Jocko Willink

Yeah, you're like, oh, I got to 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 going to slay this situation that I'm going into.

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 got to figure out what the, what the biggest priority is at any given time.

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 clutch time. It's go time. Give me the ball. I'm going to 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.

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 start moving forward. And that is the... that is the moment that can last a million years is waiting to go.

Like I said, whether it's this business or your family or your health at certain times, you got to say, all right, I 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. I got to focus on this part of the business and then within the business, this particular section of the business.

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 it, even, you know, speaking of in being in combat, if we were driving to a target,

And you're, you know, so you're going to 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 going to 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. Yep. And you're doing the thing and you're not worried about it anymore. And so it's just go. That's, that's the, that's the answer. Action is an antidote to anxiety. Man, action is an antidote to all kinds of problems.

You know, it's, I was, uh, I, I, I ski and I was up at, I was up in a big sky, Montana, and they've got this, this, you know, challenging trail and I was at the top of it. And you're thinking, oh, well, this could be the end of my ACL. And like all these stupid things are going through my mind. And I'm like, oh, it's like, as soon as I got there, just boom, just going, just go.

Is that something you always had?

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 going to go rappelling, right? Rappelling is relatively, it doesn't feel that crazy. Well, then you're going to fast rope, which is a little bit of a step up.

And then you're going to fast, you're going to rappel off of a building, right? And then you're going to rappel out of a helicopter. Then you're going to fast rope out of a tower. And then you're going to fast rope out of a helicopter. And then you're going to parachute. And then you're going to free fall 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 in the obstacle course might be the cargo net, which is a cargo net that you climb up. It's probably... I don't know how tall it is, but it's tall enough that you are not going to 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 say, yeah, it's not happening. So-

So you go right on down the line.

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. It 100% goes away. There's got to be something that you do that makes you a little bit scared. What?

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 you know he's scared because he's only a little kid and he can't pick up the sword and he can't pick up the shield it's too heavy but he's the kid he's the son of the king he's the prince he's got to 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 and but his fear is

is the same fear that we all build up for whatever that thing is, whether it's going on stage 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.

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

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 in the world, you can do that as well. It's a choice you get to make.

Yeah, it kind of is, man. Like what is the worst case scenario that's going to happen? And really the, 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 are going to get wounded or killed. And yeah, You know, fear of me getting killed, I didn't really care. 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 kind of what I always felt like. That was just who I was. But I'm okay with taking that responsibility for myself. But, you know, 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 going to experience that in a normal job. And even with businesses, you know, I, and I've, look, I've had things go wrong at my businesses. We've had, you know, made mistakes that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, you know, I've had my team saying like reporting to me and telling me about this negative thing that happened.

Well, you've got departments inside your business and you 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 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 that's a

And I could see, you know, because I got great people that they're really disappointed and they really feel terrible. But I'm like, hey, no one's going to die and we're going to recover from this and everything's going to be cool. Like we're, it's all right.

And the, 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 it, everyone laughs at them. That is horrible for that kid. And it's, you know, when the kid comes home and they're crying and, and, and they say, and you go, what happened? They do that.

I got hit in the head and they called me, you know, orange head. And you go, I don't worry about it's funny. That doesn't work. Like you, you have to learn to, you have to learn to. Deal with them as if they've just been in a firefight. 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 going to be okay. We're going to, you know, no one's getting their bonus this quarter, but okay.

Me included, but that's all right. We're going to get through this and we're going to grow and we learn from it and we're going to 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.

It's not going to work out well.

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

I think the chaos of it and the not knowing what's... So here's an example. 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 were a SEAL platoon commander, you're a 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'd be 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 is like, hey, Jocko, this is not realistic. Why isn't it realistic?

Well, we can't tell where 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 going to 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 got hit on an operation and they had two guys get really badly wounded.

But it was a really, and a couple of their Iraqi soldiers, their friendly Iraqi soldiers got killed. It was just a very vicious situation. But when you see the movie and they, he made it very realistic, right? And it's chaos. It's chaos and confusion and guys are not know what's happening, screaming, wounded guys just screaming.

But if you look at it and the fact that, you know, you might put a little more effort over here and it's going to take away from some effort over there, you can't just do everything at once. So yeah, no solutions, only trade-offs.

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.

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, and by the way, human beings with an incredible amount of training are still going to like do things that you don't expect them to do. And that that's, that's real. So it's, it's a good, it's, 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, even in Saving Private Ryan, where Tom Hanks is...

they're getting shot at and he's sort of like the, the, 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 Luke, you know, captain, you gotta get, and he kind of gets back in it. And that's kind of a, uh, leading indicator of what they're starting to get better and better at.

Yeah, I think, first of all, you've got to be able to detach a little bit and 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.

Is that a common, uh, emotion to feel that? Yeah. Like even earlier we were talking about, um, like noise. And when you're in, it was shooting your gun in a gunfight, shooting your gun is freaking 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 gunner's right here.

And he's dumping rounds. And you go, that's really loud right now. I'm getting hit with blink, by the way, which hurts. Yeah. So you, there's just these, these things that are happening that there's a lot going on. And yeah, 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, another big thing is, you know, we, 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 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 crass and crass, crass.

And it like wakes you up because everything that's going on the headphone.

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 going to 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 to their family that they lose their job, go in the wrong direction. So you need to be able to take a step back and

It is like a roller coaster. 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.

It's like Musashi showing up four hours or three hours late to a sword fight. Like, Oh yeah, you and I are going to fight. Cool. I'll be there at noon. Show up at two 30. Yeah. Do you just sit there and freak out? Yeah. It's a good plan.

Well, what's interesting about that is you would think, like if I said to you, all right, Chris, you're going to go on a patrol right now and someone... There's going to be enemy trying to kill you. You'd think to yourself like, okay, well, I'm going to be freaking locked on for this whole two hours, right? Like I'm going to be three hours. I'm going to 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 a hundred pounds worth or 60 pounds worth of gear, you start to go, dude, 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 going to stop and you'd like to lower your profile a little bit.

But after an hour and a half, maybe you'll just stand and hold that thing. So it's interesting. We talk about complacency and how you can't get complacent, right? 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.

actually assess what's going on and you can't get drawn down into the weeds 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 got to say, all right, I got to take a step back and have a look around.

I need to take a knee to lower my profile, period, end of story. I got to follow the protocols no matter what.

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 is going to be a horrible job for you. Whereas being a breacher, we're going to walk up to a door, someone's going to say, breach it up, and you're going to go kick that thing in or blow it up in the next few minutes.

14 seconds, that's a job for short attention span Chris. But if long attention span Chris, patient Chris will, you know, will guide you as a SEAL to be a sniper as opposed... And then also, like, you've got...

joint tactical air control which is the guy that's got multiple aircraft overhead and he's got stuff going on on the ground but he's got to take he's got to detach from that and he's got to put these aircraft he's got to stack them in the proper way keep them uh out of each other's way in the air and then he's got to 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 going to sort of get guided to a job that is suitable for you.

Fascinating. Yeah. And there's no genetic test on that thing to get 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 get, you end up with both people in the SEAL teams. And yeah, like someone that's super hyper emotional is probably not going to be

ideal sniper, not that they're not, because there are guys that are motion letter, good, great snipers too. But you know, if you've got someone that, as you grow, right. As you get older, you must learn to regulate some of that stuff too. I'm, I'm assuming so that you are harder to disrupt knockoff base. Yeah.

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, whoop 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.

Have you ever heard of the monster experiment? No. So it's 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 going to 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, you've got the kids with actual stutters. They say, hey, you've got a little bit of stutter right now, but it's no factor.

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 you don't compliment them on their talent you compliment them on their hard work yeah yeah 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 it's a little bit of the opposite right a little bit of the opposite

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

I guess there's always people that, you know, 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... oh, 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, cause 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 going to be awesome. That's the reward for freedom.

But I think it's, I think it's pretty straightforward. And I guess, I guess if I was to fish a little bit more, I would say that. The idea that discipline is natural or it's... Innate? Innate. And actually my middle daughter, who's a jujitsu 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.

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, 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, it doesn't matter whether you want to do it or not. You got to have the discipline, 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 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 don't have the option of being born 6'4", right? You don't have that option. You either are or you're not.

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

But you do have the option of choosing discipline or not.

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 going to get out of bed, you decide you're not going to work out. When you get to the office, the donuts are that much more tempting and you're probably going to 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.

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. 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.

when I don't feel like going to train jujitsu, 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.

Yeah. I'm like, oh yeah, I know how much better I'm going to feel in an hour, in 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, I, it was Sunday and I decided I needed a day off. It's like, no train. I know that. And I think that is very helpful.

Well, I mean, in jujitsu, it's just, I love jujitsu. Hey, you know, and again, if, if you want to do something, how much discipline does it take? You know what I mean? I love it.

Yeah. 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.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I mean, I enjoy doing these things. I enjoy working out. Yeah. 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, 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.

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. That doesn't surprise me. Just trying to make something happen.

It falls apart just a little bit at a time.

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 got to do the thing.

And look, I've said it many times, you can't count on motivation. Like, it's not going to be there for you. Or it may, but it may not be. It's lovely when it comes along. If you wait for it to be there... You might be waiting more than you should.

This is iced tea lemonade.

Yeah, that's hardcore.

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.

We do.

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

what are your options? You know, like, okay, you're upside down financially. You relationship went back, 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 the, I think it was the initial thing that we talked about. Take, take action. You got to take action and move forward. And if you don't,

he this the the downward spiral doesn't end and if you allow it to continue to go down that's where it's going to end up and so you just have to what are my options abandon the whole thing like no that's not the option that is not the option what can i make better right now And start to reassemble things and put them back together.

You know, there's something too. So people ask me about jujitsu and they don't like to fight. They don't like the idea of it. They don't like the physical close contact, whatever the case may be. And they'll say, I don't like it. 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.

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, yeah, I still feel like crap. Right. Okay.

Well get out and do a little bit more and do a little bit more 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 want to 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.

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.

Yeah. And 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, 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 going to get any gratification going to the gym. external. You're not going to see anything.

So you got to keep going. You got to keep going until you start making some progress. You know, 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. Like it's not, it's not possible. So pull-ups a good goal to have.

And if we're in a meeting and we've got some project that we're going to 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.

Yeah, one thing that's very interesting when you look at basic SEAL training, right? So basic SEAL training, it has something around an 80% attrition rate. And 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 track. 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 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 make it through training. And then another guy that's LA gangbanger or gangbanger adjacent, uh, He'll quit. So it's really bizarre.

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 going to 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.

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, 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.

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

I think it's just exploring new arenas. So, you know, 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, you know, I very, 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 you know 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

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 maneuver.

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 and if you hit a 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 surface no penetration if i hit a gap i'm going to 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 exploring first and then exploiting after

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.

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 they're a bunch of young men out there and they are getting after it. Whether they're linemen, 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, what'd you say are lost or directionless directionless. Yeah. I'm what do you want to do with your life? 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, uh, years ago, I, I spent a good chunk of my, I guess it was my thirties training MMA fighters. And, you know, we had a jujitsu gym, we had an MMA gym.

And so in the beginning, when a, when a potential fighter would come in and they'd be 22 years old and I'd say, Hey, how old are you? And they'd say, I'm 22. And they'd say, you know, I want to fight. There's a fight card coming up. I want to be on it. And I was like, I'd tell them, 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 gonna 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, that's my advice. Take 15 minutes, figure out something that you're into and go crush that thing and, and, and make it happen. Yeah.

Absolutely. 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 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.

Yeah, I had that conversation with my mom a couple of years ago, and she said, I was like, oh, hey, how's it going? Talking on the phone. And she said, oh, it's been a pretty rough couple 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 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, um, 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, and go start making things happen.

And by the way, you fail. Like, yeah, you're going to blow some stuff. You're going to make some bad decisions. You're going to screw some things up. Yeah, that's kind of cool. Like that does 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 going to screw something up. That's guaranteed. Go do it.

Get a good story out of it.

And then you'd ask me about 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.

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. It varies 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 going to hone some of the skills. We're going to make them a little bit focused for this particular opponent. But now we're just really getting you in good condition to fight. Yeah.

So we got 10 weeks where we start, you know, we're doing two 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 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 overtraining, 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.

So instead I just say, oh yeah, I don't know anything about car racing. So you tell me. 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.

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 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 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.

Yeah, two days off, not allowed.

I would, at like my actual competition days in jujitsu, there was the open class and then there was like the heavyweight 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 you know 25 pounds now i had to do that with my kids because my kids all wrestle and i've and i've done it with a million different fighters as well so um yeah i've been through a lot of weight cuts just not but heavy ones yeah the most i've ever cut was probably like 12 10 pounds right yeah i uh

Instead I'm rolling in here like, oh yeah, if he asked 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?

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.

I think probably the new administration coming in. So I think you've got a administration and, you know, the... that is very pro-American and patriotic. And I think that that's definitely helping those numbers.

Is that sort of humility? Yes, I think that is humility. And it is 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, 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.

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 that, 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.

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

Do you know? I mean, I don't know if they have this information readily available, but I remember when I, uh, in world war two, uh, In World War II, I think we had less generals and admirals than we have right now. Yes, yes, yes. So that's ridiculous. Yeah. And you've got this increasingly top heavy. Yes. And it's 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 want to build my organization to be a little bit bigger and than someone else's organization because it's going to benefit us and it's going to make me better and it's going to make our chain of command higher, then people do that. And they've been doing it for a long time.

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, or a major. If you look at what the majors did in world war two, it's like insane compared to what, uh, What level is a major at? An O4. Right. So that's like the first field grade officer in the Army or the Marine Corps. In the Navy, it 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 II, 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.

Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. What are you going to do?

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

Yeah, and people freaked out like, oh, it's never going to 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, yes, it's bureaucratic bloat that happens. And has it happened in the Department of Defense? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

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? No big deal. 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 going to do, Chris. And I don't know what I'm talking about.

And so Pete Hegseth comes in and says, yeah, yeah, we're not doing it anymore, which is very contrary to what a normal person, bureaucrat would do. Because 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.

You 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.

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.

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.

And like I said, there's going to 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, let's not get rid of that program. Okay, cool. You're right. Show me the numbers. Yep. Let's bring that program back in. So I think that it's something, you know, it's revolutionary what's happening in the government. And yeah, I think it's going to go well.

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. Yeah.

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 fiber optic 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 fiber optic lines. So when that drone flies, it's, it's dragging like a fiber optic cable behind it, but it's tiny. It's like the size of a, of a hair. And so there's on the battlefield, there's just all these spider webs everywhere. But this is just... Things are going to advance. They're going to advance very rapidly.

And we'll see what happens. You know, I've called it for a long time that we weren't going to need manned fighter aircraft anymore. But we're still making them. But, I mean, that just can't last that much longer. And then you go to ground warfare. Like, okay, we're going to have some robots that are coming. 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 cron 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 going to 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 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 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.

Yeah. Well, as I look at it, you know, again, the principles that I talk about and the principles that I teach, they're all still applicable. They're, they're a hundred percent applicable, but you're applying them with the new technology, which is what always happens. Like you, the, the principles of warfare don't change. Just like human nature doesn't change. Like it, it doesn't change.

Warfare is based on humans and humans apply human nature to everything that they're doing. So, um, 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 going to change so rapidly. And if you get caught in one idea of warfare, you're going to miss the one that flanks you. Right. Okay.

Yep. 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.

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

since you were yeah on the and to your point like i would i will watch a world war ii movie or a vietnam movie and i'm like oh yeah i see what's happening like i i've done something like that right there you know and and now you go well i didn't have that happening i didn't have a freaking drone flying over me trying to drop a grenade on me or it's just the advances are so rapid

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 you know uh

How can I make the people on your team believe the ideas that I have instead of your ideas? That's... Media propaganda. Media propaganda, cyber, internet. That's what it is. And so I wish that we would have started an arm of that instead of Space Force. But people get really scared because when I say, hey, Chris, what I want to do is I want to 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 want to make a weapon system that will massacre a bunch of you in a brutal way. Yeah, I want to fire bullets in space that will take out whole neighborhoods or whatever.

People are more comfortable with that than me saying I want to develop something that's 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 of each other.

Yeah. Yeah.

Further up the stack preemptive.

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 works, right? Yeah.

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.

It's insane.

Yeah. Well, I think in this case, it's 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, we've been doing it the whole time. So that's a beautiful, horrible thing.

You're seeing that. The big... I mean, all kinds of mistakes to talk about in Vietnam, but one of the things was the Battle of the Ai Drang Valley, which was, like, the first major, like... like engagement 1965 us military against the, 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, uh, what was their crew called? Uh, anyways, the nerds, they had some name for him. Um, Anyways, what those guys calculated was, okay, see, we can kill a thousand of 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 because

And the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese and the communists were like, oh, you killed 100 of ours? Cool, we have 100 more. And so 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 are these various sides willing to sacrifice for their cause?

And we in America look at it and we have a totally different perspective perception of what it is. 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. Everyone's going to want this outcome. We don't understand their perspective.

Sometimes the business, sometimes the other business, sometimes the health, like you're just going to have to weigh those things out and recognize that, you 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 where you make some compromises. We're gonna make some trade-offs. Yeah.

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 whole nations. So you have to consider that as you make moves.

that you're never going to completely solve anything in your life or in the world. And there's always going to 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 going to run into some real problems.

And I certainly prefer, prefer those over. I prefer painted raccoons over bombs.

Good to see you, man.

Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed.

So I filmed. Yup. So we already filmed it. Um, we filmed it in August, September, October. We filmed it up actually around here in LA and, uh, Pomona.

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

No factor.

unconfidence comes from you positioning uh your level of expertise higher than it actually is yeah and there's there's like a whole cycle too because it's almost like a circular thing because if you want to be confident you got to be humble and then when you're humble then you are more confident because you're okay with not knowing you know i had some guy ask me um it was about meeting girls.

Like it was a guy who wanted 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. I really want to 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.

A little bit of performance anxiety there, yeah. 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 going to 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 got to do, I've got to train, I've got to prepare, I've got a plan. And that whole, all of that is driven from humility, right? I don't think I'm ready. So 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 am 100% going to win. And where the, 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 to 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 a lot of fun.

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 is going to be on. And so you've got to train, train, train, train, 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, you can lose five, eight, 10 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, um, 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 going to 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.

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 getting, I'm knocking this arrow or I'm putting my night vision goggles down. That's the switch. I'm going, you know, you go on stage now, right? So, hey, do you prepare prior to?

One time my daughter came home saying that she was stupid, and I said, well, why do you think you're stupid? She says, I don't know my times tables. Bad father. I hadn't taught her how to study. She literally was thinking that she was stupid. Single points of inadequacy do not indicate general incompetence.

Well, as you know, the marketing that you can do, the marketing that I can do is the bulk of the marketing. And so that was one of the reasons why When I did leave them, you know, when I did talk about to them, you know, they offer, well, they could pay you in advance, right? Yes. Well, I didn't need an advance. Right. They could pay to have the books printed. Yeah.

Well, I could pay to have the books printed. Yeah. They could get you distribution. Well, I was selling 85% of my books on Amazon. Yeah, right. And the final one is marketing. So those are the things that a publishing company brings to the table. Hypothetically. Hypothetically is the marketing piece.

And so when I didn't need it in advance, didn't need money to print the books, didn't really need the distribution, and I don't really need them to market it, what did they bring to the table? Well, the last thing that they... that they help with is headache removal. So it's just headache removal.

And now they know that they're not gonna get 90% of the profits from it because I would just say, well, that doesn't work. So we sit down, you have a negotiation, you figure out a deal that makes sense for everybody, and that's exactly what we did.

Yeah, so we partnered with a company called Apple and a company called Skydance. So Apple is obviously Apple and Skydance is obviously Skydance.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's great. Yeah, they were great. And did they approach you? So here's... I don't know how much you care about Hollywood behind-the-scenes stuff. Well, let's hear the story. So there's a guy named Ben Everard who, he has kids, and one day he walked into his kids' rooms and his kids were doing push-ups. Oh, yeah. And he said... what are you doing?

And they're doing pushups and they showed him this book that they read called Way of the Warrior Kid. He picks up the book and says, I got to make this into a movie. He reads it in a night, goes, this is incredible. He actually tracks me down, friend of a friend of a friend. And he comes to my gym in San Diego. We set up a meeting. He comes down to my gym in San Diego.

And I had had some offers to option the book into a movie. And they were all kind of They didn't seem very serious about it. They didn't seem to really get it. Well, Ben came down and he clearly understood. He had kids that had been impacted by the book and he understood and saw the vision for it. And he had made some really big movies.

He made a movie called Yes Day, which was one of the biggest movies on Netflix in 2020 or 2021. And so he's coming off kind of a really good reputation. And he came down and said, look, I see this. I see the vision. Let's, you know, let me make this into a movie. And I said, great. So we partnered. The next thing you need to do is you need to have a screenplay.

And he said, you know, next thing we need is we need a screenplay. And I said, cool. You know, I'll write the screenplay. I'm a writer. And he said, you don't write screenplays. And I said, yeah, but I'm a writer. Yeah. Come on, I've written, you know, New York Times bestselling books and whatever the case may be. And, you know, he said, look, it's just different. Yeah.

And thankfully, I was humble enough to say, okay, you know what? This is a medium I'm not familiar with. What convinced you of that? I think just... recognizing that there's things that you don't know what you don't know. Yes. And I'm looking at something that I haven't done before.

And even in talking to him, I could see that there's things that I wasn't thinking of that a movie writer would think of. I could see the way he was talking to me that there was things that I just didn't quite understand yet.

Yeah, and I have since learned and... written one, which is a whole nother story. Oh yeah. So we end up, we get pitched, a couple people pitch us on writing the screenplay, and we finally land on a guy named Will Staples, whose dad was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. When I heard that, I was like, all right, this must be my guy. And this was right before the Hollywood writer's strike.

Again, there's all this Hollywood stuff going on. There's a Hollywood writer's strike. So we hire him to write the screenplay. And the screenplay is... costs a lot of money. And so Ben said, okay, I want to put together a group of investors to pay for the screenplay. How much is a screenplay these days that's high quality? It depends, but let's say $250,000 or so.

Yeah, okay, that's about what I would expect. Maybe $300,000, maybe $150,000, but in the neighborhood of a quarter million dollars. Right. And he says, I want to put together these investors. And I said, well, what if I just buy it? What if I just pay for it? And he said, well, I mean, you can. And what I didn't realize at the time was that

the vast majority of screenplays that get written never get turned into a movie. Right, right. And I mean, it is probably less than 1%. Right. Probably a lot less than 1%.

But I didn't know that. Yeah. So I'm thinking, okay, well, I'll just... pay for the screenplay, and then I'll get to basically sell it to the production. I'm going to make even more money. Right.

uh vanity project then right away and other people are on board and so that means as you move forward there's more people testifying to the validity of the project right there's lots of reasons to have partners yes lots and i didn't think of any of those right i just thought oh this is you know obviously this is going to get made into a movie obviously it's going to be a great great screenplay and obviously this is going to get bought by a huge studio that's going to happen right yeah and so you know i wrote the check and i own the screenplay which

Again, very lucky, I didn't realize at the time, but that is a huge amount of leverage, right? Because now you own all this intellectual property, it's yours. Yeah.

It was an amazing decision.

So, well, the screenplay, you know, luckily this guy, Will, this is a machine. He sat down, I think he put pen and paper. And of course he's got the IP, he's using ideas from the books. And so it's not like he's creating something from scratch, but he did a phenomenal job. And, you know, we're all going back and forth on the thing and revising it and don't like this, add that, take this away.

So he was, everyone was very collaborative. He was very open-minded and it was great. And so- When we finally got, like, the screenplay done, I could tell from my, you know, amateur perspective, this is good. This is really good. It was very powerful. What did you like about it? It has everything in it. So it's funny. It's sad. It's exciting. It's just a very emotional screenplay.

You're not born knowing your times tables, and you're not born knowing chemistry, and you're not born knowing European history. You have to read about it and you have to study it.

It's a very emotional movie.

The essence of those books is As a human being, you start off in life and you're not gonna be strong. You're not gonna be smart. You're not gonna be powerful. And it's very easy to let that become your life. And yet, if you learn discipline and you work hard and you train hard and you study hard, you can become a good, strong, smart human being. And that's the message.

It's, that story that I told you of kids doing pushups when dad walks, that's one story of thousands of stories that I've received. Letters I receive, notes that I receive of kids that did their first pull-up, kids that got an A in their math test, kids that memorized the Gettysburg Address, you know, kids that started training jujitsu, like.

Exactly.

Oh, I know the movie's going to pull that off.

It is in the editing right now. But I mean, it's close.

No, it's live action.

Yeah, I mean, there's a kid named Jude who plays the kid in the movie, Jude Hill, who is a great actor and just did a phenomenal job. How old are the kids in the movie? So in the movie, in the book, the kid is in fifth grade. Oh, yeah. In the movie. So 11, basically. In the movie, he's in eighth grade. So he's a little bit older, and there's a couple reasons why we did that. Oh, yeah.

But, and then the... The hero of the story is the kid, but the mentor in the story is his uncle, Uncle Jake. And Uncle Jake is a SEAL, and he comes and stays with the kid for the summer. And over the summer, he helps him transform from being a wimpy kid to being a warrior.

like that in a long time. So in the movie, Way of the Warrior Kid, Uncle Jake is played by a guy named Chris Pratt, who's a huge actor and a phenomenal human. So he's, and he does an incredible job playing Uncle Jake in the movie.

Thankfully, I was very involved. The director is a guy named McG, and McG is just an incredibly open-minded, listener, humble. And, you know, he's made some huge movies in his time. I think he started his career in the movie world making Charlie's Angels, which was a smash success. And that's kind of where he started.

He had done music videos prior to that, but that's where he started his movie career. And so he's done a bunch of incredible stuff in Hollywood, but he was...

And I was... So I was on set just about every single day. We filmed for, like I said, I think it was almost two and a half months or something like that. And McG, the director, I mean, he was just so open-minded. And you said he listened. Oh, he listened. Yeah, yeah. So dive into that a little bit, because you made a point of that. So, interestingly, on...

on a Hollywood set as you're filming, especially now with digital, you can watch the replays and they have something called video village, which is a bunch of video monitors that are showing real time what all the different cameras are seeing. And so generally speaking, the director will be watching on his monitor all the different camera angles and seeing it real time and then making adjustments.

And so for basically the entire filming, Mick G sat in his chair in Video Village and was watching, and I stood over his left shoulder the entire time. Oh, yeah. Tapped him on the shoulder. Hey, I like that. Hey, that didn't look good. Hey, and he just was so open-minded, and he just, he really wanted, you know, he really related to the movie as well.

You know, he grew up, you know, kind of a wimpy kid himself in the beginning and he developed and he grew. And so he really understood it as well and it meant a lot to him and he really wanted to do it justice. And so it was really interesting to see that.

We meet again.

I'm doing great. Great, eh? Yeah. Define great. It seems like the things in my life are moving forward in a positive direction. So it seems pretty great.

A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, I would ask him questions and he would say to me, well, here's why this will look this way, or here's why, I don't know. And sometimes he'd say, oh, no, I'm not sure about that. And sometimes you go, that's a good point.

And that's the, when I talk about this with leaders, for instance, and I talk about asking questions, I literally say, you have to ask earnest questions. It has to be an earnest questions. I can't ask you a leading questions. Don't you think it would look better? Or do you think it might be better if we do it like this? When I already think I know the answer?

I have to truly be curious and ask you the earnest questions. Hey, do you think it would look better from this angle over here? Or do you think that this is the best angle?

Yeah. I'd say it's been like that for quite a while. Yeah. What are you doing right? I guess I'm just trying to work hard and keep moving forward myself. I think that accumulates over time, I would say.

I really like the idea of consulting my ignorance. I definitely like it. Well, it's inexhaustible. What am I missing here? What am I not doing? And this is something that when people come to me, whether it's a family member or someone I work with, and they don't agree with something I say, my thought isn't, what don't they understand? My thought is, what don't I understand?

I think just from my time in the military and interacting with leaders up, down, and across the chain of command and recognizing, what would you say, accusations are the worst form of question, the worst way to kick

Yeah, a little bit insane. So how do you structure your day? Wake up early in the morning, work out. How long do you work out? It depends. Today I worked out for about probably 15 minutes because I had to get on a flight to come out here. So I just woke up. I got on the rower and I did a little bit of barbell exercise and then was done. 15 minutes.

Yeah. All you have to do is, you know, when you're a young student, 20-year-old SEAL, all you have to do is instigate the ego of one senior commander at one time. That didn't seem to work real well. No, no, no. No, especially the first time they meet you. Yeah, that's a really bad idea.

And then soon you figure out that it's not just the senior commanders, it's the junior commanders, and then you realize it's your peers. And you even. The most important

eureka moment is when you realize that it's the same with your subordinates that your subordinate doesn't want to get told what to do they want to get asked their opinion and they want to and you have to listen to it earnestly and say maybe that does make more sense yeah they want to get invited along on an adventure exactly yeah that's the best thing to set up if you can manage that yes and and you can

Look, but don't push. Yeah, I was listening to something you were doing the other day and you were just talking about the... as a leader, an invitation as opposed to an order. And I think you used something even more extreme than an order, you know, mandates, you know, these types of things. Exactly.

But it still is, you know, and this is one of the obstacles I had to overcome when we started doing leadership consulting with civilian companies because people have the stereotypical view that in the military you bark orders at someone and then people are just, they're going to obey. Yeah, right. Yeah, right.

This is called decentralized command. And you just explained it perfectly. That's exactly what you want.

I usually don't eat until like... 10, 10.30, something like that. I don't really like breakfast. And I don't really feel like eating when I get done working out. So I just let it ride for a while.

Not in the least. It has to be a deal. And how much can you grow? Are you really going to be able to make every decision? Okay, you can do that when you've got this little tiny company. But the minute you grow, there's going to be decisions getting made that are If you know about them, it's shocking. Yeah, right.

And when you say involved, I mean, obviously I'm not a technical person that's doing any, but I'm watching the iterations of the edits happen and giving my feedback. And I'll tell you what is incredible. You know, the first cut, the very next cut is incredible. exponentially better than the first cut. And so then that just happens over and over.

So we've iterated probably, I don't know how many times right now, 20 iterations down. Right, right.

Okay, so you wrote this book, The Way of the Warrior Kid. So there's a guy, he has kids, and one day he walked into his kids' rooms and his kids were doing push-ups. And he said, what are you doing? So they showed him this book that they read called Way of the Warrior Kid. He picks up the book and says, I got to make this into a movie. Oh, really? Oh, okay.

I don't think about it. I just go execute it.

editing video was very, very similar, very similar process. I remember in the Navy, you have to write evaluations for your guys. And I think the number at the time was you had 17 lines to write. And you had to give them as much credit as you possibly could in order to get them promoted.

And so it was like the number of letters in a word sometimes, like, is it worth those extra characters for this particular adjective? And it was kind of fun for me to do that. Right.

It depends how much time I have. You know, if it's a Sunday and I get up and I don't have anything else in the rest of the day that's pressing, I'll work out for a few hours, you know, just very relaxing. Relax, relax. Have a good time, yeah. And do you do that every day? I do, I do. I always find that... look, I understand rest days, but life gives me rest days, right?

I'm not sure when it's going to be released yet. Theatrically? I don't know. So Apple owns it. Oh, yes. And it depends on what Apple wants to do with it. So, you know, Skydance made it. Apple owns it. And so, yeah. And just like any other, product release, you know, they have to time it with their other products that they have coming out.

And, you know, do they have a family movie or, you know, at that time and which one, which one's ready. So I'm not sure when it's going to come out, but I'm definitely looking forward to it. And I think the world is going to be happier place and a better place when it comes out.

There was an interesting thing that I realized during this whole thing. And it is related to what you just said. So- For many years, I have told people that if you have an idea and you don't execute on it, your idea doesn't mean anything. Ideas are a dime a dozen and it doesn't really matter. And what I realized in making this movie is that I was actually wrong. Okay.

You know, whether it's a super early flight or a broken water heater or, you know, things come up in the world. And so you get forced to take rest days.

Because if an idea, it's worthless if you don't execute on it. I get that. but the actual idea that If you have an idea, if you have an idea and it's good, you can't even put a price tag on that thing. And that's why when you look at Hollywood, Hollywood makes a bunch of, what are they called? Like reruns of the same movies, right? There's a reason for that.

They have all this money to throw at ideas and they just go, well, you know what? Make the superhero movie again, make the space movie again. They just make the same movies often over and over again. And I realized that these, you know, if you have a really good idea, you have to execute on it. You have to do something with it.

Because if you don't, it's like a mortal sin not to execute on a good idea. Well, it's a revelation, a good idea. It's a gift. It's grace. Where does it come from? That's why I was kind of very curious. That's exactly right. I know the answer to that. I look at it like... you know, they know what molecules are in an amoeba, right? We know what chemicals, but we can't make an amoeba.

We can't make something alive. And just like in a movie or a book or a song, they know, you go to Nashville, they know what notes make a hit song. Mm-hmm. but they can't just produce a hit song. They can put all the chemicals in there, but they can't bring it to life. And so there is, just like there's something special about life, there's a spark that we don't understand. We can't fabricate it.

Yeah, you don't have to schedule. They just come along. They come. You get injured, you know, you get some kind of an injury. It's like, okay, it looks like I'm going to take a rest day today. Or you get sick or just whatever the case may be.

We cannot fabricate that spark in life. And we can't, as far as I can tell, we can't fabricate that spark of an idea.

typically? It depends on what's happening. But, you know, I have a few different businesses, so we all attend to the businesses, you know, have meetings and discussions and then have clients. So I have a consulting business, so I have clients to talk to. And then just the various businesses require They require a little bit of time and a little bit of care.

And I've experienced two things here. These are like the opposite ends of the spectrum. And this is, I think, a very positive thing for people to hear. If I was a young person, I would really like to hear this. So there are gonna be times like you're talking about with your wife, where all of a sudden from nowhere,

or from somewhere, but somewhere that we don't know and understand, all of a sudden there's an idea there. The source of all revelation. It shows up. It shows up. I've had that happen to me where it's like, boom, I wrote a book called Mikey and the Dragons. That came just boom. I just instantly had this idea. Boom, I wrote the book.

And I remember when I was an English major in college and some of the old poets, they would claim that, you know, they just wrote this first, you know, the first draft that was in. It was one draft, one shot. And there was sort of rumors about these that that's not really happened. They found their notes, they'd written a bunch of drafts. But sometimes it's true.

Sometimes you will get that inspiration and it'll come and boom, you're done. So you can sit around and wait for that. I don't recommend waiting for that though. It may or may not come. We can't control that. The other side of the spectrum, which I've also had this happen to me, and my silly term that I came up with for it is squeezing your brain.

You have to like squeeze your brain and squeeze something out of it. And what I like is this idea, just to come full circle a little bit here, you know, I had this thing where I wanted to... have lessons for my kids that they could read in a book. And so I have that. There's my aim, what you would call an aim.

Well, I didn't immediately say, oh, okay, what I can have as a kid that's going through kind of kid problems and his uncle who's a Navy SEAL can come and stay with him for the summer and he can teach him. I didn't have that. And I definitely didn't have the nuances of like, oh, he can get bullied by this kid. That fills in. Right.

But I squeezed on my brain and thought, what would be a good... And then all of a sudden, boom, you just start... you find your path and the story will come or the idea will come.

Yeah, so I would say the big three, I'll call them, the big three for me anyways, is I have a leadership consulting company called Echelon Front, and we work with scores of companies around the country and around the world, and we train them and help them with their leadership.

So for the movie, the reason we made the kid a little bit older, well, one thing is there's a girl in the book that befriends, and we wanted to elevate that a little bit, make it a little bit more of a romance. Right, right. And a romance is good in eighth grade, ninth grade, but it's not really the fourth grade, fifth grade type thing. Yeah, right.

And then I have a food supplement company called Jocko Fuel, and we make clean supplements for people, whether they need protein or whether they need energy or hydration, we got you covered. And so that, again, we're growing very rapidly and we've been growing very rapidly for many years now. And then the final one is a clothing and apparel company called Origin USA, which,

And just some of the things, some of the conversations that are taking place are a little bit elevated. And then just from a... from interacting with kids. Kids will buy into things that are older than them, but they won't buy into things that are younger than them. Right, right, of course. So a 10-year-old kid goes, oh, cool, it's a story about a 14-year-old, or a 13-year-old, they will do that.

Sure. But a 14-year-old doesn't go, oh, I want to hear about a 10-year-old. It just doesn't work the other way. So we wanted to attract more people and open their minds to, especially a 13-year-old kid. Yeah, you take a 13-year-old kid to a movie about a fifth grader, They don't really like that as much. But they'll go see their peer. So that was another reason in my mind.

Again, the movie is called the way of the warrior kid. Yeah. Okay. And it's the same title, same title as the books.

So I actually kicked off with a group the other day and I said, you know, let's define leadership. And, you know, we got a couple. There's a question right away. There you go. And then I said, hey, I got it for you. Getting people to do stuff. Right, right. Yes, that's actually what leads to this. Nice short words. Getting people to do stuff. Yeah. Because that's why we're here.

That's why people are wanting to know like, oh, I need to get people to do stuff. Now, what- That's a behavioral level of analysis. How complex it is to get people to do stuff. And we already talked about one methodology, which is, hey, Jordan, I'm your boss. Go do this now.

And what I always tell people is that works. Yeah. short term. Yeah. Works for a minute. You know, I can probably get, you know, I could, if you work for me and I say, hey, I don't want to hear from you. Shut up and go do what I told you to do. Or you're going to get fired tonight. Right.

You'll go do it. You want that, whatever, that you want your paycheck for that week's worth of work. But there's no way that you're not looking for another job. And there's no way that you're going to put your best effort in to execute whatever it is I told you to go do. It's just not going to happen. So what real leadership is, is like, I'm, getting you to do stuff because you want to do it.

Yeah, that's that alignment of interests. And so that's what it really boils down to. How do you teach that? Well, the thing that's interesting about it is, you know, I had you on my podcast a long time ago, and I had never really understood psychology or what a psychologist would do. I didn't understand it, never been to one, never talked to one. I didn't really understand it.

And we were talking about someone that was scared of needles and you walked through the protocol of how to get them to not be afraid of needles. And I said, oh, that's, oh, so he knows how to handle this particular, he knows how to handle these psychological problems that people want to overcome. Phobic avoidance.

There's a skill that you have that you learned, and it has to do with interacting with other people and getting them to move forward in their life. And that's the very interesting thing about leadership is it's the same thing. There are skills in leadership that you can learn. We've already talked about one of them. at me asking you earnest questions, earnest questions. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

made basically everything that I'm wearing right now, from my boots to my jeans, my T-shirt. The shirt is made by another company called Hooli, which is another friend of mine, Asil, who makes golf shirts. I'm not a golfer, but he makes golf shirts. And Origin, at Origin USA, we make everything 100% in America with American-made materials.

Me being humble. Is humble a skill? It is a skill.

especially given the current climb. Especially when you're facing tariffs from overseas. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Which is the least of the reasons why you should want to do it in America, but it is, in fact, a reason that is compelling some people to change their vision. We, myself and Pete, who own Origin, we've had that vision for a long time.

We've recognized it's not about the tariffs, it's not about the money, it's about rebuilding manufacturing in this country. And this is something we recognized 10 years ago.

I mean, if I would have said to Pete, hey, Pete, you know, I want to make a bunch of money. Yeah, right, exactly. Profitability is the number one thing on my list. And he would say, I mean, we can't partner. Same vice versa. If his goal would have been to make a bunch of money, no, our goal was to bring manufacturing back to America. Right.

So the cotton on these jeans, the zippers, the threads, the boots, the leather, everything that I'm wearing from Origin USA is from... materials that are made here, grown here. And then we actually have factories in Maine and factories in North Carolina where we cut and sew.

Yeah, where you get lost there isn't through the individual business leaders that are, you're right, because they have individual business leader, if they're doing it for profit and that's their main thing and they're burning bridges, eventually they're gonna fail. But what happens on the corporate side is all of a sudden it's not an individual and the corporation

is truly driving for profit, and they're willing to burn bridges. They have the size, they have the capacity.

Eventually, yes.

The vision starts. to the profit.

Yeah. And, and a lot of times this is where people get caught up because as long as we're going to the same place, you know, we could take your road or my road, advantages and disadvantages of both. And by the way, we don't really know what the advantages and disadvantages are because we can't see the future. And so, right. So you don't want to get too constrained in your insistence.

I don't want to get too caught up. Normally what's making me want to take my road instead of your road is just my ego. I think my idea is better. Yeah, that's not a good game. Not a good game.

Yeah, I don't know how much you care about Hollywood behind-the-scenes stuff.

And my default mode, my default setting is I want to use your idea. Whether you're my boss, my peer, or my subordinate, my default is I want to use your idea instead of mine. That's my goal. So when you come to me and you say, I think we should do it like this. My immediate response, which I've trained and practiced is, okay, why should we do it Jordan's way and not mine?

Right, right. And then... I call it the minimally viable plan. If you come in with a minimally viable plan... that it sounds like it can work. And that you'd implement. We're going to go with it.

Yes.

And by the way, when I say... When I listen to you, you listen to me. So when I say, hey, Jordan, that sounds good. Let's go ahead and execute it that way. Hey, I got one question. And now you actually listen to my question. We're doing it my way. And by the way, here's another thing you need to think about. You don't want to hear any of it.

100%.

Yeah, yeah. The other kind of big project that took a lot of time over the past few months was making a movie. So I've written a bunch of kids' books and one – part of those kids' books or one series of kids' books called Way of the Warrior Kid. And the Way of the Warrior Kid has now been, is being turned into a movie.

No.

you know compelled labor is not what you're should be looking right that's slaves yeah you don't want slaves and why not because they're not very effective and and it's no fun being a tyrant yeah well i guess so there's a whole philosophy in in warfare which is the strategy of the indirect approach which means instead of me assaulting you head on i am going to maneuver around to your flank right and attack you from an area where you're not reinforced and

You know, I always joke with people that we learn the opposite of the indirect approach. We learn that the, what is it, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. So if I've got a problem with Jordan, what I should do is go, hey, Jordan, I noticed that in the meeting today you talked like this. I didn't like that. Yeah, right.

And that seems like it's the best way to handle things. It's direct. Take that direct approach. Yeah, yeah. But when I use that direct approach and I attack you and attack your ego, what's going to happen? Your ego defenses are going to come up. You're not going to want to listen. You're going to be argumentative about the whole thing. We're in a power struggle. What'd you call it?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

And so we filmed for two and a half months in September, October, or late August, then September and October.

That's why it has to be an earnest question. If I come to you and say, hey, why did you act like that in the meeting? Yeah. Why did you dress down Fred in the meeting? That was uncalled for. Right. That's just terrible. But if I say, hey, like... I noticed you went pretty hard on Fred. Yeah, right. Was there something going on that I didn't know about?

I was sitting there kind of, I was a little bit surprised by it. Is there something going on between you and Fred that is not right right now? Is there anything I can do to help it out? Yeah. And that is a totally different approach. And getting back to the indirect approach, That indirect approach, obviously it took me four sentences to ask you that question. But you provide some context.

Yeah, that's not good. Yeah, showing you're right has a cost. Yeah, that's for sure. Being right has a cost. Just being right sometimes has a cost. Yeah. You know how many times you get in an argument or a discussion with your wife and you get to prove that you're right. Good job.

So what we'll start off with is an assessment. We'll go in there, we'll sit down with people, we'll interview people throughout the chain of command, from junior people to the senior people, and we'll figure out what's happening. Right, right. When I ask... you know, the senior person, hey, what's the mission of the company? And they rattle off an answer.

And I ask a junior person, what's the mission of the company? And they go, I don't know. Right. You know, or you say, hey, how's your interaction with your boss? And the guy goes, I don't even know who my boss is. But you ask the boss and he says, oh, I've got a great relationship with all my people. So we start to- That's just exploration. Right. So what does this thing do? Exactly.

And then once we've assessed it, we figure out what- what areas they need improvement on. And once we figured out what areas they need improvement on, we go in and we start to formulate plans and we give them instruction on how to cover these problems and how to overcome these issues that they're facing. And who's we? Who's your team? So we've got about...

15 people that are our actual consultants, our leadership instructors that go in and work with the companies. And we've got a bunch of people on the backend that set everything up. But yeah, there's about 15 of us. Some are former military, some are not.

Some are just people that were civilians and worked in civilian companies and they were good leaders and they really liked what we do and they understood the way we teach things and came on board the company. And so that's about 15. And how many companies have you worked with approximately? I mean, you know, on varying scales, hundreds of companies.

And, you know, from the actual biggest companies in the world all the way down to, you know, small startups and little construction companies and energy companies, just really everyone because...

Yeah, and... Leadership is leadership. It really is. And so it doesn't matter if you're working with a, with an oil company, you're out in the field or construction company in the field. These are, you know, hard working people or a finance company or a tech company, the leadership issues that they have. And not only the problems that they have in those companies. are leadership problems.

All right, so... Years ago, I got four kids myself, and years ago I was wanting to buy some books to read to my kids. And going to the bookstore, The books were just not good. And there was, actually, I remember there was a book that was the straw that broke the camel's back. It was a pirate book. And I picked up this pirate book and I started looking through it. Hoping for a pirate book.

They're not a process problem. It's not that the people aren't wearing the safety gear. It's that the leadership isn't doing a good job of explaining why that gear is important and how it's going to help them. And it's not that people are pushing up against the regulations in the financial company. It's that the team doesn't understand why those are important and how it impacts them.

The leadership is not leading. And so we look at every problem inside of an organization as a leadership problem.

Yeah, we'll have most of the companies that we work with are companies that have reached out to us. They want us to come out. Right. And they're usually doing pretty well. Like they're doing pretty well. They want to do better. Right. It's great. Right, right. And so when we roll into those companies, their attitude is like, oh, you're here to help us. We have open minds. We're ready to listen.

They've had to put their ego in check to reach out to us. Just for a leader, a CEO of a big company to say, you know what? We need help with leadership. That's a humble move in its own right. Which, by the way, is why that company is doing well. They're doing well because the CEO of the company or the COO of the company says, hey, you know what? The market's shifting. We need to make a move.

As opposed to the market's shifting, but we'll keep doing what we've been doing.

And it's just not true. It's not true in the fact that it doesn't make for great leaders, but there are without question tyrannical leaders out there. And look, we saw this in the military. I see it in the civilian sector as well. You can... you can crack the whip. You can crack the whip and you can get promoted and you can make things happen.

Yeah, hoping for a pirate book, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this was by no means a pirate. These were the weakest, wimpiest pirates I'd ever read about in my life. And I went home. I didn't buy the book. I went home and I said, all right. Those were the pirates that used to be known as dead. Yeah. Yeah, dead pirates, exactly. Not the kind of pirates that would survive for very long.

You know, you can be a leader that is just a complete slave driver, abusive to your people. The higher ups, what do they see? They see the numbers. They see the metrics being met. Hey, good job, Jordan. You're doing a great job. Meanwhile, your whole team is going to quit, may quit, whatever. They're miserable. You don't care. You just want to get promoted.

Absolutely not. And eventually, like you said, it's short term. Now, listen, that short term in the military, generally speaking, you're in charge of it. You're in command of a unit for like two years. So what happens? You show up at the unit. You know, everyone's, the new boss is around. Everyone's a little bit, you know, okay, let's see what this guy's like.

It takes them six months before they realize like, oh, this guy seems like he's a bit of a tyrant. Right, right. And then six months later, well, you know, you start, we're confirming this guy's a tyrant. Now, six months later, you're getting ready to go. You're on deployment. Yeah. You hate the guy. Yeah. He hates you. You're totally dysfunctional.

You still do your job and you do it to the best of your ability despite everything. working for this tyrannical leader. So you work so hard and the troops work so hard, they still make this tyrant look good. They're finally ready to have a mutiny and the deployment's over and the guy's getting promoted because the team did such a great job.

Which is just sad.

These were weak pirates. Right, right. And so I decided I'm just going to write my own books for my kids. And I ended up writing the first book in the series, which is called Way of the Warrior Kid.

Well, obviously, we have these little sparks in our brain that come to us that have to be resolved. And so, you know, writing more books. Yeah, you got another idea for a book? Oh, yeah. I mean, kids' books, obviously. I wrote another, I wrote a novel called Final Spin, which... which now has been an option to a movie. I did write the screenplay for that one. Oh, yeah. So we've got the director.

Yes, it's been published, yeah.

Yeah, and you mentioned it earlier. What's awesome about today is, like, if you have a phone, you can make movies. You can make podcasts. You can write books. You can do it all. And there's just no barrier for entry anymore. And then what it comes up against, there's a lot of stuff out there, right? There's so much... So much content being produced that how are you going to stand out in it?

And I would say don't worry about standing out in it. I would say make stuff because you want to make it. Right, and make it better and better. And make it hurt a little bit. Like it's got to have – it's got to – When you put it out there, it's got to be something that- It's got to be a sacrifice with blood. It's like a part of it. Yeah, you got to sacrifice a little bit.

If you're hiding behind something, no one wants to see what you're hiding behind. They wanna see what's there. And so when you put yourself out there, put yourself out there, really be honest and tell the truth. And I think that's a good thing to do. And it's worked for me.

The first book I wrote called Extreme Ownership, the opening chapter is about this terrible situation that took place, a fratricide, a friendly fire incident that I was in charge of.

and it's a it's a combination of my kids of some of the troubles that they had which are troubles that all kids had and have growing up and i kind of modified them a little bit for the books but you know for one thing uh one time my daughter came home my oldest daughter came home who's a incredibly smart young lady but when she was in whatever grade it was she came home saying that she was stupid and i said well why do you think you're stupid she says i don't know my times tables

And I think that if, if I would have hidden that or, or shied away from that, I don't think the book would have landed the same way.

Absolutely. Thank you.

And I said, well, how much have you studied your times tables? And she said, what do you mean? And she, bad father, I hadn't taught her how to study. She thought she should just know her times tables. And so we sat down. Come out of the womb with timetables intact, if you're smart. Exactly. So she literally was thinking that she was stupid.

And so we sat down, we made flashcards and in whatever it was, a half an hour, she knew her times tables.

Yeah. Right. It's something that you can pragmatically fix. Yeah. Yeah.

So did she master her times tables? She mastered her times tables. And she, you know, she kind of mastered everything from there on out from an intellectual level and went to a great college and all that stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think she recognized that, oh, you're not born knowing your times tables and you're not born knowing chemistry and you're not born knowing European history. You have to read about it and you have to study it. But...

Which I clearly had not done, right? I clearly had not said, you know, I wasn't engaged enough to know, oh, you got to learn your timetables. Here's what you got to do. It took her coming to me with that complaint about her genetics, that she was stupid, which, you know, I said, actually, you're not.

There are five books in that series.

There was another book that is called Mikey and the Dragons. Right, right. I think it's one of your favorite children's books of all time, if I remember correctly. But Mikey and the Dragons, that's the one where I wanted to have it published before Christmas one year. And the publishing company said that that's not feasible, completely unfeasible to be able to do that. And I said, are you sure?

And they said, yep, it's just, there's no world where this thing can be published. And I said, oh, well, watch this. And so that one, I published myself. But, and thankfully, then I published a couple more of the Warrior Kid series on my own publishing company. But thankfully, I maintained a good relationship with that publishing company and they've now taken the books back.

And so now we're publishing, all the books under that same publishing company.

Well, there's one huge advantage, and that is with the movie coming out, this is gonna be, there's gonna be a lot of books to be printed and stored and the whole nine yards. And at a certain point, you know, they're a business. I have a business mind, at least I try to. And at a certain point- And a marketing platform. At a certain point you say, okay,

what does it cost me to publish these books myself? Well, there's a lot of costs. There's the storage, the printing, the whole nine yards, the mailing, the ordering. There's a whole bunch that goes with it. Yeah, you need to have a business to do that. And there's the brainpower engagement that it takes to do that. So that's all happening. Meanwhile, they have all the necessary infrastructure.

Right. And they were a good partner. You know, I... Maybe it was a little bit too aggressive when I went and published my own book, you know, but... Were you? Okay, maybe not.