Jocko Willink and Mike Sarraille - Helping Veterans Transition into the Private Sector

Um, alright guys, well thanks for hosting me to a podcast at the Jocko podcast studio. For those of our listeners that don't know about you guys, I think we should start with some quick intros and then start talking about the new program you're working on. So, Jocko, why don't you start off?

Cool! I was in the military for twenty years, and then I retired. When I retired, I started working with civilians primarily and teaching them about leadership that I had learned was in the military. Mm-hmm. That culminated in a book, you know, another that ended up kind of morphing into a book called "Extreme Ownership." That book came out, and that book done pretty well, and that kind of morphed into a podcast. So I have a podcast called Jocko Podcast where I talk about really talk about human nature through the lens of leadership, and war, and general atrocities, and struggle other than human beings go through. So it's a little bit of a rough podcast to listen to from time to time, but there's a lot of lessons in it.

Yeah, I mean it's, uh, it really contrasts from the average podcast in the sense that it's sort of like you reading a book every single week or every other week and just going through giving notes based on your experience.

Yeah, it's interesting too because I get most of the books that I try and use are first-person accounts, right, of these situations. So whether it's war, whether it's some kind of atrocity, it's a first-person account with someone that was actually there. It's not an interpretation; it's not what someone else thought that person thought; it's what that person thought. So I think that has the ability to take you into the minds of and see some of that stuff through a better perspective. The more you— the more the more different perspectives you can get other than your own, the better you're going to understand things.

Yeah, yeah, I've been blown away by like, I mean, the likes the podcast has when you started off as I—I don't know if he's gonna be able to find 50 books.

And now, well, I thought that too because when I started, there was a few books. You know, "About Face" by Hackworth—there were three or four books that I knew I could cover that really had a big impact on me. And then I reached a little bit and I said, "Well, you know, I can do this one too." And when I started reading with the thought that, "What can I learn from this?" Not just, "What do I understand about it?" What can I actually learn from this? Then I started pulling out all these old books that I had read—"With the Old Breed"—just, just books that are incredible books. And as I pulled those out, now I realize the actual problem isn't that there aren't enough books; the actual problem is that there's no possible way I can cover all the books that exist that we can learn from and that I can learn from. So the problem ended up not being the problem my father initially was—there's a lot of incredible books out there.

Yeah, well, you're doing a great job. Mike, what's your story?

Much along the same lines. First off, thanks for having me on. Y Combinator's dear to my heart because I was born and raised in Silicon Valley. Much like Jocko, I did something uncharacteristic to a kid coming out of Atherton, California: I enlisted in the Marine Corps and then eventually became a SEAL. I finished up and retired after twenty years. I was one of Jocko's guys, you know, in the book "Extreme Ownership." It's all about the Battle of Ramadi. I wasn't one of those guys; I worked for Jocko and hence how we, you know, how we've known each other for so long. You know, I did not write a book because I believe in an extreme ownership; we can't replicate what is already working. But really, you know, I finished my MBA at the University of Texas right before I retired, and I just got into facilitating successful veteran transitions. When I say successful, a lot of the time, that is not setting the expectation on the corporate side; that is actually setting the expectation side or setting the expectations on the veteran side and getting their heads right. It's not an easy thing...