"the following is a conversation with jaco willink a retired u.s navy seal co-author of extreme ownership dichotomy of leadership discipline equals freedom and many other excellent books and he's the h..."

"is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with jocko willink is it tragic or beautiful to you that some of the closest bonds that are formed between people are through war often i think ..."

"and for the obvious reasons what are the obvious reasons why is it so obvious well it's tragic because a lot of people die and it's beautiful because you form bonds with people that are very difficult..."

"brings a lot and maybe i'm romanticizing war here but it feels like that's inextricably connected to world war ii for russians is this does that resonate at all is it so if you look at military traini..."

"tighter the bond is going to be so i think when you talk about what the soviet union went through in world war ii there was a shared suffering to survive and so the entire nation has that common threa..."

"conflict and much more like torture or suffering it didn't it didn't come off as torture only that interestingly enough as you probably know my grandfather including everybody else volunteered they we..."

"it's an awful it's an awful way but that's the that's that's what the strategy was you often talk about leadership let's put the evils of hitler aside the boldness of hitler in making some of the stra..."

"you can win many people consider that war a just war what do you think makes it just war i think you have the nazis and the imperial japanese trying to impose their will on other nations and other peo..."

"that and the other thing that you have to understand is that your troops are also going to die and it seems like sometimes we're a little bit naive about the calculation of what that's going to look l..."

"it's interesting to think about in deciding military strategy to inject ethics into it into morality it's not just about winning the war but should we do this and doing the calculation of human life u..."

"can i ask you about the loss of human life how does killing a human being change you what does it mean to kill a human being what does it feel like to kill a human being well i mean i guess you'd have..."

"in when we were in iraq we didn't have to dehumanize the enemy because the the enemy dehumanized themselves through their actions through their behaviors when when we know that they are torturing and ..."

"yeah i suppose i'm i worry about the dehumanization at a much larger scale when it's not the kind of case that you're talking about even now hopefully i'm not fear-mongering but there's a sense in whi..."

"case and at least in the way that uh it ultimately starts with hate and if again hopefully i'm not being too dramatic but i i see that there's a kind of brewing of uh it starts with dehumanization and..."

"the last resort you had a conversation with jordan peterson where he asked you a question in terms of war being last resort whether you would like your kids to grow up in peace in a time of no war you..."

"earlier and to see human beings that are willing to sacrifice their lives for their friends you mentioned the worst what are some of the worst aspects of when you were in iraq what are the things that..."

"i know that many people sacrificed to give me this opportunity to be here so but i don't dwell on it what about when you were in combat nothing there's there's tactics there's strategy there's the mis..."

"together i love that's why i love the olympics that's just the the unity of it it uh takes a step out of the selfish pursuits of any one particular ant and looks at us as a big ant colony and it's ins..."

"um autonomous weapon systems us has now officially released the report saying that they're open to uh not open they're engaging in in um adding more and more autonomy in artificial intelligence into i..."

"better in certain certain things a certain more precise targeting of the enemy the question is so what happens when you start to rely on the machine to do some of the task is you get lazy you forget w..."

"loss of human life um why not my worry is that it's much more it's it's much easier to design weapons that are effective than design weapons who have the the depth of ethics and morals that humans do ..."

"that can not lead to death yeah and that's why like i said and like you just said you have protocols in place that that are a kill switch and if if you think about the amount of nuclear weapons that w..."

"and uh i also believe in the resiliency of the human species that we're an innovative bunch and we can respond to tragedy especially we respond more to tragedy as the scale of tragedy grows and our re..."

"is very introverted but they're but but they're still a very good leader because when they do communicate they do it in a clear simple manner that everyone understands so even though they're a little ..."

"i was hearing a description of me yeah when i would give feedback to young seals that had made mistakes during training operations and the description was that same thing like this harsh blunt force t..."

"so i wasn't being harsh because it elevated my ego i wasn't being harsh because i wanted to denigrate them i was being actually being harsh because i wanted them to accomplish the mission so if that's..."

"he wants to understand the actual details of the problem not like delegating you to a manager but like because a lot of ceos a lot of managers will will talk about sort of the the power and the import..."

"that's always been inspiring to me and i wonder how many people it's inspiring to maybe you can speak to the value of doing that of of no matter how high your level of leader is to be able to do the l..."

"has a better bigger perspective not necessarily better but a bigger perspective so if you sit there and work on a problem whatever for eight hours and you're staring at you know if you were planning a..."

"it's probably this way the reason that he's successful is because he doesn't get stuck down there yeah because if he felt the need to micromanage each and every part on a tesla it wouldn't be it would..."

"yeah i think he's done that more successfully in some places than others the spacex a lot of people give the credit to gwen shawwal for the ceo um the ceo of spacex as as a very successful person that..."

"yeah so what we have to do in those situations is we have to establish a strong culture inside that organization and if you're there there's there's reasons why this happens right if i have a big ego ..."

"there's not many people like him people become complacent too easily that disappoint i've been disappointed by people a little bit it's like success makes people soft now with elon it seems like succe..."

"there's uh two things i want to mention there one once again the harshness but a very different kind and the second is team building so on the harshness he is much harsher than elon in a way in the fo..."

"you shouldn't be doing that very often so you can look back at me and say well jocko here's the most profitable company that's ever existed and so you're wrong well going back to that multitude of cha..."

"that can happen you can have people that you there's you can have people that are horrible leaders that develop something that's so universally outstanding that you end up with a a company that's succ..."

"well let me ask you this what leader wins the leader whose team is afraid who the the team who execute executes the mission because they're afraid of their leader or executes the task because they're ..."

"team to win on the second point of steve jobs uh he has this idea a philosophy of a players where you have a group like the power and the productivity of a group of what he called a players is invalua..."

"depends on the nature of the b player is the player is the player a b player because he's a little bit lazy is he a b player because he doesn't have good vision is he a b player because he's got a big..."

"what's an a player sometimes in the seal teams they would get something called the stacked platoon and what that would be is someone you know some senior person in that platoon would manipulate and an..."

"not derail a team this could be a tech thing too there's some multiplying effect of just pure excellence no matter the personalities i think for steve jobs he doesn't the ego doesn't matter none of th..."

"you're at the end of a marathon and you're just like head to head like you're just going full steam with a person that is as good as you there's no place for ego there which is great which is great le..."

"up against your foot on a backstride and throw you onto your face yeah so that's what ego is an awesome driver unless you let your ego control you yeah and you let ego drive your decision-making proce..."

"so then uh looking at a completely opposite person was this a fascinating person to me sandra pachai who's the ceo of alphabet ceo of google i admire the in a romantic sense the madness that is steve ..."

"google has done over the past several years could be attributed to that continued innovation bringing out the best out of people there's of course bureaucracy which i could criticize the end of the da..."

"but he he's one of the only people i've ever heard of who everybody loves he's an inspirational figure to millions especially like in india he's a celebrity in the best kind of way is there something ..."

"make a move and the team who trusts you says roger that boss we got it and all of them actually do this interesting thing i'd love to hear your opinion on it asander certainly does it to a large degre..."

"you do have to mitigate risk so saying hey you know lex i know you're haven't been in the military before i know you have very limited weapons experience but i want you to run a target assault on a re..."

"process because i often now i'm thinking looking so i'm looking for people both for the startup but just for my own life for help and i almost want to see evidence of excellence but maybe you want to ..."

"is that ridiculous that's not ridiculous at all and it goes back you know you were you were the way you were phrasing these questions about what makes a good person and what makes a good leader the wa..."

"now i work with companies the reason i talk about humility all the time is because for someone to be get into a leadership position in the military they have to have confidence so the tendency is that..."

"make my bed okay so what in your life maybe we can talk about the one that's most publicly facing which is uh you wake up at four o'clock or around four o'clock in the morning you post uh on social me..."

"jiu-jitsu so jiu-jitsu doesn't jiu-jitsu comes later in the day this is just you alone this is me alone working out yep and i'm going to be doing of a wide variety of things this is the thing that has..."

"so haven't i've had some injuries but they're they're healed and so yeah i train and uh food wise you mentioned grazing or some of some nuts are very light kind of things is there a main meal here yea..."

"jitsu by all means what have you learned from being a practitioner you're a black belt what have you learned from this journey of uh being a martial artist jiu jitsu for me was the connective tissue t..."

"training like the honesty of the mat in the sense that like you know what works and what doesn't work which which aspects were the most uh impactful for you all aspects so yes from a humility perspect..."

"and i wouldn't have realized that we could sit here and do this forever we could we could i could tell you these comparisons forever but this all this connective tissue bringing all these things toget..."

"is there something you can speak to the value of competition for you yep competition will reveal weaknesses in your game that you can then go back and train to rectify so that that's very useful to so..."

"to a level that i haven't seen before which is systems thinking about like you can think about military combat as tactics in a particular situation but then you zoom out and you want to create entire ..."

"said here well i mean this is um not you said it's novel to you it's not novel to me the entire my entire journey on jiu jitsu in jiu jitsu was only about submission and you know as you as you mention..."

"yes yeah so that's where that's where i agree judo and wrestling absolutely awesome get some and striking boxing muay thai yeah you know like the you should train all these things are there books and ..."

"lessons out of it just about every time this is a vietnam war and korea and korea and he got in towards the end of right at the end of world war ii so he was kind of raised by the the soldiers that fo..."

"things that are said by a bunch of different people and when you read the book you're reading this guy's account of what he went through but i never really knew if that was all true or did he just che..."

"so there's an element of rebelliousness to him and you know when you talk to me about are are there times when the leader is making the leadership this absolute senior leadership the civilian leadersh..."