko, this is not realistic!

Why isn't it realistic?

Well, we can't tell who your guys are shooting from because the paintball, the paint guns don't have muzzle flash and they don't make a bang.

So we can't tell where the shots are coming from.

And it's like, guess what?

You're not gonna know where you're getting shot at from.

I mean, it's very similar to a paintball actually.

It's like, you ever been in a city and you hear a siren over your left shoulder and you start looking over your left shoulder and all of a sudden it comes from the right because of the way sound dynamics work.

So, that's like one tiny example of how confusing and chaotic it can be.

And so I think seeing in the movies, they're doing it better and better now.

The movie just came out called Warfare, which was directed and written by a guy named Ray Mendoza, who actually was the group of guys that came and took my place and my guy's place in Ramadi in 2006, he came and took, his guys took our place.

And so a few weeks later, they had a they they got hit on an operation and they had to guys get really badly wounded.

Um, but it was a really end a couple of their Iraqi soldiers, their family Iraqi soldiers got killed.

It's just a very vicious situation.

But when you see the movie and they he made it very realistic and it's chaos.

It's chaos and confusion.

And guys are not know what's happening, screaming, wounded guys just screaming.

And so I think that level of chaos and confusion is what gets missed out on.

And then what the leader needs to do is take a step back from that chaos and confusion, figure out what's happening, and make decisions.

So, yeah, that's it.

It's not as slick or sexy as it's been portrayed in movies, traditionally.

But people are now catching up.

Yeah, I think people are catching up now.

I think people, and this movie, Warfare, is a great example of, oh, there's total chaos.

Yeah, it's not neat.

And by the way, human beings with an incredible amount of training are still going to do things that you don't expect them to do.

And that's real. So Hollywood is starting to catch up with that.

I'm just trying to think back of, you know, Saving Private Ryan did a pretty good job.

You know, that opening scene on the beach. There was definitely World War II veterans that sat through that, D -Day veterans that sat through that and said, whoa, like, you guys got it.

And some of the effects that they did in Saving Private Ryan, where Tom Hanks is, they're getting shot at, and he's sorta like, it gets quiet and slow motion type stuff.

And he's just kind of detached from the whole thing.

He's just out of body experience.

And then someone shakes him.

Hey, you know, captain, you gotta get.

And he kind of gets back in it.

And that's kind of a leading indicator of what they're starting to get better and better at.

Is that a common emotion to feel that?

Yeah. Like, even earlier we were talking about noise.

and when you're in it with shooting your gun in a gunfight shooting your gun is freakin loud but you're shooting your gun in a gunfight you don't you don't go oh that's loud now you might start to catch a glimpse of that sometimes where you're like oh my machine gun is right here and he's dumping rounds and you go that's really loud right now we're getting hit with blink by the way which hurts so you there's just these these things that are happening that there's a lot going on and yes sometimes your adrenaline's going and you start to slow down and see things moving in a slower manner.

Time kind of slows down sometimes.

You start hearing some things that you might not have heard or not hearing things that you would hear.

You know, another big thing is you know, in modern days we have these radios and we have headphones with noise canceling headphones and guys would start to pass radio traffic on the radio.

So if I needed you, Hey Chris, come down to the first floor of this building.

I need, I need you to set security for me.

And I would say that on the radio to you.

Hey, Chris, you know.

Hey Chris, come down to the first floor.

I need you to set. Meanwhile, you're up there on your machine gun.

You don't hear a damn word that I say.

And so what I have to do is I have to pass word verbally like Chris and Chris, Chris!

It like wakes you up because everything that's going on on the headphone just becomes - Oh wow, you got a patent interrupt.

Yes, yes, so. It's just background.

It's ambient fucking lift music.

Yes. That's crazy. Yeah, I mean, what about dealing with the level of adrenaline sort of during and after?

Because, you know, you hear about, I was talking to a friend in a Brownbelt and BJJ but fought in Maitai for a long time and went out to Thailand to fight.

And we were watching Chris Eubank, Jr. versus Connor Benn.

Boxing fight that happened the other week in the UK, probably one of the biggest, you know, the two sons of two very famous boxers who had a huge rivalry and now they're doing it and it's sort of been this build -up and all this stuff.

It was super epic. I mean, and it was one of those walkouts that takes five minutes to happen.

And there's the dance bit and both of the dads are with the sons.

So it was, you know, real sort of hairs on the back of your neck stuff.

But I asked Josh, hey man, do you wanna be first or do you wanna be second in terms of walkout?

And he said, well, typically the champion would come out second, but I was like, yeah, I get that.

I've always seen that, but which one do you wanna be?

Do you wanna get into the ring and sort of get a sense of the space, or do you wanna come out second?

And he was like, dude, you always wanna be second because you're stood in the ring.

The adrenaline has already been at its peak and you're just getting cold, slow.

The adrenaline's not there.

You've already had your moment.

Now you're watching this.

Dickhead have his moment.

So I wondered the same when it comes to how long can you sustain adrenaline for through a combat mission?

And what happens when we have five minutes where we regroup at one corner, and then you're like, okay, fuck, I've got a...

Here we go, we go back up again.

It is like a rollercoaster.

But what you were just saying, and what we talked about previously, walk out second, because then the guy that walked out first gets to spend an extra four and a half minutes contemplating what's about to happen and living in his own fear, right?

He's running through that fear loop and freaking out, whereas you haven't even walked out yet, so let him sit out there on the big stage and let him freak out about it.

I'm sure that they take their time, as well.

you know, it's like your workout is five minutes, it's like you're gonna start 90 seconds late, and you know - It's like Musashi showing up four hours or three hours late to a sword fight, like, oh yeah, you and I are gonna fight?

Cool, I'll be there at noon.

Show up at 2 .30. Yeah, did you just sit there and freak out?

So it's a good plan.

But yeah, that adrenaline, that up and down of that adrenaline, how did you manage that?

Well what's interesting about that is you would think, like, if I said to you all right, Chris, you're going to go down, on a patrol right now, and someone, there's gonna be enemies trying to kill you.

You'd think to yourself, like okay, Well, I'm gonna be freaking locked on for this whole two hours, right?

Like I'm gonna be three hours.

I'm gonna be totally locked on well After an hour and a half and nothing's happened yet and you're hot and you're tired and you're sweaty and you're carrying 100 pounds worth of 60 pounds worth of gear You start to go do do I really want to take a knee at this corner Do I really need to take a knee at this corner right now?

meaning you're gonna stop and you'd like to lower your profile a little bit and But after an hour and a half, maybe you'll just stand and hold that thing.

So we, it's interesting, we talked about complacency and how you can't let, you can't get complacent.

Right. Well, and people say, well, you know, in combat, of course you'd never get complacent, no, absolutely.

People get complacent in combat.

So when that adrenaline runs out, you have to have the discipline to say, oh, I'm getting my corner.

I need to take a knee to lower my profile, period.

End of story. I got to, I got to follow the protocols no matter what.

Does that suggest that different roles within military units are, that different people are disposed to different roles, I mean, this is obvious that certain people go toward spotting, sniping, being the door kickers, being the people that sit back and do more planning, people that drive, that fly drones, people, you know, all the medics, all the rest, whatever it might be.

But I have to imagine that within that you may find when somebody gets into operations that actually, I'm perfectly competent at all of the skills, but my nervous system just does not agree with this.

So I'm gonna have to adapt over time.

And maybe I do need to be somebody that's sat up top and needs to hold sustained focus at a sort of a lower rate for a longer period of time.

Or maybe I'm the sort of person I can't hold it.

I'm good in bursts and like the Usain Bolt of the fucking special forces, so I can kick a door down, do a thing, and then all right, we go again.

I imagine that that must be something that happens during training and during operations too.

Yeah, and you're gonna find, like you mentioned being a sniper, being a sniper is a job of patience.

And so if you're a person that's freaking hyperactive and you don't like to sit still for a long time, being a sniper's gonna be a horrible job for you, whereas being a breacher, where you're gonna walk up to a door, someone's gonna say, breach it up and you're gonna go kick that thing in or blow it up in the next 14 seconds, that's a job for short attention span Chris.

But if long attention span Chris, patient Chris, will guide you as a SEAL to be a sniper, as opposed, and then, also, you've got Joint Tactical Air Control, which is the guy that's got multiple aircraft overhead.

And he's got stuff going on in the ground, but he's gotta take, he's gotta detach from that, and he's gotta put these aircraft, and he's gotta stack them in the proper way, They keep them out of each other's way in the air, and then he's gotta find targets on the ground and direct various aircraft, so there's a lot of cerebral processing that has to happen.

So depending on who you are, you're gonna sort of get guided to a job that is suitable for you.

Yes, I've been thinking about this after a cool genetic testing that I did that looks at all of the different alleles that you've got and then maps them to what they're predictive for.

So some of them are to do with dopamine response.

Others are to do with how you process vitamin B12.

Some of them for me to do with how you process cortisol and adrenaline.

And one of the jobs that it said would not be good for me would be something with huge peaks and troughs.

So as long as I can sustain focus, I could be someone that was holding it for a long period of time.

But if you've got these massively intense periods and then these big dips, My nervous system isn't built to come back into land very quickly like that.

I would love, I knew that we had this episode, I'd love to see what your results would be with that.

My ability to clear adrenaline, cortisol, not so good.

I have to guess that you and the rest of the guys that you were with would be one of the equivalent of like a super, a super spreader event for being able to bring that back into land.

Fascinating. And there's no genetic test on that thing in the SEAL teams. So we end up with guys and you can see them.

Like you can see a guy that gets really, I don't know if this is the same thing, but you have people that get really emotional about things and then some people that don't and everything in between.

So I think some of that has to, I mean, certainly I would think that if your adrenaline is pumping, your emotions are heightened, right?

And then if your adrenaline is not pumping, then you're more emotionally calm.

I would think that that would be accurate.

So you end up with both people in the SEAL teams. And yeah, like someone that's super hyper emotional is probably not gonna be ideal sniper.

Not that they're not, because there are guys that are emotional that are great snipers too.

But if you've got someone that, as you grow, as you get older, you must learn to regulate some of that stuff too.

I'm assuming, so that you are harder to disrupt Knock off base.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, that's the fascinating thing that you realize when you see the building blocks of who you are, which are, you know, these 20 ,000 pairs of alleles or whatever it might be, and it's like, huh, I always wondered why fucking like gluten didn't agree with me, ah, huh, I always wondered why I struggled to sleep after something exciting happened on a nighttime, ah, I always wondered why, you know, whatever.

I would like to run another experiment where we like, you give me, I give you this test and then I just make stuff up and tell you, because I hear about people who do like woop strap and they get told in the morning you didn't get good sleep last night.

And then they start feeling like, oh man, I'm really dragging today.

And then they get told, oh, you slept great last night.

And they feel like they have more energy.

And pretty soon they go, wait a second, I got told I didn't sleep well, but I had an awesome day.

And I did, you know, I performed well in my stuff.

So I'd be interested to tell you, like, Oh, you're emotionally just stable.

You're locked on and see if you were like, oh yeah, I've worked.

There's a great book called The Expectation Effect by David Robson.

Just popular science book, it's about four years old now.

And he looked at a study where they did exactly this.

So they gave a cohort of people, two different groups.

One group has a particular genetic predisposition that allows them to blow off CO2 more efficiently.

and that means that for VO2 max work, they have, they're much more effective.

Other group does not have this mutation.

They mixed them up and split them into two parts.

So each group had equal proportions of people with and people without.

You can see where I'm gonna go.

They told group one, hey, you've got this genetic mutation, remembering 50 % of them don't.

You're gonna crush this.

It's gonna be amazing.

Group two, you don't have this genetic mutation.

It may be a little bit more tough for you to do that.

Remembering 50 % of them do.

The group that were told that they did, but didn't have it, outperformed the group that did have it but were told that they didn't, and he came up with this synopsis which is, your expectations are even more powerful than your genes.

Have you ever heard of the monster experiment?

So they did the exact same thing, except for it was with kids, with speech impediments.

So what they did is they said, hey, Chris, listen, you know how occasionally when you're talking, you kind of like stutter a little bit, and of course, everyone stutters a little bit sometimes, so I say, hey, Chris, that's because you're a stutterer and it's probably gonna get worse as you get older.

And sure enough, when they told kids that, they developed stutters and had it get worse.

And then other kids, they said, oh yeah, the kids with actual stutters they say, hey, you've got a little bit of stutter right now, but it's no fact, it's just you're going through the phase.

And they would come out of it.

And this turned into a big, giant lawsuit because it gave kids like permanent speech impediments, which is just awful.

Yeah, hence they call it Monster.

Which is interesting, because there's also that thing which I have heard and read, which is when a kid does something good, you don't complement them on their talent, you complement them on their hard work.

Which, this is a little bit of the opposite, right?

If I say, hey, you know, Chris, you did a great job because you're so talented, then you're like, oh, cool, I don't have to work that hard. But there's a little bit of the opposite, right?

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What do most people misunderstand about discipline equals freedom?

I don't know, I think it was pretty simple to understand.

I agree, but with simplicity comes an awful lot of opportunity for people to...

Yeah, I guess there's always people that, as they're trying to fish for a contrarian thing to say, which I think you kind of have to fish for it, I think you have to work for it to get with that statement.

But there's such a thing as too much discipline and if you have so much discipline in your life, then you won't be enjoying your life.

and cool, yep, if you are so disciplined that you never go out and you never eat a pizza, cool, you might be bummed out.

Yep, you can go too far with it, but generally speaking, if you have an occasional pizza because they taste really good and once a month or whatever you go down to the pizza place and you get a pizza, cool, good for you, that's gonna be awesome.

That's the reward for freedom.

but I think it's pretty straightforward, and...

I guess if I was to fish a little bit more, I would say that...

the idea that discipline is natural or it's...

uh... innate. And actually my middle daughter, who's a jiu -jitsu player, she was actually speaking the other day, And one of the things that she said was, she was speaking about discipline.

And she said, you know, I was, I was training, my dad and I, we went to the gym the other day and we were, we were both training and I was training with, you know, the, the, the guys that I train with and she was training with the people she trains with and it's a Sunday and we're training and we're both like really tired when we're done and we get done and we're kind of sitting up on the mats and we're talking and, and I look at her and I said, I was, I said, uh, not one part of me wanted to come train today.

Like 0 % of me wanted to come train today, and I'm so glad I came and trained.

Because you know, you always feel great when you get done training.

But, so my daughter went and spoke to this group and she said, you know, my dad, you know, Mr. Discipline, who's been on this path for however many decades, my dad didn't want to train and he had to go, hey, doesn't matter whether you want to do it or not, you gotta have the discipline to go do it.

And, and he did, and he got done with it.

So, and I think that's a good thing to remember that discipline isn't just, oh, this person is quote, more disciplined than, than this other person.

It's like, no, this person is choosing discipline.

This person is not, that's the way it is.

So I think that's an important thing to remember.

You have the option of being disciplined.

You, you don't have the option of being born 6 '4", right?

You don't have that option.

you either are or you're not, but you do have the option of choosing discipline or not.

So discipline not necessarily something that you're born with?

I don't think so at all.

I think maybe there's some small percentage of it, maybe this person's a little bit more innately disciplined than this other person, but I think it's a choice.

Well, how much of it's habit as well?

And momentum, as you said that, I think this is one of the vicious cycles that people get into.

and it's also why you see people that have unbelievably outsized results in life, and those who kind of have consistently bad results in life, because each positive experience is self -reinforcing, it tells you a story about the sort of person you are, and you start to build on good habits and these good habits show you more good habits, and you get a little bit more confidence and you get a little bit more...

And you say, well, this is part of my identity now actually, I can push myself a little bit, so I do da da da da da da da da and you're like, holy fuck, like to the 1 % per day increase, you end up at some unbelievably big number by the end of the year, but you also see the opposite.

And this is how you get, you know, very diverging outcomes from people that started at relatively similar places.

Certainly, and this is something that I've said for a while and is discipline begets discipline, right?

If you make a bad decision in the morning and you decide you're not gonna get out of bed, you can decide you're not gonna work out, when you get to the office, the donuts are that much more tempting and you're probably gonna eat one.

Whereas if you woke up early, you worked out, you got a little bit of work done before you even showed up to work, you show up to work and now there's donuts you're like, I don't need those right now.

You just make better decisions, and that's - Are you on the front foot today or on the back foot?

Yeah, exactly. And yeah, the compounding thing, for sure.

And you make one good little decision that leads to another good little opportunity.

And, you know, I'm sure you have friends like this, too.

So I have friends that made just small decision after small bad decision after small bad decision and they end up in terrible, terrible places, which is awful to see.

Interesting pivot on the make one good decision begets another good decision is when you've got a difficult conversation to have. My friend Alex says the life that you want is on the other side of the difficult conversations you're unprepared to have. And he uses this analogy of when you walk up to it for ages and the stress and you're in the Humvee, metaphorically driving up to the conversation and you finally do it and you go, oh, I feel amazing.

And then immediately like a psychopath, like a serial killer, you look around, you go, what are the bad conversations going to have?

And you're like seeking out targets for like, wow, I need to ring my mom and tell her that she did that thing.

You know, I've got that guy that didn't deliver the Amazon parcel correctly and I need to speak to this quick supplier, blah, blah, blah.

but it's the same with that.

This sort of momentum thing is a big deal, and it's why in that vein, when I don't feel like going to train jujutsu, or I don't feel like waking up, or I don't feel like working out, whatever that thing is, that feeling that I mentioned to my daughter of like, I'm so happy I came and trained today.

I know that feeling so well that it just totally overrides the weakness.

Oh, so you're projecting yourself into - Yeah, like, oh yeah, I know how much better I'm gonna feel in an hour and an hour and a half.

I know that feeling so well.

And I also know the other feeling, which is, man, I didn't train today.

You know, it was Sunday and I decided I needed to off, it's like, no, train.

I know that. And I think that is very helpful.

What's still driving you now from a discipline perspective?

Well, I mean in jiu -jitsu, it's just, I love jiu -jitsu.

Hey, you know, and again, if you want to do something, how much discipline does it take?

You know what I mean?

I love that you - It literally takes more discipline to not do that.

Yeah, yeah, like you get injured and your arms, you know, you can tell that your arm, every time you train, it's getting a little bit worse.

It takes more discipline to be like, all right, I need to take a day off.

You with the neck. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, I mean, I enjoy doing these things.

I enjoy working out.

Do I enjoy working out every single day?

Nope. And that's when it's like, oh, yeah, but I know the results of the long run.

And I think that's a, that's an important thing that I've talked about, and, again, talked about this with my daughter, is like, if you...

...give up a little bit today, like, you can't get it back.

Like, if you skip a workout today, you can't, you...

There's no possible way to get that back.

when you let something go, it's gone.

And Rome wasn't built in a day, but Rome didn't fall apart on a day either.

It didn't fall apart because of one thing.

It falls apart just a little bit at a time.

Nobody gets fat overnight, nobody gets fat overnight.

Exactly. And so you can't, you know, you can't submit.

You can't submit, you have to get in there and keep it going.

And I know the results of not doing the thing are not good.

and I enjoy doing the thing so in order to keep doing the thing you gotta do the thing.

Yes it is, it's this endless fucking infinite regress of doing the thing.

Yeah. Yeah, I kind of get the sense as well with that story but not wanting to go to the gym.

I do think that that's the difference between discipline and motivation, right?

Motivation, I didn't want to do the thing.

Discipline, I did the thing in spite of not wanting to do the thing.

Yeah, yeah and look, I've said it many times, you can't count on motivation, and like, it's not going to be there for you, or it may, but it may not be.

And if you wait for it to be there, you might be waiting more than you should.

On the other end of that, you know, the person who is going through a string of, can I have one of those?

You want a spare one?

I want a Jocko golf, please.

Thank you. What's the flavor of this?

This is iced tea lemonade.

Okay. You're still pasteurizing these, right?

Mhm. Yeah, that's hardcore.

Yeah that's good. That's coming from a Brit, you know a tea drinker.

I know, look. It's not the same sort of tea.

It's not the same sort of tea, this isn't a fucking Earl Gray.

No I appreciate what you guys did with this, we also did it with Newtonic.

I really appreciate the fact that you didn't go heavy on the carbonation.

Mm -hmm. You know if you're gonna have this before a workout the last thing you want is like the – What?

Just throw at it so no yeah that's lovely.

You have a sour apple one?

We do. Yeah, that's my favorite one.

It's a good one. Yeah, it's awesome.

It's a popular one.

I imagine it's all well and good saying good decisions beget good decisions.

You've got this infinite domino tumble that helps you to keep the momentum up.

And yes, it is your responsibility to deal with the repercussions of the decisions that you've made, including the string of bad ones for the last quite a long time, if that's the situation that you're in.

But it's not particularly reassuring or comforting, I don't think, to somebody who's in the shit.

So, what would you say to someone who's going through a bad month or a string of bad months and doesn't see any light at the end of the tunnel?

What are your options?

You know, like, okay, you're upside down financially.

You, relationship went, went south.

You got, whatever those things are, your credit card debt is up.

You, you got fired from your job.

Okay, you're, you're in a terrible situation.

What are your options?

What you have to do is, well, you kind of have to prioritize and execute, right?

Like, okay, I got all these bad things going on in my life.

What is my biggest problem right now?

And you got to say, okay, I got to start with solving that problem.

And you got to start to going back to, I think it was the initial thing that we talked about.

Take action. You've got to take action and move forward. and if you don't, the downward spiral doesn't end.

And if you allow it to continue to go down, that's where it's gonna end up.

And so you just have to, what are my options?

Abandon the whole thing?

No, that's not the option.

That is not the option.

What can I make better right now?

And start to reassemble things and putting them back together.

Small steps. I remember advice to a friend that was going through a period of low mood and was feeling bad about not being able to get out of bed and wasn't able to show up and all of this stuff.

I was like, dude, you need to literally see every single micro step.

You're in bed. You have gone to the bathroom a couple of times.

You haven't seen sunlight in a few days.

You've been ordering Uber Eats to the door and sort of looking at the floor as the fucking delivery guy rides.

Like, you need to think about getting out of bed in the most rudimentary steps possible.

So, what's the first thing you need to do?

Well, you need to pull the covers off you.

It's like, that is a step.

Okay. Hey. Like, I mean, that's, you know, that's better than it was before.

One foot out of the bed, two foot out of the bed, stand up, get a glass of water, put your shoe, you know...

dut -dut -dut -dut -dut -dut.

Slow, slow, slow. You know, there's something too.

So, people ask me about Jiu -Jitsu and...

and they don't like to fight.

They don't like the idea of it, They don't like the physical, uh, close contact, whatever the case may be, like, and they'll say, I don't like it.

How long, you know, how long do I have to do it for?

And one of the things that I say is you have to do jujitsu until you submit someone while you're training with them.

And the reason I say that is because if you can train long enough that you submit someone, all of a sudden you go, Oh, wow.

I made progress. Yes.

I see, I see the reward. And so with, yeah, do those little things, but do those little things until.

At the end of the day you go, that was a pretty good day.

Like don't, cause if you just get up and okay, well, I got out of bed and Chris said, get out of the bed, but I still freaking don't like it.

Yeah. I still feel like crap.

Right. Okay. Well, get out and do a little bit more.

And do a little bit more.

And you can stop when you get to the end of the day and you go, okay, you know what?

Today was a pretty freaking cool day, and I feel good.

Then if you wanna go back to living in the hole and ordering Uber Eats, go ahead.

But at least give me the effort to make yourself have a good day.

You know the idea around you do BJJ until you're able to submit someone, that shows that you've been there for long enough to have made some progress.

A friend made this point to me, and it's such a fucking smart point that I've never thought of despite the fact that I've lifted weights for like 20 years.

Going to the gym, muscular training in the gym, is one of the only pursuits in life where during the act of doing the thing, you see the future progress of where you will be if you keep doing the thing.

So if I'm trying to learn Italian with you and we're on duolingo or whatever the the fuck the app is, at no point during the process of learning Italian do I understand what it would be like in six months time to be proficient in Italian.

But if you go to the gym and you get a pump, you go, hey, if I keep doing this for six months, this is what I look like flat, in a little while.

And I think that that it's such an under spoken about dynamic of training.

I really think that that is one of the biggest feedback loop mechanisms of why it happened.

I mean, I guess in BJJ, if you just learned a particular movement and you've drilled it and drilled it and drilled it, and then you get into rolling and you're like, huh, I've still got it.

But next week you're like, where the fuck does my arm, like, I can't remember how they, so maybe a tiny bit like that, but I don't think there's anything else.

Or you don't get a pump preview anywhere else on the planet except for in the gym, and I think that that's a under -spoken about dynamic about why people love it.

Yeah, that's... That being said, you don't see much progress, you know, the next day.

You know, yeah, you get a pump and depending on your physical makeup, like if you're overweight, you don't see a pump, you know, which is a bummer.

And so, if you're overweight, you're not gonna get any gratification going to the gym...

external, you're not gonna see anything.

So you gotta keep going, you gotta keep going until you start making some progress.

and just pull, until you can do a pull -up.

Once you can finally do a pull -up, okay.

I've heard once that there's, you can't be overweight and do a pull -up.

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That's a really good point.

Fuck, do you see a Truett Hanes do the 10 ,001, 1002 pull ups.

Yeah. I had Cam on the show last week and I'm just, I'm like completely blown away by what his kids have done.

One of them's a ranger, I think.

And yeah. And Truett's Truett.

Correct. Yeah, it's absurd, dude.

I found that really interesting.

Cam, it was, he sort of really beautifully opened up in a way that I haven't heard him do it before.

And he was like, I don't know how I feel about pushing my boys that hard when they were kids, you know, he's like I regret in some ways doing the meets.

He told me this story.

His son that's a ranger I think was maybe a prison warden or something like that.

And had, you know, good stable, steady job, contributing law enforcement stuff.

And he came home and said to his dad, he was like, I'm going to apply to ranger school.

I'm going to become a ranger.

And he's like, you know, you've got, it's all well and good, Cam telling his kids when they're kids, we don't settle for average.

You're gonna be an overachiever.

You're gonna work harder than everybody else.

We're going to be elite, so on and so forth.

But when you're faced with, you're gonna maybe enter a kinetic future, the rubber really meets the fucking road with your principles then, right?

Because it's your flesh and blood that's on the line.

And he asked why. And his son said his own words back to him and said, well, you know, we're pains, we don't settle for average, we don't agree with mediocrity, or I'm gonna be special, you're elite, blah, blah, blah.

And Cam had this sort of moment where he was like, fuck, like, maybe I've pushed my kids too far.

Maybe I pushed them so far that they didn't feel happy or content with a good, normal job.

And what if my son goes off to war and gets fucking killed or injured over there because I've put them in this place.

And it was a really interesting, I've been fascinated for a very long time with the price that you need to pay to be somebody that you admire.

You know, to be somebody that is an extreme performer, that is in a position that most people would find enviable.

And this is another one of those things.

You don't understand what it is that drives people to do the things that they do.

Now some people have a beautiful balance, They do it from a place of self -love and wanting to maximize their time on this planet and it's this wonderful upward trajectory toward a goal that they believe in.

But for a lot of people it's running away from something that they fear.

Insufficiency, a need for validation, comfort control, recognition from the teachers that didn't believe in them, the bullies that got them in school, the parents that didn't give them enough attention, whatever it is.

And I think it's just a really lovely redress for most people to think, okay, I think I want this thing.

And as we said at the very, very beginning, what's the price that I need to pay in order to be able to get this thing.

Do I wanna pay that?

Do I want to pay that price?

To be true at Hanes, what do I need to do?

Well, I need to have a childhood where I'm made to carry a rock up a fucking hill every night after school for like 10 years.

Do I want that? Like, do I want to be working so hard that my hands are three times as, his hands are the size of your hands.

You know, that's where I need to be.

I just think it was really, really interesting from Cam, you know, somebody who is an extreme performer, somebody who's son's are also extreme performers to just look at, okay.

It was really, really interesting reflection.

One thing that's very interesting when you look at like a basic SEAL training, right?

So basic steel training, it has something around an 80 % attrition rate.

It is a, it is a tough course of training.

And one thing that is just completely makes no sense whatsoever is in a seal class, you'll have a kid from, you know, Massachusetts, who's both parents went to Harvard. He went to Harvard. And he, you know, spent his summers on the Cape in their third home because the other one's in Vermont, the whole nine yards, and he makes it through SEAL training.

And then there'll be another kid from New York State who is also equivalently, you know, a Princeton kid, and he played whatever sport at Princeton and he'll quit.

So, so you have two silver spoon kids.

One of them will make it, one will not.

Go to the complete other end of the spectrum, and you have some kid that was raised in the barrio in LA that grew up, You know, a gangbanger or at least gangbanger, adjacent.

And he'll, he'll, he'll make it to training.

And then another guy that's LA gangbanger or gangbanger adjacent, he'll he'll quit.

So, so it's really bizarre.

And by the way, then there's the entire spectrum in between.

of what you just said.

You know, oh, I'm going to make it, my girlfriend that dumped me, she said I could never be a seal, cool, and he's going to make it.

Or my girlfriend who dumped me, who said I'd never be a seal, she's right, I'm quitting.

Like it makes no sense whatsoever.

And so trying to figure out like who's going to make it and who's not going to make it is really, really difficult.

It's why you need to test. That's why you can't just do the genetic thing before and be like, you know, what was the movie where they could predict whether people were going to commit crimes or not.

Yeah, I don't remember the name of the movie but...

What? Minority report, thank you.

Minority report for the seals, we don't even need the test. We know that you're gonna pass, we know that you're gonna fail but you don't know that.

And the entire reason for the test is to see what happens when it all comes crashing down.

On that point, you spoke about the person that everything is going well for them.

we've also talked about the infinite regress of good dominoes.

After a while, I think, a lot of people that have consistent success for a long period of time reach a little bit of escape velocity and go sort of floating out here.

Maybe my life is very different to the one that I was used to before.

How, especially given that, you know, big trajectory for yourself as well, how have you learned to keep your foot on the gas when things are going well, not when things are going badly.

I think it's just exploring new arenas.

So, you're doing some stuff and there's something that looks like it might be interesting to me and I'll go try that thing out, and don't always win, but I'll give it a crack and see what happens.

And I'm not, I'm very much an iterative decision maker, meaning I make very small decisions at a time.

I don't go all in on some chance, I'm a little bit more methodical than that.

And so yeah, I see something that seems like it's a good opportunity or something that I'm interested in.

I'll go give it a crack, and if it works, then cool.

I'll do more of it.

And if it doesn't work, then well, maybe I'll back off.

Right, so by not making huge commitments, at least up front, it allows you to experiment with ideas, play around with different things.

It's just essentially it's maneuver warfare which is you look at the enemy situation and you probe for areas of weakness.

And once you find an area of weakness, you put more resources behind that area and assaulting that area.

And if you continue to get good results, you put more resources and you continue to do well.

And if you hit a wall, and it's interesting that the terms that they use is surfaces and gaps.

So like surfaces as I hit.

It's like defenses.

So if I hit - No penetration.

A surface, no penetration.

if I hit a gap, I'm gonna exploit more.

And that's pretty much what I'm doing and what I've been doing for a long time.

Okay, so exploring first and then exploiting after, and exploring first and then exploiting after.

Yeah, I mean, certainly one of the lessons from today so far is this.

I'm not gonna set the bar so unreasonably high that it's intimidating, that it means that it's hard to make the first move, that it's chaotic, that it's an irreversible door.

that I go through and I'm like, well, if I've put all of my money into this business, there is no more money to put into any other business.

It's the equivalent of that, but for confidence, for momentum, for continuing going with good and bad momentum, so that's a, yeah, I think the small decisions is like a lovely little framework on that.

One of the other common areas, I think, that people are struggling with, young men very directionless at the moment.

What's your advice?

You speak to a lot of young men, train a lot of young men.

What's your advice to young men that are struggling with direction in life?

It's interesting because when I hear this, I'm always a little bit puzzled about who these young men are that are directionless.

Because I work with a lot of different companies.

I have a leadership consulting company.

I work with all different kinds of companies and you know, whether it's construction companies, energy companies, software companies, finance companies.

Like, there are a bunch of young men out there and they are getting after it whether they're line men, whether they're on oil rigs, whether they're software developers, like there's all kinds of people that are out there crushing.

And so when I hear about people that, would you say are lost or directionless directionless?

Yeah. I mean, what do you want to do with your life?

Yeah. I guess that's my question.

What do you want to do with your life?

Because you got one life it's it's going by quickly.

And this is something that years ago, I've I spent a good chunk of my, I guess it was my thirties training MMA fighters and you know we had a jiu -jitsu gym we had an MMA gym and so in the beginning when a dude when a potential fighter would come in and they'd be 22 years old and I'd say how old are you and they'd say I'm 22 and and they say you don't want to fight I want to go there's a fight card coming up I want to be on and I was like I'd tell him listen you got plenty of time like get better, train, up your skills.

And I said that for probably three or four years.

And then after three or four years, when guys would come in, I would start telling them the opposite, which is, you need to get on it.

You need to be in here every day.

You're almost out of time, you're 22, you're late.

Because I realized, I saw a lot of people that didn't have any sense of urgency in their life.

And when you don't have a sense of urgency, things aren't going to happen.

You need to make things happen as we already discussed.

They're not just gonna happen for you.

You're not going to become a good fighter unless you make it happen.

And you're not going to do anything in life unless you make it happen.

So if you feel like right now you're looking around with, and you're lost or directionless, I would take about 15 minutes and figure out what the hell you want to do with your life.

And I would start getting after it.

So that's my advice.

Take 15 minutes, figure out something that you're into and go crush that thing and make it happen.

Yeah, I mean, for better or worse, life is really short.

And it's this ridiculous irony that you only see in retrospect how short it is, right?

It doesn't feel short at the time, but I bet when you get to your eighties and you look back, you think, holy fuck, that went by in no time at all.

Yeah I had that conversation with my mom a couple years ago and she said, you know I was like, oh hey, how's it going talking on the phone?

And she said, well it's been a pretty rough couple of months because this person died, this person died, this person died.

And she's almost 80 or something like that and so people die.

And I kind of said to her, you know mom, all those people that you're talking about that are 80, 85, 87 years old, like they've had a full run at it.

I'm like, I buried my friends that are 27 years old, 30 years old, 31 years old, like that's horrible.

And so people that got this full run, man, be thankful that they got that full run.

And right now, if you're a dude and you're 22 years old and you feel like you're directionless, get your shit together, man, and go start making things happen.

Yeah, that sense of urgency is such an interesting one.

You know, we, we are prepared to sort of waste years trying to work out what would take us days to do.

I understand why some people have degrees of regret around that, because they think, fuck, I don't know where that time went, I wish I'd known this thing sooner.

But again, if action is the antidote to anxiety, the only way you can work out what it is that you need to do is by hurrying up and doing it.

And again, if the fear of failure, the fear of the unknown is worse than the actual thing, It all ties together, I think, everything that we've spoken about.

And by the way, you fail.

Like, yeah, you're gonna blow some stuff, you're gonna make some bad decisions, you're gonna screw some things up.

Yeah. That's kind of cool.

Like those make for good stories, man.

Go get them, go make them happen.

Don't sit around being afraid that you might screw something up.

You're gonna screw something up.

That's guaranteed. Go do it.

Get a good story out of it.

And also prove to yourself you're not made of glass.

This was the first thing that I learned in striking, I'm sure that you, at some point when you first started, learned as well, which is the, probably as a newcomer to any striking sport, the most important day that you have is the day when you stop doing that and when a fist comes towards your face.

Because you realize, oh, actually, if this happens, it's okay.

And it's that symbolically for your life, right?

it's like if I get punched on the nose, my life continues and my nose is still there.

Yeah, go get yourself punched in the face a few times, it's gonna be good for you.

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I've heard you say as well, comfort is a slow death.

How do you balance the need for rest and recovery without letting comfort weaken you in that way?

Yeah, again, this is a good lesson I took away from training MMA fighters, which is you're in a fight camp.

You're in a fight camp for 10 weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks, depending on when the call comes, whatever.

But you get a guy, okay.

And Chris, you're my fighter.

And Chris you know, we start your camp, and you don't come into camp a slouch, right?

You're in decent shape.

But now we step it up.

And now, because now it's really about your skills should be in the bank.

We're gonna hone some of the skills.

We're gonna make them a little bit, uh, focused for this particular opponent.

But now we're just really getting you in good condition to fight.

So, we got ten weeks where we start, you know, we're doing two a days, We're sparring, we're doing conditioning workouts, and you know, you've got your three training partners that you're sparring with.

Sometimes you're grappling, sometimes you're punching, sometimes you're doing a combo.

We used to call it shoot boxing or box wrestling, like you're going to do the whole thing.

And four weeks into it, five weeks into it, you come into, you know, you come into the gym and I'm watching you and the grappling guy that you normally tear up, he gets the best of you and then we time you on the sprints.

and you lose to your sprint time by eight seconds and I look at you and I go, Hey, man, tomorrow day off, go eat steaks.

And I might even say, take two days off depending on how rough you look.

So it's very obvious.

It's so obvious when someone is over -training it, anyone can see it.

You don't have to be a genius.

And so it's the same thing with like life.

If you start going backwards in life you're probably trying to take on too much stuff and you could use a breather.

So take a breather.

Interesting that our ability to objectively look at the performance of somebody else compared with our ability to objectively look at our own performance.

And also, you know, the, do I know if I'm selling myself short and if this is a moment where I need to push through versus I've gone too hard and it's actually time for me to rest and recover.

I think this internal, the balance between having an internal jocko and an internal tyrant, I think is a delicate one.

And it's one where you go, fuck, like, is this, how close to the redline am I here?

Do I deserve the time off or do I not?

That's another one of my rules is, oh, you need a day off today?

You can't take a day, you can take it tomorrow.

So if you wake up tomorrow today and you're like, oh, I feel like crap today, cool.

Feel like crap today.

go do what you're supposed to do.

If you wake up the next day, and you go, yeah, I'm really, I'm hurting, cool, take that day off.

Because, you can get through today even if you need a day off, but if you really truly need a day off, and you plan, and you take it tomorrow, I'm okay with it.

That's a sick idea.

James Clear, this is the best idea around habits, which is basically the inverse of what you're talking about.

He says, I never miss two days in a row, that one missed day is a mistake, two missed days is the start of a new habit.

And it's just, it is one of the best ways, even with, it just stops anything spiraling.

All that we've talked about is compounding down, compounding.

It stops that from happening.

Yeah, two days off, not allowed. I think trying to just be a little bit more objective with that, you're able to see the numbers of your guys, the sprint numbers, they're not that.

Do you ever do a weight?

Did you ever have to do like a hard weight cut for anything or did you always fight a super mega weight?

No, I would, like my actual competition days in Jiu -Jitsu, there was the open class and then there was like the heavy weight and it was like 212, 213 was the weight.

And so I would have to cut like maybe eight pounds, 10 pounds, to get down to 213.

But I was never a guy that was cutting 25 pounds.

Now, I had to do that with my kids, because my kids all wrestle, and I've done it with a million different fighters as well.

So yeah, I've been through a lot of weight cuts.

Just not heavy ones.

Yeah, the most I've ever cut was probably like ten pounds.

Right. Yeah, every single time that there's a UFC card on and some of the fighters have got a big YouTube presence, invariably the most played videos are watching them go through the weight cut.

People just like watching suffering, right?

And yeah, I don't know what it is that's so compelling about that.

It's the same, have you watched the Tour de France Unchained documentary on Netflix?

I will check it out.

It is so fucking good.

So it's like Drive to Survive, the Formula One thing.

But it's about the tour.

And the beautiful thing about that is it's protracted suffering, right?

It's protracted storyline and narrative and there's stage, I don't know, 25 stages or something like that that the Tour de France, tons of them.

Some of them are speed stages.

some of them are hills, some of them are, you know.

And you get to see the ups and downs, there's this sort of permanent risk of injury, there's the permanent risk of crashes, there's always some catastrophes, especially that start at the very, very beginning.

And you get to see, it's not like in power, this is why there'll never be an amazing power -lifting documentary, because the sport is done in three seconds.

It's like, you went down, you came back up, Did, well done, or you didn't, right?

And either way it's over.

We like seeing the same as the weight cut.

You know, you're gonna check in one hour and you're gonna check in two hours and you're gonna check in three hours and get back in the sauna, get back on the bike, get back in the bath, put the towels back on, you wrap the fucking thing around your head here, have some eyes spit it back out into the you know, da -da -da -da -da -da all the way along.

And we love to see that narrative as it goes.

I wonder what would happen, I mean they do those BJJ matches that are no time limit, right?

And some of those go for three, four hours.

Which to me is awesome.

Ha ha ha It is. It's like that's the ultra endurance race, it's also the, that's kind of there is no excuses, right?

There's no, it's just you and another person.

There's no time limit.

And I think those are a very good way to do it.

Yeah. Interesting stat that I found out the U S Army's recruitment numbers just hit the highest levels in 15 years.

What do you think is driving that?

I think probably the new administration coming in.

So I think you've got a administration and you know that is very pro American and patriotic and I think that that's definitely helping those numbers.

What do you make of Pete Hegseth and everything that's going on there?

I think Pete is, I think people are, I think establishment people inside that, inside that world are scared because he is a change agent and I think he's bringing change.

And I think he's aggressively bringing change, which, wait, hey, when you aggressively do things, sometimes some things are going to get like, there's going to be some collateral damage.

And that's one of those things that I think he has decided is worth it, and so, I think he's making aggressive change, and I think some people don't like it.

And that's the way it is.

Yeah. There's some report thing that I saw, the...

120 high -ranking roles?

Oh, yeah, I think he got rid of a bunch of flag officers, of admirals and generals, yeah.

Yeah, nine four -star general positions and 80 one, two, and three -star roles.

Check. That sounds like a lot.

Do you know, I mean I don't know if they have this information readily available, but I remember when, in World War II, in World War II I think we had less generals and admirals than we have right now.

Yes, yes, yes. That's ridiculous.

And we got this increasingly top -heavy.

And everyone, you know, The military is a human organization.

And so when you have the ability, when people's human nature takes over, and I wanna build my organization to be a little bit bigger than someone else's organization because it's gonna benefit us and it's gonna make me better and it's gonna make our chain of command higher than people do that.

And they've been doing it for a long time.

Yeah, it says the goal of reducing salary expenses by streamlining upper ranks, reallocating leadership responsibilities to lower ranking officers, Army is expected to absorb a significant share of the reductions while the Marine Corps and Space Force will see minimal impact due to their already lean leadership structures.

Yeah, the Marine Corps stays lean.

I don't know too much about Space Force.

The Army and the Navy probably have excessive jet flag and general officers.

And again, he's right.

You shouldn't have, you should have junior people in charge of things that are commensurate to their level of responsibility.

It doesn't take an admiral or a general to do certain jobs that, you know, a lieutenant colonel or a major.

You've looked at what the majors did in World War II.

It's like insane compared to what a...

What level is a major at?

An 04. So that's like the first field grade officer in the army or the marine corps in the navy would be called a lieutenant commander.

that's what I was, I was a lieutenant commander in the Navy.

But if you look at what those guys did in World War Two, it's like insane.

And we, you know, we just, I think it's a good job getting back to that.

I think it's awesome.

Bring things closer back down toward the battlefield as well, presumably.

Yeah. Yeah, I wonder how much of it is just this difficulty, this inevitable bloat that comes along with any organization that's been around for ages.

Yeah, 100%. What are you gonna do, like fire this person, or like, oh, you did this, There's no role for us to elevate you into?

You remember when Elon Musk took over Twitter?

Everyone remembers that he fired, what did he fire?

Two -thirds, three -quarters of the force?

Yeah, it was like three -quarters of the people.

Him and 10 Asian guys running the entire company.

Yeah, and people freaked out, like, oh, it's never gonna survive.

I mean, obviously it survived and it, in many aspects, got better.

But you're right. When Jack Dorsey started Twitter, there was probably three employees, right?

And then over time it grew And he hired engineers, I'm sure, in the beginning, and software engineers and programmers, and eventually, eventually, he hired someone that was in charge of something that didn't really matter.

And then that person hired a team, and then that person hired five more people.

And so you, yes, it's bureaucratic bloat that happens.

And has it happened in the Department of Defense?

Absolutely, absolutely.

And so Pete Hegseth comes in and says, is, yeah, yeah, we're not doing it anymore.

Which is very contrary to what a normal bureaucrat would do.

Cause a normal bureaucrat would say, oh, you're putting me in charge of something?

Cool, I'm going to make that something as big as I possibly can and bring as much money as I can.

He invited Doge to come in there and have a look, tell me where we can save money.

And if you don't think there's money that can be saved in the Department of Defense, you're crazy.

Like, of course there is.

How much, how many billions of dollars are unaccounted for every single day.

It's insane. Totally insane.

It's totally insane.

So, I think seeing that attitude, and I think is what's helping the recruiting a lot.

The funny thing about the Elon pivot that maybe even relates to this and to the level of recruitment as well.

I remember Elon put some job listing out saying, if you want to work harder than you ever have at anything, the most difficult problems, 18 hour days, et cetera, et cetera.

Apply here, Twitter .com slash jobs or whatever.

And the responses were, this is industrial revolution era style tyranny.

There is no respect for workers and all the rest of this stuff.

And I was like, hey, look, not everybody is built to do that.

And if you're not built to do that, then I imagine that this looks like a threat to you, but you don't understand what it's like to be in the top 0 .1 percent of coders on the planet to whom, if you were to say you're not allowed to do this, you would be robbing them of a source of real wellbeing and pleasure.

There are people who live to do that, they want to sleep under their desk.

They want to be able to work on the hardest problems, so on and so forth, and you get to attract that kind of talent, but you never get to attract that kind of talent who are the most efficient, who are gonna come up with the best kind of ideas for as long as there's all of this fucking blow and bureaucratic red tape and bullshit.

Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that you think, okay, Twitter, maybe it's important, maybe it's not.

I think we can all agree that fucking national defense is pretty important, right?

So, if there is a place where you should not be allowing bureaucratic fuckery and bloat and unnecessary roles to be in there, it's probably in the Department of Defense.

And like I said, there's gonna be some collateral damage and people will freak out about the collateral damage.

But when something happens and you, oh yeah, we got rid of this program.

And it turns out that program was actually something that looks like we should keep.

Okay, cool, we'll bring it back.

It's not that big of a deal.

And it passed the test, by the way, because everyone went, ah, let's not get rid of that program, okay, cool.

Yeah, you're right, show me the numbers.

Yup, let's bring that program back in.

So I think that it's something, And it's revolutionary what's happening in the government.

And yeah, I think it's gonna go well.

What do you think the future of warfare is going to look like?

Someone who's spent a lot of time on the ground in kinetic situations, but are we on the verge of some new revolution with how this sort of war is gonna be fought?

Yeah, absolutely. And if you watch what's going on in Ukraine right now, It's new, it's a new form of warfare.

And so, you know, the drones, have you heard about the drones over there?

Have you heard about these drones that are powered by fiberoptic cables?

Or they're not powered, but that's how they're controlled, because the radio signals can be disrupted, and so you have to have a direct line, and they're using fiberoptic lines.

So when the drone flies, it's dragging like a fiberoptic cable behind it, but it's tiny, it's like the size of a hair.

And so there's on the battlefield.

There's just all these spider webs spider webs everywhere But this is just things are going to advance they're gonna advance very rapidly and We'll see what happens You know, I've called it for a long time that we weren't gonna need man fighter man fighter aircraft anymore But we're still making them but I mean that that just can't last that much longer and then you go to ground warfare like okay, we're gonna have some robots that are coming and And then you have drones on top of robots.

I mean, drones are robots.

It's weird that making something fly is so much easier than making a walker crawl along the ground, so yeah, it's drones.

And they'll make drones that, it's gonna be a new form of warfare.

And so what we need to do is the most important thing is keep an open mind and not get, same thing I said about iterative decision -making, right?

Like, you can't go all in on some specific type of drone right now because that drone is gonna be obsolete when they figure out a way to eliminate the fiber -optic cables or whatever the case may be.

And I would, you know, in the back of my mind, I always think that ultimately, like, you are going to need a human with boots and a gun that's gonna go and secure and hold a place, right?

I still think you have to have that capability at some juncture when the robots are done, or when the, when they figure out the defense for the drones and the defense for the robots, and they figure out an EMP that disrupts all the digital and all those things just flop over and die or whatever the case may be.

So you've got to train that soldier to be able to be on the ground and go and make things happen.

But as time goes on, I am definitely seeing less and less probability of that, something you still need to prepare for.

But less and less probability the robots are coming.

I wonder, you're apparently one of them, I wonder whether this next 10, 20 years or so is gonna be an exciting time to be behind the scenes in the military because you know we had what from, you could probably tell me better but I would imagine something like from 1950 to 2000, maybe sort of mid 2000's, largely slowly iterative technology, similar kind of battle formations.

You're making small adjustments here and there, look at me mansplaining to you.

And then 2020 to 2025, fucking a whole world of change.

and you think, huh, I know a lot of the previous plans are out of the window, which means that you need new tactics, you need new strategies, new approaches.

And I wonder who is the person that's in charge of coming up with those new tactics, because yeah, I mean, experience like yours that understands what's going on, how applicable is that now moving forward?

What are the principles that you can use?

And what are the ones where you think, we're in a different world now?

Yeah, well as I look at it, again the principles that I talk about and the principles that I teach, they're all still applicable.

They're 100 % applicable but you're applying them with a new technology which is what always happens.

Like the principles of warfare don't change just like human nature doesn't change.

It doesn't change, warfare is based on humans and humans apply human nature to everything that they're doing.

And like, so, but I think one of the most important things that we have to do is, like I said, keep an open mind because things are gonna change so rapidly, and if you get caught in one idea of warfare, you're gonna miss the one that flanks you.

Right, okay, you're gonna over commit to something that doesn't end up being - Yeah.

Yeah, dude, it's fuckin' wild.

I had Joe Lonsdale, part of Anduril, who's also part of Palantir, and I had him on. and he was talking about these fucking bullets from space, these rods that can be fired from space now.

You know, it's this weird blend between ground warfare and space warfare, and it's insane.

Between the evolution that you've seen of these tanks are worth millions of dollars.

because these drones with a little coke can of C4 are worth less than a grand.

And there's particular weakness vector spots on the tank.

So the drones find those then the tanks patch that up.

Then the drones get better, then the tanks put nets on the front, then the drones have little blades that cut through them.

You know, it's like watching the evolution of a predator and a prey, but happening month by month You know, there's a change and a change and a change and a change and a change.

And if you think you know everything, and you think you've got the problem solved, you're going to get caught.

So keep an open mind.

Interesting, you know, people always talk about this, how war drives forward innovation because there's real mortal consequences.

Like, I want to fly.

That's nice. It's like, we need to protect the skies, that's slightly different.

You know, if fucking the Wright Brothers were around only a couple of years later when World War I had started, it's like, maybe they would have got a big, I mean, they went pretty quick.

But yeah, and you're seeing now exactly why that's the case because people are coming up with all manner of garage solutions made with sellotape and cable ties to fix really, really, was it the, they were talking about a javelin is a million dollar missile meant to shoot down a $500 drone?

That's it. It's not a good way to win wars.

No, but these EMP things that Joe was telling me about, I can't remember, it's a gadolinium or this special type of element that's inside of this super high frequency capacitor that deploys a really targeted pulse and it can shoot these things, like this is fucking insane.

So, yeah, you know, it's not been that long since you were on the...

And to your point, like I would watch a World War II movie or a Vietnam movie.

And I'm like, oh yeah, I see what's happening.

and you're like I'd done something like that right there.

And now you go well, I didn't have that happening, I'm gonna have a freaking drone flying over me trying to drop a grenade on me.

Or just the advances are so rapid.

Yeah, or a guy, I would imagine now that in some of the special forces, at some point in the not too distant future, there'll be a fucking head of robot operations or something, there'll be a guy who's got a fucking suit and a laptop and a drone and he can deploy all shit out of a Batman belt.

And honestly, I mean, when I think about this, I always wished that instead of creating space force, they created a cyber force, like a totally separate cyber warfare because basically, we're talking about the conflict of ideas, right?

That's what's happening in war, is essentially the physical manifestation of a conflict of ideas.

And so, what does that mean?

That means information.

and now we have your information versus my information.

So what does that boil down to in this day and age?

It boils down to cyber warfare and information operations.

How can I make the people on your team believe the ideas that I have instead of your ideas.

That's media propaganda, cyber, internet, that's what it is.

And so I wish that we would have started to get an arm of that, instead of space force.

And, but people get really scared because when I say, hey Chris, what I wanna do is I wanna develop a weapon system that changes the way you think, or the way your people think, or the way the enemy think.

That makes people really nervous.

You're more comfortable, most people are more comfortable if I wanna make a weapon system that will massacre a bunch of you.

In a brutal way, yeah, I wanna fire bullets of space that will take out whole neighborhoods or whatever, People are more comfortable with that than me saying I want to develop something that is going to change the way you think and change the ideas in your head that for some reason makes people more scared but In my opinion that should be what the focus is rather than just upping the physical mechanical Massacre each other you're looking to get sort of preemptive.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah further up the stack preemptive the whole thing Text Tulsi, tell her, I'm sure she can fucking find a few billion dollars.

Tulsi's working on it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, Cyberforce is, I mean, I have to assume that this has contributed through every different agency at the moment has little wings that are onto this, but you're right, that it is a war of ideas that starts a war of bullets.

And if you can try and cut off at the knees, And this is a point to do with - Cut off at the knees.

When you think about are there aliens in space, one of two answers.

One is no there aren't and the other is yes there aren't.

So either we're completely alone or there's others out there, both answers are equally terrifying.

And I think when you look at some of the Western anti -Westernism, and I have to assume that we are able to create Easternism and Russian anti -Russianism as well, there's one of two answers for that.

One is, this is because of foreign actors that are encouraging us to think badly of ourselves and to fight among our own group.

And the other is we're doing this to ourselves.

And the same as the aliens thing, both answers are equally terrifying.

Holy shit, we're either being puppeted or we're turning around and kicking the ball into our own goal over and over and over again.

And something that is able to step.

I mean, fuck me, was it Hitler had Goebbels?

That was his like, you know, this is not new but the technology is.

Yeah, it's... You know, what success would Hitler have had if he didn't have Goebbels, if he wasn't so good with propaganda, if he wasn't so good with media, if he didn't have control over all that?

Well, he wouldn't have had near the success that he had.

So I would recommend we...

and again, that sounds terrible, right?

Well, Hitler did it, it worked.

Right? It's like, well, that type of warfare is how he had a massive amount of success.

It was psychological warfare that he's using inside of his own country to convince people to think a certain way.

So it's hearts and minds, this cliche of winning hearts and minds.

It's not just hearts and minds of your own people, but it's, you know, decreasing the hearts and minds of the enemy.

Now maybe, should we be doing this?

Is this actually what we should, and I mean, it's a really, really good point to bring up because the two main conflicts that we've got going on at the moment, Ukraine and the Middle East, nobody can agree on what's happening.

Nobody can agree on why it's happened.

This great idea, it's called knowingness.

So, a lot of the time, issues of belief and dogmatism in the modern world are laid at the feet of misinformation.

So, poor information is the reason for this being there.

And so, what, if only, if the problem is misinformation, the solution is better information, right?

If you understand something that isn't correct, We just need to give you something that corrects that misbelief and away we go.

But knowingness, which is believing that you have an answer to the question before the question has been asked, it's like an anti -intellectual curiosity.

It sort of insulates you from updating your beliefs.

So way bigger problem than misinformation, because if it's misinformation, you can fix it with new, better information.

But if it's knowingness, you're completely, you're completely averse.

There's no penetration, and there's no way that I can get through to you.

And this is the, I think, the odd realization when people are so fucking ardent.

We know that the fact is settled around this.

We know the fact is settled around the Middle East and this is why it happened.

We know the fact is settled around the Ukraine.

It's like, hey, dude, you're saying that you know the fact is settled.

No one can agree on the facts.

How the fuck can the facts be settled?

You think that your fact is settled, somebody else has a different set.

I mean even people talk about like what do we mean by facts?

We're in like such a post -truth era.

It's insane. It's insane.

It is and it doesn't surprise me.

Maybe even that, I don't know what to believe.

Maybe apathy, confusion, nihilism, uncertainty.

Maybe that's the outcome.

Maybe the outcome isn't even to give you some sort of narrative that you're supposed to believe.

Maybe the outcome that you're trying to get to is I don't know any narrative to believe and that makes you more malleable, more manipulative down the line.

Yeah, well, I think in this case, it was just trying to have an open mind about what you see happening and not completely buying into any narrative and just kind of seeing what's happening and understanding that that's the way things are going to go.

Like we're going to have people killing each other.

this is the unfortunate, horrible aspect of mankind, is that we have wars and we kill each other and we've been doing it the whole time.

So that's a beautiful, horrible thing.

When the, yeah, it is.

But when the collateral damages broadcast to the world, you know, even Vietnam.

we would have got the McNamara fallacy, the entire point, the problem with that was looking at the wrong numbers, but people were seeing the numbers.

Now you're seeing every civilian casualty, every building that was hit accidentally or on purpose or is a tactic.

And, oh, they didn't send a message that said that you need to leave 10 minutes before, or they used a particular size of armament that wasn't permitted for this era.

Are you gonna get into this, the tied up in red tape and legalese about what the specifically.

And it's just, you're drowning in information.

And you're seeing, I guess, for the first time ever, you're seeing collateral damage, which I have to assume is a by -product of every kinetic conflict in human history.

You're seeing that.

There's the big, all kinds of mistakes to talk about in Vietnam.

But one of the things was the Battle of the I Drang Valley, which was like the first major, like, engagement, 1965 U .S. military against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese.

And when we got done with that battle, we had killed like a thousand of them, and they had killed a hundred of us.

And what McNamara and his, what was their crew called, anyways, the nerds.

They had some name for him.

Um, anyways, what those guys calculated was, Oh, see, we can kill 1000 them.

They only killed a hundred of us so we can beat them.

And what they didn't realize is that you kill one American and we are devastated.

And the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese and the communist were like, oh, you killed a hundred of ours.

Cool. We have a hundred more.

And so we were, we had a different datum to start with, we had a different premise of what we were willing to sacrifice.

And so this is what we're seeing around the world, is like what is, what are these various sides willing to sacrifice for their cause?

And we in America look at it and we have a totally different perception of what it is.

On— on any sides, we have a hard time comprehending other people's conflicts.

And we've gone into, you know, we go into countries, oh, of course, everyone's going to want this.

We're— everyone's going to want this outcome.

We don't understand their perspective.

And so we don't understand what outcome they actually want.

And when you go in and try and impose your outcome on people, they don't like it.

That doesn't work with your kids.

It doesn't work with your employees.

And it doesn't work when you try and do it to hold nations.

So you have to consider that as you make moves.

You know who you should have on the show, a guy called John Lyell.

So he wrote a book called The Dirty Tricks Department.

It was a book about the founding of the OSS and the insane tactics that they used in World War II to try and stop World War II.

So one of my favorites was they found the gardener who grew the vegetables that were eaten by Hitler at the eagle's nest. and there was a psychological profile done of Hitler saying that he had a fragile hold on his masculinity.

So they tried to get this gardener to inject the vegetables with female sex hormones so that Hitler's mustache would fall off and his voice would go soprano and he would lose his mind and then they would win the war.

So that was one of them.

I didn't realize that, I think it's foxes in Japan are a symbol of foreboding.

So they wanted to create glow in the dark foxes and put them onto the shores of Japan so that they would demoralize the Japanese but they couldn't get ahold of enough foxes so they like used raccoons instead.

They're like, okay, we're gonna get these raccoons and we're gonna paint them with luminous paint like foxes but then they put them in the sea and all the paint washed off.

So then they got a PA system and a huge fox head on the side of a ship and they were broadcasting stuff.

Like it's just so good but he's got another one coming out which is the OSS came into the CIA, and then I think this one is, the transitions through that.

So interesting. But when you think about all of the different strategies psychologically that have been tried to be, okay, we're gonna try and interject here, we're gonna try an interject here.

I certainly prefer those over.

I prefer painted raccoons over bombs.

Yeah, well, they might be the same.

Jocko, dude, you're awesome, man.

I appreciate the heck out of you.

Good to see you for coming in.

Thank you. What have you got coming up next?

What can people expect?

You've got Chris Pratt starring as the dramatized version of one of your books?

Yes, indeed, yes indeed.

Is that a filmed finish?

It's filmed, yep. So we already filmed it.

We filmed it in August, September, October.

We filmed it up actually around here in LA and Pomona area.

And yeah, we filmed it.

It's in the editing process now.

It's and it's you know, so I've seen like the it's it's it's gonna be awesome It's gonna it's gonna help steal dad executive producer Hollywood The triple threat yeah, I guess Yeah, dude.

I can't wait to see that It's awesome Chris is great, and I appreciate the fuck out of you for coming here.

So thank you. Thanks brother.

Good CD back When I first started doing personal growth I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting but there wasn't a list of them.

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So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, Go to kriswillx .com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 bucks you should read before you die.

That's kriswillx .com slash books.

[자코 윌링크: 우선순위, 규율, 그리고 두려움을 넘어서는 법]-[#949 - Jocko Willink - How To Build Unstoppable Confidence]

📋 Summary

삶의 균형과 우선순위: '해결책'이 아닌 '트레이드오프'

자신감의 원천으로서의 겸손

두려움의 해독제: 행동(Action)

규율이 곧 자유다(Discipline Equals Freedom)

현대 전장의 변화와 리더십

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript