Jocko Podcast 337: When You Think You've "Made it", You Can Still Do More. SEAL Officer, Mike Hayes

2022-06-09T16:15:41Z

Underground Premium Content: https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Join the conversation on Twitter/Instagram: @jockowillink @thisismikehayes @echocharles Mike Hayes. Navy SEAL Officer and lessons from combat.

AI summary of episode

and then the exo's Sealteen Iraq deployment though um so come back and and for for everybody listening we're really good about succession planning and the Seals you know you once you're in the seat a seat for two or three years you're thinking how you have to get out of your seat and make room for the next guy and we do these diversity tours I was fortunate my first diversity tour was you know graduate school for two years in Cambridge mass and it was time for me to get out of my chair as the exo is Sealteen 10 and I applied for the White House Fellowship it's a non military program it is a great leadership public service program I threw you know that's a through my name and the hat it's quite an extensive application for us and ultimately was picked the their thousands of applicants the nation picks 14 to be White House Fellows every year and I got placed as the director for defense policy and strategy for Bush so literally report to the national security adviser who reports to the president like day seven I'm running my first meetings in the White House situation room it like the who is a lot of steep learning walking around pretending like you know how to you're wearing a washing in DC you know I'm like you know dumb team guy all of a sudden thrown in the policy world but you got speaking of getting this job in the selection process you got a cool thing in here that that talks about that a little bit going back to the book my interviewer sat me down and asked a bunch of questions a bunch of introductory questions then stared at me with intensity and said Mike what do you know about the start treaty I took a breath looked at him and said with dead pan seriousness I know how to spell it honestly I didn't know anything about our nation's nuclear treaties not a bit but what I did know and I told him this too was how to get the right people into a room and how to run the decision making process I knew how to figure out what motivated people how to get them to generate ideas how to cooperate and ultimately how to leave the room with the best possible outcome I wasn't afraid to admit that I didn't know a thing about nuclear policy and I think that's what got me the job being humble enough to admit that being humble enough to admit what you don't know but still confident enough to explain where you can add value is a balance that's often hard to strike but you need to recognize that it's a strength not a weakness to know what's beyond your knowledge or understanding at any point in time instead of pretending otherwise I walk into any room and always assume that people in it are smarter than I am faster than I am and more agile than I am that way I can never be wrong I never assume I have the idea I have an idea maybe it's the best one or maybe it's not but honestly it shouldn't even matter because our job in any room is to find the best answer for the problem we're working on no matter who's answer it is we have to listen to each other and really hear each other and the best way to do that is to walk into the room knowing there's no doubt that everyone in there has something useful to say so that's how you ended up with that job not by being this not by being the smartest guy about nuclear treaties but by saying hey look I don't know everything about that it was a legit they they legit three week one week of each other three phases of training and you know when you're going through it you're like how does this compare with the real thing it was after going through the real thing I look back and say we got a legit full treatment for each of the three weeks and I think nowadays they use that sort of it's called something else now I think it's called seal officer assessment and selection and it's it's something like mini buds but it's sort of the selection and how they're going to figure out who gets to go was it like that for for you guys I they definitely was we came out with like grades out of the 32 you know like not grades as an academic but like just an all around score of how you did and and you know I remember having a pretty high number and thought I think I'll be probably this will stand me pretty well if I applied to to circle back and go to buds and history has it I did and they took 16 guys out of ROTC my year 16 guys out of the academy so there are 32 officers taken into the program and as you know I don't know the number maybe 15 of those made it through ultimately or something like that there's only quid quitters and mini buds and it's a wake up called everybody to the recognition of what's going on out in that battlefield every single day which which you know you could hear it going on you could see it going on you could see vehicles you could see guys getting cows are backed out we were given blood whenever we could get blood like just that heavy reality of going to these scenarios um you guys you guys finish your work up you go on that that pre-depollement and now you got your platoon your your team over there your whole team never mind just the platoon now you got the whole team and it's not just your team that's you got SF guys you've got you've got an entire like force here it sounds like from the book you you had a little bit of a rough relationship with the conventional commander that was there initially with the one who was right next to me in Terran Coutt this guy just didn't want to get out and put his force at risk to go do great things and you know as well as I do you just you just don't respect people that don't want to do their job and like you know these days we think of a tech cooperation center you know we're talking plasma TV's in satellite links and internet you're talking you know like a star track look in scenario I shit you not we went on this mission and I fit this quote tactical operation center into one single rock sack I had like a sack for seventy seven hundred dollars something I had a bunch of maps I had some like I thought I was square away because I had you know like some overlays for the maps and then how much the world changed between that time and I were good friends former roommates but classmates 20 years earlier we had come up the ranks together before we each got married and started our families we shared a house in Virginia Beach for three years we were inseparable in those days we had bonded over our mutual frustration at the pull-up bar during buds training one Saturday morning after we both failed the day before to come him anywhere close to matching the 15 to 20 pull-ups our fellow trainees were able to do we decided to go find a pull-up bar to practice on far away from the buds compound we're no one would stumble upon us despite a full night's sleep we were still struggling as we fought as we each fought through our fourth pull-up I can still see his face and here the chuckle in his voice as he turned to me and said world's finest right here he was loyal genuine a man who could find humor in absolutely anything another time in training we were so cold on a boat ride back to the compound after an icy swim that we found ourselves fighting over where to place one rubber fin that was shielding very small parts of us from the 49 winds there we were two grown adults seal trainees fighting over a tiny rubber fin to help make us a tiny bit warmer and we and just a little drop less miserable we stopped for a moment and realized what we were fighting over and we both just broke out in hysterical laughter it seemed like we were always laughing back then when I was deployed he would check in on my family and when he was deployed I would check in on his I would say that I trusted him with my life except that it was so much more than that as seals we have no choice but to trust everyone on our team with our life every minute of every day on the battlefield but when you bond with someone it's not so much about trusting them with your life it's about wanting them to be there in the trenches with you feeling better because you know they're right alongside you he was so much more than a fellow seal he was a friend a teammate a brother a shiny example of the bravery a human being can exhibit you know you talk about the pressure and the pace and the battle rhythm or lack of rhythm and the lives it's stake and it's it's it's hard to describe what that feels like look I think one of the things that that young officers always wrestle with is how to walk the line between being a leader when a leader is needed to step forward but at the same time really have the humility that a lot of other people know a lot of things that you don't know and to me that's what makes the team special is is when you think about how you make decisions and who makes decisions we just grow up with that just built into who we are and and and and that's really uh you know the the the thing you test is when do I step forward and say all right guys shut up lock it on we're going this direction and when do you kind of step back like like like you you a spouse in a lot of your work is leading from the rear is but I did an incredible excel rocky Russell and who I would super supreme confidence in so I I'd go out on an operation and be with the the the Afghan commandos in a seal platoon for I don't know a day and a half two days at times and that's a that's a tough decision also because as soon as you swing and go on one operation with one unit dude you don't know what's happening with the other 24 so that takes an element of like confidence and trust but of course as you know it makes you a better leader because it helps you understand and maintain perspective and frankly just to share the same risk as the guys you know and and as of whatever I'm 51 now is a 41-ish year old seal team commander you know that deployment we got shot at and rocketed and the the I cut one of my guys legs off on that deployment and just wanted to have this. but you know hey as we got out of Afghanistan what went wrong the thing that went wrong was policy process broke down who are we bringing home we didn't have a question answer to that question and so that caused a lot of chaos and a little a lot of people rush to an airport hoping to get onto a flight you know so anyways that that's just one example of the how policy the the engine and the machine should work how many hours a day are you working in those long hours that was you know I'd get in it you know I always get my workout in the morning I honestly got there you know 737 eight clocks and like that and I forgot to mention the I know that the team thought incredibly highly of your and and Eshelon front's leadership and instruction and motivation and inspiration everything that you are that you espouse has made a huge positive impact on people and whenever that that finished up I think it was about a week ago or something like one of them was the most recent was about a week ago I got eat multiple emails saying hey this guy's awesome everything from like people who know that we know each other and others like hey you ever heard of this willing guy you know That's where all my like it was night after night of stopping bad think people from doing bad things to good people you know we were literally like vampire hours one cycle of darkness operations you know as soon as the the the sun goes down that think about you know you very your operation do you leave the FoB at 1030 pm or 1145 pm you know it's like and you go you know what we're just gonna stay out in the field like you told us you know well that that seems like the right call right now there's a little bit different here um going to the book to ensure civilian casualties where's limited is possible and that the innocent afghan civilians wouldn't turn against our forces the military set up a policy called boots on the ground battled damage assessment this meant that after every bomb we dropped we were we were required to physically go to the site to confirm that no civilians had been killed the theory a smart theory was that knowing we would have to acknowledge civilian casualties would make it less likely that there would be any civilian casualties a talented team of army green berets within my command had intelligence at one point that there were approximately 10 Taliban members gathered together at three in the morning in an area no civilian would ever go and certainly not at that time the team used surveillance techniques to view the site and we knew as a certainty that there were no civilians there they asked me for permission to drop a bomb from an unmanned aircraft and following the decision making process I'd put in place I granted it they went ahead and eight of the Taliban fighters were killed an army colonel from the commanding general staff in afghanistan called and asked my watch officer for our BDA report and my watch officer explained that we didn't have one that it was simply too much risk for not a good enough reason the road to the site was too dangerous to travel I mean of course you know I'd been exposed to everything already in my career but when you really feel that you feel that you are the owner of the risk of the whole team it's a different feeling there's a I used to think when I was second in charge of a seal team that it wouldn't really be that different to be overall in charge I couldn't have been more wrong so when I when a senior leadership team from from seal team to did our advanced reconnaissance if you will we came home on a meta-vac where I'll never forget there was a young man who was blown up in an IED who was really just being flown to Germany just so he could pass away in Germany next to his wife he was in a coma and I'll never forget like a you know six or eight hour flight just spending it next to this whole guy just my hand on him talking to him and just some army trooper who I don't even don't even know his name but like when you're really around that I got back to the states and I I already worked hard but it didn't work I realized I must have drifted much more than I expected I couldn't see back to the beach either for a few hours I was basically lost at sea worrying the other three more experience seals would think I was a total screw up I'd broken a fin strap and at one point I was startled okay scared when I was moved about 10 feet in the water bumped hard by a massive sea mammal I imagine that no one would ever find my body and everyone in the seals would think I must not a bit been a good swimmer despite entering buds training with one of the fastest swim times in the history the program and along with my swim buddy Chris Cassidy coming seconds away from the fastest ever two mile swim in buds finally the boat found me and picked me up and I was quickly exerated for being stupid enough to make the swim back out to sea my three teammates had ended up down the beach from where the current had taken me just a bit too far away from me to see them and they stayed on the beach until the boat came for them knowing conditions were too miserable to even attempt to head back I'd put myself at risk for a training exercise because I can fuse doing the hard thing with doing the right thing my decision was far too risky to make sense even as a confident and capable swimmer there's so many little lessons in that one right there that little story and by the way so your book is filled with a bunch of lessons and obviously I'm just reading excerpts from it and this chapter was choosing the hard path and doing the hard thing and of course everything's a dichotomy and you can do things where you go too hard but I can't even imagine you with your silver ranger which is for those of you that don't know it's a little compass that used to navigate on the land and you they you probably had it with you for like E&D or some whatever but you know growing up in the teams before 9-11 it was mission mission mission at all costs post 9-11 our community got much better at saying you know what there's new information let's incorporate new information what's going on let's think about risk is the risk worth the reward and constantly reassessing that risk you know it's it's uh it became okay to turn around on a mission in our raccara Afghanistan and say hey you know what the risk profile just change massively we'll come back another right for these this group of terrorists there's this risk is not worth assuming and let's not do the mission and and when I was growing up and when you were growing up we'd be excoriated for not doing the mission and we knew there were no civilians present and to ask anyone on my team to go down this isolated path in the middle of the night was an unnecessary risk to their lives and one it made no sense to take I got on the phone with the carnal and we went back and forth this is the policy but the policy in this case makes no sense to achieve an already known outcome I will not take unnecessary risk that my men will die there are consequences in the military for not following the orders of a superior truth is the lack of organizational flexibility is a huge problem for the military on the ground we were living a never agile enough kind of life but in terms of the larger hierarchy the structure had its weaknesses I could have been fired and sent home from the appointment as an in subordinate but in that moment I couldn't I couldn't just blindly follow the policy I had to act consistently with my values and make a judgment and subsequent decision that I was going to be able to live with if the worst happened the carnal said that since I wouldn't comply he was going to report my noncompliance to his boss the commanding general in Afghanistan and that he would ask his peer in charge of our Afghan partner force to order his men to unilaterally inspect the site instead I urged him not to do that but that decision was out of my hands 12 Afghan soldiers drove down that isolated road in three vehicles to make their assessment of the bomb site the first two trucks hit an IED and three V8 people in those two vehicles were killed with others seriously wounded soon after I flew by helicopter to the outstation where the green beret turned team was stationed sat with them and told them how incredibly proud I was of their amazing bravery their remarkable work they did night after danger snite it was one of the more emotional moments in my life as we started our meeting silence fell over the room and one of the guys on the team opened by looking me square in the eyes and quietly but resolutely thanking me he knew that the easier decision would have been caving to the pressure from above and deviating from my beliefs and we all knew that would have meant some of the men in this room would have died the green beret had no idea that his words made my throat almost closed as I choked up and how hard I had to fight off tears I was simply overwhelmed by the real life impact by the reality of the situation the overwhelming magnitude of these kind of decisions made under the pressure of intense nightly combat take a toll on people that's difficult to understand for those who haven't experienced it now with the benefit of several years of hindsight and the time to fully reflect on those past events I haven't even even greater belief in the importance of process your own process and a values based decision making process can no exaggeration save people's lives oh he's gonna order someone else to address those I already knew the outcome because I know you're not pushing back for no reason you're pushing back for good reason it might be hard for people to understand that kind of pressure that you're under to kind of concede and just go with what you're being told to do there's times in life you gotta just put it on the table and say be ready for the outcome be ready to be fired you always hear pick your battles this was unquestionably one of them and this is why you are in command and this is why that's is everything that you've trained to do at that point in life is for that it's for a moment like that it's to have confidence in yourself that you're that you're right and to not take that unnecessary risk I still get you know emotional as you were reading it I haven't you know

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Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jockelpontcast number 337 with echo Charles and me, Jockel willing.
[00:00:05] Good evening, Jockel.
[00:00:07] We had planned to take down an insurgent cell known to be located in three or four buildings
[00:00:14] in a village overrun with SUNY extremists.
[00:00:17] I was one of the four seals on the outskirts making sure the area was clear before establishing
[00:00:23] the command and control position.
[00:00:26] Suddenly, through my grainy green night vision goggles, I saw a family, a mom, a dad, a
[00:00:34] ten-year-old kid, and a baby sleeping outside a shack on a two-foot high platform.
[00:00:41] This wasn't entirely unusual given the middle of the night heat and I rack families off
[00:00:46] and slept outside.
[00:00:49] But something about this situation felt off to me.
[00:00:53] I saw the father start to reach for something.
[00:00:56] Instinct told me this was bad.
[00:00:58] I spoke firmly and clearly to the guy behind me calling his name, Joel, Joel, Joel, so he
[00:01:04] would know that I was about to make a move and cover me.
[00:01:10] And I held the Iraqi man in my crosshairs, ready to shoot him at any moment as I rushed
[00:01:15] as fast as I could toward him before he could grab what did turn out to be a weapon.
[00:01:23] He was reaching for an AK rifle, just as I put my foot on his arm so he wouldn't be able
[00:01:28] to point the weapon at me or any of my teammates.
[00:01:32] Then I quickly put my muzzle on his chest and subdued him and it listed Joel's help
[00:01:37] to properly detain him with flex cuffs.
[00:01:41] I could have shot him at any time.
[00:01:44] But as I first approached him, I didn't know for sure that he was armed and my instant
[00:01:49] and instinctive calculation made me confident that I would be fast enough to get him before
[00:01:54] he could take a shot at me or anyone else if he did have a weapon.
[00:02:00] It turned out that the AK was fully loaded and he had three magazines.
[00:02:06] And after we got him cuffed, his family under our control and our target secured, we
[00:02:11] realized through our interrogation process that he was in fact the number two most wanted
[00:02:16] enemy in Western Iraq at the time.
[00:02:23] So that right there is an excerpt from a book called Never Enough which was written
[00:02:31] by Mike Hayes who is a retired seal officer who served 20 years in the teams which included
[00:02:39] tours at team 4 team 8 team 10 and also a tour as the commanding officer of seal team
[00:02:47] 2.
[00:02:48] And it is career he deployed to South America, Europe, Iraq and Afghanistan.
[00:02:54] He also served in the White House as part of the National Security Council under both
[00:03:00] George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
[00:03:04] I actually did serve with him for a short time in Germany when he was the operations officer
[00:03:12] and we are lucky enough to have him here with us tonight to discuss some of his experiences
[00:03:19] and lessons learned.
[00:03:21] Mike, thanks for joining us, man.
[00:03:23] Jocco, great to see you, brother.
[00:03:25] Great to be here.
[00:03:27] Yeah, we haven't hung out much since we were playing combat water polo in Germany.
[00:03:34] Which was circa 1998 and you were stationed at Unit 2.
[00:03:41] Were you the officer?
[00:03:42] I was the assistant officer but close enough.
[00:03:46] Okay, so you were the assistant, oh that's right, seal, exo.
[00:03:50] You were the assistant officer.
[00:03:52] So that you know that made me right as an engine.
[00:03:54] I was like the assistant assistant, the officer.
[00:03:57] So we would have these games, these water polo games.
[00:03:59] Did you actually play water polo?
[00:04:01] I didn't play in college but man alive combat water polo with you was one of my best memories.
[00:04:07] I obviously sucked at water polo but I was good at jiu-jitsu even then and I used to
[00:04:13] more for me it was more just water jiu-jitsu especially against the guys that actually
[00:04:18] could play water polo.
[00:04:20] The good and there were some guys that played water polo in college.
[00:04:23] I don't know if you remember that.
[00:04:25] Yeah.
[00:04:26] There were a couple guys that really needed to get taken out of the game or at least mitigated
[00:04:30] as much as possible.
[00:04:31] Yeah, I don't have either for people listening the rules.
[00:04:35] There's just really one rule.
[00:04:36] If you let go of the ball, you're supposed to let go of the person.
[00:04:40] So it was intense and I always did my best to be on your team.
[00:04:45] All right, all right, let's get right into it.
[00:04:50] Let's talk about you and let's talk about where you grew up.
[00:04:55] Where'd you grew up?
[00:04:56] You're in New England, right?
[00:04:57] Yeah, well dad was in an AV so bounced around a good bit but from ninth to ninth.
[00:05:00] Great on, ports with Rhode Island.
[00:05:02] What did your dad do in the Navy?
[00:05:03] He was a combination of submariner out of college and then supply officer.
[00:05:08] So kind of a joint career there.
[00:05:10] And how long did he do?
[00:05:11] He did 20 years, 23 years or something like that.
[00:05:14] Answer you were all over the place.
[00:05:16] I was until ninth grade.
[00:05:19] Where were you up until ninth grade?
[00:05:21] I lived in mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Glam, you know, just a couple places around the
[00:05:27] US and then just really happy to set up.
[00:05:30] I was just a little down in ninth grade onward and call the biggest little state of Rhode
[00:05:33] Island home.
[00:05:35] How long you and Glam for?
[00:05:36] What grade?
[00:05:37] Seventh and eighth grade.
[00:05:38] Was that pretty bad?
[00:05:40] What year was this now?
[00:05:41] That was 83 to 85.
[00:05:43] So Glam was remote, a 83, 84.
[00:05:48] We get the Super Bowl mailed to us like four weeks after it happened.
[00:05:52] Because I went to Glam in 1992, 93 when they finally, when they started sending seals
[00:05:58] there on deployment and it was, I mean, you were not really connected.
[00:06:05] I mean, there's no internet or anything.
[00:06:06] So everything took a while to show up there.
[00:06:09] It was a very educational part of my growing up.
[00:06:14] You know, there's the simplicity.
[00:06:17] It was awesome, but at the same time, you definitely give up some of the amenities of modern
[00:06:23] life.
[00:06:24] Did you go to school out in town or did you go to school on base?
[00:06:26] Want to a private Catholic junior high school high school?
[00:06:30] Okay.
[00:06:31] Seventh and eighth grade.
[00:06:32] So you didn't get the crap beat out of you by the loaks?
[00:06:36] Oh, no, I did.
[00:06:37] Of course I did.
[00:06:41] I got a friend that was at S.D.V. in Hawaii, but he grew up in Hawaii.
[00:06:46] He was actually at Team 3 as well, but he said it was so, it was rough.
[00:06:49] Man, growing up, he was a highly kid in Hawaii.
[00:06:52] He said it was rough, man.
[00:06:53] Echo Charles commentary.
[00:06:54] Yes sir.
[00:06:55] Rough.
[00:06:56] Rough for the howly kids.
[00:06:57] I can't be a defense.
[00:06:58] It really depends.
[00:06:59] Well, this particular guy who's a great guy.
[00:07:04] Where I think he might have been claiming a lot of it had to do with him being howly.
[00:07:09] I think it may have also had to do with his mouth, which was rather large.
[00:07:14] That is typically the case.
[00:07:15] Yeah.
[00:07:16] Oh, classic.
[00:07:19] So you know, you mentioned that your dad was in the Navy, but you have a section here
[00:07:23] about your grandfather as well, and I'm just going to go to the book here and read this
[00:07:27] because it's a pretty awesome piece of history.
[00:07:29] You say, my grandfather graduated from the Naval Academy in 1940 and was nursing a hangover
[00:07:34] in a bungalow on the Pearl Harbor Naval Base, the morning of December 7, 1941, when the
[00:07:40] Japanese began bombing.
[00:07:43] He was with seven others at the time, and when he heard the first wave of something going
[00:07:47] on, he knew he needed to get in his Jeep and go toward the harbor back to his ship.
[00:07:53] One of the others would go with him.
[00:07:55] They all believed they were safe or where they were.
[00:07:58] He told me the scariest part was heading toward the ship, driving past the marine guarding
[00:08:02] the gate at 45 miles an hour without stopping, worrying the guard would shoot him.
[00:08:08] My grandfather made it to a ship and manned his battle station.
[00:08:11] He was on board that ship for the third wave of attacks and tended to many of the wounded
[00:08:15] that day.
[00:08:17] In the wake of the bombing, he realized that he didn't want to spend his career on the ground
[00:08:21] or at sea.
[00:08:23] He'd tell me this story.
[00:08:24] He would point up with the sky and say he wanted to be up there.
[00:08:29] He put in a transfer to become a pilot and after flight school as a World War II rage
[00:08:34] to cross the Pacific, he ended up stationed in the illusion islands doing long-range bombing
[00:08:39] missions from the outermost islands and helping to attack strategic sites in northern
[00:08:44] Japan.
[00:08:46] He took over as the commanding officer of his 35 plane bombing squadron at age 26 after
[00:08:53] his own commanding officer was shot down and he later served as a test pilot for the Navy's
[00:08:58] first helicopters and the commanding officer of the Navy's first helicopters squadron during
[00:09:03] the Korean War.
[00:09:05] He ended his career as a professor of naval science at Holy Cross and commanding officer
[00:09:09] of the school's ROTC training unit.
[00:09:13] He taught me about causes greater than self what it means to serve and how to keep pushing
[00:09:18] yourself to get better.
[00:09:22] No offense, bro.
[00:09:24] But if anyone should have written a book, it sounds like it would be the granddad.
[00:09:27] I agree.
[00:09:29] Larger than life.
[00:09:30] He's a real, like absolute hero.
[00:09:35] I was blessed to be able to grow up around a person that didn't say what do you want to be
[00:09:39] when you grow up.
[00:09:40] He would always say who do you want to be.
[00:09:43] There are a few of us on the nation and on the planet that know what it's like to set
[00:09:48] your personal desire and a suit aside and assume risk for the nation.
[00:09:52] I grew up with the stories of my grandfather who did that quite regularly and it was always
[00:09:57] inspirational and I'm really thankful it unquestionably made it in a delible mark on who I am.
[00:10:03] So he was the commander of the ROTC unit at Holy Cross.
[00:10:09] That's awesome to thank you had a guy that did all that.
[00:10:14] Did he fight in the Korean War when he was of a helicopter pilot?
[00:10:17] So he was actually here at North Island, California.
[00:10:21] As HU1 was the unit name and I just remember it because I can still see a lot of his
[00:10:26] plaques that he out in his walls which are almost memorized in my brain.
[00:10:31] But in Korea what the Navy would do is put a couple helicopters out on some of the frigates
[00:10:36] and the ships and then use that to go fly search and rescue.
[00:10:40] So he like those of us who in leadership positions in combat, he didn't have to get
[00:10:44] into the cockpit and go fly.
[00:10:46] Every time he went to visit the troops and there was something that happened, he said
[00:10:50] told the young JG to step aside and he was going to fly this one and I'll never forget
[00:10:55] one great story that he told from Korea about being shot at quite heavily going into
[00:11:02] rescue a pilot and just very calmly looking at his copilot and after this copilot was
[00:11:07] freaking out a bit and saying, sir there's shoot net us, shoot net us and of course I'm sure
[00:11:12] my grandfather just ice in his veins just sudson, we're at war, that's their paragative.
[00:11:21] I was on a go on an operation as my first deployment to Iraq and we're driving in a
[00:11:28] convoy and we're heading south of Baghdad and it was a long transit.
[00:11:31] We were going down the net job as a matter of fact.
[00:11:33] So it's a long haul, few hours, maybe like four or five hours.
[00:11:37] We get ambushed and a couple RPGs, some small arms firing, the RPGs missed us, one of them
[00:11:44] went over and I'm in vehicle two and it was a long convoy.
[00:11:47] We had some vehicle, another type of vehicle in the middle so we probably had six vehicles.
[00:11:52] So the and you know we're driving blackout and it's at night and we so we get so my vehicle
[00:11:59] we make it, nothing happens to us at all and then we see I the first thing I saw was
[00:12:05] I was looking kind of outboard and I just see an explosion which the first thing that I saw
[00:12:10] I saw a couple of tracers but then I saw an explosion which was an RPG that went high and then
[00:12:14] another one went low and we just you know kept driving.
[00:12:19] I think I think you know pushed through is the typical call whenever and then by the tune
[00:12:26] chief who's a freak a great guy but he was in vehicle six so he's the one that got to like
[00:12:31] watch the RPGs near missing all this stuff and he comes up on the radio and he
[00:12:35] goes he's like hey sir you we just got ambushed back here we took smart PG and some had some
[00:12:42] it's freaking small arms and I came up on the radio and I went Roger and he got a big kick out of
[00:12:49] that maybe I should have been more understanding at the time but yeah got to try and stay calm.
[00:12:57] Sometimes empathy works and sometimes it doesn't right?
[00:12:59] So you're growing up you do your high school years in Rhode Island what sports were you doing?
[00:13:07] Did you play sports? Yeah you saw Krabaskyball baseball you know was very you know average at all
[00:13:12] three in a town that was or in a state that wasn't exactly competitive either so.
[00:13:18] That's that's a harsh statement about poor old road highway.
[00:13:23] And so you're just a decent athlete I mean how tall are you?
[00:13:26] Six four and you didn't play did you where you go to basketball?
[00:13:29] I was you know I was decent but in college all my friends were on the varsity team and I was like man
[00:13:34] I can't hold a candle to these guys and what about grades were you studying hard?
[00:13:38] I was a good student in high school.
[00:13:41] Were you what kind of music were you listening to? Oh gosh wow that's a great question so mid 80s
[00:13:46] I was like you know rush a little quiet riot maybe what else would that have been you know
[00:13:52] that that that that pretty much dates it you'd quiet riot.
[00:13:57] Was that come on field in the ways?
[00:13:59] Is that and why and or is that twisted sister?
[00:14:02] Man that's not my hair metal bands and then since your
[00:14:07] since your grandfather worked at Holy Cross you went to Holy Cross was that pre pre or damed or how
[00:14:14] that happened my family has a long history with Holy Cross my great grandfather is in the varsity
[00:14:18] Hall of Fame class in 1910 and and so you know my grandfather there's a lot of relatives who
[00:14:26] have been there so no one ever pushed the navy or Holy Cross or anything on me it was more of just
[00:14:31] a hayson here's what's out there there's this thing called a four year ROTC scholarship and
[00:14:37] you know I just love for you to be familiar with it and you know I'll never forget my grandfather
[00:14:43] and dad put me in the car like summer of junior year in high school and driving me up to
[00:14:47] Holy Cross and and actually meeting the major who is in charge of the unit at the time and
[00:14:53] that was a guy who to this day is a great friend of mine Joe Dunford later became the chairman of
[00:14:58] the joint chiefs' staff so you know Holy Cross has as a as a story to institution with a lot of
[00:15:03] history and I was it was a no-brainer for me. Then you show up there and you're instantly you're
[00:15:10] you're you take an ROTC scholarship out of the gate I do you know they're paying for college
[00:15:14] everything that's pretty good deal yeah at the time I was just thinking to myself as the oldest of four
[00:15:20] this is a great chance to not burn any cash and save money from my younger three siblings to be able
[00:15:25] to go to college and you know it's it I thought I'd do four years of some sort of a supply officer
[00:15:30] and get out or you know be have great leadership experience for four years and then you recall we
[00:15:35] invaded Panama in 89 there was a guy named John Conner's who was killed on the Patea Runway.
[00:15:40] John was a Worcester poly tech graduate but Holy Cross ROTC so my first exposure to the seal teams
[00:15:47] was the memorial service in the chapel at Holy Cross where the the seal community came together
[00:15:52] and remembered John Conner's and that left it real mark on me but freshman year dude I was
[00:15:58] six four and I don't know about 105 pounds I'm not an auditor but I was there was no way at that age
[00:16:03] I even thought about myself being capable of going through seal training but then later on as the
[00:16:08] years progressed and I I went from one pushups to one and a half or something like that you know then
[00:16:12] then I I I went to many buds and then became was was that your first sort of knowledge of the
[00:16:19] seal teams yeah first was when Panama happened yeah because Panama definitely influenced me as well
[00:16:25] because I fought to myself wait there's a war going on as far as I was concerned there's a war going on
[00:16:31] and I was thinking to myself how is this happening and I'm not there and how do I get there
[00:16:37] ASAP and that's why I do in the Navy well you know for me it was not what went through my head at that time
[00:16:45] for me it was more of like a beef come familiar with it and said it aside for a couple years and you know
[00:16:50] an ROTC you spend a week in the summer with the pilot it's a week with the you know the submariners
[00:16:55] and the surface guys and you try to figure out what do you want to be when you grow up and you know
[00:16:59] I had a great aviation crew as I flew in an A6 off of the USS Saratoga and it was right after top
[00:17:04] gun came out so there's like 92 issue or something and I was like you know partying like a rock star
[00:17:08] and thought I'm gonna go be a pilot this is freaking awesome then I went to three weeks of many
[00:17:12] buds and became perversely attracted with that challenge is so holy cross have you ever been
[00:17:18] a Notre Dame before I have you know so Notre Dame I've been there a few times and it you know like
[00:17:25] the females aren't allowed in the male dorms and you have for the if they are they got to be out of
[00:17:30] there by 10 o'clock at night like it's pretty strict from a college aged person perspective it's
[00:17:36] holy cross like that as well it's not as strict the there were you know at this point maybe
[00:17:41] I'm gonna guess roughly 10 or 15 Jesuit priests on as as professors when I was in college it's
[00:17:47] less now but you know there was some that would would go out and enjoy a glass of wine or more
[00:17:53] for but they disappear around 10 o'clock at night and but it was it was a it was there's a great
[00:17:58] relationship between you know the the student body and the faculty so now you're saying that you did
[00:18:04] summer cruises and for those people that don't know this is when you're going to college you're in
[00:18:09] ROTC the Navy will take young college kids and send them out to get a little taste of the different
[00:18:16] parts of the Navy so did you do a ship one just a straight-up ship or do I did for a day
[00:18:21] and I was like this ain't me you know so uh that's all it took on the war that wasn't hard
[00:18:26] we did you we did you actually go like on to a ship somewhere that was on deployment or what was that
[00:18:31] you know I think what we did was got helicopter from Norfolk over to some frigate for 36 hours or something
[00:18:38] it was thank God it wasn't longer and then what and then what year was that after your first year
[00:18:43] 91-nish 92-ish yeah then when did you do the pilot thing what year was between junior and senior year
[00:18:49] okay so in between your junior year senior junior year and your senior year you get the full on
[00:18:54] top gun experience I did and then the full on buds and experience after that so that was
[00:19:01] in the same summer same summer that was an optional three week thing and I thought you know in order
[00:19:05] to really figure out do I want to be a pilot or do I want to be a seal I've got to go do this many
[00:19:08] buds thing and they took 32 kids out of college for that program what year was the mini buds
[00:19:14] it was the summer of 92 so you show up to mini buds and what are they doing this is three weeks long
[00:19:21] it was a legit they they legit three week one week of each other three phases of training and
[00:19:26] you know when you're going through it you're like how does this compare with the real thing
[00:19:30] it was after going through the real thing I look back and say we got a legit full treatment for each of
[00:19:36] the three weeks and I think nowadays they use that sort of it's called something else now I think
[00:19:41] it's called seal officer assessment and selection and it's it's something like mini buds but
[00:19:47] it's sort of the selection and how they're going to figure out who gets to go was it like that
[00:19:51] for for you guys I they definitely was we came out with like grades out of the 32 you know like
[00:19:58] not grades as an academic but like just an all around score of how you did and and you know
[00:20:03] I remember having a pretty high number and thought I think I'll be probably this will stand
[00:20:08] me pretty well if I applied to to circle back and go to buds and history has it I did and they took
[00:20:13] 16 guys out of ROTC my year 16 guys out of the academy so there are 32 officers taken into the
[00:20:19] program and as you know I don't know the number maybe 15 of those made it through ultimately or
[00:20:23] something like that there's only quid quitters and mini buds oh yeah there was fun it's just like
[00:20:30] okay don't let the door hit you the asshole the way out you know and so this is now 1993 that you
[00:20:36] graduate from Holy Cross and you get your you get selected I mean the selection process for officers
[00:20:44] now is totally insane I mean it's insane back then but with all the hype around seals and all that
[00:20:50] it's just ridiculous but still taken 16 from ROTC and 16 from the Naval Academy that's slim pickins
[00:20:59] it was tough and the hard thing as a rising senior in needing to make a life decision was that
[00:21:04] I knew that if I applied for buds I would not get my number two choice of pilot because
[00:21:09] once you work through and they take the washouts who they don't pick for seal training all the pilot slots
[00:21:15] are gone so it was a little bit of a gamble a lot of a gamble but like anything in life go for what you want
[00:21:21] and then you would have been on that ship that you didn't write very much and then you show up
[00:21:27] to what what buds cost for you 192 so you show up for buds class 192 how prepared were you you think
[00:21:34] I was very prepared I wasn't far from the most gifted physical athlete you know I
[00:21:40] I mean friends that did you know showed up and did 50 pull ups and I you know struggle with my you know
[00:21:44] eight and a quarter you know it was like that but you know 64 230 at a time I like all I ran real fast
[00:21:50] because it's one like a fish the O course was no trouble for me pull ups where my my downfall but you know
[00:21:55] I came in feeling pretty strong was there any was there anything that really challenged you
[00:22:02] for me it really was the pull ups it but never to the point where I wasn't a joke around about
[00:22:09] the eight and a quarter but I just you know I just I was there for reason you know if
[00:22:14] if something's worth doing it's worth overdoing and I prepared as well as I could and I just took
[00:22:19] it really seriously when I went through and kind of limited my my drinking when I was going through
[00:22:24] buds at age 21 everybody's drinking like a fish I was pretty serious about recovery and and
[00:22:29] just knew I needed every advantage I could possibly help myself with when I went through
[00:22:35] about that and leave the barracks really yeah like I was a total nerd I would sharpen my knife
[00:22:40] and polish my boots like all weekend long and I didn't even think about the recovery aspect I think
[00:22:46] that's a new thing like the idea of recovery I don't know I didn't really have that I didn't really
[00:22:51] think of that you didn't have guys walking around with those big jug the gallon jugs of water
[00:22:55] like that that that was the thing in our our time just pump the fluids after the after the
[00:23:00] day and for the weekend yeah I didn't really have too much of that now I've always thought that if you
[00:23:04] were if you couldn't do pull ups you're gonna have a problem with the O course and it seems like
[00:23:10] you had problems with Paul so you still didn't have a problem with the O course too and I'm I honestly
[00:23:15] I flew through though I was always top five in the of course and you socked it pull ups that's
[00:23:20] really bizarre I mean it's just a different type of strength pulling just a little bit
[00:23:26] laterally sometimes you know it's just that dead overhead up and down for pull ups is a little
[00:23:30] different than like rope climb where you're at that a little bit of an angle how were you good at
[00:23:34] rope climbs too yeah yeah it's really good that's we must just have some weird genetic anomaly where
[00:23:40] pull ups are hard because that's crazy right to be able to do their O course in a top five position
[00:23:45] and be socket pull ups that seems crazy yeah I mean I can't explain it I could just tell you what
[00:23:51] I experienced yeah well the cool thing about sucking at pull ups is you probably won't fail
[00:23:57] buds because you socket pull ups right you can fail you can get drop from buds for running you
[00:24:01] can drop get drop from buds from swimming you can get drop from buds for the O course but for
[00:24:05] pull ups you might get you know T is basically by the instructors during a PT but yeah no it's
[00:24:12] you're not going to get dropped yeah no it's it's very true it's very true how many how many people
[00:24:20] quit how many did you start with how many people quit we started with 120 and 19 graduated
[00:24:27] started with 120 and 19 graduated what were you did anybody quit that you were like dang what
[00:24:34] how's that oh hell yeah you know you you got guys that look like you walking on on day one
[00:24:40] and you're like man what am I doing here but you know guys just drop like flies and you know my
[00:24:48] you remember in the beginning they they assigned swim buddies you just throw people in the pool and
[00:24:51] go swim you know a mile or half mile I can't remember what you was but it was just swim as fast as
[00:24:57] you can and with 120 guys in the pool you're crawling all over each other and just doing and then they
[00:25:01] just pair up you know number one and number two or swim pair one number three and number four or
[00:25:05] swim pair two and so on so myself and Chris Cassidy were swim pair one and so Chris and I like
[00:25:10] life long friends from you know day one of Buds and and the two of us just we're always had this
[00:25:16] fun healthy sense of talking trash at each other and you know he ended up as the honor man for the
[00:25:23] class and I I years later went back to Buds and I told him that I pulled all the records and
[00:25:28] recalculated the math and at this point he was an astronaut of course you know and and I said hey I
[00:25:32] just got some bad news for you I'm having your name taken off the plaque and my name's going up
[00:25:38] so so but nothing really challenged you made it through one shot one shot I know honestly no major injuries
[00:25:43] or anything like that it was like that or nothing so I really can honestly say I never thought about
[00:25:48] quitting and I never it was hard just like the rest of us but just power straight through yeah
[00:25:54] so then you get assigned to so it's now 1994 and 94 and you get to assign to team four
[00:26:00] did you speak did you speak Spanish prior to that I was almost a double major in Spanish so good
[00:26:06] good in the books but never real at that point in life not a lot of practical Spanish because that was
[00:26:13] when we were coming up if you spoke Spanish you were going to team four pretty much guaranteed
[00:26:19] so being a new guy at the team and I have a good new guy story from your book here
[00:26:24] and we'll go to the book it says another story again from my time as a brand new seal
[00:26:30] the Navy needed four of us to test out some new equipment I was volunteers to take part in the
[00:26:36] exercise they took us in a boat two or three miles offshore dropped us in the water and told us to
[00:26:42] swim to the beach stay for a few minutes and then swim back to the boat together it turned out
[00:26:47] that conditions were unexpectedly harsh 40 knot winds nearly eight foot high waves and the four of us
[00:26:53] immediately lost each other unable to see more than a few feet in front of us man that's scary
[00:27:00] in its own right I swam for what felt like hours before I finally got to the beach and once I was there
[00:27:06] I could not see my teammates I waited and waited but there was simply no sign of them
[00:27:12] I figured maybe I'd miss them maybe I'd gotten slowed down by the waves maybe they'd already
[00:27:16] made their way back so I got back in the water and tried to return to the boat even though I couldn't
[00:27:21] see it in my mind I had to complete the assigned mission at all costs just keep going this is what a
[00:27:27] seal has to do I couldn't find my way back to the boat because the harsh conditions I was using
[00:27:33] myself a range of compass to do my best to swim a straight line of bearing to the planned link up point
[00:27:39] but it didn't work I realized I must have drifted much more than I expected I couldn't see
[00:27:45] back to the beach either for a few hours I was basically lost at sea worrying the other three more
[00:27:51] experience seals would think I was a total screw up I'd broken a fin strap and at one point I was
[00:27:57] startled okay scared when I was moved about 10 feet in the water bumped hard by a massive sea mammal
[00:28:05] I imagine that no one would ever find my body and everyone in the seals would think I must not
[00:28:09] a bit been a good swimmer despite entering buds training with one of the fastest swim times in the
[00:28:14] history the program and along with my swim buddy Chris Cassidy coming seconds away from the fastest
[00:28:20] ever two mile swim in buds finally the boat found me and picked me up and I was quickly
[00:28:27] exerated for being stupid enough to make the swim back out to sea my three teammates had ended
[00:28:35] up down the beach from where the current had taken me just a bit too far away from me to see them
[00:28:41] and they stayed on the beach until the boat came for them knowing conditions were too miserable
[00:28:45] to even attempt to head back I'd put myself at risk for a training exercise because I can
[00:28:51] fuse doing the hard thing with doing the right thing my decision was far too risky to make
[00:28:56] sense even as a confident and capable swimmer there's so many little lessons in that one right
[00:29:02] there that little story and by the way so your book is filled with a bunch of lessons and obviously I'm
[00:29:06] just reading excerpts from it and this chapter was choosing the hard path and doing the hard thing
[00:29:13] and of course everything's a dichotomy and you can do things where you go too hard but I can't
[00:29:20] even imagine you with your silver ranger which is for those of you that don't know it's a little
[00:29:24] compass that used to navigate on the land and you they you probably had it with you for like E&D or
[00:29:29] some whatever and you actually pulled this thing out you're trying to swim a bearing which is literally
[00:29:35] impossible to do my distance totally ridiculous and what I what I love about this is this is so true
[00:29:42] the main thing you're worried about you're lost at sea for hours you're getting pushed around
[00:29:46] by sea animals the main thing you're worried about is looking like a loser for you to keep it
[00:29:52] if you bad team guy that's exactly right you know I still vividly remember being you know
[00:29:58] pushed this you know eight or ten feet or so in the water and just thinking okay this is going to
[00:30:02] be the end but the worst thing is people are just gonna think I was a terrible swimmer and it's just
[00:30:07] not what you want stop and look you want I'm like no I'm a good swimmer please don't think that you know
[00:30:12] so yeah there's a million lessons in there you know it's you know this well when you when you're
[00:30:15] right a book if you if you if you're the president of your own fan club by definition you don't have
[00:30:20] a book you know and and so sharing these things where we you know that didn't make good decisions or
[00:30:27] or in retrospect we're we're actually stupid I think that's where the learning is and that's what I try
[00:30:31] to do in the book you you as a new guy meaning this is the universal you me you all of us as new
[00:30:38] guys pet you do some dumb dumb things and this is a classic example of like this is all the other
[00:30:47] guys that were experienced like hey we're not swimming back out are you kidding me well all
[00:30:50] die and you of course hey that's what the mission is we're gonna go and do it well a little bit
[00:30:56] too it's an interesting thing I'd be interested in your perspective on this but you know
[00:31:00] growing up in the teams before 9-11 it was mission mission mission at all costs post 9-11 our
[00:31:07] community got much better at saying you know what there's new information let's incorporate new
[00:31:12] information what's going on let's think about risk is the risk worth the reward and constantly
[00:31:17] reassessing that risk you know it's it's uh it became okay to turn around on a mission in our
[00:31:23] raccara Afghanistan and say hey you know what the risk profile just change massively we'll come back
[00:31:27] another right for these this group of terrorists there's this risk is not worth assuming and let's
[00:31:31] not do the mission and and when I was growing up and when you were growing up we'd be
[00:31:35] excoriated for not doing the mission yeah later on we were held up as smart yeah um well there's
[00:31:42] there's a big difference you know when we were coming up before the war started we were literally
[00:31:47] training for the big mission singular like hey you're gonna do this one mission we didn't know what it
[00:31:53] was but that's what we were training for and yeah there was no way it didn't even seem like a
[00:31:58] feasible idea that you would turn around on a mission or not complete the mission and then yeah obviously
[00:32:05] as the war kicked off and once we started to get combat experience for our generation it was like oh
[00:32:10] this doesn't make any sense oh the risk is too high oh the enemy has what we're not going to
[00:32:14] get them then and yeah uh that's something that we had to learn just as our forefathers had to
[00:32:20] learn and it's unfortunately one of those lessons that it it's almost like we well we had to
[00:32:26] relearn it you know uh I wrote about this in leadership strategy in tactics we used to set up
[00:32:30] this training scenario in in Mount or South where everyone would call it the urban training where
[00:32:37] the guys would be clearing like down a building down a hallway and there'd be we'd have a
[00:32:41] barricaded shooter at the end of the hallway and everybody that ended the hallway would get riddled
[00:32:45] with paintball and get put down and you'd see unfortunately just about every leader would fall victim
[00:32:53] this two more guys go they get mode down two more guys go they get mode down two more guys go they
[00:32:57] get mode down and and then you know finally after you know three quarters of the tasking is laying
[00:33:02] dead in the hallway we'd say hey man take a step back and think about what's happening what are you
[00:33:06] doing it does this make any sense and they would have that's what they have to do is they'd have to
[00:33:11] learn to detach and take a step back and go oh this is obviously bad and I shouldn't continue to do
[00:33:16] this so yeah that's definitely a lesson that we learned and that we had then to pass on to the
[00:33:23] next generation of seals to to make sure they understand that quitting is an option and you know
[00:33:31] you don't quit from a strategic perspective but with whatever tactic I'm using right now is
[00:33:35] going to cost us lives or get people killed or doesn't make any sense I got no problem saying
[00:33:39] up I was wrong this is bad move we're not doing it anymore totally agree and it's a lot of
[00:33:44] people ask me how does your business career now that have been retired for ten years and help
[00:33:49] run the operations for VMware really large software company the applicability is the exact same
[00:33:58] it's hey we have a certain amount of you know capital to invest do we invest it in in place
[00:34:03] a or place b or c and and and wait a minute you know what we're getting feedback from the market that
[00:34:08] that our original choice wasn't quite right are you going to keep trying to invest your way through
[00:34:12] and throw bad money after a good money after bad a bad path no you're going to make a decision
[00:34:16] some costs or some let's go try something different and and quickly dynamically assess and so
[00:34:21] the parallels between business and the seals are and the military writ larger are really really
[00:34:27] perfect yeah I often end up talking to companies and that's the exact example all uses
[00:34:33] hey we tried this marketing campaign it's not we're not getting the ROI we expected let's put
[00:34:39] more money into it okay and they still don't get the ROI we're expected okay let's put even more
[00:34:43] money it's the same thing as sending guys down the hallway to get shot up awesome so
[00:34:50] you so you get to team four that's kind of an example of team four what else was going on a team
[00:34:56] four when you got there do you get you get put right into a pollton I was relatively quick and maybe
[00:35:02] six months or so of kind of like schools and individual time but yeah did you go to so you
[00:35:07] went through STT at the team or was it at the team okay so your team is running STT was at a good
[00:35:13] course of instruction it was it was good you don't know what you don't know if that age and that
[00:35:18] that time in life you know but everything was learning at that point learning what to do sometimes
[00:35:24] learning what not to do you know we we but a immediate exposure to what was going on I remember
[00:35:31] in demolition training being at four AP Hill one range over from us there were four Marines that
[00:35:38] were in a demolition accident and basically vaporized and it was terrible and so what was the
[00:35:44] accident there was something called a Meekleek charge it was like a line charge and these it
[00:35:49] went low order and they you know collected all the C4 and put it in a pile and then went to
[00:35:53] burn it but forgot that there was this little thing called a booster in the C4 and so when they
[00:35:59] went because you can burn C4 as everybody as as you know but not everybody necessarily does and
[00:36:04] in that cause it to go high order and so you know right away we're exposed to you know real
[00:36:10] situations and so lots of like like you know a lot of the the biggest learning comes from the
[00:36:16] hardest situations what uh what schools did you go to as a new guy officer well you know it's funny
[00:36:23] one of my greatest friends in life war in Nicarcin was the operations chief and as a brand new
[00:36:27] incident I remember walking in and saying all right chief Nick the only question I have is do I
[00:36:30] go to free fall and then sniper or sniper then free fall and he's like shut up new guy you got
[00:36:35] some dog and ponies for you so you know so I was you know hitting the road doing you know dog and
[00:36:40] pony shows and all kinds of stuff but you know I went to you know the time it wasn't like you could
[00:36:45] get right into free fall school so it took me three or four years to be able to get there and so I
[00:36:49] I don't even my schools were so unremarkable at that time that I don't even remember what they were
[00:36:53] yeah I know it's a new guy I got sent to like well I was a very lucky that I got sent to the
[00:36:57] calm school on the east coast which was awesome but other than that it was like demo driver school
[00:37:03] just a few years after you chain up the trailer to the vehicle just complete new guys schools
[00:37:08] yeah yeah and then you get full new petune assistant to a commander yep assistant platoon commander
[00:37:14] and uh how's your work up you you do you do in a six month to uh what you do you know you're doing
[00:37:20] a six month appointment at this time team for deploys to South America yeah it was it deployment was
[00:37:25] two Panama and then from there just a lot of what J.S. joint combined exchanges for training where we
[00:37:30] we bounced around and you know we trained you know a Salvador you know Chilee Peru just the local
[00:37:37] operational forces that were similar to ours and um and it was just a big you know a big bunch of fun
[00:37:45] it's just it there just wasn't wasn't there were no real real stuff going on but uh lots of learning
[00:37:51] how was how was your you know what what what what would you feel like as a as a new guy officer if
[00:37:56] you were talking to yourself when you were younger you're talking to a young uh uh and senator lieutenant
[00:38:00] J.G. that's wrong into a platoon right now what what would your what would your advice be?
[00:38:06] look I think one of the things that that young officers always wrestle with is how to walk the line
[00:38:11] between being a leader when a leader is needed to step forward but at the same time really have the
[00:38:17] humility that a lot of other people know a lot of things that you don't know and to me that's what
[00:38:21] makes the team special is is when you think about how you make decisions and who makes decisions
[00:38:27] we just grow up with that just built into who we are and and and and that's really uh you know
[00:38:33] the the the thing you test is when do I step forward and say all right guys shut up lock it on we're
[00:38:39] going this direction and when do you kind of step back like like like you you a spouse in a lot of
[00:38:44] your work is leading from the rear is okay yeah no one ever expects the the seal leader to say
[00:38:53] hey lead from the rear right yeah are there times you got to lead from the front yes absolutely
[00:38:56] if you're doing something that dangerous or something that's horrible or something that's even
[00:38:59] monotonous sometimes you got to step up and say all right I got this but yeah well if I if I
[00:39:06] have the opportunity and someone on my platoon or my team wants to step up and lead no problem go for it
[00:39:11] I like to say I like to try and lead with minimum force required right well you know we I think
[00:39:18] there are a couple great points here first of all I always say the L and seal stands for lazy all right
[00:39:21] and and like we we find the easiest path to go achieve the goal because that gives you more time effort
[00:39:27] and energy for the next problem or let's you rest and recover for the next problem but you know
[00:39:32] it's like in business we're always thinking about succession planning and the only way you're
[00:39:38] going to get your second line ready to be the first line is if the first line can take a step back
[00:39:42] and let the second line be the first line so the only thing you need to do if you're in the
[00:39:45] leadership position and what I what I try to do now I think it's one thing I do decently
[00:39:49] is to step back and let other people make the decisions and only weigh in if and when needed
[00:39:54] most importantly it's the process does the process to make decisions make sense is it thinking about
[00:39:59] like the seals are a meritocracy as you know is who cares where the idea comes from you get all the
[00:40:03] ideas on the table you find the best idea and the best idea wins and that's the way you're going to
[00:40:07] go do the mission and that's exactly the way we we need to operate and often do operate in business
[00:40:13] yeah and and of course this doesn't mean you let the second string you know run off the cliff
[00:40:17] but you can let them bump into the guardrails and get a little dinged up and they're going to learn
[00:40:22] from that put some bondo on there and they'll be all right but a lot of times people are paranoid they
[00:40:27] don't want to take any risk at all and think that oh you you're gonna make a mistake it's like hey
[00:40:31] yeah they're gonna make mistakes and that's how they're gonna learn it comes down to comfort in
[00:40:34] your role right I mean it's it's if if I describe careers in three phases the first phase is getting
[00:40:40] really good at something whatever it is doctor lawyer seal whatever the second phase is trying to
[00:40:45] show the world you're really damn good at what you've chosen and that third phase which many people
[00:40:49] don't get to is being so confident that you are good that you no longer need to prove it to anybody
[00:40:55] and that's what lets you step back I think when I see in the business world the people the
[00:41:00] leaders who don't step back what I see is oftentimes a lack of a lack of confidence that
[00:41:08] that that makes the person feel like if they're not in front of the room making the decision
[00:41:14] then then they're not seen as the one in charge and so it's really I think a failure of leadership
[00:41:19] when you can't step back yeah I had one of the things I used to teach the jails was you have nothing
[00:41:26] to prove but everything to prove and the nothing to prove part is hey I don't care how we build this
[00:41:32] palette I don't care you know I don't care who goes on this operation I don't care what route we take
[00:41:39] in like there's a bunch of little decisions that are gonna get made that if your poll tune makes them
[00:41:44] it's perfectly fine and you don't need to prove well my way of getting to the target would be
[00:41:49] a little bit more efficient than yours or my way of building with my gutter feet wet yeah just like
[00:41:53] all these little things where sometimes that insecure junior leader feels like they need to prove
[00:41:59] to everyone that they're in charge and you don't you have nothing to prove you're actually
[00:42:03] in charge you're defacting in charge and that's fine you don't need to prove it what you do
[00:42:08] need to prove is that you're gonna listen that you're gonna pay attention that you're gonna
[00:42:11] make the right decisions at the right time that when it is time to weigh in you're gonna do
[00:42:16] something smart not something rash so yeah all good things to think about uh speaking of
[00:42:25] not being rash here's a little scenario you talk about in the book my platoon was once training
[00:42:32] at the al-tahama I'm gonna say that al-tahama al-tahama al-tahama al-tahama al-tahama al-tahama
[00:42:37] river in Georgia and we had an enthusiastic seal named Max we were carrying kayaks with a good
[00:42:43] amount of gear inside trying to find the most convenient way to transport guns, paddles and
[00:42:47] sensitive reconnaissance equipment that had to stay dry as we waited through the shallow water
[00:42:53] suddenly Max very calmly stopped and said to me Mr. Hayes there's a gator on my leg
[00:43:00] his calmed and demeanor in the face of such on the alarming statement caused me to doubt him
[00:43:05] until he lifted his leg out of the water and I saw three to four foot baby alligator had indeed
[00:43:11] added indeed latched around his knee Max to his extreme credit did not overreact he stayed calm
[00:43:17] certainly calmer than I would have been and took deep breaths until the alligator decided to open
[00:43:21] his mouth and let go Max was unharmed other than for bite mark two scars many of our enemies
[00:43:28] are not as cooperative as that baby alligator ended up being which is why our reactions to situations
[00:43:34] are so important the smartest seal isn't the one with the greatest wrong intelligence it's the one who has
[00:43:40] the best and quickest reaction to the problem the seal who can quickly assess and decide the best
[00:43:47] course of action is the one I want on my team not the seal who gets emotional and let's his
[00:43:52] feelings or his fears get in the way of pure rationality I said in chapter one that I would take
[00:43:59] someone with hunger over someone with greater ability every time I'd also take someone who reacts
[00:44:06] well over someone with greater raw intelligence you want both intelligence and control but in the
[00:44:13] stressful moments control matters a lot I would love to find people who are smart enough to predict
[00:44:19] the future but I haven't come across many of them so I need people who react well no matter what
[00:44:25] the future turns out to hold no matter the context the importance of having good controlled reactions
[00:44:32] to surprising situations can never be overstated so there you go freaking gator chops on your leg
[00:44:43] yeah you know you know the saying you don't have to out swim your buddy you just have to
[00:44:47] obviously you don't have to out swim the shark you just have to out swim your buddy so you know
[00:44:51] it's like should I go on a dry land and get away from this guy I remember that situation very
[00:44:56] well but in all sincerity it is the expression calm breeds calm excitement breeds excitement
[00:45:02] you've been shot at and rocketed enough to know that anytime you're not calm you are just
[00:45:07] using a motion that could be used to solve the problem yeah do you think that the that buds
[00:45:15] weeds out some of that it's a good question I think to some degree but not perfectly
[00:45:22] yeah it's definitely not perfect because I know you and I both have seen plenty of
[00:45:25] good like this guy max is a great example of like the calm cool collected seal that you want
[00:45:31] in your platoon either in charge of your platoon or wanting your machine gun or your platoon
[00:45:36] having a guy like that is awesome having somebody that's just loses their mind is
[00:45:41] absolutely horrible I think that's one of those traits that you can learn no I'm sure you're
[00:45:45] asked a similar question that I am frequently which is talked to me about what's innate
[00:45:50] leadership what are you born with and what can you train through time no I think that calm is a
[00:45:55] thing that you can learn and train through time do you agree a hundred percent and you know I
[00:46:01] got really lucky in that the last tour that I did was run and trade it out on the west coast and so
[00:46:05] I got to run this freaking leadership laboratory which was I honestly think it might have been
[00:46:12] the greatest leadership laboratory that's ever existed in the world I thought I think uh
[00:46:17] just to be able to put these guys in these stressful situations with so much on the line and
[00:46:24] look it wasn't life or death no so I guess combat isn't even better leadership laboratory except
[00:46:28] for and combat you can't take a guy and put him through iteration after iteration after iteration
[00:46:34] because he's dead if he's bad so you can't really it's not a laboratory it's a real world test
[00:46:38] is combat a better real world test then then going through training yes it is but the training
[00:46:44] that we had was really crazy good it was realistic it was hard and you would see guys develop these
[00:46:52] traits you would watch guys you'd see them and you'd put them into situation and they've
[00:46:56] lose their mind or they'd start getting getting panic or they'd start freaking out about
[00:47:01] something and you'd see everything would fall apart they're both who moved fall apart
[00:47:05] and then maybe you know the next time you said you know you say you're debrief from hey listen man
[00:47:09] when you start yelling and screaming on the radio no one's listening to you anymore it's not
[00:47:14] getting through anybody they can't make sense of what you're saying you need to calm down you need
[00:47:19] to think about what you're gonna say simple clearing exercise language so you breathe from on that
[00:47:22] and then the next time maybe they start getting excited you go hey man hey Fred come here take a wrap off
[00:47:28] think about what you're gonna say what are you gonna tell your pertune to do I'm gonna tell
[00:47:30] to get oh no hold on what are you gonna tell me do I'm gonna tell them to get hold on what are you
[00:47:34] telling them to do I'm gonna tell them to move to building 34 okay now come up on the radio and just say that or just
[00:47:40] yell it just just put the word out and they need to see the guy do it and you could see that they
[00:47:46] would learn so yes you can absolutely learn this stuff as long as you're humble enough to
[00:47:52] as long as you're humble enough to take criticism and and assess yourself so there was a bunch of
[00:47:57] things that that you can improve that look there's some things that you can't improve that right
[00:48:02] there's some genetic things that you have that you can't improve um this is another thing I wrote
[00:48:07] about leadership strategy tax set a guy coming through he's a tasky to commander super smart guy
[00:48:12] good tactician the voice of a mouse right so when it came time to put out word you know like
[00:48:20] to tell everyone what was going on he just didn't have the couldn't project his voice at all
[00:48:26] and so I'm talking to him like hey man listen you gotta start you gotta start putting the word out
[00:48:30] and in my mind I'm thinking you know maybe this is just maybe I'm just super biased towards being
[00:48:35] loud because I have a loud voice maybe I'm just biased and so I'm watching him and I can see he's
[00:48:41] trying to put out word no one can hear it's a problem so I say hey man if you don't start
[00:48:47] up being your volume people can't hear you I don't even know if you can do this job
[00:48:52] which is a real like horrible thing to tell someone this guy's a tasky to commander he's been
[00:48:57] in the teams for 12 or 15 years or something this has seen your guy and now I'm telling him how you
[00:49:01] can't do this and then the next iteration I'm watching him and he's got to make the call and he
[00:49:09] grabs like big mouth bill it is put to one of the tunes is like hey bill tell everyone he
[00:49:15] get to building 34 now and I was like oh cool problem solved so you've got to you've got some
[00:49:21] things that you can't get better at you know some people aren't articulate talking in front of a
[00:49:25] crowd okay cool hey echo you're good in front of a crowd you put the word out to the troops or
[00:49:29] some people can't simplify a problem so it's like hey Mike I'm having a hard time getting through this
[00:49:34] can you simplify this thing so I'm gonna can understand it so there's some things that you're
[00:49:38] gonna naturally not gonna be great at put your leadership team together where you got some people
[00:49:43] that are good at that and then be humble enough to say you know what Mike's a lot better at
[00:49:46] simplifying things that I am and that goes a lot more articulate than I am so I'm gonna have
[00:49:49] Mike figure out the problem and I'm gonna have echo talk about it and we're gonna be good to go
[00:49:53] I'm gonna sit back and just try and get these guys what they need so there are things that you
[00:49:58] can not get better at you can you can you can you can you can you improve them a little bit but you
[00:50:01] might not become an expert out of but there's there's definitely some things that you can
[00:50:06] absolutely improve on and being calm and being able to detach and take a step back is
[00:50:11] most certainly most certainly one of them so that was your system between command I was
[00:50:17] at anything else I was you got one story on that deployment about kind of getting help it was this
[00:50:22] when you got held up at gunpoint yeah talk us through that so 1996 we were the squad in in
[00:50:30] Peru squads eight seals so it's myself and in seven guys and you know we were just training
[00:50:35] the proven seals nothing crazy and the I will say that in those days the leader of the shining
[00:50:42] path Cendero Lumino so which was a terrorist organization was in jail about a mile or less
[00:50:48] in a mile from the Peruvian seals compound so we were likely you know watched or people knew
[00:50:54] that there was somebody in country helping the Peruvian seals but myself and my LPO stayed back in
[00:51:01] Lima for just a day while the rest of the guys flew forward to a Kidos Peru which was deep in
[00:51:06] the jungles of the Amazon and and we just literally out to dinner one night driving back from dinner
[00:51:12] unarmed and two cop cars pinned us in really really quickly jumped out with three or four guys
[00:51:20] armed you know rifles and you know basically open the door held me a gunpoint threatened me with
[00:51:26] execution and and they drove us around and basically interrogated us asked us a bunch of
[00:51:32] questions that nobody ever really wants to answer you know how you want to be tortured how you want to be
[00:51:36] executed how you want to die you know and and and a lot of worse things than that I had a
[00:51:41] point where I could have jumped out of the car that might my LPO can need him was in the back
[00:51:46] of the sesuvias in the middle seats and I could have jumped out when the car was going 40 years
[00:51:51] so saved myself and I very very vividly remember I can never ever jump out of this car because I
[00:51:57] couldn't live with myself if I bailed on Ken and I lived and they killed him just not who I wanted
[00:52:03] it back to the migrant fathers and who do you want to be so you know we learned never bail on your
[00:52:07] swim buddy and I was not I was fortunate after that incident because I could answer really
[00:52:13] really truthfully knowing that in a life and death situation that I would not bail on my swim buddy
[00:52:18] so it was a a lot of learning at a young age how do you get out of that scenario you know I did
[00:52:24] what I what I would have wanted victims to do if I were in the other role don't look at the victim
[00:52:32] so we can't identify or excuse me don't look at the assailants so that we can't identify them
[00:52:36] and the threat goes down and and just be compliant and answer to our previous part of the conversation
[00:52:42] around calm I was so overcome these you would never think that I was even 1% remotely worried about
[00:52:48] the situation I was in I in Spanish I was like hey where economists were desk workers we work at the
[00:52:53] at the embassy and you know we were just out to dinner these things happen all the time if we get it you
[00:52:57] guys need the car take the car we have insurance go take it it's all that's all you and and just
[00:53:03] really totally mellow answer these questions and I think these guys just figured out these guys
[00:53:08] aren't a threat these guys these guys can't possibly be seals so so so they drove us around
[00:53:13] and after the interrogation of about an hour they brought us out of the car gun point now is like
[00:53:17] okay there's the point where they either pull the trigger they don't myself and Ken just kept
[00:53:21] walking because I remember very vividly thinking hey a 10 foot shot is harder than a 0 foot shot
[00:53:26] you know maybe they'll miss an organ and so I just quickly put space between me and the
[00:53:30] guy who had a gun and at the point he just I wasn't looking backwards so I can't tell you what
[00:53:34] he was doing I was just ready to be shot and and they they never pulled the trigger
[00:53:41] that doesn't sound like a very nice last day in the in the city of there I have not been back to
[00:53:47] Lima and so that's what you did on that deployment you travel around this is pre 911 you're
[00:53:54] traveling around your training other forces and and then what happens after that after that
[00:54:01] tour is that that's when you go to Germany went to a DLI for learning German for nine months
[00:54:07] then ended up you know just going over to Germany oh you went to DLI first I did yeah
[00:54:13] so you speak three languages then well you can't tell what the count no I'm still working on English
[00:54:19] so you go to DLI and then you come over to Germany this is where I meet you 97 98
[00:54:28] 98 because I went I basically got done with OCS I showed up at Sealtime 2 and immediately went over there
[00:54:35] and it was the Master Chief there who was one of my platoon chiefs and apparently the conversation
[00:54:44] went the the commander over there or or an ops officer said hey we need like a we need someone to
[00:54:49] come and help out with with ops and they were sending their sending this ensin and they're saying
[00:54:56] who the the cus are sending us team 2 sent us a damn ensin like what good is this guy going to do and
[00:54:59] then then the Master Chief sees my name and goes away to second I know this guy so you say that name again
[00:55:05] ensin will link we want this guy over here that's so sure enough I showed up and we played water polo
[00:55:13] yeah I don't know what what we did beside that if in all truth we probably filled out some
[00:55:17] forms and almost like in the almost the pre computer days you know so I don't know what in the world
[00:55:23] we possibly we weren't delete and email in those days well I'll tell you a funny story we went to
[00:55:28] we did some big joint exercise and the the skipper at the time he's like all right jokko you're
[00:55:36] going to go forward and we're going to you're going to run the the tech cooperation center and like
[00:55:41] you know these days we think of a tech cooperation center you know we're talking plasma TV's
[00:55:47] in satellite links and internet you're talking you know like a star track look in scenario
[00:55:52] I shit you not we went on this mission and I fit this quote tactical operation center into
[00:55:59] one single rock sack I had like a sack for seventy seven hundred dollars something I had a bunch
[00:56:03] of maps I had some like I thought I was square away because I had you know like some overlays for the
[00:56:08] maps and then how much the world changed between that time so this is 1998 what I literally had the
[00:56:16] tactical operation I mean this isn't a big exercise a big giant joint exercise that was taking place all
[00:56:20] over Europe and I had a little you know we had a little the the seals there had a little roll
[00:56:25] in this exercise but it was a big exercise a lot of stuff going on and I literally had the entire
[00:56:30] tactical operation center set in in my rock sack that's that's scary that's some good times right there
[00:56:40] so then how how long you how long you spend in Germany for two years and that was the
[00:56:45] Bosnia coast of Odez and so there was some good learning there too and and I I felt like
[00:56:50] I would be a better platoon commander if I went overseas at a role like that for two years and
[00:56:56] honestly those two years really set me up to be in my in my opinion a much better platoon
[00:57:00] commander when I got to seal teammate in 99 yeah and and just kind of had some epic leadership over
[00:57:07] there too the unit that you were at I mean those leaders are just incredible leadership over there
[00:57:13] incredible really strong Rick smother's yeah yeah just great guys that awesome times um
[00:57:22] any major so it's through when you say all there's there's lessons that I learned or the
[00:57:26] things that I got from that deployment I mean is it just learning what it's like from the other
[00:57:31] side when you're on deployment yeah it's it's some taking a look at a seal platoon and saying
[00:57:37] what is the effective employment of a seal platoon when you're in the platoon you're a little
[00:57:43] bit I don't want to say biased you're you have a narrow view you know and so understanding the
[00:57:49] difference between what success and you know and I wouldn't say failure but like some average
[00:57:55] performance is was really important to me because you know hearing having the opportunity at a
[00:58:01] a young age at a junior seniority to see the senior leadership say hey that was really awesome
[00:58:07] or what the hell are those guys doing just those statements themselves carried value I was um
[00:58:15] in training sell at seal team one so I was like an E5 and I went on my first trip
[00:58:21] where I was kind of like the trip lead and it was to floored a to hurl but field floored a
[00:58:26] and we put a platoon out in the field for a recon and whatever and like they they flew down
[00:58:31] there went right in the field they might have even jumped into the field but anyways they go
[00:58:34] down there they go right in the field and of course I was there on the ad von getting the target
[00:58:37] set up and all this stuff and then they get done with the operation and we pull them out of the
[00:58:43] field and now they've got whatever it is three days in four wall and beach for a while and I'm like
[00:58:49] for it was the first time that I saw a platoon from the outside and I was like oh my god this is
[00:58:57] going to be a problem like there's no way he's got you're going to get through three days of
[00:59:03] liberty here we this is going to be crazy and I remember that was the first time I was
[00:59:08] not in a platoon because we're in a platoon you don't you just like oh we can go out now cool
[00:59:11] oh we're done with our op cool we're going to go out and do whatever we want in whatever we are
[00:59:17] and that was like the first time I saw it from the outside and it was a good learning lesson for me
[00:59:22] yeah you know like we often see now it's you don't know what you don't know and so how do you
[00:59:27] take things from that unknown unknown quadrant and make them known I like whether it's the seals or
[00:59:32] in business all of the risk and all of the opportunity is in that unknown unknown quadrant so how do you
[00:59:38] get into that and identify and pull it back out so we didn't realize it in those days but that's what we were
[00:59:43] doing yeah it's uh if you that's another lesson another uh should say a reiteration of the lesson
[00:59:53] of to take a step back and see something because when you're in that platoon you don't you don't
[00:59:58] you've been on the plymet before you knew what it was like to go on the plymet but you were in a
[01:00:02] platoon and so you don't like know the perspective of not being in the platoon and not understanding
[01:00:08] what that looks like from the outside and not understanding what it looks like when there's some
[01:00:13] kind of an incident and how much that disrupts everyone and how much it hurts our reputation as seals
[01:00:19] you know that's something you know when you're in a siope to and someone gets in trouble you're like oh
[01:00:23] Fred got in trouble you don't think about it from you know what is the fleet think of that what is that army
[01:00:29] commander that's there think of those things you just don't well at least I didn't I had you know
[01:00:33] him as young dumb and well just young dumb I guess you're definitely just that yeah um
[01:00:41] so you wrap up there you wrap up there and then where you go seal teammate took over as a platoon commander
[01:00:46] and um did work up and then deployed down to a possible so what what year is it now so 99 I moved back
[01:00:55] to Virginia Beach and take over as a platoon commander and when you get there how how you how you feeling
[01:01:03] how you feeling to get your platoon do it so great it's like finally like I'm ready you know it's
[01:01:07] it's been a year of like put me in coach and then you're finally in and it's just off to the races
[01:01:12] and just you know it's you remember the feeling well I'm sure it's it's um it's everything it's
[01:01:18] cracked up to be in more and so you said you this is that teammate yeah and so now you guys are
[01:01:24] basically fighting to try and get to go back to you com yep and go to co-savo Bosnia whatever's
[01:01:32] happening in that theater because that's the only showing time but we we made it back and you know we
[01:01:37] did a deployment there where we were doing you know small four or six man special reconnaissance
[01:01:43] missions and you know we go out on three or four day ops and then we stand QRF for three or four
[01:01:50] days while another sister part of the you know would go out and then and then we'd have three or four
[01:01:56] days off so we were actually in quite a regular predictable cycle while we were overseas
[01:02:01] you talk a little bit about one of these operations here in the book here we go I was in
[01:02:08] co-savo in 1999 in the middle of winter leading a small surveillance team in the mountains
[01:02:12] just a few hundred meters from the Serbian border freezing cold temperatures the darkness of night
[01:02:17] howling winds and both co-savar Serbian and Albanian armies somewhere in that same snowy terrain
[01:02:24] weapons ready looking for an enemy to fight as we suffered through the elements the sun
[01:02:30] soon to rise we knew we needed to find a place to rest and hide for the daylight hours from our
[01:02:36] vantage point halfway up the side of a mountain struggling to maintain our balance on the steeply
[01:02:41] sloping ground we could see a natural line of drift below railroad tracks a 10 foot wide patch
[01:02:47] of flat ground a path that could that would have called out to anyone as the comfortable place
[01:02:52] we should naturally set up camp of course we wanted to move down there I remember a young guy and
[01:02:58] our team in credulous that we could even be out in this kind of weather humans can't survive in this
[01:03:04] he said it's miserable the temptation to head down toward the easier path and the more comfortable
[01:03:11] sight was real but if it was calling out to us we knew it would be calling out to anyone who
[01:03:16] happened to be coming that way going down there would make us more visible more vulnerable and
[01:03:22] more likely to run into trouble so we set up camp a couple hundred year meters up the steeply
[01:03:28] angled slope and sure enough within an hour and just a short time before sunrise what looked like
[01:03:34] the entire Albanian army marched straight down that natural line of drift had we been camped there
[01:03:40] they would have found us for sure doing the uncomfortable exhausting thing the hard thing saved us
[01:03:47] that day so those are the type of operations you were doing yeah you're a great reader by the way
[01:03:56] yes did you did you guys do winter warfare in your workup we did and this was after I guess
[01:04:04] teammate or sorry team two had sort of given up the the the the the the the the rock they had on winter
[01:04:10] warfare they they did and you know it was all of you know four or six weeks or something like that
[01:04:15] in the Colorado what are they 13,000 or 14,000 mean foot peaks and so we did you know slept in snow caves
[01:04:21] and attempted to get good at telemark but certainly get good at that snow-showing and we did all the
[01:04:27] winter workup and and it really paid off because those operations in Kosovo were sometimes really
[01:04:31] miserable from a weather perspective and and then on that particular passage you just read I mean
[01:04:36] I just very vividly remember thinking like if we would have given in and done the easy thing there
[01:04:40] we we probably would not have survived we at a minimum would have been captured and interrogated
[01:04:49] that so you you did us full six month appointment down in that AO yes and you're doing pretty much
[01:04:55] three days on in the field three days on a QRF and then three days off yes with four stage
[01:05:01] of QRF and sleep in a home beef for three days or you know just be at the ready to go help
[01:05:05] whoever is in the field maybe you know ten or so kilometers or whatever it might be from the
[01:05:09] main element anyone ever get contacted we did on one operation it actually was the quick story is
[01:05:19] that we observed and arms transfer recall we were enforcing the date and piece of chords and and and we saw
[01:05:27] Russian forces handing weapons to
[01:05:31] Serbians which is not the date and piece of chords and this is early early in the day of no
[01:05:37] light you know no light cameras and near real time sat calm sending it back so we we got pictures
[01:05:46] and to documented the whole thing and then we weren't set up to do any sort of offensive
[01:05:52] operations you know we had a whatever 80 pound packs for three days and you know as many ham
[01:05:56] sandwiches as you could stuff in your backpack but the the there was a nearby army special forces
[01:06:03] house that that could get out get out and get underway we called them in they went and looked through
[01:06:07] the the building where the transfer had happened and I mean I just assumed that that meant we would
[01:06:13] be our mission would be over you know the age old saying if you assume if you think you've been
[01:06:19] compromised assume you have and if you have expel and this was a leadership thing I got put
[01:06:24] against the army major at the time who was in charge of the the soxie the special operations
[01:06:28] command and control element said Charlie Mike and continue mission and I was never remember
[01:06:35] over computer kind of getting in a little bit of an argument with him saying hey here's what we
[01:06:38] do in the seals this means we're over ultimately talked about it with a couple of us the six of
[01:06:43] us that were in the field said a boy's what do we think here is this is let we have time to talk
[01:06:48] this through and and everybody said you know what it's let's let's let's just continue mission
[01:06:52] let's not make this an issue we don't feel that threatened so so we just catch everyone up here
[01:06:56] so you're in the field you see this weapons transfer and you're you do this you you tell the story
[01:07:01] in the book with with great detail and it's an awesome story but you're you're in the field you're
[01:07:06] doing a reconnaissance you see this weapons transfer take place and it's illegal and it shouldn't
[01:07:12] be happening and you actually get photographs of it and you push those up over satcom which but
[01:07:17] this is not like the movies this is this is a legit effort to get that done and very cool that
[01:07:22] you guys were able to pull that off you get photographs of this weapons transfer taking place
[01:07:27] and then you send that up the chain of command and what the chain of command does is push
[01:07:31] his special forces group out to go inspect the area which clearly anyone with
[01:07:39] any sort of tactical sense is going to go oh we just did a weapons transfer and now the
[01:07:44] US military's there there's someone watching and so your thought is okay once the green
[01:07:50] berets go and inspect that site we need to get that out of here well you get told by the chain
[01:07:55] of command no you're not leaving you're gonna stay eyes on and this is where you have the
[01:07:59] discussion hold on a second what do you mean stay here and so that's where you're on so what's
[01:08:04] the decision so we we stayed and then not a few hours later we were being you know actively hunted by
[01:08:12] we counted 19 armed individuals looking through this treeline and trying to figure out where we were
[01:08:17] and you know we were set up with two OP's observation posts and then one CP command post so so
[01:08:26] two six people in the field two two and two I was in the command post with my my radioman
[01:08:30] and I did not have eyes on I was back a bit and then there's in one of the command in one of the
[01:08:35] observation posts Chad Wilkinson who you know rest in peace hero you had Sarah Wilkinson
[01:08:43] and I don't know another amazing American hero on your your show recently just you know one of my
[01:08:48] life long friends and basically radio back to me it's at hey boss we got to make a decision here
[01:08:54] we're there's somebody coming down the treeline and we either need to you know take them out
[01:08:59] or fall back and I just said listen Chad here's the deal if you you take him out just know that
[01:09:05] we're gonna have you already know this well 18 other people hunting us even more actively but do
[01:09:10] whatever you think is right and I'm behind you and and he ultimately with one of the guys he was
[01:09:16] with pulled back took eyes off didn't shoot and to this day I think that was one of the greatest
[01:09:22] decisions ever because we the six of us got back together and then we just worked our way out of a
[01:09:27] really tricky problem I remember two or three times having my weapon in hand coming off safe
[01:09:33] finger on the trigger with like an Albanian you know insurgent if you will walking feet from me
[01:09:39] and saying okay please don't let me have to shoot this guy because it'll be a bad day and we made it out
[01:09:45] we ultimately made it out yeah and this is like I said and it's hard for people to really
[01:09:53] it might be hard for people to comprehend this this is pre 9 11 so you're out there doing real
[01:09:58] operations before the war kicks off and getting yourself into leadership situations and
[01:10:04] learning a lot and really being pretty being pretty lucky in that situation for sure
[01:10:14] so you could done with that deployment and then what do you do next well I screen to go to
[01:10:20] seal team six and as you know they take only a handful of officers every year and I screen positive
[01:10:26] I needed to come back from deployment just a couple of weeks early to go to what they call green
[01:10:30] team and my commanding officer said Mike you can't come home early you can apply again
[01:10:34] next year and I just remember being so disappointed and and I came home and I was like you know what
[01:10:40] forget this I'm I just don't see a future in the seals for me after this and and that's right around
[01:10:45] that was literally the time when we started deploying again as two platoons going overseas and
[01:10:50] they said Mike I got a different job for you stay here at seal team eight be in charge of two seal
[01:10:55] platoons and I had a hard decision to make because I just wanted to go to development group and
[01:11:00] and be the best of the best and and in those days like that's where you went if you really wanted to
[01:11:05] you know be in the mix the regular teams weren't in the mix nearly as much and I just
[01:11:12] ultimately you know like many times in life don't don't overreact and stay calm and think about
[01:11:19] what's the best thing and and to this day I'm I look back at that decision as Mike Mike
[01:11:24] as as incredibly fortuitous because my life wouldn't have paned out the way it did and so
[01:11:28] you know nine eleven happened and all of us in the teams had way more work than we ever would have
[01:11:33] wanted and so life works out you don't always think it does in the moment when you get really
[01:11:37] frustrated with a decision that's not breaking your way but when you zoom out over time things usually
[01:11:42] work out where were you in September 11th happened I was on the pull-up bars at seal team eight
[01:11:51] handful of us just doing a command PT and just really just never forget the moment
[01:11:57] so at this point were you a task unit commander this was yeah I was a in charge of two
[01:12:03] seal platoons and we were in them in our work up we weren't close to being deployed overseas but
[01:12:08] like everything we were scrambling and I actually remember there were questions like who knows
[01:12:12] how to operate singer missiles this is when there are planes in the sky nobody knew what was going on
[01:12:16] and and we were getting ready to go you know you are basically protect the ships and just
[01:12:23] homeland defense if you will if that's what it took so we ended up not doing any of that but just
[01:12:28] watching on TV just like everybody else but but as you know that that infamous day really changed
[01:12:34] all of our future and then where did you go on deployment when you so now did you take that task
[01:12:37] unit on deployment we we did and and we went over to Germany in Europe at the European command and we were
[01:12:46] we were really ready to go and didn't get put into the mix early on so it again a little bit
[01:12:54] disappointing and I said to myself what in the world I'm sitting here as a task unit commander
[01:12:59] ready to serve the nation and we have forces at the ready but but we're in the wrong theater
[01:13:05] and there was talk about every day there was talk about pulling us from Europe over at
[01:13:09] you calm over to set calm to help out it didn't happen and again I said all right you know what
[01:13:14] if this is the way that things are going to break I applied for the the Paul Mill Fellowship the
[01:13:19] political military fellowship no seal had ever been picked for two years of fully funded grad school
[01:13:24] and I said all right I'm at the stage of life where I need to to think about other things and
[01:13:28] I thought let me just put my name in the hat here and I was the lucky squirrel that was picked and
[01:13:32] I got two years of fully funded grad school and then went to to grad school in Cambridge mass
[01:13:38] for for two years from 0 3 to 0 5 so the whole early phase of the war I was largely an observer
[01:13:45] when you there's a I asked often about this especially from young seal leaders right now
[01:13:53] because you know every seal joins this well you hope that every seal joins the teams because they
[01:13:58] want to go to war and then there's no wars going on how was it so you're in a task unit you
[01:14:04] got a fully capable task unit you've September 11th has happened when when is this deployment to
[01:14:09] you come um like 2001 so that would have been yeah oh one it was oh one yeah so you go on to
[01:14:17] appointment oh one oh two and you've got a bunch of hungry frog men and they're sitting around in Europe
[01:14:24] it's exactly right what's the what what did you do to try and keep your your forces focused on
[01:14:30] the mission at hand pull ups yeah that's a rough one that was a rough one as well I've
[01:14:39] I've told many young seals that I was in the seal teams for 13 years before I ever shot my weapon
[01:14:44] at the enemy and you don't know and all you can do is keep going keep doing what
[01:14:48] workups and keep going on deployment keep training that's the best thing you can do is keep
[01:14:52] don't workups keep going on deployment keep trying to get better and they're the the
[01:14:56] naysets gonna call at some point totally great so you are you think and maybe once you get
[01:15:03] done with that deployment sounds like you're also the new young frog man that's pretty fast
[01:15:06] off and not going to war so you apply to go to school you go up you get you think you're going
[01:15:13] to get out after that or you're incurred three your obligation so at that point I had
[01:15:18] done on a twelve or so years in but I was like I I wanted to finish twenty years with a master's
[01:15:22] degree and so you know the Kennedy School of Government was a really good path you know being the first
[01:15:27] seal for this program I thought great I applied at Harvard Business School and then the detail
[01:15:32] it was like way that's a little too far off the reservation you can do a master's in public policy
[01:15:37] at the Kennedy School and I applied there and and got in so that was um that took me from 03 to 05
[01:15:43] and then as you know a date burn in every seals head is June 28 2005 I had orders to seal
[01:15:49] team 10 all the guys on the other helicopter were all teammates from seal team 8 and uh and I
[01:15:54] went overseas right away and took over for for Eric Christians and God rest him and uh and basically
[01:15:59] took over for the guys who were in who weren't shot down on June 28 2005 so so so so so so
[01:16:12] that shot that shot that that that shit happened um I don't know what to better what to say
[01:16:16] it and you are the guy that goes then to team 10 and you go on deployment and you take over
[01:16:23] for Christiansen yep I'd already been a task unit commander and I was like so privileged to be
[01:16:28] able to do it again I you know I felt like my calling was to help all the guys who were um
[01:16:34] who lived through that who really had a hard a really hard day you write in the book about some of the
[01:16:41] things that you implemented to try and help guys out from uh I guess a psychological and
[01:16:48] spiritual perspective talk us a little talk us through that a little bit not only um what you did
[01:16:55] but also what made you what gave you the awareness you know this is pretty early on in the war
[01:17:01] and you seem to be so you seem to somehow be instinctively or intuitively know that
[01:17:08] guys who are going to need some help yeah I think look I'd like to say in life I just have
[01:17:12] varying levels of ignorance on everything and some things I'm a little less ignorant on but this
[01:17:16] was definitely one of them uh I I in talking to the guys I realized that this isn't a problem we're
[01:17:22] going to solve alone kind of your voice example for the the the sweety voice guy or real here you know
[01:17:27] and so uh no what you're good at no what you're not good at no how to bring in teammates that that are
[01:17:32] better at things than you and and and so we I asked to have a psychologist and a chaplain come out
[01:17:39] and uh took everybody in the platoon aside and I said listen I've had one on one conversations
[01:17:43] with every single one of you you are all struggling with things in different different different
[01:17:47] things and in different ways I will never talk about any of our conversations with anybody else it's
[01:17:52] not it's not for public knowledge but but here's the deal um I I want every single one of you to
[01:17:59] spend at least five minutes with a chaplain and five minutes with a psych it's it was very counter-cultural
[01:18:03] at the time you know all we did and I was growing either strength or perceived strength and this
[01:18:10] was kind of like weakness and it could be perceived as weakness clearly not but um but in those
[01:18:16] days could be perceived as weakness and you know we we had the you know the guys who would you know
[01:18:21] beat their chest and say no fing way am I talking to the chaplain and blah blah blah and I was just like
[01:18:25] okay the way to get through this is make everybody do it and there'll be no stigma for who did
[01:18:30] who didn't talk and and there wasn't a single person who didn't talk less than several hours
[01:18:36] to each of the psych and the chaplain we had to extend them there for a couple weeks and and really
[01:18:41] I think set the foundation for a couple things number one is for each of those guys in their own
[01:18:45] lives as they dealt with you know the post-traumatic stress of of doing the body recoveries
[01:18:51] from the downhill a copter and and putting their buddies and bags and bringing them home
[01:18:54] which which clearly isn't easy and just the extreme loss of teammates and such it was the
[01:18:59] first-year-old mass casualty that the seal had in the modern era and so I just felt like it was
[01:19:06] a no-brainer to me to bring in to bring in help and then I ultimately as I return from that
[01:19:12] deployment made a real push to get a psychologist on the staff and to begin the era of of really
[01:19:17] saying asking for help is a sign of strength not weakness. Yeah you definitely get some credit
[01:19:24] for some foresight there because yeah that's that that culture that we have in the seal teams of like
[01:19:32] just suck it up just deal with it and that's just the way it's going to be for you to sort of
[01:19:39] see beyond that that's definitely that's an admirable move right there. We're just here to help each other
[01:19:46] um so you guys get done with that deployment and come home and and now what do you do now
[01:19:58] now are you the ops officer at 1010 or so. This is the era where the ops officer at a team became
[01:20:04] an O4 so I'd already been an ops officer is an O3 I became the ops officer as an O4 so
[01:20:10] this is why my career has been it was awesome I just spent that seal teams my whole life I never did
[01:20:14] a boat unit tour I never did an STV tour I just was in this perfect storm of always seal team
[01:20:19] seal team seal team so now I'm an ops officer again I already know how to do the job pretty decently
[01:20:24] we uh and that's really you know O5 all the way through late O7 which included a six month
[01:20:33] deployment as as the deputy commander for Soto Fwest and Onbar which you know very well I was I think
[01:20:38] one I was like a couple months after you is when I got there and um and so just you know some
[01:20:45] augmentations I got to get out to theater a couple times during the work up for a month we were
[01:20:50] really aggressively augmenting guys forward as you recall so so you guys roll out to Iraq and what
[01:20:58] 2007 you take the team is going on deployment yeah it was um spring of O7 and this is this is when
[01:21:06] Jason Redmond's out with guys Redmond's when he got wounded and the other guys with him got wounded
[01:21:12] what was that deployment like from your perspective? That's where all my like it was
[01:21:20] night after night of stopping bad think people from doing bad things to good people you know we were
[01:21:24] literally like vampire hours one cycle of darkness operations you know as soon as the the the
[01:21:31] sun goes down that think about you know you very your operation do you leave the FoB at 1030 pm or 1145 pm you
[01:21:37] know it's like and and you remember these days really well but just one cycle of darkness you get back
[01:21:42] before sunrise you know you you lay down around six in the morning and you get back up at 10 a.m.
[01:21:47] and you rinse and repeat it was a really high up tempo and in Soto Fwest we had about I want to say
[01:21:52] about 15 or maybe 18 kind of outstations throughout the onbar province and so there's always something
[01:21:58] going on somewhere and I'll say I was I was really fortunate it was team 10 and team 7 came together
[01:22:04] we we so the CO team 7 was the CO of the the of onbar and I was the deputy commander and you know
[01:22:13] really privileged just a quick aside I one of my one of my favorite most memorable memorable
[01:22:18] buds instructors mark cramped and just beat the hell out of us and and and and used to do berm
[01:22:24] sprints and and just would get out there and lead from the front and I was just always so impressed
[01:22:28] with this man back in 93 when I went through training on this deployment in 2007 marks the command
[01:22:34] master chief for Sealtime 7 and one of my some of my greatest days when mark and I strap hang
[01:22:39] and go out on operations and literally the two of us you know two guys who didn't have to go on
[01:22:43] the operations going out every third night and it was just super meaningful for me and that's why
[01:22:48] you know as I I visited Coronado yesterday so one of the the way I started my workout was going
[01:22:56] to the very berm where where mark used to make us do those berm sprints and I just had some quiet
[01:23:03] time all by myself and just you know spoken my head to mark and you know just paid a huge tribute
[01:23:07] to him just yesterday and made myself super effing miserable and you know it's it's this is this is
[01:23:15] the weight that we all carry you know so for those you know mark marked by suicide about three
[01:23:19] weeks ago just before Easter this couple weeks ago yeah a guy that I never saw him without a smile on
[01:23:26] his face in my whole career never saw him without a smile on his face with a great attitude
[01:23:32] looking to help everybody just just just pure positivity and just shut the shocking I don't know
[01:23:41] how to explain it. Where you guys were you guys working with I Rackies was every element out there
[01:23:50] working with I Rackies. We were but you know as well as I do it was a lot of it was window dressing
[01:23:56] you know hey guys we got to start building these guys up we got to take you know six or 12
[01:24:01] I Rackies with a son the mission and it was early in the days of actually you know really
[01:24:06] committing to trying to build the Iraqi army. We tried we tried to build the Iraqi army and
[01:24:13] we would take them out and it was definitely the one of the biggest challenges was trying to work
[01:24:20] with the Iraqi army especially at that time and that's why it was very it was very rewarding when
[01:24:24] they pushed into the middle later in 2017, 1819 and the Iraqi did a lot of the fighting and they
[01:24:32] made incredible sacrifices which you know at the time when when I was there in 2006 you wouldn't
[01:24:38] anticipate them stepping up many of them stepping up at all you know there's if there was a few
[01:24:46] brave Iraqi soldiers for sure but a lot of them you would think about they're not going to be able to
[01:24:50] ever do this for themselves. Yeah well for us I mean so I got sprint that deployment started I think
[01:24:56] was March of O seven and I recall the peak of the insurgency by using the metric of attacks on
[01:25:01] Americans which we know is a flawed metric when you have more Americans or more attacks on Americans but
[01:25:05] the um but the there were the way to to kind of quantify it is my first 30 days in theater in
[01:25:12] Felusia we lost 35 Marines from the greater Felusia area and and so it was just night after night
[01:25:20] it we didn't we were in the real early innings of of being able to actually confidently take
[01:25:26] a lot of Iraqis out on operations and let them take the risk for their own nation.
[01:25:32] Where'd you bring back from that deployment for lessons learned? Wow that's a great question I think
[01:25:38] the the main thing is sustained operations the importance of of efficiency and making sure that that
[01:25:48] that you don't have seals or special forces doing things that don't take seals to do.
[01:25:53] You know when I grew up there was a little bit of an attitude in coming out of buds that's like
[01:25:58] I'm a seal you're not you know there's there's the seals and there's the non seals at the team and I
[01:26:03] think the you I know you live this way also the faster you learn that an integrated team
[01:26:09] is what it needs what it takes to be successful the faster your trajectories to success these are
[01:26:13] things that weren't learned quite as quickly in the early days but in that deployment all of the
[01:26:17] younger guys that that were able to hand off you know the Iraqis the the the the insurgents that they
[01:26:23] took off a target and hand them to somebody else to interrogate them and you know there's a lot of
[01:26:27] people that can ask questions in interrogate you don't have to be a seal to have that skill or
[01:26:31] intelligence analyst or whatever the case may be and so I think we got really good at saying what's the
[01:26:36] part of the job that just takes a seal to do what's that comparative advantage and then how do you
[01:26:41] hire people for everything else yeah you know I tell this to leaders all the time do you should
[01:26:48] be doing things that only you can do and if someone else can do it you're in a leadership position
[01:26:53] let's someone else do it and if there's no one else can do it cool then that's an indication that
[01:26:57] maybe you should start training someone to do that other thing that you only at this time can do
[01:27:03] because as long as you're the only person that can do a job that's what you're going to be doing
[01:27:06] that job and that's that should be your goal not to be doing the same thing forever and if you're
[01:27:12] doing that job that means you're looking down and in instead of being able to look up and out
[01:27:16] and see what the next horizon's going to be see what the next market's going to be see where we
[01:27:20] can maneuver to those are all things we need to look at um you could done with that deployment
[01:27:27] and this is this one you went to the White House yeah I finished three years basically of run
[01:27:31] and pretty hard as the exo so the the ops officer and then fleeted up as the exo at Sealteen
[01:27:37] 10 did you deploy again with the XO I did and where did you go on that oh sorry that was the
[01:27:42] Iraq deployment okay got that that was that was got it so so I did two deployments one as like the
[01:27:48] right out of grad school got it and then the exo's Sealteen Iraq deployment though um so come back
[01:27:55] and and for for everybody listening we're really good about succession planning and the Seals
[01:27:59] you know you once you're in the seat a seat for two or three years you're thinking how you have
[01:28:03] to get out of your seat and make room for the next guy and we do these diversity tours I was
[01:28:08] fortunate my first diversity tour was you know graduate school for two years in Cambridge mass
[01:28:14] and it was time for me to get out of my chair as the exo is Sealteen 10 and I applied for the White
[01:28:18] House Fellowship it's a non military program it is a great leadership public service program
[01:28:26] I threw you know that's a through my name and the hat it's quite an extensive application for us
[01:28:30] and ultimately was picked the their thousands of applicants the nation picks 14 to be White House
[01:28:36] Fellows every year and I got placed as the director for defense policy and strategy for Bush
[01:28:42] so literally report to the national security adviser who reports to the president like day seven
[01:28:46] I'm running my first meetings in the White House situation room it like the who is a lot of steep learning
[01:28:51] walking around pretending like you know how to you're wearing a washing in DC you know I'm like you
[01:28:56] know dumb team guy all of a sudden thrown in the policy world but you got speaking of
[01:29:01] getting this job in the selection process you got a cool thing in here that that talks about that a
[01:29:06] little bit going back to the book my interviewer sat me down and asked a bunch of questions a bunch
[01:29:11] of introductory questions then stared at me with intensity and said Mike what do you know about the
[01:29:16] start treaty I took a breath looked at him and said with dead pan seriousness I know how to spell it
[01:29:25] honestly I didn't know anything about our nation's nuclear treaties not a bit but what I did
[01:29:30] know and I told him this too was how to get the right people into a room and how to run the decision
[01:29:35] making process I knew how to figure out what motivated people how to get them to generate ideas
[01:29:42] how to cooperate and ultimately how to leave the room with the best possible outcome I wasn't
[01:29:48] afraid to admit that I didn't know a thing about nuclear policy and I think that's what got me the job
[01:29:55] being humble enough to admit that being humble enough to admit what you don't know but still
[01:30:00] confident enough to explain where you can add value is a balance that's often hard to strike
[01:30:06] but you need to recognize that it's a strength not a weakness to know what's beyond your knowledge
[01:30:11] or understanding at any point in time instead of pretending otherwise I walk into any room and
[01:30:17] always assume that people in it are smarter than I am faster than I am and more agile than I am
[01:30:22] that way I can never be wrong I never assume I have the idea I have an idea maybe it's the best one
[01:30:30] or maybe it's not but honestly it shouldn't even matter because our job in any room is to find
[01:30:35] the best answer for the problem we're working on no matter who's answer it is we have to listen to
[01:30:41] each other and really hear each other and the best way to do that is to walk into the room knowing
[01:30:47] there's no doubt that everyone in there has something useful to say so that's how you ended up with
[01:30:54] that job not by being this not by being the smartest guy about nuclear treaties but by saying hey
[01:31:00] look I don't know everything about that but I can help make a decision it's it's exactly what you
[01:31:05] talk about in extreme ownership it's it's the exact same way we've grown up in the seals and
[01:31:10] just espousing that for sure so you're working at the White House so what's this job what's the
[01:31:16] first job that you get when when you get there as a White House fellow what's the first job well
[01:31:21] the White House Fellowship is has kind of like three legs of the stool as an active White House
[01:31:26] fellow you're you're wearing a suit to work every day it's not a it's not a uniform job
[01:31:31] and so the program has places you in a full-time job throughout the year and some people opt
[01:31:38] into a job that's a little bit more a little bit more fellow E meaning you don't have really
[01:31:44] that many obligations you're there to learn you just get to observe and I'm like you know I
[01:31:48] want to really get in the mix you know so I had opportunities at department of commerce and I
[01:31:52] had opportunities at National Security Council and so I thought do I go deeper in something I
[01:31:56] know National Security do I go to commerce and learn something new and ultimately you can't pass up the
[01:32:02] the the role where you're going to be in the West Wing and be just in the mix with the nation's
[01:32:08] hardest problems and so that so so with that the Fellows also get together though a couple of times
[01:32:15] a week and you listen to you know cabinet secretaries the Vice President the the President and
[01:32:21] and so on and just ask them questions and you learn it's all off the record and 14 Fellows plus
[01:32:27] the President or 14 Fellows plus the Vice President and it's just a tremendous program but you're
[01:32:32] really if you pick a job that is a real a job with real responsibilities it's a hard year.
[01:32:40] When you see the news now and I mean I guess it's just like seeing like a movie about like a military
[01:32:46] movie how you and I will watch a military movie and it's like oh that would never have an oh that's
[01:32:50] another thing how is it for you now you look you look at what's happening in the White House and you
[01:32:56] know all these inner workings of what's going on behind the scenes what does it what it give us a
[01:33:00] little glimpse of what it's like going on behind the scenes. Yeah you know I think the real thing
[01:33:05] that is not sexy is process but process is what accelerates outcomes and so when you think about
[01:33:11] it there are 17 acres of the White House but there are but Jillians of different decisions that
[01:33:17] need to be made and so not everybody can bring their decision to the top of the house and so at my
[01:33:22] level I ran a certain meeting in the in the White House situation room and it's it's simple it's a
[01:33:29] binary outcome you know with it's either we agree in which case national policy is made or if not
[01:33:37] then we we sus out what is what are the different stakeholders think what is the department of
[01:33:42] state or department of defense or energy or the intel community think and and why can't we compromise
[01:33:47] and so by definition only the harder issues are bubbling up to then a deputies committee meeting where
[01:33:52] the number two runs it again binary outcome at a deputies committee meeting they either agree
[01:33:57] and make policy or not and then it becomes a principles committee meeting where you have the national
[01:34:01] security adviser chairing it and you've got the sec death the sec state all of the the number
[01:34:07] ones of all the departments and agencies around the table again binary outcome agree or not
[01:34:12] if agree great policy made if not that's going to the president and so by definition you've created
[01:34:18] a system where you get volume and flow but only but only the hardest things are making it to the top
[01:34:24] sometimes that runs well sometimes that doesn't run well and so as I sit back you know I think about
[01:34:31] you know how are things working are they working like they can or should as soon as decisions
[01:34:35] get made outside of that process you you you you actually diminish the probability of the best
[01:34:44] possible decision getting made because you know as well as I do if not everybody's at the table
[01:34:48] and you make a decision you've kind of alienated a bunch of stakeholders and you don't get
[01:34:52] everybody rolling in the same direction so that's kind of the lens that I look at at Washington DC
[01:34:57] and you know I think sometimes we're we're way more broken than we should be but other times
[01:35:02] I think you know it's it's you've seen the smartest mine solve some of the really hardest problems we have
[01:35:07] we have a lot to be proud of and we have a lot to work on in this in this nation so what which meeting
[01:35:13] is it that you would run you said well every of all these meetings which which one where you which
[01:35:18] level of meetings would you run so every administration changes the name a little bit just because
[01:35:24] they need to you know put the their own stamp on on what it's called but a policy coordinating committee
[01:35:29] was what it was called in the Bush administration as an example a PCC I think it was if I'm I'm
[01:35:34] I didn't even be wrong on that but a three three letter acronym that was you know something that
[01:35:38] changes but but but but the point is I'd be at the head of the table and you'd have basically
[01:35:43] assistant secretary level people or you know roughly two three star-ish generals from the
[01:35:50] from the Department of Defense you know just whoever this day called there was for the
[01:35:54] particular issue some people from under secretary defense and the policy shop sitting there and
[01:35:59] and look I'm not trying to glorify myself or be the president of fan club I'm a guy who ran the
[01:36:04] process but the thing is that's that's the role if you can run the process really well
[01:36:08] then it makes the nation run well you know and you know you know I've been often asked
[01:36:14] a little bit of a segue here but you know hey as we got out of Afghanistan what went wrong
[01:36:18] the thing that went wrong was policy process broke down who are we bringing home we didn't
[01:36:23] have a question answer to that question and so that caused a lot of chaos and a little a lot of
[01:36:27] people rush to an airport hoping to get onto a flight you know so anyways that that's just one
[01:36:33] example of the how policy the the engine and the machine should work how many hours a day
[01:36:39] are you working in those long hours that was you know I'd get in it you know I always get my
[01:36:45] workout in the morning I honestly got there you know 737 eight clocks and like that but but it was
[01:36:50] home at 10 o'clock on a lot of nights and then a lot of times you know paying attention to the
[01:36:56] blackberry I'll date myself oh 708 oh nine time frame and in fact I remember very well one night
[01:37:04] at three in the morning the blackberry just buzzing nonstop which usually didn't wake me up but it
[01:37:09] did this night and that's where the guy captain Richard Phillips got uh got uh taken hi it was
[01:37:14] hijacked on the mayor's gallabama and then I called a friend of mine Chris Demensick who was at
[01:37:21] at at team six and said hey man a million layers between you and me but you gotta go start
[01:37:26] looking at this right now and and you know hours later I'm in my suit in the basement of the
[01:37:31] Pentagon and the NMCC the National Military Command Center and just trying to work the problem and
[01:37:36] and ultimately ran that I ran that whole thing from the the national security council and
[01:37:42] one of the cooler things was you know running these meetings and you know President Obama
[01:37:46] would walk in and there's only about only about four or five six of us kind of running this this
[01:37:50] this situation and when the whole thing was done President Obama wrote a really nice note
[01:37:56] on White House Stationary Mike great job on the Somalia situation you made a family very
[01:38:02] happy at Easter Baroque. Yeah that's pretty cool. Yeah you have a little little section here
[01:38:08] that thought was pretty cool talking about that as this is going down you get these you get these
[01:38:13] uh text or whatever the the Blackberry's buzzing you say I called the Pentagon and a one star
[01:38:19] animal who is on duty told me that his guidance was not to prepare any options to deal with
[01:38:23] the situation. I responded with something I said only twice in my two years in my position at the
[01:38:29] National Security Council. quote Sir please take this as direction from the White House and quote
[01:38:37] I told him that the Department of Defense needed to prepare military options to rescue the crew
[01:38:41] and keep the pirate capers from selling Captain Phillips to Al Shabbab or another terrorist
[01:38:46] organization. The only question I said to the Admiral is how fast can you have options back to
[01:38:52] the National Security Council. By the afternoon my biggest worry had become real. The pirates had left
[01:38:57] the ship putting the crew putting the crew out of danger but they had taken Captain Phillips with them
[01:39:02] and were holding him hostage on a lifeboat heading toward shore fortunately by that point
[01:39:07] the Department of Defense had done what it does best and was giving the National Security Council
[01:39:11] and the President real options to address a really hard problem. My friend my friend Scott
[01:39:17] commander of the entire task force being deployed for the mission and Chris a leader of the
[01:39:22] tactical response itself arrived on scene halfway around the globe in a matter of hours after the
[01:39:27] mission was launched they inverted a crisis on Easter Sunday as they shot three pirates with three
[01:39:32] rounds in the dark and night while both their ship and the pirates lifeboat rocked up and down
[01:39:37] on the swells of the open ocean. Scott Chris and their snipers were the true heroes of that day.
[01:39:45] It's no different than third phase of Buds. Do you remember when we're thinking
[01:39:48] we're we're we're told think about what can go wrong on your mission.
[01:39:52] Yeah. Think forward what are all the things that can happen? So it's not like I was
[01:39:56] anybody special in the White House. I was just doing what I grew up with and the seal teams
[01:39:59] it's the same thing you or any other you know seal leader would have done which is hey this
[01:40:03] can actually go bad and here's how it can go bad and we're going to prepare for the worst case not
[01:40:07] the best case. Have you been to the UDTCL Museum and Fort Pierce Florida? Not lately but but I have
[01:40:12] they have they have the lifeboat there. Yeah. I don't know if you know that you have to
[01:40:15] welcome myself. Yeah that's pretty awesome. That's pretty awesome. Group doing pretty awesome stuff there.
[01:40:23] So that's so that's this White House fellow position and you that's an interesting
[01:40:28] going from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. What do you notice about those two leaders?
[01:40:34] First of all great governors of people and great leaders in different ways. You know the
[01:40:44] the press has a certain view and a certain lens on things and having been on the inside
[01:40:48] I'll just it's really obvious statement but just don't believe everything you see you read.
[01:40:53] So that was another great set of lessons that what came out of that two years in Washington DC
[01:40:57] for me the White House fellowship was supposed to only be a year but after that Captain Phillips
[01:41:01] thing President Obama said hey can you stay my whole administration. So I stayed at state a second
[01:41:05] year and continued in my role but you know the at really at the end of the day it was about
[01:41:16] about seeing an administration in year seven and a half is a lot different than an administration in
[01:41:21] minute one and so people can think about oh the right and the left. For sure that can there's
[01:41:26] of course policy differences not as many national security ironically once you get briefed up
[01:41:31] and you're really like in the T the TSS CI top secret sensitive apartment information of like
[01:41:36] what's happening in the world politics actually causes the the opinions to narrow a good bit because
[01:41:42] there's only so many solutions to the national security problems but the the thing I would say is
[01:41:48] setting aside right and left issues it's really an energy you know you're seeing the third or
[01:41:55] fourth person in the role at year seven and a half of an administration and you're seeing somebody
[01:41:58] else on minute one who's got incredible energy and they're just happy to be they're happy to be there.
[01:42:04] They might not know where the lights which is are for the first few weeks but but it's um but that's
[01:42:08] the beauty of the the permanent staff that that kind of works as part of the institution in DC
[01:42:17] and I've always felt you know people will complain that nothing ever changes
[01:42:22] well there's some positivity to things being hard to change in our government.
[01:42:28] Would you say that's an accurate assessment? A 300% like I don't want the government to be at the
[01:42:34] whim of whoever's in charge to just whip it one way or the other. No I think our nation's four
[01:42:39] fathers made it easy to kind of bump down the the the highway but not to get off the road.
[01:42:46] Awesome hard so you wrap that up and and while you're there is this when you figure out that
[01:42:51] you're gonna go to a sealed team to as the CEO. It is and you know it's handling Afghanistan policy as well
[01:42:56] and Scott Moore was the detailer the Scott that you just referred to in the in the previous
[01:43:01] passage and he said hey Mike you're gonna you're gonna take over sealed team too can you get yourself
[01:43:05] out of the White House like we can't pull you out like you're the only one who's gonna have to you know and of
[01:43:09] course that after two years I was ready for my next challenge and ultimately got permission to leave and
[01:43:16] I said I've got a great opportunity of and I knew I'd be deploying back to Afghanistan because
[01:43:23] as you well know the naval special war for community doesn't frequently get real estate to own
[01:43:29] and so we had southeast of Afghanistan and it was a great opportunity to not just take a
[01:43:35] sealed team overseas but to integrate a bunch of you know green berets a bunch of you know
[01:43:40] you know infantry from the army and just every single aspect of of what the what the nation's
[01:43:46] Department of Defense really is. Yeah what's that what a huge what a huge step for the community
[01:43:53] you know I was talking to animal Richards and and those guys that had this sort of vision that we
[01:43:59] should be deploying in that in that even with the idea that we should be deploying like that like
[01:44:05] as a team CEO deploying overseas like that was those guys came up with this idea and thankfully
[01:44:11] they came up with it before September 11th it they kind of it wasn't there yet I mean what was
[01:44:16] remember vision 2000 like that that was them trying to formulate this idea but yeah this is an
[01:44:22] example of how well that actually worked the opportunities that we're there. Yeah so so awesome
[01:44:29] and so exciting as a commander of a sealed team to be able to bring your whole team overseas to one
[01:44:33] to one effort and to make a meaningful impact. Yeah I mean for just so everybody knows for
[01:44:39] pretty much for the entire history the sealed teams it was going to be one season two z's
[01:44:44] a platoon going here maybe a couple platoon's going there and that was what they did in Vietnam it was
[01:44:50] like one or two platoons at a time deploying the sealed team commander was pack and coronado or back
[01:44:56] in Virginia Beach and they were just kind of watching and and then to have this idea that actually a
[01:45:02] sealed team the whole team should be able to deploy and then the team should be able to take on
[01:45:07] other assets and utilize those assets I mean it's we got to be very thankful for those senior
[01:45:12] leaders that came up with that plan for sure totally agree and I would say that you were you
[01:45:17] were definitely a benefactor of those things couldn't be couldn't be more accurate so so appreciative.
[01:45:24] So you show up at a team what was your attitude coming back to the team? Oh fired up man to
[01:45:28] like get out of the White House and we're in a suit every day for two years I was ready for some sand and
[01:45:34] in surf zone. You show up and the work up anything particular that you guys focused on during the
[01:45:41] work up. Well you know we of course knowing it's a real benefit to also know you're
[01:45:46] really preparing for Afghanistan and you get to not prepare for a bunch of different things and
[01:45:51] so we minimize you know hate to say this but we minimize diving we had to make hard decisions like
[01:45:56] we're not going to be diving in Afghanistan let's not go spend three weeks diving it just doesn't
[01:45:59] make sense and and yes it kind of moved us away from our roots a little bit but that was that was
[01:46:05] that's what commanders do is you make the those types of decisions and so for me I was really moved
[01:46:11] when I went overseas I went to Afghanistan to spend a couple weeks out in theater early on in command
[01:46:18] and you know I was there when we lost three seals in a helicopter crash out in Zabl province
[01:46:24] and of course terrible terrible incident you know being there really left of serious mark on me
[01:46:32] I mean of course you know I'd been exposed to everything already in my career but when you really
[01:46:36] feel that you feel that you are the owner of the risk of the whole team it's a different feeling
[01:46:43] there's a I used to think when I was second in charge of a seal team that it wouldn't really be
[01:46:48] that different to be overall in charge I couldn't have been more wrong so when I when a senior leadership
[01:46:55] team from from seal team to did our advanced reconnaissance if you will we came home on a
[01:47:03] meta-vac where I'll never forget there was a young man who was blown up in an IED who was really
[01:47:10] just being flown to Germany just so he could pass away in Germany next to his wife he was in a coma
[01:47:15] and I'll never forget like a you know six or eight hour flight just spending it next to this whole
[01:47:20] guy just my hand on him talking to him and just some army trooper who I don't even don't even know
[01:47:25] his name but like when you're really around that I got back to the states and I I already worked hard
[01:47:31] but I worked like it really stepped up the like this is real like I will bring all my guys home
[01:47:38] and and and we'll do everything we can yeah those we we experience that going getting to
[01:47:52] a body like as soon as we get there there's there's soldiers and Marines get killed just about
[01:47:56] every day and and we would go to those services whenever we could but it was out of the gate we were
[01:48:01] hating two three services in a row and it's a wake up called everybody to the recognition of
[01:48:09] what's going on out in that battlefield every single day which which you know you could hear it going
[01:48:13] on you could see it going on you could see vehicles you could see guys getting cows are backed out
[01:48:18] we were given blood whenever we could get blood like just that heavy reality of going to these scenarios
[01:48:25] um you guys you guys finish your work up you go on that that pre-depollement and now you got your
[01:48:36] platoon your your team over there your whole team never mind just the platoon now you got the whole
[01:48:41] team and it's not just your team that's you got SF guys you've got you've got an entire like force here
[01:48:48] it sounds like from the book you you had a little bit of a rough relationship with the conventional
[01:48:53] commander that was there initially with the one who was right next to me in Terran Coutt this guy just
[01:49:00] didn't want to get out and put his force at risk to go do great things and you know as well as I do
[01:49:06] you just you just don't respect people that don't want to do their job so uh that being said
[01:49:14] your your determined and you're gonna go make things happen you got some you got your you got your
[01:49:19] pltunes your teams your forces still out there still getting after it but you got to know when it's
[01:49:31] time to not get after it got to know when it's time to push back you got a thing here that's a
[01:49:37] really good lesson and it's a really good lesson and you do this in the book you counter it to the time
[01:49:41] with when the major told you in Kosovo was a Kosovo to stay out in the field and you go you know
[01:49:48] what we're just gonna stay out in the field like you told us you know well that that seems like the
[01:49:53] right call right now there's a little bit different here um going to the book to ensure civilian
[01:49:58] casualties where's limited is possible and that the innocent afghan civilians wouldn't turn against
[01:50:04] our forces the military set up a policy called boots on the ground battled damage assessment
[01:50:11] this meant that after every bomb we dropped we were we were required to physically go to the site
[01:50:18] to confirm that no civilians had been killed the theory a smart theory was that knowing we would have
[01:50:24] to acknowledge civilian casualties would make it less likely that there would be any civilian
[01:50:29] casualties a talented team of army green berets within my command had intelligence at one point
[01:50:35] that there were approximately 10 Taliban members gathered together at three in the morning
[01:50:41] in an area no civilian would ever go and certainly not at that time the team used
[01:50:47] surveillance techniques to view the site and we knew as a certainty that there were no civilians there
[01:50:54] they asked me for permission to drop a bomb from an unmanned aircraft and following the decision
[01:50:59] making process I'd put in place I granted it they went ahead and eight of the Taliban fighters
[01:51:06] were killed an army colonel from the commanding general staff in afghanistan called and asked
[01:51:12] my watch officer for our BDA report and my watch officer explained that we didn't have one that it
[01:51:18] was simply too much risk for not a good enough reason the road to the site was too dangerous to travel
[01:51:25] and we knew there were no civilians present and to ask anyone on my team to go down this isolated
[01:51:31] path in the middle of the night was an unnecessary risk to their lives and one it made no sense to take
[01:51:37] I got on the phone with the carnal and we went back and forth this is the policy but the policy
[01:51:44] in this case makes no sense to achieve an already known outcome I will not take unnecessary risk
[01:51:50] that my men will die there are consequences in the military for not following the orders of a
[01:51:55] superior truth is the lack of organizational flexibility is a huge problem for the military on the
[01:52:02] ground we were living a never agile enough kind of life but in terms of the larger hierarchy the
[01:52:07] structure had its weaknesses I could have been fired and sent home from the appointment as an
[01:52:13] in subordinate but in that moment I couldn't I couldn't just blindly follow the policy I had to
[01:52:20] act consistently with my values and make a judgment and subsequent decision that I was going to be
[01:52:26] able to live with if the worst happened the carnal said that since I wouldn't comply he was going
[01:52:33] to report my noncompliance to his boss the commanding general in Afghanistan and that he would
[01:52:38] ask his peer in charge of our Afghan partner force to order his men to unilaterally inspect the site
[01:52:45] instead I urged him not to do that but that decision was out of my hands 12 Afghan soldiers drove
[01:52:53] down that isolated road in three vehicles to make their assessment of the bomb site the first two
[01:52:59] trucks hit an IED and three V8 people in those two vehicles were killed with others seriously wounded
[01:53:06] soon after I flew by helicopter to the outstation where the green beret turned team was stationed
[01:53:11] sat with them and told them how incredibly proud I was of their amazing bravery their remarkable
[01:53:17] work they did night after danger snite it was one of the more emotional moments in my life
[01:53:22] as we started our meeting silence fell over the room and one of the guys on the team opened
[01:53:26] by looking me square in the eyes and quietly but resolutely thanking me he knew that the
[01:53:32] easier decision would have been caving to the pressure from above and deviating from my beliefs
[01:53:38] and we all knew that would have meant some of the men in this room would have died
[01:53:43] the green beret had no idea that his words made my throat almost closed as I choked up
[01:53:48] and how hard I had to fight off tears I was simply overwhelmed by the real life impact by the
[01:53:55] reality of the situation the overwhelming magnitude of these kind of decisions made under the
[01:54:00] pressure of intense nightly combat take a toll on people that's difficult to understand for those
[01:54:06] who haven't experienced it now with the benefit of several years of hindsight and the time
[01:54:11] to fully reflect on those past events I haven't even even greater belief in the importance of
[01:54:16] process your own process and a values based decision making process can no exaggeration save
[01:54:25] people's lives yeah um a point I like to bring up in situations like this is if you're in a
[01:54:42] leadership position and someone below you in the chain of command is refusing to do something
[01:54:49] or pushing back that hard you should probably listen to them and this is a situation I mean
[01:54:57] when as I was reading this as soon as I saw you know it go to oh he's gonna order someone else
[01:55:04] to address those I already knew the outcome because I know you're not pushing back
[01:55:08] for no reason you're pushing back for good reason it might be hard for people to understand
[01:55:17] that kind of pressure that you're under to kind of concede and just go with what you're being told
[01:55:21] to do there's times in life you gotta just put it on the table and say be ready for the
[01:55:26] outcome be ready to be fired you always hear pick your battles this was unquestionably one of them
[01:55:33] and this is why you are in command and this is why that's is everything that you've trained to do
[01:55:39] at that point in life is for that it's for a moment like that it's to have confidence in yourself
[01:55:44] that you're that you're right and to not take that unnecessary risk I still get you know emotional
[01:55:49] as you were reading it I haven't you know I you know I sit back and I can very tactily feel
[01:55:57] sitting in that room in the silence and me looking at all these guys and really knowing that
[01:56:03] that me having the backbone saved you know several of their lives and not not be able to look at
[01:56:09] which guy wasn't there or which guy you know it would have been but it's just the weight of combat
[01:56:15] gets really hard over time and and there's certain moments like that where you just say to yourself
[01:56:20] this shit is real how long was this deployment that was ten months that's a long deployment
[01:56:31] for seals it is what was there was was were we correcting a deployment cycle or something like that
[01:56:36] was it one of those things what happened we were just trying to stretch our forces more get more out of
[01:56:40] the forces we had so lengthen it out a bit and and then you could put more people on the battlefield
[01:56:45] and that it was not more complicated than that sometimes NSW's had to kind of make adjustments
[01:56:52] and extend someone and cut someone else short but it wasn't that hard we're just trying to
[01:56:57] know it was it was a line with the you know there were a line with the command leadership structure
[01:57:04] for the joint special operations task force throughout Afghanistan there were you know five
[01:57:09] different regions if you will so I was southeast but there was also you know obviously south and west
[01:57:14] and that was the cycle that the that the special operations community was on and so if the
[01:57:20] seals wanted to you know play the game and have the the battle space you just had to
[01:57:25] acquiesce and do the ten months you can't get off cycle with the rest of the rest of the force but
[01:57:29] yeah decisions like that very frequently and literally life and death what was your kind of
[01:57:38] battle rhythm your your personal battle rhythm during that deployment like what what time are you
[01:57:44] going to sleep what time are you waking up is there any rhythm jaco i had no rhythm you know i had
[01:57:48] a red light my ceiling that was anytime there was it was a tick troops in contact you know my
[01:57:53] my bedroom was about a thirty yard sprint down this like you know plywood palace kind of hallway
[01:57:59] to get to the the the the the the the operation center the the the antithesis of the the
[01:58:06] talking a rucksack that you talk about at the beginning you know we had the we had the plasma
[01:58:10] TVs and the terrain mapping and the unmanned aerial vehicle feeds and everything and and you know
[01:58:14] you you would just get the the the calls that you know you you hear the the crazy machine gun
[01:58:20] fire coming in over the over the satellite radio and you hear one of your your key leaders whose
[01:58:25] voices you know immediately even though they're not saying their name on the on the on the sat calm radio
[01:58:29] and they're just calmly saying what they need it's a it's a I need a 500 pound jdm drop like yesterday
[01:58:35] on this particular location and and and I was the one to make the decisions on when we drop
[01:58:41] bombs and when we didn't and when operations we went on what we didn't and so because I had I don't
[01:58:46] know is roughly 25 different outstations throughout the southeast and sometimes literally I think
[01:58:50] the five six seven different elements in a ticket a time I was I was just I was just on
[01:58:57] did you were you the approval for yeah I was the approval for air yeah
[01:59:02] yeah so you're busy yeah I mean we I don't know I don't think I've ever said this number
[01:59:08] publicly but it's it's not you know a secret but we had over 1100 air to ground drops over 10
[01:59:15] months and I'm in proud to say we didn't harm anybody we shouldn't harm there were times that we
[01:59:19] that we said no it wasn't a lot but but you know the mostly the leadership in the field new
[01:59:25] when not to ask for something but occasionally there were times it came up when when I said no and
[01:59:29] I just wasn't comfortable with something and so the the other thing that's interesting when
[01:59:34] you ask about the battle rhythm though is that it was also important to me to go out on some
[01:59:38] of the operations with the guys and I didn't go out quite as frequently as I did in Iraq but I
[01:59:42] still got out maybe once a week or something like that and I didn't do that in the beginning of
[01:59:47] the deployment because I wanted is the the staff to kind of see the the judgment the decision making
[01:59:52] etc but I did an incredible excel rocky Russell and who I would super supreme confidence in so I
[01:59:59] I'd go out on an operation and be with the the the Afghan commandos in a seal platoon for I don't know
[02:00:04] a day and a half two days at times and that's a that's a tough decision also because as soon as you
[02:00:09] swing and go on one operation with one unit dude you don't know what's happening with the other 24
[02:00:16] so that takes an element of like confidence and trust but of course as you know it makes you a
[02:00:20] better leader because it helps you understand and maintain perspective and frankly just to share
[02:00:24] the same risk as the guys you know and and as of whatever I'm 51 now is a 41-ish year old
[02:00:30] seal team commander you know that deployment we got shot at and rocketed and the the I cut one of
[02:00:37] my guys legs off on that deployment and just wanted to have this. There was somebody in an IED who
[02:00:45] was blown up and we had a mass casualty situation and so you know it was it was we had you know doctors
[02:00:52] but they were busy and you know I was kind of under it wasn't like I did it on my own the doctor
[02:00:56] kind of said hey okay do this do this do this and cut this and you know go and and because it was a
[02:01:01] it was an all hands on deck kind of thing in the in our in our in our headquarters at the
[02:01:08] it was kind of like the mass unit if you will you know oh so you had you had casualties come into your
[02:01:14] location yep and it was a mass casualty yeah it was yeah and so you were there freaking they were like
[02:01:21] scrubbed up getting it getting it on I don't even think we scrubbed it I mean we you know we we did
[02:01:27] it I don't remember perfectly but I just remember we didn't I met this guy at the helicopter who
[02:01:32] had three turnicots on and one of them was had come loose and yet arterial bleeding coming from
[02:01:38] the middle of his leg that was missing and I had to you know reach in and hold pressure on arterial
[02:01:43] bleeder and take him from the helicopter and get him all the way into the get him all the way into
[02:01:47] the medical unit and there was another guy who was I mean blown up beyond recognition but I mean
[02:01:53] I knew who was of course but I mean it was just it was really really bad and and then it was just
[02:01:59] there were only a handful of seals in the in the the headquarters at the moment and you know
[02:02:05] the the tick was gone and so it was that was taken care of and so it was just all hands on deck
[02:02:10] and dealing with the medical situation and that was one night but there were several nights where
[02:02:14] we had overwhelming number of of people who were shot up or blown up that we were taking care of
[02:02:23] but somehow from your seal team from seal team too you guys made it through that deployment
[02:02:28] without losing anyone no one was killed in action yeah
[02:02:31] any other any other thing to wrap up on that deployment I think it's really the main it really is
[02:02:43] the inexplicable pace and and dedication that our entire entire department of defense has
[02:02:55] is is really remarkable you know it's you just get humbled every day to see how hard people
[02:03:01] work in the u.s. your conditions and you know both seals and green braise and and non-seals
[02:03:08] and non-green braise out in these hinterlands literally just not showering for months on and
[02:03:14] only eating the food that helicopters drop into them and just really putting country and others
[02:03:20] before self I just was constantly humbled to to be part of an organization with such great
[02:03:27] great Americans so you get home from that deployment and I'm gonna go to the book here
[02:03:41] I'd been home from Afghanistan just for just a few weeks when I found out that my replacement
[02:03:47] as commander of the special operations task force who had taken over my team
[02:03:54] finished when my team finished its deployment had decided to take his own life shooting himself
[02:03:59] with his pistol in his room in the bed I had slept in for the previous 10 months
[02:04:06] I was shocked and devastated he and I were good friends former roommates but classmates 20 years earlier
[02:04:13] we had come up the ranks together before we each got married and started our families we shared a
[02:04:20] house in Virginia Beach for three years we were inseparable in those days we had bonded over
[02:04:27] our mutual frustration at the pull-up bar during buds training one Saturday morning after we both failed
[02:04:33] the day before to come him anywhere close to matching the 15 to 20 pull-ups our fellow trainees were
[02:04:39] able to do we decided to go find a pull-up bar to practice on far away from the buds compound
[02:04:44] we're no one would stumble upon us despite a full night's sleep we were still struggling
[02:04:48] as we fought as we each fought through our fourth pull-up I can still see his face and here the
[02:04:54] chuckle in his voice as he turned to me and said world's finest right here he was loyal
[02:05:01] genuine a man who could find humor in absolutely anything another time in training we were so
[02:05:07] cold on a boat ride back to the compound after an icy swim that we found ourselves fighting
[02:05:12] over where to place one rubber fin that was shielding very small parts of us from the 49 winds
[02:05:19] there we were two grown adults seal trainees fighting over a tiny rubber fin to help make us a tiny bit
[02:05:27] warmer and we and just a little drop less miserable we stopped for a moment and realized what we
[02:05:33] were fighting over and we both just broke out in hysterical laughter it seemed like we were always laughing
[02:05:40] back then when I was deployed he would check in on my family and when he was deployed I would check
[02:05:46] in on his I would say that I trusted him with my life except that it was so much more than that
[02:05:52] as seals we have no choice but to trust everyone on our team with our life every minute of
[02:05:58] every day on the battlefield but when you bond with someone it's not so much about trusting them
[02:06:04] with your life it's about wanting them to be there in the trenches with you feeling better
[02:06:09] because you know they're right alongside you he was so much more than a fellow seal he was a friend
[02:06:15] a teammate a brother a shiny example of the bravery a human being can exhibit
[02:06:30] you know you talk about the pressure and the pace and the battle rhythm or lack of rhythm
[02:06:52] and the lives it's stake and it's it's it's hard to describe what that feels like
[02:07:06] and it's hard to it's hard to describe what it feels like I guess it's all I can say
[02:07:13] but man this was this was just a travesty and a shock
[02:07:17] to have the the commander on the ground who would just take in your place someone you grew up
[02:07:26] within the team somebody I was at team two with I mean just freaking good good mug
[02:07:31] it's it's so hard to understand yeah this one hurt they all hurt some of them hit closer to home
[02:07:48] than others you know as I know you've experienced too and you know this is this is the
[02:07:54] thing I was talking about and not describing well enough before but it's the
[02:07:59] it's the weight that people carry it's the it's the not not always knowing the weight that
[02:08:09] people carry and yeah this that was a tough one for me you talk a little bit in the book
[02:08:20] you know I mean obviously we all have the we all go through the you know what could I have
[02:08:25] done differently maybe I could have said this or seen that or done this or done that
[02:08:31] is there anything as you look back is there any pattern did you have any indication
[02:08:37] I mean you did a turnover I was looking um I was looking at there's an article in the New York
[02:08:43] times about this and there's a there's a there's a situation that you describe in the book where
[02:08:48] I guess the local afghans had gifted you some kind of a you know ceremonial head garment
[02:08:55] of some kind and he was with you and they kind of ceremonially gave him as well the same thing and
[02:09:01] and it's it's it's I don't know if you've seen this I'm sure you have but there's so you
[02:09:05] write about that in the book and there's a picture in the New York Times of of you in that there's
[02:09:10] the picture of when that happened and it for me was very tough to look at because I read it and I kind
[02:09:15] of imagined it and you know then then then I then I go on the New York Times I'm reading this article
[02:09:20] and I think oh there's the picture there's exactly what Mike was talking about um is there anything
[02:09:26] that you look at that you think we need to do a better job of looking out out for?
[02:09:33] Yeah well I mean let's start that with me right I think that you know we've grown up saying
[02:09:39] look we can always go blame the world at everything but guys like you and me grow up starting with
[02:09:45] ourselves and say what could I have done better and so when I look back at at this particular
[02:09:50] situation I've recalled very vividly on a Friday afternoon to a clock in the afternoon or so at a
[02:09:55] team picking up the red line and trying to dial him and just check on him and see how he's doing
[02:10:02] and there was a new policy where you needed a four digit pin or something like that and I was like
[02:10:06] oh the convict guys have already gone home I'm not going to bug them on a Friday afternoon and
[02:10:09] make them make my phone work I'll just call call overseas on Monday. Well that Saturday is when
[02:10:15] when he took his own life and I sometimes look back and say you know did I did I did I do enough and I
[02:10:22] certainly wrestle with that and it leads me to a lesson that I talk about which is
[02:10:29] not seeing intrusive as a bad thing you know it's it's a good thing to be intrusive in people's lives
[02:10:35] and to ask the question of like hey really how are you really doing have you ever considered
[02:10:41] harm to self is a hard question to ask and it's a little bit embarrassing sometimes to ask it
[02:10:47] but I'll take 99 embarrassing for the one yes I miss that here and I won't miss that again and since then
[02:10:54] since that happened I've had plenty of yeses where I've been able to to step in and it helped
[02:11:01] I certainly wish I could have helped more in the past. When you guys are doing a turnover the turnover
[02:11:08] I mean just to to so I really understand this is like just the commander of the team. It's the
[02:11:13] commander of team but also the turnover this is for a lack of a better word this is like the most intimate
[02:11:20] intellectual exchange you're gonna have with another human being in your life hey I've been on the ground
[02:11:25] I've been fighting these troops we've been at war I'm gonna give you everything I can to help you do the
[02:11:33] job I mean this is as close as you're gonna intellectually transfer information between two people
[02:11:40] and then plus on top of that you guys are brothers from buds and I mean as you're doing this is it is there
[02:11:48] any there's nothing there's no you know Jaco have never said this publicly the there's just one
[02:11:54] shred of little thing when I play back in my mind you know we didn't lose any Americans and in my last
[02:11:59] you know session with the leadership I celebrated that but the incoming team was also there and
[02:12:09] my friend you know pulled me aside afterwards and said hey that was you know really rough for us to
[02:12:14] set the bar to expect that we're not gonna lose anybody and and it turns out that that the leader
[02:12:21] from the East Coast seal teams had also pulled my friend aside and said hey listen just do the same
[02:12:28] thing Mike did just bring everybody home and and he had lost four guys in his first month and so I think that
[02:12:33] pressure of losing people and you know it's it's it just it didn't it didn't add up so I mean I don't say
[02:12:40] that's the cause but it's certainly unquestionably a contributor.
[02:12:48] Yeah yeah I actually remember turning over with the guys that took over for us in a
[02:12:55] modding I told them well because I had lost guys and I'm like it was a whole I remember thinking
[02:13:00] myself am I gonna say this yes I am you guys are gonna take casualties like you there's a 100
[02:13:06] percent chance you're gonna take casualties there's a 100 percent certainty that you're gonna take
[02:13:10] casualties and I mean I've talked to guys since then that were in that group then that task
[02:13:18] unit that relieved us and they were like that was the wake up call for them was holy shit like
[02:13:23] we got our we got the seal team commander of the task unit telling us we are a 100 percent
[02:13:28] certain gonna take casualties yeah but all you can do is look at wake up calls as fuel for
[02:13:38] improvement in the future yeah right and and that's how we you know both of us live our lives
[02:13:42] this way now is we do carry inexplicable weight and it's we're just here to make everybody
[02:13:47] else's lives better and and and what do we how do we make the the families who've
[02:13:52] born the cost lighter and better and how do we help the nation better learning from the things
[02:13:58] that we've learned you want one of the really heartbreaking things in the book that you write
[02:14:04] about was you're you're going to I guess were you part of the k-co team no I was home um you know
[02:14:12] on post-applement leave but but in in Virginia Beach and so being such a family friend we were we were
[02:14:17] of course you know we were one of some of the few in the house yeah and you're talking about
[02:14:22] on your way to let you know his wife and his family know what had happened you you you you
[02:14:28] call this a child psychologist and you you asked uh you said do we tell his daughter now the truth
[02:14:33] of what happened or do we wait until she's older so she can better understand it and the
[02:14:37] psychologist says you have no choice but to tell the truth now tough stuff I mean I'll never
[02:14:45] forget being in the house with my wife and daughter and I mean this merits a super quick story it's
[02:14:52] you know when I was overseas of course their family was checking on my wife and daughter and
[02:14:58] one of the things before I came home it was that my daughter made uh deployment box that had
[02:15:04] 10 months worth of note cards written out to her friend my my friends daughter and they said things like
[02:15:12] when you miss your dad going to his closet take out a shirt of his put it on and pretend it's a hug
[02:15:18] you know notes like that they say here's how you're gonna get through the deployment and so then
[02:15:22] you know just a month later or so me being there and seeing the deployment box that she had
[02:15:28] told me about which neither my wife nor I gave her the direction to go do that that was her
[02:15:32] entirely on her own and um sometimes you know the the the the kids and the wives and the spouses
[02:15:37] never get enough credit for for as strong as they are but being in that room and I'll still never
[02:15:43] forget her screams you know he said he'd come home and and then more importantly like my daughter
[02:15:49] being there and and consoling her friend who had just lost her dad it's these are these are
[02:15:54] weighty things man make sure you grow up fast
[02:15:58] how much longer after that did you decide you're gonna you're gonna retire
[02:16:08] I was really close at that point I was weighing it pros and cons in my head that's not what
[02:16:15] influenced me in any way I um I made I actually frankly can't recall if it was how soon after
[02:16:22] that I made the decision but you know it ultimately was about continuing to make a difference and
[02:16:28] and I was I was at year 20 and after being commanding off sort of a team I just felt like there's
[02:16:33] so much more to do in life and while it's awesome to be a seal and I'd already been privileged
[02:16:38] to run meetings in the situation room and like what am I gonna do like another six years and
[02:16:42] return to attend the meetings that I've already run you know so I was like let me just pivot and go
[02:16:47] spend a chapter of my life in the in the private sector which I'm 10 years into now and have been
[02:16:52] really fortunate and learn a ton and and at some point in my life I'll return in some capacity to
[02:17:00] serve this nation and I'm not sure what what former fashion that will take I really have no idea
[02:17:04] I just know that when you're open to service it will find you and the ways we serve now are genuinely
[02:17:10] doing things like writing books and trying to make a difference for gold star communities and
[02:17:13] just continuing to elevate the conversation. How was your transition when you retired? I know people
[02:17:21] asked me that time that question a lot and and I always give the advice of like hey when you get out
[02:17:28] you need a new mission because you've been on mission of super hyper focused on this one thing
[02:17:33] for your whole life for everything from how to freaking put your web gear together in the most
[02:17:38] efficient ways your magazines are on the right place for an off hand draw like all those little
[02:17:42] things that we are focused on for 20 years and then you get you go up through the ranks we're
[02:17:47] now you're focused on how can my platoon do this better how can my task do this better for you
[02:17:50] it's how can I do this better for my team how can I better support them and then one day in one
[02:17:56] day you clean out your locker your a civilian and I always tell guys hey man you gotta find a new
[02:18:02] mission and it sounds like you got all mission pretty quick when you got out did you did you already
[02:18:07] have that did you already have job set up when you retired yeah I did I was again I've been
[02:18:14] very fortunate because I had exposure that that few people are privileged to have whether it was
[02:18:18] the White House Fellows program or two years of of a pretty reputable graduate school and so you
[02:18:24] know I I didn't know what I would do when I made the decision to retire but I I had a lot of
[02:18:32] conversations to try to go find that thing I had great mentors and in ultimately you know had
[02:18:39] had offers at Goldman Sachs and at JPMorgan and at Bridgewater the hedge fund where I ultimately
[02:18:44] went good good really good front of mine Dave McCormack who actually just ran for Senate in Pennsylvania
[02:18:50] was in the Bush administration the the Treasury wall I was at the National Security Council
[02:18:54] but Dave is a a a good really good human and really good friend and just asked him for some advice and
[02:19:00] and and he ultimately created another option that I wasn't trying to create and I jumped into
[02:19:07] to Bridgewater with him and in a couple of other really great leaders and learned to turn there
[02:19:11] and that was my first chapter so look it's really it can when you look in the rear view mirror
[02:19:17] with transition you can say oh it must have been really easy no way man it's super freaking hard
[02:19:22] like because we're all planners you know in the teams we're not like we're not letting life just
[02:19:27] happen to us we're planning life and this is an element of time when you're like it takes patience
[02:19:32] to for the plan to come together it's not like you can plan harder and create things to happen
[02:19:38] in 12 hours and and man I'm bad at a lot of things but patience is definitely one of my weeks
[02:19:43] weeks spots you have this this section which I think kind of wraps up some of your transition here
[02:19:51] you say this I hear the question all the time how did you manage to move from the military to the
[02:19:55] government to the private sector when those arenas are so different from each other my answer is
[02:20:01] to premise the challenge or challenge the premise of this question of course there are different
[02:20:06] different details different specifics but the truth is in my experience all high stakes organizations
[02:20:11] and all high stakes decisions are pretty much the same the concrete knowledge you need is the
[02:20:18] easy part anyone can learn that but the details don't matter if you don't have the right process
[02:20:24] and if you do have the right process you can go anywhere it's why strong leaders are able to jump
[02:20:28] from one industry to another one organization to another so that's what you did apply to your
[02:20:36] your decision making process your your lessons learned from the military you applied to the
[02:20:42] government sector I guess and then to the to the civilian sector so you did bridge water for a few
[02:20:49] years and then you ended up actually entering the another business right with with cognizant
[02:20:56] yep and then what was that experience like well first all bridge water is a phenomenal place four
[02:21:01] years it is it is a crucible of of of talent that is all trying to be more talented and do great
[02:21:09] things in in markets and in ultimately how to manage the company so that they can outperform in
[02:21:13] markets and the mission is very simply to figure out what's going on in the world and how to
[02:21:18] how to capitalize on that for for their own investors you know police retirements and teacher
[02:21:25] retirements and you know sovereign wealth funds and things like that so I like the mission of
[02:21:30] figure out what's going on in the world right it's a large thing yeah it was so that they do quite well
[02:21:36] over their bridge water very well and and so but but after you know four years or so three and
[02:21:42] half four years I was ready to pivot and a really good front of mine started a company called
[02:21:46] cognizant he spun them out of uh done in Brad Street twenty-fut at the time twenty-five years ago
[02:21:51] and twenty-five years prior and then they had an activist investor take a billion six position
[02:21:56] in the stock and start agitating and and I just call them and said hey man here's what you need
[02:21:59] to be thinking about just this this and this and that the other thing and you might just come
[02:22:03] help me come help me run the company and I was like I'd never been at a large public company and I was like
[02:22:07] look let me bet on myself this is risky I'm not sure I'm gonna be great at this but I'm gonna go
[02:22:12] figure it out and it it's what you just read in the book and and honestly I think I did very well there
[02:22:17] and and I've continued to you know pivot I'm now running global operations and transformation and
[02:22:25] and uh security and real estate etc for for VMware it's a large software company and with with
[02:22:34] very public news right now about a potential acquisition or an acquisition again very public
[02:22:39] knowledge and and VMware is an awesome organization in so many different ways and and just bringing
[02:22:44] the same exact you know skill set if you will to VMware but with some of the knowledge that you
[02:22:51] that I've learned along the way the ten years so it's a combination of specific knowledge but also
[02:22:56] you know the the management skill of seeing forests and trees but definitely both.
[02:23:02] Yeah we've been my company excellent funds been working with VMware we've worked with VMware
[02:23:07] decent amount but the fun thing is for me the first time I worked with him was telling him hey
[02:23:12] I used to carry VMware stuff in the field and hook it up to my satellite radio and make
[02:23:19] columns and they were all pretty stoked and they got a good veteran community there really
[02:23:22] VMware so awesome company. Well you know and I forgot to mention the I know that the team thought
[02:23:30] incredibly highly of your and and Eshelon front's leadership and instruction and motivation and
[02:23:37] inspiration everything that you are that you espouse has made a huge positive impact on people and
[02:23:42] whenever that that finished up I think it was about a week ago or something like one of them was
[02:23:46] the most recent was about a week ago I got eat multiple emails saying hey this guy's awesome
[02:23:50] everything from like people who know that we know each other and others like hey you ever heard of this
[02:23:54] willing guy you know like yeah yeah I heard of right on so you got that going on in the
[02:24:00] Civilian sector that that chief digital transformation officer and at the me in the meantime you
[02:24:06] know you mentioned giving back and you are giving back and one of the things that you're doing
[02:24:13] which is incredible is this book that we've been reading through today this book which is called
[02:24:18] Never Enough you've taken all the profits from this book all the profits from this book and you are
[02:24:26] very specifically giving the profits to gold star families and very specifically in order to pay off
[02:24:35] their mortgages and this is you know home ownership is not only the American dream but it's also
[02:24:43] the American nightmare when you've got a mortgage to pay or when you don't have a place to live
[02:24:48] free if that comes under pressure there's just there's just a you know your home is your castle
[02:24:54] and so this idea and I'm not sure quite how you can't you probably can't have a conclusion the way
[02:24:58] I just spoke through which is listen if there's anything we could give a gold star family the best
[02:25:04] thing we can give them in terms of security and peace of mind is to say hey you can you don't have
[02:25:11] to worry about where you're going to live forever and so that's what you're doing with this and you
[02:25:16] know it's funny I was asking you well like is there a website we can put out or anything you're like
[02:25:20] nope it's not it's it's you're you're you even want to spend money on a website you you're like
[02:25:25] a hundred percent it all goes to buying these houses for gold star families and I personally know
[02:25:32] some of the people that you've done this for again I can't imagine a better gift to give a gold star
[02:25:38] family then the absolute peace of mind of here's a place for you to live and security for the
[02:25:44] rest of your life how did you get to that how did you get to that goal well it's thanks for sharing
[02:25:50] that I really appreciate that because that is really you know multiple goals with never enough one
[02:25:54] is to elevate the conversation but a very very tangible one is to literally pay off more pages like
[02:25:59] you describe and just from seeing firsthand the situations where you know the the government doesn't
[02:26:05] really cover nearly as much as as you would expect in in a situation where there's somebody killed
[02:26:11] an action or who dies by suicide and I just felt like there's a gap in the community there's plenty
[02:26:18] of fishing trips and mental health about like all very very good things but the most fundamental
[02:26:24] thing is for these families not to feel the pressure of needing to move from the communities that
[02:26:29] have hugged them for the previous one or 15 years of their lives and if you could you imagine being
[02:26:36] a gold star widow all of a sudden not that any of none of them make that choice nobody wants that
[02:26:41] title and and being pressure to leave your community like it's unfathomable to me and so I
[02:26:48] just really was fired up that we don't do more and so at this point we very very confidentially
[02:26:54] paid off six mortgages and I'm on a drive to do more and ultimately alleviate this burden for
[02:27:01] for really every one of these families that has experienced this and I wish we could wave
[02:27:05] a magic wand and do all of them all at once but look it's it's it's it's really what drives me
[02:27:12] in one of the ways that that I try to not I mean that I am giving back and if people want to help
[02:27:18] that cause I was real simple going by this book that's just that's how you help this cause hey look
[02:27:23] when you get awesome lessons cool we get some cool stories yes you will but you will you'll be
[02:27:28] able to help out these gold star families so freaking outstanding you're also you're also involved
[02:27:34] with the national Medal of Honor Museum so so tell me what's going on with that yeah great we
[02:27:39] I'm on the board of a museum that the nation hasn't built so about four years ago I got asked to
[02:27:46] give somebody some advice there was something that was a small local effort in South Carolina
[02:27:50] long story short they this person asked me to join the board I said you know like all of us are
[02:27:56] too busy don't have time excuse blah blah blah blah blah and and then for personal reasons
[02:28:03] after sharing a story back and forth I said okay you've got me I'll join the board on one condition
[02:28:09] we get to fire everybody who's on the board and we're gonna make this thing go national
[02:28:13] so we raised at this point a hundred and sixty five million dollars we've got about sixty
[02:28:18] million more to go we took us three years but we worked through a concept to city selection
[02:28:23] New York City offered us governor's island and Washington DC offered us a spot in the mall
[02:28:29] we ultimately did a bake-off between those plus Denver in our LinkedIn Texas we chose our
[02:28:34] LinkedIn Texas we're building the museum right next to AT&T Stadium we've got an incredible board
[02:28:39] we've got all of the ex presidents with the exception of of president Trump mostly from a timing
[02:28:44] perspective you know we're we're we have great momentum this is irreversible at this point
[02:28:51] of course not surprisingly the the CEO of the museum is my swim buddy that we've talked about
[02:28:56] Chris Cassidy he's a phenomenal American you know seal astronaut and now CEO of this museum
[02:29:02] and what we're really doing with this is we're on a mission to inspire America we will we will
[02:29:08] take the lessons that the metal of honor recipients have that that they espouse the character
[02:29:15] the values etc and and talk about that to make the nation greater and and the vision is for
[02:29:21] you know some young kid to see the brits LeBinsky and what he did and learn about his
[02:29:26] character values or you know strike brits name and replace it with any recipient and say
[02:29:31] how do I you know I'm seeing this little third third grade situation develop a I see a girl
[02:29:36] being bullied on the school yard how do I step in and go make this situation right that is what we
[02:29:42] we want to stop that or school shootings or or having the bravery the courage to step in during
[02:29:48] a school shooting and and stop the shooting from happening or just to make the make our nation
[02:29:52] stronger and better and the the premise is really to inspire America we will open in about a year and a
[02:29:59] half what we haven't to completely determine our opening date but this will be one of the nations
[02:30:04] if not them I should say the the premier museum for the nation that will tell the stories of the
[02:30:10] roughly 3500 recipients and 64 living recipients many of them many of whom you personally know and
[02:30:18] and just get their stories out there yeah that's that's just awesome I mean just the idea of
[02:30:24] giving people examples to read about and to be introduced to that they can try and follow in their
[02:30:31] footsteps at least be inspired by and yeah that's just that's just phenomenal I mean while
[02:30:38] I look on maybe a couple you I guess it was maybe a year and a half two years ago you you
[02:30:42] okay show me a text hey you know we're looking for a CEO of this of this the metal vanner
[02:30:49] museum thing if you know anybody let me know and I was like I racked my brain a little bit
[02:30:53] mom I definitely couldn't give you I couldn't have given you a candidate to do this crispy
[02:30:57] so that's that's that's an awesome guy to to to take the to take the lead on that and so
[02:31:03] did they did they start construction already yes was that when you were you doing the ground
[02:31:08] breaking ceremony when we were both yes pass weeks right this each other in the hotel by whatever
[02:31:13] an hour or something March 25th is Congressional Medal of Honor Day that's the day we broke
[02:31:17] around we had president Bush we had just we we had a lot like 17 or 18 of the living recipients there
[02:31:25] and yes that's when we we came like minutes from linking up with each other well that's awesome
[02:31:31] um does that bring us up to date on your life right now yeah absolutely I mean look I
[02:31:40] life is busy I can't sit still just like you can't it's all about giving back and and I really
[02:31:45] do appreciate for everybody out there just never pushing never enough I promise you it's it won't
[02:31:51] disappoint it's it's it's not been extreme ownership and therefore you can buy it a lot cheaper on Amazon
[02:31:57] so you but really do you appreciate that great support and if people people want to find you
[02:32:04] you have a website which is this is my case dot com you have Instagram which is this is dot my case
[02:32:13] you have Twitter which is this is my case and Facebook the real my case yeah so I don't know
[02:32:19] about you social media was foreign to me about a year ago but you know it's like like the disconfort
[02:32:25] leaning into discomfort it's it's it's part of the new the new us yeah it's definitely a very strange
[02:32:32] thing to go from zero social media and also being anti social media which we were absolutely
[02:32:39] had to be well you kidding me um but yeah it was I guess it was a combination it was it was
[02:32:47] life babbins wife Jenna who was like you got to get on social media I'm like no I think
[02:32:54] life life it makes me now you know where I'm like no we don't need it not doing it and then Jamie
[02:33:00] who who's the CEO of one of my companies is like you should really do this I'm like I don't think
[02:33:06] we need to and then Tim Ferris who said dude you better get on Twitter or your nitty it I was like
[02:33:10] all right time there's a bunch of people that are telling me to do this what's real I have to say
[02:33:15] you know it's really funny is of course I follow you and when you show the 404 30 wakeups
[02:33:20] I keep saying to myself I'm gonna get the exact same watch and set it for one minute earlier
[02:33:24] than you and take my picture and just show that my I'm a minute earlier than you every single
[02:33:28] morning but I just haven't had the energy to actually pull it off. Yeah there's there's been
[02:33:31] some campaigns on that I know Andy's dump for a while was he forget if he was waking up earlier
[02:33:37] or he was doing something something like that there's also a whole host to people that
[02:33:41] you know show their their watch at 1042 in front of a box of donuts and you know just got after it
[02:33:48] but yeah so that's where the people can find you echo you got any questions oh yeah real quick
[02:33:53] the no the fellowship program or your job at the White House how often do you see the president
[02:33:59] it depends on what role you're in the fellows get together a couple times during the year with the
[02:34:05] president and and have these candid off the record conversations and then if you're in a role
[02:34:12] like I was at the National Security Council sometimes it was three times in a week and then
[02:34:16] it'd be a month without seeing the president so a little bit varied depending on what was going on
[02:34:20] in the world. That's your rush yep that was easy one that's throwing softballs looking for the
[02:34:27] high and inside fastball from my control. That's just the only thing that you can eat what you'll
[02:34:31] know. Sorry for taking it easy for me. Awesome. Mike any closing thoughts? No just extreme appreciation
[02:34:39] I think that's maybe the next extreme appreciation besides extreme ownership but just so appreciate
[02:34:46] you and and all of our our community and the the nation for helping elevate the conversation
[02:34:53] and just recognizing that you know while we were in the service we're ultimately all here to
[02:34:57] serve each other and it takes different forms and fashions and I just encourage people to get off
[02:35:01] the sideline and serve in whatever way makes the most sense to everybody listening and just
[02:35:06] great appreciation for being here. Jocco it's a real um special day for me to be able to be
[02:35:12] shocking when we go from you know water polo and kill in each other are you killing me in the
[02:35:16] pool and then and this many years later seeing where we both are in life it's it's fun.
[02:35:21] Kind of crazy man well speaking of service thanks for your service to the country
[02:35:27] to the nation to the teams for what you've for what you've done in your past and for what you're
[02:35:34] doing today not only the civilian sector but more important for what you're doing today to take
[02:35:38] care of the families of our fallen teammates so thanks for coming out man sorry to because
[02:35:43] so while to get this together but appreciate it man. All good brothers my pleasure thank you Jocco
[02:35:49] thank you I could Charles and with that my case has left the building I go Charles yes sir
[02:35:59] key takeaways what do you got to go it's the one key takeaways kind of a reminder something that I guess
[02:36:05] yeah yeah I guess you talk about this but anyway he said on a few occasions process can save life
[02:36:12] the process because and it's one of those things where I'm personally I think I fall victim to this a
[02:36:18] lot of the time where I kind of I'm not used to having for lack of a living term or where like you
[02:36:27] know there I don't have any many I guess I do have some processes in place but sometimes I can put
[02:36:33] it this I can get distracted you can get the process I'm going to take joint warfare dude yeah
[02:36:38] I'm not saying I have all the processes for all things for sure but I get distracted from the process
[02:36:44] kind of easy even though I know that if I stick to the process the chances of success go way up
[02:36:51] exponentially and I think that's kind of like and I think about myself and I think how generally
[02:36:57] speaking this can be the case where if you allow that to happen like whether be because of stress
[02:37:01] because of you know just whatever kind of distraction or whatever that's that's how it works
[02:37:07] where if you just stick to the process you can keep yourself out of a lot of trouble even in like
[02:37:12] hectic kind of situation yeah and the dichotomy is sometimes you gotta get outside the process
[02:37:19] gotta be flexible you know it's people literally say think outside the box yeah so you got to
[02:37:25] know index with when it's say the sex of the process and when the yeah making adjustment yeah
[02:37:30] like the process can be somewhat flexible but the process is the process for a reason yeah it's like
[02:37:36] okay so think of it in terms like jiu-jitsu for example like when things start to get you know
[02:37:41] let's say I'm rolling with you yeah and you know you start turning up the heat on me all of a sudden
[02:37:46] for whatever reason that's going on in your head I can't get all panicky and start going off
[02:37:53] natural like instinct I gotta stick to the technique yeah seems saying sure I can turn on my
[02:37:57] urgency but I stick to the process which is the technique to get ideas stick to what you've learned
[02:38:02] like that can stuff that's that's a version of the process yep but there's also a situation where
[02:38:07] you might have to do something that's against the process a little bit jiffy-glover jiffy-glover will
[02:38:13] do some wild things yeah but if they're not it well I'm gonna get I can't read just mine yeah but
[02:38:19] I will say this the stuff the creative stuff that he does is all within the realm of jiu-jitsu that he's
[02:38:24] either learned or experimented no no because nowhere in jiu-jitsu does say like oh turn your back
[02:38:30] nowhere and it doesn't say that anywhere well that's his idea now I would say this and
[02:38:36] I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily but this is what I'm what about Pete the Greek
[02:38:39] going for wrist all the time okay so let's say that's still jiu-jitsu because what I'm saying
[02:38:43] so think of this I mean I'm talking about my focus on the rest I'm put it this way they're not
[02:38:48] doing this on rest lock they don't do that they don't do that because they get distracted or
[02:38:53] taking out of their game they do that voluntarily as part of the game yeah seems saying outside
[02:38:59] the process though is all I'm saying maybe that is within their process maybe they're
[02:39:03] probably telling you like no there's no process in jiu-jitsu seven years ago that said hey
[02:39:10] turn your back on the person on the person there's no no no one said that do you predict
[02:39:15] Jeffy Glover just did it I know you can't read just mine or Pete the Greek or anyone for that matter
[02:39:19] but would you say yes or no would you say that turning his back
[02:39:24] done out of creativity do you think that's part of his process
[02:39:27] I didn't say it wasn't part of his process as they part of the process
[02:39:34] all right so because you said trust love process and what I'm saying is okay your process
[02:39:40] and how about that okay trust your process hey if there's a process in place I'm saying
[02:39:44] if there's a process in place go ahead trust it yep to a significant degree to a significant degree okay
[02:39:50] and what I mean what I mean we can say what I mean and you just
[02:39:54] I'm saying don't get distracted meaning don't go on like if you start going all crazy hard
[02:40:00] is it beneficial for me to involuntarily go all crazy hard back yeah like that's trying to
[02:40:05] go kind of quite a fire is all they're like involuntarily and what's that like this well
[02:40:09] you're making it you're making me get all specific over here with though and his and all this other stuff
[02:40:14] on process right on yeah no point now right on no okay
[02:40:22] I'm trying to I'm trying to trust the process myself and you trying to make a point I'm trying
[02:40:27] not to ridicule it too hard yes there is process that's why we have standard operating procedures
[02:40:33] right and you gotta stay within those standard operating procedures to your point
[02:40:38] a lot of that time yeah but you can't get stuck in them so what complacency distraction panic
[02:40:43] these are all things that can make you deviate from the process yeah and then which kind of
[02:40:47] goes along to my secondary thing take away which is how and you guys but you can say this a lot
[02:40:53] all the time too it's like staying calm and really making it a point to stay calm which kind
[02:40:58] it can be rolled into the process right not only is it part of the process potentially it helps you
[02:41:04] stick to the process one should be all right so we're sticking to the process speaking to
[02:41:08] sticking to the process get yourself a subscription to a joint warfare let's say super curl yeah
[02:41:13] okay so the process is we're we're made and here's the thing too this is important follow me
[02:41:19] so in life life process no matter if you're no matter what your job career whatever you have
[02:41:24] certain things in life that if you do stick to don't get distracted complacent or panic about
[02:41:29] these things are gonna benefit you in life not only exponentially indefinitely working out
[02:41:36] reading and getting smarter keep it in open mind doing you just to yes part of the game for sure
[02:41:42] so when you work out can you solve some supplements to help you yeah working outside easy
[02:41:51] all the time not only can you help you work out it can help you keep working out because what's
[02:41:55] face it you can get jammed up yes you can so the process is work out eat good take relevant
[02:42:02] supplements and I do see a relevant because that's that's something it's not nothing some people
[02:42:08] take your relevant supplements in my opinion so take relevant supplements you stick to that process
[02:42:12] now you're on the right track there you go jockel field dot com get yourself some of those relevant
[02:42:16] supplements true not what you call the other stuff irrelevant not irrelevant supplements you did
[02:42:21] very too much on your vocab there you went relevant irrelevant which is fine you know we talk
[02:42:25] about effective ineffective you're doing the same thing it's cool authorized you're staying with the
[02:42:28] process jockel fuel dot com you can check it out at wall while you can get the drinks by the way
[02:42:35] this is probably worth saying right now we got all new flavors coming out not only new flavors
[02:42:42] but the old flavors which let's face it some people didn't like that much we'd read it
[02:42:49] a while and I'll tell you what they're all amazing now and I don't say that lightly this isn't like
[02:42:56] you won't find me in the passing oh try this it tastes try our try jockel discipline go drink
[02:43:04] it tastes amazing you wouldn't hear me say that before because it wouldn't be true it tastes good
[02:43:09] and maybe to me some of them taste pretty amazing but I wasn't throwing up that black blanket statement
[02:43:14] blanket statement right now the new drinks taste amazing and that's a bold statement but I'm making it
[02:43:23] reformulated so check those out they're kind of hitting the stores right now so as the as the
[02:43:29] old drinks run out the new drinks are coming in so is there a way to tell we can you will be
[02:43:39] in like month but we we have to use up the old cans so the old cans right now starting maybe
[02:43:46] like this week the old cans have the new heat you know but how do we know and they want to
[02:43:52] you know you'll know that taste it when you taste you're like damn jockel wasn't lying about that
[02:43:56] it tastes amazing that's what you're gonna get so check out those check it out at wall watch
[02:44:02] check out the vitamin shop vitamin shop's got all this stuff too and so there you go
[02:44:06] get some of that you probably saw me down at the ftcmth factory I saw them video video
[02:44:11] okay then you saw me at the factory origin us a dot com making stuff in America
[02:44:16] the highest quality the best gear it's what you need pair jeans you need a pair jeans
[02:44:21] yes okay where are you gonna get them origin are you gonna get them from someplace that
[02:44:26] utilizes slave labor I would prefer not to not yes how but you don't yeah don't do that I don't
[02:44:32] have to anywhere you don't have to correct origin us a dot com get yourself a key you can
[02:44:38] wear a d that feels good that's a weird thing right it's a weird because can it can a
[02:44:42] g have a feeling yeah oh yeah yes okay well isn't it nice when it feels good yes and you
[02:44:48] can I focus on the duty to part of the the experience yeah not only discomfort of your
[02:44:53] geek yeah the third man in the match yeah it's you against your opponent and against your
[02:44:58] shitty old geek and against the game now it's you and your geek against your opponent
[02:45:05] your opponent has to wear this old crappy geek it's already bothering you bro you don't have to
[02:45:10] do that you know the gear on your side just get the gear on your side that's my message
[02:45:15] go to origin USA dot com for some of that it's true there you go also when you're on the path
[02:45:19] you want to represent go to jockelstore dot com where you can give you t-shirts hoodies light and heavy
[02:45:24] by the way not super heavy we'll say regular hoodies and then you're light my bro the more and
[02:45:30] more people that acquire these lightweight hoodies the more and more good feedback I get from them
[02:45:36] there's such thing is light hoodie environments and weather
[02:45:39] conquer you little bit also we have a little thing called the shirt locker okay recently we
[02:45:45] be getting heavy positive feedback from the shirt locker design so what it is is if you don't
[02:45:50] know which most people do but if you don't new shirt new shirt design every month
[02:45:56] subscription automatically comes to you very creative I guess for lack of better term but yes very
[02:46:02] good positive feedback and so check that one out at jockelstore if you want if you want to get a cool
[02:46:09] shirt to wear that not many people are gonna have because you know you know sometimes like
[02:46:14] someone go a girl goes out to a party and there's another girl there and they were in the same dress
[02:46:20] yes and it's drama man this is drama man or as my daughters would call it you know what that is this tea
[02:46:25] what a tea no it's just tea it's tea it's tea is a meme of like someone drinking tea and it's
[02:46:32] sort of like drama so you can say that's tea you see you're not called up no you don't you
[02:46:38] don't you don't hit like me I don't see the correlation to tea in drama it comes from a meme
[02:46:44] where someone's drinking tea oh yeah covered the frogs drinking tea and it represents drama
[02:46:51] okay it's pretty sure the meat I don't know I think you might be right but maybe the
[02:46:57] root so I'm the frog is drinking tea and he said it all the meme will always say something something
[02:47:04] but that's not a my business there and drinking tea so so you will get let's say a
[02:47:10] what group is this millennial no it's lower than millennial what's not lower but what's
[02:47:15] younger than millennial I think it's Z so Jen Z I think with L say oh and they won't say tell me the
[02:47:21] gossip you'll say tell me the tea do you not know this I this is news to me yes okay
[02:47:28] oh absolutely I did not that's good that's good cool oh so yeah so there they go yeah if you
[02:47:35] want the tea get a good tea show right you're saying you're saying one girl show up to the
[02:47:40] body and somebody's wearing the same outfit yeah that's some tea for your do this drama right so when
[02:47:45] you get we when you're part of the Charlotte locker no one's showing up with the same t-shirt as you
[02:47:49] well actually technically if they do you kind of like dot you're kind of down yeah no tea well here's
[02:47:55] the thing it's kind of cool the tea scenario with my girl over the small country when you do that
[02:48:00] you show with the same shirt locker t-shirt and you're like what let's go take over this nation start
[02:48:05] planning plotting no that so technically the the female drama when there's the same outfit in
[02:48:12] the same location is opposite with males it's opposite okay that's like the thing this is why you
[02:48:19] carry when you show up and you're wearing the same t-shirt like a fist bump yes yeah you will
[02:48:23] grow out like yeah they've worked good deal they same deal show up with the same t-shirt but I'm
[02:48:28] telling like if you went to the okay if you went lucky you're wearing this you know no matter
[02:48:31] what you're wearing you go somewhere and someone else is wearing the same thing you don't feel like
[02:48:36] all you're wearing that you kind of feel it's a positive feeling yeah same same check like the
[02:48:41] t-shirt so she logical expert over there either way the word shirt locker shirts jockel store stuff
[02:48:48] no exception you feel you can feel the camaraderie this is what you can do yeah I'm not
[02:48:52] speaking to subscribe so subscribe to the podcast don't forget about joccona ground dot calm
[02:48:57] appreciate the support over there don't forget about the youtube channel
[02:48:59] so if you want to see some some just really sort of award winning assistant directing happening
[02:49:07] you can come and check out some of my AB activities it's incredible actually there's some new stuff
[02:49:13] on there on youtube like the stuff that's gonna review like someone kind of won off videos
[02:49:18] yeah pretty solid the top one on the I put some underground clips on there for the people just so they
[02:49:24] can get a little yeah let's go sometimes the things are important yeah that they need to know about
[02:49:29] so check that out psychological warfare on MP3 platforms flipside canvas to code a mire speaking
[02:49:36] metal of honor recipients to code a mire's metal of honor recipient he's badass he's funny
[02:49:42] it's hell I have conversation sometimes with the code of work we're laughing so hard to need
[02:49:46] to one of us can talk this is rare and he also has a company called flipsidecampus.com where he
[02:49:53] puts cool stuff to hang on your wall so if you want something cool to hang on your wall cool
[02:49:57] might as well get it from the code of mire books hey first of all never enough by my case
[02:50:02] check that book out listen all the profits for that book all the profits go to gold star families
[02:50:09] so just get the book and all the lessons learned yes are the cool stories yes
[02:50:15] will you help out gold star families yes you will so check out that book only cry for the
[02:50:21] living by holly make check out that book if you want to know what was going on and I rack
[02:50:27] and Syria then I got a bunch of books that I've written you can check those out as well
[02:50:33] I have a leadership consultancy called echelon front where we teach leadership
[02:50:39] two companies and leadership is how you solve problems inside of organizations so if you need to help
[02:50:46] there go to echelon front dot com we get we got the master coming up there's like a couple more
[02:50:51] seats left I don't even know if I should say anything because it might be sold out by now if you
[02:50:54] want to come to the master go to echelon front dot com the next one is June 15th through the 17th
[02:50:59] Denver Colorado I know it's late but if you want to come come and check it out we also have an online
[02:51:05] training academy if you want to learn how to lead you don't necessarily have to leave your office
[02:51:12] your house you can learn to lead online you cannot just learn to lead others because that's not
[02:51:18] what it's all about some of it's about that some of it's about how to lead yourself how to make
[02:51:22] good decisions for you how to be on the path so check out extremownership dot com for that
[02:51:29] and if you want to help some service members active and retired you want to help them get medical
[02:51:34] treatments that they might need that the government doesn't pay for for whatever reason and there's
[02:51:39] a bunch of reasons why they might not pay for it check out america's mighty warriors dot org
[02:51:44] that's momma lee organization mark least mom check that out also remember heroes and horses dot org
[02:51:52] Mike a fink up there in the wilderness taking people out on horses and letting them re-learn how to
[02:51:59] live so check that out and once again don't forget about never enough and helping out gold star
[02:52:07] families not have to worry about a mortgage or a place or a house or a home or a castle because
[02:52:14] that's what Mike's given them so that's awesome and if you want to find Mike a's on social media this
[02:52:20] he's at this is Mike a's you can find about instagram twitter
[02:52:27] Facebook also echoes on there i'm on there echoes at a patrols on a juggle willic hey when you get there
[02:52:34] just just watch out because you all the algorithms sneak it up on you thanks once again to my case
[02:52:40] for joining us and for your service and sacrifice for our great nation appreciate you come on
[02:52:47] buying thanks the rest of our selfless military members out there right now on the front lines
[02:52:53] protecting us and protecting our way of life from kind of take it for granted it's real easy
[02:52:58] to take it for granted it's real easy but we're not taking it for granted here also thanks to our
[02:53:07] service the service of our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMT's dispatchers
[02:53:12] correction officers board patrol secret service all the first responders that are out there doing the same
[02:53:16] thing sacrificing to protect us here at home thank you and everyone else
[02:53:25] you know you know i know sometimes you've been on the grind for a while right the grind
[02:53:36] you've been working you've been staying focused hold my line and at some point
[02:53:43] maybe you feel like you're there like you got there like you made it but that's a good time when you
[02:53:51] feel like that that's a good time to remember that that's not enough it's never enough we can all do
[02:54:00] a little more work a little harder be a little bit better so reload and recharge and go out there
[02:54:13] every day and get after it and until next time the zeco and jocco out