Literacy and Strength | Jocko Willink | EP 160

49m read

·Nov 7, 2024

[Music] Hi everybody, I'm pleased today to be talking with Jocko Willink, who I've talked with on his podcast on three separate occasions. I don't think I've had Jocko on mine, and my memory isn't what it should be, but I'm quite sure that so far when we've talked, it’s been on your podcast. So I thought I'd take the time today to get to know you in some more detail.

Jocko is an American author, podcaster, and retired naval officer who served in the Navy SEALs. He co-authored the books "Extreme Ownership" and "The Dichotomy of Leadership" with fellow retired SEAL Leif Babin. Would I pronounce that right?

It's actually Leif Babin.

Oh, so I didn't pronounce it right at all. Leif Babin. He hosts a weekly podcast with Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner Echo Charles called "The Jocko Podcast." He has a million subscribers on YouTube and his podcast attracts many more listeners. He co-founded the management consulting firm Echelon Front LLC and has extended his business development on a number of additional fronts.

His military service included combat actions in the war in Iraq, where he eventually commanded the SEAL Teams III Task Unit Bruiser that fought in the battle against the Iraqi insurgents in Ramadi and was honored with the Silver Star and Bronze Star for his service. He achieved the rank of lieutenant commander.

Good to see you again, Jocko.

It's good to be here.

Yeah, I feel the same way. It's good to be here. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. So I'm glad that you were able to gut through that ridiculously long bio, and I felt that as you got to the end of it, you were breaking free of the chains of that reading, so I'm glad it's over with.

Yeah, well, it's so much better just to talk than to read in this sort of format. But at least everybody who doesn’t know already has some sense of who you are, some minimal sense of who you are. So tell me what's been happening online with you over the last couple of years because we haven't spoken—I would say it's got to be two years, I think, something like that. I've cast an eye on what's been happening with you on YouTube, and some of my staff have filled me in, but I'm really curious. Tell me about what's happening with your YouTube channel and your online activities, your podcast, and all of that.

Um, yeah, a few years ago I started a podcast. That was actually, it was quite a few years ago now; it was in 2015. It might have been kind of as the explosion of—prior to the explosion of podcasts. In fact, I think I read something that said at that time it was like 17% of Americans were listening to podcasts, and that number's much, much higher now. And I kind of got lucky because at the time, Tim Ferriss had one of the most popular podcasts—still very popular—but at the time, just because of the numbers of podcasts that existed, his podcast was even more popular. And I went on his podcast, and when he got—when we got done recording and he pressed stop on the record button, he looked at me and said, "You should have your own podcast." And I kind of took that, you know, and noted it. And then a little while later, I was on Joe Rogan's podcast, and he had, you know, obviously another one of the most popular podcasts in the world. And he told me in the middle of that podcast that I should have my own podcast.

And so when guys like Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan are telling you to have your own podcast, you have your own podcast. Now, I came to realize later that Joe Rogan actually would tell everybody to have a podcast, so maybe here he would tell everyone, "Oh, you should start a podcast." Well, I actually listened to him, and so I started that podcast.

And I would say if somebody would have asked, you know, "What should a person do to make a good podcast?" or maybe not a good podcast, but a popular podcast, somebody would probably say, "Make it probably a half an hour to an hour, bring a bunch of different guests on so that you can hear a bunch of different people talking, and, you know, talk about positive things in the world."

And so instead of doing any of that, what I did was I have a podcast that's between two and five hours long, oftentimes it's just me talking, reading from a book, and reviewing a book, and usually the books are about war or suffering or some kind of human atrocity. And so that's what my podcast is. And really what it boils down to is it's learning about human nature, and for me, human nature is best revealed, or most clearly revealed, in times of suffering. And one of the—the I guess a pretty good monopoly on the market for suffering is war and right in there, as well as, you know, human atrocities.

So I started that podcast, and like I said, when I started it, there weren't that many—there weren't as many podcasts as there are now, so it got some traction out of the gate, and it kind of just stayed there. So I was very lucky in that respect, and I've been doing it ever since. I've put out one podcast a week for five years, I've only missed one week in there, and that was when my best friend was killed in a parachute accident, and so I didn't put out a podcast that week. But other than that, I've been very consistent.

And then the YouTube channel is, well, it's kind of the podcast, and then we do some excerpts there and little clips and stuff like that, and Echo Charles—uh, I forget what you called him in the bio—a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner. He's also a video guy, and so he makes his little—he makes little clips and puts special effects in them and stuff because he's creative and bored, which means it's a great combination for someone that you're working with.

It is indeed. So I think that's what's been happening online for me in the past few years.

Who do you think is your audience, or do you know?

Yeah, I know. I actually quite well. My demographic is people. It's people. It's human beings, really. It's all over the place. And when I go and do live events, I'll have just the entire spectrum of humans there. Hey, look, is there a kind of a typical person? Yeah, there's a typical person, but we get everybody on the spectrum from the grandma to the little kids. You know, I've written a bunch of kids' books, and the little kids show up as well, right? Pretty broad demographic.

I meet all kinds of people—everybody from a—I’ll meet a firefighter and then a hedge fund guy and then a stay-at-home mom and then a retired Marine. I just meet everybody, and that's the audience.

Do you have any sense of what it is that's attracting people to your podcast? I mean, you sort of approach that tongue-in-cheek, in some sense, for a dark topic. You know, you concentrate on things that are pretty negative or they're pretty dark. And so as you said, that might fly in the face of any advice you'd get about what to talk about. But obviously, I mean, one of the things I've encountered is that there's a vast hunger for serious dialogue, and I mean, one of the things that struck me always about your podcast was you often read something that's very, very emotionally demanding, stark, harsh, rough, and—well, and it's interesting to think about why people might be attracted to that. What's your sense? And also, why are you doing it?

I think that it's emotional. I think that these are emotional topics. I think these are things that people can be a little bit afraid of and a little bit nervous about, and being able to brush up against them a little bit gives them a little bit more familiarity with them. And therefore, when you see—when you come close to things that are that stark and dark and horrible, it also makes you look up around at the present situation that you're in, and maybe it doesn't look as awful.

Yeah, so there you touched on two things about knowing something about history that might be really useful or about human affairs, right? One is that—I mean, it's a tenet of clinical psychotherapy that a voluntary approach to what's frightening, threatening, even disgusting is curative. It has to be voluntary, and it can't be too intense, right? Because if it gets too intense, it can actually hurt you. But if it's voluntary and measured, that actually seems to strengthen people. I would say that's one thing that virtually all well-trained clinicians agree on, is that that kind of exposure—whether it's discussing old difficult experiences in an autobiographical manner or whether it's actually going out into the world and facing things that you're afraid of—if you're an elevator phobic, for example, you might be faced with—a confronted with the necessity of at least looking at an elevator, which is something you might avoid if you're phobic.

And then—so that's the first thing. So there is some pronounced human tendency to be attracted to what's dark because that is a pathway to mental and physical resilience. And then the second thing is, which I also think is extremely important, is it's useful to cultivate gratitude in my estimation. And one of the ways that you can do that, because you take a lot of what's good in your life for granted, it gets invisible—especially if it's predictable, it gets invisible—and that's unfortunate because it's still rare and precious. And if you know how terrible things can be, have been, or could become, then that can alert you to how fortunate you are when all hell isn't breaking loose right now everywhere in your life.

So, yeah, and you can also sort of learn some skill sets of how to handle these tough situations when you get in them, and if you can see that someone went through something that's much worse, and what did they do to deal with it? How did they get through it? What did they think about? What did they do? You can say, "Okay, well, I've seen that before, and the situation I'm in isn't quite as bad, but I know that that person took action. I know that person stood up and made a move and made things happen and tried to move forward, and maybe that's what I should do too."

So you can definitely garner some skills from the past. And right, so that's a third element, is that it can expand your notion of human competence. And that's, you know, I think that's partly—one of the reasons that people love watching high-end sports performances, you know, because you think, "Well, look, there's—that's what a human being is capable of. Isn't that so remarkable?" And I am one of those, and so that's a limit case, but there's obviously room for me to develop, and that's something that's very hopeful. And so if you are in dire straits and you've seen that other people can get through that, you think, "Well, maybe I could get through that if I could just learn how to do it."

So, I had a guy on my podcast who had written a book; his name was William Reader, and he had—he was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and he was shot down—well, he shot down two times. The first time he was shot down, he was able to make it back to friendly lines. The second time he was shot down, he was captured, and he was captured in South Vietnam, which is actually worse. You didn’t want to get captured in South Vietnam because then they had to get you to North Vietnam to the prison. And getting to North Vietnam while you're patrolling through the jungle for months on end is not a good thing. And at one point, he's in a two-foot tall bamboo cage in the jungle, and his legs are shackled, and it's nighttime, and he's trying to sleep, but he's having trouble sleeping because the rats are gnawing at the wounds on his legs.

And so knowing that someone could suffer through that and survive and get through and make it out the other side and then carry on with a completely productive life tells me that we are pretty resilient as a species if we can dig deep and find that resiliency.

Yes, well that's exactly the kind of story that also makes you much appreciative of the fact that you have a bed in an air-conditioned room in a house in a town that's not burning to the ground with rioters, and you have that every night. And you take it for granted, but it's still worth noting that it's a kind of miracle compared to all the alternatives that might manifest themselves.

Yeah, I think people appreciate that. I think people, you know, look how many movies have been made about war—countless movies have been made about war, countless books have been written about war. So human beings definitely have some sort of a—I don't know if it's a fascination or at least an appreciation for the sacrifice and the effort that goes into fighting a war. And I will tell you, and I can't speak for everybody, but certainly me and many of the kids I grew up with and then many of the people that I served with, that's what we wanted to do. We had some kind—I had some kind of an interest.

That's such a great thing for you to be able to say, you know? Because I remember watching this kid once. I saw him in Montreal, and he was standing—he's a big kid, about six-five, I would think—and he was wearing these punk boots that were like military knockoffs, essentially. And um, he was standing there, he's about 17 or 18, and he's standing there on the corner of this outdoor shopping mall, carrying these two pink shopping bags and looking completely out of place. And I thought, you know, if you went there and offered that kid a chance to go off and have an adventure, you know, to have a battle, he'd drop those shopping bags and be gone in two seconds. Because he wants something more than to be—he's not built for that. It was so incongruous, you know? He wasn't built for that.

And William James, the American philosopher, said that we needed a moral equivalent to war because war calls people to extremes, right? To the extremes in their life. And there's something about that that was obviously compelling. As you say, it's uncomfortable as well to state that blatantly, because obviously peace is a desirable condition. But the question is then, well, how do you put sufficient adventure into the peace? And that's a very, very—that's a very complicated problem.

Yeah, you know, it's very true in the fact that in war, I was lucky enough to go, and I was lucky enough to serve in combat and to be in a position of leadership in combat. And in those situations, I was able to witness with my own eyes, on the one hand, the most heinous and despicable acts that human beings can partake in. And I was also able to witness with my own two eyes these soldiers, Marines, the guys that were in my task unit making the most incredible sacrifices for their friends.

So yes, there is an extreme to war, and like you said, it's not something you wish on anybody. And I had this conversation with Sam Harris a while ago because he called me out and said, you know, you're talking about how hard war is and it's terrible, but at the same time, you say it's the best thing that you have been through. And I asked him if he'd ever known anyone that had cancer and survived it, and oftentimes those people will say, "It's the best thing that happened to me. I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but I'm glad it happened to me." And that's kind of how I feel about war too: I wouldn't wish war on anybody, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

So when you look back on your involvement in the war in Iraq and your country's involvement, what do you make—how do you make sense out of it morally? I mean, we're in that domain right now. You know, you already told me that you're pulled between these extreme views. You don't wish war on anyone. I mean, if you do have— do you have a son?

Yes.

How old is he?

Well, so then you think—I presume—but I wouldn't deign to presume—if you could have what you wanted for him, would that be peace?

Of course.

Okay, okay.

Of course.

But well, right, right. Exactly.

Well, the other thing that you do as far as—please correct me if I get any of this wrong—but I mean part of what you're also offering to people is the call of a kind of radical discipline right now. You post on Instagram the times you wake up in the morning, correct?

Yes.

4:30, something like that?

Yeah, pretty regularly.

And I guess you do that to show people that you can get the hell out of bed at 4:30 and get your day going.

Yeah, maybe not—I would love to tell you that I was that um, had that much forethought into when I started doing that. But I was on Tim Ferriss's podcast, and he told me I should join Twitter, and I kind of said, "What's that?" And he showed it to me a little bit, and he said, "You really should join this. It's a way you can communicate with people." And I said, "Okay, fair enough." So I signed up for Twitter, and then whatever—the next day, I woke up in the morning and didn't know what to write or what to do, so I just took a picture of my watch and said, "Here I go." And other people kind of noticed that, and so that's kind of how that whole thing started.

But yeah, well, it's not always the case that when you do something new and creative, you know why you do it. I mean sometimes you have—and even if you think you know why you do it, you might find out five years later that there are ten other reasons that you did it that you weren't aware of at the time. Like we live beyond ourselves all the time. That's especially true if you're entrepreneurial and creative because you're changing who you are all the time, and there's no reason to assume that your understanding of yourself would keep up with the changes.

So my take on the Instagram posts was—it’s like, well, you know, yeah, you can sleep until 10 o'clock in the morning if you want, but you can also get a jump on the day. And I think part of what makes what you're doing attractive is that there's so little emphasis in our popular culture, especially with regards to the so-called mainstream media, on discipline and responsibility. That there's a tremendous hunger for anything that pertains to that.

And you have a right to be discussing that, I would say, because of your—because of your background if nothing else required a tremendous amount of discipline.

Yeah, and I ended up writing a book called "Discipline Equals Freedom," and I'm lucky that I wrote it when I did because if I would have written it two years later, everyone would have said, "Oh, everyone's talking about discipline now."

So, yeah, discipline absolutely—discipline does bring you freedom in life, and that's something that I kind of figured out over time.

I didn't—well, so what do you mean by that? Like, how did you figure that out, and what do you mean by that? Because they're often—and you know the classic sort of, uh, what would you call it, romantic rebel is someone who has—is free from excessive order, let's say. They see freedom and discipline as antithetical rather than seeing one as a precondition for the other.

So how did you learn that discipline was a precondition for freedom, if I've got the equation right? How did that manifest itself in your own life?

So we'll start off by saying this. Look, I was a young kid. I joined the Navy to go in the SEAL Teams. I went through SEAL training, I showed up at SEAL Team One. And when I got there—and as I look back, this is a very powerful thing, even though it's very simple—when I was, so I'm 19 years old when I show up at SEAL Team One. I'm done with the basic SEAL training, and I have a goal in my head, which is this: I want to be a good SEAL. That's what I want to do. That's like—I don’t know about anything else. This is what I want to do. I want to be a good SEAL—that's what I want. I want to be a good SEAL, and so as a 19-year-old with all kinds of energy—and we haven't talked about my childhood yet, but I was kind of like a very rebellious kid. When you talked about seeing a kid that looked like you could have handed him a club or a battle axe, he would have probably been feeling a little bit better, I was like that. I was constantly looking around for a club or a battle axe because that's what I felt like I needed to do, and it was beautiful because I was running around the woods as a young kid playing army, and I just went and actually played army. You know, that's what I ended up doing, so I never really had to do—you know, force myself into some mold that I didn't want to be into.

So I got to SEAL Team One, and now I just want to be a good SEAL. That's what I want, and so now that starts steering some of my decisions. And for the most part, it steered my decisions in a decent direction. Now, there were some times where, as I look back now, what I thought was a good SEAL was a little bit off, but luckily it wasn't 180 degrees off; it might have been 30 degrees or 40, right?

And as I got older and more mature, and I figured out more about what that ideal should look like to me, I could keep chasing that ideal. That was good. But even to be a 19-year-old kid with a 70 or 80-degree corridor to move forward in is not a bad thing.

No, it's a gift!

It's a gift, exactly. So then I'm looking around at other SEALs that were older than me and more senior to me and trying to figure out which one of those guys is a good SEAL. Yeah, and what I realized was that the guys that were working harder, for the most part, were good SEALs. Now, look, there's just some people that are just way talented, right? We'd show up, you know, three minutes before a run or three minutes before we do a shooting competition, and they could just walk through it no problem, right? And that's great for them.

I'm not that great at anything, but I saw other guys that might not be great at anything either, but they worked hard. They showed up to work early. They did the drills that they were supposed to do. They had discipline. And when you have—it has amalgamated statistics, and I hope I get this right, but it's approximately correct if you work 10% longer hours, you make 40% more money, right?

And so—and I think your comments about talent are also dead on. It's like in any field of enterprise, there are people who are phenomenally gifted, and then if they work really hard, they're even more phenomenally gifted, right? Those are the people who break records. But that talent–hard work actually works. And with virtually everything, it might not make you the best at whatever it is you're pursuing, but it will certainly make you better than you are.

And then I have this new book. I hope you got a copy, because we did. You get a copy? Okay. So I'm bringing it up for a particular reason. I have a chapter in this book called, well there are two that are relevant. Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. That's one. And then the complementary chapter is work as hard as you possibly can on one thing and see what happens. And that's also predicated on this idea that discipline is a precondition to freedom.

So you were fortunate; like you had this goal, right? So that meant you had a goal, which is a really big deal, because you could learn about goals. You had a sense of what—a higher mode of moral being, that I would rather be a good SEAL than the person I am now.

Well, it's a code of behavior and a way of perceiving, so there's an ethic in that. And then you said as well, you know, your conception of what a good SEAL meant changed as you matured. But that's also fine. It wouldn't have changed unless you would have pursued that initial, only partially accurate goal. And so that's also a really good thing for people to understand, is like if you don't know what you're doing, aim at something. Is it the right thing? No, but it's better than just shooting randomly.

So you aim at something, and then as you aim and you move towards it, you're going to find out why you're wrong, and then you might recalibrate your aim, and that's going to happen over and over because as you move towards a goal, it recedes or it broadens or it recedes and broadens. Otherwise, you'd run out of things to do.

So, but anyways, back to the story. You have this identity, and you said it was there in you right from the beginning because you would play army in, by yourself even, in the forest by your house, I presume. And how old were you, do you think? When how far back can you remember having that as a fascination?

I do not remember wanting to do anything else.

So would you say what is early? Is that as early as four, three, five, preschool, something like that? Can you remember playing when you were that young?

I can't remember a specific age, but if I think back to "hey, that looks like what I want to do," I remember I wanted to be a soldier.

Do you remember when you were a kid? I mean, I'm fascinated by this because one of the things I really noted when I had kids was how much their personality was there right from the beginning. Like my children are quite different; they have their similarities, but they're quite different from one another, and those differences were there right from the beginning, and they've maintained themselves throughout their lives.

And so it's fascinating to see that that destiny, in some sense, is built right into the person to begin with. And so while this was built into you, by all appearances, and so it manifested itself in what attracted you even in play as a child. And that's the beginning of identity formulation—that play. And so what was it about being a soldier that you think attracted you when you were a kid? Like, what was it that was so compelling?

Because being a soldier is a multi-dimensional identity. There's the physical combat element of it, there's the strategic element of it, there's the discipline, the camaraderie. What were you playing, do you think?

I got asked this—I was talking to some folks at the Special Operations Command the other day, and they asked me, they set me up with this kind of beautiful possibility or opportunity for me to give some kind of an incredibly beautiful answer to this very question, you know? And there was something along the lines of, you know, at what point did the opportunity to serve and sacrifice for your country reveal itself to you or something along those lines.

And all I'm thinking about is when I'm eight years old, 12 years old, 15 years old, I want a machine gun, and I want to go fight a war—that's what I want to do. I would love to tell you, I would love to tell you that I read some heroic book. I read the Odysseys and realized that they haven't read any of that stuff; well, that wouldn't be anything to do with it anyways, right? I mean, I’m curious about what it was so early, you know?

And so, okay, so for you, it had something to do with weaponry apparently. I got to tell you a story about my father.

Okay.

And tell me if this act we like produces any echoes. Before you go—yep. Weaponry was like for sure—that’s fine. But it could be a club. It wasn't—it wasn’t like I wasn’t a kid that was obsessed with guns, okay? It was—and maybe it was just, you know, we're going to get out and run around with sticks and try and hit each other or get into rock fights.

Did you ever have rock fights when you—?

Well, we—we had ice fights because it was Northern Alberta. But also dirt lump fights, and now and then those would have rocks. And I can remember it was usually the Protestant kids against the Catholic kids. I mean, there wasn't that much of a division between those two in our town, but the Catholic kids had their high—their junior high and high school, and we had ours, and so our gangs were separate and so we would have dirt lump fights in the vacant lots where buildings were being constructed. And those were extremely exciting. You know, now and then you'd take a dirt lump rock in the mouth, and that was a little bit on the painful side. But there’s no doubt that it was extremely exciting and so—and then I cut you off about your dad.

And the guy—oh, well, my dad told me something, and then this might be more relevant to guns, but my dad collects single-shot rifles, and he has a lot of them, like hundreds of them. And he’s a gunsmith and makes stocks and hand carves them, and anyways, he's an artisan in that regard, and it’s really a focal obsession. He’s a great shot; he shot at the provincial level, which would be the state level in the US.

But it was single shots, and he hunted, and so we grew up on moose meat and elk meat. And he brought elk into Northern Alberta as part of a repopulation attempt. Anyways, um, I thought for I could never understand his fascination with guns because it was really a deep fascination.

So it was it was something that elicited my curiosity. And at one point, I realized that he only hunted with single shots, so he had one shot at whatever he was hunting. So it had to be a good shot. And so he was pushing himself. And then I realized, well, he was really obsessed with hitting the target, taking aim and hitting the target.

And it was about that time I learned that the Greek word for sin, hamartia, meant to miss the target. So there's this tight alignment between taking careful aim at the center of something precisely, and then bringing yourself into alignment so that you would hit that target. There's a deep morality in that. It's a morality of hunting; it might be a morality of combat, and it's really deeply embedded inside of people.

And that was what had my father in its grip. And so I was wondering if your automatic interest that that even the club elicited in you had something to do with that—seeking, that hunting, that target seeking? Or if, you know, perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree?

I would say no, but when you were talking about getting hit in the head with a dirt clump and whether you get hit or not, when you get done with that situation, you are in an elevated state of mind because that was dangerous and it was a very high level competition. Because even when you're throwing a baseball or, you know, kicking a soccer ball around, there's no real danger in that situation. But when someone's hucking dirt clumps at your head, you get a legitimate rush from that, and it feels good, and it feels exhilarating.

One of the most fun days I ever had as a child was—this was less dangerous—I lived next door to a policeman, an RCMP officer, and we went out one day. I was probably about eight into my neighbor's backyard, and she had green tomatoes everywhere, far more than she was ever going to eat. And we had a green tomato war for like an hour and a half, and he was moving them at a pretty good velocity, so if they caught you, especially in the head, you know, you kind of remembered it, but it was exhilarating, and it was really fun to engage in that with him, and I really do remember that. And I do remember those—I hadn’t until today—but I do remember those dirt lump wars, and there is an exhilaration in pushing yourself like that.

So—and I also don't want to give the impression that I was, you know, running around with camouflage paint going to high school, or I was, you know, I was doing a bunch of other stuff too. I played soccer, I played basketball, I—I—we had, you know, a bunch of different bands. We played music; I played bass in a band, I sang in a band, I played guitar. We did all kinds of other stuff, but yeah, I was always kind of just in the back of my mind sort of wanted to do that job.

All right, so you went to the SEALs. And tell us about that a bit.

It was awesome. You know, you're making more money than you could ever figure out to do with—you know, I'm 19 years old, and I am the richest person that's ever existed, in my mind, because I'm making whatever it is, however many thousand dollars every two weeks, and, you know, my expenses were nothing. And so you're just totally stoked. You're getting—you got a great job; you’re working out, you’re shooting machine guns, you're blowing things up, you're hanging out with a bunch of other guys that like to blow things up and—you can fight each other at the drop of a hat, and then you get done with a fight and you shake hands, and then you go eat a steak. And so you're just in this environment, and it's perfect. It's freaking awesome.

So what was it like?

It was awesome. That's what it was like. It's funny; you read accounts of the Navy SEALs, and I've never read an account as enthusiastic as that account right there.

And so then how long after you—what happened after you were done your Navy SEAL training? What direction did your military career take?

Yeah, so I got done with SEAL training, I went to SEAL Team One. It was 1991. I just missed the first Gulf War. I was all brokenhearted about that because this war had happened, and I didn't know when another one was going to happen. And so what do you do? You train. And we trained a bunch. I did a bunch of SEAL platoons, which is—you form up with a group of guys, you do a training cycle together as a platoon, and then you go on deployment overseas. And when there's no war going on, you go to other countries, and you work with foreign nationals, and you train them on the skill sets that we have and learn some stuff from them, and then you come back and you do it again.

And then eventually from there, I went into where I became a trainer at SEAL Team One and taught the tactics to the SEAL platoons that were now training to go on deployment. And I did that for a couple of years, and then I got picked up for a commissioning program and became an officer in the SEAL Teams, which moved me up into a leadership position. And then I did a couple of deployments as a young SEAL leader. Then I had to go to college—the Navy sent me to college, because in order to be an officer in the Navy you have to go to college, and I hadn't been to college.

Where did you go?

I went to the University of San Diego.

You went to the University of San Diego? What did you take there?

I was an English major.

All right, so you finished college and then what happened?

You're not going to ask me why I was an English major?

Why were you an English major?

I thought when he hears English major, he's going to say, “Wait a second here; you are this guy talking about machine guns and blowing things up. What in God’s name are you going to go study English for?” I have to say that thought did pass through my mind.

Okay, uh, why was I an English major? I was an English major because, believe it or not, when you're in the SEAL Teams, and especially when you're in any officer position, you have to write and read all the time. So when one of your troops does something, and they deserve some kind of recognition for that, you have to write them an award. And if the award is written well, there’s a much better chance that it will actually be given to the person that you're writing it for. You have to write evaluations for your troops, and the evaluations that you write is how your troops are judged, so that they can be promoted. On top of that, if you want to go do a mission, you have to write a concept of operations, which is a document which is five, six, seven, eight pages long that you send up the chain of command that they scour through and see if they're going to approve your mission or not.

You know that's so insanely important, you know? I mean, one of the things I did a talk at Harvard four years ago, and I pointed out two things to the students in the audience. One was that a tremendous amount of civilization and effort had gone into producing the institution that they were now part of, and that everyone who was part of that institution was hoping that they would come there and learn everything they possibly could that was relevant and important and that they would be the best possible people they could be and they would go out in the world and do as much good as they possibly could. That was the essential mission of the enterprise, and that was really the case.

And also that learning to write in particular was going to make them more powerful than they could imagine. And a number of students came up to me afterward and said, "I really wish someone would have said that to us when we first came here." And it's the writing part of that—I kind of got obsessed with that when I was working as a professor, and I'm working on a piece of software right now to help—which we'll launch soon—to help people write because what I observed in my own career—and it's so interesting, the parallelism is so interesting, but not surprising—is that nothing can stop you if you can write, and it's for the reasons you just laid out.

It's like when you write, you make a case for something, whatever it happens to be, and if you make the best case, well then you win and you get whatever it is that you're aiming at. And so, you know, you said maybe that's why I didn't ask you why you went into English; I guess that might have been the reason, is that the utility of learning to write is so self-evident to me that it could pass by without question. But it's also interesting to think about how it fits into this broader, well, let's say at least partially military strategic way of looking at things. You know, you describe the intense relationship between marshalling your arguments properly, getting everything in order on the page, and making strategic progress, truly in the military sense, that those things are tied together very, very precisely, and it's obviously your ability to communicate as well.

That's, that’s, well, look, what it's done. You have your podcast, you have your YouTube channel, you have your books, which many of which you self-published. So that ability to communicate is, I just can't understand why it's not presented—especially not entirely—but especially to adventurous, well, let's say young men, we could say young people, you're adventurous; you want to make a mark because you bloody well better learn how to write, because if you learn how to write well, then you can think, and you can communicate your thoughts. So not only are you deadly strategically, you become extremely convincing, and then you can go and do anything you want and no one will stop you, and that's never told to people.

And I don't really understand why, you know, you hear the pen is mightier than the sword, which is just a cliché unless it's fleshed out, but the reason—you laid out the reasons perfectly.

Yeah, you have to communicate what happened as well as having it happen, right? So you already connected the dots, but obviously, you studied English, so you also read. And so what's the advantage to that as far as you're concerned, practically speaking?

Well, obviously there are so many lessons that you can pull out of books, and you can get to a point where nothing really surprises you because you've at least seen some indication of what can unfold through reading. So again, for me, it's very much focused on combat and war. But there's lessons that you learn, and you say, "Oh, I've seen that before."

There's a book—it is a book called "About Face," which I think that last time you and I talked, you were— I think you were writing the foreword for the Gulag, and I was about to write the foreword to—I don't know if that's your favorite book, but I was lucky enough to be able to write the foreword for my favorite book, which was re-released because I was talking about it all the time. And the book is called— the book is called "About Face," and it's about a guy that was in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and his name is Colonel David Hackworth.

But I would read that book when I was on deployment; I would read, open up that book anywhere, and I would read two pages or three pages before I'd go to bed if I was in my bed that night. And there were so many lessons that correlated to what I was actually going through, and a real obvious example was when he was in Vietnam, he was working with the South Vietnamese soldiers. And therefore, by proxy, the South Vietnamese government. And guess what? They're all corrupt, and they're not motivated, and they don't have the right gear. And here we are in Iraq, and we're working with Iraqi soldiers, and therefore, by proxy, we're working with the Iraqi government. Guess what? They're all corrupted. They're not well equipped.

And how do you—how did he deal with it? How did we deal with it? So there's an example of when you read, you can learn, and you don't have to go through the school of hard knocks; you don't have to get punched in the face repeatedly with things that turn out to be situations that other people have absolutely gone through. And the amount of—the level of capability increases so much by seeing something one single time.

Well, if I see something one time, I'm infinitely better than if I’d never seen it before. So, it's like those little puzzles they give you, you know, those little puzzles, some kind of a mind bender, right? The mind benders only work on you one time. The riddle only works on you one time. Then you know the answer to that; that's the answer. You know, you never get fooled by that again. So just knowing—just seeing it one time, you're infinitely better. So when you read enough, you're capturing all these lessons, and, you know what? It's—I gotta say this, it's not just reading.

It's not just reading, and I learned this because as I started doing my podcast, and many of my podcasts are just me reading books, I realized how to read more intently, even more intently than I did when I was going to be, you know, writing a paper about a book. And so I’d read it in a certain way, but even that reading was a little bit detached, a little bit detached, because you're looking for a theme or you're looking for character development or what have you. But when you read to learn about human nature and life, you detach less and you kind of put yourself in there and you experience it a little bit closer.

And then when you take a step back, you go, "Oh, yeah, I know what he was thinking right there because I was right there with him." And so there's a certain attitude you kind of have to put yourself into the work and really read it with that kind of—uh, intensity, for lack of a better word.

Is it possible for a human being to read intensely? Because that's what I try and do.

I get—you know, that's no different than acting intensely or playing intensely. Of course, you want to put the book on—you want to become that person that can rattle you up, man, especially if the person is thinking all sorts of things that you've never thought.

I mean, I love reading for that reason. I could pick my peers too, which I really loved. It's like, well, you know, I have these people around me, but then there's these people who've lived before me and in different places, and I can set them up on my shelf. I can enter into their world and I can benefit from everything they've thought and saturate myself with that person.

And it's very disruptive, especially if the person that you're reading has a mind that's more powerful and more well-developed than your own. I mean, Friedrich Nietzsche spun me around for about three years. I was reading Jung at the same time intensely, and the same thing. You know, it was very disruptive but unbelievably useful. Unbelievably useful to try on other people like that, and you get the benefit of their entire life distilled into their book, you know? It’s 30 years of work.

I read this one book called "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety," which is a great scientific work. I think it's the greatest neuropsychological work of the last 50 years; it's a very hard book. I think it has 1,800 references, something like that. And this guy, Jeffrey Gray, he actually read all those references, and he understood them. And so it took me six months to read the book, but I got an entire education out of it. I got to experience in six months what it took him 30 years to learn. What a gift that is!

It’s unbelievable! I was listening to an interview with Gary Kasparov, I think; he was a chess world champion for 20 years, something like this. And they asked him—anyway, the interviewer didn’t ask him directly if he could beat this young guy named Magnus Carlsen, who’s the current kind of prodigy of chess; he’s just phenomenal and has the highest chess rating ever, etc., etc.—and he didn't get asked directly if he could beat him, but it was definitely implied, if I remember the interview correctly.

And what was very interesting to me, Gary Kasparov, there were two things that I found interesting. Number one was he said, "He's younger than me." And he didn't mean that in like a, "Well, that's an advantage for Gary." He meant it, "He's younger than me, so he has an advantage." Because I kind of thought to myself, "Well, that's kind of weird because this isn't a physical—this isn't a wrestling match; this isn't a jiu-jitsu match; why would that help?"

And then sure enough, you learn a little bit about cognitive decline, and Gary Kasparov is 57 years old when he did this interview, and guess what? You start—well, depending on who you are—you start to see cognitive decline around that time.

And I'm going to—it kicks in at 25. There’s—you know, IQ is pretty unitary, but you can fracture it into crystallized and fluid, and fluid IQ is what enables you to learn, and it declines from 25 onward. Crystallized intelligence continues to grow roughly speaking because it's partly dependent on such things as vocabulary, which you can learn and which accumulate. But interestingly enough, you know, you were talking about physically—the best way to stave off cognitive decline is not cognitive activity; it's exercise. Weight lifting and cardiovascular exercise can stave off cognitive decline, yeah.

So Kasparov would have the advantage in terms of experience, but the younger guy would have the edge on sheer raw brain power.

That's what I thought too, but guess what? That's wrong, and it's wrong for the exact reason that you just said. So Magnus Carlsen, when he’s 11 years old, he gets to open up a book and see every single match and move that Gary Kasparov—right? That's what they do: they document that stuff. And so what he got to do was what you got to do; you got to learn a person’s 30 years of experience in six months. Well, this young kid, Magnus, so this where it might have taken Gary Kasparov, you know, eight years or four years to figure out how to get out of some particular quandary on the chessboard, well, Magnus just opened to a page in a book and said, “Oh, if I ever get in that quandary, I’m there.”

And so what Magnus got to do is he got to start from here and build. And so I make this point from a leadership perspective. Yeah, we can do the same things as leaders. We don't have to figure all this stuff out. We can jump up to Gary Kasparov's level, or at least get a baseline of what he knew, and win because we learned.

It's very interesting to me. Well, you think—and again with regards to selling this sort of thing, you know, I'm stunned that it's possible to make history boring, for example. People should be so enthralled with history that they can't get enough of it, but with reading, imagine you have this opportunity to learn whatever you want from the greatest people who ever lived along that dimension.

And well, it's stunning to me that that is a hard sell. It’s mysterious that it isn't something that everyone is just clamoring for. I mean, that to me points to a devastating failure—a systemic inadequacy of the education system.

A mysterious inadequacy. Yeah, there's a—I think maybe the transaction isn't always clear for people. I always talk about, well, if you're going to sell somebody a book—you know, if I'm going to sell you a book, Jordan, you've got to give me 20 bucks and eight hours of your time, right? That's what you know; you're going to give me 20 bucks, and you're going to give me eight hours of time.

Which you would probably have other things that you might need to do, and the transaction is not always clear of what you're going to get out of that, especially when—look, you can spend a lot of time reading books and not get as much as you might want. You might not get your 20 bucks' worth out of a book, so you have to be somewhat selective. Now, luckily, it's not even that hard to figure out which books to read, because there are so many reviews and history about where these books came from and the productivity that they resulted in.

So I think it's hard sometimes for—look, I can only speak for myself. When I was younger, it was really hard for me to figure out that transaction.

Yeah, fair enough. Like I had a librarian when I was 13 who told me what to read, which is what a teacher should do, right? There's nothing a teacher can do for you that's better than say, well, here's ten books that will change you completely. And who actually knows that to be the case? One of the things I’d really like to do, I’ve toyed with the whole concept of online education. One thing I’d really like to do is to divide up the variety of domains of learning and identify the top ten books in each domain.

So to ask an expert, it’s like, "Well, you’re a historian; you’re a great historian. What ten books are crucial?" And I have a list on my website—a list of recommended books. There's about 100 of them that have been instrumental for me, and lots of people have used that list to purchase books. So that's been really good, but I’d really like to extend and expand it.

Yeah, I have the same thing on my website—the books from the podcast. And same thing—all kinds of those books get sold, and it's beautiful to see. But the people that are checking the website or listening to the podcast, they know that those books have been through a filter. They're there for a reason; they're there because they're going to be worth that transaction.

And I think that's a tough sell for a lot of people. They can't figure out—they maybe they've invested in books before and they didn't quite get the return on investment that they wanted and bought two or three books and $50 or $60.

Yeah, that's a great observation, I think, because one of the advantages to coming from a literate background is that you do in fact reduce the transaction costs, because there's an infinite number of books. I mean, well, no, there isn't, but as far as we're concerned, there might as well be. And so the question of what to read really is daunting if you don't know anyone who reads. "Where do I start?" And, "How can I not be a fool in doing this?"

So, well, okay, back to English. So what were you reading when you were in university? Was it fiction, novels? Was it nonfiction? What were you focusing on?

Uh, it was like your basic English literature: that’s what I studied. And so I read everything, you know, from each one of the little periods and took the various classes. And really, as trite as this may sound, it was actually the most impact was from Shakespeare. It was the most impact on multiple levels, and I'll tell you the primary level.

When I've covered Shakespeare on my podcast, I explain this to people. People think, "Well, you know, I didn't really understand." "I read it; I didn't understand it." And so I start off when I talk about Shakespeare on my podcast. I start off by saying, "Listen, if you think you're going to just pick up Shakespeare, open it up and read it and understand it, you're not going to, because it's barely written in English." It's barely written in English; it's almost another language. And so you're not going to be able to just pick it up and read through it. It's written in almost another language.

So what you have to do is you have to start to interpret it. And so what I realized with Shakespeare is, number one, the weight of the words—these words were so pregnant with meaning that you had to pull those words, and parse those words and pull those words apart to see all the depth that each individual word had, and then the way that they're put together.

And what was great about this was by the time I was back—because then I went right back into the SEAL Teams, and somebody would hand me a rules of engagement document that is written by some lawyer in Washington, D.C. And I’d pull it out and say, "Wait a second; this word, I don't know what this word means." Let's pull this word out; let's see what’s—the actual definition of this particular word is and how that changes my viewpoint of these rules of engagement and how can I translate that for my troops so that they actually know what to do.

So that part, for me, was from a reading perspective, starting to read Shakespeare and saying, "Oh, okay, you're not going to understand this.” And if you don't understand something, that's okay. You pull out the Oxford English Dictionary and you look it up. And then you not just find out what the meaning of the word is, but what's the root word and where does it come from? And what kind of depth and what kind—that's really—that's unbelievably useful too, to discover the connotation of words.

And the Oxford English Dictionary is particularly good for that, because you discover things that you'd never guess by looking at how the word developed. I mentioned the word hamartia. Like the fact that the word for sin was derived from an archery concept was revelatory to me. It's like that's so cool. It ties this moral concept, abstract philosophy, back down to something as primordial as weaponry and hunting, and just the fact that that's the metaphor is absolutely fascinating.

And then there's the overlap in meaning that I already referred to, and virtually every word is like that because a word is an ancient artifact. It's like an animal in some sense; it has an evolutionary history, and it transforms across time, and each word carries the echoes of its past with it too because each word attracts other words in a particular unique way, so it kind of lives in a word ecosystem as well.

And the ecosystem contains information about the history of that word and you think, "Well, why is that important?" It's like, "Well, hey, guess what? You think in words; you talk in words; you have all these archaic—what are these archaic entities, these words, these living entities that you use." It's like the more you know about them, the more you know about you, the more you know about other people, and the better you are at formulating and communicating your ideas. There’s nothing left; there’s nothing lost in that kind of investigation. Nothing. There's nothing but gain there.

So, yeah, and that was so—that was the English road for me and it was a good thing I asked you that question, eh?

Yeah! It was really, really insightful for you to come up with that. Thank you.

Thank you! All right. So, did you enjoy university? Did you find a community there?

No.

Okay, so when I was going to university, I was married. I had two kids when I got to university; I had three kids when I left. I was not a university student.

I was in fact—in fact, I would sit in the front row during my classes. I would have three pencils and three pens lined up and staged on my desk. I would be ready to take notes when the teacher said something I didn't understand. I'd be sitting in the front row, raise my hand: "I don't understand what you just said; can you explain that?"

And I mean, you know, I'm 28 years old, and there's a bunch of 18-year-olds in there, and they just want to, you know, go out and hang out with their friends, and I'm there, I’m in there to—I'd love to really sound cool and come off sounding good and tell you that I was there to learn, but I was there to get A’s, which meant I did have to learn. So I went at it as a competition, and I was competing—not with the other students; I was competing with the teachers because I'm a little bit crazy sometimes. I would want to make sure that they couldn't ask me a question on their test that I didn't know the answer to.

So that's what I did. And so did I have fun? Maybe not. And one thing I—when I got back to the SEAL Teams, what I told the guys, I’d say, "You know what I learned in college?" And they'd say, "What?" And I said, "I learned never, ever, ever, ever get out of the Teams."

Ever?

Never get out of the—sorry, get out of the Teams.

Okay, okay. Well, you know, I taught older students in Boston, undergraduates, and the undergraduates, especially in Boston, but also at the University of Toronto, were very, very bright and generally very hard working. The older students were generally not as highly selected but, man, they were committed. And most of them had had jobs that they weren't thrilled with, let's say, and had a hunger for what education could bring them that the younger people lacked.

And so it does seem to me often—and maybe this is just because I'm getting older—that after high school, it might be good for people who want to pursue university to go do something that they're qualified for, which isn't much at that point for a year or two so that when they do go to college or university, they understand just exactly what they're being offered.

Yeah, but I couldn't agree more. Working in the regular world will definitely make you appreciate the opportunities that you may have if you go and learn more in the world.

All right, so you came out of university, you had three kids, you were married. What happens next?

Go back to the SEAL Teams and go through the rest of my career. Dude showed up at SEAL Team, September 11th happened, so I show up in a SEAL Team. I become a platoon commander at a SEAL Team and then go on deployment. I get done with that deployment—that deployment was primarily to Baghdad, although we worked kind of all over Iraq—got done with that deployment, I went and became the aide-de-camp for the admiral that was in charge of all the SEALs at that point in time.

And so that was sort of an—well, not even sort of; it was a very administrative job, but it was also a huge opportunity for me to get to see the SEAL community in the most broad way that I could. So I got to learn a lot there, and then I went back to a SEAL Team and was now what's called the task unit commander, which is two SEAL platoons combined together. And I was in charge of two SEAL platoons combined together, which is called the task unit. My task unit was called Task Unit Bruiser, and we deployed to Ramadi, Iraq, and that was in the summer of 2006. Very tough fighting, a very tough battle. And I came home from that deployment.

Hey, can I let me ask you there? So can you describe a typical day or a typical week? What was it like to be there? I like all the details. What did your day look like?

So we're there; we showed up there, and as soon as we got there, and we knew going into it in 2005, 2006—if you can remember watching the news in 2005, 2006, just about every day you would see in the news that there were three soldiers killed in Anbar Province or five Marines killed in Al Anbar Province or three Marines wounded in Al Anbar Province. And the capital of Al Anbar Province is the city of Ramadi. And the vast majority of those casualties were happening inside the city of Ramadi.

And we knew that going there.

And when you say "we," you say "we were deployed there." Who are you referring to? You're obviously referring to the country—your country, but what does "we" mean when you say that?

When I say "we," in this particular case, I'm talking about my SEAL task unit. So I had—

And how many people?

Yeah, so I had about 35 to 40 SEALs most of the time, and then another 60—around 60 support personnel. And these people are armorers that, you know, can fix our weapons and mechanics that can fix our Humvees and intelligence people that gather information for us and radio operators that can receive our radio calls. So there's a big support network that goes with the SEAL task unit as we deployed.

And why was it a SEAL enterprise? What was specific about this deployment that required this? The whatever it is that the SEALs bring? And what is it exactly that the SEALs bring that's specific?

So on this particular deployment, at this time, at this point in time, SEALs were deploying to Iraq all the time; there were always SEALs in Iraq. My first deployment was in 2003-2004, and we were in the beginning of that deployment. We were the only SEAL platoon there. And then by this time, there would be many more SEALs. I forget what the number is, but we were in Iraq and we were conducting special operations missions. And in particular, in Ramadi, when we got there, a standard SEAL operation on my first deployment was gather intelligence from various sources.

So through various sources, we would gather intelligence about the location of a bad guy. Okay, so you had you had a variety of people who were targets identified, and they were leaders of—of what made—what marked them out as bad. What were their characteristics?

These are people—well, we want to talk about their psychological characters?

No, no. I mean, you might not be able to do a better job than that. I can tell you what they were doing for a living was trying to kill Americans, trying to kill coalition forces, trying to kill other Iraqis, trying to create chaos and mayhem for the interim government in Iraq.

These were—were they generally leaders of a group that you would target, or are these people who were involved in the army on the other side? Or like, put them in context?

Yeah, so there's no—I mean, the Iraqi army is actually on our side, right? So these—the Iraqi army is our friends, and that's who we're working alongside. And now early in the war, not so much, because the coalition forces made a decision to disband the entire Iraqi military, right?

This is why I wondered if there were people on the military to what degree there were people with military training that were facing you.

Yes, so since that happened, a lot—and as a matter of fact, in the city of Ramadi, there used to be a massive Iraqi military base there. And so a bunch of former Iraqi military lived there. There was a whole area that was called the—there was an area called the officer housing. There was an area in Ramadi that was called the officer housing where Iraqi officers used to live. So I'm not nailing that name, but it's something like that. So yes, there was former Iraqi regime army people that were out there fighting; there were also foreign fighters.

And so would they have their own little groups, their bands of people that were fighting with them? You were targeting leaders. I’m just wondering how people were selected.

So the SEALs were after specific individuals, generally speaking, yes. And here's what we figured out: if you only target the leaders, well, it's going to be a lot harder to catch them because they're laying low, and they’re moving around and they try and—they try and give misinformation about where they are and what not.

So we’d go and grab, you know, one of their lieutenants, grab one of their soldiers and find out where the lieutenant is, grab a lieutenant, find out where the leader is. So there would be these cell networks, these little networks, and maybe they're a mortar cell, and they’re dropping mortars; they're a roadside bomb cell, and that's what they're doing. And so we would figure out who these bad guys were. And then through these various intelligence sources, we would find out a location. Maybe it was a mid-level guy; maybe he was a high-level guy; maybe he was a low-level guy; and then once we know their location, we're going to get them.

So what were the typical motivations of the people that you were pursuing? What were they fighting for?

So there's a variety of motivations. Some of the, you know, if you're a front line—guess what? If you're a 15-year-old kid with no money, guess what's a good motivator? Money. And the insurgency has to be—yep, the insurgents say, "Hey, we'll give you 100 bucks to go launch an RPG at the American base." So that's their motivation, end of story. The higher you get up the chain of command, the more you're going to start leaning towards legitimate jihadists that now there are jihadists throughout the chain of command, don't get me wrong, and I mean hardcore jihadists.

And I remember the first time I—I was in my first deployment, the first time I saw a legit hardcore jihadist—you can tell that this guy hated us, and it was very clear from the look on his face when we captured him. It was completely—he was filled with seething hatred.

So there's jihadists throughout the chain of command?

And that guy was like, so the jihadist motivation was, well, by definition, in some sense, a religious motivation. But your experience of it was that it was primarily a visceral hate and hatred for what? Do you think? I mean, obviously you're an occupying force, let's say, and you know—and America is seen at least among the jihadists of that time as a truly satanic force, I suppose. I mean, what's motivating—what was your experience of what was motivating the hatred?

Yeah, it’s—it’s everything you just said. But, I mean, you can trace it all the way back to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I mean, you can draw lines and see, view the West as evil, as the Great Satan. And so that's what—what did you think at that point about the morality of the endeavor? I mean, we're in that domain right now.

You know, you told me already that you’re pulled between these extreme views. You don't wish war on anyone. I'm—I mean, if you have—do you have a son?

Yes.

How old is he?

So then you think—I presume—but I wouldn't deign to presume. If you could have what you wanted for him, would that be peace?

Of course.

Okay, okay.

Of course.

But, well, right, right, exactly.

Well, the other thing that you do, as far as—please correct me if I get any of this wrong—but, I mean, part of what you're also offering to people is the call of a kind of radical discipline right now. You post on Instagram the times you wake up in the morning, correct?

Yes.

It's 4:30, something like that, and pretty regularly. And I guess you do that to show people that you can get the hell out of bed at 4:30 and get your day going.

Yeah, maybe not—I would love to tell you that I was that um, had that much forethought into when I started doing that. But I was on Tim Ferriss's podcast, and he told me I should join Twitter, and I kind of said, "What's that?" And he showed it to me a little bit, and he said, "You really should join this—it’s a way you can communicate with people." And I said, "Okay, fair enough." So I signed up for Twitter, and then whatever—the next day, I woke up in the morning and didn’t know what to write or what to do, so I just took a picture of my watch and said, "Here I go," and other people kind of noticed that. And so that's kind of how that whole thing started.

But yeah, well, it's not always the case that when you do something new and creative you know why you do it. I mean sometimes you have—and even if you think you know why you do it, you might find out five years later that there are ten other reasons that you did it that you weren't aware of at the time.

Like we live beyond ourselves all the time; that’s especially true if you're entrepreneurial and creative because you're changing who you are all the time, and there's no reason to assume that your understanding of yourself would keep up with the changes.

So my take on the Instagram posts was, well, you can sleep until 10 o'clock in the morning if you want, but you can also get a jump on the day. And I think part of what makes what you're doing attractive is that there's so little emphasis in our popular culture, especially with regards to the so-called mainstream media, on discipline and responsibility, that there's a tremendous hunger for anything that pertains to that.

And you have a right to be discussing that, I would say, because of your—because of your background if nothing else required a tremendous amount of discipline.

So yeah, discipline absolutely—discipline does bring you freedom in life, and that's something that I kind of figured out over time.

Well, so what do you mean by that? Like how did you figure that out, and what do you mean by that? Because they're often—and you know the classic sort of—what would you call it? Romantic rebel is someone who has—is free from excessive order, let's say. They see freedom and discipline as antithetical rather than seeing one as a precondition for the other.

So how did you learn that discipline was a precondition for freedom, if I've got the equation right? How did that manifest itself in your own life?

So we'll start off by saying this. Look, I was a young kid. I joined the Navy to go in the SEAL Teams. I went through SEAL training, I showed up at SEAL Team One, and when I got there—and as I look back, this is a very powerful thing, even though it's very simple—when I was—a 19 years old, when I show up at SEAL Team One, I'm done with the basic SEAL training, and I have a goal in my head, which is this: I want to be a good SEAL. That's what I want to do. That's like—I don’t know about anything else. This is what I want to do. I want to be a good SEAL—that's what I want.

I want to be a good SEAL, and so as a 19-year-old with all kinds of energy—and we haven't talked about my childhood yet, but I was kind of like a very rebellious kid. When you talked about seeing a kid that looked like you could have handed him a club or a battle axe, he would have probably been feeling a little bit better, I was like that. I was constantly looking around for a club or a battle axe because that's what I felt like I needed to do, and it was beautiful because I was running around the woods as a young kid playing army, and I just went and actually played army.

You know, that's what I ended up doing, so I never really had to do—you know, force myself into some mold that I didn't want to be into.

No, it's a gift!

It's a gift, exactly. So then I'm looking around at other SEALs that were older than me and more senior to me and trying to figure out which one of those guys is a good SEAL.

Yeah, and what I realized was that the guys that were working harder, for the most part, were good SEALs.

And look, there's just some people that are just way talented, right? We'd show up, you know, three minutes before a run or three minutes before we do a shooting competition, and they could just walk through it no problem, right?

And that's great for them. I'm not that great at anything, but I saw other guys that might not be great at anything either, but they worked hard. They showed up to work early. They did the drills that they were supposed to do. They had discipline. And when you have—it has amalgamated statistics, and I hope I get this right, but it's approximately correct if you work 10% longer hours, you make 40% more money, right?

Well, it's a code of behavior and a

Literacy and Strength | Jocko Willink | EP 160

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