Jocko Willink is a retired Navy SEAL, co-author of Extreme Ownership, and host of Jocko Podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:10 - The beauty and tragedy of war
8:44 - Soviet Union in World War II
15:03 - What makes a just war?
28:39 - Jordan Peterson
31:51 - Fear of death
36:02 - Autonomous weapons systems
47:37 - What makes a great leader?
50:24 - Elon Musk - a leadership case study
1:04:12 - Steve Jobs - a leadership case study
1:14:24 - Sundar Pichai - a leadership case study
1:21:24 - Young Jamie
1:25:32 - Discipline
1:28:24 - A day in the life of Jocko
1:34:39 - Jiu Jitsu
1:50:27 - Books

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The following is a conversation with Jocko Willink, a retired US Navy SEAL, co-author of Extreme Ownership, Dichotomy of Leadership, Discipline Equals Freedom, and many other excellent books.

He was the commander of SEAL Team 3's task unit Bruiser that became the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq war.

This conversation was intense and to the point.

We agreed to talk again, probably many times.

And what I find very interesting, aside from the talk of leadership, is the conversation about military tactics of specific battles in history.

Quick mention of our sponsors, Linode, Indeed, SimpliSafe, and Ground News.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

Since it's the 4th of July, a holiday in the United States, let me say a few words about what this country, my country, the United States of America means to me.

First, by way of background, I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, just long enough to get a bit of the Russian soul, an appreciation of Soviet history, music, culture, of wrestling and mathematics, of engineering and philosophy, stoicism and humor, tragedies and triumphs of war and revolutions, all in ways that are uniquely Russian.

I do happen to at times mention that I'm Russian.

This is what I mean, that I got a bit of that Russian soul.

But of course who I really am is an American.

This country gave me the opportunity, the freedom to become and to be who I am, to stand as an individual.

This seemingly simple freedom to be a sovereign human being in the face of all the beauty and cruelty of life is why I love this country.

Much of life can be unfair, unjust, even tragic, but this is the country where if I'm clever enough, work hard enough, and just get lucky enough, I have a chance to dream big and make my dream a reality.

The United States welcomed me, my family, and millions of immigrants throughout its history so that we can make something meaningful of ourselves, to love, to dream, to create, to find joy and meaning.

It lets me be the weird kid I am, who wears a suit, talks about love, and has a fascination with robots.

I know some people these days have an aversion to pride and love for their country.

I believe these 2, patriotism and humanism, are not in conflict.

Much like loving your family and loving your country are not in conflict.

They are all manifestations of the human spirit, longing to strive for a better world.

I was born a Russian, but I believe I will die an American, a proud American.

Hopefully not too soon, but life is short.

I already had 1 hell of a fun journey, so I'm ready to go when it's time.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Jocko Willink.

Is it tragic or beautiful to you that some of the closest bonds that are formed between people are through war often?

I think it's both, both tragic and beautiful.

Well, it's tragic because a lot of people die and it's beautiful because you form bonds with people that are very difficult to break once you've been through them.

What is it about the trauma of war that makes bonds difficult to break?

Because what you realize when you're in a war is that the people that are next to you, you rely on them and they're relying on you to survive.

And when you realize that you need to work together as a team to live, that forms a very strong bond.

And there's nothing like that team outside of the realm of war?

I don't know because I've, there's a lot of things that I haven't experienced in my life, but I think the pressure and the consequences of war, there could be similar situations in survival scenarios, in various atrocities where people need to work together in order to survive, And I think you could probably get something that was

There's a very particular nature to the kind of war that World War II was, especially for the Soviet Union, where it didn't just influence the lives of people, it created culture.

It's in the way they talk even still to this day.

And of course I was talking about the directly relationship between 2 soldiers, but there's something about the depth of human connection that results from this almost like reverberations of war.

Like generations later, you're still close to other humans.

There's a coldness towards other humans in Russia, but once you open up, it's depth.

You seek depth of connection versus like breadth of career kind of thinking, how can I make friends with this so I can move into this direction?

Instead, you seek a depth of human connection and appreciation that brings a lot.

And maybe I'm romanticizing war here, but it feels like that's inextricably connected to World War II for Russians.

So if you look at military training, what they do is they take people in the military from the civilian world They bring them into the military and they put them through boot camp Which is the stereotypical thing that you see on TV.

You're gonna get screamed at you're gonna get you're gonna get put in the mud and you're going to be made to do hard things together.

And what does that do with those civilians?

It gives them a common suffering that they've been through together.

And they form some sort of connection, some sort of bond.

Now, to make that bond a little bit stronger, after you get done with boot camp, they send you to advanced infantry school.

And when you suffer more together, now you're in a smaller group too because now it's infantry, it's not supply people anymore or logisticians, it's strictly people that are going to fight, they're infantrymen.

So they go through a school together and now they get a little bit tighter.

Get done with that and maybe you go to an airborne division.

So you go to airborne school and now you all overcome this fear of jumping out of an airplane together and you celebrate surviving that.

Then maybe you get done with that and now you're at an airborne division, now you're an even tighter group because you've suffered together.

What comes next is special forces training or ranger training And what they do is they put you in these situations where you're gonna suffer together and you're gonna build these bonds because as I said earlier, you have to rely on each other to survive.

Not everyone makes it through this training.

So you sort of have these memories of people that didn't make it.

And you can keep going down this road until you go into combat with a military unit and military units that go through combat, have an even tighter bond, and the harder the combat that they go through, the tighter the bond is going to be.

So I think when you talk about what the Soviet Union went through in World War II, there was a shared suffering to survive.

And so the entire nation has that common thread, and that's probably the thing that you sense or feel when you refer back to the bond that resonates all the way back to World War II.

So in your podcast and your writing, you talk about some of the most fascinating things I listen to talk about in terms of military conflict is tactics and sort of the details of combat.

But allow me to stick on World War II for a second.

There's a particular aspect to that war, I don't know if you can speak to it, where twice the number of civilians died than military personnel.

You know, my grandfather was a machine gunner in Ukraine as the Germans were marching towards Moscow.

There's this main, there's this important push in 1941 where they were trying to get before the winter to Moscow.

And what Stalin was doing is he was basically throwing bodies at, to slow the attack.

And what that meant is everybody understood that your job was, you have this heavy machine guns, it's very, it's almost unreasonable to be able to be mobile in any kind of way with them.

So you're thrown at the front and you're just nonstop shooting and 95 plus percent of people are just dead.

And then you just go back and back and you're trying to protect as many civilians as you can throughout this whole process, but you don't.

And so you have millions of civilians that die along the way into this march.

Is there something you could say about this complete, perhaps it's naive of me to say, but a war that lacks tactics, that lacks strategy, and is purely about just no consideration of human life and just throwing bodies and bullets into a mix together where millions die.

And that in particular felt much less like conflict and much more like torture or suffering.

It didn't come off as torture, only that interestingly enough, as you probably know, my grandfather, including everybody else, volunteered.

They were proud to march to their death for country, for love of country.

But the question on the civilian side, when more civilians die than military personnel, what do you make of that?

It's awful when 10 civilians or 10 soldiers and it's even more awful when millions and millions of soldiers and civilians die.

I think it's safe to say that the Soviet Union was facing an existential threat to their existence against the Nazis.

So to not fight would be to die as well, maybe die a death a few years later, maybe die a different way.

But The choice was die now trying or die later on your knees And I think the choice was pretty clear as far as the tactics go.

I Mean there is this is attrition warfare.

We are going to keep, you know, you said throwing bodies at the problem.

And the Soviet Union had a lot of bodies, more than the Germans.

And when you fight with attrition warfare, whoever has more men and material will eventually win.

It's an awful way, but that's what the strategy was.

The boldness of Hitler in making some of the strategic decisions he did was considered by many military historians quite brilliant early in the war, or insane and brilliant.

Stalin on the other hand, I think universally is seen as somebody who is terrible military strategist, especially early in the war.

He did not see all the possible trajectories that the war could take.

Is there something you could say about failure of leadership, Stalin, also the United Kingdom before Churchill, and also FDR on the United States side, who basically was trying to turn a blind eye to everything that was happening over there with a perspective of we just want to make, we wanted to keep America's interest as the primary interest and everything else, let other countries work out their problems.

You know, I think 1 of the things with Hitler was in the beginning of the war, he listened to his advisors, he listened to his generals, and therefore they did pretty well with that.

I think as the war went on, he believed that he was smarter than he was and made decisions that were bad that cost him dearly.

I mean, case in point, as everyone knows, going and attacking the Soviet Union while you're still fighting a war on the other Front is not not a good move There's an example of yeah bad leadership letting your ego get in the way believing that you can do things that you that are beyond your capabilities But you know as you mentioned in the beginning with Blitzkrieg, those were really dynamic and bold moves and they worked.

That fuels your ego and makes you think that you can win.

Many people consider that war a just war.

I think you have the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese trying to impose their will on other nations and other peoples and when that happens I think on a grand scale people look at that and believe it's just to step in and do something about it.

The United States has been involved in a lot of military conflict since then.

How do you draw the line to the gray area?

I know you don't get into politics much, but the decision to go to war.

You have to look at the situation that you're going into and you have to make sure that you have the will to go to war.

And the will to go to war means that you are willing to kill people.

And when I say people, I don't just mean enemy because in war, civilians are going to die, women and children are going to die.

Every, a lot of people are going to die, and you are going to kill them.

Doesn't matter what kind of smart munitions you have, doesn't matter how disciplined your soldiers are, when you go into a war, civilians are going to die, and you have to understand that.

And the other thing that you have to understand is that your troops are also going to die.

And it seems like sometimes we're a little bit naive about the calculation of what that's going to look like.

And maybe we think, well, not that many civilians and maybe not that many of our personnel are going to die.

And that's where you get into sticky situations.

And you know, another thing when you were talking about the Soviet Union versus the Nazis, that's total war.

And we don't engage in that very often it's total war it's we will do absolutely anything to win and America doesn't fight like that very often.

In fact, the last time we fought like that was World War II.

We will do whatever it takes to up to and including the atomic bomb to destroy the enemy.

So those are the kind of things you need to think about before you go to war.

And I don't think we think about that very often.

You know, even the United States, the atomic bomb, nuclear weapons is an interesting 1 because there's a lot of, There's a lot of hesitation on that.

There's a lot of critics of that decision as it was happening.

So even America, you can imagine other countries like Germany would not be so hesitant to use nuclear weapons.

It's interesting to think about in deciding military strategy to inject ethics into it, into morality, it's not just about winning the war, but should we do this?

Usually those decisions are made by leaders, not by the soldier that's going to be implementing that decision.

Do you put some responsibility, I should even say blame, on the leaders in not doing that kind of calculation here?

You could say that about the Vietnam War, you could say that about even the war that you were involved with in Iraq, is there some criticism here that you could apply to leaders for failing not to consider the broader moral questions?

Natural, like all leaders will make these mistakes or should leaders not make these mistakes?

It's impossible to know what's gonna happen in war just like it's impossible to know what's gonna happen in life.

You make decisions based on the information that you have at the time.

And if you fail to admit that you made a mistake, that's where I have a more significant problem than someone that makes a mistake and says, hey, this is the mistake that I made.

This is the intelligence that I thought we were utilizing and it actually is not what I thought it was going to be.

And here's the new direction that we're going in.

We don't have enough of that type of ownership in leadership globally.

Just saying I made a mistake that resulted in a loss at scale of human life, being able to say that.

And when you don't say that, you end up with a more loss of human life.

Can I ask you about the loss of human life?

How does killing a human being change you?

What does it feel like to kill a human being?

Well, I mean, I guess you'd have to look at what circumstances a person's in when this is taking place.

If you've got someone that's in a fit of rage that goes and kills somebody, You know, they're going to come out of it and think, wow, I've just really messed up.

If you've got a someone that is a sociopath, right, they're not going to feel anything.

If you've got a soldier who feels like they're trying to protect their friends, they'll move through that.

If you've got a soldier that's doing it because they want some kind of personal glory, they'll probably not feel good about it later.

I think it depends on the psychology of the individual that's going through it.

Is there some calculation here that a soldier, when they kill another soldier, a realization that it's just another human being, I mean, is there some heavy burden to that aspect?

That it's ultimately just human on human?

I think it depends a lot on the scenario.

I know that when I was in Iraq fighting, we talk a lot about the dehumanization of the enemy, and it's something that the governments will do.

I mean, governments will do that to each other.

I mean, the Japanese dehumanized the Americans, and the Americans dehumanized the Japanese, and the Americans dehumanized the Nazis, and the Nazis dehumanized the Americans, so that to remove as much of that human on human killing aspect that you're talking about.

And what I've said is that when we were in Iraq, we didn't have to dehumanize the enemy because the enemy dehumanized themselves through their actions, through their behaviors.

When we know that they are torturing and raping and murdering the local populace, they've been dehumanized.

And so as far as looking at them and thinking oh this is a you know a human another human that's that's on the level of you know my my uncle or my brother, I didn't think of them that way.

I thought of them as murdering, raping, evil

Yeah, Iraq is different and America's position is different.

You're right that America has not been involved in a war where it's quite like 2 humans fighting, like teenage boys fighting against each other.

And you've got to remember, I mean, we're seeing these Iraqi kids that are living under this sadistic terror, the Iraqi women that are being raped and abused by these insurgents.

And so on the 1 side, we become the Iraqi populace is very humanized to us because we're talking to them, we've got interpreters, we understand, we're seeing them day after day, the same individuals, and so we form a bond with the local populace, and yet we see what the insurgents are doing.

And so it's, again, not difficult to dehumanize people that behave in that manner.

Yeah, I suppose I worry about the dehumanization at a much larger scale when it's not the kind of case that you're talking about.

Even now, hopefully I'm not fear mongering, but there's a sense in which there's the drums of war slowly starting to build with China.

In the best case, it would be a cold war.

There's a dehumanization aspect that's happening with China currently, which is they're the other and they're after stealing all of your data.

There's a cybersecurity, it starts with cybersecurity and it worries me because it creates the other out of a very large population that may ultimately lead to conflict, in the worst case, hot conflict, that would no longer be the situation you are in in Iraq and more similar to the Soviet Union conflict with Germany, that it's kids and then they're dehumanized to where you're at scale slaughtering them or at least hurting their quality of life in a way that's maybe, you know, suffering has many forms.

It doesn't have to be through just a hot war.

It could be through starvation, through camps, all those kinds of things, and I worry about that.

We kind of tend to think that these wars are behind us, and I'm not always so sure that's the case.

And at least in the way that it ultimately starts with hate.

And again, hopefully I'm not being too dramatic, but I see that there's a kind of brewing of, it starts with dehumanization and then turns to hate of the other.

You see that with China, you see it a little bit with Russia.

And you have an early podcast between the, where you break down the tactics of the Chechen war versus Russia.

But that's the kind of conflicts I'm referring to.

There's a, I know you're a bit of a musician.

I love, I love Dire Straits song called Brothers in Arms.

I think they play it quite often in military funerals, which I just recently learned, but it's this powerful song that has a line, we're fools to make war on our brothers in arms.

Do you think there's some sense in which, at the leadership level, but just as human beings, we're perhaps foolish in engaging in military conflict as much as we have, or as fool, a very inappropriate word here.

Well, I think that using the term brothers in arms means the people that are on my side, right?

So it doesn't make sense to start wars with people that are on your side.

So that might just be the way the lyrics are written so that it fit the song or whatever.

I think broadly what you're asking me is, is war foolish?

And I would say the answer is yes, and if you can avoid it, you absolutely should.

But if there is a bear or a wolf that is trying to get into your house, is it foolish to shoot that bear or shoot that wolf?

So when you're threatened or your family is threatened or your way of life is threatened, then you have to do something to try and defend your family, your way of life.

You had a conversation with Jordan Peterson where He asked you a question in terms of war being last resort, whether you would like your kids to grow up in peace in a time of no war.

You said, yes, but, and so happens Jordan didn't let you finish.

Well, you and I have been talking about the fact that struggle brings people together and brings out the best and and the worst brings out the worst in people war brings out the worst people it also brings out the best in people so Would you want your kid to go and enter in a wrestling tournament where you paid all the other kids off and your kid won.

Or you enter them in a jujitsu tournament where they're a purple belt and you know that everyone that they're gonna fight against is a white belt.

And so they get the big W, they get the win, but they don't really get tested and they don't really struggle.

And if you don't struggle, you don't grow.

The absolute best times of my life were in combat and the worst times of my life were in combat.

And so even though I wouldn't want any of my children to suffer through the worst of times, at the same time, the bud is, I would want them to have the opportunity to feel that bond that you're referring to earlier and to see human beings that are willing to sacrifice their lives for their friends.

What are some of the worst aspects of when you were in Iraq, what are the things that, the hardest on you?

Was it due to mistakes or natural consequences of fighting?

Is that at the end is just losing those brothers in arms?

There's a million different ways to get killed in the war.

And you can go out on an operation and you can do everything wrong and you can survive.

And you can go out on an operation and do everything perfect and you can get killed.

Is there some aspect which makes it worse when there's mistakes made?

If there's mistakes made, then you're gonna sit there and beat yourself up eternally for mistakes that were made.

But to you, the things that hurt is just losing.

Does it make sense to you that this thing ends?

Like do you, the Stoics contemplated death.

There's something about finiteness of life that makes it, this Jocko Discipline Go drink, Sour apple that I'm enjoying is delicious makes it taste better because I'm going to die 1 day And I think about that a lot.

Other than I know that it's gonna end I mean but I don't think about it on a daily basis I think about is the fact I think about I know that I'm lucky to be here I know that Many people sacrificed to give me this opportunity to be here.

There's tactics, there's strategy, there's the mission, and then your own mortality is not part of the calculation.

I think you get to a point where you accept the fact that you can die.

Like I said, you can do everything right you roll out the gate you hit an IED a Triple stack subsurface IED and you're dead you're done and there's nothing that's gonna stop that it's gonna happen And I think if you're scared of that or you're thinking about that It's gonna inhibit your ability to do your job properly.

And I think it's also gonna drive you crazy.

The thing that I thought about more was that happening to my guys.

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Jocko Willink: War, Leadership, and Discipline | Lex Fridman Podcast #197